Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  Dedication

  For my mother, Cecilia, who died on

  12 September 2016.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 Judgment Day

  2 Growing up

  3 Journey to the ABC

  4 Getting the job

  5 Life on the road

  6 ICAC: you couldn’t make it up

  7 Stalkers

  8 The ICAC fall

  9 Justice on trial

  10 Local courts

  11 Looking for love

  12 What happens in public galleries

  13 Court officers and court sheriffs

  14 Juries

  15 Foyers

  16 Staying awake

  17 Court watchers

  18 Crimes against children

  19 The famous and the infamous

  20 How much detail?

  21 Cars as weapons

  22 The Sydney siege inquest

  Acknowledgements

  Endnotes

  Copyright

  Introduction

  IN JANUARY 2016 MY mother, Cecilia, found out that she had terminal cancer and came from her home in country New South Wales to stay with me for a while in Sydney for treatment, while my father Allan stayed at home.

  I was covering the Sydney siege inquest. She spent long days on her own watching me standing in the gutter outside the John Maddison Tower court building in Goulburn Street in the CBD doing live television crosses on the ABC News Channel and listening to my radio news stories and live program crosses on ABC Radio Sydney.

  Her palliative care drugs made her anxious and she was petrified of dying. One night when I got home, she was so worked up that she was pacing back and forth in my house.

  ‘Mum, I don’t think you are going to die tonight,’ I said to her and got her into the car to go out for a drive to try to take her mind off things.

  As we pulled out of the car park she settled a bit.

  ‘I’m proud of you,’ she said, ‘but I’ve never seen where you work — can you show me some of the courts in the city?’

  So we spent hours driving around the CBD, past the ABC at Ultimo, past the John Maddison Tower court complex, past the Downing Centre Courts and Central Local Court in Liverpool Street, past the Law Courts building in Queens Square, the St James Road Court, the King Street Courthouse and Darlinghurst Courthouse, past Glebe Coroner’s Court on Parramatta Road and past the new ICAC building on Elizabeth Street and the old one on Castlereagh Street.

  I explained to her that these were just a few of the courts I’d been hanging around for almost a decade and we didn’t have time to go out to all the other courts in the suburbs.

  We were on our way back to my inner west house when she said, ‘Where does Eddie Obeid live?’ She had seen photos of the former Labor minister’s Hunters Hill home in the news for many years.

  So we went past there too and ate a choc-top ice cream in a park overlooking the water near Hunters Hill.

  Mum had calmed right down by now.

  ‘You might be sad when I die so you need to keep busy,’ she said. ‘You could write a book about some of your adventures in the courts and all the people you’ve seen and talked to.’

  So that is what I’ve done.

  Over the last decade I have covered hundreds of different court cases and I have filed more than 10,000 radio news stories alone. That figure does not include thousands of live radio and television crosses. I have been closely involved with the ABC News Channel since it started in 2010 doing live television crosses on major court cases and have worked with ABC Online from the very start covering court stories.

  I have covered so many cases I actually forget I’ve covered some of them and am only reminded of them when I come across videos and recordings of my work or stories online. Not always remembering some of the detail of the more confronting things I’ve covered is probably a good thing, because like a doctor or police officer you can’t carry it all around with you and you need to switch off sometimes and keep a certain distance and objectivity to get the job done.

  I have had moments in court when the public gallery has erupted into fits of laughter, fights have broken out or people have collapsed with grief.

  I’ve done stories about horrific stabbing, shooting and beheading murders. I’ve covered a case involving a member of the Milat family, another involving bush fugitive Malcolm Naden, and the murder trials of former water-polo champion Keli Lane, ex-chauffeur Gordon Wood and Sydney man Jeffrey Gilham who was jailed for life after being convicted of murdering his parents Helen and Stephen Gilham in their Woronora home in Sydney’s south, but was later acquitted on appeal when new evidence was found.

  I have covered cases involving politicians, including the court case between former speaker Peter Slipper and his ex-staffer James Ashby, and cases involving the Health Services Union, and senior police, including former New South Wales Crime Commission investigator Mark Standen, who was jailed for conspiring to import drugs.

  One Federal Court case I covered involved a public servant who sued for compensation after injuring herself having sex in a motel her employer had booked for a work trip in country New South Wales. The woman claimed that a glass light fitting that came away from the wall, hit her in the face, injuring her nose and mouth and causing a psychiatric adjustment disorder. She won the Federal Court case but then the government’s workplace safety body, Comcare, appealed to the High Court and won, so the compensation she thought she was entitled to never eventuated.

  The round has taken me into court for cases involving celebrities such as the late Leonard Cohen, Gina Rinehart and her family, and ex-Hey Dad! television star Robert Hughes.

  I’ve covered grubby, horrible cases involving sex offenders, husband killers, wife killers, child killers, petty thieves and very bad drivers.

  There are cases I’ve followed in and out of several court jurisdictions and appeals that have resulted in acquittals or shorter jail sentences.

