I Catch Killers

by Gary Jubelin

  Drive inland, towards Kendall and away from the coast, and it becomes a place of twisted forests and black swamps, through which the roads and tiny country towns thread their way like thin ribbons of brightness. The road leading up towards the house where William went missing bends left, and because of the trees, it’s only once you’re close to it that you get a clear view of the house and the sloping lawn behind it, which leads down to the road itself.

  If you were close enough, on the morning when William jumped off the deck, where his foster mum and grandmother were sitting, and ran away, making a roar like a tiger, you would have seen him appear around the corner of the house at the top of that slope, facing the road.

  Was there enough time for somebody standing here to run up there and take him?

  I have come here because Hans’s retirement on 2 February means I am now in charge of the investigation, giving me the opportunity to run it my way, the way I was taught to. The strike force working on the case is called Rosann and based in Port Macquarie, in the same room from which Strike Force Tuno once investigated Terry Falconer’s murder. The trial over Evelyn’s death in Bowraville was also held in Port Macquarie. Since then, my parents have bought a house up here to go with their holiday property, which they are now renting out. I don’t stay with them when I’m here, though, sleeping instead in the El Paso Motor Inn near the police station. To me, Port Macquarie is no longer a place I go for holidays. It is a place where I work on murders.

  Looking up, I reckon it would have taken someone a couple of minutes to get up to the back of Anne Fiore’s house, taken William and got back to their car. But they would have had to be waiting here at the moment the three-year-old appeared. Then they would have had to get William into the car, get in themselves and drive off. All of that would also have taken time.

  According to his foster mother, Jane, William disappeared at around 10.30am. She called 000 at 10.57am. The first cop was on the scene at 11.06am. It is a small window of time for anything to happen.

  Only Anne knew the family were coming to visit, and the CCTV of their journey here from Sydney shows no one was following them. So it cannot have been a targeted abduction. Looking up at the house in silence, I try to picture how a predator could have happened to be here at just the right moment.

  Standing on this isolated road, I have to accept that Hans is right. To abduct William and get away, you would have to have a reason to be here. You don’t end up in Benaroon Drive by chance. This is the thinking that led Hans to Bill.

  Following Hans’s thinking, I’ve also found what look at first like signposts pointing in the same direction. During the raids on Bill’s property, a toy Spider-Man figure was found inside Bill’s van. He said it belonged to a grandchild, but this hadn’t been confirmed. I have it checked. Bill’s telling the truth. A covert search of Bill’s storage shed in Wellington also turns up a Spider-Man suit, and for a moment my heart seems to stop beating. We check: it is the wrong size to fit William.

  Then a neighbour comes forward, saying he saw Bill’s van the day after William went missing, driving up a bush track near Kendall, which the locals call the Ghost Road. We search it, sending a line of uniformed cops forcing their way through the bush, looking for any sign of William and provoking another media frenzy.

  While the TV cameras are recording, Bill drives right past us, looking out his window.

  We find nothing, though in this bushland, with the humidity and heat, a body would be skeletal within weeks and a child would have little bones, making them easier to hide, or to miss when you are searching.

  Again, we check, though all of this takes time. It turns out Bill was at a function in his local club the afternoon his neighbour claims he saw him, so it couldn’t have been his van driving up the Ghost Road.

  Bill also says he has an alibi for the morning William vanished, although this proves more difficult to confirm. Both Bill and his wife, Margaret, say they were at a school assembly for one of the three boys who live with them. But that assembly was months ago now, and, while we speak to everyone who was there, their memories have faded. We can’t find anyone who is certain they saw him.

  It’s frustrating; why wasn’t this checked much sooner, before Hans raided Bill’s house. We are playing catch-up.

  I take Margaret to the school itself and get her to retrace her footsteps. She says she and Bill arranged to meet for coffee before the assembly and a receipt from the café opposite the school shows the couple were there, at 9.42am. And yet, it only takes 18 minutes to drive from there to Benaroon Drive – I know, because we timed it – so Bill could easily have left and been at Anne’s place by 10.30am. Normally we’d be able to track Bill’s movements using the signal from his mobile phone, only his was switched off.

  Compiling everything we know about Bill so far, our analyst draws up a profile, which also reveals his first wife is the sister of Jeffrey Hillsley, whom I locked up in 2005 for child sexual assault and murder. I take a breath. What does it mean? Maybe nothing. This could be like all those other signposts that seemed to point us in a clear direction, but led to dead-ends when we followed them.

  I talk about it with Dad. While I prefer not to stay over at my parents’ house when I am working up here, I do go round for dinner, where he and I will sit on their deck, have a beer and look out at the Hastings River. He asks how the case is going.

  I tell him about these different obstacles. I also tell him how the Department of Family and Community Services are refusing to allow either William’s foster parents or his biological parents to do press conferences encouraging witnesses to come forward. They say it’s to avoid revealing William is a foster kid, which they say comes with a stigma, but I think they’re only covering themselves. I saw the same response when one-year-old Jayden March was killed by his foster mother. I think the department is terrified of scandal.

