Call Me Cruel (6 page)

He repeated, ‘I've always fantasised about you.' He started kissing her neck and she moved around, trying to avoid him, but he took no notice. He sat up and pulled down her track pants and then her G-string.

‘Gary, no, stop,' she kept saying. ‘What are you doing?'

Kylie told Donna O'Mally, in her sworn statement, that she hadn't yelled because she was scared he might hurt her if she made a noise. Then he got back on top of her again and raped her. He was wearing a condom. She felt powerless and scared but there was nothing she could do. He kissed her neck some more, and when it was over said, ‘You're not to say a word about this to anyone.' He said it in a threatening tone and she feared for her life. When he got off her, he went into the bathroom and she stood up, pulled up her pants, grabbed her bag and went to walk out the door. Gary came out and switched the light on.

‘Thanks for coming,' he said. ‘I'll call you.'

Kylie told O'Mally that when she got home she was feeling dirty and took off her clothes. She had a shower, soaping herself up three times and shampooing her hair. She got into her pyjamas and went to bed, where she slept poorly. At one point she got up and wrote an account of what had happened in her diary. The next morning she could smell Gary's aftershave on her clothes, so she washed them.

That was Kylie's statement. It raised a few questions, such as why Gary would rape the wife of a man he was so close to, why Kylie wouldn't have resisted more (Gary was neither strong nor fit), and how he thought he'd get away with it. There might well be answers to these questions, but at the moment they were puzzling. Turning from what Kylie had told O'Mally, Craig read what she'd written about the incident in her diary.

‘Wrote out statement of what Gary did to me last night,' it began. ‘Even though he had threatened me not to say anything. I wrote it down and kept it hidden in my drawer. I feel tired and scared as I didn't sleep that much last night. I was frightened that Gary was going to come back and do something to me. I wish that Sean was here. I wish that I could talk to him. Please Sean come home.'

But Sean was at sea on HMAS
Newcastle
. He came back on 25 February but Kylie didn't tell him she'd been raped until 3 March. This raised another question: why, if she was desperate for him to come back so she could talk to him, would she wait almost a week before saying anything? Again, there might be an answer to this question: victims of crime do not always act in a normal manner. But it was another puzzle.

One of the handwritten documents found in Kylie's room apparently recorded an exchange of text messages with Gary that had occurred in the days after the rape. Part of it went like this:

Kylie: ‘I cant handle this anymore I am going to tell Sean.'

Gary: ‘Tell him what.'

Kylie: ‘What happened.'

Gary: ‘What happened?'

Kylie: ‘What you did to me.'

Gary: ‘Sorry you have lost me in this I don't know what you are talking about.'

Kylie: ‘In Sydney.'

Gary: ‘Are you OK. Did I do something wrong.'

Kylie: ‘Yes everything you did was wrong and no I am not OK.'

Gary: ‘I will call U 2morrow is that OK.'

Kylie: ‘No dont call me I am telling Sean.'

Gary: ‘I cant figure out what you are on about but if you want an excuse to end your marriage which is what it sounds like then don't involve me and my family you are playing with peoples lives childrens lives!'

The same document contains what seems to be a transcript of the conversation when Kylie finally told Sean about the rape. She was sitting on the bed in their room and said she had to tell him something.

‘What's wrong?' he said. ‘Is it your job, uni, your family?'

Kylie burst into tears and told him Gary had raped her. Sean came over and sat down next to her on the bed and hugged her. He was upset and angry but also confused. It didn't sound like Gary at all. He rang Gary's mother, whom he knew very well, and told her what Kylie had said.

‘It is not in his nature,' she said. ‘It's very out of character. I'll speak to him about it.'

Later, Sean received a call from Gary, who said, ‘What's going on? What did Kylie tell you?'

Sean said, ‘You tell me what happened.'

‘I've just spoken to Mum, and nothing happened in the hotel room, nothing at all. I've always thought of you as a brother. I can't believe you would think that I would do that to Kylie. I swear on my kid's grave that I would never do that to her.'

‘Then why's Kylie said all these things?'

‘I don't know.'

Sean said she planned to tell the police but Gary didn't seem concerned. ‘It will be good,' he said. ‘That'll clear my name. Then you can divorce her and we can get back to being friends.'

After Kylie went missing, Sean confirmed to police that she had told him about the alleged rape and a conversation such as that above did occur. He was still conflicted about what had happened, believing it highly unlikely that Gary would have done such a thing, but also believing that Kylie would not lie: the whole thing was a painful mystery.

