Call Me Cruel (5 page)

Some 10,000 people are reported missing each year in the state of New South Wales, and in many cases their relatives assure police their absence is not typical of their normal behaviour. Despite this, nearly all the missing soon reappear, and it turns out their absence was completely voluntary. And even when they don't come back and an investigation occurs, the missing person is usually found. Often it emerges that they went off deliberately, not wanting their families to know where they were. Because of this pattern, and because the cost of investigating all those disappearances immediately and fully would be enormous, the police usually don't do much at first, at least where an adult is concerned.

These were some of the considerations on the mind of the officer who spoke with John and Michael that afternoon. Kylie's disappearance was entered on COPS, the police operational database. Then the officer, after considering what had just been learned, decided that in this case there were enough suspicious aspects to warrant investigation, and rang up to the detectives' office on the second floor of the big concrete building. On duty that afternoon were senior constables Rebekkah Craig and Andrew Pace.

Craig would be the only officer involved in the investigation from start to finish. She was thirty-one and had grown up in Narrabri, joining the police force in 1998. After six months at the Police Academy in Goulburn, she'd been posted to Redfern, an area with a relatively big Aboriginal population. There are racial tensions in Redfern largely absent in other city police stations; these were to figure in the story of Kylie's disappearance.

Craig had married a fellow officer and transferred with him to Gosford in late 2003, thereby missing the Redfern Riots by a few months. These occurred on 14 February 2004, after a police car gave chase to a seventeen-year-old Aboriginal boy named Thomas Hickey—known as ‘TJ'—who was riding a bicycle. There was an outstanding arrest warrant for Hickey, who in his attempts to escape lost control of his bicycle and was impaled on a metal fence and died. (There were conflicting accounts of his death. This is the authoritative one reached by the coronial inquest.) Aboriginal people from around Sydney gathered in Redfern and, claiming the police had killed TJ by ramming his bicycle and forcing him onto the metal spikes, rioted and injured many officers. From the safety of her new home on the Coast, Craig watched on television as her old general duties team, with Redfern Railway Station in flames, faced a mob of angry Aboriginal people, some hurling petrol bombs. She was glad she'd left.

It's not uncommon these days to see policewomen so small you wonder how they can carry their enormous equipment belts. Craig is not like this. She's an attractive woman with light-brown hair and a tan, and carries herself with a confidence backed by physical strength. At Redfern she'd been put on plainclothes duties in the detectives' office, not really wanting to leave uniform but finding after a while that she liked criminal investigative work. In 2004 she began the twelve-month detectives' course, a mix of work at Gosford (which came to include the investigation into Kylie's disappearance) and stints back at the academy.

One thing that struck her immediately when she sat down with John Edwards was the name Paul Wilkinson. Craig had actually worked with him when she was stationed at Redfern—Wilkinson had been there too, one of several Aboriginal Community Liaison Officers. An ACLO acts as a sort of buffer between police and the Aboriginal people they deal with. ACLOs must be at least part-Aboriginal—Wilkinson has an Aboriginal mother—but they are not police officers. (There are still relatively few Aboriginal cops in New South Wales.) In essence, their job is to explain the police point of view to Aboriginal people and vice versa, in situations of conflict or potential conflict. It's an important job but a difficult one, because each side suspects the ACLO's first loyalty lies with its opponent. Some ACLOs handle this tension better than others.

In Craig's experience, Wilkinson had been friendly and generally competent, and others who worked with him at Redfern say the same thing. But she'd never been quite sure about him because of one peculiarity. Whenever a police officer at Redfern arrested an Aboriginal person and brought them into the holding cells, the procedure was to do nothing more until an ACLO had a word with them, making sure they knew what was happening and were aware of their rights. Craig noticed that after Wilkinson talked with someone she'd arrested, they were often more hostile than when she brought them in. This surprised her—the ACLO's job was to achieve the opposite outcome—but it hadn't been a big enough deal for her to make anything of it. Wilkinson had moved from Redfern to Marrickville in July 2003, and—Craig was later to learn—had walked off the job there in February 2004 and was no longer working.

Now, in an interview room at Gosford, Craig looked at the phone bills John had just given her and saw that they showed thousands of calls and texts between Kylie and Wilkinson in recent months. Clearly there'd been some sort of relationship, and right away she had an uneasy feeling about Wilkinson's involvement. It wasn't something she could put into words but, like all good cops, she knew gut instincts can be important. She told John and Michael she'd look into Kylie's disappearance.

A few days later Craig called Wilkinson, and after they'd exchanged greetings she asked how he knew Kylie. He repeated the story he'd told Leanne Edwards, about first meeting Kylie at Redfern Police Station some years earlier and coming across her later at Miranda. He said they'd been friendly since then, although nothing more. Then he started to expand, saying Kylie had mentioned self-harm. He claimed she'd tried to hurt herself before and run off—he thought she'd been placed in psychiatric care against her will at one point—and said that recently she'd borrowed
$
500 to buy cannabis. He said that while Kylie had informed her family she was going to the Police Academy, she had actually been going to Sutherland Railway Station to meet an unknown person. This was presented in a rambling manner that Craig was to become familiar with.

For someone her family had never heard of until a few days ago, Wilkinson seemed to know a lot about Kylie. And he sounded nervous. Craig said, ‘Obviously, we need to speak to you, Paul. Can you come in?' She was hoping he'd come up to Gosford: she knew she would be working Kylie's case along with an already busy schedule, and didn't want to spend a day going to and from the city to take a statement. But Wilkinson was hesitant, so she said, ‘How about I come to Sydney?'

