The Tall Man (6 page)

At 8
A.M.
on Saturday, the day after Cameron’s death, Darren Robinson went to Dee Street and found Roy Bramwell. None of the officers, including Hurley, knew whether Bramwell had witnessed anything. Robinson and Kitching interviewed him at the police station. Bramwell said he’d seen an assault. His view had been partially obscured by a filing cabinet, but Hurley was a big man with long arms: “I could see the elbow gone down, up and down, like that … ‘Do you want more Mister, Mister Doomadgee? Do you want more of these, eh?’” Roy said he’d watched Doomadgee’s feet writhing as Hurley’s elbow went up and down. Asked why he didn’t move, he told the officers: “If I got up and seen where the punches were hitting he would have hit me, he would have threw me in the bloomin’ cell.”

N
EARLY TWO YEARS
later, on October 6, 2006, when Roy Bramwell was in prison for his assault on Gladys Nugent and her sisters, he called in a Legal Aid representative. His nephew Patrick Nugent had just been arrested again and he was frightened for him. Roy made a sworn statement:

On the 20th November 2004 … I was visited by 4 demons [police officers] who obtained a statement from me regarding what I had seen … One of the four detectives present was Darren Robinson and after my statement was signed he threatened me with if anything happens to his friend Chris Hurley, he would come looking for me. I did not tell anyone of this threat until now as I am now scared for my safety and also for my family.

In 1987, after the media had aired claims of high-level corruption within the Queensland Police Force, a judicial inquiry was set up, headed by Tony Fitzgerald QC. Fitzgerald exposed a police service linked to illegal prostitution, gambling and kickbacks, an organization “debilitated by misconduct, inefficiency, incompetence and deficient leadership”. Endemic corruption led all the way to the state’s long-serving, ultra-right-wing premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and to his anointed police commissioner, Sir Terence Lewis. In September 1987 Sir Terence was forced to resign and later went to jail for ten years on corruption charges. Chris Hurley was sworn in as a police officer the following month. The month after that, in November 1987, after nineteen years at the helm, Sir Joh spent his last moments in office shredding incriminating documents.

The Fitzgerald inquiry identified within the force a pervasive unwritten “code,” which required that police “not enforce the law against other police, nor co-operate in any attempt to do so, and perhaps even obstruct any such attempt”. Police justified this code to themselves by claiming they “need to trust each other”. Fitzgerald found that it “effectively places police officers beyond the law”.

O
N THAT SAME
Saturday morning when Robinson and Kitching interviewed Roy Bramwell, Inspector Mark Williams arrived on Palm Island. Williams was from Ethical Standards, the police division required to sign off on deaths in custody. At 10:52
A.M.
he and Inspector Webber conducted a video interview with Bramwell, wherein he repeated his claim of having seen Hurley’s elbow going up and down three times.

A few feet away, Hurley sat in his office with the door closed.

When the interview was finished, Webber, Williams and Hurley went to Dee Street to look at the scene of the arrest. The two investigators’ conversations with Hurley immediately following their interview with Bramwell were not taped. At the inquest, Webber denied telling Hurley of Bramwell’s allegation: “I certainly did not, and certainly in my presence no officer did.” But Webber could not say where, in or around the police station, Hurley had been after 8:15
A.M.
, when Roy first made his claim, or which officers he had spoken to.

Back at the station once more, Hurley had his own video interview with Webber and Williams, recorded at 11:53
A.M.
Hurley is shown standing loose-limbed and slouching. He is tense. He can’t keep his hands still; he clenches his fists and flutters his fingers, flexing them. His long arms look like they have a lot of leverage. He knows how to box and demonstrates four different punches in the space of a few seconds, to show how Cameron hit him. This relaxes him. Hurley is articulate when he’s being physical. He starts describing their “figh—” before correcting himself and calling it a “tussle”. “I knew there’s going to be a tussle on if he’s going to hit a copper,” he tells the inspectors in a voice that seems to expect agreement.

Inspector Webber plays the part of Cameron while Hurley reenacts his story: he’d been hit, he said; they had “tussled” on the way to the door and tripped and fallen through it side by side. But now he adds a new element.

