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After visiting Adelaide to spend Christmas 1991 with a friend she had met in Europe, Caroline returned to Kings Cross in early January 1992. In February, Caroline, Joanne and two of their flatmates went to Mildura to pick grapes. They caught a train to Liverpool before splitting into pairs to hitchhike the rest of the way. In a letter to Gill Baker, a close friend from England, Caroline wrote, ‘I’m no longer in Sydney, but actually in Victoria in a place called Mildura for 6 to 8 weeks. I’m doing grape picking . . . the money’s not bad, about 40 pounds a day. I’m not paying rent so it’s even better . . . [W]e all get on really well and have a good laugh in the evening.’
The girls returned to Kings Cross in late March, but Caroline and Joanne were back only a few days before they and two friends left for Tasmania, hitchhiking from Liverpool to Melbourne and catching the ferry to Tasmania. A fortnight later Caroline and Joanne decided to return to Sydney, but before they did Caroline and Steve Wright, one of their companions, swapped tents. Caroline’s was a small one-person tent while Wright’s was a three-person tent that she and Joanne could share. The pair made their way back to Kings Cross, where they booked into the Bridge North Apartments. Within weeks they were on the move again, bound for Mildura, but they would never arrive.
By late July 1992 the New South Wales Police Missing Persons Unit had identified six foreign backpackers who had disappeared in broadly similar circumstances: Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, Simone Schmidl and a young woman who had disappeared from the Gold Coast several years earlier. The head of the Missing Persons Unit, Sergeant Peter Marcon, told The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘[W]e’ve got nothing at this point to suggest they’ve been killed, but we’ve had a massive media campaign and we haven’t been able to come up with anything positive.’
It was the first time Simone’s name had been mentioned alongside those of Caroline and the others. At this stage the missing Victorians, James Gibson and Deborah Everist, had not been connected with the others.
2
TWO BODIES
People go missing in New South Wales every day, often by choice. The head of the Missing Persons Unit, Sergeant Marcon, told The Sunday Telegraph in July 1992 that ‘there were 861 people regarded as long-term missing in New South Wales and about a further 400 more recent cases being investigated’. But media interest both in Australia and England, generated especially by the father of Caroline Clarke, pressured senior police to take seriously the disappearance of the foreign backpackers.
Kings Cross–based Detective Sergeant Neville Scullion was given the job of investigating the disappearances of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters. It was an unfortunate choice, as Detective Scullion’s main interest was in enriching himself through corruption—a fact revealed some years later by the Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service. Nevertheless, growing media attention and speculation of foul play forced Scullion to spend the following weeks chasing leads and, in some cases, taking statements from seemingly credible witnesses who claimed to have seen Caroline and Joanne since their disappearance. Few leads provided results; most fizzled out after a cursory investigation.
After about two months Scullion was convinced that Caroline and Joanne were dead, but he had no idea where, how or why they had been killed, or who had killed them. Police interest in the case began to wane. But Caroline’s parents refused to give up and they continued to speak to the newspapers. In August 1992 Joanne’s parents, Ray and Gill, came to Sydney. They spoke to Scullion, who told them privately that he believed both girls were dead. Despite Scullion’s advice, Joanne’s parents continued hunting for information about their daughter in Kings Cross and elsewhere, even travelling to Mildura to visit the vineyard where Joanne and Caroline had picked grapes.
Ray and Gill Walters were still in Sydney on Saturday 19 September when an unidentified body was found in the Belanglo State Forest, about 140 kilometres south of Sydney, near the town of Bowral and about 12 kilometres west of the Hume Highway. Keith Siely and Keith Caldwell had been on an orienteering training exercise in the forest when they noticed a bad smell. It came from a nearby rocky overhang about 95 metres south-west of the Longacre Creek fire trail. Under the overhang and covered by dry sticks and leaves they saw a bone, a boot and some clothing. They had discovered a body.
Two others on the orienteering course soon joined them. They rang Bowral Police who, along with Senior Constable Andrew Grosse of the Goulburn Police Crime Scene Unit, arrived and began an examination that continued into the night. The female body was badly decomposed, but it was soon clear that it had been subjected to extreme violence. There was evidence of at least fourteen stab wounds to the neck, chest and back, cutting ribs, spine and cervical vertebrae. What appeared to be a garrotte lay on the ground near the victim’s neck.
The next morning, as police scoured the surrounding bush, another female body was found hidden under branches and other forest debris beneath a fallen tree about 30 metres away from the first. The second was also badly decomposed. An examination revealed ten bullet entry wounds to the skull from five different angles: the back, front, each side and top of the skull. Ten .22 calibre Winchester cartridge cases were found clustered on the ground about 3 metres from the body. A red cloth had been wrapped twice around the head, apparently before the shooting. There were also a number of stab wounds to the upper body and multiple slashings of the clothing.
Except for the clothing and jewellery worn by the victims at the time of the attack, few other personal items were found at either scene or in the surrounding bush.
