by Gary Jubelin
‘It wasn’t long-held, but I was lucky enough to get a spot, yes.’
The magistrate picks up on the timing, that within a day of signing his statement, Greg landed his dream job, ‘I think his credit is at issue,’ he says. ‘I am not running the case, but that’s my reflection on how this is progressing.’
Other, smaller, consolations follow, when different cops from the strike force give evidence saying that, unlike Greg, they never saw me bully, belittle or intimidate.
* * *
Later on Friday, Paul is called to give evidence via audio-visual link from Port Macquarie Court House. His face is twice as large on the TV screen as in real life. When asked if he can see and hear what the lawyers are saying, he leans forward, licks his lips and answers, ‘Yes.’ Amplified through the court’s speakers, his voice has a harsh, grating quality.
Paul says he didn’t know I was recording the conversations. He says that when I went to his house on 2 May, I was giving him a hard time, saying how I knew he’d done it. ‘He wound up saying, “I’ll be back tomorrow to take you in”, to arrest me,’ Paul says.
‘To take you in?’ asks Margaret, standing at the bar table, looking up at the television screen.
‘Yeah, arrest me.’
‘I’d suggest to you he didn’t say that, sir.’
‘He said, “I will be out tomorrow to take you, to pick you up or take you in”, something along those lines, because he’d been telling me how it was my fault, I had something to do with it.’
‘But he didn’t say he was going to arrest you the next day did he?’ asks Margaret, choosing her words with care.
Paul insists, ‘Yeah, he did. He said he was coming out to pick me up, he’s coming out to get me. Those were his words. They were his words.’
I never said that. The recording of my visit has been played in court. I didn’t threaten to arrest him. The conversation ended with me saying, ‘All right, cheers Paul’, and him saying, ‘All the best.’
* * *
My old boss Scott has been promoted to assistant commissioner, which means the Homicide Squad has got a new commander, Daniel. I’ve never heard of him before, but hope things between us might be different. He’s come to court today, so during a break, I ask to talk to him.
I tell him I’m not enjoying this process, that I’m not a rogue cop and that I’ve been backed into this corner.
There might be times in the future when I can help, I tell him. I’m thinking of other unsolved cases, not only William’s disappearance but the murders of the Bowraville children and of Theresa Binge.
He looks at me without reaction and the conversation dies between us. With it goes my last surviving hope, of helping others to work on these cases in the future.
* * *
By every evening I’m exhausted.
The boundaries between work and home are breaking down. My family, the Levesons, Leonie and Marbuck Duroux and Jane Fiore all sit together in the same corner of the courtroom; they eat their lunch together; they hug each other hello in the morning and goodbye after the court hearings.
I tell myself that I am still unbroken, but it’s Friday night and I’m drinking at home, alone. Jake and Vic are out together in the city. Like them, there must be hundreds of places in Sydney I could go to, only I don’t want to face having another camera pushed towards me, or having someone ask me how the trial is going.
I don’t know what to do, I am so angry. I haven’t trained or meditated since the trial began. I haven’t had the focus. Instead, I turn on the television and skip through the channels looking for a news program, worrying about what they’re saying about today’s court hearing.
I can’t move on until this is done. Looking at my apartment, where the table is still covered in the white legal folders and a spill of court documents, it makes me think of other nights when I’ve sat up alone working on my cases.
I can’t move on. I’m out of the cops, yet my flat is still covered in court papers.
* * *
The trial was supposed to last a week, but it drags into a second. On Monday 10 February, Darrin, who led the investigation on me, gives evidence. He confirms that he charged me months before checking whether Paul had consented to the recording of our conversations.
My interview with Darrin and his offsider, Neale, is played in court and it is strangely unfamiliar. The set-up, a narrow table with two detectives in shirtsleeves flanking the screen, is one I’ve seen so many times before, but never like this. This time, I am the figure sitting at the end of the table, staring into the ERISP machine camera.
Behind me, Mum leans over to my elder sister, Karen, and whispers, ‘He looks just like Kevin.’
I’ve Been Waiting for a Year to Say That
12 February 2020: seven months out
The second Wednesday of the trial. I’ve been up since 2am, unable to sleep, seeking some distraction. Today, I’ll take the witness stand and, leaving home, the shirt sticks to my back in the early-morning heat as I walk to the train station. It’s cool inside the carriage, and now I’m moving, I can gather my thoughts. The train carries me underneath the city centre, turning back at Circular Quay, where I get a brief glimpse of the water and open sky hanging over Sydney Harbour before looping towards the city centre again, where I step out into the dark, underground warmth of Museum Station.
From here a short tunnel leads to the exit opposite the courthouse. It is a longer journey than I need to take to get there, but it means I don’t arrive looking hot and sweaty. The worst part is the final stretch, crossing the road, being surrounded by the TV cameras, being outside, in public, exposed, before walking into the shadows of the courthouse.
