The Devil's Garden (19 page)

The Dodd family emigrated to Western Australia from England in 1990. It was shortly after that they heard news that Margaret Dodd's niece had been savagely beaten to death by her husband, the murder weapon a piece of wood stuck with nails. The young woman's father, a paramedic, attended at the scene, unaware that the call-out was to his own daughter, who died in his arms. The murder was so violent that Margaret struggled for months to comprehend it. 'We didn't know at the time,' she says, 'that a few years later, we would be facing our own shocking situation.'

On 29 July 1999 Hayley Dodd, a shy, good-natured 17-year-old, was en route to a new farm job at Badji, 200 kilometres north of Perth. Last seen by a motorist walking toward the farm at 11.35 am on the same day, she didn't turn up. The following morning, Margaret called 000. The situation, she was told, was not an emergency. It was Margaret's first dealings with authority, the start of the nightmare that would continue for years. They treated Hayley as just another runaway. Margaret pleaded with the police to understand that her daughter would not do that to the family.

'We were very close. I wish she were a runaway. I wish she were. But I knew straightaway she were not.' It was to get worse. 'When we complained that nothing was being done, we were told that we were lucky it was being investigated at all.' Determined to keep her daughter's name in front of the police, Margaret embarked on an obsessive campaign, never letting up with phone calls and letters. It got their attention – and their backs up. Margaret shudders when she recalls the insensitive way she was informed that Hayley was most likely dead. On 24 August 1999 she rang a divisional inspector, begging that sniffer dogs be put in the area where Hayley was last seen. She was in tears, but he was adamant. 'There will be no dogs,' he told her. 'That is just not going to happen.' But this time the inspector went further, his voice dripping with uncontained exasperation. 'Look, Margaret, let's be frank. You don't seriously think that Hayley is walking around, do you? The fact is, Hayley may never be found.'

In shock at the blunt way in which the news had been delivered to her, Margaret gasped, cupping her hand over her mouth to stop the heaving sobs.

'Yes, I had wanted to hold onto the hope that she is still walking around,' she said, before hanging up the phone.

Margaret talks so quickly, and with so few pauses it is hard to keep pace with the conversation. Slightly built, her physical appearance belies her feisty Yorkshire spirit. She once appraised a police officer, whom she believed was not taking Hayley's case seriously, with a critical eye and a dash of her caustic wit. 'I can see a promotion coming your way very soon,' she told him. The officer, pleased with the compliment, grinned and asked her why. 'Because,' she replied, 'they only promote the incompetent.'

He was promoted within a week.

A week after Hayley disappeared, detectives walked into the Dodds' home, uninvited. Brandishing a search warrant, they brusquely demanded that Ray and Margaret declare who they were. Margaret felt the blood rush from her face and steadied herself lest she faint. 'Is this about Hayley?' she asked. 'Have you found her? Is she dead?' Confused, the police looked at each other. 'I rang a liaison officer we were dealing with, who had a quiet word with one of them,' Margaret recalls. 'They nearly fell over themselves backing out of our door. The idiots were there for a drug bust! They had the wrong house!'

Margaret also vented her spleen on Dave Caporn, then Detective-Superintendent of the Major Crime Division, when he rang her. 'We had heard nothing from him – absolutely nothing – and so I was none too pleased when he finally called. He was trying to pacify us after an avalanche of bad publicity.' It didn't work.

Caporn introduced himself. 'Hello, Margaret, you don't know me,' he started in smooth voice.

'Oh, yes I do,' she told him. 'I know exactly who you are. Round face, round glasses, balding. I know exactly who you are.' When Caporn visited with another officer, she deliberately sat them outside in the blazing sun. 'They just about melted. We'd been to hell and back: police not believing that Hayley wasn't a runaway, the whole way the investigation had been handled. I didn't think a bit of sun and my dog jumping on them would do them any harm at all.'

Caporn, she said, would go to great pains to address inaccuracies in media reports and to write her lengthy letters in which he outlined what the police had done. All had the line: 'I ask that you support the investigation by keeping the details contained within the confines of your family members.'

'I wasn't about to do that,' Margaret grimaces. 'We've had so many official assurances that resources have been poured into Hayley's disappearance, but these seem to be just empty words. They didn't like me going to the media but no one had a clue where our Hayley is.' At the end of a visit from Dave Caporn, Margaret quoted an old saying to him. 'You know what they say, Mr Caporn?' she said, suppressing a grin. 'The further up the ladder the monkey climbs, the more he shows his arse.'

