Later that day, when the work was completed, Ces came over to our house, looking tense, and asked to see John in private. They went into the bedroom. Ces assumed a threatening manner and pushed his face upwards as close as possible to John’s, whose height gave him a certain advantage. ‘What’s to do?’ Ces growled. ‘What’s this I hear about you bad mouthing me to my boxers?’
`I just expressed my opinion on the murder. Everyone knows you had something to do with it.’
Ces was highly displeased and came even closer.
`What are we going to do about this then?’
John sensed he should play it as calm as possible, though his warrior-blood was stirring.
`Ces, isn’t it a matter of trust? I say what I feel and you do the same.’
Ces calmed down, realising John had a point.
Two dominant males were sharing the same patch of dirt. Ces liked to be the leader of the pack. He hated being in the subservient position of depending on our goodwill. John in turn, with his Irish temper and volatile spirited nature, wasn’t afraid to stand up to Ces or anybody else.
Not long after, Ces came round for a visit while an old school friend of John’s, Morrie Richmond, stayed with us. Morrie was a Justice of the Peace. Ces had met him several times before and had initially been very wary of Morrie, suspecting him of being a cop due to his neat short haircut and conservative dress. During a discussion about ‘trust’ Ces told Morrie about an exciting moment in his life. While on his recent remand in prison, he was approached by Ivan Milat, who had been arrested for the Belanglo Forest backpacker murders and was awaiting trial. Ces told Morrie how Milat came up to him and said, ‘I know you. You’re Ces Waters. Let me shake your hand.’ Ces enthusiastically described that as ‘true respect’. Morrie could not believe the twisted mind of Ces. Milat’s only claim to fame was picking up innocent vulnerable young hitchhikers and torturing and killing them. It seemed Ces was unable to discriminate good from bad.
Ces’s solicitor sent Margaret Barnett an unexpectedly large invoice for drawing up the bail documents, $600. About a month after the windmill incident, John found the money had been withdrawn from the trust account. Our hedge against Ces doing a runner was more than halved. It made him furious. It wasn’t so much the loss of money (it wasn’t ours anyway), it was that it had been done without any consultation with us. For John, this theft was the last straw. He raised the issue with Ces who instantly blamed the solicitor for accessing the money from the account, and, of course, when confronted, the solicitor blamed Ces, who he said had given him permission. John and I both knew who would have requested the withdrawal. John rang Margaret Barnett and told her how disappointed he was that she had let this situation happen, knowing how important it was for him to have his bit of modest security. Margaret suddenly developed a very short memory. It was difficult for her to deal with both John and Ces, so she took the easy way out. She sided with the man who was on the same end of the phone as her.
Ces must have brooded about this conversation for a few days. It really irritated him that John wanted to have this money sitting idle in a trust fund when he had so many uses for it. Ces must have reached boiling point because that was his temperature when he rang John at Chatswood and blasted him—over the years, another of the many times that John had turned the other cheek. In his foul mood, Ces lost control. He called John ‘a failure’. John laughed, inflaming Ces further. He then accused John of trying to interfere with the book, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
It was a very unpleasant phone call, fortunately cut short when Ces slammed the receiver down. Margaret Barnett probably had a word to him, pointing out yelling at John and then hanging up wasn’t a very sensible way to treat someone who’d just organised his release from jail. Ces rang back a couple of minutes later in a more conciliatory mood, but he couldn’t say sorry because he was too proud and stubborn to ever admit he had done anything wrong.
John’s English nurse friend was still in our lives, though we saw her less often as she was studying for a nursing diploma. Barbara came up to the farm and stayed there alone for a week to prepare for her exams. Ces came around and in spite of their previous altercation, ended up having a long chat with her on the verandah. They actually got along quite well that time, though Barbara sensed a certain flirtatious element had crept into Ces’s repartee. During the discussion, he told her he thought ‘John and Margaret were very green’. Barbara reported this back to us and it started us wondering what we were ‘green’ about? Ces had promised me he’d told me all about his life and everything he’d said was the truth. I began wondering if Ces had been as honest with me as he claimed Isn’t it strange how an innocent little comment like that would turn the tables?
