Crimwife (8 page)

There is no such thing as a typical relationship, if you ask the individuals involved. For each person, their situation is complex and unique. There is also no accurate way to predict how a relationship where one or both partners are involved in criminal activity will turn out. Some start as train wrecks, others with overwhelming attraction, love and respect. The reverse may be true when it concerns how they end. Just like your next-door neighbour, you never can tell.

Both superhero and superloser acts have been performed in the name of love. People do unbelievable stuff for someone they love. Is what women do for law-breakers any crazier than what goes on outside every day, where there are no bars to restrict star-crossed lovers? Is being a crimwife a bigger gamble than dating a BASE-jumper? It depends who you talk to.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that once a woman says OK to involvement with a crim, more often than not she finds her life getting harder, not better. And the longer it goes on, the worse it can spiral. There are, however, some exceptions: women who thrive, even profit, while enduring the inevitable and jagged multi-pronged suffering that walks alongside the incarcerated. They are either true survivors or sociopaths, and somehow they emerge victorious. They tend to be in the minority.

Two very different women dated two brothers, raised in the same family, who had each begun criminal activity of their own volition in their teens. Both situations contained immense tragedy and bloodshed. It is impossible to measure the damage, but the reactions of the women have been as different as chalk and cheese.

Deana’s most memorable romance in high school resulted in a beautiful baby boy when she was seventeen years old, but not much else. There wasn’t time to date after Rob was born, and the years passed. She was working as a sales assistant and raising her then six-year-old when she met and befriended Carl through a mutual acquaintance.

Carl was eighteen and an average nice guy, well liked in the neighbourhood. A few weeks after they met, he asked Deana for a favour. It was local knowledge that Carl’s older brother, Shane, had had problems with drugs on and off for a few years and was now in jail for shoplifting. Until Shane was locked up, the brothers were inseparable. Shane had twelve months left of his two-year whack, and Carl wanted Deana to visit him at the Melbourne remand centre. Deana couldn’t see the harm in it and she agreed.

Shane, it turned out, was as easy to talk to as his brother. Deana began visiting him weekly and the two fell in love. Shane was attentive and kind. He called her every day and wrote long caring letters. He told her that she would never be loved again in the same way as he loved her, that no one could possibly love her more. As a lonely single parent, Deana says, she responded to this attention. “He wrote all the time saying all these wonderful things. They write what you want to hear, what they think a woman will pay interest in.”

Within months, Shane was bailed to Odyssey House, a drug rehabilitation centre. As soon as he arrived, he absconded from the centre and met up with Deana. The two of them then left Victoria on a train to Adelaide. With Rob safely in the care of his grandparents, Deana was delighted finally to be alone with the man she loved, who in turn loved her so much.

But when they got off the train in Adelaide, Shane turned to Deana and said, “You’re nothing but a fucking slut and I’m going to leave you.” Recalling this shocking start, Deana wishes now that she had turned around and taken the next train home to Melbourne. Instead, she managed to calm Shane down and they found a boarding house in Adelaide to stay in.

Shane had come out of jail clean. Prison works as a detox centre for the poor. He had then left rehab to get away from what he said was another jail, but still hadn’t returned to using heroin. Deana knew he was taking pills such as Rohypnol to settle his stress, but thought that was all he was doing.

Life was looking better and the couple moved into a flat of their own. Their life was ordinary and peaceful, until Shane appeared from the bedroom one morning and fell on the floor. Deana went over and poked him with her foot. She thought he was joking around. But when she got closer, she realised something was wrong. Having never been around drug use, she had no idea that Shane was overdosing on heroin. She went next door and her neighbour called an ambulance. When Shane was resuscitated, he refused to stay in hospital. Deana went back to Melbourne to see Rob, and for time to think.

She wasn’t gone long and soon returned to Adelaide and Shane. By then Shane was thieving thousands of dollars a day to support his habit. After less than a year in South Australia, the couple returned to Melbourne, with Shane now on the run from the police.

