‘Sir,’ Duncan said, ‘I’ve just arrived in and seen the report on your wife. When the other detectives come in, in an hour or so, we’ll have a close look at it.’
Duncan’s superior, Detective Sergeant Brett Henderson, was the next to arrive at Parramatta. He agreed that Mrs Whelan’s vehicle needed to be scientifically examined for fingerprints. He despatched officers to canvass the area, and he ordered them to phone all hairdressing businesses and beauticians in the vicinity of Phillip Street.
By the afternoon, with no sign of Mrs Whelan, Duncan called Detective Sergeant Dennis Bray of the homicide unit at the Major Crime Squad, north-west region. ‘We’ve got this missing person, a wealthy woman whose husband is CEO of a large company,’ Duncan told him.
Bray was immediately concerned and annoyed, as he felt that the local police should have contacted him earlier. Every police officer knew how crucial the first twenty-four hours of a case were. Bray strode down to the station and spoke to Duncan and another Parramatta detective, Glen Vincoe: ‘Mate, this isn’t right,’ Bray told Vincoe, ‘you have a woman who disappeared with more than $50 000 worth of jewellery, married to a senior executive of a multinational company. What are we doing about it? You need to get things happening.’
Duncan said he would call in at the Whelans’ home to get a statement when he finished his shift. ‘It’s on the way to my place,’ he assured Bray.
That would not be until 7 p.m. Bray’s anxiety about the case grew. As part of police protocol, the Major Crime Squad could not get involved in a matter until invited by the local area command. Bray recounted the case to his boss, Mick Howe, back at Parramatta headquarters. He told Howe he thought that not enough was being done. Howe, who was the commander of the Major Crime Squad for the north-west region, instructed Bray to stay in touch with Parramatta and keep him updated.
‘I think there’s more to this, boss,’ Bray said. It was a gut instinct on Bray’s part. ‘Something smells,’ he said. ‘I’m worried it could escalate.’
3 IN OUR
KEEPING
The mail sat untouched in the Whelans’ letterbox all afternoon. Kerry or Amanda would usually collect it as they drove through the security gate of Willow Park and up the 700-metre-long driveway to the house. But today, Wednesday 7 May, bills and junk mail were the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Bernie had kept the children home from school. While Matthew and James played outside, Sarah sat in her bedroom sketching a self-portrait. It was a distraction she used when she was upset or stressed but today it was not working, her mind clouded by thoughts of what had happened to her mum. Bernie’s children from his first marriage—Marita, thirty, and adopted son Shane, thirty-two—arrived. Kerry’s brother, Brett Ryan, was trying to calm his father, Leo, who had become increasingly frail in the last year, since his wife’s death. The tension in the house was palpable. When a telephone rang everyone jumped. When the security gate swung open, Bernie prayed it was his wife returning.
Around 5 p.m. Amanda’s boyfriend, Damon Spackman, tried to amuse James and Matthew, who were bored and getting in the way: ‘Come on, boys, let’s ride down and get the mail. Grab your bikes.’ James was the first there and pulled four letters from the green wooden box. They raced each other back. Damon chucked the mail on the kitchen bench, and then took the pair outside for a kick of the football.
It was not until just before seven o’clock that Marita handed the envelopes to her father. Something, anything, to distract Bernie from the fears that were consuming him. He stood chatting to Marita as he routinely slit open each envelope. There was a horse vet bill, addressed to Kerry, a belated birthday card for James, an electricity account and then a long yellow business envelope marked ‘B Whelan, 23 Cedar Ridge Road, Kurrajong’. Bernie would later remark to police that the way it was addressed was unusual. Most of the Whelans’ mail was addressed ‘Willow Park, Cedar Ridge Road, Kurrajong’.
Bernie was in mid-conversation when he pulled out the two-page white letter from its envelope. He unfolded it and glanced down. The pages were covered in typed capital letters.
He read the first few lines:
THERE WILL BE NO SECOND CHANCES. FOLLOW ALL INSTRUCTIONS OR YOUR WIFE WILL DIE. BY THE TIME YOU RECIEVE [SIC] THIS LETTER SHE WILL BE SAFELY IN OUR KEEPING.
Bernie let out a cry: ‘Oh, God! Oh my God, they’ve got her!’ For a minute he forgot to breathe. He went ghostly white and his legs buckled under him.
Marita caught hold of her father who still had the ransom letter clasped in both hands. Recovering, he regained his feet and threw the letter across the table as if it was a bomb about to explode. Everyone crowded around, wanting a look at the object.
