by Megan Norris
By the following year, however, ugly is a tame word in Robertson’s abusive vocabulary. Just one year later, by the time she is thirteen, things have changed so dramatically that she holds herself and her life in absolute contempt. She hates everything, especially herself, and cannot find a single positive thing worth writing about. Over the coming six years, a desperately unhappy, lonely little girl matures into an angry, friendless, depressed adult. Throughout her teens she hates school, and by adulthood her only contacts, outside her family, appear to be with her colleagues at work. By now we see a deeply damaged young woman, brimming with intense self-loathing. Little wonder that she wished for transformation. In one of these disturbing, undated letters to her father, in childish handwriting, she claims apologetically that she’s facing the end of her life. Burdened with so many bad things, she finds nothing positive to make her life worth living. ‘I’m sorry I can’t stop the end of my life,’ she says flatly, explaining that ‘everything’ has ended it. There is a pervading sense of isolation and hopelessness about the letter as she says that nobody understands her pain, a pain most people couldn’t even begin to imagine. She acknowledges that people think she is immature, but swears ‘till I’m dead that today was the end of my life.’
In another similarly worded letter, Robertson’s desperation is evident even in her style of handwriting: her enormous scribbled uncontrolled words almost spilling off the pages as she again pleads for understanding, and asks him not to be angry with her for saying her life is over.
A photocopied bundle of these writings was presented to Justice Vincent to illustrate how prolific an author of lists, letters and notes Robertson became during those early formative years leading up to Rachel Barber’s murder. Seven long years of venting her rage on paper.
In one letter she says she finds it difficult to discuss her feelings with her family, preferring to put her thoughts on paper as a safe outlet for them. ‘I heard a saying ages ago, “Paper is more patient than man”. I suppose it’s real.’
Most of the writings appear to date back to Robertson’s very early teen years which Lovitt claimed were ‘disastrous’. And the majority refer quite dramatically to her relationship, as she perceived it, with her mother Gail Reid.
Among these documents were the letters from as far back as 1992 when Caroline Reid would have been only about twelve years old. Some of these too indicate the despair she felt about her family and her life. In a letter written late one evening during the school holidays of April 1993, Caroline tells her father she has spent the entire break feeling horrible. She repeats bitterly the belief that she’ll never achieve anything worthwhile in life and lashes out in distress, claiming everyone yells and ‘bitches’ at her. ‘I’m so sick of everything!!!’ she writes angrily, before adopting the same persecuted tone in which she states school life is hell and she’s tired of being a victim. Then she denigrates herself, saying she is viewed as an ugly, weird girl who’ll never fit in.
Then in September 1993 a miserable fourteen-year-old Caroline Reid drew a portrait of herself. She called it ‘Misfit’ and surrounded her sketch with a list of adjectives summing up her appearance and emotions. Of all the writings tendered to the court, this picture of intense self-loathing speaks most eloquently of the turmoil in her mind. She brands herself an idiot, funny in the head, calls herself ‘Spotty Dotty’, and claims to have a brain tumour. She believes she’s boring, weird and jealous. She even writes some verse down the side of the drawing: ‘If the plastic surgeon lived overseas, what a good swimmer Carrie would be!’ Her desire to remove herself from the person she most hated – herself – was clearly very strong indeed. There is also an earlier drawing from 1992, where Robertson has smothered her face with hundreds of dots representing her pimples, not neat pin-point dots created with a steady hand, but marks made by the apparently frenzied jabs of a sharpened pencil.
She writes in one undated note, ‘I get yelled at and hated … I don’t let people get close to me …’ Faintly, at the top of the note, are the words ‘I Hate Caroline Club – President; Caroline.’
In another deeply disturbing letter, entitled ‘School is Hell’, Robertson writes of her childhood dreams of becoming an actor. Written in giant, simple, childish print, it begins almost apologetically, saying she doesn’t want to burden her father with more ‘childish crap’. But she reveals pathetically that she is haunted by a particular problem that has been ‘pissing her off’ for some months and she needs to share it with someone.
She then details an incident in which she has told her friends about her secret dreams of becoming a singer or an actor, and how she is humiliated when they respond by laughing at her. Crushed, the teenage Robertson notes that her friends have always been more ‘striking, more unusual and more attractive’ than she is. ‘I just keep dreaming that one day everything would be almost perfect (as perfect as things can be)’, she concludes.
By the time Robertson reached her mid-teens she had become a totally frustrated and unhappy young woman, stated Colin Lovitt. She writes of her feelings and problems in a barrage of ‘outpourings’ tinged with despair. Some of the letters she asks to be thrown away or burnt; others, including diary entries, she wrote to herself and kept. Occasionally, after writing, she would mention her intention to destroy the document, stating that putting her feelings into words relieved her despair.
There are indications in the writings of intense anxiety about herself and her future – and grave concerns about achieving many of the often impossible goals she has set for herself.
