by Gary Jubelin
Chastened, the sergeant tries to clarify his question, asking if there was anything strange about the way she slept?
‘I felt really sick and that the next day,’ Rebecca tells him.
Later, he asks her about James Hide. Has she seen him with tablets? Rebecca says she has, at parties.
‘Have there ever been occasions where you think that Hide might have put a drug in your drink?’
‘Yeah, I reckon I was drugged or spiked or something.’
‘What is it that makes you think you’d been drugged that night?’
‘Because I didn’t wake up and I never heard nothing in that room. And I usually get up and make my baby a bottle and that and go to the toilet and that. It was just when I got on that bed, my mind was just completely blank. I didn’t hear anything.’
The sergeant finishes his questions. Before she steps down from the witness box, he looks up and tells her, ‘Thanks, Rebecca.’
* * *
The inquest continues through the cold, first days of August. Rebecca’s mum, Patricia Stadhams, gives evidence about how James was at the party that night and brought some spirits with him. He was drinking, she says, they all were. Patricia saws she saw James in the bedroom with Rebecca, arguing with another man. She says she went in there and moved them out, so Rebecca and the kids could sleep. She says the door had a lock, but you could open it from the outside with a knife if you knew how to.
Soon after, the party wound down Patricia says. ‘Everyone was gone then, by three, and only him was around, James Hide.’
Another relative of Evelyn’s, Fiona Duckett, is called to give evidence and describes how in the night, after the party finished, she woke up to fix her infant son a bottle and saw James walk out of Rebecca’s room, alone. He walked down the hallway. He didn’t see Fiona and by the time she’d followed him to the front door and looked outside, James had disappeared.
On 10 August, Axeman is called to the witness box. The police sergeant runs through his criminal history, saying, ‘Sir, is it the case that the offences which you have been dealt with by the courts include “Break, Enter and Steal”, “Fradulent Misappropriation”, “Supplying Heroin”, “Possessing Heroin”, “Stealing”, “Malicious Damage”, “False Pretences”, “Forgery”, “Offensive Behaviour” and some quite serious assaults?’
‘Certainly is,’ Axeman answers. At least he isn’t hiding anything, I think.
The sergeant asks what James told him in prison.
‘He just commented that he’d been charged over the death of a young fellow. I didn’t know the name of the bloke.’ The sergeant nods, inviting Axeman to continue. ‘He said that they were trying to pin him on it and they had him on the grounds that, it was something about a blanket.’
Sitting in court, watching, I’m thinking how, with an informer, you’re always looking to see if they can provide details they couldn’t have got from media reports. I’ve heard a lot of Axeman’s story before, but the reference to a blanket is potentially interesting: a stained, blue-and-pink striped blanket was found near Clinton’s body. A pillowcase matching those in James’s caravan was stuffed down Clinton’s shorts.
‘They’d had a knife fight and what-not and he’d buried him out in the marijuana patch,’ says Axeman, recounting what James told him. That’s also interesting. Clinton’s body was found near a small plantation of marijuana plants growing in the forest. We’d checked if it was mentioned in the trial over the teenager’s murder, or if that fact had made its way into the newspaper and TV reports. It looked like it hadn’t.
‘Did Mr Hide describe to you where the fight with the male took place?’ the police sergeant asks Axeman.
‘It was in a caravan.’ Clinton was last seen in James’s caravan.
Axeman says James told him Clinton had pulled a knife during an argument over a drug deal, but James had taken the weapon from him. ‘And, yes, he dealt with it.’
This version of events just doesn’t fit with what we know about Clinton. According to his family, the 16-year-old was a decent young bloke, not even much of a drinker, although he was drinking at a party on the Mission before going back to sleep with his girlfriend in James’s caravan.
Clinton was only in Bowraville for a short time, visiting his father, Thomas Duroux. It seems unlikely he’d got into drug dealing.
Another possible explanation might be that, if James did it, he would be reluctant to tell anyone in prison, I murdered a kid. Child killers become targets behind bars and, big as James was, he wouldn’t have wanted to attract that kind of attention. Maybe he lied about what happened, saying, There was a knife fight and Clinton came at me. I stabbed him in self-defence.
‘Did Mr Hide describe where on Mr Speedy-Duroux’s body he was stabbed?’ the sergeant asks.
‘No, he didn’t no. Just said he give it to him about the head,’ Axeman replies. Clinton was stabbed in the head.
I know none of this is direct evidence James was the killer, and that Axeman’s account is not enough on its own to convince a jury but, like everybody else in the courtroom – the police sergeant, the coroner, the children’s families sitting silently behind me in the public gallery – hearing him give these details on oath, I can’t help but want to know what else he says that James told him.
He says he did not want to hear more. Knowledge is dangerous in prison – ‘Hear enough and you become involved.’ Though James did say he was confident he’d never get convicted. He claimed the Aboriginal witnesses were drunks, says Axeman, looking out at the children’s families.
‘What did he say about them?’ the sergeant asks.
‘Just they were going to be hopeless in court and said it wouldn’t make the grade and wouldn’t get up there.’
The sergeant asks if James talked about any other murders.
