Call Me Cruel

by Michael Duffy

  Julie’s parents first met Paul when she brought him home for dinner. He was wearing a South Sydney football top and jeans. Like almost everyone who met him, at first they found him articulate and charming. Their one concern, as they learned more about him, was that he didn’t have anything to his name, not even a car. This seemed strange for a man in his mid-twenties who’d been working for years. But Paul had an explanation: he said he’d used all his money to repay his mother’s gambling debts, so his parents wouldn’t lose their house.

  Other than this, he didn’t seem to have any vices. He liked AC/DC and country music, especially Charlie Pride. His food tastes were basic—he was just a meat-and-veg man. He smoked a lot but told Julie he was staunchly against drugs. She saw him drink only a few times: he said he’d seen what alcohol had done to some of his relatives and didn’t want to turn out like that himself. His one indulgence was Coca-Cola, of which he consumed up to four litres a day.

  Paul didn’t push himself forward in conversation, although he had plenty to say when asked. Kevin and Jenene got the impression from what he did say that he must be an important figure at work. So did Julie. When they were at home, he would talk all the time, for hours on end, often about his achievements at Redfern. He always seemed to be the knight in shining armour. Once, for example, he told Julie how a newborn baby was being thrown around by Aboriginal people at Redfern Park; he’d gone in and rescued the child, saving the day. There were a lot of stories like that.

  Around September, one of her friends let slip that Julie had slept with Geoff Lowe. Paul had shown intense jealousy when he learned of other men Julie had had sexual relationships with before she met him, but with Lowe it was far more fierce, for some reason. Over the next few months he brooded on her brief liaison with Lowe, and in time it became a fierce obsession. He asked her to change her diary and put in an entry saying she had been raped by the policeman. She refused. Then he showed her a letter he had written and was about to give to a police officer at Redfern, accusing Geoff Lowe of rape. She read it with astonishment.

  ‘Are you going to back me up?’ he said. ‘Come on, back me up.’

  ‘No, Paul. It’s wrong.’

  ‘Well, if you loved me you would.’

  In October 2001, the duty officer at Redfern rang Julie to tell her that Paul had been bitten by a criminal. When he came home, he had tooth marks on his wrist. Julie had always wondered about Paul’s claim that he’d been stabbed by a syringe before she met him, but she didn’t have any evidence either way. Now she looked at his hand—it didn’t seem too bad. But Paul made a big deal of it, which she knew by now was his nature: he liked to dramatise things. He took a year’s stress leave after the incident. Julie thought he still quite liked his job, but the hours had been getting to him. He was not a morning person and had been pulling a lot of seven-to-three shifts. Now he got to sleep in every day, on full pay.

  It’s a fact of police life that while the work can be hard and sometimes dangerous, the provisions for leave and even retirement if something goes wrong are relatively generous; as a result, they are often rorted.

  Julie pushed on with her training but noticed Paul becoming increasingly unhappy. He started trying to talk her out of becoming a police officer, saying, ‘All male coppers are sleazes.’ By this time she knew what an ACLO really was and had detected that Paul resented colleagues who were police officers. This exploded on her birthday in January 2002, when Geoff Lowe sent her a joking text message with a sexual reference, which Paul saw. She tried to explain this away, but he was furious and typed up another complaint alleging that her sexual encounter with Lowe back in January 2001 had been rape, and that it had involved another police officer and been conducted at knifepoint. Julie again refused to support the complaint, but Paul put pressure on her and later she gave it to Redfern police, but did not pursue it. This set a pattern for the next few years: Wilkinson had Julie in his power but there were limits. If he tried to involve her in anything illegal she would resist, which he accepted although it made him bitter.

  Finally, he told her that if she became an officer, she would have more power than him and that this would be bad for their relationship. ‘If you love me,’ he said, ‘you’ll leave the police.’

