Ladykiller

by Candace Sutton

Sarah was clearly agitated. She wanted to shake her father and scream at him: ‘Don’t give up, Dad. Just don’t. We have to keep looking. You can’t give up.’ But she couldn’t. She could see the torture in her father’s eyes. She knew how difficult this was for him.

  Distraught, they each handled the news in their own way, and separately. Over the remaining few days, time became a blur.

  After the weekend, the Whelans returned to Sydney to find dozens of interview requests, from national and international media. In order to keep the case in the public spotlight, and on the advice of the Taskforce, Bernie agreed to appear publicly and for the first time in the flesh since his wife disappeared.

  On the morning of Tuesday 22 July, the media assembled on the second floor of Penrith police station. Looking tired and drawn, Bernie walked in and took a seat at a desk, surrounded by tape recorders and microphones. His dark grey trousers and navy double-breasted jacket with gold buttons seemed too big for him. He was dignified and solemn as he addressed the wall of journalists.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming here today. It’s been over two months since my wife disappeared and I think we are of the opinion that we will not get Kerry back alive. I believe she was kidnapped and murdered.’ He said he ‘gave up the last hope’ when the $500 000 reward he announced on 13 June failed to bring any information about her.

  ‘How are the children coping?’ asked a female reporter.

  ‘We cope day by day. They are all pretty bad, but probably the nights are the worst, the loneliness. Obviously your partner is there at night,’ Bernie swallowed in an effort not to cry, ‘and then she is not. She is gone and it’s an extraordinary feeling to have someone for that time and all of a sudden they are gone, she is taken from you. It’s indescribable.

  ‘But I’ve got to be tough for the little guys. If I am down, they are down. It’s left a gigantic void in our lives. Sarah is the image of my wife. They only have one parent to put them to bed at night and they are finding it hard,’ he said, his face finally cracking into tears.

  The reporters all had questions for him. ‘Can you describe your marriage?’

  ‘We had a wonderful marriage. We had a wonderful seventeen years. We were very much in love. I know people use the term, but we were, our love grew for each other. We were so close, we believed we had a mental telepathy and knew what each other was saying or thinking before they said it. We were thinking of having another child a couple of years ago. We couldn’t have been closer. This tragedy is just a huge void in our lives. We were blessed with three wonderful children and all of a sudden she is gone.’

  One reporter asked Bernie whether his wealth had made his wife a target.

  Bernie shook his head. ‘I’m an employee of the company. I’ve worked hard. I’ve done well, but for me to be a target of this crime I find it quite extraordinary, considering there are many other higher profile business people than me.’

  Asked if he had anything to say to the kidnappers, Bernie paused before replying, ‘If they had any decency at all, I’d ask them to tell us where Kerry is, so my family can have the dignity of finalising this tragedy.’

  He recalled his last conversation with his wife, only forty-five minutes before she was last seen. He said she had been excited about their planned trip to Adelaide. ‘Like a typical lady, she packed three times, and changed her mind about what she was going to bring,’ he said with affection. They had chatted about which vineyards they would visit in the Barossa Valley. ‘I finally reminded her to be on time because she had a habit . . .’ Bernie chuckled, ‘of not necessarily being on time.’ The journalists laughed.

  ‘What of the future?’

  His voice wavered again. As he had said already, the days weren’t so bad but the nights were so very lonely.

  The journalists had stalled on asking the hard questions. Finally, from the back of the room came: ‘Mr Whelan, did you have anything to do with your wife’s disappearance?’

  ‘No.’ For the first time Bernie raised his voice. ‘It’s preposterous for anyone to think I would hurt her. That’s just ridiculous. You couldn’t hurt someone you loved as much as I did. What’s wrong with the truth? Why can’t two people just have a happy marriage and be in love?’ Bernie knew there were people who suspected he had killed his wife, or was somehow involved in her disappearance.

  He had little to say about Bruce Burrell. ‘Mr Burrell is an ex-employee of my company, but at the moment there are matters before the court about goods that were stolen from me which involved that individual, so I can’t comment. I don’t believe that would be proper.’

  Did he harbour suspicions about who was responsible for his wife’s disappearance?

