Crimwife (15 page)

Looking at Ella now, in her thirties, she is slender, pretty, with long brown hair, a straight white smile and clear pink skin. She has two kids under five and appears to have barely gained a pound. I suddenly wonder if it’s always been that way, and I ask her, “Was there food in the house?”

“No,” she says casually, “I was like an Ethiopian with the belly and everything. That was during the time my dad went away.”

Over the years, my own experience is that children love their parents no matter how hard it is at home, or how long the abuse or neglect goes on for. Many abused children choose to stay with their parents, or run back home when welfare removes them. Most of the children who die from abuse suffer from neglect over the long term. Lack of supervision, stimulation, food, shelter, clothing, education and love is what kills children in this country. The kind of childhood Ella was living is the most dangerous of all.

Ella was loyal to her mum. When her mother felt threatened, she made Ella promise she wouldn’t leave to live with her father. “If you go, then I’ll have nothing to live for and I’ll kill myself,” she would tell her. Ella would respond with, “I’ll kill myself too, Mummy. I would never let that happen,” and I watch her own mothering indignation kick in. “Fancy that,” says Ella. “Imagine getting your own child to promise you that.”

Twenty-five years ago, the courts weren’t quick to award custody to fathers. But Ella’s father was tenacious, and finally Ella, as an eleven-year-old, went to live with her father and stepmother in a very stable average life. She started going to school regularly and could count on meals. Her father was an auto electrician, and the already toughened-up tomboy learned everything there was to know about cars.

A few months later, soon after she’d settled in, the phone call came. Ella’s young, pretty mother had died of an overdose. The chaos was finished, but Ella was grief-stricken and she tells me her life was never the same. “Why do you think I’m a drug addict?” She laughs with no real emotion at all. She’s not a very emotional person, she tells me. Never one to cry much.

Her adolescence was, by her account, fairly normal. She finished twelve years of schooling, keeping more or less to herself. She had a boyfriend for two years who adored her, but she found him too clingy and, for her, too negative. “I’ve always tried to find the best of a situation,” she says. “No matter how bad it is, I’ve always tried to look for the good in it.”

She says it took her two more years to get rid of this boyfriend, which seems odd. Ella comes across as tough as nails, but maybe she was softer then.

After school she got a job as a sales rep with an electronics franchise, company car and all. She was there for a couple of years and life was going well.

If you believed in such things, you might call it destiny that Ella pulled into the servo after she finished work that day, over a decade ago.

They immediately struck up a conversation about her wheels. Jeremy offered her a set of rims that had fallen off the back of a truck. He told Ella he would give them to her if she went out to dinner with him.

Ella said she’d be more than happy to skip dinner and pay for the rims herself. They kept talking and checking each other out. She mentioned she was dealing on the side, which gave Jeremy another chance to get her phone number. He started using drugs again as a way of seeing Ella.

After some weeks and much coaxing by Jeremy, she changed her mind. One night, he didn’t call at the time he’d promised. Ella realised she missed him. Two years later their first child was born, and four years later a second. Somewhere in there they got married, in a low-key ceremony, and remained side by side.

Ella didn’t need much training in keeping up with Jeremy, and vice versa. The last time the cops took him, Ella was there. He’d been on the run again for months when finally they found him around the corner from home. Twelve police made a scene in the suburban street and the couple did not go down quietly.

Ella says that when Jeremy was being taken, the cops twisted his arm back behind him, and twisted his hand behind his wrist. “Could you go a little easy on him?” his wife said. The cop punched her square in the face.

“Keep going and you’ll come in as well,” he said to her.

“Good,” she argued. “Arrest me and throw me in the cells. At least I’ll be with Jeremy.” The police immediately changed their approach.

Jeremy has done over a year of this three-year sentence. Ella shakes her head when she talks about staying with him. “I told him last time that it was the last one. That’s it. But here I am, still with him.”

