I Catch Killers

by Gary Jubelin

  * * *

  Throughout September, after the current block of inquest hearings end, I work my way through the brief of evidence the police have gathered against me. I have to keep working. With all this time alone, it is the only thing that stops me falling into a black depression. Each week has to have a purpose. Each Friday, I tell myself, I have to be able to look back and see that I’ve achieved something.

  There is no evidence from Craig in the brief. Since he went on sick leave, I’ve not heard from him, nor was I ever told the details of what happened with his claim against the police force. But I can see who else on the strike force has given evidence against me, including Greg, the junior detective who recorded my phone call with Paul. His witness statement says I became ‘fixated’ on Paul and that ‘the investigation was deviating away from the core issue’, the disappearance of William.

  The date on his statement, 8 January 2019, looks familiar. I check my records: that was four days after I called Greg at home, angrily demanding to know why he wasn’t at work. He said he wasn’t coming back and that he’d transferred to the Unsolved Homicide Unit. I was angry about the transfer and, afterwards, had tried to block the move, saying I needed staff on the strike force to prepare the brief for the coroner.

  I also find the witness statement taken from Paul, saying he did not know I recorded our conversations. It’s dated 5 September 2019: almost three months after the decision was made to charge me and after the details of these charges were made public.

  That matters, because without knowing whether or not Paul had consented, the police could not have known that a crime was committed. This realisation – that they didn’t check, they just went ahead with the prosecution – lights a spark inside me.

  The year ends in an inferno as bushfires consume the State. Ash from the burning forests is carried on the wind until it falls like rain upon our shoulders. For days on end, a red sun boils through the choking smoke that settles over Sydney.

  He Was a Boxer

  3 February 2020: seven months out

  I’ve told people I am looking forward to my day in court, but I don’t really mean it.

  Axeman, our prison witness at the inquest into Evelyn Greenup’s murder in Bowraville, calls. He and I have stayed in contact since then and now he warns me about what to expect at trial.

  ‘You can’t win. Good guys come last, Gary,’ he says.

  Right now, I feel closer to him than I do to the police force. Walking to the Downing Centre courthouse on the morning of Monday 3 February 2020, the first day of my trial, I think how we were taught at the police academy that someone is to be considered innocent until they’re proven guilty. It feels like a lie now. I’ve been treated like a guilty person since this started.

  I’m also exhausted by the waiting. It’s been eight months since I was charged, and more than a year since I was first put under investigation. Yet, I’m so certain the police will try to delay the trial longer, if only to frustrate me, that I woke up this morning at 3am, preparing a list of arguments Margaret can use if that happens.

  I’m learning that the State has all the power in court, and the accused man has nothing. Jake’s come to stay with me during the trial, and when he got up, he found me sitting at the kitchen table, working. After leaving the regular army, Jake joined the reserves and has just got back from a month in uniform, clearing up after the summer’s bushfires. He, too, knows what it’s like to face a tireless enemy. One night, he told me, they were pulled back and slept on a cricket oval as the fire advanced again, burning the already blackened ground.

  In the end, though, Jake found satisfaction in the work. As we dress for court, Nick Kaldas, my Homicide commander in the early 2000s, sends me a text message: ‘Go get them.’ Michelle Jarrett, Evelyn’s aunt, texts: ‘You are our Gumbaynggirr warrior.’ The parents of Courtney Topic, whose death in a police shooting I investigated in 2015, have also sent a good luck message. Terry Falconer’s widow has done the same.

  Jake’s girlfriend, Vic, arrives and we leave the apartment together. The two of them have been together for months now and I like her. ‘Have you got a spare set of keys in case I get locked up?’ I joke.

  We walk out, opening black umbrellas against the gentle rain. Both Jake and I are in dark suits. It feels like we’re going to a funeral.

  ‘Will Pam be there?’ Jake asks. I nod.

