Ladykiller (26 page)
While at Grace & Associates, Bruce met a company client, Peter Buckley, who ran an automotive franchise called Ultra Tune. Initially, Buckley liked Bruce. They shared a few business lunches and began socialising at each other’s homes. Bruce would later use Buckley as an alibi, claiming that he had been at lunch with him and Peter Grace, on the occasion of Grace’s birthday, at the Sentosa Malaysian restaurant in Crows Nest on the afternoon when Dorothy Davis disappeared, 30 May 1995. Buckley himself was unconventional and he had been convicted of fraud after he was caught share-dealing without a licence and opening accounts in false names, for which he received a two-year good behaviour bond. But Bruce Burrell’s behaviour would soon prove extremely disquieting to Buckley.
In August 1995, Buckley fell out with Peter Grace, who believed Buckley was involved in an illicit money-making scheme. Grace reported him to the Australian Securities Commission (later changed to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission) and Buckley moved his business on, hiring Bruce Burrell to handle Ultra Tune’s advertising. When Burrell left him, Grace discovered he had run up a $900 bill on the service station account.
Bruce’s maiden presentation to the Ultra Tune board was bizarre: ‘I’m very new to Ultra Tune,’ he said, ‘pretty virginal really. But I’m sure that if I leave my legs open this afternoon, you guys will know what to do . . . let’s face it, you’re the guys at the workface. Without you, we marketing and advertising “gurus” aren’t worth a squirt of lemonade . . . the reason for sessions such as these are not only to “look the new bloke over” but to open up verbal intercourse between us.’
Just before Christmas 1995, Bruce arrived home behind the wheel of a gunmetal-grey Jaguar Sovereign. It was a beautiful car. He told Dallas grandly that he had bought it for her ‘through a guy I know’ and ‘got a good deal’ and she didn’t question it. After Christmas was over, it was Bruce who mainly drove the Jag.
The next month, Bruce drove the car to Buckley’s offices at Parramatta. He took Buckley down to the car park. ‘Do you like my new car? I just bought it,’ he said.
‘Yeah, it’s a beauty,’ Buckley said. ‘How much is this worth?’
‘About a hundred and forty,’ said Bruce, who then suggested swapping the Jag for Buckley’s gold BMW, which was worth at least $40 000 less.
They went off to lunch at the Lone Star steakhouse in Parramatta. In conversation, Burrell told Buckley that police had been conducting a search down near his farm for a group of lost bushwalkers. Burrell said he often heard the distress calls of lost people on his CB radio. He described how the forest near his property was full of mineshafts, dense scrub and cliffs.
‘You could get lost in the forest for weeks,’ he said. ‘You could bury a body there . . . and nobody would find it.’
Buckley picked up the lunch tab.
Bruce Burrell regarded Hillydale as his country seat. It was the place to which a gent like himself could drive down from his city house in his fine motorcar, an Arcadian retreat where he entertained all manner of fancy friends. Hillydale was his showpiece, proof that Bruce Burrell had made it in the world. Bruce used the property to impress people; if he could gain some advantage from a business associate or a colleague, he invited them to Hillydale. Most of all he liked to invite down rich men to shoot wild animals with guns. Bruce was at his happiest with a firearm in his grip. One old friend remembers his pride when posing with a huge revolver.
Restaurateur Bob Keller and his wife Judy spent several weekends at the farm. On one occasion, Bruce brought a revolver into the kitchen and showed it off , saying, ‘It’s a Magnum.’
Keller knew something about handguns. The pistol was around 20 centimetres long, gunmetal grey with a wooden handle. It looked like the handguns used in gangster films. ‘Where did you get it?’ Keller asked.
‘A mate of mine from the States brought it in for me,’ Bruce said, adding that if anyone entered his place uninvited, he would ‘blow them away’.
On another weekend, the two men drove to a paddock over on the property’s north side. Bruce aimed the pistol at a tree and discharged a few rounds. Keller noticed that Bruce kept the revolver in the glove box of his four-wheel drive.
Keller had met Burrell in 1983 and considered him generally friendly but possessed of a strange personality. He could ‘alter very quickly without reason’, like the occasion when Keller and Burrell were discussing work and, suddenly, Bruce raised his voice and yelled out, ‘None of your business!’
