Call Me Cruel (21 page)

Wilkinson said he was not prepared to say why Kylie had been killed, except that it involved ‘a fellow by the name of Sheik Fazi who goes to the Lakemba Mosque' and had something to do with the theft of army rocket-launchers: ‘I've actually handled one of those rocket-launchers . . . we are dealing with people that don't give a fuck.' (A number of rocket-launchers had been stolen from the military, and the possibility they were in the hands of terrorists was the subject of occasional speculation in the media at the time.)

On 18 March, Wilkinson, having again announced he was prepared to reveal the location of the grave, was brought back to Gosford Police Station. Smith, who had assembled a search team, noted he was in an ‘aggressive and agitated state'. He said the body was at Mooney Mooney, under the big freeway bridge. This was interesting: it was where Wilkinson's uncle Alan lived.

Glenn Smith legally recorded this and later conversations on a portable recorder, and they provide a fascinating insight into Wilkinson's frame of mind. He now said, ‘You wanna go down there, let's go down there, but you start pullin' ya finger out and start being a fuckin' proper copper. Start doin' the right thing and don't bring that fat slut near me either.'

Smith: ‘Paul, I'm not bringing her, I told you before that we wouldn't be bringing her . . .'

Wilkinson: ‘I'm not happy with you either.'

Smith: ‘Paul, let's just get what you want to do today over and done with. I've just got to organise the guys from the video unit . . .'

Wilkinson: ‘Don't bring 'em.'

Smith: ‘The video unit?'

Wilkinson: ‘Don't bring them . . .'

Smith: ‘All right, you're going to have to go in the van with the guys, and we'll follow you down there.'

Wilkinson: ‘Fuckin' ridiculous.'

Smith was angry at Wilkinson's manner but kept his cool. He could see the humour in it—after all, Wilkinson was the one in handcuffs. They reached Karool Road at Mooney Mooney and drove past his uncle Alan's place and up to an area near the gigantic pylons that support the smooth white bridge far above. Wilkinson identified a spot where the grave might be. Then he suggested another place. Police went to work, clearing the ground and inspecting it with a cadaver dog and ground-penetrating radar. As Wilkinson watched the search, he raved about various matters, including his still unexplained hatred of Rebekkah Craig. He continued to try to play with Smith's mind, asking him where he thought the body was and taunting him with hints of knowledge. At one point he referred to the stolen rocket-launchers he'd mentioned the previous month: ‘Let me tell you something, Glenn, it's not a matter of if there's gunna be terror attacks, it's a matter of when. And if you're pullin' my fuckin' chain and ya think I'm pissing in people's pocket, when it happens and if youse haven't done anything about it, it's gunna bite you on the arse, not me. I've given you every opportunity.' A few minutes later he said, ‘Man, I know that you think that I'm a fuckin' lunatic and I'm way out there, but you put this in the media and people are gunna die.'

Then he started to go on about Julie, telling Smith he ought to ‘start doin' something about that fuckin' ex-wife of mine'. The fact that Smith hadn't chased up some of the things he'd previously told him about Julie enraged him. ‘Why the fuck didn't youse do things right since the first place? If ya hadda started doin' it then I woulda given youse everything without fuckin' youse around. But now ya still fuckin' me around . . .'

Smith: ‘I wasn't here, Paul [at the start] . . .'

Wilkinson (indicating his handcuffs): ‘Damn lucky these are on.'

Smith: ‘All right, Paul, I can see you're getting angry with me.'

Wilkinson: ‘Getting angry with ya, I'm livid with ya, I'd love to snot ya . . . Don't you think it's a little bizarre, that bang I'm in custody and Julie's got a new bloke? Don't you find, don't you find all of that side of things sort of strange?'

After some more raving, he said, ‘Why do you think I fucked youse around from day one? Why do you think I did that?'

Smith: ‘I don't know, Paul.'

Wilkinson: ‘Well, ask me.'

Smith: ‘Well, why did you stuff the original guys around from day one?'

Wilkinson: ‘Because I'm sittin' in Bankstown detectives' office, Rebekkah Craig walks in with the look of fury on her face. “What the fuck's wrong with you, Rebekkah?”

‘ “You tell me.”

‘ “Well, fuck you too, Rebekkah.” That was it, she walked in with an attitude, because she took it personal because we used to work together at Redfern. She took it personal.'

They kept chatting and Wilkinson learned for the first time about the undercover operative, Brad.

Wilkinson: ‘Who the fuck is [that]?'

Smith: ‘He's an undercover operative . . .'

Wilkinson: ‘Where did I meet him?'

Smith: ‘At the SUS Club . . .'

Wilkinson: ‘You're a sneaky cunt.'