The first crime scene yielded little additional evidence, but at the second police found six cigarette butts. Five were later identified as being Longbeach, the brand smoked by Caroline Clarke; the sixth was not identifiable. All cigarettes were believed to have been smoked by Caroline. This suggested the killer had spent half an hour or more at the scene before killing Caroline.
Ten fired Winchester cartridge cases were found about 3.5 metres from the head of Caroline Clarke. It was a position where the cartridges would be expected to have landed after being ejected from a rifle used to shoot Caroline Clarke in the head in the area where her body was found. Three bullets were recovered in the ground under the head of Caroline Clarke and seven were later recovered from her skull during the autopsy. It appears that her head was moved at least three times and further shots were fired each time. Sergeant Gerard Dutton of the Forensic Ballistics Unit said that eight of the bullets were consistent with having been fired from a Ruger 10/22 rifle while two of the bullets were too damaged to identify the weapon from which they had been fired.
Dr Peter Bradhurst, a forensic pathologist, and Dr Christopher Griffiths, a forensic odontologist (dental expert), came to the forest to inspect the bodies. The remains were then taken to the morgue at Glebe, where a detailed examination was carried out and the findings photographed and documented. Both girls appeared to have been sexually attacked.
Before the bodies were removed from the bush, the first had been tentatively identified as that of Joanne Walters and the second as that of Caroline Clarke. Detective Scullion was contacted by investigators and told of the finds and the provisional identifications. Among other things, a distinctive ring on the finger of the first body convinced investigators and examiners that the first body was Joanne’s. Scullion contacted her parents and met them at the Opera House, where they were sightseeing. In a public place crowded with tourists and local visitors, Scullion told Joanne’s parents the news they had hoped never to hear: their daughter was dead. Her body and the body of her friend Caroline had been found in the Belanglo State Forest. They had been murdered.
Gill Walters broke down while her husband, Ray, tried in vain to console her. Ray would later say of the news, ‘The miracle we’d always hoped for just didn’t occur. We have cried so much since she went missing. Now we’re too numb to take it in.’
Scullion also passed the news to an English police officer who had
been acting as liaison with the Clarke family. The Clarkes were devastated to hear that Caroline was dead, but at the same time they felt some relief from knowing at last what had happened to their daughter. Now they wanted to know who was responsible.
Detective Inspector Bob Godden, head of the South West Region Homicide Squad, and squad member Detective Sergeant Steve McLennan were called in to take over the investigation. Godden and McLennan were both long-serving detectives, with experience of numerous murder investigations, but the level of violence still took them by surprise. Another odd feature was the amount of time evidently spent at the crime scene by the killer or killers, indicated by, among other things, the time it would have taken to smoke the cigarettes. While robbery did not appear to be a primary motive, there was no sign of the personal property backpackers would be expected to be carrying, such as tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, clothing and identification documents. If these items had been kept as trophies then they might lead police to the killer or killers.
Godden and McLennan studied the few leads they had: the recovered spent bullets, the cigarette butts and the bodies themselves. With luck, forensic analysis back at the laboratories would yield further clues. But one thing they knew for sure: there would be no quick arrest.
Over the next seven days some 40 police searched an area 300 metres around the crime scenes and along the Longacre Creek fire trail towards the highway for a distance of about 3 kilometres, but nothing was found.
Media reporting of the discovery of the bodies brought another flood of information and sightings. Investigators trawled through files of missing persons in the hope of finding a link, but came up with nothing.
In October Caroline Clarke’s body was returned to England, where she was farewelled by her family and friends at the village of Slaley in Northumberland. A few days later the Clarkes flew to Australia where they met Gill and Ray Walters. They would stay in Sydney while Gill and Ray accompanied the body of their daughter back to Maesteg in South Wales.
Over the following weeks Godden and McLennan briefed a forensic psychiatrist, Dr Rod Milton, on the Belanglo murders and took him to the crime scenes. Milton was well known to both Godden and McLennan, and over the years had worked for the police as a profiler on several big cases. At the forest they were joined by Detective Andy Grosse from the Crime Scene Unit.
From what he had seen and heard, Milton drew several conclusions: the killer or killers were familiar with the forest; the victims had been killed for pleasure; because they had been killed in different ways with different weapons, and because two victims had been abducted and killed together, there were likely to have been two killers, probably brothers. The older brother, probably in his late twenties to mid-thirties, was dominant. The younger one was rebellious and not very bright, but submissive to the elder. The younger brother was more sexually inclined; the older one was the shooter. It was likely that they lived locally and belonged to a local gun club. They were probably involved in hunting and were not very sociable. The shooter showed signs of needing to be in control. They probably lived in isolation in the bush. Neither would have talked much to their victims. Milton stressed that his conclusions were not science but informed guesswork. That did not mean they were not true.
In November the New South Wales Government offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer or killers. The offer included the possibility of a free pardon to any accomplice who had not committed the actual crime.
Despite further forensic and ballistics analysis, and potential leads from police records and the public, the investigation petered out. Meanwhile, police were no closer to explaining the disappearances of James Gibson and Deborah Everist, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, and Simone Schmidl. By Christmas 1992 the murders of Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters seemed unlikely to be solved without a major breakthrough.
