Underbelly 2

by John Silvester

  BIRCH: ‘Right. Who is Ron Williams?’

  MacDONALD: ‘He’s a guy from Melbourne.’

  BIRCH: ‘Right, do you know Ron Williams?’

  MacDONALD: ‘Yes.’

  BIRCH: ‘How do you know Ron Williams?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I met him on the pretext of employing him.’

  BIRCH: ‘Under what circumstances did you meet him?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I needed an identity. I ran an advertisement in a newspaper … the Herald Sun … For someone to take up a position with a geological survey.’

  BIRCH: ‘And what was the intention at the time of placing the advert?’

  MacDONALD: ‘My intention was to find a person of suitable age, background. No – no close relatives, and assume his identity.’

  BIRCH: ‘Right. How many persons responded to that, to that advert?’

  MacDONALD: ‘Fifty, I guess.’

  BIRCH: ‘Over what period of time did those fifty people respond?’

  MacDONALD: ‘Within the space of – yes – a week.’

  BIRCH: ‘Can you explain to me how you would assume the identity of a person who responds to an advert for employment?’

  MacDONALD: ‘You kill them.’

  BIRCH: ‘Did you kill Mr Williams?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I did.’

  BIRCH: ‘Can you approximate for me when that occurred?’

  MacDONALD: ‘Early March, 1996.’

  BIRCH: ‘Right, and how did you kill Mr Williams?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I shot him.’

  BIRCH: ‘And what were the circumstances … ?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I required his identity. I transported him to Western Australia. Took him to a beach, and shot him there.’

  MacDonald then explained how he put an advertisement in the paper, under the name Paul Jacobs, for a field hand for ‘geological survey work,’ and how he had formed a short list of men ‘with no dependents, no close relatives.’

  MacDONALD: ‘He (Williams) was quite drunk at the time (when he rang) which was one of the factors that decided me to interview him further. A few days later Mr Williams turned up at the flat for the interview and looked even more promising.’

  MacDONALD: ‘(He was) a guy of my build, roughly – maybe a little shorter. Obviously of the same age group.’ The prospective employee and employer had chatted for about an hour in the flat.

  BIRCH: ‘When did you form the opinion that he was a person of whom you wanted to assume his identity.’

  MacDONALD: ‘At that time I was about eighty per cent certain that he was suitable, so I asked him back for a second interview … at which he could supply more personal details … educational background, family background, employment.’

  BIRCH: ‘Was that – in what way was that necessary to you?’

  MacDONALD: ‘To give me the background story of that person.’

  About six other men had telephoned for interviews but MacDonald put them off. At his second interview Williams said he had been brought up in orphanages, had no close family ties and had changed his name from Chomszczak. MacDonald had diligently written down all these personal details.

  MacDONALD: ‘Yes, he was married to Margaret Joy Manning in 1981, July 1981.’

  BIRCH: ‘And where is Mrs Manning now?’

  MacDONALD: ‘He didn’t know … they divorced in 1982.’

  BIRCH: ‘At the times you were writing down (the personal details) what was your intention with Mr Williams?’

  MacDONALD: ‘To kill him.’ MacDonald then described how he had congratulated Williams, telling him he was the successful candidate, that he would be employed in WA for two years, and would be paid $60,000 a year if he signed a contract that he would not take up alternative employment. Until then, he had promised him a retainer of $500 a week ‘to lock him into the program.’ He then spoke freely to police about the murder.

  MacDONALD: ‘It took place on Cheyne Beach in Western Australia at approximately 8pm. I shot him once in the forehead and again in the back of the head when he fell to the ground.’

  BIRCH: ‘With what intention, if any, did you take Mr Williams to that location?’

  MacDONALD: ‘Of killing him … I stopped the motor vehicle, we took some fishing tackle from the rear of the vehicle, proceeded along the beach, fished for perhaps and hour and then I shot him.’

  BIRCH: ‘Right, where was the firearm?’

  MacDONALD: ‘It was in a fishing bag that I had with me.’ (a khaki knapsack from a Greensborough army surplus store).

