As for Sean, she was not sexually attracted to him, and her thoughts reveal a high level of naivety and confusion. ‘I told him that I am involved in an undercover case in order to see Paul,’ she recorded, ‘and to continue to see Paul. I can’t tell Sean what the case is because it is undercover secret squirrel stuff. And naturally he got the shits and that is how this all came about. But why couldn’t he just say OK that is what you are involved in fair enough and leave it at that. Why so many questions.’
It was a volatile combination of naivety, wilfulness, and frustration. Despite this, Kylie told Lynne Baker she was feeling better, and repeated this twice in the following weeks.
*
But things had got worse at home. In early February, Sean was checking their joint email account and found a message for Kylie, which he opened. It contained sexual innuendo and was from someone he hadn’t heard of before, a man named Paul Wilkinson. When he asked Kylie about it, she told him this was the policeman she was working with, and that he was nothing more than a friend.
‘You’ve got female friends,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ve sent them emails like that.’
‘No,’ Sean replied.
Kylie reacted by becoming angry again and abusing Sean for opening an email addressed to her. She began to tell him some amazing tales about Wilkinson and his police work. These conversations would occur out in the car because she was afraid their house was bugged. She said Wilkinson was in an undercover section of the police force’s State Protection Group, based at Redfern. Kylie said she had met his colleagues, including a girl who had been raped at the police academy and who later killed herself.
When the Redfern Riots occurred in the middle of February 2004, Kylie devoured the media coverage and cut out articles from the newspapers, keeping them in a manila folder. One front-page photograph showed a line of police in Redfern, facing the mob with their backs to the camera. Kylie drew a circle around one of the cops and told Sean it was the fellow she was working with, Paul Wilkinson. Sean asked her how she could identify him, and she said Wilkinson had told her.
If he had, it was untrue: ACLOs were not involved in this sort of dangerous work, and in any case Wilkinson was no longer working at Redfern. But Kylie seems to have believed it, because she had the picture laminated and later showed it to some of her family.
In early March, Kylie told Sean she had been raped by Gary. He wonders now if the rape allegation might have been an attempt to drive a wedge between himself and family members who had begun to comment on Kylie’s strange behaviour. Certainly it did not bring the couple any closer together.
‘When I’m on the phone [to someone],’ he said to her one day in a conversation she taped, ‘I’ve told you a million times, do not speak at all, and do not say, “Sean, Sean, Sean.” ’
‘Sean!’ she said. ‘I wanted you for something. Shit. Fuck me dead!’
‘I’m sick of tellin’ you: we do not speak [to each other] when we’re on the phone.’
‘You fuckin’ speak to me when I’m on the phone!’ she said.
‘Not unless I’m meant to.’
‘Now what type of fucked-up thing’s that?’
‘Well, maybe that’s the way it goes,’ he said.
‘Well obviously, obviously your method of speaking has failed miserably because every time we do it we fight.’
Kylie said she was worried about what Sean would say when he got into the witness box if Gary went on trial for rape. ‘I’ve stood behind you 100 per cent,’ said Sean. ‘End of the day, if [Gary] did this to you, he should pay for it.’
But it turned out that what Kylie was really concerned about was whether Sean would mention Paul Wilkinson. We now know—although, of course, Sean didn’t at the time—that this was due to Wilkinson’s insistence that their relationship remain completely secret—he didn’t want Julie finding out what he’d been up to. But Kylie told Sean the reason for the secrecy was Wilkinson’s involvement in undercover activities, and so Sean agreed to keep him out of it if the matter ever went to court.
‘We’re going along that track [of keeping quiet about Wilkinson] because of the bullshit you’re involved in,’ he said. ‘So, yeah, I’m gunna do it because I want to support you, but no, I do not agree with it and I never will. Because it’s wrong. Simply that.’
