Ladykiller (23 page)
Through this scene strode a number of characters—big Matt Raper, an impressive man who was a buyer, Cliff Friend, a top wool man, and Splinter Burrell. Allan Burrell was well-respected by most in the wool trade, especially the families whose properties he visited to assess their clip while it was still on the sheep’s back and to dole out advice on what rams they should be buying for a better yield in future seasons. Bruce Burrell, tall for his age and with a youthful handsomeness, was a familiar figure tailing his father. When he got older, he would accompany his father to the Carlton Hotel or Ernie McDermott’s pub near the railway station for a beer with the wool men of the era.
At primary school it became clear that while Bruce was not stupid, he was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. That did not stop his father from putting Bruce on a pedestal. As a schoolboy, John MacCulloch remembers, ‘Bruce got away with blue murder’. When they were naughty, the other boys got into trouble with their parents, who smacked them or made them stay at home. Bruce went unpunished. However, he did well enough at some things to substantiate his father’s pride. Bruce was a very good rugby player and an excellent swimmer. As in a lot of country towns, sport was an integral part of children’s lives and it was important for a boy to excel on the football field.
In primary school, Bruce hung around with a group of eight boys, Mick Maclay, Peter Slater, Geoff Shepherd, Mick Ford, Michael Deegan, Michael Constable, Benny Pocious and Tony Ross. Bruce and his best mate Michael Constable formed Goulburn’s first water polo team, The Dolphins. ‘We chose the colours of Cronulla rugby league because we were footie mad,’ Constable said. The tight-knit bunch of boys all had a nickname, usually devised for themselves. Burrell’s moniker was ‘Butch’, although the other boys changed it to the rhyming word ‘Sutch’, because when Bruce wasn’t getting his own way, in between flashes of white hot temper, he could be a real sook.
Constable always believed the Burrells were well-off . ‘I don’t know why. His parents were the tweed pants and tweed jacket, rugby union types. ‘Bruce was always well dressed whereas the rest of the blokes were lucky to get a new pair of school pants for Christmas.’ While the other boys had part-time jobs to earn pocket money—the paper run, helping the milko or mowing lawns—Bruce did nothing. ‘I don’t remember him getting involved too much in the working type of things. From the age of ten the rest of us were doing milk runs,’ Constable said.
Grazier families and Goulburn’s professionals sent their sons and daughters to private schools in Canberra or Sydney. Catholic boys with slightly poorer parents went to St Patrick’s. Protestants and the working classes educated their children at Goulburn High School, one of the roughest government schools in the state. A few years before Bruce went to the high school, a gang rape of two girls took place in the school’s main hall. The New South Wales Department of Education took action and sent a tough Sydney teacher in to act as principal. Stuart Garnsey instituted a strict regime of corporal punishment for unruly boys, but it was still a maxim in the schoolyard that if you could not fight, you had better make friends with someone who could. The school’s motto was ‘Survive’.
In the 1960s the school’s population boomed when the Catholic schools closed because of a dispute within the diocese over hygiene in the school toilets. Goulburn High School numbers swelled to ten classes in each of the three most senior years, with thirty-four students in each. They were ranked from A to K in order of academic excellence. Bruce Burrell was in Class D.
There wasn’t a lot to do in Goulburn. Teenagers went to the movies, played football, swam, did their homework, hung around the milk bar or watched TV. Otherwise, they played sport.
On Saturdays, Splinter would watch his son play in the second row at North Park. During one match Bruce threw a punch at the opposite side’s hooker but ended up clocking his mate, Mick Maclay. ‘He knocked me out, the old upper cut,’ Mick Maclay said. ‘He was just looking out for me, that’s all. Bruce was fairly noisy and boisterous.’
Spiro Pandelakis played five-eighth in the under 12s and Bruce in the under 14s for the Goulburn Rugby Club. The boys were rugby mad and used to pile in to the milk van of their coach and mentor, Tony Lewis, and travel over the state to bush matches and to state junior football championships against regional teams such as Gordon, Randwick, Balmain, Easts and Parramatta. Lewis was tough. If Bruce squealed about training or playing, Lewis would say, ‘Get in there, you baby.’ Bruce liked to get his own way, but he was not as successful at it with his rugby friends, who called his bluff. They knew how much he exaggerated, and also how to take the mickey out of him in an affectionate way, because Bruce was such a big, confident boy who liked to stretch the truth.
