Now Jubelin and Evers spoke with her often. To do this they drove out to Dubbo on a number of occasions, timing the trip for Sunday afternoon so they could listen to the football in the car. Evers was as deeply committed to the case as Jubelin. His theory was that you had to âfind the passion' in an investigation, the element that made you want to try that extra bit harder. Often it was the innocence and vulnerability of the victim. In this caseâTerry Falconer had been no innocent, although he hadn't deserved to dieâit was the fact that the crime had obviously involved at least three brazen criminals (the abductors), and possibly more: locking them up would be doing the world a favour.
In the end they got nowhere much with Liz Falconer: they played the role of concerned detectives dealing with a grieving widow, but always suspected she knew more than she was saying. She did show them a document she'd found in her husband's papers. It was a ârunning sheet', a sort of formal note, prepared by police who'd interviewed him when he was arrested for manufacturing meth. They noted that he'd refused to tell them anything about other criminals but had said he might do so later, depending on how things went for him. In particular, he said he might be prepared to give them information about the Dubbo Rebels and drug dealing. It was a fairly standard comment by an experienced crook in his situation, hoping to persuade the police to go a little easier on him now in the faint hope of future information. The document had become part of the Crown's brief of evidence for Falconer's prosecution and was given to his lawyer, which is how Falconer came to have a copy among his papers. After Liz found it, and the conflict over property began, she used it to support her claim that he was an informer, and showed it to a number of people.
The detectives had already identified several main groups of suspects. One consisted of the people of interest from the killing of Anthony and Frances Perish back in 1993. As we have seen, there was a current reinvestigation of those murders, Strike Force Seabrook, and Falconer had been spoken to by its detectives not long before his death. Maybe he'd been killed because he'd murdered the old coupleâor because others had done it, and they suspected he was about to give evidence against them at a forthcoming coronial inquest. These were only theoriesâat the moment, all Tuno had were dozens of
such possibilities, hypotheses and hunches that needed to be worked through and tested.
The next and biggest group of suspects consisted of criminals who might have feared Falconer was informing against them, either because of what Liz Falconer was telling people or because they'd somehow discovered that Falconer, as Tuno learned, had indeed been talking not just to the police but also to other law inforcement agencies. Another category of suspects comprised other criminals who Falconer might have upset during his career as a drug manufacturer and dealer. It was quite possible he'd committed acts of violence to protect his operation, and had made some serious enemies. Altogether, it was a rich assortment of possibilities.
Tuno was hampered right from the start by the reluctance of criminal informants, so essential to solving many crimes, to come forward. That Falconer had possibly been killed because he was an informant himself had sent out a clear message to even the slowest crook. This shutdown of traditional sources of information was to hamper Tuno for years.
Even the New South Wales Crime Commission was unable to break through this silence. It was working on some bikie killings at the time, and one of the people it had talked with was Terry Falconer. In 2001 and 2002 it assisted Tuno on the investigation into his murder, and tapped a number of phones and held hearings of people including Liz and James Falconer, and Rob Institoris. But despite its special powers and deep knowledge, the commission was unable to indentify Falconer's killers.
One thing on Jubelin's mind from when he first heard about the murder was that it would have been much easier
just to shoot Falconer dead. The fact he'd been abducted could suggest a desire to extract information from him, and this guided Tuno's thinking as the detectives pondered the long list of persons of interest. There was a strong possibility Terry Falconer had possessed information someone else wanted to know. But what?
In the first half of 2002, little progress was made even though an enormous amount of work was done. The packages in which Falconer's body had been found were examined minutely. Every piece of tape and wire and plastic and flesh, every hair found in the parcels, was pored over by experts in the government analytical laboratories at Lidcombe, a job that was to take years andâunfortunatelyâyield absolutely nothing of significance. In April 2002 someone found Falconer's anklet on a vacant block of land at Ingleburn, cut through and wrapped in an old singlet. This too told them nothing.
Jubelin's bosses in homicide began to wonder about keeping Tuno going. Unfortunately for the investigation, Crime Agencies, the Homicide Squad's umbrella group in the New South Wales Police Force, was undergoing a budget crisis, and resources dried up. For a period in 2002 there was limited overtime and it was difficult for officers to travel out of Sydney. Tuno didn't even have its own permanent office, and was first placed in an office of analysts who spent their days looking at computers. The noisy homicide detectives were not a welcome addition and were soon asked to move on.
The investigators talked to most of the seventy persons of interest and dozens of others they thought might know something. After a few months they had spoken with a majority of the state's toughest criminals. They went in hard, telling
the crooks this was a personal one: âThey've dressed up as police, so now people are pointing their fingers at us. They think they can fucking get away with that and make us look bad, especially after the Royal Commission? We are going to come after them hard.' Jubelin wanted the word to get around that he and his team were determined to solve the crime no matter what.
Often when several people are involved in a serious offence and realise it is being pursued by police with especial vigour, one will get nervous and roll over to avoid jail. Or one will talk to a criminal associate not involved in the crime, who will give the information to police to gain some advantage such as avoiding prosecution for his own criminal activity. The investigators thought one of these outcomes might occur here, because the kidnapping had been so well planned and complex that more people than just the three kidnappers might have been aware of it. They were trying to increase the chance of this happening by keeping the pressure on. But the months rolled on and no one was offering anything.
Jubelin and some of the team went out to Lightning Ridge to talk to a man who'd cooked with Falconer. They didn't have much luckâthey'd pull up in an unmarked car at a mine where he was supposed to be working, and all the blokes hanging round would disappear into the mine shaft like rabbits down a hole. On one occasion Jubelin looked at the desolate surrounding countryside and then into the black hole at his feet. I'm not going down there, he thought. Later they went to a bar, just a corrugated iron shed in the bush, and everyone else there fell silent and just watched until they'd had their drinks and left.