On the whole, Smith didn't enjoy these walks in the bush with Wilkinson; this search proved as futile as all the rest. But for a moment he felt happy.

*

As the four-year anniversary of Kylie's disappearance approached, John Edwards wanted to do something to remind the family of Kylie's life rather than her death. He came up with the idea of a memorial service where the family and others would talk of their memories of her. Some family members criticised the idea but it went ahead on 26 April 2008, at the Terrigal Senior Citizens Club on the Coast.

John organised the whole thing, including a celebrant and a poem to be read at the event, and the hire of the hall and provision of food. Even the preparations were a deeply emotional experience: it took him a month to prepare a memorial card because he would break down and lose his capacity to focus on the task. On the day, a slide show of photos of Kylie was shown, the poem was read and there were speeches from most members of the family. Michael was overseas but John arranged for him to ring up and talk to the family. Afterwards, those there told John the experience had been worthwhile.

Despite this, John's grief remained intense, and because of this he had difficulties handling his job at the plumbing company. In July he resigned. He'd done good things there, tripling the company's turnover in his first year, but the responsibility and effort had become more than he could bear, given his emotional state. When walking in a crowd, he would see a young woman and think it was Kylie, and have to repress the desire to shout his daughter's name and run up to her. When he was home, every time the phone rang he hoped it was her.

He found he couldn't work anymore and spent a lot of time just sitting around at home, thinking about Kylie and the time it was taking to get Paul Wilkinson to trial. By February 2009 he was no longer able to meet the mortgage repayments on his home in Lurnea and lost the house.

Geoff Lowe decided to persist with his plan to leave Sydney, even after Wilkinson was arrested. He and Sue had lost their house in Loftus and were keen to get away from an area that reminded them of the bad times they'd been through. Geoff's second attempt at promotion was successful, and he won an inspector's position at a dream posting, Lismore in the sub-tropical north of the state. His marks were excellent in all the categories involving objective tests. The only problem was his score based on ‘management team comments', which had been embarrassingly low: just thirty-five out of 100. He believed this bore no relation to his actual performance but was a result of resentment because of all the trouble he'd caused at Miranda by complaining about his managers' inaction over Paul Wilkinson. However, the low score was not enough to stop him getting the job, and in February 2008 Sue and he and their young child moved to a small farm on the north coast, to make a fresh start.

But Geoff's luck turned again. There were five appeals against his promotion, which was almost unprecedented for a man of his seniority, with twenty-five years in the job. In June 2008 one of them was successful, thanks in large part to Geoff's low score based on the management team comments. Paul Wilkinson had struck again, this time indirectly.

Geoff took two days' stress leave after learning of the successful appeal, the first such leave he'd taken since the Wilkinson business began. He was a sergeant once more, and for Sue this was the last straw. She was living with a small child in relative isolation in the country, far away from her old friends and community. If Geoff had remained an inspector, with more status and money, things might have been better, but now they were back where they'd started and hundreds of kilometres from home. Six months later, she took their child back down south, and her marriage to Geoff was over.

Thanks to Paul Wilkinson, Geoff Lowe had lost his peace of mind, his home, his promotion and his family.

Like most people charged with a serious crime, Wilkinson had a committal hearing at a local court, where the Crown's case was presented to a magistrate to determine if there was enough evidence to proceed to trial. It was a so-called ‘paper committal' and no witnesses were called. Wilkinson pleaded not guilty to murdering Kylie, and the magistrate decided the case was strong enough to be put to a jury. A trial date was set for late in 2008, and Smith worked busily to obtain yet more information for the lawyers. He sought an update from the Missing Persons Unit, where the checks of two years ago were repeated. Once again nothing was found.

As the trial approached, Wilkinson's lawyers requested a psychiatric report from Olav Nielssen, an experienced forensic psychiatrist. They wanted to see if there were any mental-health issues that might affect their client's capacity to stand trial. Clearly, Wilkinson was not normal—but was he actually mad?

Nielssen interviewed Wilkinson at Silverwater and in his report described him as ‘a man of Aboriginal appearance who was clean shaven with close cropped hair. He polished a pair of glasses in a theatrical way and held them in front of him for the duration of the interview. He was initially suspicious, reluctant to discuss aspects of his case, but soon became conspiratorial in his account of his knowledge and involvement in a range of criminal enterprises.'

Wilkinson told Nielssen he was unaware of any family history of psychiatric disorder, and had had few contacts with mental-health services. He had been stabbed with a syringe in 1999 and had started using drugs, although he would not specify which ones. He said he had been a ‘big gambler', once losing
$
80,000 in a weekend on the horses.

Julie and he had formally divorced two weeks before.

