When Dallas started her own business and as it was becoming more successful, was ‘Bruce . . . spending more time at Hillydale?’
Tedeschi ticked off a few more items: the post-marriage financial settlement, whether Bruce had a typewriter, Bruce’s back injury.
Dallas believed he may have complained about a sore back, but it was nothing serious.
Phil Young stood to cross-examine Dallas Bromley for the defence. He was a more comfortable performer than Dalton, but although he persisted for several minutes, he failed to pin down an admission from Dallas that Bruce had a serious back injury; nor did he elicit any evidence of a reasonable contribution to the couple’s finances made by Bruce’s efforts on the farm. Basically, Bruce was shaping up as a shirker. The next two voices in court would confirm the impression.
Just before the lunch break, Tedeschi played a taped conversation between Burrell and Lawrence Brown, a Bungonia neighbour. The call was recorded on a listening device on Burrell’s telephone on the afternoon of 22 May 1997, the day before the phone call from the kidnapper was made to Crown Equipment from a Goulburn phone box. By then, Burrell’s property was under siege by Detective Inspector Couch’s search team and Burrell’s cars had been impounded. Burrell sorely needed a vehicle to get into town. Neverthless, his voice on the tape is light-hearted and blokey.
‘Hello, mate,’ he says to Brown, ‘the reason I rang is I was talking to Charlie this morning. I’ve got a little bit of a problem at the moment. I haven’t got a vehicle. Charlie suggested you might have a spare vehicle there at the moment.’
Brown did not. ‘You haven’t?’ Bruce sounded hurt. ‘. . . Jesus Christ.’
The Bruce Burrell in the courtroom had flushed red and was coughing and blowing his nose. But the Burrell on the tape was talking on, dominating the conversation, with only short replies from Brown. Burrell sounded cocky despite his circumstances: ‘Fuckin’ oath . . . how much rego? Yes, mate . . . errrghhhh . . . can’t lend me some money, can you?’ Burrell said, and complained about Dallas.
Lawrence Brown: ‘What has she done to you?’
Burrell: ‘Aw, mate, all sorts of strange things . . . have you got a lazy fifteen grand in your back pocket . . . ?’ There was a long pause before Brown agreed he did not have that sort of money. Burrell continued: ‘Oh, mate, not a lot of joy . . . bloody hope so . . . not a lot of joy . . . anyway I’ll tell you about that when I see you.’ Bruce mentioned a mutual friend of his and Brown’s: ‘He’s still running away like a fucking lunatic . . . oh shit, mate, oh, mate . . . money at the moment. Oh, mate, long story . . . tell me about it . . . Thanks, Lawrie, see you, mate.’
The call ended. Bruce sneaked a look at the jury. The jurors were looking away from him, as if they were embarassed.
Tedeschi called his next witness. John Dennis Fogarty had grey hair, wore a grey suit and glasses and carried a briefcase. He looked like an accountant, and he was—a forensic accountant employed by the New South Wales Police’s fraud squad to analyse financial information related to crimes.
Mr Fogarty had examined Bruce Burrell’s bank accounts from 1993 to 1997. In the months leading up to 1997, when Burrell would incur the $127 000 mortgage on Hillydale as part of his financial separation, his bank balance dwindled from $16 000 in July 1996 to $6700 in January 2007. When the mortgage repayments began to feed on the account, the amount dipped further. By April 1997, he had just $1188 in the bank and a monthly mortgage repayment of $1016.
‘Now do you agree with this,’ Tedeschi put to Fogarty, ‘as at the beginning of April 1997, the accused in these accounts did not have enough to both live on and to pay that month’s rent?’ The evidence would allow Tedeschi to sum up: as of April 1997 Burrell was a desperate man of little means.
To top off his day, Tedeschi called three more witnesses. Kerry Whelan’s friends, Tony and Mary Garnett, affirmed she was a ‘devoted mum’.
Brett Ryan, Kerry’s brother, said she was ‘very clucky . . . her life basically focused around her three children’.
‘And what did you observe about Kerry’s and Bernard’s relationship?’
‘Particularly strong,’ Brett said.