They changed the subject and Sean mentioned the stress he was experiencing over the rape matter and other things. Kylie said she was under a lot of stress too, and Sean sounded sceptical. ‘You don’t even work,’ he said.
She said she was on sick leave: ‘I sit at home, that’s what I do now . . . You think they’re not hounding me to come back to find out what I’m doing? You think that, you know, it’s all clear sailing? That’s not pressure?’
‘You don’t work.’
Kylie became almost incoherent. ‘I don’t have that closing pressure,’ she said, ‘but what I have had when I was working in a clinical setting? But I still have the mental stability of the, of the pressure being outside of the setting. Right? . . . I still have to face the fact that I have to go back there one day. I have to deal with all that shit that I’ve had to deal with when I was there . . . Uni pressure, I’ve got the work pressure, I’ve got the home environment pressure, I’ve got the Coast pressure.’
‘Mmm.’
‘No matter what environment I walk into, I carry one pressure load onto another. Right? . . . I’m bloody sick of this shit.’
‘Yeah? Welcome to my world.’
‘Oh, your world? Oh, you ought to sit in mine sometime.’
Sean accepted an awful lot of bad treatment from Kylie. ‘At the time I believed what she said,’ he later recalled, ‘but now I just don’t know. Things just don’t add up.’ His frustration back then was mixed with sympathy for her clearly disturbed state. Sometimes she would go to Cronulla Beach by herself and sit on the rocks and look out at the sea. On other days she’d drive over to Sydney Airport and just watch the planes come and go.
Finally, Kylie agreed to Sean’s demands that they have a serious talk about their marriage. She said she wanted to ask along a friend as a mediator. Sean said this was okay, and at the appointed time a casually dressed Aboriginal man in his early thirties turned up at their place. He was of stocky build, in his early thirties, with short dark hair, about 165 centimetres tall and with a bit of a pot belly, wearing a Rabbitohs football jumper, cargo shorts and runners. He seemed to Sean to be a pleasant enough bloke, and the three of them went out onto the back patio. Sean began to ask Kylie various questions. She responded angrily, jumping out of her chair and yelling, but the man was quite good at calming her down. But the conversation was non-conclusive and after a while the man left. Sean doesn’t know who he was: he says he didn’t look like the pictures of Wilkinson he saw in the press several years later. On the other hand, he did look like a picture of a guy he’d seen on Kylie’s mobile phone.
If it was Wilkinson, you’d have to wonder why he’d have wanted to meet Sean in this manner. One reason might be a desire to experience some sort of thrill in deceiving his lover’s husband in this way. Or there’s the possibility he actually wanted Kylie out of his life: the relationship had become too intense, he feared his marriage was threatened and this was a way of ensuring Kylie talked to Sean about their problems. Whatever the case, and whoever the man was, this meeting was one of the most perplexing incidents in a story full of them.
Throughout March, Kylie was receiving phone calls and text messages almost all the time, sometimes nonstop for several hours. She would leave the house, telling Sean she was working with the undercover police. She said she was doing surveillance work in cars in the Sutherland and Menai areas, or taking photographs in Bondi. It got to the point where she insisted, before Sean took their car out, that she made a phone call first: she needed to ‘clear it’ with someone in the police.
One night at 3.00 a.m. she received a phone call and told Sean that ‘Paul and another guy have been jumped and both beaten [during a police operation]. One has a cut to his head and one has a cut lip, they were talking to someone and someone came out of the dark and jumped them.’ Kylie was in a panic, saying to the person on the phone, presumably Wilkinson, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right? Just relax and stay where you are and I’ll come down.’
She grabbed the first aid kit and took off, saying, ‘It’s only down the road—I’ll be back in half an hour or so.’ She came back about an hour later and there was blood on her hand and on her shirt. She told Sean she had to bandage Paul’s head on the side of the road.
He asked why Wilkinson hadn’t gone to hospital, and she said, ‘They can’t—they’re not supposed to be doing what they are doing.’
