Call Me Cruel (14 page)

On 11 November 2005 he texted a female contact: ‘Received letter from Internal affairs they DON'T believe my story RE murder of that girl.' On 16 November he texted Cheryl Kaulfuss: ‘Im FUMIN, these bastards hav gone 2 a all time low. They followed my mother and she honestly thought she was goin 2 join that girl in the Royal National Park.'

Later that night he spoke with Kaulfuss and said, ‘The barrister refuses to do anything without the body, and I said [to him], “Well, you're not getting one, because I haven't got any insurance.” ' On 4 December he told his cousin Brigette Fernando that the detectives should be looking at other police for Kylie's murder, and then he texted Julie Thurecht: ‘Well there u hav it im GOIN DOWN 4 A CRIME THAT CUNT COMMITTED and u still sittin at home letting RAPIST MURDERING CUNTS GET AWAR WITH IT.'

There it was again, a recurrence of Wilkinson's obsession with the idea that his wife had been raped by Geoff Lowe. Smith decided to talk with Lowe, who was still a police officer. But first he would see if Julie Thurecht would agree to an interview.

Kylie and Sean

Paul Wilkinson and Julie Thurecht

Courtesy of Julie Thurecht

Detective Constable Glenn Smith at the Supreme Court after Paul Wilkinson was sentenced in 2009 ©
AAP Image/Katelyn Catanzariti

Julie Thurecht was an only child and had a typical upbringing in the Sutherland Shire. Sydney's southernmost coastal area is blessed with rich vegetation growing on ridges between attractive and often deep valleys, some containing creeks and rivers. It's bounded by Cronulla Beach and the Royal National Park to the east, and the big Georges River to the north. The buildings in the Shire (as it is fondly known) are mainly houses, running along the ridges and spilling halfway down the valleys, thanks to the firm foundations provided by the Hawkesbury sandstone, which breaks the soil everywhere among the plentiful trees and bushes.

Almost the only institutions to be seen as you travel through the leafy suburbs are schools, of which there are many, and ovals. The area is fairly Anglo—the Cronulla Riots of January 2006 were caused by disputes with Lebanese youths from other parts of Sydney. The Shire lacks extremes of wealth and poverty, and many of its residents, who tend to be passionate about the area, are tradesmen and white-collar workers. It's a traditional Australian suburban idyll, and as you wander its empty streets on a warm weekday, it's hard to imagine anything really bad happening there.

Julie's parents' brick-and-tile house in Illawong sits on one of the Shire's many streets jutting into bushland, on the side of a valley so steep that there are no houses across the road. The garden and house are meticulously maintained, the walls of the lounge room covered in old photos of bike races: Julie's father, Kevin, was once a racing cyclist. He later became a bank manager, and her mother, Jenene, ran a dry-cleaning business.

Julie has always been close to her parents. As an energetic and cheerful child she had lots of friends. She went to Menai High School and then to business school, after which she worked as a medical receptionist. Her life was like that of thousands of young women, but in early 2001 she did something ordinary that, thanks to some unfortunate twists of fate, was to have some extraordinary consequences: she had a very brief fling with a policeman named Geoff Lowe.

Soon after, she started to train to be a police officer herself. She'd always wanted to be a cop but her father hadn't supported her, not wanting his daughter to spend her working life dealing with criminals. But once she turned twenty-one, she applied to join the police and was accepted. She went to the academy and did a secondment at Bankstown, working twelve-hour shifts helping some people and arresting others. It was busy work, often exciting. She got on with the officers she was working with and loved the whole experience.

Julie first met Paul Wilkinson in July 2001, when he gave a lecture at the academy on his work as an Aboriginal Community Liaison Officer. Later, a mutual acquaintance introduced them in the bar. She found him funny and charming, and after that night he began sending her text messages; before long, they were seeing each other. He seemed to be an ordinary, pleasant bloke who had grown up in a southern Sydney suburb and was a mad-keen Souths supporter. They began a relationship and started living together the following May.

