Call Me Cruel (2 page)

In the photos of John and Carol Edwards' wedding in Sydney in 1973, John looks happy, with a huge smile pushing his narrow cheeks into long creases. Carol, a short, solid woman, has her thick, dark hair rolled back above her forehead, and her fluffy white dress covers every inch of skin except her face and hands. She seems happy too, although there's a hint of wariness in other photos from around this period, which was to become more evident with time.

Before long, they had three children: Leanne in 1975, Michael in 1977, and Kylie Maree Edwards, born 16 September 1980. Carol became pregnant with Kylie by accident, and the couple's relationship deteriorated as the pregnancy progressed. Carol was a fragile woman who sometimes found the challenges of motherhood overwhelming. John was away a lot on military exercises, and she spent much time at the home of her parents, Louisa and Harry Windeyer, at Villawood in Sydney's west so they could help with the other children.

Kylie was a demanding baby. She rarely slept and she cried constantly, refusing to be with anyone but her mother. John was posted to New Guinea for three months, and Carol recalls being like a zombie. She moved back to the home of her parents, who grew close to the children; Harry called Kylie his sweet pea.

Soon after John returned to Australia, he was posted to Watsonia in Melbourne. The family went with him but Carol found it tough, having no family support and little time to make new friends. Life is often hard for army wives, and having three young children made it worse. Kylie was frequently very ill with tonsillitis, almost dying several times due to breathing difficulties. Louisa would fly down from Sydney to help Carol cope. John continued to be away from home frequently on army matters, and in April 1985 he announced he was leaving Carol. She packed her bags and took the children back to her parents' place.

Once settled in, she began to go out to a local club, the Chester Hill RSL, and made some friends. This was a new experience for her: she'd never smoked or drunk alcohol before, and since getting married at nineteen and having children, she'd almost never had the time to socialise. Now, at the age of thirty and with her parents available for babysitting, she was determined to make up for that.

But Carol was hurt and vulnerable, and had little experience of men. Within a few weeks she met Robert McCann and found herself attracted to him, even though he was ten years her junior. McCann wanted someone he could dominate, and Carol was perfect. After all the years of doing the right thing while bringing up the children, often feeling lonely, her self-esteem was low. Only a few months after separating from John, she left her parents and went to live with McCann, taking the children with her.

Before long he was hitting her. An officer from the Department of Community Services (DoCS) found out and said the department would remove her children if she stayed with him, because of the danger he posed to them. Carol felt she was being forced to choose between her children and the man she loved. She felt she'd been pushed around all her life, and now, when she'd finally found a chance of happiness, someone wanted to take it away from her. So she abandoned her children. In early 1986, Michael, Leanne and Kylie—aged eleven, nine and six—went to live with their grandparents in Villawood.

Carol says the decision to leave her children was a traumatic one, which she now deeply regrets; today she finds it hard to understand what she was going through at that time. One thing she does know is that DoCS' concerns were justified: years later, Kylie told her that McCann had already assaulted her twice by this time, once holding her out an upstairs window by her ankles and threatening to drop her, and once throwing her down a flight of stairs. At the time these attacks happened, Kylie was just four or five years old.

Losing her mother in this way, and later realising more fully how Carol had chosen her lover over her children, must have been deeply traumatic for Kylie, in ways most of us can only imagine. Leanne believes Kylie was probably more affected by it than she and Michael were, but has no idea to what extent. She doesn't know if anyone ever sat down with Kylie at the time and explained what was happening and why their mother had left. But the effects were deep and permanent: Kylie was a victim of life long before she became a victim of Paul Wilkinson.

Louisa brought the children up for the next decade. She performed the job almost single-handedly, because Harry died the following year. John had access to his children every second weekend. When Kylie started in kindergarten at Villawood East Primary School, she became hysterical every day when Leanne—who was an older pupil at the school—left her at 9.00 a.m. This went on for weeks, until the teachers prevented Leanne from waiting with her outside the classroom. After that, Kylie seems to have calmed down and enjoyed primary school. She grew closer to her grandmother, who provided an emotional and physical refuge from which the child was able to observe her mother's tortured second marriage.

A question raised years later by people familiar with Kylie's disappearance is why she would have entered an abusive relationship with a man like Paul Wilkinson. One possible reason is that as she grew up, her main experience of a relationship between a man and a woman was her mother's with Robert McCann. It lasted ten years, and Kylie visited her mother often, encountering McCann and seeing what he was doing to her. Maybe this conditioned the expectations she came to have of adult relationships. McCann was, after all, the man her mother loved—indeed, he was the man for whom she had abandoned Kylie and her other children.

McCann's father had been in the air force, so the family moved around a lot in his youth. When he was fifteen his parents separated, and the next year he was convicted of multiple crimes—mainly stealing cars—and sent to Mount Penang Juvenile Detention Centre. He was a violent youth: one of his thefts had involved force, and in the year he met Carol he was charged with attacking another woman.

Carol and McCann married in March 1987. They both had jobs, she with the NRMA and he as a station assistant with the railways. She found him completely dominating. If a night went badly on the poker machines, he'd lock her out of the house. He took most of the money she earned and used it for drinking and gambling, and he insisted on seeing her financial records to make sure she was handing over everything. The couple spent their nights and weekends at clubs, drinking and playing the machines, except for the times he would head off into the darkness to do a bit of ‘midnight shopping'. He would steal cars and buy wrecks of the same models, swapping the plates and chassis numbers before selling them on.

In 1988 McCann stopped working for the railways and Carol and he were evicted from their house in Villawood. He started committing more crime, culminating in an ambitious attempt to rob the cash box on a train. In January 1989, he and a partner, who was dressed in a guard's uniform, turned up on Platform 24 at Central Railway Station. Somehow the partner was able to take the place of a rostered guard on the service that collected the takings from railway stations, and he smuggled McCann on board.

