by Jess Hill
A call about Kelly Thompson’s address should have raised immediate red flags at Melbourne’s Werribee Police Station. Over the previous thirty-nine days, Kelly had called the station thirty-eight times. She had first come to police attention just a few weeks earlier: Wayne had attempted to choke her, and when she managed to escape he had chased her down the street in his car. A passing driver, Steven Hall, saw a distressed woman walking quickly down the street and had the presence of mind to stop and ask if she was okay. ‘Not really,’ Kelly replied. ‘My partner tried to strangle me.’ As Kelly was talking to Steven, Wayne swerved his car around and trapped her between Steven’s car and his own, then started shouting at Steven to ‘get the fuck out of here’.§§ As Wayne raved and yelled, Kelly leaned into the passenger window and whispered her address to Steven’s girlfriend, and asked her to call the police.
At around 8.50 pm, emergency services relayed these details to Werribee Police Station:
Female versus male in a vehicle. The female asked the complainant to call the police for her. The complainant’s not involved. She’s stated her partner’s tried to strangle her. The male came around in a vehicle. He told the complainant to leave.
Dispatching a car, the police radio operator said it was ‘just a domestic’.
When the two constables arrived at the house, Kelly looked ‘a bit dishevelled, like she had been crying or very upset’. Police separated the couple to question them. Wayne, ‘upset’ but ‘calm’, told his story: they’d had an argument over business, and he had just been trying to get Kelly to come back to the house after she walked off saying the relationship was over. The police appeared to accept that this was just a lover’s tiff: as one of the attending constables later testified, ‘he wasn’t violent towards us at all and he didn’t seem violent towards her’ and ‘none of them had any injuries on them’. Kelly refused to explain what had happened, insisting she wouldn’t say anything until their business partner arrived. But instead of waiting, the two constables simply advised Wayne to stay somewhere else for the night ‘to allow both parties to calm down’ and told Kelly that if she wanted to take out an intervention order, she could apply for one at the Magistrate’s Court.
It’s police policy to gather statements from all available witnesses, but the constables did not interview Steven Hall or his partner, who had called Triple Zero. If they had, they would have heard how Kelly looked and sounded when she disclosed being choked, and learned of her whispered request to call police – a clear indication that she was frightened of Wayne. They would have also had witness testimony of Wayne’s erratic driving, and his attempt to pin Kelly between two cars – something that would likely have warranted an investigation into separate charges and cast a very different light on Wayne’s story. All of these missed opportunities – and the laziness of the constables’ response – set off a chain reaction that would tragically compromise the police response over the coming weeks, until the night Norman Paskin called to report that Wayne was inside Kelly’s house.
When the constables returned to the station, they did what all police do after a family violence incident: they filled out a form. The L17 form, as it’s known in Victoria, is the ‘cornerstone’ of the police response: subsequent police rely on it to tell them the victim’s level of risk, the kind of support they may need and whether the perpetrator is likely to reoffend. The constables wrote up the incident exactly as Wayne described it: as an issue regarding ‘relationship breakdown and business problems’. Kelly was described as ‘not fearful’, despite her clear refusal to speak about the incident in Wayne’s presence. With no mention of the choking – a known red flag for future homicide – the matter was set as a low-risk case. As is policy, the L17 form was then sent on to the Wyndham Family Violence unit for review and follow-up. There, another constable reviewed the information, which the two attending members had assessed as ‘minor in nature’ and ‘unlikely’ to present any future risk. That constable followed every protocol to the letter: Kelly was referred to a family violence service and, after he called and left a message on her phone, the incident was marked as complete. Kelly didn’t return the call.
Meanwhile, although Kelly had made it clear the relationship was over, Wayne became more controlling. At a local pool competition a week later, Kelly complained to a friend that Wayne wouldn’t even let her go to the toilet without him. Afraid that Wayne’s behaviour was escalating, Kelly asked her brother Patrick to come and get her. When Patrick arrived, Wayne confronted him: ‘What, are you here to belt me?’ ‘No,’ said Patrick, ‘I am here to take my sister – she doesn’t want to be with you.’
Two days later, Kelly applied for an intervention order. ‘He tried to strangle me 1/1/2014,’ she wrote on her application. In notes taken by the intervention order registrar, Kelly says, ‘he is jealous and possessive and I don’t believe he will leave me alone and I fear he may kill me’. Given how serious the threat was, the magistrate granted her an interim order straightaway, and the order was faxed to Werribee Police Station. Over the next five days, Kelly – too afraid to return home until the order was served – called the station ten times to ask when it would be served. It took five days – a delay that almost certainly wouldn’t have occurred had police applied for the order on Kelly’s behalf.
Within a week, Wayne had breached the order, approaching Kelly when she was out to dinner with friends. Kelly reported the incident, and police called Wayne into the station for questioning. But despite Wayne admitting he had breached the order, police did not charge him, telling him only that he may be summoned to court later. There is no ambiguity in police protocols: breaching an intervention order is a criminal offence, and breaches – no matter how small – are to be strictly enforced. Yet even when Wayne breached for a second time, he was not arrested. Kelly confided in a friend that police told her it took ‘ten breaches’ before they could arrest someone for breaching an intervention order.
