by Gary Jubelin
Craig is a concrete thinker. He’s set himself the task of working through those thousands of items, but it’s going too slowly. They are becoming a prison. Now, the coroner wants to see all the evidence on Bill and Paul, and there’s no way, with the staff we have available, that we can get through the thousands of hours of unreviewed listening device material on both of them by December.
I suggest that we give the coroner the entire transcript we have so far, including Paul’s statements of his innocence, but with those sections that seem important highlighted.
‘Is everyone happy with that?’ I ask.
‘No,’ Craig answers.
‘Well, why not, Craig? Why don’t you agree?’
‘That’s misleading,’ he says, sitting upright. ‘He’s denied it.’
‘I know he’s denied it, Craig. If the coroner wants to have a listen to something, it’s all there. We’re not hiding anything. It’s not just selective evidence.’
Both of us are frustrated. Both of us are ready to take out our anger at not knowing what happened to William on each other.
‘I strongly disagree,’ Craig says.
I look around at the other, watching faces. ‘How about everyone leaves? Craig and I have got to talk about this.’
They walk out and Craig goes from zero to 100, ‘Right, we’re gonna have it out.’
‘Craig, what is your problem with this? You’ve gone on about the postwoman, and I wasted all that time on that. You can’t move past that.’
‘That’s bullshit!’
Those outside the closed door can hear that we are yelling.
‘Craig, you’ve been running this for three years. Your job is to come to me with people for us to investigate. Have you given me one person of interest? Because our role here is to find out what happened to William.’
He gets up, tears open the door and walks out into the main office, shouting, ‘Fuck it, I’m out of here!’
I give him a couple of minutes, then follow him out. I can see him talking to another senior detective.
I approach them and ask, ‘Craig, mate, can we discuss this?’
Before today, I would have said that he and I were friends. Just months ago, he stood with me at the boxing match. But now, he moves towards me.
‘Come on, I’ll fight you!’ he shouts.
‘I’m not fucking going anywhere.’ Everyone in the office is watching.
I drop the folder I’m carrying, to show I am not backing down. Craig’s hands are up. He’s a kickboxer. I’m a boxer. Both of us know how to hurt the other. Other cops rush past me, grab Craig and pull us apart.
‘I’ll take you any time!’ he’s shouting. ‘I’ll take you on now!’
Craig’s led away, shouting insults at me about the investigation; that I’m obsessed with Paul, that I’ve been illegally gathering evidence, that I falsified affidavits. Someone walks with him out of the building.
I turn back and try to get on with our work.
I Know Where William Tyrrell Is
August 2018: 33 years in
The investigation doesn’t stop. It cannot.
I don’t have the time to dwell on what happened with Craig. I see too much of myself in him, for one thing. He has an iron commitment to his training, which I recognise within myself. As well as his kickboxing, he runs marathons and if his training schedule tells him he needs to get 30 kilometres on any given day, he does it, even if it means getting up in time to pound them out before arriving for work at six in the morning.
I used to tell him to take it easy when I saw him heading for the office door at the end of a shift, ready to start running again when still stiff from yesterday’s workout, but he didn’t accept excuses.
The lack of flexibility became a problem. The two of us had fixed ideas and were looking in different directions. But I assume we’ll patch up the damage, so decline to lodge a grievance over what happened.
In Homicide, however, we are always held to account, either by a judge, a coroner or the victims’ families.
Within the squad, we’re also closely monitored. When Craig returns to work in August, our commander, Scott, tells me to use the command management system, put in place to review those officers I directly supervise.
I don’t think it will help. Already Craig’s become more withdrawn from others on the strike force and, despite my hopes of reaching over the divide between us, the conversations between him and me are functional, but distant.
In September, I email another senior officer in the squad, asking if he can intervene. I tell him there’s a lit of tension in the team, which is impacting on morale, and I don’t want to inflame the situation if we can avoid it. But Scott doesn’t change his mind and I’m forced to lay out my thoughts on Craig in writing.
Scott also emails us both, wanting an update on the investigation. He wants to know how many of the more than 1000 persons of interest identified to date have not yet been ruled out, and how many hours of listening device recordings from Paul’s house are still outstanding. The answers are still in the hundreds and the thousands.
Craig takes extended leave. I am now filling both his position as officer-in-charge of the strike force and my own of investigation supervisor, while Laura has gone back to the Sex Crimes Squad. It is a move she had been pushing for but it means the loss of another driven, quietly determined detective.
Always, there is the nagging fear of something lurking in the darkness that we’ve missed, so I ask two other Homicide cops, Mark and Andrew, to go back and fish again through the black waters. They look at an old tip where the burned-out car of one of the paedophiles we uncovered living around Kendall was found lying upended in nearby bushland. The car’s owner, Tony Jones, has also been seen with another person whose name surfaced during the investigation, Frank Abbott. Abbott is an old guy in his 70s who lived in a caravan near a local sawmill, who was previously found not guilty over the murder of a 17-year-old and has since been jailed for child abuse.