Again she told him, ‘They only answer to the assistant commissioner in the city.’
In mid-March, Sean went to Canberra for work and Kylie rang him, saying she urgently needed $2000. He said he didn’t have that sort of money so she got her grandmother to give him a cheque, which he cashed. He asked Kylie what the money was for but she refused to say.
A week later she came to HMAS Newcastle and asked for another $2000, and again he asked what the money was for. Again she refused to tell him, but said, ‘If I don’t have it by 4.00 p.m. today, I can’t guarantee my safety.’
Later that day she told him she had increased her credit card limits and taken out a personal loan. Whenever he asked her about the money after this, they would fight. Kylie’s phone was keeping him awake because now it rang all night, and on 16 March they moved into separate bedrooms.
We have little idea what Kylie’s life away from Sean was like in these last frenzied months, because Paul Wilkinson has never said. It must have involved constant frantic drives to meet with him, those meetings eagerly expected and often bitterly disappointing, as he refused to give her the commitment she sought and asked for yet more money to prove her love for him. She was hooked on that love, and so she raced off in shameless efforts to raise money from her husband and her family to give to the man with whom she was having an affair. Presumably, the $24,000 she borrowed at this time all went to Wilkinson.
This activity involved constant journeys through the suburbs of southern Sydney, as her life turned increasingly feral while the lives of those around her—her family, Sean, her colleagues—went on as before. By accepting Wilkinson’s bait she had passed over into a darker world, and yet it was one that existed in the same physical locations as theirs, shared the same freeways and hospitals and houses and shopping centres. But now this once familiar landscape was full of her lover’s assignations and crazed fantasies about persecution and undercover work, and a fictitious future together. As Kylie drove through the streets of Sydney, her mind aflame with such thoughts, other women pushed prams, and little girls—girls like she had once been—played in the front yards of the brick and tile houses. But she was no longer part of that world.
One morning Sean came home from a night shift and had a shower. He went to bed but was woken by a call from Kylie’s grandmother Louisa, saying Kylie wanted him to check his phone.
He listened to a message from her: ‘Read the note beside my bed. Sorry, but I had to go.’ He raced up to her room and found she wasn’t there. Next to the bed was a note that read: ‘Life’s got too hard, sorry for what I’m doing, but I have to go. Tell everyone I love them.’
Sean thought it was a suicide note and called Miranda Police Station, and two officers came around. While they were in the lounge room, Kylie came home. When she saw the police she ran outside and tried to drive off, but they stopped her and had a chat. Eventually they went away, and Kylie told Sean she wasn’t going to kill herself yet, but she was close.
Kylie’s anger slackened towards the end of March, but it was replaced by increased anxiety and nervousness. She was jumping at shadows and started talking about their phone and car being bugged. Whenever Sean took the car out, she still insisted on making a phone call to her police contact to ‘clear it’ beforehand. She told Sean she couldn’t guarantee his safety if he didn’t let her do this. Sean felt unnerved, and the stress built up week by week. It got to the point where she would insist not just on going out to the car but taking it for a drive in order to talk. They would pull over and chat by the side of the road. None of it made much sense to Sean. He was frightened by the fact that it seemed to make sense to Kylie.
Finally, he told her he could no longer go on as they were. The constant arguments were grinding him down: he was unhappy and losing weight, as was she. He couldn’t eat or sleep normally and his health was suffering. He told her that unless she told him what was going on, they would have to go their own ways. She said she couldn’t tell him what he wanted to know, that she was involved in something bigger than their arguments. He said the marriage was over and they arranged to separate.
On 23 March Kylie drove down to Kiama, on the south coast of New South Wales, for the funeral of an uncle. Carol and other members of the family were at a coffee shop when she arrived. She was sobbing uncontrollably when she got out of her car, and her mother asked what was the matter. ‘Sean and I have separated,’ she said. ‘He’s filed divorce papers.’
