by Megan Norris
Carmel Rosendale also told Homicide detectives how she had received a strange email from Robertson the week Rachel Barber disappeared. ‘It started, “Where the fuck are you!” ’ said the woman. ‘This was a bit of a shock to me, as it was unlike Caroline to use terminology like this on an email.’
After reading of Robertson’s arrest in the media, two of her former Kompass workmates, Michelle Batselas and Denise Harris, wrote to her in the Deer Park prison, sending her a stamped self-addressed envelope. She responded, inviting them to visit her on remand.
She told the women she had been sick from her epilepsy and claimed there were people who wanted to visit her ‘out of curiosity’. She also told them not to believe everything they read about her in the newspapers. This letter was subsequently handed over to Homicide Squad detectives.
On Saturday, 17 April, the two women went to Deer Park to visit Robertson, spending over two hours with her. She discussed her pending court appearance but declined to talk about the case, claiming the interview room was ‘bugged’.
Neither women asked her about the case but noticed that her hair had recently been dyed blonde. When asked why she had done this, she responded that she wanted to get rid of the green dye that had been in her hair at the time of her arrest. She said she had no idea why she’d had green hair in the first place.
She then accused her mother of ringing a newspaper to volunteer ‘her story’. Robertson told the women she would not allow her mother, or stepmother to visit her.
After the visit Michelle Batselas continued to write to Robertson, but never received a response.
27
OBSESSION
Detectives building a case against the suspect on remand were intrigued by the meticulous observations contained in the handwritten dossier Robertson had carefully compiled on her chosen victim. A victim she perceived to be perfect.
Though the document bore no date, it was obvious from the detail in the character study and background history that the suspect had shown more than a passing interest in Rachel, and had been closely monitoring the girl for at least twelve months. The general opinion among the detectives was that this crime stemmed from some powerful fascination with the victim. She appeared to be a girl who had been targeted over a long period of time.
To the Homicide Squad the dossier, collected along with other equally mystifying writings from Robertson’s flat, suggested almost an admiration for Rachel Barber. The romanticised list of the younger girl’s qualities catalogued in a neat, orderly fashion down the page certainly seemed obsessive. This was not, though, a hate list. On the contrary, there was no mention of any ill feeling towards Rachel. It was only Robertson’s closing statement, ‘All things come to pass’, that sounded warning bells.
The unhealthy interest was not confined to Rachel either. Robertson’s writings showed that she had done some detailed background work on the entire family.
Her research tracked the Barbers from their early days in England together, to Elizabeth’s work in a castle, and followed them to Australia and the large country house they’d struggled to sell. She even noted the Barber home was ‘one filled with joy’. She’d studied the victim’s uncle Tony, and Rachel’s grandfather, the prominent Australian children’s writer, Ivan Southall. Living opposite Rachel in Mont Albert, Robertson would have been fully aware of the family’s creative talents. Rachel’s mother Elizabeth was a writer, her father a toymaker and designer. Rachel’s step-grandmother Susan was a photographer and artist, her Uncle Drew an artist and author. Ashleigh-Rose had taken up the flute and little Heather, with her beautiful singing voice, was musical too.
It was not surprising that Rachel had been born with an artistic streak. It had been obvious to everyone, from very early on, that Rachel’s talents lay in dancing. She danced almost as soon as she could walk. Robertson, a heavy, plain girl, could well have been envious of this slightly built dancer. She would have observed Rachel running in and out of her house in ballet outfits, hopping into the car for constant lifts to her latest performances. She’d also been fascinated by a photographic portrait of Rachel that hung in the Barbers’ lounge room, commenting on her graceful neck.
Still, nothing in this profile gave police the faintest idea why Robertson had chosen Rachel in particular. And the lack of any explanation by the suspect after her arrest, and her refusal to answer further questions, left everyone baffled.
Police had sensed that there was something extraordinary about this crime. And as the committal hearing loomed, and the pile of information grew, they were able to throw more light on Robertson’s character and her choice of prey.
