Ladykiller (16 page)
Bernie, at his wit’s end, thought Bonnette may have heard something, anything. But Bonnette could not help, he had not heard a thing.
While Bernie was immensely frustrated, Bray was buoyed by the puzzle that was slowly coming together. The dot point notes were crucial. If only they could find a body, or bodies. Forty-two mineshafts had been searched. Markings on trees, and colour-coded biodegradable police tape littered the forest, a testament to the large area of ground already covered.
Physically and mentally exhausted, the searchers packed up and moved out on 3 July. The
Sydney Morning Herald
’s Nick Papadopoulos phoned Burrell to tell him the search was over.
‘Thank you for letting me know but I have no comment to make,’ was Burrell’s response.
Little did Papadopoulos and the other reporters know, but Burrell had already said too much to Bray. And it may just have sealed his fate.
The trip from Sydney to Port Macquarie was normally a raucous affair. Kerry would keep the children happy with I-spy or games of hangman. They’d have a singalong, read, or curl up in the back of the car absorbed in their Nintendo Game Boys. But this drive was solemn. Sarah was in the front seat where her mother normally sat. The boys argued and poked fun at each other in the back.
It was now ten weeks since their mother had vanished from her children’s lives. In their own way each of them was putting on a valiant front for their father as he took them on the first family holiday since Mum had been ‘taken’. Inside, each of them was privately crumbling. Sarah had seen the life sucked from her once energetic father. He looked older and had lost his lighter side. Now he looked right through people, not registering what anyone was really saying, and at times she would catch him staring off into the distance for long silent minutes.
Matthew seemed to be bottling up his emotions and James was simply denying it had happened. He still expected his mum to walk in the door and every day that she didn’t, he became more forlorn in his pronouncements about her. ‘When Mum comes home I’ll show her my new Game Boy,’ James said to his father. ‘When Mum comes home I’m getting her to take me to buy a new skateboard. She’ll let me.’ For Bernie, his son’s false hopes were unbearable. He had resigned himself to the fact Kerry was gone forever. He had promised his children from the start that he would always be honest with them and it was time to keep that promise.
Marge and Amanda helped him pack on the morning of Friday 18 July and gave the children soft drinks, sandwiches and lollies. As Bernie steered the car up the F3 freeway, he felt the relief of escaping from the media ambush and the family home, which was filled with memories of his former life. But Bernie knew he was about to endure the hardest day of his life. He thought he had already had his fair share of those.
For years Kerry and Bernie had been coming to Port Macquarie, a holiday town on New South Wales’ mid-north coast. ‘Port’ was around 400 kilometres from Sydney, a three and a half hour drive. The Whelans had enjoyed happy times here. On summer holidays, Bernie indulged his love of boating while the kids swam and Kerry lazed by the pool. There were barbecues in the evening and socialising with other families who, like the Whelans, had been coming to the same spot for years. During their 1988 holiday, Bernie found a house close to one of the beaches that was going to auction. He snapped it up in the hope that he and Kerry would retire there.
It was after lunch when Bernie pulled into the driveway. His neighbour, Jean Eriksson, had aired the house, left some freshly cut roses in a vase, and filled the fridge. The weather was too cool for swimming, so James and Matthew kicked a football around the backyard all afternoon.
‘C’mon, boys, get showered and dressed, it’s time to get dinner,’ Bernie yelled from the patio.
‘Chinese, Dad. Please,’ James insisted.
Matthew and Sarah chimed in with their endorsements.
‘All right,’ said Bernie, ‘we’ll have Chinese. Takeaway.’ Since Kerry had been kidnapped, Bernie always seemed to acquiesce.
Thirty minutes later he returned with three large bags, enough to feed almost half the street. It was tradition that he ordered too much. ‘Darl, there’s no way we’re going to get through all this,’ Kerry would recite to him each time. It was another running joke between them, which he now missed.
Bernie tried to eat but tonight the food stuck in his throat. He took a gulp of light beer.
‘Kids, there’s some stuff we need to talk about.’
Suddenly James looked frightened.
He went over the events of the past two months: the police investigation, the problems with the media, until he was unable to contain it any longer and the words tumbled out: ‘I don’t believe Mum is coming home.’ The sentence seemed to hang in the air for an eternity.