‘Don’t touch it. No one touch it!’ Bernie yelled.
The children burst into tears.
Bernie picked up the pages again and, with a shaking hand, silently read the rest.
TO ENSURE HER SAFE RETURN YOU MUST AT NO TIME BRING IN THE POLICE THE PRESS ANY AUTHORITIES OR OUTSIDE ASSISTANCE. WE WILL KNOW IF YOU DO SO.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF BREACHING TIS [SIC] RULE WILL BE DIRE FOR YOUR WIFE. YOU ARE NOT OUR FIRST AUSTRALIAN TARGET THERE HAVE BEEN OTHERS. YOU HAVE NOT HEARD OF THIS IN THE PAST BECAUSE THEY HAVE IMPLICITLY FOLLOWED ALL INSTRUCTIONS AND BEEN REUNITED WITH THERE [SIC] LOVED ONES.
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE OUR CAPABILITIES.
WE WILL KNOW IF YOU BREACH ANY CONDITIONS AT ANY TIME AND YOU AND YOUR FAMILY WILL NOT SEE HER AGAIN.
James had run to his father’s side and was clawing at his sleeve. But Bernie couldn’t read the thing out, not before he had gone through it all. How could he tell his children this?
THIS IS OUR ONLY GUARANTEE.
THE RANSOM FOR HER RETURN IS ONE MILLION U.S. DOLLARS. THE RATE OF EXCHANGE MEANS YOU WILL PAY ONE MILLION TWO HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND AUSTRALIAN DOLLARS TO BE PAID IN ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR AUSTRALIAN NOTES.
The rest of the letter gave instructions relating to the kidnappers’ demands and their preferred means of delivery. Only ‘new plastic notes’ were to be used. No ‘remote transmitting devices’, no ‘radioactive dust’, dyes or any means of tracing the money. It was to be delivered in a ‘heavy duty green plastic garbage bag’.
DO NOT BE TEMPTED FOR IF ANYTHING IS USED TO TRACE THE MONEY IT WILL NOT BE COLLECTED AND YOUR WIFE WILL DIE.
The word ‘die’ shook Bernie. He could barely take in the rest of the directions, which were very specific.
YOU HAVE SEVEN DAYS. WHEN THE MONEY IS READY YOU ARE TO PUT AN ADVERTISEMENT IN THE PUBLIC NOTICE SECTION OF THE SYDNEY DAILY TELEGRAPH NEWSPAPER SAYING:
‘ANYONE WHO WITNESSED A WHITE VOLKS WAGON [SIC] BEETLE PARKED BESIDE THE EASTERN GATES OF THE SYDNEY OLYMPIC SITE AT 10.30PM ON TUESDAY 8.4.97’.
He was to put his home telephone number at the end of the advertisement and the note insisted he carry out the whole operation on his own.
DO NOT SUBSTITUTE YOURSELF FOR THE DELIVERY. YOU MUST BE ALONE. HAVE NO WIRES ON YOURSELF OR IN THE CAR YOU USE. WE WILL KNOW IF YOU TRY TO USE THEM. DO NOT USE THE CAR RADIO.
The letter seemed to go on and on. It ended with two more warnings.
ANY SIGN OF OUTSIDE INVOLVEMENT OR INTERFERENCE AND YOUR WIFE WILL DIE [. . .] TAKE CARE THIS IS YOUR ONLY MEANS OF EVER SEEING HER ALIVE AGAIN.
Bernie felt suffocated. Someone had just smashed apart his world and the pieces were collapsing in on him. He managed to utter a few of the details to the stunned group around him. They cast their eyes over the pages, careful not to touch them. The children were becoming hysterical. Matthew and Sarah understood the situation. Only the previous week they had watched a video of the Mel Gibson film Ransom. Marjorie Minton-Taylor took the children into the kitchen while Shane and Brett Ryan sat with Bernie, reading it through and trying to think rationally in an unreal situation.
‘Now, Dad, we have to ring the police,’ Shane said matter-of-factly.
‘But it says not to. What if they’re watching the house? What if the phones are bugged?’ Bernie’
s voice was high and strained. But he knew it was too late to keep the police out of it. Detective Duncan was due to arrive shortly to take a statement.
Bernie now felt a terrible urgency. Kerry might be tied up, gagged or in pain. He could not imagine his wife as a hostage. Using his mobile phone, he dialled Parramatta detectives.
