by Sue Williams
As Tangey was filming, he saw Kuhl spray Luminol on a door and heard the detective with her, Senior Constable Bill Towers, ask her if the resultant glow was blood. ‘No, it can’t be,’ she replied. ‘I went right over it this afternoon.’ Carmen Eckhoff, as well as a team of crime scene examiners, had done a number of thorough investigations earlier in the case, finding no evidence of blood, but tiny amounts of DNA on the steering wheel and gearstick. Tangey, however, saw what he thought to be the blurred outline of a partial handprint on one wall of the Kombi, and felt that Kuhl was taking no notice of it at all. It was yet another echo of the Chamberlain case: the bloodied handprint on baby Azaria’s jumpsuit that was later found to be red sand.
Tangey was alarmed. ‘I thought, “why are they dismissing this?”’ he says. ‘Instead, they moved on quickly to the dash and carried on with an intense examination of the whole van. It wasn’t until later that I mulled it over and thought, “What was that about?”’ Tangey downloaded a digital copy onto Towers’ computer, but kept the original himself. When he saw the story in the press criticising the police for not having seized the hard drive of the Shell Truckstop security camera computer, he phoned the reporter who’d written it, and sent him a copy of the tape. The newspaper ran an image of the alleged handprint. After that, it was given to the Today TV show, and a host of other media.
Superintendent Kate Vanderlaan phoned Tangey immediately, asking for the tape. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘You didn’t pay me anything for it, it’s my property.’ Later, Tangey spoke to another officer who arranged a conference call with the head of forensics, Dr Peter Thatcher, who told him the tape was of little value. That only ignited Tangey’s suspicions even more. ‘I thought, “So why are they going to so much effort to tell me this?”’ he says. ‘Steve Liebmann [of the Today Show] said it looks like a handprint too.’ He then called barrister Stuart Littlemore, and arranged to store the tape in a safe in Sydney.
John Daulby was the next police officer to call him to ask for the tape, saying they didn’t have an audio track, and therefore needed the original. Tangey didn’t believe him, and the two had heated words on the phone. Tangey reported him to the Ombudsman. ‘I feel it was a stuff-up by forensics, and a cover-up,’ he says. ‘During the Chamberlain case, they stuffed up and I thought this was another one. I couldn’t believe that Joy Kuhl was still involved in forensics. But the police couldn’t afford to be seen to stuff-up again.’
Yet it was purely by chance that Joy Kuhl hadn’t been in charge of forensics throughout the entire Falconio investigation. As the call came through about the ambush early on the Sunday morning, she’d had guests for dinner and had been drinking. As a result, she sent her deputy, Eckhoff, to Alice Springs from Darwin instead. Another time, she happened to be in Alice on a different matter, and police asked her to do more Luminol testing on the Kombi. ‘It had already been so closely examined, I said it was a silly idea,’ she says. ‘Luminol is very very good for an outside scene in detecting blood invisible to the eye, but in a car there are so many different compounds, metals, plastics, chemicals, that so much of it glows, it’s frustrating. I kept trying to talk them out of using it, but I eventually said okay.’ Kuhl went over the Kombi for a full six hours, testing every surface and finding nothing. Then she did the night-time test, with Tangey present. ‘We wanted to see how it would be as we were thinking of buying a camera for future scenes,’ she says. ‘But it didn’t work. He couldn’t focus on me or on what I was doing. He’d never had anything to do with a crime scene before, but then he decided he’d found a handprint which is the most idiotic rubbish I heard. If there was anything there, it would have been found during all the proper testing by Carmen, then the crime scene examiners and then myself earlier. If there was real evidence there, why wouldn’t I have taken notice of it? We were all so keen to get evidence. Then it became a real bone of contention. It was all so silly, a storm in a teacup. The press just needed stuff to write about.’
Daulby had similarly dismissed Tangey’s concerns. ‘I spoke to him on a couple of occasions and he went to the Ombudsman on the basis that we threatened him which is rubbish. People had to accept that everything that had to be done to the VW Kombi had been done. The significant examination was done by Carmen Eckhoff.’