The pile of paper was sent to police forensic scientists. Some of the notes were intriguing. Other documents made little sense to the untrained eye. Seemingly useless, innocent sheets of blank paper left in notepads where pages had been ripped out were closely scrutinised for information. If useful evidence had been destroyed in the missing pages, the forensic experts would soon find it. Using special electronic equipment, the scientists quickly discovered that these blank pages were loaded with vital clues. They were able to reconstruct fresh notes from the missing sheets of paper – interpreting indentations made by the writer’s pen as much as six pages below.
A forensic comparison of handwriting samples was conducted to identify Robertson’s handwriting. Almost all the writings, concluded forensic scientist Dr David Black, were penned by the killer. They were compiled into a legible transcript for Homicide Squad detectives. And what they revealed was startling indeed. The scientists had uncovered a blueprint for Rachel Barber’s murder. In her own hand, Robertson had written down details of a complicated and bizarre scheme to lure the teenager to her death. It was a grim plot that involved drugging, killing and disfiguring her, then dumping the girl far away. Her body, concealed in an army bag, was to be disposed of at a place only the killer knew.
Detectives now believed that Rachel Barber’s death could not possibly have been accidental, as Robertson had originally claimed. On the contrary, the crime had been very deliberately planned, a cold-hearted murder that had involved considerable thought. Crown Prosecutor Jeremy Rapke, QC, would later tell the Supreme Court hearing that this was the premeditated and cruel murder of a totally innocent, harmless child by the older daughter of a family friend.
Detectives speculated about the length of time Robertson had been planning the crime. How far back was it that she had begun cataloguing her intended victim’s movements, her physical characteristics? A fixation this powerful must have taken a long time to germinate.
The documents included endless ‘action’ lists. Things to be done, places to go. They seemed very precise and methodical, checklists ticked off in order. Always organised. Among her plans was a trip around Australia for the weeks immediately following Rachel Barber’s disappearance. There was also a note about a train ticket from Melbourne to Sydney, and another about a ticket to Queensland. Since Robertson could not drive because of her epilepsy, train transport made sense.
Police also found an application for a bank loan, made out in Robertson’s name just two days before her arrest. She had applied to borrow $10 000 for a new car. The application was rejected, of course. What did she want the money for? Travel perhaps.
In other lists Robertson recorded items she wanted to buy. Household items. Lists of cosmetics and clothing. And repeated notes on plans for cosmetic surgery. Expensive procedures: a nose job, liposculpture. Would $10 000 cover this? Strangely enough, though, Robertson had not made a single mark in her diary for the day Rachel Barber disappeared. Or during the weeks after the teenager’s disappearance. Not a single note on a single day during the first two weeks of March. It seemed out of character for such an organised and careful thinker, one who had even prepared a careful countdown for the day leading up to the murder: plans for showering, dressing, calling in sick, even what she would have for breakfast.
And Robertson had taken extreme care to compile a priority list of the
things she would need to do immediately after killing Rachel Barber in order to conceal her death. It was a checklist of all the things police later concluded she had done in the days after the murder: things like checking a farm, a reference to a bag, trashing stuff, going to the Grand Prix and arranging the loan. Then there was the name Jem Southall – Byron Bay, Bondi Beach.
Now this name was a bit of a puzzle to police. Southall, police already knew from Robertson’s writings, was Elizabeth’s father’s name.
Another thing that struck the police as even stranger was that Robertson had also appeared to have completed research on missing persons: questions were listed such as, did they still have rights; and for how long? What about applying for things like birth certificates; and was there a list that enabled follow-up checks to be done on missing people? She considered the prospect of private detectives, writing in brackets the words ‘six years’. Was she wondering, perhaps, how long someone might search for a missing person before giving up? Then she wrote of a plan to rent a box ‘so Rachel can’t be traced’. Undoubtedly this was a reference to Rachel Barber and the police assumed the box she wrote about was some kind of post-office box.
