The Devil's Garden (11 page)

The Macro taskforce adds another name to their mission statement, written after Jane Rimmer disappeared. 'Mission: to identify, apprehend and prosecute the person or persons responsible for the disappearance of Sarah Ellen Spiers and the murders of Jane Louise Rimmer and Ciara Eilish Glennon.' In fulfilling that mission, over the next three years alone, the taskforce will track 30,000 separate lines of inquiry.

The investigation is now at its most intense stage, the activity frenetic. Paul Ferguson returned to Major Crime in April 1997. Dave Caporn – from January 1996 the lead case officer on Macro – now assumes overall command of the taskforce and is its public face. With a third victim, the department needs a fresh structure, one that reflects the requirements of a long – potentially very long – inquiry. Tony Potts, a former Major Crime homicide investigator, now assumes sole responsibility as media spokesperson and strategist, handling day-to-day inquiries while Dave Caporn is rolled out for major developments: startling new evidence, the advice of profilers and, God forbid, any further victims. This structure allows Caporn to continue at the coalface of the investigation and not be drawn continually to answer media inquiries as Ferguson had done before Potts. The intent is for the public to have faces they know, trust and recognise instantly as Macro taskforce members. From this time, they will see Potts, Caporn and occasionally Ferguson on television, or hear them on the radio.

With Ferguson returning to his duties as officer in charge of the Major Crime Squad, Caporn fronts his first press conference for Macro in April. Outwardly tougher than his predecessor, and despite being in the force since 1976, Caporn is the new breed of officer: a politically ambitious man, steeped in the minutiae of administrative policing, frugal with information he doesn't want the press to know. Hawk-eyed, with large glasses that dominate his face, he can be charming, charismatic. But gone is the easy banter that Ferguson employed with the press, replaced by the implacable mask and arrogant air that reporters come to recognise as Caporn's media style. He nods to the cameramen and sits down, getting straight down to business. The way the killer operates, he says, shows adaptability that is a common trait in organised, intelligent offenders. The headline in
The West Australian
spells it out: 'Killer will strike anywhere: police'.

Perth journalists have a plethora of stories to tell about the way in which Dave Caporn likes to keep his finger on the pulse. One recounts that he requested the contents of a high-profile story, due to run in the next day's edition, be recounted to him prior to publication. When the reporter suggested that he instead spend a dollar and buy the paper, Caporn called the chief-of-staff. When the story duly appeared, television and radio stations were asked not to repeat it. They, too, ignored the request. Caporn, known as a great networker, has the nickname 'Gurkha' – 'take no prisoners'. To both his supporters and detractors, it seems well earned. He also has a reputation for maintaining an obdurate demeanour in the face of the harshest criticism.

'There was a press conference not long after Ciara Glennon's body was found,' Paul Coombes recalls. 'The usual commotion, reporters screeching questions, flashbulbs going off everywhere. "Mr Caporn," one journalist said, "do you feel personally responsible for these deaths?" What sort of question is this? We were furious but Dave stayed calm. "No," he said. "I don't feel personally responsible. I know we're doing everything possible to resolve and apprehend this person."'

Every day there is a full briefing by the ten team leaders, bringing Caporn up to speed on all aspects of the investigation. Paul Coombes, who sat next to Caporn for three years, recalls he led by example. 'No one can ever overestimate just how bad it was in those early days. Absolute, utter pandemonium. There was so much pressure from all sides and, even then, officers were caving in, taking sick leave and mentally falling over. Caporn didn't. He was – and has remained – an easy target, but he was always incredibly focused.'

Desperate for information, 15 weeks after Ciara's body is found, Caporn throws a curve ball. The serial killer, he surmises, has picked up other young women. But for his own perverse reasons, or to protect his identity, he has let them go instead of harming them. Played the Good Samaritan, done a good turn, instead of showing women his real face. There is a chilling historical precedent in Perth. David and Catherine Birnie seduced dozens of women into their vehicle during their murderous rampage, but let all but four of them go. Caporn wants to hear from any women who have accepted lifts in the Claremont area in the past two years.

