Call Me Cruel (8 page)

The officer named in this letter was Mick Hollingsworth. The detectives, recalling what Wilkinson had said earlier about his conversation with Kylie at Sutherland Hospital, asked how she had come to know of Hollingsworth's alleged responsibility for Hickey's death. ‘They were knocking each other off [ie. having an affair],' Wilkinson said, ‘Kylie informed me that . . . he told her [that he'd killed TJ Hickey], like, to her face . . . I put an entry in a notebook, um, and after that things just got nasty, where I was threatened, like, not to say anything . . . By Kylie, I was told not to say anything, otherwise harm would come to Julie, my wife, and Bradley my little boy.'

The detectives asked if he'd ever spoken to Hollingsworth about TJ's death. He said he'd bumped into him at Redfern Police Station on the afternoon after Hickey died, and Hollingsworth began to tell him how he'd ‘put his hand through the wound in TJ's neck and placed it down towards his heart to stop the flow of blood'. But the conversation had been stopped by a senior officer, who Wilkinson said had come into the room and said to Hollingsworth, ‘Don't fuckin' say anything in front of him.' (There is no evidence anything Wilkinson said about Michael Hollingsworth is true.)

Several times Houlahan and Craig pushed Wilkinson about the nature of his relationship with Kylie. He continued to deny having an affair with her and persisted with the story that she had pursued him and he had resisted but been too scared by her threats to just walk away. He said they'd exchanged maybe eight or ten SMS messages a day, and their content had been ‘like a stage play, really, like, I was told what, you know, like, the messages she sent to me, in some of them were very sexual, like, I was told on what, you know, how to reply to it and I didn't dare go against what she said.' Asked for an example, he said, ‘ “I want to suck your black cock”, you know, you know, I had to reply like, “I want to pound your”, like, I don't know if this is spot-on or not, but like, “I want to pound your white C-U-N-T”.'

‘And that's what you sent back?' said Craig.

‘I was like a fuckin' dog cornered, like, you know . . . I was frightened of what would happen, not to me, so much to me, but my boy and my wife, you know, I was frightened and I'm frightened, I'm still frightened now.'

‘And how many do you think of those sexual—'

Wilkinson said, ‘Oh, you're talking thousands there.'

‘A lot.'

‘A hell of a lot.' Craig asked how he'd felt when Kylie threatened to lie to his wife and say they were having an affair. He said he didn't want her to do this: ‘My wife, she's jealous of any woman in the world, I know what it's like when I drive the car down the street, I've got to put horse blinkers on if I look to the right or look to the left, I'm supposed to be, you know, possibly looking at someone's arse or someone's breasts. That's the reason I don't go down the academy any more and do any of the Aboriginal lecturing to the probies . . . it was in her head that I'd go down there and I'd sniff around the Eagles' Nest for a sheila . . . That's why I stopped going down there, anyone would think you're the world's fuckin' prettiest man, you know, the way she goes on.' (Probies are probationary constables; the Eagles' Nest referred to the academy bar—the eagle is the symbol of the NSW Police Force.)

Returning to Kylie, the detectives asked if she'd ever wanted him to leave his wife for her. ‘Yeah,' he said, ‘that was mentioned, she actually um, mentioned that, she would have Julie knocked off . . . have her killed, you know.'

Houlahan and Craig knew a bit about Kylie by now, from speaking to her family, her husband and some of her colleagues. They'd received no hint she was the sort of monster Wilkinson was describing. They wondered what it all meant, unaware that this particular fantasy—Kylie as a threat to Julie's life—would emerge years later as Wilkinson's justification for the murder he had committed less than a fortnight before this interview. But for now, they could only sit back and ask themselves what the hell he was raving about. They knew he was lying, but his lies were not mere denials, they were well-developed fantasies.

