Ladykiller (32 page)
Back at the command post, Inspector Bray had arrived. The family lunched with the searchers before emerging for an encounter with the waiting media. ‘I think unless you come here and see it, it is really difficult to understand how rough and rugged it is,’ Maree said.
A reporter asked how difficult it would be if Couch’s team found Dottie’s remains.
‘We accept our mother died the day she disappeared . . . to know the worst is better than to not know at all,’ Maree said. ‘What we as a family desperately need is the opportunity to find her, to take her home and to say our goodbyes in the way we would need and she deserves. The police will never give up on this. They haven’t given up on us in seven years and they certainly don’t intend to give up on us now.’
Maree smiled at Detective Inspector Couch, but she felt gutted. As she turned towards her car, Couch walked over and pressed something into her hand. It was a small stone from the forest.
For the next week, the OSG proceeded in lines through the forest and over thick, slippery mud with their prodders and shovels, looking for the smallest something. This time, they lowered camera probes down the mineshafts.
On Tuesday 10 September it was the Whelans’ turn, a few days before Sarah Whelan’s twenty-first birthday. She drove south with her boyfriend, David, and brother Matthew, feeling goose bumps on the drive down. Bernie Whelan and Debra took James and Little Bob, the dog, just in case he might sniff out something.
Bernie looked grim when he reached Hillydale’s gate, and saw the media throng surge around the cars. Bernie stopped for a few seconds: ‘I wanted my children to see where their mum was; I think it’s important to them.’
Sarah already believed this was where her mother lay and the feeling intensified as she walked around, inhaling the bush smells and having the odd sensation that it was all familiar. Mum is here, Sarah thought, she was sure of it. She looked around at her father and the boys. They felt it too. It was overwhelming, but at the same time a relief.
Back in the tents, Sarah looked admiringly at the men and women police officers eating their lunch. They looked tired and some were barely older than her. She felt a rush of affection for these people who were searching for her mother.
Bernie stood up and thanked the team. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful we are,’ he began.
At the insistence of the press, Bernie agreed to a small conference with Dennis Bray and Bruce Couch.
‘How was it?’ a reporter asked.
‘Very difficult for the kids,’ Bernie said. ‘I knew it would be emotional seeing the shafts and the density of the forest. Obviously, it’s been a tough day for all the family. We know Kerry’s here and being this close to her, there’s a lot of emotion running. The family and I have been mentally tortured for this crime for five years. The only way we can see an end to it is to find Kerry and bring her home and lay her to rest with the dignity she deserves.’
The press turned to Sarah, who told them it was her twenty-first birthday wish that the police would find her mother’s remains. ‘It would be nice to have some questions answered,’ Sarah said.
Asked what it meant to have her mother taken from her, she took in two breaths and said, ‘She was my life, like every little girl’s mother is.’
Maree Dawes would make one final trip to the forest, weeks later, with her daughter Kate, and two bunches of flowers for Dottie. Dennis Bray and Detective Sergeant Nigel Warren drove them along a path up to an escarpment which ended at a sheer drop down to the Shoalhaven River. After the repugnant forest, the vista was beautiful.
‘This is the spot,’ said Maree, but she had trouble propping the bouquets up against a tree.
The two detectives gathered some stones and made a cairn for the flowers.
Maree looked out across the valley and said, ‘The forest for the forests of Mum’s childhood, the river for the water from Undine Street,’ and she held her daughter and they wept. This was Dottie’s grave. She had no other.
A week after Black Friday in September 2002, Bruce Burrell was dished up his own piece of bad juju. The New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions sprung a surprise, announcing an ex-officio indictment against Burrell for the kidnap and murder of Kerry Patricia Whelan. Nicholas Cowdery used his power to authorise prosecution when there has been a defect in previous committal proceedings.
It was a bolt from the blue—albeit a welcome one—for Bernie Whelan, who was planning to take the family on a holiday following the disappointment of the fourth search. The murder charge came the day after Sarah’s twenty-first. Not a bad belated present, she reckoned. ‘I knew they were looking over the case thoroughly, but I had no idea that we were going to receive the phone call,’ Sarah said.