In mid-February 1999 Dave Caporn, 38, becomes the youngest officer in the history of Western Australian police to attain the rank of Superintendent. Now in a managerial role in tactical intelligence at the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, his experience is cited. Detective-Sergeant and then Inspector at Macro, where he was chief for four years from 1993. Involved in other high-profile investigations, including the Wayne Tibbs murder. Officer in charge of the Major Fraud Squad. Joining him in the promotion are 22 other officers, including Mal Shervill, who will later figure prominently in the Andrew Mallard inquiry.

By November 1999, as the city starts to gear up for another sweltering Christmas and the holiday season that brings young people out in droves to party, police stop the overt surveillance of Williams. But they do not resile from their resolve. He is, they say with pointed chin, still a suspect. Like other 'persons of interest' targeted by the team, Williams is neither charged nor cleared. Instead, he is doomed to a purgatory of suspicion.

Soon after, an exhausted and drawn Denis Glennon appeared on Perth television confirming his belief in the police force and assuring viewers that an arrest is expected very soon. The police operation, he said, had been a success because no other girls had gone missing from Claremont.

Sarah McMahon's family would not agree.

The last time Trish McMahon saw her 20-year-old daughter, Sarah, she reminded her to say goodbye to her father. 'He's going away on business, Sarah. Don't forget.' Sarah never would have forgotten once but had become troubled and intense, she needed reminding. Deferring her university studies for one year, she had worked that day – 8 November 2000 – at the job she had started two weeks before, as a receptionist at a gardening supply shop in Claremont. In the late afternoon, she took a phone call from a friend who was suicidal and asked a co-worker the fastest route to get to his home. Sarah walked out of the shop into the late afternoon sunshine and vanished.

By the next afternoon, when Trish had not heard from Sarah, she was panicking. Sarah had failed to pick up her sister as arranged the night before and her bed had not been slept in. Trish rang the police and her husband, Danny, begging him to return home. 'Come back. Sarah's missing.' He drives the 1500-kilometre return journey at breakneck speed.

The second youngest of four, Sarah, a perfectionist, was gifted at classical piano and dreamed of becoming a journalist. Blessed with beauty and an arresting personality, she was also plagued with low self-esteem and demanded the most attention in the family. 'It is the squeakiest hinge that gets the most oil,' Trish smiles, ruefully. A loving, outgoing girl, Trish accepts that of all her children, Sarah is the only one capable of leaving home and not making contact with her family. But she wouldn't have done that, she knows. She obsessively goes over in her mind events leading up to Sarah's disappearance. She had been troubled before she disappeared, losing herself in dark classical music and mixing in bad company. Moody and rebellious, relationships with her siblings had become erratic, but the family was close and strong. Danny adored all his children and Trish never doubted Sarah would revert to the loving young woman she had once been.

The police, acutely aware that Sarah had gone missing from Claremont, were on the McMahons' doorstep every day when she first disappeared. After a couple of weeks, that attention tapered off. Terrified of the answer, Trish asked them if her daughter could have been abducted by the Claremont serial killer.

'They said no, definitely not,' she recalls. 'But I couldn't work out how they would know that? How
could
they know that? Until they find the Claremont killer, nobody has a clue.' Police ask the family whether Sarah could have committed suicide. Trish shakes her head. 'I can't imagine her doing that. And if she had taken her own life, I'm sure she would have been found by now.' She also clings to hope, born from a strong belief in God and a mother's prayer, that Sarah is still alive. 'There is as much chance of Sarah being alive as there is of her being dead,' she says emphatically. It has become a mantra, but the passing years tinge her hope with hollowness. 'Why must she be dead? How can anyone say with certainty that she is? That's the point: no one knows any-thing with certainty.' Her voice trails off and she lowers her head in a vain attempt to hide her tears.

Days after Sarah disappears, the family receive a call from a school friend saying she had seen Sarah driving up the hill toward the house. The family is plagued by questions they can't answer. 'Was it her? And if it was, she would have driven into the garage and spotted her father's car there. She thought he had gone away and she would have freaked out. She'd have thought she was in trouble. So did she just drive away again?'

Some nights, it is only Trish's faith in God that keeps her going. 'God hasn't stopped listening,' she says, 'even though I've stopped talking.'

