The Tall Man (28 page)

In that interview, Detective Senior Sergeant Joe Kitching said: “So you tripped over a step, is that right?”

Hurley: “Over the step as we came in—there’s a step there.”

Kitching: “How did you manage to fall on the ground?”

Hurley: “I fell to the left of him and he was to the right of me.”

Later in the interview, Hurley’s friend Detective Sergeant Darren Robinson asked: “And you didn’t land on top of him?”

Hurley: “No, I landed beside him on the, ah—what do you call it?—the, ah, lino.”

After the jury had heard the audiotape, they then watched the video re-enactment Hurley made the day after Doomadgee’s death. In old Westerns, doorways were built small so that the heroes looked taller. That’s how it appears in this video: Hurley as John Wayne in a doll’s house. Again he tells the investigators that he fell to the left and Doomadgee to the right. But what is remarkable about the video is that there is no fall. There is an approximate description of a fall but no attempt to reconstruct the fall itself. The very thing the re-enactment is meant to explain is the one thing it most patently ignores: how Cameron Doomadgee sustained the injuries that killed him.

Sitting in the witness box, Hurley now broached the fall. He said this was “the greyest area” of his memory: “I mean, when I say ‘grey’ it’s not black, it’s not white.”

Zillman: “How quickly did you fall?”

Hurley: “In an instant.”

Zillman: “How rapidly?”

Hurley: “In an instant. We, we fell very fast to the floor …”

Zillman: “And you know that in the course of those interviews, you essentially said that you fell beside him?”

Hurley: “Yes, I know that.”

Zillman: “What do you say about that?”

Hurley: “I would say to that, that if I did not know the medical evidence that came to light out of the postmortems, if I … if I had not sat in the court for the past week listening to what the witnesses have said, I would sit in this box today and say that I still fell beside him.”

Zillman: “What confidence do you have in that recollection as you expressed it in those interviews?”

Hurley: “Well, it’s not correct, obviously. It’s not correct.”

Zillman: “What do you say to the proposition that after the fall, you in some unspecified way deliberately applied force resulting in the fatal injuries to Mr Doomadgee?”

Hurley: “I say that’s not correct. I can say with a hundred per cent certainty and honesty that I did not do that.”

For forty minutes an invisible string connected Hurley to his barrister; there was a rhythm to their back-and-forth, and together they played a
We know what the real world is like
chord. A few phrases Hurley repeated had the subtlest air of rehearsal, but if he was lying, he was brilliant at it. He seemed grave. He seemed sincere. He really could have been an old screen idol from a time when men had grit and did not go to a gymnasium to get it. A figure before black voting rights, before black land rights, before Reconciliation.

After Cameron was found cold in the cell, Hurley said, he and the other officers were “just tossing thoughts in the air about why he was dead”. A heart condition, choking on sputum, an aneurysm, food poisoning—these were some of the “ideas” they’d been “throwing around”. Lloyd Bengaroo had wept. Hurley told the court that during the first two interviews, he too had been “emotional”. “I just felt very distressed about it. I knew he had a partner because she had come up to the police station and she had a little one with her at the time and that was what was upsetting me.” Also they were the same age, thirty-six: this coincidence unnerved him.

“There’s been some evidence you’re a big man,” Steve Zillman said, and he asked Hurley for his dimensions.

“Six-foot-seven or two metres, a hundred and fifteen kilograms,” Hurley replied. His hands were big hands, his knee a big knee.

P
ETER
D
AVIS MAY
not have expected Hurley to give evidence, but he’d prepared a cross-examination just in case. Standing with his arms folded, Davis rocked back and forth, leaning over the bar table, inclining towards the accused
.

This would be Hurley’s great test. He sat with his legs apart. He met Davis’s force with force, his aggression with aggression. You punch me, I’ll punch you.

Davis: “You see what’s happened, I suggest to you, is that you have knee-dropped on him in an attempt to wind him. That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it?”

Hurley: “No, not at all.”

Davis: “Try to subdue him?”

Hurley: “No.”

Davis: “And in doing that, not knowing your own strength, you’ve killed him?”

Hurley: “No, I haven’t.”

