Justice Hulme said, because of incompetence, self-interest, disinterest or negligence, Ebony’s parents didn’t get her the help she needed.
‘To my mind, for a person to have done nothing in those circumstances is so morally reprehensible that it could be no more serious if the person actually intended that the child die,’ he said.24
Throughout their court appearances Ebony’s parents showed no emotion as they sat at opposite ends of the dock.
A New South Wales Ombudman’s report in 2009 was highly critical of the way authorities dealt with Ebony’s death, blaming government agencies for a lack of teamwork and for not sharing information. After her death, there was also a special commission of inquiry into child protection services presided over by retired Supreme Court Judge James Wood.25
Dean Shillingsworth
Two year old Dean Shillingsworth was choked to death by his mother, Rachel Pfitzner, in 2007. She held him up by the hood of his jacket until he started choking, then threw him on the floor. His body was then wrapped in plastic, put in a suitcase and thrown into a pond at Ambarvale in Sydney’s south west. Rachel Pfitzner wheeled the suitcase to the pond in a pram and watched the suitcase sink but it was later found by local children.
She was twenty-eight at the time of the murder and in 2009 was jailed for at least nineteen years with a maximum sentence of twenty-five years after pleading guilty.26 The Crown had earlier rejected her guilty plea to the less serious charge of manslaughter. At her sentencing hearing, Senior Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC said that she killed her son the day she found out a court had granted permanent custody of him to his grandmother, Ann Coffey.
A victim impact statement that had been read in court in October 2009 by a police officer on behalf of Ann Coffey, said the child was scared of his mother and tried to hide from her when he heard her coming.27
Pfitzner at times sobbed in the dock as her sentence was handed down on 9 December 2009 and Justice Robert Hulme referred to her problems with anger management and drug abuse.
To me, she looked just like any normal suburban mum with her thick, dark hair tied back. At times she nodded and I wondered if she was agreeing with some of the things the judge was saying.
Justice Hulme said that Pfitzner loathed and punished her son because he reminded her of her former partner and that she killed Dean before she was meant to return him to his grandmother who wanted to look after him.28 Justice Hulme also referred to her severe personality disorder.
‘Dean was entitled to love, protection and nurture but instead she took away his very life,’ he said.29
A New South Wales Ombudsman’s report later found child-protection agencies didn’t do enough to protect Dean Shillingsworth and Linda Burney, who was then the Community Services Minister, apologised to his grandmother.
Ombudsman, Bruce Barbour, concluded that DoCS had received thirty-four reports of Dean and his siblings being at risk, but did not properly assess the reports.30
Tanilla Warrick-Deaves
Two year old Tanilla Warrick-Deaves died from bleeding on the brain after being tortured by her mother’s boyfriend, Warren Ross, in their Watanobbi home on the New South Wales Central Coast in August 2011. In 2014 Ross was jailed for at least thirty years after being found guilty of murder. What struck me about this man was his complete lack of empathy. It was hard to imagine what Tanilla’s mother saw in him and why she stayed with him.
In the days before Tanilla’s death, in his efforts to toilet train the two year old, Warren Ross had whipped her with a belt while joking about how he could make her scream and forced her to run laps around the house until she could no longer stand up. He kicked her across the floor with so much force that she hit a linen cupboard. In sentencing him Justice Rothman said the child died after days of ‘severe corporal punishment’.
The judge said, after smoking marijuana, Warren Ross held Tanilla’s little head under cold water in the shower then repeatedly slammed her head into the shower screen telling her, ‘You don’t shit in my house — you are an animal’. After this torture, the couple put her in a pram and covered her over with a blanket. They did not seek medical help for her and two days later when her mother noticed she had stopped breathing, she finally called triple 0.
Justice Rothman said although the murder was not pre-meditated, Warren Ross’s offending stemmed from his antisocial behaviour and he showed no remorse.
Alarmingly, Justice Rothman said welfare authorities had been contacted a number of times about Tanilla.31
Riot Squad officers were called outside the court that day due to tension between Warren Ross’s family and the media. His lawyer said Warren Ross had been involved in fights in jail because of his crime and that he was in protective custody.
The cruelty of this case was sickening, yet in court that day Warren Ross rolled his eyes and shook his head during the judge’s comments and waved to family members in the public gallery.
His mother, who was in court for his sentence, shouted, ‘I’ll be dead’ when the maximum forty year sentence with a minimum of thirty years was read out.32
The little girl’s mother, Donna Deaves, was jailed for at least nine years on 18 September 2013 after pleading guilty to manslaughter. Although she didn’t inflict the injuries that killed her daughter, she failed to get help for her. In sentencing her, Justice Rothman told the court the death of the two year old could have been prevented if community services and family members had stepped in.33 Deaves was a prosecution witness at Warren Ross’s trial and she gave evidence about his violence. She said that when she first suggested calling an ambulance because Tanilla looked drowsy, Warren Ross threatened her by saying, ‘Do that and I’ll tell them you did it’.