More concerning still was yet another peculiar action plan, an orderly checklist which seemed to prioritise her week. It began by repeating the mention of a farm, then on Tuesday she would arrange the bank loan; then a moving van. She’d allocated a night to disguise her hair and thoroughly clean her house, including a steam clean of all the carpets.
So, she didn’t intend Rachel Barber to be found? Or perhaps she was intending to go missing herself? After all, she’d taken the trouble to dye her long brown hair green. And only recently too. Had she cleaned her carpet to remove any evidence that would have revealed Rachel had been there? Police thought this possible since they had found another note planning ‘to fix everything’, including cleaning the carpet. It also revealed plans to sleep in nearby parklands on the Friday evening, but she was arrested hours before this could happen. And since Rachel had been missing twelve days by the time Forensics moved into the flat, there would have been sufficient time for her to erase any incriminating stains or other evidence.
Detectives gathered from the telephone call trace, revealing Robertson’s two lengthy calls to the Barber household the night before Rachel’s disappearance, that this was when she had put her murder plan into action. This was when she offered the naive young dancer $100 to take part in the so-called ‘highly confidential’ psychological study she had written into her plan. This, the Crown speculated at Robertson’s final plea hearing, was the bait she laid for the unsuspecting girl, a plan that was headed ‘Rachel Southall’ rather than ‘Rachel Barber’.
In that carefully constructed plan, Robertson refers to the final phase of the fictitious psychological study. It’s clear she’d given this some detailed thought because she instructed Rachel to pack a small backpack, as if she were running away. She also told the teenager to bring her wallet, her ID, photographs and clothes. Even her teddy and ballet shoes. She stressed the confidential nature of the study: ‘you can’t tell anybody about this,’ she writes.
It appears from the plan that Robertson had intended to meet Rachel Barber outside Melbourne’s Flinders Street station, but this idea is punctuated by a query about cameras in the area. The motive behind the secret meeting then becomes apparent: Robertson reveals a plan to lace a pizza with ‘drowsy powder’ before going through some relaxation techniques. ‘Then toxic cloth over mouth – use army bag,’ continues the plan. It appears she’d already contemplated dumping her victim’s body far way, concealed in the bag that police assumed must be some sort of body bag. But the last line of the plan puzzled everyone. ‘Dump bag separately – then I’ll drive you home.’ Drive who home? Since Robertson had no driver’s licence she wouldn’t have been able to drive anyone anywhere.
The tale Robertson spun must have been very convincing, and Rachel obediently kept the study secret. She did not tell her parents about this highly confidential work; even Manni just got a vague story about a job that would earn her ‘heaps’. To Rachel, eager for her first pay cheque, $100 was a huge amount. She’d already earmarked the money for the shoes her parents could not afford, and she would soon be wearing them. So Rachel went along, and in keeping with the secret nature of the study, she did not mention the name Caroline Reid. She was just an ‘old female friend’.
Rachel, court evidence later revealed, was ‘somewhat shy and reserved’ with strangers, and was more comfortable and talkative around those she knew. Because Caroline was no stranger to Rachel, she had no reason to suspect the older girl of ill intent.
Despite Robertson’s lack of assistance in police inquiries, investigations revealed that after leaving her dance friends in Richmond, Rachel walked a short distance to a toilet block on the corner of Lennox Street, where Caroline Robertson was waiting for her. The older girl had earlier caught a taxi from her flat in Prahran to Richmond, walking from Erin Street – not far from Rachel’s dance school – to the appointed meeting place. Rachel followed the instructions she’d been given, taking along her dance bag, ballet shoes and the teddy bear she took everywhere with her. She was also wearing the commitment ring Manni had bought her at Christmas, plus tiny diamond earrings and two gold necklaces.
The girls caught the tram to Prahran, as Robertson intended, with Rachel excitedly telling her about the new kitten and her boyfriend. But Robertson had not counted on the presence of Alison Guberek. Her sighting of the two together was to prove more than a hiccup in Robertson’s scheme to commit the perfect murder. After reaching Prahran the two girls ordered pizza and went off to Robertson’s flat, Rachel probably being keen to get on with the study and head off home with her $100.