By his early teens, Bruce’s babyish good looks were attracting the opposite sex. With his great shock of blond hair, lounging about in his dark blue school blazer, grey slacks and yellow-and-blue-striped tie, Bruce was particularly captivating among private school girls looking for some romantic rebellion with a ‘city’ lad. He was not shy and he took out a couple of Presbyterian Ladies College students in Goulburn.
Bruce was fifteen years old when his sister, Tonia, was born, and the Burrell family left Goulburn. The wool industry was falling into a recession and Allan Burrell was offered a position with the Australian Wool Board in Sydney. The Burrells moved to Dee Why and Bruce started playing rugby for the Manly club. Spiro Pandelakis and Bruce caught up on a tour to Adelaide as members of a country under 18s rugby team selected by Tony Lewis. The team lost to New South Wales City, but on a free day earned the winning trophy in a friendly golf game. Bruce was still trying to please his father with his sporting prowess and he lied about the golf trophy, telling Allan he had won the award for being the best forward in the rugby tournament.
Bruce concocted another story about himself when the Goulburn team played Manly at North Sydney Oval in 1971. Bruce, who played on the opposing side to Spiro and the other Goulburn players, told them he would soon be quitting rugby because of a bad accident. He said his nose had been injured and there was a risk the bone could be pressed back into his brain. The Goulburn boys rolled their eyes at yet another of Bruce’s stories.
On his resumé Bruce said he completed his Higher School Certificate at Beacon Hill High School and undertook a three-year marketing course at Sydney Technical College. In fact, in 1970, when all his school friends were finishing their final year of school, Bruce started work at the Narrabeen branch of the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac). He played football on weekends and, off the field during the week, he swaggered around like a college jock. He had shoulder-length hair and wore the latest fashion: tight trousers with flared bottoms and body-hugging shirts. He flirted with young women and flattered older ladies and then he stole from them.
Bruce’s first job as a bank teller became too much of a temptation. The seventeen-year-old believed he could cheat the system, and over a period of several months he stole from the bank accounts of three women. He forged a withdrawal slip for the bank account of one woman customer, made out for the sum of $115, and forged two cheques for $150 and $200 of two women customers at the bank. He was eventually found out and on 18 February, Bruce Allan Burrell faced the Metropolitan Children’s Court at Collaroy charged with three counts of ‘Forge and Utter’. He was convicted and on 12 March 1971, the Collaroy magistrate placed him on twelve months’ conditional probation on each of the charges, to run concurrently. Allan Burrell paid back the bank, which had already sacked his son. It was Bruce Burrell’s first run-in with the law, but not his last.
On Remembrance Day 1973 Linda Burrell, forty-five years old, collapsed in her Beacon Hill kitchen from a cerebral haemorrhage. She died on 14 November in hospital and was interred in the Church of England cemetery at Frenchs Forest.
Bruce had never seen his father cry in the way he did that November, but it was the ensuing months of dry-eyed stony grief which tore at the family. In the absence of his wife, Allan Burrell was incapable of doing much it seemed, except sit in the kitchen and watch a meal grow cold. Bruce’s sisters— Debbie, thirteen, and Tonia, six—were separated; Tonia went to live with an aunt because their father was so abject with sorrow he could not care for two children.
Bruce, then twenty-one, was sharing a flat with two young men in the beachside suburb of Manly. He was devastated at his mother’s sudden departure from his life, and struggled to come to terms with it. Burrell’s parents and his sisters were among the few people he would truly bond with in his life. In his family home, Bruce had grown up idolised and—for the most part—uncriticised. With his mother’s death, that sanctuary, in which there was no judgment of his actions, disappeared. His vibrant mother had simply dropped to the floor and thereupon remained unconscious until she died; there was no time to say goodbye to her.
Bruce thought it was not fair and from then on he began to fill the gap in his life with an increasingly fantastic world. With no mother around to adore him, and a father who had retreated into himself, Burrell would invent a life in which he was a king—rich, successful, adored and feted by all who met him. Between 1971 and 1973 Bruce worked for the Sydney radio station 2GB as a junior copywriter, earning a small wage. On his curriculum vitae, however, Bruce said he was a trainee marketing executive with Cumberland Newspapers, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited. The company has no record of his employment there.
