by Gary Jubelin
I told my friends we had the evidence of the alleged victims. ‘What other options have you got?’ they asked me.
The police’s own lawyers also looked at the brief of evidence before any final decision was made. Their advice was that there was enough to go ahead. As a cop I can’t ignore that.
As a cop, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I did not also try to take advantage of the extra pressure this will put on Bill by seeing if I can gather evidence to rule him in or out of any role in William’s disappearance.
Bill is silent during the drive to Port Macquarie Police Station. Once we arrive, a custody sergeant reads him his rights, his fingerprints are taken and he is shown into a jail cell ahead of tomorrow’s court hearing. Anyone would find this frightening. If he is hiding something, maybe this will be enough to crack him open. Maybe it will be enough to make Margaret think about him differently.
In the evening, after Bill has been interviewed about the sexual assault allegations, which he denies, I speak to him about William. He must be feeling that the ground beneath his feet is now much more uncertain and I want him to know that we are waiting, should he stumble. A thin man, Bill looks back at me coldly. He denies having anything to do with William’s disappearance.
Late into the night, the light from the strike force’s room in the police station shines amid the darkness. Inside that room, I am working, still trying to find a missing three-year-old. Beneath it, in the cells, Bill must know his life has changed for ever.
* * *
Bill is not our only line of inquiry. So far, we’ve spoken to 18 known sex offenders who live among the acre blocks and rural properties that lie within a 30-kilometre radius of Benaroon Drive, and another 60 who live further beyond it. There seem to be so many such offenders on this stretch of the Mid North Coast. It’s as if they’ve settled on this quiet, overlooked backwater like mosquitos.
One of them, Gavin (not his real name), is now Bill’s cellmate at Cessnock Correctional Complex where the white goods repairman is waiting for his next bail hearing. We monitor their interaction. Both men live near each other in Kendall and both have past links to Wellington, yet it seems they have never met before.
While Bill is in the cell, I go back at him again. We launch a covert operation, the details of which are kept within our strike force and the bosses who authorise it.
It seems to work. Bill continues to insist he was nowhere near Benaroon Drive when William went missing.
That’s it, I think. He didn’t do it. On 8 June, I update the strike force’s investigation plan, to say that, accepting on the balance of probabilities, Bill was not involved in William’s abduction and we need to refocus our investigation.
I know Bill’s reputation and his business have been ruined, the three kids who lived with him and Margaret have been taken away, and Margaret herself has suffered greatly. I must have made her doubt her husband. But this is a murder investigation. Justice is what matters here, not injury.
I needed to be certain. Yes, getting here was painful, but as the person leading the investigation, I had to weigh up the cost of charging Bill against the cost of doing nothing and found the scales did not balance. The cost of doing nothing was heavier.
All that’s left is for the child sexual assault charges to play out in court.
* * *
In June, I drive southwest, through the sun-baked country inland from Sydney to the Army Recruit Training Centre at Kapooka where my son, Jake, is due to pass out after his basic training. Over the past three months, since saying goodbye to Jake when he climbed onto the bus that brought him here, I’ve known he was being yelled at, just like I was at the police academy. I’ve known that the instructors would be doing their best to break him, just as they did with me back then.
As his dad, I’d wanted to protect him but known that I couldn’t. I just had to hope Jake would survive it. Watching them march out onto the parade ground, searching for his face among the ranks of stern-looking recruits in their khaki uniforms and slouch hats, there is a sense of pride, of course, but also sadness. He is no longer a child. He looks tougher now and more confident.
After the ceremony, I hug Jake and tell him I’m proud of him. Standing back, I can see that he is different now, he can survive in life without me. His military training was a test and he has passed it.
* * *
On 17 June, Bill’s lawyer tells the Supreme Court he should be released on bail, arguing that someone else, a ‘known paedophile’, had access to the alleged victims of his assaults at the time they happened. That paedophile was his then brother-in-law, Jeffrey Hillsley. It’s possible, the lawyer argues, Hillsley committed these offences, not Bill.
After eight weeks in prison, Bill is released on bail. The case moves slowly through the courts and, a year later, he is still fighting it, with no trial scheduled to take place until another year has passed, and which is then delayed again until 2018.
When finally it gets to the New South Wales District Court, Bill’s lawyer argues that the allegations against him were made to Crime Stoppers by his ex-wife, following a bitter divorce. He argues that evidence has been lost and witnesses have died in the decades since the offences were allegedly committed. The presence of Hillsley in Bill’s life at that time also means it cannot be proved who committed the offences, if any did take place.
The judge says he believes no jury could say for certain that Bill’s guilty and, on 5 March 2018, throws out the charges against him.
Walking away from the court, I feel a deep sense of sympathy. Sympathy for the women who were the alleged victims and who told the police about the most awful alleged crimes being committed against them. Sympathy for Margaret, Bill’s wife, who has been an innocent bystander in all of this. Sympathy for the scrutiny and sheer pressure that we put Bill under.
