by Gary Jubelin
‘You think I’ve done something I haven’t done.’ He said that he’d already been found not guilty. ‘I just need to be left alone,’ he said.
We stared at each other.
I told him this wasn’t over. He didn’t blink.
During the long drive back to Sydney, every time I caught a glimpse of my own eyes in the rear-view mirror, I could see him looking at me.
* * *
Inside the Bellingen courthouse, the children’s families are crowded between walls lined with rich, dark timber. On one hangs the New South Wales coat of arms, showing a rising sun above a shield decorated with sheep fleeces and sheaves of wheat, held upright by a kangaroo and a lion. Underneath this is the latin motto ‘Orta recens quam pura nites’, which translates as ‘Newly risen, how brightly you shine’. It is a world away from the Bowraville Mission.
After two brief weeks of evidence about the children’s disappearances, the inquest is adjourned on Friday 13 February. It won’t resume until August. I feel embarrassed. I don’t know how the families of murder victims can withstand all the delays and the waiting involved in the court system. I guess you do it day by day. You have no choice. This is how justice is delivered.
Jason and I go back to work. Nine days later, on Sunday 22 February the body of a 14-year-old, Michelle Pogmore, is found, dumped in a council refuse bin. I’m driving back from lecturing at the detectives’ course in Goulburn with Pam, and we have Jake and Gemma with us, when I get the call. I drive them home, then turn the car around, heading for the crime scene at the Town Centre Reserve in Mount Druitt, western Sydney
It is a hot summer’s day when I get there. Michelle’s been missing since leaving a nearby street party two days earlier. It is another sight that I know will never leave me.
The next day, after Michelle’s identity has been confirmed, I pull up outside her family’s home to break the news, knowing the 14-year-old’s mother must be watching as I walk up to the door. I try to keep my face expressionless, not giving anything away, so she doesn’t guess at what has happened until I am there to tell her in person. As detectives, we meet people at the most real, vital moments, when life and death collide, and it is sometimes our job to make the collision happen: Your daughter has been murdered.
As a young cop in uniform, I failed in the task of delivering news of a child’s death to a parent. Back then, I was overwhelmed. I didn’t understand my role and stood there mute and uncomprehending while the mother broke down in front of me.
This time, I get it right. I’m older now and have seen so much more emotion. After saying that we’ve found Michelle, I stay with her mum, providing what little support I can offer. There’s nothing wrong or weak, I’ve learned over the years, about a detective offering somebody a shoulder to cry on when they have lost a loved one. I wish that I could swallow all her pain, but my duty is to offer only the prospect of some understanding: this person did it for this reason. I tell her I’ll do everything I can to find the killer.
Making this promise means leaving a piece of yourself behind with every victim’s family. It goes back to what I learned in Bowraville; you have a responsibility to those people whose trust they place in you to find their loved one’s killer. It is a heavy weight. Picking up another person’s cross means that sometimes it will crush you.
Years before, during one of our visits to Bowraville, Aunty Elaine Walker had approached Jason and me and said, ‘One of the old boys wants to see you.’ When we asked why, she said, ‘It’s men’s business.’ She couldn’t talk about it.
We were to go down to the break wall at Nambucca, where the green river that flows past Bowraville empties itself out into the ocean. The old boy met us there then took us down to the water’s edge and told us to look out at the horizon. We stood together in silence.
Jason may have been sceptical but I recognised something. This was like some of the meditation classes I’d done with Ben. We stood and listened as the old boy spoke about his people and their country. He spoke about justice, and what this investigation meant to them, and us. Some of what he said I understood, some I did not, but I realised he was giving us a gift.
He wanted us to understand this place as he did. Afterwards, driving back, I thought about different trips I’d taken in recent years to Hong Kong and Vietnam to practise meditation, like I was chasing some secret knowledge round the world. Here it was at home.
And that made sense. After all, as Indigenous Australians, the Bowraville mob were part of the oldest living culture on the planet. Being invited to take part in this ceremony gave me confidence. It made me feel accepted. It made me feel that we were on the right path.
As white cops speaking to blackfellas, we still had a wall of colonial history to break down between us but, the more we understood each other, the more information was handed from one side to the other. Sometimes, Jason and I would spend hours on the Mission, not because we had specific questions we wanted the people there to answer, but just yarning with the elders.
It worked. One day we spoke to a woman on the Mission who told us how she’d woken up at night to find James Hide standing in her bedroom, watching her and her sleeping children. Another told us how James had chased her friend across the golf course, only he couldn’t catch her.
One man, Hilton, said that he’d been drinking with James after the children’s disappearances, when James whispered something like: ‘I’ve got bodies. I’ve killed people and their bodies are out on the Congarinni Road near my crops.’ Both Clinton’s and Evelyn’s bodies were found dumped beside the Congarinni Road, with Clinton’s body near a crop of marijuana plants.
We asked Hilton why he’d kept this information to himself for years. He said he didn’t think the cops would believe him. When we asked why, he said it was because he was Aboriginal and James was white.
