Ladykiller (12 page)
It was after lunch on day four of the search, wet and freezing cold. Even though the search warrant by the local court had only been issued for three days, police believed that once they had taken possession of a property, they were entitled to remain on it until the completion of their search. On Hillydale’s front lawn, Inspector Bruce Couch was standing in his heavy-weather gear as his team fanned out all over the property. Suddenly an officer came running up the driveway: a white Commodore was coming down Inverary Road. Couch had a terrible hunch. He jumped into his vehicle and took off up the road until he saw the car coming for him. He stopped in the middle of the road and got out. The
Sun-
Herald
team crested a rise and saw the car and next to it the police officer, standing stock still in navy coveralls, coat and cap. He did not look friendly. Jackie Ghossein touched Fia’s arm. She recognised the policeman from the Belanglo forest searches a few years earlier.
They got out of the car and Fia shouted ahead, ‘I believe you’re searching for Kerry Whelan.’
Couch knew it was the press. ‘No, I’m running a training course,’ he said. ‘Now this is private property. Get out.’
Fia Cumming insisted. ‘Inspector Couch—’ she began, but Couch held up his hand like a stop sign and shook his head.
‘You did the search for the backpackers in the Ivan Milat case,’ the reporter stated.
Couch shook his head again.
‘But you are Inspector Couch, aren’t you? We know that.’
‘And I’m telling you, young lady, we’re down here training. I don’t know what you are talking about. Now you and the rest of the press get the bloody hell out of here.’
Fia smiled at him as Ghossein took photos. Couch advanced on them and they backed off , into the Commodore and up the road.
Couch was furious. When he got back to the property, he padlocked the gate and phoned the taskforce. ‘We’ve got a problem,’ he told Mick Howe. ‘I just got sprung by a journo.’
At Richmond, Howe and Bray agreed that by the time the newspaper hit the pavement the following morning, journalists would be crawling all over Bungonia.
Fia Cumming knew she was onto something. Her news desk had received a tip-off of a search operation in the Goulburn area, and they were certain they had found it. They headed back into town to interview some of the locals and then returned to Sydney: their story would make the paper’s first edition.
By 7 a.m. the next day, Sunday 25 May, the first helicopter hovered over Bungonia. Then another flew in, and another— five in total, full of Sydney television crews descending en masse in a hungry posse bigger than the town’s population. They started photographing everything that moved. There was no avoiding them on the street.
A press conference was slotted for 1.30 p.m., right in the middle of Inverary Road, on the first crest after the turn-off for Hillydale. Almost the whole town turned up, emerging from their houses and properties to form a quiet cluster on the roadside. The last local to appear was Eric Schmidt, an 85-year-old retired plumber with a sonorous voice. He was drunk, and lurched over to the cameras, one arm flapping as he demanded to know what was going on. Couch sent an officer over to shut him up.
Dennis Bray kept the press conference brief. He was in no mood for talking today—the search of Hillydale had been wound up, and police were no closer to finding Kerry.
‘Mrs Whelan’s well-being is paramount,’ Bray told reporters. ‘We will use every resource available to locate and return Mrs Whelan safely to her family.’
Asked what led police to the Bungonia property, Bray brushed off the question. ‘This is one of the many enquiries we have had and we’re not discounting any information . . . there’ll be other properties, I would imagine, that will be visited in the course of the investigation.’
Detective Bray said the property’s owner had been cooperative. A reporter asked whether the man had once worked for Crown Equipment.
‘I don’t believe that has any consequence in this enquiry,’ Bray said and brought the conference to an end, adding that police were keeping a positive attitude that ‘Mrs Whelan is still alive’. Bray’s instincts told him otherwise. Privately, he believed it was likely that Burrell was involved, and if Kerry wasn’t already dead, she soon would be.
If the Bungonians thought that the media contingent would go on its merry way, they were wrong. Camera crews and reporters became temporary residents of their village as they kept a constant watch for Bruce Burrell. Photographers from the daily newspapers, the
Telegraph
and the
Herald
, stayed in their cars on Inverary Road as the Bungonia nights plummeted to minus two. Inside their vehicles, the photographers could not sleep; they were like sausages frozen in tin cans.
