See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  According to Constables Wright and Connor, that was not their last contact with Ted that night. What they say happened next defies belief, given how intent Ted had been on finding Charlie and the fact that just an hour earlier he had been willing to pay $800 on the spot to geolocate him. According to police, however, after Ted returned home, he made another call to the station to tell them everything was fine: he had spoken to Bell, Charlie was safe, and they didn’t need to look for him anymore. At 4.15 am, Constable Wright updated the file on Charlie’s disappearance with a new entry, based on this supposed phone call:

  TPC received from Edward Mullaley stating that Mervyn Bell has contacted him and they have had a long and heartfelt conversation. Mullaley states that he no longer has any welfare concerns for the child. He states that Bell loves the child and is caring for him well. Bell explained the evening’s events to Mullaley, who now believes that it is good for the child to be with Bell. Bell has arranged to meet Mullaley and transfer custody of the child during the morning (daylight). DCP [Department of Child Protection] advised of development. They have requested that any further updates be provided to the Broome DCP office.20

  Acting Sergeant Connor (who had earlier described Ted as drunk and aggressive) told the CCC that he was with Wright during this phone call, and that they later discussed it. When I ask Ted if he made this call to Constable Wright, he is emphatic. ‘No, no, no,’ he says. ‘I don’t recall that at all. I never felt that Charlie was safe at any time.’

  What is clear is this: Wright and Connor failed to do the most basic police work on Charlie’s abduction. They failed to enter the most basic – and crucial – information in Charlie’s file: Bell’s violent criminal history, and Ted’s fears that he would hurt or kill the boy. Neither officer filed a missing person report, either – a failing Connor explained by saying he didn’t consider Charlie missing because it was common for kids in Indigenous communities to be looked after by multiple family members, and he didn’t know that Bell had assaulted Tamica that night. If he really didn’t know about the assault, that reveals another catastrophic failure of communication within Broome police – because the police’s own notes show that Ted told the two officers at the scene of the assault that Mervyn Bell was the perpetrator. He also told police that this same perpetrator had abducted Charlie, and that Charlie’s life was in grave danger. The only way Connor could maintain his apparent belief that Charlie was just being ‘looked after’ by a member of his extended family is if he paid no heed whatsoever to Ted’s reports.

  At 6 am on the morning of 20 March, Connor handed over to Sergeant William Withers. He says he briefed Withers on what had happened overnight. But Withers has no recollection of any briefing. 21 When he began work that morning, he had no idea that Bell had viciously assaulted Tamica and abducted Charlie, or that Ted had made several reports the night before, including calling Triple Zero.

  When Ted returned to the station that morning, he was hoping to hear that police had begun a search for Charlie. ‘You know, my sister works with child protection, and she says an alert is supposed to blare when a kid goes missing like that. Everyone should swing into action.’ By that time, ten-month-old Charlie had been missing for more than six hours.

  Ted was horrified to find that Broome police hadn’t even started to look for him. There were only two roads Bell could have taken out of town: a right turn out of Broome, which would have put him on the road to Port Hedland; or a left turn, which would have had him driving towards Derby. ‘I sort of knew he’d gone to the right, towards Port Hedland,’ says Ted, ‘because he had phone reception. But they weren’t interested in looking either way.’

  Ted’s instincts were right. At 5.45 am, Bell pulled into the closed Pardoo Roadhouse, 460 kilometres south of Broome, on the road to Port Hedland. He tried to steal some petrol by cutting the hose, and when that didn’t work drove around until they opened, then filled up and took off without paying. At 6.40 am, staff from the Pardoo Roadhouse called police to report the theft but were told that police didn’t attend drive-aways. As Bell was speeding away from the roadhouse, a young guy driving behind him called police to report that a man who’d nicked off without paying for fuel was now driving erratically down the highway. Bell’s driving was so alarming that a truck driver going the other way also rang police to report him. Broome police missed this chance to locate baby Charlie. ‘If Broome police had rung Hedland and said, look, we’re looking for an 80 series, this colour, with this bloke driving it,’ says Ted, ‘police would’ve known that was the car.’

