by Gary Jubelin
It took Hillsley three hours to walk there, he says, and then he walked around for several hours more, ‘thinking about if I was going to do it or not’. His mind made up, around 10.30pm, he let himself into the garden, checked the back door and found it locked, then saw that the bathroom window was open.
He wants to relive the crime, I think. As if he’s feeding off the moment. He knows he’s never going to do anything like this again. He’ll be in a prison soon and, once inside, he’ll have only the memories to sustain him.
Hillsley says he piled an outdoor chair on top of the outdoor table and climbed up, then reached in to pick up the toothbrushes and bathroom things left lying on the windowsill.
He’s friendly now, almost boastful. ‘If you go there, you’ll find them under the back bush up in the left,’ he tells me. ‘In the right corner, that’s where I threw them.’
It seems unreal that he is offering this evidence. No normal crook would offer up the evidence I need to jail him. But it’s like Hillsley’s trying to co-opt me. Like he wants me to witness what he did.
He describes climbing through the window and pulling out his hammer.
‘I still didn’t know if I could go through with it,’ he says, and pauses, inviting me to move the interview forward.
‘Was anyone awake at the time?’ I ask.
‘No, no one was awake.’
For half an hour, Hillsley says he wandered around the sleeping house. He made himself a drink of Ribena. When Michael’s four-year-old woke up and saw Hillsley, with his wild hair and hammer, standing in the darkness, he told the child to go back to bed.
I don’t allow myself to think about my children. About how they might one night wake up and discover an intruder. Empathy is important as a cop, but too much of it will not help you. A good detective won’t let themselves feel emotions at a moment like this. Jaco wouldn’t do so, if he were here. The interview is too important.
I’ll process those thoughts later.
Hillsley says he walked into Michael’s bedroom, where his victim was sleeping. He woke him up before starting to hit him.
‘Can you demonstrate how you were holding the hammer and how you struck the blows, just with your hand?’ I ask. It sounds banal, but I want to see if he’ll admit he knew what he was doing. When his case goes to trial, I don’t want Hillsley to hide behind a claim of ignorance to get a lesser sentence. I want to see if he knew a hammer could kill.
‘I grabbed it right down at the base,’ he says. ‘Because I know that’s where the power is.’
OK, I think, you’ve no excuse. ‘The power is down in the base,’ I repeat.
‘Yeah, of course, that’s how I’ve always learned to use a hammer.’
‘Right.’
‘So I just, when he woke up, I just went, bang, bang, bang like that.’
This is horrendous. He’s having too much fun with this. I pull him back.
‘You’ve learned to use a hammer?’ I ask. ‘Have you a trade or a background?’
‘No, my father had a scaffolding business and we used to put the bindings on the end of the new planks when they came in.’
‘So you understand the power of the hammer?’
‘Well, I think most people do once they’ve used one.’
Hillsley tries to take the interview back to where he wants it. He says he only wanted to pay Michael out. He thought Michael would go to hospital and be fixed up. Then Hillsley could tell him, That’s what you get for being an arsehole.
I’ll leave it for the jury to decide. On Hillsley’s account, the death was an accident, but there’s no doubt he meant to attack Michael, and to harm him badly. In New South Wales, the law says murder is killing done with intent to kill or inflict grievous bodily harm, or with a reckless indifference to human life. Whatever Hillsley thinks, I believe he’ll go down for murder, not manslaughter.
But now I have to ask about the 10-year-old.
I caution him again. He’s not obliged to say anything but whatever he does say may be used in evidence. ‘You understand that?’ I ask.
‘Yes, I do.’ He smiles again. This is something he wants to talk about. ‘That was further payback to Michael really, apart from my sexual attraction to her.’
I let him talk. He describes how she was screaming, how he pulled the knife out. He walked her out to the garage. I wonder if the other children heard.
Hillsley tells me how he assaulted her.
I listen, feeling horrified, knowing I’m complicit in what’s happening between us. Each of us is getting what we want from this, I think. I’m getting his confession. He’s enjoying telling me about this. Again, I’ll deal with all these thoughts later.
Hillsley says he asked the girl to leave the property with him. ‘I just told her that I loved her and I was sexually attracted to her and sorry what’s been happening to her but, um, she willingly wanted to come with me, so . . .’
Fuck this, I think. I can let a lot slide, but you’re not going to tell me that this girl, after you’ve just murdered her stepfather, is enjoying having your grubby hands all over her?
I almost spit the words out, ‘When you say willingly, do we agree that that was a result of the threat that you made towards her life with the knife?’
‘Yes.’
‘So in terms of willingly, she was compliant because of the fear that you had instilled in her. Would that be fair to say?’
‘Very fair.’
Good. Now, when you get to court, your lawyer can’t stand up and say, ‘My client believed these acts to be consensual.’ It happens. I’ve seen lawyers saying worse than that. I’ve seen lawyers saying the victim led her rapist on.
Hillsley continues, explaining how the two of them started walking towards the city centre. They asked for water at a house because they were dehydrated. They were going to catch a train but didn’t because he thought a woman who sat down near them on the platform was acting suspiciously. They got lost. Hillsley assaulted the girl again.
