Ladykiller (13 page)
Police made their own check of institutions: hospitals, the morgue, trains, buses and airlines, all without result. Dottie’s GP, Dr Andre Haski, told detectives Dottie suffered from a condition called claudication, which caused severe cramping in Dottie’s calves and hamstrings as a result of her chronic vascular disease.
‘If Mrs Davis were to walk down a steep hill of some two to three hundred metres, would she be able to walk back up that hill?’ the detective asked.
‘Very unlikely,’ Dr Haski said, ‘but perhaps Dottie was expecting a lift home.’ He listed Dottie’s other health problems: arthritis, high cholesterol and mature-onset diabetes. He said Mrs Davis was her usual self, ‘composed, happy, very straightforward’ when he saw her on the morning before she went missing. Only twice had she been depressed, the first time after her husband died in 1984, and then again in 1993, when she attempted to stop smoking.
However, he made an intriguing statement. Dottie once told him that she was sick of her children and went off on her own to Lismore in the New South Wales Northern Rivers district. ‘Mrs Davis . . . was cranky and said “those kids of mine won’t leave me alone. If I want to go somewhere I will. I don’t have to be beholden to my children”,’ Dr Haski recounted. ‘She told me where she had been . . . however, her family found her within twenty-four hours . . .’
Listening intently, the detective sniffed a lead.
On Saturday 3 June, police held a press conference at Maroubra station. They had advised Maree and Lessel not to attend; there would be no benefit. It was poor advice. With no one to push the story along in the media, it soon fell from sight.
The following day the
Sun-Herald
published a story buried in the back of the news section headlined ‘WEALTHY WIDOW MURDER FEARS’, which generated no follow-up interest from other media, nor the public. Maree shuddered at the glib typecasting of her mother as a ‘wealthy widow’; it was a tag that would stick.
On 5 June, Detectives Andrew Ford, a crime scene investigator, and Frank Giordano from Maroubra drove to Dottie’s house to take photographs. They found nothing unusual. An empty coffee cup and a plate of biscuits lay on a table in the sunroom, the old lady’s dresser was neatly arranged and a few boxes lay around the house.
Back at Maroubra, Giordano and Detective Senior Constable Sue Whitfield were focusing their attention on the builder. They had taken Kenneth Hulse’s statement on 1 June, then hauled him back in to the station on 6 June and fired more than two hundred questions at him. Police again interviewed him on 8 June, as well as his wife, Rita, and put them under surveillance.
Lessel was also a suspect, particularly after police learned that Dottie had lent her son a million dollars. The police had asked both Maree and Lessel strange questions about whether their mother was ‘trying to get away from her children’. When police finally told Maree Dr Haski’s claims, she was furious. ‘It’s ridiculous that I am a suspect,’ she told Frank Giordano and Sue Whitfield, informing them that the doctor’s story could not be true. Maree phoned Auntie Heather, who lived up in northern New South Wales. She described the story as ‘rubbish’. Maree was extremely frustrated and felt the police’s focus was misdirected. She assured Whitfield that members of the Davis family had a normal, healthy relationship which included conflict and harmony, dispute and resolution—and, overall, much love.
Almost a month after Dottie’s disappearance, detectives got their first possible lead. On 20 June, a 33-year-old sales director named Wayne Reuben arrived at Maroubra police station. Dorothy Davis was Mr Reuben’s godmother. His parents, Ron and Norma, had been friends with Dottie and Jack since just after the war. Through Dottie, the Reubens had met Les and Shirley Bromley. Wayne Reuben explained to police that Dottie had recently lent a large amount of money to a friend, Bruce Burrell.
Bruce was married to Dallas Bromley and they were almost neighbours of Mrs Davis. Dallas occasionally walked over from their Marine Parade duplex to visit ‘Auntie Dot’. Reuben had found Dottie a sensible and practical woman who was in charge of every aspect of her life, particularly her finances. But Reuben disliked and mistrusted Burrell. In fact, police were not surprised to hear about the loan. Maree Dawes had rattled off a list of people she knew had borrowed money from her mother. However, Wayne Reuben’s story cast the revelation in a more sinister light, and the police decided to schedule a visit to the Burrells the following week.
Bruce and Dallas lived in a house with stunning ocean views. Detective Sue Whitfield remembers pale-coloured walls and a white shag-pile carpet she feared messing up with her work shoes. The officer felt as if she ‘was inside a seashell’.
