I Catch Killers

by Gary Jubelin

  ‘You can see it directly through there,’ I say to Paul.

  ‘Possibly, without the bush.’

  ‘Well, there is no bush, there’s trees.’

  ‘Yeah, I can’t remember now.’

  ‘But the trees are high, the foliage is high,’ I say. I can’t believe we’re stuck on this. He was sitting out the front of his house shortly before William was last seen. He could be our best witness. ‘You could see that area.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I most probably could. I don’t know. I never studied it.’

  ‘You’ve lived there for 15 years and never looked up there?’

  ‘Oh, well, I might have looked up there, but I don’t carry things like that around in me head because it’s not important.’

  ‘No? Well, it could be important.’

  He tells me he didn’t see William.

  I drag him back and forth over the details of the AVO taken out against him for stalking his postwoman. He tells me it’s a load of rubbish.

  ‘You’re lying,’ I tell him.

  ‘That’s a load of crap.’

  ‘What about the Spider-Man suit?’ I ask him. Did he see anything the day before he reported seeing it lying in the forest?

  ‘I didn’t see anything, no.’

  ‘So if I look you in the eye and say, “I know you’re lying to me and I’m not even going to tell you why or how I know you’re lying,” what would you say to me?’

  ‘Well, I’d say you’re badly mistaken. I am telling you the truth.’

  After Paul leaves, Laura tells me she believes him.

  As Paul drives home, the listening device inside his car records him talking to Heather again: ‘Make sure you don’t tell anyone, love, they’re right after me. Don’t tell anyone love, please, they’re right after me.’

  * * *

  The ambulance arrives for Dad. I’ve tried to steel myself, ready for this moment, but there’s still a hollowness inside me when it happens.

  Someone needs to make the journey to the hospital beside him. When I climb into the ambulance, he tells me, ‘This will be where you are in three months.’

  I frown, then he reminds me about the boxing match I’ve got coming up at the end of November.

  We laugh. Nothing like your dad to build your confidence. As I sit beside him, driving to the hospital, I think that Dad taught me how to live and now he’s teaching me how to die.

  Do you give up yet?

  Never.

  Not giving up, no matter how much it hurts.

  At the hospital, Mum’s in a state of disbelief, as if she can’t imagine life without him. I try to help her find acceptance, saying it is the right time. He’s very sick. He wouldn’t want to live this way for long.

  I spend the night sitting alone with Dad in hospital.

  ‘How you going, Dad?’ I ask him.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘That’s good, Dad,’ I tell him.

  That’s me saying I love you, Dad, and thank you for being my father.

  My dad, Kevin Jubelin, dies the next day, on 29 August 2017.

  That afternoon, I call into the strike force room in Port Macquarie. One of the detectives asks me how my dad is.

  ‘He died,’ I say. She looks at me with wide, open eyes. We’ve both seen so much death. We both know what an effect it leaves on the living.

  At the funeral, I help to carry Dad’s coffin. Then I sit at the front, wearing a black suit, white shirt and black tie, with one arm around Mum. My sisters, Karen and Michelle, are there, as is my brother, Jason. My children, Jake and Gemma, are with us, surrounded by their cousins. Behind us, the service is crowded with other family, friends and even my old sergeant, Paul Jacob. I’m proud Dad had so many people who now want to pay their respects.

  The celebrant begins the service she has written, saying:

  Kevin was part of the world’s healing and not of its hurt. He valued his successes and what he had been able to achieve and believed you never say you can’t do something you set your mind to. He had a mischief about him that meant he could be hard to read. A clown sometimes, a devil other times. He’s also described as a man who was complex and contradictory, however, he was also a man of integrity who had a strong ethical code to do the right thing. He expected high standards, but he also held himself up to those high standards as well.

  Afterwards, Jaco comes up to me and jokes, ‘Well, now we know how you turned out the way you did.’

  * * *

  I don’t take any time off. I’m angry at myself for not taking a moment to stop and breathe. I ask myself, What’s more important? But I have so much work on.

  * * *

  The strike force stumbles forward. Detectives who were told they’d be working on this case for weeks now see it stretching out ahead of them for years. At different times, our covert cameras fail. We get a second set of listening devices for Paul’s home, but they’re worse than the first ones. The batteries inside the device recording in Paul’s car run out and not replaced. Some of the junior detectives tell me they now believe Paul when he says he didn’t see the Spider-Man suit on the first morning.

  I tell them I trust the surveillance team who were there on the day and said they saw Paul looking at the suit. Disobeying my direction to leave it alone, four of these junior detectives look more closely at the surveillance footage taken on that morning, and go out to the forest track where we left the suit itself. They don’t take one of the surveillance team with them, to ask where they were located. They don’t know precisely where the suit was left. They don’t take a tape measure with them. Instead, they come up with a report that concludes, in bold capitals:

  It can not be determined what [Paul] was looking at for 12 seconds.

  It can not be excluded that he was not looking back towards the direction of the suit.

  It’s meaningless, a waste of time and energy, when we have little of either to spare. All they’ve found is that we can’t exclude whether Paul was looking at the suit. It’s ludicrous.

