by Belinda Neil
Jennifer De Gruchy was a slight, small woman with dark hair. Her face had been bashed in, all bloodied and bruised. When the pathologist examined her skull, he had difficulty working out the number of strikes as compared to the bone fractures. The wounds to her face were so severe that he believed that the weapon had been either a sledgehammer or wheel brace.
Whoever had killed this family had really gone berserk and inflicted incredible injuries. I still couldn’t comprehend that a human being could do this to another human being. Being exposed to the sheer physical violence that this crime scene provided was a real shock. This was no CSI or any other TV crime show. These were real bodies with real blood and wounds. The De Gruchy crime scene was so awful that one police officer who attended it never returned to work.
I finished at 8.30pm. I was exhausted and went home. Thank heavens Rob was there; I needed to talk to someone about what I had seen, to try and process the horror of such violence. I was too tired to eat; all I needed was to feel clean. I hung my dark green jacket over a chair in the dining room and hung up the matching skirt, sure they had another day’s wear in them before needing to be dry cleaned. The rest of my clothes I left lying on the bathroom floor while I jumped into the shower. The hot water felt wonderful, washing away the events of the day.
The next morning I woke up to get ready for work to find that a very strange unpleasant smell seemed to be all through the unit. It was my jacket, reeking of formaldehyde.
Some weeks later two bags and some loose items were found in a local dam, not far from where Matthew De Gruchy’s girlfriend lived. They included the video recorder, clothing and other things taken from the De Gruchy house, as well as pieces of carpet, Jennifer De Gruchy’s driver’s licence and a calculator labelled with Adrian De Gruchy’s name. Of most interest was a torn-up note in handwriting identified as Matthew De Gruchy’s. It was headed ‘Sarah, Adrian and Mum’ and described a plan to remove incriminating physical evidence from the scene as well as ways of making it look as though Matthew, the other son, had been assaulted. The tyre lever from Jennifer De Gruchy’s car, possibly the murder weapon, was never found.
I had seen Matthew De Gruchy at the police station: a slight, insipid, even weedy boy, not very tall with dark hair. It was hard to fathom how he could contain such aggression and cause so much damage. In June 1996 he was arrested and charged with the murders of his mother, sister and his brother. He never made any admissions about the murders or his actions. He was later convicted and sentenced to three concurrent terms of imprisonment of twenty-eight years with a minimum of twenty-one years. He is not eligible for parole until 2017.
I returned to work in the Homicide office. According to my police issue duty book, I had conversations with Wayne De Gruchy and his brother and went back to the crime scene with other police officers, but I have no recollection of this. Mentally I had shut down. However, I carried the crime scene with me, my own personal horror movie in full technicolor. The shocking images remained etched in my mind, part of a growing and gruesome mental scrapbook.
CHAPTER
7
The case of Kim Meredith
On the morning of Saturday 23 March 1996, just ten days after the De Gruchy murders, I was about to enjoy a well-deserved day off when the home phone rang. It was Detective Sergeant Wayne Hayes asking me whether I was available to travel to Albury to assist local detectives in investigating the brutal murder of a young woman.
I said I was. I was no longer involved in the De Gruchy investigation and had no other pressing work commitments. This was not only another major case, it would also enable me to work with Wayne, a highly regarded investigator; if I said no I might never be asked again. I quickly packed a bag, Wayne picked me up and we drove to Albury, about six and a half hours south-west of Sydney with a stop for lunch.
We went to the police command post near the intersection of Swift and Macauley streets: easy to find because of the cars with the revolving blue lights and the blue-and-white checkered crime-scene tape. We parked and walked towards the young constable who was guarding the crime scene. He quickly stood up, looking ill at ease; we were not in uniform so he probably thought we were journalists. When we showed our police ID and explained who we were, he produced the crime-scene register and we signed in.
