True Stories

by Helen Garner

  An autopsy that evening showed that Daniel had died of internal bleeding from abdominal injuries. A pint of blood was found in his abdominal cavity. Many of his organs were bruised, his duodenum was ruptured, and the mesentery (the membrane that anchors the intestines to the back wall of the abdomen) was torn in several places.

  Aiton was taken in for questioning. He held out for quite some time. According to Butcher, when she visited him during these hours he was ‘very clinging’ towards her. He told her several times that he loved her. He asked her to marry him. She asked him whether he had hit Daniel. He said he had not. But on the Sunday morning early, after a second conversation with Butcher, Aiton at last admitted to the police he had struck Daniel.

  He claimed that he had not meant to harm the boy, and certainly not to kill him; that he had merely wanted to stop him crying. He had been having a bad morning: he was stressed out by the garage sale, by the fact that the toilet had blocked and by an angry phone call from a tradesman about a cheque that had bounced. Daniel had started to cry and scream just as Aiton was passing his bedroom door. Aiton had gone in, slapped him, then when he would not shut up, punched him several times in the stomach while Daniel lay there on his back.

  Everybody knows that a child’s crying has the power to derange, and that some people—especially those who, like Aiton, have been mistreated as children—lack the resources to control their own violent tendencies. It seemed at the time a simple case of a bloke’s having ‘lost it’, as Aiton put it, gone berserk under pressure, lashed out. The charge at first was manslaughter.

  But Daniel’s end was not so short and simple. At the morgue they counted one hundred and four bruises on his tiny corpse, inside and out, distributed liberally over his head, face, neck, chest, abdomen, arms, legs and back. Both his collarbones were broken, and had partly healed without ever having been diagnosed, or treated. Many of Daniel’s injuries, said the pathologist, were more than twenty-four hours old. He spoke of ‘bruises upon bruises’. Daniel also had an undiagnosed condition of the bowel that would have caused him, doctors said, bouts of excruciating pain, and which appeared to have been present for some time. Daniel’s slide towards the day of his death, it now became clear, was a long, slow process.

  Through the witness stand at the Supreme Court poured a stream of people who had seen on Daniel Valerio the marks of the violence that infected this already broken family, once Aiton met Cheryl Butcher through an introduction agency in February 1990 and soon afterwards moved into her house. People who noticed the boy’s afflictions—monitored them, in some cases—included neighbours, tradesmen, social workers, teachers, family friends, doctors, nurses, police, a photographer. Over these months, Daniel was seen by twenty-one professionals.

  These witnesses are not ‘bad people’. They are ordinary citizens who go about their daily business as best they can, trying to sleep at night. They saw the marked child, they harboured suspicions. Their instinctive response was correct. What stopped so many of them from speaking or acting?

  Was it fear, squeamishness about dobbing? Were some of them inured to suffering by the terrible things they encounter professionally every day? Or were they captives of the resilient myth of the nuclear family, the ability of the most pathetic and vicious collection of children and parents to throw up a stockade around themselves, a force-field that repels outsiders?

  The doctors, for the most part, impressed in court by their lacklustre quality. Their manner appeared limp, their language feeble and non-committal. What they conspicuously seemed to lack, and what Aiton perversely seemed to possess, was energy.

  From about June 1990 Daniel was exhibiting an ever-renewed array of black and blue marks. Three different doctors at the local clinic remarked on this. The tenant in the flat behind the Aiton–Butcher house used to hear screaming ‘over the sound of the television’; it was so intolerable to her that she would go out driving in her car until it was over.

  So frequently did Daniel display bruises to the temples, eyes, forehead and back of the head that a family friend and sometime babysitter, Wayne Williams, bought some strips of wetsuit material and constructed for the little boy a child’s version of a boxer’s headguard: a lime-green strip of rubber ran round his skull, a dark blue one passed over the top of his head, and the thing fastened under his chin with a black velcro strap. When this colourful contraption was shown to the jury, onlookers sobbed. It seemed a gesture of helpless kindness by a good, gentle man—but wasn’t it misdirected? Wayne Williams used to change Daniel’s nappy. Hadn’t he seen the bruises in places where the normal bumps and trips of toddlerhood don’t reach?