In the lift to the fourth floor, I close my eyes and breathe in deeply before the doors open. In court, I take the affirmation, and Margaret, standing at the bar table, leads me through my career: from the day I joined the cops, 24 April 1985, back when detectives wore short-sleeve shirts with sports jackets and we still used unsigned statements to convict crooks, to my last day of active duty, 12 July 2019, when everything was different. How I’ve worked homicides since the late 1980s and led investigations into organised crime murders, serial killers, domestic murders and child murders, serving under eight different Homicide Squad commanders.
Margaret asks me about my last boss, Scott. Did I have a conversation with him about a photograph of William Tyrrell that was next to my desk?
‘Yes,’ I say. And I have since waited a long time to say this in public. If they are going to put me on trial, then I will tell the world what it was like to be the one left trying to find William.
Margaret waits for me to describe the conversation.
‘He came over to my desk and . . . pointed at the picture of William Tyrrell and said to me, “No one cares about that little kid. Get him off the books. Get him to Unsolved Homicide.”’
I hear Jane’s sharp intake of breath and see her eyes well up across the courtroom. The journalists tap louder at their laptops.
I watch Darrin stand up and walk out of court, then come back a few minutes later and whisper to the lawyers representing the police force. Their barrister stands up and asks for a suppression order to be applied to the whole of my evidence.
The magistrate looks stunned. He refuses to grant it.
Later, the barrister says he would like to put it on the record that Scott denies ever having said that about William.
I wish I could get my denials put on the record as easily as that, I think. Then we could do away with the whole trial.
What was it Axeman told me, before this trial got started? Good guys come last, Gary.
* * *
My cross-examination by the prosecutor stretches across the afternoon and will continue into the next morning. He stands at the bar table and leans back, his belly sticking out, with one hand on the lectern, questioning me about my conduct as a detective.
‘Your interview with [Paul] on 16 August went for something in the vicinit
y of four and a half hours?’
‘That would be correct, yes.’
‘Over 2000 questions.’
‘Yes.’
He says I did not suggest Paul speak to a lawyer. That’s true, although a custody sergeant had explained his rights to him before the interview had started.
My job isn’t to give people reasons not to talk to me. Put yourself in my position. At every moment, working on this strike force, and in that interview room with Paul, there was the possibility that William was still alive. I needed Paul to talk. If we’d been able to establish that he was not involved, that itself would have been some progress.
I broke no laws. If Paul asked for a lawyer, he would have got one, but I wasn’t going to suggest it.
The temperature rises in the courtroom. In the public gallery, people are fanning themselves as they watch us.
The prosecutor asks why I didn’t caution Paul, telling him he had a right to say nothing. I say that Paul was not in custody.
He’s getting more aggressive now, ‘Is it possible that that was a deliberate decision on your part because you didn’t want to disclose to him from the outset of the interview that you were going to accuse him?’
‘I don’t forewarn people if I’m going to ask them questions.’
‘You put to him that he might have run over William?’
‘Yes.’
‘You put to him that Heather might have run over William?’
‘Yes.’
I feel like I’m shadow boxing: I’m a suspect who’s on trial and being questioned about my treatment of a suspect.
The day ends and I can’t tell who has come out of the fight as the winner. I go home and change into my training gear, meaning to work the bag hanging in my yard, but I don’t have it in me.
Again I can’t sleep. By Thursday morning, the folders and stacks of documents spill off the table and along the corridor to my bedroom. But this time, walking through the tunnel from the station with Jake at my shoulder, the atmosphere feels different. The sound of our footsteps echoes off the tiled walls. It feels like we’re about to walk into the Colosseum.
Inside, the hostilities resume. The prosecutor says the way I interviewed Paul crossed a line; I didn’t warn him that I was going to accuse him, yet I told him more than once that he was lying.
‘I suggest that the way you asked the questions, your demeanour, was designed to bully him?’
‘It was designed to elicit honest answers from him.’
He says I could have extended the existing surveillance warrants to cover my recording of our telephone conversation.
I say we couldn’t roll them over again by applying for another extension, as we didn’t have the staff to listen to the recordings we already had, let alone another month’s worth.
I also repeat what I’ve said from the beginning: I didn’t trust our listening devices. And that telephone conversation with Paul wasn’t recorded so I could use it as evidence, but for my own protection. Equally, I couldn’t go to a judge and say I needed a warrant just to cover my back.
A grey-haired woman knitting in the back row of the public gallery drops a red ball of wool onto the floor. It rolls beneath the chair on which my mum is sitting and rests there.
‘You also gave some evidence yesterday that Scott had said, from my notes, “No one cares about that little kid. Get him off the books. Get him to Unsolved Homicide”,’ the prosecutor says.
‘I did.’
‘You must have found that an outrageous comment?’
‘I did find it an outrageous comment.’
He says I didn’t make a note of it, or a complaint at the time. ‘You are lying when you say that Scott said that.’
‘I totally disagree.’
‘Just like you are lying about believing that you made these recordings to protect a lawful interest.’
‘I disagree.’ I’m angry now. We are going toe to toe and I think I can take him. I’ve been in the witness box countless times over my career – going right back to my time in the Stick-Ups – when lawyers have been telling me I’m lying. Our voices rise.