Burrell surprised the media, although not police, the following day when he came to his gate and gave a sort of sermon on how he had welcomed the police onto his property. He wore a brightly patterned blue, turquoise and black sweater and had tied a woollen scarf around his neck. ‘My attitude was very straightforward. I simply said it is open, please do what you want,’ Burrell said. ‘The only involvement that I have to date is the fact that my property has been searched and that’s it.’
Later, he gave a lengthy interview to Channel 9’s
A Current Affair
, declaring he had nothing to do with Kerry’s disappearance. ‘I have been asked the question by police. I absolutely know not a thing and I wish to God it would be resolved,’ he said. ‘I know nothing of her disappearance. I just want it to be resolved, like everyone else.’
Burrell confirmed he had worked for Mr Whelan, but he said he left on ‘good terms’. ‘It’s been an extremely tough five days for me and my family, with implications which extend into the future,’ he said. He did not know why the police had searched his property. ‘I wish to God I did. It has turned my life upside down,’ he said. ‘I can’t begin to understand how Bernie and his family feel. All I can say is that the experience I have had has been the most horrendous of my life. I want everything back on an even keel for me and my family.’ Burrell said he had remained a good friend of Bernie Whelan since his retrenchment, adding that ‘several employees were being investigated. I happen to be one of them.’ Both statements were lies. ‘The unfortunate portrayal of my role in the case being investigated by the police has to date given an appearance of guilt and contamination by association,’ Burrell said, smiling into the camera. His words sounded rehearsed.
Back in Sydney that night, a police officer watched the television news with growing astonishment. She grabbed the telephone, dialled police headquarters and asked for Dennis Bray. Detective Sue Whitfield had some intriguing information for him. Almost two years earlier, Whitfield had investigated the disappearance of an elderly woman, Dorothy Davis. The woman had left some meat defrosting on the sink while she walked to visit a sick friend and she had not been seen since. Whitfield told Bray: ‘the case was unsolved’. But among those interviewed about the disappearance was one of Dorothy Davis’s neighbours, a man in his forties. His name, Whitfield said, ‘was Bruce Allan Burrell’.
Undine Street, South Coogee inclines steeply down to the cliff top above the rocky foreshores of Lurline Bay, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. What had been a working-class area in Sydney’s eastern suburbs during the 1950s turned nouveau riche in the late twentieth century; property values in the street had skyrocketed. Old houses were being knocked down or refurbished and, amid the smell of sea salt, the air hung with cement and sawdust. At the bottom of Undine Street, Marine Parade curves around the coast, offering its residents stunning views across the Tasman Sea. Beyond the fenced edge of the cliff, the sandstone drops steeply to waves which crash on boulders the size of Range Rovers.
In 1995, the small community of fortunate landowners included Dorothy Davis, a 74-year-old widow who lived at number 9 Undine Street, next door to the
Strictly Ballroom
star, dancer Paul Mercurio, and his wife, Andrea. Dottie, as her friends called her, often chatted over the back fence and doled out lollies and small gifts to the Mercurio children. On the other side, at number 7, Dominic Ianna lived with his family. Margaret Keg and her husband Brian resided with their sons, Durwin and Damian, at number 8, down the hill from Dottie. The neighbours looked out for one another, exchanged pleasantries and enjoyed the occasional get-together.
Dottie had arthritis in her legs and, given the slope of her street, she tended to drive her Mercedes almost everywhere. Very occasionally, she would go two houses down to visit Norma Peacock, another widow, but it was unusual for her to walk far. Everybody knew that Dottie drove. Norma, seventy-seven, had lived at number 5 for almost forty years; her late husband had known Dottie’s late husband, Jack. From her kitchen window Norma could see Dot coming and going from the garage.
Two hundred metres away, on Marine Parade, lived Dallas Burrell, who was recovering from cancer. Dallas was married to Bruce Burrell, and she was the daughter of Dottie’s friends, Les and Shirley Bromley. In her generous way, Dottie treated the Bromleys’ daughter like a niece.
On the morning of Monday 29 May 1995, Dottie woke early to let in Kenneth Hulse, a 48-year-old Liverpudlian-born builder who was installing a roof on Dottie’s back verandah. Dottie would bring him coffee and biscuits and tell him whenever she was popping out for some reason. Around 5 p.m., Margaret Keg paid Dottie a visit and they discussed Dottie’s plans for a party to celebrate the completion of her balcony in a few weeks. The old woman had a lively social life and a big circle of friends. As Mrs Keg took off for home, a freezing wind was blowing up Undine Street from the sea.