  I blow up over their decision – a family appeal can really help – but the truth is we are not short of publicity. The front page of one newspaper announces we intend to track the movements of everyone who was within a kilometre of Benaroon Drive at the time William went missing.

  ‘If you were in the area and did not come forward, we would have grave concerns and a certain amount of suspicion would be attached,’ I’m quoted as saying. Under the headline ‘You’d Better Come Forward’, the paper runs a photograph of me standing on Benaroon Drive, showing that it’s Homicide, not the local cops, who are now running this investigation.

  I’ve also managed to increase the size of the strike force from two detectives to half a dozen, though that is still short of the numbers William deserves and I am still working this case as well as my other open investigations. Returning to the Homicide Squad also means I’m back to spending one week in every six on call.

  Keep going, my dad says. Put your head down and work. You’ll get there. We’ve grown closer as I’ve got older, and now speak a few times a week, at least. When I am working in Port Macquarie, I get up early to train, then go for breakfast at a café across the road from the El Paso Motor Inn, where I can sit and read the papers. One morning, the owner asks if I’m related to Kevin Jubelin. When I say yes, she says I look like him. He rides his bike out here, she says, and always sits in that same seat to read the papers. ‘He does exactly the same thing as you,’ she tells me.

  I tell her he’s more hot-headed than I am sometimes, but older and wiser. After my breakfast, I head to the police station, go up to the strike force room on the first floor and put my head down and work. Like dad says, we’ll get there.

  * * *

  On 10 February 2015, I’m coming to the end of a week on call and due to fly over to Perth to see Tracy when we get a report of a category one critical incident – a police officer has killed another person.

  A young woman, Courtney Topic, has been shot dead in the car park of a Hungry Jack’s in Hoxton Park, southwest Sydney. The 22-year-old was carrying a knife and, according to the police radio reports before he
r death, was visibly distressed, hitting herself in the head and pointing the knife at her own body.

  Courtney was shot within 41 seconds of police arriving in the car park. Afterwards, when we arrive at the local police station, all the regional police bosses seem to be there before us and are in a room together, watching video footage of the shooting captured by a Taser carried by one of the three cops who were present.

  It shows Courtney walking towards the camera, a thickshake in one hand and the knife in her other. You can hear one of the cops call out ‘Taser’ and fire the weapon, but it doesn’t work. Another cop tries pepper spray on Courtney, who stumbles but keeps walking. Then one of the cops shoots her.

  Watching the tape, I see the bosses nodding at each other and one says, ‘Well, nothing wrong with that shooting.’

  I shake my head. Maybe he’s right and those cops did follow the regulations, but, to me, it looked like the situation escalated too quickly.

  As we investigate, it turns out Courtney was most likely suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia and a severe episode of psychosis. Her parents say she was a gentle, loving woman, who had never before been aggressive. No one knew why Courtney had a knife with her that morning.

  One Sunday, her grandfather calls me up. He’s angry, saying the family hasn’t heard from me, they don’t know what is going on and that I’ve not had the decency to call them. I try saying that I gave Courtney’s father my contact details, but it is not enough. I get in the car and drive round to Courtney’s parents’ house, then sit with them at their kitchen table.

  They unleash. They’ve never had any contact with police before and now a cop has shot their daughter. They didn’t think they were allowed to contact me. What right had they to contact a detective inspector?

  Looking at them, I realise how the relationship between the police and the people we deal with is out of balance. We have all the power. Those on the receiving end of a police investigation have little control over what is happening to them. I thank Courtney’s family, saying they have taught me to be a better cop, and promise to keep them informed from now on.

  They’re sceptical but I tell them we won’t cover up anything. This will be an honest investigation.

  Before the inquest that follows into Courtney’s death, I’m called into the office of the Crown Solicitor and asked for my opinion of the shooting. I say my role as the critical incident investigator is to look at whether the operation was done within the parameters of police operations. I think it was. But, if you’re asking me personally, was it the right decision to shoot her? No, I don’t think so.

  The counsel assisting the coroner, Gerard Craddock SC, does not call me to give evidence at the inquest. It’s the first time I’ve been a senior critical incident investigator and not been put in the witness box, although, ultimately, it makes little difference. The Deputy State Coroner, Elizabeth Ryan, finds errors were made in the way police dealt with Courtney, and her death exposed a ‘compelling need for change’ in how the force treats mentally ill people.

  Almost half of the people shot by police were suffering mental illness, the inquest hears. Sometimes, as with Ryan Pringle’s death, I know the cops have no choice. In this case, the coroner says there had not been a breach of police procedure and that the cop who shot Courtney had a reasonable basis for believing his life was in danger

  Afterwards, Courtney’s mother, Leesa, tells the gathered reporters her daughter was a beautiful little girl. ‘She is not a statistic.’

  * * *

  The bureaucrats’ refusal to let both sets of William Tyrrell’s parents be identified and talk about his disappearance in public means there’s a void at the centre of this case, and rumours rush in to fill it. We see them spread on TV, in the newspapers and on social media. There are sightings of William by the hundreds: a boy in Queensland seen travelling with an older woman; a boy at Central Station in Sydney; a boy in a Spider-Man suit seen less than an hour from Kendall.

