The Devil's Garden (17 page)

The Williams's Californian bungalow house in the ritzy bayside area of Cottesloe is shielded from the street by a tall fence and greenery. The house is now a ghoulish tourist attraction, people slowing down as they drive past and pointing. I have decided that, instead of taking my chances with another telephone interview, I will go to the house on the off-chance of finding someone home. The gate is closed but not locked and I warily open it and walk through. A leaf flies past me, airborne on the slight breeze and I jump in fright, dropping my notebook. Berating myself for being ridiculous, I realise I am nervous. The gate has clicked shut behind me and I am alone in the courtyard. My fight-or-flight adrenaline has kicked in and I need to make a fast decision whether to continue or turn back. I take a long, deep breath and stride to the front door.

Norma Williams answers my knock and peers at me through the locked flywire screen. Her face, denuded of makeup, has the exhausted, washed-out look of the hunted. She shakes her head when I tell her what I want. No, she will not talk to me, she says. No, her son won't either. I think she will close the door in my face.

Petite with light grey hair, Norma is dressed neatly in a denim skirt and a muted coloured shirt in geometric patterns. Her voice has a martyred air, her words cushioned in a sigh. Her soft voice rises and falls with the hint of a mewl and frequently trails off, leaving sentences unfinished. 'Oh well . . . You know . . .' The dark, wide passageway behind her shoulder is spotlessly clean, but a faint, musky smell wafts toward me, as though the home needs to be aired. It strikes me as a fortress, in which the family hole up against the world, Norma the guard of the palace. I shuffle in the intense February heat, silently willing her to invite me inside. She doesn't. Instead, she holds court from behind the door while I am condemned to stand in the 35-degree furnace for more than an hour.

There is someone else inside the house, though I neither see nor hear him. Norma's husband, Jim, sequestered from prying eyes, is watching television in the room off the hallway. I recall a story a Perth journalist told me of the day he attempted an interview with Norma. 'Her husband is significantly taller than she is – a giant in comparison – and after I spoke to her for a minute or so, Jim appeared at the doorway. "He is known to be a nice bloke, and he was simply trying to defend his family. I don't want you coming 'round here upset-ting us anymore," he said. The reporter thought Norma would close the door on him, but the opposite happened. "Go away, Jim," she ordered her husband. "Go back in the lounge room." So this big man slunk off, just as he was told to do.'

Norma and Jim have long since celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, and she smiles when she mentions his name. 'He's a gentle, gentle man,' she says. Jim had a stroke some years back and doesn't deal with the media. He is the invisible partner. I peer back at this 74-year-old woman and reflect on what a police officer said to me. 'Met the mother yet, have you? Don't be fooled by appearances. She is a real control freak.'

'Mrs Williams,' I start. 'People say you are very controlling of your family. Is that true?' She looks startled, as though I have verbally slapped her.

'No, it is not!' she replies, more hurt than indignant. 'I have never tried to run my children's lives. People who know me well say I've always been too soft with them. Lance comes and goes as he pleases. Who said this? The police?' She sighs. 'They just think they can say anything they like.'

Fed up with the constant carping from the media questioning why Williams became – and remains – their prime suspect, a former senior Macro insider decides to disclose to me previously unknown, intimate features regarding Williams's behaviour. 'We had him under constant surveillance, so much that we knew his every move, day and night. What we saw often wasn't pretty, but everything is documented in the police files. Everything.' He pauses, weighing up whether to continue. 'We didn't just target him because we could,' he says. 'It's all fact, and if and when there is an inquest it will be revealed.' According to psychiatrists and profilers, he says, Williams was a 'square peg in a square hole' for the murders. 'The fact is, he wasn't nominated by an outsider. It was his behaviour that put him on a collision course with us. It is quite possible that he has murdered these girls. He may not have, but we cannot eliminate him.'

He has, he discloses, been involved in 'very serious and extreme acts of violence' in the past. 'I can't tell you what it is and he wasn't charged for it, but we saw everything in his background to support our suspicions about him and the benefit of the world's leading psychiatric minds back up our beliefs.'

They know his routines. The incessant driving and watching, the odd behaviour. They follow him as he goes to prostitutes, spending up to $300 a time, sometimes three times a day, and they talk to the girls in the brothels. They always remember this client. He jokes with them, they say. He's childlike, boyish, with an insatiable sexual appetite.