In a sad letter riddled with enormous anxieties, she expresses the constant inner turmoil and confusion that dogs her life. It’s clear, from the struggle Robertson describes, that she’s now finding it increasingly difficult to express her feelings to anyone, or even to understand them herself. The letter is loaded with concerns for her future and is marked by a depressive perception of what life is likely to hold for her. By now it appears she is recognising that perhaps a nose job may not provide her with true happiness. But she replaces this goal with an equally unrealistic one. This time, she claims, becoming an actor is the only thing that will bring relief and a happy life. Then she cries for help, saying, ‘What am I to do?’ She is so far away from reaching her goal that it seems almost unattainable.
In another tragic letter, under the heading, ‘Life is Torture in Its Purest Form, aged 14’, she repeats the following negatives about herself: ‘Funny in the head, ugly, deformed, stupid, doormat, loser, dickhead’ and again claims to have a brain tumour.
Two psychologists and a psychiatrist assessing the defendant told the court that they had read the material, which gave them a helpful and very revealing glimpse of Robertson’s disturbed thinking. Mr Lovitt stated that though the court might reasonably hold the view that these were the typical scribblings of adolescence and expressed the sentiments of many young people, there was something far more troubling about them that should be considered when examining the background of the case.
One particularly unsettling letter demonstrated this, he said. The letter, which Robertson signs ‘Spotty Dotty’, is indicative of the despair that now tinged every aspect of her life.
By the time she wrote that letter, life had deteriorated into a black trough where she was questioning how much longer she could survive with her overload of intensely bad feelings and thoughts. ‘I don’t know how I have survived this long,’ she writes bleakly, hinting of suicide. She can’t envisage a happy future any more and says death might be her only escape from a horrible existence in which she feels embarrassed to be alive. In this letter her prolific lists which itemised the reasons for her negative thoughts have by now disappeared. She abandons any attempt to explain her thought patterns. Life, she says simply, holds no hope.
The most troubling aspect of these teenage scribblings is the mounting sense of detachment which surfaces repeatedly. She is flawed, different, less worthy, more loathesome and totally unlovable. All these negative beliefs app
ear to add momentum to her growing sense of ‘otherness’. In Robertson’s mind she’s become a ‘troubled, tortured soul’ thrown into an alien environment ‘full of angels’. She can’t even communicate her feelings any more … except from her letters. ‘Life for me sucks,’ she says.
While many of Robertson’s letters carry the same depressive trademark of hopelessness and helplessness, others can barely contain the mounting sense of rage she feels towards a world that has apparently abandoned her. Many open with a torrent of self-directed anger about her physical flaws. Others are outwardly angry – her giant writing dominating the pages of her notes. She tells herself it’s because she’s fat, weird, unattractive and stupid that she attracts victimisation and is an outsider at school. A lonely girl, she cries through her words that nobody understands or cares about Caroline the victim. Yet amid the barrage of illogical rantings she vaguely acknowledges that her mother has attempted to organise counselling for her and that her school teachers have repeatedly tried to talk to her about her moody withdrawal. She describes them asking if she’s okay, but seems hostile towards their approaches.
By now she feels out of reach. ‘All of the feelings and horrible things everybody says about me bottle up,’ she wrote, ‘and I have nowhere to explode everything.’ But with such powerful feelings even a disturbed teenager like Caroline Robertson noted that she wouldn’t be able to contain such angry emotions for ever. Murderous thoughts may not have been on her mind back then, but in a chilling prediction of the overspill of rage that would eventually erupt six years ahead, Robertson foretold the explosion inside her would get bigger and bigger, ‘until there is nothing left inside me.’
The reports written by doctors assessing the prisoner in jail support the difficulties Robertson had in relating to her parents, and they to her. Her relationship with her father, while apparently close at times, was often strained, and in several letters she directs her anger at him. In others it is focused on her mother, who had apparently suffered post-natal depression after Caroline’s birth. In her writings Caroline describes her as weak, powerless and dependent. Mr Lovitt said that in the defendant’s perception her relationship with her mother had broken down ‘many, many years ago’.
In one letter to her father, dated 11 November 1996, Caroline acknowledges in a defensive tone that she knows she’s rude and a ‘bitch’, but claims that these are defensive mechanisms. Again she expresses her desire for a happy life and laments that she is feeling isolated because there is nobody who understands ‘what it is like in here’.
Among the writings tendered to the court as part of the defence case was an extract from a letter in different handwriting from Robertson’s. It appeared to be written by Gail Reid to her estranged husband, expressing her concern for Caroline: ‘It is for my Carrie that I cry, she is so unhappy.’ In return, Caroline fumes about her mother in her writings and accuses her of carping criticisms – of telling her she could never do some things like dancing. ‘She said I was awful at ballet.’
At fifteen Robertson begged her father to let her move out of home. But she was clearly emotionally vulnerable and immature at that time, and he refused. Her repeated references to her parents’ marriage breakdown in her letters to her father make mention of his dealings with lawyers. These notes, said Mr Lovitt, paint a vivid picture of the trauma she experienced as she battled to cope with her parents’ divorce. In many of her letters Robertson refers to her parents by their first names, and she occasionally spells their names backwards.
