by Gary Jubelin
Another name floats up. Frank Abbott is a heavy, bullying man who lives in a caravan near a sawmill, a few kilometres from Kendall. He has twice stood trial for the murder of a 17-year-old found buried near a timber cutters’ road southwest of Sydney in 1968. The first jury failed to reach a verdict and the second found him not guilty.
All these men live so close together, yet when we ask, they say there is no connection between them. But still, there is something unhealthy about this place, something that lives in the black pools of water overshadowed by the forests. As we head into the second summer since William went missing, the heat and the humidity, the constant drilling sound of insects, are exhausting. Driving back to Sydney, after another few days trying to pursue this case, I turn up the air-con try to blast myself clean of all these feelings.
William’s eyes stare at me from the roadside billboards.
The Right to Silence
17 December 2015: 30 years in
Faye Leveson looks at me and tells me, ‘No.’
I was expecting that reaction. Not just because of what I’m asking, but because Faye reminds me of myself sometimes in the way she often puts her fists up first and, only later lowers them.
This time, her arms are folded across her chest. Her face is set.
‘Absolutely no way,’ she repeats.
‘Hold on, let’s hear them out,’ says Mark, her husband.
Unlike me, even when he’s cranky, Mark is still a gentleman. He tries to see the best in people. I reckon he has every right to throw me out of this small room outside the court in which the inquest into their son’s death is happening, but his decency prevents him.
The couple’s two sons, Matt’s brothers, do not try to hide their feelings. They look at me in angry silence.
Inside the court, after 10 days, the inquest into Matt’s death has so far failed to provide any answers to their questions about what happened to him. His former boyfriend, Michael Atkins, is now due to give evidence. Only, the way the legal system works, he can decline to do so if his answers may incriminate him in a crime.
‘Atkins is going to object to giving evidence, ‘I tell them. ‘But when he does, there is an option available to the coroner to grant him a certificate under section 61 of the Coroner’s Act.’ The Levesons don’t blink. They know this, as some of Matt’s friends who’ve already given evidence about their social lives, including their drug use, have received the same protection.
I continue, saying that we could offer a certificate to Atkins. It means he is not able to refuse to answer any questions. It would also mean that, if he did confess to something, his evidence couldn’t then be used to put him on trial.
The only crimes not covered by a section 61 certificate are perjury and contempt of court.
Faye shakes her head. I can see why she’s angry: Atkins could confess to murder and never be punished. I know it doesn’t sound like justice and, as far as I’ve been able to establish, no one has ever tried to do this in a possible murder case before.
But, as I’ve told Matt’s family, I’ve been working on this case for almost two years now and I don’t think I can take it any further with police work.
Since picking up the case again in early 2014, I’ve spent months following up the supposed Facebook confession from ‘MikeyBoi Atkins’, only for it to turn out to be false. That was a crushing blow, to me and Matt’s parents. Working with local detectives from the Miranda local area command, which covered the area where Matt’s car was discovered in 2007, we have made some advances. We’ve found new CCTV evidence showing that after the Levesons’ son and Atkins left the ARQ nightclub together on the night before Matt’s disappearance, the older man returned, alone, to complete a drug deal almost an hour later.
One of the Miranda cops, Detective Senior Sergeant Scott Craddock, is standing with me in the room with Matt’s family. A tall, wiry, young bloke, Scott has impressed me; he’s smart, much smarter than I am, with a real emotional intelligence.
Left with the not guilty verdict over Matt’s death, Scott and I are in the same position that Jerry Bowden and I are now facing with the Bowraville murders – needing ‘fresh and compelling’ evidence in order to ask the appeal court to order a retrial. Despite our best efforts, we don’t have this evidence. So I’d tried something that worked with the Bowraville case. I went to the new State coroner, Michael Barnes, and told him Matt’s family had put their faith in the court system and it had failed to give them any answers about what happened to their son.
This time, the situation was slightly different. Typically, no inquest is held after a murder trial, but I argued that this left Matt’s family with no answers, only an acquittal, and the coroner had consulted his law books, finding there was nothing to actually prevent an inquest taking place. I’d also encouraged Matt’s parents to petition the coroner in person, asking him to hold an inquest and, when he agreed, and a journalist at the 60 Minutes TV program approached me saying she wanted to report on the case, I said I would cooperate.
The media attention would be useful, I thought, as I’d started to doubt my faith in the court system. Look at the decision during the trial over Matt’s murder to prevent the jury from watching the footage of Atkins’ police interview, or the way the Bowraville trials were separated, so each jury was only told that one child went missing. In both, the courts decided justice meant preventing evidence from being heard in public. Having 60 Minutes sitting in the courtroom meant that, this time, the case would play out in the spotlight.
It risked provoking a confrontation with the coroner, or my boss, Mick Willing. Maybe later I’d regret that but, like Faye, I was putting my fists up and was prepared to slug it out because finding Matt was more important.
It also means there is now a huge weight of public attention on Matt’s parents to make this decision. I tell them I don’t want to pursue the section 61 certificate unless they agree.
