The Devil's Garden

by Debi Marshall

  Falconer admitted, just before he left the job, that he was disquieted about the fact that the Claremont murders remained unsolved. And they would stay that way, he warned, without fresh new evidence.

  In June 1999, there is a change of policing leadership, with New Zealander Barry Matthews becoming the state's first commissioner appointed from overseas since 1867. The deputy commissioner in his native country, Matthews stayed with the police force after being admitted as a barrister and solicitor. But despite his academic qualifications, his appointment to the highest police position in WA was not welcomed in all quarters. Bringing to the office what his supporters called a spirit of reform and his critics called the 'cut and slash years', his time in the chair would be marked by controversy and battle royales with government which were gleefully related by the press.

  Beleaguered by claims that he had a combative and turbulent professional relationship with Police Minister Michelle Roberts, under his stewardship taskforces came to replace the specialist squads that had dealt with homicides and missing people. Commissioned staff were offered early retirement, a salve for the problem identified as a pyramid top-heavy with management. More than 90 police above the rank of inspector left the force, but detective numbers were not boosted. This, according to its many critics, left a dearth of experience and saw the meteoric rise of inexperienced, younger officers.

  But the most important event on Matthews's watch was the Royal Commission into police corruption that delivered its findings in early 2004. They were explosive, and less than flattering. Then came the Argyle Diamond investigation.

  'Police looked at allegations that millions of dollars had been stolen out of Argyle,' Quigley says. 'Matthews is in the chair and who do they appoint to do the review of Argyle? Bob Falconer's private investigative firm in Melbourne that he started after he retired: FBIS. Argyle had happened while he had been commissioner, and now he's got the job of reviewing it all! During this process, all the dinkum, highly experienced investigators are thinking, this police force is going to mud; soon they won't be able to find their own shoelaces! They started leaving in droves, and they left behind no mentors in place for the younger coppers.'

  In 1999 a police stake-out of Williams's home goes embarrassingly awry. A scout hall opposite his parents' home was the base for the surveillance team, who used the premises 24-hours a day to keep Williams under tight watch. But the squad used something else, as well. The toilet. At a regular council meeting an incensed ratepayer, unaware of the supposedly covert operation, rose to complain that police were refusing to foot the water bill at the scout hall. The complaint was picked up by a reporter from the Post, who dutifully ran the piece. Now exposed, the police shed their covert approach and became overt in their around-the-clock surveillance. Regard-less of where Williams goes, plain-clothed police in unmarked vehicles tail him.

  'He had to catch a bus one day and they jumped on that to follow him,' Bret Christian recalls. 'They were chasing Williams, and the media were chasing the police. It was like something out of Keystone Cops, but with a marked difference. At its heart, this story is about murdered young women. And there is nothing funny about that.'

  Shortly after, the taskforce is again the butt of jibes when Williams's parents' home is burgled in broad daylight. The burglar, disturbed by an elderly neighbour, does not steal anything, but police are forced to defend themselves against biting criticism.

  'You'd have to ask,' a reporter laughs, 'that if they can't manage to keep a burglar out while Williams is under surveillance, how are they supposed to find the Claremont killer?' Williams, police respond, was not in the house when the break-in occurred.

  43

  Norma Williams has given me Lance's direct work phone number but cautions me about how he may receive the call. 'He's so sick of this whole thing,' she sighs.

  He certainly is. He answers the phone immediately in a curt, no-nonsense tone. 'Lance Williams.' It is a strong voice, much stronger than the one used in his doorstop with journalists, and underpinned with more than a hint of irritation. I introduce myself, but sense that getting him to talk is going to be a challenge. Surrounded by a few loyal workmates, they advise him to hang up from the moment he takes my call. I have to speak fast, before he heeds their advice. The press has not exactly been kind to him; a headline in The West Australian pointedly asked in July 1999 whether he was 'Public Servant or Public Enemy?' So beleaguered was he by the constant police presence following him day and night, that he would call police himself if he was going anywhere out of the ordinary.