I ask Mark and Andrew to look at the two men and whether there is really a connection between them.
When they come back, they tell me Jones is a drinker, while Abbott looks like a silver-haired grandpa from Central Casting, but when he speaks, you can hear that he is cunning. It’s hard to know if he is only lying for the sake of lying, but he’s been telling people he knows where William is. People say he’s told them about a place in the bush where he smelled a dead body. We are back in the swamp again with this investigation, picking our way between rumours and hearsay evidence, trying to take hold of something solid.
Abbott is also said to be friends with a third man, called Geoff. Witnesses say Abbott used to go up to local people saying, ‘I know where William Tyrrell is, why don’t you check Geoff’s place?’ Nobody believed him and, on its own, it is evidence of nothing, but when Geoff’s name comes up during a briefing at Port Macquarie, someone mentions that he called Anne Fiore’s house on the morning William disappeared.
Say that again?
Phone records show a call between Geoff’s and Anne’s place just before William went missing. The front deck – the one William and his sister were playing on – needed repairs and Geoff was going to do it. He’d already visited the property once.
Which means, after Bill, we have a second tradesman connected by a phone call to the house where William disappeared. Again, a phone call itself is evidence of nothing, but why did we go after Bill? Because of a phone call from the house that morning.
Why the fuck have I not heard about this call before?
We need to concentrate on Geoff, I say. The phone call connects him with the house and he is also connected with Abbott. I tell Mark and Andrew, OK, he’s not a suspect, and there’s no information to suggest he’s directly involved in William’s disappearance but we need to eliminate him. Concentrate on his friendship with Abbott, I tell them. Try to break it.
Maybe that will help lead us through the shadows in front of the strike force.
In contrast, my boss Scott wants this case done with. As the year marches towards a conclusion, I get a call from Ken Jurotte, manager of the cops’ Aboriginal Coordination Team, set up to improve our relationship with Indigenous communities. Ken says he tried to nominate me for an Australian Police Medal for my work on the Bowraville investigation. He asked Scott to sign off on it but he declined, telling Ken the case had not been solved yet.
I don’t have the time or attention to wonder about this, though it does not surprise me. Scott’s also been questioning me in person, asking, ‘Why are you so hands-on? Why are you all over the Tyrrell case? You’re the investigation supervisor. You’re supposed to supervise it. Why are you interviewing people?’
Because I have to, I think. Because we don’t have the staff. Because I have the skills and experience to do it. Because it’s what I promised William’s family: that I’d do everything I could to find William. That I would work each line of inquiry to destruction.
This is what I do. It’s what I am. This is how I catch killers.
The Pain and the Sorrow
13 September 2018: 33 years in
I stand alone in the emptying courtroom, feeling as if the life has also emptied out of me. Today is the twenty-eighth anniversary of 16-year-old Colleen Walker-Craig’s disappearance from Bowraville, and the appeal court judges have just announced their decision.
They said the evidence surrounding Colleen’s death is not ‘fresh and compelling’. The Norco Corner evidence is not ‘fresh and compelling’. None of the other evidence we’ve gathered over decades is ‘fresh and compelling’. None of it is enough to overturn the previous not guilty verdicts and order James Hide to face trial again.
Outside, there is a hollowness among the children’s families.
A meeting room has been set up, to give them a place to sit and try to comprehend what’s happened. I make an effort to say the right things, to assure them that we will keep on fighting. We share the usual sandwiches and drinks. We take some photographs, in which they look like broken people.
Justice comes in different ways, Aunty Elaine told me. James himself didn’t come to these court hearings. Instead, he sat and watched a live broadcast on a TV screen set up in a court building near his home, to save him being chased down the road each morning by TV cameras or out of fear, perhaps, of what the families might say to him.
He’s spent a lifetime since the murders happened being chased, by me or by the media, or living in fear of what people might do to him if they found out what he’d been accused of. That life can’t have always been a pleasant one. In that sense he has suffered.
But that is not enough, not yet. It doesn’t feel like justice.
* * *
The Attorney General takes the case to the High Court, challenging the appeal court’s decision. The hearing is on 22 March 2019, held in a blank-walled courtroom packed with people in the multi-storey Law Courts building in central Sydney. A fire alarm keeps sounding while the lawyers argue. It’s like this case is jinxed.
The judges don’t take long to come to their decision. The High Court will not overrule the appeal court’s decision. When it is over, the families and I go into another, smaller, official room, this time in the State Parliament building. I face them and try to hide my tears.
I never cry. I try to joke that this is hayfever causing me to choke.
‘I’m standing here, looking into your eyes, guys, and I just see the pain and the sorrow and I just don’t know what to say,’ I manage.
Through tears, I recognise so many different faces in the room, all wanting me to say: Fuck this, we’re not giving up. We’re going to try something else.
But I have nothing to offer them. Over three decades, through two police investigations, different inquests, two trials, the appeal court and now the High Court, we’ve failed to put their kids’ killer in prison.
