Usually for bail applications in this court, judges don’t wear their wig and red robe, but I knew that Justice Elizabeth Fullerton, who was sentencing Robert Xie, would wear the full formal judge’s costume.
I also wondered if she would be nervous because the sentence was being filmed by the media, which was something first introduced in courts in New South Wales around 2014. There is usually only one television camera or pool camera allowed in court to film a sentence and the vision is shared with all the other media outlets. The camera only focuses on the sentencing judge and the rest of the courtroom is not shown. Permission still has to be granted by the court to film and it’s nothing like the trials that are shown live on US television.
We jostled with court watchers to try to get through the door.
‘Please move . . . move move. Come on . . . MOVE . . . Do as you are instructed. MOVE ASIDE AND GET AWAY FROM THE DOOR!’ a court sheriff yelled.
Two other sheriffs came to his aid and they asked to see our media identification as we filed through one by one and herded us into the jury box to make room in the public gallery for everyone else. I feared this would spell disaster because I needed to be near the court door to get outside quickly to file after the sentence was handed down. With broadcast filing deadlines sometimes less than five minutes after a court matter has ended, I have learned over the years that the best court seat is the one closest to the door. I stake out every court I work in this way. A fast exit is one of a court reporter’s tools of the trade and every extra minute wasted getting outside to meet a deadline counts.
So while I couldn’t sit near the court door I did claim the seat at the exit end of the jury box and assessed the path I would need to take down the jury-box stairs, past the judge, past the bar table of prosecutors and lawyers and through the public gallery to the court hallway to get outside. Then I looked up and could see why we had been herded into the jury box. The upstairs level of the gallery was already completely full of court watchers as well as the watchers in the public gallery downstairs with me.
The low-level chatter that had quickly spread throughout both galleries turned to complete silence when Robert Xie was led into the dock with an interpreter.
‘All rise,’ a court official said before Justice Elizabeth Fullerton’s entrance.
We sat down after the judge took her seat. She politely asked the reporters sitting in the jury box to ‘not type loudly’ and to make sure their mobile phones were on silent. Almost on cue a mobile phone in the pocket of a man in the public gallery rang. Red-faced he fumbled around, then turned if off just as a court sheriff headed towards him.
Robert Xie was sitting directly opposite me. He stared straight ahead during the judge’s sentencing remarks. I was face-to-face with a convicted murderer in a navy suit who looked straight through me.
He didn’t blink, didn’t flinch and didn’t cry, just stared. It was as though he had mentally put himself somewhere else to get through this ordeal. I wondered if he was meditating. Reporters next to me tweeted that his stare was disconcerting and that it was evil. I stared straight back at him trying to work him out and he made no effort to move or look down or turn his head away.
He didn’t seem angry. He did none of the things I have seen people do when they are sentenced.
Kathy Lin, who had come to his trial almost every day, bringing him lunch, also showed little emotion. During his trial she would often sit near me at the back of the court. Maybe she too had sussed out the quickest way to escape from the court and the waiting media each day.
The King Street Courthouse has a damp and musty underground tunnel that goes past some toilets and some unused holding cells and has an exit near another court in Elizabeth Street. I used to wonder, on the days we couldn’t see Kathy Lin outside court, if she had quickly slipped through there. But for her husband’s sentence she chose to sit down the front of the public gallery, as close to him in the dock as she could.
As Justice Fullerton continued her address it became evident that the Crown would get the five life sentences it had asked for.
I wasn’t surprised.
These were horrible senseless murders.
The judgment was relatively short compared to some sentences that can go for hours because Robert Xie’s defence had made no sentencing submissions.
He was still declaring his innocence.
‘I did not kill the Lin family,’ he had shouted a month earlier, the day he was found guilty.6
In sentencing him, Justice Fullerton described Xie’s crime as a ‘murderous assault’, criminality of the highest order and ‘a course of offending that can only be described as heinous in the extreme’.7
The judge said the crimes were in the worst category because he aimed a hammer at the victim’s faces and heads and hit them all many times. She said Xie attached a rope to the hammer and put it around his wrist to ensure he killed the family with speed and efficiency and to maximise force.
Justice Fullerton said it was also likely that the two young boys he murdered woke up and struggled and that the youngest boy, Terry Lin, was probably alive for some time after Robert Xie attacked him. The judge said the five murders were planned and Robert Xie knew the layout of the house and was trusted by the Lin family.
She said she could not help but conclude that he posed a danger to the community.
‘The meticulous planning involved in the timing and styling of the murders, coupled with the offender’s resolve to execute that plan and then to persist with the infliction of extreme violence with the intention that all occupants of the house should die, despite the active resistance offered by Terry Lin, the youngest victim, as he struggled for his life, is an ample basis upon which to make that finding,’ she said.8
The judge also took into account the impact of the five murders on the surviving family member Brenda Lin. Justice Fullerton referred to the very brave and powerful victim impact statement that Brenda had given just days earlier at Robert Xie’s sentencing hearing. In the statement Brenda had talked about the loss of her family and how she regretted not hugging her father when she last saw him at the airport.