  'Lance, why didn't you have a lawyer present the night you were taken into the police station?' I had been told he is acutely shy but instantly I sense abrasiveness in his tone. Not just the wariness of a hunted man dealing with an unsolicited call from a journalist, but an aggression, a tacit warning to me to back off, a warning that he could explode at any moment. He repeats the question, threading his way through his sentences with intricate caution. 'Why didn't I have a lawyer present? I don't remember them even offering me a lawyer.'

  'And have you had legal advice since?'

  'I saw a solicitor once, but the cost is prohibitive. Look, I am not going to see a solicitor – ever – and I don't talk to the press.'

  I plug on, quickly. 'What about your alibi for the night all three girls went missing? Do you have one?' There is a deep sigh on the end of the line. 'I was home the night Ciara Glennon went missing and when the other two girls disappeared.' That is not exactly what Norma told me. No alibi, she said. Lance had no alibi for those two nights.

  'How come your car is in such perfect condition?'

  'Oh, the police reckon I cleaned it because I needed to, that I had had something in there, but that's not right. Detailing the car was part of my warranty offer. I could have opted for tinted windows, whatever, but I took detailing instead.'

  'And the rumour that before you got your licence back – the timing of which would have made it impossible to abduct Sarah Spiers – you hired a car? Did you?'

  'Not true. The only time I've ever hired a car is in Penang with my parents in 1980. And as if I'd suddenly start driving again after all those years and then murder somebody.'

  I can hear the incessant whispers of his workmates. 'Hang up, Lance. Hang up.' He is clearly becoming agitated.

  'Look, I'm at work and there are people wandering around. I'm tired of all this.' His voice has risen, as though he will suddenly start shouting. 'All this nonsense. Like, they reckon there was a knife in my car; it was a fingernail cleaner on my key ring. I want to try and put it behind me. How would you feel if it was you? How would you feel if you had eight guns shoved in your face?'

  'I would be terrified,' I admit to him. 'I wouldn't like it at all.'

  I want to ask him a very sensitive, personal question and have little time in which to do it. As much as anything, I want to check the veracity of the police report. 'Lance, sorry to ask you this, but I have a reason. I am told you wet yourself when police pulled you over. Is that right?'

  Now he is clearly aggravated, a mercurial swing from the relatively calm person who had answered the phone. 'What do you think! How would you react? I was terrified!' His exit from the call is swift. 'I'm hanging up. Right now.'

  The line goes dead.

  ***

  Williams sounds so aggrieved I am reminded of the celebrated case of Richard Jewell, the former security guard finally exonerated of involvement in the July 1996 bombing at an Atlanta park during the Olympics, in which 100 people were injured and two killed. Hailed first as a hero for noticing a backpack in a city park and clearing the area before a pipe bomb exploded, within days Jewell's status had changed. Hounded as a suspect after his name was leaked to the media, he was under overt surveillance for 88 days but never charged. Jewell, who lived with his mother, endured house raids, incessant media interest and FBI profilers 'matching' him to fit the characteristics of a bomber. But there was one problem: despite their best efforts, the FBI co
uld not produce one skerrick of evidence to prove he was guilty. His reputation in tatters, an often tearful Jewell made a televised criticism of how his case was handled after the US District Attorney's office cleared him of all involvement. The FBI 'latched onto me,' he said, 'in its rush to show the world it could get its man. I am a citizen with rights. I am a human being with feelings, just like everybody else.' He saved his biggest salve for the media for distorting his background to show he fitted the profile of a bomber. 'Let the headline be based on the facts,' he told them. 'Don't shape the facts to fit the headline.' And then he sued them, reaching out-of-court settlements with all outlets who had inferred – incorrectly – he was the Atlanta bomber.

