by Gary Jubelin
* * *
Not every case can end in a conviction. Two months before the Perishes were sentenced, on 24 February 2012, the appeal court announced its verdict after hearing a challenge to the conviction of Gordon Wood for the murder of Caroline Byrne. Despite interviewing Gordon in London in 2001, I haven’t worked on the case since leaving Homicide and so am not there in person as the three judges hand down their 186-page judgment.
It’s devastating to the police case.
In cold, black type, the judgment details the lack of any police photographs or contemporaneous records of where Caroline’s body was discovered at the base of The Gap in 1995. This led to controversy in 2004, the year I left the Homicide Squad for Chatswood, when the police were forced to change their estimate of where Caroline landed.
This in turn caused problems for the physics professor the prosecution relied on as an expert witness in court, Associate Professor Rod Cross from the University of Sydney. He’d argued Caroline could not have jumped the distance between the cliff edge and where she made impact, so must have been thrown over. His findings were subsequently disputed.
What made things worse was Professor Cross’s publication of a book about his role in the case after Gordon’s conviction. According to the court judgment, this showed ‘he clearly saw his task as being to marshal the evidence which may assist the prosecution to eliminate the possibility of suicide and leave only the possibility of murder’.
Reading on, the judges also criticised the prosecution barrister, Mark Tedeschi QC. His argument that Gordon killed his fiancée because she wanted to end their relationship was ‘entirely speculative’, according to the judgment. Tedeschi had suggested Caroline might also have been killed to stop her revealing details of the Offset Alpine Printing scandal involving Gordon’s boss, businessman Rene Rivkin. This, too, was dismissed by the appeal judges.
‘There is nothing in the evidence which justifies the prosecution’s speculation with respect to the applicant’s motive,’ said the Chief Judge, Peter McClellan. Throughout the judgment, Gordon is referred to not by name but as ‘the applicant’, because he applied to the appeal court to challenge the guilty verdict.
Without motive, certainty where Caroline’s body was recovered or confidence in its expert witness, the judges were not prepared to let the guilty verdict stand. ‘Suspicion and conjecture, even grave suspicion, is not a proper basis for the finding of guilt.’
Gordon’s actions and statements, both before and after Caroline’s death, ‘require careful consideration’, the judgment read. ‘It would seem that he lied about some matters. Certainly his behaviour was at times unusual.’
But this was not enough. Perhaps they could be explained. The way the court system works, Gordon did not have to explain them. ‘The Crown must prove its case. No burden falls upon the applicant.’
The prosecution had not proved its case. The judges ordered Gordon’s conviction be overturned and that he instead be found not guilty.
That’s how the system works. The highest court in New South Wales had spoken. I was still proud to have worked on that case. After the appeal court judges stood and walked out of the courtroom, Caroline’s father, Tony, left with my old sergeant, Paul Jacob. I felt guilty not to be there with them. I could only guess how both men were feeling.
* * *
Like every other case, I carried this decision home, where Tracy has now learned to judge the way the verdict has played out from the expression on my face when I walk in. She knew not to worry, as the frown lines would relax once I’d had time to do my meditation. It is almost a year now since she and I were married, on 12 November 2011, in a ceremony held in Port Macquarie, a place full of memories for me, both good and bad – from holidays when the kids were little, to setting up the strike force investigating Terry Falconer’s murder.
The two of us had found a balance between us. We’ve also bought an apartment together in Pyrmont, in Sydney’s inner-west, near the harbour, but we still have our different lives. Tracy’s business, working in specialist mental health services for Aboriginal people, was going well, although she was spending more time running it from Perth these days than on the east coast living with me. We’d got engaged among the waterfalls and vine forests of Litchfield National Park, in the Northern Territory, during a trip for Tracy to give a keynote speech in nearby Darwin.
That night, she’d gone out in the city with some girlfriends, while I went back to the hotel and watched a boxing match on TV, thinking life didn’t get any better. With her often in Perth and me in Sydney, the distance separating the two cities meant that I could concentrate on work during the week then fly over on a Friday evening, switch the phone off and watch out the plane window as the red desert unfolded beneath me in silence.
In Perth, I wasn’t a Homicide detective. I could relax. Selling the townhouse in Copacabana and leaving the kids behind during the move to Pyrmont had been a wrench, made easier by the fact they were older now, with Jake at university and Gemma finishing school. They’re growing up, making their own way into the world and don’t need me around so often.
I am excited about the future. Just before our marriage, I took a few months long service leave from the cops and spent it with Tracy in Perth, helping with her business. With the company going well, she told me how she wanted to make the wedding a big event, so we hired a rural property near the Hastings River and had a wedding planner fly up from Sydney to meet us. We brought in marquees, a bar, a dancefloor and a lighting crew. There was a boat cruise. Tracy’s family came over from the Pilbara, and the Bowraville mob also made the journey from the Mission.
It was a different world for them, and for me also. It was an outdoor service, with chairs for the assembled friends and family arranged in rows on the pasture overlooking the river. Standing there in my new suit, I’d come so far since my first wedding, held near where Debbie and I grew up, where my mates cheered us on from the awning of the nearby bottle shop.