The judge said:
She told me her achievements feel hollow and as she has passed various milestones from adolescence to early adulthood since the death of her family, celebrating those achievements with others is bittersweet.
She described missing the support and guidance her parents had given her as their eldest child with the certain knowledge that would have continued.
She has difficulty sleeping.
She is dealing with an array of mental health issues and is experiencing some trouble with her tertiary studies.
Despite Ms AB’s gratitude for having been welcomed into loving families and for the support her friends have given her, she recognises, and the Court well understands, this can never be a substitute for the love, support, warmth and intimacy of her own family.
I acknowledge the profound grief she has suffered and continues to suffer. I also commend her for her strength and dignity, and her courage as she faces the future without parents, siblings or a loving aunt.9
When she had finished the reasons for her decision the judge leaned forward, looked over the top of her glasses.
‘Will you stand up please?’ she said to Robert Xie.
Here we go. I thought.
Xie quietly obeyed her.
‘On counts one to five in the indictment you are convicted of the murders . . .’ said the judge. ‘On each count you are sentenced to imprisonment for life commencing on 25 May 2012.’10
Robert Xie sat back down passively in the dock before the court sheriffs took him away. Kathy Lin then quietly began to cry.
As I quickly made my escape out of the jury box and through the court door onto King Street, the public gallery chatter started up again. I found my crew and launched straight into the first of many of the live television crosses that I did that day with Midday presenter Roz Childs. Throughout the day I up
dated crosses with the ABC News Channel and that night was a guest on The Drum to discuss the case.
When Kathy Lin emerged from the courtroom she told reporters her husband was innocent and they would be appealing against his conviction. She said police had made a scapegoat of Robert Xie and he was wrongly charged.
‘We want the police to tell us what happened in my brother’s family,’ she said. ‘Robert did not kill my brother’s family. He is a loving and caring family man.’11
Kathy Lin’s parents Yang Fei Lin and his wife, Feng Qing Zhu, however, believed Robert Xie was guilty. They came to court for his sentence visibly upset and holding photos of the murdered family members. After they left the building they stood around the corner near Elizabeth Street crying and holding each other while they were waiting for the lights at the pedestrian crossing to change.
Detective Chief Inspector Chris Olsen who had worked on the case, said the five life sentences represented justice for the victims. He also thanked the jurors for their deliberations.
‘My heartfelt thanks to the Lin family survivors for their strength and their dignity throughout this seven-year ordeal,’ he said.12
Brenda Lin stood on the veranda outside the court building talking to her friends after the sentence. They could have been any group of young people on a day out in the CBD.
A few days after Xie was sentenced she did an interview on Channel Seven’s Sunday Night show giving permission to be identified. In the interview she came across as intelligent and strong, describing how so many people had helped her and shown her kindness. Brenda Lin said she first learned her family had been murdered when she was overseas, by seeing a link to her house and the crimes on Facebook.13
That night I went for a long walk and wondered if there had really been any winners in the court that day. I thought about how Robert Xie, an educated man who trained as a doctor, would probably die in jail after committing these horrible violent crimes.
Yet I also knew from experience that his case might not be quite over because his wife was standing by him and they would more than likely lodge an appeal.
I thought about how despite Xie’s never-to-be-released sentence, Norman Lin’s parents would never get their son, grandchildren or the rest of their murdered family members back.
Their child had died before them and also their grandchildren.
Brenda Lin was on her own now and nothing could possibly compensate her for Robert Xie’s sexual abuse or the loss of five members of her family including her two little brothers.
I also thought of the jurors who had to sit through the months of evidence at all Robert Xie’s trials and if the evidence had changed them in some way.
I thought about the huge financial cost of the Xie trials.
What were the judge, the lawyers and the court officers thinking that night and what about the people who packed the public gallery but had nothing to do with the case at all?
Tomorrow it would be all over the front of the newspapers and online and people would be talking about it. I wondered if reporting on these crimes fell into the ‘helping people’ category or was it really the entertainment business. Was I contributing to the problem of people’s fear of Sydney becoming a bad place by scaring them unnecessarily?
I got home that night and went through my phone messages. There was one from my eighty-three year old father who phoned every night at the same time from the small outback town where he’s lived his whole life.
‘It’s Dad, love. Just ringing to see how you are. I worry about you living down there. Sydney’s such a bad place.’
I’ve lived in Sydney since I was seventeen and he still worries.
2
Growing up
ONE DAY IN PRIMARY school a group of kids were tormenting me about my sister.
‘Your sister’s dead and your name’s in the cemetery,’ one said as they gathered in the playground of St Johns Primary School in Cobar, the little mining town in central west New South Wales where I was born and grew up.
