The Tall Man (5 page)

SOON AFTER DAWN
the cicadas resumed their electrical humming, as if releasing some live current into the air. I woke in a low single bed in a room whose walls had strange stains. This island was on some other frequency. Its element was different, like when you enter a hospital and the air changes. I thought of Chris Hurley on the surveillance video, slumping down the wall with his head in his hands. What did that slump mean? That this was a cop’s worst nightmare? That he was distraught because a young man had lost his life while in his care? Or was it guilt? Had remorse hit his bloodstream and made his legs crumble underneath him?

The morning Cameron Doomadgee died, when the ambulance had gone and the surveillance video stopped running, there were five men in the police station: four officers—Chris Hurley, Michael Leafe, Lloyd Bengaroo, Kristopher Steadman—and Patrick Nugent, unconscious in a cell. There was also Cameron’s body.

“We were sick,” Hurley said later. “Lloyd was upset, he was crying.” Lloyd was part-Kalkadoon, from around Mount Isa in northwestern Queensland, and he had a connection to Cameron’s mother. He reckoned they should tell the family Cameron was dead, but Hurley told him to stay put and keep quiet. Hurley asked one of his officers to print out the pages in the Queensland Police Service’s
Operations and Procedures Manual
(
OPM
) dealing with black deaths in custody.

The 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody had investigated ninety-nine deaths over a ten-year period, calculating: “If non-Aboriginal people had died in custody at the same rate … there would have been nearly 9,000 deaths.” But after painstaking research, the inquiry found no evidence that any of the deaths was the result of foul play. Rather, Aboriginal people were chronically overrepresented in jail (making up 2.4 per cent of the national population but 22 per cent of the prison population), were in appalling health, and were given inadequate care while incarcerated. The commission found that police investigations into these deaths in custody “had usually been perfunctory”, and now, thirteen years later, there were strict guidelines dictating what police had to do if they found themselves in this situation.

Hurley and Leafe moved Patrick Nugent to the station’s other cell and sealed Cameron’s cell off as a crime scene. Hurley then rang the Townsville District Police Communications Centre: “We’ve had a death in custody … bloody came in, he was bluing and carrying on … calling out fuckin’ … fuckin’ white cunts and carrying on basically, walking down the street and calling Lloyd a black cunt.”

The officer in charge of the communications centre, Senior Sergeant Stephen Jenkins, telephoned his superior, Inspector Greg Strohfeldt, on a closed line to notify him of the death. Jenkins then contacted the region’s acting superintendent, a higher rank again. Those in the chain of command were now aware there had been what they called a SIGEV—a significant event.

Within minutes of finding Cameron dead, Hurley also called his close friend Darren Robinson. This was not an
OPM
directive, although “Robbo” was the detective on the island. He and “Hurls” had worked, lived and bonded there for the past two years. Robinson had been a good mate when earlier that year Hurley’s girlfriend had left him and gone back to the mainland. The previous day, Robinson had escorted a prisoner to Townsville, and that’s where he took the call.

After the men spoke, Robinson called his superior, Detective Senior Sergeant Joe Kitching of the Townsville Crime and Investigation Bureau. Kitching was also a friend of Hurley’s. During Hurley’s posting in Burketown, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, Kitching had worked “nearby” in Cloncurry, a pastoral centre eight hours’ drive away. They knew each other “reasonably well”, Kitching would tell the inquest. “If I saw him in the street, I’d certainly say g’day to him and stop and have a talk.”

Robinson then placed a call to Kitching’s superior, Detective Inspector Warren Webber, the northern regional crime coordinator. Webber had done a two-day disaster management course with Hurley and held him in high esteem. He believed community and police relations on Palm Island had been improving under Hurley’s leadership.

The
Operations and Procedures Manual
stated that in “custodypolice related incidents” the regional crime coordinator (in this case Webber) “should appoint an investigator from a police establishment other than from where the incident occurred, or where the officers or members directly involved in the incident are stationed.” Webber decided that Townsville, though only fifteen minutes away, was separate enough from Palm Island to fulfil this requirement, and appointed Kitching and Robinson to the investigation. It was true that Robinson had worked on the island for the past two years, but he would be a junior investigator. Webber himself had never set foot there.