But it was the right thing to do to charge him. Going to court is usually a bruising experience and not every criminal charge results in a conviction, although it is rare to have your whole case thrown out like this one. I’d still rather take a case to court and lose than never go to court in the first place. Sometimes, like when I fought with Trevor as a schoolboy, you just have to take your lumps.
Bring Him Home
June 2015: 30 years in
In the strike force room at Port Macquarie Police Station, a poster fixed above my desk carries the words, ‘Have you seen William?’ Above it are three smaller photographs: William grinning at the camera, William in the driving seat of a fire truck, and the photo which has by now become famous from TV news reports and newspaper pages, taken in the hour before William disappeared and showing him in his Spider-Man costume, his open mouth revealing tiny white baby teeth, his eyes like two dark pools of deep, still water.
On whiteboards along the length of the room are a timeline, maps and aerial photographs. One map is coloured pink to show the area covered by foot during the search for William. Another shows the places searched by cadaver dogs. On one board, a photo shows the place where Jane thought she saw two cars parked on Benaroon Drive that morning. Another shows the one-kilometre radius from her mother’s house, within which we’ve tracked every human movement. There were close to 200 people within that area at that time.
Beside the door, on top of five full filing cabinets, are stacked more than a dozen lever-arch files of documents. In front of them, a tangle of electrical cables spills from the office tables, on which sit the computers and laptops that hold over 3000 different items, from weeks’ worth of listening device recordings to 50-page witness statements. The computers also hold details of the more than 1000 reported sightings of William we’ve so far received, some of which are ridiculous, like the claim a ball boy at a televised NRL match looked like William, but all of which add to the relentless flow of information pouring into the strike force room.
It is enough to drown in. Every single new sighting, tip-off, investigator’s note or witness statement must be logged, triaged, examined, cross-referenced and f
inally acted on.
My desk sits on its own, against the far wall. As the investigation supervisor, I oversee everything that happens both within and outside this room, putting me in a powerful position, but one that is also isolated. My job is to guide the strike force, to navigate our way across the pool of information they’re collecting, while it keeps getting deeper beneath us.
Those people arrive for work about 6.30am and stay as late as 8pm. I usually work later, by which time the strike force room is almost silent: just me tapping away on my laptop and the ticking of the clock on the office wall. Each time I leave, I know we will be here again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. Each day means going further into these dark waters.
To do this work, you have to be prepared to leave the shore behind you, swim out and hold onto the pieces of potential evidence that come to the surface. I grasp at one and then another, trying to remember everything Jim Williams and Paul Jacob taught me. My greatest fear is still that we’ll miss something. The strike force is now bigger than when I took it over, but we’re still short-handed.
Nine months after William went missing, there are still over 1600 files on the [email protected] computer system that are yet to be properly reviewed. Any one of them could contain the sighting of a car, a name, or the few words in a witness statement that we need to grab hold of before it’s lost amid the inflow of new evidence and sinks beneath the water again, unnoticed.
We have hundreds of hours of listening device recordings, but too few detectives to listen to them, so they are piling up, unheard.
I’m losing faith in the police force. Despite being a Homicide detective, I’ve been told to report to Paul, the local uniformed police commander, who is still giving interviews in which he’s described as the man leading the investigation. We clash when I complain that this arrangement means the cops are giving out mixed messages. Later, Paul says his staff need to use the room in which my strike force are working for meetings. I say we can turn the whiteboards round, to hide the confidential information on them, and leave the room during these times but this compromise fails. We end up leasing a room instead on Port Macquarie’s main street, at extra cost.
I don’t have the energy to waste on these battles. In the evenings, alone in my motel room, I practise qigong and meditation. Both help me deal with the chaos and my anger, as well as the constant fear of being overwhelmed which laps at my mind.
In a few days it will be 26 June 2015, William’s fourth birthday. I stay in contact with his foster parents constantly, by phone or in person. By now, I’m satisfied there is no evidence of their involvement in what happened, but they are still our most vital witnesses, because they were known people to see him before he disappeared.
It’s heartbreaking, having to call them up and say that I have nothing new to tell them. They have a thousand questions, among them, ‘Is it possible he’s still alive?’ All I can say is it’s possible, but I know that with hope comes pain, and their thoughts, like mine, are often pulled beneath the surface.
What do you do with William’s clothes? I wonder. Do you pack his toys away? Do you convert his room to something else, or leave it in case he comes home?
What about William’s sister? How do you protect her? How do you go on with your life?
I also know there is no evidence that William’s biological parents took him and sometimes, though less frequently, I visit them, or they call me.
Their lives are more chaotic. There’s been some drinking and drug use. At times, his birth mother will shout or spit her anger at me. Sometimes we agree to meet but they don’t turn up. You can only do so much, I tell myself.
I have to kick hard to stop all of this from dragging me under. I have to keep on searching, through the forests and the one-acre blocks, the homes of the people living around Kendall and the black waters of my own imagination, because the worst is not that we find William and I have to tell his parents he’s been murdered, the worst is we never find him.
