Call Me Cruel (9 page)

‘Well, we've found something on the seat and we've had to take it.'

‘No,' he said, ‘that's not what I asked you. What did you find on the seat?'

Again Craig was struck by his arrogance. ‘Well, I'm not prepared to tell you at this stage,' she said. ‘We're going to have it analysed. Don't worry about the seat—we will have it replaced. We should be able to get it back to you within an hour at the most.'

In the end, the car provided no forensic evidence of Kylie. In fact, from this point on, the investigation began to run down. Craig had strong suspicions about Wilkinson but no proof, and most of her inquiries ran into dead ends. In July she talked with Maxine Cahill, the woman who'd helped bring up Kylie, and went to Dubbo to examine Kylie's possessions, which were still in Ark Self Storage, where the removalists had left them on 29 April. The items provided no suggestions as to what had become of her. In September, the detectives talked to an official at the Centre for Mental Health about the possibility that Kylie might have admitted herself into a psychiatric hospital, where patients' details are kept secret. There is no central register of such patients, so the detectives contacted thirty-two hospitals around the state. The response was non-conclusive: twenty did not reply. (A more successful search was conducted later, but it too found no trace of Kylie.)

The detectives asked to see the death threats Wilkinson said he'd received, and gave the letters and envelopes, along with a sample of Kylie's handwriting, to an expert document examiner in the police Forensic Services Group. He compared elements of the writing such as slant, spacing, connections and pen lifts, and came to an important conclusion: Kylie had definitely written one of the items, and had probably written five others. On several occasions Wilkinson had sent Julie and Bradley to her parents to stay for a while after receiving these death threats. The discovery they'd been written by Kylie suggested that their purpose had been to get Julie out of the way so they could have an affair.

And yet despite all this, despite knowing Paul Wilkinson was a chronic liar, there was still not one scrap of physical evidence as to how Kylie might have disappeared or died. For the detectives, it was deeply frustrating. The investigation continued throughout the second half of 2004, with Craig and Houlahan doing what they could, along with all their other duties. But gradually, due to the lack of anything firm, it wound down. Gosford is a busy police station, and before long it became difficult to justify spending much time on Kylie's investigation, given it was going nowhere and there were so many other new crimes that needed their attention.

Most murders are solved fairly soon after they are committed, or not at all. If Paul Wilkinson was a killer, it was starting to look as though he'd got away with it.

Meanwhile, the Edwards family were distraught. They had been told almost nothing of what the detectives were doing. This is standard: most investigations involve uncovering information of a private nature, and the police are not allowed by law to disclose any of this to third parties. Apart from privacy issues, there's concern about what a victim's family might do if they learned the identity of someone who was suspected (possibly incorrectly) of being the murderer. But this was no consolation to the Edwards as the weeks and months passed by.

In the second half of 2004, Carol Edwards was constantly on the phone to Gosford Police Station, emotional and demanding information. Her grief was tinged with the memory of her last conversation with Kylie. ‘What are you planning to do with your life?' Carol had demanded.

Kylie had refused to say and they'd argued; Kylie had left without saying goodbye. Now Carol thought about this every day, wishing she could take back those last words.

Although John was not as emotional as Carol in his dealings with the police, he took the lack of information very hard. As far as the family knew at this point, Paul Wilkinson was a serving police officer, and several of the detectives in the investigation had served with him at Redfern. Some of the family started to wonder if the New South Wales Police Service might be protecting one of its own. John decided to deal with his suspicions by commencing his own investigation. He had a certain amount of experience to guide him: he'd served in the army for twenty years, in Australia and Asia, and retired as a Warrant Officer Class One, Supervisor Communications for Australia.

For a while he worked twenty hours a day, going through every detail on every piece of paper of Kylie's he could find, trying to build a picture of her life in the months before her disappearance. Like the police, he found she'd exchanged an extraordinary number of text messages with Paul Wilkinson. There was one period of several days when he couldn't see how she could have slept, because by his calculation there had been a call at least once every five minutes. Based largely on his daughter's diaries and phone records, he prepared an analytical profile of her movements and phone calls from 18 January 2003, when she had married Sean, until the time she disappeared.

