The Devil's Garden (5 page)

Three days after Jane's disappearance, her parents front a press conference. Looking drawn and gaunt but still hopeful that Jane will return home, their confidence is shattered by the first carelessly constructed question. 'Trevor, can you tell us what sort of girl Jane was?' from a young reporter. The question, phrased in the past tense, sends Jenny into a paroxysm of tears.

The madness begins. The Rimmers endure the same end-less procession of people as the Spiers family. Police. Friends ferrying food. Clairvoyants. Psychics. They have little patience for the seers and rarely return their calls. One psychic with a divining rock stands on the pavement outside the hotel at Claremont before moving to the beach, 15 minutes away, and pointing to a nondescript house. 'Jane is here,' she tells Trevor with authority. 'Or she has been here.' It is useless information, all so obscure. But the Rimmers pass the information on to police, anyway. Who knows? But Jane isn't there.

The family put hundreds of flyers on lamp posts, beseeching help.
Have you seen Jane Rimmer? Phone Crime Stoppers.
Jane's face is at every corner. A person calls Jenny's relative with news that they know what has happened to Jane and who has abducted her. It is an anonymous call; always anonymous. The second last sighting of Jane, outside the Continental Hotel, is captured on the hotel's security camera. She is grinning as she swings around the pole outside the pub. The final poignant sighting of her is standing alone on the pavement for a few minutes, on the corner of Bayview Terrace and Gugeri Street. The camera moves to another area of the hotel. When it pans back, Jane is gone.

Paul Coombes, who started as an investigator and was later promoted to Detective-Sergeant on the Macro taskforce, recalls, 'Police made public statements that they would take all information. The result was that we were flooded with calls from the public, receiving many, many more than even the Milat backpacker investigation. And the case still attracts calls from clairvoyants. But research doesn't back up their claims. There isn't one where it's been proven they have solved a case. In Claremont, no one ever linked any information they gave us with fact. They usually homed in on Sarah, because she is still missing. In the end, we would tell them, "If you know where she is, go out there, take your mobile with you and if you find her, give us a call." We never got that call.'

Police install a second telephone line to free up calls that may lead to information and are compassionate, gentle in their dealings with the Rimmer family. Peter Norrish and John Leembruggen, the Rimmers' liaison officers, call in frequently, keeping them up to speed.

A relentless rain teases and taunts the Rimmer family. Trevor continues to go to work, staring at a photo of Jane on his desk. 'Where are you, Janie?' he asks her. 'Tell us where you are.' Jenny pretends normality, returning to work at the Shenton Hotel and telling herself Jane will come home. It is a mantra, and one she knows is nonsense. 'She's probably gone overseas or met a guy. She'll be back soon.' She knows they are feeble excuses. Jane has no passport and no ambition to travel. And she always lets them know where she is.

Hard rain has fallen for months, a lashing, cold rain that daubs her naked body. A canopy of trees protects her; branches thin as whips bow in mourning. It is lonely here, through the winter months of June to August 1996, as the body of a 23-year-old lies hidden from the world in a sodden roadside verge, lightly covered with foliage. Elegant snow-white flowers with elongated leaves and vibrant lemon tongues grow tall around her, surrounding her in a macabre guard of honour. Arum lilies –
death
lilies.

A lashing rain has fallen for months, forming stagnant pools that wash the evidence away. Pools in which the death lilies grow.

Jane Rimmer's foot peeks from her rough blanket of foliage. The Arum lilies have kept her disposal site secret. A woman, picking water lilies with her children on the dirt Woolcoot Road in rural Wellard, 40 kilometres south of Perth, pauses, then looks again. It takes only a moment to compute what she sees lying on the roadside verge, sprawled pitifully in death.
Oh, God
, she thinks, her stomach somersaulting as she turns her children's heads away.
It's a body
. Within an hour, the area will swarm with police officers.

Fifty-four days of exposure to the filthy weather have rendered Jane unrecognisable. From the moment of her death, nature started its inexorable march toward decomposition. Within 24 hours of her death the insects, working in their rhythmical, cyclical way, zero in, in successional waves, colonising her corpse, laying their eggs in the body's orifices or wounds. The internal tissue begins to decay, turning into gas and liquids, and after just one week the flesh under the skin is of liquid consistency and skin sloughs off it when touched. As the body moves through its ritual of decay, a month after death hair and nails can easily be removed, the trunk is bloated to twice its size and the tongue protrudes. By six weeks, the body resembles what is described in the trade as a 'soup'.

Wellard, in the shire of Kwinana, houses Casuarina Prison and the mockingly named Hope Valley. Tucked away here, out of sight in the verge that captures water like a dam, lying for almost two months in nature's shallow bath at the mercy of the tiger snakes and wild animals that inhabit the area, Jane is so putridly decomposed that only dental and fingerprint records can prove identification. But while she can't tell investigators what has happened, her body can, offering clues to the forensic scientist to calculate the circumstance and time of her death. Using the insects' life span as a barometer, they count back from the age of the bug or larvae to determine how long they have lived on the corpse.

