The detective told me he would not call John and I up as witnesses for the Crown, because he recognised the dangerous situation we were in. I said that I would be happy to help him in any way and offered him a copy of the typescript in case there was something in it which could help his case. O’Toole took it. He was confident about the outcome of Ces’s trial.
Although Ces stopped visiting us when we came up on weekends, it was not unusual for him to ring me weekdays at Chatswood. One very curious phone conversation I had with Margaret Barnett was clearly prompted by Ces. I can’t remember why she said she rang, but she told me a story about someone she knew, ‘not Ces’, who fell out of favour with his friends who no longer believed what he said, and how ‘that person’ ended up wanting to commit suicide with grief. Of course she was talking about Ces. Even so, her story had little impact on me. I knew Ces would never take his own life, despite his relating to me several attempts to kill himself in the past. As far as I was concerned these cries for help were part of Ces’s manipulative strategy.
Whenever I spoke to Ces I reminded him that I wanted to see a copy of the ‘bug transcript’. He was very evasive about this but eventually said he’d give me a copy. I wasn’t prepared to do anything else on the book unless I could present both sides of the story.
Ces rang me to pass on a familiar warning: ‘You can be my friend or my enemy. If you are my friend I will treat you very well. However, if you are my enemy, you may as well leave the country.’ I told John about this call and he reacted as expected: at the first opportunity he was determined to remove Ces from our land.
I could hear John muttering. In the shower, while he was meditating, or mowing the lawn. At other times he was unusually quiet, lost in thought. Eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to find out what was going on in my partner’s head. After all, I had to live with the consequences. He confirmed my fears when he said that the threat from Ces would most likely end in violence. His concern was that Ces would either hurt me or the children as a tactic to cause John the greatest grief.
John had approached Legal Aid in his quest to get Ces off our land. He was told there was not much we could do apart from giving Ces written notice to vacate. The lawyer said that if Ces didn’t move after tendering the request, men from the Sheriff’s office would arrive and take all his goods and chattels off our property and on to the street. These would get impounded if they weren’t moved. Ces would lose everything and be made to look a fool, just the way he did when Christine left him for Allen Hall.
John then asked Legal Aid what kind of protection was available and was told it would require a 24-hour deal with a security company. The threat from Ces was a presumption on our part, so police protection was unlikely. How on earth could we afford 24-hour protection and for how long? The only prospect that would work for us would be Ces being convicted in his forthcoming trial and incarcerated for a long time. But what would we do if he got off? After all, he had got off last time, thanks to Chris Murphy.
No wonder John was doing so much muttering to himself. He was wracking his brains trying to work out what to do. Then a few weeks later he revealed how desperate he was. He asked me what decent law-abiding citizens do in such a fix? The law can only play it’s role after an illegal act. So John admitted he’d been thinking of a worst-case scenario, for example, if our relationship with Ces >disintegrated to the point where Ces directly threatened our lives or caused us harm. Then it would become man against man, like in medieval times. How could he kill Ces before Ces killed him or one of his family?
Had John sunk to such a low level? Ces’s level? John, the warrior husband, feeling he was the protector of life and property, had given the old saying ‘Desperate situations call for desperate measures’ real meaning. He went on to share with me his plan to end Ces’s life with a crossbow. He’d walk up to Ces with the weapon wrapped in paper and disguised as a child’s kite. Powerful, silent. Then cut Ces’s jugular vein, just to be sure. John went into all the precautions he’d have to take. As I listened, I wondered where John got all this stuff from. No wonder he liked story-telling with scripts. My heart grew heavier.
I did not want to go up to Bumble the following Friday afternoon but John had to do what a man’s gotta do. He wouldn’t put it off. On the Thursday night I eventually nodded off in the early hours but had a terrible dream and woke, cold and wet. The next day, John stayed home to package film deals. I went to work but couldn’t concentrate and co-workers commented that I had an absent look in my eyes, as if I was somewhere else. I had no appetite. My guts were clenched and my shoulder and neck muscles went into spasm. I kept repeating to myself that I had to be brave because that was the only way I could get my life back to normal again.