  Senior Detective GRAINGER: ‘You say your intention was to kill him – were you apprehensive or were you just – you – you had a job at hand and you were doing that job?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I had a job at hand.’

  He explained he had previously tested the gun at a bush camp on the Mary River, near Gympie in Queensland.

  He said he and Williams arrived at the spot and fished several areas along the beach before he committed the murder.

  BIRCH: ‘What was he doing?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I believe he was just standing there. We were talking about something or other.’

  GRAINGER: ‘So how was it that you were able to distinguish him and kill him in the dark?’

  MacDonald: ‘I have reasonably good night vision.’

  He said that he had been a gunner in the regular army, serving for five years from 1968, and trained to use machine guns, rifles and grenade launchers.

  MacDONALD: ‘I dug a hole, placed the body in it, covered it with sand, smoothed out the area put branches and shrubbery over it.’

  BIRCH: ‘What were your duties to perform, or that you performed, in Vietnam?

  MacDONALD: ‘I’d rather not go into that.’

  BIRCH: ‘Did you cause a death of any persons in Vietnam, by way of shooting them with a rifle?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I’d rather not discuss that.’

  GRAINGER: ‘Prior to the actual killing of Mr Williams, when was it that you decided, right – this is the spot – this is where it’s gonna happen?’

  MacDONALD: ‘When I first saw the area.’

  GRAINGER: ‘And how long was that before you actually killed him?’

  MacDONALD: ‘An hour and a half.’

  He said that as he prepared to shoot Mr Williams he ‘just switched off, I guess.’

  BIRCH: ‘What do you mean by that?’

  MacDONALD: ‘When you cut off your emotions … I guess it’s part of military training that sometimes you need to switch off your emotions … To be able to perform anything that needs to be done.’

  GRAINGER: ‘Why is it that you – you’re telling us all this? Do you have any reason for that?’

  MacDONALD: ‘Well. It’s a foregone conclusion that you would’ve found this all out anyway.’

  GRAINGER: ‘Why – why did you kill him – what’s your reason for murdering Mr Williams?’

  MacDONALD: ‘To assume his identity.’ He was asked by police if he had any mental illnesses and he said he had been diagnosed with a personality disorder.

  MacDONALD: ‘Perhaps I don’t share the same emotions that other people do.’

  GRAINGER: ‘Do you know that killing someone’s wrong?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I know that many people consider it to be, yes.’

  GRAINGER: ‘Did you consider the killing of Ron Williams wrong?’

  MacDONALD: ‘No.’

  GRAINGER: ‘Why?’

  MacDONALD: ‘To me, it seemed appropriate.’

  BIRCH: ‘Have you found yourself in other circumstances where you’ve found it necessary to kill someone?’

  MacDONALD: ‘Yes.’

  BIRCH: ‘When?’

  MacDONALD: ‘In Vietnam.’

  MacDONALD: (Coughs) ‘Pardon me.’

  BIRCH: ‘You okay. Got a bit of a dry throat?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I think it’s the blasted cigarettes, actually.’

  BIRCH: ‘They’ll kill you, they say.’

  MacDONALD: ‘So they say.�
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  He then explained buying the boat to sail to the Solomon Islands.

  GRAINGER: ‘Would that be in an endeavour to flee Australia?’

  MacDONALD: ‘I don’t know quite how to phrase this. A terminal effort, shall we say.’

  GRAINGER: ‘You intended to kill yourself in the Solomon Islands?’

  MacDONALD: ‘That’s correct.’

  GRAINGER: ‘Why is that?’

  MacDONALD: ‘Because I didn’t see any future.’

  GRAINGER: ‘Why would it be necessary to kill yourself in the Solomon Islands?’

  MacDONALD: ‘More pleasant surroundings.’

  The map that Alexander MacDonald drew to show police where he had buried Ron Williams’ body.

  CHAPTER 2

  Till death do us part

  The night daddy didn’t come home

  ‘He was lying almost as if he was asleep. That he might be dead was the last thing that entered my head’

  LONG after midnight she hears the familiar rattle of a vehicle crossing the cattlepit at the front gate, the drumming of tyres on gravel, the hum of a motor. She sees a man in the moonlight and, for a second, her heart leaps. Then she realises it’s not her husband. It’s the local policeman. She goes to the door, sick with fear. She knows it’s bad. When he puts his arms around her, she knows it’s the worst. ‘Rob’s not coming home,’ he says gently.