  Bernie took a breath and said, ‘Well, I do.’ He would not elaborate other than to say: ‘Undoubtedly it was a premeditated crime against my family and myself and my wife. It was something that I believe was very carefully planned and executed. My wife was a very intelligent person but she was also a very cautious person and I don’t think she was just grabbed off the street at random. I believe this was a premeditated crime.’

  Finally, in a move requested by Inspector Mick Howe, Bernie added, ‘There are substantial aspects of the investigation that police have asked me not to talk about publicly.’ If Burrell was watching this interview, Mick Howe hoped it made him nervous. That was its design.

  16 UP, DOWN,

  TURNAROUND

  Kerry’s life with Bernie could not have been more different from her upbringing. Her parents, Leo and June, were working-class Catholics. Leo was conservative with his money, and despised those persons who worshipped materialism. He had lived through the Depression in a family which struggled to feed seven children, and had served in World War II, fighting in New Guinea. He returned deeply affected by the experience, and would rarely speak of it.

  Leo and June married in 1956 and they bought a quarter-acre block in Showground Road, Castle Hill with a £900 war service loan. The Ryan’s three-bedroom weatherboard house in Sydney’s north-west was the first to be built on the semi-rural subdivision. They had no neighbours; rabbits and bandicoots were more of a problem than traffic.

  Kerry Patricia Ryan was born on 28 January 1958. She had a mop of thick black hair, big brown eyes and a beautiful olive complexion. There was a Spanish look about her, derived from a great-grandmother with a mysterious lineage. Her brother, Brett, was born in 1960, and Kerry was always protective of him, particularly when they started at St Bernadette’s Primary School, Castle Hill. Tall for her age, Kerry towered over most of the boys at school, and always took a back row position for class photos. She was a beanpole with a netball player’s physique. Because of her height, she was incredibly shy and would bury her face in her father’s lap when visitors called to the house.

  The Ryan family lived humbly. Leo did not believe in extravagant gifts, restaurant meals or flashy cars. The children wore second-hand clothes and, for holidays, Leo borrowed a neighbour’s caravan. Leo avoided tourist places, driving the family to obscure inland bush destinations such as Wellington or Manila, near Tamworth. Eventually the family moved. Castle Hill was growing, but their new suburb of Kurrajong, was like Castle Hill used to be: semi-rural, quiet, and with little traffic.

  Kerry had a nervous disposition—she was ‘highly strung’, it was said—especially when it came to exams. In her final year of school, she became so stressed in the lead-up to the exams that her mother took her to a doctor who suggested hypnosis. Leo had never heard of such a thing—‘bloody modern nonsense’—but forked out the money to help his daughter. It appeared to work. Kerry passed her Higher School Certificate and won a scholarship to Oak Hill Catholic Teachers College. It was a natural career move for the eighteen-year-old. She loved children and they loved her back.

  Two years into the course, however, a romance interrupted her studies. She ran into a man while picking up a car from Thompson Ford, Parramatta. His name was Bernard Whelan. At the age of forty-one, Bernie was weal
thy, successful and terribly unhappy. What Kerry saw in the waiting area of the car dealership was a high-flying executive from a very profitable multinational company. But what she would soon learn was that Bernie came from a background not a million miles from her own.

  Reared on a dairy farm, Bernie left school at thirteen to help his father on the property. For six days each week, he rose at 4 a.m. to work fourteen-hour days. ‘We worked a half day on Sundays,’ Bernie quipped. ‘It gave me a great work ethic.’ By the age of sixteen, Bernie was already showing his entrepreneurial skills and bought a hay baler, and later a bulldozer to build roads and dams for the neighbouring farmers.

  In 1959, 21-year-old Bernie married his first wife, Helen, and after being told that she could not have children they adopted Trevor, and then Shane. Against the doctor’s findings, Helen would later fall pregnant with Marita.

  Bernie’s rural business was beginning to thrive but it ended suddenly when he had an accident on the bulldozer and his right leg was crushed. With a family to feed, he moved— still on crutches—to Melbourne and worked three jobs: selling Pinnock sewing machines door to door, as a private investigator repossessing properties and as a machinery salesman for Cameron & Sullivan.