  She resisted his requests she stop her training, but when she did her placement at Bankstown he made her life hell, ringing her frequently and turning up to talk with her. In the end he wore her down: she gave up and resigned. He’d forced her to choose between the job and himself, and she’d chosen him. She says now she doesn’t know if this was because she loved him or because she’d already fallen under his control. She was ashamed to tell her parents the real reason for what she’d done. Already she was defending Paul by hiding things from them.

  Paul had family at Dubbo and Walgett and talked about moving there. Julie made a few visits out west and was shocked by the way his relatives lived, the constant drunkenness and pot-smoking, the abuse and domestic violence and poor living conditions. No one seemed to have a job. The women were constantly having babies: one, a few years younger than Julie, already had five children. It was a concern to her that Paul was so attracted to this lifestyle. She came back with no desire to leave Sydney.

  Despite the fact he saw his own parents frequently, Paul was jealous of Julie’s close relationship with her own father and mother. He told them she was too dependent on them, and in May 2002 took her to live at Umina on the Central Coast. It seemed to Jenene that Paul felt like he was the man who ought to be in control of Julie, but so long as they were in Sydney, Kevin would keep his influence over her.

  The move to Umina led to more of the financial problems Julie had come to accept as part of life with Paul. Even though he was being paid while on stress leave, he never had much money. The couple drove a car that was on permanent loan from Julie’s parents. Now they used her Visa card, which was linked to her father’s account, to pay the bond and furnish the new flat. The only thing Paul contributed was a television set. Things never got much better financially: Kevin paid the bond on the next two homes in which the couple lived.

  In July 2002, Julie announced to her parents that Paul and she were getting married. Kevin was unhappy—he hadn’t been very impressed by what he’d seen of Paul lately. For whatever reason, Wilkinson was a financial black hole. And Kevin had begun to doubt the truthfulness of some of the stories Paul told, which so often put himself in a very good light. Another problem was Paul’s desire to isolate Julie from her old friends. He wanted her to be with him all the time, usually alone, sometimes with his own friends. As a result, Julie was now seeing little or nothing of people she’d known for much of her life. Kevin shared his doubts with Jenene, who’d noticed herself that Paul was a somewhat solitary character, often falling out with what friends he did have. Julie was being sucked into his narrow world, in which the main other people were his parents. Jenene and Kevin met them and found June very reserved. Ron was more open than his wife, but almost his only topic of conversation was rugby league.

  Despite their concerns about the proposed marriage, Kevin and Jenene said nothing to Julie, deciding to support her in what she wanted.

  Wilkinson’s obsession with Geoff Lowe continued. In February 2003, a few weeks before the wedding, Julie was alone one night and received three calls from a man who did not identify himself. Each time he said, ‘Keep your mouth shut or I’ll kill you.’ It sounded like Paul, although the voice was muffled. After the third call, she rang Paul to tell him about the calls, not asking if it had been him. He sounded upset and said he was going to contact the police. Soon, an officer from Sutherland Police Station rang Julie, saying Paul had come in and was standing next to him.

  ‘Do you have any idea who made the calls?’ said the officer.

  Julie told him she had no idea.

  Some time later, Paul called her in a rage, and yelled, ‘Why didn’t you say you thought it w
as Geoff Lowe?’

  ‘Lowey has no reason to threaten me,’ she said. ‘Was it you?’

  Paul denied it for a while but finally admitted it had been him. ‘It will help put more weight on the rape allegations,’ he said.

  Later the couple met up and Paul drove to the pay phone in Loftus where he said he’d made the call. He got out of the car and went over to the phone, which he wiped with a cloth. When he got back into the car he told her he’d been removing his fingerprints.

  In retrospect, this was a turning point in Wilkinson’s life, the first time we know of where he fabricated death threats, which were to become a major tool in his manipulation of the people around him and their families.

  They kept coming. One day he showed Julie a piece of paper with a threatening message on it, composed of words cut out of a newspaper. It was something to do with Aboriginal deaths in police custody. Paul insisted their lives were in danger as a result of the work he’d done, and said Julie must stay at her parents’ until the wedding. Julie accepted what he was saying and moved back to Illawong. This was to happen several more times over the coming year. Presumably, Wilkinson did this to get time away from Julie, although on this first occasion we do not know for what purpose.