The killer will be watching. He may have hidden the jewellery and clothing someplace safe where he can later take it out and admire it, or given it to his partner or wife to wear as a sinister trophy. This woman, usually unsuspecting, may have already been taken to the disposal site, not understanding why her partner suddenly develops an overwhelming desire for sex, nor understanding a body is nearby while he fantasises about the kill. They are his girls. Tossed away in the scrub, their disappearances force police into a grim game of hide and seek. Tossed away to wait, through the rains and a pitiless sun that scorches their bodies, for someone to find them, for the game to move up a notch. Now it has.

He will be watching the news, reading the papers; he will behave as FBI profiler Robert Ressler said serial killers do at critical times in investigations. 'The first or second murder, they're very paranoid, very frightened ...But when they get away with it three or four times, they develop this omnipotence . . . "I am God, because I've gotten away with murder." ' He will be alternately apprehensive and gloating; fear that he may soon be caught will mingle with exhilaration. He's given the cops three chances to get him for these murders and they've failed. He's tied them up in knots, had them running all over Perth. And he is prepared to break patterns if he has to, to leave a trail behind like a jagged jigsaw that they can't put together. He can't be too careful. A pattern can get him trapped.

He is reading the papers to see if the story has made page one, quietly celebrating when it does, channel-surfing, changing radio stations. Obsessed. He hears that they're exhausting leads. He's out the door again, on the prowl, watching and waiting for his next victim.

He is cleverer than they are, all-powerful. This is his handiwork; he has caused this chaos and grief. The entrapment, the abduction, the kill; all part of his warped brilliance. Sitting back, watching, seeing how long it will take until the next stage begins, when they start finding the bodies. It is such fun, playing hide and seek with the coppers. They have found two of his three hidden treasures. Now their challenge is to find
him.

In the first winter after Ciara's murder, two doves nest in the alcove outside Denis and Una's bedroom window, huddling from the wind and rain. They have never been there before and they never return, leaving in the spring. The signs continue to come, intensely personal visions that slowly, slowly thaw the icy cold detachment that Una feels from the world around her. She incessantly reads her favourite poem, 'Requiescat' by Oscar Wilde.

Tread lightly, she is near under the snow.
Speak gently, she can hear the daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair fallen to dust.
Lily white, white as snow, she hardly knew
She was woman, so sweetly she grew.
Coffin board, heavy stone, lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone, she is at rest
Peace, peace she cannot hear lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here, heap earth upon it.

It will take years for Una to find the answers, to regain her faith, to reconcile a loving God in a cataclysmic world, but she does so, eventually. Ciara is safe. Denis, broken with grief, burrows deeper into his faith. They find a reluctant acceptance of Ciara's death, but no closure. There will never be closure. They will never get over the loss of their daughter. 'I will only be fully healed,' he later tells journalist Tony Barass, 'when I am reunited with Ciara. That is not this day. Our family is not only for this life.' In his articulate and poetic way he explains the pain of grief: a pain you cannot physically isolate, a feeling of terrible emptiness. And it is worse, much worse that he knows how Ciara died. Her last minutes or hours, he knows, would have been utterly terrifying.

And again, there are numerous psychics and clairvoyants who wish to share their visions of these last hours with him.

Along-time sceptic, Bret Christian, who grew up in Claremont believes that clairvoyants have proven to be one of the biggest problems in the Macro case. Either well-meaning or malicious, they add, he says, nothing more than further heartache to those already deep in grief. 'The saddest thing about their "visions" is that they are not only usually wrong but that they are foisted on people when they are at their most vulnerable.' Overseas, neither US nor UK police services use the findings of psychics; officially, Australian police do not, either. Writing in the 2004 Autumn edition of
The Skeptics
, Christian quotes a story told by leading US sceptic James Randi. 'A man claiming to be a psychic attracted the interest of police when he predicted a serious industrial fire. The accuracy of the detail after the event could only have been provided by the psychic's special powers. But police discovered that he had no need of paranormal powers to produce his visions – he himself was the arsonist.'

Former police officer Jeffrey Noye – whose name is greeted with sly smirks by serving officers because of Noyse's protracted and determined resolve to clear his name from the Argyle Diamond smear – says police take clairvoyants' calls with a grain of salt. 'They ring and the protocol is they're afforded the same civilities as anyone else with information. But it doesn't work like that. In reality, the person shares their vision and the cop rolls his eyes. It goes something like this. "I see. Yes. Uh huh, uh huh. And when did you have this vision? Last night, during the commercial break while you were watching television? Uh huh, uh huh. And was there anyone else with you? No? No one else saw this vision? No? Uh huh, uh huh.'