We arrived at Bumble late on Friday. Ces wasn’t on his part of the land because his dogs were barking. They only barked like that in Ces’s absence. John decided he would confront Ces on Saturday. I felt sick with dread but knew we must go through with it, no matter what.
That Friday night, 14 April John rang home to pick up any messages from our answering machine. There was a curious, distressed message from Irene, one of Ces’s friends—she asked us to ring her urgently. He did. She wasn’t at home. She rang back on Saturday morning with the news: Ces was dead.
I gave John a curious look. Surely not?
35 Serpent’s Tooth
Oh death, where is thy sting?
0 grave, where is thy victory?
1 Corinthians 15.55
John found it hard to contain his sense of elation, as if a great weight had been taken off his shoulders. Irene explained.
That night, Ces was at the Redfern RSL Club, watching Danny The Boy Pierce win the NSW junior welterweight title. Ces had been overjoyed. Tears flowed freely down his face as he embraced the courageous young man who had given him trust and had been rewarded. A proud and happy Ces had picked up a mobile and was talking to Margaret Barnett, who was at Ces’s place caring for the dogs, when he suddenly collapsed. Ian Batty, his cornerman, later told us the first sign Ces was in trouble was the sound of his badge-heavy beanie flopping to the floor. Ian and Irene turned to see Ces sliding to the ground, clutching his heart pills. (Uncannily like one of his scenes in Weird Ones.) He died later in hospital, aged 70.
John theorised that Ces, knowing the law was closing in, had given up and willed himself that release, that escape. In friendlier times, John and Ces had discussed mind-over-body matters and discovered that both of them used the process at times.
My reaction was a curious mixture of relief and pain. The relief was like a huge long sigh, draining all the stress and tension out of me. The pain was like a sharp stab below my heart in that tender spot awakened with the loss of my brother John and my loved mother. Despite all the evil things Ces had been accused of, I still deeply cared for him and wanted to believe in his innocence, despite his obvious guilt. Like Margaret Barnett.
We walked across our property to see her. All we had were our condolences. Margaret was sitting with Ian Batty and Danny among Ces’s belongings, her eyes red, terribly distressed at losing her adored Ces. She said, regardless of what they put on Ces’s death certificate, she knew he died of a broken heart. She asked if Ces could be buried on our land, it had been his wish to remain ‘on the mountain’. In such a grieving atmosphere we could only agree.
The funeral was arranged for a week hence. Margaret had been placed in a sticky situation. Some weeks earlier Ces told her that if he died, he didn’t want his children or John Meagher to attend the funeral. Margaret wanted to honour Ces’s wish but she was embarrassed to tell John he was banned from his own land during the service. She rang my dad and he contacted me at work to explain it would be best if John stayed away. I told him it was ridiculous and that I wouldn’t attend if John didn’t. When I put down the receiver, I shook my head in despair. Even in death, Ces was still causing trouble. When would it end?
The 60 Minutes crew turned up at the local Kulnura Commun
ity Hall. They were compiling another expose about Ces as seen through the eyes of Dean and expected dramatic tension at the service. After all, the mourners were either vehement believers or disbelievers in Ces. On one side of the hall was Margaret, Danny, Jason (another boxer trainee) and a handful of others distraught with grief at his death. On the other side were the disbelievers, the hurt, mainly represented by Ces’s children and their families. They sat more quietly and crestfallen and feeling a different sort of pain. John had decided to attend both the service and the funeral; he wasn’t going to tolerate `bloody stupidity’. Ces’s sons and Ian Batty lifted the heavy lead-lined red-timbered coffin off the white hearse and lowered it to its resting place.
Ces had requested lead so his body would remain intact as long as possible. As he had mused in life-and-death discussions, somebody or something might make it possible to bring life back to his body. He shuddered when anyone talked of cremations. He insisted on burial. He also shuddered when anybody talked about God, any god. He couldn’t stand religious people; they were all weak. ‘How can you make a fighter out of someone who’s all the time regarding themselves as meek?’ he’d bellow.
