Perfect Victim

by Megan Norris

  In discussions with the State Coroner’s office, I asked that, if it was not advisable for families to view a body because of forthcoming court procedures, could it be possible for Homicide detectives to advise families further in this area? To tell them that if they wished, a police chaplain could be asked by the State Coroner’s office to say a prayer over their loved one? Provision should also be made for religions other than Christianity.

  The Principal Registrar wrote in reply:

  Arrangements can be made at any time for prayers to be said whilst a person is retained at this office. A number of religions require that whilst a person is retained, their ‘holy man’ spends the night at this office.

  In your case I note that it was necessary for Rachel to be retained for ten days. In most cases this period is two days and issues such as religious observances are dealt with by the funeral directors.

  We attempt to be responsive to the needs of people who come into contact with this office. In the circumstances outlined by you, arrangements could have been made for prayers to have been said for Rachel. In future, if contacted by family members with a similar request to that as outlined by you, we will make every effort to comply …

  I was pleased that this service was possible. But the main issue for me was that in our shock we had forgotten to contact the office. We didn’t stop and think, ‘Oh yes, we must arrange this today.’ How comforted we would have been if this service had been made known to us. The Registrar did say that I could contact him further if I had other queries relating to this matter. But, at the time, it appeared to me that he had missed the point, so I did not reply. I have since discovered that the Coroner’s office have an information booklet for family and friends about the Coroner’s process. Perhaps this could be where such information could be put, possibly in the ‘Practical Issues’ section, under funeral arrangements.

  After Caroline had been sentenced we again tackled the subject of photographs. The Homicide department really did want to protect us from images they considered would be too distressing.

  ‘We don’t need to be protected any more,’ we argued. ‘It is your protection of us that is making us distraught.’

  Paul Ross said he would inquire further. Rob Read from the Victims Advisory Unit also said he would pursue the matter for us. Rob explained that there were other factors for Homicide to consider before allowing us to view the photographs. But after a lengthy discussion he had said, ‘What right have we to play God?’

  On 14 December 2000, having signed an indemnity form, and in the presence of Rob Read and our psychologist Michael Clarebrough, we sat before a very thick but ordinary-looking photograph album.

  Rob Read told us he had taken the liberty of looking at the photographs first and had marked with sticky tabs the spot where the photographs of Rachel’s body began. He explained that a lot of the photographs were of Caroline’s flat and her father’s Kilmore property.

  ‘Are you ready?’ I asked Mike.

  ‘Ye-es,’ he said, in a ‘come on – get on with it’ tone.

  Rob Read warned us again that the photographs were horrific.

  We opened the album, flipping through the pictures of Caroline’s flat with some curiosity.

  The next page was marked with a tab.

  Immediate relief. It was Rachel. Our daughter was dead.

  I have likened the story of the photographs to an archaeological dig. There were photographs of each layer of the gravesite as it was meticulously investigated. It was obvious why parents could not be present. Our first response would have been to have lifted our beautiful parcel in our arms. It would have felt just like the image I’ve mentioned of the little girl who found her puppy, dead, in her Christmas parcel. We would not have noticed the exposed flesh and the raw bone. We would have recognised, as we did, our Rachel.

  What I don’t think we would have been prepared for was the smell. Mike said he felt this would have stayed with him for ever. He wondered how the investigation team dealt with the smell. How difficult this must have been for detectives. For the forensic pathologist.

  I had prepared myself for this. Susan had shown me a book she had of black-and-white photographs showing body remains from Sarajevo. My first thought was, oh how grotesque – not the photographs themselves, but rather that some photographer had been inclined to photograph such grief, such misery. However, looking at the photographs, if I imagined these remains as modern sculpture, I could see the work of Henry Moore. Ugliness is often only how we perceive an image.

  Paul Ross had warned us that the photographs did not resemble Rachel. Rob Read repeated that the photographs were horrific. The Homicide Department had struggled to protect us from ourselves. And looking at the photographs of what was once our daughter, we could understand their reservations. But these images were not grotesque to us. That is how it was. We saw the Rachel within.

  My first words were, ‘I can remember massaging those shoulders.’ Shoulders? Her beautiful neck could now have been a beautiful spring cut from the finest gems.

  I could not see her toes. Where were her toes? Had the detectives left them in the soil, buried beneath the bark floor? She was a dancer. All her life she had needed her toes. We needed to see her toes now.

  We turned the page and the photograph we now viewed was of Rachel on the forensic table.

  ‘There,’ said Mike. ‘There are her toes … She looks as if she is asleep,’ said Mike. ‘Remember her asleep in bed?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, gazing at the photographs everyone else thought were so awful. There was our daughter, resting, as if asleep.

  ‘Her hands,’ I said. ‘Look at her hands.’

  Her hands did not appear decomposed. Her beautiful hands. The image I shall remember for ever. They glistened. Perhaps she had been frozen.

  And I remembered Caroline’s hands in the Supreme Court. It’s the image I shall have imprinted on my mind, from the day of sentencing, for ever. I sat looking at the profile of a murderess, looking at her hands. The hands that squeezed the life out of our daughter.