  Liam Bartlett, who covered numerous stories on the Claremont case for Perth ABC, originally thought the Macro task-force was a good idea. 'It seemed to focus and crystallise all the leads in an efficient manner.' His attitude, however, changed. 'They just seemed to become incredibly preoccupied with Lance Williams, as if all roads led to Rome. But no charges were laid, and neither was he cleared. It seemed to the media that it was a Mexican stand-off.' Bartlett, whose brother-in-law is press secretary to the commissioner, sees what he regards as fundamental problems in the way WA police do business. 'They're never wrong, they're never going to apologise and they don't see that they need to change. The Claremont story is a subliminal powder keg. All they need is just one more body.'

  Following the initial taking of Williams into police custody, over the next 18 months he is taken in for questioning another six times. He never complains, never asks for a lawyer, never refuses to go to the station.

  'We knocked on his door at around 9 pm one night,' Stephen Brown says, 'and explained that a psychiatrist that Macro had brought in from overseas, Saathoff, would like to spend some time talking to him. I said we'd be back the next morning at 7 am to pick him up. "Okay," he said and he was there, waiting. This man can be unpredictable, but make no mistake: he has the patience of Job. He sat through almost three days of conversations and psychological assessments with Saathoff and never raised an eyebrow.'

  Lance Williams's living arrangements attract incredulity at best, and outright scorn at worst. The general consensus from the public is that police have got their man, but that they don't have enough evidence to charge him. If challenged to explain why they are so sure, the reply is often a simple repeat of the bland assessments they have read about him in the press and no more educated than that he seems 'odd'.

  'What do you mean, "odd" ?' I ask.

  'You know. Strange.'

  'In what way?'

  'Still living at home at his age.'

  'But that's not a crime.'

  'No, it's not a crime. But it's strange.'

  Williams is not the only subject of conversation or news reports in Perth. Women, paricularly, are alarmed at the number of sexual predators in the city. A woman wrote to the Post expressing her alarm that a man of European descent was pouncing on women in or near the Claremont area, jumping out in front of them and aggressively coercing them to do his bidding. Police, she said, discounted this person as being of any interest in the Claremont investigation. 'Maybe no one associated him with the western suburb social scene, but he was definitely around, definitely a sexual predator and a person who disappeared around the time Ciara Glennon was murdered,' she wrote. 'A mild-mannered 46-year-old public servant is a far easier target than a street-wise drifter who can vanish without trace until he leaves his bloody mark some-where else.'

  44

  Between 1982 and 1985, Paul Ferguson worked as a detective team leader on the-then drug squad with Bob Ibbotson. By early 1998, amidst consistent agitation for a Royal Commission into police corruption from journalists and the opposition, Ferguson himself became a target for corruption slurs. A drug dealer, convicted during Ferguson's time at the drug squad, alleged that police had stolen some drugs from him. 'Everyone knows that corruption festers from the top down,' Ferguson says. 'The real scalp they were after was Ibbotson, by then the assistant commissioner. They thought they could somehow get to him through me.' Wanting to avoid the potential fallout from a Royal Commission into policing on their watch – a slur no serving government has ever survived – Richard Court's government created the Anti-Corruption Commission. A fierce and aggressive agency, the ACC was seen by many as a political puppet with an agenda to get quick scalps. Enter Ferguson. Pulled in to answer questions about a person with alleged links to Ibbotson, he did not give the ACC the answers they wanted to hear. 'They needed to shake the tree a bit harder,so they accelerated the pressure by arresting me. In normal circumstances I would have been summonsed, but they wanted to make a big deal of this and threw me straight in the bin on 27 March 1998.' Charged with giving false testimony to the ACC, Ferguson was released on bail. Warned that the fight ahead would be long and dirty if he elected to go to trial, Ferguson crossed sides, preparing the mother of all defence battles with the help of Malcolm McCusker QC. Ferguson, the 'copper's copper', would be out of the force for four years, waiting for the trial.

