Into the Darkness

by Robin Bowles

  ‘Yes.’

  Payne spoke of how much effort had gone into following up most of the witnesses we’d heard from and several that we hadn’t. The false phone number in Phoebe’s jeans pocket had been canvassed with no result, but Payne still had ‘one last avenue to follow up. I know what the answer will be, but we do have to follow it up.’ He’d made some enquiries about a letter from a previously unknown person who’d said that he thought his wife may have given Phoebe drugs or sold her drugs, but it all came to nothing.

  He’d finally chased up the unidentified man Ruth Foster had seen using the lift at Balencea on the afternoon of 2 December. ‘As of this week,’ Payne said, ‘we’ve identified the male. We believe he had a reason for being in the building on the day. We haven’t had a chance to speak to him at this time, but we don’t hold any suspicion of him.’

  So who could he be? It had only taken four years to find him. Was he hiding from investigators?

  Payne had visited the phone repair shop too — twice. Poor Mr Nguyen! At least the detective would have been wearing civvies, not uniform. Police are bad for business.

  There had also been further visits to Balencea. Payne had been asked to check whether the Level 12 refuse door had a gas strut to smooth the movement of the hatch. He did, and found the hatch had ‘nothing to slow it down. It comes back pretty quick.’

  He’d also been asked to have a look at the refuse room with the lights off to check whether if any light from the corridor showed under the door.

  He told the Coroner, ‘The ground floor room is pitch black. An orange or red light on the machine does illuminate the room a tiny bit, but not enough to see your hand in front of your face. If you’re away from the light at all, it’s pitch black.’

  ‘So if you were in that dark room, you wouldn’t be able to identify where the door was?’

  ‘No way.’

  So had Phoebe’s eyes become accustomed to the low light, or did she feel rather than see the edge of the door? She may have still been able to register a possible doorway before she lost consciousness.

  He’d found out that the fiftyish man described by the ambulance officer was Sergeant Graeme Forster.

  He’d also asked the pathologist to test for DNA in Phoebe’s nail scrapings, something that wasn’t done at the time. He didn’t hold out much hope, because she said they’d be pretty degraded or possibly contaminated by now.

  One interesting point was that Eric’s criticism of the CCTV in the building had forced the issue with the owners, who’d installed a new system and put the old one into a locked storeroom. Lorne later discovered that there was an expert in Queensland who might be able to recover some of the lost footage from the old disk. He told Natalie, who approached Eric, who told her it was definitely there — he’d seen it quite recently. But when the police went to look for the disk next day, it had vanished. All the rest of the system was still there, but the one potentially useful part of it was nowhere to be seen. None of the people who had access to the keys knew what had happened to it. Eric asked around to see if anyone knew, but nothing had come of his enquiries. Another mystery.

  And a third. On 4 April 2011 Payne received a CD containing various files with a note telling them how to access it. It couldn’t be used in evidence at this point. E-Crime was looking at it and should be able to supply a report by October.

  I wondered if they’d hired more staff. That seemed much quicker than usual.

  Endless hours had been spent going over security logs and phone printouts that went for dozens of pages. For some reason, the phone printouts were 11 hours out. It turned out that the phone company was recording all times as Greenwich Mean Time.

  Payne was asked whether anything had been done to trace the movements of Phoebe’s phone on 1 and 2 December.

  He said, ‘My understanding is, if a phone’s off, that we don’t have any power to track it.’

  He also said that Phoebe’s Nokia phone log showed no use after 30 November, but Moglia later put it to him that the phone had been called and apparently answered during 1 and 2 December. ‘The records we have don’t show very much, if anything, about the location of the phone.’ Had someone else been using it?

  Moglia also tried to elicit more information about the drug-selling connection in Port Melbourne and the real identity of ‘Tina Smith’, whose number was in the pocket of Phoebe’s jeans.