‘You can’t file them for twelve months,’ said Carol. ‘You can work this out.’
‘We can’t work it out,’ said Kylie. Carol hugged her and then Kylie declared to the family, ‘I’m going to say this once and only once: Sean and I are getting a divorce.’ Her family were shocked by her appearance: her face was pale and pimply and she’d lost a lot of weight. And she was smoking. She told her mother for the first time about being raped by Gary, and a distressed Carol asked if she’d reported it to the police. Kylie said she had. She announced she was applying for a loan from a bank so she could have a holiday, and also that she had decided to become a police officer and had been accepted into the academy. It was a day of big announcements.
On the day the removalists arrived at Sylvania to take away Kylie’s furniture, in the first week of April, she was in the best mood she’d been in for months, and Sean and she divided up their possessions amicably. He drove her to her grandmother’s house for the last time, up the freeway and over the Mooney Mooney Bridge, and when they reached Erina he gave her a hug and a kiss in the driveway. Kylie shed a few tears and said she was sorry they hadn’t been able to make a go of it. Sean drove off and never saw her again.
One day not long after, Kylie drove down to Sylvania to collect some small items that were still in the townhouse, and she took Louisa along. When they arrived she wouldn’t let her grandmother out of the car until she’d been in and checked out the house. According to Louisa, Kylie was petrified. Maybe she believed some of the stories Wilkinson had spun her—or maybe she was just a good actress.
Leanne thought Kylie was depressed; her face looked drawn. Often Kylie would call her at night, and she would drive down to Erina with the girls in the back of the car, pick up Kylie and take her back to her own home in Ettalong. Then Kylie would head off in Leanne’s car, bringing it back in the morning when Leanne needed it for work. Kylie didn’t say where she went, but later Leanne would learn that Paul Wilkinson’s parents had a holiday house nearby.
After only a few visits to the Lindfield campus of her university, Kylie dropped out. When at Louisa’s, she was very quiet and spent much of her time listening to the radio, writing lists and sending and receiving text messages. She was still thin but her skin cleared up and she began to eat properly. A few times a day she would go for a walk to Erina Fair, the local mall. She went to a birthday party for Leanne’s two girls and there was a new spa. Everyone was using it and Kylie joined them—but she brought her phone with her.
On 13 April Kylie visited a local medical centre and learned she was pregnant. This was hugely important for two reasons, because she’d always wanted
a child and because the father was Paul. There was a flurry of phone activity that day: Kylie sent 119 text messages to Paul and received ninety-one. The news must have cheered her considerably, but you have to wonder how he took it. Not all that long ago, Kylie had been complaining about not seeing him enough and questioning the strength of his love for her. It’s likely the pregnancy would have increased her pressure on him to leave his family. Where previously he might have argued that his obligations to Bradley were keeping him with Julie, now that Kylie was going to have his child, she had a much stronger case.
Two days later, Kylie rang her mother and invited her to a dinner for the whole family on 22 April.
‘I’ve decided what I’m going to do with my life,’ she said, ‘and I’m going to make a formal announcement.’
She also invited Leanne and her daughters, and there was a lot of talk between Louisa, Carol and Leanne about what the big announcement might be. Leanne knew that with Kylie it could be anything: she might be pregnant, or going overseas, or she might have a new boyfriend. She didn’t try to get the secret from her before the dinner, knowing from experience that this would be futile.
On 20 April Kylie called Sean and sounded sad. She was crying, he recalls, and saying she still loved him, and he suggested she see someone to talk through her problems.
They had a reasonable sort of conversation, and Kylie said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ll make it right for you.’
Then she hung up. It’s possible that this conversation indicates Wilkinson had not received the news of her pregnancy as enthusiastically as she had hoped.
The day before the big dinner, Carol rang Louisa and discussed the forthcoming announcement. Carol said she thought it would turn out to be nothing, because Kylie was a drama queen.
Call Me Cruel Page 9