Bernie Whelan had been on a number of shooting trips with Bruce. During a trip to the Hunter Valley to eradicate feral pigs, each member of the shooting party carried a rifle and shotgun, and Bruce had an extra, a .357 Black Hawk Magnum revolver slung in a tan leather holster on his right hip. Bernie asked Bruce about his rifle and the Black Hawk pistol. ‘Have you got licences for them, Bruce?’
Bruce would not say, but he kept the weapons in a secret spot down on his Bungonia farm that no one knew about. ‘I have a hiding place that no one would ever find,’ he told Bernie. It was an ‘Aladdin’s cave’, he said, repeating the words several times. ‘It’s known only to me.’
To Bernie, it sounded like a boast, although he surmised the guns were not licensed. He had never seen Burrell’s farm. Bruce had invited him often enough, but Bernie had no desire to go. After Burrell ‘lost’ his livestock down there in 1992 and then Bernie’s Ruger rifle went missing in 1993, Bernie severed the relationship. But other Crown staff took the trip.
When Stephen Deane and his wife Marla visited for a weekend they watched Bruce carrying a handgun in a holster on his hip, cowboy style, because, he claimed, ‘I got attacked by a pig. I was riding my quad.’ On their last visit, in 1996, Bruce showed off a pistol around dinner time, a silver 9-millimetre Luger he had wrapped in a cloth. The weapon had a slide-back mechanism for loading the magazine, which Burrell showed Deane when the two men stepped outside into the backyard. Burrell fired the Luger up into a tree near the woodpile, leaving a couple of rounds for Deane to shoot; the men then went back inside for dinner.
Burrell never did introduce Peter Grace to Bernie Whelan, as he had promised, but while Burrell still worked for him Grace was invited down to Hillydale for a weekend with his girlfriend, Julieanne Keane. The first thing that struck the couple about Hillydale was how Bruce could have afforded a country property. Burrell had previously shown Grace photographs of the Lurline Bay house with its magnificent ocean views. For all his airs of being an ‘advertising executive’ Bruce was far less important than he made out and was earning practically nothing at Grace & Associates. ‘I cannot fathom how a person who had previously been only a marketing manager could own so much expensive property,’ Grace said to Julieanne.
Bruce showed Peter a cache of rifles and then as they had a drink in the kitchen, he held up one of his handguns. Bruce curled his lip and said, ‘There’s nothing like solving a problem with somebody by sticking a .22 up their snout or in their mouth.’ He said he had once fixed a dispute with a neighbour by ‘putting a gun in their mouth and telling them if they didn’t stop making trouble he’d be back and he would use it’. Peter Grace thought it was just tough talk.
On one of the last big shooting weekends at Hillydale, a mishap occurred. Adam Pantle’s parents were friends of Les and Shirley Bromley. Pantle and his wife Maree went on their second trip to Hillydale in early June 1996. Adam, who was president of the Harbour City Pistol Club in Sydney, owned a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver, a Browning semiautomatic .32 pistol, a Brno .32 semiautomatic and a .22 calibre Browning Buckmark target pistol. It was the latter weapon which caught Burrell’s eye.
Friday night on the farm was pleasant enough, although Bruce was occasionally short with Dallas, snapping at her to get things done, and Maree noticed the kitchen and main bedroom doors were depressed and splintered. When she asked Dallas about it, Dallas said Bruce had punched the doors when he lost his temper.
By Saturday night, Adam was cold, tired and had done enough shooting. But following dinner, Bruce was keen to have another go. ‘I am not really fussed,’ Adam said, but he could see his host was keen. It was late when the men climbed into Bruce’s Suzuki four-wheel drive. The car had a white soft-top which folded back, allowing Bruce to shine a spotlight, while Pantle fired the rifle. If he did not get a complete kill, Bruce would finish off the animal with the pistol, which he kept on his lap between shoots. It was after midnight when they returned to the house.
In the morning, Adam went looking for his guns to pack up. The Buckmark pistol was missing. He fronted Burrell, who offered to look for it out in the paddocks. Adam asked his wife to search the house. When the men returned without the gun, Adam whispered to his wife, ‘I think Bruce has got the pistol.’ Bruce and Dallas told Pantle not to worry, but he said, ‘I have to find this. If I report it lost down here I will be in big trouble as I am only supposed to have it in Sydney.’ Bruce placated him and promised to make another search for the weapon.
Adam Pantle called Bruce two days later, but Burrell told Pantle he had not found the gun and he did not want any missing firearms report to say that it was lost on Hillydale. It was clear to Pantle that Burrell was distancing himself. When he had first met Burrell, he found him friendly and pleasant. Now, he thought him less than honest. Pantle believed Burrell had stolen his pistol. In a short time, he would come to believe he was ‘a liar and a thief ’.