  Then Ms Siemensma made an intriguing observation. She pointed out that the number of the phantom Tina Smith was almost identical to one of the numbers in the address book on Phoebe’s phone. Phoebe had made repeated calls to that number on the evening of 30 November, after she’d taken the ecstasy.

  The Coroner directed Brendan Payne to check police records for any information they might hold about the person with that number.

  At Ms Siemensma’s suggestion, he also ordered that the phone records for the Nokia be checked for 1 and 2 December, just in case it had been used to make any calls.

  Cross-examining Payne, Mr Galbally went over familiar ground. He asked if there was any evidence that the compactor-room door was chocked open or that the operation of the compactor was manually interfered with on the day of Phoebe’s death.

  Payne said there wasn’t.

  Galbally went on, ‘Have you been able to gather any evidence of third-party involvement in Phoebe’s —’

  Ms Siemensma objected. ‘Your Honour has received a great deal of evidence, and what can be inferred from that must be a matter for Your Honour. This witness is being asked in effect to make a value judgment or some sort of interpretation of the evidence, and in my submission that’s not appropriate.’

  The Coroner supported her, and Galbally chose not to pursue it.

  O’Neill asked if Payne had conferred with Jason Wallace occasionally during his investigations.

  He said he had. ‘I visited Jason Wallace and the Homicide Squad on a few occasions, voicing my concerns and some things that weren’t adding up. Some of them have added up since.’

  O’Neill asked, ‘Does that include Mr Bone’s evidence that in his opinion now, Phoebe couldn’t have passed through the compactor in auto mode and sustained the injuries that she sustained?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Payne had also checked on 12 August that year to see whether the security system at Balencea recorded when somebody was buzzed up using the intercom system. He said there was no unexplained record of anyone being buzzed up to the twelfth floor on 2 December.

  He’d asked Dr Lynch about Phoebe’s minor bruises, but the doctor couldn’t say with any certainty how they were sustained.

  Ms Siemensma had one last question. ‘Detective, before this inquest, when you were saying “There are things that don’t add up”, what was the response from the Homicide Squad?’

  ‘They were concerned — they obviously took note of what I said. But in the end, without proof, I couldn’t persuade them any further. They were aware of my concerns, and they took them on board.’

  ‘And when you say you couldn’t persuade them, were you suggesting that they reinvestigate or take it back?’

  ‘Oh, no, not really.’

  *

  October had been mentioned several times as being when the inquest would resume. The Coroner had been compelled to set such a late date because two significant issues had yet to be resolved. E-Crime’s analyses were not yet ready, and Sol Solomon, the Homicide detective tasked to review the initial handling of Phoebe’s case, couldn’t deliver his report until 6 October. So, after Brendan Payne had delivered his evidence, the hearing went into a two-month recess.

  When we reconvened for the final part of the inquest, there wasn’t much excitement around. Phoebe’s family members were disappointed that Lorne’s long list of questions about the investigation had been referred to a member of Victoria Police, no matter how experienced.


  Sergeant Solomon’s report lived up to expectations. He said that Brendan Payne had ‘conducted a thorough investigation and has presented the evidence available to him in a comprehensive inquest brief’, which I endorsed, but he ‘disagreed with Lorne Campbell’s assertion that the Homicide Squad had been negligent in their handling of the investigation’. I didn’t endorse that conclusion.

  He also disagreed with Lorne that ‘on the available evidence, a conclusion can be drawn that Ms Handsjuk was criminally killed by one or more people’. He said that the evidence does not permit this view. The statements of Ant Hampel, the evidence of his work colleagues, and his phone usage that day ‘indicate no realistic window of opportunity for him to have attended at Balencea during the day, killed Ms Handsjuk, disposed of her body and returned to work’.

  But what about the potential ‘window of opportunity’ between 6.05 p.m. and 7 p.m.? If the ambos had been allowed to examine Phoebe’s body and check her temperature, that possibility could have been ruled in or out too.