‘In terms of sex with a 10-year-old girl, you realise that’s wrong?’ I ask him.
He says, ‘With paedophiles, they know it’s wrong but they’ve really got no control over it to be quite honest with you.’ He is almost convincing.
‘Talk me through what you mean by that, from your perspective?’
He pauses. ‘Well, you know it’s wrong. You know it’s going to hurt the child but it all comes down to that self-gratification and that is stronger than what harm you are actually doing to the child.’
I think about it for a moment. He has urges he can’t control. I put it aside. Someone smarter than I am can decide, or if it matters.
Hillsley says he was always going to give himself up. Then the girl ran away from him. ‘I told her not to go because if you do it this way, they’re gunna get me and kill me.’ A whining sound has entered his voice. It grates.
I ask him who was going to kill him.
‘The police.’ He says he always gives himself up. If I look at his record, I’ll see that for myself.
‘But the way it turned out was not the way you wanted it to?’ I ask him, disbelieving.
‘Yeah, well, that’s right, because, you see me face and teeth and everything’ – he points to his injuries – ‘so, I mean, you know, I know what it’s like in jail, when you come into a police station, how they knock you around severely.’
‘Just so I cover this, that graze to the side of your head, that appears to be a graze under your hairline.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was that incurred during your arrest?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how did that happen?’
‘By an officer.’
I tense. I need to deal with this. The days of phone books might be over, but if Hillsley says that he was beaten, then when this gets to court, a smart lawyer might claim he gave his confession under duress. If I do anything tonight, I will make sure that doesn’t happen.
I ask if anything took place during h
is arrest that forced him to take part in this interview.
He shakes his head. ‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘The interview’s not a problem.’
I stop the tape and walk out of the room, to clear my head. I’m pissed off that any cop might have beaten Hillsley. I understand that they’d want to but it doesn’t help. It’s like with forensic evidence, it just contaminates the interview.
Outside, Luke and I talk to Nigel, checking if anything new’s come in while we’ve been inside the room with Hillsley. No new crime scene discovered. No new physical evidence. Nothing that we need to put to him. It is a brief break but I need it. It feels like several days have passed since that phone call this morning.
We walk back in and Hillsley watches us in silence.
I tell him we’d like a sample of his DNA. Will he agree to that?
‘As long as the person doesn’t start bashing me before he gets it all done.’ He’s back on this. He’s trying to provoke me. He wants to get inside my head.
‘There will be no one bashing you.’
He says that he could hear us talking outside the room. Talking about the 10-year-old. He says I was trying to incite some other cop to go down to the cells later and give him a caning.
Is this a fantasy? Is he imagining this? Or is this just how he wants to play it, casting himself as the victim?
‘I heard her name,’ he says again, nodding at the door through which we’ve just entered.
‘Most definitely you’ve heard her name,’ I say, because we were talking about what happened to her and what happened to Michael. I want him to drop this.
I raise the DNA test again. ‘I was asking are you prepared to participate, or for us to –’
He interrupts, ‘Well, see, I’ve done those sort of examinations before and what are they doing there? They’re hitting me in the guts and everything. I mean, Jesus.’
I stare at him. I get the creeping sense that he wants us to bash him. It’s like another way of him savouring his crime. If he provokes me into violence, it proves how bad he is. He’d relish it. This is a man who signs his name as ‘Walking Evil’. Bashing him would show that he is special.
‘You’ve busted my teeth tonight, so you’re going well,’ he says.
‘How did we bust your teeth?’ I ask, swallowing my anger.
‘Well, the officer there, they rammed me head into the brick wall there, so they’ve busted all me teeth up the top here.’
‘Well, there’s no excuse for assault any time,’ I tell him, flatly. ‘What I want to clarify here, because you’ve raised it, is that the answers you have given in this interview haven’t been clouded by any concerns or fears that you’ve got?’
‘No.’
‘Your fears haven’t impacted on you participating in this interview?’
‘Oh, no, the interview’s not a problem.’
‘OK. Now, can we get back to the original question . . . are you prepared to participate in the forensic examination?’
‘Yes, I’m here to cooperate as best I can. There’s no lies and I’ve got no problem doing the test.’
‘Thank you.’
That’s it. That’s everything I need. Exhaustion overwhelms me.
He has confessed, but there is nothing in his gaunt face that looks like remorse. If anything, he seems almost disappointed.
I look at the time: 12.28am. New Year’s Day is over. No other year will ever start as badly as this one has. I did my job. I didn’t react. I didn’t let my disgust or anger overwhelm me.
Jeffrey Hillsley, you only made me tougher. It is as if the job keeps asking me, Do you give up? Not yet, I don’t. What’s next?
Later tonight, I will tell every other cop in the station not to talk to Hillsley. I’ll stand in front of him while he is in his cell, just so he can hear me ask another detective about the cricket. Not because I’m really interested in how Australia have battered India, but to show Hillsley that I’m not interested in him. That he has not provoked me. Talking about the cricket tells him that he is not important to me. That I do this every day, and he is just another number.
