by Gary Jubelin
Back at my desk, I take a look at the [email protected] computer system, and can see that Mick is right. It’s obvious how much was missed in those first hours and days when the local cops treated it as a missing-persons case and before Homicide was called in. Neighbours’ houses were not properly searched, cars came and left the street where William disappeared without being checked, and no crime scene was established.
Even since Hans’s arrival, there is still work that needs to be completed. The [email protected] system shows over 1000 items – reports, statements, investigators’ notes – still waiting to be reviewed. Hans prides himself on being a shoe-leather cop, he likes to be out there, on the street, talking to people. As a younger detective, he spent a lot of time at the Armed Hold-Up Squad and still has their heads-down, keep-moving-forward approach, rather than standing back and taking a considered view at what’s in front of him.
Going through the computer files, I can’t even find a written investigation plan. There are only a few cops from Hans’s team working with him on the case. It’s not enough.
Reading through the files, it looks like, for two weeks following William’s disappearance, the cops still clung to the idea that the three-year-old might have simply got lost, that he was still a missing person, meaning someone whose disappearance has not been classified as something worse. Hundreds of cops and volunteers scoured 18 square kilometres of bush, farmland and tangled lantana. They searched dams and drains, waterholes and sheds, caravans and cubbies.
Taking this over, it is important to keep my mind open, but even so, it looks almost certain William was not lost. If he were, the massive search effort would have found him.
If not, that means he might have been abducted. That kind of crime is rare, and when it happens, for the family not to be involved is almost unknown. It would be a once-in-a-decade crime within Australia, but it happens.
And if he was abducted, then whoever took him must be someone who was in the area that morning. We need to find out who was there. Most likely, the answer is already somewhere among the hundreds of reports and witness statements on [email protected].
The answer is always there, I think. You just have to find it.
But the failure to treat this at least as a potential abduction early on has made this work harder. Not least because the hundreds of people who helped with the search, thinking William was lost, were given free access to the road outside the house where he went missing, meaning they would have trampled over any forensic evidence. Nor do we have complete records of who took part in the search itself, among them SES volunteers, surf lifesavers and even a local pony club on their horses.
This won’t be easy to take over. If Matt Leveson’s unresolved disappearance had called me back into the dark waters of Homicide investigation, this case means taking the plunge completely. I’m ready to do that now, I think. After 29 years in the cops, I have the right skills, energy and experience. This will need a considered, determined approach. Instead, the confusion continues.
I’m told the strategy agreed on by our bosses is for Homicide to lead the investigation but to cooperate closely with the local cops, who will handle the media.
That way, it’s explained to me, if William was abducted, whoever took him won’t know who’s really coming for them. But this plan isn’t helping.
Ahead of his retirement, Hans takes me to meet William’s foster parents, Jane Fiore and Tom Nevis (not their real names). On the drive to their home in Sydney’s north, we hear Paul, the local police commander in Kendall talking about William on the radio. He says the case is ‘actually baffling’.
I turn to Hans. ‘I thought you were leading this.’
‘Whatever that bloke says, it’s got nothing to do with me.’ He shrugs.
Hans and I knock on the foster parents’ door and wait. They answer, looking at us in hope, as if we might be bringing them answers, with faces that are drawn and exhausted.
We’re barely inside before Hans says it looks like William’s been taken by a paedophile, and if he has been, statistics show the chances are he’ll have been killed within a day of disappearing.
Jane and Tom are crying. I can’t let myself feel anything for them, however. Instead, I watch them, thinking: You were both with William that morning. That makes you my first suspects.
Jane pushes some strands of hair behind her ear and looks back at me, as if guessing what I’m thinking. She’s obviously intelligent. She’s had a successful career before becoming a foster parent and there is a stillness to her as if, even in grief, she is still considered. She’s asking Hans about the case; what has been done and what hasn’t. Despite my suspicions, I get the sense she is genuine in her desperation to find out what happened to William.
Like Jane, Tom is smart and has been successful, but he seems the more emotional. Watching him, I can see his feelings welling up, his words are catching in his throat, as if they’re threatening to choke him. If he’s playacting the part of a grieving father, then it’s a good performance.
They tell us how William’s five-year-old sister doesn’t understand what’s happened to her brother. They don’t understand themselves. On the day before William went missing, they’d made a last-minute decision to head up a day early for a visit to Jane’s mum, Anne (not her real name), in Kendall. They arrived late and, the next morning, Friday 12 September 2014, Jane and her mother played with the children on the back deck, while Tom went into town to find somewhere with decent reception in order to make a Skype call for work.
William was playing with dice and then, when he got bored with that, he started a new game pretending to be a tiger. Around 10.30am, he jumped down off the deck onto the grass, ran around the side of the house and gave a tiger roar. Then there was silence.
Jane went looking but couldn’t find him. She says she heard a faint, high-pitched scream, as if a child were in pain. It seemed to come from some tall reeds, not far from where she was standing. She ran and looked all through them, but there was no sign of William.