  NOT all love stories end in tragedy, but many a tragedy begins with a love story.

  Darina Pasco’s begins when she’s seventeen, the week she arrives from New Zealand to train at the Sydney Adventist hospital. On her first Saturday night in Australia she meets Rob Foots.

  That was in 1971. ‘We’ve been together ever since,’ says Darina. She corrects herself. ‘I mean, we had twenty-four years together …’ The generous face clouds and hardens. ‘We should have had another twenty-four.’

  She often switches tenses – and moods – when talking about the love of her life, the father of her four children. She is kind and open, but something else lurks close to the surface, now, a weariness and a wariness that at any moment can wipe away the happiness of remembering the good times. Before 8 August, 1995.

  The boy she meets in the early 1970s is big and strong, but so baby faced it’s hard to believe he’s already on the way to owning his own electrical business. Pictures taken of them show a pair of awkward big kids gazing into each other’s eyes.

  They’re teenagers in love, but they take a more traditional route than many through the permissive society eddying around them. They marry at Wahroonga, in Sydney, in 1974.

  Rob Foots is a goer, and always was. Youngest child and only boy in a big family, at eight years old he sells eggs from his own hens, and has a milk run. At fourteen he leaves school and starts work in the family electrical business.

  As he grows up, he manages a difficult balancing act between living life to the full and observing the principles of his family’s Seventh Day Adventist faith.

  Like the business, young Foots thrives. He becomes the sort of man of whom people say he never preaches his religion, but lives it. He is generous. He does nothing by half measures. He believes right is might, that God helps those who help themselves.

  And so, in a sense, Rob and Darina are pioneers without a frontier to go to. They do the next best thing. In 1981, after their two daughters are born, they move to the country.

  THE first stop in the Foots family adventure is a five-hectare block at Tabletop, near Albury. There they set up their business – and have their third child, Justin.

  They prosper, and buy a bigger place, sixty-five hilly hectares on the Victorian side of the border, on the banks of Lake Hume in a district called Talgarno. The view of the drowned valley is sensational. But you can’t live on a view.

  They call the place ‘The Foothills’. Their commitment to it is almost biblical. They plant trees down the drive, and build a huge shed, where they live for nine months while building the first stage of the magnificent sprawling house they had dreamed up for the point overlooking the lake. It becomes a ‘granny flat’, where they rig up four tiny ‘temporary’ bedrooms – and live in it for six years.

  As Rob Foots expands the business over the Riverina he spends every spare moment building the dream house. Typically, he thinks big. It’s all solid brick and soaring ceilings and tall chimneys, deep windows, a spa and ensuites.

  Along the way, a fourth child is born: another boy, Carl. ‘He’s the image of his father,’ Darina says. She says he’s ‘a Godsend’, and means it literally.

  They move in two days before Christmas, 1993. They’ve been married twenty years, and this is their present to each other.

  So here they are, a happy family in a new house. The children go to the Border Christian College, where Rob is on the school board. He’s also taken up singing, practising as he drives his ute to distant jobs, and wins medals at local eisteddfods. They have a canoe and a ski boat and a labrador dog.

  Every morning at dawn, he takes the dog, Jake, for a jog. Every evening, after a family dinner, he goes to the shed to prepare for the next day’s work, then shares a spa bath with Darina to talk over the day’s doings. They are content; true believers in their promised land.

  It lasts one year and eight months.

  BEFORE church on Saturday, 5 August, 1995, Rob Foots goes for a morning walk along the Talgarno road, which lets him check his cattle and fences. He has rigged a temporary fence along the roadside so his cattle can graze down grass that would otherwise be a fire hazard.

  The fence is basic: a few wires strung on star pickets, known by farmers as steel posts. The posts are light and strong, and can be driven into the ground with a sledge hammer or post driver. And, at about $3 each, they’re cheap.