Ces also must have known his heart condition was deteriorating and that the end might come at any time. He gave his girlfriend Margaret a box of family photographs and asked her to cut out the photos and compile three collages he could leave for each son—but not for Tracey. Margaret framed them herself; they were nicely done. She gave us the three framed pictures to give to the boys. She was suffering too greatly from grief and didn’t want to see or speak to them.
John asked for all the left-over photos and made up a fourth for Tracey. John acted out of an odd mixture of motives: wanting to present Ces in a better light to his daughter and, at the same time, thwart Ces by pretending Ces had given in to fatherly love. Most of all, John wanted to protect Tracey’s feelings. He found a selection of photos that chronicled Tracey’s life and found a frame to finish it off like the others; nice job too.
We’d secured some trust from Dean, Guy, Troy and Tracey. They came up with their families and, over afternoon tea, we presented the collages to them. There were tears and happy and painful recollections of past times as they stared at the cut-out photos of their captured youth. Had we not discovered a small strip of brown tape attached to the back of one of the collages just moments before we handed them out, one of the boys would have got a nasty surprise. Ces had written:
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child.
(For the record, King Lear, act 1, sc 4.1.) Vicious.
Margaret Barnett continued to come up to Ces’s area of our property to tidy up Ces’s estate. She wanted to buy him an impressive tombstone and had to sell off a lot of his bric a brac in order to do so. As I knew she was sorting through his possessions, I told her that Ces agreed I could see the transcript, and could she please lend it to me for a short time. She said she’d look for it. The next time I reminded Margaret about this, she said she’d burned it. This action spoke volumes to me.
In May Damon Cooper attended the Newcastle Supreme Court. He was found not guilty of murdering Allen Hall but guilty of manslaughter. His sentence was 18 years, 12 minimum. Dean said that both he and Damon were brainwashed by Ces into committing the crime. Dean had been given a rifle by Ces and taken to the forest where he was trained to kill. Ces had called Dean a ‘good soldier’ and told him ‘it was the right thing to do’. In the bushes at Allen’s place, Damon wanted out and Dean had to encourage him: ‘It’s what my dad wants. So what dad wants, we’ve got to do.’
In early June Guy won the WBF world light-heavyweight championship. Guy was being managed by Marc, Tracey’s husband. If Ces could have swallowed some of his bitterness, he would have been proud. Guy gave Ces credit for getting him some of the way there through all the hard fanatical years of training.
Dean’s court case was in a couple of months and we were asked if we would attend as witnesses for the defence. The small pro-Ces camp believed Dean deserved all that he would get from the law. John and I, knowing ‘the serpent’s tooth’, were happy to help Dean, though—like everyone else—felt he was going to end up behind bars for a long time, like Damon. After all, he had confessed. Beforehand, we were well grilled by Manny Conditsis, Dean’s defence counsel, who was concerned we might stuff things up in our eagerness to assist Dean. We believed that Dean Waters didn’t deserve to go down for years. We finally knew Ces’s bullying was psychopathic, with an obsessiveness unrestrained by moral and humanitarian considerations.
When Dean’s trial got underway in late July, Ces’s fatherhood came under intense scrutiny. On the first day the Crown rejected a plea of guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. This option was never mentioned to the jury. The Public Prosecutions office was confident Dean’s confession and the evidence gathered was sufficient to persuade the jury to put Dean behind bars on murder. The jurors were placed in a difficult situation when they discovered this was not going to be a cut-and-dried who-killed-who case. What the crown had not fully taken into consideration was that these six men and six women were emotional caring people, not prepared to make an important decision based on evidential facts alone.
One of the first witnesses to take the stand was Dr John Strum, a psychiatrist on the case. He said that in 30 years of practice he had not come across such brilliant and skilful manipulations as those shown by Ces, who he described as thoroughly evil. Comparisons were also made between Ces and Charles Manson in relation to the power Ces had over his children’s perception of good and bad, his extreme control over them and his wife. Like Manson over his cult.
