At 5.50 p.m. the investigators met Carl Hughes on the Gundamaian fire trail in the Royal National Park, and Hughes told them this was the third time in a fortnight he’d been out with Wilkinson looking for the grave. Wilkinson believed he’d found it today and had left after identifying the place. It was off the trail near a large gum tree, and the ground appeared to have been slightly turned over. By the time Sproule and Murphy had examined the site it was growing dark. Sproule called Andrew Waterman, who said he’d send some people out the next day. He arranged for uniformed police from Sutherland to guard the site overnight.
At 9.50 a.m. the next morning the PIC investigators met in the national park with quite a crowd. It included Carl Hughes, forensic officers, more police from Sutherland and the Homicide Squad, and others including a botanist from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, which managed the park. Rebekkah Craig had been told the search was to occur but was advised not to attend, to her disappointment. Wilkinson himself was not there.
Hughes walked them to the possible grave site, the proceedings being carefully filmed by a police photographer. A cadaver dog went over the area, without finding anything. Then the digging began. The search occupied most of the day but nothing was found. The digging revealed extensive and intact tree root systems just below the surface, which the botanist said were well over two years old, indicating the ground hadn’t been dug for at least that long. Kylie had disappeared only fifteen months before. When Carl Hughes was told this, he indicated a new area nearby, which was also dug up without result. At 5.15 p.m. the search was abandoned.
The cost and effort had been considerable. The search involved, apart from the PIC officers, five detectives from Sutherland, four Homicide investigators, four Crime Scene staff, two National Parks staff, four Crime Scene guards and one cadaver dog ($100 an hour for three hours). The total cost was $20,804.
The PIC and Homicide officers were, naturally, concerned by the failure to find a grave. Sproule tried to contact Wilkinson but he didn’t ring back. On 13 December Sproule called again and the phone was answered by a male who claimed to be Wilkinson’s brother, although Sproule thought it was Wilkinson himself. The man said Wilkinson was unhappy with what the PIC had done but declined to say why. The next day Sproule called the number again and had a conversation with Wilkinson’s mother, asking that Paul contact him urgently. He never heard from Wilkinson again.
If Paul Wilkinson had not walked into the PIC’s offices that July, he would almost certainly be a free man today. But the allegations he made were so serious that they had to be investigated, and so it was that Strike Force Bergin was reactivated. Detective Peter Houlahan had moved on, so the bosses at Gosford looked around for someone else to lead the investigation. Some of the senior detectives wanted no part in the job: the prospect of spending months investigating Wilkinson’s crazy stories was of no appeal at all. Eventually, the bosses’ eyes settled on a thirty-two-year-old detective who had transferred from the Homicide Squad earlier that year.
Glenn Smith grew up in western Sydney and had wanted to be a cop ever since he was a kid, inspired by television programs like Chips and Starsky and Hutch. But he didn’t like the authority structure of school and left at the end of Year Ten, aged fifteen. To be a police officer you have to complete Year Twelve.
Smith became a graphic designer, working with a legal publisher. By the time he reached his early twenties, the predictability and the indoor life got to him and he started to feel the tug of his old ambition. He completed his Higher School Certificate at night and entered the Police Academy at the age of twenty-two. He became a cop and enjoyed it, liking the variety of work and moving from uniform to detectives after assisting in a few murder investigations when he was stationed at Glebe. He married, and when his wife became pregnant they decided they had to buy a house. They could afford the outer western suburbs or the Central Coast, which for them meant there was no choice: they moved up to a suburb near Brisbane Waters, and Glenn Smith, like thousands of others, began the daily commute down the F3 and over the Mooney Mooney Bridge.
