by Gary Jubelin
Josie taught me to take pleasure in simple things, like a picnic in the sun or drinks with her eclectic mix of friends from around the world.
At first, it frustrated me when I wanted to talk about work and she would change the subject, but slowly, I felt myself beginning to unwind. We found happiness together. In a way, I think she saved me.
After I arrive back from the Royal National Park, Josie cooks while I put on some meditation music and practise my qigong, concentrating on my breathing.
Later, I know I’ll need to sit up late, preparing documents or dealing with multiple requisitions from Tracy’s lawyers as part of our divorce. This process just keeps on getting harder, expanding to take up all my spare time outside of work. There are too many evenings like this one, which end with me sitting, sleepless, in a pool of light at the table, while Josie reads, or goes to bed without me.
The divorce also means court hearings on both sides of the country, which means legal fees and the cost of flights. Unable to afford a barrister in court, I represent myself, which doubles or trebles my workload and often leaves me struggling, like an animal caught in quicksand, to make sense of the complicated legal language the lawyers use. Eventually, it will get too much. I won’t be able to pull myself out of this quagmire. Josie will need to get on with her life and I cannot save us both. We’ll separate and move out of the flat in Pyrmont. With my finances in tatters from the legal process – I’m in my 50s, in a good job and do not own a home to live in – my younger sister, Michelle, and her partner, Jacqui, will offer me a room, living with them in Redfern.
I can see it coming. But, for now, I focus on my breathing, taking each breath deeply into my abdomen.
I’ve done qigong for more than 25 years now, longer than many of my cases. Longer than the lives of some of those people whose deaths I have dealt with at work. At first, as a raw qigong student, I was taught the movements dictate your breathing: raise your arms and breathe in, exhale as your hands return to the centre of your body. Later, I learned it is really the other way round: the breath dictates movement.
Standing in my apartment, feet shoulder-width apart, I think, Breathe in.
* * *
In December, Scott Craddock and I take Atkins back to the Royal National Park, driving the same route from his apartment that he took to dispose of Matt’s body, looking again for the site where he buried his boyfriend.
As we drive, Atkins describes his thoughts and memories of that journey. He was panicking and felt he had to get into the park quickly. He turned into the park at the Waterfall railway station and followed the hill down. He pulled over onto gravel near a bend in the road, where there was space enough for a few cars.
He became disorientated when he left the car and walked into the bush. He stumbled, trying to carry Matt. When he stopped, there was enough moonlight breaking through the trees for him to dig.
Our hope is that something about this experience, some sight, some sound or smell in the forest, might trigger his memory. It doesn’t work.
We leave and take him back again, after night has fallen. I wonder at how, in the darkness, everything seems different.
‘It’s really scary down here,’ Atkins says. Scott looks at me in silence. He’s worked this case harder than anyone, putting in hours of his off-duty time driving these roads.
We pull the car over and tell Atkins we have a surprise. Opening the boot, inside it is a life-sized mannequin for him to try dragging through the bush. He takes a step back but we insist. Maybe this will help him to recover those memories. With no prospect of a criminal trial, given our deal that Atkins will get immunity from prosecution, we’re not bound by the same rules of evidence and I do not believe Atkins carried Matt’s body as far into the bush as he claims.
The forest is silent except for the sound of Atkins struggling to drag the dummy away from the road on which we are standing. He says we’re right, there is no way he took Matt 70 metres into the bush. We should be looking much closer to the road.
On 9 January 2017, we bring the excavator back to search a second site, which Atkins says might have been the one, although he isn’t certain. We find nothing.
* * *
Breathe out. My divorce from Tracy is made final on 16 January 2017, although the legal arguments over how to divide up our private life together continue, which means more money, more court hearings, more expensive flights across the country trying to resolve it. As a result, when my daughter, Gemma, gets married, I feel ashamed that I cannot afford to help pay for her wedding.
* * *
Breathe in. We keep trying to find Matt’s body. In February, Scott talks to an expert in human decomposition, asking what to expect if we do discover the gravesite. In March, we bring Atkins in for a ‘cognitive interview’ – a kind of hypnosis – meant to aid his memory of what happened. We give him Matt’s car, the one he drove to the park that night, and let him head off in it into the park, alone.
Anything to find a way through the tangle of his memories. But he keeps coming back to the same turnoff near the railway station, the same bend in the road, the same gravel strip with room for a few cars, the stretch of bush we have already excavated.
* * *
Breathe out. On 10 March, after Atkins has spent three days driving round the Royal National Park in Matt’s car, we meet with him and his lawyers. He’s certain Matt is buried at the first site he took us to. I’m reluctant to go back, thinking maybe Faye was right and he’s just playing with us, but his solicitor Sharon Ramsden argues that we have to. There are still the 30 centimetre gaps between the trenches that we dug there.
Sharon says we don’t know what is in those gaps. She’s right. In May, we send the excavator back in.
For 20 days, we dig that ground over, watched by Matt’s family, who come down every day to sit beside the road and watch us. Every single square metre of dirt is dug, down to the depth of close to a metre, and checked. We find nothing. Wednesday 31 May is set as the last day of searching.
