by Robert Drewe
‘I prefer sheaths,’ some woman invariably said, to the raised eyebrows of the other women and the winks of the men.
‘ “Today you’ll use a Dunlop product!” ’ declared Mr Wittaker, saying the slogan in a radio announcer’s voice.
By now everyone except my father was red-faced and chuckling. Having gained their attention, he told them the Ansell family were looking for a buyer. Should Dunlop buy them out? His advice to head office, he said sagely, was that they should. But they must jettison the condom. There was no money in it. The contraceptive pill was coming in.
‘Condoms?’ he declared decisively from centre stage. ‘Not this boy! I was put on this earth to sell tyres and tennis racquets!’
‘He’s a one!’ the women murmured.
‘Just talking business,’ he said, twinkling at everyone.
What was all that about? I wondered. What had got into these middle-aged folks?
After overhearing one Sunday evening’s anti-condom declaration I went into the kitchen to get a beer and he was standing by the fridge with Mrs Gwen Halliday from Minora Road. He was holding a bottle in one hand and studiously examining her necklace with the other. She was patting his head. Then the hand fingering Mrs Halliday’s necklace moved down and solemnly cupped one of her substantial breasts.
This was the man who tore Zulu and Tahitian breasts from the National Geographic and tossed them in the garbage. Who, one January, had thrown away a perfectly good Countryman calendar because September featured a billabong full of adolescent Aboriginal girls, bare-chested, beaming and waist-deep in water lilies. The man who, for that matter, avidly waited for the Mirror to be delivered so he could burn it as he was reading it.
I wondered whether this hypocrisy happened to you after you got married and had children. I wondered whether the Prudery/Lust roundabout came from the clash in his nature between the church architect and the Myer’s millinery assistant, the Baptists versus the pub and racehorse owners. Birth and death were making me think a lot about genetics lately.
They kept standing by the fridge. Mrs Halliday continued patting the skin of his head and he kept holding her breast – not squeezing it, just cupping it reverently.
He was too absorbed in treasuring this precious artefact to notice me, but Mrs Halliday broke away gently and came out of the kitchen then, and as she passed me on her way back to the party she smiled at a spot a few feet from me and said, ‘Isn’t he looking much better lately?’
After surfing with Bill one Saturday afternoon, I drove him and his surfboard home to Circe Circle. I thought I’d go in for a coffee and to say hello. The Fairlane was in the driveway but the front door was locked. The back door was also locked. We rang the doorbell, and knocked, but no one answered. The curtains were drawn and so were the venetians in the main bedroom.
Strange, we thought, and decided to get inside by our old death-defying method. We climbed up onto the narrow brick wall of the Doghouse stairwell – on its outer side a garden bed, on the inside a risky drop of twenty feet onto a damp square of cement – and I pushed up the window into our, now Bill’s, bedroom and began to hoist him through.
He was almost inside when the back door opened and my father called out, ‘Oh, boys, there you are!’
We clambered down and went to the back door. He stood in the doorway beaming at us as if we’d just returned safely from Antarctica. He seemed very chatty. From behind him appeared the manageress of his favourite pub. ‘I’d like you to meet Mrs O’Hare,’ he said.
She was just a middle-aged woman, round-faced and placid-looking, but she was smiling insanely at Bill and me like meeting us had realised all her dreams. Neither of them could stop jabbering. Something about a business meeting and home-decorating tips. I hadn’t heard such twaddle since I’d delivered it myself. Coming home earlier than expected, my parents had almost sprung Ruth and me a couple of times. I’d tried to brazen it out, too.
We backed off. Bill and I muttered something and made our excuses and left. We couldn’t wait to get out of there. Bill looked confused. A few days before, Betty, their new, officious housekeeper, had found a copy of Playboy in his desk. In the row that followed, he received the grim warning: ‘You don’t want to end up like your brother, do you?’
‘What do you reckon?’ he said.
‘Of course they were,’ I said. What the hell. He was a widower.