  But it means the strike force is divided. In September, Laura films an interview with Paul at home, asking him to recreate his movements on the morning William vanished. Paul can’t find the path he says he took through the bush while searching, but on her drive back, Laura calls me to say, ‘I just don’t think he was responsible.’

  The next day, during a briefing in Port Macquarie, Craig argues with me publicly. He now wants to investigate the circumstances of the AVO taken out against Paul by the postwoman; he says he doesn’t trust her. I ask Laura to do it. It takes her weeks. When she comes back, she says the witnesses back up the postwoman’s account that Paul was following her around. But all of this takes time that could have been better spent working through the masses of unheard listening device material.

  When we do get to the recordings, we hear Paul calling Laura a ‘stupid girl’ and me ‘as low as the bastard who grabbed him’. He complains the door to the room in which I interviewed him was locked, and that the room itself was freezing. He seems to think this was deliberate: ‘I wonder if that was to stop me thinking.’

  One morning in September, Paul starts crying to himself at home, saying how sorry he is, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t do it again.’

  He turns the radio in his house back on. It plays at a fierce volume, but still we can hear him saying, ‘Great, they’re gunna find something Mum, don’t dob on me OK . . . OK Mum, oh, oh, oh, oh Mum, oh Mum, oh Mum, what do I do? What do I do? Hey? ’Cos everything he said to tell me is all lies, you know . . . I’m sorry.’

  * * *

  On 5 October, I visit Paul at home. I tell him we know that he saw the Spider-Man suit on that first morning, despite his denials, because we had surveillance officers in place who saw him. Once again, he denies it.

  Afterwards, we record him talking to his daughter: ‘I didn’t see the suit, from memory I just seen this white thing on the ground that was covered in dirt.’ Later that day, Paul says to himself, ‘Because it wasn’
t the suit, it wasn’t the suit Gary, it was half the suit, I’m not sure, I think it was the top half of the suit . . . from memory the white bit, the white top or whatever it is, with the spider.’

  I think about the spider. The suit William Tyrrell was wearing when he disappeared had a white spider on the back, but not the front. The suit we left on the walking track was lying with the front upwards.

  I wonder whether any image showing the spider on the back of the suit has been used in any TV reports, Facebook campaign posts or billboards over the past three years.

  We need to be certain of that, I tell the strike force, but, looking around the briefing room, I see doubt on their faces. I know there are some good, dedicated cops in here, but others are sick of this job and want to get out. Some are talking behind my back, saying I’ve pushed Paul too far, and that he’s starting to confuse his own recollections with the version of events I’ve put to him.

  Without them, I am beginning to feel isolated. Every time I go on call, or focus on another job, when I get back it feels as if the strike force has lost direction. Craig and Laura are no longer talking to each other. Craig isn’t talking to anyone, it seems. We’ve got 15,000 different items to manage on e@gle.i and are drowning in information.

  When the intercept warrant for Paul’s landline and his mobile phone expires, I let it go. With the backlog of unlistened-to material and too few staff to work through it, I can’t justify an extension.

  * * *

  Late on Friday 3 November, I get the news: no image of the white spider on the back of William’s suit has been used in the media.

  We have to move, I think. Sometimes, in police work, you might advance a line of enquiry by only millimetres, but you have to take them. I promised William’s parents I’d do everything I could. Not to explore this now because this case is hard, or it means staying late at the office would be a betrayal.

  But I’m in Sydney, where I’ve spent the week working a different case, helping to lock up some bikies over the death of a 42-year-old, Clint Starkey, who was bashed at a service station. That means I can’t travel up to interview Paul tonight, but I can still telephone him. The warrant covering our telephone intercepts has now expired, but the listening devices in Paul’s house are covered by a separate court order, which still has a few days to run – another reason to act quickly.

  For a moment, I feel doubt. What if the pressure is too great and Paul reacts? He’s already accused me of locking him in a freezing room, what if he now says that I did worse? We’ve heard him sobbing late at night; what if he harms himself? I think of Bruce Matthews, the race-track owner who took his own life, knowing I was planning to interview him in prison. What backup do I have of what Paul and I will say to each other? The listening devices in his house will record his part of the conversation, but not what I say on the phone. And listening devices fail.

  I call Craig into a room in the Homicide Squad offices, along with Greg, the junior detective who met Paul when he went to organise putting covert cameras near his property.

  Looking at them, I realise my sense of isolation’s grown. Even inside this meeting room, I feel alone.

  I want to talk to Paul, but only if there is a record of what we say to each other.

  I know the law. It says I can’t record a private conversation without consent, unless I am protecting my ‘lawful interests’.

  Dialling Paul’s number, I switch the call to speakerphone and tell Greg to get out his mobile phone.

  ‘Record the conversation,’ I tell him.

  He looks at me. He looks at Craig. Craig looks down. Greg presses record.

  What none of us can know is that this recording will one day be tendered in my own trial, when I will face criminal charges.

  An old man’s voice answers the phone, saying, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, Paul,’ I say to him.