That breakthrough happened ten months later with the discovery of two more bodies in the Belanglo State Forest.
3
A POISONED CHALICE
Wednesday, 6 October 1993 started out as a typical day at the Liverpool Local Area Command: thefts and other crimes were being reported; several people arrested during the night were in the cells waiting to be processed; detectives were investigating cases or preparing to give evidence in court; uniformed police were patrolling the streets.
The previous afternoon I had been told that the remains of two unidentified bodies had been discovered in the Belanglo State Forest. Newspaper headlines were now screaming that a serial killer was on the loose and that the police had botched the investigation; how many more bodies were buried at Belanglo? It was bad news, the sort every area commander dreads, and I was relieved that it wasn’t on my patch.
About 10.30 a.m. the phone on my desk rang. The caller was my district commander, Chief Superintendent Dennis Gilligan. ‘You’ve heard about the bodies?’ he asked. ‘Get down there now and find out what’s going on. The boss [Assistant Commissioner Bill Galvin, South West Region commander] wants you to get down there and give us an assessment. You’ll probably have to take it over. We’re out at Broken Hill for a few days.’
As I drove to the forest I listened to commercial radio, which was in a frenzy over the discovery of the bodies. Trying to manage a criminal investigation in the full glare of the media was always difficult, and I had been in the police long enough to know what could happen when media coverage began to influence the way an investigation was run.
My mind raced back four and a half years to another case that had dragged me into the spotlight: Harry Blackburn, a former police superintendent, had been arrested and charged with thirteen counts of sexual assault and twelve related charges of assault, robbery and detaining for advantage. The charges related to two sets of attacks, more than fifteen years apart, on a total of sixteen women. Blackburn’s arrest had been stage-managed for the TV news cameras. He was employed at the Australian War Crimes Commission and footage of the arrest was accompanied by archival film of Nazi troops saluting Hitler. When the senior detective involved in the Blackburn investigation was seriously injured in a car accident, I was instructed by Police Headquarters to take on the case. I drafted two more detectives, Detective Ron Shaw and Detective Jackie Plotecki, to join the original investigation team. I was assured that all the investigative work had been done and that all I would have to do was ‘put the brief of evidence together’.
Within days I knew we were in trouble. There was no brief of evidence or even partial brief of evidence, no recording or tracking system of documents or exhibits; formal statements had not been obtained, and several that had been obtained were of dubious quality and value; procedures that led to the identification of Blackburn were questionable—during one attack the offender had at all times been wearing a balaclava, but was identified by a victim; and evidence had been tampered with and, in some cases, obtained illegally. In other cases, exculpatory evidence had been excluded.
As I studied the evidence, the investigative team became defensive and I began to hear rumours. A conspiracy theory was circulating within the police and among politicians and the media about a so-called fight for control of the New South Wales Police. According to this theory, the forces of evil (‘black knights’ or ‘the barbecue set’, of which I was supposedly a member) were locked in a bitter struggle with the forces of good (‘white knights’, led by Assistant Commissioner, later Commissioner, Tony Lauer). Supposedly, Blackburn was actually guilty but I had somehow ripped the evidence out of the case against him to discredit the white knights and enable the black knights to take control.
Amid this climate of suspicion and accusation, the briefs of evidence were served on the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, which quickly dropped all charges against Blackburn. The government bowed to calls for a royal commission under His Honour Mr Justice Lee, which reported in mid-1990 that not only was there insufficient evidence to convict Blackburn, the evidence exonerated him. His Ho
nour said:
Mr Small had done all that any man could have done to get the senior police to recognise the appalling predicament in which Mr Blackburn had been placed at the hands of the investigating police, but the senior police clung tenaciously and blindly to the hope that Mr Small might be wrong, and they did so without either really acquainting themselves with the fine print of the evidence in the brief, or treating the evidence with objectivity, as every competent investigator into crime knows he must do.
Blackburn received around $1 million in compensation, a sum the government was willing to pay in order to make the embarrassment go away. Professionally, it was a gratifying result for me, but one that would not make the police executive happy.
Assistant Commissioner Tony Lauer, who had ‘executive oversight’ of the original Blackburn investigation, was promoted to commissioner. (Justice Lee found that ‘the word “oversight” provides an excuse to claim no responsibility and should not be used’. Four years later Lauer dismissed calls for a royal commission into the New South Wales Police. He told the press, ‘We have dealt with institutionalised corruption.’
Lauer resigned in 1996 as the royal commission was about to release its first report. Superintendent Col Cole, who also had an ‘oversighting role’ in the arrest and charging of Blackburn, was promoted to assistant commissioner in charge of Police Internal Affairs. (A short time later he was boarded out of the police medically unfit after the botched reporting of a corruption investigation.) A number of senior detectives involved in the original Blackburn investigation were discharged medically unfit on full pensions. The only person ever criminally charged over the Blackburn matter was the most junior officer on the team, Constable Kevin Paull. In 1993, after a trial without a jury, Paull was acquitted of perverting the course of justice.