by Megan Norris
Subsequent police checks on Robertson’s telephone line showed that on Wednesday, 3 March she had made calls to a local taxi truck company, though no record of them was ever found at the company itself. The Supreme Court was later told that it was reasonable to conclude that the prisoner transported Rachel’s body to Kilmore that day.
In spite of the ‘cock and bull story’ Colin Lovitt, QC, said she had originally given to her lawyers about having help with the actual killing, it transpired at the Supreme Court that she had acted alone. Mr Lovitt said that once Robertson had decided to ‘come clean’ she’d even admitted that her earlier version had been ‘bullshit’. She then admitted to hiring a truck and telling the driver that she wanted him to help move a statue, or sculpture, to the Kilmore property. He probably had no idea that the figure wrapped in blankets and concealed in an army bag, lifted out of her wardrobe and into the truck, was the body of a dead girl. At Kilmore, she instructed the driver to drop the bag off next to the house. She told Crewdson she then dragged it to the clump of trees, burying it ‘in a hastily dug shallow grave’.
The van Robertson claimed she had hired was seen by neighbours at the Kilmore property on that Wednesday afternoon – two days after Rachel’s death. It was sighted near the clump of trees where the girl’s body was later found. One neighbour claimed she saw the faded white older-style van in the grounds late that afternoon. She had been driving to collect her children at a nearby pick-up point just before 4 p.m. that day, when she noticed the van moving away from the clump of trees. She described seeing two people walking alongside the van, apparently talking to one another. The van was moving, she said, so a third person must have been driving it.
Of the two walking people, the neighbour claimed, one was short and stocky with dark shoulder-length hair, while the other was taller and thinner, with shorter, fair hair. But she was unable to tell, given the distance, whether that person was male or female. When she returned a short while later the van was still at the property.
Another neighbour also reported seeing the van, but because it was moving she could not see who was driving. Later investigations failed either to identify or locate the driver, or the third person supposedly sighted in the area at the time.
On Friday, 5 March, four days after Rachel Barber’s disappearance, Robertson appeared to have recovered from her alleged illness. Using some of the free tickets handed out around her office, she attended a practice session for the Formula One Grand Prix. This was the same day the Barbers had attempted to visit the event as well, looking for their daughter.
Two days later she telephoned the Barbers’ house and spoke with Rachel’s uncle, Andrew Southall, for fourteen minutes. He recorded her name and number on a notepad along with those of other callers that day and, though he cannot recall what they discussed, he feels sure he would have informed Robertson – who gave him her old name, Caroline Reid – that the family was out, still searching for the missing girl.
On Thursday, 11 March and Friday, 12 March, Robertson left messages at work saying she was still sick and would not be coming in. But when the supervisor rang her home on the Friday requesting a medical certificate, there was no answer. Robertson had already left by cab for the city, probably to make arrangements for her train ticket out of the State. She was still in the city when detectives from Missing Persons first called at her flat during the morning. Returning home at around lunchtime, Robertson telephoned Donna Waters. She wanted the rest of her money, this time for a ‘musical session’. She rang Waters again that afternoon, just two hours before the police returned with the keys to her flat.
Robertson’s semiconscious state when the police found her in the flat was thought to have been the result of an epileptic fit induced by their forced entry. Manufactured symptoms could not be ruled out, however, said Mr Rapke at the plea hearing.
At the final plea hearing Jeremy Rapke told the court that in considering the mental and emotional state of the defendant at the time of the killing it should be remembered that Robertson had shown some degree of clarity in the days following the murder – chasing up money, working some full days, and her visiting the Grand Prix, where her employers observed her to be ‘in good spirits’.
‘If she’d been struck by immediate remorse or regret for what she had done, she was able to suppress such feelings to an extent that she was able to function normally and efficiently, even ruthlessly’, he said in his closing speech. ‘Her conduct after the murder was, therefore, particularly cold-hearted and calculating. She had set about creating the impression that she was leading a normal and unremarkable life, while having the body of a child that she’d murdered in her cupboard and planning and executing its disposal. And at the same time attempting to gain funds, presumably to assist her in her own escape from justice.’