According to Kylie's notes, on the same day as her conversation with Sean about the alleged rape she also told ‘a guy called Paul Wilkinson'. She rang him at 9.00 p.m. and said, ‘There's something I need to tell you.'

‘What's wrong?'

‘You remember when Gary was in Sydney?'

‘Yes.'

‘He sexually assaulted me.'

Wilkinson asked for details and told her she needed to go to the police station and make a formal statement. The next day she went to Miranda and reported the rape to Sergeant Di Stricker, and the day after that she had a phone conversation with Donna O'Mally. On 9 March, according to her diary, ‘Went to Cronulla Police Station and made a statement about sexual assault. I found it very difficult and hard to re-live the past. I cried several times. Sgt. O'Mally took my statement. It went from 1400–1730 hrs. It was very traumatizing to go over the sexual assault.'

O'Mally was an experienced police officer, and certain aspects of Kylie's interview troubled her. Kylie appeared to have trouble recalling the sequence of events, and kept jumping back and forwards during the statement. Despite mentioning Paul Wilkinson, she seemed very keen to keep him out of the investigation. She said their relationship was purely professional; she'd called him for advice because he was someone she knew who was with the police force. But there was an intensity when Wilkinson's name was mentioned that made O'Mally wonder about this. O'Mally later recalled she ‘formed the opinion whilst speaking with Kylie that she was lonely and may have been susceptible to mental health issues. I formed this opinion based on my experience interviewing numerous sexual assault victims and experience as a police negotiator.'

Still, Kylie was sticking to her story. O'Mally told her about counselling services she might like to contact and then passed the investigation over to City Central Police Station, because the alleged assault had occurred in the city. That night Kylie didn't sleep well. According to her diary, ‘The statement was on my mind. The night kept going through my mind. It was like a nightmare, flash backs. I was home alone and [that] made me a little more frightened.' At this time Sean was often away, on the ship or working in Canberra. On 17 March Kylie had trouble sleeping once more, and the next day she wrote: ‘dyed my hair burgundy as tomorrow is a month since sexual assault couldn't stand having blond hair any more as it reminded me of sexual assault.' On 23 March she wrote: ‘Todd Holoson contacted me from City Central Police Station Darling Harbour re. case and progress. Todd to call me next week to make arrangements to come to station and discuss case.' This was the last diary entry of any substance about the rape.

Donna O'Mally must have been surprised to receive a phone call from Paul Wilkinson on 7 May. He said he had something to tell her about the rape, and later that day came to see her. He said Kylie had admitted to him that she'd made up the whole thing. In fact, she had been having an affair with Gary and was now pregnant by him, and had said she might move interstate to be with him. Wilkinson said Kylie's family had called him. (This was the day he received the phone calls from Michael and Leanne Edwards.)

O'Mally listened to this and thought there was something strange about Wilkinson's manner. He was uptight and ‘appeared to be disjointed in his conversation and I was having trouble getting facts . . . from him'. She urged him to call Kylie's relatives and ask them to report her missing, and to tell Gosford police the report number for the sexual assault, and also to tell them about the possibility Kylie was with Gary. Wilkinson did this. O'Mally asked about his own connection with Kylie. He said they had not had a sexual relationship, but from his manner she suspected this was false.

Once Craig had obtained and read all the documents relevant to the alleged rape, she contacted Gary and asked if Kylie was with him. He said she wasn't. He hadn't seen her since the time they met in Sydney. He denied the rape allegation and was distressed by it. He had an alibi for the time she'd disappeared.

Rebekkah Craig wondered about the rape story. Donna O'Mally was an experienced officer; if she thought Kylie might be lying, that had to be taken seriously. But what possible reason could there be for such an extraordinary fabrication? And where did Paul Wilkinson fit in? In particular, what was to be made of his claim to have heard from Kylie in recent days, about going to live with Gary?

By the end of the first week of the investigation, Craig was pretty sure that neither Sean nor Gary was involved in Kylie's disappearance, which left one person of interest. She hoped to learn more when she interviewed Paul Wilkinson the following week.

