Call Me Cruel

by Michael Duffy

  A few minutes after the call, Kylie rang Carol and said, ‘So I’m nothing but a drama queen? You’ll never know what the announcement will be, because I’m cancelling the dinner.’

  In fact, the dinner went ahead, although without Carol. Beforehand, Kylie said to Louisa, ‘I’ll let you know in half an hour whether anyone else is turning up.’ Louisa got the impression Kylie was referring to someone she hadn’t met before. In half an hour, Kylie received a text message and told her grandmother, ‘The person won’t be coming.’

  There was no big announcement at the dinner. Afterwards, when Leanne and her family had left, Kylie told Louisa she would be starting at the Police Academy on 15 May. Louisa thought she was very happy, because she’d always loved anything involving a uniform and authority. The next morning Kylie changed her story and told Louisa she was pregnant; this was the first time she’d told anyone in her family. It meant she would not be going to the academy.

  ‘Who’s the father?’ said Louisa, thinking about the rape allegation. ‘Is it Gary?’

  ‘No way,’ said Kylie. ‘I can’t tell you—you’ll know as soon as I’m able to let you know.’ Even now, apparently, Wilkinson was still insisting on her silence. Kylie swore Louisa to secrecy about the pregnancy. A few days later, on Monday 26 April, she drove down to Sydney to see the Rabbitohs play the Bulldogs at the Sydney Football Stadium. When she came home, Louisa saw she was upset about something but didn’t find out what.

  On the same day, Kylie called Sean again and had a conversation. He asked how she was going. ‘Not too bad,’ she said.

  ‘Is everything sorted out?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really, but I’m getting there.’ She started to cry and he said, ‘Look, speak to your family. You need to speak to someone. Whatever you’re involved in, you need to speak to someone about it.’

  ‘Yes I will.’

  ‘If you need anything, just give me a call.’ She was crying a lot by now and said, ‘I should do that.’ It was the last time they spoke to each other.

  On 28 April, Leanne drove Carol to Louisa’s place in the morning, so she could borrow some money. Leanne went into Kylie’s room and found her sitting on the bed, her bags already packed. Leanne had been told she was off that day to Goulburn to join the police; as instructed, Louisa had not told anyone about the pregnancy. They had a brief conversation and Leanne thought Kylie was happier than she’d been in the past few weeks. ‘What time are you leaving?’ she said.

  ‘6.00 p.m.’

  It was 9.00 a.m. ‘Gosh,’ said Leanne. ‘You’ve got ages to wait. What are you doing?’

  ‘Watching the minutes tick over,’ said Kylie.

  Leanne said goodbye. She never saw her sister again.

  During the early months of 2005, the police investigation remained inactive; the first anniversary of Kylie’s disappearance came and went. John Edwards’ fears that the police had engaged in some sort of cover-up increased with another family tragedy. In February his niece, a young mother named Cassandra Girkin, also went missing. She was shopping with her husband at the Westfield mall at Tuggerah when she went to the toilets and didn’t come back.

  The last sight of her was on one of the mall’s security cameras as she left the centre alone. It seemed to John, in his misery and confusion, too much of a coincidence that two members of his family should have disappeared from the Coast in the space of one year, and he wondered if they could be linked. (Cassandra’s skeleton was found six months later, in bushland just a few hundred metres from the mall. It is not known how she died.)

  John’s belief in some sort of police conspiracy festered, to the point where he came to believe they made two attempts to kill him in 2005 in order to stop his investigation. The first was on the F3, as he was on his way from Sydney to Gosford Police Station to talk to detectives. A female driver came up alongside him and looked across, then swerved in front of his vehicle, almost forcing him off the road. Later he saw the woman at the police station but said nothing. The second incident was on the M4 motorway in Sydney, when a male driver tried to do the same thing. After that, John stopped his investigation. His anger and frustration remained but he was scared for the safety of himself and his family. He put copies of all the information he’d gathered onto CDs and sent them to six people around Australia he trusted, some of them ex-army colleagues. In an accompanying letter, he directed that if anything happened to him, they were to send the information to the New South Wales police commissioner.