Allan Duncan had just finished typing the situation report when he answered the phone and heard a man’s voice speak, taut and tripping over his words: ‘Detective, it’s Bernard Whelan. I’ve, I’ve just received a letter. They’ve got her. They’ve got her!’
‘Slow down, mate,’ Duncan said. ‘What’s happened exactly? You’ve received a letter, have you?’
‘I’ve just opened a letter. A ransom note,’ Bernie said lowering his voice.
Duncan could hear the distraught children in the background. ‘Oh God, why is this happening to our family?’ a girl’s voice cried. ‘Why us?’
Duncan asked Bernie to read the note to him slowly. As the detective took down the words, Duncan could not help but notice how long it was. Highly unusual for a ransom note.
Bernie was now trembling uncontrollably. He pleaded for police to get there immediately. The kidnappers might be outside his property. ‘I don’t know if they’re watching the house,’ Bernie said. ‘I’ve got my guns from the cabinet. I’m armed and ready.’ It was bravado, but there was real fear in his voice.
‘Whoa, whoa,’ Duncan said, trying to calm him. ‘Mate, I know how you’re feeling and we’re going to get police out as soon as possible. Be aware the detectives will be in plain clothes. I’d appreciate it if you’d put the guns aside. Guns are not going to achieve anything.’
Duncan lived in a rural setting similar to Kurrajong. He knew about physical isolation and could well understand Bernie’s predicament, but he repeated that firearms would exacerbate the problem. After hanging up, Duncan ordered a police car to head to the Whelan house. It was protocol in a major incident to telephone the police duty officer, who would immediately page one of the most senior officers in the force, Chief Superintendent Rod Harvey.
Back at Willow Park, the Whelans waited. The last twenty-four hours had seemed like a week. They could barely stand another minute. Tony Garnett, Bernie’s best mate, had only just left the house before the discovery of the ransom note. Shane Whelan called him: ‘Uncle Tony, it’s Shane. You’ve forgotten your house keys. Could you please come back immediately?’
Garnett hesitated, feeling the house keys in his trouser pocket.
Shane repeated to him in a loud voice, through clenched teeth, ‘You’ve left your house keys here. You need to return to the house.’
Garnett realised something was amiss. ‘Righto,’ he said, ‘be right there.’
Garnett sped back to the Whelans, arriving around 8 p.m. Bernie rushed out to meet him. ‘Someone’s got her, mate, there’s a note.’
‘Oh please God, surely not,’ Garnett said.
‘It came in the mail and could have been here for hours because I’ve only just opened the mail.’
Bernie ushered him inside and insisted that everyone stay in the house. He ordered Shane to make sure all the doors and windows were locked, saying: ‘The house could be bugged so we’ve gotta be careful where we talk.’ Garnett directed him into the bathroom to discuss what to do. Meanwhile they waited for the police.
In the kitchen, Shane mulled over who might be responsible. He thought about his older brother, Trevor. Bernie and his first wife Helen had adopted both boys before Helen conceived Marita. Trevor, thirty-seven, bore a tremendous animosity and resentment towards his father and Kerry, who he called a ‘money grubber’. He blamed her for the marriage break-up between Bernie and his mother, Helen, and was convinced that had fuelled her alcoholism and caused her subsequent death. So upset was Trevor that his father had taken up with a woman who was roughly Trevor’s age that a violent confrontation occurred in which he threatened Bernie with a knife. As a result, Bernie had excluded him from his will.
‘One day I’ll get even with him,’ Trevor told a friend at his mother’s funeral. ‘He’s cut me out of the will and he’ll pay for it . . . I never got anything off my old man and some day I’ll get money off him.’
These thoughts came flooding into Shane’s mind, and when Garnett emerged from the bathroom, Shane pulled him aside. ‘Mate, we need to find Trevor. He’s capable of anything. He’s very disturbed and violent. I just hope he’s got nothing to do with this.’
4 THE ROLY-POLY
MAN
Rod Harvey was used to sudden changes of plan. The head of the State Major Incident Group was with his wife at their son’s graduation in North Sydney when his pager beeped. Rod Harvey listened, drained his beer and then he and his wife left the function.