Without warning, the family become the recipients of letters and phone calls from crazed people, clairvoyants and psychics. Always with different information. Sarah is the victim of a cult, they claim. On and on, never any thought for the rollercoaster ride the family endures every time they listen to yet another hypothesis.

Shortly after Sarah's disappearance makes the news, Trish goes to a health shop. The man who serves her gives her some free advice. 'Think of it like this,' he says, his opinion uninvited. 'If she's been held captive, victims are usually only held and tortured for a few days before they are killed, and she'll be dead by now and out of her misery.' Trish stares at him, dumbfounded, before stumbling out of the shop.

The family travels all over Australia looking for her, putting up posters, beseeching police to study Sarah's face. 'Have you seen her? Have you seen her?'

The McMahons cope differently with their emotions in the first few years after Sarah disappears. Trish loses herself in books; Danny shrinks from the world, working obsessively in the garden. It is, Trish says, as though their heart has been ripped out, and she cries when she discusses how grief has broken her husband's spirit. Gardening is the only way he copes, what he does to try to ease the pain of missing a daughter he adores. In an attempt to find some reason in the inexplicable, he sought counselling from Dr Andrew Dunn, whose house they had bought and who knew Sarah, once treating her hand after a horse-riding fall. Trish did not have counselling but panic attacks overwhelm her when she sees mothers and daughters together, and she scans crowds to find Sarah's face. She has become expert at 'silent screaming' – being with people and breaking down without them knowing. They live in a world of 'maybe' and 'if '. When a female body is found, Trish's knees buckle until the person is identified and she berates herself for losing faith. 'Of course it's not Sarah,' she tells herself. 'Sarah is not dead.' There is never any warning from the police that the news program is going to air, never any warning to be prepared.

The reality – that it is very possible that Sarah is yet another victim of the Claremont serial killer – is too hard for Trish to embrace. The mantra 'Sarah is not dead' is the only thing that keeps her sane.

Trish is completely dissatisfied with the police investigation into Sarah's disappearance. 'I don't think they've done enough. I don't begrudge one penny of the money that's been poured into the Claremont investigation – millions of dollars – but I think a lot more could be put into the other missing girls. A lot more effort, a lot more time. They say the police are understaffed and overworked, but I'm not interested in that. My only concern is Sarah.'

In comparison to the saturation media coverage the Claremont girls received, she says, the other missing girls have been virtually ignored. 'There is nothing for them at all. No one remembers them but their families. The Bali bomb victims, for example, have a memorial to them, and it's right that they should have. But they are no more victims than the mothers and fathers and siblings of all the children here who have just vanished into thin air. John Howard said the Bali bombings were an outrage – well, so is this. So is this! These are our children who have been forgotten.'

Trish's eyes, set in a gentle face, are bright with indignation when she recalls that it was the family, not police, who found Sarah's car when she had been missing for ten days. 'We had gone to Swan District Hospital to visit our grandson who was in hospital with a broken arm. We couldn't find a park, went round and round until we eventually did. And there was Sarah's car, right behind us! We were overjoyed, thought she was in hospital and that is why she hadn't contacted us. We ran screaming through the corridors, joyful, calling out her name. But she wasn't there.' The driver's side door to Sarah's car was closed, but not locked and the window behind the driver's seat slightly open. Her handbag was on the floor, tipped over. But there was no sign of Sarah.

Trish recalls a police constable who said, when they found the car, 'I didn't used to believe in God, but I do now.' The family's hopes were raised in the first critical days after the discovery. 'The police came and cordoned off the car, turned it into a crime scene. It was in a real mess when they brought it back to us, but they hadn't found anything of any value to them. They found some fingerprints of people who could be accounted for, they said. That was all.' Unbeknown to police, Trish's son had deliberately placed his fingerprint on the vehicle, to ensure police were thorough in their testing. They missed it.

Sarah's mobile phone was also missing, and the family believed that it could provide real clues as to where she was. 'Police had found it 18 months before they told us they had,' Trish says. 'When I asked why they failed to mention it, I was told it was because it was an ongoing inquiry.' All three McMahon girls had special rings, a filigree with an antique coin. Given the fact that jewellery had been taken from Ciara Glennon and Jane Rimmer, they asked Trish about jewellery that Sarah had worn. 'They wanted to look at my other daughter Amanda's ring. When they left the house, they left the search warrant behind. They came back for that and left their street index behind. When they returned to pick up the index, they left a briefcase behind them. This was Major Crime, the people who were leading the search for our precious daughter. It didn't inspire much confidence in us. Not much confidence at all.'