Tedeschi left the court grounds smiling and returned to his chambers. Mark Alfredo Guido Tedeschi is said to very occasionally like a drink after a long day.
40 EFFING MONEY
Peter Buckley was quite a handsome man, aged in his forties with brown hair and glasses, but there was a sharpish quality to him that made him unlikable. He had a cocky air, an uppity way in which he answered questions, even those of the Crown prosecutor, who had called him as a witness.
With less compelling evidence to give, Buckley might have appeared like many a twenty-first-century businessman— slick, confident, perhaps full of himself—but he caught everyone’s attention, not least for the string of profanities which streamed from him into the court. They were not Buckley’s own words, but those of the accused, which Buckley quoted from an encounter between the two men almost a decade earlier. A short series of questions from Mark Tedeschi had brought Buckley to this point. How did he know the accused?
As the owner-director of a company called Ultra Tune, Buckley said he was introduced to Bruce Burrell in 1995, and over half a dozen lunches, they had discussed advertising campaigns for Buckley’s company, though little came of it. In early 1997, Burrell asked Buckley for a favour to enable him to secure a bank loan of $125 000. Burrell wanted a letter stating—falsely—that Buckley paid him an annual salary of $60 000 to $80 000. Buckley refused, but it did not deter Burrell, who put the bite on his associate again when he sensed an opportunity.
Buckley’s company had become involved in legal proceedings which landed Ultra Tune in a court case. This time, Burrell asked for a $15 000 fee in return for giving sworn evidence in an affidavit to be presented in the court. Buckley was not interested in an affidavit from Burrell, or being bribed.
Over several months, Burrell again approached Buckley. The answer was always no. As Buckley now told the court, he was probably ‘a little bit weak in not cutting him off straight away’. On the occasion that Burrell made his last unsuccessful approach for a $15 000 loan, Bruce was ‘very hostile’.
Tedeschi nodded at Buckley: ‘When you say hostile, what did he say to you?’ The witness gulped and looked up at Justice Barr. ‘Your Honour, am I allowed . . .?’
‘As best you can,’ Tedeschi interrupted, ‘would you use the actual words the accused said?’
‘He said . . .’ Buckley paused, ‘. . . “I want you to give me the fucking money. If you don’t give me the fucking money you’d just fucking well better or else” and threatened me on the phone.’
‘Did you have any further contact with him?’
‘I tried to avoid him and, other than him tricking me one day, I always managed to avoid him.’
The jury stared at Buckley in the witness box, their mouths open, astonished, yet wanting more. But Tedeschi ended his questions and let silence fill the room. His witness had just inflicted a gaping wound on the defence case and he was happy to let it bleed.
When Phil Young stood to cross-examine Buckley, or at least to dent his reputation as a completely honest operator, the barrister’s fatherly voice turned a little nasty. ‘You’re changing your position now, sir,’ Young said, and accused Buckley of altering the evidence he had given at the hearing during which Burrell was committed for trial.
Buckley might have been a man blighted by circumstance— at one point in his business history he had been made bankrupt and, at another, a former partner had reported him to the companies’ watchdog of the mid-1990s, the Australian Securities Commission. But he was damned if a lawyer was going to slur his name. He came back to Young snarling, ‘I am not changing my position at all.’
Young tried to throw doubt on Buckley’s claim that Burrell had asked him for a falsified letter about his employment. Young’s tone was acidly polite, ‘Sir, I suggest to you that the suggestion for such a letter w
as a total fabrication on your part.’
This infuriated Buckley. ‘Totally false?’ he spat out the words. ‘It is absolutely one hundred per cent correct that he asked me for that letter.’
After lunch, the Crown prosecutor sought to re-examine Buckley. It was an opportunity to allow the witness to again quote Burrell’s threat and Tedeschi mostly managed to conceal his delight in hearing it a second time in open court, albeit slightly paraphrased. In the gallery, on the jury benches, in the media seats, men and women leant forward to catch it. This time, Buckley used the word ‘fucking’ twice.