Deaves said after putting Tanilla in her stroller she spent a night awake beside her unconscious child.34
19
The famous and the infamous
Leonard Cohen
In April 2012 I was on holidays in Los Angeles, walking around Hollywood when I came across the Los Angeles Superior Court building on Hollywood Boulevarde. I’d travelled to the US west coast a lot and was familiar with all the tourist attractions and shops but had never been inside this courthouse.
It was an unremarkable building but I had read that morning about a case that was being heard there involving the (now deceased) legendary singer–songwriter Leonard Cohen, who was seventy-seven at the time and his former lover and business manager Kelley Lynch.
Kelley Lynch was on trial for harassing Cohen with abusive phone calls and thousands of emails and for breaching a restraining order. He accused her of sending emails that affected his reputation and falsely accused him of being a drug addict. In 2004, he had sacked Kelley Lynch and accused her of stealing $US5 million from him while he was living in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. They had a professional relationship for about seventeen years and were lovers for a short time. After Cohen sued Lynch, she was ordered to repay him but she never did and he came out of retirement and started touring again around 2008.
Being a Leonard Cohen fan, but thinking that the case probably wasn’t sitting that day because it was so close to the Easter break, I checked at the ground floor registry, where, to my surprise, the helpful court staff told me that not only was the case sitting, but also the courtroom number and which lift to catch to get to it.
So I went up to the courtroom, opened the door and found the trial in full swing but only a handful of people in the public gallery. I bowed to the judge and sat up the back of the court eyeballing the room. A court officer gestured to me ‘mobile phone off’ and I nodded in acknowledgement chuckling to myself that the issue of ‘mobile phone crime’ in public galleries was probably a universal one.
A slightly stooped, thin and frail man with glasses, whom I assumed was Leonard Cohen, sat quietly with a supporter in front of me watching the proceedings, but left just before the morning break. Two other men sitting next to me told me it was him and
that they thought he had been very unwell.
I had gone into that court as a sightseeing court watcher but after hearing about ten minutes of the evidence, I started taking notes as the court reporter in me took over. It was like being in court in Australia but with a string of different American and Canadian accents. The Deputy City Attorney Sandra Jo Streeter paced around the public gallery as she began summing up and describing how Kelley Lynch, then fifty-five, was a con artist who deliberately set out to annoy Cohen. She pounded the table in front of the jurors to emphasise points and stood up close to them. It was a compelling and theatrical courtroom performance and she had a powerful voice and was amazing at her job.
I had, up until now, thought that some courtroom performances by prosecutors and defence barristers in Sydney were dramatic, but this made them look very tame. As her evidence continued, I wanted to take more notes and more and more. So I took notes on bits of paper in my handbag and on the back of a boarding pass and a motel receipt and a travel itinerary.
The jurors seemed too scared not to pay attention to every word this woman was saying.
During the morning break I went out and bought a notebook, phoned the ABC newsroom back in Sydney to check in and file a couple of stories.
To me this was not work; it was an overseas holiday treat.
As the summing up continued, Ms Streeter rejected allegations that Kelley Lynch sent Leonard Cohen threatening emails because she was influenced by alcohol and she said that his former business manager knew exactly what she was doing.
‘This case is about how, over one year she made his life hell,’ Ms Streeter told the jury, turning on her heel and staring one juror straight in the eye.1
Kelley Lynch’s lawyer then told the court that although Leonard Cohen claimed to have felt threatened by Lynch’s behaviour, he had once had a gun held to his head by songwriter and producer Phil Spector while they were recording together but he had not felt threatened by that.
They’ve just mentioned Phil Spector, I thought to myself. Legendary songwriter and record producer Phil Spector was famous for his production technique known as the ‘wall of sound’ and in 2009 was jailed for the murder of actor Lana Clarkson, who was found dead from a gunshot wound in his home in 2003. It was one of those court moments where I wanted to turn around to someone and say, ‘Did you hear that?’ but the men sitting next to me were starting to look a little bored with the proceedings.
Kelley Lynch’s lawyer went on to say that Leonard Cohen was famous, that he had been performing for fifty years and that he had given yet another performance in the witness stand.
That afternoon, not long after retiring to consider a verdict, the jury found Lynch guilty of a number of offences including harassment and violating a restraining order.2
Lynch didn’t react when the verdict was read out. She had sat through the day’s proceedings looking very calm, even though she was in custody in lieu of $25,000 bail.
At the end of the day a softly spoken man from the public gallery approached me in the foyer and asked if I knew Leonard Cohen from the Zen Buddhist monastery. I was taken aback by the question and asked why he would assume I had ever lived in a Zen monastery.
