The Devil's Garden (21 page)

'Nothing is right and nothing is just;
We sow in ashes and reap in dust.'
Violet Fane

The West Australian Police Service is in spin control. At 10.55 am on Tuesday, 2 December 2003 this memo is broadcast to all members of the force.

Subject: Macro Investigation into the Claremont Serial Killings

Staff may have seen in recent editions of the
Sunday Times
a story, then a column, regarding the Macro investigation into the Claremont serial killings. It was a concern and disappointment to me and others that, despite repeated approaches, the news-paper chose not to publish the Police Service's point of view. In essence, journalists from the
Sunday Times
have claimed that the Macro case has not been the subject of satisfactory, independent reviews, and should be. This is wrong and needs to be corrected. It is important that staff be aware of the following information concerning Macro.

Contrary to what was reported, the University of Western Australia's Robin Napper was not approached by the Police to review Macro; instead he held discussions with senior police regarding cold-case review methodology generally.

Since 1996 there have been ten independent, major reviews of the Macro investigation, five of which have not involved a member of the WA Police Service. One review was conducted in the UK and four in the United States. 150 recommendations have emanated from those reviews and have been addressed. We were the first police service in Australia to invite an independent senior investigator to chair a review of a major investigation, by a Superintendent from NSW with extensive experience investigating homicide and serial-murders undertaking that review. Recently, an independent forensic review was initiated and this is continuing. Western Australia maintains one of the world's highest solvency rates for homicides which, over many years, has been comparable or better than the United Kingdom's own rate. While the suspect referred to in the media cannot be excluded from the investigation, this has not deterred investigators from conducting comprehen sive investigations regarding many other persons of interest.

Authorised for Broadcast by the A/C, Crime Investigation & Intelligence Services.

The same month, Assistant Commissioner Mel Hay is invited to participate in a workshop comprised of members of the International Homicide Investigators Association at the University of Western Australia. The free policing workshop, where forensic advances are networked and shared to help solve difficult cases, attracts the interest of members through-out 15 countries. Hay's letter is polite, though firm. Due to 'competing priorities and other commitments', he writes, it is not possible for the police service – including officers from Major Crime and forensic areas – to participate.

John Quigley, 57, started his life as a truck driver before practising criminal law for 25 years, making a name for himself in the small legal fishbowl that is Perth as an eccentric and often brilliant firebrand, a man unafraid to speak his mind. He acted for the police, a lone voice defending them in court, obsessively taking up the cudgels on their behalf. A colourful character, Quigley often sported a Balinese t-shirt which read: 'Admit nothing. Deny everything. And then make counter allegations.' He often used the motto to help police clients. 'This is the way we'll proceed!' he told them. But defending police took its toll. Tired of what he regarded as the shambolic way the police force was being run, in 2001 he sold his lucrative legal practice and entered parliament, hoping to expose the disarray. When Premier Richard Court lost office, he instead found himself sitting on the backbench. It was from this position that Quigley, using parliamentary privilege, would raise the bar on what would become a high-profile, shocking miscarriage of justice story in Western Australia: the Andrew Mallard case.

Working pro bono for Andrew Mallard, who was wrongly imprisoned for the murder of Pamela Lawrence in 1994, in 2002 Quigley brought his incisive legal prowess to the case. By July, he had uncovered evidence that had been withheld from the original trial. The legal team fought hard for police documentation to be aired, but despite the findings proving to be legal dynamite, in December 2003 the Court of Criminal Appeal found the evidence that had been withheld would not in any way have changed the guilty verdict. By October 2004, when Mallard's legal team, headed by Malcolm McCusker QC, is given leave to appeal to the High Court – the stage for eminent judges to reconsider trial transcripts but hear no witnesses – Mallard had been incarcerated for nine years. Their findings were unanimous and damning: quashing his conviction, the High Court found a myriad of issues with which to argue, including withheld evidence and unreliable confessions. '. . . It also became apparent that a deal of [evidence] had been in the possession of investigating police before and during the trial, and had not then been disclosed to Mallard . . .'