  ‘After reading the inquest brief and consulting with the people mentioned at the beginning of my report (Payne, Butterworth, Wallace, Carrick, Lynch, and Giammario), I can see nothing to indicate to me that any other person was involved in the death of Ms Handsjuk, that is, no person precipitated her death, other than herself.’

  Sol said that in his testing of the possibility of Phoebe being able to enter the shaft on her own, he’d demonstrated it was possible for someone of Phoebe’s height and build to get into the chute unaided.

  He tended towards thinking that Stilnox might have been a precipitating factor and recommended that the Coroner look into this.

  It was the expected outcome, but still disappointing in some areas. Natalie was unhappy, Lorne furious.

  So that seemed to be it. We milled about in the foyer for a while, Natalie thanking Moglia and his briefing solicitor and especially thanking Deborah Siemensma. I hung back. There was no room for me in that group after all they’d gone through. I said my goodbyes, promised to visit soon, and headed for home.

  *

  Natalie recorded the closing events of the inquest in her blog on 21 December 2013. She said that after the short hearing on 9 October, the Coroner had declared the inquest closed.

  That day, he’d heard evidence from a police telephone analyst, who advised that the software being used by the police at the time of Phoebe’s death was unable to read the SIM card from her iPhone, resulting in an incomplete analysis. They now have a program that would be able to read the SIM card, but the handset and SIM card had been returned to Ant a few days after her death. The handset was now being used by one of his work colleagues, and he couldn’t locate the SIM card.

  There was also evidence from a police computer analyst, who told the Court he was unfamiliar with the architecture of iMac computers, and the software he used wasn’t designed to analyse them. He said that the log files hadn’t been requested, and that the Coroner had only asked him to examine the computer over a five-day period using six keywords.

  Natalie wrote, ‘These words were chosen by Coroner White without consultation with us. We felt that the parameters fixed by the Coroner were too limited and the analysis was inadequate.’

  So many different things pointed to the possibility that the computer could prove to be the key. Phoebe’s ‘sent’ emails had been deleted and her blood was found on the mouse. There was no suicide note, and Phoebe’s family felt that the absence of a note should have led the police to take possession of the computer that night.

  Now, Lorne and Natalie were hoping to arrange their own analysis of the computer. She wrote, ‘We feel that an independent analysis of the computer hard drive is essential to ascertain whether Phoebe wrote something of importance, to ascertain when her emails were deleted, and because of the unsatisfactory police analysis.’ It was estimated that this would cost the family between $12,000 and $15,000. ‘We would not be in this position if the police had taken the computer on the night,’ Natalie wrote.

  On the last day of the inquest, the Coroner granted them access to an image of the hard drive for independent analysis, but the next day he reversed his decision, giving as his reason Ant’s right to privacy. The Coroner allowed them to press their arguments on this matter, but on 28 November he advised that his decision would stand.

  At first, Lorne and Natalie were keen to have his decision reviewed, but in the end they decided to withdraw their challenge. The Supreme Court is extremely expensive, and the Coroner has sweeping powers. If His Honour was satisfied that everything possible had been done, a challenge would be virtually guaranteed to fail — or that was what the lawyers told Natalie.

  CHAPTER 26

  MALLACOOTA

  My husband Clive and I have a long tradition of escaping town at Christmas every second year. That’s because I love the Christmas madness and Clive hates it! It was ‘his’ year in 2013, so we decided to go to Mallacoota. Our plan was to arrive the week before Christmas and leave on New Year’s Eve so that we’d avoid the holiday crowds and would be driving home against the throng heading for the beach.

  Mallacoota is one of Victoria’s most isolated towns, 25 kilometres off the Princes Highway and about seven hours drive from Melbourne. It’s also the home of Phoebe’s grandmother Jeannette and mother Natalie, who was now working at the golf club, and I had plans to spend time with them over our ten-day break.