  ‘If you sold you got a quid, if you didn’t you starved,’ Bernie recalled. He was a great salesman and when Cameron & Sullivan went bust, businessman Neville ‘Ned’ Kelly asked him to join machinery company Davies Industrial Equipment. It was there that he got his big break. The pair of ambitious salesmen had identified a gap in the market and approached Crown Equipment, a large American forklift company based in Ohio, to open an arm of the business in Australia. Crown’s head, Jim Dickie, flew out to Sydney and during a meeting at the Chevron Hotel, gave them the go-ahead.

  ‘We sat around drinking beers and Mr Dickie handed us just $10 000 and said: “There, now get it done”. What we did was we got them to agree to allow all the profits to be kept in Australia,’ Bernie said.

  Crown Australia opened on 18 January 1966 and began to market a pedestrian-controlled forklift which didn’t require the operator to possess a licence.

  A young advertising salesman called John Singleton convinced the pair to advertise on television. Singleton’s jingle, ‘Up, down, turnaround. There is nothing like a Crown. For picking it up, turning it round’, drew an immediate reaction. Australians swamped Crown with orders and a multimillion-dollar company was launched, as was Singleton’s career.

  Bernie moved to Sydney in 1972 when Ned Kelly, his health deteriorating, appointed him the company’s sales director. The Whelans settled in Castle Hill but while Bernie’s business flourished as Crown Australia entered a booming Asian market, his home life was a shambles. Long hours and frequent travel meant he hardly saw his family. His marriage was disintegrating and Helen was drinking heavily; when Bernie would arrive home from work or business trips Helen sometimes threw bottles at him. Two years later, in 1974, Bernie was appointed Crown Australia’s boss.

  Helen’s alcoholism was actually borne out of a terrible secret: she had been sexually abused as a child, but Bernie did not know it. One night when he walked in the door, Helen pointed a pistol at him and pulled the trigger. A bullet lodged in the wall. Bernie put the children in the bathroom, and called the police and Helen’s doctor. Eventually she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, but she signed herself out after three days.

  Desperate for a change of scene, Bernie moved the family to Cottage Point, where he signed up as a volunteer coastguard. Bernie loved boats and, for a time, the Whelans were happy. Bernie established a mobile flotilla and as the boss of Crown Australia, donated the first water ambulance in 1974. His weekends were dominated by search and rescue operations to aid stricken vessels. Helen revelled in the job of operating the coastguard radio. She was a natural on air, talking to people up and down the east coast of Australia. She took mayday calls and saved lives. For a while it worked, but Helen started drinking again; she became a liability on the radio and an embarrassment to the flotilla.

  The Whelans moved back to Castle Hill and their marriage went downhill fast. Bernie would find empty wine casks and bottles in the wardrobe. One day he came home from a business trip and found Helen passed out on the floor. Twelve-year-old Marita had not been fed or bathed for days. Shane, fourteen, and Trevor, nineteen, had moved out into a flat, unable to cope with their mother’s drunken tantrums. Now Bernie moved out too. For the moment, Marita would stay with her mother.

  While his twenty-year marriage was ending, Bernie’s business dreams were being fulfilled—Crown had an annual turnover of several hundred million dollars. And then he met Kerry. Bernie thought the 21-year-old had real class. Kerry had grown into a vivacious, confident woman. She had a sharp tongue, a clever wit and style.

  Bernie telephoned Kerry a few weeks after they met. He had been away, travelling. He asked her to meet him in Adelaide for a drink, saying, ‘Your flight is booked and the plane leaves at 5.30 p.m.’ Kerry was impressed. Looking across the table at her in the Adelaide bar, Bernie was smitten. Their twenty-year age difference troubled neither of them, although it worried Kerry’s parents.

  Kerry’s brother Brett was the first to meet Bernie. Brett had ended up in Gosford Hospital after a serious motorbike accident. He woke from surgery to find Kerry standing beside his bed with a grey-headed man. Bernie had a pile of motorbike brochures under his arm. ‘I want to buy some new bikes for the farm, mate,’ he told Brett. ‘You know all about bikes.’ Brett was impressed. God, you are smooth, he thought.