The video shows him standing near the filing cabinets, as Roy Bramwell said he had been. But where Bramwell said he saw a punching motion, Hurley demonstrates a “picking up” motion. He leans down to the floor and bends his elbows up and down. When he straightens, his head nearly touches the ceiling. He explains to the inspectors that he was trying to lift Doomadgee by his shirt. Rather than saying, “Do you want more, Mr Doomadgee? Do you want more?” as Bramwell claimed, he was calling on Doomadgee to get up: “Get up, Mr Doomadgee! Get up!”

This interview is striking for its camaraderie. Webber refers to Hurley as “mate” or “buddy”; Hurley calls him “boss.” When he demonstrates trying to lift Cameron by the shirt, Hurley laughs with the investigating officers—they joke about not tearing Inspector Webber’s shirt the way Hurley had torn Cameron’s faded Hawaiian one. Neither inspector asks Hurley why Doomadgee was taken into custody in the first place. They don’t ask why he had objected to his arrest. They don’t ask whether Hurley hit Cameron back. They don’t ask how the dead man got a black eye.

After conducting the re-enactment, Inspectors Webber and Williams sat down to watch the cell-surveillance tape. “Senior Sergeant Hurley actually had to operate it for us,” Webber told the inquest. They could not remember if Hurley watched it with them, just as Robinson and Kitching could not remember if he had watched it with them the day before.

Next morning, Sunday, November 21, two days after Cameron’s death, Detective Senior Sergeant Kitching tracked down Penny Sibley, the Aboriginal woman who had been standing outside the police station when Hurley struggled with Cameron. She had left Palm Island and was staying in the sugarcane town of Ingham, an hour’s drive from Townsville. She had not yet heard Cameron was dead: “I got the biggest fright.” Penny, who’d known Cameron all his life, described him in traditional terms as her nephew. She told Kitching she had seen him strike Hurley’s face, then Hurley “got wild” and punched Cameron back. She said that when she saw this she started to cry. Kitching asked her if she was on any medication. Penny admitted she was on “a helluva lot of drugs” for “heart, high blood pressure, sugar, yeah, diabetes.” Penny’s daughter wondered if her mother should be talking out against Hurley: “All this things that Mum doing,” she asked Kitching, “this can put in danger?”

Darren Robinson, meanwhile, had heard a rumour that Cameron had been drinking bleach, and was researching alternative causes of death. On Monday morning, November 22, Kitching suggested he stop by the hospital to get the dead man’s medical records. This was what Robinson found: Doomadgee had been admitted in 1991 with hepatitis; in 1993 with a head injury; in 1994 with an alcohol-related seizure and also renal trauma; in 1999 with multiple stab wounds to his chest and stomach. In 2000 he was admitted with stab wounds in his right thigh and a fractured arm; in 2003 it was lacerations to his hand and lip from fighting; and later that year he was admitted with broken ribs. This was life for a young man on Palm Island. From around the time of Robinson’s visit to the hospital, the rumour emerged—popular with the police—that Doomadgee had been in a car accident just before Hurley arrested him.

Kitching, of the onyx Christian ring, signed the police report on Cameron Doomadgee and sent it to the pathologist. He did not include Roy Bramwell’s allegation of assault: the cause of death was a fall.

But by Monday afternoon, Bramwell’s story of seeing and hearing Hurley beating Doomadgee had made its way around the island. Mayor Erykah Kyle had been calling on any witnesses to come forward and speak on a PA system she’d had set up in the town square. Around a hundred Palm Islanders listened as Roy Bramwell—now a kind of hero—told his story: Cameron had been lying on his back; Hurley’s knee was on him and he was punching down. Afterward a mob went to the police station demanding to know what was happening with the investigation. To their surprise, it was Chris Hurley who came out.

Rising to his full six-foot-seven, Hurley stood facing the crowd. He told them he’d done nothing wrong. Nothing—and since he’d been on the island it had become a better place. He seemed angry, affronted that they were questioning him. People started yelling out abuse, and other police officers came to see if Hurley was all right. According to one officer, someone threatened “to drag him out of the station and bash him to death the same way he had supposedly done to the offender Doomadgee”.

A group of older women, including Erykah Kyle, ran and stood between the crowd and the police.

One woman, Rosina Norman, said she couldn’t look at Hurley. It made her cry. “Stop it!” her sister told her. “He might guess what you’re thinking.”

“He did something to him,” Rosina replied.