'This is not the single, naïve boy the press presents him as,' the insider tells me. 'He is absolutely and utterly preoccupied with sex and with following women.' He takes the prostitutes presents, wrapping them in hand towels when he has finished his mandatory shower, laughing, joking, daring them to find the small gifts. Never intercourse, only hand relief, sometimes satisfactory, sometimes not. He returns, often to the same prostitute, forming a bizarre bond with them. He tracks one, with the pseudonym 'Angel', down at home where she lives with her parents, who have no idea what line of work she is in. He knocks on her door and she demands to know how he got her address, tells him to piss off and leave her alone before she slams the door in his face.

The police don't know how he found her, either. 'Maybe he tracked her through her number plates, or perhaps he followed her home one night. Who knows? The point is, she didn't welcome his advances.' My next questions are obvious, and he pre-empts them before I ask. 'Yes, the girls did look similar to the Claremont victims, and, yes, they did know who he was after we started overt surveillance. They saw him on television.'

But what if police have got it wrong?
What if they have got it wrong?
Police have heard this question before. 'All the indicators are, from our surveillance, that we were right to keep on his wheel. All the indicators.'

They track down the former girlfriend that Lance took to the movies when he was 16 years old. She is in her 40s now, and is startled that police are interested in talking to her. 'Tell us about your relationship with him,' they ask and she laughs, outright.

'Relationship? What relationship! We went to the movies once and held hands, that's all. I met someone else straight afterwards.' The police look at each other. This is a far cry from the story Lance has given them, of being in love with his teenage sweetheart, the love of his life who dumped him and broke his heart. 'We took the story to world-renowned psychiatrists who said it's the classic case of unrequited love, with fantasy and rejection. There hasn't been a girlfriend since.'

An electronic bug placed inside the Williams's home picked up the subtle nuances in the house. 'Issues were shoved under the carpet,' he says. 'After we went overt in our surveillance, and would knock on their door asking more questions, the family would act as if nothing had happened after we left. Saathoff, a leading criminal psychiatrist, analysed what we picked up in that house. He commented that the relationship between Mum, Dad and Lance is like a three-legged stool. Take a leg away, the unit falls over. They are so symbiotic, they start and finish each other's sentences.'

Lance is treated like a 14-year-old in the household. On one occasion the bug picks up an argument between Lance and his mother. It is a trifling matter over what to have for dinner: beef or lamb? Lance loses the argument and is sent to bed.

Norma sighs again when I ask her if the story is true, if Lance is female emasculated. 'Oh, there are so many stories. So many.' She appears bewildered by the whole situation, as though nothing will ever surprise her again. 'When Lance was recuperating from a depressive bout, he took some cooking lessons at rehab. I may have suggested he try things a different way and he may not have liked that. He can be moody, difficult nowadays since this whole business started. He gets into arguments easily. But I wouldn't have sent him to bed. He would have just gone, himself, maybe in a temper.'

His temper. It peppers Norma's conversation, the sudden explosive flashes of anger that ignite without warning. She admits that Lance's mood swings can be hard to live with. 'Most people would tell him to get out, I suppose,' she sighs. 'But, oh well, you know. He's our son.' There is an edgy weariness in her voice, as though she is tired of tiptoeing around her own home for fear of triggering an explosion from his temper.

'You know,' she adds, almost as an afterthought, 'Lance wasn't like this before. It's only since they've been hounding him. The police have got a lot to answer for.'

Many psychologists believe that serial killers have often suffered a trauma to the head in their childhood. I ask Norma about the severity of the blow to the head when he was 14. She thinks about it for a second. 'It was nothing major. Not serious. But yes, he hit his head.' She shifts on to another foot. 'I'd better go, now,' she says, but makes no attempt to move. Virtually imprisoned in their own home, perhaps talking to a stranger – even a stranger who is a journalist – can break the endless monotony.

It wasn't just Lance who was under surveillance. When Norma or Jim had to leave the house, they were recognised by the public. 'It was just terrible,' she says, her eyes panning past me to the gate as though someone might suddenly walk through, uninvited. 'Terrible. The police were getting around here of a night-time, sort of sneaky. I think they've probably gone now, but how would we know? They still could be around the place. They could be anywhere.'

They were. In the ceiling cavity above Williams's desk at work, police secreted covert surveillance equipment. But it wasn't as secretive as they planned. Without warning, the monitoring equipment, the size of a mobile phone, fell out of the ceiling, hanging by a thread above his desk. His work-mates watched in alarm as it fell out, but Williams didn't. 'He didn't bat an eyelid,' Stephen Brown says. 'He looked up, looked down and then went back to his work.' The camera also picked up something else: Williams working at his L-shaped desk, turning every so often to re-stack a pile of A4 papers. He counts and stacks, then counts and re-stacks, over and over again. Moulds them to shape so they are perfectly square, and then does it again. An obsessive-compulsive ritual.