He found that her diaries were generally just a record of things done and didn't indicate her state of mind. There was almost no reference to Wilkinson, and in fact her diary for the current year suggested her marriage had been going well. On 17 January 2004, Sean took her on a Captain Cook cruise on Sydney Harbour for their first wedding anniversary, an event she described as ‘wonderful'. On Australia Day the couple went to the Garden Island naval base and inspected a submarine.

‘It was fantastic,' she recorded, ‘so confined and so many levels. I wouldn't join though not for me at all.' On Valentine's Day, she ‘gave Sean his gift first thing in morning. Sean then went to Miranda to buy me a gift. I got a big love bear-shaped balloon a teddy and a card. This night we got dressed up and drove to the city and had dinner at Centrepoint Revolving Restaurant. The view was magnificent. It was a sunny clear day. The restaurant revolved four times prior to our departure.'

Possibly the diary entries had been made on the assumption that Sean might read them. The phone records, with her incessant communication with Wilkinson, painted a very different picture of her life at the time: they even revealed that she had phoned him from Centrepoint Tower while she was there with Sean on Valentine's Day. John tried to find out more from people who'd known Kylie, and discovered from her address book that she'd actually had few friends. The one he did speak with was Maxine Cahill, whom the detectives also talked to. She told him that on 5 February Kylie had visited and said she was moving to the country with a policeman. Kylie had been texting the man all the time she was with Maxine, and said she'd been having problems with Sean, who was accusing her of having an affair.

During his investigation, John read documents, listened to tapes, looked at photographs and talked to people. The experience was sometimes overwhelming, and he would have to take a few days off before immersing himself once more in Kylie's life. Finally he compiled all his information into a report and sent it to the Gosford detectives. He tried contacting them often but was not always successful, and became increasingly angry at what he saw as a lack of communication. A few email responses from Peter Houlahan, received after John had provided him with an updated version of the analytical report, give a flavour of what he was going through, as well as the pressure of the other work the detectives were performing.

Houlahan and Craig had been looking into a possible sighting of Kylie in Dubbo. On 10 June 2004 Houlahan emailed, in part, ‘I don't feel it is Kylie, but possibly someone who looks remarkably like her. I sent another request to the Crime Manager at Dubbo yesterday afternoon asking him to treat our request as a priority bearing in mind that they had a murder there on Tuesday evening. I will keep you advised.'

And on 1 July 2004: ‘Unfortunately some of the strategies we are currently employing are covert and as such what I can tell you is quite limited at this time. I can however assure you that we have not lost sight of the importance of this investigation and will continue to diligently pursue all avenues of inquiry in an effort to locate Kylie.'

John continued with his own investigation. He would go to work in the daytime and come home and do what he could to find out more about Kylie's life in the months before she disappeared. Gradually, he filled in bits of the picture. Some pieces of paper found in Kylie's room were particularly interesting. One was a list of thirty questions in her handwriting, apparently intended for Paul Wilkinson. It is undated but would have been written not long before her disappearance. ‘When are you going to tell your family about us?' was one, and another read: ‘When are you going to leave Julie?' According to another: ‘A couple of weeks ago I asked you to separate 10 balls all worth 10 per cent. What is it now? 80/20 Kylie-Julie.'

The last line read: ‘Paul if you say you love me as much as you do I need to see it.'

By this time John had found out that Wilkinson was not a police officer. It was possible he'd intended to retrain as one, though: the questions on the list suggest he and Kylie were planning to go to the Goulburn Police Academy together (or that he'd lied to her that was his intention). They also reveal her high level of dependence on Wilkinson; for example, she'd accepted his request not to tell her family about him. Several others indicated that he was involved with some police unit called ‘the team', and that Kylie wanted to join it too. Some of the questions suggest a certain ignorance of the world. Kylie asks, for instance, if she will have to pay for her own police uniform, and if ‘the DPP will cost me anything'. The last reference is probably to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the government agency that would have prosecuted Gary if the rape case had ever gone to trial.