“And after all that,” she tells me, “he didn’t need to get locked up. He didn’t have to get in trouble. I told him he was getting lazy. He was going out leaving DNA everywhere, not bothering to wear gloves. And then he decides to jump in whatever car he wants to take, when he doesn’t need to do that. I told him to stop doing that, but that’s him.”

So he could have prevented going to jail this time? “Yeah, of course,” she says.

It’s also ruined her plan to have three children by now. Ella wanted him there for one of the births, since he’s missed both so far. But she says she’s young enough, so she figures they still have time.

“How is your relationship different to other people’s?” I ask her.

“How isn’t it?” she almost shrieks at me. “I want a house, I want a husband that goes to work, that doesn’t go on the run, or is out all night thieving. I want my kids to have a normal upbringing, but … I don’t see it happening for a while.”

By 06-05-04, I should have known better. During my training at the academy, we’d watched a tape on crims who try it on with officers. It was a standard training video: NIDA rejects stiffly acting out life’s great issues. A female prison officer appreciates a crim’s compliments, which grow steadily over the days recorded on the eleven-minute film. Before you know it, she is out of a job, piecing back together her life and her reputation, and he is nowhere to be seen.

Some months before, my colleague Max and I had discussed the application of the department’s Duties of the First Responding Officer to everyday life. The DOFRO is the instruction list for the first officers to arrive at the scene of an emergency. If people followed the DOFRO procedures in their interpersonal relationships, we decided, life would run a lot more smoothly.

The first officer to attend the scene of an incident is instructed to implement the following steps:

Determine and assess
: Figure out what the hell is going on, how bad it is and how bad it could get.

Establish or notify communications
: Talk to the person if they’re still alive or tell someone else quickly and ask for back-up.

Contain and isolate
: Shut the door if it’s messy in there, and try to stop the blood from spreading.

Evacuate all non-essential personnel
: Chuck out the sticky beaks. Get rid of anyone that doesn’t need to be there.

Establish perimeter control
: Set the boundaries up. Decide who may enter the area and who may not.

Take charge until back-up personnel arrive
: While you are on your own, you are the authority at the scene. Maintain that control until someone more senior than you can take over.

Report to command personnel after the incident for debriefing
: Get the therapy you need.

In my case, I’d believed I had perimeter control, even if I hadn’t evacuated all non-essential personnel. I had tried to take charge, but although I had established communications, there was no response crew to call for. Who was I supposed to tell? By the time I reported to appropriate personnel, my Standard Operating Procedure was an epic fail.

At 2.15 on a Thursday afternoon, 6 May 2004 to be exact, there Jimmy was again at the gate of the Coach House, waiting to see me. He knew that staff finished their lunch at 2 pm, and that not long after we were often found in the garden area having a cigarette. He made his way in past the guards, who had come to know him as a regular visitor there. He offered me one of his White Ox rollies, a generous gift for a voracious smoker with limited tobacco. We sat on opposite benches and smoked, and he made conversation, which we both knew was superficial, about his case. Jimmy was arguing a line of defence that was implausible, which made him look much more innocent than was possible.

“It’s not going to happen,” I told him. “You can’t just do whatever you want and hope it’ll work out.”

“Yes, I can,” he said. “I could pick you up and carry you over my shoulder out of here, if I wanted to.”

The thought of this was hysterical. I pictured Jimmy flinging a not-petite me over his shoulder like a sack and waiting for the guard to let him carry me through the gate to … where? The yard? His cell? He lived in his own world.

“What do you want from me?” I asked him. “Why do you keep following me around?”

I sat there in plain view of the towers, whose brick eyes were watching, as well as those crims and officers nearby. Being in jail means acting as if you’re being watched all the time just in case you are, since there’s always someone waiting to trip you up. I concentrated on acting natural, keeping a distance, and averting my eyes, which only ever makes you look and feel conspicuous.

“You’re the most special person I’ve met in a long time,” he said. I knew this was ridiculous, because I was one of the
only
people he’d met in a long time, but it was time to hear his reasons for making my life so hard.