He didn’t plan to end up in Homicide, knowing it would disrupt his home life with its long and unpredictable hours. These days, most police work involves regular work rhythms, but the Homicide Squad is different. Its unofficial slogan is ‘Our day begins when yours ends’. When its detectives are on call, they can find themselves anywhere in the state at a few hours’ notice. Investigations can involve very long hours in the first week, and can sometimes take them away from home for a month or more. But despite this, the squad was where Smith’s experience led him—in his early work as a general detective he continued to get involved with murders and he made plenty of contacts in Homicide. One day he was asked to join, and he was fortunate over the next few years to work with some of the state’s best homicide investigators, such as Andrew Waterman and Paul Jacob.
Once Smith’s second child was born, the Homicide hours became just too much and he transferred to Brisbane Waters Detectives to be near home. His wife needed him. Two weeks after he arrived in Gosford, he was working on a Sunday when he got his first murder as OIC (officer in charge). The case was pretty remarkable: a man named Paul Renete had killed a friend’s mother and then slashed his own wrists and mutilated his penis, before jumping on his pushbike and riding down to the end of the street, where he fell off and was found. It was a so-called ‘smoking gun’ case: Renete admitted his responsibility. There was no trial and he was found not guilty according to the McNaughton Rules, meaning he was insane. He ended up in a mental institution.
Smith had just wrapped up that investigation when he was called into the office of his crime manager and told that Strike Force Bergin was to recommence and he was to be the OIC. Smith knew about the case. While working in Homicide, he had come up with Andrew Waterman twice when the inspector was advising Craig on the investigation. When he’d transferred to Gosford he’d read through the documentation: it was an interesting ‘whodunit’ but also something of a poisoned chalice because it had been dragging on so long, with no sign of an arrest in sight. At one stage Gosford had actually tried to pass it over to Homicide, which had declined the offer.
But Paul Wilkinson was a challenge, and Smith liked a challenge. It was August 2005, sixteen months since Kylie had disappeared. He began by reading all the documentation again and discussing it with Rebekkah Craig, who was still on the investigation, and Andrew Waterman. He came up with a plan of attack and realised he would have trouble getting time to work the investigation from the Gosford office, because Craig and he would be expected to help with the other cases that kept pouring in. So he persuaded the bosses to let Bergin operate out of the Homicide Squad office for a while.
He returned to Parramatta and found himself one desk away from where he’d been working not so long ago. Some of Waterman’s team assisted when they could, and Smith was also given two junior officers from Sutherland, although he lost one when the man announced that he knew Geoff Lowe. The remaining one was a plainclothes constable, Ben Mang, a young man with a pleasantly dry sense of humour.
The detectives paid a lot of attention to the nature of Wilkinson’s lies, of which they now had many examples, wondering if they meant anything at all. They needed to understand them if they were to understand Paul Wilkinson, but it was not easy. Usually criminals lie to cover their tracks, but while some of Wilkinson’s stories fell into this category, others didn’t. Many were bizarre fantasies that had served only to draw attention to him. Maybe there were elements of truth mixed up with his lies—but which were which?
A great deal of time over the next few months was spent investigating what Wilkinson had told the PIC and disproving it, step by step. Despite the implausibility of his allegations, this had to be done, because Smith was trying to build a circumstantial case that Wilkinson had killed Kylie. This involved ruling out any alternative explanation for her death that might be brought up by the defen
ce during a trial.
Smith wanted desperately to find Kylie’s body, for the sake of proving she was dead, for the sake of her family and also for any forensic evidence it might provide. He sometimes thought of the family, of their need for a grave where they could go and grieve. Without a body, they would always wonder where Kylie was. Maybe lying in the bush somewhere? Or at the bottom of some river?
John Edwards’ first reaction on meeting Glenn Smith was disappointment. The detective looked even younger than his years, and with his gelled blond hair and easy manner, he was not the senior figure John believed was needed to uncover the truth about his daughter’s disappearance. He felt let down. ‘This is a whitewash,’ he said to himself. ‘They’ve thrown all of this onto this young guy and it’s just not going to happen.’
But this soon changed. Smith realised there’d been a breakdown in relations between the police and the family, and tried to get some order back into things by saying that from now on communication would be regular but controlled: only one detective would talk to one member of the family, once a week. He said the person he’d speak to would be John.