Rod Harvey was a stalwart of some of the old squads of the NSW Police, the Breakers and the Armed Hold-Ups, whose solid reputation had seen him rise up through promotions to the Joint Drug Taskforce and the group investigating Sydney’s underworld killing spree in the 1980s. Another of Harvey’s skills was hostage negotiation. He had undergone one of the first negotiator training courses in the state. He listened to the duty officer with particular interest, his mind forming responses on two different fronts: to the kidnap situation on the ground and, as an overview, how police would keep the case out of the news.
Harvey had a principal role in the NSW Police which was currently undergoing a restructure. He would be one of the most senior officers in the new investigative body, called Crime Agencies, which an ambitious younger detective called Clive Small was amassing as the investigative arm of Australia’s largest police force. Crime Agencies was just three months old, but had yet to be gazetted. Harvey’s initial reaction to the news was that the abduction of a rich man’s wife and a ransom demand in US dollars had an international flavour. And that was very unusual, in Harvey’s experience.
The official numbers for abductions in New South Wales— 273 kidnappings the previous year—were misleading. Many occurred in Sydney’s Asian community and lasted for less than a day. Harvey phoned Detective Mick Howe, catching him as he was almost home.
‘I need you at Parramatta immediately. That missing persons case at Parramatta. It’s just turned into a kidnap. The husband’s received a ransom letter. An international group could be behind it,’ Harvey said.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Howe said and turned his car around for Parramatta, where he would be joined by Detective Sergeant Dennis Bray. The pair took immediate charge of what was to become a mammoth logistical exercise, calling in specialist units—surveillance teams, hostage negotiators, the State Protection Group and the dog squad, radio technicians and the police helicopter, Polair.
Police Commissioner Peter Ryan granted permission for the establishment of Taskforce Bellaire, which would comprise twenty-three detectives. Howe was appointed the commander and, because he was similar in age to Bernie Whelan, was also assigned to the role of victim care. Whatever happened, he was to stay close to the husband.
Howe had come to the north-west region from Internal Affairs, the ‘toe cutters’ as they were known, where he had helped to uncover some of the worst police corruption in New South Wales’ history. Many officers resented him for it, and some regarded him as a spy.
Detective Dennis Bray was appointed the chief investigator. He did not know it then, but the Whelan case would come to consume his life for most of the next decade. The good-looking cop had a reputation for his dogged determination, refusing to let go of a case until it was thoroughly investigated.
Police were treating the ransom note as genuine. The demands suggested an international connection, with a number of participants. Its talk of radioactive dust and listening devices was designed to invoke fear, and it was successful in that. The Whelan household was in a state of panic laced with grief. Everyone was terrified.
Just before nine o’clock, Detective Sergeant Allan Duncan gathered the family together. His instructions were strict, he said, because
Kerry’s life depended on it: ‘I know this is an absolutely devastating situation for you all, but we’re going to do all we can to get your wife and your mum back,’ he said. ‘But you’re not to talk to anyone outside this room about the ransom note, nor anything to do with the case. That means that you can’t even mention that your mum is missing.’ Duncan’s voice was stern: ‘To anyone.’
The children nodded. James started to cry.
Duncan told Bernie they needed to interview him. Was there a quiet area somewhere? Bernie led them out to the cottage, a sort of upmarket granny flat at the back of the family home where Amanda Minton-Taylor stayed a few nights a week, often with her boyfriend, Damon. For the next four hours, two detectives dissected every detail of Bernie’s life with Kerry.
Bernie assured them his marriage was a good one. Loving, stable and honest.
‘Are you having an affair, Mr Whelan?’ Duncan was blunt.
‘Absolutely not. I adore my wife.’
‘What about your nanny, Amanda Minton-Taylor?’
‘That’s a ridiculous suggestion. Amanda is like a daughter to Kerry and I.’
‘But, Mr Whelan,’ Duncan said, ‘you travel a lot. Could your wife have been having an affair then? Often us men don’t see the signs.’
Bernie swiftly held up a hand in protest. ‘Absolutely not. Look, my wife’s not like that, but even if there is someone else, she would never have left Sarah at this time.’ Sarah had a life-threatening bowel condition and her second major operation was just weeks away.
‘Her children are her life, Detective,’ Bernie said, gasping a bit for breath. ‘She would never leave them.’ Also, his wife had plans: a boating trip for Mother’s Day, an overseas holiday in July.
Duncan needed to know whether Bernie had any enemies. Had threats ever been made against him?
‘I’ve employed thousands of people going back twenty to thirty years sir, and you can’t help upsetting some people,’ Bernie said. ‘I’ve been threatened by unions, an opposition company, and that was scary. But, no, nothing recently.’
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