Davis: “And then you’ve thought later on, Oh well, he’s probably died of a heart attack or something. Why do I have to confess having dropped my knee into him? That’s what’s happened, isn’t it?”

Hurley: “Not at all. You said yourself, sir, a hundred and fifteen kilograms—if I dropped a knee down onto a man and he was dead within an hour, the investigators come three hours later, they give me an opportunity in the first interview. On the second time they say, ‘You didn’t fall on him?’ And so, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I could’ve. Oh, that’s right, yeah, I could’ve—’”

Davis: “Oh, is—?”

Hurley: “I could’ve fallen on him, you know?”

Davis: “Oh, that’s the lie you’d tell, is that right?”

Hurley: “Well, that’s what I could’ve told them.”

Davis: “Is that the lie you’d tell?”

Hurley: “That’s what I could’ve told if I’d done the knee drop … that you’re saying I have.”

Davis: “I see. So had you—?”

Hurley: “I could have easily written myself out of this.”

Davis: “Oh, I see. I see. So your state of mind now is, the way you’re thinking, the way you’re telling this jury is that, had you done it, you would’ve lied your way out of it, is that right?”

Hurley: “No, I’m saying had I been the type of person that had done something like that, I may follow that up with a lie to get out of this, to cover your backside, or whatever the term is.”

In effect, Hurley was saying: “If I had assaulted him, I could have—even might have—lied about it, and since I didn’t lie, I didn’t assault him.” When he first told his story, however, he’d had no reason to tell such a lie—he did not yet know how Cameron had died and had no reason to concoct the excuse of falling on him to explain his injuries. His friends had cleared him of misconduct before. If Hurley had been “the type of person that had done something like that”, he could also be the type to know he’d get away with it—short of it killing Cameron.

Peter Davis asked: “Are you swearing on oath to this jury that there was not one skerrick of anger in you after you ended up on your own nose in the police station, falling into your own police station?”

Hurley now grew combative. “Depends on your definition of anger. I wasn’t pleased. I wasn’t pleased I was down, but I wasn’t angry.”

Davis: “He’d resisted, hadn’t he?”

Hurley: “So what? That happens a lot out on the street.”

Davis: “So that didn’t anger you?”

Hurley: “No.”

Davis: “What about a smack in the chops? Did that anger you?”

Hurley: “No, not at all.”

Davis: “Not at all?”

Hurley: “It surprised me.”

Davis: “Are you saying that an adult man bashing you in the face didn’t raise any emotion of anger at all?”

Hurley: “Wasn’t bashing. It was just a back hand from a fella that had drunk too much grog that day basically.”

There was a brief recess and the jury left. Hurley, ashen-faced, walked from the witness box back to the dock. Eyes narrowed, he sat staring at his open hands. Penned there, he looked rotten, as if there were something poisonous inside him. I could almost see the bitter rage rocking through his head.

I thought of the cave painting I’d hiked to see in Laura, Cape York, showing the two-metre-tall police officer being bitten on the foot by a huge snake, perhaps the Rainbow Serpent—the totem of the Doomadgees’ grandmother. Hurley had told his story as a man would suck venom from a bite. His life was at stake. And this was the only antidote.

Compared to his indignation, Hurley’s remorse had a subtle note. Maybe the balance shifted from day to night, from public to private. Maybe it didn’t. One of the Police Union men had told me Hurley felt betrayed by the Aboriginal community. For all these years he’d looked after the women and children, brought order where there was chaos—and they had all turned against him. I wondered how he felt now about Reconciliation.

I had sent Chris Hurley a number of letters through his solicitor, wanting to speak to him, but had received no reply. As he sat there, I wished I could ask him:

Do you ever dream you’re falling?

Do you ever dream of Cameron Doomadgee?

What do you think of the places you once chose to live, where good and bad are blurred and where you thought you were good?

Do you still think you were?

And there was one other question:
How can I get you to talk to me?

Then, for some reason, Hurley looked over at me. He was only metres away but his brow was so knitted, his glower so dark, I could not see his eyes. His glare had partially erased them, had sunk them even deeper into their sockets, so that it took a few seconds to realize I was its subject. I don’t know if he knew who I was; I suspect he did. With a weak smile I turned away, feeling my blood surge. I did not have it in me to stare back. He was a man trying to save his life and he seemed to be saying,
How dare you judge me?

