by Gary Jubelin
It makes me think we’re looking for somebody who acted on their own.
* * *
I joke that my whole life is affidavits: the coroner keeps demanding more paperwork be completed as part of our offer of immunity from prosecution to Michael Atkins; so do the lawyers preparing to take the Bowraville murders to the appeal court; the Supreme Court wants affidavits written out each time Strike Force Rosann applies for a listening device or telephone intercept warrant, and each of these will only last so long before you have to go back to court, asking for it to be extended, carrying another affidavit.
At home, two weeks after the million-dollar reward is announced, my divorce from Tracy is listed in the Federal Circuit Court, which means dealing with more documents.
Legal letters seem to arrive every Friday at 5pm, ruining the weekend and forcing me to reckon up our assets – the apartment we bought together in Pyrmont, my super, my two motorbikes – and the costs of our relationship, including more than $21,000 I’ve spent on flights between Sydney and Perth.
We agree to sell the apartment and I move out as directed by the arbitrator we had engaged, only the money from the sale doesn’t come through as expected, so I can’t afford to buy a replacement. Facing my mounting legal costs, I sell my bikes. By chance, an apartment comes up for rent – next door to the one I shared with Tracy.
Each evening, I come home from work and walk past our old front door to get to my new apartment. I’d planned to retire at 55, but will no longer be able to afford that, so have to accept I’ll work until 60. Police work is hard and already I am among only a handful of those who graduated with me from the police academy who are still serving. When I visit my parents, hoping to pour out my troubles, I can see Dad is getting sicker.
He lashes out at Mum sometimes, like he did when we were kids, and she tells me my divorce is worrying him more than anything. I mean to sit down with him and tell him not to worry, I’m OK, but instead, I get angry.
‘Look, regardless of what you’re going through, you can’t treat Mum like that,’ I tell him.
Maybe anger is one kind of defence. So is denial: He’s Dad, he’s tough, never mind what the doctors say, he’s going to get through this. I’m overloaded with emotions, fear of losing him and guilt because I didn’t spend more time with him before his illness, resentment of myself for not spending more time with him now because instead I am spending every weekend dealing with my divorce.
Anxiety about all my different cases. Worry that I might not solve them. When I’m in Port Macquarie working on William’s disappearance, if work isn’t going well, I find it difficult to visit Mum and Dad because their first question is always, ‘What’s going on with the investigation into little William?’
Sometimes I tell them I don’t want to talk about it, and the question hangs in the air inside their house, unanswered.
Yet, at the same time, I’m doing some of my best police work. My attempts to answer the questions of what happened to Matt Leveson and the Bowraville children are setting legal precedents and overturning old, established obstacles like the right to silence and double jeopardy. The investigation into William’s disappearance may be the biggest in the country.
When I think about how this period of blackness contains this single point of light, it reminds me of the yin-yang symbol. The black side, yin, contains a white circle. The white side, yang, contains a black one. If I accept that my life now is yin, and that there is no longer any balance, then maybe I can reach that point of yang within it. I might find Matt Leveson’s body. I might jail the Bowraville killer. I might discover who took William.
Maybe I’ve been reaching towards this point all my life.
* * *
I keep taking on more work.
In October, I travel north, to the flat inland country near the New South Wales State border. The family of a murder victim, a 43-year-old mother of three called Theresa Binge, have contacted police because they’ve heard my name from Bowraville, and because Theresa is a cousin of Clinton Speedy-Duroux.
Theresa was last seen alive in July 2003, drinking in the grand Victoria Hotel on the high street in Goondiwindi, Queensland, just north of the State border. A local man had bought her half a dozen beers. He himself drank about a dozen heavy pots of XXXX. The two of them left the pub together at around midnight.
Theresa was part of a big family, one of 17 if you counted her half-brothers and -sisters. When she didn’t turn up to a birthday party the following night on the nearby Toomelah Aboriginal Reserve, where she grew up, they started to worry about her.
Her family went out looking for Theresa on the Saturday, and reported her missing to police a day later. At first, her disappearance was treated as a missing-persons investigation, led by the Queensland police but, more than a week later, on Tuesday 29 July, her partially naked body was found lying beside a culvert running beneath the Boomi Road, which runs like an arrow through this empty country.
Theresa was on her back. Her silver tracksuit trousers were down around her right ankle and she had bruises around her neck, arms and thigh, as well as the right side of her face, suggesting she’d been punched and kicked.
There were drag marks in the gravel leading down from the road to where she was lying, along with an empty pack of Peter Jackson Virginia cigarettes. The culvert was on the south side of the State border, meaning the New South Wales police had taken over the investigation, without success.
Once again, it was worked by the local cops, with little help from the Homicide Squad. When I sat down with them in Toomelah, Theresa’s family wanted to know why nothing had happened? Why had no one been jailed? Was it because Theresa was black, while the man she left the pub in Goondiwindi with was white? I listened as they vented all their raw frustration, suspicion and disappointment. It was like the first time I went to Bowraville, all over again.