  Hands. I think of this image. Hands are creators. Hands are caressers. Hands hold newborn babes. Hands speak of love and hands mould hate. Hands beat. Hands withhold. Hands kill. Hands had once nailed feet and hands to a cross, and in this image is depicted both hate and love.

  Our beautiful daughter. Is our journey now complete? Have we finally departed your grave?

  I wonder, is it possible to massage a soul?

  35

  UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

  Did Rachel’s killer really appreciate the magnitude of her evil act? It was a crime of self-obsession, a self-obsession that took over the reality of the present. Let’s say that if she could not appreciate the magnitude of it – then how much of her act is she guilty of? How much of her crime are others guilty of? The unhappiness of the teenager? The obsession? The killing?

  In making excuses for murder it is not enough for one to say that one has had an unhappy childhood. There are many people for whom childhood has not been the idyllic fairytale. Although my own childhood had been happy, it was not without its difficulties. I was bullied at school in Years 7 and 8 at an Anglican Girls Grammar because I had a Down’s syndrome sister two years younger than me. I can remember the taunts. ‘You’re mental like your sister.’ I can remember being pushed backwards into a locker and locked in. I can remember the repulsion of a girl walking towards me in the corridor and spitting in my soup. And my parents’ marriage ended when I was sixteen – as did Caroline’s parents’. But I did not choose to murder someone, and I say ‘choose’ because in premeditation one is choosing to kill. Caroline is guilty of Rachel’s murder.

  I remember saying to the press on the steps of the Supreme Court after Caroline had been sentenced to twenty years with a non-parole period of fourteen years and six months, that I wished Caroline had been given counselling earlier, before she had destroyed a beautiful life. I remember thinking over the ensuing months after Rachel’s mur
der how we had said to the press that we wanted the family of the woman charged with the murder of Rachel to know that we felt nothing but compassion for them. I told family and friends that Gail and David need not share any sense of responsibility.

  But these feelings perplexed me after the sentencing – after hearing the angst in Caroline’s letters and her written pleas for help as a lost teenager. These thoughts troubled me because for once I was wishing we had not made these statements. Caroline’s parents, I thought, must share the responsibility. More importantly, I thought, they shared in the demise of their own daughter.

  I emphasised to the media how important it was for children to receive unconditional love. I stressed that children need to know they are loved – for who they are – regardless of their shortcomings.

  These ungracious feelings towards her parents really bothered me. Not only for the raw anger I now felt towards these two parents but because of the lack of compassion beginning to encroach on me. And I sobbed – I was angry with myself. Gail and David were not on trial, and never had been.

  There are many adults who have suffered a miserable childhood, suffered abuse – physical or mental. There are also those who have walked through their journey and become outstanding people in spite of it. Recently I was speaking to the mother of one of my children’s friends who was fostering a baby boy. I discovered that in the last three years she and her husband had fostered close to thirty babies and children. They had both experienced difficult childhoods and it was out of this background that these parents, with two children of their own, had decided to help other children facing difficulties, to help parents needing assistance in the care of their children.

  From Gail’s comments in the days when we were neighbours, we were aware that Caroline was an unhappy teenager. ‘She won’t let me near her,’ were the cries of helplessness from Gail. Gail couldn’t reach her. She told us that Caroline had called her an unfit mother.

  I had suggested counselling for Caroline, and for herself. I told her that Rachel was seeing a counsellor to help her with difficulties in relation to a dance teacher. But Caroline didn’t want to see a counsellor.

  I remember saying to Gail, if she won’t let you near her just hold onto her, wrap your arms around her, in your heart. I tried to explain to Gail that I thought Caroline could have blamed her for sending her father away because at sixteen I blamed my mother for sending my father away. Why couldn’t my mother make my father happy? My relationship with my mother broke down during these years. We became alienated.

  I told Gail it wasn’t until I was in my twenties and married that I realised it wasn’t my mother who had sent my father away. I had come to see that the relationship between two people can irretrievably break down for one reason or another. It wasn’t always just one party sending away another party. I told Gail that one day Caroline would come to her again, but for now just to keep on loving her. (Caroline, your mother does love you. I think perhaps she has been trying for years to help you, but in her despair she didn’t know how. Let her in. Caroline, none of us are perfect, least of all parents.)

  A separation, and often the stressful years leading up to a divorce, can put unfathomable strain on a family. Parents can forget the inner needs of their children. The Reids were financially comfortable. Materialistically, the children lacked for nothing. Their children had the opportunity of a good education. Caroline’s family had neighbourhood status. Caroline was always pleasant to us, and obviously she was to others too, because she babysat for several families in the district, not just us.

  Some people have said to us, ‘Where did all your prayers get you? Where is your God? Your Rachel is dead.’ But God is not responsible for Rachel’s death. Caroline’s parents are not responsible for Rachel’s death. It was her killer, Caroline, who chose and plotted over many months to kill Rachel. As far as our God is concerned, our God chose to save Rachel’s soul. Our prayers were answered. Rachel was found and brought home.