  By mid-2005, Carol and John were both depressed and hopeless with grief, and Paul Wilkinson appeared to have got away with murder.

  The Police Integrity Commission is a state government agency independent of the NSW Police Force; it is charged with dealing with police misconduct. Its officers come from other states, to ensure they have no links with local police. Senior Investigators Simon Sproule and Kieran Murphy were on duty when Paul Wilkinson arrived at the commission’s offices in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, on 29 June 2005, fourteen months after Kylie’s disappearance, and declared he wanted to tell them about some very serious police misconduct.

  Wilkinson no longer worked for the police force: he’d walked off the job in February 2004, and had finally been sacked just two weeks before coming to the PIC. He was accompanied by his parents and a journalist from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It was explained that these people could not be present at the interview, and after they left it began, at 10.50 a.m. The PIC hears some wild stories, but this was to be one of the most outlandish. It was also to reactivate the investigation into Kylie’s disappearance.

  Wilkinson told the investigators that in January 2001 the woman who later became his wife, Julie Thurecht, had been raped at knifepoint by two police officers, Geoff Lowe and Mark Paul Trevethan. Julie had been too scared to complain to the authorities, and Wilkinson had lodged a complaint with the then police minister, Michael Costa, later in 2001, after he’d started a relationship with Julie and she’d told him about the rape. ‘I threw all my trust into the Police Minister’s office that he was gonna put it onto the appropriate people and it was gonna be investigated thoroughly,’ he said. The complaint, according to Wilkinson, had been given to the police force to investigate, and the officer responsible had improperly told Lowe and Trevethan what was going on.

  From this point in the story, Trevethan (who was as innocent as Lowe) receded and Lowe became the focus of Wilkinson’s anger. He claimed that in 2002 Lowe had approached him at Loftus Railway Station: ‘He’s pulled up, I’ve told him to get fucked, he’s a fuckin’ idiot, and he deserves to go to jail, and if I had my way, he will go to jail.’ To which Lowe had said, ‘Keep your fuckin’ mouth shut or else you’re gonna end up dead.’

  Wilkinson said he’d heard nothing more about his complaint to Costa’s office. But in March 2005, Julie and he and their young son, Bradley, had been in a car on the Princes Highway when Lowe had pulled up alongside them at traffic lights, and yelled, ‘Youse keep your fuckin’ mouth shut!’ Wilkinson had complained to the police about this and it had been investigated. The previous Friday, he’d received a call from the investigating officer: ‘Basically he told me I’m full of shit and the complaint is going nowhere.’ To which Wilkinson had replied, ‘Mate, I’m not happy with this at all and I will be taking it further.’

  And now he was.

  Wilkinson told the PIC officers that Julie and he had separated eight months earlier. He still saw her and Bradley, and she was reluctant for him to persist with the complaint against Lowe. But he thought it was important because Lowe was a major criminal.

  He proceeded to tell an amazing tale of how he had been forced to deliver bags of heroin for Geoff Lowe and Mick Hollingsworth, the officer who’d been driving the pursuit vehicle when TJ Hickey died. He had done this under duress: they told him that unless he helped them, they would shoot his wife and cut his child’s throat.


  If some of these stories seem vaguely familiar, it’s because they echo some of those Kylie told Sean—for example, about rape and death threats. And now Kylie herself reappeared in Wilkinson’s fantasy world.

  Wilkinson: ‘They were, they were rootin’ a sheila—her name’s Kylie . . .’

  Sproule: ‘Who’s Kylie . . . ?’

  Wilkinson: ‘She was a nurse and she was also a, worked the streets over in the Bankstown area . . . She’d been runnin’ tricks with Geoff Lowe and Mick Hollingsworth . . . Yeah, she was a hooker, mate . . .’

  Sproule: ‘How did you meet Kylie?’

  Wilkinson explained how he’d been a patient at Sutherland Hospital, where Kylie had worked: ‘I’d go out the back . . . started to smoke. She came out and asked certain questions . . . Asked if I knew Geoff Lowe . . . The next day I was sneakin’ another smoke [and Kylie asked,] “Your wife wouldn’t happen to be Julie, would it?”

