by Anna Krien
And indeed this is what makes football special. It is a chance, an opportunity for glory, in a life that sometimes may hold little other promise of that. But what happens when some of these kids go on to become known by their teammates, clubs and fans as the ‘King’ or ‘God’? And when having sex with girls, especially the same girl, becomes a kind of off-field levelling among players? She’s the ball and everyone gets a touch – that is, if they’re ‘hungry’ enough. So have social distinctions really been done away with? It seems there are rankings in the darker stirrings of the football world, and it’s got nothing to do with class. And it’s in this murky territory where boys can become someone’s fucked-up idea of men.
*
One of the Mount Eliza Drinking Team was giving her evidence when the court suddenly started to fill up. Distracted, she faltered with her answers, looking past the lawyers to the heavy door that kept opening and shutting to reveal yet another reporter. Soon the questioning was over and the next witness was called.
Dayne Beams.
‘How do you guys always know when to turn up?’ I wanted to ask the journalist sitting next to me, but the star attraction was already making his way to the witness box. He was smirking, as if sucking in a smile. I figured he’d had to run a press gauntlet to get into the courthouse, and so his swagger was already warmed up. His renowned sleeve tattoo was hidden beneath a navy blue suit.
Plonking himself down on the chair, he swivelled it away from the judge and faced the wrong direction – looking at all of us in the court seats. Ryan stood up and cleared his throat. Swinging in the chair, Beams looked at the redheaded man with his pink cheeks, wearing a white wig and gown, and smiled a little.
The prosecutor began his questioning as he had with all the witnesses. Where were you prior to Eve, he asked, a simple question that harboured no trap, and yet Beams was defensive.
‘I’m not sure,’ he quipped.
Confused, Ryan asked again.
‘I’m not sure,’ Beams said.
Ryan decided to start at Eve instead. He asked how drunk Beams was when he left. ‘I would have been drunk, but not extremely drunk,’ said Beams.
Ryan turned to Dorcas Street. ‘While you were in the house, did you see Justin Dyer?’
‘Yes,’ said Beams. ‘He was with somebody … They were walking down the stairs, holding hands. She was blonde and she was tallish.’
Like all the witnesses from the Dorcas Street house, Beams had been warned not to reveal any of what had happened in the bedroom, yet he seemed to be going the extra mile, feigning ignorance and talking about this blonde female ‘somebody.’ But at the same time it was an act he seemed only partially to bother with – a half-smile kept pushing up the corner of his mouth, a kind of I-know-that-you-know-that-we’re-all-full-of-shit smirk.
A few minutes later, Beams said he saw them again when he was jumping into a cab. ‘I seen Justin Dyer and he was kissing the blonde female girl on the corner of the street.’
‘Where were you?’ asked Ryan.
‘I was outside.’
But where, Ryan wanted to know.
‘I’m not sure.’
Ryan looked at Judge Taft. He asked to make an application without the presence of the jury or witness. The judge nodded and Beams was told to wait outside, and the jury members were sent to their room at the back. The court was still full of reporters.
‘In my respectful submission,’ said Ryan, ‘Mr Beams constitutes an unfavourable witness.’
Taft looked at Ryan sternly. ‘Let me make it clear to you,’ he said slowly, ‘that I regard the slope you are facing as having a pretty steep incline.’
Ryan disagreed. He rummaged around in the papers on his desk until he found the right document. ‘Your Honour has a copy of the conversation he had?’ he asked. The judge nodded. Gesturing behind him at the full court, with a slight flick of his wig towards the suddenly interested press, Ryan said: ‘For the purposes of this exercise I will do it in a silent method.’
Taft looked at the document in front of him. ‘Yes, thank you.’
Ryan said, ‘The assertion that he saw Justin Dyer “walking down the stairs” with a female “holding hands” does not appear in his version of events on that first occasion. Rather he says he saw him, his observation of him, was outside the dwelling, not inside the dwelling.’
Ryan was in a bind. He wanted to reveal to the jury that Beams’s evidence had altered since he’d spoken to police and to suggest that he was covering up for his mate – but by law he could not cross-examine his own witness without dispensation from the judge.
The judge made a ruling on the spot against clarification. ‘White-line fever should be avoided from every perspective,’ he said. ‘The application is refused.’
Beams and the jury were called back in.
Unable to cross-examine, Ryan’s only other option was to get Beams out of the witness box as soon as possible. He wrapped up as soon as Beams sat down. For a moment, the baton was passed to Thomas, who glanced up from his papers and said, ‘No questions, Your Honour.’
As Beams walked out of the courtroom, the tide of reporters stood and followed him. Ryan turned around, facing the open door, his face redder than usual, and said, ‘Well, that was a fizzer,’ before slumping down in his chair.
*
From interstate Scott Dempster, Justin’s flatmate, appeared on the screen above the witness box. Dempster told the court that Beams had invited him and Justin to Nate’s house. Taxis were scarce, and when one did finally stop, it couldn’t fit them all in. Dempster and one of the girls decided to walk.