Bernie had rehearsed the line over and over on the drive up, but when he finally voiced it, he felt his eyes fill with tears. ‘I’m sorry, kids. I’m really sorry.’
‘But, Dad,’ Sarah pleaded, ‘you can’t give up.’
‘I’ve spoken to the police. We have to be realistic. I’m sorry. If I could fix it, I would.’ He patted his palms on the table. ‘Mum’s been gone for ten weeks. I don’t want to believe it either, but from what the police tell me, after this amount of time it looks like we’re not getting Mum back.’
James was sobbing. Matthew appeared unmoved, as if he had long prepared for this. He remained stony-faced, then took a sip of his Coke and grabbed his Game Boy.
Sarah was clearly agitated. She wanted to shake her father and scream at him: ‘Don’t give up, Dad. Just don’t. We have to keep looking. You can’t give up.’ But she couldn’t. She could see the torture in her father’s eyes. She knew how difficult this was for him.
Distraught, they each handled the news in their own way, and separately. Over the remaining few days, time became a blur.
After the weekend, the Whelans returned to Sydney to find dozens of interview requests, from national and international media. In order to keep the case in the public spotlight, and on the advice of the Taskforce, Bernie agreed to appear publicly and for the first time in the flesh since his wife disappeared.
On the morning of Tuesday 22 July, the media assembled on the second floor of Penrith police station. Looking tired and drawn, Bernie walked in and took a seat at a desk, surrounded by tape recorders and microphones. His dark grey trousers and navy double-breasted jacket with gold buttons seemed too big for him. He was dignified and solemn as he addressed the wall of journalists.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming here today. It’s been over two months since my wife disappeared and I think we are of the opinion that we will not get Kerry back alive. I believe she was kidnapped and murdered.’ He said he ‘gave up the last hope’ when the $500 000 reward he announced on 13 June failed to bring any information about her.
‘How are the children coping?’ asked a female reporter.
‘We cope day by day. They are all pretty bad, but probably the nights are the worst, the loneliness. Obviously your partner is there at night,’ Bernie swallowed in an effort not to cry, ‘and then she is not. She is gone and it’s an extraordinary feeling to have someone for that time and all of a sudden they are gone, she is taken from you. It’s indescribable.
‘But I’ve got to be tough for the little guys. If I am down, they are down. It’s left a gigantic void in our lives. Sarah is the image of my wife. They only have one parent to put them to bed at night and they are finding it hard,’ he said, his face finally cracking into tears.
The reporters all had questions for him. ‘Can you describe your marriage?’
‘We had a wonderful marriage. We had a wonderful seventeen years. We were very much in love. I know people use the term, but we were, our love grew for each other. We were so close, we believed we had a mental telepathy and knew what each other was saying or thinking before they said it. We were thinking of having another child a couple of years ago. We couldn’t have been closer. This tragedy is just a huge void in our lives. We were blessed with three wonderful children and all of a sudden she is gone.’
One reporter asked Bernie whether his wealth had made his wife a target.
Bernie shook his head. ‘I’m an employee of the company. I’ve worked hard. I’ve done well, but for me to be a target of this crime I find it quite extraordinary, considering there are many other higher profile business people than me.’
Asked if he had anything to say to the kidnappers, Bernie paused before replying, ‘If they had any decency at all, I’d ask them to tell us where Kerry is, so my family can have the dignity of finalising this tragedy.’
He recalled his last conversation with his wife, only forty-five minutes before she was last seen. He said she had been excited about their planned trip to Adelaide. ‘Like a typical lady, she packed three times, and changed her mind about what she was going to bring,’ he said with affection. They had chatted about which vineyards they would visit in the Barossa Valley. ‘I finally reminded her to be on time because she had a habit . . .’ Bernie chuckled, ‘of not necessarily being on time.’ The journalists laughed.
‘What of the future?’
His voice wavered again. As he had said already, the days weren’t so bad but the nights were so very lonely.
The journalists had stalled on asking the hard questions. Finally, from the back of the room came: ‘Mr Whelan, did you have anything to do with your wife’s disappearance?’