Quite abruptly, it seemed, my father was promoted and transferred back East. He was made the Dunlop manager for New South Wales, the biggest State branch. He sold the house in Circe Circle. His resignation from all his business and service associations was accepted with regret and congratulations on his new posting. He put Bill into boarding school for his last two years of school, and he moved to Sydney with Jan.
It was hard to imagine him in a different setting. He’d seemed so at home here. Such a big fish. I wondered whether he would have accepted the posting if my mother had been alive. I wondered whether he’d sought the transfer.
Perth was a branch manager’s town. Men like him from head offices in Melbourne and Sydney ran the business of the city. As young men they had brought their initially complaining wives and families across the Nullarbor to the most remote city in the world and deposited them in its leafier and more tranquil middle-class suburbs. And then something happened to them. Resisting national advancement and calls back to head office, they were seduced by the light and the landscape and the promise of something as intangible as ‘a way of life’ and stayed forever.
But he was returning. The greatest fear of our childhood had been realised. The three of us had always worried that one day he’d be brought back East. We’d be dragged away from our friends and from the beach, torn out of Western Australia and sent to austere new schools, to live among pale, citified Easterners with no appreciation of the casual coastal life.
I used to indignantly tell my mother, ‘You can all go, but I’m staying right here.’
‘Don’t worry, dear,’ she’d say. ‘No one’s going anywhere.’
2
TRIAL
This time Eric was looking very spruce – clean-shaven and grey-suited. I thought he looked like someone who read electricity meters or sold fabric lengths. He could have been a Watkins man, worried about cochineal and thimble supplies. He didn’t look like an insane serial killer, someone who had recently confessed not only to the murder of Shirley McLeod but to the additional murders of Patricia Berkman, Lucy Madrill, Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson. Someone who had shot, stabbed and strangled eight people, who had struck them with a hatchet and a car.
Nor, with that mild appearance and demeanour, and his indistinct, nasal speech, heard by his public for the first time, did he resemble someone who’d felt – so he told the court – that when he shot the sleeping John Sturkey a power was operating upon him as though he were God.
His trial in the Criminal Court was proceeding swiftly. The prosecution concluded its evidence in only one day. It called just fourteen of its twenty-one listed witnesses and not many of them were even cross-examined. His only chance was to plead not guilty to John’s murder because of insanity. He told the court, ‘I thought I had power over life and death and must use that power.’
That was his feeling on the night of Australia Day, he said, after prowling around Cottesloe with a stolen rifle and spotting the couple, Rowena Reeves and Nicholas August, the barmaid and the poulterer, in the parked car. He didn’t know them and he had no animosity to them. In the beginning, when he walked towards their car, he was only holding the rifle by the sling. ‘My desire was just to be a peeping tom or a pervert and look into the car,’ he said.
Then something made him raise the rifle. ‘It wasn’t an impulse. It was stronger than an impulse. I brought the rifle up and put a bullet in it. It was then that this power came over me. I felt as though even if there was an army in front of me they could not have shot me – as though I could have walked through a brick wall.’
Not that you c
ould always go by appearances, but I kept glancing at the jury – eight men and four women – and they didn’t seem to be buying insanity. They looked as if they would have been happy to give their verdict as soon as they were sworn in. The judge, Mr Justice Virtue, just looked sanctimonious. Only in real life, I thought, could a judge in the State’s most notorious murder trial be named Mr Justice Virtue. You couldn’t get away with that name in a movie or a novel. It was too much.
But in the real world there was Virtue on the bench. And there was Evil in the dock, the man who had brought fear and chaos to Perth, trying earnestly now to oblige his lawyer, Ken Hatfield QC, by politely stressing how insane he’d been.
‘What came over you?’ asked Mr Hatfield.
Eric frowned thoughtfully. He said, ‘I had full possession of my faculties, like speech and hearing, everything like that. But there was a power. I can’t say whether it came from my heart or my head, but it was a very, very strong power – as though I were God and I had power over life and death.’