Dallas blinked through an enormous pair of spectacles ‘seeming to know very little about her husband or his affairs . . . she didn’t appear to know where Bruce got his money’.
Whitfield asked them to come into Maroubra police station to make a statement the next day, 29 June. They arrived around 9 a.m. Whitfield remembers, ‘Bruce was all charm, and Dallas dressed up to the nines with long nails and her hair immaculate.’ Bruce made a point of mentioning his car, the grey Jaguar parked outside, saying with a broad grin, ‘I hope I don’t get booked.’
‘He came across as a big guy, a company director with a big house in Maroubra and a country property,’ Whitfield says, ‘and Dallas was keeping up with the Joneses.’
The husband and wife were interviewed separately, and each had an alibi—they were at work on the day Auntie Dot vanished. Burrell was at his office on Sydney’s North Shore and had attended a lunch with colleagues at Crows Nest.
Whitfield and Giordano quizzed Dallas about their lives, their finances and their friendship with Dottie. Dallas seemed vaguely aware of a cheque Mrs Davis had asked Bruce to process. In the other interview room, Malabar’s Detective Jim Bignell asked Burrell just thirteen questions about the financial transaction with Dorothy Davis. He said Dottie had not lent him money. He said she had simply asked him to process a cheque for her which he had done. Bignell remembers Burrell ‘was as slick as a fresh dog turd’. Burrell’s interview lasted four minutes longer than his wife’s, and when the couple left , they seemed relaxed and amiable.
By that evening, Bruce Burrell was in a rage. He paced the white carpet in his house as he spoke in terse sound bites down the telephone to Maree Dawes, who was at her own home on Sydney’s lower North Shore, alone. She could sense his anger through the receiver.
Burrell told Maree he had been interviewed by the police about her mother’s disappearance. He wanted to come over and explain the arrangement he had with Dottie.
Maree was feeling drained and sad, as she often did these days, and Burrell’s fury alarmed her. ‘Don’t worry about it, Bruce,’ she said, trying to placate him, ‘we’ve all been interviewed.’
But Bruce insisted, and he would not let it stand undefended. He was coming over.
Maree hung up the phone and dialled Maroubra police station. She was frightened, she told one of the officers, because her husband was at work and she was about to be confronted by a big ball of fury.
Maree had managed to calm down by the time Dallas and Bruce arrived on her doorstep. She opened a bottle of wine, gave Bruce a beer, and put out a plate of cheese and biscuits.
Burrell was sweating. ‘Bloody Wayne Reuben,’ he cursed. He went on to explain Dottie had asked him to keep the cheque transaction a secret and Wayne Reuben had spilled it to the police without knowing the truth of it. Bruce explained to Maree that Dottie had asked him to process a cheque for $100 000. He had done as she asked and Dottie gave him $10 000 for his trouble.
Bruce’s story did not make sense, and Maree challenged him. Dottie would have to have been dead drunk to hatch that plan. Was she worried about something else?
Burrell was sitting bolt upright, chain-smoking and babbling, his face puce with emotion. He continued to blame Wayne Reuben.
Maree sat there thinking two things: poor Wayne, and thank God Burrell did not know she had also told police about Dottie and the loan arrangement. Maree kept on feeding him possible scenarios. At one point she said, ‘I’ll bet that money was meant for me.’ Perhaps Dottie had wanted to appease her daughter because she had propped up Lessel’s company with the one million?
Burrell raved on while Dallas reclined languidly in a chair, sipping her wine with the wifely indifference of someone who had seen this tirade many times before. They left and Maree was confused and bewildered.
Burrell’s version of events was very different to what Dottie had told Maree in the months before she disappeared. Dottie had mentioned to Maree over the phone that Burrell had asked her for a loan as bridging finance to purchase a house on the water for Dallas. Dottie had mentioned a large amount, around $300 000, Maree thought. She remembered saying to her mother, ‘Dallas probably deserves that after all she’s been through, given the cancers. It’s your money, Mum, do what you like with it.’
Dottie had later told Maree that she had lent Burrell the money but it was a lesser amount, which would be ‘easier’. Now, with her mother gone and Burrell giving her a different version of the transaction, Maree did not know what to believe. She had a feeling, which amplified with time, that if she could work out the true story of the $100 000 she would have the key to her mother’s disappearance.