Turning to his present situation, Wilkinson said, ‘I am up against the government . . . strings will be pulled to make sure I get it [a guilty verdict].' He told a version of his story about Kylie's death at the hands of Geoff Lowe, and said that while he had known Kylie, the numerous texts and phone calls she'd received from his phone had actually been sent by someone else. As to the large sums of money Kylie had obtained just before she disappeared, he said these had been to pay off Geoff Lowe, a corrupt police officer who had raped Julie and then had an affair with her and fathered Bradley.

Nielssen concluded that Wilkinson's intelligence was in the normal range and his intellectual function was largely unimpaired. However, he held what seemed to be paranoid views regarding the police, the legal system and the government. ‘Mr Wilkinson's presentation is unusual,' wrote the doctor, ‘and it was not possible to make a firm psychiatric diagnosis on the basis of one interview without the benefit of corroborative information from a family member or someone who knew him well. However, on the basis of the information available, derived from the history elicited, his presentation during the interview and aspects of the case, I believe the most likely diagnosis is one of underlying psychotic illness presenting with grandiose claims and persecutory beliefs . . . I believe there are serious concerns about Mr Wilkinson's fitness for trial'.

The Crown sought its own report from another psychiatrist, who (as is not uncommon in this situation) disagreed with the opinion obtained by the defence and thought Wilkinson was fit to be tried. The disagreement between the experts would need to be resolved before the trial could commence.

Before going any further, it might be useful to reflect on those of Wilkinson's lies that had become major fantasies, and on how he had tried to tie them all together. Here is a summary.

1. Julie Thurecht was raped by policemen Geoff Lowe and a colleague in January 2001.

2. Policeman Mick Hollingsworth killed TJ Hickey on 14 February 2004.

3. Wilkinson and his family received death threats on and off from February 2003 to April 2004.

4. Wilkinson's house was burned down by Kylie and an Aboriginal man on 16 May 2004.

5. Kylie was killed by Geoff Lowe, and in a later version by Julie too, in the Royal National Park in April or May 2004.

6. Kylie was buried at various locations.

Lies are commonly used by people for practical purposes, to assist in doing wrong or covering up. Lie number three (the death threats), for example, was used to get Julie out of the house so Wilkinson could pursue his affair with Kylie, and possibly with Anna Simons before her. Number four (the fire) was intended to distract attention from himself as a suspect in Kylie's disappearance by suggesting she was still alive.

But in other cases, the motivation for the lie is less evident. Take number one, the rape of Julie. At first glance, there seems to be no reason for telling it. When Wilkinson found out she'd had a brief sexual fling with Lowe, and felt intensely jealous about this, he could simply have left her (they were not yet married). Instead, he stayed and created his lie about the rape. This might make some sense if he'd been passionately in love with her, but there is no evidence of this (although he did want to control her). What he seems to have been really passionate about was the story he had spun about Lowe.

This, and some of his other lies, might more usefully be called fantasies. They seem to have stemmed from a desire to create a sort of parallel world, one that suited his emotional requirements better than the world in which he actually had to live. Each of these fantasies spawned lies of its own, either spontaneously (eg. the Lowe traffic lights complaint) or because of Wilkinson's need to link things that really happened with his fantasy life (eg. blaming Lowe for Kylie's death). He was quite inventive when it came to joining his various fantasies together, which confused those around him and made the job of untangling them even more difficult for the detectives.

Part of the lying process for Wilkinson was a need to repeat a lie to others, to make it seem real by talking about it often. It is difficult to overestimate the strength of this compulsion, which did him no favours in the end. It was his statement to the Police Integrity Commission that led to the investigation into Kylie's disappearance being reinvigorated. It was his continued communication with Julie (even when he suspected she was relaying what he said to the police) that produced elements of the case against him. If he had simply kept quiet, he would be a free man today.

But he could not stay quiet, because he needed to give voice to his fantasies to keep them alive. And he wanted to keep them alive because his fantasies were more important to him than his real life. He lived in his stories.

The Crown prosecutor for the trial was John Kiely SC, a white-haired man with smooth skin and glasses, and a warm Australian accent. He was then in his late sixties and one of the most experienced prosecutors in New South Wales. He had grown up in Cowra, and from his father, a bookie on country tracks, he acquired a familiarity with a wide range of people and behaviours. On leaving school, he went into a seminary for four years, before deciding it was not for him and becoming a country solicitor.

He went to the bar after being involved in an unusual victory in a murder trial. A man had shot his de facto's father and then walked into the police station, handed over the shotgun and announced, ‘I shot the cunt—he deserved it.' It was an unpromising start, but when the lawyers got to examine the weapon they found it was faulty, and this contributed to a successful defence of their client. Kiely thought this was pretty fascinating stuff.