Behind the genial face he showed to most of the world, Bruce Burrell was angry and he turned most of his fury on Dallas and her parents. But Dallas was still physically weak and could not yet summon the mental strength to leave him. In January 1994 Dallas had been diagnosed with choriocarcinoma, an aggressive cancer which grows in the uterus. Doctors also found spots on her lungs, and she began attending hospital twice a week for chemotherapy. Throughout the treatment, Dallas continued to work and financially support her husband. Bruce had not had any work since 1992 and was spending more and more time at Hillydale. Bruce would lecture Dallas about selling up in Sydney and moving to the farm permanently. She always said, ‘No way.’ She liked the farm on weekends, but she liked living in Lurline Bay and she loved her work.
Dallas had opened her own graphic arts business and as her work brought more success, she hid the thrills from Bruce. He had become sour and controlling. He asked her why she had to work so hard, demanded to know why she had late meetings and questioned her about who she met. Dallas felt his seething resentment. Her family and friends who saw him shrank from his anger. As the peaks and troughs of his mood swings escalated, Dallas decided to leave her husband. She was afraid to think what he might do if she told him, but she knew his reaction would be extreme.
In May 1996, Dallas flew to Tahiti with her mother, Shirley, for a rest. If 1994 was her year for physical illness, 1995 was a time of mental pain, but this year Dallas would break free from all her adversities. As they took in the bright skies and lush tropical landscape of Tahiti, Dallas and Shirley put together a plan for her to escape from Bruce.
But when Dallas landed in Sydney her first few sentences uttered on the phone to Bruce were halted by a torrent of abuse from him. It was a Thursday morning and he was speaking on his mobile en route to Bungonia.
On the Saturday morning, weighed down by dread, Dallas drove to Hillydale with Shirley. Bruce refused to speak with her. Shirley and Dallas made lunch, but Burrell silently ate, then got up from the table and walked outside. They heard the tractor start. Dallas said to her mother, ‘That’s it. I have had enough. Let’s get out of here.’
When Dallas arrived back in Sydney, the telephone was ringing. Bruce was on the other end, making threats. Most of them were personal, against Dallas and her parents, or against their property and possessions: ‘I’ll send your horse to the dog meat factory,’ Bruce said. That night, Les and Shirley Bromley stayed with their daughter at the duplex. They phoned Allan Burrell and described to him his son’s behaviour.
The next morning, Bruce turned up at 7 a.m. Allan Burrell arrived, but Bruce said little in front of his father. Dallas told Bruce that if he wanted the farm, they could sell the duplex they owned at 34 Marine Parade, Lurline Bay and she would move back into the unit, which was a hundred metres up the road. Dallas told him to leave her alone while he went away to think about it, but he rang continually. When Bruce spoke about it to Jennifer Ettia, he played down the separation, saying it was amicable. Dallas, however, was always angry when she spoke with Jennifer about it. On the phone one day, Dallas told Jennifer that Bruce had become violent and on one occasion, in a fury, went to hit her, but she had run off and left the house.
Bruce stayed down at Bungonia for several weeks. He telephoned Dallas and told her he was having treatment for a brain tumour. She sympathised but she was determined to press ahead with their divorce. When she rang the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital to enquire about his treatment, there was no record of a Bruce Allan Burrell being a patient.
Bruce’s anger towards his wife did not subside. Dallas was scared of him. He told old friends and associates a variety of tales about his marriage, that he and Dallas had split up or that they were about to. He did not reveal that his wife’s departure from his life had left him bereft of cash. By now Burrell had basically been unemployed for almost six years, apart from brief stints here and there as a consultant.
In September 1996 Burrell rang his old boss from the Cooke Collins advertising company—from the offices of which a newly single Dallas Bromley was operating her company—and asked to meet him in a coffee shop in Sydney’s Town Hall arcade. He told Michael Collins that he needed to refinance his mortgage and his bank required supporting documentation that he had a source of income. He asked Collins for a statement saying he was guaranteed an income of $60 000 a year. Collins said, ‘No.’ Nevertheless, he put together a letter which said Burrell was a consultant who would ‘gain monies from the company for any new business he generated’. Burrell collected the letter two days later, but after that he did not enter the company premises and whipped up no new business.