‘Let’s break it down,’ I tell them. ‘What do you ideally want out of this inquest?’
‘To prosecute Atkins and to find Matt’s body,’ Mark and Faye reply together.
I hesitate. ‘What if you could only achieve one of those things? Which would you choose?’
‘We want Matt’s body back,’ says Faye. Mark says he agrees.
‘I can’t make any promises,’ I tell them. But this way, if Atkins gets immunity from prosecution, at least he might reveal the gravesite. They might get to hold a funeral.
* * *
When I tell Atkins’ lawyers, they look at me as if I’m crazy.
‘So you don’t believe in the right to silence?’ they ask.
‘No,’ I answer. The right to silence is about protecting the suspect, just like the double jeopardy rules that the Bowraville families overturned. But what about the victims? What about Matt’s parents?
‘Never have believed in it. Never will,’ I tell Atkins’ lawyers. I’m just trying to make the system work.
* * *
Over the coming months, Atkins will fight our attempt to compel him to give evidence all the way to the Supreme Court. On 12 October 2016, he loses.
On Monday 31 October, during his first day in the witness box, Atkins denies knowing that Matt was dead and says he told police the truth when he was interviewed in the days after Matt went missing.
Atkins returns to the witness box day after day, and his answers to the repeated questions start to stumble. On his fifth day, he admits that yes, he lied during the police interview when he said he hadn’t bought a mattock and duct tape from Bunnings. Yes, he bought them, he finally confesses, but only to grow vegetables.
With this step forward, Atkins walks into a trap laid for him by the counsel assisting the coroner, who asks him, ‘Your evidence was, you did tell the truth to police. That’s your evidence here in this court?’
‘Yes.’
‘You agree that in your interview to police you told them lies, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yo
u’ve lied in your evidence in this court, haven’t you, on Monday, when you said you told the police the truth. That’s right isn’t it?’
Atkins is silent for a moment. ‘Yes.’
He’s caught. Perjury – lying to a court – isn’t covered by his immunity from prosecution.
But I don’t want to prosecute him for perjury. I want to find Matt’s body.
I go back to Matt’s parents, then talk to the Attorney General. I ask both the same question: ‘Will you allow us to make Atkins a second offer of immunity from prosecution – this time for perjury – in return for telling us where he buried Matt?’
This time, we can say to him, If you don’t tell the truth, you’ll go to prison.
I am certain he’ll agree. The Atkins I’ve seen in the witness box is a coward. He’ll be too frightened of what might happen to him inside to refuse this.
There’s No Death That’s a Good Death
January 2016: 31 years in
The deeper we wade into the lives of the people living around Kendall, where William Tyrrell went missing, the darker the water seems.
In the new year of 2016, we start looking at someone new: a fat, hairy gorilla of a man living in the area near William’s foster grandmother’s house, where the three-year-old was last seen.
He worries me. His name keeps coming up in conversation with locals. Without a clear suspect in William’s disappearance, suspicion seems to be seeping through the area from its pools and rivers, pooling among the roots in the forest and poisoning the trees.
Up close, the man’s house looks like the bush has grown right over it. Hanging in what remains of his garden are the bodies of dead animals, tied up with string. Walking inside, my worry deepens when we find what looks like a kind of shrine at the end of the man’s bed made out of a photograph of William along with quotes of mine taken from newspapers, saying we’ll never give up on trying to find him.
It’s one of many disturbing things I’ve found, carried in the stream of trauma caused by William’s disappearance. Talking to the man, however, I suspect he is more guilty of seeking attention than anything actually criminal. He seems lonely – when I go to his home, he doesn’t want me to leave. But we put him under surveillance, to be certain.
I ask Greg, one of the junior detectives on the strike force, to look at whether we can install covert cameras in the forest to keep watch on this man. Greg’s come over from the Robbery and Serious Crime Squad and doesn’t have much experience of working homicides, if any. I’ve had him transcribing telephone intercepts for months because I was unsure about giving him anything demanding but I now tell Greg to drive out and take a look at where the cameras could be installed. Before he leaves, I remind him to walk through the bush to get there and not to park on Benaroon Drive. After all, this is a covert operation.
When Greg comes back he tells me he parked on Benaroon Drive, in full view of the neighbours, and walked straight through a big, open property to get to where we’re thinking of setting up the cameras. The property’s owner, an old bloke called Paul, who is in his 70s, approached him.
‘G’day mate,’ Greg said, introducing himself as a detective. Then, remembering the cameras were supposed to be a covert job, he tried to disguise what he was doing: ‘I’ve been sent here because we have some concerns about the initial search for William Tyrrell and we believe it hasn’t been searched on this side and I need to do an initial assessment before we do a search.’
Paul seemed interested. He hadn’t been on his usual morning walk yet, so offered to go with Greg, who said he accepted.
Paul seemed to know his way around, Greg tells me. He seemed to be friendly. Listening, I wonder whether it occurred to Greg his new friend might be trying to ingratiate himself with the police.