In 1977, he and his family moved to Sydney's northern beaches and he soon had a thriving practice on the country circuit, as well as some industrial work for a union in Newcastle. In 1990 he decided it was time to ease back a bit—he'd been working six or seven days a week for years—and became a Crown prosecutor. The job involves only criminal cases—usually, after he rose through the ranks and became a deputy senior Crown prosecutor, murder trials in the Supreme Court. Kiely took silk in 1999.

He's done many famous trials. One was of state politician Barry Morris, convicted in 1992 of threatening to bomb the Blue Mountains City Council building. Another conviction was Lennie McPherson, often called Sydney's Mr Big, for assault. At the end of that trial, as Kiely was leaving the court, McPherson called to him, ‘You'll be the death of me—I'll die in prison.' McPherson was right: he died in 1996, at Cessnock Gaol.

Kiely found a huge difference between being a defence counsel and a Crown prosecutor. In defence, there's no need to prove anything—you just need to break down the Crown case. But the stakes are much higher: if you lose, someone might go to jail for a very long time, and this pressure has got worse. When Kiely came to the bar, the sentence for murder was typically a non-parole period of ten years. Now it's about twice that.

Being a prosecutor is more disciplined: you have to prove the various elements of murder in a systematic and confined manner. The Crown must disclose its case to the defence before the trial begins; there is no obligation on the defence to do likewise. There is also an obligation on the Crown's part to assist the judge and ensure the trial is fair.

The Wilkinson case was unusual from the start, both because there was no body and because of its complexity. There were all the text messages, the burning of the house, the stories told to the PIC and the various searches for the grave. Working with DPP solicitor Helen Rallis, Kiely spent many weeks mastering the details of the police brief and working out how he would conduct the trial. This was a considerable intellectual challenge, although of course he'd done it many times before. It's been said that a barrister has a mind like a bathtub: with each new case you fill it up with knowledge, and when it's over you pull the plug and it all runs out. Then you put the plug back in and fill it up with the next one.

The trial was estimated to last six or seven weeks, with over a hundred witnesses due to be called. There was a need to prove that a relationship had existed between Wilkinson and Kylie, drawing on evidence such as the breakdown in their respective marriages. The burning of the house and Wilkinson's various allegations about Kylie's death would have to be described and explained in court. Then there was the mobile phone evidence, which has convicted many criminals and would play a central role here.

Kiely found it helpful, as he often did, to think of the forthcoming trial as a play, with various acts and scenes representing the different elements, all of which had to be conveyed to the jury in a way that would enable them to grasp the story of what had happened. This meant witnesses would need to be presented in the best order. It would all come together in the Crown's closing address to the jury, which for a barrister is the climax of a trial, when the main elements are drawn together, ideally in such a way that the jurors are convinced by the Crown's interpretation of those elements.

John, Carol and Leanne were kept in touch with the legal process by a DPP witness assistance officer, who was assigned to them for the extent of the trial. They spoke often with solicitor Helen Rallis, whose job involved not only supporting Kiely with the legal side of things but also liaising with everyone involved in the trial, including the police and the defence solicitor. John Kiely met with the family and explained what was going to happen. During the trial itself, he would have little time to speak with them, as all his attention would be consumed by running the case.

The trial was due to begin on 13 October 2008 before Justice Elizabeth Fullerton in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. But on the first day of that month, Wilkinson protested that she should not sit because, before going to the bench, she'd been the counsel assisting the coroner at the inquest into the death of TJ Hickey. Wilkinson, of course, disagreed with the coroner's finding that the police did not kill Hickey. Fullerton stood aside and was replaced by Peter Johnson, a highly respected judge with a short grey beard and glasses.

On the morning of 13 October, John Kiely received some news from Helen Rallis. Wilkinson's lawyers had just told her that their client wished to change his plea: he was going to admit to killing Kylie. The announcement sent a shock through Kylie's family, who were sitting in the public gallery. Emotions of relief and anger, happiness and despair, swept over them, and for a moment they seemed to freeze.

Such last-minute confessions are actually not unusual. Accused people often wait until the eve of their trial to confess to a crime, in the faint hope something might change in their favour: maybe the Crown will propose a deal, or a vital witness for the prosecution will be run over by a bus. In the absence of such luck, they change their plea at the last minute because it gains them a discount off their sentence of about ten per cent. The state provides this reduction as an inducement, because a guilty plea removes the necessity for an expensive trial.

John Kiely was happy to hear what Wilkinson was proposing to do, but cautious. He wanted to make sure a plea of guilty would stick, and one thing that concerned him was whether Wilkinson was mentally capable of making the change. So he asked the judge to make a determination and Johnson agreed. This would involve considering the evidence of the psychiatrists. And so the emotions of Kylie's family went on hold again.