It was also the first time Mark Tedeschi and Gordon Wood had been in the same room together since the day in 2008 when Wood was found guilty of murder and led down to the cells by court officers.
A hush fell in the crowded public gallery every morning when Mr Tedeschi walked in. Sitting across the room, Gordon Wood moved back and forward in his chair and looked at Tedeschi each day out of the corner of his eye while biting his nails. When the two men passed each other outside the courtroom each day in the foyer they both quickly looked away.
Mark Tedeschi was mostly patient and gracious under cross-examination by Bruce McClintock SC but there were times when he became clearly annoyed and the judge had to remind him that he was the one being questioned. How hard it must have been to be grilled about a job you did nine years ago and how difficult it would be to remember every detail of what you did. It was a huge role reversal.
The day Mr Tedeschi first appeared in the witness box a group of seniors from a community college filed into the public gallery.
‘Phones off . . . phones off,’ shouted their teacher just before Justice Fullerton came onto the bench. So they all conscientiously rummaged through their bags looking for their phones but someone must have pressed a wrong button because a phone rang as soon as the judge came into the court.
‘Who is that?’ she snapped and the offending phone was quickly silenced. Next, two school groups filed in prompting Justice Fullerton to tell them to sit down in any vacant seats so as not to block the aisles they were standing in.
I then did a double take when two characters from Mark Tedeschi’s recent past made a grand entrance. First was Rachelle Louise, the glamourous ex-model and former partner of Simon Gittany. She was wearing a white dress. Not long after Gittany had been convicted and jailed she had settled a defamation claim against The Daily Telegraph after accusing it of depicting her as a stripper and a prostitute and being ‘deluded’ for sticking by him.27 There were reports she had also started studying law and she sat up the back of the court with the seniors group typing away on her mobile phone.
‘Turn around — Rachelle Louise just walked in,’ I texted a colleague in court sitting one row in front of me. He turned around and there she was.
Not long after that moment, in walked Kathy Lin, the wife of convicted murderer Robert Xie. Wearing a cardigan and carrying an umbrella, Kathy Lin sat quietly in between two school groups.
Were these women, who had both maintained that their partners were innocent when he prosecuted them, back in court hoping to see Mark Tedeschi in hot water? Did they hope to pick up some tips that would help them free the men?
Everywhere I looked that day there were court watchers. One was wearing a grey suit and thongs making me question if there should be an official dress code for public galleries. My tweet about his attire was repeatedly retweeted.
‘They are like happy tourists without cameras,’ quipped 2GB’s Gil Taylor trying to get past some court watchers blocking the court exit door so he could go outside to file a radio story.
On one hearing day the judge was told by a court sheriff that he had noticed someone in the public gallery taking photos with a mobile phone. The phone was confiscated and the judge told the sheriffs to ensure any photos taken in court were deleted.
On another hearing day, Mr McClintock accused Mark Tedeschi of using his closing address to the jury at the 2008 murder trial to suggest that Gordon Wood was at The Gap just before Caroline Byrne’s death, even though there was really no evidence to support the assertion.
Mr McClintock said to Mark Tedeschi, ‘It was a little drop of illegitimate poison you were putting in the jury’s mind.’
Mr Tedeschi was firm with his reply. ‘I disagree,’ he said.28
The sinister twist
Another day, waiting for the case to go back in after lunch, an argument broke out in the court opposite me with lots of shouting.
One man was trying to push a court watcher out the court door screaming, ‘Get out, get out — you don’t belong in here.’
The court sheriffs parted them and escorted the shaken court watcher towards the lift.
The lawyers in Wood’s case were huddled in the meeting rooms off to the side of the courtrooms and a few reporters and court watchers were sitting on foyer seats opposite me waiting for the doors to the court to open.
It was then that the Gordon Wood case took a sinister and creepy turn for me.
A woman sitting opposite me started a conversation.
‘Are you Jamelle from the ABC?’
I said yes and suspecting she was just another court watcher asked what her interest was in the case. As I looked harder at her face I thought she seemed familiar. Had I seen her in other public galleries or spoken to her somewhere before and forgotten her name?
She leaned towards me and said, ‘Jamelle, I know where Juanita Neilson’s head is buried up in Kings Cross.’
‘Ah-ha,’ I replied, preparing to hear yet another conspiracy theory about Juanita Neilson, the newspaper editor and Kings Cross anti-development campaigner who mysteriously disappeared in the late 1970s and whose body has never been found. This court watcher’s manner was strange but not aggressive and she kept talking until the court doors reopened and I was saved. I went in and sat between two other reporters.
The woman sat directly behind me. Then I realised who she reminded me of — a former Kings Cross brothel madam who was convicted of child prostitution offences a few years earlier.
To confirm my suspicion, I texted the colleague sitting on my left, ‘Am I dreaming or is the woman sitting behind me the one whose child prostitution case we covered?’
My colleague turned around for a quick look then texted back, ‘Yes. What’s she doing here?’
