Lizzie's Tale

by Graham Wilson

  Chapter 21 - Julie’s Investigation

  When Lizzie met Julie at school in the middle of 1964 and disappeared to have her baby Julie was left with an enduring sense of shame, with a hard edge of anger sitting behind it.

  Her friend was one of those sparkling people who she found great company. Lizzie always thought of herself as Julie’s poor cousin, and looked up to her glamorous friend, but for Julie the reality was much more the opposite.

  She knew Lizzie was cleverer than she could be, and was also much more hard working. But she was not worldly wise the way that Julie was, she did not mix with boys nor did she have money for clothes or fashion. But she had such vitality: passion and commitment were at her core; she set herself to do things and did them. And, even though she was not classically beautiful, she had something, a real look. The pointy chin, slightly uneven teeth, dark hair framing dark challenging eyes that looked into your soul and gave you their total attention. And when she smiled it lit up her face so totally that you basked in its sun-like intensity.

  But at the same time, there was an innocence and old fashioned naivety to Lizzie. Julie really loved her friend, loved doing things with her and, as she thought of it, expanding her friend’s horizons. But Julie also sensed she had a special responsibility to be careful with Lizzie and her vulnerabilities, that deep hole from the early death of her father; her fraught and difficult relationship with her mother.

  So she had been determined to show her a good time and help her have fun. But she realised now, looking back, that in doing so, a lot of it had been about advancing herself, showing off this charming and witty friend who had such an ability to captivate others.

  In encouraging her friend to come out with her she had been reckless about protecting her and safeguarding her. She had pushed Lizzie to come to the beach that day as much to show the interesting circles she moved in to Carl and his friends, and thus advance her own status, as to provide an opportunity for Lizzie to experience something new and exciting.

  And her almost forcing Lizzie to come to the party had been more of the same, plus a desire to try some sexual intimacy with Carl, in a place free of parental restraint, due to the cover that her friend could provide. In the end, despite Carl trying it on, she had said No! She decided she did not much like him anyway, rich but hollow was the way she now thought about him.

  She had never trusted Martin, Will or Dan, but had just played along with their sexual innuendos and nasty jokes, as they were Carl’s friends. She had never given serious consideration to the danger they might pose to her friend, and how, with her friend’s naivety and alcohol, what such boys might seek to do to her in this condition.

  But then, having brought her friend to the party, and having watched her become intoxicated, she should have gone and brought her into her circle, found her some water for her to drink. She should have given her cover from those creeps. Instead she had chosen to ignore what she saw while she played her own games. Then when Lizzie vanished, and these men returned with their self-satisfied smirks she had not really challenged their version of events, she had not gone looking for her friend that night.

  At a minimum she should have caught a taxi and checked Lizzie was safe home. Then, when she found a devastated Lizzie the next day looking, for all the world, like the many other rape victims she had seen since, she had blocked out this awful possibility, instead choosing to feel hurt at her friend’s rejection of her.

  It was only months later, when she saw her friend’s thin gaunt face, her swollen belly and her quiet desperation, that she had come to her senses. Then she had been filled with a combination of burning rage and deep shame. This had endured over the years undiminished.

  She made a promise to herself, on that day, that she would both do all she could in the future to help her friend, on whatever terms that help was needed. And at the same time she would get even with those bastards.

  That night she had written her own memory of everything that Lizzie had told her and signed and dated it, then asked another friend, who she trusted, to countersign and date it too. She did not ask her friend to read this record, but just to witness this writing had been done at this time and place. Even then her very limited knowledge of the law suggested a contemporaneous record may have value.

  Previously her idea of a career had been to finish school, and get a job in fashion or something else glamorous, a lawyer or doctor was a possibility but it always had her at its centre with an elegant image.

  After that she knew that her career would go down one of two paths, either as an investigative journalist who uncovered and brought to light stories such as what happened to Lizzie, or a prosecuting lawyer who sought to convict and jail these sorts of people, nasty abusive creeps.

  She became focused on her studies to get top marks. Then she went to University doing a combined Arts-Law Degree, with a journalism major. At University she became an advocate for women’s rights, protection against violence, protection of girls on campus, protection of street girls, rape support and counselling services. By the time she left University she had talked to innumerable rape and domestic violence victims. She was already starting to make her name with hard hitting articles in the University Magazine “Honi Soit” about women’s rights.

  One downside of her experience and passion was that she found herself very distrustful of men. Every story she heard amplified her belief that men were inherently bastards. Since that early relationship with Carl, which had not gone beyond some heavy petting, she had become totally distrustful of men and their motives. Many at University tried it on but she had such devastating repartee and withering scorn that most retreated from first encounters. For those who did not get the hint she turned nasty with complaints about harassment and more. She knew there were jokes about her sexuality, like “the butch bitch”, but she did not care.