  ‘She’s dad’s ex-, ex-, ex-, ex-, ex-,’ Jake explains to Vic, who smiles as if unsure what to make of our family.

  ‘Thanks, Jake,’ I say, smiling. The humour helps.

  From Museum Station, we walk out the Liverpool Street exit, and look up to see the grand, old court building.

  All at once it hits me: I am today’s defendant. Everything I’ve been for more than 30 years has been upended. After a career built on bringing crooks to courts like this one, it’s only now that I am the accused man that I can really understand what power we wield as cops when we charge someone. Walking with Jake, I’m powerless to know how hard the road ahead will be to demonstrate my innocence, or how long the journey to recover my reputation.

  I wish I had my dad walking beside me now. I’d feel a foot taller if he was still alive.

  The pack of TV cameras pick me up as I cross Elizabeth Street, just as I’ve seen them pick up dozens of defendants in cases where I was a prosecution witness. They catch me on the broad courthouse steps and circle round me. I walk up and they part.

  Waiting inside are Leonie Duroux, from Bowraville, and her son, Marbuck, a nephew of Clinton Speedy-Duroux, the third child to be murdered. So are Mark and Faye Leveson. Ian Lynch and Angelo Memmolo, both former Homicide cops, are there as well. So are my mum, my sisters and my daughter, Gemma.

  But there are no witnesses waiting outside our allotted courtroom. That means, as I suspected, the prosecution have no intention of going ahead with the proceedings today. Despite this, we are ushered in and take our seats. I sit at the front of the court, just behind Margaret and Lauren MacDougall, a fiercely intelligent solicitor, who is working on my defence and whose firm is better known for defending bikies than detectives.

  The same ritual I’ve seen so many times before plays out; a knock on the court door, we stand, the magistrate walks in. We bow. We sit.

  Today, the magistrate is Ross Hudson, who walks into the court in a black gown, with short, grey hair, designer glasses and an animal energy. He sits down, looks at us sitting facing him, and starts the trial by saying, ‘Counsels, yes?’

  It will be he who decides my guilt. Whatever you’re accused of, in the local court your case is heard by a magistrate, sitting alone and without a jury. But the police are not ready. Their barrister says they need to get a signature to release some documents we’ve asked for. There are also many suppression orders in place, prohibiting the discussion of evidence that featured in the William Tyrrell inquest, which itself is currently in one of the months-long gaps between its public hearings.

  The nature of these orders means even the magistrate cannot be told what’s been suppressed, the police force’s barrister is saying. To change that, the coroner will need to vary her orders, and unfortunately that can’t happen until 4pm, although he does not explain why she is not now available, or why this has not happened before today.

  The magistrate is angry; the delay is ‘despicable’, but he cannot prevent it. The police barrister also wants him to suppress the same evidence as the coroner, meaning my trial would be heard behind closed doors.

  These are my worst fears made real: that I would come here to fight and they wouldn’t let me; and that, even if the trial went ahead, it would be held behind closed doors, so nobody could see it. Innocent or guilty, that would mean the police never have to justify their actions against me. Margaret tries to argue but the magistrate says a decision will also have to wait until tomorrow.

  Until then, I’m still silenced.

  * * *

  Walking out with Margaret and Lauren, a woman I don’t recognis
e asks if she can talk to me. She says that she’s come here to support me. Her brother was murdered 34 years ago tomorrow, and the case is still unsolved.

  ‘He was a boxer,’ she says.

  I like to box, I tell her. ‘Keep on fighting for him.’

  I wish I could do more to help her.

  * * *

  When I get home, Gemma brings her son, Zion, who is now 19 months, round to play at my apartment. We teach him to balance on a sofa cushion, arms outstretched as if he’s surfing. His little face is serious, while everyone around him is laughing. Looking at Gemma, I can see her mother, Debbie, in her.

  My family don’t judge me, I think as I watch them. They know only too well how much I’ve given to the cops.