Two men in the public benches smiled appreciatively at Buckley’s newer rendition. It was a welcome distraction from frustrating days of long legal arguments and boring hours of defence applications. For the court-watchers, there had been a five-day gap in live witness evidence before the jury, and they had sought entertainment elsewhere in the Darlinghurst complex, sitting in on other cases while Dalton plighted his troth with Justice Barr. They were not legal experts, but outside the courtroom one observer told reporters he thought the case for Burrell’s innocence was floundering, that it was drowning in a sea of delays and faltering and useless entreaties to the judge.
David Dalton was pushing for more opportunities to argue one of the main thrusts of his case: that underworld criminals had caused Mrs Whelan’s disappearance and the police were too incompetent, or did not have the will, to investigate properly. Dalton wanted to delve into the Taskforce Bellaire running sheets, the daily records of Dennis Bray’s investigation, which included every scrap of information, each phone call, every anonymous tip-off , and each morsel of hearsay or just plain gossip. Dalton’s contention was that the police had never bothered pursuing new leads once Burrell stepped into their sights.
Dalton was chewing on an old bone though, and Justice Barr looked inclined to throw it out. He was not convinced he should allow the running sheets to be included in the evidence and Tedeschi warned him that, if Dalton got his way, the Crown would be forced to comprehensively disprove that Karl Bonnette, or Bernie Whelan’s adopted son, or any dark figure from the Whelans’ distant past, might have taken Kerry. That might require the Crown calling twenty or thirty witnesses, perhaps from the United States; the trial would be very prolonged. Dalton reminded the judge that it ‘was always part of the defence case that a major attack would be made upon the effectiveness of the police investigation’. Justice Barr said he would think about it.
By the next morning, Dalton had conceded to the Crown’s advice: that he was not going to win the right to raise hearsay evidence from the police running sheets, so he would have to stick to cross-examining Dennis Bray about the ‘failure to investigate a number of other suspects’.
Dalton continued to insist he needed more time. Justice Barr said he was keen to keep the trial ticking over, with the jury in the court. He wanted to end the examination-in-chief of Bray and to hear a particular witness who had journeyed down from Cairns to appear in the judge’s court. Dalton countered that he needed time to re-examine and analyse all the papers found in Burrell’s farm house, the formidable twenty-two bags of documents seized by Taskforce Bellaire. His Honour scotched the application almost immediately, but Dalton argued on. He had an enormous exercise to go through all the documents.
Justice Barr apologised to the jury for the hours and days of exclusion from the courtroom. ‘I am sure you will understand that criminal trials don’t just happen,’ he said in his avuncular manner. ‘Barristers don’t just stand up, call a name and a witness walks through the door. An enormous amount of work has to be done in the preparation of any criminal trial . . .’
The next witness who walked in through the door was a bottle blonde with a plump face and prominent bags under her eyes. Although her appearance would be brief, she looked terribly unhappy to be there. Bruce Burrell’s sister, Debbie, bore a slight family resemblance to the accused, who put his head down as she took the stand after lunch. Her evidence was lacklustre. She denied ever providing financial support to her brother, other than $50 for bread and milk following a farm stay at Bungonia while police were searching the property.
The next family witness looked nothing like his relative, but then Trevor Ross Whelan was adopted. A trained shipwright who now lived in Cairns, Trevor Whelan’s difference from his father was more profound than just in appearance. Where Bernie was the neatly pressed executive, Trevor was a working-class man. Balding and bearded, he wore a black T-shirt and a tattoo on his forearm.
Only a year younger than his murdered stepmother, Kerry, Trevor said he had resented Kerry when she came into his father’s life, suspecting she was ‘a money grubber’. Trevor then thirty-six, had gone to the family home in Castle Hill after he learned his parents had separated and found Kerry there. He believed Bernie’s new relationship financially disadvantaged his alcoholic mother who, he claimed, had been pushed aside in the marriage settlement.
Trevor agreed with Tedeschi that a violent confrontation in which he threatened Bernie with a knife had played out in front of Kerry. At the time he was working for Bernie’s boat company, Whelan Marine. Bernie cut his son from his will and Trevor disappeared to northern Queensland. Over time, the animosity abated and, though distant, Trevor had reconciled with his father.