‘No.’ For the first time Bernie raised his voice. ‘It’s preposterous for anyone to think I would hurt her. That’s just ridiculous. You couldn’t hurt someone you loved as much as I did. What’s wrong with the truth? Why can’t two people just have a happy marriage and be in love?’ Bernie knew there were people who suspected he had killed his wife, or was somehow involved in her disappearance.
He had little to say about Bruce Burrell. ‘Mr Burrell is an ex-employee of my company, but at the moment there are matters before the court about goods that were stolen from me which involved that individual, so I can’t comment. I don’t believe that would be proper.’
Did he harbour suspicions about who was responsible for his wife’s disappearance?
Bernie took a breath and said, ‘Well, I do.’ He would not elaborate other than to say: ‘Undoubtedly it was a premeditated crime against my family and myself and my wife. It was something that I believe was very carefully planned and executed. My wife was a very intelligent person but she was also a very cautious person and I don’t think she was just grabbed off the street at random. I believe this was a premeditated crime.’
Finally, in a move requested by Inspector Mick Howe, Bernie added, ‘There are substantial aspects of the investigation that police have asked me not to talk about publicly.’ If Burrell was watching this interview, Mick Howe hoped it made him nervous. That was its design.
Kerry’s life with Bernie could not have been more different from her upbringing. Her parents, Leo and June, were working-class Catholics. Leo was conservative with his money, and despised those persons who worshipped materialism. He had lived through the Depression in a family which struggled to feed seven children, and had served in World War II, fighting in New Guinea. He returned deeply affected by the experience, and would rarely speak of it.
Leo and June married in 1956 and they bought a quarter-acre block in Showground Road, Castle Hill with a £900 war service loan. The Ryan’s three-bedroom weatherboard house in Sydney’s north-west was the first to be built on the semi-rural subdivision. They had no neighbours; rabbits and bandicoots were more of a problem than traffic.
Kerry Patricia Ryan was born on 28 January 1958. She had a mop of thick black hair, big brown eyes and a beautiful olive complexion. There was a Spanish look about her, derived from a great-grandmother with a mysterious lineage. Her brother, Brett, was born in 1960, and Kerry was always protective of him, particularly when they started at St Bernadette’s Primary School, Castle Hill. Tall for her age, Kerry towered over most of the boys at school, and always took a back row position for class photos. She was a beanpole with a netball player’s physique. Because of her height, she was incredibly shy and would bury her face in her father’s lap when visitors called to the house.
The Ryan family lived humbly. Leo did not believe in extravagant gifts, restaurant meals or flashy cars. The children wore second-hand clothes and, for holidays, Leo borrowed a neighbour’s caravan. Leo avoided tourist places, driving the family to obscure inland bush destinations such as Wellington or Manila, near Tamworth. Eventually the family moved. Castle Hill was growing, but their new suburb of Kurrajong, was like Castle Hill used to be: semi-rural, quiet, and with little traffic.
Kerry had a nervous disposition—she was ‘highly strung’, it was said—especially when it came to exams. In her final year of school, she became so stressed in the lead-up to the exams that her mother took her to a doctor who suggested hypnosis. Leo had never heard of such a thing—‘bloody modern nonsense’—but forked out the money to help his daughter. It appeared to work. Kerry passed her Higher School Certificate and won a scholarship to Oak Hill Catholic Teachers College. It was a natural career move for the eighteen-year-old. She loved children and they loved her back.
Two years into the course, however, a romance interrupted her studies. She ran into a man while picking up a car from Thompson Ford, Parramatta. His name was Bernard Whelan. At the age of forty-one, Bernie was wealthy, successful and terribly unhappy. What Kerry saw in the waiting area of the car dealership was a high-flying executive from a very profitable multinational company. But what she would soon learn was that Bernie came from a background not a million miles from her own.
Reared on a dairy farm, Bernie left school at thirteen to help his father on the property. For six days each week, he rose at 4 a.m. to work fourteen-hour days. ‘We worked a half day on Sundays,’ Bernie quipped. ‘It gave me a great work ethic.’ By the age of sixteen, Bernie was already showing his entrepreneurial skills and bought a hay baler, and later a bulldozer to build roads and dams for the neighbouring farmers.