  Don’t Cry

  4 February 2020: seven months out

  Tuesday. Magistrate Ross Hudson doesn’t seem impressed by the police force. Inside the tiny, confined courtroom, its walls lined in pale wood like a cheap coffin, he dismisses their attempt to have the trial held in secret.

  My mate Bill, who went through the police academy with me, nods to himself in the public gallery, as if saying, Right decision. Sue, my childhood friend, sits in the front row near my family and gives me a smile.

  The prosecution agree to play the recording of the ERISP interview I did with Paul at Port Macquarie Police Station, which was not played at the inquest into William Tyrrell’s disappearance.

  After court, I work late, reviewing the hours of recorded material, working out which sections we should play in public. As night falls, Jake and his partner head off to dinner at my mum’s place with Gemma and her family. When Jake gets back, I’m still sitting at my dining table, working, its surface swallowed up by stacks of court documents and white ring binders of evidence.

  I get to sleep just before midnight and wake up at 3.30 to keep working.

  * * *

  Jane Fiore is at the Downing Centre courthouse when I arrive on Wednesday morning. She says she wants to see the interview with Paul. She wants to hear what he told me.

  I nod. When I was charged, I told her that, if my case went to trial, it would be an opportunity to tell people what’s happened: what Strike Force Rosann achieved; the evidence we gathered that hasn’t been made public at the inquest; the mistakes made by police after William’s disappearance as well as how the resources given to the investigation waxed and waned depending on the media and political interest.

  I take my seat inside the court. Behind me there two rows of seats, both full, with other people sitting on the floor or standing against the walls. Jane sits in the back corner of the courtroom, hands folded in her lap, watching as my recorded interview with Paul plays on two television screens.

  She leans forward when when Paul says he went out looking for William alone, then came back and had some tea inside without talking to anyone.

  ‘So you thought you’d just sit there and have a cup of tea?’ I ask Paul in the interview.

  ‘Well, whether, why I done it or even if I done it, I don’t remember havin’ it, but, uh, that’s not the point,’ his voice carries through the courtroom speakers. The only other sound is the reporters tapping on their laptops. Like Jane, they, too, have not heard any of this evidence before.

  On the screen, I question Paul about whether he followed the postwoman in Kendall, whether he told her, ‘We don’t get enough time together.’ He says that’s crap, and that the postwoman told him that she loved him.

  He looks old and thin and grey, on camera, sitting on his own in a police interview room.

  ‘Do you think this could be slightly delusional?’ In the back of the courtroom, Jane is still watching closely.

  Paul says he left his house with his wife, Heather, at 10.38am on the day William went missing and nobody was then outside looking for the three-year-old. Jane stares, wide-eyed. She was out there. So were others.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ I tell Paul on the television screen.

  ‘That’s not a lie,’ he responds.

  Watching it, I feel uncomfortable, as if I’m looking at someone other than myself on screen, and wondering, Who is this guy beating up on this poor old man?

  But then I think, That’s what I was paid to do. If I’m an attack dog on the ERISP recording, it is because the police trained me to become one. Then they put me in the Homicide Squad. They put me in charge of Strike Force Rosann because of what I was, a hunting detective.

  What shits me about the cops now is how they don’t want to take responsibility for what they unleashed.

  * * *

  Laura steps into the witness box. She seems nervous and frowns as she sits down. Her eyes, which are ringed with shadows, like mine are, as if she hasn’t slept either, skitter across the faces in the courtroom. The prosecutor asks if I told her I was going to use my phone to record my conversation with Paul when I went to his house on 2 May 2018?

  ‘Not that I can recall,’ she murmurs, looking down.

  Did I tell her I was going to use my phone to record when I went back a day later?

  ‘Not that I can recall.’ The same words, but in a whisper this time.

  I realise these recordings will now be played in court – sooner than I expected. I lean forward and whisper urgently: ‘Margaret, you’ve got to get me two minutes.’