  Online conspiracies sprout up, claiming we’re hiding the real offender. The phone lines at Port Macquarie Police Station are infested by psychics calling up to offer their help. At 10 o’clock one Sunday night, I get a call saying William was seen among the passengers boarding a flight to New Zealand. The CCTV from the airport is inconclusive, so we arrange for local New Zealand police to meet the plane when it lands. It isn’t William.

  In April 2015, seven months after the three-year-old went missing, one of the local detectives on the strike force speaks to a 75-year-old Kendall man called Ronald. A retiree and judge at local flower shows, Ronald says that on the morning William disappeared, he was sitting at a table in the sunroom of his house, which is just two turns – one left, one right – from Benaroon Drive, when he saw an old, beige or fawn-coloured, four-wheel drive tear past, followed closely by an iridescent blue sedan, driving so fast it cut the corner.

  Ronald says he got a glimpse of the driver of the first car, enough to see she was a blonde woman in her late twenties to late thirties. A small boy was standing up in the back, without a seatbelt, says Ronald. The boy was peering out, with his hands pressed against the window. He was wearing a Spider-Man suit.

  Ronald says he didn’t come forward at the time because he was waiting for police to come to him. They would knock on his door eventually, he thought. When they didn’t, he went down to the Kendall Services & Citizens Club one Friday night, hoping to bump into the town’s police officer, who he’d known since childhood. She wasn’t there, so Ronald left a message with her sister-in-law, asking her to call him.

  The message was not passed on and, eventually, we hear about Ronald’s story second- or third-hand. As the weeks passed, he’d told other people, though often the details were different. Two relatives staying with him at the time William went missing say he never mentioned seeing the boy in the Spider-Man suit being driven past. When pressed, Ronald tells the local detective that maybe he only dreamed it.

  But the detective says he’s definitely talking about William, because he showed him a photograph.

  ‘What photo did you show him?’ I ask.

  ‘I showed him a photo of William Tyrrell.’

  That concerns me. It’s just like what happened in Bowraville, when local cops were prompting people’s memories by going round with photos of Evelyn and Clinton, asking if they’d seen them, rather than showing potential witnesses six photographs of different people and getting them to pick out the person they’d seen.

  In Bowraville, most of these ‘sightings’ turned out to be false. They were memories that could not be trusted, but which hung around like bad spirits and jinxed the investigation.

  Still, we follow up Ronald’s evidence. It turns out his neighbours had their four-year-old grandson visiting on the morning William went missing.

  This boy was wearing a Spider-Man suit. Just like William’s.

  * * *

  On 23 April, Margaret screams, ‘No!’ as we tell her husband Bill he is under arrest and needs to come with us. Walking with him away from his house back to our unmarked car, I look at the long line of TV trucks and hire cars on the road beyond it and wonder: What the fuck has happened? How do all these journalists, from every major outfit in the country, know that this was happening today? I didn’t tell them. God knows who in the police hierarchy did. I’m furious.

  Margaret shouts at the photographers and cameramen crowding closer towards us: ‘Get off the property! Right now!’ They fall back, wide enough only for the car to move forward. Camera flashes fire at Bill through the windows.

  This evening, I guess, Margaret will sit in her empty house and watch her husband’s arrest on the television news. I hope she’s shocked; the charges against him are shocking – the alleged sexual and physical assault of two girls, aged three and six, in 1987 – but I did not invent them.

  It’s taken months of careful work to get to where we are today. Unlike the first, rushed raids on Bill’s home and business, this moment has been planned for, t
ested and carefully considered. I know the damage those television images will wreak in Margaret’s home, as well as in the homes of William’s foster parents and his biological family. That’s why I wanted to avoid them. But once you take hold of a line of investigation, you have to follow where it leads and, from the moment I took over this investigation, Bill has been the main thread I was given.

  The allegations that form the basis of these sexual assault charges are not connected to William. They come instead from the same Crime Stoppers tip-off that brought Bill into Hans’s reckoning when he was running the case.

  The alleged crimes date back decades. While Bill was not charged at the time, or after, once we received this report it was our responsibility to follow it up. I’ve spoken to both of the alleged victims. One of these women’s medical records from the time also suggest an assault took place.

  Even then, the decision to act on this evidence was not one I made alone. I spoke to my old team member, Nigel Warren, who worked on the Barbara Saunders and Terry Falconer murders and who now leads a team of his own in the Sex Crimes Squad, asking him to take a look at what we’d gathered. Nigel’s work now regularly involves prosecuting historical child sex offences and I trust him. He’ll always do the right thing for the right reasons.

  He said we had the statements of the alleged victims, one of which seemed to be corroborated by the medical evidence. Nigel had seen cases prosecuted with less, he told me.

  I also asked the advice of friends, without naming Bill but saying, ‘I’m about to pull the trigger on a guy’s life.’ I knew that Bill’s name had already been linked publicly to the investigation into William’s disappearance. Charge him with these crimes and there was no way to hide it. Get it wrong and I destroy him. At the least, there would be public court hearings in which he would be accused of being a paedophile.