This niggling doubt was confirmed the next time we visited the farm, when Ces admitted he had not told us about all his criminal activities because, as he claimed, he could still go to jail for some of them. He implied he’d done some terrible things I wouldn’t want to hear about. Naturally, this made me feel very uncomfortable.
We were in post production on Weird Ones. Unknown to Ces, by a coincidence, Eric Hall, the stunt man who worked on the film, also turned out to be a friend of Tracey and her husband Marc Erbsleben. We were very keen to make contact with Tracey and hear her side of the story. Eric contacted Tracey. She told us she would deal with us only after we had been to the police to help them with their inquiries. She was testing us. We agreed to this and not long afterwards, John and I were interviewed by Dennis O’Toole, by then transferred to the Chatswood crime squad.
Dennis O’Toole came to Honeywell and we chatted in the busy canteen, cappuccino and muffins a distraction. I was grateful he was wearing plain clothes and did not draw attention to himself (or me). He seemed a very charming and kind man. All the time I could hear Ces’s words in my head: ‘Never trust a copper, especially a nice one.’ So I was initially wary, especially of the sort of questions he might ask. For example, I did not want to tell him about Ces’s threats to me after the murder or about Ces wanting to kill Christine. I was concerned about being subpoenaed to give evidence against Ces in the court case scheduled for November, seven months hence. I knew that if I did my public duty, Ces would interpret this as betrayal.
But the detective did most of the talking, and to my horror a different picture of Ces Waters started to emerge. He began by telling me about his relationship with Dean which started after Dean was acquitted.
Detective Inspector O’Toole told me some terrible things about the way Ces had treated his children and his wives, acts of unforgivable cruelty. He reported how Ces would often beat the children with a rubber hose or anything else close at hand. The wives felt a thumping fist on their cheek or a bottle smashing over their heads. They lived in fear of Ces who used emotional and physical abuse to maintain iron control.
Dennis O’Toole told me about the damning evidence he had from wiretaps, and that he’d sent a transcript of it to Ces’s legal representative. The many conversations Ces had with the ‘potential buyer’ in various coffee shops revealed Ces’s dislike of women generally, his involvement in the murder of Allen Hall, and an attempted murder of Christine on an earlier occasion. Dennis told me that he was saving the transcript for the court case. He felt confident he had enough evidence to put Ces behind bars for the rest of his life.
The attempt on Christine’s life followed her avowal of love for Allen in 1989. The origin of that love in her account was significantly different to the sexual-freedom basis Ces claimed. He ordered her to have sex with Allen because she was ‘frigid’ and never considered the development of an emotional attachment. Besides, he enjoyed watching their couplings. He decided to kill Christine before she caused trouble for the family; his control of her was threatened. What happened next is blackly comic on the surface of it, and unlike Ces the strategist. He drove her inland to a spot above a cliff edge near Cessnock, ordered her out of the car, took a tyre lever from the boot and told her he’d bash
her over the head, then push the car over the cliff to fake an accident—until he realised he’d be stranded there and postponed it! Whatever his motives, when he boasted of the incident to the wired man he corroborated a statement Christine had, unbeknown to him, given police.
Regarding his plot to murder Allen Hall, Ces had boasted how he and Dean approached a wharfie from Newcastle. Ces asked him to do a favour: he wanted Allen castrated and one of his hands cut off. The wharfie thought he was joking. He apparently told Ces he didn’t mind shooting Allen but wouldn’t stoop to mutilating him. Ces then told Christine he’d put down a $1,000 deposit and ‘provided I don’t hear any problems or ruffles or anything that will affect our family name,’ Ces wouldn’t give the wharfie the go-ahead to harm Allen Hall.