  The politics of policing are of little interest to the Spiers and Rimmer families who attempt – often fruitlessly – some semblance of normality. The Glennons try, too, leaning hard on their faith to get them through. At a memorial service for Ciara in 1998, Denis articulates the family's continuing grief. 'To date Ciara's murder is our life's worst pain,' he says. 'The burden of sorrow can never be fully lifted, but we are learning to carry it. Alongside the pain of the loss of Ciara, the torment of the way she died and frustration associated with an apprehension of the person or persons responsible, there was another more debilitating source of anguish, namely the mysterious dark side of death, the silence of the grave, the absence of evidence of where Ciara is.'

  The politics of policing would seep into other areas, as well. In October 1998, 63-year-old great-grandmother Dolores Chadwick died in hospital after a car driven by Dave Caporn's 73-year-old father, Roy, careered through a hairdressing salon in suburban Perth and pinned her to a workbench. The police explanation for why Roy Caporn was never charged was that the accident occurred in a car park and not on the road, and that charges of either unlawful killing or dangerous driving causing death were difficult to prove without evidence.

  Amongst other evidence, Chadwick's inquest heard that the day after the crash Dave Caporn – then Detective-Superintendent – had put a call through to junior crash investigator Senior-Constable Trevor Howard, advising him that his father was seeking legal advice and would not be answering police questions. It was a low-key start to the case that would seriously reverberate with police and the public.

  Coroner Alistair Hope criticised police actions following the crash as unsatisfactory, including their failure to either photograph or seize Roy Caporn's shoes. He found Dave Caporn had not interfered with the investigation, but that his call to Howard was 'inappropriate' and had led to a perception of impropriety in the investigation. Hope recorded an open verdict, finding that the accident was not a result of Caporn's slippery shoes but of the mental and physical effects of ageing and that Dave Caporn had called in the capacity of a concerned son and not as a senior police officer.

  The Royal Commission reviewed the case. 'There is no evidence,' it found, 'that the decision not to charge was affected by considerations in favour of Superintendent Caporn or was otherwise improperly reached.' After examining the documents, the commission decided that further investigation was unwarranted and it was satisfied with both the Coroner's findings and the internal review undertaken by the West Australian Police Service.

  There was incredulity in Perth at the outcome of the incident. 'People were saying that they should have been called "Teflon" because nothing sticks,' a former officer recalls. 'Bottom line is, if the average person in the street jaywalks, their arse is grass. People did not understand this at all.' And they still don't.

  45

  If the public are alarmed at the lack of resolution to the Claremont case, of
ficers outside Macro are also feeling the pinch. The CIB overtime budget, they grizzle, is constantly being plundered to renew the coffers of the Claremont investigation. It's an expensive business and one that is consistently justified by the Macro hierarchy. With young women falling victim to an active serial killer, resources are found. Nothing is ever refused. It is a justification that is vehemently defended. 'Gary Ridgway, the so-called "Green River Killer" who murdered at least 48 women around the Washington area in the United States, killed about six women before a taskforce was put on that case,' Tony Potts says. 'In comparison, we got straight onto it. And we put our money where our mouth is.'

  The Green River Killer's confession gives a chilling insight into the warped mind of a serial killer and, apart from his victims being mostly prostitutes, bears uncanny resemblances to the Claremont case. Gary Ridgway admitted the women he targeted were strangers. 'I killed them the first time I met them and I do not have a good memory for their faces. I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight . . . I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught. Another part of my plan was where I put the bodies of these women. Most of the time I took the women's jewellery and their clothes to get rid of any evidence and make them harder to identify. I placed most of the bodies in groups, which I call "clusters". I did this because I wanted to keep track of all the women I killed. I liked to drive by the "clusters" around the county and think about the women I placed there. I usually used a landmark to remember a "cluster". Sometimes I killed and dumped a woman, intending to start a new "cluster", and never returned because I thought I might get caught putting more women there.'