At 12.31am on 2 January 2004, I switch off the tape. ‘Interview between Detective Sergeant Jubelin and Mr Hillsley concluded.’
Luke and I stand and walk out of the interview room, leaving Hillsley behind with just his thoughts for company.
Just Pure Anger
9 February 2004: 18 years in
On Monday 9 February 2004, the inquest into Evelyn’s and Colleen’s deaths begins in Bellingen, a little country town not far from Bowraville, with an old-fashioned courthouse at its centre. A few months before, I drove north from Sydney on the Pacific Highway, heading for the hardscrabble cluster of houses where James Hide is now living, taking with me a court order to appear at the inquest. I wanted to deliver it in person.
Staring at the empty highway, I thought back over the past decade, since James Hide was found not guilty of murdering Clinton. It was almost eight years since I became involved in the reinvestigation. It’s five years since the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) refused our application to restart the prosecution of James over the charge of murdering four-year-old Evelyn, which was dropped after he was acquitted of Clinton’s murder.
After swallowing our disappointment at that decision, Jason Evers and I had tried to use it to our advantage.
The following year, in 2000, we approached the State Coroner, arguing that there was now no prospect of a criminal trial, which meant the children’s deaths in Bowraville remained formally unexplained. While inquests had been held into Evelyn’s and Colleen’s deaths in 1991; the former was halted when James was first charged with the four-year-old’s murder and the latter ended in an open verdict, meaning the coroner had not been able to find whether she was killed, had killed herself or died by misadventure.
The inquest into Colleen’s death was reopened in 1994 but ended with the same result. There’d never been an inquest into Clinton’s death. In the strange bureaucracy that governs inquests and criminal proceedings, the fact someone was put on trial for Clinton’s murder meant no inquest was necessary, even though the trial led to an acquittal. Officially, despite the suspected murderer being found not guilty, the state still accepted the victim had been murdered.
But, Jason and I argued, there was still no formal explanation of what happened to Evelyn and Colleen. We told the coroner we also had new evidence from our investigation. Would he hold a new inquest, into these two deaths, to hear it?
Justice is delivered slowly – a coroner has to be available, an unbooked courtroom found; plans were made to hold an inquest into the children’s deaths but these fell through due to the pressures of another hearing – but, in 2003, the State Coroner, John Abernethy, agreed that he would do it. That meant we had to provide a formal brief of evidence and, by that time, Strike Force Ancud existed only on paper. Jason and I weren’t given any new resources, so most of this work was done at night, on weekends or during office time that we were able to steal from other investigations.
Finally, the inquest into Evelyn’s and Colleen’s deaths was scheduled to begin in February 2004. This would be the first time evidence about all three of the children would be heard together in one courtroom as differences in the law between criminal trials and inquests also meant the coroner could hear the details of Clinton’s disappearance. I hoped it would provide the children’s families with some answers. I also hoped it might put some pressure on the DPP’s office to overturn its own decision and send the murders to trial.
Throughout the years it had taken a long time to get to this point – longer than Evelyn’s lifetime – and the decency of the people I met in Bowraville had left me humble. Despite enduring a trial and two inconclusive inquests, so far, they’d always done the right thing, never taken justice into their own hands, and were now prepared to put their faith once again in the police and the courts.
The children’s parents, brothers, sisters, aunties, cousins often called me in
the evenings. I listened to their stories of the children. I also spoke to the children’s friends who, by now, were adults. When Jason and I visited Bowraville, we could look at Colleen’s younger sister Paula and think, That’s Colleen. Clinton’s nephews, who were growing up fast, were Clinton. We saw Evelyn in the young kids running around the Mission.
When they called, we’d sometimes talk on the phone for hours and my own children soon realised what I was discussing. They’d grown up with this investigation, just like the missing children’s families. If ten-year-old Gemma was sitting in the next room when one of these calls came in, she’d sometimes turn down the volume on the television just so that she could listen.
It wasn’t like the missing children haunted us, it was more like we now knew them. Driving north from Sydney to James’s house, this gave me a sense of purpose. Taking the sharp right off the main road, I looked over at the back of where he was now living, wondering if he’d be there when I arrived at his new home. Another turn, then another, and I was pulling up on the narrow, comfortless road outside it.
Walking through the wooden gate, I passed a bulky air-con unit bolted to the brick wall and headed up the steps to his front door. We’d met only once before this, years ago, when I visited him to see if he would talk to the police about Colleen and Evelyn, because he had only ever been formally interviewed about the death of Clinton. Back then, he told me, ‘No, I’m not saying anything.’
This time, James answered the door and I could see that he was older. He was in his early 40s, and the muscles in his arms and shoulders, which had once been strong from working at the Bowraville tanning factory, had grown soft.
He invited me into his house. Inside, it was small and dark. We sat facing one another.
I told James about the inquest. ‘I’m basically accusing you of being a serial killer. Where do we go from here?’ I told him.