Robertson’s murder plan mentioning the toxic cloth over the girl’s face and lacing the pizza with ‘drowsy powder’ was probably designed to render the victim unconscious so that the rest of the plan could be executed without attracting attention. Robertson could carry out the disfigurement she wrote about before putting Rachel’s body into the army bag she had prepared. She would dump the body and Rachel’s belongings in different remote locations.
Whether she actually used ‘drowsy powder’ to dope her victim is unclear. But toxicological tests conducted on Rachel Barber’s body twelve days after her death revealed traces of diphenhy-dramine in her system. This antihistamine compound found in cold and flu preparations has side effects of drowsiness and impaired mental alertness. Rachel was also found to have a blood alcohol reading of 0.05. This reading, said the pathologist, could have been a result of biological changes in the girl’s body after death, though she could not rule out the possibility that Rachel had drunk alcohol beforehand. Robertson did recall buying alcohol for them to drink at Trinian Street, but Rachel, she claimed, had declined. There was no obvious explanation for the antihistamine. Rachel’s family told police she had not been sick or on any medication at the time she disappeared.
In fact, despite her handwritten reference to ‘drowsy powder’, Robertson strenuously denied carrying out this part of the plan when questioned by Buddhist monk, Greg Sneddon: ‘Jee, if I’d wanted to make the girl drowsy, I mean, I could have easily stolen it [drugs], just easily got pills from my mum’s place, much more powerful pills than something like that.’
Mr Rapke, for the Crown, told the subsequent plea hearing that while it was ‘not possible to say with any degree of certainty’ when the prisoner murdered Rachel, forensic tests showed that the girl most likely died very soon after her disappearance on 1 March. He said that some helpful information could be gleaned from a report by Robertson’s treating psychologist, Michael Crewdson, which detailed a conversation Crewdson had had with the killer. ‘Caroline has given me an account of the way in which Rachel Barber died, but was only able to do it reasonably recently. Caroline told me she had asked Rachel to do some meditation exercise … she told Rachel it would help with unpleasant things and told me she had been in a
daze and did not want to do it. “I was in so much trouble now, I had to.” ’
Robertson told the psychologist that she had strangled Rachel Barber with a piece of telephone cord from an obsolete handset, then kept her body hidden in the bedroom wardrobe for two days, the cord still around the neck. When her father visited the flat the following day, he noticed that she took an ‘unusually long time’ to answer the door, and that the door to her bedroom remained firmly closed. Robertson later told Mr Crewdson she had shut the door to discourage her father from entering and perhaps finding the body.
Mr Rapke, in his later summation of the case to the Supreme Court, was to say that this killing had been executed ‘in a particularly cruel and callous fashion. Manual strangulation seldom leads to instantaneous death. It requires an application of some force, applied at close quarters for some seconds or minutes’.
Even more distressing to the Barber family was the revelation at the plea hearing that Rachel might have had some forewarning of what was to happen, pleading with her killer just before she was strangled, ‘Please, please don’t.’ Robertson had volunteered this information when talking to her psychologist in prison.
Though it is unclear when Robertson actually carried out the strangulation, Steven Granger, an occupant of the flat below, said he had been woken early on Tuesday morning by crying and sobbing coming from the bathroom area above his flat. He thought it was a young female, possibly a child, having ‘a furious tantrum’. He said he lay awake listening to the wailing for about ten minutes before falling asleep again with the noise still going. The Crown later concluded that while the sounds possibly came from Rachel, no one could exclude the possibility that they were the cries of her murderer.
The day after the killing Robertson went to work as usual, but was notably quiet. Police investigations revealed she telephoned the Victorian Transport Corporation twice that morning from work, and again the following morning from home. Oddly, at 9.48 that morning when Robertson was at work, her workstation telephone was used to call her own home number. But it did not answer.