Axeman looks like he’s weighing up whether to hold back or continue. After a pause, he says there was another time, when James came back from court after being charged with the murder of a young girl.
Evelyn, I think. The case that was dropped after James was found not guilty of killing Clinton.
Axeman says James approached him after arriving back at the prison.
‘What did he say?’
‘Not to get the wrong idea about the young girl’s death . . . he went into a bit of detail and I had to cut him off but she’d had her head smashed against a wall.’
I sit up and lean closer. Axeman cannot know this, but when I sat down to interview Evelyn’s grandmother Patricia Stadhams in 1997, she told me how, on the night her granddaughter went missing, she woke up and heard Evelyn crying. Patricia went to the locked door inside which Evelyn and her mother were sleeping. She heard her crying, ‘Mummy, Mummy.’ It sounded like the child was scared and Patricia started shaking the door and yelling out to Evelyn to open it.
She said she heard a thud, then silence. Like the sound you’d make striking a crying child against a wall?
‘I can just hear her screaming and screaming every time I think about it,’ Patricia had told me. ‘I could tell by the sound of her voice that she was scared.’
I’d asked her why she hadn’t come forward with this before.
‘I told my people that I just heard her crying but didn’t tell them all that I knew and they put me through hell,’ she answered. ‘They accused me of having something to do with it. If I told them all that I knew, if I told them how she was screaming for her mummy, they would have blamed me.’
A child screaming. A thud. Then silence. In the inquest, the sergeant asks Axeman if James told him what was happening when he attacked the girl.
‘No, no. I cut him off, mate. Yes, I didn’t want to know about it,’ he says.
‘Did he talk to you about the reasons why he had to –?’
‘He was trying to justify himself but it was over anger. It was just pure anger, mate.’
‘Did he say what he was angry about?’
‘No, no. He didn’t.’
‘Did H
ide talk about any other children?’ the sergeant asks him.
‘There was something about a 15- or 16-year-old white girl.’
Colleen? I wonder. She was 16, with pale skin. Her mother said the family had some white in it, but you wouldn’t describe her as white.
Axeman scratches his chin with his long, scarred fingers. ‘Yes, it was a white, young girl, Woolgoolga, Maclean, something or other,’ he continues. Woolgoolga? Among the different, conflicting accounts of Colleen’s movements on the night she disappeared was that she was planning to travel to Goodooga. It is a stretch, but could Axeman have misheard, or misremembered? The information about Colleen’s travel plans has never been made public. Or was James talking about something else?
* * *
The day after Axeman gives evidence, James himself is due to take the stand, so Jason and I drive to the nearby motel where he is staying to pick him up and drive him to the courthouse. He is alone, without a lawyer to represent him. During the journey back, I try to start a conversation, but he offers only one-word answers.
Once in the witness box, the coroner asks James, ‘Have you had legal advice in this matter?’
‘By phone, yes.’ His voice is flat and hollow, echoing off the timber walls.
‘We’d like to hear from you but is the legal advice to the effect that you’ve been advised not to answer any questions if the answers you give may tend to incriminate you?’
‘That’s right, your honour.’
‘And do you want to exercise that right?’
‘I do, your honour.’
With that, the sergeant assisting the coroner says he has no further questions. James steps down from the witness box and walks out across the courtroom.
* * *
James does not come back a month later, on Friday 10 September, when the coroner announces his decision. Despite Colleen’s body never having been recovered, Abernethy finds that she was murdered, but that there is not enough evidence to say who it was that killed her. He formally suspends the inquest into Evelyn’s death, saying he is ‘satisfied firstly that there is evidence capable of satisfying a reasonable jury properly instructed of her murder and secondly, that there is a reasonable prospect that that jury will convict a known person of her murder’. It will now be for the criminal courts to decide what happened to Evelyn.
‘A known person has been given every opportunity to make submissions before me and has chosen not to do it,’ says Abernethy. Afterwards, he writes to the State DPP asking him to reconsider whether there are grounds to charge James with killing Evelyn.
I keep working the Bowraville case, both on and off duty, preparing a submission to support this. At first, the DPP remains unconvinced. Then, in May 2005, I’m walking through Hyde Park in the centre of Sydney when I get a call from one of the DPP’s lawyers, asking me to clarify something in the submission.
‘I’ll come over,’ I say.
‘There’s no need –’
‘I’m just outside. I’ll be straight there,’ I interrupt. Inside their offices, I spend three hours arguing that they should take the prosecution forward. I try to make them understand the humanity of the decision they are making, like how Evelyn’s grandmother Patricia is the most credible witness you could hope for – if you meet her. I talk about how Hilton, who said James whispered to him that he killed people and buried their bodies, had not come forward before because he was a black man who feared a white policeman would not believe him. I tell them that we’ll never have this chance again.
The DPP agrees. I start preparing for court.
You’ll Have to Wear a Uniform
March 2005: 19 years in
The black suit jacket feels comfortable. Well worn. Beneath it, a white shirt and knotted black tie. Black trousers. Non-regulation leather boots. My Glock 22 in its holster tucked into the small of my back.