At Dean’s first trial, Christine had mentioned this incident but by the time Chris Murphy had finished with her, nobody believed her story. She was badly discredited. One can only imagine how she must have felt, the legal process failing to sort the truth from the lies.
Ces admitted on the tape he was involved in Allen’s murder. He even asked the wired man for a loan of his backhoe in order to dig Christine’s grave. He told this man that the night before the murder, he and Dean were practising shooting with their .22 rifle at their place. They picked up the spent cartridges afterwards. When the police swarmed on the property after the murder, searching for evidence, Ces noticed a cartridge on the ground near his feet. He whipped it up and slipped it under his tongue. When the police left, he spat it out. The cartridge would have been traced to the gun Damon used at the murder scene. After the murder, Ces boasted to Damon about putting the cartridge in his mouth. Damon told this to the police after he was arrested. Once again: corroborating information.
Ces was always testing ‘the buyer’ to see how far he’d go. During another discussion, Ces enthusiastically tried to persuade the man to murder Christine. In return, Ces was prepared to murder the wired man’s partner or another person of his choice. Ces described this as the perfect crime as it was difficult to trace.
Dennis told me Ces was a pathological liar who he believed had never been to Dartmoor. We both had a copy of Ces’s criminal record indicating his lengthy imprisonment for jewel theft but it did not mention the place of incarceration. He said that the larger prisons were always mentioned on the records. He was convinced that Ces would have told me many lies about his past and distorted the truth to suit himself.
I couldn’t accept all the things the detective was telling me. Some openly contradicted very important events in Ces’s life. Not only did he cast serious doubt on Ces’s credibility, but also some of those missing jigsaw pieces were at last falling into disagreeable place. Especially concerning why his children and wives had left him.
A few days after meeting with O’Toole, we visited Tracey and Marc, who lived at Terrigal on the Central Coast. We met at the Hogs Breath Cafe opposite the main beach. This was the first time I had met Tracey. Approaching her mid thirties, she had a lot of the energy and intensity of her father, the same powerful eyes and an attractive face full of character and grit. Her husband Marc was slim and fair haired. His face betrayed a sensitivity and his body a sensuality. He’d once worked as a male stripper, was an expert in martial arts, and managed a gym. Their two young daughters, Siobhan and Jessica, were attractive spirited girls. My first thought? No wonder Ces was upset about never being allowed to see his grandchildren. The girls played with Dean and Jinka while we ordered lunch and broke the ice.
Tracey was very guarded. As we’d assisted the police in their inquiries, she kept to our deal and eventually opened up enough to give me a glimpse of what it must have been like growing up in that household under the domination of a tyrannical and cruel father. She spoke of the beatings and humiliations to which they were exposed. We heard about the physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuse Christine and Gloria had to endure before they packed their bags and fled.
Apparently Ces would often say to Tracey, in a matter-of-fact way, that she was worthless and should have been dropped on the floor at birth. She was treated worse than her brothers. Tracey considered it a gender problem because Christine was treated badly too. Ces was often violent to Tracey and mainly without reason. She often went to Davidson High School bruised because of the bashings. Tracey remembers when he beat her so badly she was off school for about three weeks until all the marks healed. When she was older, Ces lost his temper and punched her jaw in front of witnesses, dislocating it. He once picked her up and bashed her head against the wall.
Tracey also spoke of Ces abusing Christine. How he’d forced her into prostitution. How he’d force himself sexually on her with the children hearing her screaming in pain as they lay in bed, feeling powerless. Christine stayed on the farm to protect the children, fearing for their safety if she left, fearing for her safety if she stayed. He once hit her over the head with a glass bottle and then wanted Tracey to doctor the wound, refusing proper medical attention for it. On another occasion he laid into her and was kicking her head as she lay unconscious on the ground.
The boys’ upbringing was tough but not as violent as Tracey’s. He ruled them with a hosepipe and after several beatings they obeyed out of fear. They were terrified of his potential to harm, observing the way he treated Tracey and Christine. Intermittently, Ces had violent outbursts towards them. Dean would describe these beatings as ‘dad chastising us’.