Sometimes kids are not very nice and in small towns everyone knows everyone else’s business and all sorts of information is gossiped about. I was born in the town’s only hospital and my identical twin sister, Julie, died a few hours after our birth. The kids were right: ‘Sister of Jamelle’ is on her headstone in the local cemetery. My parents had never told me about my sister so that day I went home and asked my poor mother, who then had to relive her past to try to explain the death of a sibling to a six year old.
Cobar was, however, mostly a great little country town to grow up in and although very isolated, as it’s about a nine hour drive from Sydney, it is still a friendly town to visit. Cobar has a population of about 4,000 and is driven by the mining industry and travellers dropping in on their way from Dubbo through to Broken Hill and South Australia. There’s red dust and long, flat roads and people have big air conditioners on their roofs to cope with the summer heat. Locals wave at you as they drive past and sit at tables outside the Subway fast-food franchise on the main street drinking their coffee and talking. It’s the sort of town where as a kid you said goodbye to your parents early in the morning, hopped on your horse or bike, then came back at dinner time and your parents never had to worry about anything happening to you.
I still think about all the freedom I had as a child there, when I cover court cases now about children who are abducted or attacked in their own homes, and when I see parents paranoid about taking their eyes off their children for five minutes in a big city shopping centre or park.
My father Allan, a carpenter by trade, was born in Cobar and lived there all his life. He was one of four brothers but the only one of them who stayed in town. Heading to Wollongong in the late 1950s to buy a car, he met my mother when he saw her working in a clothing shop. Egged on by his mates he held a cardboard sign up to the window that read: ‘Will you go out with me?’
My mother, Cecilia, on a Wollongong beach in the 1950s.
Dad liked his home town so much he rarely ventured out of it. My mother, Cecilia, had a very different experience growing up. She was born in Western Australia and was one of six children. The family moved all over Australia with her electrician father, Patrick, who, for a time, was a projectionist for JC Williamson and used to travel around showing movies from the back of his utility.
Patrick left the family at one point and my grandmother, Grace, a nursing sister, struggled to work and care for the children. The six kids all ended up in separate orphanages. That was what authorities did back then when families were in trouble. They took the kids away and split them up. Mum never talked about her time in the orphanage, but in her adult life she was wary of anything to do with institutions and authority figures. Her family somehow reunited and settled in Wollongong together in a commission house in the early 1950s. They lived with my grandmother in a house in the suburb of Fairy Meadow and my mother only left them when she met my father.
Like Dad, Mum left school at fifteen. She worked in retail and being tall and elegant soon became a house model for David Jones in Wollongong. She was approached by modelling agencies in Sydney and a June Dally-Watkins representative who wanted to coach her, but she didn’t have the confidence to leave her family after being reunited with them again. I look back now and think that her life could have been so very different if my father had not walked past the shop that day and if she had not moved to Cobar.
My parents, Cecilia and Allan, on their wedding day in the Wollongong suburb of Fairy Meadow, 1959. Photo by Reginald Warlow.
As a little kid I remember her reading children’s story books to me at night after my father had gone to bed. There were no adult books in our house and no bookshelf when I was growing up, but the Daily Telegraph would sit on the kitchen table with the sport section read over and over. My mother did, however, have a little stash of fashion magazines that she would hide away and she would sit up late at night reading them and looking at the pictures when everyone else was in bed. Perhaps they
were her only connection with the past life that she must have pined for.
It was a generational thing, but she never had a paid job after she was married. For a woman to go to work was seen by my parents as something to be embarrassed about because it would mean that the man of the house must not be earning enough money. When I was an adult I think she often worried that I liked my work so much and that I was not a full-time homemaker, but I think she was also secretly glad that I chose the life I did.
I was a bright student at primary school and Cobar High School where the classes were small. Most of my peers left high school in Year 10 or went away to private boarding schools and there were only a few of us left in Cobar for the HSC. The high school had a library where I buried my head in books each lunch time and after I had read everything in there, the librarian would get me more books on ‘special loan’ from other towns. I was lucky to be taught by keen, young teachers who had been posted to the bush to get a foot in the door in their profession and they were all very encouraging. There were no media subjects, no drama or public-speaking classes, no special after school extracurricular activities, none of the things I later learned were available in city schools at the time. But one enthusiastic young teacher started up a debating team and I was the youngest member when I was in Year 10. I was devastated when the older team members left school and volunteers to replace them couldn’t be found.
One lunch time I scoured the playground and eventually talked two other ‘recruits’ into joining the debating team with the incentive that it would get them out of sport and get them days off school to compete in competitions in other towns. I wrote their speeches and made them wear blazers, ties and school badges because I thought it looked authoritative.
‘Just stand there and say it like this,’ I said to one poor recruit who in my mind at the time wasn’t trying hard enough.
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