  Inquests into the death and disappearance of people whose families still grieve have been part of my job, including the long-running Sydney siege inquest and inquests into the cruise-ship death of Dianne Brimble, television newsreader Charmaine Dragun, tasered Brazilian student Laudisio Curti and the Quakers Hill nursing home mass murders.

  I’ve covered terrorism trials, bikie trials, sexual harassment and animal cruelty cases and a case involving a woman who killed her children with rat poison and another who jumped to her death after doing a self-help course.

  The long-running Church Sex Abuse inquiries, ICAC inquiries, copyright matters, Industrial Court matters, Land and Environment Court matters, defamation and copyright cases and committal hearings have all been part of my job.

  I’ve been chased, spat on, threatened with physical violence, stopped from entering a court and injured on the job, but have, on the flipside of all that, had the incredible reward of connecting with audiences and being in court for some of the biggest moments in New South Wales politics.

  A courtroom presents life in all its complexities and it can provide the most amazing and addictive theatre. The case itself is often a subplot for all the dynamics and relationships in a public gallery.

  I wrote this book to fulfil my promise to my mum and it is dedicated to her memory. I hope that you find the courts and all the colourful stories and characters as interesting to read about as I did to witness.

  1

  Judgment Day

  ON 13 FEBRUARY 2017 Robert Xie was given five life sentences for murdering five members of his wife’s family by bashing them to death as they lay sleeping in their beds in the quiet, leafy, middle-class Sydney suburb of North Epping. Just a month earlier a jury found him guilty in a
majority eleven to one verdict when it couldn’t reach a unanimous one. The case was intriguing and frustrating at the same time for me because it had dragged on for so long. I had been following it since Xie’s arrest in 2011 and his subsequent committal hearing and the aftermath.

  This short and rather frail man always had a calm demeanour in court. He looked no different than the other suited professionals on their way to work in the CBD each day. He was a trained ear, nose and throat surgeon who was born in China and came to Australia in 1999. Xie owned a restaurant in Melbourne before moving to Sydney where he was mostly not working.

  In 2011 he was charged with murdering his wife’s brother Min ‘Norman’ Lin (forty-five); Mr Lin’s wife, Yun Li ‘Lily’ (forty-three); their two sons Henry (twelve) and Terry (nine); and Lily’s sister Yun Bi ‘Irene’ (thirty-nine). Their bodies were found early on Saturday 18 July 2009 in their home after Norman Lin didn’t show up to open his newsagency.

  Hours earlier they had been at their usual Friday night family dinner with Norman Lin’s parents at Merrylands in Sydney’s west.

  According to police, Norman Lin was well-liked and he had no known enemies. At first police thought the murders might have resulted from some sort of gang rivalry or from an unpaid debt. The murders had shocked Sydney because they were so violent and gruesome and at first it was assumed they had been committed by a number of people. Bloody footprints were found at the crime scene house, with blood spattered over the walls, ceiling and furniture.

  Robert Xie was questioned by police soon after the murders. Two years later, following a secret police operation that included months of video surveillance in his home and the questioning of his wife, Kathy Lin, by the New South Wales Crime Commission, he was charged.

  The Crown case was that Robert Xie crept into Norman Lin’s home in Boundary Road (which was only about 300 metres from Xie’s own home in Beck Street) late at night, let himself in with a key, turned the power off and bashed the family to death in their beds with a hammer-like object. The prosecution alleged Robert Xie drugged Kathy Lin that night (but in sentencing him Justice Fullerton said she could not be totally sure of that and Kathy Lin may have just remained asleep when he snuck out).1

  The prosecutor argued that Xie was motivated by jealousy and bitterness because he thought his wife’s parents favoured Norman Lin and that he wanted the family out of the way because of his sexual motive involving Brenda Lin, the oldest child who had been overseas at the time of the murders.

  Xie denied committing the murders and his defence case was that he had no motive to kill the family because he got on with them.2

  After Xie was found guilty in January 2017 the Supreme Court released some of the exhibits that had been shown to the trial jury.

  They included horrific and graphic photos of the crime scene that included blood on walls, power points, door handles and even on ceiling light fittings. There were photos of the children’s room with their blood all over the walls.

  Prosecutors had also argued that a stain found on Robert Xie’s garage floor labelled ‘stain 91’ contained the DNA of four of his victims and the jury saw police surveillance footage of Xie destroying shoe boxes in his house after officers found bloody footprints at the crime scene.

  The jury was told that when Xie and Kathy arrived at the Lin family home on the morning of 18 July 2009. Xie told his wife not to look at one body that he couldn’t possibly have seen from where he was standing and that he must have known beforehand where that body was.

  The court also released the frightening triple 0 emergency call Kathy Lin made after finding the bodies. Xie had driven off and left her at the Lin house on her own, probably so he could get rid of the murder weapon and pick Kathy’s parents up from the nearby suburb of Merrylands and tell them about the deaths.

  Norman Lin’s body wasn’t found by police first for some time because it was hidden under a doona, yet Xie told some of the first police officers at the scene that there were five bodies in the house not the four that they first thought were there.