  “No. Why?”

  ‘ “Did you make a complaint about rape?”

  ‘ “No. Why?” and I got warnings from her: “Keep your fuckin’ mouth shut.” ’

  It was after this, Wilkinson said, that the two policemen had forced him to deliver drugs for them, paying him for the work. The investigators asked why Lowe and Hollingsworth would have involved him in their drug-dealing. He suggested they’d wanted to implicate him in illegal activity so they’d have a hold over him. Kylie had been involved too.

  Sproule: ‘I’m a little confused.’

  Murphy: ‘I think we’ve missed a bit. We initially started, you said about delivering the drugs for Lowe and everybody else. You started to tell us about Kylie. I think we might have gone down the Kylie track, but we wanted to know about the drugs . . .’

  Wilkinson: ‘She’s involved in the drugs . . .’

  Murphy: ‘Right.’

  It wasn’t right at all, of course; it was incredibly confusing. And there was more. Wilkinson went on to explain how Kylie, at one point in this increasingly incoherent story, had threatened him with a Glock pistol. At another, she had told him that Mick Hollingsworth had admitted to her he’d deliberately rammed TJ Hickey’s bike. But finally, he said, the drug drops had stopped, in late April of 2004.

  Murphy: ‘Why did it stop?’

  Wilkinson: ‘Because Kylie went missing.’

  Murphy: ‘Okay.’

  Sproule: ‘She went missing. Is she still missing?’

  Wilkinson: ‘Yep.’

  Sproule asked if Wilkinson knew where she was, and Wilkinson almost boasted about the fact that the Gosford detectives had spoken to him and examined his car. He said he used to work with Detective Rebekkah Craig at Redfern. But he offered no further information about Kylie’s death and the conversation moved on.

  Then, later in the interview, he casually dropped in, ‘Mate, Kylie is still missing, yes. She’s actually dead.’

  Sproule: ‘Sorry?’

  Wilkinson: ‘She’s dead.’

  Sproule: ‘Oh, is she?’

  Murphy: ‘Do you want to tell us the story? How do you know that?’

  Wilkinson had a good answer: ‘Because I was there when it happened.’

  He proceeded to tell the astonished investigators a story horrific in its details, and made more so by the elaborate casualness with which he set them out. He’d been at his parents’ house at Yarrawarrah in April 2004 when Geoff Lowe arrived and forced him at gunpoint to get into his utility. They drove to the nearby Royal National Park, where Lowe stopped and put a blindfold on Wilkinson. Then he drove for twenty-five minutes into the park and stopped again, telling Wilkinson to get out.

  Then ‘he pulled Kylie from the back of his car . . . She was bound, and he cut her toes and fingers off and stabbed her, raped her, while she was still alive, and placed her fingers and toes in a bag. I remember trying not, trying not to look, but told I had to, I actually had to go and look at her. She was trying to scream but couldn’t. She had—I guess it was fuel, I don’t know, don’t know what it was—put on her head. He’s lit it and she’s lost her head . . . He cut her throat and he stabbed her several times.’

  A grave had already been dug, he explained, and after removing Kylie’s teeth with pliers and cutting off her head, Lowe had made Wilkinson bury her body. The head was buried nearby.

  Lowe then put the blindfold back on Wilkinson and drove him to the entrance of the park, where he left him, telling him that if he told anyone what he’d seen, his son would be next.

  Murphy said, ‘Why would he want to murder her? Do you know that?’

  Wilkinson: ‘She wanted to break away from it, from all the shit that’s gone on, you know, the drug trade. She wanted to break away from all of that.’

  When they’d finished with the details, Kieran Murphy said, ‘Paul, we started today and we went through a number of matters and concerns of yours and allegations. Why didn’t you bring up the murder when we first started our conversation?’

  It was a good question. Wilkinson had seemed more interested in talking about his wife being raped by Geoff Lowe than about Kylie’s horrific death.

  Wilkinson: ‘I’ll be honest with you, I really didn’t know whether I could trust coming to the PIC either, but after speaking to you blokes, I knew that youse weren’t here to piss in me pocket.’