T
HE COURT RESUMED
and Peter Davis replayed the video reenactment. The jury held their transcripts as if they were scripts of a play. Hurley sat in front of the screen watching himself on Palm Island. He pulled his jacket tighter. Leaning forward, Davis took the accused man through the video frame by frame, asking him to account for the detail he’d been able to give investigators, seeing as his memory was impaired. But Davis got no traction. He seemed exasperated by the unlikely story that Hurley was telling. Yet Hurley seemed to grow more comfortable.

Davis: “We’re in ‘the grey area’ now, aren’t we?”

Hurley: “Yes.”

Davis asked why, if it was so grey, Hurley had been able to “specifically direct the interviewers as to how you had Mr Doomadgee, where he was standing, how he was crouching”. Davis replayed the part where Hurley said, “No, lower, boss.” He stopped it at the moment Hurley and “Doomadgee”—Inspector Webber—walked through the doorway. In the video, Hurley said he fell to the left and Doomadgee to the right.

Davis: “A hundred and something kilograms of you and seventy-something kilograms of Mr Doomadgee, and you’ve come together on the floor of the police station heavily?”

Hurley: “Yes, obviously.”

Davis: “And you’ve missed [falling on him]?”

Hurley: “Yes, I have, obviously.”

Davis: “And that, that’s your whole case?”

Hurley: “Yes, it is.”

The senior sergeant’s body had impacted with the force of a car smashing, with the force of a plane crashing. Peter Callaghan, the lawyer for the Doomadgees at the inquest, had always said, “Doomadgee didn’t give himself a black eye,” and this black eye was “unlikely to have been caused in the same action which damaged the liver.” But Davis, focused on the fatal injury, did not choose to make much of the black eye, believing it a risky strategy without forensic proof. Some people watching the proceedings thought Davis’s position was weak, they wished
they
had hired the mauling Steve Zillman.

Davis: “You can’t assist us, can you, in explaining how or what part of your body impacted upon Mr Doomadgee?”

Hurley: “No, I don’t know what part. I can only say one hundred per cent that I did not cause any deliberate force to Mr Doomadgee.”

It was Friday afternoon. Hurley had been examined and cross-examined for over two hours. But he was like one of the tall spirits not just in his size, but in his evasiveness. He seemed to find ways of hiding in the legal cracks. The law pretended it could pin him down, cut him to size. Each new proceeding claimed to be the place where the truth would be known, the shadows cast out, with the bright light of justice triumphing. And yet, as Hurley returned from the witness box, his supporters stepped forward to congratulate him. He shook hands and was slapped on the back. He had done well.

Hurley was the only witness for the defence. All evidence had been taken, and on Monday the defence and the prosecution would deliver their summaries. I looked around for Cameron’s family but couldn’t see them. Tracy had found the forensic descriptions hard to bear and had not come back. Elizabeth had been keeping to herself, even sitting separately from her sisters. She too had not been well; her manner was frayed. I had seen her earlier in the day clutching a face towel. These past three years had been too much. The top button of her collar was undone and she had a series of pink plastic pads on her chest—her heart was being monitored.

The last time I’d visited Palm Island, three weeks earlier, Elizabeth’s garden was a jungle of metre-high weeds. Some of the plant cuttings had taken, most had not. She sat on her veranda with a nursery catalogue a neighbour had lent her, looking at pictures of lilies and roses with full, perfect petals. She pointed out the bright red and yellow lilies she liked, then turned the page. Inside, the house was quiet. Ten days earlier all her foster children had been taken away from her. They had been removed and put in foster care on the mainland.

What had happened was unclear. Queensland’s Child Protection Services had come and taken them either before or after she’d “tapped” a machete against some social workers’ car windshield. The machete, she told me, was blunt anyway. She had been on her way to the island’s workshop to have the blade sharpened for $5 so she could slash the wild grass in her garden. Elizabeth said she’d apologised to the social workers and they had accepted her apology, but still they took the children. When I asked for more details a fog rolled in. I knew the story was more complicated than this, and also that Elizabeth was too proud to ever tell me what had really happened.