Looking at the roomful of desperate, saddened faces, I remember how the judges stood and walked out of the courtroom after announcing their decision, without a word to the families, without a backward glance.
There’s no compassion in the court system, I think. Just arrogance.
Broken Beyond Repair
November 2018: 33 years in
Things move fast in the last few weeks of 2018, as we are also hurrying to complete our brief of evidence on William’s disappearance, ready for the inquest next March.
In November, I get an email from an investigator working for the police force’s insurance company. Craig, the officer who was in charge of the William Tyrrell case, has made a claim against the cops. The investigator’s email says:
The Claimant has alleged whilst working with yourself on SF Rosann, there had been a significant deterioration in the working relationship (between yourselves) as a result of proposed work practices (in respect to a person of interest to the Strike Force). The claimant has described some of these practices as illegal and unethical . . . The Claimant stated the working relationship with yourself was broken beyond repair.
Reading it, I am offended. That wasn’t what happened, or how I saw our relationship. I wonder what this might mean but, once again, am distracted by the work ahead.
Scott tells me not to worry, he’s taken care of it.
* * *
On 4 December, a senior official in the Department of Justice emails about getting the coroner to grant a court order for us to search Paul’s home and car. He seems supportive, saying ‘you may wish to consider providing’ the coroner with an application outlining how Paul lived so close to the house where William went missing; how ‘there has been no forensic search of his house, car, garage or carport, caravan etc’, to date and how, without one, ‘should any person be charged in the future, such person could reasonably say that a necessary step to eliminate [Paul] from suspicion has not been taken’.
The coroner grants the order, while we keep working long hours trying to clear the backlog of unreviewed recordings from Paul’s home, as well as trying to find out more about the two paedophiles, Tony Jones and Frank Abbott. Especially with Craig off sick, I just don’t have enough resources to do everything. The interest in William’s disappearance is waning, and with it the number of staff the police will commit to finding him. Failing to properly resource a criminal investigation is also a crime, I think. But we can make this work. It’s solvable.
The inquest could give us the breakthrough we need.
* * *
On 20 December, I’m copied into an email from Scott about the investigation into the death of Theresa Binge, the cousin of Clinton Speedy-Duroux.
Since going up to Toomelah to meet Theresa’s family, I’ve got to know the local cops and we’ve started looking at a person we think knows more than he’s admitted. I’ve also started to suspect there might be someone else involved, if not in Theresa’s killing then in disposing of her body or protecting the killer afterwards. I’m sure the case is solvable. It just needs time, commitment and resources. I’ve suggested that, along with the local cops, I keep pursuing it.
Scott’s email says I’ve overstepped the mark; Theresa’s unsolved murder has instead been sent for a review by someone else. When that comes back, it will be put through what he calls a quality control process and a committee will decide whether to investigate it further.
I feel gutted. What am I to tell Theresa’s family? News like that will only cause them grief.
* * *
I’m at Mum’s place in Port Macquarie for our first Christmas without Dad. There is an emptiness in the house without him. I drift about it, wishing I had spent more time here with him when I could. Mum seems distracted by the family and playing host – Jake is here, as well as Gemma with Matt and little Zion – but I know she is missing him deeply. After we’re gone, the house will be too big and quiet for her to be here alone.
Paul calls me three days after Christmas. His car has been returned to him following the search covered in white fingerprint dust left by the forensics te
am. He wants me to sort it out.
This is an opportunity to talk to him again.
I borrow my mum’s car, leaving my gun behind, and drive over to his house alone, arriving just after 10am. Once more, unsure what Paul might do or accuse me of doing after, I record the conversation on my mobile.
He’s friendly, greeting me with an unguarded, ‘How ya doin’?’ We talk about our Christmases. He says the powder on his car seems to disappear when you wash it, but it comes back. I say I’ll take some photos and we can arrange to get it cleaned, or recommend something he can use to do it.
We talk about the inquest coming up. I ask if he’s got a solicitor.
He says that he hasn’t.
‘As I’ve said, it’s, you know, if you do want to talk . . .’ I say.
Paul says he’s got nothing to talk about. He’s told me the truth, he says again. ‘I always tell the truth.’
I try again. Maybe it was an accident, that it wasn’t him who hit William. Maybe it was his dead wife, Heather. If I can provoke some emotion, maybe he’ll talk to me now.
‘This is not the way I usually talk to people in investigations,’ I say. ‘I just can’t help thinking it’s a tragic set of circumstances that can be resolved without being painful for anyone. So that’s all I’m saying.’
Paul insists he had nothing to do with William’s disappearance. I try again, then leave it.
We’re standing outside, on his bush block. It’s a hot summer morning. The place reminds me of my parents’ house in Dural when I was young, before joining the police.
‘It’s peaceful out here, isn’t it?’ I say.
‘Oh, it’s beautiful, yeah,’ says Paul. It is beautiful country. It is a shame that so much death has ruined it.