The investigation continued to struggle for information. Jubelin had not given up, but after eight months he still had no idea who had killed Terry Falconer. He was facing the prospect of failure, and this upset him.
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Gary Jubelin was born in 1962 in Sydney's north-west, and went to the local public high school. His adolescence was rocky, and there were times when he broke the law. He got into fights at school and on the sports field because, although tough and not one to back down, he was a quiet person and sometimes people mistook this for weakness. It was a mistake because, after being pushed for a while, he would react strongly. To some degree this continued once he grew up, and even today he confuses some people, which can be a problem but also an advantage.
Jubelin was friends with an Aboriginal boy named Anthony who'd been adopted by the white family next door. Anthony had a troubled childhood, often being sent back to the orphanage when he was disobedient. One day, at the age of about fourteen, he turned up at Jubelin's house to say he'd just had a fight with his foster mother and was going on the run. Did Gary want to come? Jubelin declined the offer.
After leaving school he became an electrician, working mainly on building sites. It wasn't what he wanted to do, but he had no idea what that might be until the day he climbed out of a hot roof one lunchtime and saw some cops chasing a bloke through the streets of Ryde. That looked like a better job than the one he was doing, and the next day he applied to join the force.
Six months later he was a policeman at the age of twenty-three, working at Hornsby in Sydney's north, and soon knew it was what he wanted: it matched his personality. Like many cops he has a strong feeling for justice, an understated but confident manner, and considerable tenacity. He enjoyed the ordinary uniform work and also the more exciting action as a part-time member of the Tactical Response Group, a job where the physicality attracted him. After a year of this he was tapped on the shoulder and invited to join plain clothes, the training ground for criminal investigation. He jumped at the chance: he had found himself envying the detectives who would turn up to every serious crime the uniforms discovered and take it over just when it got interesting. The following year he married Deborah, whom he'd known since childhood.
After a few years in plain clothes, Jubelin was promoted to detective and assisted in his first murder investigation. He found it totally fascinating, and decided that one day he would join the homicide detectives. He didn't share his ambition with any of his colleagues: it would have seemed out of place in one so young. The attraction of homicide, for him as for many others in the job, was not moral; it had little to do with the nature of the crime, except that murder was the worst crime and investigating it was the height of police work. Jubelin was an ambitious man, not in a career sense but in the sense of wanting to push himself to the limits of whatever he was doing. He wanted to play A grade.
But there was still a long way to go. In his late twenties, he was invited to join the Armed Hold Up Squad at Chatswood. The squad's members were seen as being toughâthey were the cops who got things done by confronting criminals head-on.
Their reputation was also linked, rightly or wrongly, to the exploits of corrupt cops such as Roger Rogerson, and accusations of bashing and loading crooks were not uncommon. When Jubelin arrived he was told, âWe work hard and we play hard,' and this was certainly true. He realised it would be a tricky learning curve, but knew he had to get major crime experience before he would be considered for homicide work.
Deborah and he now had their first child, Jarvis, and Jubelin continued to be heavily involved in sport. As drinking was a big part of the Armed Hold Up Squad culture, a good work/life balance was difficult to maintain, especially as he had to get home to Dural every night. After little more than a year he realised things weren't working out and decided to move back to Hornsby detectives, in 1992, a hard decision because major crime was his passion and he thought he might be burning his bridges. He also enjoyed the camaraderie of working with hard men doing a tough job. There were some flawed characters in the squad, but there were also people he had great respect for, yet he figured the squad was not only bad for him but that its best days were over, and so it was to prove: when the Police Integrity Commission struck a few years later, some of Chatswood's colourful detectives were out of the job.
Jubelin did his best to make a go of it back at Hornsby, but after a year he was frustrated and returned to Chatswood, although not the Armed Hold Up Squad. This time he joined the Organised Crime section. It was a busy life: in his spare time he coached a soccer team and was heavily involved in kickboxing and martial arts. On top of that he was finishing a degree in policing. One night while waiting to catch a gang of professional thieves in a darkened unit block, he hid in a
kitchen cupboard and completed an overdue assignment by torchlight.
Soon he did his first murder investigation as a major crime detective and it was a terrible case. Eileen Cantley, who was eighty years old, was sexually assaulted and killed near Hornsby. Homicide was too busy to take it and Jubelin was put on the job along with Jim Williams from Hornsby, an old workmate and mentor. They caught the killer, who turned out to be a serial predator, a couple of months later.
After this Jubelin applied for a homicide posting and in 1995 got a job with the Chatswood squad, working under some of the state's finest investigators, including Paul Mayger and Paul Jacob. Another was Andrew Waterman, who was struck by Jubelin's extreme determination, which was unusual even by the standards of homicide. He would later conclude, after observing Jubelin for two decades, that he was the most competitive and focused detective he'd ever come across. Not all the challenges of homicide can be met by simple determination, though. The work requires persistence because many investigations take a long time; it requires attention to detail because every case ends in a court of some kind, the Supreme Court or the coroner's, being scrutinised by experts; it involves constant contact with grieving families, which many police find hard; and it tends to be more complicated than much other police work, with multiple lines of inquiry and persons of interest. There is also the need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the defence, especially when compiling a brief.
There are two main parts of a detective's job: first, solving the crime and, then, preparing the brief of evidence to go to the lawyers at the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions,
who will take the case to court. The strength of the brief determines whether the accused persons will be prosecuted, and can strongly influence whether they plead guilty and whether they're convicted if the matter goes to trial. So a strong brief is a thing of great importance, but it is something the public almost never sees. Jubelin began to learn how to prepare a case for court, how to look at it from the outside and spot its weaknesses. This flowed back into his investigative work and he acquired, as all good detectives must, the ability to be objective as well as passionate.