The High Court was also scathing about aspects of the police interviews. Mallard complained that detectives set him up to sketch a plan of the shop in which Lawrence was murdered. Asked during a polygraph test why he did that, he replied, 'Because that's what the detectives told me to do. One of the detectives put a pistol in my face as well, in the car . . .' But it wasn't over yet. The High Court ordered a retrial at the discretion of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Robert Cock. With no new evidence, a retrial would always be difficult, but Cock did not rule out the possibility. He was supported in this by Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan, who stated in a media release from 2 December 2005, 'I strongly support the DPP decision to proceed with a retrial of Andrew Mark Mallard and I am unaware of any matters that could not be tested at the retrial . . . There is no information to hand that would warrant me to stand down or stand aside any of the concerned officers.'

Using parliamentary privilege, in December 2005 John Quigley raises the Andrew Mallard case in state parliament. He aims his missile with deadly precision: his speech, picked up by journalists, paves the way for the Crime and Corruption Commission to announce the following month that it will investigate the case.

Urging a presumption of innocence to all concerned pending further inquiries, Quigley says he believes the Mallard affair was an attempt to pervert the course of justice and that the Crime and Corruption Commission was the right avenue through which to investigate the matter. Quigley concludes: 'A man has been in jail for 11 years and the High Court has said it is because the police and prosecution suppressed evidence. This throws a great big question mark over the credibility of senior police in this town at a time when we as a community must place more and more trust in them because of the powers vested in them by the terrorism laws. The Assistant Commissioner [Caporn] in charge of the terrorism laws was one of the investigators involved in the Mallard case. Although there is a presumption of innocence, I am sure that all members share my concern about how people at the highest level in the police department have been conducting themselves.'

But if the police and the prosecution hoped the ripples from the story would quietly fade, they were not only wrong – they were about to be hit with a tidal wave. And if the Macro task-force had enjoyed a relative lack of criticism, able to take refuge in the police line that no information could be given because it is an 'ongoing investigation', the worm was about to turn. And two of those worms, according to many Macro insiders, have names.

Robin Napper and Rory Christie.

In mid-November 2001, Canadian Rory Christie's former wife, Susan Christie, a 42-year-old Australian, disappeared without a trace from her Perth apartment. The couple, who met in Canada in 1995, had moved to Perth after their wedding, where their son Fraser was born. But the marriage, strained by what the prosecution would later describe as mutual 'loathing and hatred', quickly eroded and the pair legally separated. The same year that Susan went missing, presumed murdered, Rory Christie gained full custody of Fraser, based on ugly family court documentation that showed Susan was a promiscuous alcoholic who mixed with equally hard-drinking friends. Despite her body not being found and his protestations of innocence, Rory was charged with Susan's murder several months after she disappeared. The celebrated 2003 trial was itself something of a mini-drama, titillating the public and avidly followed daily in the press. The real murderer, Christie's defence lawyer Belinda Lonsdale enigmatically told the court, could well be a witness for the prosecution. Rory Christie, she said, had neither motive nor opportunity to kill his former wife, but there was no shortage of other suspects who did. The police did not agree. They claimed Rory, then living in a de facto relation-ship, had lied about his whereabouts on the day Susan disappeared, had shown signs of panic when his car was to be forensically tested and had also tried to charter a yacht to leave Perth.

Found guilty, two years into his life sentence Christie's conviction was overturned and a retrial ordered. Canadian blood-splatter expert Constable Joe Slemko ('rent-an-expert' as the police call him) would testify for the second time that the blood found on Rory Christie's tie – the equivalent of the prosecution's 'smoking gun' – was not his former wife's but potentially watermelon juice, rust or horseradish. In a dramatic move, Judge John McKechnie ordered the charges be dropped and that Christie be released due to lack of evidence.

Christie, who bolted back to Canada with his son as soon as he was set free, told a Canadian newspaper that Western Australian police had used 'shoddy detective work' to build a case against him. 'If we held the case to Canadian standards, there wouldn't have been a trial,' he said. 'Everything they did was completely flawed and exaggerated. They didn't care if I was guilty or not. They wanted to get someone.'

Sergeant Brian Cowie, from WA police media, defended the original police investigation. 'It doesn't mean we didn't have the right person,' he said, defiantly, 'but we didn't have enough to convict that person.'