In 2013 the woman had been given a two-year suspended jail sentence for letting a fourteen year old runaway girl work for her. A judge had taken into account that she had no prior convictions and that she had a thought disorder that made her fixated on Kings Cross and its past underworld culture.
Now that I knew who I was dealing with, I wondered how healthy it was for this poor woman to come back to court each day as she did, throughout Gordon Wood’s malicious prosecution case. I hoped she was getting some sort of treatment.
10
Local courts
IN LOCAL COURTS THINGS can swing from the silly to the serious and back again in a just few minutes because local court magistrates deal with such a large volume of cases each day.
Magistrates can talk to offenders in a more direct and informal way than in some of the higher courts and often give them advice about their future or tell them off in great detail for their offending. It must be so frustrating for magistrates to repeatedly hear the same excuses.
On Wednesday 20 September 2017 I headed to the Downing Centre in Liverpool Street for the sentencing of a Woolworths’ supermarket employee who pleaded guilty to filming female employees in his workplace toilets and filming up the skirts of shoppers with his mobile phone in Surry Hills in the inner city. His case was with several other matters in Local Court 4.5 before the Chief Magistrate, Judge Graeme Henson.
I got to court early and waited in the foyer thinking what this building must have been like when it was the Mark Foys Department store up until 1980. It has a marble floor in the foyer and a spiral staircase leading up to the first floor. My mother, who used to work in fashion retail and as a house model before she was married, would have loved this building in its former life. The Downing Centre building especially reminds me of the department store it once was at Christmas time when the Salvos are singing carols in the foyer, which they do every year while criminal matters are being dealt with around them. The Salvation Army also provides a court support service and I often see its chaplains in court with family members of people on trial for a criminal offence.
The people in the line to get though security on this particular day were mostly people called up for jury duty, and one man in a white, polo-neck
skivvie and brown parker asked me if this was the jury line. I told him everyone going into the building was in the same line for security and when we got through, to go and see the court officials at the desk on the left.
‘I’ve never done this before,’ he said.
My own shoes set off the alarm going through the security and a sheriff said to me, ‘Madam, can I please see the tops of your socks.’
It pays to check that your socks are matching and don’t have holes in them when you go to court for this very reason.
The doors to Court 4.5 opened on time at 9.30 a.m. and it had about thirty public gallery seats which filled up almost straightaway before Chief Magistrate Judge Graeme Henson entered and lawyers started approaching the bench.
All of the following happened in the court between 9.30 a.m. and midday, in just under three hours.
A couple of people entered guilty pleas to court attendance notices. I became aware that a man sitting on my left was so nervous he could not stop his leg shaking. The shaking was so bad the whole row of sets vibrated and he also reeked of body odour. When he was asked to stand up by his lawyer so the judge could see who he was, I realised he was appearing on assault charges, but his case was adjourned.
Another man in court to be sentenced for one count of malicious damage copped an eloquent spray from the judge. The man had pushed a computer terminal across a shop counter and ripped down a shop awning in a fit of rage. To vouch for his ‘usual good character’, his lawyer started to talk about where the twenty-four year old went to school and the TAFE course he did in 2011.
Judge Henson got what he was driving at and cut him short.
‘This is not an episode of This Is Your Life. Why are we going back six years?’ he said. The man’s lawyer said he had no prior convictions and the damage was worth just $896. He said the man had stopped taking his medication before he committed the offence and was therefore anxious and lacking in judgment and the offence was spontaneous and not deliberate. Judge Henson told the man to stand up.
‘The community is sick and tired of people imposing themselves on other people’s property because they feel like it,’ he said.
He fined the man $1,000.
The lawyers who kept filing up to the bar table representing their clients were a mixed bunch with some in expensive-looking suits, others more casually dressed. Some were highly articulate and well spoken and some had thin voices or spoke way too quickly. One lawyer in a navy suit had long, grey, wavy hair down past his shoulders. The judge looked at him when his mobile phone started ringing, so the lawyer apologised as he went through his bag to turn it off.
With a smile in his voice Judge Henson joked with the lawyer that the lawyer must be getting old, ‘You can’t hear it as well as you used to,’ he said.
Next was a twenty-seven year old Vietnamese man dressed in a black, long-sleeve shirt and black jeans who could barely look anyone in court in the eye. He was there to be sentenced after pleading guilty to stealing goods worth just $26: boot polish, three mandarins and two iced coffee drinks.
In response to his lawyer’s claims about his previous good behaviour, the judge said, ‘Welcome to Australia. If you wouldn’t commit the offence in Vietnam, you can’t do it here.’
The man was ordered to return the goods and was put on an eighteen-month good behaviour bond.
When another assault matter was mentioned, a short woman with thick, dark hair wearing a long, beige, knitted cardigan and carrying a cheap, pink, plastic handbag stood up in the gallery and said, ‘I’m the victim and I want to drop the charges’.
The judge told her that decision was not hers to make on the spot.
‘The law has to take its course,’ he said.