  Williams’ wife Sylvia was Cheryl Butcher’s best friend. She had a special feeling for Daniel, who called her ‘Mum’. Sylvia found a large scrotal swelling on Daniel. She said Cheryl told her ‘she didn’t know it was there’.

  Cheryl repeated to the court—as she had over these months to anyone who asked her about the child’s constant bruisings, black eyes and mysterious pains and stumblings— her explanations that Daniel was ‘clumsy and accident-prone’, that ‘all small children bump into things’, that his older brother ‘headbutted him and played roughly with him’, that Daniel ‘often fell from his stroller’, that he often ‘walked into the furniture’ (in particular, a dangerous table with edges at the exact height of his temples). The theory she was most at ease with was one that several doctors took seriously: that Daniel must be suffering from ‘a blood disorder’. They put him into hospital and ran tests.

  During his five days in hospital Daniel displayed, according to his paediatrician, the classic behaviour of the neglected, emotionally deprived child: not at all shy, he would go eagerly to total strangers, such was his need for cuddling and attention. No fresh spontaneous bruises appeared on Daniel in hospital; on the contrary, he put on weight and ‘generally blossomed’. The only thing the tests picked up was a slower than normal blood-clotting time. Daniel was discharged on 29 July. Cheryl Butcher did not bring him to his follow-up appointment. Daniel’s blossoming period was brief. Around this time, Wayne Williams, who was fond of Daniel, backed away from any further babysitting. He said in court that Daniel was too sick for him to want to take the responsibility.

  Aiton, according to Williams, ‘was a big man, and he talked loud’. He worked and travelled manic hours as a foreman in a painting and decorating firm. Three of his workmates told the court that Aiton had boasted to them about his rough treatment of his girlfriend’s kid. Two of them would apparently listen without comment to Aiton’s laughing tales of hitting Daniel on the penis with a wooden spoon, pushing Daniel’s face into his own shit, picking up the sleeping child by the hair and the seat of the pants and dropping him face-first on the floor. The third workman, however, when Aiton bragged about his custom of making Daniel ‘do a stary’—stand with his legs and arms spread, upon which Aiton would kick him so hard between the legs that he flew across the room—finally jacked up. This workmate told the court that, distressed, he had ‘spoken very sharply’ to Aiton. In fact, he had sworn and said, ‘People like you should be put away.’ In this bleak story of moral paralysis and missed opportunities, even a few sharp words stand out like an act of goodness.

  About a fortnight before Daniel died, the family moved from Rye to a house Aiton had bought not far away at Rosebud, in a street with the Proustian name of Swans Way. The police video of the house’s interior gave onlookers a pang of sympathy. Everyone can imagine the strain of moving into an unfinished house with three small kids in tow at the end of a Melbourne winter: the thronging plastic bags, the stained and sheetless mattresses, the incongruous pale pink leather lounge suite, the unconnected electrical wiring poking through holes in the plaster.

  The wiring might have saved Daniel, if Victoria’s police and welfare bureaucracies had been better co-ordinated. On his way home from work one night, Aiton stopped at a local florist to buy Cheryl some flowers for their six-month anniversary. It chanced that the florist was also
an A-grade electrician. Aiton asked him to do the wiring job at Swans Way, and over the following week he visited the house several times. What the electrician saw there—the way the children were control-led and disciplined and, on his last visit, the bruised, silently stumbling, ‘man-handled’ Daniel—upset him so much that when he got home, on 30 August, he phoned the Rosebud police and made a report. At last, someone had broken through the force-field.