Carol wasn’t happy with that and rang the Gosford superintendent, who insisted the detectives talk to her as well. So Smith talked to John, and Craig talked to Carol, on a weekly basis. (Later this dropped back to fortnightly, and when Craig went on maternity leave, Smith talked to Carol too.) This regular contact meant a great deal to the Edwards. It was something John says had never happened before. From the police point of view, that is perhaps understandable: it must be very hard to call the father of a woman who has almost certainly been murdered and to have to tell him, week after week for months, that no progress has been made. But for John, hearing nothing had been even worse than hearing bad news. Now at least he knew that the police were still working on Kylie’s disappearance, that someone in authority cared.
And it wasn’t all bad news. Some weeks, Smith would say to John, ‘We’ve got some lines of inquiry going. I can’t tell you anything about it but we’re still moving. It’s slow, and I’m sorry about that.’ But at least there was movement.
Smith and Craig were becoming familiar with some of Wilkinson’s obsessions. They’d read the transcript of his PIC interview and learned that one part of it was true: he had lodged a complaint with police alleging Geoff Lowe had threatened him while stopped at traffic lights. That complaint had been rejected not long after Wilkinson was sacked by the police force, and his anger at these events had probably driven him to approach the PIC. The detectives learned that his wife, Julie, had been in the car with him at the lights and had refused to support his version of events. Now they wondered if they should have a word with her too. Houlahan and Craig had never tried to talk to her, figuring she would side with Paul. But now she had separated from Wilkinson, and maybe the time had come to chat.
On 4 November 2005 Smith and Craig obtained permission to place a telephone intercept on Wilkinson’s mobile. For many months Ben Mang spent long hours wearing headphones in a small room, listening to Wilkinson’s rambling phone conversations. The work was mind-numbing at times: Mang had to write a summary of every call, as well as reading all of Wilkinson’s text messages and noting any of interest. Many of these calls and text messages were made to a female friend in Victoria named Cheryl Kaulfuss. There was a large number of them: Wilkinson was unemployed and seemed to live through his phone. In the first two months, police monitored over 2500 outgoing and incoming texts and calls. Some of these became part of the Crown’s case and so can be quoted here.
On 11 November 2005 he texted a female contact: ‘Received letter from Internal affairs they DON’T believe my story RE murder of that girl.’ On 16 November he texted Cheryl Kaulfuss: ‘Im FUMIN, these bastards hav gone 2 a all time low. They followed my mother and she honestly thought she was goin 2 join that girl in the Royal National Park.’
Later that night he spoke with Kaulfuss and said, ‘The barrister refuses to do anything without the body, and I said [to him], “Well, you’re not getting one, because I haven’t got any insurance.” ’ On 4 December he told his cousin Brigette Fernando that the detectives should be looking at other police for Kylie’s murder, and then he texted Julie Thurecht: ‘Well there u hav it im GOIN DOWN 4 A CRIME THAT CUNT COMMITTED and u still sittin at home letting RAPIST MURDERING CUNTS GET AWAR WITH IT.’
There it was again, a recurrence of Wilkinson’s obsession with the idea that his wife had been raped by Geoff Lowe. Smith decided to talk with Lowe, who was still a police officer. But first he would see if Julie Thurecht would agree to an interview.