Macro officers also talk covertly to some of Williams's female workmates. 'This was prior to him being named as a suspect,' Brown says. 'They told us that he can fly off the handle so fast that they have no warning it is coming. They have been known to ask supervisors not to be left alone with him to lock up the office or to be left alone in the room with him. He has the most mundane processing job in the Western Australian government: stamping permits. No stress – yet he explodes to anger for no reason.'

Using funds partly provided by the Secure Community Foundation, in mid-1998, Dave Caporn and Detective-Sergeant Paul Zanetti travel to the United States to meet with Park Dietz, recognised as the world's foremost forensic psychiatrist. Following a two-day review of Macro, Dietz tells Caporn he could not come up with a strategy that hasn't already been tried, apart from a polygraph test. But he does offer one possible, but very unpalatable, solution. 'To solve Claremont,' he says, 'you need another offence.' With already intense pressure from the media, internal police and politicians, that is the last thing they want. Dietz, unable to travel to Australia because of a back problem, recommends Macro consult with criminal psychiatrist Dr Gregory Saathoff, who comes to Perth for the first time in 1999. Impressed with the Macro taskforce's strategies, Saathoff leaves them with an enigmatic message. Referring to the suspects and investigation, he says, 'When this case is solved, it will be the case study of all case studies.'

Following separate reviews in the US by Dr Park Dietz, and then Dr Janet Warren, Associate Professor of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia and liaison to the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI, FBI criminal profiler Greg McCrary and retired Lieutenant Eddie Grant undertook yet another paper-based review. McCrary had forged a reputation as the profiler who spoke directly on television in 1992 to the unknown person who had abducted, raped and murdered 15-year-old student Kristen French. 'If you are watching,' he said, 'I want to tell you that you are going to be apprehended.' The killer's family, he warned, were in danger and particularly his accomplice and wife. McCrary's strategy worked. Seven months later the killer's wife – who
was
his accomplice – went to police with details of two murders and a series of rapes for which her husband was subsequently convicted. These reviews were a part of the process of casting a critical and independent eye over different areas of the investigation, but important as they were they did not achieve results. Robin Napper, a former high-ranking officer in the British police now living in Perth, was not surprised. 'What a waste of time giving bits and pieces of the case to different people. By 1998, it was already cold. They needed to push it along.'

The reviews continue. In 1999, Macro calls on the expertise of Detective-Inspector Chuck Burton – the Derbyshire designer of the 'CATCHEM' Database in the UK, used to assist with the investigation of child murders. This is now the eighth review. With the definition of 'child' as a female victim under the age of 22 years at the time of death, the database analyses common elements relating to modus operandi of offenders and compares the psychological traits of the people who have been arrested. It also uses an index to predict matching ages of offender and victim. This review, concluded in consultation with other forensic experts, provided advice to the taskforce on aspects of offender profile and likely behaviour that may be exhibited by the killer. This is the first time that Macro has utilised the combined resources of a scientific database and experienced police officers. Still, the results are negative.

MP and former police counsel John Quigley rues that coppers who worked in the 'old-fashioned' way are no longer able to use those skills. 'By "old-fashioned" I mean they didn't have computer profiling; all they had to rely on was intuition and nous. In the practice of criminal law, you can be a great technician but unless you've got the intuition and nous, you're not going anywhere. It's the same with police. Everyone needs a mentor, and where are they today for these young detectives? Where are all the experienced murder investigators?' Falconer, he says, was known to have little time for the CIB. 'They were strange days, indeed. Falconer himself ended up on a criminal charge of breaking secrecy provisions of the police force. He was charged and committed for trial but the DPP stepped in and stopped it.' At one stage, Quigley says that he spent so much time in court defending cops from their own that he hardly ever saw daylight. 'All this litigation was happening in a blaze of publicity, but the damage to morale was incalculable.'

What investigations like Claremont need, according to Quigley, is the old-style detective work. 'Take a former copper like Peter Coombes, for example. He had been involved in that many investigations, including tracking around Australia to find a bloke that no other cop had been able to locate: the Fox, otherwise known as Bruno Romeo. The Fox had leased up to a dozen cattle stations around Australia where he was growing marijuana crops. Romeo had dug out an underground camouflage area and covered it with netting so it couldn't be seen from the air. His wife was in the caravan preparing a Sunday roast when Romeo felt the barrel of cold steel under his left ear and heard Coombes's dulcet tones. "Bruno Romeo – my name is Peter Coombes. You're mine."' Quigley chuckles. 'Not bad, eh? In my opinion he's one of the best investigators in Australia, but he was driven out of the police force during this mad time that resembled the Salem witch hunts and was reduced to laying limestone blocks in landscape gardening, wasting his talents.'