Dottie continued cleaning her house and turning out items for a garage sale to aid the Randwick Lantern Club for Deaf and Blind Children. She had been a founding member of the club for thirty-three years. Already she had found some old photographs and given them to her son, Lessel. The pictures were of her and Jack, who had died from cancer more than ten years earlier.
The next morning, Tuesday 30 May, Paul Mercurio saw Dottie moving her car to give the builder access. She drove to her doctor to have a skin cancer removed at 10.45 a.m. and returned around 1 p.m. with a red, puffy blotch on her face. She took some steak from the freezer to thaw and, gesturing towards the ocean, told the builder she was going to visit a friend who had been suffering from cancer, and had ‘lost all her hair’.
Around 2 p.m., Margaret Keg had struck up a conversation in the street with Sandra Walker from number 2 and she could see no sign of Dottie at her house or in the street.
The builder left at 4 p.m., puzzled that Dottie had not returned to see him out.
In the late afternoon, Paul Mercurio noticed Dot’s car was still in the street, but he did not see her.
Inside number 9 Undine Street, the steak on the sink had defrosted when the phone rang. It was Dottie’s daughter, Maree, who was trying to contact her mother for the second time that day. Maree felt a tiny wave of anxiety as the phone rang out. She lived on Sydney’s North Shore, and called her brother, Lessel, who agreed to call in to see Dottie on his way home to Coogee.
The house was silent when Lessel let himself in that evening. As he searched for a sign of his mother, he noticed her diary which was lying open on a desk. In it was an entry for a doctor’s appointment and, for the evening, the Dining Dollies—a group of women who met each month at a different restaurant in Sydney. Lessel assumed she was out with them and left .
The next morning, Maree tried again, and in the evening also. No answer. She rang Lessel whose son, Andrew, answered and said that his parents were at a school function.
‘Is Grandma with them?’ Maree enquired.
‘Probably,’ the teenager said.
But the next morning when Maree called Lessel she learned her mother had not been with him the previous night. Maree knew something was terribly wrong. ‘We’re in trouble,’ she told her brother.
They met at Undine Street and they began searching for clues inside the house. Dottie’s car was parked in the street, which was unusual. Phone calls to friends revealed that she had not turned up at her regular Dining Dollies outing, and had not called to cancel. This was not like Dottie.
Lessel’s wife Tanna rang hospitals and taxi companies, to no avail. That afternoon, Lessel filed a missing person statement but was told that police procedure meant they had to wait three days. ‘She’ll show up,’ the constable assured him.
Back at the house, that wasn’t good enough for Maree, who pressed Lessel to call in some favours from a friend who knew detectives at Maroubra. By evening a major search was underway for their mother. As Maree sat on the front steps of her mother’s house, she heard a helicopter buzzing overhead and the sirens of three police cars pulling into Undine Street. A searchlight blazed down from
Polair
. ‘Oh my God, this is real,’ Maree said in a half-cry.
A doorknock of the neighbourhood began and the police rescue and dog squads embarked on a search of the cliff ledges and shoreline around Lurline Bay. The search would take them to the northern end of Maroubra Beach, but they could see nothing in the torchlight on the sea. Friends of Maree and Lessel’s from Coogee Surf Club launched out in a rubber duckie onto the black waves. Maree stood for a while with Paul and Andrea Mercurio, watching the
Polair
searchlight beaming down over the ocean.
‘All I hope,’ Maree said, ‘is that she didn’t suffer.’
Andrea Mercurio sucked in a breath and Paul put his arm around Maree. ‘Don’t say that,’ he said gently.
Maree could not sleep that night as her mind somersaulted over the possibilities. Perhaps her mother had suffered a stroke and was disoriented? Or had she fallen? Dottie never walked down near the cliffs so how could she have come to grief?
The next morning was cool and rain drizzled as police resumed their search. Lessel and Maree made ‘Missing’ posters with a photograph of Dottie, which they plastered up around Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Lessel had it posted out to hotels and motels up and down the coast and, later, Maree drove to the New South Wales central coast to meet up with her cousin, a truck driver, so he could distribute it to other truckies driving around Australia. Maree thought that if her mother was disoriented, she might try to return to where she grew up, in Grafton on the New South Wales north coast.
