I Catch Killers

by Gary Jubelin

  Why have I heard nothing about this before? Returning again to the files from the first police investigation, I find that Greg and Michael did speak to police at the time, but no formal witness statements were taken. Worse, during our reinvestigation, another detective looked at their evidence again, but it was not followed up.

  Why not? I can only guess, but maybe because back then we weren’t focusing on Clinton’s murder, since it had already resulted in a not guilty verdict. Looking at the name of the cop on the paperwork, I also remember how, when we were away in Bowraville together, I saw more of him in the pub than out, chasing up confusing leads.

  There are other questions to be answered. Michael says this happened on the morning after Clinton slept in James’s caravan, the morning his family say they realised he was missing. But the old files suggest the first police investigation thought it might have been a week later, when there is a record of a similar call being made to the local police. Michael also talks about seeing a dog, when neither James nor Clinton owned one. But still, why was none of this heard during the trial over Clinton’s murder?

  These are the questions I’d like answered. Call them a case theory:

  What if James bashed Clinton while the teenager was sleeping in his caravan? That would account for Clinton’s broken jaw when the cops found his body. Maybe James knocked him unconscious. Maybe the blow killed him outright.

  The distance from James’s caravan to Norco Corner is a few hundred metres. James matched the description of the man seen by Greg and Michael standing over the body lying on the road that morning, which matched Clinton’s description.

  Did James put Clinton’s body in the car and drive to Norco Corner?

  Did he drag Clinton out onto the road?

  Norco Corner’s a blind turn. It would have been dark – Michael and Greg’s truck had powerful driving lights and they only just managed to avoid the figure lying on the bitumen. Another car or truck might have hit him. If it was Clinton lying there, the collision might have disguised his injuries. What happened after Michael and Greg stopped? After they asked the white man what was going on, and he assured them that he’d called for help and they drove on?

  If that white man was James, did he then load Clinton back into the car and drive up to the forest? Did James dump Clinton’s body beside the Congarinni Road, near his crop of marijuana plants?

  I’d love to ask James those questions. Only, he isn’t talking.

  * * *

  I can’t leave the case alone for another reason, also. It’s still affecting my life at home.

  When I met Tracy, the psychologist helping the Bowraville families, I knew we got on well but didn’t think we had a future. Our homes were more than 3000 kilometres apart, on opposite coasts. After I broke up with Pam, Tracy and I began to speak more often on the phone. Sometimes we spoke for hours.

  In October 2006, a month after I met Michael in Bowraville, Tracy starts to spend more time with me in Copacabana.

  She’s different from Pam. Tracy is different from anyone I’ve ever known. Born in the northwest corner of Australia, she grew up near Shark Bay, where her father was a station manager and her mother a shearers’ cook. As a child, her family moved to nearby Useless Loop, a closed community town servicing the salt harvesting operation, and lived in a shack with a dirt floor, before settling in the mining town of Tom Price, 500 kilometres northwest. These experiences gave her a sense of drive, and an empathy for what other Aboriginal people have been through. Tracy had seen the effects of the Stolen Generations, the poverty, the booze.

  She became the first Aboriginal person in the country to complete a combined masters and PhD in clinical psychology, and then she started her own business. She’s won awards for her research into mental health in Aboriginal communities.

  Tracy says she can keep running the business from the east coast, and so we set her up in my home. It’s hard yakka and means she’s travelling across the country every couple of weeks, but when we are together it’s great. She gets on well with Jake, who’s now 15, and 13-year-old Gemma, and we start to build a life together. She runs, so understands the importance to me of my training. Like the kids, Tracy gets used to waking up and finding me doing press-ups, weights or yoga. All three of them laugh about how they can tell how my day went by watching the way I rip into the punchbag hanging on our balcony. But all three of them are serious about their sport as well.

  Jake and Gemma both do kung fu and I also encourage them to play one team sport and one individual sport, so Jake plays soccer and goes surfing – just like I do – while Gemma does ballet and netball.