  When the community police came to the house to do a welfare check on Daniel, Cheryl Butcher was ‘distraught’ at the suggestion that he was being abused. The photos that a police doctor took the next day are almost as horrific as those taken at the morgue after Daniel’s death; and yet the doctor’s report was not delivered to the police until four days after he died. Three days before he died, Cheryl took Daniel along to the open day at the school of his half-sister, Candice. Candice’s teacher sobbed in court as she described the ‘picture which still haunts’ her: Daniel’s ‘ghostly white’ face, his bruised temple, his unfocused, listless stare, his utter lack of response.

  The rest of the story reads, now, like a race between heavy-footed bureaucracy and a sleeker, livelier force. The boy was adrift. The people with the power to save him strolled, fumbled and tripped; and Aiton got there first.

  Paul Aiton’s first jury—eight women and four men—could not reach a verdict, and was dismissed, many of its members in tears of apparent frustration. The second one, an older, more sombre panel of seven women and five men, took less than four hours to convict him of murder. Late in the first trial, his new girlfriend had come into court holding on a stick a heart-shaped silver balloon with the defiant red words I LOVE YOU. In the second trial, the senior defence counsel’s flamboyant style of presentation had made Aiton seem cocky, and towards the end even brought a tiny smile of hope to the faded face of his adoptive father who sat in court beside the girlfriend almost every day.

  ‘This man,’ cried the QC, flinging a hand towards the dock, ‘brought flowers for Cheryl Butcher on their anniversary. I ask you, is this the behaviour of a sadist?’ One of the older women on the jury, in unconscious rejection of this line of rhetoric, set her lips and slowly, firmly shook her head. It was clear at that moment that Aiton was a goner; that the defence’s theatrical appeal to the complexity of human psychology, and to our lack of right to make moral judgements, was missing its mark. It was clear that the muffled, phlegmatic summing-up by the prosecution, with its central image of the man’s huge fist pounding into the sick child’s tiny, aching abdomen, had entered the souls of that jury, and lodged there.

  Ferocity against children is not rare. Why did the murder of little Daniel Valerio pierce the public heart, pack the court, even bring some of the first jury back to the retrial to hear the outcome of this haunting story?

  I think it’s because Daniel’s fate was not confined within the pathology of his fractured family. It escaped into the wider community. It unravelled slowly, offering multiple entry points to at least twenty official agents of what we like to think of as our collective decency. And yet Daniel was lost.

  In a strange way, Aiton’s conduct is easier to understand than Butcher’s: we may loathe it, and believe it should be punished, but we can see what he did. Action is easier to grasp than inaction, somehow. Cheryl Butcher’s behaviour remains enigmatic, the kind of thing that people lose sleep over, trying to puzzle out the meaning of such passivity, such apparent abdication of responsibility.

  What happened to Daniel Valerio reflects on us all, on our private and public natures. It stirs up deep fears about ourselves, and makes us frightened and ashamed. I don’t see how it is possible to contemplate Daniel’s story without acknowledging the existence of evil; of something savage that persists in people despite all our enlightenment and our social engineering and our safety nets, something that only philosophy, religion or art can handle: the worm in the heart of the rose.

  1993

  The Fate of The First Stone

  MANY YEARS AGO I came across a remark made by the poet A. D. Hope. He said, ‘With hostile critics of my work, I am always scrupulously and cheerfully polite.’ Professor Hope’s subtle resolution came back to me in March 1995, when my book The First Stone finally appeared, and I had to stand up and defend ad nauseam my attempt to discover the truth behind a sexual assault case at one of Melbourne University’s residential colleges. I hung on like mad to the poet’s tactic, and I’m happy to report that it’s possible, in the face of the most intense provocation, to keep your temper for months on end. I bit my lip and gnawed my fist and went on taking deep breaths and counting to ten—partly because I wonder if, when the chips are down, courtesy is all we have left; but also because I knew that, if I waited, a time would come when I could put forward calmly some thoughts about the furore provoked by this book, and about the things I’ve learnt from the strange experience of publishing The First Stone.