While Kelly’s status in the police files remained as low-risk, Wayne was calling police repeatedly to accompany him to collect property from the house. This kind of controlling behaviour should have rung alarm bells, as Victoria’s assistant police commissioner, Luke Cornelius, would later testify: ‘I would’ve expected this issue to be the subject of some discussion back at the station.’19 Meanwhile, Wayne was stalking Kelly’s friends and hiding in her backyard. According to one friend, Kelly had called police to report that he was lurking outside the house and appeared to show up everywhere she went. ‘She told the police that on numerous occasions,’ they said. There is no police record of Kelly reporting any of these breaches.
On 8 February – the day neighbour Norman Paskin called police – Wayne attended a reunion of friends. He was not drinking but was sweating profusely and looked ‘devastated’. To one friend, he said he was going to ‘do the business partners [who had ripped him off], Kelly and then himself’. To another, he said, ‘I will get her, you know.’ Wayne couldn’t read or write, and since the business had failed, he had no choice but to go on welfare. ‘I’ve lost everything,’ he said.
While Wayne was at the reunion, Kelly was at lunch with her friend and his wife. They urged her to stay with them – they could help her move so that Wayne would not find her. Kelly agreed, but said she needed to go home and do a couple of things first. She was also worried about her beloved dog, Roxie.
That night, Norman was out late, tending his garden, when Wayne walked straight past him ‘without any kind of acknowledgement’. Norman thought he must be drunk: Wayne was staggering, ‘seemed unaware of the things around him’ and was staring intently at Kelly’s house. After he drove around the area a few more times, Wayne parked his car at the end of the street around midnight and walked over to the house. Norman asked his wife to text Kelly, so she messaged: ‘Hi Kelly, It’s Sheryl your neighbour. Norman has noticed that Wayne has driven past the house a few times. Is everything ok?’ When Kelly didn’t respond, Norman called Werribee Police Station. As he was
on the phone to the junior constable, Sheryl saw the ensuite light at Kelly’s house switch on, and the silhouette of Wayne’s bald head in the window.
On the phone, Norman was struggling to get the police to take him seriously. Despite him saying that he thought there was an intervention order in place, the constable dismissed his concerns, explaining that the police escorts he’d seen at Kelly’s house could have been supervising a simple property dispute. He asked Norman: ‘Can you do me a massive favour, pal, and keep an eye on the address? If the circumstances change, you notice anything untoward, or if you hear any yelling or screaming coming from that particular address, please do not hesitate calling back and I’ll send a van around.’
Three days later, after receiving a missing person’s report from Wayne’s brother, Gavin, police went to Kelly’s house. They found her car in the driveway and could hear a dog barking inside. Forcing their way in, they went up to Kelly’s bedroom and found two bodies. Kelly had been stabbed with a hunting knife, and Wayne was found kneeling on the bedroom floor, with a rope attached to the bedpost tied around his neck. There were two kitchen knives beside Kelly’s bed, and a third in the top drawer.
In his testimony to the coroner, Assistant Commissioner Cornelius was contrite, conceding to a laundry list of police failures in the lead-up to Kelly Thompson’s murder. The failure to dispatch police to Kelly’s house the night she was murdered was ‘a very significant oversight’. Police should have waited for Kelly’s business partner to arrive during that first crucial callout, and they should have interviewed the driver she disclosed the choking to, Steven Hall. It was clear there was a story to be told, he said, and the attending police had ‘a duty to inquire’. Leaving out the strangulation report on the L17 was ‘a critical omission’, and the fact that police still relied on fax machines for receiving intervention orders was akin to ‘using a carrier pigeon’. By agreeing to escort Wayne on several occasions to pick up property from Kelly’s house, police may have been used as ‘an instrument of family violence,’ he added.
In his findings, the coroner said that Kelly took ‘all the right steps’. She was obviously in fear for her life – as her mother, Wendy Thompson, told the inquest, ‘I knew she was fearful but the thought of the depth of her fear as to need three knives close to her bed shocked me.’ The coroner stopped short of finding police responsible for Kelly’s death, attributing that blame solely to Wayne. Even if police had responded to the call from Kelly’s neighbour, he said, it’s unlikely they would have been able to save her. Wendy had a different response: ‘Had [Victoria Police] responded, or shown him there were consequences for breaching those orders early on, Kelly would be alive today.’20
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In the wake of Kelly Thompson’s murder and the state’s royal commission into family violence, Victoria Police made several significant changes. But protocols don’t necessarily fix culture.
Victoria Police should be the gold standard for policing domestic and family violence: for the past twenty years, it’s been led by the most progressive chiefs in the country. Christine Nixon was the trailblazer: in the early 2000s, she declared family violence a priority for the force – a truly revolutionary act – and introduced the first code of practice for investigating domestic violence. Since Nixon, successive chiefs have been fierce and uncompromising. Ken Lay dropped the dry operational language: in 2011, he outed domestic violence as one of ‘Australia’s filthy little secrets’. This was not just a crime committed by individuals, he insisted; it was a cultural issue fuelled by misogyny and complacency. The onus was on police – and the rest of us – to listen to and believe the stories of abused women. In a speech to the National Press Club, Lay said what so many women probably never thought they’d hear from a police chief: ‘I would like to acknowledge the frightened, the scared and the haunted. We believe you.’