I have first-hand dealings with a psychic who saw 'visions' of a seaside unit that she passed on to police. After several emails, telephone calls and broken agreements to pass on information to me, this 'intuitive medium', as she prefers to be called and who boasts she works nationally and internationally, agrees to meet with me in Perth at which time, she promises, she will outline her dealings with WA police. But when we finally meet, she has forgotten to bring her notes and can't conjure any memories of her experiences with police except that Dave Caporn treated her as a 'crackpot' and refused to take her seriously. That, and the vague notion that she thinks she warned Paul Ferguson that 'someone is going to go tonight'. After further promises to email me her 'feelings' regarding the profile of the killer, she forwards a text message I can't decipher. The email, too, never materialises.

Paul Ferguson takes a broad view of psychics. 'It was accepted that if we're asking people for information, then we couldn't just pick and choose. But it was appropriate to prioritise information. Caporn was always blunt about them: he regards them as fruit-loops and advised us to piss 'em off. But from a corporate point of view, this message could not go out to the public.' Ferguson recalls the 'intuitive medium' that I met in Perth. 'I sent a policewoman out; she read her tea-leaves and indicated she had specific information to share. I went along after that and checked out every possible angle.' He pauses, struggling not to laugh. 'Let's just say nothing came of it.'

Just weeks after Ciara is found murdered, Denis Glennon suffers a public roasting by Claremont Mayor Peter Weygers. Glennon, he rages, has blamed him for not expediting security in Claremont and has demanded he retire from the position he has held for many years. 'Mr Glennon has virtually told me he holds me responsible for the death of his daughter,' Weygers fumes. 'I can understand that Mr Glennon is confused and upset, but I am totally confident that this council has acted properly . . .' In a letter addressed to the council, Glennon had earlier raised queries about the slow response to the installation of security cameras, telephone boxes and street lighting in the Claremont night strip. The unseemly verbal stoush, played out in the press, is greeted with incredulity. Denis Glennon's daughter was found just over three weeks before. It is not the time.

The security debate is about to become critical. When Weygers calls on the Continental Hotel and Club Bayview to up the ante and improve security for patrons, co-owner Jon Sainken responds promptly – with a writ for defamation. Though he later drops the writ, the acidic relationship between the two men spills over into the courts when the Claremont council spends a massive $100,000 to oppose expansion of the nightclub through the courts. Sainken again responds, this time with a full-page advertisement in
The West Australian
denouncing 'fascist over-regulation' and victimisation. While the community watches the public stoush with some bemusement, it wears thin very quickly. There are missing and murdered girls out there. That is far more important.

In 1997, Weygers's mayoral role comes to an end when he is toppled by young local voters for vehemently opposing the expansion of Club Bayview. To his supporters, there is no doubt that he has been made a political scapegoat.

Other issues also come to the fore, picked up by the press. The police Freedom of Information unit is embarrassed by a media report that they mistakenly sent a man seeking information under FOI a letter intended for the lawyer of a person interviewed by the Macro taskforce. The letter, acknowledging the man requested information regarding a polygraph test he had taken, named the person and the police officers who had interviewed him. The bewildered recipient of the letter contacted
The West Australian
about the gaffe. 'I haven't received a reply to my own request for information, so I don't know who might have that information,' he said.

The officer in charge of the FOI unit acknowledged the blunder, citing administrative issues and said the problem was now rectified. He asked that nothing be written about the mistake.

***

Psychiatrist Dr Tim Watson-Munro describes the Claremont killer as a psychopath who could survive high stress levels. 'He is not psychotic, which rules out paranoid schizophrenia and manic depression,' he tells the press. 'People like that would not be able to plan and kill so efficiently.' He appeals to the Western Australian police to be less limited in their thinking and to allow him to look at the case investigation. He does not mince words. 'You have a major problem,' he warns. 'This person is going to strike again.' He is not in the same mould, he says, as the backpacker serial killer, Ivan Milat, who killed his victims on site in the Belanglo State Forest and left them there. 'Broaden the scope of your resources. Sooner rather than later there may be a fourth abduction.'