Ladykiller

by Candace Sutton

  But, as Bray would later note, Bruce Burrell was different from any criminal he had dealt with over his decades as a detective. Bray had arrested confidence tricksters and helped lock up murderers, but in his vast experience he had never found the two types rolled into the one package. He had never encountered a conman as slick as Bruce Burrell, with such a bent for violence.

  Even after his incarceration for murder, Bruce Burrell was still ripping off people—this time, Australian taxpayers who have had to fund his legal defence for the past twelve years through the Legal Services Commission and the Public Defenders office. Between 1998 and 2008, Burrell has relied on the Australian public to pay for senior counsel from Legal Aid to defend him. It took a coronial inquest, a committal hearing, and three murder trials to get him behind bars. The cost to taxpayers runs well into the millions.

  Behind the scenes, his barrister fought all the way for a stay application for the trials not to go ahead, and following his convictions, Burrell has launched four appeals. Each of the three trials cost the state on average $35 000 a day, amassing to about $2.1 million for the first Whelan trial, $1.75 million for the second and $1.225 million for the Dorothy Davis trial, making a $5 million bill for the murder trials alone. The tab has been running too, for each day his counsel has spent preparing for the trials, for his sentence hearings and for his four appeals against his convictions.

  Since the day he was convicted in June 2006 for murdering Kerry Whelan, Burrell has spent forty-seven days on the Legal Aid teat, and opening old wounds again and again for the families of his victims.

  Dottie’s daughter, Maree Dawes, estimates that the cost of prosecuting Burrell is about $10 million. ‘When does Legal Aid turn the tap off?’ she said. ‘How many hospital beds or teachers in schools could have been funded instead?

  ‘And every time I think we have to get on with our lives, that the dreams have stopped and my family can start being positive, it gets dragged up yet again.’

  Bernie Whelan said his family suffered greatly when the case rose again in the courts. ‘Each time my children have to re-live it. It has a profound effect on them and it’s just not fair. This thing’s been going on for eleven years.’

  On 31 July 2008, Burrell, represented by Ian Barker, QC, won the right in the High Court to have an appeal reheard against his conviction for Kerry Whelan’s murder, after it was discovered that material not in evidence had been handed to the CCA by his defence. Burrell’s defence counsel has also submitted an intention to appeal his conviction for the murder of Dorothy Davis. Taxpayers also funded a court application to suppress evidence from the murder investigations, which was not heard at trial.

  In November 2008, Burrell lost this appeal and the order was lifted, enabling the whole truth about the police case finally to emerge. The circumstantial evidence deemed inadmissible for the juries in the Whelan and Davis trials is compelling. Police, in conjunction with Mark Tedeschi, QC, had calculated that during the three years Bruce Burrell befriended and then killed two women, 21 000 people were reported missing in New South Wales and sixty-one of them were never found. Remarkably, of those sixty-one, just two had no connections with the criminal or drug world. Their names are Kerry Whelan and Dorothy Davis.

  Also suppressed was evidence of a near-empty bottle of chloroform found at Burrell’s farm after Mrs Whelan’s death in 1997. Police believed it was the substance he used to subdue or kill her. Chloroform was also used in the 1995 murder of Mrs Davis, detectives said.

  The jury was never permitted to hear the evidence of a street directory, found in Burrell’s car, marked with a highlighter pen to show the route between Phillip Street, Parramatta, from where Kerry Whelan disappeared, to Smithfield, the location of Bernie Whelan’s factory. Nor did it hear the videotaped interview with Jennette Harvey, a wealthy widow who Burrell was trying to pressure into investing in a phoney diamond scheme and who spoke to Dennis Bray just before her death from cancer.

  ‘I would love the jury who convicted Burrell for my mother’s murder to be able to see that tape, to know that they came to the right conclusion even though they were not allowed to see the evidence like that which existed,’ Maree Dawes said. ‘The judge said they were thoughtful and praised them for being thorough. They should be given the opportunity to see all the suppressed evidence.’

  His legal appeals notwithstanding, Bruce Burrell’s life has ground to a halt. At Lithgow prison, he resides in a wing populated at various times with armed robbers, driving offenders, car thieves and rapists: a dreary but potentially violent assortment of serious and petty crims.

  His wardrobe comprises of tracksuit pants, sloppy joes, T-shirts, shorts, singlets and underpants, all in the same hue of prison green. Each morning he arises around 6.30, makes toast or cereal for breakfast, leaves his cell around 8 a.m. and spends the next six hours working a tedious shift as a process worker, stripping electrical cables, followed by an hour or so to bullshit to the other crims in the yard. Around 3.30 p.m., he returns to his wing for a bland evening meal before settling down in his 3.4 metre x 2.5 metre cell for around sixteen hours with a television for company.

  It is a meaningless existence punctuated by moments of fear, dominated by long stretches of boredom and relieved only by seeing family or friends on weekends when Burrell is trussed up like a turkey in a white synthetic jumpsuit in a crowded visits room.

  While Burrell continues to drain the public coffers, the Whelan and Davis families and the prosecution team have tried to get on with their lives. In the time it has taken for Bruce Burrell to be charged, convicted and sentenced to life, Dennis Bray has seen his children grow from teenagers to adults with children of their own. Bray, widely regarded as one of the state’s best homicide detectives, was promoted in July 2008 to head the newly formed Cold Case Homicide Squad, a unit which is examining hundreds of unsolved cases, among them the disappearance of teenager Trudie Adams from Sydney’s Northern Beaches in 1978.