  But few things are so cheap that a thief won’t steal them. Several times in the previous five years, someone has cut the wire and stolen Rob Foots’s posts. It always happens on moonlit nights in winter, when the ground is soft, out of sight of the house.

  Each theft, though not a big financial loss, leaves Rob more angry. Which is why, when he returns from his walk, he says ‘the buggers have knocked off more posts’. After church they drive down the road to have a look. They find some loose steel posts leaning against a tree, as if the thief has forgotten them. ‘They’ll be back to get the rest,’ Rob predicts. But he doesn’t mention it again.

  Tuesday, three days later, is the same as any other in the family’s well-ordered lives. Joanne has just started at Avondale College at Coorambong, north of Sydney, leaving the three younger children at home. They have their evening meal together, as usual, then watch Funniest Home Videos and Just Kidding on television.

  At 8.30 pm Rob goes to the shed, about a hundred metres from the house, to do his accounts and pack his utility ready for the next day’s work.

  At 9pm the telephone rings. Corrine answers it. Using the Commander system, she puts the call through to the shed and tells him it’s ‘Uncle Ray’, a family friend also on the school board.

  Darina realises there is a school board meeting that night, and that Rob has missed it. At 10 pm, she fills the spa, ready for the nightly ritual of a bath and a talk before bed. But, this time, with Rob working later than usual, she has it alone.

  By the time she finishes, the time is creeping towards 10.30 pm. She rings the shed telephone extension. She tries her husband’s mobile telephone, then the two-way radio fitted to the ute. No answers. She feels the first pang of fear.

  It’s a freezing August night. She puts on her dressing gown and walks towards the shed, thinking he might be stuck underneath a vehicle. But the shed is empty. No Rob. No ute.

  Darina decides he might have suddenly gone to the school board meeting after all. She tries to ignore the fact he never leaves the property without telling her. Stomach knotting, she rings the school, to see if the meeting is still going. No answer.

  She recalls, later, each action and each thought. ‘I looked at my watch,’ she i
s to say. ‘It was 12.30. I thought, if he’s not home by 1am, I’ll go and look for him myself.’

  That doesn’t happen. Ten minutes later, someone comes looking for her instead.

  IT HAS been a bad time for the de Hennin family, and about to get worse. This Tuesday night, Jim and Julie de Hennin, who live on a property past the Foots’s, have been to Albury to see one of their daughters, whose husband was accidentally electrocuted two weeks earlier. They drive home in separate cars, Jim ten minutes behind his wife. It’s some time after 9.30 pm.

  As he takes the bend past Foots’s gate, de Hennin sees a vehicle on his left, skewed on a steep angle to the road, headlights shining into the paddock. He thinks his neighbor might need help with stray cattle, and stops.

  He recognises the vehicle as Rob Foots’s Holden Rodeo. Its motor is running and the driver’s door wide open. Inside is an open briefcase, with a jacket lying across it, a mobile telephone, and, barely visible, a notebook.

  De Hennin calls out. No answer. He walks to the front of the ute and peers outside the wedge of light. Then he sees his neighbor, face down on the ground just to the left of the beam.

  ‘He was lying almost as if he was asleep,’ de Hennin is to recall. ‘That he might be dead was the last thing that entered my head.’ But as soon as he picks up Foots’s hand he realises it’s all wrong. There’s no pulse, and the hand is cold.

  He calls the emergency number on his mobile telephone. The ambulance people say to keep the patient warm. He calls home. His wife knows first aid and his daughter, Kirsten, is a trainee nurse. They come quickly and work furiously at resuscitation.

  Not until they roll the body over to get at his mouth does de Hennin suspect foul play. There are spots of fresh blood on the green grass. And, under the shirt, a neat hole in his chest.

  Pat Garrett, the local policeman, arrives. ‘Keep working on him,’ he says. ‘Don’t give up.’ He and de Hennin see the grass and the soft ground is torn up where a vehicle has reversed past the ute. A perfect set of tyremarks, etched in red mud, leads onto the bitumen, towards Albury.

  Much later, after a detective arrives from Wodonga, Garrett goes off to face the toughest job a cop has to do.