  Later, Murphy said, ‘You understand, obviously you understand, you know, murder is a very serious allegation. Why haven’t you reported it to any other police?’

  Wilkinson: ‘Well, I’m not gonna have my son go, be the next person.’

  Murphy: ‘Right. Okay, so what’s changed your mind now?’

  Wilkinson: ‘Fuck, it’s gotta stop.’

  Murphy: ‘Right.’

  Wilkinson: ‘It’s gotta stop. I’m sick and tired of this prick comin’ around my fuckin’ house, toying with me.’

  He’d told them Geoff Lowe had been visiting his home and threatening him. He now added a story about a time he’d been seized by police one night outside the Engadine RSL after some trouble with the bouncers. He said the senior police officer present was about to take him home when Geoff Lowe had turned up, and ‘next minute I’m in the back of a fuckin’ paddy wagon, gettin’ me head, you know, punched in the head.’

  *

  The PIC officers were deeply sceptical about what they were hearing, but they were obliged to check it out. The first step was to take Wilkinson seriously as he sat in the room there with them, to ask him for details which they were almost certain were being invented. This was how the law enforcement and justice systems were to respond to Wilkinson again and again over the next few years, by treating his ravings with a respect we now know they did not deserve. If anyone had seen the whole pattern of the man, they might have stopped and decided to go no further. But everyone saw only a piece of the pattern, and that piece had to be dealt with by the rules. They weren’t bad rules, but the people who wrote them hadn’t been thinking of someone like Paul Wilkinson.

  ‘All right,’ said Murphy, ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m just telling you, there can be serious repercussions if a lot of time and money is spent investigating these serious matters and they come to nothing. You understand that people who give out information can be in a lot of trouble themselves then, you understand?’

  Wilkinson had no problem with this. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s not my fault if things can’t be found.’

  Murphy agreed, but stressed again how serious it would be if the allegations turned out to be a waste of time. Wilkinson assured them he wasn’t there ‘to piss in your pocket’.

  After two hours the interview concluded and the investigators made a copy of a nine-page written statement that Wilkinson had brought with him, summarising his allegations. They arranged for him to accompany them to the Royal National Park the next day and show them Kylie�
�s graves.

  Late that afternoon, Wilkinson called to say his family had advised he have a legal representative with him during the visit to the park. He promised to let Sproule know the next morning if he had been able to arrange a lawyer. The next day a solicitor named Frances McGowan called the PIC to say she was acting for Wilkinson, and would be unable to come with them to the national park for two weeks because of a court matter she was involved in. Sproule explained how important the search was but McGowan said she could do nothing for a fortnight.

  On 11 July Sproule called Wilkinson to follow up on some matters raised in the interview, and Wilkinson was edgy. He asked why they needed to know more, and Sproule reminded him that at the end of the interview they’d told him they’d need to talk again, and he’d agreed. Wilkinson said he’d get his ‘legal people’ to deal with it. On 15 July McGowan called Sproule to say any visit to the national park would be further delayed because there was to be a conference next week between Wilkinson, herself and a barrister named Terry Healey.

  This was the beginning of a series of delays involving different people that was to stretch out Wilkinson’s dealings with investigators and the justice system for four more years. The causes of these delays included the number and complexity of his lies, his frequent changes of mind and the slow-moving nature of the legal world. These delays were to increase the already heavy burden of grief on Kylie’s family, who still knew almost nothing about the course of the investigation or Paul Wilkinson.

  Nothing more happened in July, and on 3 August Terry Healey called Simon Sproule and announced that he had been instructed by Wilkinson to say where Kylie’s body was. In fact, they had someone at the location at that moment, a forensic consultant named Carl Hughes. Fifteen minutes later, Sproule and Kieran Murphy set off for the Royal National Park. Sproule had been in touch with Andrew Waterman at the Homicide Squad and now rang him with the good news. Waterman said he’d wait to see what they found before he sent anyone out. The number of police involved in searches for graves can be considerable, and he wanted to make sure there was good cause to commit resources.