Smiley Kylie (sitting on her father’s knee)
All photos courtesy of John and Carol Edwards unless otherwise indicated
Kylie in red
Kylie’s wedding, 2003 (with her father)
Kylie and Sean
Paul Wilkinson and Julie Thurecht
Courtesy of Julie Thurecht
One of the searches for the grave near Mooney Mooney Creek, 2008
Courtesy of NSW Police Force
Paul Wilkinson outside Sutherland Police Station on the day he was arrested in 2007 © Newspix/John Grainger
Detective Constable Glenn Smith at the Supreme Court after Paul Wilkinson was sentenced in 2009 © AAP Image/Katelyn Catanzariti
Julie Thurecht was an only child and had a typical upbringing in the Sutherland Shire. Sydney’s southernmost coastal area is blessed with rich vegetation growing on ridges between attractive and often deep valleys, some containing creeks and rivers. It’s bounded by Cronulla Beach and the Royal National Park to the east, and the big Georges River to the north. The buildings in the Shire (as it is fondly known) are mainly houses, running along the ridges and spilling halfway down the valleys, thanks to the firm foundations provided by the Hawkesbury sandstone, which breaks the soil everywhere among the plentiful trees and bushes.
Almost the only institutions to be seen as you travel through the leafy suburbs are schools, of which there are many, and ovals. The area is fairly Anglo—the Cronulla Riots of January 2006 were caused by disputes with Lebanese youths from other parts of Sydney. The Shire lacks extremes of wealth and poverty, and many of its residents, who tend to be passionate about the area, are tradesmen and white-collar workers. It’s a traditional Australian suburban idyll, and as you wander its empty streets on a warm weekday, it’s hard to imagine anything really bad happening there.
Julie’s parents’ brick-and-tile house in Illawong sits on one of the Shire’s many streets jutting into bushland, on the side of a valley so steep that there are no houses across the road. The garden and house are meticulously maintained, the walls of the lounge room covered in old photos of bike races: Julie’s father, Kevin, was once a racing cyclist. He later became a bank manager, and her mother, Jenene, ran a dry-cleaning business.
Julie has always been close to her parents. As an energetic and cheerful child she had lots of friends. She went to Menai High School and then to business school, after which she worked as a medical receptionist. Her life was like that of thousands of young women, but in early 2001 she did something ordinary that, thanks to some unfortunate twists of fate, was to have some extraordinary consequences: she had a very brief fling with a policeman named Geoff Lowe.
Soon after, she started to train to be a police officer herself. She’d always wanted to be a cop but her father hadn’t supported her, not wanting his daughter to spend her working life dealing with criminals. But once she turned twenty-one, she applied to join the police and was accepted. She went to the academy and did a secondment at Bankstown, working twelve-hour shifts helping some people and arresting others. It was busy work, often exciting. She got on with the officers she was working with and loved the whole experience.
Julie first met Paul Wilkinson in July 2001, when he gave a lecture a
t the academy on his work as an Aboriginal Community Liaison Officer. Later, a mutual acquaintance introduced them in the bar. She found him funny and charming, and after that night he began sending her text messages; before long, they were seeing each other. He seemed to be an ordinary, pleasant bloke who had grown up in a southern Sydney suburb and was a mad-keen Souths supporter. They began a relationship and started living together the following May.
Paul had been born on 4 December 1975, the son of Ron, a fitter and turner, and June, an Aboriginal woman. They’d met when Ron was pig-shooting in Walgett in 1974. Paul went to Engadine High School, where he didn’t do particularly well academically but was good at sport. He left at the end of Year Eleven and worked as a security guard at Garden Island before getting a job at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He became an ACLO in 1997.
When Julie first met him she didn’t know what an ACLO was, and from the way he talked in the early period of their relationship she assumed it must be some sort of plainclothes cop. He didn’t actually say this, but the way he talked about his job made it sound like that.
The Wilkinson family was different to Julie’s. A lot of time was spent drinking and gambling, and June was a regular at the Sutherland United Services Club. They swore a lot. But June and Ron made Julie feel welcome, and before long she was getting along well with them. Paul was as close to his parents as she was to hers, and she began to spend a lot of time at their place, also a red-brick house on a dead-end street jutting into the bush. Yarrawarrah is in the south of the Shire, and the Wilkinson house is a bit smaller and older than most in the street. Today the concrete driveway up the steep block is heavily cracked, with a big tin letterbox standing at the bottom with no number on it.
Call Me Cruel Page 11