Jane is naked, her clothing, handbag and some jewellery items missing. Police delay broadcasting details of the missing jewellery to prevent the killer panicking and disposing of them. The only piece of jewellery found, much later, is Jane's watch, a small distance from her body. The rain, relentlessly pounding her for 54 days, has turned the crime scene into a quagmire, such a washout that Dave Caporn, with pursed lips and extreme understatement, will describe it to the press as being 'not fertile'. It does not provide any clues. But the lilies surround her, tall as a picket fence.

Trevor Rimmer knows straightaway. Jane has been missing for almost two months and now the police are standing on his doorstep, looking intently at him. They always say 'no news', so as not to get his hopes up, but they don't say this tonight. A handsome man with a gentle face, Trevor says nothing as the police follow him inside. He turns away from them to continue cooking his rack of lamb. The police are used to odd reactions to bad news: shock and overwhelming grief kick the brain into a dull numbness and will keep Trevor buffeted from the pain for a short time, at least. 'Do you want to come with us while we go and tell your wife, or should we just bring her home?'

Trevor stares at them, unseeing. 'Bring her home,' he says.

Jenny Rimmer is at the Shenton Hotel where she works, sharing a drink with friends before they return to the house for dinner. The past two months have been so harrowing that she and Trevor have tried to pretend some semblance of normality. Anything, the small rituals, to pretend Jane will return home to them safely.

Jenny, sitting in the alcove off the main bar, watches as the police walk toward her. An obscene inner voice starts taunting her:
This isn't going to be good, this isn't going to be good
. She feels the police are moving toward her in slow motion. She knows these police officers who have liaised with the family over the months but wants to cringe from them as they approach. She stumbles to her feet. 'Can we speak to you outside please, Jenny?' The bar has fallen silent, drinks and conversation poised mid-air. She feels insensate and cold and her chin starts quivering; from somewhere a hand reaches out to catch her lest she falls. 'Can we have a quick word please, Jenny?'

'You've found Jane, haven't you?'

They didn't want to tell her here, in a bar with people watching, but they now have no choice. They keep their voices calm and low. 'We're sorry. We have found a body. We believe it could be Jane.' A fog has fallen, shrouding her in darkness and she can't hear anything now but a muted scream in her head. She follows the police outside, not noticing as people stand up as a mark of respect for her as she walks past.

Jenny recalls pieces of the conversation, small trivialities the police tell her but mostly she sees their mouths move, and she feels numb and ill.

They want to know cause of death, nod mutely when police tell them what happened to Jane. Her throat, it appears, had been slashed. Nature has betrayed the indignities visited on her, swarms of ants rushing to the site of her jugular vein to feast. It is, as a forensic officer will note with grim irony, a 'dead giveaway'.

Jane's belly button ring is still on her body, and the amethyst ring she wore. But her clothing is gone. Jenny and Trevor brace themselves for the inevitable that they are sure is to follow. Do they want to know? Yes, they do. They can take some consolation, they are told, that it does not appear Jane has been sexually assaulted. It is heartening, a small relief, but one that will haunt them. Are police telling them the truth or simply trying to shield them from further grief? They don't want to dwell in a world of ifs and maybes. They want to know what happened, gritty and sordid as the detail may be. It is their daughter, they say. They have a right.

The police agree. As far as they can tell, there was no sexual assault and definitely no mutilation, dismemberment of the body or bondage. And Jane was not left in a staged, set pose.

At home, they eat in silence the rack of lamb Trevor has prepared, tasteless and chewed over and over in their mouths. By morning, Jenny Rimmer will assume a foetal position, and stay curled that way until her daughter's funeral and for months after.

Jane – meaning 'God is gracious' – comes to Jenny in dreams. Not as the young woman heading off to Claremont for a night out clubbing with friends, but as an 8-year-old child, swinging androgynous hips as she dances to Abba and sings into the broom handle. She wakes and tells Trevor, 'Jane has been here again,' and he knows not to ask. He knows she would only be eight years old. In Jenny's dreams, Jane never grows up. She never goes to Claremont.

Woolcoot Road is meticulously searched, media choppers flying overhead as every object from cans, cigarette butts and hairs are picked up and sealed. An infra-red scanning system is employed to search the bush around the disposal site, detecting objects and other materials foreign to the area by heat radiation. Forensic teams vacuum the bush and tracks near Jane's disposal site, using gauze pads that they repeatedly change. Entomologists, who calculate the time of death from the life cycle of insects and the age of flies that have gorged on the body, go about their grisly task.

Police are also quietly briefed to look for Sarah Spiers, who has now been missing for seven months. They have no doubt she has been murdered and reason the killer would feel comfortable returning to the Wellard area. Sarah's body hasn't been found. He may have dumped her there, and later Jane, believing he would not be caught.

The taskforce goes over and over the 'points of fatal encounter' as geographical profilers call it – the area from where the victim is abducted. Very often it proves to be close to the killer's home, always much closer than the disposal site. The more victims the killer murders, the cockier he – or they – becomes, dumping bodies increasingly closer to home.

