Any other person would have sought work. Not Bruce. He had a grander plan. It would be an ambitious and elaborate venture, which would be more daring than anything he had done before. He would use intimidation, and violence if necessary, to regain power and control. But it would make him rich. Burrell would take his time; this would require patient and meticulous planning. It would be similar to a contract killing, except he did not need a hit man. Burrell would do the killing himself. On hot January nights at Hillydale, Burrell sat drinking beer on his verandah, and writing outlines for a kidnap and ransom that would captivate a nation. It would go down in history as one of Australia’s great unsolved crimes.
On 14 January 1997, Burrell called the help desk at Canon Australia, which dealt with customer enquiries about Canon typewriters, printers and other devices. Details of the call were not logged, but police believe Burrell was enquiring about the ‘daisy wheel’ in his Canon typewriter.
Around the same time, Burrell was trying to get his hands on a boat. He asked his former boss, Peter Buckley, if he knew anybody who owned one.
‘What do you want it for?’ Buckley said.
‘I want to go fishing, about eight to ten kilometres from shore.’
Burrell had never shown an interest in boats or fishing. His question surprised Buckley, who could not help him, and did not want to. He had started to become wary of Burrell. He did not quite trust him. In January 1997 Burrell had asked Buckley for help in refinancing a loan. ‘Maaate,’ he said, ‘can you write me a letter and say I work for you and earn sixty or seventy thousand?’
‘I don’t want to do that sort of thing, that’s fraud,’ Buckley said. Over the next few months, Burrell approached Buckley again, pestering him for a loan of $15 000. Four times he asked, saying, ‘You’ve got to help me out. I need some money. I promise you, I’ll pay the money back.’ When Buckley turned him down for the last time, Burrell became threatening: ‘Get me the fucking money, right, just make it fucking happen.’ Not many people scared Buckley. But Burrell had. He severed all contact with Burrell, refusing to take his calls.
Oddly though, while Burrell was desperately seeking out cash, he was making plans for big-buck ventures. On 28 February he phoned the Tasmania Development and Resource Office in Hobart and spoke to Benjamin Wagner about setting up a winery in the region. Burrell said he intended moving to Tasmania and wanted to know about costings and the viability of growing grapes there.
‘You’d need a minimum of $400 000, sir, and that’s not including the associated costs.’ Mr Wagner said the total outlay would be a million dollars and Burrell did not make any protest at the amount.
By April, Burrell’s funds had drained. His bank balance read $1650. Another mortgage repayment was due to be deducted soon. Burrell picked up the phone and punched in the number for Crown Equipment. Burrell had not spoken to his former boss, Bernie Whelan, in four years, yet he knew Bernie would be polite and forthcoming. Burrell took notes as Bernie explained that he travelled to Adelaide every second Wednesday for work. ‘And how’s Kerry and the kids?’ Burrell asked before hanging up.
Burrell put down the phone and looked at his diary circling Wednesday 16 April. Before then, however, there was much to do. With gloves on, he typed the ransom letter. He had spent days crafting it. He thought it was brilliant. He threw the daisy wheel and ribbon in a fire he lit in the yard.
Burrell would need to create an alibi. He decided to stay at his father’s house at North Balgowlah, on Sydney’s northern beaches, on 15 April. The next morning, he told Allan Burrell he was going to a demonstration at the Macquarie shopping centre. He laid a large sheet of plastic in the boot of his Jaguar, and then drove his car towards the Whelans’ property, the ransom note in his top pocket. At Kurrajong he discovered an unexpected obstacle: Amanda Minton-Taylor and James Whelan were at home with Kerry. It was bad luck, but Burrell prided himself on thinking on his feet. He was flexible and resourceful.
Whatever Burrell told Kerry, it was enough for her to agree to meet him on 6 May at Parramatta. Burrell drove back to his father’s house. He decided not to redo the ransom letter. Too hard—besides, he reckoned it was a work of genius.
Burrell was isolated down on the farm. Occasionally he saw his neighbours, the Coopers. He sometimes phoned Dallas, although she always tried to end the conversation quickly. She had recently confided to a friend, ‘It’s funny how you can live with someone for eleven years and not really know them.’