The honeymoon was over. The warm and charming man she had visited at the remand centre was gone, replaced by a violent controlling thug.

From that time on, Deana endured years of beatings at Shane’s whim. He was merciless, and once his rage began, he was unstoppable. Shane would drag her up and down the hallway by her hair. Deana remembers the multiple times when she was repeatedly hit and kicked, when he beat her unconscious, when friends dragged him off her, and when he attacked her with a club lock. During our conversations, Deana apologised for not being able to provide precise dates, because she has memory problems from being struck on the head so often.

Their relationship lasted for five years. Shane spent his time in and out of rehab facilities. The pair moved around according to which facility offered new hope or held his bail address. Despite the violence, Deana reunited with Shane every time. He would say once again that he was sorry, and she would believe that he truly was repentant.

Deana’s honesty is raw when she talks about her desire to be loved by Shane. She discusses a number of events in her life that led her to being vulnerable, but there was one important reason why she kept returning to Shane. Deana was completely terrified.

When Shane was in the throes of rage, he would threaten Deana should she ever leave. For years, Shane told her that if she left, he would take her son, and Deana would never find him or see him again.

Once, early on, Deana applied for a restraining order. A couple of weeks later, she received a phone call from a police officer telling her that if she knew what was good for her, she’d drop the order. Deana doesn’t know why this happened, but she followed the officer’s advice.

Her friends and family grew weary of trying to separate her from Shane. Deana felt as if she could never let anyone know the full extent of the violence. Her parents had never liked Shane and towards the end of the relationship were threatening to seek full custody of her son.

Shane’s family chose to ignore almost all of the violence and passively support their son. After Deana would leave, having been beaten, Shane’s parents, George and Barb, would call her and tell her he was sick, encouraging her to get back together with him. On one occasion, following a particularly savage beating, Barb told Deana that she “must have done something to deserve it.” Barb’s empathy had never been astounding. She had frequently reminded her sons that she preferred Carl to Shane.

Deana’s life with Shane grew worse. They had become engaged, but the violence escalated. So did Shane’s chaotic behaviour. Then it all changed again one night after Shane had beaten her and held a knife to her throat. Deana was in bed when she heard a thud and some pot plants smashing against the window. Shane had tried to hang himself and kicked the chair. She ran in and put the chair back under him. While Shane went to a psych hospital for two days, Deana started to pack.

Deana went to stay with her mother and Shane went to his. Barb told her son not to worry: “She always comes back.” But this time she didn’t.

Deana’s mother became sick with lung disease and Deana stayed to care for her. Shane left her alone while her mother was ill, and she managed to avoid him for some months. Deana’s mother died in August. In her own world of grief, Deana wasn’t around when Shane overdosed and died in November of the same year. It was only when she got word that his brother Carl was trying to find her that she heard the news.

With five years having passed since Shane died, Deana has had plenty of time to think over what she survived. She still doesn’t have cut and dried conclusions. “It’s not a scam. They believe what they’re saying at the time. It’s just there’s a difference between jail and the outside world.” She maintains that “Shane was a good person. We just shouldn’t have been in that relationship. Are we stupid? Are we, especially single mothers by yourself, looking for anyone who’ll say ‘I love you’? Maybe. It starts off that you’re the strong person, but when they come home, they dominate.”

Although Shane can’t harm her again, the damage inflicted has lasted. Her son suffered panic attacks and nightmares for years after and has questioned her repeatedly over why she stayed so long. Deana doesn’t know how to answer him.

Deana and Shane met while he was incarcerated. There was no way of knowing how or if it would work before he got out. When Deana found out, it was almost too late.

Shane’s brother, Carl, was a quieter, more even-tempered man. Devastated by his brother’s death and the bad treatment he witnessed his brother get from the police, Carl Williams grew to become one of the most renowned gangsters of the Australian underworld. Unlike Deana, Carl’s wife, Roberta, thrived on the thrills that life as a high-flying gangster’s moll offered. Even though the couple had divorced by the time Carl was bashed to death in prison, Roberta rode a new wave of publicity, unashamedly playing on the public’s morbid fascination with her insider knowledge.