Police, Trish says, now have nothing to do with the family, apart from the phone call that came in the day after 'He Who Waits' – a telling examination of the Claremont case – aired on
Australian Story
in February 2004. 'I took a phone call from a police officer who announced that he was our new liaison officer. I was speechless and angry. What utter incompetence! "I didn't realise we had an old one," I told him.'

Trish keeps Sarah's memory alive, regularly freshening her bedroom and, on the nights she is most distressed, sleeping in Sarah's bed. She looks out her window and up to the sky, talking to her daughter. 'Your sky is my sky, your stars are my stars. Where are you, Sarah? Where are you?'

Bret Christian is not convinced that Sarah is not another Claremont victim. 'Without a body', he says, 'how can anyone know?' But another Perth journalist, who requests anonymity, is in regular contact with police sources. He tells me police know Sarah is dead and also know who is responsible, but they are unable to find her body. 'A relatively senior police officer gave me the information about Sarah,' he says. 'There was all this scuttlebutt about her possibly being a Claremont victim but he told me, categorically, that that is not right. A female police informant told him she had helped a man clean up the crime scene where Sarah was murdered. It was a real mess, but she didn't help dispose of Sarah's body. This man, a nasty character who is well known to police for attempting to murder a prostitute and has an extensive criminal record for drugs and violence, had some drug involvement with Sarah.' The journalist is convinced police are right. 'You're wasting your time if you're going down any other path about Sarah. This information is definitely correct.'

So what happened to Sarah McMahon? How could a young woman simply vanish into the ether without anyone noticing anything? Is it too much of a coincidence to think that she just happened to disappear from Claremont? Certainly she was troubled, but not enough by all accounts to take her own life, and not enough to stay away from her family for years without contact. It is not in the police's best interests to admit that she may well be a victim of the Claremont serial killer. That would put the number of victims that they now categorically acknowledge to four. Where would it end?

Sarah was a young, bright, intelligent woman. Who did she know outside her immediate circle of friends? Who would she trust enough to get into their vehicle? An older person she has met before? An acquaintance or friend of her family? There were no sightings of her once she left her workplace, suggesting the chances that she actually disappeared from the Claremont area are high. Why would her car end up in the hospital grounds? What was she doing there? Or had someone else driven it and dumped it in that area, a place known to that person. What happened to Sarah McMahon?

Police have named the person they believe responsible for Sarah's disappearance to Trish and Danny, but Trish does not believe he is responsible. 'They clutch at straws,' she says. 'Anything but admit they don't have a clue. And they
don't
have a clue. It does not placate us.'

***

I talk to Luke Morfesse about some other missing girls, starting with Julie Cutler. Three weeks before Cutler disappeared, another woman had been abducted and bound after leaving Perth's Sheraton Hotel, and later dumped near a bridge. Could it be the same offender? We move on to other names. Lisa Brown? Nineteen years old, 175 cm tall with dirty, dark-blonde hair, brown eyes and a slim build. Brown, a junkie, mother of two, and street worker, has been missing since 12.30 am on 10 November 1998 from a Perth city street when she was touting for business. Her approximation in appearance to the Claremont girls – hair colour, height and build, but certainly not her profession – drew immediate comparisons with their disappearance.

'The year in which Brown went missing raised fears that she may have been another Claremont victim,' Morfesse says. 'But police are certain that she was murdered by a pimp.'

A pimp. If anyone knows about them it's Con Bayens, 26 years in the force – who headed up Operation Bounty to clear prostitutes out of Perth's Northbridge and Highgate areas. Home to nightclubs, restaurants and brothels, these areas crawl with street workers and their clients, the flotsam and jetsam that cruise at night.

Bayens has a clear interpretation of what happened. 'When the three girls went missing from Claremont, it attracted a lot of media attention. As a consequence of all this activity, no further girls went missing in Claremont. However Lisa Brown and Darylyn Ugle – both known street prostitutes and both murdered – worked the nearby Highgate and Northbridge areas. Did the murderer change suburbs because of the police activity in Claremont? Who knows?' But, he says, he knows one thing for certain. 'Street prostitutes don't have pimps. They perform sexual services, normally fellatio, for $50 a time. The money is immediately spent on a drug hit. All street prostitutes have terrible drug habits and there simply would be no money for a pimp in it. If the police reckon that Brown was killed by her pimp, it goes to show how far off base they are, and how little chance they have of catching the person responsible.'