‘And were you able to combat this power?’ Mr Hatfield asked.
‘No, sir. I wish I had.’
‘Did you feel any change take over you?’
‘I felt these people in the car were not people in the sense of the word. I did not regard them as human beings. I started to laugh.’
Eric said the power had remained upon him while he walked into Brian Weir’s flat and shot him, and then while he drove to Nedlands and shot John Sturkey. The power only lessened after he shot George Walmsley. ‘While I was walking back to the car the power left me altogether.’
If this were so, it seemed to me he’d been very selective about using the power. He hadn’t shot the milkman he’d said he saw making deliveries along the way. He’d decided against shooting the man he spotted in the front window of Shirley’s Frock Salon (Detective-Sergeant McCurry’s regular client!) making love to his girlfriend the shop dummy.
Mr Hatfield skated over that. He said, ‘Can you tell the judge and jury how you felt after the power left you?’
‘I felt deflated, like a pricked balloon. I knew what I had done but it was too late. I could not make amends.’
Mr Hatfield got him to tell the court of his miserable childhood: the mockery from other children, the savage beatings from his drunken father, the expulsions from every school he attended, and his many accidents and head injuries and hospitalisations. He told how he had suffered headaches, blackouts and ‘grey-outs’ since he was fourteen, when he knocked himself semi-conscious in a high dive. He’d had exploratory brain surgery and had spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital.
Mr Hatfield asked him about his family. He said he’d been married for ten years and had seven children aged between two and nine. His eldest boy was mentally retarded. His eldest daughter, a twin, had been born with her right arm missing below the elbow.
While Eric was talking, Mr Justice Virtue was cradling his fingers like a judge in an English film when someone from an inferior class was in the dock. He rested his chin on them, then stared over them at the far wall. Eric’s voice sounded eager and peculiar. The jury were shifting in their seats. Their faces said they thought this litany of genetic misfortune was in bad taste.
The prosecution called the State’s Director of Mental Health Services, Dr Aren Samuel Ellis, to rebut the insanity plea. The defence had asked, in fairness, for a psychiatric assessment of Eric to be made by a psychiatrist from another State, or by one not employed by the government. The Crown had refused. The Crown had also refused permission for any government psychiatrist junior to Dr Ellis to examine Eric. The only psychiatrist to examine him would be their man.
Dr Ellis told the court, ‘My examinations indicate that this boy has a chronic long-standing resentment against society.’ He said he wasn’t suffering from schizophrenia. He had an abnormality of character as distinct from any question of mental disease. It possibly stemmed from being born with a harelip and cleft palate and from the maltreatment he’d received at home. His self-esteem was very shaky and he would go to any lengths to bolster it and get the attention he required.
‘Attention is another name for what some people call love and affection,’ said Dr Ellis.
Mr Hatfield did his best in the circumstances. In cross-examination he asked whether patients suffering from schizophrenia sometimes regarded themselves as being driven by an outside power or an outside force.
Dr Ellis said yes.
‘And if a patient said he thought he was God, would that be a relevant sign or symptom?’
‘No. If he said he was God, it would be. But not if he thought he was God. There is a distinction there, sir.’
The West Australian had anticipated a longer, more complex trial than this. Mr Goldsmith had assigned a team of reporters to cover it in shifts. The usual Supreme Court reporters, the shorthand whizzes, took down the evidence and addresses to the jury and the rest of us ran their copy back to the office. But no one minded being relegated to copy boy this time.
This was the biggest local story in memory, even though Eric suddenly had his thunder stolen by two other murderers. The report of his trial’s first day was pushed off the front page by the dramatic news and picture of Jack Ruby shooting President Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The second day’s trial report was shunted back to make way for the photograph of three-year-old John-John Kennedy saluting his father’s casket.