“You don’t meet a lot of people,” I said.

“I know a lot of people. I’ve met a lot of people before you. I can’t help the way I’m feeling about you.”

“I don’t want to lose my job.” Surely I wasn’t having this conversation. “Can’t you feel that way about me from 5 Wing? Can’t I keep my job, too?”

“You don’t have to lose your job,” he said. “But why would you want this job anyway? You’re too good to be in jail. You haven’t done anything wrong, so why should you be here? This is hell and you don’t belong here.”

“I want this job,” I told him. “I worked hard to get this job, and it’s not fair that you want to take it away from me. You keep turning up and they are watching me. And you know it. It’s not fair.”

“And what are they going to see? We’re not doing anything. You can keep your job. I don’t care. I just don’t think you should have to be here, that’s all. It’s putrid in here. And you’re too special.”

“Please!” I said. “You’re a crim. You’re a crook. You’re a bank robber. You lie for a living. What do you want from me?”

“Yes, I do,” he answered. “I know this is not what you planned. Believe me, it’s not what I planned either. But you can’t tell me there’s nothing going on here.”

And it was at that moment – if you wanted to mark it on the calendar, somewhere around 2.43 pm – that I stood at the edge of the cliff and made a decision. It was the moment which defined all that was to come. I knew that muster was at 3 pm, when he would go back to his cell and soon after I would go home to my flat, and we would both do headmiles.

So it was then, with Jimmy saying, “Come on, let’s jump,” that I could have, should have, would have turned around and walked away from the edge, saying, “Inmate X, I can no longer have further interaction with you. I will inform my supervisor of this discussion, and the risks to my safety. If you approach me again, I will report you immediately to the nearest officer and ask that they remove you from the area.”

I could have turned 180 degrees around, back to safe land, and kept on walking. I could have left it there and carried on with my work, quite possibly pursuing a career in working with the incarcerated. Maybe I should have thought through the consequences more closely. But I didn’t do any of those things.

My treatment, the inmates’ treatment, and the treatment by those in blue of each other had worn me down. I know that by 06-05-04, I no longer believed what I had eleven months earlier. I no longer felt beholden to the side that was supposed to protect the community. My loyalty had not necessarily switched to those behind bars, but I had learned by then that the legal system is about many other things, such as money and connections and political power, and if justice were to get too much in the way, the system would fall apart. The law is an ass.

And right then, speaking with Jimmy, I chose to forget who we both were. I looked at him, with his practised, uncomfortable but confident smile, then down at the rocks that vanished into nothing, a valley whose end I couldn’t see through the clouds, and put out my hand. Following an armed robber’s lead, I decided to jump with him.

“I have to say,” I told him, “that I have been thinking about you, too. And it’s not right, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Go with it!” he said. “‘Go with the gut,’ I always say.”

“But, my job.”

“Don’t worry about your job.”

“And does this work on the outside?”

“Yes, it does. It will.”

“I’m going upstairs now. Please don’t say anything. I have to figure out what to do.”

“Mum’s the word,” he said. “See ya.”

He got up, nodded and headed for the gate, waited for the guard to unlock it, and left. I smiled at the guard and, trembling, made my way upstairs to figure out my escape.

By the end of the 45-second walk to my office, I was a different person. I had steered my ship off course. My heart was racing as I sat at my desk, beating out a string of second thoughts: What have I done? What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?

I knew that my time there was over. Before 2.43 pm I’d had choices. Now I had none. There was no way Jimmy was going to let this go. He was going to pursue me. I had admitted too much, so much – it was out there. The inmate now had control. Before 2.43 pm I could have reported his behaviour to the authorities, who were ever ready for such complaints. But now there was no going back. I had handed him permission to think the unthinkable. I had crossed the line over into his world, and sacrificed my own. Whatever he felt for me, I knew then, was not as important as what he felt for himself. He would never let me get away with any back-pedalling.