The Bruce Burrell described on his resumés—he wrote numerous versions—became increasingly important. Over the next two years, on paper at least, life was very busy for the high-flying Burrell, who promoted himself to an advertising account executive with Sydney agency Jacque McAskill in Willoughby. According to Burrell, he had big-name clients, including Volvo Australia, Mercedes Benz, Malaysian Airlines, food company Kellogg’s, Fabergé cosmetics and McWilliams Wines. Another CV had him employed as the New South Wales representative for the KG Murray Publishing company, representing
Australian House and Garden
, and
Wheels
magazines.
Bruce’s teenage crushes with private schoolgirls had whetted his appetite for rich girls and his first adult romance was with Vanessa Jones, whose father was the managing director of the billion-dollar jam company, IXL. Bruce bowled Vanessa over with his charm and she accepted his marriage proposal. But her father saw straight through Bruce and while his vehement opposition to the union only served to fan Vanessa’s infatuation with Bruce, she accepted it when her father sent her away to England.
Bruce moved on, finding a new romance. Susan Gerathy was a schoolteacher from a conservative Catholic family. Her father was a retired bank manager who had recently bought a large farm at Carcoar, twenty minutes out of Orange. Susan believes Bruce saw dollar signs in the Gerathy family, but his dreams were ill-founded. While the Gerathys lived a comfortable life, they were not millionaires.
Susan taught at a Sydney primary school and Burrell became her first serious boyfriend. He was four years younger than her, and Susan thought he was ‘a lost soul’. She remembers feeling sorry for him. ‘He’d lost his mother suddenly and he was a very sad man, I thought. I saw him as a wounded soul who I could look after,’ she said. By nature, Susan was a carer of people and she mistakenly believed she could save poor, troubled Bruce. She soon realised he was beyond help.
Bruce lied about everything—how much he earned, where he had been, and how much he spent on buying things for himself. He would fib about simple things, such as whether he had posted a letter or cleaned the car, and soon Susan realised that almost nothing he said was true. His lying was a compulsion. ‘I thought the problem was that he was desperate to please his father. He didn’t want to disappoint him. He made things up to make himself appear more successful. He had an overriding fear of failure.’ Susan ended the relationship, but Bruce persisted, pleading with her to come back. ‘I couldn’t get away. I knew I wasn’t in love with him,’ Susan said.
Eventually she fled back to her family home in Carcoar, securing a job teaching at St Joseph’s Primary School, Orange. But Bruce pursued her, turning up on her doorstep in 1977, proclaiming his love for her and pleading with her to give it another go. He had his bags with him and nowhere to go. Susan was a compassionate woman with a sympathetic ear, and she let him in. Susan’s parents offered him a room. By this time he had secured a job at Channel 8, the television network serving New South Wales’s western regions, which was based in the town of Orange. ‘I was never in love with him but I felt trapped. I wasn’t strong enough to say “no”. I kept thinking maybe I can help because he was a very sad man and had a very sad life, or that’s what he told me anyway. He was very upset that his sisters had been separated when their mother died.’
Susan felt immense pressure to accept Burrell’s hand in marriage; not just from Burrell himself, but from her Catholic beliefs and her family. De facto relationships were still heavily frowned upon, particularly in the Catholic community in which Susan Gerathy lived, and especially as she was a Catholic schoolteacher. ‘Living in sin’ with Bruce, she risked getting sacked.
Bruce and Susan married in 1977. Burrell did not have any mates and he seemed to find it difficult to form close bonds with people. He asked the television station’s news director, Peter Andren, to be his best man and Tom Baz, a Channel 8 cameraman, to be his groomsman. After the wedding, neither man had continuing contact with Bruce, except after work at the pub. Andren, who went on to become the Federal MP for the electorate of Calare, in the Orange region, died in 2007.
Bruce worked as a copywriter at Channel 8, and was responsible for organising the scripting, filming and the final production of commercials. He received a basic wage plus a $5000 bonus a year. Despite his lowly status, he was a ‘bit of a show pony’, staff thought. He drove a 1968 British racing-green MG and he would brag about his advertising contacts in Sydney and his family’s emerald mines in northern New South Wales. All fantasy.