  Margaret asks the magistrate for a two-minute break, and I stand up and search the public gallery until I see Mark and Faye Leveson. I signal for them to join me outside the courtroom, then tell them that they are about to hear a recording in which I talk about their son, Matt. I tell them that I spoke to Paul about him, explaining how we’d been able to find out what happened to Matt and recover his body.

  They’re going to hear me talk about their son bluntly, calling him ‘the gay guy’, and saying that he died of a drug overdose, despite Faye’s refusal to accept this happened. I tell them I’m sorry they are going to hear this. ‘You of all people will understand I’m just trying to bring William back to his mum and dad.’

  As they walk back into the courtroom, Mark says to Faye, ‘Don’t cry.’

  The tape of my first conversation with Paul in his home is played. The courtroom listens as I tell Paul how Matt’s boyfriend kept his secret for 10 years, but when he finally admitted what happened, you could see the weight of the world lifting from his shoulders. I tell him how Matt’s parents made the decision to give him immunity from prosecution, despite believing their son had been murdered.

  ‘He has been!’ Faye whispers at the back of the tiny courtroom.

  When I tell Paul that I believed her son had died of a drug overdose and Atkins panicked, Faye whispers: ‘That’s what you think, Gary.’ A moment later she stands up and walks out of the door.

  It’s wounding to think I have inflicted more pain on her through my actions. I only hope she can accept I was just trying to give Paul a way out, like Atkins, should he choose to take it.

  On the recording, you can hear me saying, ‘He hasn’t gone to jail; that was the deal I did with him. We just needed to get to the bottom of it for Matt’s parents, and we got Matt’s remains back.’

  I’m asking him, If you know where it is, just help us find William’s body.

  A short time later, Faye walks back into the courtroom, and my mum reaches back from her seat in the front row to take her hand. Soon afterwards, the court adjourns. Outside it, I walk up to the Levesons again, holding my breath.

  Faye reaches up to embrace me.

  I let out a deep sigh of relief.

  They Were His Words

  6 February 2020: seven months out

  On Thursday, I wake up happy from a dream then remember where I am and that I must go back to court today, and think, I don’t know if I can get through this.

  I put on shorts and a T-shirt, hoping to train for the first time this week before leaving, but then I get an email, containing two long witness statements served on my lawyers overnight by the prosecution.

  My shoulders slump. I need to read
these before doing anything else. I don’t make it to the gym.

  The only thing that gives me strength is the way the trial has become a kind of public inquiry into the William Tyrrell investigation, exactly as I hoped. In court, Laura is again called to the stand, followed by Greg. They give evidence about how our listening devices were poor quality and that they sometimes failed, about the dysfunction inside the strike force, about how there were thousands of pieces of information sitting on the e@gle.i computer system waiting to be processed and how the backlog of unlistened-to surveillance recordings grew and grew for having too few staff to hear them.

  * * *

  On Friday 7 February, the fifth day of the trial, the rains arrive, beating down like they did on Monday, but harder, and putting out the bushfires.

  Inside the court, Greg is called back to the stand, and asked about recording my phone conversation with Paul on 3 November 2017. He says he worried the recording was illegal, but that, when he hesitated, I glared and told him, ‘Just do it!’

  ‘I was in fear,’ he says.

  ‘In fear of what?’ the prosecutor asks him.

  ‘Of my career in jeopardy, or being bullied, intimidated, all those things.’

  ‘Bullied and intimidated by who?’

  ‘Mr Jubelin.’

  Watching Greg, I remember calling him into my office on the day he left the strike force for his transfer to Unsolved Homicide to thank him for investing almost three years into the investigation – God knows, it broke enough detectives. He’d looked at me in silence then. I thought maybe it was because of my anger when we’d spoken previously about his transfer. I didn’t know how, only the day before, he’d signed his witness statement.

  When Margaret Cunneen stands to cross-examine Greg, she asks him about his new job. ‘That was your long-held dream and ambition, to get a job in that area of the Homicide Squad?’