But the trial’s final day made the front-page lead. In his summing-up, Mr Hatfield told the jury, ‘You are as capable as a psychiatrist of forming an opinion of a man’s mental condition at a particular time.’ It would be difficult for them to forget the emotions they felt at the time of the crimes, he said, but they must consider only what they had heard during the trial.
It was asking a lot. The jury retired for only sixty-five minutes. This was almost as brief as court decorum allowed, a retirement of less than an hour suggesting rashness and impoliteness, even an insult to the legal process. The jury rejected the insanity plea and found Eric guilty of wilfully murdering John Sturkey.
Mr Justice Virtue complimented them and said the verdict was the correct one. From somewhere close at hand he produced the black cap, elaborately placed it on top of his bewigged head and sentenced Eric to death.
Eric took the death sentence like someone who had won a handy lottery prize. Not first prize exactly but a perfectly acceptable third. He said, ‘Thank you, Your Honour. Thank you.’ His voice was surprisingly clear. For a moment I wondered if he’d misheard the verdict. If he hadn’t, this was taking good sportsmanship and grace under pressure to the lengths of absurdity. He winked at the Press table and at the detectives who had arrested him and at the police as they led him down the stairs. He was winking all over the place. This time I didn’t wink back. I wouldn’t accept the gesture. I was stunned. The verdict was hardly a surprise – he’d killed and killed without remorse; he’d shot my friend dead – but I felt burned out and nauseous and I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears.
Maybe the government psychiatrist would have said he was enjoying the ultimate in attention. But this reaction to a death sentence, especially from a man of thirty-two, a father of seven, looked bloody insane to me.
3
THE BOY THE COLOUR OF SAND
While Eric was on death row, his mentally retarded eldest son, Michael, who was in care at the Nathaniel Harper Home down at the river bend at South Guildford, was taken on a picnic to Sandy Beach. He became separated from the other children, wandered into the river and drowned.
When the prison authorities told Eric about his boy’s death he broke down. He cried and talked about him all that night and next day and read his Bible. He asked to be buried alongside his son’s ashes. The authorities were non-committal. ‘You’re jumping the gun a bit,’ they told him. In the meantime, he asked to be allowed to attend the funeral. This was denied. He took the decision surprisingly calmly.
In his last days, according to those who saw hi
m in the condemned cell – the prison superintendent, the Methodist chaplain, his lawyers, his mother, and his wife, Sally – he again apologised for his crimes. He repeatedly said that Darryl Beamish and John Button were being punished for two murders he’d committed, the hatchet murder of Jillian Brewer and the running down of Rosemary Anderson. He swore on the Bible they were innocent. He seemed relieved to get it off his chest.
His visitors remarked on how philosophical and uncharacteristically talkative, lyrical, even optimistic, he seemed since his son’s death.
He said lots more things went through his head these days, as you’d expect. Reading the Bible started off all sorts of thoughts and regrets. But what he kept thinking of was the day his boy said ‘starfish’.
When he remembered that day it was stretching out in three sharp colours – yellow and blue, and then the river a milky green like an aquarium, with things in it you couldn’t quite see. A warm Saturday afternoon in late January.
They were at Crawley, sitting on that strip of sand between the grass and the river, near the tea-rooms. There was quite a crowd, mostly families, with old people and little kids and a few New Australian boys showing off with a soccer ball. There were radios playing. The people who preferred the river to the ocean – people with little kids, New Australians, old people and other people scared of the surf – liked to take a radio to the river.
They were half in the shade of a big flowering gum. He’d sat his boy in the shade so he wouldn’t get burnt. But there were tree roots poking up, and ants, and the shade kept moving, and the boy kept squirming out into the sun again, so he’d had to spread zinc cream on him. The other kids were way down the beach by now, doing bombs off the jetty.
The Paddle Pop he’d bought him was melting fast. He’d got it all over himself, all mixed up with sand and zinc cream. He was a mess. He’d tried to wipe him off with a towel but of course he was twisting away. Anyway, all of a sudden the boy stopped wriggling, looked him in the eye and said ‘starfish’. Clear as a bell.