‘Well I’m goin’ to keep hangin round with him,’ she said of the accused who was not in court.
The judge cautioned her it was not in her best interests to say any more and to get some legal advice, so the woman got up and walked out.
Judge Henson then asked another drug offender why he disrespected the laws of his own country so much.
‘Would you do something like this in Thailand or Bali?’ he asked him.
The offender meekly replied, ‘No, your honour.’
‘Then grow up while you’ve got the chance,’ Judge Henson said, putting him on an eighteen-month good behaviour bond.
The lawyer for a young Japanese student in court to be sentenced for stealing $646 worth of clothes, told the judge his client didn’t have much money, even though she was working part-time as a waitress at the Hilton Hotel and that she had an impulsive brain snap when she took the clothes. The judge pointed out, however, that the young woman had stolen twenty-four separate items and had also removed the security tags.
‘It is very difficult to steal from retail stores,’ Judge Hensen said. He said people from Japan are ‘mostly well-behaved visitors to Australia’ and she had let them down.
At that point I wondered how many people had stolen from the room I was sitting in when the building used to be a department store. The Japanese woman pleaded guilty, so she was ordered to return the property, put on an eighteen-month bond and was given a ‘Section 10’ which means no conviction was recorded.
I noticed the woman’s white designer sneakers and designer handbag as she left the court.
‘Is that a Coach handbag?’ a reporter next to me whispered.
My own bag was one my mother had given me years ago and had just the right number of pockets and room for an iPad, iPhone, notebook, make-up kit and also had ink stains all over the lining from broken pens.
The court had been sitting for almost two hours when the proceedings took on a different tone.
A lawyer told the judge that his client, who was charged with stealing, was homeless, and had been living on the streets around the Broadway Shopping Centre in the inner city. He said he was unwell and needed medical treatment. Judge Hensen softened his approach as he adjourned the matter.
‘I appreciate the difficulties of those who are homeless in an otherwise affluent society,’ he said.
Another man said he hadn’t received unpaid traffic fines because he had been evicted from the address they were being sent to and he was living in his Kennards Hire storage unit but had recently been evicted from there too. I wondered what the excursion of private-school students up the back and the work-experience student who was with a lawyer in the court made of all this. Would they go back to class and discuss the processes of the law or their surprise that someone had, out of necessity, been forced to live in a Kennards Hire storage unit?
By midday the case I had come for, the man who filmed his work colleagues and supermarket customers for his own gratification, was adjourned to another court up on level five. It didn’t get to sentence that day because the court was waiting for a psychologist’s report on the offender.1
The following month, the offender, twenty-three year old Nepalese university student Bibek Guragain, was sentenced to ten-months in jail with a non-parole period of six months and had his student visa revoked. He wrote a letter to the court apologising for his behaviour and saying he didn’t understand why he had committed the offences.2
Hiding out at Penrith
Some people involved in court cases go to great lengths to try to avoid the media and although it makes my job hard, I can’t really blame them. Personal and family secrets are laid bare in a courtroom and ordinary people who have no experience speaking in public or to the media suddenly find themselves hounded by journalists and camera crews outside. Filming and recording is not allowed inside court buildings but I’ve seen all sorts of ways people try to avoid us when we wait for them outside the building.
An unsuccessful avoidance effort that I have never forgotten was not during a high-profile murder trial or defamation case in the bustling Sydney CBD, but in the suburban Local Court at Penrith in Sydney’s west in June 2008.
I was in court for one of the first appearances of a thirty-seven year old man w
ho was accused of deliberately infecting his former wife with HIV. They had three children together and, after being diagnosed with HIV, their youngest child later died from an AIDS-related illness. The man had refused to wear a condom when having sex with his former wife, despite knowing he carried HIV. They started going out in 1994 when he was 24 and she was just 16. On this particular day, the man’s bail was continued and another date was set for him to return to court.3 So he left the courtroom and we followed him towards the exit.
Just before the offender got to the exit he turned around, looked at us and dashed into the nearby men’s toilet. We waited near the court exit door for him to come out. Our eyes were fixed on the men’s toilet door and we waited and waited. I was starting to think he had climbed out a back window and that we had missed him but we kept waiting. About thirty minutes later a man walked out of the men’s toilet. He was the same height and physical build as the offender and was wearing exactly the same clothes. The difference was that this person was also wearing a baseball cap and had much longer and different coloured hair.
Another reporter mouthed to me, ‘Is that him?’
‘I think so,’ I mouthed back.
Then as the man started to rush through the exit, I instinctively called out his name. He spun around startled and looked at me, then realising he’d been discovered, he bolted through the exit glass doors, stopping cars on a busy road outside, and ran across the car park near a shopping strip. He ripped off the hat and wig on the way, with reporters and camera crews in full chase. We got pictures of him, but in the end were unable to use them due to suppression orders that were placed on the case by the court.
Months later the matter moved into the District Court and the offender was eventually jailed for at least three years after pleading guilty to an offence of maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm.4
Court Reporter Page 12