Together with our guests, waiting for Tracy’s arrival, we watched the clouds gather: first bruise-purple, then black. Tracy walked down the aisle as the first raindrops started to spatter. We made it through the service before the storm, but then it was chaos, with floods of water deeper than our ankles. I took my shoes and socks off and rolled my trousers up to carry Tracy to a house on the property.
During the reception, somebody told me, ‘You’re bloody.’ A leech had crawled up my arm and the whole sleeve was crimson.
Let’s get away from here, I thought, as Tracy and I got into our chauffeured car to leave that night.
We were looking forward. Tracy was smart and fun. She stood for something. Her career was going well and at work, I’d just received an unexpected invitation from Peter, the new Homicide Squad commander, to return to it from Gangs and take up a senior role in the Unsolved Homicide Unit, reviewing old, unsolved cases that have often been forgotten – except by the victims’ families – to see if new technology or sheer determination could make a difference.
It felt like the best fit for a cop with my skills and experience. I like the tough cases. Not working on fresh murders also meant fewer pressures, fewer sleepless nights and other sacrifices for myself and those around me.
Just before Tracy and I drove away from the wedding, her sister jumped into the car. She was looking for her teenage son, could we help her? Of course. I was feeling happy – freshly married, the crooks in my career case all inside prison cells, and, with my new marriage, leaving behind us a period when my personal life had too often been out of balance. There had been too much darkness over the past decade; I’d lost my sifu, got formally divorced from Debbie, split from Pam, and endured a painful break in my friendship with Jason Evers.
But I’d also formed new relationships, with Rocco and Axeman among others. Our relationships are based on the fact I don’t judge them, which is something I learned in Bowraville, where both sides, the police and the Mission families, had to get over their distru
st of the other.
After buying the apartment in Pyrmont, I’d also found a new sifu, Chan Yong Fa, who taught in Sydney’s Chinatown and was not afraid to slap me in the face and call me an ‘angry policeman’ if I turned up scowling to our Saturday morning qigong classes.
Getting older, I was more confident about talking to other cops about my qigong and meditation. I’d proved myself as a Homicide detective during this phase of my life and, with that, some of my old insecurities had washed away. I wasn’t worried about whether other cops saw me as a hardarse detective, which made me more willing to talk about this softer side of my personality and the benefits I’d got from it. And, the older I got, the more obvious those benefits became. When many of my generation of detectives were having to let their belts out as their bellies spread, I could still train as hard as people 10 or 15 years younger.
The noise of the wedding reception started to fade behind us. I was getting some perspective; while it had been a dark decade during which my private life had fallen apart, it had also been a time when I’d been at my most dangerous to criminals. Linda Wilson, Jeffrey Hillsley and the Perish brothers had all been jailed. I can take it easier now, I thought. Maybe I can rest on my laurels.
The car swerved. A body was lying on the road. We stopped, and I told Tracy and her sister to wait in the car before running back to find it was a young Aboriginal bloke – just like the one on Norco Corner.
It was Tracy’s nephew. Like my own son, Jake, he’d drunk too much at the wedding. Drunk. I looked at him lying there, head lolling back, completely out of it and thought how this could easily have ended in a tragedy. That’s the fine line between life and death. Whose fault would it have been if something had happened to him? His for drinking too much and ending up on the road, where he was so vulnerable? Ours, for allowing him to drink?
Either way, your past has a way of catching up with you. You are the product of your actions.
I helped to get him in the car.
Round Three
Enough to Walk Away
December 2013: 28 years in
The needle hurts, but not enough to make me flinch. Beneath its point, the Sanskrit symbol ‘Om’ is emerging in blue ink etched into the skin of my right bicep, which is my stronger arm when I am boxing. Om is a holy word, one we chanted at a meditation retreat where I spent time in Nepal earlier this year. I don’t think I’ve ever been as relaxed as I was then, getting up early in the morning to do some boxing training on my own, then taking part in group sessions doing yoga, meditation or doing a painting of Buddha, which is now hanging in my kitchen.
When we arrived, they asked us why we were at the retreat. I said I’d taken a year off working at the police and spent the time instead in Perth with my new wife, but would soon be heading back to the world of Homicide investigation. I wanted to be prepared, to find a sense of peace I could carry with me into the battles ahead.
This tattoo is a reminder to myself of what I learned there, about trying to be peaceful. That’s my soft side. To balance it, I’ve also had the words ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees’ tattooed on my left ribs, above my heart. That is how I intend to live my life from this moment forward.
The tattooist shifts in his chair. Behind him, the warm Perth sun filters through the glass of his dark shopfront. Over the past year, I’ve also taken other trips, riding a motorbike round Vietnam, surfing in the Maldives and a cycling trip through Thailand with Bill, my old mate from the police academy. Each trip was like a window into my old, hippy lifestyle before joining the cops, a world I had since pulled a curtain over. I found some of that sense of joy that I’d been missing while riding my motorbike, sitting on my surfboard looking at the horizon or cross-legged on the floor in Nepal. I started to accept I can have both sides in me: detective and hippy.