I should be putting on a uniform, but I don’t want to. I haven’t worn one for 20 years, not since I became a detective.
The only reason I’m even thinking about a uniform now is that a new anti-corruption policy introduced after the royal commission means every detective in State Crime Command now faces being rotated to a new squad every few years. It’s meant to stop cops from building corrupt relationships with the crooks they meet through work, but I think it’s a mistake. In Homicide, we work a case, then move on to the next one, not like the old Kings Cross detectives, who spent their days surrounded by the same club bosses. Nor are we like those cops fighting the War on Drugs, who might regularly walk into crime scenes where there’s a pile of money sitting on the table. When the Homicide Squad get to a crime scene, there’s most often just a body.
Rather than be rotated out, during 2004 I jumped instead, winning promotion to detective inspector and a position working as Crime Manager for the Chatswood local area command, on Sydney’s lower north shore. The pay’s good, which helps with my money worries, but it’s a desk job with a huge range of responsibilities. I oversee the local intelligence, crime prevention and transit cops, the beat police officers who patrol the local streets and shopping centres, as well as the local detectives. It means 7am briefings and evening Neighbourhood Watch meetings, sitting on the human resources committee and overseeing the station rosters. Shopping trolleys are one of the big issues I deal with. People don’t like it when they’re taken from shops and left lying round the streets.
I try to stop the admin work from taking over, so I can spend more time with the detectives, or working on the Bowraville case, even if that means doing it in my own time. It’s a way of staying faithful to who I am at heart, a Homicide detective, but it isn’t always easy. On my first day, Doreen, the local area commander, told me: ‘You’ll have to wear a uniform.’
I said I didn’t have one. She asked someone to sort it out. As each item came in – hat, jacket, pants – I’d throw it under my desk.
After a few months, Doreen asked me again to wear a uniform. I wore it for a month or two, more out of respect for her than anything, because Doreen was a good boss, then took it off and went back to wearing my suit.
My happy place at Chatswood is the station gym, where I can train or meditate. The other cops have got used to coming in and seeing me with my eyes closed in lotus position. Like with the uniform, it is another way of keeping balanced; OK, I’d been forced to take a different job, but that didn’t mean I was a different person. That sense of sanctuary I found in the gym might help explain my actions when someone violated it.
One day I smelled something foul in the changing rooms. Taking a look, I found someone had shat in the shower. The cleaner said it wasn’t the first time it had happened, and that made me mad. We’re cops. We have real responsibilities to others – we can take away other people’s freedom. For a cop to do this was mocking those. It was perverse.
At the next morning briefing, in front of the whole station, I walked in and told the assembled officers, ‘No wonder people call us pigs, because we are pigs. We’re dirty, rotten pigs. Someone shat in the shower, and I’m going to use every ounce of my investigative skills to find that person.’
I wanted to shock them. To drive the message home, I kicked a chair and stormed out of the room.
Later, I had blue and white crime scene tape put up around the gym shower block, then emailed every cop at the station saying I was disgusted. The email said I’d called in forensics and that, yes, stupid, you could get DNA from human faeces.
Word came from one of the older guys that a young cop went white when he read this. I had him brought up to my office via the stairs, so he was out of breath when he arrived, then shut the door and stared at him.
‘Why did you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Don’t fucking muck around, someone shat in the shower and you’re the person that’s done it.’
It only took a couple of minutes to break him. He confessed, but there was something weird about the way he did it. It felt like he was getting off on telling me the
story.
‘Give us your gun and get out of the police station,’ I said. He went. I didn’t have a clear idea if I was sacking or suspending him, and probably I broke some rules, but he didn’t come back, so that wasn’t an issue.
Looking back, I can accept it seemed extreme, but I was happy to be seen as a hard man to work for if that meant stopping other cops from taking the job less seriously than I did. Getting older, and being stuck behind a desk not out there chasing crooks, I have less patience for those who don’t see that police work is life and death. At its extreme, in certain situations where it is justified, being a cop means you can kill someone and the law will defend you.
Yes, afterwards, in the pub, I laughed about the Mystery of the Phantom Shower Defacator, but in the moment I was deadly fucking serious. For me, it was partly about dealing with someone who I thought had no right to call himself a policeman. And partly it was proving I have more to offer than shift rosters and pushing back the tide of abandoned shopping trolleys.
* * *
Sometimes, you have to take this seriously.
On one job in 2005 I oversaw a kidnapping: a father disappeared with his child and was calling the mother demanding a ransom to reunite them. She walked through the front doors of Chatswood Police Station to ask for help and, given what was at stake, I referred the case to State Crime Command. They said it was a civil matter not a criminal one, and so they couldn’t touch it.
Fuck that, I thought. We’ll do it.
The father kept phoning, making more demands, so we traced the calls. The New South Wales Crime Commission, a powerful and largely secretive law-enforcement body, stepped up to help. They had better equipment than we did in the cops, so we eventually tracked the calls to Thailand. Working with Interpol and the Thai police, we got the child back and were in the process of extraditing the father when a federal politician called me and tried to vouch for him, saying surely there was no real need to do this?