Dallas was due to fly to Italy on 7 May. She had been diagnosed with cervical abnormalities and wanted a rest before surgery. Two days before she flew out, Burrell called her. He was angry and she could not make sense of his tirade: ‘Slow down, Bruce. What are you talking about?’ Dallas said. Her ex-husband complained that the rates bill had arrived, and even though Hillydale was now mortgaged solely to him, the letter still had Dallas and her mother listed as the owners. Dallas told him she would sort it out. She could not wait to be on that plane and away from him. She had no idea, however, what she would return to.
Burrell was concocting a new alibi. This time it would be a sore back, which would confine him to bed for the first ten days of May. He set the alibi in motion on Sunday 4 May by visiting his neighbours, Kevin and Beryl Cooper, where he complained of a crook back. Burrell stood at the door talking to Kevin; he told his neighbour he was unable to sit down.
‘How ’bout a VB, Bruce?’ but Burrell knocked back the offer. Cooper was surprised—Burrell’s back must be bad, he thought.
Burrell had called his doctor two days earlier to report a sciatic nerve problem and ask for a prescription. On Monday 5 May, despite his supposed ailing back, Burrell drove into Goulburn and bought two cartons of VB, which he carried to his car. He also banked one of his few remaining cheques, for $150. He had just $634 in his bank account.
The next morning, 6 May 1997, Burrell left Hillydale at 8 a.m. and headed to the Parkroyal Hotel at Parramatta. It was a clear yet cool morning. It was time for Burrell to put his master plan into action. He would never have to worry about money again.
28 IN THE FIRST
DEGREE
On April Fool’s Day 1999, Bruce Burrell woke up in new surroundings. He had been brought down to Sydney in a prison van the night before and taken to a cell at Silverwater prison and then on to the Sydney Police Centre in Surry Hills that morning. Dennis Bray wanted a word.
Dressed in prison greens, Burrell was ushered without handcuffs into the charge room of the centre’s homicide and serial violent crime unit. Bray and another detective, Nigel Warren, were seated at a rectangular table.
‘Mr Burrell,’ Bray began. ‘We are here to inform you that you are under arrest for the kidnap and murder of Kerry Patricia Whelan—’
‘What?’ interrupted a surprised Burrell. His eyes bulged slightly and he flushed red.
Bray continued: ‘… on May 6, 1997, at Parramatta.’ Burrell leant forward as Bray delivered the lines: ‘You are not obliged to say or do anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do or say will be recorded and used in evidence. Do you understand that?’
‘Yeah, I mean I don’t understand,’ Burrell said, clutching his hands together tightly. It was almost two years since Kerry Whelan’s disappearance and as far as Burrell was concerned, the case was closed. If police had evidence, they would have moved before this. So he thought.
Bray and Warren left the interview room, telling Burrell that a custody officer would speak to him. Thirty minutes later, they returned. Burrell had acquired the on-duty Legal Aid solicitor, Greg Meakin. Bray began the formal interview at 7.48 a.m., starting with the usual questions: name, current occupation . . .
Burrell deadpanned: ‘I’m an inmate of the New South Wales prison system.’
As soon as Bray turned to questions about the kidnap and disappearance of Mrs Whelan, Burrell became defensive. ‘I’ve got no comment,’ he declared.
‘Do you intend to answer any questions in relation to this matter?’
‘I don’t believe so. No, on legal advice,’ he glared at Bray.
Bray stared coolly back. ‘Would you like me to show you a number of items of evidence in this matter?’
‘Yes.’ Burrell seemed astonishingly confident. Almost smug. If he thought that Bray could not have much on him, he was wrong.
Bray played the footage from the security surveillance cameras at the Parkroyal Hotel in Parramatta, which, he told Burrell, had recorded activities within and outside the hotel on the day Mrs Whelan vanished. Nigel Warren paused and rewound the tape as Bray pointed out people and movements to Burrell.
Burrell remained expressionless, although, until this moment he had not been aware of the film’s existence. Yet he did not flinch. He refused to agree it was his vehicle in the video, repeating only, ‘I’ve got no comment to make at all. On legal advice.’