  Knock ’em Down, Bowra!

  29 November 2017: 32 years in

  The hearing date for the Bowraville murders approaches, 18 months after the Attorney General’s decision to send the case to the appeal court.

  It’s difficult handing over 20 years of work to the lawyers at first and, when I go to meet them with Jerry Bowden, the other detective on the strike force, I am nervous. Their team, led by the fierce, austere barrister Wendy Abraham QC, sit in a crowded, cluttered office, which looks like it was somewhere a lot of work was done and ask us a lot of questions. My nerves begin to settle, I like their approach. When Wendy says she doesn’t like to lose, I smile.

  I also watch how heavily the lawyers come to rely on analyst Bianca Comina, the third member of our strike force. That makes me glad, as Bianca’s knowledge of this case is matched only by her commitment. The three of us, Jerry, Bianca and myself, wonder how the lawyers are going to run the case, only they won’t tell us. Then, four months out, I’m asked to take part in a charity boxing match, raising money for the families of dead police officers. I go to mark the date on my calendar and realise the fight would be on the night of the third day of the appeal court hearing.

  I hide the fact that I’ll be fighting from the lawyers, so they don’t think I’m distracted. Preparing properly for court, or for a fight, is hard work; it should be all-consuming. I’m also worried about being called to give evidence in court. If that happens, I’ll need to be at my best, and I’ve been in enough boxing rings to know that your brain gets rattled for a few days if you cop a bad beating.

  * * *

  The first day of the court hearing comes and row after row of weary black faces take their seats in the public gallery, opposite the three white judges. This is the Banco Court, the State’s biggest, ceremonial courtroom. The judges wear red robes and white horsehair wigs. The Bowraville families wear brightly coloured footy shirts, printed with large photographs of their long-dead children, Colleen, Evelyn and Clinton.

  On three sides, the high walls are hung with heavy, gilt-framed paintings of other, long-dead judges. I have a sick feeling in my stomach – I’ve been around courts my whole career and I’m still intimidated walking in here this morning – but I can’t help feeling hopeful.

  A court hearing is like tossing a coin, I’ve learned. You throw the facts up into the air, while the two sides, prosecution and defence, argue about which way they should land. There’s really no predicting.

  Wendy stands and outlines the argument for overturning the previous not guilty verdicts. She says there is so much evidence suggesting the same person must have murdered all three of the children. That is the first step in her argument. The second is trying to convince the judges that James Hide was that person. The families shift uncomfortably, frowning as they try to follow the bloodless legal argument, despite this case being about their children. At times, I also struggle to understand it.

  To my surprise, the lawyers have decided not to rely on the Norco Corner evidence about a white man standing over the body of a black teenager on the morning that Clinton went missing. They say it doesn’t pass the test of being ‘fresh and compelling’ because the police did know about it at the time of Clinton’s trial, although they never followed it up. Instead, Wendy argues, the evidence we’ve gathered about Colleen’s death was not used during the separate murder trials over the deaths of Evelyn and Clinton, which means it is still ‘fresh’.

  It is ‘compelling’ because of the similarities between all three of the murders.

  I look up at Colleen’s mum, Muriel Craig, who sits surrounded by her children. Near her sits Rebecca Stadhams, Evelyn’s mum, who is watching the judges and twisting her greying hair around the fingers of one hand. Thomas Duroux, Clinton’s father, sits in the front row, with his arms crossed, listening intently. When I first met each of them, their hair was darker, their faces less lined with time and sorrow. But working this case has changed me too.

  Before going to Bowraville, I was a young cop caught up in the idea of catching crooks. I was naïve. I would say stupid things, like calling somebody an Abo, with
out thinking. That changed.

  I also used to think my fellow cops and I were part of one team, but this case has made me realise I’m heading in a different direction. When I was starting out, I was taught not to connect with the families of crime victims, because it made it harder to do the job, but now I think you have to.

  You have to take a murder on as if it happened to your family. You have to open yourself up and let some of the hurt in. Their pain might drive out your own feelings, but that only makes you tougher. It is your compassion for how the victims’ and their families are feeling that makes you want to solve the crime.

  I look back at the judges, while they and the opposing lawyers debate the meanings of ‘fresh’ and ‘compelling’. How many of them know what it’s like, I wonder, to sit down with a family whose child has just been murdered? Certainly, none of them has taken on the load of finding a loved one’s killer. Nor have they carried the weight, as many other cops have, of taking part in an operation where somebody dies. In my case, I went through the door of an apartment where a man was shot while I was talking to him.

  Without this real, direct experience of life and death, the judges’ and the lawyers’ words seem weightless. To me, at least, and to the children’s families, this is real. This is their lives. In Bowraville, I’ve learned things that were simple, the people there taught me values: tolerance, humility, a refusal to give up and accept injustice. I’ve tried to teach the same things to my children.

  In black law, if one man kills another he accepts there will be payback. In this court, such certainty seems to slip through our fingers and rise instead into the air, twisting around the different meanings of words, as quick and tricky to grab hold of as is the breath that carries them.