‘I was saying, “William, it’s Mummy . . . you need to talk to me . . . it’s Mummy . . . You need to tell me where you are . . . You’ve got to say something, William.”’
She called 000 and the cops came. Soon the street was full of people, searching.
‘It’s not a little boy lost,’ she says. William had asthma, which was brought on by stress. He’d not been known to wander off. The bush surrounding the road was so thick the people heading into it were coming out with ripped clothing.
Within moments of losing sight of him, Jane feared he’d been taken.
She’s also sure she saw two cars, one white, one grey, parked on the road outside her mother’s house that morning, before William vanished. That was strange, because it’s such a quiet place – some distance from Kendall itself, which is only a small town, so small you stay there for any length of time and you’ll recognise most of the people.
‘You don’t see strange cars parked on the road,’ says Jane. Partly, that’s because all the houses on it are on acre blocks with long driveways, so when people come to visit, they tend to park off the street. And it’s practically a dead-end road, her mum’s house is the second-to-last one before the bitumen turns into a gravel fire trail leading up into the forest. You wouldn’t be there unless you’re visiting somebody.
Jane says a third car also drove past the house that morning, while she was playing with the children. It was a dark green-grey sedan, she says, heading up the road, towards the fire trail, but then it stopped, turned into the neighbour’s house and reversed out, heading back down the road past them. The driver stared at her directly.
‘The guy held my eyes, he challenged me,’ says Jane. Then he was gone.
I ask her about William. She describes how he adored his sister. How close he was to his foster dad. How he liked to wait outside the house when Tom was driving home from work to welcome him, so the couple had got into the habit of having Tom send a text just before he arrived, so she could get W
illiam ready.
As far as I can see, they are a decent couple, though I am not yet willing to rule them out. Still, when Hans and I leave, I try to reassure them. I don’t want them to fixate on the idea that William was taken. Instead, I tell them that we don’t know what happened to him yet, but we won’t give up until we do. We’ll do everything we can to find out where their boy is.
* * *
A phone call wakes me in the night. Elsewhere in the flat, my son, Jake, is sleeping. He arrived yesterday and will soon be heading overseas for a few months, so I’d been looking forward to seeing something of him. But, instead, the voice on the telephone says three people have been killed, and I am to run the crime scene.
I drive into Sydney’s city centre through the early-morning darkness of 16 December 2014, remembering the images I saw on the TV news just a few hours before: of hostages standing helpless in the windows of the Lindt Chocolate Café; of the gunman with his black bandanna and heavy rucksack.
In Martin Place, blue lights are reflecting off the office buildings. Inside, the chocolates are still lined up on the shelves in their brightly coloured wrappers. The floor is littered with fallen chairs and smears of blood, as well as sharp fragments of shattered stone from where the bullets of the tactical police have hit the walls and marbled pillars.
Forensic officers in their blue body suits have started to pick their way around the bodies lying among the wreckage. The siege has led to the deaths of two hostages, Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson, as well as that of the gunman. My role is to coordinate their work, as well as the ballistics analysis that will aim to track the route and impact of every shot fired within the café, to make sure all this and any other evidence is preserved, the physical exhibits bagged and secured, accurate records kept, and to report back to the officer leading the investigation, Angelo Memmolo.
Normally, managing the crime scene is one part of the lead detective’s work when running an investigation, but this is no normal job. From what I saw on television, this was a terrorist attack in the heart of the city, and from what I am told on my arrival, one that ended when tactical police stormed the café, despite fears the hostage-taker was carrying a bomb.
It is as yet uncertain who fired the fatal shots and I can imagine Ange’s responsibilities on this case are already vast. They will weigh him down for months to come as this investigation and the inevitable high-profile inquest follow. My job is to take at least a little of that load.
Normally, I tell myself: Don’t put life into the bodies. Don’t let yourself imagine them as living people, as it will distract you. While I think it’s important to get close to their families, to offer them some comfort and to use their grief as rocket fuel to help propel you through the work ahead, at this point, when their death is at its rawest, it doesn’t help to animate the victims. Don’t think about the horror they experienced. Emotions are for later, when you’ve left the crime scene.
Just get in there and do your work. Only this time, it is harder. I saw the crime take place on television before I went to sleep. I saw the hostages when they were alive, pressed up against the café windows, the fear on their faces.
By the time the sun rises, people have started leaving tributes to the victims in Martin Place, outside the cordon of police tape. A few scattered blooms expands into a sea of flowers, so wide that we have to part them, clearing a path for the forensic team to get to the café door. I thought I’d seen everything at crime scenes, but I have never seen a whole city grieve before now.
That also makes the work harder to bear.
* * *
For days now, I’ve been telling Hans, ‘Please don’t do this.’ It’s too public.
He’s been looking at Bill, a local white goods repairman, who visited Anne Fiore’s house in Kendall a few days before William’s disappearance, to look at her washing machine. Bill told her he needed to order an extra part and would come back when he’d got it. Hans is interested in this because, five days after William disappeared, a tip-off to Crime Stoppers revealed Bill was the subject of lurid child sex allegations decades ago, although he’d not been charged.
