The Devil's Garden (3 page)

Despair and hope render the Spiers family pitifully vulnerable and clairvoyants hover like crows at a feast. Don Spiers does not believe in clairvoyants, but for years he will continue to take their calls, locked in a vicious circle. One of them, he reasons, one day may just have the answer. Or they may be his daughter's abductor, offering cryptic clues as to where she is.

One offers a vision of Sarah, her body entombed in marshy reeds at Salter Point, a small distance from the family's Perth home. Don should search this area, the clairvoyant suggests. He must search tonight. He drives to Salter Point immediately, thrashing and fumbling around with a torch in the darkness, alone and knee-deep in rushes and mud. Parting the reeds, looking for a sign, crying softly at first and then sobbing, calling out her name.
Sarah, Sarah.
He struggles home after a few hours in the water, soaked, distraught, empty-handed.

Up to 300 clairvoyants contact Don, all with their peculiar, specific visions. One advises that Sarah is in a house with a tree in the garden and a 'For Sale' sign out the front. Don becomes obsessed, driving around Perth suburbs, peering up at houses. But there are so many with a tree in the garden and 'For Sale' signs out the front that he becomes disorientated, distressed, his car his place of solace where, away from his family, he buries his head in his hands and weeps.

The clairvoyants' obscure visions weary him. One couple has him driving all over Perth with them in the car for two days. Every time their 'vision' is proved wrong, they change the location. After days of fruitless driving, the last insight they share with Don is that Sarah is at a weir where there is a flock of wild geese. The geese are there, but nothing else. 'There's the geese,' Don points upwards. 'And this is a wild goose chase.' He returns home, dismayed.

The family has nothing to go on. Nothing but the mystery of Sarah vanishing without trace. Don angrily taps a finger on the table as he recalls the clairvoyant who described himself as 'No. 1' in Western Australia. 'He charged into our home without invitation, stood in our living room and started blurting out statements as though they were facts,' he recalls. ' "Sarah is deceased," he said. "Her head has been smashed in with a rock." We just stood there, amazed and disgusted. And then his mobile phone rang and he started doing business! "I charge $50 a session," he told the caller. When he hung up, he volunteered that there was normally a fee for his services, but under the circumstances he wouldn't charge me. We were so outraged at his insensitivity, we were all speechless.'

Thousands of different leads pour in from the public. Information about a stranger offering lifts to young women in Claremont the night Sarah vanished; calls from people who want to assist the inquiry but only serve to hinder it further. Two weeks after Sarah disappears, Detective Senior-Sergeant Paul Ferguson, who heads the inquiry, is circumspect about her chances of being found alive. A popular copper with the press who avoids corporate-speak, he has a determined lack of ego and an approachable air that belies a sharp mind. 'Reality must take effect eventually that this young lady has come to harm,' he says. 'But we say to the parents, "don't give up hope, we're trying our hardest". The inquiry team is still working to try and find the lady alive.' From hard experience, Ferguson knows that this is unlikely. He reads and re-reads the motto stuck on his wall. 'Thoroughness + Persistence = Success.'

If anyone knows about persistence, it's Ferguson. He is going to need it.

Western Australia is the largest police jurisdiction in the world, covering often remote and barely accessible areas of 2.5 million square kilometres. The population of almost 5000 uniformed and non-uniformed officers is a far cry from the fledgling colonial service that from its earliest days developed in isolation. A fresh-faced copper in 1972 when he joined the force, Paul Ferguson was seconded to the CIB in 1976 and attained the pinnacle – officer in charge of the Homicide Squad – in 1994. Through the years, his personal motto hasn't changed. It is, he says, an absolute privilege to work in homicide and to speak on behalf of murdered victims who cannot speak for themselves. In 1986, Ferguson was handed the file on a case that defied description. The unrepentant killers would later be identified as husband-and-wife serial killers, David and Catherine Birnie.

What David Birnie, an angular, thin-faced man, did to his victims was depraved enough. That he sought – and received – willing help from his wife, Catherine, in his debauched perversions was beyond comprehension. In early autumn 1987 the pair, both 35, pleaded guilty to the abduction, rape, torture and murder of four women in suburban Perth the preceding year. Three were strangled as they begged for mercy, their bodies tossed into scrub at Glen Eagle Forest, 30 kilometres southeast of Perth. Another was stabbed and axed to death, her body buried at a pine plantation north of Perth. The Birnies' murderous spree had lasted four weeks; the court hearing just 30 minutes. Details of the crimes are so horrific that, decades later, police who worked on the case still shake their heads in horror.