  Even though Bray is consumed these days with nailing other criminals who believe they have got away with it, Bruce Burrell still lurks at the back of the detective’s mind, along with an enduring disappointment that he was never able to return the bodies of Kerry Whelan and Dorothy Davis to their families.

  Bray’s offsider, Nigel Warren, who also devoted more than a decade to the Burrell investigation, feels so too. As a young detective, his daughter was in nappies when Kerry Whelan disappeared. Now as she prepares for high school, Warren is leading the investigation into NSW obstetrician Graeme Reeves, the so-called ‘Butcher of Bega’, who is accused of the genital mutilation and sexual assault of female patients over two decades.

  Mark Tedeschi has gone on to win a number of other high-profile cases, which has cemented him as the state’s best Crown prosecutor. In November 2008, he was lauded for his successful prosecution of Gordon Wood who threw his girlfriend Caroline Byrne off The Gap at Watson’s Bay in Sydney. Tedeschi’s other career, photography, is flourishing and in 2008 he held an exhibition, Legal Chameleons, which featured some of the country’s best-known barristers in their gowns and wigs doing emphatically non-lawyerly things, including breastfeeding, dishwashing and boxing.

  For Bernie Whelan, the psychological damage of having his wife snatched from him has taken a heavy mental and physical toll. Bernie turns seventy this year (2009) and it shows. He should have been celebrating a happy combined 120-year birthday with Kerry’s whose 50th it would have been in January 2009. Instead, the pain and enduring sorrow haunts his face; twelve years of hard labour fighting for Kerry has left him frail and emotionally unstable.

  ‘He’s never going to be free of it because it has been his life for too long,’ said Bernie’s wife, Deb, whose loving support has probably kept Bernie alive. ‘He has never got over it and never will get over it,’ she said. ‘We take each day at a time.’

  Kerry’s brother, Brett Ryan, who continues to struggle with the loss, said Bernie is very different from the man who married his sister. �
��Bernie was such a young, vibrant, energetic man. Now I look at him and see he is very much his years. Bernie is a living breathing example of the damage Burrell has caused.’

  Bernie won’t speak about the psychological damage, saying his only concern is his children and the heavy burden they carry. ‘It has affected the kids in different ways,’ he said, ‘and only now, all these years later, some of it is finally coming out.

  ‘People have tragedy in their family, someone gets killed and you have a funeral. But it is just ongoing, not knowing where her remains lie. And you never forget. There are always reminders of Kerry wherever you go. One good thing is the family still talk about her. They say: “Mum said this, Mum did that.” It’s lovely to see.’

  James Whelan, now twenty-two, works for an investment advisory firm while he completes a TAFE business certificate, and Sarah Whelan, twenty-seven, has left her job working in horse stables in western Sydney for a career in the hospitality industry.

  Matthew is regaining his independence since his accident, studying for a Business and Administration degree and, in December 2008, obtained a driver’s licence for the van Bernie had specially modified for his disability. Nevertheless, Matt is confident that one day there will be a cure and he will walk again. Already he is regaining some feeling in his limbs, following stem cell treatment in China, in April 2008. He can now hold a beer bottle in his hand at family barbecues and plans to undergo more treatment.

  Bernie Whelan says he has lifelong friends in Dennis Bray and Nigel Warren, a mateship united in the desire that Bruce Burrell might eventually do the decent thing and reveal Kerry’s burial place.

  Bernie, who believes Kerry and Dorothy Davis were disposed of in the same spot, dreams that one day both families will be able to hold funerals. Maree Dawes hopes that ‘once the doors are closed forever’ on Burrell’s chances of being released, that he will ‘bargain with us’. ‘Do you know how many times I have said to my mother “give me a hint”?’ she said.

  As for Burrell, Maree Dawes and Bernie Whelan each despise the man. ‘I hope he will be attacked in jail, although my daughter Kate says “Oh no, I want him to live a long time. I want him to go mad”, ’ Maree said. As Bernie puts it, Burrell is the worst sort, ‘a serial killer, who killed for money . . . To me, that cemented the conviction and the sentence of life in prison.

  ‘I just wonder what else has happened that we don’t know about? Who else has he killed? I don’t think he’s mentally ill. I think he’s an absolute mongrel,’ Bernie said.

  Bernie Whelan’s $50 000 reward for information leading to the recovery of his beloved Kerry still stands. Maybe one day soon, in Bernie’s lifetime, a nature walker, a fossicker or an abseiler down a ravine in Bungonia, or somewhere further out in the vast, treacherous terrain of the Morton National Park, will come across human remains and Detective Bray will get that telephone call he has been waiting for.

  The Whelan and Davis families will get true justice and the chance to lay their loved ones to rest; while back in the prison yard the last shred of pretence will be stripped away from Bruce Burrell, the flash adman who murdered women for cash.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bottom, Bob (1979) The Godfather in Australia: Organised Crime’s Australian Connections, Reed, Sydney

  Hare, Robert D (1993) Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, Simon & Schuster, New York

  Hickie, David (1985) The Prince and the Premier, Angus &Robertson, Sydney