  Our culture at large is obsessed, at the moment, with matters of sex and power in the relations between women and men. Given this, and given the attempts by the two women complainants from Ormond College to get access to the book in the courts before its publication, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the extent of the response to the book. But what did astonish me, and still does, is the nature of the response—its primal quality. Primal things lie much deeper in people than reason does. People in the grip of a primal response to the very existence of a book like this will read it—and if they consent to read it at all—between the narrow blinkers of anger and fear. I realise now, having had it forced on me by this experience, that there are as many versions of The First Stone as there are readers of it. And yet there are certain words and sentences on its pages, put there on purpose in a certain order by the hand of a certain person—namely, me. So I’d like to take the liberty, here, of briefly and firmly listing a few of the things I did not say.

  I did not say that the two young women who brought allegations of assault against the Master of their college ought to have agreed to be interviewed by me. I was terribly frustrated that they wouldn’t, and in the book I often express this frustration, but right up to the end of the book I continue explicitly to respect their right not to speak to me.

  I did not say that women should ‘go back to wearing ankle-length sacks’.

  I did not say that the correct way to deal with sexual assault or harassment is to knee a man in the balls.

  I did not say that women are responsible for the way men behave towards them.

  And I most emphatically did not say that women who get raped are asking for it.

  I know it’s the fate of all writers to feel themselves misread. I hoped I was writing in such a way as to invite people to lay down their guns for a moment and think again—and not only think, but feel again. I wanted people to read in an alert way—alert to things between the lines, things that the law prevents me from saying outright.

  The book is sub-titled not ‘an argument about sex and power’, but ‘some questions about sex and power’. There are more questions in it than there are answers. Because it declines—or is unable—to present itself as one big clonking armour-clad monolithic certainty, it’s not the kind of book that’s easy to review briskly. Because it’s a series of shifting speculations, with an open structure, it’s hard to pull out single quotes without distorting it. What the book invites from a reader is openness—an answering spark.

  But I found that many people, specially those who locate their sense of worth in holding to an already worked-out political position, are not prepared to take the risk of reading like that. Perhaps they can’t, any more. What is not made explicit, for readers like these, is simply not there. Being permanently primed for battle, they read like tanks. They roll right over the little conjunctions and juxtapositions that slither in the undergrowth of the text. It’s a scorched-earth style of reading. It refuses to notice the side-paths, the little emotional and psychological by-roads that you can’t get into unless you climb down from your juggernaut
, and take off your helmet and your camouflage gear and your combat boots. It’s a poor sort of reading that refuses the invitation to stop reading and lay down the page and turn the attention inwards. And it’s always easier, or more comfortable, to misread something, to keep it at arm’s length, than to respond to it openly.

  Thus, several prominent feminists have used the word ‘sentimental’ to dismiss the scene in the book where the ex-Master’s wife speaks, through inconsolable tears, of the devastation these events have brought to her and her family. Less doctrinaire critics have been able to recognise, in this scene, a terrible example of the human cost of political action which narrows its focus to the purely legal, and thus divorces thought from feeling.

  Many feminists, even, incredibly, some who teach in universities, have declared it correct line not to buy The First Stone or to read it all. This position is apparently quite widespread, judging by countless reports that have reached me of bitter arguments round dinner tables, in women’s reading groups, and at bookshop cash registers. This sort of feminist, while refusing to sully her party credentials by reading the book, also knows, however, or has absorbed from the ether by some osmotic process, exactly what the book ‘says’, so she is able to pontificate freely on how I have ‘betrayed the feminist cause’, and ‘set feminism back twenty years’. One woman, representing the student body of an institution in the town where I was born, wrote to let me know that, the minute she heard I was going to go ahead with the book, she had purged her shelves of all my other books. She rebuked me for having ‘profiteered’ off other people’s misfortunes, and suggested in a challenging tone that I should donate my ill-gotten gains to a worthwhile feminist organisation. Here I permitted myself the luxury of a coarse laugh.