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Another murder he worked on involved the disappearance of Martin Davidson, a paedophile who ran an indoor slot car track at Hornsby. He had been reported missing by one Bruce Matthews, who ten years earlier had reported his wife, Bernadette, missing. This seemed like too much of a coincidence, and to make things worse, when Jubelin reviewed the investigation into Bernadette's disappearance he found serious flaws. Matthews hadn't even been interviewed at the time.

He interviewed Matthews about his wife and told him they weren't going to let the matter drop. Matthews went on the run. The detectives tracked him to Queensland and flew up and brought him back. He was in Parramatta jail and Jubelin drove out to talk to him one day, to try to get a confession to the murders of Bernadette and Davidson. Matthews knew he was coming. While Jubelin was still in his car he received a call from Waterman to say the interview would not be proceeding: Matthews had hanged himself in his cell.

Around this time Jubelin qualified as a member of the State Protection Support Unit. Officers attached to this unit
usually worked elsewhere, but when necessary were called out to provide support for the State Protection Group, the police section that deals with armed, dangerous offenders and high-risk situations. The pressure of work—and his busy life—began to take a toll on him and his marriage. Deborah was pregnant again. Despite having achieved his dream of working in homicide, in 1997 he put in a request to return yet again to Hornsby, with its more predictable work hours and shorter travel time to Dural.

His request was knocked back, and a month later he was given a job that was to see him away from home for much of the next eighteen months. He was offered a place on Strike Force Ancud, which was being set up to reinvestigate the deaths of three Aboriginal children at Bowraville, west of Nambucca Heads on the north coast. It was one of Australia's greatest unsolved murder cases.

In September 1990, sixteen-year-old Colleen Walker had gone missing, followed in October by four-year-old Evelyn Greenup and in February 1991 by Clinton Speedy, also sixteen. The bodies of Greenup and Speedy were found dumped in bushland, each killed by a blow to the head. Walker's body has never been found, although her discarded clothes turned up in a local river.

Despite the fact there was only ever one suspect, a local white man seen near each of the children shortly before they disappeared, there were problems with the original investigation, and when Jay Hart was tried for the murder of Clinton Speedy in 1994, he was found not guilty. His trial for the murder of Evelyn Greenup was then no-billed, meaning the attorney-general withdrew the prosecution.

The families of the victims were deeply unhappy with these outcomes, and it was widely said that if the children had been white, their murderer would have been in prison long ago. Following a small riot, Police Commissioner Peter Ryan went to a public meeting at Bowraville and decided to hold a second investigation. It was a tough assignment, and reviewing other detectives' work is not something all cops are keen to do, but Jubelin didn't regard it as a punishment. He'd got the job by chance—Bowraville was part of the north region where he worked, and the other homicide detectives were tied up on other jobs. Waterman, for instance, was involved in the investigation into the disappearance of seven backpackers, which would ultimately see Ivan Milat convicted of murder.

Jubelin's second child, his daughter Mia, was born during the many months he was away at Bowraville. The distant job pushed Deborah and him apart as he lost himself in the task of re-interviewing the large number of witnesses and uncovering new information about the three murders. It was there he met Jason Evers, who also worked on the reinvestigation, and began a friendship that continues to this day. The two worked well together, Evers admiring Jubelin's relentlessness and contributing his own humour and tact to put out the spot fires the sometimes angry Jubelin created.

Finally, in May 1998, Strike Force Ancud submitted a brief of evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions suggesting Jay Hart be charged again, this time in connection with the disappearance of Colleen Walker. Jubelin was told he'd done a good job and could pick his next assignment. One Saturday morning, while coaching his son's soccer team, he was rung by Rod Lynch, the senior officer who allocated work. Lynch
said that although he'd promised Jubelin would not have to do another reinvestigation in a hurry, one had cropped up that was so interesting he might want to be involved. This was the death of Caroline Byrne. The initial investigation had been cursory and concluded the death was suicide, but Byrne's father, Tony, had been claiming publicly for years that his daughter had been murdered. Paul Jacob was running the reinvestigation, and Jubelin joined and ended up being one of the team that flew to London and interviewed suspect Gordon Wood for five hours.

Around 1999 Jubelin's marriage ended and he moved out of the family home. It would be too simplistic to blame his job for the breakdown, something he did not think would happen and for which he continues to feel shame. He is uncomfortable discussing it except to acknowledge he was the one who changed during the relationship. Deborah and he grew apart before he even realised.

In order to deal with the pain of the separation, he threw himself even more intensely into work, trying to shut out his emotions by focusing only on what was in front of him. He also put considerable effort into trying to be around for his children as they grew up, moving into a place close to the family home and attending school functions, sometimes while juggling the pressures of work. Many times the children would find themselves heading to a murder scene as Jubelin made phone calls to find a family member who could look after them.

Meanwhile, there was bad news on the Bowraville front: the Director of Public Prosecutions announced he did not think the evidence was strong enough for Jay Hart to be
charged as a result of Strike Force Ancud's work. The matter would now go to the coroner. Jubelin and Jason Evers were bitterly disappointed.

In September 2000 there was a need for extra police to provide security for foreign dignitaries attending the Sydney Olympics, so Jubelin did the training needed to qualify in Close Personal Protection, building on his experience in the State Protection Support Unit. He figured it would be a good way to see lots of sport, and he was not disappointed: his assignments during the games ranged from protecting Prime Minister John Howard to looking after the president of Bulgaria. The latter job was cut short when a Bulgarian weightlifter who'd just won a gold medal tested positive for drugs, and the president and his entourage left Sydney on the next plane out.