“Do you know why I have credibility? Because I don’t exude morality.”

—
Bob Hawke
,
former prime minister

“All our best heroes are losers.”

—
Richard Glover
,
journalist

It’s no great surprise that Roberta Williams is magazine-cover material. In Australia, the convict is the cornerstone of our cultural foundations. Carl Williams’s wife, then, is a First Lady of sorts. Our society’s obsession with criminal heroes seems strange until the history of this kind of celebrity is examined.

Where else but Australia are law-breakers celebrated as heroes? Is there any other country that has the face of a convict, albeit reformed, on its currency? While other nations have rich cultures and long histories, Australia was founded as a penal colony. Our forefathers were convicts and prison officers. It wasn’t a brave new world, but a wilderness of punishment far from any form of civilisation.

The descendants of other cultures have hundreds if not thousands of years of cultural identity behind them. Anglo Australians from a convict lineage have only rebels, rejects, the unwanted and the forgotten. Yet that doesn’t mean Australians of convict descent are ashamed of their heritage. On the contrary: they’re proud of the hardship their ancestors overcame.

Ned Kelly boasted of the theft of 280 horses and was hanged at the age of twenty-five in 1880 for killing three policeman. He was the son of an Irish convict who was transported to Tasmania for stealing two pigs in Tipperary. After his release, Ned’s father, John, made a name for himself as a gold digger and an expert cattle thief. John died a year after his release from a Kilmore prison sentence for theft.

From early adolescence, Ned Kelly was involved in criminal activity, mainly theft and assault, and lived as an outlaw. However, rather than being viewed as a source of national shame, Kelly is revered as a folk hero, an example of Irish resistance against the English-ruled colony.

More recently we have Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read, a self-confessed murderer and underworld figure in the 1980s – and best-selling author. His true crime books, based on his own experiences, catapulted him to fame and popularity despite the torture and violence he freely confessed to enjoying. Chopper, as he is affectionately known by fans, readers and the authorities, was also portrayed on film with breathtaking irony by Eric Bana as a sympathetic, somewhat misunderstood, character, which only boosted his reputation as a lovable larrikin, rather than a sociopathic member of the criminal underworld. He has discussed his first marriage as one of convenience to win favour with the courts.

The TV dramatisation of gangland murders in Melbourne,
Underbelly
, maintained an average of over 1.2 million viewers each week. Carl Williams, who graduated from a criminal apprenticeship with the Moran family and went out on his own, started an underworld war which saw thirty people die before Victorian police were able to take control of the situation. Williams was responsible for several of these deaths, although he hired others to do his work.
Underbelly
featured spectacular performances by Gyton Grantley as Carl and Kat Stewart as his loyal but scrappy wife, Roberta, which only served to endear the couple to the public.

Initially, Roberta Williams professed outrage that Stewart had portrayed her in an unbecoming light, saying she would “grab her by the throat” if she had the chance, a position she soon backed down from. As the popularity of the series and the semi-fictional couple grew, Roberta, a convicted drug trafficker and mother of four, was quick to seize the day.

Soon after the series, Roberta appeared in men’s magazine
Zoo
in a bikini photo spread. She released her autobiography, which detailed her tragic upbringing and introduction to crime by her first husband. Roberta credits Carl with saving her from a life of violence and misery. She has the same ability as Judy Moran, the mother of Carl’s former employers turned arch-enemies Jason and Mark Moran, to glide over the details of family crime as if they were peripheral to the murders that ensued. Roberta discusses the Morans as if the Williams were just a regular family being targeted by the mob for no reason. Yet she was recorded by a police bug after Jason Moran’s murder, saying, “I’ll be partying tonight.”