Dennis Bray was jubilant. Only Maree Dawes was angry, wounded that she was kept in the dark, and had to hear the announcement via the radio news. While Bernie Whelan told Radio 2GB it was a ‘bittersweet’ moment for his family and they were all ‘very emotional’, Maree was just bitter. Not for the first time, it seemed to her, Dottie was the poor sister to Kerry.
Over at Taiyul Street, North Narrabeen, a large media contingent was staking out Burrell’s house. Burrell was living in more humble circumstances than he had previously enjoyed: in a converted garage under the house of his sister Tonia, with his dog, Rebel. Outside, reporters lay on the footpaths under gum trees, waiting for the accused to emerge. Photographers climbed the trees for a vantage point from which to capture him in a frame. But the curtains on Tonia Pai’s two-storey house remained drawn and Bruce Burrell did not come out all day.
Bruce’s sister became the centre of attention when she shuttled her children around in a battered white Mitsubishi sedan. Tonia was used to screaming at reporters to get the hell out of her face. This time she marched towards a group of reporters: ‘No one is going to speak to you. We all know you can’t lie straight in bed at night.’
Tonia said that her brother was in Bali but it soon became clear she was lying: a steady stream of people arrived, carrying in cases of beer. Burrell was having a party and among the guests was his neighbour, Bob, who arrived wearing a mask from the teen horror film
Scream
. A man of Islander appearance turned up in the driveway in his sports car. He was a truckie friend from Bruce’s latest job at Watts Waste in Oxford Falls. When he looked around and saw the cameras, he yelled, ‘Fuck off , he’s not coming out.’
Bob staggered out several hours later and boasted that he had photographs of ‘Bruce’s last party’. Another man fell over on Tonia’s driveway and cut his arm. The boozing continued into the night. A group of young, drunk neighbours returned home from a night out, and called out, ‘Tell us where the bodies are buried, Bruce.’
In the morning, Burrell poked his head out of a window for a second, but found the media were still waiting. A photographer, hiding in a house next door, managed to snap a frame of his freshly shaven face.
At 10.45 a.m., Tonia arrived back home from a shopping excursion. In the back of her car were her kids, Taylah, Courtney, Morgan and Leely. She entered via the side of the cream brick house, into Bruce’s quarters, and emerged two minutes later, tense and angry. She walked over to a group of reporters and said, ‘Please be respectful of my children.’
The following day Burrell’s face appeared on the front page of the
Sun-Herald
under the headline ‘Hello, Bruce!’
A week later, on 27 September 2002, before a packed session in the New South Wales Supreme Court, Burrell pleaded not guilty to the kidnap and murder of Kerry Whelan. A trial date was fixed for 28 April 2003. Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, QC, told the court the fresh arraignment followed new evidence which emerged during the inquest. Allan Burrell agreed to put up $20 000 bail for his son.
Burrell’s barrister, David Dalton, said he would seek a permanent stay of proceedings, arguing there had been an ‘abuse of prosecutorial discretion’. Dalton’s stay application would be among several the lawyer would make as he fought to stop the trial going ahead. Many more twists and turns lay ahead for the parties and many more days in court.
On 12 October bombs ripped through two nightclubs on the Kuta Beach tourist strip in Bali, Indonesia. The country was still focused on the disaster when, on 18 October, Nicholas Cowdery’s office of the DPP served a second ex-officio indictment on Burrell. For the second time in six weeks, Bruce Burrell appeared in the New South Wales Supreme Court, charged this time with the murder of Dorothy Davis. Maree Dawes was relieved to see her mother’s murder formally acknowledged.
‘I am innocent of that charge, Your Honour,’ Burrell told the court. Cowdery issued a statement requesting that ‘media outlets respect the need for a fair trial, according to law, by not publishing potentially prejudicial material in advance of the trial’. For once, Burrell was left alone. Reporters were busy with stories about the Bali terrorist attack, which had left eighty-eight Australians dead.
Despite their persistent pleas, Kerry had refused to allow her sons to play rugby. ‘It’s too rough, boys,’ she would tell them at the beginning of each season, ‘you’ll get hurt.’ Instead they played soccer, and Kerry would ferry them each Saturday to the sports ovals where she would barrack ferociously from the sidelines.
In the months after their mum disappeared, sport took a back seat. Matthew eventually returned to it, launching himself into rugby, playing breakaway for the Penrith Emus. He was a good player but by the age of twenty he had developed a very lanky physique. He had that most dangerous of physical attributes on a rugby field—a long neck. His coach had advised him to give the game away, concerned he would be injured. Matthew agreed.