Caroline’s profile on Rachel, her methodical death plan and the orderly checklists of a killer intending to get away with murder certainly added up to damning evidence. And the police, armed with this information for the Crown, were well prepared by the time the suspect’s name appeared on the committal hearing list.
A much thinner Caroline Reed Robertson arrived at the hearing before the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday, 31 January 2000. She was handcuffed to two prison officers. This was her first court appearance in several months. Her depressive illness combined with the stress of the pending court case had undoubtedly contributed to her weight loss.
For members of the Barber family, it was their first opportunity to glimpse the young woman accused of killing Rachel. They filed into court to ensure that Robertson felt their presence. But because the Crown intended calling them as key witnesses in the trial, still many months away, Elizabeth and Michael Barber were not allowed to hear any of the police evidence that would be aired over the coming two days.
It was at this preliminary committal hearing that the bizarre story of Robertson’s blueprint for murder emerged for the first time. It had all the elements of a thriller – and the media seized upon it. A weird, obsessive girl, hatching a macabre plan to kill a pretty young dancer. A contrived plot, reconstructed from old notes. Evidence penned by an apparently ordinary young woman from a middleclass family living in an affluent suburb. A quiet office administrator, a former babysitter.
Prosecutor Robert Barry outlined the strange case, calling witnesses to support the contention that this was a cold-blooded killing executed by a callous murderer. He called Robertson’s work colleagues, the neighbour who had heard the early-morning sobbing from the flat above, neighbours from Kilmore who had seen the van, scientists, pathologists and police.
Robertson sat quietly throughout the hearing. But her defence lawyer, still armed with her earlier yarn about her two supposed accomplices, took care to explore this possibility. It was corroborated by the evidence of the Kilmore neighbour who was convinced that she had seen three people at the Reids’ holiday home.
A forensic psychiatrist, Dr Helen Parker, called by police to assess Robertson’s ability to answer questions, told the court she could find no major physical, intellectual or psychological problem with the accused that would prevent her from pleading to the charge of murder.
At the close of the hearing, Robertson formally pleaded not guilty to the murder of Rachel Barber. Magistrate Frank Hender determined that there was sufficient evidence against the defendant to support a possible murder conviction, and ordered her to stand trial in the Supreme Court. As Robertson was handcuffed and led away, back to Deer Park to await a trial date, police issued an appeal for more information about the van and the ‘two other people’. But they did not believe for a moment that anyone other than the suspect was responsible for the death of Rachel.
Caroline Reed Robertson’s trial was listed for September 2000 at the Supreme Court in Melbourne. She was still maintaining her innocence.
But a week before the case was due to be heard, the family received an unexpected telephone call from Paul Ross at the Homicide Squad, informing them
that the hearing date had been postponed again. They were given no explanation, but it looked as if paperwork for the defence case was still outstanding. The waiting game began again. The case was eventually relisted for trial on 10 October before Justice Frank Vincent.
Witness subpoenas had already been issued when the Office of Public Prosecutions was notified of a significant and unexpected development. A last-minute bombshell: Robertson wanted to change her plea to guilty.
Detectives at the Homicide Squad greeted the news with sighs of relief. Paul Ross was later to say that while police had strong evidence and had always been confident of securing a conviction in the case, they had anticipated that the trial would be a prolonged and painful affair for the Barber family. A guilty plea meant that the family would be spared the distress of hearing fabricated stories from Robertson – a manufactured, sanitised version of their daughter’s death that would only have compounded their anguish. Now they would be spared the trauma of having to give evidence. And it would mean that the Crown did not have to call witnesses to prove what Robertson’s writings had already told them. That she was the killer.
Since her change of heart there would be no need to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt. No trial by jury. No agonising wait while the panel of twelve men and women considered a verdict. The case was relisted for plea mention the following morning.
The sudden change of plea took the media by surprise. The press bench was virtually empty, save for a sole journalist from one of the daily newspapers.
