by Gary Jubelin
Sitting in the tattoo parlour, as the warm sun washes over the street outside, part of me is tempted to stay here, despite what I told the organisers of the meditation retreat in Nepal. Being here, I’ve reconnected with the hippy side of myself I thought I’d lost. There are new worlds to explore here. There is a freedom; I can train in the morning, then have a nice breakfast and sit outside reading the newspaper rather than heading into work each morning before most other people have left the house.
As the tattooist picks away at the final curling point of the Om symbol, I also know there’s been another area of lightness over the past 12 months; not having to bear the weight of responsibility being a Homicide detective demands of you.
It is hard work. Few other jobs involve being called out in the middle of a winter’s night and standing there, sleepless and freezing, looking at a broken, bloodied body while knowing that all you have to look forward to right now is an autopsy. Part of me wants to be excused from picking up that load again.
And yet – I chose to do this work because the work, to me, is sacred. It has a moral weight. The gravity of being a policeman is pulling me back to the east coast. There is also a drifting, weightless feeling to being – well, what am I? – in Perth. I miss the daily intensity of working murders and I miss knowing my role within that work. I am an expert in it. My toughness, my relentlessness, all the things that have led me to fall out with my colleagues and bosses in the past, are also advantages when your job is catching killers. Life is sunny here in Perth but I don’t have a purpose.
I told them the truth at that meditation retreat among the Himalayan mountains; however far I have travelled this past year, I’ve always known in my heart that I was going back to the New South Wales Police Force.
I’m not done with the cops yet. Policing is the one thing I am really good at.
* * *
Another realisation. While I was thousands of kilometres away in Perth, my sister-in-law Lisa died in Port Macquarie after a long fight with cancer. She was a wild, loving and funny woman, who’d helped light up our family. A great mum and someone who was always laughing.
I flew back, having been so distant from my family for so long, and the suffering her illness and death had caused them threatened to overwhelm me.
With most deaths, I am fairly stoic. I can stand up at a funeral or in court and say what has to be said. This time, I saw my brother, Jason, and found it hard to talk to him. He and Lisa had three kids. Instead, I just looked at him in silence. I realised how much I admired him.
I’ve chosen one path in life and Jason chose another. Mine led me to a place where I had won promotions, faced down killers and got public recognition. My name was in the newspapers and on the TV news reports, but Jason has done more than I have done. He’d gone out to work each day and come home to his children. He’d fought alongside Lisa for years while she was sick. He’d held his family together.
Jason was more a man than I was.
* * *
I need to go back to work.
After a year out of the police, I’ve done what I said I would in Perth, helping with Tracy’s business and the renovations. The house is looking beautiful, easily the nicest place I’ve ever lived in, but I know that, at work, leaving my senior position in the Unsolved Homicide Unit means I will not get it back and I resent that. It doesn’t seem to bother Tracy.
It feels like our relationship’s been different since our wedding. We still get on, we can sit and laugh together, but it feels as if she’s trying to control me. We have also retreated from each other physically, we don’t hug or kiss the same way that we used to. I need that part of our relationship and, not having it, have started to turn to my boxing instead for those bodily feelings of hitting and being hit, for that rush of adrenaline when you climbs into the ring, and that stomach sickness afterwards.
I want to feel alive. Too often, living our life in Perth, I’m missing that.
I should have faced this earlier. It’s like when I was at school, if someone said something that cut me, I wouldn’t find a way to deal with the injury, but would instead try to ignore it, so the wound would fester, until something erupted.
Over the past 12 months with Tracy, it’s as if I’ve been trying to ignore the part of me that is a cop and found I cannot function as only half a person. It’s like the way I meditate because it gives me a sense of peace in a life full of conflict. In Perth, I’ve realised that meditation on its own is not enough. To be complete, I need to go and pick a fight.
I tell Tracy I am going back to Sydney. She says she’s staying in Perth. We agree to start living on either side of the country again. We can each fly over every second weekend.
In January 2014, I travel back to Sydney, alone.
It doesn’t work. Every second weekend will soon become every three, or four. Or we might have a good weekend in Perth, then I’ll fly back and by the time I’ve landed in Sydney, Tracy isn’t answering my calls. There are long silences between our conversations. In Sydney, I discover I am lonely here, as well. After a year away, I’ve lost contact with my old mates.
We try a marriage counsellor. We try a few.
In February 2014, I put on my suit and walk back into the Homicide Squad offices, past the wall covered with the yellowing front pages of newspapers writing up old arrests, to take my place among the rows of desks overflowing with paperwork and coffee cups. I listen to the old office sounds, the telephones ringing, the keyboards tapping and voices calling across the room. They seem louder to me somehow, after a year away, and it’s hard to make sense of anything amid the noise.
I haven’t been assigned to any team, just given a desk and a stack of old, cold cases, to see if I can make anything of them. I feel isolated. I watch other cops go out for coffee with their teams, while I will often leave the building at the end of the day having barely spoken to anyone.
Outside work, friends and family say, ‘Let’s catch up when Tracy’s over’, expecting to see her next weekend, or the next. I don’t want to say I don’t know when she’ll visit, so I stop trying to contact old mates. I have no time for my kids, and when I do occasionally see them, I’m not really present.