The police had floodlit the scene of the crime, which was not large, just a small car park and yard at the rear of an office block. A door to the rear of the office block had a light above it and next to that was a grassed area, a lattice screen and bushes near a fence.
One of the first things I saw was a large pool of blood in the car park with a trail leading from it in the shape of a figure eight. The body of nineteen-year-old Kim Meredith had been dragged behind the lattice screen then back to the door, where she was found. She was almost naked, wearing only a pair of socks. Shoe prints were found in her blood. Her clothes had apparently been pulled off behind the lattice screen, with her bra, panties and shoes dumped behind it. Her blouse had been thrown up on the roof of the office block. The jacket and jeans she had been wearing were found in a disused toilet to the rear of the adjoining premises, and her handbag was in the same area.
I kept looking towards the large pool of blood while I tried to understand what had happened. I knew that she had had her throat slashed, and if the wound was as severe as I had been told, severing major arteries, there should have been a blood spray pattern, but there wasn’t. The only explanation appeared to be that she had been held face down like an animal while her throat was cut so that the blood would simply pour out straight down on the ground rather than arcing up in the air. It was a horrible image.
After we had finished examining the crime scene, we went to the morgue at the Albury Base Hospital to view Kim’s body. There we met Detective Mark Smith, the officer in charge of the investigation. After seeing what had been done to the De Gruchy family, I thought I would have been better prepared for what followed. I now don’t believe anything can really prepare you to see the damage one human being can inflict on another.
Kim Meredith was lying on her back on a metal hospital trolley when I saw her. The first thing I noticed was her waxen pale smooth skin and then I saw that her head had been almost severed from her body and the skin around the wound curled at a weird angle. There were twigs and leaf litter in her hair, and blood and abrasions all over her body from where she had been dragged around after her death. There was also what looked like a bite mark on one of her nipples. Her killer had wiped faeces over her stomach, a very distinctive colour against her pale skin.
It’s just a body and the spirit has left the body; it’s just a body and the spirit has left the body, I said to myself over and over as I stared at her wounds and made myself breathe. I had to try to forget that the body lying on the trolley was a human being so I could concentrate on investigating her death.
After viewing Kim Meredith’s body we went to Albury police station and spoke with other investigators. We discovered that Kim had been studying business management and hospitality part-time at La Trobe University and that she had a casual job as a bar assistant at the Commercial Hotel. On the previous evening she had worked a shift at the hotel from 8.30pm till sometime after midnight. When she finished she drove her car to another hotel, the Terminus, to meet friends. At some stage she left the Terminus Hotel – she must have gone on foot because her car was still parked near the hotel – and it is believed she was heading towards Sodens Hotel to meet up with other friends. She never made it.
The detectives from Albury had been involved in the investigation since the early hours of the morning after a local security guard found her body. Our role was not to take over the murder investigation but to provide investigative expertise, to assist in the investigation and aid local detectives. We spent much of our time evaluating various pieces of information that were flowing in to the police. We finished at 1.30am.
About nine the next morning Wayne and I had a briefing with other police to discuss
the information we had, look at investigative strategies, and see where the investigation was headed. The Albury detectives were in charge of the primary victim care, that is, they were liaising with Kim Meredith’s family, her mother, father and brother, and keeping them up to date with the progress of the investigation.
One of the investigators told me that Kim’s mother had wanted to know how long Kim’s body had been at the crime scene. It seemed an odd question, and its significance did not strike me until years later – here was a mother wanting to know how long her child had lain naked and alone, an anguished mother unable to comfort her child, even in death.
During the day information continued to flow in from a number of sources, particularly concerning a local man named Graham Mailes. He was well known to Albury police, having a lengthy criminal history involving assault and carrying a knife. Mailes had been seen in Albury in the early hours of the evening on the night of the murder, but was now on his way back to Forbes, 370 kilometres north of Albury, where he lived with his aunt and her family.