  The jury was told about a phone call that Xie later made to tell a detective he really meant ‘four or five’ bodies to try to cover his tracks.3 Xie stood trial four times, with the first trial starting in 2014. That first trial was aborted after new evidence was found and the second trial was aborted after the judge, Justice Peter Johnson, became unwell. A third trial that ran for a massive nine months and was presided over by Justice Elizabeth Fullerton ended in a hung jury. Senior Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC led the first three trials.

  The fourth, which was led by prosecutor Tanya Smith, ran for over six months.4

  Xie did not give evidence at any of them.

  I was covering Xie’s sentence in February 2017 for the ABC News Channel. Knowing it would be a big story for the day our senior chief of staff in the Sydney newsroom, Simon Santow had sent other reporters with me to cover it for other ABC news services. I got to the Supreme Court building in King Street an hour early to suss things out and check in with my camera crew who arrived a few minutes after me. We found a good position on the footpath to set up for my live television crosses. It was not too close to the building so as not to get ‘moved on’ by the court officers, but close enough to see it in the background. We tried our best to set up out of the wind. Other media outlets were staking out their own positions. One cameraman had a fold-up camping chair to sit on. Two women, one with shopping bags and the other, with a big white envelope under her arm, stopped and asked me what everyone was there for.

  ‘The sentence for Robert Xie,’ I told them. ‘The guy found guilty of murdering the Lin family.’

  ‘I remember that — it’s terrible,’ said one. ‘Sydney is getting worse.’

  They moved off towards Macquarie Street.

  As all the lawyers, family members and court watchers started trickling towards the court foyer, the television crews got footage of all the Lin family members and the prosecutor and the legal teams coming in. A car came past us down King Street and slowed down as someone shouted out the window at the media pack.

  ‘You fucking parasitic vermin!’

  We are accustomed to these types of greetings from some members of the public. No one from the media pack even batted an eyelid or turned around to see who it was — we were too busy working.

  Kathy Lin arrived wearing a cardigan and with a female Salvation Army court volunteer. Then the very emotional Lin family grandparents arrived carrying photos of their slain loved ones.

  One of the last people to arrive, with some of her friends, was the surviving and oldest Lin child Brenda, who had been fifteen at the time of the murders and was now a tertiary student in her twenties. She was the witness whose identity and evidence had been supressed throughout Robert Xie’s trials.

  In sentencing Xie, Justice Fullerton referred to Brenda as ‘Ms AB’.5 Disturbing evidence had been presented at his trial about how Xie had sexually abused Brenda before the murders, then after them when she went to live with him but we couldn’t report it.

  Brenda had been overseas on a high school language excursion in New Caledonia when Xie murdered her family and he applied for guardianship and took her in to live with him and his wife after the deaths. It was about half way through his first trial in 2014 that she came forward with the sexual abuse evidence.

  Earlier that morning I had gone over the main points of the case in my head and decided that if I talked about the sexual abuse evidence in my live cross, the safest thing to say was ‘Xie’s motive for the murders included a sexual one’ as I had done when reporting on his trials.

  Some of the other reporters getting anxious about this were in a huddle asking each other, ‘Can we name Brenda . . . can we talk about the sex abuse?’

  I suggested leaving her name out if they were not sure and to talk about what they were sure of. I also knew from experience that when a case ends, victims sometimes give permission to be identified and I wondered if Brenda had already agree
d to do an exclusive interview with a network to tell her story. Who could blame someone for doing that after everything she had been through: losing her entire family because of this man and being subjected to sexual abuse by him.

  As the Lin family members sat in the foyer and waited to be let into court they were surrounded by court watchers waiting for exactly the same thing.

  ‘Angela’s not here,’ someone else commented. ‘She’ll be so angry about this.’

  They were referring to long-time court watcher Angela Thomas who had patiently sat through all of Xie’s trials from the start but couldn’t be at the jury’s verdict or Xie’s sentence because she was visiting family in London. She had tweeted that the guilty verdict in his trial a month earlier was a ‘huge miscarriage of justice’ because Xie was innocent. She was contacting others in court via Twitter to find out what his sentence was.

  ‘Do you think he’ll get a life sentence?’ I asked the waiting court watchers.

  ‘Ooooh, yes,’ they chorused.

  A man sitting with them added, ‘I hope the judge doesn’t go soft and give him thirty years.’

  The legal teams started drifting in and the court officers opened the door to the courtroom to let them inside first and everyone else had to wait. I was towards the head of a long queue of reporters waiting at the courtroom door to get into the public gallery. There was nervous chatter and gossip as we waited in the line. Reporters texted their crews outside and phoned their newsrooms. The court watchers talked to each other and swapped tips about which cases they were going to check out after this one.

  I knew that in an hour or so, or maybe even less, I’d be talking to a camera outside relaying what the judge had to say.

  When the court door finally opened, people were pushing and shoving as if they were at the start of the department store Boxing Day sales.

  This sentence was not in the same court where Robert Xie’s trial was held but in a smaller King Street Courthouse court that usually hears bail applications for people whose bail has been refused in a local court by a magistrate, or bail applications for people facing out-of-the-ordinary difficult circumstances in custody.