Call Me Cruel

by Michael Duffy

  ‘I’m not going to lie for you,’ she said when she realised he was going to make a complaint. ‘I have to take Bradley home.’ She left the police station.

  Julie didn’t tell much of this to Detective Ryan because she was scared of Paul. She just said she’d been in the car, sitting in the passenger seat, so she was closest to Lowe and hadn’t heard any threat. She asked him not to tell Paul what she’d said, as this would cause problems for her.

  Ryan wrote to Lowe to inform him of the complaint, and Lowe said he had not even known he was next to Wilkinson on the day in question. He told Ryan about the rape allegations Wilkinson had made to the police minister’s office in 2001 and expressed concern that there would be more false complaints in the future.

  Ryan called Wilkinson and, without referring to Julie’s comments, said the complaint was being rejected. Wilkinson was clearly unhappy and accused Ryan of protecting Lowe (who was also stationed at Miranda). In June, Ryan advised the complaints-management team, ‘It would not surprise me if the complainant makes further attempts to complain about Sergeant Lowe or other members of the NSW Police Service given his knowledge of the system and recent experience with the service.’ He suggested that Wilkinson be assessed as a vexatious complainant. This didn’t happen.

  As we have seen, a few weeks later, in July 2005, Wilkinson went to the PIC with his nightmarish claim that Lowe had killed Kylie. Julie knew nothing of this until September, when Paul gave her a copy of the nine-page statement he had given the commission. They discussed it after she read it, and he added a detail that was not in the statement: he said Lowe had given him a choice between raping Kylie and stabbing her.

  ‘I chose to stab her—I stabbed her four times,’ Wilkinson said to Julie, ‘because raping her would be too much like what happened to you.’

  Julie just looked at him, not for a minute believing it, thinking this was just another of his crazy stories.

  But the stories were getting worse.

  By late 2005, the investigation into Kylie’s death was heating up again. Since November the police had been intercepting Wilkinson’s phone calls, and Glenn Smith was thinking seriously about talking to Julie. Early in the investigation, Houlahan and Craig had decided against approaching people close to Wilkinson, because they knew they’d tell him about the sort of questions being asked, which would enable him to prepare mentally for their next contact with him. But it seemed from the calls they were listening to that while Julie still talked with Wilkinson, she didn’t have much sympathy for him anymore. Her role in the relationship now seemed to be as the recipient of his increasingly emotional rants.

  Wilkinson also had many phone conversations with the woman named Cheryl Kaulfuss, telling her he knew where Kylie’s body was but had chosen not to tell the PIC in order to see how they’d react. He said his barrister and Ray Jackson, a support person from the Indigenous Social Justice Association, wanted him to tell the police where the body was, but he wouldn’t until he had ‘some sort of guarantee’.

  The pressure was clearly telling on him, but he continued to cling to the notion that he could wriggle out of it by implicating Lowe and getting some sort of indemnity for his own role in (he claimed) burying Kylie in the Royal National Park. On 13 December he told Kaulfuss, ‘The big thing is, if they want to come and grab me, then come and grab me. But at the end of the day, you don’t scratch my back, I won’t scratch yours, and it’s their family that’s not going to know where she is.’

  Wilkinson told Julie she could expect a visit from the cops before too long, and he renewed his pressure on her to change her 2001 diary by adding a mention of being raped. Julie later told police, ‘Paul has said on several occasions, “If you do the diary it will strengthen my story about that cunt.” When Paul says “that cunt” he is referring to Geoff Lowe, as this is how Paul always refers to Geoff Lowe.’

  Julie continued to resist these requests, and Wilkinson’s behaviour deteriorated. He would call and demand money and cigarettes, and threaten to come to her parents’ house and make a scene if she didn’t oblige. Finally, she began to consider the unthinkable: that he might have had an affair with Kylie Labouchardiere. And maybe worse. By December 2005, Julie’s desire to know the truth finally became stronger than her fear of Paul; she called the police and said she wanted to talk.