The phone calls made, there was a knock on the station door. Hurley opened it to see Tracy Twaddle with Cameron’s sister Carol and a small child. In her police statement Tracy said she had heard Cameron yelling from the back of the police van as it drove past their house, and she’d brought him some lunch. But now, “Chris Hurley’s face was funny; he didn’t know how to look at me. I thought there was something wrong.” She asked when Cameron would be let out.

He said, “Were you with him?”

“Yes, I live with him, I’m his defacto.”

“Were you with him [this] morning?”

“No, he went when I was asleep.”

“Did you have anything to drink the night before?”

“We had about one and a half cartons of beers.”

“Come back at three o’clock and I will talk to you.”

Hurley claimed to have no recollection of ever seeing the dead man before. On computer records he found that Cameron Doomadgee had been arrested a few times for being drunk and disorderly in Townsville. As well, he found that they were the same age—thirty-six. The child at the door might have belonged, he thought, to the man lying on the cell floor.

Hurley later said he felt his stomach giving way. This was not meant to be happening to him. Until 11:22
A.M.
he’d been a man with a tight, hard plan, who’d worked his guts out in a string of places other cops thought were shit holes, and as a result the insignia on his uniform had been constantly upgraded. Another embroidered chevron, then another, until as senior sergeant he had an embroidered crown circled by laurels. He was ambitious, he wanted to go all the way in the police force, and in each posting he’d earned not just a chevron but the respect of a lot of people—including a lot of black people. It was not part of Chris Hurley’s plan to be standing in the doorway lying—or whatever it was—to the woman of a dead blackfella.

Hurley still did not know the cause of Cameron Doomadgee’s death. But he and the other Palm Island officers had more than three hours in which to compare notes on the SIGEV before the investigators arrived. Hurley, Leafe and Bengaroo sat “throwing around ideas” about how it might have happened. Possibly they were too distressed to realize this contravened the
OPM
’s clear directive that “members directly involved in the incident should not discuss the incident amongst themselves prior to being interviewed.”

Hurley’s investigators were on the 2:30 flight from Townsville. Fifteen minutes later, the senior sergeant was waiting at the airstrip to pick them up. The
OPM
says a death in custody must be investigated as a potential homicide, but Inspector Webber, the senior investigator, told the inquest he considered the case of Cameron Doomadgee to be something less serious than a “potential homicide” and more a “homicide-type investigation, if you like”. He had no actual suspects, but “persons of interest were obviously anyone that was in the station at the time.”

Inspector Webber was in his fifties, short, balding, grey, bespectacled, with a squint that merged easily with a frown. He did not record any conversation he had with Hurley that day. “I didn’t go into great depth,” he said. “We didn’t engage in any great conversation. It was simply a matter of ‘All right, what’s happened?’ and a two-minute conversation to secure the scene, put the forensic team into the cell.” A crime scene photographer took pictures of the police station and of Cameron lying dead in the cell. The body would be moved to the hospital that evening before being flown to the mainland for autopsy.

It was Inspector Webber who went to Dormitory Lane, to Cameron’s mother’s bright blue house, to tell Doris Doomadgee that her son was dead. The
OPM
requires officers to inform the deceased’s next of kin immediately, but recommends that a senior member of the Aboriginal community be asked to do this. Though Webber was aware that Hurley had not met this requirement, he told the inquest that he thought “it was appropriate for a senior officer to reassure the mother of the deceased that a thorough and proper investigation would be conducted of that death.” He also felt it was inappropriate for the family to be advised by “one of the persons of interest”. This did not stop him, however, taking along Sergeant Michael Leafe, who had earlier that morning attempted to rouse Cameron with a kick.

Carol, Cameron’s sister, recalled the officers’ visit: “The detective had a red book with him, and he read it out to us telling us we lost Cameron.” Doris Doomadgee was in a wheelchair. She was emaciated, dying of cancer. She asked Webber to notify her family in the Gulf region town of Doomadgee. Two weeks later, she too was dead.