Most of the past year, though, has been spent in Perth with Tracy. She’s building her business up and explained how her earning capacity is greater than mine in the cops, so the more I was able to free her up to focus on that, the more we could earn as a couple.
The agreement was it would be just for a year. I do the groceries, tidy up at home and pick up the slack for her at work, doing office administration and even getting involved in bigger decisions like the hiring and firing of people.
I still travelled back to Sydney often, staring out of the plane window at the dead heart of Australia. There are always court hearings for old cases including, earlier this month, an inquest into the death of a 33-year-old called Ryan Pringle, who was shot by police at a remote property near Tenterfield, in northern New South Wales, over a year and a half ago.
Police shootings are called ‘critical incidents’ and they’re seen as being serious enough that the Homicide Squad investigates them. Ryan, who suffered from schizophrenia, had been staying on an isolated property as part of a spiritual gathering called the ‘School of Happiness’. When we arrived, we learned that, late at night, he started making death threats against the other campers and two local cops were called out. The two cops were a couple, which is not unusual in country towns and they were thrown into a nightmare together, trying to find their way around in the pitch-black and help the other people flee, when Ryan came at them out of the darkness, carrying a crossbow.
He walked towards them, refusing to put the weapon down and at one point yelling, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ Carter, the police sergeant thought his partner, Karen, a senior constable, had been shot and, in his torchlight, saw Ryan a few metres away, pointing the crossbow at him. Carter fired four times. The closer we looked, the more we saw he had no choice but to do it.
After his death, Ryan’s blood showed a concentration of more than 10 times his prescribed dose of anti-psychotic medication, as well as a cocktail of other chemical traces, including oxycontin, marijuana, speed, methamphetamine and alcohol. At the inquest, the coroner said Ryan ‘was a man who lost his mind’. He cleared both the local cops of wrongdoing, recommending them instead for bravery awards.
Ryan’s father also told the two cops he didn’t blame them. ‘I share your pain,’ he said in the coroner’s court. ‘The discharge of your firearm was not only the last resort but was imperative in the deteriorating reasoning of my son.’
It was another tragedy, and a reminder of how close we tread alongside death when doing this job. It comes for you out of the darkness.
In Perth, one of the highlights of this year has been working on the renovations to the home Tracy and I share here. She wanted something special, so we designed a lap pool, a walk-in wardrobe and an outdoor gym. The house would be full of sunshine. I enjoyed working on the ideas and talking to the architects, creating something for the first time, rather than spending my days at crime scenes where we arrive only after life has fled, and in the morgue for autopsies, watching the dissection.
You can’t escape this work, though. Not once you have started. One time, I sat in our house in Perth for two days and a night without sleeping to finish a report on the Bowraville murders.
Nor would I want to stay here, for it means missing my family. At home, on the east coast, my son, Jake, says he wants to join the army. I’m proud of him for the decision, and also glad that he has made a choice to see more of the world rather than simply grow up, live and die on the Central Coast, like so many others. But, as a parent, it is also sad, having to accept my boy’s no longer a child, and it is no longer my role to parent him. The army will do that for me.
My daughter, Gemma, is also growing up. She’s taken a year out, working in admin at her old school. The older she gets, the more she looks like her mother, Debbie, and, just like her mum, I’m learning not to underestimate her. Gemma is capable, confident and never flustered. There’s a strength of character and a hardness to her. No one will walk over Gemma.
As much as I want to see more of them, having this confidence in both my kids was what made it possible for me to come to Perth in the first place. They have the right values. They’re
not going to fuck up their lives without me.
If anything, I’ve been feeling more disorientated by the move than they have. I hardly knew anybody here when I arrived in this city and have had to find a new sense of who I was for the first time in almost three decades, without being a policeman.
Since arriving, I’ve joined a kung fu class, working with a former disciple student of Master Chan, who I train with in Sydney. Every Sunday we practise qigong outside in the morning sun and I’ve started to explore this culture more, joining the other students to take part in lion dancing during the local Chinese community festivals.
I also train at a boxing gym run by a former State champion and Golden Gloves winner, David ‘Iceman’ Letizia. Dave’s a hard man, and I had to prove myself when I first walked into his gym but now, when one of his boxers is in camp preparing for a fight, I train with them, running up hills together and living as disciplined a life as they do.
I’m proud that I’ve been able to earn their respect. Boxing tests every aspect of your personality, exposing your strengths and weaknesses in public. Dave’s gym is a place full of genuinely hard people and I am surviving within it. After watching me train, he invited me to start sparring and saw that I could take a hit. From then on, we’d go hard at each other and I got my nose broken again. A photograph taken afterwards, shows me bruised and bloody but smiling. I’d proven to myself that I could step out from behind the police badge.
When Tracy saw that I was thriving, she started to remind me how uncomfortable things got in the cops after the Strike Force Tuno investigation and the Underbelly series. She got an accountant to look at our finances, including my super. ‘You’ve got enough to walk away and we’ll do this together,’ she told me. She wanted me to leave the cops and stay in Perth.
If Tracy and I were out with friends in Perth and someone mentioned Underbelly, she would shut down the conversation.