Both highly dysfunctional adults with appalling back-grounds, the Birnies met in their teens, forming an intensely intimate relationship during which they embarked on a series of domestic burglaries, crimes that would become an ominous precursor to the serial killing spree that would follow years later. After they separated, David Birnie married and Catherine worked as domestic help in a house, marrying the owner's son. Despite having five children, Catherine yearned for David; when they reconnected in their 20s, she walked out of her marriage, leaving the children behind. Theirs was a volatile, highly sexual relationship in which David Birnie demanded intercourse or other sexual acts up to six times a day. As a twenty-first birthday present for his brother, James – who would also serve time for sexually molesting his 6-year-old niece – David offered Catherine as a sexual gift. In 1984, during a temporary separation from Catherine, David climbed into his brother's bed, demanding and receiving sexual gratification.

The Birnies had planned to abduct and rape girls a year before they took their first victim, 22-year-old Mary Neilson. The student had ventured to the Birnies' house to buy tyres; instead, she was forced to submit to a brutal rape, which Catherine watched after David steered the petrified young woman into the bedroom at knifepoint. Raped again in the forest where they had planned to bury her, Mary was mutilated after death and then buried.

The Birnies' next victim was 15-year-old Susannah Candy. Imprisoned for days, during which time she was repeatedly raped, Susannah was finally strangled by Catherine Birnie, who had grown tired of her husband's sexual obsession with the teenager. Their next victim, Noelene Patterson, a 31-year-old airline stewardess, had met the Birnies prior to her abduction. After helping push her car to a nearby service station for petrol, Noelene endured the same terrifying ordeal as the other women, raped repeatedly at the Birnie home before being murdered days later at Catherine's demand. Jealous of the attentions David had shown the attractive woman (he would later describe to Paul Ferguson that it was not rape, but that he and Noelene had 'made love'), when Catherine showed police where Noelene was buried, she vented her contempt by spitting on her grave. 'That's where we got rid of the bitch,' she told police.

The final victim was 21-year-old computer operator Denise Brown. As the wind howled through the pine plantation, she was raped for days, and finally stabbed while being sexually violated where she was murdered. Frustrated that her death was taking so long, Catherine expedited the process by handing her husband a larger knife.

The Birnies' reign of terror finally ended three days after Denise Brown's murder when a 17-year-old, semi-naked and hysterical girl ran into a supermarket, screaming that she had been raped. Dragged into the Birnies' car the evening before from where she was strolling near her home in the elite suburb of Nedlands (near Claremont), the girl had been tied to a bed in chains and subjected to repeated rapes by David. Either deliberately or through carelessness, Catherine left her alone and unchained when David went to work the following morning. The girl seized the opportunity to escape through an open window. Within the hour, police had the Birnies in the station for questioning.

Paul Ferguson led the gruelling eight-hour interview. Near the end, he appealed to Birnie to confess for the sake of a victim's mother. When Birnie asked if he could see Catherine, Ferguson knew he had him. 'How many are there?' Ferguson asked.

Birnie shrugged his shoulders, nonchalantly. 'Four.'

'But why did you kill them?' Birnie's response was typically psychopathic.

'Well, if you kidnap someone and rape 'em, you've gotta kill 'em, dontcha?'

Catherine Birnie – a cold-faced sexual monster with an icy demeanour – sickened investigators when she calmly recounted details of what was done to the victims, including her taking photographs as David raped them. While the defence painted a picture of Catherine as a subversive woman who desperately needed to satisfy her husband's insatiable sexual desires, Ferguson saw this 'witch', as he would dub her, very differently. Women, she had told Ferguson, were put on earth to satisfy men. Regardless of what men did, that was a woman's role. Each sentenced to life imprisonment, Justice Wallace showed the court's disgust at the premeditated, shocking crimes. David Birnie, he ruled, 'should not be let out of prison – ever'.

But despite the judge's warnings, it is not the last time Paul Ferguson would see David Birnie.

If the Birnies' deplorable crimes riveted Western Australia, other murders and attempted abductions, equally as heinous, made the news for a short time before sliding off the front page. In 1991, 18-year-old Kerry Turner was last seen hitch-hiking to a girlfriend's house in a Perth suburb after partying all night at a city nightclub. With no money to pay the fare, a taxi driver first dropped her at an all-night café; shortly after revellers described to police a woman fitting Kerry's description climbing into a Datsun sedan. One month later her clothed body, still adorned with jewellery, was found by picnickers near a gravel track off an access road at Canning Dam, 15 kilometres from where she was last seen. Her church-going family, frustrated at their daughter's classification as a missing person, organised their own desperate searches. Police refused to let them see her body, leading to rumours that she had been mutilated. As they would later do with taxi drivers in the Claremont case, police home in on all drivers of blue Datsun 240c cars.

In March 1996, two months after Sarah Spiers disappears, a 21-year-old woman is bashed and indecently assaulted in a lane behind Claremont's Club Bayview. The assault is investigated and no one charged. Police would ask themselves if this, too, was the handiwork of the Claremont serial killer, desperate to strike again.