  Jenene was not as concerned about the approaching wedding as Kevin was. She felt caught between his concerns and Julie’s enthusiasm, and would be positive when she was with her daughter. Julie now says she was actually having doubts herself just before the wedding, as she became increasingly aware of Paul’s controlling nature. On her hen’s night, he hung around the venue and learned that she’d danced with one of the actors in the show the women had gone to see; afterwards there was an explosion of jealousy. Julie says she pushed her concerns away, thinking maybe they were just normal pre-marriage nerves. In any case, she told herself, it was too late to stop: people were coming to the wedding from overseas and interstate. Plane tickets had been booked.

  In February 2003, she and Paul were married at St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Cronulla. There were 130 people there, including many of Paul’s colleagues from Redfern. At this stage he was still liked by most of the people he worked with, who found him easy to get on with and apparently enthusiastic about his job. The reception was held at the Novotel at Brighton-le-Sands, and lots of Paul’s extended family from Dubbo and Walgett were there. This was an eye-opener for Julie’s family. They were vastly outnumbered by the Wilkinson clan, who obviously enjoyed a party. Some had made an effort but others were dressed in casual clothes, as though they’d just come off the street. One, from west of the mountains, tried to steal Julie’s uncle’s jacket. Another, who hadn’t been asked, turned up anyway and tried to punch the bride for not inviting him.

  In the months after the wedding, Paul became increasingly unsociable. By the second half of 2003, he and Julie hardly saw his old friends at all—most of hers had already been driven away—and their social life had become restricted to their own home and visits to their parents every few days. This didn’t worry Julie so much, because by now she was pregnant and concentrating on becoming a mother. But she did notice the isolation increased Paul’s desire to control her. For a while he was even fiercely jealous of her gynaecologist.

  In September 2003 they moved to the rented house in Kelvin Parade, Picnic Point, in preparation for the birth. On 18 November Julie was due to be induced and Paul dropped her at the hospital at 10.00 a.m. and sped off, telling her he was going to get new tyres for the car. Julie started pushing at 1.30 p.m. and said to the female friend who was with her, ‘Could you please ring Paul and get him back in here?’

  He just made it for the birth but left again an hour later. He returned briefly that evening, announcing that he had a headache and was going home to sleep. Later that night there was a crisis when Bradley stopped breathing. Julie rang Paul in a panic while the child was being resuscitated and he tore shreds off her for calling him so late. This was not like Paul, who was very much a night person, and she wondered what he was up to.

  It turned out he’d celebrated his son’s birth by cleaning out their joint bank account. He got paid the day Bradley was born, and when Julie left hospital and went online to their joint bank account to pay the rent, she saw that Paul had withdrawn all his wages at the Sutherland United Services Club on the night of the birth. They were all gone, gambled away. A friend lent her enough to tide them over for the next fortnight.

  On leaving hospital, Julie went to her parents’ for a few days so her mother could help with the child, and then wanted to move back to Picnic Point. But there was a problem. Paul said he’d received more death threats in the past few days, and for their own safety, Bradley and she should remain at her parents’. Julie agreed. Today she has no idea why he wanted to keep her away at this time, before his affair with Kylie began. Possibly he was just not looking forward to sharing the house with a newborn baby. One thing he didn’t do was take refuge in work, as many men do: he was on sick leave for most of the time from November until the following February.

  In December Wilkinson blacked out and went into Sutherland Hospital for a few days to have his sugar levels tested. It was hard for Julie to keep up with all his health issues by now, what with his stress and all the rest. Recently he’d told her he’d been diagnosed as having some sort of psychosis. She discussed this with her parents but they all found it hard to believe: they knew Paul was lazy and told a lot of stories, but they had no suspicion of any deeper problems. Kevin wondered if Paul had fooled the expert who’d made the diagnosis. There was no doubt his son-in-law was a good actor, and cunning too.