“How can I feel sympathy for this person who was prepared to kill my husband and my child or even me?” she said in a 2009 interview with the
Sydney Morning Herald
. “I just don’t allow myself to give it head space. I don’t get the sympathy side of it. People might think it’s a bit harsh, but in reality this was the life that I was living – you protect your own and that’s what Carl did.”

What Roberta doesn’t mention is the $20 million amphetamine and ecstasy business that was at stake in the war between the families.

Her love of the camera has been insatiable. Changing her profile from a mum portrayed unfairly by the press, Roberta, always the extrovert, took every opportunity offered. She was rumoured to be appearing on
Dancing With the Stars
and she guest starred on
MasterChef
. In the
Sydney Morning Herald
interview, she congratulated herself on her now boring lifestyle: “I don’t have all that madness happening now, so I can take a breather,” she said. “I don’t sit there and think, ‘OK, I’ve got a bill to pay. If I go and get an ounce of speed, I can make $500.’” Roberta has described her deep desire to be a regular mum. Her eldest son has already been to jail, and she recognises that her daughter with Carl, Dhakota, has had a difficult time.

Roberta’s infatuation with her own publicity and power may have helped lead to her husband’s death. It is believed that Carl turned police informant once he was arrested for the murders, and that, in return, Roberta insisted police compensate the family by paying for Dhakota’s private school fees. It was only days after this was revealed that Carl was bashed to death in prison.

According to
New Idea
it was “sheer coincidence” that a journalist was at Roberta’s home on the day she received the phone call about Carl’s death. It was unlikely the media were ever too far from Roberta’s door. Not only did Roberta capitalise on her ex-husband’s death with an article headlined “I killed Carl” running in
Woman’s Day
soon after, but even more bizarrely, after falling pregnant to a new partner, she once again appeared on the cover of
Woman’s Day
, claiming the baby was “a gift from Carl.” Yet magazine covers run on supply and demand. And the demand is high.

Why are we so compelled by crime and its participants? What makes us want to look at the inside of a jail cell or a courtroom? If these people are society’s outcasts, locked away, deemed unfit to walk the streets, why then do we want to know so much about them? Do we see our own sins broadcast? Do we think, there but for the grace of God go I? Do we remember our own secret times, our worst mistakes, our greatest indulgences and wonder if a split-second or an extra drink could have seen us in overalls? Do we think of our own desperate passions, which drive us in ways we can’t always control? Do we recall our own opinionated self-righteousness and the values and people we swear we’d die to protect? Do we fear that a corrupt prosecution or a lazy defence could have ended our lives the way they sometimes do on TV?

Are we looking for retribution and revenge? Do we smirk at the crims’ stupidity, greed and cold-heartedness, and comfort ourselves that justice is being served? Do we feel relieved knowing that we have the means and the methods to identify the bad guys now? DNA evidence, we know, can’t be faked. Do we think innocent people will usually be acquitted and those in jail are there for a reason? Do we feel safer seeing it balance out in the space of forty-eight minutes of scripted TV?

Print media is our other great source of crime and punishment. The daily papers often give more reporting space to the crimes of the day than politics or even sport. Sydney’s
Daily Telegraph
reads like a prison newsletter. Who’s in court, who was sentenced and for what, who’s in jail, who just got out, who got parole. Anything you need to know about the current crime climate and population, you can read about in detail over breakfast.

Perhaps TV shows and news reports make us wonder what
we
would do in these situations. We know the human psyche is fragile and capable of sudden change. What would we be like? If we were in charge of inmates who had wronged society, how would we use those powers? If we were locked away in a cell, would we fight or would we crumble?

The most ignored element of the attraction to evil is that the stereotype focuses solely on women. Women are taken to task for falling for the bad boy, when in reality, or at least through the movies and TV, we’ve all been doing it for a long time. There would be no
Godfather
movies, no
Sopranos
, no
Easy Rider
, no Elvis if bad boys were only of interest to women. So just who are these bad boys we love to watch?