  On graduation, at the age of 22, she found herself with a job as an investigative reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald focusing on women’s issues. Women were a large and growing part of the readership, bringing this desire for equality and liberation. She soon interviewed many leading edge feminists, both in Australia and internationally.

  She crusaded against the idea that pregnant women should be obliged to leave work. Lizzie on that day standing before her seven months pregnant and having just had her employment terminated was her vision for this. She campaigned against forced adoption and lack of support for teenage pregnancy, the same Lizzie fleeing first to Melbourne and then on from there was burnt in her mind to motivate this. She campaigned for protection for street girls against violence, abuse and intimidation, Lizzie the call girl was her motivation for this.

  She had not been surprised to receive Lizzie’s letter as she sat waiting to catch the boat from Perth to Broome with her small baby. She now understood her need to become a prostitute and marvelled at her great courage in this awful time, it only fuelled Julie’s own rage further. And her admiration for her friend grew as time went by, the higher the adversity the higher Lizzie climbed. She knew she would succeed in whatever she did, that was the nature of Lizzie’s courage.

  It came as no surprise when Lizzie wrote to her in early 1971, soon after as she begun as a journalist, telling her that she had fled yet again from these awful men, and had taken refuge in the desert, their arrogance and misogyny knew no bounds. Now when Lizzie told her of her intention to stop running and confront this evil, she knew her own time for action had come too.

  Now she had a specific purpose and four names to follow. She set to work. She was sure there were other victims. She must locate them, hear their stories, record their details then encourage them to testify.

  Within a month she had a name, a Newcastle girl whose mother had worked in the head office of the Wallis shipping business in Newcastle. It had happened five years ago and, on hearing through the women’s rights grapevine of Julie’s investigation, the mother had come to Julie with her own suspicions.

  Bac
k then she was a mother of two children, a seventeen year old boy and a fourteen year old girl. She told an overly familiar story.

  Her fourteen year old daughter, Miranda, had started to come to the office to help her on Saturdays sometimes. She was a beautiful girl whose body had matured; she was sweet and innocent about men.

  Martin, who mostly worked Saturdays, had asked Miranda to start doing jobs for him, just odd little things, but he had paid her and she had been flattered by the attention of this good looking man in his twenties. He was now married to a local girl with a young child and a veneer of respectability. Dan and Will still worked in the firm and were often with Martin though their jobs were unclear.

  Then the mother had to go to Sydney for a few days, leaving her daughter and son at home together. Since she had returned the daughter had never been the same, she flatly refused to go near the office, she stayed in her room and cried a lot, she was moody and bad tempered and had dropped out of school.

  Now she was in Kings Cross, a nineteen year old prostitute, addicted to heroin. Her mother had tried to find out the reason; she had asked her daughter, but got just tears, door slamming and stony silences. She asked the son, but all he knew was something happened that Saturday, the day that Miranda normally went to work at the office. She had gone in that morning as usual, and he was out at the beach for the day with his mates. When he came home that night she was locked in her room and she had barely spoken to him since.

  So the mother suspected something awful had happened to her daughter that Saturday, she had tried to make discrete inquiries, but could get nothing useful. But the word of her interest must have got around, because within a month the company dismissed her, despite having told her, just before, what a valuable employee she was. She had worked even harder after this thing had happened to Miranda, but they sacked her anyway.

  It felt bad and it smelt bad. The mother knew something bad had happened which had destroyed her daughter’s life. But the cause was only speculation.

  So Julie had her lead, she found the girl in Kings Cross, now calling herself Mimi, looking half stoned and sitting in a gutter. She was resentful and distrustful of talking to Julie. The first time Julie tried to talk to her she told her to get lost. Then she just ignored her. But Julie kept coming back, day after day, week after week, trying to make friends with her.

  One day Mimi did not tell her to go away or look the other way. Today she did not seem stoned and looked at Julie with something like friendly curiosity. “You are very persistent,” Mimi said, “Why don’t you tell me what you want?

  So they went and sat together over an ice-cream in a café. After five minutes Julie said to Mimi, “Can I tell you a story?”

  Mimi shrugged, feigning disinterest.

  So she told her about her friend Lizzie and how Lizzie trusted her, then about the party, then the rape, then the baby, and now how Lizzie had got her life together but then the men had pursued her again. So now Julie was determined to pursue these men. “I want them to feel the fear they have dished out. One day I will go and say hello to them through the bars of Long Bay Jail, and know they can’t hurt others” she said.