  Julie moved back home just before Christmas, unaware that Paul had begun his affair with Kylie. She did not find out about it for many years. She was vulnerable to deception for several reasons: her acceptance of Paul’s longstanding odd behaviour; her focus on her newborn child; and the amount of time she spent at her parents’.

  Wilkinson picked vulnerable women and preyed on them. He made sure they were trusting by nature, because part of his technique involved portraying himself as a victim in order to gain their sympathy. Once he had their attention, he took their money—in Julie’s case, also her father’s—and grew bored. This still lay ahead for Kylie.

  When the Redfern Riots occurred in February 2004, Paul told Julie that the police had had nothing to do with TJ Hickey’s death. He’d visited Redfern and chatted with former colleagues and confirmed this, he said. The claim that Mick Hollingsworth had pursued TJ to his death was false, he told her—it was just the local Aboriginal people trying to cause trouble. But a few weeks later he changed his story: he said he’d been told Hollingsworth had killed TJ after all.

  At the same time he told Julie this, the death threats started to arrive again. This time they were in what looked like female handwriting. At first Paul was hesitant about showing them to police, but on Julie’s insistence he did. (Or at least, he said he did.) After receiving three threats in one week, he demanded she return to her parents’. She did for a while and then insisted on coming home again. Paul picked Bradley and her up, and when they reached home told her to wait in the car while he checked the place out. After a while he came out and said, ‘I don’t want you going in there—someone has been in there.’

  She insisted on going inside, where she found one of Bradley’s teddy bears stuck to the wall with a knife through its throat. The knife was also pinning a sheet of paper with the words ‘Bye bye baby Bradley’. The portable cot had been turned upside down in the lounge room and a few other things were scattered around the house on the floor. There was also (as Wilkinson was to tell detectives a few months later) the word ‘Die’ written in pen on the fridge. Paul insisted that Julie and Bradley go back and stay at her parents’ yet again, which they did.

  In retrospect, Julie now sees that Paul wanted her out of the way so he could conduct his affair with Kylie. But at the time, she believed his story that he
was being persecuted for trying to do the right thing and reveal the truth about police involvement in TJ Hickey’s death. Over the next few months he would visit Julie at her parents’ most days in the afternoon and remain for about half an hour. He would not normally stay for dinner, saying he had to get home to keep an eye on the house ‘in case anything happened’.

  Julie had little idea what else he was doing with his time. As we have seen, in February 2004 he left Marrickville Police Station and never returned to work. He told Julie he had punched a police officer but a few weeks later a senior officer called her to ask what had happened to Paul, who she said had just walked off the job one day for no apparent reason. He later told a former colleague he had cancer.

  On 14 March, Kevin received his Visa card bill and it showed thousands of dollars that had been spent by Paul. He blew his top and told Julie he was sick of her moving between Picnic Point and Illawong: she had to make a choice. Julie called Paul and he drove around to take her home. Once Julie and Bradley were in the car, he came back into the house and told Julie’s parents they would never see Bradley again. He made a great drama of this declaration, saying they could throw him out of their house, but not their grandchild. When he’d gone, Kevin was really upset: Jenene and he had become deeply attached to Bradley. The next day, Jenene called Julie and she came around; Kevin told her why he’d been so angry the day before and how there was no desire to exclude Bradley from their lives.

  Although Kevin and Jenene were still susceptible to Wilkinson’s influence, their suspicions were growing. The next day they changed their wills to make sure that if anything happened to Julie, Paul could not benefit from their deaths: the money would go into a trust for Bradley. It was not that they feared any violence from Paul, but rather a reaction to the financial problems he had introduced into their daughter’s life and their own. By now they knew he was a serious problem gambler who often got into financial trouble. At one point Julie had even taken his cashcard and kept it for a while so he wouldn’t gamble away all their money.