At the brief hearing Robertson’s barrister Colin Lovitt, QC, told Justice Frank Vincent that his client had given him ‘quite firm instructions’ that she wanted to change her plea from not guilty to guilty. Later it would be revealed that Robertson’s change of heart had followed ‘a tempestuous period of internal turmoil’. This led to her terminating investigations which had produced material Justice Vincent claimed might have ‘greatly assisted her legal situation’. But now she’d told her lawyers to formally abort all outstanding investigations.
The defendant, who had to be guided past the press bench and up the staircase into the heavily oak-panelled dock, was escorted by prison officers. She was asked to stand and was arraigned before the court, formally entering her new plea. Mr Lovitt told the brief hearing that a weekly visit from a private psychologist had been necessary to keep Robertson alive, and he informed the judge that further evidence would be called at the full hearing to show that the defendant had been a desperately discontented person with an unhappy family background.
The case was adjourned for a two-day full plea and mitigation hearing at the Supreme Court before Justice Vincent on 25 October. Since there was no longer to be a trial, the only witnesses called would be those giving evidence on behalf of the killer.
28
A NEW PERSONA – TOTAL REVHEAD
‘Jem Southall – 16 years – Total revhead’ ran a note presented in evidence at the Supreme Court on the first day of Caroline Reed Robertson’s plea hearing on Wednesday, 25 October 2000.
The handwritten documents had not made much sense to detectives originally studying them. But this note, combined with the application for a copy of Rachel’s birth certificate, raised a new suspicion. And at the Supreme Court in Melbourne, on a miserable October morning, what already promised to be an exceedingly strange murder case began to take on a new dimension.
An incredibly bizarre twist seemed to be emerging from the investigations, and it gave the Crown a possible motive for murder. Robertson, it appeared, had not just planned to kill Rachel Barber, she had wanted to become her. Or at least somebody closely resembling Rachel Barber, with all the admirable qualities and physical characteristics she perceived in the young dancer. Somebody far removed from the ‘nobody’ Caroline Reed Robertson considered herself to be.
‘It seems from the prisoner’s handwritten notes, that she intended to adopt the name “Jem Southall”,’ stated Mr Jeremy Rapke, QC, opening the Crown’s case at the two-day plea hearing. ‘She even constructed a short personal history of Jem Southall which contained fictitious details of the parents of the new persona,’ he said.
Robertson described her new alter ego as sixteen years old and a ‘total revhead’. She was going to reinvent herself as someone younger, more dynamic, different. A real go-getter.
Another document confirms the existence of this extraordinary identity-swap scheme. In this one, Robertson begins scribbling Rachel’s name in capital letters, slowly renaming her Rachel Southall as she goes down the page. Then Rachel’s name disappears and a new signature emerges – Jem Southall. She doodles the new name repeatedly as if this new identity is slowly evolving from her imagination, the new person subtly replacing Rachel Barber, whose name has vanished. ‘Jem, Jem, Jemmy’, she scribbles. Then, ‘Oh Baby, baby, how was I supposed to know’. She signs off with ‘Cool Bananas’, punctuated with a heart.
More puzzling is the sudden appearance in her writings of the international racing car celebrity Jacques Villeneuve. Police knew from Robertson’s conversations with friends that she expressed some interest in Formula One racing. She had, after all, gone to the Grand Prix in Melbourne just two days after disposing of Rachel’s body at Kilmore. Perhaps Villeneuve’s name featured in her fantasy of becoming someone new because of his glitzy lifestyle – the lifestyle she may have dreamed of having. In other writings Robertson refers to the Australian entertainer Dannii Minogue, Villeneuve’s love interest at the time and a self-confessed chameleon of 1990s transformation herself. Alongside the ‘Jem’ signatures Robertson had also written, ‘Jem Southall Year 11 – 2000’, suggesting that in her fantasy she was already projecting herself a year ahead, into the new person whose identity she planned to assume.