Paul had been born on 4 December 1975, the son of Ron, a fitter and turner, and June, an Aboriginal woman. They'd met when Ron was pig-shooting in Walgett in 1974. Paul went to Engadine High School, where he didn't do particularly well academically but was good at sport. He left at the end of Year Eleven and worked as a security guard at Garden Island before getting a job at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He became an ACLO in 1997.

When Julie first met him she didn't know what an ACLO was, and from the way he talked in the early period of their relationship she assumed it must be some sort of plainclothes cop. He didn't actually say this, but the way he talked about his job made it sound like that.

The Wilkinson family was different to Julie's. A lot of time was spent drinking and gambling, and June was a regular at the Sutherland United Services Club. They swore a lot. But June and Ron made Julie feel welcome, and before long she was getting along well with them. Paul was as close to his parents as she was to hers, and she began to spend a lot of time at their place, also a red-brick house on a dead-end street jutting into the bush. Yarrawarrah is in the south of the Shire, and the Wilkinson house is a bit smaller and older than most in the street. Today the concrete driveway up the steep block is heavily cracked, with a big tin letterbox standing at the bottom with no number on it.

Julie's parents first met Paul when she brought him home for dinner. He was wearing a South Sydney football top and jeans. Like almost everyone who met him, at first they found him articulate and charming. Their one concern, as they learned more about him, was that he didn't have anything to his name, not even a car. This seemed strange for a man in his mid-twenties who'd been working for years. But Paul had an explanation: he said he'd used all his money to repay his mother's gambling debts, so his parents wouldn't lose their house.

Other than this, he didn't seem to have any vices. He liked AC/DC and country music, especially Charlie Pride. His food tastes were basic—he was just a meat-and-veg man. He smoked a lot but told Julie he was staunchly against drugs. She saw him drink only a few times: he said he'd seen what alcohol had done to some of his relatives and didn't want to turn out like that himself. His one indulgence was Coca-Cola, of which he consumed up to four litres a day.

Paul didn't push himself forward in conversation, although he had plenty to say when asked. Kevin and Jenene got the impression from what he did say that he must be an important figure at work. So did Julie. When they were at home, he would talk all the time, for hours on end, often about his achievements at Redfern. He always seemed to be the knight in shining armour. Once, for example, he told Julie how a newborn baby was being thrown around by Aboriginal people at Redfern Park; he'd gone in and rescued the child, saving the day. There were a lot of stories like that.

Around September, one of her friends let slip that Julie had slept with Geoff Lowe. Paul had shown intense jealousy when he learned of other men Julie had had sexual relationships with before she met him, but with Lowe it was far more fierce, for some reason. Over the next few months he brooded on her brief liaison with Lowe, and in time it became a fierce obsession. He asked her to change her diary and put in an entry saying she had been raped by the policeman. She refused. Then he showed her a letter he had written and was about to give to a police officer at Redfern, accusing Geoff Lowe of rape. She read it with astonishment.

‘Are you going to back me up?' he said. ‘Come on, back me up.'

‘No, Paul. It's wrong.'

‘Well, if you loved me you would.'

In October 2001, the duty officer at Redfern rang Julie to tell her that Paul had been bitten by a criminal. When he came home, he had tooth marks on his wrist. Julie had always wondered about Paul's claim that he'd been stabbed by a syringe before she met him, but she didn't have any evidence either way. Now she looked at his hand—it didn't seem too bad. But Paul made a big deal of it, which she knew by now was his nature: he liked to dramatise things. He took a year's stress leave after the incident. Julie thought he still quite liked his job, but the hours had been getting to him. He was not a morning person and had been pulling a lot of seven-to-three shifts. Now he got to sleep in every day, on full pay.

It's a fact of police life that while the work can be hard and sometimes dangerous, the provisions for leave and even retirement if something goes wrong are relatively generous; as a result, they are often rorted.

Julie pushed on with her training but noticed Paul becoming increasingly unhappy. He started trying to talk her out of becoming a police officer, saying, ‘All male coppers are sleazes.' By this time she knew what an ACLO really was and had detected that Paul resented colleagues who were police officers. This exploded on her birthday in January 2002, when Geoff Lowe sent her a joking text message with a sexual reference, which Paul saw. She tried to explain this away, but he was furious and typed up another complaint alleging that her sexual encounter with Lowe back in January 2001 had been rape, and that it had involved another police officer and been conducted at knifepoint. Julie again refused to support the complaint, but Paul put pressure on her and later she gave it to Redfern police, but did not pursue it. This set a pattern for the next few years: Wilkinson had Julie in his power but there were limits. If he tried to involve her in anything illegal she would resist, which he accepted although it made him bitter.