And the more he spoke, the more the fantasies grew. It was hard to keep on top of them all. ‘I was frightened of her,' he said, ‘I was frightened of Mick [Hollingsworth], you know. She said that she had, whilst living in Melbourne she, you know, she had associations there with, you know, with the underground down there. She said she had association with the Bankstown boys . . . Said [a relative] was a major drug dealer in the Bankstown area and he's, he had some rough and ready associates, you know, that could have things done, you know, no wonder I didn't fuckin' say anything about anything, you know.'

Houlahan asked if Kylie had ever said she was pregnant, and Wilkinson said she'd told him five weeks ago she was pregnant to Gary. ‘That's when I started to get frightened too,' he said, ‘cause she was going to tell, she was going, this was what was thrown at me, she was going to spread the obsession, runs wild, she was going to tell my wife that [we were] having an affair, second to that, like, the child was mine and, like, you know, fuckin', it definitely would have been fuckin' divorce, without even the chance of DNA, the wife would have just packed my little boy up and just taken off.' The last time he saw Kylie, he said, was at the Sydney Football Stadium on Monday 26 April 2004, when Souths played Canterbury. Wilkinson had insisted she tell the police her rape allegation was false, they had argued about this, and later she had agreed and arranged to meet him at Sutherland Railway Station on 28 April, to go to the local police station so she could retract her story about the rape. Wilkinson turned up on that evening, at about 9.00 p.m., but there was no sign of Kylie.

After this interview, Craig was convinced that Wilkinson had killed Kylie. The case was circumstantial, but strongly so. Wilkinson's behaviour and stories suggested someone who was trying to cover up a crime. He had sought to minimise his relationship with Kylie but the records showed otherwise. The detectives had now obtained details of all her phone use in the months before her disappearance, and the volume was staggering. There had been 23,836 phone calls and text messages between Wilkinson and her from 21 December 2003 to 28 April 2004—an astonishing average of 184 per day. His claim that there had been only eight or ten calls a day was nonsense. It was self-defeating nonsense, though, because he must have known this was something that could and would be easily checked. But then, as Craig now knew, Paul Wilkinson was a peculiar man. He wasn't stupid but he was lazy; probably, he just hadn't thought things through.

A police analyst set to work on the telephone data, and patiently pieced together all the calls for 28 April, showing Kylie and Wilkinson had been in frequent contact. The analyst noted the mobile phone towers used by the phones for each call, as these indicate the general location of a mobile at the time a call is made or received. They suggested that for most of the day, Wilkinson had been at home in Picnic Point and Kylie at her grandmother's place in Erina. Then Kylie left Erina and caught the train, and by 8.00 p.m. her calls were using a city tower as she approached Central Station. At 9.10 p.m. she made a call using the Sutherland tower, and Wilkinson's phone received it using the tower at Bonnet Bay, in between Picnic Point and Sutherland. This suggests she had changed trains at Central and was on her way to Sutherland, and that he was driving to the station to collect her. Soon after, Kylie called him again and both their phones used the Sutherland tower, indicating they were very close. And yet, according to Wilkinson, he arrived at the station and she wasn't there.

If this is really what had happened, you'd expect one of them would have rung the other to find out what was happening. But there were no more phone conversations between them that evening. What the records showed is exactly what would have happened if they had met successfully at Sutherland.

Once the police had the phone records and realised Kylie must have taken the train to Sutherland, they tried to obtain CCTV footage from the station. Unfortunately, it retained footage for only fourteen days, and more than that time had now passed since Kylie's disappearance.