Sitting in my chair that Thursday afternoon, pretending to work, all I could see were the ICAC men, in suits, busting through the door. Seizing my computer, my files, escorting me out. I saw my name in a story taking up one-sixteenth of a column on page four of the
Daily Telegraph
, my career over. So the first thing I needed to do was get my stuff out of there, before any of this began and I never saw my belongings again. I scanned the room to see what I could start siphoning out in my clear plastic work bag.

Would they know I was escaping, even if it was slowly? If I was to salvage anything from this year in jail, I would have to start with the small, personal and important. And there I sat, feeling stupid and excited and scared. I’d fallen for a criminal, which was as clichéd and embarrassing as it could get. Guys in jail are desperate. They’ll do anything to be near any woman. Everybody knows that. Toddlers know it. Any grown woman who believes their con man’s lies can only be fat, desperate, dateless and just basically sad, sad, sad. Still, that wasn’t how I saw myself, which was disturbing, because it meant I was now deluded too.

I made it through the afternoon, and with Jimmy locked in, I could almost forget that I had thrown myself into a great abyss only hours before. By dinner time I was thinking that maybe it would all be OK. Maybe he would let me be and we could see what unfolded over time. Maybe it was a spark that would die out, and this had all been just a strange conversation that went a bit too far.

Wrong again. The next morning, an hour after I got to work, Jimmy’s mate Louis turned up and asked if he could see Drug and Alcohol Services. I let him in and he sat in my office. “Jimmy wanted me to give you this,” he said, handing me a folded-up piece of paper.

I did my best impression of nonchalance, mixed with a little understated surprise. “Oh? OK. I’ll look at that after. Now what’s going on with your court?”

We spoke for a while about programs he could apply for which might make the judge view his charges differently. This was unlikely considering that his drug trafficking had been record-breaking in its scale nationwide. But again, unspoken, was the mutual knowledge that if he was going to be running messages for Jimmy, we needed something to show for his visits to D’n’A.

The piece of paper sat in my drawer, neutrally, for the rest of the day. I guarded it closely but was too afraid to put it in my diary or purse or anything that would imply consent to or collusion with its contents. I knew what was in there, and if I could get it past the gates, I would be safe to indulge in it. Just after 5 pm, I carried it through the gates and made it to the car. Once inside I opened up the letter and began to read. It said everything I wanted it to, which at the same time was everything I didn’t want. I folded it back up quickly and drove straight home. That weekend I spent mostly in bed, racked with terror. And wanting to see Jimmy again.

The letter read:

So you find yourself looking at my world with a new contempt for how it really doesn’t work … I sit in my jail cell and I try to make sense of it all.

I know you never went out to fall for a crim but by the looks of things that’s just what happened.

This is where I begin to have a problem but before I go into it I want you to know it is a problem I gladly take on.

Now, as a friend, I feel I must warn you against getting close to anyone who lies, steals and generally takes advantage of any given situation at will with no concern for the effects on others.

As a friend it must be said.

The problem is I am not just your friend, so in a sense it no longer helps. It doesn’t sit well with me that I let you into my life but now you are a part of it I am not willing to let you go.

Yes, you are now the lover of an inmate and that’s the cold hard truth. What do you do with it? It is no longer just up to you. It has a life of its own.

We both know how bad it could get but we just don’t know how good it could be and that alone drives me on.

I no longer want to waste time with idle chitchat about commitment. It’s time for us to enjoy the pleasure of each other’s company.

I’d been right about one thing: there was no getting out of this. I spent the next three weeks at work trying to avoid Jimmy. He spent his time strategically planning his movements so that he could cross paths with me. I had brief conversations with him, long enough so as not to appear to treat him differently and yet not long enough to infer favouritism. I knew the way the gossip spread, and, more paranoid than ever, I strained to do the right thing by every element of the jail. Jimmy would not let it be. Finally he was called into the deputy’s office and told not to go near me or the Coach House.