A man said that in the early hours of the morning after the murder Mailes had asked his help in getting money from an ATM. When we checked with the bank we found that Kim Meredith’s credit card had been used twice, at 2.40 and 2.41am, in an attempt to get the same sums of money that the witness said Mailes had tried to obtain. This happened twenty minutes before her body was discovered. Another witness saw Mailes in an agitated state at a men’s shelter and had noticed what appeared to be blood on his jeans. We also talked to one of Mailes’s friends. It became imperative to talk to Mailes himself.
About 9.30 that night four of us drove at high speed to Forbes to find Graham Mailes, arriving at about one in the morning. We had little time to rest; at 6am we presented ourselves at Forbes police station, where the local detectives would, we hoped, lead us to our prime suspect. The house was on the outskirts of town and Kate, Mailes’s aunt, answered the door, followed by Mailes himself.
Graham Mailes was a sinister individual, not a man anyone would like to see in a dark alley. Taller than me with a slim but muscular build, he had ginger blonde short hair and a severe cleft palate.
Kate took Wayne and me into the laundry and showed us a pile of Mailes’s clothes thrown on the floor. She later surrendered a pair of his blue Stubbies jeans – and a blue collared shirt, later identified as Kim Meredith’s. Both garments were heavily stained with blood. Mailes agreed to come back to Forbes police station to be interviewed. During the interview he told us he had spent the night of the murder with his girlfriend Debra and had left for Forbes the following morning.
We took Mailes to the local medical centre so a doctor could take blood samples from him, as well as hair from his head and fingernail scrapings. I recall him wincing when a couple of hairs were pulled out and I couldn’t help thinking about the pain inflicted upon Kim Meredith. Wayne provided Mailes with another pair of shoes and the joggers and socks Mailes was wearing were taken as evidence. Kim Meredith’s blood was later identified on the joggers and the shoe impressions at the crime scene were also found to match the joggers Mailes had been wearing.
Unfortunately, all this DNA testing took several days and Mailes had been allowed to leave the police station. After he left, we continued painstakingly working through evidence, including his purchase of a lock knife on the night of the murder and a Guess watch he had in his possession.
The next morning, Tuesday 26 March Wayne and I, together with the two investigators from Albury, drove out to the home at Forbes where Mailes lived. He was mustering sheep in a paddock. After Wayne had offered to help him he consented to come back to the police station provided he was given a lift home, which was agreed. Wayne and Detective Smith started helping Mailes move the sheep and I chose to drive behind them. I was wearing cream-coloured high-heeled shoes, definitely not the best choice of footwear for walking through a dusty paddock with a suspected murderer.
We still didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with murder and we desperately needed results from the blood examinations. We needed to take a number of exhibits, including the lock knife and the Guess watch now identified as Kim Meredith’s, for examination at the government’s Department of Analytical Laboratories at Lidcombe approximately 350 kilometres away. We drove there next morning, delivered the exhibits and drove back towards Albury: a long day of driving, about 700 kilometres.
The next day we did a ‘video run-around’ with police from the Video Unit who had travelled to Albury. A bus had been organised to convey investigators, Video Unit officers, and Mailes and his aunt. She had been invited as support for Mailes, as we believed that while he seemed very street smart, he had a mild intellectual disability. The video runaround meant visiting various places around Albury, including where Mailes’s girlfriend lived, and making recordings. This took the better part of the day and by the time we had reached the car park, the scene of the murder, the media, including television cameras, were well and truly present. The media can be a great ally. They can be a very useful tool, for example in enlisting public help to aid investigations. However, in certain circumstances they can be an encumbrance. In this instance, we would have preferred not to have media present to avoid spooking Mailes.
Police interviewed Mailes again and I watched from another room. When testimony from witnesses appeared to contradict what he had said, including his girlfriend Debra’s declaration that she had not seen him for more than a year and had never lived at the residence Mailes pointed out, he simply said they were wrong or lying.