  I push them hard, but for their own good, like my dad did. Which makes me shake my head to see how soft he is with them.

  One time Tracy and I go away for the weekend, leaving Dad in charge, with a list of instructions: the kids can only eat healthy food; they must do their training, and their homework when they’re not doing that; they absolutely cannot go to McDonald’s; and are not to spend the day at Aunty Karen’s, who lives about an hour away from us.

  Dad ignores everything I say. The kids eat Macca’s, go to Aunty Karen’s house, and do no homework and no training. They do everything I’ve told him that they cannot. Now that he’s a teenager, Jake’s also started to defy me, trying all the same tricks that I used to with my own parents.

  He’ll say he’s staying at a mate’s house while his mate claims he’s staying at ours, then they’ll go out together, knowing that if I catch them, there’ll be trouble. Jake’s mates call me The Unit, joking that I look like a utility and I’m capable of anything.

  One night, I’m driving home from work at about 2am in an unmarked police car to find a mob of drunk kids spilling across the roads in Copacabana. The local cops had been called in to break up a house party, leaving the kids to roam the streets. They’re still over-excited. One teenager puts his face up to the car window to give me a razz, freezes in horror and pulls back, shouting: ‘It’s Jubes’s dad! It’s Jubes’s dad!’

  The crowd scuttles. Jake jumps behind a bush to hide. Suddenly the road is deserted.

  * * *

  While I follow up the Norco Corner evidence, the murdered Bowraville children’s families are campaigning for a change to the laws surrounding double jeopardy.

  It seems impossible: a small group of blackfellas from the Mission, where broken-down cars are left to rust on pitted roads, seeking to pull down one of the pillars that supports the white man’s justice system, a pillar that’s stood in place for as long as the convict-built sandstone columns supporting the State’s old Supreme Court building at Darlinghurst in Sydney.

  The families shrug at this. It’s not their law, they tell me. Black law says anyone who kills another accepts there will be payback.

  At the heart of their campaign is a woman called Leonie Duroux, the no-nonsense daughter of a conservative Baptist minister who grew up in Sydney but defied her parents and left the city before getting together with Clinton’s brother, Marbuck. Physically, Leonie is small, her head barely reaches my shoulder, but you wouldn’t mess with her. She carries the weight of the world around on her shoulders like it’s barely a burden. For years now, she’s been writing letters about the children’s killings – hundreds of letters, to victim support groups, to the Aboriginal Land Council, to Members of Parliament, to the New South Wales Governor, asking for their support. Recently, she’s started writing letters about the double jeopardy laws.

  A campaign group is formed, called Ngindayjumi, which means Truth Be Told in Gumbaynggirr, the Aboriginal language spoken in Bowraville. It gets the attention of journalists and is featured on the ABC’s Australian Story TV program in September 2006. The families are getting themselves heard.

  Leonie goes with Marbuck and Clinton’s father, Thomas, to meet their local MP, who arranges for them to travel to Sydney and meet with the head of the New South Wales Premier’s Department. When they get there, the politicians tell them the judges are against a c
hange. Leonie argues that the same law was changed a year ago in the UK, after an inquiry into the death of another black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, which found the police investigation into his murder suffered from institutional racism.

  The world is changing, Leonie says, to anyone who’ll listen.

  When anyone asks me about the law, I say look at DNA technology. When the Bowraville murders happened, we didn’t have the ability to test a bloodstain or a strand of hair and say who was at a crime scene. Surely, the courts have to accept this technology might mean it’s possible an old exhibit could throw up some fresh DNA evidence, meaning a verdict has to be reconsidered? We’re all after the same thing, I say, which is justice.

  In December 2006, the State Government announces it will change the law. The Mission families have knocked down the sandstone pillars.