The review organised a meeting with Tangey, looked at his video and examined his claims. They came to the conclusion that the vehicle had already been tested with the more accurate Orthotolodine and had been subjected to a fine fingerprint examination. ‘The performance of forensic personnel was professional,’ it concluded.
MORE CONTENTIOUS WERE THE review’s recommendations on future media strategies. They recommended that media releases should be initiated by investigative teams as opposed to reacting to issues raised by the media themselves. They’d obviously learned little. Police in the early days of the case had done no favours at all to Joanne by ignoring so many media misunderstandings, and failing to correct them before they were given credence and repeated again and again. This looked like a recipe for similar problems in the future.
Daulby was critical too. ‘The review said we should have had one or two press conferences a day, but that wouldn’t have worked,’ he says. ‘You’ve got the major radio networks who have a fair degree of pull, then you’ve got people like John Laws. You had to talk to the local media to keep it alive because it’s a Northern Territory crime, and then there’s the interest nationally from those who all want to be party to the information. Then with the British press, you had to push home the remoteness of the scene. They’d started out saying we should have had police on every road within half an hour. It was a bloody difficult time for everybody. The community is worried and feels unsafe and the government worries about it. There’s a lot of pressure, but I kept insisting I was briefed every hour and I had to make sure they didn’t take things out of context. You have to treat every crime on its merits.’ Media officer Denise Hurley feels much the same about the review’s proposals. ‘That was a disastrous idea!’ she says. ‘If you have a press conference at 9 a.m., the story’s changed by 10 a.m. and there might be some story running around that the police stuffed-up that’s not true and has to be countered. They’d learnt nothing from what had happened.’
But it was on one final recommendation of the review that Daulby saw red. They instructed Taskforce Regulus to pursue a line of inquiry they’d already exhaustively investigated, and finally discounted: the Kombi with its two women and one male passenger that had been followed by the man in a ute near Hughenden. A meeting between White, Daulby and media press officer Hurley became heated. Daulby voiced his criticisms of the review team, questioning why they’d been still sending materials to people who’d been eliminated from inquiries, and asking why they’d proposed that two detectives conduct an investigative audit on the job to date when they’d claimed earlier they had been through all the case entries. He was also angry that they seemed to have assumed a level of resources and personnel that simply hadn’t existed. After all, the South Australian force from which Litster had come was a service with 4700 officers, compared to the Northern Territory’s meagre 940.
‘I believe it reflected the attitude of Litster and his “and what would have occurred in South Australia” attitude. It is apparent both Owen and Litster failed to appreciate the lack of seniority in the detective ranks that we currently have and have had for some time. We simply don’t have a cadre of senior detectives that can be shuffled about.’
Litster declined to return calls.
JUST AS IN THE LINDY CHAMBERLAIN case, the misinformation had an effect. The documentary made by Britain’s Channel 4, The Trials of Joanne Lees, was finally shown on 18 July 2002, and aired a number of vox pops from the general public, all suspicious of Joanne’s story, all repeating half-baked, half-remembered half-truths. The program itself came in for criticism too for claiming that Adelaide was ‘the murder capital of the world’. After protests from Prime Minister John Howard, South Australian MPs a
nd the public, the claim was cut from the tape, and an apology issued.
The documentary was revealing of the attitudes of some sections of the press, too. ‘One of us was going to get her, because that’s what happens,’ said James Morgan, freelance photographer for the British Sunday Times. ‘That’s what we expect. We are the British media.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOUR DAUGHTER
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY when German tourists Eva Obermeyer, forty-nine, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Sarah arrived at the vast Litchfield National Park, just off the Stuart Highway 130 kilometres south-west of Darwin, in their rented Toyota Corolla. They spent the afternoon driving around many of the park’s beauty spots, gasping at the size of towering termite mounds and having lunch at one of the pools at the base of the rocky escarpments. As the light began to fade, they wandered down to the last of the four picturesque spring-fed waterfalls in the park, Tolmer Falls, to a lookout 500 metres from the car park. But they were not alone. A man had been following them and he slipped from his Toyota Landcruiser, pulled out a loaded Glock semi-automatic pistol, and stuffed some black cable ties and a pair of handcuffs into his pocket. He then crept over to the emergency phone in the car park and slashed the cable with a sheath knife, before sneaking back to the tourists’ car and puncturing two of their tyres. He then sat down in the tourist information shelter, and watched the path, awaiting the pair’s return.