On 12 January 1996 Detective-Sergeant Dave Caporn – whose name will shortly become synonymous in Perth with the Claremont investigation – is assigned to a murder in Geraldton that will lead to the exposure of a large-scale organised crime syndicate whose currency is cannabis crops, illegal guns and explosives and which will end, sensationally, with the acquittal of a man who was provided with the perfect alibi: another man's confession to the shooting.

While Wayne Tibbs' murder led to the establishment of one of the biggest police taskforces ever seen in Western Australia, police juggle the inquiry into Sarah Spiers's disappearance at the same time. The victimology between the two people could not be more different, but with the clean-up rate for major crime high – about 60 per cent of murders in WA are crimes of passion – in 1996 police can boast that there are only two unsolved murders on file over the past four years.

With the Claremont killings, that is about to spectacularly change. Of equal importance, the West Australian Police Service is about to enter a protracted and uncomfortable period during which they will fight with everything at their disposal to protect their reputation. It is the Pamela Lawrence murder.

In 1994 the Major Crime Squad investigated another brutal murder in the suburb of Mosman Park, near Claremont. By the time this case finished, most people had heard of Andrew Mallard. Of more importance to WA police, they also knew the names of those police officers who had investigated him. This will become one of the most talked about police stories in a decade, involving the top echelons of lawyers, police and politicians.

On 23 May 1994, 45-year-old Pamela Lawrence was found dying in a pool of blood, violently bludgeoned with a blunt object at her chic jewellery store in wealthy Mosman Park. She died soon after and her apparently motiveless murder, with no eyewitness and no murder weapon ever found, would set in place events that would expose serious flaws in the police investigation into her shocking death and have ramifications far beyond it.

Claremont Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) started the investigation into Pamela Lawrence's death. Maverick lawyer turned MP, John Quigley would take a keen interest in the Mallard inquiry. 'I am told' – he elongates and leans hard on the word
told
– 'but have been unable to confirm – that according to high-up police sources there was huge political pressure to get a result in the Lawrence murder. If that is the case, would it be because it fell within the elite electorate of Nedlands – then Premier Richard Court's electorate?'

The Major Crime Squad appointed five investigating officers to the case: supervising officer, Detective-Sergeant Mal Shervill; principal investigator, Detective-Sergeant Dave Caporn; assistants, John Brandham; and detectives Mark Emmett and Alan Carter. More than 130 possible suspects fell under suspicion but by 10 June – less than three weeks after Lawrence's murder – the team singled out 31-year-old Andrew Mallard for questioning. Mallard, an awkward delusional man with drug-induced psychosis, had come to their attention with his odd behaviour. Discharged on 10 June from a psychiatric hospital to attend a court hearing on another matter, he was taken to the police station and subjected to an eight-hour, unrecorded interview – then legal – by Dave Caporn. During this interview Mallard offered bizarre theories on who may have committed the murder, and how. At his trial, he commented that during that interview he had been in 'total confusion to the point where anything that Caporn suggested to me I would adopt'. He was not cautioned or charged during or immediately before the interview.

At the end of the interview, a tussle took place between Mallard and Caporn. 'Mallard's story was that he was attacked by Caporn, and Caporn said that he was the victim of an attack by Mallard,' Quigley would later submit in parliament. 'In any event, Mr Mallard was charged with a minor assault and admitted to bail. It is remarkable that the police let him loose on the streets of Fremantle given they thought he had confessed to murder.' Seven days later, Mallard had a second, unrecorded interview with Brandham, now Detective-Sergeant. To the detective's knowledge, Mallard had spent most of the previous evening at a nightclub where he had been assaulted, and he had had little sleep. After recording the end of this interview, Mallard was formally charged with Lawrence's murder.

However, the police realised there were inherent difficulties in the prosecution case, which was outlined to then-Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), John McKechnie QC. Not least of this was part of Shervill's report, where he noted that,'. . . the rambling admissions made by the accused during interview left doubt in the minds of some investigators as to whether the accused had in fact murdered Pamela Lawrence'. Another problem was the state pathologist's view that the murder weapon – a wrench – that Mallard had hypothesised would have been used to kill Lawrence, could not have caused her injuries. But at no stage during the trial was this mentioned by either police or the crown prosecutor. 'The police must have known . . . that if the evidence went before the court, there was a real chance that the prosecution case would fail,' Quigley said. He also outlines how, prior to the trial, the investigating police changed or excised parts of the witness statements.

Found guilty in 1995, Mallard was sentenced to life imprisonment. Determined to prove his innocence, his family sought and received help from a team of people, including Perth journalist Colleen Egan and highly respected Perth lawyers. While Mallard languished in prison, the case picked up its own steam. By the time the appeals finished, it had claimed more casualties than a wrongly convicted man and exposed faultlines that placed extreme pressure on the investigating police officers and the DPP.