It took fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to get to the house on Dorcas Street. When he got there, Dempster saw Justin outside with a girl. According to Dempster, Justin called out ‘Scotty!’ and then kissed the girl. The next day, he said, at their flat in Elwood, Justin told him he’d had sex with the girl.
When Thomas stood up, he had only one question to ask – Ryan had done all the hard work, much of it to the prosecution’s detriment.
‘Justin said to you that afternoon that the girl was planning on coming over later in the afternoon?’
Dempster nodded. ‘Yes.’
*
I was ready to hate him when Nate Cooper took the stand. Judge Taft sharply told him to sit down after he swore on the Bible. Cooper was tall with blue eyes. He gulped nervously as he peered around the courtroom.
He lived in Dorcas Street with his sister and his cousin, John McCarthy.
‘Was part of your reasoning to go to Eve to meet up with Sarah?’ asked Ryan.
‘No, not at the time, no,’ said Nate. ‘I’d met her before, once.’
Again the narrative drew a blank as Ryan skipped over what happened in the bedroom.
‘Now there came a time when Sarah left?’ said Ryan.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know when?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember saying goodbye to her?’
‘No.’
I wanted to slap him. Why hadn’t he seen her out? Why didn’t he say goodbye? He was the one who had brought her home to this mess. I was simmering with anger when Nate gave Judge Taft a pleading look. ‘Excuse me, Your Honour,’ he said in a breaking voice, ‘can I please ask for a glass of water?’ The anger in me eased off a little. The judge, too, seemed to soften. The court watched as Nate took the glass of water, his hand shaking, and gulped it down.
‘At some point did you leave 303 Dorcas Street?’ asked Ryan.
‘Yes, with two mates,’ said Nate. ‘We went to 7-Eleven on Clarendon Street.’
‘Did you notice anything on your way back?’
‘I saw Justin and Sarah … I imagine I would have said “Hi.”’ The glass was empty, but Nate still held onto it tightly.
&nb
sp; Just a boy, I thought. I remembered something I had heard a man say on the radio show This American Life. The interviewer had asked him why, when he was a teenager, he hadn’t intervened when his friend had pulled a gun on another teenager. The man was quiet for a moment. Then, sighing, he said:
You gotta remember, Johnny, now we’re big, now we’re men – but we weren’t men then, we thought we were men, but we were still kids.
Perhaps one of the most dangerous things is a kid who thinks he is a man. Will this line-up of boys reflect on this night in the same way? Nate sat wide-eyed in front of the judge, his mother and sister looking on, their hands in tight knots. Like Justin’s family, did they think all of this was ‘the girl’s’ fault, a slut who was now making their boy’s life hell? Or were they looking at Nate anew? Uneasy, were they wondering how he had found himself in such a situation? Had he brought Sarah home with the intention of ‘sharing her’? Or did the others enter his bedroom uninvited and he just move aside, letting them in?
At the end of his evidence, Nate, his mother and sister left the courtroom. There was no hanging around. And I wondered how much his mother knew and how much she refused to know. Did she feel as though she had failed, and that maybe, in the same way that her son had not respected Sarah, he did not respect her?
*
‘She’s lying,’ Justin’s grandma hissed in my ear out in the foyer when the court took a break. ‘She slept with four others that night, you know that? Four.’
I didn’t know what to say anymore, so I said nothing.
*
Dr Angela Williams was introduced to the court as a forensic expert, having done up to 1000 examinations. She had examined Sarah Wesley at the Royal Women’s Hospital on the Sunday of the allegations. Her evidence was brief. Ryan had few places to go with her as he was not allowed to venture into territory that could be easily explained away as evidence from the house, while for the defence the absence of Justin’s semen could have been helpful only if he had denied having sex with Sarah. The lawyers tried to find their way through the minefield.
‘What you do is look very specifically at a person’s body? You write down what you see?’ asked Thomas.
‘Yes,’ said Williams, ‘and sometimes what we don’t see.’
Thomas was only just getting started, but within moments the jury was dismissed. Judge Taft peered down at Thomas.
‘Where are you going with this?’ he enquired.
Thomas read from Sarah’s police statement describing how she had said ‘No’ to the person in the alleyway, how it wasn’t violent but she couldn’t leave.
‘Is it not consistent with what she says?’ asked Taft, meaning Sarah’s recent testimony.
‘In relation to the alleyway?’
‘Yes.’
‘Arguably it’s not,’ said Thomas, ‘if one is being grabbed and dragged.’ If she was telling the truth, he was asking, then where was the physical evidence?
The jury was brought back in, and Thomas asked if there had been a pattern of fingermarks on Miss Wesley’s arm. Dr Williams said no, there were no markings on the left or right arm. On the right elbow, she noted, there was a 1.5 cm bruise. It was red, which meant it could be either very young or days old. She added that everyone bruises differently and it was important to remember that an ‘absence of an external sign doesn’t indicate lack of trauma.’
Thomas nodded, thanked Dr Williams and sat down.
*
‘Are you with the victim?’ a thin grey-haired woman asked Carol in the court foyer.
Justin’s mum responded ferociously, ‘It depends on who you think the victim is.’