I’ll walk through Darling Harbour at the weekend, see all the happy couples and think, What’s wrong with me? Look at all these people in happy relationships.
All they see is a tall, broad-shouldered detective, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, and they can’t know what’s going on inside my head, because I refuse to show weakness. I’m too proud to put my hand up and ask for help.
At home, I pull the blinds down over the big windows overlooking the bays of Sydney Harbour. Those windows should fill the place with sunshine reflected off the water, so I shut it out. I’m sick of the world. I leave the apartment only to go to work or train.
I live like this, without a view, for weeks.
One day I realise how close I am to losing myself completely.
I open the blinds. It is a direction to myself: Get out there.
At work, I pick up an old case file I recognise: the disappearance of a 20-year-old called Matt Leveson. It was something I’d looked at briefly before I went on leave and I’m disappointed to see nothing’s been done in the time since. Fuck this, I think. Someone has to do this properly.
Matt was starting out in adult life. A young lad, like so many others. Blond hair, big smile, well-dressed, he worked for an insurance company.
Matt was trusting, blameless. He was reported missing by his parents in September 2007, after a night out dancing at Sydney’s ARQ nightclub with his 45-year-old boyfriend, Michael Atkins.
In an interview with Homicide detectives during the days that followed, Atkins claimed he’d left the nightclub with Matt and driven home to his flat in Cronulla, southeast Sydney, where the two men lived together. Atkins said he fell asleep watching TV and woke up a little later, to find Matt was missing.
Already, when he spoke about Matt, Atkins used the past tense.
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Also, although the police hadn’t told him by the time the interview started, Matt’s car had been found earlier that day, parked at the Waratah Oval in Sutherland, a 20-minute drive from Atkins’ flat and near the entrance to the expanse of wild bushland called the Royal National Park that forms Sydney’s southern border. Inside it was a receipt for the purchase of a mattock and duct tape from a local Bunnings Warehouse, dated 23 September 2007, the day Atkins said that Matt went missing.
The cops had checked the store’s CCTV, which showed a man who looked like Atkins making the purchase.
‘Is there anything you wish to say about that?’ asked Mathieu, the detective.
Atkins looked away before replying, ‘Ah, don’t think it was me.’
After a moment’s silence, Mathieu asked him, ‘Who do you think it could be?’
‘I don’t know.’ Atkins reached for his cup of water and drained it.
Later during the interview, Mathieu asked him, ‘How do you feel about our belief that it’s you that made the purchase?’
‘Surprised.’
‘Do you wish to say anything further about that?’
‘Nuh.’
Watching the video recording of the interview, I cringe at how the detectives keep letting Atkins off, not demanding he explain what sounds like an obvious falsehood. Asked outright if he was in any way connected with the disappearance of Matt Leveson, Atkins just said, ‘No,’ and the detectives interviewing him seem to simply accept it.
A year later, in August 2008, Atkins was arrested and charged with Matt’s murder. A year after that, he was put on trial. The case file on my desk contains the inches-thick court transcript. It shows how the cops also discovered a big stereo speaker had been ripped out of the boot of Matt’s car, meaning there was more room in there to carry something. On Atkins’ phone they found worried text messages he sent to Matt after his boyfriend went missing and, alongside them, messages showing he was also contacting old boyfriends and trying to line up dates. Matt’s mobile was itself found in Atkins’ car, meaning he’d been sending those text messages to a phone that was already in his possession.
Three days after Matt’s disappearance, and less than 24 hours after it was reported to the police, Atkins had driven from Sydney to Newcastle for sex.
But there was still no physical evidence of murder; no DNA, no fingerprints. Juries love forensic evidence, probably because it plays such a big part in all the cop shows they watch on TV. During the trial, Atkins’ defence lawyer also took issue with the discovery of the receipt for the mattock and duct tape. ‘What has it got to do with this case?’ he asked the jury. So what if Atkins bought a mattock and some tape at the same time? ‘Big deal. He’s in Bunnings.’
And then, the lawyer argued, Matt himself had not been found. ‘We don’t know if the man is dead.’ Sparing few thoughts for Matt’s family, who sat watching from the public gallery inside the courtroom, the lawyer raised other possibilities: Matt and Atkins did a little drug dealing, which meant they knew some shady characters. Maybe Matt met with foul play during a drug deal? Or at the hands of another gay man? Maybe he ran away? Melbourne had a great gay community too.
However unlikely these seemed, or however hurtful to Matt’s family, the defence did not have to prove any of these things had happened. Just like in the Bowraville case, it was the prosecution’s job to prove its case. All the defence had to show was these other possibilities existed.
The defence also had another advantage: the jury was never shown the part of the recorded interview with police where Atkins denied buying a mattock and duct tape on the day he claimed Matt had vanished from his unit. The judge ruled the footage was inadmissible because the cops failed to formally warn Atkins he was being interviewed as a potential suspect, not simply a witness.
That failure meant the jury who found the case against Atkins was unproven never saw his shifting, uncomfortable explanation of why a man matching his description was buying a digging tool that morning, the receipt for which was later found inside Matt’s car.