‘No, no, no, don't come here,' he said. ‘I'll come to you. I'm busy. I can't catch up with you this week.'

At that stage Craig wasn't sufficiently worried to push things, so they made an appointment for 1.00 p.m. the next Monday. There were plenty of other jobs to be getting on with.

On 10 May, she and Pace went to Louisa's house and searched Kylie's bedroom, from which they took a hairbrush and a toothbrush in case they needed a DNA profile for her. They read the cards addressed to Louisa and Leanne, which John had told them about. One thing they'd been wondering was whether Kylie might have committed suicide—this is always a consideration when someone goes missing for no apparent reason. Craig thought the cards, which had been written recently (because of the reference to Leanne lending Kylie her car), suggested otherwise. They indicated that she had been intending to move out of Louisa's place and make a new start. (Presumably this move was not the train trip she'd made on 28 April: if it had been, Kylie would have given them the cards before she left.) Further evidence suggesting Kylie had not been suicidal included lay-by dockets from Big W and Target dating back only a week or two, and the opinion of her doctor, who'd seen her five times in the three months before she disappeared, that she had seemed happy enough.

The detectives talked to Louisa about Kylie's financial circumstances; they learned she was receiving Centrelink payments and had recently borrowed
$
700 from her grandmother. They spoke with other members of the family and encountered the same problem John had. Kylie had told different people significantly different stories about her life and her plans. This was fairly unusual in a missing person investigation, and it was a problem for the police. It meant they had to look at multiple theories for her disappearance and it raised the possibility that all her stories might be false: if Kylie had lied to one relative, why not to all of them?

Some of the things they found in her room were odd. There were cassettes of telephone conversations she'd recorded, and a transcript of a conversation she'd had in her home with Sean. Craig found this bizarre: it was as though Kylie had been conducting some sort of private investigation, although there was no hint as to why she would have done this.

Back at the office, the detectives commenced the standard checks. Craig's first request for Kylie's phone records was knocked back by a senior officer who did not consider the matter serious enough yet. She pursued other lines of inquiry, checking with the Austrac reporting system to confirm that Kylie had not made any recent financial transactions over
$
10,000. Pace obtained CCTV footage from the Erina Commonwealth Bank ATM at 11.00 a.m. on the day she went missing, plus footage of her from Erina Blockbuster Video the day before. The detectives called various financial institutions to find out about Kylie's bank accounts; they discovered that in recent months she'd maxed out her credit cards and borrowed almost
$
20,000 from various sources. They went back to the family but no one had any idea what had happened to this money. (Eventually they found the full amount of borrowings was closer to
$
24,000, all of which had disappeared.) On 11 May, Craig sent a statewide email to all NSW police, asking them to keep an eye out for Kylie.

Apart from Wilkinson, there were two other ‘persons of interest', as police call possible suspects. These were Kylie's husband, Sean Labouchardiere, and his friend Gary, whom she alleged had raped her. Craig rang Sean, who confirmed that Kylie and he had separated. On the night she disappeared he'd been at home by himself. He said she had borrowed
$
3000 from him in March but had refused to say what it was for. As far as he knew, she did not have any mental-health issues. The detectives later took several statements from Sean and decided he'd had nothing to do with Kylie's disappearance.

Wilkinson had told Michael Edwards that Kylie had moved interstate to live with Gary, the man she claimed had raped her. Before talking with Gary, Craig needed to know more about the alleged rape. She obtained a copy of the statement Kylie had made to Detective Sergeant Donna O'Mally at Cronulla Police Station on 9 March 2004.

Kylie recounted how Gary, whom she'd met with Sean before, had called them and said he was coming to Sydney on 19 February on a business trip, and the three of them should meet up. They agreed, but then Sean was ‘crashposted'—ordered to sea at short notice—so Kylie went to see him by herself. It was 9.00 p.m. and she'd just finished her shift at Sutherland Hospital, having changed out of her uniform into a white padded bra and white G-string, a white Puma singlet top, navy blue track pants and joggers. When she reached the city she had called Gary at his hotel and asked if he wanted to come out and have coffee, but he suggested she come to his room. She got there and found him wearing a white T-shirt and beige shorts. They hugged briefly at the door and sat down and talked, and after a while Gary told her he and his wife hadn't had sex since Christmas. ‘Why is that?' she'd said. ‘Is everything all right between you guys?' He said it was, but she knew there was a problem.

Gary showed her some photos he'd taken with his digital camera and they went onto the balcony and looked at the view. Then they came inside and Gary opened the mini-bar and said he could take whatever he liked from it at his employer's expense. He lay down on the big bed and suggested Kylie lie down too. He said it a few times and after a while she lay down and they watched the television, which had been on all the time. At one point they talked about the recent Jewel concert, and Gary said, ‘I've always liked blondes.'

‘Oh, great,' joked Kylie, whose hair was blonde at the time, ‘I'll have to dye my hair now.' They watched television some more, then Gary rolled over and started prodding her arm and ribs with a finger.

‘What are you doing?' she said.

‘I always fantasised about you,' he said, laughing.

‘I'm married, Gary.'

He seemed angry, and got up and switched off the television. Then he turned off the room's light and went into the bathroom. When he came back into the room, which was dark, he got back onto the bed and came close to her, and she realised he'd taken his clothes off. He climbed on top of her and she put her hands up against his chest.

‘Gary, stop what you're doing,' she said.