According to the phone records, there had been no more activity from either phone until 10.15 p.m., when Wilkinson rang his uncle Alan Wilkinson, who lives on Mooney Mooney Creek beneath the F3 bridge of that name. This call was made using the Picnic Point tower, suggesting that Wilkinson had gone back home from Sutherland Station. Forty minutes later, there was a text from Kylie's phone to Sean Labouchardiere, also using the Picnic Point tower, and two texts from Wilkinson's phone to Kylie's. Wilkinson was called by his cousin Brigette Fernando at 10.54 p.m., and there was one last intriguing text for the day: from Kylie's phone to that of Gary, the man she'd said had raped her. This time, Kylie's phone was using the tower at Illawong. The detectives were deeply suspicious of this pattern of activity. When put in the context of the frequency of phone communication between Kylie and Wilkinson over the previous months, it suggested the two had met up after 9.00 p.m. and had not separated afterwards. Wilkinson might have sent a few text messages from Kylie's phone later that night to create the impression she was still alive.

The investigation continued in other areas. A search warrant was executed on the Erina Medical Centre, which confirmed it had conducted a positive pregnancy test on Kylie on 13 April and estimated she was five weeks pregnant. Formal statements were taken from Kylie's mother and grandmother. Carol said Kylie had never run away before, and she'd always kept in close contact with her grandmother by phone. Both women agreed that Kylie's continuing silence was completely out of character. On 25 May 2004, Craig and Houlahan met with Andrew Waterman to discuss the progress of the investigation. By now it had a name, generated at random by a computer: Strike Force Bergin.

The next day the detectives visited Sutherland with photos of Kylie, to see if anyone remembered seeing her. Sutherland, the urban centre of the Shire, is one of those places that looks bigger on the map than in reality. The railway station where Kylie had come on the night she disappeared is an old place painted in pleasant light colours. You ascend the steps from the platform to the road that crosses the station on a bridge, and then go in either direction over the line and down to a strip of largely unrenovated older shops. It's a quiet place where it would be very difficult to miss anyone coming off the train, if you were waiting for them. But few people would have been there at that time of night, and no one recalled seeing Kylie.

The detectives visited Kelvin Parade in Picnic Point and canvassed the houses there to see if anyone recalled Kylie from the day of Wilkinson's house fire. These inquiries also drew blank. A big question was where Wilkinson might have killed Kylie. The house was examined for forensic evidence but yielded nothing.

On 2 June the detectives went to Wilkinson's parents' house, in Yarrawarrah in southern Sydney, where Julie, Bradley and he had been living since the fire, and executed a search warrant for the car he used. Wilkinson called Legal Aid while Craig told Julie, ‘We're just going to be seizing this vehicle and having it forensically examined as I've explained to Paul already, okay? . . . You can have the vehicle back in twenty-four hours, so tomorrow morning you'll be able to pick it up.'

Wilkinson asked why they were interested in the car and Craig said, ‘You've admitted Kylie was in it.'

Julie heard this comment and it was news to her. She knew Kylie was missing and her husband had had professional dealings with her—but why had she been in their car? She grabbed the baby seat from the car and stormed off. Later she had an argument with Paul who, far from apologising, was upset by her behaviour, which he thought made him look guilty.

For the first time, Julie realised Paul was a person of interest in the police investigation. She told her parents, Kevin and Jenene Thurecht, who discussed it with Paul. He told them Kylie had been in the car once because she'd been trying to persuade him to hand over his notebook containing incriminating information about her drug-dealing lover Mick Hollingsworth. For the moment they believed him: he had always exaggerated the excitement and importance of his work at Redfern, so as far as they were concerned, these new stories were plausible. The Thurechts would come to realise that Paul was a thorough fantasist and had lied to them almost continually, but it was to be a long and gradual awakening.

The car was taken to the Sydney Police Centre in Surry Hills and fingerprinted and examined. There wasn't much there, apart from various receipts and other bits of paper. The Crime Scene people removed a hair and some unspecified debris from the mat in the boot. When the examination was finished, a woman from Clean Scene came to clean the vehicle so it could be returned to its owners. She found a stain on a front seat, and a section of it was cut out for analysis. The next day Wilkinson called Craig at 9.15 a.m. to ask when he could have the car back. She explained they'd taken a piece from the seat but would replace it. ‘Why?' said Wilkinson. ‘What did you find?'