Finally, he told her that if she became an officer, she would have more power than him and that this would be bad for their relationship. ‘If you love me,' he said, ‘you'll leave the police.'

She resisted his requests she stop her training, but when she did her placement at Bankstown he made her life hell, ringing her frequently and turning up to talk with her. In the end he wore her down: she gave up and resigned. He'd forced her to choose between the job and himself, and she'd chosen him. She says now she doesn't know if this was because she loved him or because she'd already fallen under his control. She was ashamed to tell her parents the real reason for what she'd done. Already she was defending Paul by hiding things from them.

Paul had family at Dubbo and Walgett and talked about moving there. Julie made a few visits out west and was shocked by the way his relatives lived, the constant drunkenness and pot-smoking, the abuse and domestic violence and poor living conditions. No one seemed to have a job. The women were constantly having babies: one, a few years younger than Julie, already had five children. It was a concern to her that Paul was so attracted to this lifestyle. She came back with no desire to leave Sydney.

Despite the fact he saw his own parents frequently, Paul was jealous of Julie's close relationship with her own father and mother. He told them she was too dependent on them, and in May 2002 took her to live at Umina on the Central Coast. It seemed to Jenene that Paul felt like he was the man who ought to be in control of Julie, but so long as they were in Sydney, Kevin would keep his influence over her.

The move to Umina led to more of the financial problems Julie had come to accept as part of life with Paul. Even though he was being paid while on stress leave, he never had much money. The couple drove a car that was on permanent loan from Julie's parents. Now they used her Visa card, which was linked to her father's account, to pay the bond and furnish the new flat. The only thing Paul contributed was a television set. Things never got much better financially: Kevin paid the bond on the next two homes in which the couple lived.

In July 2002, Julie announced to her parents that Paul and she were getting married. Kevin was unhappy—he hadn't been very impressed by what he'd seen of Paul lately. For whatever reason, Wilkinson was a financial black hole. And Kevin had begun to doubt the truthfulness of some of the stories Paul told, which so often put himself in a very good light. Another problem was Paul's desire to isolate Julie from her old friends. He wanted her to be with him all the time, usually alone, sometimes with his own friends. As a result, Julie was now seeing little or nothing of people she'd known for much of her life. Kevin shared his doubts with Jenene, who'd noticed herself that Paul was a somewhat solitary character, often falling out with what friends he did have. Julie was being sucked into his narrow world, in which the main other people were his parents. Jenene and Kevin met them and found June very reserved. Ron was more open than his wife, but almost his only topic of conversation was rugby league.

Despite their concerns about the proposed marriage, Kevin and Jenene said nothing to Julie, deciding to support her in what she wanted.

Wilkinson's obsession with Geoff Lowe continued. In February 2003, a few weeks before the wedding, Julie was alone one night and received three calls from a man who did not identify himself. Each time he said, ‘Keep your mouth shut or I'll kill you.' It sounded like Paul, although the voice was muffled. After the third call, she rang Paul to tell him about the calls, not asking if it had been him. He sounded upset and said he was going to contact the police. Soon, an officer from Sutherland Police Station rang Julie, saying Paul had come in and was standing next to him.

‘Do you have any idea who made the calls?' said the officer.

Julie told him she had no idea.

Some time later, Paul called her in a rage, and yelled, ‘Why didn't you say you thought it was Geoff Lowe?'

‘Lowey has no reason to threaten me,' she said. ‘Was it you?'

Paul denied it for a while but finally admitted it had been him. ‘It will help put more weight on the rape allegations,' he said.

Later the couple met up and Paul drove to the pay phone in Loftus where he said he'd made the call. He got out of the car and went over to the phone, which he wiped with a cloth. When he got back into the car he told her he'd been removing his fingerprints.