  Smiling at my own lack of faith in this community, I think it’s only right if the Bowraville case is the first to take advantage of this earthquake. Reading through the new legislation, it says that somebody who’s been found not guilty of a murder can now be sent back for retrial, if ‘fresh and compelling’ evidence is found against them.

  DNA evidence would be ‘fresh and compelling’, but we haven’t got it. Too many years have passed and what little physical evidence we have has degraded. The first investigation of the murders found a tiny red stain on the headboard of the bed in James Hide’s caravan. Today, if DNA testing could match that to Clinton, it might prove he was attacked there. At the time, all the police could do was confirm it was a bloodstain, and in the process of running that test, the stain itself was destroyed.

  I wonder if the Norco Corner evidence is ‘fresh and compelling’. It’s never been heard in court before. If so, this is our chance to solve this case; it means the appeal court could overturn the previous not guilty verdicts over Evelyn’s and Clinton’s deaths. We’d have the chance to run the trials again. And that means a chance to overcome the other, fundamental problem in the prosecution – the decision of the judge at the time James was arrested to separate the cases, so each jury could only be told one child disappeared from Bowraville, not three.

  These laws have also changed since that decision was made. It’s now much more likely the courts will accept what they call ‘tendency and coincidence’ evidence about the similarities between separate crimes that show they may be linked. That means a new trial might be able to hear evidence about Evelyn’s and Clinton’s murders, and maybe even Colleen’s, which has never been presented to a jury, all together. That might be enough, I think.

  I am excited. This might be a chance to right a historic wrong. Three children were murdered in Bowraville, I tell myself. On that basis alone, I can’t think of a more important case in New South Wales.

  And I’m supposed to work it on my own, without a strike force.

  Standing on the balcony of my townhouse in Copacabana, I call Linda, the acting Homicide Squad commander.

  I tell her that I want to put in a submission to the State Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), seeking a retrial of James over the murders of Evelyn and Clinton. As I’m still the crime manager at Chatswood, I’ll need assistance from Homicide.

  She says there isn’t anyone available.

  I put in written requests, and get nothing. Years ago, Linda and I worked together as detectives at Hornsby and were friendly, which makes her refusal feel worse.

  Weeks later, when work at Chatswood takes me to the police headquarters building in Parramatta, western Sydney, I go to visit Linda, catching her in the corridor just as she’s leaving the Homicide Squad office.

  ‘Linda, I need staff,’ I tell her, the anger rising in my voice. ‘I’m sick of fucking around trying to get staff.’

  ‘You can’t speak to me like that,’ she says, but I’ve exhausted all my reasonableness.

  ‘Fuck off, I’ll speak to you any way I want!’

  She stares at me. She says there are other cases, other murders, with a much better chance of being solved than the Bowraville killings. Those cases need resources too, she says.

  Then let the cops working those come in here and fight for them. ‘Let’s go up to level nine,’ I say. That means the senior bosses. ‘Let’s go up there and sort this out. You explain to them why I’m not getting any staff to help me with a triple murder investigation. Come on, let’s go now.’

  She walks away. I know I’ve gone too far. I know I always over-escalate and usually regret it. But this time, I don’t feel regret. I know there are people at work who say I am a zealot. I hear the rumours going round. Well, fucking let them. I know I’m doing the right thing. And I know that the Bowraville families accept me.

  The case is too important. If it means a falling-out with the acting Homicide commander, then so be it.

  Hours later, I get two people assigned to work the case: Bianca Comina, an analyst I’ve worked with before on the Caroline Byrne investigation, and Jerry Bowden, a Homicide detective.

  Right, let’s fucking do this.

  * * *

  Our first job is to prepare a formal submission to the State DPP, asking him to send Evelyn’s and Clinton’s cases to the appeal court. Jerry is a character, with an easy smile and tireless energy that I’d been missing in Jason Evers’ absence. He’s the yang to my yin again, without which it had been hard to lift myself up and stop from being swamped.