David Dalton asked Trevor why his father had named him as a suspect to the police investigating Kerry’s disappearance. ‘Do you agree with your father’s assertion, in May 1997, that you are a “violent and disturbed person . . . capable of many things?”.’
Trevor Whelan answered in a soft voice, ‘I am capable of a lot of things. I had my problems, yes.’ The adopted son appeared a rather mild man, perhaps not so unlike Bernie after all. He left the court complex in the sunshine and a flash of media cameras and made his way back to Sydney airport.
41 TRIAL AND
ERROR
The sex bomb, as an old court-watcher had taken to calling one of the women jurors, was wearing a coral-coloured frock and silver hoop earrings. She was smiling, although behind the scenes the twelve members of the jury were bogged down in conflict and arguing daily about the case. But the ‘gypsy’, as she was known among the reporters covering the case, looked around the courtroom as if she wanted to chat, so convivial was the atmosphere on that balmy afternoon of Thursday 29 September.
Rays of sun beamed through the high windows down on to the heads of the courtroom participants. On the media benches, the Telegraph’s Nicolette Casella joked with the television reporters. With the good weather, and no expectation of serious evidence to note down for the day, had come a holiday feel and only Bruce Burrell, his lips pursed in that pious way he had, seemed to disapprove. He stared on balefully as the female reporter laughed and he put his hand to his mouth. The chain-smoker had a persistent cough.
David Dalton resumed his work on Bray and kept at it all morning, as he had the previous day, to negligible effect. The Herald’s Malcolm Brown ventured that for all his thrashing, no doves of freedom had flown from the bush. Despite the effort Dalton had put in to building up to this apogee for the defence case—that the police inadequately investigated the Whelan kidnap—Dalton seemed to have parked himself in a corner and he was frustrated.
After the long sessions of legal argument, the defence seemed to become stalled in a history lesson about old Sydney crims. Dalton was very interested in why Mr Whelan had sought protection, twenty-five years previously, when the late transport millionaire, Sir Peter Abeles, set one of his goons on Bernie with a threat against Kerry and the children because Crown was perceived as a business rival to Abeles’s company, TNT.
Tedeschi objected. What relevance could a threat so many years ago have?
‘I think the early eighties,’ Justice Barr said, ‘is a bit too early.’
Was it possible Kerry Whelan departed the country under a false name, leaving a hapless Burrell to take the blame? ‘You . . . did not concern yourself with other lines of enquiry that presented themselves,’ Dal
ton said, ‘that might suggest she had been the architect of her own disappearance or someone other than Mr Burrell had been responsible for her disappearance. Isn’t that right?’
Inspector Bray did not accept that.
‘You kept an open mind about it?’
‘Yes.’
The questioning stretched on into the afternoon as Dalton picked the eyes out of the police running sheets. Hadn’t Don Moxham from Radio 2GB heard a story about someone who had a conversation with Kerry Whelan in a bank and Kerry had said she was considering changing her lifestyle?
That, Tedeschi rose to object, was double hearsay.
Regularly, the judge had to eject the jury so legal argument could ensue. It was clear this did not sit well with the judge. He hated the idea that his trial might not be running well, or that the case might have become disjointed for the jury.
Why, asked Dalton, had Inspector Bray not pursued a claim by a chauffeur called Ivan Pierre? Pierre said he drove Russell Goward and Kerry Whelan from the Parkroyal on 6 May to an address in Strathfield. In the car, Mrs Whelan said she had caught her husband cheating on her. ‘I would seek to cross-examine the detective inspector over his failure to locate this particular limousine driver.’
Tedeschi was incensed. ‘My learned friend could have called Mr Goward. He could have interviewed Mr Goward.’
It became a tennis game. Dalton would suggest an area of enquiry; Tedeschi would demand he explain its relevance. More than once, Justice Barr would rule Dalton’s questions too remote.
Dalton who seemed to be gaining only the irritation of the judge, returned to his favourite crim, Karl Bonnette, and said there had been an allegation that Bonnette and a hit man called ‘little Joe’ were connected with the kidnapping of a union organiser.
‘I think this is too old,’ Justice Barr said.
Dalton said a little tersely that he did not require the inspector for any further questioning.
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