  We’d found ourselves a lovely modern apartment looking out over the water and the almost-empty camping ground on the foreshore. The apartment was on the upper floor above a bakery, a newsagent, and a coffee shop. Apart from catching up with Natalie and Jeannette, I didn’t envisage walking much further than the downstairs shops, although there was a big national park behind us and the beach at our door. Miss Deva, my dog, came with us, much to Clive’s displeasure. They coexist in a continual state of armed truce, but she was pretty happy about lazing around at my side and so was I.

  After Christmas Day, I went to visit Natalie. Her house was exactly as I had imagined it would be: hidden well back from the road, surrounded by trees and a bush garden, with a slightly hippie look. A gravel drive, pitted with big shallow basins (far too large to be called pots), led through the bush to the front of the cottage. Inside, it was cool and shaded, casually furnished and reminiscent of a 1960s beach house. The kitchen wasn’t the least bit modern and looked as if it had been the source of many lovingly prepared meals. Natalie had made us a platter of healthy food to snack on, and she suggested we sit upstairs on a balcony overhanging the back garden, almost in the treetops. Since then, I’ve always thought of her house as ‘the tree house’.

  Phoebe’s presence was pervasive. Her drawings lined the walls, her poetry was stuck up on the smaller wall spaces, her sculptures were everywhere, and her journals were piled high beside Natalie’s bed.

  Natalie was still in a state of deep grief. She hadn’t relinquished her relationship with her Tiger Cub and was a long way from putting Phoebe’s memory aside.

  Her overwhelming sadness was a bit of a paradox when I considered the somewhat rocky nature of the last years of Phoebe’s life. Ever since Phoebe had run away from home at the age of 15, she and her mother had had quite a tempestuous relationship. As a mother myself, I wondered whether part of Natalie’s grief was her sense that it was now impossible to change that for the better.

  Close friends of Phoebe had told me she was very private about her mother and rarely if ever said negative things about the members of her family. At the same time, she didn’t willingly slot into anyone else’s preconceived ideas about how she should be. Linda Cohen told me, ‘Phoebe was a wild child. She wasn’t troubled, she was just not ready to be tamed.’ And in the next breath she said, ‘Ant’s rules are Ant’s rules and they threatened the two things Phoebe valued most — freedom and independence.’

  So here I was in the treetops, in a house Phoebe had l
oved, with the mother who’d loved her so much. We pored over her journals, which were full of childlike writing put down on pages every which way (she obviously didn’t like to stay between the lines, even in her journals). It seemed that Natalie thought that by immersing me in the Phoebe memorabilia I’d get to know her better and understand why she could never have committed suicide the way she did, or at all for that matter.

  Natalie talked about Phoebe, Tom, and Nicolai growing up, how close they all were, what fun they had together, and again how Phoebe wouldn’t have killed herself on the eve of her brother’s birthday party.

  She showed me an email exchange she’d had with Phoebe on 4 and 5 October, only weeks before her death. Natalie was writing from the Western Desert, where she was working on a photo shoot. In an email headed ‘Hullo My Tiger Cub’, she told Phoebe they’d climbed to the top of a mountain of rocks called Eagle’s Nest and taken photos for a catalogue with a Chinese audience. ‘Everywhere I go here, I feel an amazing energy from the earth. It is very still and you can sense the age of this amazing country of ours out here like nowhere I have ever been. It is absolutely silent apart from the sound of the wind through the spinifex. The wind seems to speak. I wish you could come out here one day. I think you would love the landscape.

  Loads of Love, Your long way away Tiger Mother.’

  Phoebe wrote back from Melbourne: ‘I would love to be able to come out there and see where u are and u know, I’d give any excuse to get outta here. I have been thinking about my 21st present [a return air ticket overseas] and I would like u to hang onto that for me, for there may be a time in my life that I need to get away without much notice and I would like to have an international flight available for me. I also ask that u don’t mention anything of this to anyone and I wont bring it up again unless I need it. I have thought long and hard about this and have made my decision, so if the offer still stands, would that be ok? I am very pleased that this trip is only an eight-week one and I hope we can have many more visits when you return, missing you and love you lots, xox.’