Around 2.30pm, with an hour or so left before we call the search off, the excavator rips up a bright green cabbage palm that has so far stood, untouched, among the devastation.
Scott calls ‘Stop!’ and raises his hand. He edges closer and looks down. He stiffens.
I’m standing with Matt’s parents, but excuse myself and walk over. Following where he is looking, I can see something cream-white among the dark brown earth. Looking closer, I make out part of a pelvis. Leg bones. The top of a skull.
We walk back to Mark and Faye, who lets out a sob and collapses into my chest. I pull her in then put a hand on Mark’s shoulder.
I ask them if they want to see their son.
They do. Their faces are numb. When Faye looks down, she howls. Lying in the ground beneath us is her nightmare.
This is a kind of justice, I think as Mark holds his wife tight. At least you have your son back. It is a point of light among the darkness. But nothing I can say will ease their pain.
White Spider
March 2017: 32 years in
As we search for William Tyrrell, I rely on the other detectives in the strike force to tell me what they’ve found when picking through the different threads of evidence. But the decision on where we look next is always mine.
This responsibility is worse than in other cases. It’s worse because William Tyrrell is a child; because he might still be alive somewhere; because if he was abducted, that person could strike again; because this case is always in the newspapers, which means the politicians read about it then ask questions of our bosses, who expect us to give them answers; because society expects whoever did this to be brought to justice; because when each of us leaves work each evening, we’ll know we were supposed to find William by now and we haven’t.
During a briefing in March 2017, Laura says we should do more work on Paul, the neighbour who lives opposite the house where William went missing. There’s no evidence he was involved, but nor do we have anything to
rule him out. There are also odd, unexplained things about him. William’s foster grandmother, Anne, says that he started turning up at her house unannounced after her husband’s death in February 2014. One time, she saw Paul standing outside her glass sliding doors, watching her inside them. Anne spoke to Paul’s wife, Heather, asking her to tell him to stay away. After Heather’s death in 2015, the year after William went missing, Anne says he walked up to her in a café and tried to kiss her. She was scared.
She also thinks it was strange Paul did not come out of his house after William went missing, when her daughter was running up and down the road, shouting for him. Anne says she couldn’t understand it. Paul was normally a stickybeak.
Other members of the strike force also agree with Laura. ‘OK,’ I say, ‘let’s look at him more closely. If we find nothing, great, we rule him out and then move on.’
Craig, the officer-in-charge of the strike force, has a different opinion. He wants to look at the local postwoman who took out an Apprehended Violence Order (AVO) against Paul, saying she, also, had a reason to be in Benaroon Drive that morning.
We bring the postwoman in for an interview in April 2017. She tells us her mail run to the street that day was unusually early, at around 8.45am, so she would have been gone long before William disappeared.
Although there’s no CCTV on Benaroon Drive, we can follow her movements around Kendall on different cameras and see nothing to contradict her version of events. But Craig is insistent. He wants to search her financial and travel records, to find out the kind of mail she was delivering, what time she started work that day and how long it took her to complete her route.
It strikes me as a waste of time to be pursuing the postwoman and I tell the strike force not to do it. If anything, during her interview, I was more interested in the reasons why she sought the AVO against Paul.
She said he was erratic. He kept approaching her, making her feel uncomfortable. And, around the time William went missing, Paul was often outside, or watching the street, waiting for her arrival.
Paul says he was out for his morning walk at around 8.40am that morning. The two times, his walk and her post run, are so close together it’s possible he might not have known she had been and gone, and still have been watching for her.
We’ve got nothing to suggest Paul’s involvement with William, but he could be our best eyewitness, I think.
* * *
In May, we go to the Supreme Court and get warrants authorising us to install listening devices in Paul’s home and car, and intercept his phone calls. The devices in his house record him listening to conservative shock jock Ray Hadley on the radio at full volume, talking to his dead wife, Heather, or ranting about the Greens, Aboriginal people and homosexuals. As we never know when he’ll start talking to himself, every hour we record has to be listened to in real time, transcribed and logged. Throughout June and July, the work mounts up. The transcripts are also far from perfect as, too often, the quality of the recording is poor. When he talks to himself about the postwoman, the transcript reads: ‘The AVO’s a pack of bullshit, they gave me one day, one day, one day . . . I was advised by some idiot . . . he was the bloke, the receiver of the phone call . . . and I told her . . . and I went to court . . . that I tried to stop her with my car and I used to run around the post office . . . some fucking bullshit.’
At other times, the recording fails, just like it did in the Bob Ljubic and Terry Falconer murder investigations. When this happens, the transcript reads ‘Inaudible’ or ‘File does not exist’. At one point it says simply, ‘Gap in data – about three days of recordings. Reason is unknown.’
* * *
I want to stir Paul up, to provoke him to talk about William’s disappearance, so we can listen to what he’s saying. This strategy has been agreed upon with my bosses and our forensic psychologist, but it’s my job to advance it.