Trevor and Jenny have been married 40 years and still touch hands tenderly as they discuss their murdered daughter. They move effortlessly around each other, as couples do after years of intimate familiarity, but they cope very differently. Jenny, brown eyes set in a face chiselled with grief, is not afraid to cry and does so, often. Trevor, quiet and circumspect, is more controlled. Look closer and his heart is splintered into tiny shards, like the spidery lines that criss-cross his gaunt cheeks.

Trevor borders on angry when the police ask him pointed questions about his relationship with his daughter, and when they take blood samples for possible DNA testing. But he understands their reasons. Everyone is under suspicion. Still the phone calls flood in to police, thousands of people offering clues to the killer's identity. Mothers nominate sons. Wives point the finger at husbands. Bisexual men suggest former partners. Early on police form a list of names whose calls should be ignored. They don't have time for crackpots. Prostitutes are asked to go through their 'ugly mugs' file, the photos and names of clients who they know to be sexually perverted or violent.

It is a simple symbol, on a tiny badge: the Arum lily, chosen after Jane's body is found. Underneath, there is an equally simple, one-word inscription. Macro. Normally, the names of taskforces are spat out of a computer at Canberra's Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence. Not this time. 'Macro', meaning 'to look at everything', was chosen by taskforce members themselves. 'To look at everything'.Every possibility.

The taskforce officers choose the symbol as a sign of respect, to honour Jane Rimmer and Sarah Spiers, to keep them focused on the girls' disappearances. Each officer – around 100 at the peak of the investigation – will wear it discreetly on their lapel.

If police know anything about serial killers, it is that their cooling-off period is followed by an overwhelming need to kill again. It has been five months between Sarah Spiers's disappearance and Jane Rimmer's. Odds are, he will strike again soon – if he hasn't already. Mother nature has loosened her grip on the normal controls that balance conscience and fear, has 'stuffed up, badly' as one psychiatrist noted. What police don't know is
when
they will kill again or the motive, the underlying reason why this person is killing women at all. Are they strangers to the killer, or have they met before? Is their murder an act of revenge against women in general? Is he targeting women who remind him of someone else: a dominant mother, a former girlfriend who rejected him, a hated sister? Do the murders, afforded front-page headlines, satisfy some perverse longing for celebrity? Are the killings born out of resentment against a society that the killer perceives does not recognise his worth? What is known of the victims?

Police examine what they know of the girls, the similarities. They are the same
type.
Both young women, aged between 18 and 23. Decent. Well heeled. Well groomed. Both employed. Both out in the same area late at night. Both drinking. Average build. Sarah Spiers: shoulder-length fair hair. Slender. Open, attractive face. Jane Rimmer: Similar hair colour and length to Sarah. Taller at 167 cm. Well proportioned, though slim figure. Open, attractive face.

The police work through the possibilities. Was the killer, or killers, targeting a type? Was it the case, as with American serial killer Ted Bundy, who murdered 23 women and chillingly remarked that 'the victims have to be worthy of me'? Had he watched them in the club or hotel, loitering at a distance, observing their movements, following them as they left? Or was it random, opportunistic as he stood outside his vehicle ready to use a rehearsed line –
I wonder could you help me?
Did he attack them from the shadows and throw them in the car? Did he lie in wait inside the vehicle, dragging them in as they walked past, or wind down the window to engage in casual conversation? Did he monitor taxi radios, know that a woman is waiting for a cab, cruise along and offer her a lift?

How did the women get into the vehicle? How much alcohol had they consumed? Police will not release that information, but concede each woman was highly intoxicated. Jane Rimmer, caught on security camera outside the Continental Hotel swinging around a lamp pole, a young woman with a zest for life after a night out with friends. A young woman just having fun. The memory of that last glimpse of her daughter makes Jenny smile. Jane loved a good time. Sarah Spiers? Her father, Don, is defensive on the subject when it is raised, and emits an unspoken warning not to delve too hard there. It is a protective mechanism, to shield his beloved daughter's memory from prying reporters. Back off. This is hallowed ground.

Alcohol would render the women more vulnerable, less inhibited, impair their decision-making. And the killer would know that. Would know that they are more likely to be approachable, more likely to be at ease.

The team theorises that the girls got in the car of their own free will; that the chances of forcibly abducting a female on two separate occasions, without one person seeing them or without something going wrong, are too remote to be credible. They work on three areas: that it is probable, possible, or unlikely.

Were they forced into a vehicle? Possible, but not probable. If they had not been forced, what made them enter the car? Their ability to assess risk was diminished by alcohol. They have a driving need to get home and have no alternative transport. Would they, under those circumstances, get into a stranger's vehicle? Were they seduced, cajoled or beguiled into the car by someone smooth, well-educated and plausible? Probable or possible?
Both.
Was it possibly someone they knew?
Both.
A trusted stranger, such as a taxi driver?
Both.

Without lucrative crime-scene evidence, strong leads or eyewitness material, police are locked in a deadly game of Blind Man's Bluff. The vastness of their task is more than daunting. The clock is ticking as they shadow box with a deadly stranger.