Bray handed him the next exhibit. The ransom note. Burrell read it through the plastic sleeve it was contained in. He shoved it back to Bray. ‘It means nothing to me.’ To Bray’s trained eye, the witness looked deeply unsettled. He became combative, telling Bray that he could ask all he liked but he would not be saying a word. Question after question prompted answer after answer of ‘no comment’.
Bray showed him the dot point notes, then asked him to read the statement from Crown’s secretary Kathleen Pemberton. Pemberton had taken the call from the kidnapper. No comment again.
Burrell was mute and his mouth was dry. ‘Can I have a glass of water?’ he asked at 8.22 a.m., ‘I’ve got a dreadful cold.’
When the interview resumed, Bray showed him the transcript of the 15 June police interview conducted at his home. Burrell did not read it; he didn’t need to. Perhaps, he had gone over and over the admissions he made to Bray on that fateful day long ago and realised his mistake.
Bray put to him the final three pieces of evidence: the Canon typewriter, the phone call he made to Canon, and the chloroform bottle. Burrell said nothing.
‘Is there anything further you wish to say about this matter?’ Bray asked.
‘No, there is not, except that I am not involved,’ Burrell said with disdain.
The interview finished at 8.50 a.m. and shortly after 9.30 a.m. a press release, which had been prepared earlier, was faxed to newsrooms, informing them of a media conference. At 10 a.m. the head of Crime Agencies, Clive Small, addressed a crush of journalists at the College Street headquarters. It was probably Bray’s right to do so, but Small was fond of the limelight.
‘A short time ago Crime Agencies detectives charged a 46-year-old man with the abduction and murder of Mrs Kerry Whelan,’ he said. ‘He will be appearing in Central Local Court later today.’
Everyone knew the unnamed man was Bruce Burrell, but until his court appearance his name was not able to be reported.
Burrell arrived at court in a police Holden Commodore with four detectives. He sat in the middle of the back seat with a white towel over his head. During the fifteen-minute hearing, the prosecution told the court the kidnap and murder charge relied on a five-folder brief of evidence. Included in it would be an allegation that Burrell wrote two notes, outlining a kidnap and ransom demand, which were found in his house with an empty bottle of chloroform. The court heard that Burrell was serving prison sentences for five convictions and was not due for release until April 2001. The magistrate, Michael Price, asked the media to show caution in reporting matters in the prosecution’s summary of the case which might not be relied upon or admissible at trial. Burrell then went back on the truck to Silverwater, en route to Kirkconnell prison farm near Lithgow.
‘He isn’t pleased, of course,’ Burrell’s barrister, Mr John Doris, told a reporter outside the court. ‘But he’s keeping his spirits up as best he can.’
Mr Joe Scarcella, Crown Equipment’s solicitor representing the family, described the charges against Burrell as ‘a major development . . . I can’t comment a great deal more other than to say Mr Whelan has faith in the judicial system,’ Mr Scarcella said.
29 IN TATTERS
‘I plead not guilty, Your Honour,’ boomed Bruce Burrell from the dock of the New South Wales Supreme Court.
Burrell had not spoken publicly in two years. He stood, in a crushed navy suit and scuffed tan shoes, with his head cocked back. A shabby briefcase, which looked empty, lay on the seat beside him. He was this time represented by Legal Aid, unable to afford the services of private counsel, John Doris, and stared directly ahead as he was formally indicted for the kidnap and murder of Kerry Patricia Whelan.
It was 5 May 2000, almost three years to the day since the mother-of-three had disappeared. Burrell’s lawyer, David Dalton, a stocky man with a square head and little-to-no neck, leapt to his feet, telling Justice Michael Kirby that the pre-trial legal argument, or voir dire, would be lengthy. A trial date was set for many months down the track, in the new year.
When the case again reached a Supreme Court room, it went before the dapper Justice Brian Sully, a lover of legal tradition and loather of the media. On 29 January 2001, Dalton rose to object to fourteen pieces of Crown evidence, in particular the admissibility of the dot point notes, which had been seized from Burrell’s house on 25 May 1997, two days after the search warrant had expired. Dalton also claimed that the dot points had been found during an ‘unlawful, mass sweeping up of any and every piece of paper in the home’. Burrell was enjoying this show of strength; a smirk drifted across his face. His hands were clenched in his lap.