  Several hours later, Sergeant Withers tasked an officer with calling roadhouses north and south of Broome, which the officer did. Withers also asked him to telephone police stations in both directions. Phone records from Broome police station indicate that this was not done.

  It was 10 am before officers went to interview the two women who had been caring for Charlie when he was abducted. At 10.58, Sergeant Withers called the Police Operations Centre in Perth. He told Inspector Trevor Davis that an infant was missing, having been taken by its mother’s current partner, and that Broome police were considering scaling it up to a child abduction scenario. Withers told Davis that the child’s grandfather had reported Bell threatening the mother that he would take and kill the child. Davis replied that unless Withers had evidence of these threats – a statement from the mother, for example – there was nothing Perth could do.22

  By that time, Tamica – despite her severe injuries and against doctors’ wishes – had discharged herself from the hospital. She left first thing that morning, straight after Ted told her that Charlie had been taken. ‘I took off from the hospital to go and look for him,’ she says. In severe pain, she ran two kilometres to a friend’s house to get his car, then rushed around town, stopping at houses where she thought Bell might have stayed overnight. ‘By then, most of town knew Charlie was missing, because Dad had rung everyone looking. Everyone was looking for him.’ Deep down, though, Tamica knew Bell had left town.

  Around 11.20 that morning, in Roebourne – 800 kilometres south of Broome – a truck driver who worked for Ted saw a car on the highway that belonged to his boss. Ted hurried back to Broome police station and reported that Bell had been seen on the road to Karratha, 40 kilometres past Roebourne. When police said they would set up a roadblock in Carnarvon – over 600 kilometres past Karratha – Ted was furious. ‘Do you realise how far away Carnarvon is?’ he fumed. ‘I ran amok in the police station actually,’ he says. ‘I abused them, to be honest with you.’

  Ted’s sister, who had flown in from Perth that day to help, said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Outside the police station, she rang a homicide detective she knew through her child protection work. On the phone, that detective told her not to talk to anyone else, and that he would be on the next flight. ‘He was absolutely devastated about how they were treating us,’ says Ted. ‘He was a helluva nice person. A really, really good policeman.’

  At 12.57 pm – more than thirteen hours after Charlie’s abduction was reported – Broome police finally broadcast an alert about it to all districts.

  Less than an hour later, as Ted and Tamica were sitting with Broome police, Bell pulled up to the Fortescue Roadhouse in Mardie, 930 kilometres south of Broome, and burst through the front door with a baby in his arms. Yelling Charlie’s name, Bell strode towards one of the tables, and laid Charlie down on the table in front of Gavin Duff, who was in the middle of his lunch. As Bell hollered for an ambulance, he started trying to resuscitate Charlie. Duff looked at the infant in horror. There was ‘significant bruising on his body’, ‘a large welt on the side of his head’ and ‘a mark on the centre of his chest, where it had started to peel’. Bell was worked up, yelling ‘come on, come on’, so Duff took over, and tried to revive Charlie. When paramedic Gary Harris arrived at the Roadhouse, he put a stethoscope on Charlie to see if he could find a pulse.

  But Charlie was dead.

  He had been alone with Mervyn Bell f
or fifteen hours.

  Back in Broome, police told Ted and Tamica that Charlie had been found and was now in an ambulance going to Karratha. Ted and Tamica were loading up the ute to drive to Karratha when two policemen walked towards them. ‘They just said bluntly to Tamica, “Your baby’s gone,”’ says Ted. ‘She lost it – ran down the road, rolled in the dirt …’

  Five years later, Tamica can barely talk about that moment. ‘I ran off, crying and screaming, didn’t want anyone near me. I ran to the church and was sitting in the church crying.’

  Tamica’s mother, who was going to fly to Broome to be with Tamica, had changed her ticket to Karratha when she heard that baby Charlie had been found. When she got to Karratha hospital, staff refused to let her see the child’s body. It may have been for her protection. The post-mortem revealed devastating injuries to the ten-month-old boy: burns, abrasions, bruising, internal bleeding and a broken arm and broken leg. His genitals had also been seriously injured.