The man said it was because I paused in the doorway and bowed to the judge every time I entered and exited the courtroom and he thought it was a very Zen Buddhist thing to do. I hadn’t noticed that people coming in and out of the Los Angeles court were not bowing to the judge. In Australia it is customary to pause at the door and bow — even if it is just with your head — when you are entering and leaving their court as a sign of respect for the law. I am used to bowing many times each hour as I go in and out of courtrooms filing stories and doing live crosses. I’m so much in the habit of it I sometimes have to stop myself bowing when I enter cinemas, theatres and doctors’ surgeries. Bowing when you enter and leave a court in session is just one of the many traditions that add to the theatre of it all. Other examples are standing when the judge or magistrate walks in and not sitting down until they do, and the wigs and gowns they wear.
Lynch was later jailed for eighteen months and ordered to get anger-management training, have a mental-health assessment when she got out of jail and was banned from owning weapons for ten years.3
Cohen was seventy-seven at the time and I thought how hard it must have been at that age to be going through a court case. I also thought of how, during his 2009 tour of Australia, despite his own financial woes, he donated $200,000 to the Victorian bushfire appeal after the Black Saturday fires in which 173 people died.
I remembered my day in that Los Angeles court with Leonard Cohen, when he passed away at eight-two on 7 November 2016.
The Rinehart Family Trust saga
The Rinehart family feud over a $5 billion dollar trust was a court case unlike anything Australia had ever seen. It was born out of a stoush between Gina Rinehart, one of the richest people in the world, and three of her four children.
This case is a good example of how matters can stay before the courts for years, eating up thousands of dollars in legal fees, even when the people involved in the cases don’t actually have to be in court themselves. The matter was before the courts for almost three years before it actually got to a public hearing.
People often still ask me, ‘What impression did you get of Gina Rinehart after seeing her in court?’
But I can’t answer that because through all the years of covering the case, Mrs Rinehart did not come to court, as she was not required to.
In the case of the Rinehart family, their emails and correspondence with each other and statements they released about each other during the long court saga became just as much the story as the allegations the case was based on.
In September 2011, Gina Rinehart’s three eldest children, John Hancock, Hope Welker and Bianca Rinehart, lodged a case in the New South Wales Supreme Court, accusing their mother of engaging in misconduct by changing the date they could access their money from a family trust without telling them.
The Hope Margaret Hancock Trust, which had been set up by Gina Rinehart’s father Lang Hancock and owned around a quarter of Hancock Prospecting, had been due to vest in September 2011 when the youngest child, Ginia Rinehart turned 25.
Gina Rinehart rejected the allegations that her children had made against her, denied any wrongdoing and maintained she had contributed substantially to the trust. As the case unfolded before the courts, Hope Welker pulled out after reaching a financial settlement with her mother.
That left John Hancock, and his sister, Bianca Rinehart pitted against their mother. John Hancock backed Bianca to take over the trust ‘in the interest of family harmony’.
During what seemed to me, three very long years before their case even got a hearing in open court, Gina Rinehart pulled out all stops to try to have the feud settled privately in mediation. During those three years, the matter was in and out of the Supreme Court, an Appeals Court and even the High Court to try to keep details of the feud out of the public eye.
There was a pattern. A suppression order on some aspect of the dispute would be lifted, Gina Rinehart’s legal team would immediately apply for a stay on the court ruling, then they would apply for a new suppression order for some different reason.
In the lift one day leaving the Law Courts building in Queens Square during one of the many hearings involved in this case, one lawyer quipped, ‘It’s been to almost every court in the country.’
The case provided plenty of stories during the three years it took to get to an open court hearing, a civil trial in 2014.
In a surprise move just before the civil trial was about to start, Gina Rinehart stepped down as trustee. So the case then became mostly about who should replace her: a family member or an outsider. A judge decided in 2015 that the new trustee should be Bianca Rinehart.
Along the way, a lot was revealed about the way the family lived and the way they communicated with each other. There was a lesson about emails to be learned
from this story. Never send anyone an email you don’t want made public, no matter how close to them you are, because one day that email might be read in a court.
I was in the Supreme Court on 2 February 2012 at one hearing for the Rinehart case that ran into the night. On this occasion, which was just a day after the High Court granted Gina Rinehart the right to keep details of the case secret for a month, her lawyers applied for a permanent suppression order on the case due to ‘safety fears’ for the Rinehart family. However, Justice Michael Ball in the New South Wales Supreme Court refused to grant a permanent suppression on the case, which meant that certain documents that revealed details of the case could be reported on for the first time. The documents released by the court that night included personal emails that provided a glimpse into the privileged lives of the Rinehart children, their security fears and their feuds with their mother over money.
One email from Hope Welker read: ‘I don’t think you understand what it means now that the whole world thinks you’re going to be wealthier than Bill Gates — it means we all need bodyguards and very safe homes.’
As part of her argument, Gina Rinehart had used an ‘expert security report’ that stated that the children, who were all living overseas, faced an increased security risk if the case continued publicly. The report by an independent advisor said that increased media reporting of the case put the Rinehart children at greater risk from terrorists and foreign government, petty criminals, deranged persons, maleficent employees or business partners, competitors and issue-motivated groups.
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