When Eva and Sarah walked back up the hill, the man asked them for directions to the pool. And then he asked again. And again. They started feeling nervous, but smiled politely, and kept walking towards their car. But the man had other ideas. He stepped in front of them, produced the gun and told them he needed money. Eva quickly handed over all her cash — $150 — but then the man ordered them into the shelter. When Eva refused, he put the gun against her chest and told Sarah he was going to kill her mum. Both women suddenly realised he could be deadly serious. Sarah started crying, and Eva obeyed. But as soon as they entered the shelter, he motioned towards a rough track framed by Pandanus ferns leading away from it towards the creek. Again, he threatened he’d shoot if they refused. They stumbled down the sand and gravel path, and the man fired a shot in the air behind them, just to show he meant business. Halfway along, the man forced the pair to sit on a rocky outcrop while he went through Eva’s travellers’ cheques, credit cards and collection of odd notes in her rucksack. He then ordered them on.
When the three reached the clearing at the bottom, he stood by the water flowing into a shallow stream about 3 metres wide, and told Eva to stand next to one of the old grey ghost gums where he planned to tie her. He’d take Sarah, he said, back to the car. Eva shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I won’t let her go with you. You’ll have to kill me.’ She clung to Sarah as if she’d never let her go.
The man then tied both women to the tree, pulling the cable ties around Sarah’s wrists so tightly that she screamed out in pain. At that, he slashed the ties with his knife, and snapped on the handcuffs instead. He made two attempts at tying Eva with the cable ties, but couldn’t manage to tie her feet. He then offered them a drink of water from the creek. They both refused. ‘You stay here,’ he told them. ‘I need an hour. Don’t move or I’ll shoot you. I’ll come back to check.’ He then left.
An hour later, it was nearly dark, but he was back with a torch. He removed the handcuffs from one of Sarah’s hands and suggested they both go up to the car so she could get the key to free herself from the other. At the prospect of being separated, both women panicked. ‘You’ll have to shoot me first,’ said Eva bravely.
The man looked at her, then sat down. ‘I’d like to have sex with your daughter,’ he said, calmly. ‘What do you think about that?’ Eva gasped. ‘How old is she?’
Desperately, Eva, a psychotherapist, tried to talk him out of the plan.
‘But I want to have sex with your daughter,’ he replied. ‘That’s why I chose you. I saw your daughter, I saw you without a man, I watched you. That’s why I picked you.’
Eva pleaded for her daughter, pretending she was twelve years old, and saying how being raped would destroy her life.
‘Twelve?’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘That’s too young.’ He said he needed two hours and would come back and check on them. Then, finally, he disappeared.
After around three hours, Eva eventually managed to slip her hands from the cable ties, and broke off a branch from the tree to free her daughter. The two terrified women then spent the rest of the night hiding in the bushes, clinging to each other for warmth, fearful of the poisonous snakes and spiders they’d been warned about in the wilds, and jumping at every sound made by animals, and the orange horseshoe and ghost bats native to the area, thinking it could be signalling the man’s return.
When the sun rose, they raced back to the car park, only to find their car undriveable and the phone useless. They then flagged down a passing motorist on the road who drove them to safety and contacted the police.
THE ATTACK ON THE TWO women sent alarms throughout the police force. It sounded so close in some ways to the Barrow Creek incident: the man was white, he was driving a Landcruiser, he had gone armed with a gun and cable ties and was planning to rape at least the young girl. An alert went out around the Territory. At last. This could be the man they’d been looking for.
A WEEK LATER, THREE PEOPLE were driving through the wilderness of Arnhem Land in their Toyota Troop Carrier, when they were waved down by a man on foot. He got into their car and asked them to take him to the nearest settlement. They started talking about the man wanted for an attack on two German tourists and he pulled out his gun and ordered them to drive on to where he’d left his car and hidden his Smith & Wesson .22 semi-automatic pistol and a .308 rifle. But the Northern Territory police had been prepared. They were not going to let their suspect slip through their fingers so easily twice. They’d set up roadblocks all over the area and when the tourists’ car hit one, the gunman gave himself up.