Webber then went to inform Tracy. She was waiting at home, “wondering what happened, [why] I’ve got to wait till three o’clock, for Cameron. For to talk to them … They told me that Cameron was found on the police cell an hour after he got locked up; they found him dead.”

Elizabeth Doomadgee did not even know her brother had been arrested. She was gardening when an Aboriginal hospital worker came and told her the news. She felt choked and could not speak. She’d been waiting for Cameron with a pack of smokes he’d asked for.

Later that evening, Elizabeth and Jane went to identify their brother’s body. He was wearing his favourite shirt. It was torn and he had a black eye. “He was not at peace,” Elizabeth said later. “Cameron had his eyes half open and I looked into his eyes and I could see struggle.”

Lloyd Bengaroo, at the end of his working day, went back to the house he shared with his sister. Agnes Wotton, who lived across the road, was visiting. She thought it strange Bengaroo didn’t say hello. He went straight to his room and closed the door and stayed there.

W
HILE
C
AMERON’S FAMILY
was hearing of his death, Chris Hurley was being interviewed by his two friends Officers Robinson and Kitching.

Darren Robinson was a fitness fanatic. The locals often saw the thin-lipped policeman with the impish face and upturned chin running or riding his mountain bike around the island. Although he had “conducted minimal investigations … essentially none” before arriving on Palm Island, he was putting together evidence against the island’s suspected child abusers. He had bought magic tricks with his own money as aids to interviewing children who’d been molested. Kitching, who outranked Robinson, was a balding redhead with orange eyebrows and moustache, and the kind of bright, supernatural tan that comes over years to the very pale. He wore an onyx ring with a gold crucifix on it.

The taped interview began at 4:04
P.M.
and concluded at 4:36
P.M.
In it the detectives focused almost exclusively on Cameron punching Hurley. A dead body lay nearby, a dead body with a pronounced black eye, but the officers did not ask Hurley if, when Cameron hit him, the senior sergeant hit back. In old-school policing, punching a cop was considered enough provocation to teach the offender a hard lesson.

“I observed that he had a small amount of blood that was, ah, coming from a very small, ah, injury above his right eye,” Hurley said.

“How did he receive that injury?” Kitching asked.

“I don’t know.”

Neither officer asked him to speculate. Instead, Robinson wondered whether Hurley had sustained any injuries himself.

“Just a tiny scratch on my arm there,” Hurley replied, “probably from the ah … the little wrestle that we had. That’s the only thing I can see.”

Then Robinson, perhaps giving his friend an out, asked, “And you didn’t fall on top of him?”

Hurley could not have been more emphatic. “No, I landed beside him.”

That night, Robinson and Kitching and Webber met Hurley at his house, and Robinson cooked dinner. Sergeant Leafe joined them afterwards and they all sat out on the balcony, talking, drinking beer. At the inquest, Hurley said he had no recollection of what was discussed. He was too distressed. Anyway, Robinson and Webber, he said, were barely speaking to him. “I wasn’t treated like a friend … I was treated like a leper.”

Robinson was asked at the inquest, “Did you make an effort to console him, or to offer him support if not console, saying things like
don’t worry about it
?”

Robinson responded, “Ah, no.”

“Or,
don’t blame yourself
?”

“No.”

“He’s a good friend of yours, isn’t he?”

“He is a friend of mine, but I’m not there to give him a pat on the back about what happened.”

“But if a friend of yours is highly distressed, you usually do what you can to alleviate that distress, don’t you?”

“Ah, not in this situation, no.”

This was not the first time Webber had instructed Robinson to investigate Hurley. (In fact, Webber had once instructed Robinson to look into a complaint against his own conduct, to investigate himself.) Robinson had cleared Hurley of wrongdoing at least once—and he knew his friend could be quick to use his fists. Robinson had seen Hurley hit another Palm Island resident, a drunk schizophrenic who’d come into the station one evening and mouthed off at Hurley and five other officers who were sitting around talking. Hurley said he threw the punch when he thought the man was going to head-butt him. The punch put the drunk on the floor.