  For Charlie’s memorial a few days later, relatives flew in from all around Australia. Ted held Tamica as she sobbed outside the Our Lady Queen of Peace Cathedral. In the memorial program, Tamica wrote a poem for her baby boy, titled ‘My Child’:

  So precious, so innocent, not yet knowing what life holds,

  Much to learn, much to see, much to hear, much to need.

  Loving, wanting, adoring, and demanding.

  I love you my child, my second son. I love you my baby, my dear

  Charlie Boy.

  *

  In 2014, Bell was found guilty of the rape and murder of ten-month-old Charlie Mullaley. ‘Once in every ten years a crime is so evil it shocks the public,’ said Justice John McKechnie, as people in the public gallery wept. He sentenced him to life imprisonment.

  Nine months later, in September 2015, Bell killed himself in Casuarina Prison.

  Tamica was relieved to hear that Bell was dead. But barely a month later, she and her father were back in court. Broome police – who had charged Tamica for assault and Ted for obstructing police on the night of Charlie’s abduction – had decided not to drop the charges after Charlie was found murdered. They had pursued them. And now they were taking Tamica and Ted to court.

  In finding them both guilty, Magistrate Stephen Sharatt said that Tamica had clearly been in control of her senses, because during her scuffles with police she was worried that her baby would see her bloody and injured. He commended Ted – who freely admitted in court that he tried to prevent police from arresting his daughter – on his ‘candour and honesty’, saying, ‘Rarely do you see such honesty in the witness box.’ Ted was given a criminal record and a $300 fine. Tamica was given a twelve-month suspended sentence. Magistrate Sharatt said, ‘If ever there was a time for the court to be merciful, it’s this matter today.’

  Outside the court, Tamica addressed the media, asking why police were more interested in prosecuting her than they had been searching for her missing baby boy. ‘They never looked for Charlie at all, and the police need to be accountable for not looking for him,’ she told reporters. ‘They could have looked for him and he’d still be alive. It’s all wrong, but this is the law and this is how things work.’

  In April 2016, Western Australia’s corruption watchdog investigated the response of Broome police to the abduction of Charlie Mullaley. While it concluded that several police failures that night had contributed to a delayed and ineffective response, those failures did not justify a finding of serious misconduct. ‘Whether a more rapid response may have saved Charlie is impossible to know,’ the report found, ‘but it is important to recognise that Bell alone was responsible for Charlie’s fate.’23 The Mullaley family responded with its own statement:

  There are too many ‘don’t recall’ comments and a lot of ‘notes were not taken’ by officers. It is convenient for police not to recall certain matters that we consider crucial and to omit details that should have been included. Ted told them [police] that Charlie was at risk but, as the CCC report states, he was not taken seriously and we have lost our beautiful baby boy.

  The big question is: what changes have police made? What happens when the next Aboriginal grandfather walks into the station and reports his grandson missing without any action being taken for hours?24

  The family’s lawyer, George Newhouse, from the National Justice Project, was critical of the CCC investigation. ‘What astounds me is that in the years since Charlie’s death no-one has examined the conduct of the WA Police when baby Charlie was alive and under their control,’ he told The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘It seems obvious that the police should have intervened to protect Charlie when they arrived on the scene, but it appears that the WA Crime and Corruption Commission inquiry totally missed this critical aspect of the case.’25

  Ted only talks about this now because his quest for justice is ongoing. ‘I knew in my heart that something was wrong. I hate talking about it, actually. I knew. I have to talk about it, to get justice. We don’t want to see anyone else go through what we’ve been through.’

  *

  Indigenous women and children have been assailed by the rage of men for over 230 years. First came the rage of the colonisers: at their blackness, their freedom, their sexuality. Then came the humiliated fury of some of their colonised men: at being emasculated, enslaved, and rendered powerless to stop their women and children being taken and raped. Ten generations of Indigenous women have been expected to absorb these furies and never complain. The men who have unleashed them have had one thing in common: they could not tolerate women living free and felt entitled to control them. Today, Indigenous women and children are more vulnerable to men’s violence than anyone in Australia.