Dalton grilled Detective Mick Howe over the orders the detective had given to officers searching Burrell’s house. ‘Did you ask the police to remove every scrap of paper or every document that you found?’ Dalton said.
‘Yes,’ Howe replied.
‘Did you ever look at the search warrant?’
‘Not that I recall.’
Howe said he told his officers he wanted ‘everything’ from the house.
‘Did you wonder whether you were empowered to do that under the search warrant?’
‘No.’
Justice Sully shook his head slightly and picked up his pen. His response was formalised a week later, on 6 February when he ruled in favour of Burrell. The documents had indeed been seized unlawfully but the judge said it would be up to the Crown to argue that despite this, the document held high probative value which far outweighed the prejudicial element.
Over the next weeks, Crown prosecutor Barry Newport and Dalton were at loggerheads, challenging the admissibility of the evidence. Newport was called on to prosecute the case at the last minute because Mark Tedeschi was required to appear at the murder trial of former Fairfield councillor Phuong Ngo, who was accused of the assassination of his political rival, John Newman. Tedeschi, who had been liaising closely with Bray from the outset, was disappointed he could not run the Whelan trial but it could not be helped. Burrell was enjoying the legal stoush. He had been in jail since 1998 and his excursions to the dock of the Supreme Court relieved him of some of the tedium of life behind bars.
On 5 March, six taskforce detectives and a lone court reporter, Cindy Wockner from the Daily Telegraph, filed into the court for Justice Sully’s judgment. His Honour’s face was unreadable under his long wig. The judge turned to the fourteen disputed pieces of evidence. He ruled that the dot point notes were authentic and written by Burrell, but had been obtained in a ‘cavalier approach’ by police. ‘The relevant authorities would have only themselves to blame if this court were now to exclude the evidence on that account. And yet in the present particular case, there are powerful countervailing considerations. If Mrs Whelan was indeed abducted and murdered, then whoever abducted her committed . . . what is one of the most serious crimes known to law.’ Justice Sully said it would be ‘an outrage upon common sense and a defiance of elementary justice’ to exclude the dot point material.
In the court, Howe relaxed his shoulders somewhat. But if the taskforce believed the decision was an indicator of the rest of the judgment, Howe and Dennis Bray
would be disappointed. Sully disallowed nine pieces of evidence because their ‘prejudicial nature’ to a jury far outweighed their ‘probative value’. He struck out the highlighted list of rich Australians in the Business Review Weekly magazine. He excluded the evidence that Burrell had told a friend that ‘you could bury a body’ on his property, and he would not allow evidence that Burrell had enquired about setting up a winery around the time that Kerry Whelan disappeared.
Expert analysis which found the author of the ransom note had experience as a copywriter was struck out because it could be ‘misused by a jury’. The judge also excluded Burrell’s phone call to the Help desk at Canon. The chloroform bottle found in the accused’s home could not be put before a jury because ‘the jury will reason impermissibly that the evidence has a significance’, Justice Sully said.
He also barred James Whelan’s evidence about Burrell’s secret visit to Kerry. The ‘risk of misuse is significant’, Justice Sully said. Parts of Amanda Minton-Taylor’s account of that visit were struck out too. Burrell’s defence had objected to the admission of Mrs Whelan’s comment, ‘That bastard, why did he do this to me?’ Justice Sully said the words were ‘vague’ and ‘obscure’, and it was not known who Mrs Whelan was referring to. Sully firmly ruled out the evidence of Burrell’s arsenal of weapons. He said a jury could conclude ‘that Burrell was a man who . . . kept unlicensed weapons . . . and who was therefore just the type of violence-prone individual quite capable of murdering Mrs Whelan’. It was the judge’s ninth and final exclusion. It had taken His Honour just thirty-five minutes to smash apart four years of investigative work. But there were still enough pieces left for a conviction, Bray believed.
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