His final game was at the Nepean Rugby Club on Saturday 17 April 2004. His girlfriend of four weeks, Meg Ryan, cheered him on in his second-grade game. He showered and was ready to relax when the A-grade team called on him because they were short of players. With five minutes of play left , Matthew ran on and caught the ball from a kick-off. The ruck closed in around him and when the players dispersed, Matthew lay there, unmoving. For him, the world had gone black. He was paralysed up to his neck and he could not scream for help. The other players were oblivious to what had happened and his side had gone on to score a try. In a panic on the side of the field, Meg caught someone’s attention and the cheering stopped. A new crisis was about to envelop the Whelan family.
Bernie and Debra arrived at the ground as Matthew was being carried on a stretcher to a rescue helicopter. He was flown to the Royal North Shore Hospital where a scan showed he had severely injured his spine. At 10 p.m., he underwent a delicate three-hour operation to fuse the C3 and C4 vertebrae. After Matthew underwent numerous tests, Bernie was told the prognosis was not good. His son was a quadriplegic and was unlikely to walk again. Doctors advised Bernie and Debra to go home and get some rest. Kerry’s brother, Brett Ryan, decided to stay, scared that his nephew would wake to find no one with him.
Matthew was in the cardiac section of the intensive care unit, the only wing where he could be found a bed in the overstretched public health system. A year earlier, in April 2003, as he was preparing for his trial, Bruce Burrell was treated in the same ward, undergoing a triple heart bypass. As the Whelans now kept vigil over their son, the nurses would gossip to them about Burrell, who was ‘demanding and abusive’ to staff. His sisters, Tonia and Debbie, were often heard, in raised voices, insisting the nurses ‘attend to Bruce’. Burrell, even while recovering from major surgery, was bossy and rude, saying ‘Get me this. I need a drink, now.’ In the end, the nurses would draw straws on who had to answer his constant calls.
The Whelans were the opposite. Bernie had retired a month earlier from Crown and he drew up a family roster to ensure someone was with Matthew twenty-four hours a day. During those first few weeks, Matthew drifted in and out of consciousness. The paralysis meant he found it difficult to breathe and he required assistance through a ventilator, which was fed by a tube down his windpipe. It was heart-wrenching for his family to watch the once-active, lively young man lie conscious, but powerless.
Most days and nights Matthew sobbed for his mother; it was the first time he had properly grieved. The accident had opened up the emotions he had kept so tightly in check. Sarah had flown back from her new life in Queensland to be at his bedside where she tried to fill the void left by her mother.
Matthew was still in intensive care on 6 May. Nobody mentioned it was Kerry’s anniversary, although everybody thought of it. Sarah knew the day would be hard for him. ‘Hey, baby, I’m here for you.’ Sarah kissed Matt’s forehead as soon as she walked into his hospital room. Tears rolled down Matt’s cheeks. ‘You know what day it is, sweetheart?’ Matthew nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here with you. It’s okay.’
Matthew was eventually moved to the hospital’s spinal unit and, determined to prove the doctors wrong, he gradually made small improvements. After six weeks he was able to lift his right hand, then his left, and he began to breathe on his own. The specialists were impressed and transferred him to a rehabilitation hospital where his girlfriend Meg and his best mate Drew Bolton spent long days by his side for five months. Matthew was bent on making it home for Christmas—and he did.
Meanwhile, Bruce Burrell was suffering continuing problems from his own hospitalisation for heart surgery a year earlier. He had caught a post-operative staphylococcal infection, was put on heavy doses of medication and was in and out of hospital, rendering him unable to appear in court, according to his defence lawyer. His trial had been set down for 28 April 2003 in the New South Wales Supreme Court, but his illness caused further delays, no doubt to the delight of Burrell, whose counsel was continuing to fight for a permanent stay of proceedings, submitting that the intense publicity that surrounded the case made it impossible to get a fair hearing. The stay application was vacated and the months rolled by. Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi was maintaining the fight to have the Whelan and Davis matters heard together, but he was also unsuccessful. Trial dates were set again and again. For the Whelans, the legal wrangling was an aside. Matthew was Bernie’s priority at the moment and the young man had a long road ahead of him.