Among the old paper records from the first police investigation, we also found witness statements from people on the Mission who said that, in the months before the children disappeared, they got into an argument with James. He brought a golf club to their house, they said, and started smashing the front, shouting: ‘I’ll get youse, you two fuck heads, I’ll take youse out to Congarinni Road and use youse for fertiliser, under the ground.’ These witnesses were never mentioned during the trial over Clinton’s murder.
They will be heard at the inquest, though. When it resumes, in August 2004, it feels like we are making progress.
We never do find out who killed Michelle Pogmore.
* * *
The inquest will also hear from another, unidentified witness; a criminal informer. Like Rocco, in the investigation into Terry Falconer’s murder, he is risking his life by coming forward, so the coroner agrees to identify him only as Mr X. Jason and I know him by another name. We call him Axeman.
We first learned his name from a neat, handwritten letter that was already old when we found it in 1997, buried among the stacks of paperwork collected by the detectives who led the first, unsuccessful, prosecution of James Hide over Clinton’s murder.
The letter was a warning, sent by a prisoner who James had got to know after being arrested and briefly held. While James had been released on bail, awaiting trial, the letter said there was a rumour going around the prison that the cops were planning a covert operation to gather evidence against him. It named a former prisoner who was planning to approach James to talk about the killings.
That prisoner was a dog, the letter warned. He’ll be wearing a wire. It was signed, ‘Your mate forever, Axeman.’
As a prisoner himself, a copy of Axeman’s letter was made by the prison authorities and passed to the cops working the first Bowraville investigation. Going through the files again during our reinvestigation, we learned that the covert operation it described hadn’t gathered any useful evidence against James but the letter itself was interesting. On it, Axeman had written his inmate number, which allowed us to find out his name. He’d been released since the letter was written but we’d f
lagged him, meaning if he ever got arrested again, I’d get a call.
The telephone rang on Easter Sunday 1998, which meant I was in trouble with my family. They’d gathered at my parents’ place in Dural for a barbecue to mark the holiday but I told them this was too important. Making my excuses, I drove a couple of hours north to Belmont, where I met Jason and walked with him into the local police station. They took us to the cells.
Behind the cell door, Axeman was six foot three and skinny, with scars on his hands, and arms covered in rough tattoos that looked like they’d been done in prison. He looked like a typical crook, and reading through his criminal history confirmed he was a bad one; he’d been charged with murder once, a brutal killing which gave him his nickname, although he was later found not guilty. There were also convictions for break, enter and steal, supplying heroin, malicious damage, some serious assaults – what he described as ‘ultra-violence’ – and perjury. Since first being caught, for passing dud cheques as a 17-year-old, he’d spent most of his adult life in prison.
Look at it one way, I thought, and all that means he’s a long way from being the perfect witness. Look at it another and, just like Rocco, it means that he’s the real deal. To my mind, his criminal past was what qualified him as a potential informer. As a real crook, he would have genuine knowledge of other criminals.
It also meant that Axeman had some seniority within the justice system – which is why, he told us, James approached him in Maitland Gaol asking for advice after he was arrested.
‘He was just a mellow, fat little pig that was running around the jail,’ said Axeman in a thin, rasping voice. But James could snap. ‘Someone was having a piss in the shower and pissed on his leg. Well, he just attacked the bloke in the shower and smashed his head in, then jumped on his head while he was on the ground and, oh mate, went off, right off, just frenzy. Violent. Yes, full attack mode.’
I asked him if James ever talked about the murder he’d been charged with: the death of 16-year-old Clinton Speedy-Duroux.
Axeman nodded.
I said we’d like to talk about it with him.
He shrugged, as if to say, ‘I’ve got no objection’.
I asked why he was prepared to talk.
‘The fact that a child was killed’, Axeman said. ‘Look, I’m a crook. I’m scum, I’m this or that – but I just had a kid.’ Becoming a father had changed him. His way of looking at the world had shifted. It sickened him to think of children being hurt.
We asked if he would wear a wire, like Rocco. If he would, I figured we could play on the letter Axeman sent to James, the one we used to find him. He could use that letter as an excuse to seek James out, telling him the cops had been in touch about it. Axeman could claim they wanted to charge him with hindering a police investigation, because he sent James a warning letter.
He said he would do it. We wired him up and arranged for a female undercover cop to play his girlfriend, thinking that made him look more credible than if he was alone. I drove them out to Bowraville, where Axeman walked into the local stores and asked people, ‘I’m looking for James Hide.’
They told him James left town, but to try his mum’s place, where he’d been living at the time the children were murdered. Axeman knocked on her door and told her he was a mate of James’s and needed to speak to him about some shit that’s going down.
We already had her phones off, so when James’s mum called her son, we listened. She was cautious. She warned him, remember how the cops tried to fit you up before.
‘Look, it’s really OK. I trust him, he helped me out a lot,’ James told her.
Listening in, I was thinking, Happy days.
* * *
The first time James and Axeman met, they sat and talked for hours. Listening in to what they were saying, I didn’t think James had any suspicion he was being recorded.