Train 60A travelled to Bondi and down through the Shire to Waterfall, then back towards the city. Staff at each station put bags of cash in the locked steel box, and between stations McCann used tools he had brought with him to try to unbolt it from the floor. The getaway car was parked at Tempe, but when the train arrived there the box was still attached, so they went on, eventually throwing it off near Erskineville Station and jumping after it. The partner kept watch on the box, which was later found to contain
$
53,247.41, while McCann raced off to collect the car.

But they were caught, and in July McCann pleaded guilty to this and other offences; he was sentenced to seven years' jail, with a non-parole period of three years. It would have been longer except that McCann had given information to the police.

The next three years provided Carol with a respite, but when McCann got out of jail she took him back and the cycle of violence recommenced. Kylie—who hated the man and couldn't understand why her mother stayed with him—was now eleven.

Fortunately for the children, Louisa continued to provide an emotional centre for their lives. She later described Kylie as a private child who didn't like being told what to do and was snappy at times. She was a bit of a wanderer and could be unsettled, and liked doing things on her own. Outwardly she was an average sort of girl, not doing too well academically but enjoying sport, for a while playing with the Birrong Sports Netball Club. She was a happy-go-lucky kid in a casual world, wearing brightly coloured T-shirts tucked into loose shorts, usually with thongs. Her light-brown hair was cut just above her shoulders.

A change occurred at the end of primary school. Kylie wanted to go on to Bass Hill High School, like all her friends, but Louisa insisted she go to Chester Hill High School because that's where Leanne and Michael were. (Leanne had started out at Bass Hill but switched because it was too rough.) At Chester Hill, Kylie became a rebel. When Leanne was sixteen she moved into a spare room in Louisa's garage and her friends would come over, some of them boys with cars. Over the next few years, Kylie was always trying to go out with the older kids. She showed off and sought their attention, but she didn't seem to have too many friends of her own.

Carol says that Kylie went off the rails in high school. She started skipping classes and Louisa was unable to control her. Often she would stay out until midnight. When she was thirteen or fourteen, she began to sleep over at the house of a boyfriend, Troy Myers, at Regents Park. For several years she lived there or at Louisa's, depending on the state of her relationship with Troy. His mother, Maxine Cahill, became a good friend, and Kylie called her ‘Mum'.

Cahill doesn't remember a lot about Kylie at that age. She does recall that she knew how to have fun. They would all go driving together with music blaring out, and Kylie could be cheeky. She might call out to a man walking his dog, ‘It's not nice to take your wife for a walk!' She was popular with boys but didn't have a lot of boyfriends. Later in her adolescence, she was interested in a policeman from Bass Hill but it didn't go anywhere. She didn't drink a lot or smoke, and had stopped playing much sport, although for a while she was a cheergirl for a rugby league team.

Kylie, says Cahill, ‘loved to laugh and was very trusting. She trusted too much, believed everything people would say.' It was an observation others would make in the years to come.

It was an uncertain adolescence and sometimes a violent one. One day in 1996, Kylie was umpiring a game of hockey at the Sefton Roller Rink when she was attacked by a boy who'd recently broken up with her best friend. The boy was under the impression Kylie had been spreading gossip about their break-up, and he struck her with his hockey stick. She fell to the ground but managed to get up and off the rink, where she sat down and took her skates off. She began to have trouble breathing so she walked over to the first-aid post and collapsed, unconscious. An ambulance took her to Auburn Hospital. The assault left her with sore ribs, blurred vision in her left eye and a numbness on the left side of her face. This developed into Bell's palsy, which caused that side of her face to droop for about a week.

Meanwhile, Carol's marriage with McCann continued and the violence got worse. He'd hold a knife to her throat and say, ‘Ring your mother and say goodbye to her.' Carol says she was too scared to leave because McCann said that if she did, he would hurt her children. The injuries she suffered were extensive and serious, yet he got away with hurting her for a long time.

Years later, after her marriage broke up, Carol would give evidence against McCann in court after he was charged with assaulting her. A few details from the hearing give a sense of what she'd gone through. The transcript shows that, at first, the magistrate at Sutherland Local Court had difficulty grasping just how many assaults there were and how far back they stretched.

BENCH: Well, wait a minute, what are we talking about now? . . . I'll have to start again . . . 30 July 1988 [assault on Carol], that's the first assault occasioning [actual bodily harm]. The second assault occasioning matter that I have is between 1 January 1988 and 31 December 1988 at Fairfield, assault . . . 

CRAWFORD-FISH [McCann's lawyer]: Yes, your worship, that's correct.

BENCH: The next matter I have is between 1 March 1991 and 31 March 1992 assault, common assault on Carol Anne McCann?

CRAWFORD-FISH: That's correct.

BENCH: The next matter I have is 26 November 1996 at Narellan, assault occasioning actual bodily harm on a person?

CRAWFORD-FISH: That's correct.

BENCH: And then malicious wounding between 15 October 1997 and 16 October at Chester Hill?

CRAWFORD-FISH: That's correct, your worship.

Behind this incomplete list lay the long and violent history of Carol's second marriage, part of the background to Kylie's childhood and adolescence. In his sentencing, the magistrate said McCann's offences ‘fall into the most serious category as far as the assault occasioning [bodily harm] matters are concerned in terms of the extreme violence that was used . . . They not only involve acts of violence but they involve acts of violence which resulted in substantial injuries on some occasions and the implements used to inflict those injuries include . . . tennis rackets, cricket bats and there was even a threat with a knife.' He sentenced McCann, who had pleaded guilty at the last minute, to nine months' periodic detention.