  Leo Ryan gave Bernie the once-over and thought he was not too bad. Despite the grey hair, Bernie looked young for his age, which seemed to narrow the gap. But Bernie was the opposite of Leo. Where Leo came from Struggle Street, Bernie was ensconced in a world of money. Leo hated expensive cars, Bernie had a Mercedes and a boat, yet the two got on marvellously, helped by the fact that while Bernie had wealth, he never flaunted it.

  Kerry dropped out of teachers college and began travelling on business trips with Bernie. His clients loved her vivacious personality. She was assured, amusing and she loved a verbal joust. When Kerry became pregnant in 1980, they decided to get married. Bernie would later recall, ‘Kerry was happiest when she was pregnant and having babies. She could have had ten.’ After Sarah, came Matthew three years later, then James.

  When Sarah started horse riding and the Whelans met Marge and Amanda Minton-Taylor, it just seemed like an extension of their family. Kerry and the Minton-Taylor women were more like sisters than just friends, and they always seemed to be having adventures. Kerry was outgoing and at times quite gregarious but Marge had also seen her nervous, overcautious side. While driving one night, Marge and Kerry noticed a horse on the road. They chased it down a laneway and into a property. Marge got out and opened the gate of the stranger’s property to drive in. Kerry was panicked, and extremely hesitant. ‘You can’t drive down someone’s drive. Don’t go in, Marge, you don’t know what could happen.’ She was shaken, and Marge, who had always admired Kerry’s outgoing personality, was shocked at her timidity.

  Kerry and Bernie idolised one another. During their seventeen-year marriage Bernie would often arrive home with flowers; every Friday was ‘date night’, when they would go to dinner without the children. Bernie had found the loving, stable family life he had yearned for. Kerry never worried about ‘other women’ and had once told her brother, Brett Ryan, ‘It’s not exactly his character. He is more than happy to be at home playing with the kids than doing anything like that. Bernie is the most uncomplicated person I know. If you had told me seventeen years ago I would still have been happily married to the one man, I would have laughed at you.’

  But Bernie’s wealth was unimportant to Kerry, whose family was her focus. She loved being around people, and always tried to see the best in them, although at times she suffered for it. ‘I’m sick of being a walking chequebook,’ she told Marge after someone had tried to rip her off on the sale of a horse.

&
nbsp; Leo and June were concerned that some people put it over their daughter and Bernie. They worried that supposed friends turned up for the toys and the high life.

  ‘You’re too trusting and open with people,’ Leo told his daughter. ‘Be careful, love. You get too close to those people and something will happen. It’ll end in tears.’

  17 DADDY’S

  LITTLE GIRL

  Sarah Whelan lay in the Sydney Adventist Hospital under an assumed name. The fifteen-year-old had never felt more vulnerable in her life, despite her mask of feisty indifference. It was 30 June, the eve of her second major operation. In twelve hours, Sarah would be undergoing surgery and her mother should have been there to reassure her, sit with her while she waited for the operation and be there when she woke. Sarah was resentful that she wasn’t. Life had never seemed so unsure. She was not even herself anymore. So intense was the media obsession with her mother’s kidnap, the hospital had registered her under a pseudonym. ‘Sarah Merrick’ read the clipboard above her bed. Merrick was her grandmother’s maiden name.

  Security guards at the hospital were keeping a special watch out for reporters disguised as nurses or doctors and checking the CCTV cameras regularly. A tabloid magazine had offered the Whelans $50 000 for an interview and photographs of Sarah in her hospital bed. Furious, Bernie had told the magazine he would have none of it. For the next week, Bernie would pose as a doctor himself, with a newly minted, fake hospital pass pinned on his jacket for easy entry and egress. Security guards were on alert at the hospital entrances for people pretending to be staff members or anyone carrying a camera.

  Bernie knew how tough this was for his rebellious little wild child who feigned stoicism for the benefit of himself and her brothers. The following day, a surgeon would remove Sarah’s bowel and large intestine and make a new bowel out of the latter. The operation would take six hours. Not only was his daughter facing a serious operation, Bernie could not help but compare the road she was about to travel with her previous experience in the same hospital and felt like an inadequate carer. Kerry had commandeered Sarah’s previous hospital stay like it was part-military operation, part VIP tour. Kerry was there to clasp her daughter’s hand, tell her the facts, fend away any unsympathetic interference and cushion Sarah’s post-operative recuperation with toys and visitors.