* * *
On 22 August, Tracy and I are in court, getting divorced. The last time I saw her was two months ago in Perth, when she was running the city’s marathon. At the finish line Tracy ran straight past me and, when I caught up with her, she was talking to one of her friends. Back in Sydney, my calls to her went unanswered. Finally, she phoned me and asked me when we were going to talk.
‘The talking’s done. We’re over,’ I said. During the long silences I’d come to accept the distance between us for what it was – the width of the country. It felt like a simple choice: break up or have the strain of trying to bridge this gulf break me.
In court, I know enough from the criminal trials I’ve been involved with at work to guess at what this process will hold; the arguments, the delays, the lawyers’ fees, the paperwork. In a way, going through it will bind Tracy and I to each other until it is over but I will never see her in person again.
* * *
On 12 September 2015, the anniversary of William’s disappearance, thousands of people across Australia take part in ‘Walk for William’ events. They wear ribbons, T-shirts and Spider-Man costumes to show their support for his parents and for the effort to find him. It is a milestone nobody wants to reach.
The strike force is assigned another member: Laura, a recently promoted detective sergeant who comes recommended by my old teammate Nigel Warren, who worked with her in the Sex Crimes Squad. I like the fact she represents another link in the chain between detectives that was once broken by the Wood Royal Commission; Paul Jacob was my sergeant, I was Nigel’s sergeant, Nigel was Laura’s sergeant. Now she is here to help guide the other detective constables.
Laura’s been told she’ll be with us for only eight weeks. She ends up staying for years.
At times, she steps in to cover for Craig, the officer-in-charge of the strike force, who reports directly to me as the investigation supervisor. Craig is a dedicated cop and a champion kickboxer. I like his intensity, but he can seem strangely silent. Like each of us, the job bears down on him and, as the next most senior detective, Laura often ends up becoming a bridge between him and the junior members of the strike force.
Craig also insists on reviewing the other detectives’ work himself, until he has more than he can cope with, and often sends each report he receives back demanding more be done. In the monthly written progress reports I submit to my bosses, I record how much work each member of the strike force has outstanding. Many have dozens of tasks or items of potential evidence still to review. Some have hundreds. Craig, alone, has thousands.
We’re one year in, and no closer to finishing this work.
* * *
Everywhere, William’s face stares back at me. Driving on the freeway from Sydney to Port Macquarie, I pass billboards with the question ‘Where’s William?’ and that same photograph of the three-year-old in his Spider-Man suit that hangs above my desk.
The same image is on posters, on beermats, all over Facebook. Across the country, kids are donating their pocket money to the official Where’s William? Campaign, set up by a PR company working with the three-year-old’s foster parents. The company also works with the New South Wales Police Minister, Troy Grant – a former cop – to organise a private event at Parliament House in Sydney on 17 September. Politicians are invited to come and meet William’s foster parents in person. They try to reassure them by saying how lucky they are to get me; that if anyone is going to solve this, it’s Gary; that they have the best cop in New South Wales leading the investigation.
It’s well meant, but it’s pressure. At one point during the event, a singer performs a solo of ‘Bring Him Home’ from the musical Les Misérables. His voice echoes from the stone walls of the parliament building. I can feel tears welling up. The State Premier, Mike Baird, is also crying. Afterwards, I give a speech, saying the case is solvable and we owe it to William to keep trying.
The premier introduces himself and says if there is anything we need, to let him know. Troy says the same thin
g, as does the Attorney General, Gabrielle Upton. The next morning, back in the Homicide Squad office, I tell my boss, Mick Willing, about this. I tell him that I told the politicians we were fine, that I had enough staff and resources were not an issue. Mick nods, saying nothing. Within a week, I get a call to say the strike force is being doubled in size, to 14 people.
With them, we now have an opportunity to properly investigate some of the paedophiles we’ve identified living along the stretch of the Mid North Coast where William disappeared.
There are dozens of known child offenders in the area, mostly living inland, among the small, overlooked towns where property is cheap and there are fewer eyes on them than in a city block. We’ve learned to navigate our way around this stretch of country by their crimes: there’s Wauchope, where we find one child abuser; there’s Logan’s Crossing, where we find another; there’s Dunbogan, where one abuser says he was on the day that William disappeared.
This offender, a retired priest, has been found guilty of indecently assaulting a boy in the late 1980s, and of possessing child abuse material 20 years later. Another is the founder of a local support group for grandparents caring for young children and has won an award for his volunteer work.
A second member of the same group is a heavy drinker with a long handlebar moustache, a white station wagon similar in appearance to one of the cars Jane remembers seeing before William went missing, and no one to vouch for where he was that morning. He says maybe he was out collecting scrap metal, which he sells to buy beer, while his wife says she only knows that he came home drunk at lunchtime.
Soon after we speak to him, he is arrested and jailed for assaulting a child.