The court volunteer quickly backtracked as it dawned on her that the family of the defendant was seated all around her. ‘Oh yes, that is true.’
I silently tried to urge the woman away, to signal she was about to step on an ant’s nest, but she kept talking. ‘Oh yes, well, I’m a child of the sixties. Back then you’d never have seen the things that come up before the court today – but it is hard getting the balance right. Once we had a woman come in here at the same time as her alleged attacker and she just fainted away –’
‘I would have laughed,’ said Carol coldly.
‘Mum,’ said Justin.
‘No, I mean it, I would have laughed in her face.’
‘Mum,’ Justin said again, but Carol kept going, her face cold and closed and unforgiving.
Justin rose and walked away down the corridor.
CHAPTER 23
Justin was wearing a maroon rugby jumper and was slumped at a grey table. His hands rested in front of him as the policewoman informed him of his rights. He looked stunned. This wasn’t what he’d expected. It wasn’t supposed to be him the police were interested in. He thought he was here to talk about what had happened inside the house. At least that was the impression he had received from Beams, whom he’d spoken to earlier in the day, the AFL footballer telling Justin to see David Galbally, Collingwood’s lawyer, before going to the station. Galbally hadn’t mentioned this turn of events either. Justin had arrived with a statement he’d typed out with the Collingwood lawyer and expected to be able to leave it at that. Instead, he was ushered into an interview room. He had the right to say nothing and to request a lawyer, but he shook his head. He was happy to talk. The footage flickered a little.
Instead of Justin giving his evidence in the witness box, the defence decided to play the video of his original police statement. My story hasn’t changed, Justin said to me outside court when I asked why. ‘Malcolm thinks this way is better.’ This way, I later discovered, the prosecution could not cross-examine him. Justin looked younger in the video, the edges around his face softer. It was Monday night and the news was still awash with highlights and analysis of the grand final. It had been some thirty-six hours since Justin got out of the cab and said goodbye to Sarah.
‘Now, as we talked about,’ said the officer, ‘it is an allegation of rape.’ She asked Justin to explain what had happened.
‘We rocked up,’ said Justin, outlining how he arrived at the house, that he needed to go to the loo and had asked where the toilet was. Then the tape skipped a little. Justin was now describing talking to Sarah. ‘Struck up a conversation, she said she was going to walk home, from South Melbourne to Carlton, “Not going to let you walk to Carlton.”’
Justin explained that walking down Dorcas Street he still hadn’t been to the loo and ducked into a laneway to take a piss.
‘Called her into the lane,’ he said, ‘we had sex. Then she stopped and said, “I’ve gotta go to this party.” She took about two steps and I caught her hand, “Can you finish me off?” She said okay, and then stopped, said she had to go to a barbeque or something.’
Justin called her about an hour later to see if she had got home alright. ‘This guy picked up and said she’s sleeping. She’d promised she’d come over around 4 p.m. Called back, texted, I didn’t hear back from her. I haven’t heard from her.’
The tape cut out then reopened, like an eye.
The police officer asked him to go over the events again in more detail.
Justin said that ‘Coops’ opened the door for him at the Dorcas Street house. ‘I only know him as “Coops.”’
This, it turned out, was Nate’s nickname. Justin started talking to Sarah at the top of the stairs. ‘How you going? What’s your name? Where you from?’
That kind of thing, he said. As Justin talked, I noticed that his voice neither rose nor fell, but remained at the same constant quiet level – it was his hands that moved, as if marking the emphases. He splayed them, palms up, as if surrendering.
Justin said he was at Dorcas Street for about fifteen, twenty minutes. When they left, he saw Scott Dempster out the front and called to him, then started kissing Sarah.
‘She was already
halfway up the alley when I was pissing,’ he said. ‘I had a few drinks, couldn’t really get my penis hard, had a couple go’s, fell out.’
The officer wanted to know if he was drunk.
‘Drunk? I felt alright. I knew what was going on.’
The officer then pressed for more detail. ‘Rubbing her vagina, she was rubbing me, come down here, I undid my pants and she dropped to her knees, I asked if we could have sex, she bent over – maybe ten, fifteen seconds, then she went down again, did it more and then she said, “I really gotta go.”
‘“Can you finish me off?” She said yes. I thought if she didn’t want to do it, she would’ve said no.
‘She turned around, lifted her dress up and pulled her undies down,’ Justin continued. ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t intimidate her. I don’t intimidate girls.’
Justin’s hands were face up on the table. They flared up with his last sentence, his fingers curling, and then lay back flat. The video flickered again and cut out for keeps this time. All those little erased bits, I thought, hovering around like question marks.
*
Two detectives arranged to meet Justin at the alleyway after his police statement. They parked on Dorcas Street, just near the townhouse, wearing a wiretap. The ‘covert’ recording was played in court. One of them phoned Justin to ask where he was – you could hear his faint, tinny reply. At the laneway, he said. He had parked his Holden ute outside the Commonwealth Bank on Clarendon Street. The officers walked down the street, past the two laneways they’d been looking at, to meet him. For about five minutes the court listened to the clip-clopping of the female detective’s heels.