  Despite decades of radical Aboriginal activism, few of us have ever learned the real history of how this country was colonised‡; most of us who want to learn do so bit by bit, picking up fragments from disparate sources – a book, an interview, a story someone told. Among these fragments, it’s even rarer to read or hear about what white men have done – and are still doing – to Aboriginal women and girls. As wrote the renowned expert on Indigenous violence and trauma Emeritus Professor Judy Atkinson: ‘Australians have never been able to acknowledge sexual violence in their history. It is now alright to write of the guns and the poisoned flour, the killing of black women and children. It is still taboo to acknowledge the horrific level of sexual violence towards Aboriginal women and girls by white males.’26 Almost thirty years later, that taboo persists.**

  Sexual violence against Aboriginal women and children weaves an invisible thread through the short history of black and white Australia. To understand Indigenous family violence today, we need to follow that thread back to the beginning.

  *

  But before we do, let’s address that perennial question: is family violence ‘cultural’? It has often been claimed, even in the courts, that family violence is part of Indigenous culture, and that women and girls were being customarily brutalised long before the colonisers arrived. Until 2007, defence lawyers and anthropologists would regularly defend Indigenous men charged with violent crimes against women on the grounds that these were ‘customary practices’. In her remarkable book, Our Greatest Challenge, McGlade documents a case from 2001, when the Aboriginal legal aid team acting for a fifty-year-old man – who violently beat and raped a fifteen-year-old girl he claimed was his ‘promised wife’ – defended his behaviour as culturally ‘appropriate and morally correct’. The offender was sentenced to just twenty-four hours’ imprisonment for unlawful intercourse with a minor (and fourteen days for firearm offences). This was despite his history of severe domestic abuse: he had killed his former wife, a highly respected teacher, by beating her to death with sticks – a crime that had been ‘minimised by the court as a drunken fight between two parties’, despite a post-mortem finding seventy-five bruises on her body.

  McGlade writes: ‘Causing much controversy, Justice Gallop agreed with the “expert” anthropological evidence concerni
ng promised marriages, stating “She didn’t need protection [from white law] … She knew what was expected of her. It’s very surprising to me [that he] was charged at all.”’27 Speaking to ABC Radio after the judgement, McGlade said, ‘It’s disconcerting that our own Aboriginal legal services have assisted … by running defences where violence is said to be culturally acceptable or excused under some sort of cultural basis.’ When The Law Report’s Damien Carrick asked her to respond to the argument that Indigenous communities should be allowed to keep their customary law strong, and that issues surrounding those practices were best left to the communities, McGlade countered: ‘But has this been left to the community, or has it been left to the powerful members of the community, the men of the community, the people who have … engaged in the distortion of traditional customary law?’28 This betrayal of Aboriginal women has also been challenged for years by Marcia Langton, a formidable campaigner against men’s violence: ‘Are the Aboriginal legal services, which supposedly work for us,’ she asked in 2006, ‘ever going to stop arguing that rape is traditional law?’29##

  It would be naive to suggest that men’s violence against women was alien to Indigenous culture before white people arrived. As Atkinson writes in her landmark book Trauma Trails, ‘Aboriginal societies before Cook were not perfect harmonious groups of people living in paradise … All societies have conflict. All humans have ego, bad behaviour, hostility … tensions between generations and gender groups, passions in sexual encounters, and attempts to control others.’30 Indeed, gendered violence is at the heart of one of the most widely told ancient Aboriginal stories: the Seven Sisters were pursued relentlessly by the bad and lusty shape-shifting sorcerer Wati Nyiru, until they rose into the sky and became the seven stars of the Pleiades. The story of the Seven Sisters is danced, sung and painted across Australia, and told to Aboriginal girls as a cautionary tale. As do ancient myths from virtually every culture, it indicates that men’s violence against women has been a constant throughout human history.