Atkins was found not guilty in October 2009.
In 2012, before I went to Perth, the new Homicide commander Mick Willing and I had met with Matt’s parents, Mark and Faye.
Faye sat facing us with her blonde hair framing a careworn face and both arms folded tightly across her slender frame, as if trying to hold in her grief. It was clear that her son’s disappearance had changed her. Once, she’d been a mother who gave out love and received it, like any mum. Now she was a fighter, demanding that somebody do something to find out what had happened to her son.
Mark Leveson was grieving too, although he disguised it better. A broad man who obviously lifted weights, he too was a fighter, even if you were more likely to notice his soft eyes and gentle way of talking, and the fact he seemed to have a smile for everyone.
Mick told them we would take another look into what had happened to Matt and both Mark and Faye were grateful. Looking through the file again more than a year later, I want to make good on that promise.
There’s little doubt Atkins remains the chief suspect, but as with the Bowraville murders, the acquittal makes it hard to go after him again. Even since the overturning of the double jeopardy rules, he can’t face another trial without ‘fresh and compelling’ new evidence.
There is another tragic parallel between the cases. In Bowraville, Colleen Walker-Craig’s family still go out searching the riverbanks and ditches for her body. Matt’s parents also go out looking for his body, digging at sites across Cronulla’s coastline and in the Royal National Park. When I met them, it seemed like the only thing worse than finding where he was buried was the burden of not knowing what happened to their child. They were convinced Atkins had buried Matt – why else would he buy a mattock?
After the not guilty verdict, Matt’s father, Mark, had a series of tattoos inked into his skin as permanent statements of his love and loss. Among these, on his right forearm are the words ‘Death leaves a heartache that no one can heal’, and on his left forearm, ‘Love leaves a memory that no one can steal’. On his right shoulder is a portrait of his son’s face, with Matt’s date of birth and the date that he went missing.
Like Faye, who also had other, similar tattoos done after the not guilty verdict, Mark was determined not to let the court decision be the end of this. Yet, like the three children in Bowraville, it seemed to them that nobody cared about Matt Leveson – not the courts, not the media, nor the police, who had let the case drag while I was in Western Australia.
Elsewhere on Mark’s left arm, are tattooed the words, ‘It’s not a justice system. It’s just a system.’ Putting the file down, I can see that he and Faye have every right to think that.
Matt should have got better attention. For starters, there was a tip-off to the Crime Stoppers telephone number, dating back to 2010. This claimed that another of Atkins’ former boyfriends had a late-night Facebook conversation about Matt with someone who identified themselves online as ‘MikeyBoi Atkins’.
The conversation suggested Matt was killed because he threatened to go to police about Atkins’ drug dealing.
During the exchange MikeyBoi asked, ‘U wanna know how he died?’
‘Yeh?’ replied his former boyfriend, Andrew.
‘He called me a dog, and I hit him,’ MikeyBoi had written.
Somehow, the cops had not followed this up. At its worst, in the Unsolved Homicide Unit, cases would be picked up once every six months, checked to see if there might be an easy way to solve them, like some new DNA and, if the answer was no, they’d be ignored until another six months had passed.
Even after the meeting between Mick, myself and Matt’s parents, nothing was done. I start to follow it and find Crime Stoppers had in fact been contacted three times over the years about this conversation, but still nothing had happened. The next step is to contact Andrew, and see if he will wear a wire to record his conversations with Atkins.
He says that he will.
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There is a part of me – the part that took me to Perth – that still doesn’t want to pick up this burden. Another part of me knows that I have to do it.
A case like this, with a suspected murder, a missing victim and a not guilty verdict, is going to be difficult. A case like this will give me the motivation I need to leave the blinds up at home and go to work each morning.
I will do this, because Dad taught me to never give up. I will do this, because working is a way to swim against the current of my marriage, which I know is failing. I will do this, because I’ve met Matt’s parents and they need someone to stand up for them, and for him.
Once again, I make it personal, putting a photograph of Atkins up above my desk. Taken from Facebook after his trial over Matt’s murder, it shows him at a pool party, standing in swimwear with his arms around a group of other topless men. He’s big, he must work out, although his muscles are turning to fat with age and his hair is receding. The men he’s posing with are skinny, young and under-developed, as if they’re barely out of their teens.
I silently compare the photo to the other faces I’ve pinned up in its place during other investigations. Anthony Perish has been up there. So’s James Hide. Only, this time, something is different.
After my year away, I have a new perspective: I look at the photograph and realise it’s not me and him. Atkins is not my enemy this time. Nor is James Hide. Nor, really, was Anthony Perish.
My enemy is the senior cops who won’t devote enough resources to these cases. It’s the court system that prevents juries from hearing all the available evidence, and the judges who hand down short sentences so killers can walk back into the community after only a few years inside. It’s the lawyers and politicians who won’t let the victims’ families go to the appeal court and try to overturn not guilty verdicts. It’s the media who, sometimes, just won’t listen. It’s everything I’ve been fighting against all my life, everything that prevents me from doing my job.