‘You’re lying about believing that you were protecting your lawful interests, by making these recordings, in order to avoid the responsibility for your own illegal behaviour, aren’t you?’ he asks me.
‘No, I’m not,’ I snarl back.
Here I am, the attack dog. You want to make me out like I am rough and tough, the kind of street-fighting detective who will do anything to bring a killer to justice? Fine, this is what a real detective looks like.
The prosecutor smiles at me, then at the magistrate. He takes a seat. He thinks he’s won. I step down from the witness box.
* * *
That afternoon, Margaret stands and says, ‘I call Jane Fiore.’
For a moment, silence swells and fills the courtroom. Jane stands and takes quick, certain steps towards the witness box.
‘Are you the foster mother of William Tyrrell?’ Margaret asks her.
‘Yes,’ Jane says, and you can see the sadness in her.
‘Did you attend the inquest hearings in relation to the disappearance of your son, William, in March of last year?’
‘Yes, every day.’ She is a calm, deliberate witness. I was reluctant to call her at first, knowing how much trauma she’s been through, until she said that she wanted to give evidence.
‘Did you have occasion to have a conversation with Scott at that inquest?’ Margaret asks her.
‘Yes.’
‘Could you tell the court the circumstances of that, please?’
‘We said hello, exchanged pleasantries.’ Jane’s face lifts as she talks, looking more confidently around her at the courtroom. ‘After the pleasantries, Scott said to me, “You are not the only family of victims of crime.” I stopped and looked at him and I thought, No, but you are at the inquest of one of those victims. He then proceeded to say, “William is not our only case.” I then said to him, “William was three years old, he was taken from his grandmother’s house. It was a street where there’s probably 20 houses on it. We were sitting just around the corner and he’s a child in care. I don’t think you’ve got any other cases that can be described like that and I don’t think you can just give up on him.”’
‘Did he make any reply?’ asks Margaret, who knows enough to stand back and let her witness say everything she has to.
‘No.’ Jane starts to cry. ‘I then asked him, “So, are you planning on taking William’s case to cold cases?” He said, “Yes, it’s going to Unsolved.” . . . I said to him, “You can’t send it to Unsolved, you can’t do it.” He said, “It’s going there.” I said, “So, it’s going to sit in a box and in six months’ time you are going to pull it out again, lift up the box and go, ‘Oh, nothing new,’ close the box and put it away.” And I’m saying that and he’s looking at me and he’s nodding and I’m thinking I can’t believe you are saying this to us, here, at the inquest for this little boy. You’re saying this to his parents.’
Margaret gently asks if anyone told Jane about a handover being done between myself and David, who took charge of the investigation after I was taken off it.
‘I was really worried because I didn’t know what was going on,’ she says. ‘I said specifically to Scott, “Who’s doing the handover?” He told me Gary Jubelin was doing a handover with David.’ Jane says she spoke to David, who told her there was no handover. That he was not allowed to talk to me.
‘I was told by David . . . “I don’t need to have a handover,”’ says Jane. She doesn’t need to explain what that meant: All that knowledge gained in the years we’d spent trying to find William, who we had spoken to, what we had learned, where the different pieces fitted, where the cops could look next. None of it was passed between us.
‘I am angry,’ says Jane, her eyes now overflowing with tears.
The prosecutor doesn’t try to challenge her. Jane steps down from the witness box, walks between the rows of seats, takes
her handbag and leaves the court. Outside, after the trial is over, Jane sits against a wall, surrounded by a knot of women, including my sister Michelle and Faye Leveson.
Between them, Jane looks up, red-eyed and defiant.
‘I’ve been waiting for a year to say that,’ she says.
I Own It
6 April 2020: nine months out
The courtroom doesn’t suit this moment. Right now, waiting to hear if the magistrate has found me guilty, I want to be somewhere dark, where I can hide. Instead, we are in one of the bigger, grander courts, where the walls are pastel-coloured, pink and blue and green, lit up by heavy, golden chandeliers suspended from the ceiling.
Magistrate Ross Hudson walks out and takes his seat above us. I close my eyes, running my fingers back over my shaved scalp and down the muscles of my neck, which are as taut as wire ropes.
He speaks fast, his words like machine-gun bullets. ‘In terms of these matters, Mr Jubelin, the defendant, was charged with four sequences arising out of offending on 3 November 2017, 2 May 2018, 3 May 2018, and 28 December 2018 in regards to a number of recordings made of conversations between [Paul] and himself.’
I focus on my breathing. The magistrate fires out a short summary of the case, and of the legal precedent he has consulted. Looking down, he turns his sights towards me. ‘I have to query this, what evidence?’ he asks. Why did I pick out Paul as a person of interest, and why did I pursue him? ‘There is no DNA, there are no fingerprints, there is no one necessarily who says, “I saw him go to the backyard where William Tyrrell was or could be.” There are no leads, there is nothing.’
What does he expect? I think. That with no DNA, no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses we just give up? That’s usually our starting point. If we have DNA and eyewitnesses available at the beginning, the Homicide Squad don’t even get the call-out. A case like that would be left to the local cops.