Axeman offered to fix him up with marijuana, which he could then sell on. James said he’d done a little dealing: ‘In the last 12 months I’ve only had about three ounces, and that I got rid of pretty quickly.’ Just enough to make a little money and keep some back to smoke himself.
But when Axeman tried to steer the talk towards the murders, James denied his involvement. He also denied admitting anything in prison, saying, ‘When I was there at Maitland, I didn’t ask anyone about anyone else’s business and I didn’t tell anyone else about mine.’
The meeting ended with us gathering no new evidence against James. Two weeks later, we tried to raise the pressure by sending Axeman back to try again. This time, we told him to claim the cops had told him they’d got evidence from someone else saying James admitted to the murders while in prison. I gave Axeman a copy of a fake record of interview, which we had done with him, making it look as if we pulled him in for questioning. I wanted James to think we were closing in.
Once again, James denied making any admissions. Listening to the surveillance recording, I could tell something had changed over the past fortnight, because he was now clearly suspicious. James talked about how the police might be using high-tech equipment to listen to his conversation with Axeman. ‘I’d be even more worried if I was fuckin’ guilty of something and had to be careful what I said in my own house,’ he said.
After that, my bosses shut down the operation. I tried to say it was the wrong decision. If we could do this properly, I argued, have Axeman move in somewhere near James, find him some work, let them hang out and become mates, then maybe we’d get something.
I failed to win the argument. I should have argued harder.
* * *
But we still have Axeman’s account of what James said to him in prison. It’s not as good as a recorded confession but it is still evidence and will be heard when the inquest into the children’s deaths resumes in August.
Between Axeman and Rocco, I’m now using serious crooks to pursue two separate investigations. One of them has beaten one murder charge while the other’s been convicted of manslaughter.
The fact they were both prepared to wear a wire does give me some comfort, because it means they were prepared to let us test the truth of what they’re saying. And, on a personal level, I trust them. Neither is gaining anything from their cooperation. In fact, both their lives have been made harder by the decision to come forward. Both now live in fear some other crook will find out they turned dog and decide to come for them.
Both of them are outlaws – an alleged killer and a convicted killer respectively. Their values might be different from my own – ask Axeman and he’ll tell you all the violence he’s done was righteous – but I can still identify with them, thinking back to my own wild youth, breaking into building sites and bringing down power lines. They live in a different, mixed-up, shadow world from the one I inhabit. It is a tougher world, where the first commandment is Thou Shalt Not Talk to Cops. But both of them have broken that, not for reward, but because they think it’s right to. In that sense, they are both moral people.
All this is a long way from when I joined up. Back then, everything seemed simple; we were the cops, we caught the crooks. Even during my first years in Homicide, I saw things in black and white: good guys, bad guys, killers, victims. Now I’m older and I see the world in shades of grey, as if a fog of different, conflicting instructions is clouding my vision. Without a clear choice between black and white, I have to use my own moral compass to find the way forward.
By the time the next inquest hearings loom up ahead of us, calling Axeman feels like a simple decision. If, for him, informing is the moral choice then, for me, it is the moral choice to use him. My job is to catch killers. In Bowraville, I’m looking for a child killer. If that means using one crook to catch another, then so be it.
The inquest resumes.
* * *
On 3 August, when Evelyn’s mother, Rebecca Stadhams, takes the stand, the counsel assisting the coroner, police sergeant Matt Fordham, calls her ‘ma’am’. That’s respectful, which I like, but no one calls Rebecca ‘ma’am’
at home and hearing it here, the word has a formality about it, just like the coat of arms, which says, This world is different from your world.
Rebecca looks so small and alone in the witness box, and when she starts to talk about her daughter, the coroner asks if she wants to stop because there are so many tears.
‘No, I’ll be right to go,’ Rebecca says.
Others among the black faces watching in the courtroom are also crying. I hate seeing them suffer. I notice Rebecca is looking down, not at the sergeant asking her the questions. Before going to Bowraville, I know my instinct would have been this meant she was hiding something.
She also takes long pauses before answering the sergeant’s questions, during which I can hear the other family members breathing. Before going to Bowraville, I would also have suspected this meant she was choosing her answer carefully, and maybe even lying.
Today, I know that both these things are just seen as good manners on the Mission. Sitting on the hard wooden bench of the courthouse, I can imagine how this subtle form of racism might have impacted on the early police response to the murders and also how witnesses like Rebecca, who are so clearly uncomfortable within this environment, might still be easily misunderstood.
Rebecca explains how she was drinking on the night before Evelyn went missing. They were at a party at her mum’s house and she can’t clearly remember going to bed. She’d been drunk before, she says, but this night was different. She had all three of her children sleeping in the same room as her and normally would wake up to give the youngest a bottle. This night, she didn’t.
‘Just as soon as I hit that bed I never moved.’
‘Was that strange?’ the sergeant asks.
‘Very strange,’ answers Rebecca.
‘Why was it strange?’
‘You wake up the next day and find out that your pants, trousers, your jeans is halfway down your legs and your underwear’s been interfered with. I reckon that would be strange.’