These letters of misery escalate in intensity as the years pass and, though bizarre and disturbing, they do bear some degree of eloquence, depicting a literate and intelligent, if somewhat immature, author. As Caroline Reid matures, the entanglements in her unhappy home life cause her to resent both parents. She portrays herself as ‘the blame thing’ in one of her letters, and complains yet again that the pressures on her are ‘so numerous I just can’t humanly possibly cope with life’.
Her simmering anger seems to grow following her parents’ separation when she is sixteen, and is further magnified when her father embarks on a new relationship and later remarries. The disruption to Robertson caused by this family breakdown, said Mr Lovitt, was profound.
All of this highlighted the glaring disparity between Robertson’s unhappy life and that of her victim. Robertson was shattered, experiencing ‘severe difficulties’ with both parents – particularly her mother. She refers in one of her self-hate lists to having no family and in distancing herself from her parents she already appears to have begun the slow process of dissociating herself from the Caroline she loathes. She refuses to address her parents as ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’, signing off in names other than her own. Even back then, in 1993, there were indications that the awfulness of her life, and her intense self-anger, had begun to manifest itself in a strong desire to escape what she described as her ‘blue cardigan life’ – by being someone else. She signs off her letters often using different names: sometimes she’s Rebekah, sometimes Charley Robertson, sometimes Reid Robertson. Occasionally she uses the signatory ‘Spotty Dotty’ or the ‘Hellraiser’. In her own mind she is now no longer Caroline Reid. And then in 1998 she actually does change her name by deed poll, retaining the name Reid but changing the spelling and becoming Caroline Reed Robertson.
In one of the few optimistic letters tendered to the Supreme Court, Robertson says that it is time she moved on in her life. She appears in this brief notation to have had some glimpse of a more positive future, saying it is time for a fresh start and expressing a desire to move to a new home in a new suburb. She will start a new school and take up new hobbies. But the hint of wanting to be a whole new person is still very much in evidence, even in this letter. She ends the letter angrily, stating she is still ‘harping on’ about wanting a new name. Caroline, or ‘Carrie’ as she calls herself, is a product ‘of the shit’.
Robertson’s treating psychologist, Michael Crewdson, said she saw herself as ‘the bad kid’ in the family, failing everyone’s expectations. In revenge, her aggression was directed back at her family. She stole from them and lied. David Reid, one doctor noted, described her as a manipulative, sometimes frightening girl. Rapke, for the Crown, told the plea hearing that although no application had ever been made for bail on Robertson’s behalf, any such application would have resulted in David Reid lodging an objection – on the grounds that five other women would have feared for their lives.
Crewdson wrote that Robertson felt alienated and perceived a sense of unfairness permeating her life: ‘Others seem to have good lives – Caroline has shit. She once painted and hung a portrait of herself, which was completely black.’
This black mindset coloured Robertson’s teen years completely. She lashes out at her family for not being the ‘perfect child’ she claims they wanted her to be. In another furious letter to her parents, she apologises to her mother for having been born, stating that she wishes she’d been aborted before birth. Her punishment for living, she says, is to live the life of a ‘cursed alien’. She writes about an alien-like force inside her that compels her to commit despicable and objectionable acts like cheating, lying, stealing, swearing and screaming. She claims these feelings were there at her birth. Now, even as she verges on adult life, she perceives herself to be an older version of the same angry, confused child.
Then, in a pathetic apology, she professes to feel sorry for her parents and vaguely acknowledges the hurt and pain she is causing to her family. ‘I’m sorry I’m not a perfect kid,’ she says. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’
In the Supreme Court, Justice Vincent asked the defence a question: ‘What, if any, response was made to these various calls by her?’
Mr Lovitt responded: ‘It would seem very little, Your Honour …’ But this was only Robertson’s perception of events, he said, that when she cried out for help, none was forthcoming.
‘One has to differentiate between things that she says as being true and things that she is
believing were true,’ said Lovitt. ‘It is clear that the disruption to her family had a profound effect on her in a way that clearly we can happily say doesn’t normally occur but certainly has in this case.’
Little wonder then that, filled with such self-hate, Robertson’s depressive state of mind would spiral downwards over the years to a point where she would plot and scheme to leave it behind for ever. That she would create a fantasy in her mind in the form of a new persona – one that she would create through cosmetic surgery, weight loss and disguise. One that she would kill for.
By her mid-teens Caroline Reid described her life as a living hell – if she could magically change herself, then she and her life would be perfect. Being perfect meant she would finally be happy.
One of her letters talks about her aspirations to achieve total perfection and she fantasises about a distant scenario where she would one day appear on TV and amaze all her old acquaintances with a fabulous new persona. She refers to a segment on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ in which old friends are reunited with people from their past. The segment, with the title ‘If You Could See Me Now’ appears to have captured her imagination and in her writings she had already projected herself into this fantasy scene where she’d reveal herself as a transformed star. This, she pondered vengefully, would be fitting justice for all the people in her life that had ever insulted or underestimated her determination and talent. The newly invented Caroline would be a million miles away from the ‘little deadbeat scum bag’ they remembered. She would show everyone.