  She was put on to Glenn Smith, who said it was a coincidence to hear from her. He’d been planning to ring her that afternoon.

  Julie was twenty-five, the same age Kylie would have been had she still been alive—five years younger than Wilkinson. Glenn Smith and Rebekkah Craig interviewed her at Menai Police Station, and early on she asked what they thought had happened to Kylie. They said they thought Paul had murdered her. As the detectives went through their questions, she started to see her life over the past few years in a new light. She felt shattered, not just that Paul had betrayed her but that her son might turn out to have a murderer as a father. Julie asked the detectives if they thought Paul had been having an affair with Kylie. They told her she was pregnant at the time she disappeared, almost certainly with his baby. Julie began to cry.

  In retrospect, Julie seems to have been gullible for a long time, believing stories such as the threats to her life that had forced her out of her house so often. Other people were gullible, too, most notably Sean, with his belief in Kylie’s stories about the police work Wilkinson was doing and which she was supposedly engaged in. Kylie was gullible herself. We will never know the extent to which she believed Wilkinson’s stories, but her behaviour while still with Sean indicates she believed at least some. In other cases she helped create them—for example, the death threats she wrote, and almost certainly the story about her alleged rape by Gary.

  Of course, it takes two people to create an effective lie: one to tell and one to believe. Chronic liars know this and are adept at surrounding themselves with people who are prepared to believe their lies. This does not necessarily mean these people are gullible from the start. Sometimes a liar will start off by being honest in a relationship and introduce the lies gradually. Their partner will accept the lies because by then they are committed to the relationship, maybe because of love or a child. Sometimes lies are believed in a weak moment, to avoid conflict, and pushed to the back of the mind. Sometimes deceit can become part of the fabric of a relationship, hardly noticed anymore. This seems to have been the case with Wilkinson and Julie. Some of what he said was amazing stuff, but what was new? Julie and her parents had stopped taking Paul seriously long ago. As she now told the detectives, ‘He just comes out with things sometimes.’

  Something else he’d come out with was an observation about a car they’d passed at Loftus Railway Station that belonged to the wife of Geoff Lowe: ‘That’s that dog’s wife’s car,’ he’d said. Glenn Smith found this disturbing: for Wilkinson to know this, it was likely he’d been watching Lowe’s house.

  The police asked Julie about a sledgehammer Wilkinson had borrowed from her parents’ house and returned a few weeks after Kylie disappeared. Julie didn’t know why he’d taken it: ‘He was definitely not the handyman type.’ It was another mystery—in this case, despite forensic examination of the implement, it would be one that was never solved.

  Smith and Craig spent two full days with Julie, learning all they could about Wilkinson. Although the information filled in a lot of gaps, they were disappointed to realise that she knew nothing that put them much closer to being able to charge him. As it turned out, her greatest value was that she was still in touch with Paul. Over the coming years she was able to keep them up to date on his state of mind. Now she knew what he’d done, she was keen to do what she could to help Kylie’s parents. As a parent herself, she felt sorry for what they must be going through.

  Someone else the detectives spoke with in December 2005 was Wilkinson’s uncle Alan, whom he’d rung the night Kylie disappeared. Alan Wilkinson lived on Karool Road, alon
g Mooney Mooney Creek almost under the F3 bridge. A Vietnam veteran of average height with short dark hair, he was known in the area as a tough man who liked a drink. His nickname was Rambo. His house, perched on poles up a steep driveway, overlooked the creek, which despite its name is a fairly broad tidal river. Just below the house he kept a blue houseboat, with a tinnie tied up to it, and on occasion took off for a few days up Mullet Creek, to get away from things.

  The detectives went up the steep drive and found a somewhat decrepit dwelling with building materials scattered around the yard. When Alan Wilkinson answered the door, they asked him to come to the station to make a formal statement.

  Craig said, ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, it’s pretty simple, just come and speak to us.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Alan. ‘I want to get a lawyer.’

  ‘Go for it. All we want to do is get an explanation [of the phone call]. Your name’s come up.’