  As she talked she watched the face opposite, at first it was mildly bored, but when she said the name Martin she had total attention. Then, when she described the beach rape, the tears trickled down Mimi’s cheeks, and they kept coming with the baby and what continued. When she talked about the men coming after Lizzie again she knew she had her; she was Witness Two.

  Now the girl was nodding and talking, her tongue and mind freed from years of paralysis, “Yes, that’s what they do, rotten scum, they still come to see me every time they come to Sydney, often they don’t even pay, and I still have to give them what they forced on me as a little girl. It was bad enough, what happened when I was fourteen, but to keep having to relive it again and again, even now, it is like a horror story that never goes away.

  So now Julie had sworn testimony from Mimi. She had managed to get her onto methadone and found her a part time job out of the game. It was very fragile but Mimi was holding it together, just.

  The third girl was remarkably similar but this had happened only a few months earlier, this time in the Sydney office of Newcastle Transport. This girl, Alicia, who was then also fourteen was an office casual who did cleaning and tidying jobs, after school, at weekends and in school holidays. Her Mum was on a disability pension and Alicia needed the money to help support her family.

  And this time there was a fourth player, a man named Jack Mackenzie, who had been there on a visit from Melbourne. The girl thought he knew what happened, and maybe had done it too, but at the time she had been blindfolded and had not seen his face, though she knew the other men were there, both from before it started and from their voices.

  On a Saturday afternoon, when no one else was around, she had been called into Martin’s office to tidy up. Will and Dan had been there. As she bent over to pick up the bin, one had put his hand up her skirt from behind. She had tried to push him away but then the other two had come and started to fondle and feel her too. At first she had tried to fight back but then they had put a cloth bag over her head, making it hard to breath and threatening to tie it up tight if she started to scream. Then she had felt them pull her dress up and take her panties off before they did it to her, the others laughing as each took a turn. She had also felt them push other things inside her, laughing all the while.

  For her one of the worst things was, when they finished, that they had given her an envelope with five hundred dollars. They said it was to pay for services rendered, just so there were no hard feelings. Alicia had kept the money, her Mum needed things very badly because they were so poor, but now she felt both bought and abused. She knew it would be so much harder to try to say no next time when there was another envelope of desperately needed money on offer, and could see that soon they would take it whenever they wanted, without even bothering to pay as she would have no-where else to go.

  Despite the anger and hurt Alicia had kept going there to work, she did not have any other job to go to and she knew her family could not get by without the money. A month later, this man Jack, who she thought was there that first time, came back on another visit.

  That day he was laughing and joking with the others, and sometimes pointing to her, like he had seen what happened to her before and had enjoyed it. He had a folder sitting on his desk, and he left it there when he went out to lunch with the others. So she had opened the folder to see what was there. Everyone else was in the lunch room.

  She saw a pile of photos, they were naked photos of herself from when it happened, some were close ups where the men had put things inside her, her head was covered but it was still clearly her, even down to a scar on her leg from when she cut it as a kid.

  The photos also clearly showed the other three men, Martin, Dan and Will doing things to her and laughing as they did. There were none of Jack, but then he had the photos, he was probably the photographer. At the time the rape happened she did not know what to do, it had been her word against all these men, and she did not want to give back the money.

  But now, maybe, there was some real evidence to nail them. She was terrified but really angry too. Most of all she wanted to get them and get even. She knew they were planning to do it again. There was talk of Jack coming again to visit next month; she had heard Dan say that they would have a party on the Saturday night at the office where they invited some good friends, while he gave her a sick grin and wink.

  They had asked her to come in to the office on that next Saturday afternoon, when no one else was there, to make sure the office was really tidy for that evening, when the caterers would be coming to serve their guests. She knew they would be waiting for her, perhaps with another fat envelope of money.

  Alicia said she was happy to let nothing happen until that weekend so long as she did not have to go in alone, she just did not want the money enough for that. She thought that th
ey would probably have the photos there then to gloat over, so maybe someone could do a search and catch Jack with the photos or something similar.

  Julie knew this was as near to a smoking gun as she would ever get, she had Witness Three and she had photo evidence to prove what the three men had done to this fourteen year old girl.

  Her lawyer brain had charges of rape, carnal knowledge and indecent assault mapped out. Her journalist brain had a scoop planned for the day after a trial verdict giving the full story of these sexual predators and the way they abused peoples trust to get access to these under aged and vulnerable girls, then after they terrorised them into silence.

  But she knew she still had much work to do to put it together into a brief of evidence, something strong enough to convince prosecutors to go forward and, in the end, ensure all these men received their rightful date with justice and got nailed.