The last thing I need right now, I tell my dad, is another murder. Especially one that is an eight-hour drive from Sydney. But there’s talk of a new witness, and I go back with Scott Craddock, who I’m working with on the Matt Leveson case and who has now joined the Homicide Squad.
He and I spend days searching for people, being passed from one person to another, just like in Bowraville, before eventually running a witness to ground and finding there is nothing in what they were saying. We talk to the local cops, and work through the files of the original investigation.
It looks like the cops who worked it the first time went hard, but that they came up against a great, impenetrable silence. But I think we can break it.
‘It’s solvable, Dad, I’m sure of it,’ I tell him when I next visit, looking out over the Hastings River. ‘It just needs some commitment.’
I Thought I Would Get Blamed
9 November 2016: 31 years in
I look up when I hear the soft padding of the lawyer’s heels on the thick carpet. She says that they’re ready. It must be close to midnight.
Scott Craddock and I were already tired after a full day’s work when we got to these plush offices at 4pm. Since then, we’ve been pacing up and down or sitting, listening to the sound of cleaners elsewhere in the building, while the lawyers argued.
Michael Atkins has finally agreed to talk about the death of his boyfriend, Matthew Leveson – but with conditions. His lawyers wanted to get it in writing that anything he says will not be used against him in a criminal trial, and that he will not be recalled to give evidence to the inquest. We, too, have one condition: Atkins only gets immunity from prosecution if we find Matt’s body.
His lawyer leads us into a small conference room. I watch Atkins walk in. Scott opens up his laptop to type a record of the conversation.
Close up, Atkins is almost childlike. He sits, sagging, in his chair at the table. He’s dyed his hair to look younger and built up his muscles to look bigger, but I get the sense that the real person is hiding. He looks at his lawyers, sitting on either side of him, as if asking for reassurance: ‘Is this wh
at I should do?’
I have to control my excitement. I’ve pursued this man for more than two years; I’ve staked him out, listened to our surveillance of his private conversations and worked with the police force’s forensic psychologist to get inside his head. Following her advice, we have a plan for how Scott and I should approach this moment. We are not to judge Atkins or give him any reason to throw up his defences. Instead, we are to give him every opportunity to open up and reveal the truth.
I ask him, ‘Can you tell me your knowledge as to what happened to Matthew Leveson?’
‘Yes.’ He takes a breath and exhales it. ‘He had a drug overdose.’
I panic. My mind spins, thinking, Fuck.
Even his lawyers look stunned. Everyone in the room expected him to offer up a murder.
Atkins says he and Matt drove home from the nightclub, barely talking to each other. He fell asleep in front of the TV, and when he woke up in the morning, ‘I went into the bedroom and saw that Matt was lying on the ground with his eyes open, and he was not breathing and he had a funny colour.’
Atkins says a vodka bottle full of a clear liquid was standing open on the kitchen counter. Inside it was GHB, the drug he had been dealing at the nightclub the evening before.
‘Did you cause Matt’s death?’ I ask, trying to slow the pace of the interview and regain some control.
‘No.’
‘Why did you cover up Matt’s death?’
‘Because I thought I would get blamed.’
‘Why would you think that?’
‘Because we were dealing drugs, and everyone thought I was the more responsible one so I should be the one caring for him.’
‘Who were you concerned about blaming you?’
‘Everybody, I think. Matt’s parents. I thought everybody as in society, I suppose.’
So, he didn’t want people to blame him. To avoid it, he buried Matt’s body. Do I believe him?
I hold his gaze, watching the way he looks at me or avoids me, listening to whether his answers flow or hesitate, using all the skills I’ve learned from Jim, from Jaco, and from three decades spent sitting in interview rooms like this one. Nothing tells me Atkins is lying.
‘How did you think burying Matt’s body would make it all better?’ I ask him.
‘I was not thinking very clearly. I thought people would think he has just gone away or is missing because he had done that before.’
‘What would that achieve?’
‘I thought the problem would all go away in some weird way.’
‘To describe the death of someone as a “problem that would go away” is very unusual. Can you explain to me what you mean by that?’
He seems to flinch. ‘I don’t really understand what I was thinking at the time. I look back now and I don’t understand it. I just don’t know. I thought I was going to be blamed and be shamed. I’ve always thought of myself as a good person.’
‘So you buried a person that you loved in an unmarked grave to protect your reputation. Is that correct?’
His voice is low, ‘I think so. The whole thing about being blamed and the guilt. I did not want the drug thing to come out so I was trying to protect that, and I was worried about what my family would think of me. I was worried about what my mother would think of me . . . She didn’t know I was gay.’
This is the tipping point. I believe him. I’m looking at a grown man who buried his boyfriend because he didn’t want his mum to know about his sexuality.
Matt’s parents, I know, may never accept this is what happened to their son, but it makes sense. It’s too stupid a motive to make up.
Atkins looks at me, as if he is pleading, and I hold his gaze. His confession is not enough. If there’s to be any kind of justice then we need to find Matt’s body.
I get him to describe how he bought the duct tape and mattock. How, back at the apartment, he had covered Matt’s body in a blanket or a donna cover – he can’t remember which – then, went down to the garage beneath the apartment building at night and removed Matt’s big stereo speaker from the boot of his car. How he went back upstairs and wrapped Matt’s body fully. ‘I can’t remember if I used the tape, I think I did.’