  Without Jason, I’d also lost his uncanny ability to remember the details of the investigation. If I couldn’t remember a name among the different folders full of witness statements we’d built up over the years, Jason would always be able to remind me, and say where I could find their evidence. While we use the e@gle.i computer system, I still like to have a hard copy of everything printed out and now it looks like a mountain to dismantle, but Bianca comes in to move it. She breaks down folder after folder of documents, working with a tireless determination that also gives me strength. I don’t know if I could have continued with those files if I was on my own.

  Together we draw up a 61-page affidavit, outlining what we know about the case to date, including the Norco Corner evidence. It also includes a list of 20 examples of the ‘tendency and coincidence’ evidence linking the murders together, including that James had previously expressed a sexual interest in Colleen, Evelyn’s mother, Rebecca, and Clinton’s girlfriend, Kelly Jarrett, who was also asleep in the caravan on the night Clinton disappeared.

  Colleen had previously complained to a friend that James had pulled her pants down and ‘mauled’ her while she slept in his caravan two nights before she went missing. Both Rebecca and Clinton’s girlfriend also woke up following Evelyn’s and Clinton’s disappearances to find their pants had been pulled down.

  Another example of ‘tendency and coincidence’ evidence is that James’s mother’s red Galant was seen by witnesses near where each of the children went missing. And, after James was charged with murdering Clinton, the third of the three children, no further similar murders happened in the area.

  We also ask the Australian Institute of Criminology to analyse the data held in the National Homicide Monitoring Program (NHMP), which lists every such death nationwide, to see how likely it might be that the three children were killed by separate offenders.

  We want to show the DPP that we are dealing with a serial killer, and that the version of events presented to each jury in the separate trials over Evelyn’s and Clinton’s murders was therefore misleading.

  ‘Based on the interrogation of the NHMP database covering a period of 16 years, the murder of three children from a small town over a period of 6 months by different offenders to date has not occurred,’ our affidavit argues.

  I sign the affidavit on 31 January 2007.

  On 4 June, the DPP writes back, saying that ‘even accepting that any admissible evidence concerning the Norco Corner incident is fresh, in my view it is not compelling’, and declining to let the case be reheard.

  * * *

  Throughout my separation f
rom Pam and the disappointment of Evelyn’s trial, I’ve grown closer to my sifu, Ben. He sometimes comes to Chatswood Police Station to give me private classes or for meditation. When it has felt as if life might tip me over into darkness, he’s reached out to help me rebalance and find the sense of purpose I need to keep going.

  But, in the middle of 2007, a cop who I don’t know comes to the martial arts gym where Ben teaches and confronts him, saying he’s not happy.

  The cop is worried about his daughter, who he says has thrown her life away to follow Ben’s training. She is under 18.

  Ben introduces me, saying I’m a fellow officer, that I’m at the gym a lot and I can tell him what’s been going on. I say I know Ben well and that I’ve seen his daughter at training. Everything I’ve seen has been legitimate, I say.

  He’s being asked to take my word, as one cop to another. He leaves, but I’m not certain he’s convinced.

  The experience makes me watchful. I start to look at Ben differently and, for the first time, I see how he’s lost some of his humility. He boasts about the champion fighters who’ve trained with him. I ask myself if I can be so sure that he’s trained under this master or that master, as he claims.

  I also watch the cop’s daughter and see the way she looks at Ben, and the way he acts with her in training. I see how they spend so much time together, despite the difference in their ages. I start to feel uncomfortable.

  I call Ben out and he begins to protest, saying, ‘Oh, but –’

  ‘There’s no fucking buts,’ I tell him. ‘It’s like me getting into a relationship with a victim.’

  ‘Listen, Gary –’

  ‘You’ve taken advantage of her. There are no excuses.’

  I tell him I don’t want to see him or to speak to him. She is a child. It’s a betrayal. It’s a betrayal of me also, because I believed him.