Days later, Detective Bignell and a constable arrived at Burrell’s office on the Pacific Highway at Crows Nest, an advertising company called Peter Grace & Associates. The police wanted Bruce Burrell to accompany them back to the police station. Burrell’s boss, Peter Grace, noticed the extreme agitation on his employee’s face.
The next day, a sheepish Burrell told him, ‘One of our neighbours has gone missing. Dallas and I have already been interviewed by the police and we told them everything we know. I don’t know why they keep wanting to interview me.’
A few weeks later, the police returned to the office to verify his alibi. Burrell was flustered by their second visit, but relieved when his boss, Peter Grace, confirmed to police that on 30 May Burrell had been at work. Burrell later told Peter Grace that police were interviewing him about a loan Dottie had given him. ‘They’re treating me as if I am a suspect,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet the old girl’s gone walkabout without telling her family. She did it once before when there was a dispute over money, by packing up her bags and catching a train north to go and stay with a friend.’
The Maroubra detectives accepted Burrell’s alibi and lost interest in him as a suspect. They had obtained bank reports of the transaction and a copy of a Westpac cheque made out to Burrell by Dottie. But they took it no further. Eventually the builder was ruled out as a suspect too, and the case fell fallow. Everyone—except for Dottie’s family—forgot about the old lady.
After their mother disappeared, the bitter pill of her vanishing would rise up in Maree and Lessel’s throats for many years to come. They had no body to bury and so no grave for them and Dottie’s grandchildren to visit. Maree and Lessel kept the house at Undine Street going, but cleaning away the cobwebs and dust every few weeks was an emotional task that only got harder. They could not sell her house, or even Dottie’s car, because according to the law, the family was not allowed to declare probate on her possessions. Maree still had to file tax returns for Dottie because, officially, her mother was not dead.
On the first anniversary of their mother’s disappearance, Maree and Lessel held a memorial service at St Jude’s Anglican Church in Randwick. Maree’s daughter Kate rehearsed her eulogy in front of the mirror for days, until she could do it without crying. Maree had two hundred orders of service printed for the memorial. They quickly ran out. Friends, neighbours and people Dottie’s children had never met packed the church. Afterwards, as the family stood at the church entrance thanking the mourners, Maree caught sight of Bruce Burrell standing in the church grounds with his father-in-law. She tried to catch Burrell’s eye but he had slunk away.
Just over a year later, Maree was having a cup of tea at a friend’s house in Pymble, on Sydney’s north side, when her mobile phone rang. Lessel was calling. ‘You know that woman they are searching for on a property down near Goulburn?’ Lessel said to Maree. ‘It belongs to Bruce Burrell.’
Maree’s friend watched the colour drain from her face and Maree felt her legs turn to jelly. At that moment, any last, secret hope she might have held that her mother was alive vanished.
Monday 26 May 1997
A young
Sydney Morning Herald
artist named Felicity Walsh read the newspaper reports with growing intrigue. It all came flooding back to her: two years earlier while she was working at an advertising agency, Peter Grace & Associates, two policemen had interviewed her then colleague, Bruce Burrell. Now his photograph was splashed across the newspaper. Fat, lazy Bruce.
Walsh still remembered how his face dropped when an insistent police sergeant asked for a spare room at the agency to interview him. It was the principal memory she had of Burrell, apart from the fact that he did little if any work and was always boasting about money but borrowing cash. Walsh heard at the time, in whispered corridor exchanges, that the police were investigating the disappearance of an old lady who lived in Coogee, not far from Burrell. The police had returned to interview Burrell and check his alibi. Walsh relayed the incident to her news editor and to
Herald
journalist Kate McClymont who was sent out to follow up Walsh’s claims.
When she reached Lurline Bay the first thing that struck McClymont, even in a pair of modest work heels and at half Dottie’s age, was that Undine Street was no place for strolling, unless you were a mountain goat. By her second door-knock, McClymont found someone who remembered that around the time she vanished, Dottie had told the builder she was going to visit a sick friend and waved a hand towards the ocean.
Meanwhile, McClymont’s colleague, Greg Bearup, had secured an interview with Bernie Whelan and made his way to Crown Equipment’s headquarters at Smithfield. In Bernie Whelan’s neat office on the building’s top floor, Kerry Whelan and the children beamed out from framed photographs arranged precisely along a shelf. Bernie’s fingers trembled as he pulled a manila folder from his desk drawer and ran through some loose photos. He paused at one picture, his voice quivered and he began to cry. ‘This is my Kerry,’ he said. It was one of the last photographs taken of her.