When Christine took the stand, she told of how Ces had encouraged her to have sex with Allen Hall because he thought ‘she needed a younger lover’. He got his thrills by watching them through a gap in the curtains. She spoke of how she fell in love with Allen and left Ces because Allen treated her decently and showed kindness. Ces responded jealously and then allegedly threatened, ‘Everything will go all right for you and Allen for a few months and then you will have a surprise coming. You will find out.’
Then each of the children took the stand: Troy, Dean, Guy and Tracey. Dean made sensational allegations. He spoke of how his father frequently beat him with a hosepipe, even when he was a small boy. As a nine year old he was thrashed for not standing up to another boy who won a game of marbles by cheating. It was through fear of painful assault that his father gained such control over him. Back in England, when the children were small, Ces trained them daily by making them run in front of his car while he beeped his horn, regardless of snow or blizzards. ‘I remember one occasion when I was seven years old,’ said Dean. ‘I was vomiting and crying as I was running along while my father was driving behind us. My father said to me words to the effect: “It is my way of getting the bad out of you.”’ The frequent beatings continued into adulthood and when Dean went out for the first time alone, aged 21, he received a severe beating with a hosepipe with a brass attachment at the end which caused bruising on his arms and legs.
The children were isolated on the farm and not permitted to have friends or take part in team sports. Ces instilled fear in his children by telling them how he had gone to jail for killing a man in England, probably the Indian Bushmere Ali he’d told me about, page 150-51. He also boasted how he’d cut off a woman’s breast and thrown it down a well. (If this were true, it would have been one of the horrible things Ces refrained from mentioning to me, for obvious reasons.) Ces had described Allen as ‘an alcoholic wife-bashing child molester’ and Christine as ‘no good, a tramp and a whore’ and had repeatedly told Dean that he would have to kill them both. After Dean committed the murder he rang his father who allegedly said, ‘Good boy, good lad.’
Although Dean pleaded not guilty to the charge of ‘maliciously destroying by fire’ Allen Hall’s home, he admitted pouring 20 litres of petrol through the fibro cottage and setting it
ablaze.
Guy spoke about the frequent beatings too. Ces told him not to have children with Sharon because they would turn out spastic.
Tracey spoke about the frequent beatings she received since the age of eight and not only with a hosepipe, until she left home aged 20. She recalled Ces’s anger when she came second in a running race, and how he forced her back over the track in the early hours of the morning and drove a car behind her as she ran, and afterwards beat her with a hose. He would not permit her to wear a bra, even when playing sport. He called her a trollop and said she would never amount to anything. He told her that she would become ‘the local bike’ of Kulnura after she was upset about not being allowed to go out with the boy next door. She mentioned how Ces took her to a Kings Cross flat in Sydney (the red light district) on more than one occasion when she was about 12 to have nude photographs taken with a naked woman. She had gone along with this because she feared being beaten. The jury was very moved by her account, some were seen to wipe tears from their eyes. Tracey herself cried during her evidence when she spoke of how gentle Dean was and the control Ces exerted over him.
I felt sick. This evil man they were talking about had been my friend. He had claimed to have been a loving and caring father. This was a man with whom I’d laughed, hugged, shared confidences, been proud of and boasted about. This was a man about whom I’d written a book, worked on a doco, and admired so much. Talk about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
John and I were the last two witnesses in the case. I took a day off work, we drove up to Newcastle early in the morning so we could first have a meeting with Manny Conditsis in the briefing room before our court appearance. Manny asked John to keep his answers brief. But John suggested there might be an opportunity to illustrate what Ces was like when he pushed people around. Manny asked John to illustrate, so John did, lowering his voice with an accusing tone, gesturing with wild pointing of one finger and demeaning his imagined adversary. John was remembering the way Ces behaved in a heated argument with Dean at our place in Chatswood during the filming of the documentary. The attorney raised his eyebrows in surprise. He agreed to the demo from the witness stand, if the opportunity presented itself.
Hellbent: Ces Waters & Me Page 39