When Craig arrived at work at 8.00 a.m. on Monday 17 May, there was a note on her desk asking her to contact Detective Mark Polley at Bankstown detectives. She called and heard yet another weird tale: there had been a fire at Paul Wilkinson's house in Picnic Point in Sydney's south. Wilkinson was claiming that one of those who'd set it was Kylie Labouchardiere, and that she'd tied him up and left him there, presumably in the hope he would burn to death. Fortunately, the fire had done only modest damage to the house, and Wilkinson had not been injured. Given the apparent seriousness of the incident, Bankstown police had driven up to Louisa Windeyer's flat to see if they could find Kylie. They'd learned of her disappearance and now wanted to talk with Craig to see if she'd found anything that might help them.

The case was becoming complicated, so Craig's senior officer, Detective Sergeant Peter Houlahan, decided he would accompany her to Bankstown to talk to the detectives there. He was to be the officer in charge of the investigation for the next year. The detectives drove to Sydney—the first of many long trips the investigation would require—where Mark Polley showed them the statement Wilkinson had provided after the fire.

Wilkinson was twenty-eight years old and lived in a rented house in Kelvin Parade with his wife, Julie Thurecht, and their six-month-old son, Bradley. It was a simple two-bedroom place, fibro with a tile roof, and a driveway running up the side. Late on Saturday afternoon, he'd left Julie and the child at her parents' home at nearby Illawong, just across the Georges River, and was driving to see his own parents at the Engadine RSL when his mobile rang. When he answered, all he heard was heavy breathing, and he hung up after about ten seconds. He then drove home because ‘for the last couple of nights there had been an increase in vehicles travelling up and down the street', which was normally a very quiet one.

Wilkinson said that when he arrived he went into the lounge room, where he was confronted by Kylie, whom he knew as an acquaintance. He said they'd first met a few months earlier and that she'd told him she'd been raped. After urging her to report it to police, he had ‘kept in contact with Kylie regarding the sexual assault and progress of the case. During this time Kylie started becoming possessive and would call me up to eight times a day. I didn't speak with Kylie all the time but did some of the time. Along with the phone calls Kylie would send me SMS messages. The messages saying that I was hers and that she wasn't getting on with her husband and wanted to be with me.' He said that after a while he had came to doubt the truth of the rape allegation, because Kylie would change the details every time she talked about it. Eventually, he had told her she was ‘full of shit' and suggested she return to the police and admit she'd made a false statement.

‘It wasn't long after this,' he said, ‘that I heard Kylie was in fact having an affair with [Gary, who] was supposed to have sexually assaulted her.' Asked why Kylie might have made up the rape claim, he said, ‘It's the easiest way to get a divorce, 'cause it would have put a rift through the family . . . her husband's side of the family [because they were close to Gary]'. According to Wilkinson, Kylie had continued to pester him, even coming to visit him at Marrickville Police Station, where he was then working, and where she stole some police property: a digital hand-held video recorder, a mobile phone and a number of portable two-way radios. The Marrickville crime manager spoke to Wilkinson about these thefts, and he had a word with Kylie and she returned the items.

After this she started sending him text messages of a sexual nature, even though he didn't want to have a sexual relationship with her. When he told her this, ‘The messages and phone calls soon turned nasty, and I started to receive death threats in my mail,' he told police, ‘along with messages from Kylie such as I was going to get my car blown up and that my wife and kid would be killed.'

Like many fantasists, Wilkinson sometimes included bits and pieces of the truth in his fabrications. In the above account, the story of Kylie visiting him at work might have been true: it recalls the visits she used to make to Sean's naval base. Wilkinson said he continued to receive threatening messages from Kylie until about 25 April (just a few days before she disappeared), when she told him she was going interstate to be with Gary. Wilkinson told her they first had to tell the police the rape allegation was false, and she agreed to come to Sutherland Railway Station on the night of 28 April. (He did not say why he had to be involved in this.) He said he'd driven there but she hadn't turned up, and he'd had no communication with her since that day, until he found her in his house on 16 May, along with a tall, thin Aboriginal man who looked about thirty years old and sported a moustache and a number-two haircut. Kylie was wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and blue track pants, and the man had a black jumper and black pants. Wilkinson had never seen him before. ‘As soon as I saw both Kylie and the male standing in front of me,' Wilkinson told police, ‘I thought they were there to hurt me in some way. I don't know how they got into the house as I [had] shut the front door behind me when I entered, they must have been there when I walked in. I have immediately struck out and punched Kylie in the mouth. At the same time of doing this the male with Kylie had punched me once above the right eye causing me to stumble backwards before falling over and landing on the floor. The man has yelled, “Black cunt. Is this the cunt?”