But culture is stubborn, especially in a hyper-masculine environment like policing. The toxic attitudes Lay put so squarely in his sights are embedded within the police forces of every Australian state like a noxious weed. Despite all the positive changes to police policies and protocols, women are still experiencing the same old victim-blaming attitudes. As one recent study noted, ‘despite policy changes toward greater victim support and offender accountability, the next generation of law enforcement professionals still share some of the attitudes and beliefs of their predecessors who operated in the early days of the women’s movement (in the 1970s)’.21
Perhaps the starkest insight into attitudes comes from a survey of 204 Victorian police officers (or 1 per cent of the force).22 Without any prompting, the vast majority of participants raised the topic of intimate partner violence. The results were disturbing. ‘On the whole,’ the authors wrote, genuine ‘victims of family violence existed for officers only on a purely hypothetical plane, drowned out for the most part by a steady procession of imposters, liars and timewasters, presenting what were regarded as highly suspect claims to victim status.’ Even where there was evidence of a physical assault, some police were still frustrated at having to respond to it:
You’re an adult, do it yourself … if you think he’s going to hit you, then leave. Don’t stay around and call us and expect us to come and kick him out of your house and do something proactive about it … That’s the most frustrating part about it … I refuse to regard them as a victim when they’ve got a say in what actually happens to themselves.
Urban station, Senior Constable, six years
Many emphasised that only a few domestic incidents were even legitimate:
They’re just unhappy with their lives and expect you to sort it out for them, and the majority of times there’s no assault … 99 domestics out of 100 are just someone’s husband yelling at the wife and vice versa.
Urban station, Senior Constable, eight years
The frustration directed at women ‘refusing to help themselves’ was a common theme:
When you go to some domestic which you’ve been to fifty times before, you’ve done everything you can for this person, they refuse to do anything to help themselves … You do what you have to do and what you procedurally have to and probably nothing more.
Urban station, Sergeant, nine years
There is no excuse for victim-blaming. But, as the authors of the study make clear, these comments from police must be understood in the context of the enormous amount of family violence they deal with. The magnitude of what police are confronting cannot be captured in cold statistics. In an effort to convey the visceral reality of daily duties, Ken Lay recounted a day’s schedule from just one local police area ‘on no special day in particular’:
6am: We are called to a house where a man has beaten his girlfriend up by punching her to the stomach. Both were drinking all night and he is extremely violent and unpredictable when we get there.
10.30am: We go to an incident where a man had gone to his ex-girlfriend’s house and tried to abduct her. She escapes and runs into her bedroom where he follows her and then blocks her in. A friend comes to help her out and the ex-boyfriend punches this guy in the face. The woman escapes as her ex-boyfriend threatens to kill her.
1pm: We respond to a neighbour’s call to police because of screams of distress in the house next door. We arrive to find a couple arguing and the male having thrown furniture and plates around the house and at the victim. A small child was there, saw the whole thing, and was crying and distressed.
3pm: We go to a house and find a man who was previously arrested for breaching his intervention order and bail conditions. He was breaching those conditions again. Another trip to the Court.
8pm: We find a man who was wanted for assaulting his girlfriend. When we try to arrest him at his mother’s house, he assaults both our police officers and we find he had also bashed his mother.
11pm: We go to a house where a 14-year-old girl has held a knife to her mother’s throat as she was not happy about her mother’s treatment of her.
4am: We respond to a neig
hbour’s call about hearing screaming and glass breaking. We send two divvy vans. When we get there, we hear the glass smashing and a woman screaming. We find a large pool of blood and broken glass everywhere. We find a woman lying on a bed with a cut on her arm. We try to arrest the man who starts to fight my two people and we wrestle him for five minutes until we are able to handcuff him and take him to St Kilda Road.23
Every day, police around Australia face a state of emergency that threatens to overwhelm them. The domestic violence callouts they receive are both the most tedious of duties and the most dangerous. They turn up to some of the most confronting scenes imaginable. They deal with victims who, under the disorienting effects of abuse, are terrified of their partner one day, and in love with them the next. They attend houses where both parents are out of their minds on drugs or drink, their kids crawling around on filthy floors. They have to pick apart two opposing stories in the heat of the moment, under enormous pressure to get it right. And at the end of it all: a Sisyphean pile of paperwork.
But it seems clear that many in the force want domestic violence to be something it’s not – a discernible crime, like a home invasion or a drug deal, with a clear victim and a clear perpetrator. They want the ‘gotcha’ moment, and they resent anyone who gets in the way of that – especially the victim. As one constable said, ‘The system works as long as the victim abides by it. Like … getting an intervention order, that will work if the victim reports the breaches, but they never do, and when they do, then they change their mind … It’s very frustrating; you just get sick of it. I think, “Don’t call me, I don’t want to be involved until you’re willing to actually use the service that we provide.”’