Before long the interview room door opened and Mark, who had been questioning Mailes, came out, leaving the door open. It was only a small room, about 2 x 2.5 metres square, with Mailes sitting sitting directly in front of the small table on which was the electronic recording device including video and tape recorder, with two chairs opposite. Wayne was sitting on one of these; the other was empty as Mark had left the room.
Mailes appeared agitated, very unsettled; his head was shaking, his face was red. Mark came over and explained to his aunt Kate that he had just told Mailes he was about to charge him with murder, and asked her to come into the room to see whether her presence might calm him. She went in with him.
All of a sudden Mailes pulled his right arm back, clenched his fist and drove it straight towards the left side of Mark’s face. Next minute the two of them were on the floor struggling. Kate ran out of the room while Wayne rushed in to help Mark. They were quickly joined by other police who had been watching on closed-circuit TV in another room. Eventually Mailes was restrained, though it took a number of police to overpower him, and he was handcuffed and led away. He had a bleeding cut above his right eye and I was amazed when he complained about the pain: again, it was hard not to consider the fear and agony Kim Meredith must have suffered.
When I returned to Sydney the following day I was drained. Two days later I was providing Homicide assistance to local investigators at Sutherland regarding a suspected paedophile murder and I really needed some days off. I was rostered for five rest days, which I was looking forward to, just spending some time with Rob and not doing very much.
On my last rest day I had a phone call from Detective Senior Constable Robert Allison at the Homicide Unit. Mailes, who was currently at Long Bay prison hospital, wanted to speak with police about the Kim Meredith murder. Mark in Albury would normally have handled this, but he wouldn’t be able to get to Sydney for six or seven hours and felt the matter was urgent. Could Wayne and I do the interview? Wayne was on holiday in Queensland, so it was down to me. I really wanted to do this right; it was my first Homicide interview and I did not want to do it by myself. Fortunately Detective Robert Allison, who was more experienced, was available.
I headed into the Homicide office trying to collect my thoughts and wrap them back around the Kim Meredith murder investigation. I found a portable Electronic Recorded Interview with Suspected Person (ERISP) machine and away we went.
Long Bay Correctional
Centre is based at Malabar in Sydney, and its hospital is a maximum-security facility. After passing through numerous security checks, we were shown to a room where I could set up the ERISP machine. A short time later, Mailes was brought in.
After introducing ourselves to Mailes, and confirming that he wanted to talk about the murder of Kim Meredith, I launched into procedural questions and confirmed that he understood what was about to happen, including that he would be given a complete copy of the interview on audio cassette. Then I asked the question we all wanted answered. ‘Can you tell me why you wish to speak to us?’
He replied, ‘Why? I didn’t done the murder. I know who done it.’ He added, ‘But when the murder happened I was there.’
Over the next two and a half hours Mailes dealt in excruciating detail with every bit of evidence against him in the police fact sheet tendered to court. In his initial police interview he had denied a witness’s statement that he had been with another friend, Damien, about midnight and they had bought hot dogs. Now he said they had been together. After midnight, he said he and his best mate, Tony, went for drinks at the Terminus Hotel, the last place that Kim Meredith was seen alive. (Though they were allegedly best friends, Mailes had said that prior to that night he had not seen Tony for four years.) About 2.30am Tony had suddenly left the hotel and Mailes followed him. He saw a girl walking up a laneway – it was one that the police had shown Mailes during the video run-around – and Tony attacked her.
Mailes said, ‘He had his hands around her throat, I was a hundred yards away and I said, “What’re you doing?” He took her across the road, he took the knife out, that’s when I saw the knife in his hand, that’s when he slashed her, went swwwwwt real quick. I seen blood bursting out, right, and that’s when I walked off.’ Mailes explained the blood on his own jeans and shirt by saying that, because Tony had been wearing shorts and was therefore barred from the pub, he had given him his own jeans and short-sleeved shirt and put on some black tracksuit pants he found in a Vinnies bin. Tony was about his own height but slimmer.