Two months after Rory Christie's acquittal, a government poll released its report that the satisfaction rating for WA police was an abysmal six per cent below the national average. The response from senior officers was that because there had been a delay in the opening of a call centre for the public, the dissatisfaction rating had risen. But journalists questioned this rationale. Eight weeks after Christie's acquittal, no police officer had been assigned to review the Susan Christie murder. Despite assurances that the case was open, it was gathering dust. It soon became obvious why: the case, according to many police, was already solved. There just wasn't enough evidence to keep Christie in prison.

One of the witnesses called in the Rory Christie trial, amongst a phalanx of people including Perth taxi drivers, that Susan Christie knew, was medical practitioner Dr Andrew Dunn. The name rings a bell and I rifle through papers to find my notes. He had started his testimony at Christie's trial by talking about his karate training at the University of Western Australia, later moving on to how he knew Susan Christie. Christie, Jenny Rimmer told me, had once had a drink at the local hotel, since razed, that she and Jane had favoured. I keep flicking through the pages. There it is. Sarah McMahon's family had bought Dr Dunn's house, and he had counselled Sarah's heartbroken father, Danny, after she went missing. Then I find Neil Fearis's notes. It was Dunn who had visited Fearis, sharing the information given to him by a patient that Ciara Glennon was to be offered up as a sacrifice over the Easter long weekend.

Perth seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Not six degrees of separation, but far less. I add another note to the list.
Call Dunn.

There is a pervading sense of parochialism in Perth, the sense that it is locked in a time warp, either unable or unwilling to shrug off vestiges of the past. A city where the adage 'six degrees of separation' converts to three, where the wealthy unashamedly rub shoulders with politicians and where judges attended the same private schools. Where interlopers with pretensions to wealth are snubbed on the cocktail circuit but the nouveau riche, their money built on booming real-estate or mining investments, are accepted in the city's most salubrious areas. A city of traditionalists, of bluebloods, where pedigree
does
matter. And that, according to one faction, is part of the problem. Perth, they claim, is crawling with Freemasons who protect themselves and each other. It is a city where half the judiciary are shaking hands with half the police.

In his inimitable, tongue-in-cheek fashion, Quigley describes in colourful language the taking of the Freemasons' oath. 'They put a bag over their head and a noose, and swear never to betray the brotherhood. They say they will hang and have their life snuffed out as this noose will snuff their life out; believe me, it is a serious business. Judges get up and swear to this, standing on one foot with a bag over their head and with their dinner suit on.' He takes a gulp of coffee. 'People say I draw a long bow, but I don't agree. To understand what is wrong with policing in the West, you need to go back in history.' The force, he says, was alternately run by two factions: the Catholics and the Freemasons.

Quigley's detractors – and he has many – point to what they regard as his, and others', obsession with Freemasonry in Western Australia. It is naïve and fanciful, they say, to claim that the city's power base is held by those who keep each other's secrets. 'The idea seems to be that if you are a Mason you can cover pretty much anything, including murder,' one tells me. 'Of course there is room for corruption always, but the system is open to so much more scrutiny than it used to be. Being a Mason cannot cover a multitude of sins. That's just a paranoid idea of the conspiracy theorists.'

It is the secrecy of the Masons that adds to its enigma. Threats of terrifying violence are levelled at every Mason candidate in case they transgress their codes of secrecy. For only the first three degrees of initiation, the oaths are a warning about the ordeal that awaits the Apprentice should he break that code. In the First degree, the Apprentice must agree to have his throat cut across, his tongue torn out by its roots, and his body buried in the rough sands of the seas, at low-water mark, where the tide ebbs and flows twice in 24 hours. Quigley recites the findings of the Standing Committee of the House of Lords in Britain which handed down its report on elements of Freemasonry in the UK in the 1990s. 'They said that the links between the police and judiciary at executive branches of government through Freemasonry were leading to miscarriages of justice because the judges weren't scrutinising their fellow lodge members. In Australia, after Queensland's Fitzgerald Inquiry, there was a parliamentary committee that looked at the impact of Freemasonry in that state's police force. They also reported that the close connections weren't right. Bottom line is that all police officers should be required to sign a register of their membership to secret societies.'