  When Alan Wilkinson arrived at Gosford a few days later, he told Smith that Rebekkah’s words the other day had caused him to drink two cases of beer and jump in the creek. Possibly he shared his nephew’s dislike of women in authority. He claimed to have no memory of the call Paul Wilkinson had made on the night of 28 April 2004, saying that he’d been away from home at some event related to Anzac Day, although he couldn’t remember the details. The detectives were interested in Alan Wilkinson: he couldn’t prove where he was that night, and phone records suggested he’d actually been at home, or nearby, when Kylie disappeared.

  Meanwhile, the phone tap on Wilkinson’s mobile continued. On Boxing Day he told Cheryl Kaulfuss, ‘You go and investigate Geoff Lowe, and then you’ll make a connection between 2001 [Wilkinson’s delusion that Lowe had raped Julie] to this incident now [Kylie’s death], and that’ll prove that he’s aggressive, and that it’s in his nature to do it.’ Then his story about the grave changed and he said, ‘It’s so unfortunate that I cannot remember the exact location . . . in the Royal National Park.’ And yet twenty minutes later he texted her: ‘the following is HALK co-ordinates 2 a location 26E 29N in the event of death & only death a cousin will ring u with the otha half.’ These manic texts and phone conversations had become important in maintaining his delusions.

  In January 2006 he texted Julie: ‘I tried my best with them 2 kill me, I begged em 2 kill me 2 ensure safety 4 u and KING [his name for Bradley].’ He told her that Geoff Lowe would be so angry if he talked that ‘You might end up in the National Park, just like Kylie’.

  In late January, Wilkinson told Kaulfuss he’d been contacted by the forensic specialist hired by his lawyers, who wanted to go out with him to look for the body again. He said he could no longer remember where it was. On 31 January he sent a text to Julie that combined all his fantasies about Geoff Lowe: ‘I c what he did 2 her, I c the gun in my chest, I c the fire surroundin me, I c my version of what they did 2 u. Mostly the murder Julie it was vicious sadistic.’

  There was one last person the detectives had to speak to for their case against Wilkinson. Although convinced his allegations against Geoff Lowe were nonsense, they had to be investigated, and so they arranged to interview Lowe in early 2006. It would be the first time anyone had talked to him officially about the details of Wilkinson’s six-month-old allegation that he had killed Kylie Labouchardiere.

  What Paul Wilkinson did to Geoff Lowe almost beggars belief. The others whose lives he damaged were at least connected with him, either directly or through their close relationships with Kylie or Julie. But Wilkinson had never met Lowe when he accused him of rape and murder. His hatred of the man stemmed from his possessiveness of Julie and his dislike of police officers in general, and blossomed into the macabre attempt to frame him for Kylie’s murder.

  Geoff Lowe was a uniformed sergeant at Miranda in 2006, and did not look like a crazed killer and rapist. When I met him later I found a mild-mannered man of below average size. In fact, although his father was a policeman too, Geoff had never thought he’d be accepted into the force because of its physical requirements: at sixty-four kilograms, he was simply too small. But in 1983 his application was successful and he soon found he loved the job and was good at it. He enjoyed the camaraderie, being part of a brotherhood of men and women who had to look after each other, no matter who they were. Much of a shift in the early years was spent driving around in a truck with a colleague, sharing your life’s experiences to help pass the time. The next day it was the same thing, but often with a completely different person. And then there was cop humour, that take on the world that only someone else who’s been through the same experiences can understand. Geoff also liked the knowledge that he was serving the community. Whether people were grateful or not, he knew he was doing a good thing, making a difference every day he went to work.

  In 2001 Geoff had a long-term girlfriend named Sue. During a break in their relationship, he had a very brief sexual fling with Julie Thurecht. He got back together with Sue and they married in March 2005, and settled down happily in Geoff’s house in Loftus, towards the southern end of the Shire. It was a modest, pleasant place right at the end of yet another dead-end street running into the bush. Like many houses in the street, it was made of weatherboard. It had a green tin roof and was shaded by big trees, overlooking a reserve maintained by volunteers. Geoff regarded it as his dream home, the place where he would bring up his children one day.