  Rachel’s sisters cannot understand why, as Rachel’s mother, I have a certain amount of compassion for her killer, even now. Sometimes, like living through the month of March with its many dates of anguish, the compassion I feel for her leaves me despairing and angry. Though it is not the act I pity for the killer, for having seen a photograph of the telephone cable that was used to kill Rachel, a photograph I saw after Caroline’s sentencing, I realised it was a cable with a knot that could have been released by a simple slackening of tension. Our daughter’s life could have been spared. It was never an accident. Our daughter was slain in a way that could not have been more personal. Caroline’s full strength would have been needed, until Rachel’s last breath expired.

  In my wildest hopes I thought her killer, having been intent on killing Rachel – and after placing the death cable around Rachel’s neck – had changed her mind on hearing Rachel’s plea, ‘Please, please don’t.’ I had thought perhaps this was what her killer meant by ‘accident’ because then, when she had pity for our daughter and changed her mind, she had discovered to her horror that the ligature could not be slackened. I thought that the crying tantrum the witness had heard could have been Caroline, appalled.

  But the death cable could have been slackened. Simply by letting go.

  It is for the person, the soul within the killer, I have pity for. The person who did not experience a feeling of self worth for who she was, even with all her mistakes; the person who did not perceive an unconditional love, before she despaired to kill. Instead I am left despairing. Despairing at my compassion. I am not saying she did not receive this love but rather that it was her perception that she did not. One day I hope Caroline can feel the warmth of love. If I were her parent I would want to hold her in my arms, to say, one day everything will be all right. I have been abhorred by the sensation to want to do this myself. But how can I? I still fear for Ashleigh-Rose and Heather. And it is my mother love for these two breathing children that holds me back. On her release, will Caroline be any less dangerous? A scary thought. Someone love her, before it is too late.

  I need to repeat that it is important for children to feel unconditional love from their parents. Even for those who kill. Perhaps for some, nothing could be more healing than the embrace of their parents’ innate love. Killers were once born, were once babes with parents. Some killers have parents who can see beyond their child’s abhorrent crime and love their baby. The child within the killer, their child who is now an adult, is still their child, whom they once cradled with hope.

  Some say Caroline was experiencing remorse when she changed her plea. Some say she was sorry she was caught and, realising her chances of a ‘not guilty’ verdict were slim, decided to plead guilty so that she would receive a lesser sentence. Whichever way one looks at it, Rachel did not receive a lesser sentence. Whichever way one looks at it, we have not received a lesser sentence.

  Throughout the eighteen months or so leading up to Caroline’s sentencing, because we were possible witnesses, all the way through we were excluded from the details of Rachel’s murder for the sake of the impending trial. We couldn’t visit the unit where Rachel was murdered. The police, knowing we had never been in Caroline’s unit, didn’t want us to. The less we knew the better. We couldn’t visit her first gravesite at Kilmore before the impending trial. We were advised against seeing her body because of the impending trial. We couldn’t even see photographs of her body before the impending trial. We couldn’t speak to the forensic pathologist. We couldn’t attend the committal hearing. We couldn’t tell Rachel’s grandparents how she was murdered until the committal hearing, nearly a year later. We only told Rachel’s sisters how she was murdered during the December 1999 school holidays. We were not allowed to tell Rachel’s beloved Manni how she was murdered. Rachel’s friends went to the committal hearing and were confronted, for the first time, with the story of how her life was squeezed out of her. And so many other little things.

  If Caroline were truly remorseful, wouldn’t it have
been kinder to plead guilty earlier? But I realise that none of the above would have even occurred to her. And quite fairly, I say, why should it? How many people would realise that because of the security of the coming trial we could be made privy to none of this? Or – think about it – to you, if ever you found yourself in the same ghastly situation.

  Is it any wonder that, when told the day before the trial that Caroline was to change her plea, I greeted this news with anger?

  I remember the anxiety I felt in the weeks leading up to the day of sentencing. I found myself on a new passionate quest. I got it into my head that I wanted our Victim Impact Statement to be read out in court.

  But I remember the social worker from the Office of Public Prosecutions was quite concerned for our welfare. It seemed our request would not be possible.

  ‘Why would we want to do this?’

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘I want to personalise the victim. I want the killer to feel the impact she has had on our family.’ I considered that if Rachel’s family and friends had listened to pleas on Caroline’s behalf at the plea and mitigation, then surely at the time of sentencing, the killer and her family could listen to the impact Caroline’s actions had had on our family. After all, the document was called a Victim Impact Statement.

  For several reasons it was not possible for the statement to be read in court. If ever our idea could have had a chance, it should have occurred when the Victim Impact Statements were tabled in court at the plea hearing.

  Then we were told that Victim Impact Statements were simply not read out in court. Essentially the statements were for the judge or magistrate to read, and for the defence lawyer or defendant. It would technically be a misuse of their purpose for them to be read out in court and perhaps it would be regarded as an interruption by a judge to ‘normal’ court proceedings. My answer to this was that the case was already bizarre, so why not be more bizarre?