Another investigator who was driven out of the force by Falconer started off an international security company, doing corporate investigations for overseas corporations operating in areas where there is an insufficient police force. 'A South African mining company thought they were being massively ripped off by their executives and called his company. Coombes did the whole presentation in the boardroom, just as he would have for the Western Australian police and they got the blokes. So he's not good enough for the Western Australian force, but he's good enough internationally. This is the calibre of people that Falconer got rid of. But I tell you: if I wanted anyone to look at Macro, I'd go straight to blokes like Peter Coombes. No risk.'

Quigley ribbed Falconer in the press, particularly after he had successfully defended police officers in court. After one monumental battle – which Quigley won – and a celebratory bottle of wine, he banged out an email to the editor of
The West Australian
. 'I must have pressed the send button,' he grins, 'for the next day there was a picture in the paper with a cartoon attached of the police commissioner with a ten-gallon hat over his head. It read something like, "Methinks the midget sheriff has got a hat too big for his head and it's falling over his eyes and ears, he's lost sight of the posse and the bandits have ridden into town and taken over." Detectives blew the cartoon up and stuck it all over the lifts and walls in the police building.'

Falconer admitted, just before he left the job, that he was disquieted about the fact that the Claremont murders remained unsolved. And they would stay that way, he warned, without fresh new evidence.

In June 1999, there is a change of policing leadership, with New Zealander Barry Matthews becoming the state's first commissioner appointed from overseas since 1867. The deputy commissioner in his native country, Matthews stayed with the police force after being admitted as a barrister and solicitor. But despite his academic qualifications, his appointment to the highest police position in WA was not welcomed in all quarters. Bringing to the office what his supporters called a spirit of reform and his critics called the 'cut and slash years', his time in the chair would be marked by controversy and battle royales with government which were gleefully related by the press.

Beleaguered by claims that he had a combative and turbulent professional relationship with Police Minister Michelle Roberts, under his stewardship taskforces came to replace the specialist squads that had dealt with homicides and missing people. Commissioned staff were offered early retirement, a salve for the problem identified as a pyramid top-heavy with management. More than 90 police above the rank of inspector left the force, but detective numbers were not boosted. This, according to its many critics, left a dearth of experience and saw the meteoric rise of inexperienced, younger officers.

But the most important event on Matthews's watch was the Royal Commission into police corruption that delivered its findings in early 2004. They were explosive, and less than flattering. Then came the Argyle Diamond investigation.

'Police looked at allegations that millions of dollars had been stolen out of Argyle,' Quigley says. 'Matthews is in the chair and who do they appoint to do the review of Argyle? Bob Falconer's private investigative firm in Melbourne that he started after he retired: FBIS. Argyle had happened while he had been commissioner, and now he's got the job of reviewing it all! During this process, all the dinkum, highly experienced investigators are thinking, this police force is going to mud; soon they won't be able to find their own shoelaces! They started leaving in droves, and they left behind no mentors in place for the younger coppers.'

In 1999 a police stake-out of Williams's home goes embarrassingly awry. A scout hall opposite his parents' home was the base for the surveillance team, who used the premises 24-hours a day to keep Williams under tight watch. But the squad used something else, as well. The toilet. At a regular council meeting an incensed ratepayer, unaware of the supposedly covert operation, rose to complain that police were refusing to foot the water bill at the scout hall. The complaint was picked up by a reporter from the
Post
, who dutifully ran the piece. Now exposed, the police shed their covert approach and became overt in their around-the-clock surveillance. Regard-less of where Williams goes, plain-clothed police in unmarked vehicles tail him.

'He had to catch a bus one day and they jumped on that to follow him,' Bret Christian recalls. 'They were chasing Williams, and the media were chasing the police. It was like something out of Keystone Cops, but with a marked difference. At its heart, this story is about murdered young women. And there is nothing funny about that.'

Shortly after, the taskforce is again the butt of jibes when Williams's parents' home is burgled in broad daylight. The burglar, disturbed by an elderly neighbour, does not steal anything, but police are forced to defend themselves against biting criticism.

'You'd have to ask,' a reporter laughs, 'that if they can't manage to keep a burglar out while Williams is under surveillance, how are they supposed to find the Claremont killer?' Williams, police respond, was not in the house when the break-in occurred.