At about 9am on the morning William went missing, his foster mum, Jane, called Bill from her mother’s house, to ask why he hadn’t been back to fix the washing machine. William was last seen an hour and a half after that phone call.
Maybe Bill picked up the message, Hans thinks. Maybe he went back to the house. He can’t have gone inside it, otherwise the family would have seen him, but maybe he was out there, on that isolated road.
So Hans wants to search Bill’s home and business.
I say that, if we go in, we need to do so covertly, putting listening devices in place first to listen to Bill and his wife, Margaret’s private conversations.
Going in like this is all or nothing. By now, William’s disappearance is easily the most high-profile criminal investigation in the country. News of the raids will leak.
Sure, get it right and we might find William’s body. But get it wrong, spook Bill before we have any real evidence against him, and we risk losing everything.
But Hans is not persuaded, and he is still running this show. I need to get the search stopped. With Mick Willing on leave, I go to Jason, the acting commander, and, when he won’t call off the raids, ask him to call Mick at home and put the boss on speakerphone.
‘Mick, stop this,’ I say. I don’t want these raids to happen. I also want to hold a press conference, announcing I am taking over the investigation from Hans. We need to make it clear who’s running this.
Mick does not agree with me. ‘Gary, Hans is retiring in two weeks’ time,’ he says. ‘He’s been in the job for 40 years, just let him retire in peace.’
‘I don’t want this.’
‘Mate, it’s not your problem at the moment. You worry about it when you take over.’
* * *
The raids on Bill’s home and business go ahead on 20 January 2015. At the time, I’m in Perth with Tracy, trying to keep our marriage going, and also training with David Letizia, the local boxer who has now asked me to work his corner during his final fight, which will take place next month.
Dave’s told me his greatest fear isn’t losing but being embarrassed. I understand it. When you climb through the ropes into the boxing ring, you’re on your own. There’s no one looking after you.
In the world outside that ring, Dave has his family and reputation to fall back on if he needs them, but once he gets inside it he will be exposed.
Which is how I feel, sitting with Tracy, watching reports of the police search on the evening TV news. As I feared, the story leaked. The cameras caught everything.
We watch the cops take a cadaver dog inside Bill’s house, trying to smell a body. We watch them rake over the garden. We watch them drain the septic tank.
I try to imagine the effect of these pictures on William’s biological and foster parents but I cannot. It’s too awful.
Afterwards, Bill is put through a six-hour interview, but isn’t charged. When I get back to Sydney, the word is that they found nothing during the searches, but Bill’s weird. He’s got a strange, nasal voice and a sly way of answering your questions. You can’t form a connection with him. But he denies having anything to do with William’s disappearance.
One of the detective sergeants on Hans’s team, Justin, led the interview with Bill. He asked why the call from Jane on that morning doesn’t show up on his phone. Did he delete it?
No, Bill said. He didn’t. Only much later will we learn this may have been because Bill was talking to someone else when Jane phoned him, so her call doesn’t show up in his records.
After a full-scale search and six hours in the interview room with Justin, what have we got to show for it? Nothing. All that’s changed is now Bill knows the cops are watching him.
I tell Tracy I have to sort this out, and shut myself away for two days solid to draw up a proper investigation plan. Tracy is supportive. By now, with all th
e media attention, everyone in Australia knows who William is, and that we need to find him. As the cop who’s now facing that task, I need to salvage what I can from this chaos.
Given Hans has started working on Bill, I need to see it is done properly rather than drop it. For one thing, Bill’s alibi has not been checked and we need to do that. For another, we should search the storage shed he owns in Wellington, a bush town six hours’ drive inland where Bill used to run a business. We’ve received a report that his car was seen there the day after William disappeared.
We also need to go back to the start of the whole investigation and make sure there have been no missteps, which means ruling the biological and foster parents in or out to my own satisfaction, sorting out the mess on [email protected], where sometimes William’s surname isn’t even spelled correctly, and dealing with the media, who are crawling all over this and causing problems – like with the raids on Bill’s house.
At the same time, we need to widen the investigation. We can’t just follow Bill and see where he leads us, we need to also identify and pursue other persons of interest, meaning people who are not suspects but who the police want to talk to, including the large number of known sex offenders living in the area.
How has it come to this? I think, looking at the work in front of me. Why has half of this work, at least, not already been done? A three-year-old has gone missing and we can’t bring our A game?
I fly back to Sydney, determined to correct that.
* * *
It’s the silence I notice on Benaroon Drive, the wide road where William went missing. You can hear birds calling. You can hear insects in the forest. You can hear a car drive past, even from inside a house.
Before coming here, I looked at maps, as well as diagrams of the area drawn up during the investigation and showing who lives in each of the scattered houses, as well as the dates on which they each were interviewed. I also know the area around here personally, from coming up to nearby Port Macquarie for holidays when the children were little and for my wedding to Tracy, although it is a tougher country than the one I remember.