How he waited until after midnight before carrying Matt down to the car.
Atkins says he drove Matt to the Royal National Park.
By now, it’s two or three in the morning. We print out the statement Scott’s typed up of Atkins’ confessions and he signs it. I tell his lawyers: ‘I want to take him down there. I want him to show us the location.’
The five of us, myself, Scott, Atkins and his lawyers, Sharon Ramsden and Claire Wasley, crowd into my car, and drive through the empty city to where the streetlights stop at the park’s edge, then on into the darkness.
The road winds down between thick forest. Nobody talks, until Atkins says: ‘Pull in here.’
* * *
Staring out at the forest in daylight more than a week later, I remember the look on Atkins’ face at that moment. There was nothing noble in his expression. There was no remorse. There was relief.
I keep telling myself that as I stand with Mark and Faye Leveson, watching an excavator dig trenches in the soft, dark earth. The growl of its engine seems to infuriate the birds, which are wheeling and shrieking above us in the canopy of trees.
The forest is so thick here you cannot see the sky. Not that anyone is looking upward. Everyone is looking down, at where the excavator is digging. So far, we have not found Matt.
After driving Atkins into the park before dawn on 10 November, we stopped at a couple of different places beside the road snaking its way down into the forest. At each, he looked around and then dismissed them. One was too open, Atkins said. At another, the space for a car to pull up beside the road itself felt too small.
At the third, I watched Atkins edge his way out into the bush, ten, 20, 40 metres, talking to himself as he moved forward: ‘I remember that tree’, ‘I remember that slope’. About 70 metres in, he stopped. It seemed a long way to carry Matt’s body from the car, I thought, but he told us, this was it. We marked the spot and left two other detective constables, who had just arrived, carrying high-powered flashlights, to organise a police guard of the area.
After daybreak, Scott and I went back to the coroner’s court to tell Mark and Faye Leveson what had happened. A day later, on Friday 11 November, Matt’s family joined us to watch the bright yellow excavator roar into life, sending the outraged cockatoos soaring into the air.
After seven ugly days of searching, by Thursday 17 November this stretch of bush beside the road has been torn up like a battlefield, with rows of trenches dug 30 centimetres apart, and Faye looks as if her heart has been ripped open.
‘He’s lying,’ Faye says of Atkins. ‘Toying with us. Matty isn’t here.’
Mark is more resolute, saying that they will still find their son. I say nothing but am beginning to doubt.
There’s no good reason Atkins would be lying. He knows the deal: no body, no immunity. If we don’t find Matt, he’ll go to jail for perjury after lying to the inquest. I think again of that look of relief on his face.
So what are we missing? I ask Matt’s parents if there’s anywhere among the trenches they’d like us to search again. They walk out across the savaged, broken earth, planting white flags, and the excavator follows, digging beside each of these markers. Each time it finds nothing. Today is the last day of the search.
A line of TV cameras is filming the operation, crowded behind the crime scene tape. As the sun sinks, Faye walks up to them, carrying a card she’d hoped to leave on her son’s grave.
‘Matt, our beautiful son and brother, we made a promise to you nine years, one month and 24 days ago to find you and bring you home,’ she reads, her breath ragged with sobbing. She breaks off, her body bent with pain. Behind her stands her husband. Nearby, a solitary, bright green cabbage palm still stands amid the destruction.
‘We haven’t fulfilled our
promise to him yet,’ Faye continues, looking up at the cameras. ‘But I promise you, Matty, we will bring you home.’
* * *
I’m the one who has to find him. I drive away from the park, back to my rented flat next door to the home where I used to live with Tracy. Inside it is my gym equipment and a rack full of white shirts. My family photographs are still in boxes, meaning the only pictures on display are a promotional shot from the Underbelly series, a painting of Buddha I did on my meditational retreat in Nepal and Aunty Elaine Walker’s funeral notice, stuck on the fridge door.
* * *
Also living with me in the flat in Pyrmont is Josie. As I open the door and walk inside, seeing her gentle smile makes the weight I’ve carried back with me from the park feel a little lighter.
I’ve known Josie for years, from the yoga and pilates classes she teaches at a nearby fitness studio. After moving back to Sydney from my year in Perth, I started taking her classes more often, and found they helped unwind some of the tension coiling inside me, caused by my separation from Tracy. Sometimes, we would chat after the class was over, but I never thought it would lead to anything. Once, when I’d been away for a couple of weeks with work, Josie asked where I had been. I told her I’d been hunting.
Things moved slowly. I was dealing with my second failed marriage while Josie had also recently come out of a long-term relationship. We went for coffee together and, sitting at the café table, I was struck by how relaxed she seemed. There was an innocence about her; a way of looking at life I’d not experienced before, neither concerned with the future nor the past, but instead living truly in the moment.
She was just what I needed. Shortly after we got together, Josie went back to her native Brazil for Carnival and, while she was away, I realised how much I missed her. When she got back, we moved in together in Pyrmont.