After walking through the bush, the two of them returned to Paul’s driveway, where they talked about the two cars Jane thought she saw parked on Benaroon Drive the morning William went missing. We’d just released these details to the media.
Paul said he didn’t know why they were talking about two cars on the television.
‘What do you mean?’ Greg asked him.
‘They weren’t there on that day.’
‘What day?’
‘The day William went missing.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I walk every day. They weren’t there on that day . . . I saw those cars two days before William went missing.’
It is a strange conversation, and I ask Greg to make a written record of it. In the end, we wrap up our investigation into the hermit, calling him in for a formal interview during which time we search his house covertly, but find no evidence against him. We’re just not making progress.
I think again about Greg’s chance conversation with Paul and wonder if we’ve missed something. Paul lives opposite William’s foster grandmother, Anne Fiore, and his front verandah looks out towards the back of her house, although the view is partially obscured by trees.
William was last seen running around from the front of Anne’s house towards the back of her property. Yet no witness statement was taken from Paul until almost two weeks later and his house was not searched until three days after William disappeared.
I look at his witness statement, and another Paul gave almost a year after William went missing, when we re-interviewed everyone who lived near Anne’s property on Benaroon Drive. He says that, on the day itself, he went for his daily walk in the State forest and returned home about 8.50am. He made some calls, then sat on his verandah having some tea and toast. About 10am, he heard children playing. That would make Paul only the third adult witness, apart from Jane and Anne, to have heard William and his sister shortly before the three-year-old went missing.
Paul’s statements say his wife, Heather, left to drive to her regular bingo morning at about 10.30am, or a few minutes after – around the time William was last seen. Apart from sitting on the verandah, Paul himself was in and out of the house, packing to drive to Lismore, over four hours away, to pick up his brother from hospital. But he didn’t see or hear any of the frantic search for William until he got a knock on the door from a neighbour saying the little boy was missing. After that, Paul cancelled the trip to Lismore and went out looking for him.
Leaving his house, Paul didn’t go down the road to where everybody else was searching. Instead, according to his statements, Paul went in the other direction, alone, up the hill and along the same track he walks every morning. Having done so, he cut through the bush to the back of his property and went inside to have a cup of tea. At about 1pm or 1.30pm, just as he was about to go outside to search again, his brother- and sister-in-law arrived for a visit.
He doesn’t have an alibi, I think. Heather’s own witness statement, taken before her death, says that she spent the morning getting ready for bingo and left at 10.38am, but doesn’t say what her husband was doing. No other witnesses confirm where Paul was between the time that neighbour knocked on his door and when his relatives arrived roughly two hours later.
My job as a detective means coming up with case theories, then testing them. That means asking questions: Why would Paul go off into the bush and search alone? And why then come back to the house and go inside, without asking if William had been found yet?
Which leads to another question: A couple of days later, Paul did make the journey to Lismore and back, to pick up his brother. Were the local police searching the cars going in or out of Benaroon Drive at that time? I check and find the answer is no.
But, so far, I have too few other answers, and the statements we have got from Paul so far are not detailed enough to provide them. There are also inconsistencies; in one statement, Paul says his brother- and sister-in-law’s visit was scheduled, in the other he says that they just dropped in.
I ask Laura to visit Paul at home to take another statement from him on 16 March. He tells Laura the same story, although afterwards, she says he was difficult to interview, prickly and emotional. Whene
ver Laura tried to get into the nitty-gritty, she says he started to cry about his dead wife.
When Paul’s name comes up at the next strike force briefing, other cops say yeah, he’s odd. After his wife died last April he wore a photograph of her around his neck for a month. He also has an Apprehended Violence Order against him for harassing the local postwoman, and he’s breached it. Someone says that Paul found one of the hidden surveillance cameras we’d been using to keep a watch on the hermit, and kept it for six weeks before finally handing it back to us. We’d known the camera was missing, but not who had taken it.
I look at the strike force. Why have I not been told these things before? And there are other questions: like why Paul told Laura that, once he found out William was missing, he went out the front of his house and spoke to Anne Fiore.
According to Anne, Paul didn’t.
* * *
On a Sunday afternoon in April 2016, I am standing on an isolated clifftop on the Central Coast, looking down at a bag containing the body of a young, unidentified woman who has just been recovered from the blowhole beneath us. The longer I do this job, the more I learn what the dead can tell us. Are there defence wounds, usually scratches on the hands and arms, showing where a victim tried to fight off their attacker? Does this look like a crime of passion, where a killer has caved in their victim’s skull, or was this a clinical killing, delivered with a bullet to the back of the head, leaving the skull around the entry hole relatively intact but the face through which it made its exit in fragments?
How has the body been disposed of? This, also, can tell you something. Did the killer panic? Was he practised?
Unzipping the bag lying on the clifftop, I look at her arms and see bright red defence wounds. A murder.
A day later, on 25 April, a Sydney couple report their niece missing. Mengmei Leng is a 25-year-old student from Chengdu in China. She’d been staying with her aunt and uncle but they say they haven’t seen her for days.