Towards the end of 2000 Jubelin was promoted to sergeant. It was late coming—he'd always assumed promotion would follow good work, but now realised he had to learn certain buzz words and expressions to present at interviews in order to be considered for more senior positions. It was a lesson he would need to come back to later in his career.

By now he was working in Surry Hills—all the city's homicide squads had been centralised as part of the reforms that flowed from the Royal Commission. Around this time, he began a relationship with a colleague, Pamela Young. She was a detective sergeant, one of the few women in homicide, and had come from the North West Homicide Squad, based at Parramatta. They got to know each other when they were chosen to give lectures about homicide investigation at the police academy at Goulburn, and worked on various on-call
jobs together and on a strike force set up to investigate a serial rapist, which was part of homicide's charter at the time.

Jubelin was attracted to her and impressed with the way she conducted herself professionally and personally. She taught him how to take a step back from things. Until then his practice had been to crash through something head-on, but he saw how she would take a more logical approach and invariably get the same result, with less collateral damage. There were certain costs in being a woman in a man's environment—as Jubelin got to know Young better, he found the compassionate and caring side to her, which would have been seen as weakness and had to be concealed when competing with the men.

For her part, Young says she came to admire Jubelin for the effort and energy he put into his work. She also liked the affection he had for his children and the time he devoted to them when he could. After a while, she and Jubelin started to live together, and she saw that his energy did not stop outside work, but was channelled into formidable daily routines of exercise and training. He found it almost impossible to relax. ‘I dragged him to the theatre a few times but that didn't work,' she recalls. She says it was a rich and intense relationship, but sometimes the going was hard.

When the Olympics were over, Jubelin did his first job as sergeant, leading his own team. It marked an important step up, from working under experienced men such as Jacob and Waterman to standing alone. His senior constables were Jason Evers, who had joined him on the Caroline Byrne investigation after Bowraville, and Nigel Warren.

Their first investigation was into the murder of Barbara Saunders, a housewife from sleepy Normanhurst, near Hornsby,
who was shot while walking home from the railway station in December 2000. For the first time Jubelin found himself fronting the media on an almost daily basis—a job normally grabbed by more senior officers, but due to the season most were away on holiday. He was struck by how distracting the media pressure could be, but it was valuable experience. After a few months they caught Saunders' killer, a young local man named Nicholas Grayson who'd shot her while trying to steal her money.

In May 2001, the team investigated the murder of Jayden Marsh, an eighteen-month-old Aboriginal child killed by his foster carer, Linda Wilson. The child had been beaten to death. The killing had occurred in Sutherland—following centralisation, Jubelin was working all over Sydney, spending hours each day commuting. By now he regarded homicide as a sort of vocation, and resented colleagues not prepared to bleed for the job, which mainly meant working long hours and weekends. It is not hard to see why so many good detectives are divorced.

After charging Linda Wilson, who was later found guilty of manslaughter, Jubelin and his team moved on to Strike Force Tuno.

When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive
.

Tuno's first break came in August 2002. It occurred during a house call to talk to one of the hundreds of people whose names had come up in the course of the investigation as having a link—usually tenuous—to someone who might or might not have murdered Terry Falconer. It was dispiriting work but, nine and a half months after Falconer's death, the detectives still had no productive leads. That afternoon the man to be interviewed was a Rebel named Tod Daley. On 29 August, Glen Browne and Luke Rankin knocked on his door at Minchinbury in western Sydney. They had no great expectations of the interview, and half expected him to tell them to get fucked. It was what bikies often did.

There was a locked security screen providing largely one-way vision from the inside. When the door behind it opened, they could just make out a large figure looming on the other side.

‘What do you want?' asked the man.

Once they'd confirmed his identity, they said, ‘We're from homicide. We want to speak to you about the Falconer murder.'

‘Where are you from?'

‘Homicide. We—'

‘I know who's done it, and why they've done it,' Daley said. ‘I'll meet you later.' He arranged to see them at another address.

As they waited for the evening meeting, the detectives wondered if this might be a joke, or the break they'd been looking for. There was no point getting too excited—police work is full of disappointment—but men can dream. Daley was in his thirties, a tough and long-time bikie, but he'd had his problems. While serving time for manslaughter, he'd been savagely assaulted. He'd also been summonsed to hearings at the Crime Commission on two occasions, in 1996 and 1997, and some of his criminal associates thought he was an informer.

Browne and Rankin met him in a granny flat out back of another house at 8 pm. It was a small place full of junk, and the detectives cleared some space so they could sit down. Daley had not been joking that afternoon, and proceeded to tell them an amazing story. He said he'd been approached by two men the previous October and asked to help them get rid of the body of a man they were going to torture and kill. The men were Anthony and Andrew Perish. This was
the first time anyone had definitely linked the brothers to Falconer's murder.

It was to take Tuno over a year to get the full account out of Daley, who was extremely suspicious of them. Several of the detectives got to know him well; Glen Browne was particularly adept at getting on with criminals. Luke Rankin recalls how the story came out in dribs and drabs, and how Daley would always be watching them warily, asking questions about what they'd done about things he'd told them previously. He was also high maintenance—for example, he would ring them in the middle of the night and express concern about a car he'd seen go by in the street. He'd insist on meeting at 10 pm in parks out the back of Mount Druitt and Blacktown, where Jubelin and Browne would go to talk with him while Evers and Rankin sat in cars on either side of the park, concerned for their colleagues' safety as the hours ticked by. But in the end Rankin came to admire Daley, to feel he'd redeemed himself by telling the police what he knew.

For the sake of coherence I will set out most of Daley's story now, apart from certain details that have to be left out to protect his identity: after he eventually gave his statement, he moved away from Sydney and changed his name. The following account comes from multiple sources, but is mainly what he would later say in court.