Putting it all together, John realised that Kylie had not been as happy as he'd thought when the family had had dinner with Sean and her on New Year's Eve. In fact, her marriage had been falling to pieces; the only thing keeping her in it appeared to be Wilkinson's reluctance to leave his wife for her. John discovered a sad reflection of this in conflicting notices Kylie had placed in the
Daily Telegraph
on Valentine's Day, two months before her disappearance. One read:

SEAN: ‘Happy Valentine's Day! I love you with all of my heart and can't wait for you to come back home. Love always Bun Buns.'

The other:

PAUL: ‘Happy Valentine's Day! Thank you for always being there for me. I know that there is a future for us and I can't wait to spend it with you. I love you and always will. Love SV69.'

In September 2004, to the surprise of many looking into Kylie's disappearance, Paul Wilkinson appeared in the media. He had volunteered to give evidence before the New South Wales Parliament's Standing Committee on Social Issues, which was investigating the Redfern Riots. Given his experience in the ACLO job, which he'd begun in 1997, and his familiarity with Redfern, he was potentially a valuable witness.

He claimed to be TJ Hickey's cousin and painted a picture of himself as a man well respected in the Aboriginal community. ‘I socialise in Redfern,' he told the members of parliament. ‘I feel safer in Redfern and Waterloo than I do anywhere else in Sydney . . . I played footy with various kids' fathers who are now in trouble with the police . . . I went to preschool in Redfern.'

But the role of Aboriginal Community Liaison Officer brought tension with it: ‘In our job, basically, the community wants you to be on their side . . . and the police expect you to be on their side.'

Regarding the death of TJ Hickey, Wilkinson declared there had been a cover-up. He said the police car driven by Mick Hollingsworth had rammed Hickey and directly caused his death. It was a sensational claim, and there was more, for Wilkinson said pressure had been put on him to keep quiet about what he knew. ‘I've had me house burnt down as a result of the crap that's gone on, I've had death threats stating to stay away from this inquiry,' he said. ‘And you may ask who from? The police.'

Wilkinson was not just wrong about what had happened to TJ Hickey, he was inventing stories to support his version of events. He seemed to have decided to set himself in opposition to the police and portray himself as a victim, a tendency that was to increase in the coming years. Just why he went down this path is impossible to say with certainty, although potential reasons will emerge later in this story. I have been unable to ask him myself, as writers are not allowed to interview inmates in New South Wales prisons.

One factor possibly related to his craving for the status of victim, noted by some who knew him, was his laziness. He had a deep dislike of any sort of work, and it's possible the cause of the fights he picked with his employer was simply a desire to justify taking time off. In 1999 he claimed to have been stabbed with a blood-filled syringe, and even though the police force refused to believe him, he later said he'd had eight months' paid leave as a result. In October 2001 he was bitten on the hand by a prisoner—his wife, Julie, says the bite marks were barely visible a few hours later—and took twelve months' paid stress leave. He was on sick leave for other reasons from November 2003 to February 2004. Then—six months before he gave evidence to the parliamentary committee—he left his job and never worked again.

Work is the source of status and respect for most men, so abandoning it indicates an unusual preparedness to walk away from those things, and an acceptance of the further loss of status that comes from living on welfare unnecessarily. Circles of acquaintance dwindle and change, and in young men the lack of productive activity to fill the days often leads to tension with family and crime and violence as an outlet for frustrated energy. Male murderers are far more likely than men in general to be unemployed.

In any case, Wilkinson's evidence to the parliamentary inquiry was sensational and it was published in the newspapers. One who read it with great attention was John Edwards. The parliamentary committee did not accept Wilkinson's version of events in its report, but John wondered if he might be right. Maybe Kylie was involved in some sort of police cover-up? John didn't know what to believe. He later admitted that in this long period, through 2004 and into 2005, he was consumed by grief and anger and was not thinking clearly. He continued to pore over the extensive coverage of the Redfern Riots and their aftermath, wondering if they held the secret to his daughter's disappearance.