  When he became a sergeant and moved to Miranda at the end of 2004, he knew Julie had married Paul Wilkinson. Geoff says Wilkinson had a reputation in the Shire among police, but as a client rather than a colleague. Sometimes he would get into trouble in pubs and clubs so they had to be called, and when this happened he would try to use his job to get special treatment. The fact he was an ACLO placed them in a tricky situation. They wanted to help him but he was also a pain in the arse.

  In early 2002, soon after he sent his birthday text message with the sexual reference to Julie, Geoff received half a dozen anonymous phone calls with threats such as the intention to cut his throat. In an early call, the speaker used the term ‘Pre-88’, which referred to a police superannuation scheme. This made it almost certain the caller was with the police, and Geoff tried to think which colleague would want to abuse him like this. Later the caller mentioned the name ‘Julie’, which narrowed the field considerably. The calls came to Geoff’s private mobile, which he figured Paul Wilkinson could have got from Julie Thurecht’s phone. He kept a record of the times and dates of the calls. Finally, Wilkinson rang while his phone was off and left a long, abusive message. Geoff took this and the other information to his superiors, who arranged to have a check done on the source of the recorded message. It had been made from a public phone box on the Central Coast, not far from where Wilkinson and Julie were living at the time. Police management decided not to pursue the matter and Geoff changed his phone number.

  In October 2004 Geoff met Paul Wilkinson for the only time. He was at work and was called to a job at the Engadine RSL Club, on the night Wilkinson had been ejected and (as described earlier) was carrying on outside. Geoff was in the second or third car to arrive, and found two officers restraining an Aboriginal man who had his shirt off. Geoff got out of the car, and a moment later the man started calling out his name, yelling, ‘Get Senior Constable Lowe here.’

  Geoff walked towards the man and racked his memory, thinking maybe he’d encountered the bloke before at some domestic incident. But nothing came to mind. When he reached the group, Wilkinson asked to speak to him around the corner.

  ‘No, mate,’ Geoff said. ‘If you want to speak to me, just say whatever you’ve got to say here.’

  To his surprise, Wilkinson proceeded to yell out that Geoff had once raped his wife.

  ‘What?’ said Geoff.

  It was the first time he’d heard the allegation. There was a crowd of onlookers, and as he stared at their faces Geoff recognised one as Julie Thurecht. A
s soon as she saw him looking at her, she turned and ran off.

  Wilkinson continued to hurl abuse at Geoff, until he was handcuffed and put in the back of a police truck. Members of his family were nearby, and they started to yell insults too, one of them using the word ‘rapist’. Geoff found the completely unexpected incident incomprehensible. It was painful to be accused of rape, and even worse to have it done in public, in front of his colleagues. He was suddenly in some kind of twilight zone.

  Gradually, though, the memory faded, and Geoff hadn’t thought too much about Paul Wilkinson in a while when he was rung in April 2005 by Detective Andrew Ryan, who said he was investigating the complaint Wilkinson had just made about the incident at the traffic lights. As we’ve seen, the complaint went nowhere because Julie refused to support Wilkinson’s version of the event. But after the threatening phone calls of 2002 and the incident at the Engadine RSL in 2004, it had a big impact on Geoff and his wife, Sue. She in particular became seriously scared of Paul Wilkinson, who they found was living at his parents’ place, only five minutes’ drive from their house. As the traffic lights allegation showed, he knew what sort of car Geoff drove.

  Geoff complained about this history of harassment to his management team at Miranda. There had now been three incidents in almost three years. He asked that Wilkinson be charged with some sort of offence, or at least be recorded as a vexatious complainant. Nothing was done, so Geoff took the first of many steps for his own protection by changing the number plates on his car. This was not the end of the world, but he resented having to do it because his old plates were personalised and much-loved. He’d been given them as a twenty-first birthday present by an aunt who did this for all her nephews and nieces: it was a modest family tradition. Wilkinson was starting to affect the way Geoff lived his life.