Despite having assembled the crowd, Erykah told me she was “almost pleading” with them to leave. “We are not going to find the answers here,” she said. “This will achieve nothing.”

After the protesters dispersed, Hurley walked from the station across the dirt of Police Lane to his home, a high-set white weatherboard house surrounded by palms and trimmed with white lattice and wooden window guards. Dark vines were overtaking the Cyclone-wire fence. Unlocking the gate, he crossed his neatly trimmed lawn and went up the side stairs. He had set his place up with every comfort, padding himself from the grind of the job. Did he start to pack, knowing he would leave and not come back? Did he start with the basics, then add the things he did not want to lose?

Within a few hours Hurley was at the airstrip with two large bags of clothes and personal effects. He was joined by Lloyd Bengaroo, who had started receiving death threats. The two men boarded a plane and flew off the island.

D
ETECTIVE
S
ENIOR
S
ERGEANT
Kitching travelled to Cairns on Tuesday, November 23, and attended Doomadgee’s autopsy, which took place later that afternoon. When he and the pathologist, Dr Guy Lampe, discussed the evidence, Kitching again failed to mention the allegation that Cameron had been assaulted.

A doctor involved in the case told me in confidence that because of Cameron’s black eye, both the initial police investigation and the autopsy proceeded on the assumption that the cause of death was a head injury. In fact, the autopsy revealed four broken ribs, a ruptured portal vein, and a liver almost cleaved in two. Blood had quickly filled Doomadgee’s abdominal cavity, restricting the flow to his vital organs. His internal injuries were so severe that even with instant medical attention he would not have survived. On the autopsy certificate, Dr Lampe reported that Cameron had died from an intra-abdominal haemorrhage caused by a ruptured liver and portal vein. Under “Antecedent Causes” he wrote “Fall”.

The next morning, Dr Lampe rang Detective Senior Sergeant Kitching and told him that his superiors did not want him to include “Fall” on the certificate for fear it “may be seen to be assisting police with a cover-up”. He would have to reissue the certificate. Later that day, November 24, the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC), a Queensland government organization born out of the Fitzgerald inquiry and known as “the filth” by the police they investigate, took the case away from Hurley’s associates.

On November 30, 2004, a second autopsy was performed by Dr David Ranson, an English pathologist based in Melbourne. He had been called in by the Queensland state coroner, who wanted an outsider to give a second opinion. Ranson concurred with Lampe that Cameron Doomadgee had died due to blood loss from internal injuries. But Ranson also discovered further bruising on Cameron’s right eye and eyelid, his forehead, the back of his head, the upper part of his back, along the right side of his jaw, and on his right and left hands.

Unfortunately, as a CMC insider put it to me, by then the police detectives had already “stuffed things up”. In the five days they controlled the investigation, the truth had begun to evaporate. When the CMC interviewed Lloyd Bengaroo, he had clearly decided to keep his mouth shut.

Crime and Misconduct Commission: “Did Senior Sergeant Hurley assault Mr Doomadgee whilst he was on the floor?”

Bengaroo: “I can’t recall that one.”

ELIZABETH DOOMADGEE INVITED
the lawyers and me to dinner. She covered the table with a purple batik cloth and upon it laid a large economy packet of biscuits and two bowls full of fruit. Her house was fastidiously tidy, and spare of furniture other than mattresses and a set of bookshelves with Bible stories and family photos. In one frame a young Elizabeth was laughing, a hibiscus in her hair: a beauty. She had three daughters—the youngest, Sylvia, ten years old—but six other small children, some still in diapers, sidled up to us for the biscuits; they climbed onto our laps as if we were all old friends, struggling to be held and cuddled and given attention. Aborigines call their elders Aunty or Uncle as a sign of respect, but I was Miss, like the teachers at school. The children eating biscuits were Elizabeth’s grandnieces—some of whom she fostered—and neighbours’ kids who had spilled in from the street and the warm night: it was her policy that any child was always welcome. Seeing the Palm Island children had made Andrew Boe decide to take on Cameron’s case. Now these kids took turns to play with him.

The coroner had come and taken a brief tour of the island on February 8. After a pre-inquest hearing in the local gymnasium, he had ruled that when the inquest began on February 28, the Palm Island witnesses would give their evidence on the island and the police witnesses would give theirs in Townsville.