Rachel Barber, like the new persona Jem Southall, would have been a Year 11 student by the year 2000 if she had not already left school to pursue dancing full time. If the undated document had been written before Rachel had even left school, it would explain Robertson’s assumption that the girl would be in Year 11 by 2000. And this meant that the crime could have been germinating for more than eighteen months.
It was plausible, said her defence lawyer Colin Lovitt, QC, that the crime had been motivated by the killer’s desire to become Rachel Barber – or at the very least to reinvent herself in an image resembling that of the girl who possessed all the wonderful qualities she lacked. A talented, loved, pretty, popular child who had the makings of a big star.
‘Rachel had everything going for her, and she had nothing going for her,’ said Mr Lovitt. ‘So, it seems, she [Robertson] ultimately decided, in the most illogical fashion that it beggars belief, that she would take the life of a child, because she could then, in some way, become that child, or at least have the qualities of that person as she perceived them to be.’ It was baffling to all concerned, especially to Robertson, he explained. Everyone trying to help her had all ‘drawn a blank’ when it came to offering a reliable explanation for what had occurred. Mr Lovitt said ‘her motivation we can only guess at’. He found it totally irrational: ‘and I must say after many, many homicide cases one has seen, I have certainly not come across a more frustrating or more irrational taking of a human life’. The last-minute change of plea, he said, illustrated Robertson’s remorse for her crime. It resulted from the passage of time, her conscience and her friendship with the Buddhist monk now supporting her in jail.
The Crown concurred with the defence that the material before the court did not give ‘an entirely reliable picture’ of the motive for the murder – though, if it lay anywhere, it appeared to be in the killer’s jealousy of Rachel Barber’s attractiveness, popularity and success, in the desire to emulate the successes of the girl with whom she had become ‘infatuated’.
‘The writings of the prisoner show an abnormal, almost obsessional interest by her in the deceased,’ said Jeremy Rapke, QC. ‘Her writings are replete with references to Jem Southall and one is driven, almost invariably, to the conclusion th
at it was the plan of the prisoner, after killing the deceased, to assume a false identity – more than likely that of Jem Southall.’
So what slowly emerged during the course of this two-day hearing was a deeply disturbing portrait of a plain, depressed young woman who, like Rachel Barber, was the eldest of three daughters, and who had once lived with her family in the house across the road. But it was a warped mirror-image Robertson saw reflected from the happy Barber household. Robertson had little in common with Rachel and her loving close-knit family. Robertson was the first-born in a crumbling, unhappy, though well-off family on the brink of divorce. Rachel, charming and apparently blessed, might not have been well off, but she had beauty, recognition, love and happiness.
When Robertson set out to obtain a copy of Rachel Barber’s birth certificate, she had already rented a post-office box presumably to avoid detection. But when she filled out the application, she ticked the box indicating that she would pay for it by cheque. Presumably a personal cheque in her own name, which was certainly a major slip-up in the carefully planned scheme.
In Caroline Reed Robertson’s unhappy mind, her fantasy had found its focus. And as in all fantasies, everything was perfect. She was perfect. Jem Southall was young and beautiful. Her notes about cosmetic surgery suggested a plan to reinvent herself into the ‘total revhead’ of her dreams. She would do this, she wrote, through liposculpture for a new slimline figure. She would achieve flawless skin, perfect white teeth through bleaching. She would dye her hair different colours, just as Rachel had.
Robertson also made comparisons in her notes between Rachel and the young Hollywood actress Claire Danes, who played the lead role in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. ‘Nose job as per Rachel Barber/ Claire Danes/ Juliet,’ she wrote. She had collected dozens of coloured photographs of Claire Danes, and others of another Hollywood actress, Katie Holmes – teen heroine of the American TV show, ‘Dawson’s Creek’. ‘Smile and talk to one side (like Katie Holmes/Jewel) – clear big open eyes (like Katie Holmes/young CR)’, Robertson wrote. The ‘Jewel’ referred to an Alaskan pop singer who has the same luminous, angelic wide-eyed look as Claire Danes, Katie Holmes and Rachel Barber. The initials CR possibly referred to a young Caroline Reid – perhaps as a young girl she had found herself more attractive.