On the morning of 14 June, we send in an undercover cop, posing as a freelance journalist. Thinking of Paul’s reputation as a stickybeak, I tell her, ‘Don’t worry about how you approach him, he’ll approach you.’ It happens. She parks on Benaroon Drive, gets out of her car and Paul approaches, asking if she’s lost.
She tells him she’s writing an article about the impact of William’s disappearance on the community in Kendall and they end up speaking for two hours. Paul tells her the only way he can see William being taken was if someone used the fire trail leading from where Benaroon Drive ends towards the town cemetery. That trail isn’t used often he says, ‘Only people like myself who go for a walk that way.’
On 5 July, the undercover cop goes back and talks to Paul again, both in his house and while they are walking through the bush around it. Paul tells her William might have been taken by someone who was hiding under his foster grandmother’s house, who put something on the boy’s face to quieten him and then drove off. He doesn’t think it’s worth police searching the area again.
After she leaves, the listening devices record Paul sobbing to himself inside his house: ‘My angel. My love. My angel. I love you.’ He sobs throughout the evening, mumbles to himself or shouts at the television. On the phone to his son, he talks about the freelance journalist’s visit, repeating his theory that William’s was a planned abduction by someone who left through the Kendall cemetery. When he goes to bed, alone, he is recorded saying, ‘Love you darling. Good night, sweetheart.’ We can only guess he’s talking to his dead wife.
Later, in the silence, Paul says to Heather, ‘I love you.’
* * *
I’m uncertain what to make of what we’re hearing. On 26 July, I test Paul’s reactions, not seeking to gather evidence this time, but rather to get some indication of whether we are justified in looking at him more closely.
We leave a child’s Spider-Man suit beside the track where Paul takes his morning walk, having first buried it to make it look old, then dug it up. A surveillance team are hidden in the forest, watching.
Afterwards, their report reads: ‘[Paul] continued walking west along the dirt track, bent over and looked at a Spider-Man suit lying next to the dirt track. [Paul] stopped for approximately 12 seconds.’ Paul does not report seeing the suit to the police.
That afternoon, we record him at home, mumbling, ‘You know I love you angel’ and ‘I bloody screwed up, eh’ while the radio continues in the background.
We leave the suit out again the next morning, and this time Paul stops, puts out his foot to touch it then walks home and calls the local police station. Asked whether he walked the trail the day before, he said he did but ‘I never seen it yesterday’.
That afternoon, we record Paul saying, ‘I never seen it before, maybe a dog’s dragged it, from wherever. I don’t know, it’s no good asking that.’ Later, while mowing his lawn, he says ‘Oh shut up Paul.’
Two days after, we record Paul talking to himself again. It’s indistinct, with parts where different detectives think they hear different words, but it sounds like, ‘No, yeah, well I’m gunna run into your property too.’ He continues: ‘This is my place, you’re in my place, you do what I want . . . don’t want to take too much crap, hey, I’m not interested in your bullshit mate . . . you’re a little boy, you’re nobody. You’re just a little boy, you’re nobody. You don’t tell me, I’ll tell you, I did tell you.’
* * *
With more than one listening device operating in Paul’s house day and night, the backlog of unlistened-to surveillance recordings grows into the hundreds, then thousands of hours. We haven’t got the people to go through them.
As July ends, we record Paul saying, ‘You haven’t got anything to do with this, so it’s ridiculous.’ Minutes later, he continues, ‘I don’t know what’s going on with the little bloke.’ Some of the junior detectives who spend their days listening to these recordings tell me they believe him.
Craig also thinks Paul is innocent. I tell him that we have to prove it. Craig doesn’t respond. He’s often silent in our briefings, also. He i
s a kickboxer, and a good one, so sometimes the best exchanges he and I have with each other are when we put on boxing gloves and spar in the car park, going hard at each other until we’re both exhausted.
Hoping to move forward, on 16 August, I ask Paul to come in for an interview. Laura, who interviewed Paul before, also sits at the table with us. The narrow, green-grey room feels so small the three of us barely fit inside it.
This has gone on too long, I think. Not knowing what to make of Paul. Not knowing what to make of what he’s saying.
I want us to be able to rule him in or out. If I can press down hard enough in here, then he might break, or say something when he gets back home we can record on the listening devices. It won’t be pretty but Paul’s been read his rights by the custody sergeant, so he should know what is coming.
Paul sits with his shoulders slumped and arms crossed: a grey-haired 72-year-old with a wiry, Clint Eastwood body. We’ve barely begun talking when he starts to cry, talking about his childhood, how his parents separated and the children were broken up, leaving him to be moved between nine different families.
‘Nobody wanted me,’ he says. At one point, he stands up, saying that he’s got a cramp, and tries to walk it off in tiny circles.
He denies having anything to do with William’s disappearance. I ask him about that morning, when he was sitting on the verandah of his house and could hear the children playing.
‘Did you see them?’ I ask.
‘Nuh.’
‘You can see from your verandah, you can see up into the back of Anne’s place.’
‘No, I can’t see into the back.’
I try to make it clear. From his house, you can see where the grass slope runs down from the back of Anne’s place towards the road. The grass slope that William was last seen running towards, when he jumped off the front deck at Anne’s house ran round the side of the building and disappeared.