Fear stopped the children and Christine talking to the media and police.
All prosecution witnesses were fearful of their lives, Tracey and Marc especially. Ces hated Marc because two of Ces’s boxers had gone to train with him. Ces told one of his boxers that he had to choose between his family and boxing. He asked both for money and when they said they didn’t have it, he told them they were being disloyal and wouldn’t train them any more. Marc had spoken to Ces on the phone and had told him he would die a lonely man. His outspokeness riled Ces.
Allen and Christine had gone to dinner at Tracey and Marc’s place just weeks before Allen was murdered. Allen was described by Tracey as a lovely gentle guy who smoked dope. Christine said he treated her kindly. They had joked at the dinnertable about who Ces would kill first.
After the murder, Marc once thought he was being followed by several men in a car. After that he always took a shotgun to bed. One night he heard a noise in the house and when Tracey awoke Marc had the gun loaded and cocked, pointing at the door. When Tracey was pregnant and needed to use the outside toilet, Marc would accompany her holding his gun for protection.
Tracey said she loved Ces because he was her father, and hated him because of the way he treated her. The only time she wanted to be near him again was at his funeral.
The boys were advised by professionals to completely break off contact with Ces because he was dangerous. However, on several occasions they tried to make it up with their father and each case ended in an argument, because Ces wanted to do it on his terms. All he wanted was glory in the boxing ring for himself and didn’t care about what the boys wanted themselves.
Tracey described Ces as a smooth-tongued conman who would charm people and then use them. He had no loyalty or compassion and would only stay your friend while he had something to gain from the friendship. A chronic liar, a manipulator of the truth.
The sort of lunch to bring on severe indigestion. At least the children had fun.
Ces had worked hard for years discrediting Tracey. First, he showed me a Christmas card Tracey had sent him after she left home, saying in it that she realised Ces did things for her own good, and hoped one day they could get back together again. He also showed me a bitter letter Tracey’s ex-fiancé had written to Ces after she ended their engagement in Perth. This seaman felt jilted when Tracey turned her attentions to Marc. He explained in the letter that Tracey was a liar and how he had been misled. Ces was going to use this letter in the court case to show his daughter’s testimony was unreliable.
I found Tracey and Mark
very credible. I had not proven myself to be any judge of character, far from it. Their sincerity had been no greater or more convincing than any of Ces’s performances. The absoluteness of their credibility came from holding those missing jigsaw pieces. Then I knew why the children left. Cruelty. Something Ces always denied, Ces ‘the loving father’. My jigsaw was complete then. I could no longer hang on to my old beliefs; this was the critical turning point. I had to fight back tears when we said goodbye after lunch. I don’t like showing emotion; I knew I could cry later.
On the way back to Sydney, I curled up in the passenger seat, my guts churning. My trust in Ces had been betrayed. Then—and it was only really then—I, like John, ceased being a believer. John looked at me sympathetically and put a warm hand on my arm for a time as we drove along. I said, ‘I feel violated’ very softly, not wanting to upset the children in the back. I fell silent then. I was ashamed I had been conned by Ces Waters and helped him, his myth, his image. I never wanted to see or speak to him again. That was going to be difficult. Although Ces didn’t trust John any more, he still considered me an ally. Tracey and Marc were in fear of their lives and made us promise not to breathe a word of our meeting to Ces. They also warned us how dangerous Ces was. They underlined the point we should watch our backs.
My next reaction was anger towards Ces for deceiving me. In a short time, just half an hour, it was replaced with a burning desire for revenge. I was The Woman Betrayed and wanted Ces to pay for his crime and spend the rest of his life behind bars. I thought that if the police read the typescript of this book they would find a lot of incriminating information. Ces could hang himself by his own admissions. The idea had a lot of appeal. But it was another book that threw me.
Hellbent: Ces Waters & Me Page 37