THE GUNMAN TURNED OUT TO be Queenslander Matt Page, thirty-one, a keen member of the Australian Sporting Shooters Association and a former tour guide, manager of hotels in England and Scotland, and most recently a hospitality teacher in Queensland’s Hervey Bay. His girlfriend had recently dumped him, he’d quit his job which he hadn’t liked, he was heavily in debt and he’d just been turned down for a job with the Queensland police. He’d decided to go on a final journey across Northern Australia and commit suicide at Cape York. But then he’d changed his mind. He robbed the Obermeyers because he was broke, yet couldn’t account for the rest of his actions.
The women were both badly affected by the attack. As well as fearing for her own life, Eva Obermeyer had to cope with the terrible prospect of her daughter being raped and murdered. ‘I have lost the ability to enjoy life and will not be able to resume my work at full capacity,’ she told Page’s trial. ‘I have become socially withdrawn, argumentative, stressed, tearful and insecure.’
In November 2002, Page was jailed for nine years. Another threat to life and safety had been removed from the highways and byways of Australia. But the other — the one the whole country wanted to see behind bars — was still on the loose.
CHAPTER FORTY
THE NET TIGHTENS
THE CALL FROM BROOME ABOUT the identity of the Barrow Creek gunman from an arrested drug runner brought some welcome traction to an investigation that, if it hadn’t actually stalled, was certainly spinning its wheels. Okay, anyone arrested with 4 kilograms of cannabis in their car might be desperate enough to say anything to get themselves off the hook. They might even be desperate enough to tell the truth. And, of course, it would be just one more lead out of so many that had already been checked and rejected. But with each new suggestion came the fresh possibility of an answer to a case that had everybody stumped. And this one sounded interesting. Very interesting.
The lead landed on the desk of Superintendent Colleen Gwynne, the woman who’d taken
over the day-to-day running of Taskforce Regulus after Superintendent Kate Vanderlaan was promoted to Commander of the Central Region, based in Katherine. Gwynne still reported to Assistant Commissioner John Daulby but, after the review of the investigation had been completed, was generally left to manage everything her way. It was a position she relished.
When the murder of Peter Falconio — for it was at last being described as a murder inquiry — had first happened, Gwynne spent the first forty-eight hours in the operations room, helping to coordinate the searches and the setting up of roadblocks. After that first flush of involvement, however, she’d gone back to work as an Acting Superintendent in Alice Springs, running everything else that was happening. She was adamant that Joanne Lees was telling the truth. ‘As a police officer, you can’t disbelieve,’ she says. ‘Otherwise, it’s too easy to miss things. And you’re busy dealing with the dynamics of the incident, checking that the victim is coping, working out what resources are needed, seeing how your officers are managing, looking for the offender. You don’t have time to think about the bizarre-ness of the situation.’
By the time Gwynne had been brought in to run the Falconio case in March 2002, the review had recommended cutting the number of people involved from fourteen to nine. She took the opportunity to cull out everyone who wasn’t 100 per cent behind Joanne. She felt she couldn’t afford the doubters.
COLLEEN GWYNNE WAS THE YOUNGEST person in the Northern Territory Police ever to be appointed a Superintendent. Aged thirty-five by the time of the slaying at Barrow Creek, she was a tough, ambitious officer, used to surviving in what was still very much a man’s world. She’d learned that lesson early. The second youngest child of eight, Gwynne’s father was a big, hard-drinking man, who used his fists often. Her second eldest brother Phillip later wrote a kids’ novel, loosely based on the family’s life in the tiny South Australian coastal township of Port Victoria, 190 kilometres west of Adelaide across the Gulf St Vincent on the Yorke Peninsula. Deadly, Unna?, released in 1998, was an instant hit, winning awards all across Australia for its tale of domestic violence, racism, friendship and Australian Rules football in a small community. In 2002, it was adapted for a movie, Australian Rules, which caused massive controversy throughout Australia for its treatment of white–black relations — and chilling violence.