The Tall Man (19 page)

“Not if you swear,” I answered.

Steadman laughed. The doors opened and Bengaroo was spirited away.

Outside the courthouse, Erykah Kyle told me that Lloyd Bengaroo made her think of the Native Police, who until the late 1890s were the subordinate allies of white police and involved in bloodcurdling killing sprees. The system had used Lloyd, she felt, and she wished her council had tried to reach out to him. “I feel sorry for him, truly I do.” Lloyd had spent his policing years being the white cops’ errand boy, holding the van doors open while other blackfellas were arrested. Cameron had shamed him that morning, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t been shamed before. In his twenty-one years as a community police officer, he’d heard similar things during most arrests. It was just that, this time, Cameron Doomadgee was dead forty minutes later.

A
MID MUCH EXCITEMENT
the next morning, Senior Sergeant Hurley arrived at the courtroom—and I felt I was glimpsing some figure from myth. After nearly nine months of intense speculation, and after legal proceedings in which he was the absent subject of witness accounts, here he was—tall, dark, classically handsome. Flesh and blood. He came in through a back door so he could not be photographed. His uniform was so carefully pressed each crease was visible. He was clean shaven, tanned, calm, polite. It went to making him a good witness. He sat very straight and referred to Doomadgee as “Mulrunji” or “the gent” or “the gentleman”. He called Terry Martin “sir” and looked him directly in the eye. His accent was unpolished, but not particularly broad. He told the court of his years of volunteer work with Aboriginal youths.

Martin: “Do you have friends who are Aborigines?”

Hurley: “Yes sir.”

Neatly dressed in jeans and shiny shoes, Murrandoo Yanner sat in the courtroom, leaning forward, attempting to be seen by Hurley. Murrandoo had travelled from Burketown to try to confront his old friend. “We know each other too well and have too much respect for each other,” he had told Tony Koch, “for him to be able to look me in the eye and not tell me the truth.”

Martin: “Do you have anything against Aboriginal people?”

Hurley: “No, no. I wouldn’t have, I … I wouldn’t go to these communities if I had something against Aboriginal people, I … I couldn’t serve in those communities.”

Hurley sat very still in the witness box and told the court how, on November 19, 2004, he had been waiting in the police van on Dee Street with Lloyd Bengaroo while Gladys Nugent collected her medication. “We had the windows up and I could hear some yelling going on. And Lloyd asked, ‘Are you hearing what he’s saying?’ … Patrick Nugent was yelling out abuse towards Lloyd and myself.”

The senior sergeant had got out of the van to arrest Patrick, and that was the moment Cameron Doomadgee walked past and spoke to Bengaroo. When Hurley returned to the van he could tell his colleague was upset. “His pride was hurt. He’s a very proud man,” Hurley told the court in a sincere tone, “and Lloyd takes his job very seriously.” In the 1980s, Hurley explained, Bengaroo had been in charge of thirteen community police officers and was entrusted with the power to arrest. By 2004, the system had changed and he had “no actual authority”. Lloyd’s only role was to liaise between the Palm Islanders and the police.

Hurley said that he’d looked over at Cameron, farther down the street, who yelled out, “‘Fucking cunts. You fucking cunts!’ or something similar to that.” But it was the insult to Lloyd that concerned him. Lloyd, Hurley told the court, had said, “‘He shouldn’t speak to me like that, mate.’ And I said, ‘Well, who is it?’ And he told me Mulrunji’s correct name.”

Doomadgee.

The day before, Lloyd Bengaroo had told the inquest that Chris Hurley knew Cameron and “knew the Doomadgee family, where they came from”. Hurley maintained that he did not remember Cameron, but even so, the very surname must have brought to mind the red-dirt town. It must have had a smell to it, a feel. All day long, blackfellas in old cars drove up from Doomadgee to the Burketown pub and loaded up with cases of beer and bottles of rum. Young men from Doomadgee would go up the road and slash the tires of whites at the local trailer park. The Doomadgee men had broken noses, scarred faces, do-it-yourself prison tattoos; the Burketown whites could feel the tension in the air.

Steve Zillman stood up and asked for a brief meeting with his client. The rest of us sat waiting in the courtroom, suspended in the moment that Hurley reversed thirty metres to arrest Cameron. One man had seen a black drunk, the other a white demon. The next step was pure ritual. It was hot, it was clammy. It was, to quote Norman Mailer, “carnal”. “At the moment of the arrest, cop and criminal knew each other better than mates … an arrest was carnal. Not sexual, carnal—of the meat, strangers took purchase of another’s meat.”

When Hurley returned to the courtroom he announced, “I take the opportunity to claim privilege.”

Christine Clements directed that Hurley was required to “answer questions and provide evidence to this inquest”. She had the power to order him to speak, but any evidence he subsequently gave could not be used against him in a criminal proceeding.

Hurley now told the court he’d decided to arrest Cameron “in support of Lloyd, because Lloyd doesn’t have the power of arrest … my view is,” he added, “that we give one hundred per cent support to Lloyd. Our job is difficult over there but it was nothing compared to Lloyd’s.” The senior sergeant sat in the witness box telling his story confidently, as if no one could fail to see how reasonable he’d been. The suspicions around this death were all due to a terrible misunderstanding. A mix-up. He had actually been supporting Aboriginal people that day. In fact, the arrest itself was a brotherly, protective arrest to help a black subordinate—Cameron’s offence was “public nuisance.”

“But why would being rude to Lloyd justify that offence?” Terry Martin asked.

Hurley’s face changed minimally. “Well, my point being, sir, is that I believe if Lloyd had the power of arrest, he would’ve arrested the gentleman himself.”

Martin: “For what, though?”

Hurley: “For public nuisance.”

Belligerence flickered just beneath the senior sergeant’s poise. Experience had taught him, he told the court, that if he didn’t arrest Cameron that morning, chances were he’d reoffend. Hurley wanted to take him back to the station and check if he had a criminal history.

But, Terry Martin wondered, in a place where drinking dominated life, why did Hurley not say, “Look, mate, you’ve had too many, you’re yelling out in the street, come and we’ll give you a lift home.” Doomadgee, after all, was not known for being a troublemaker—Hurley said himself he had never met him.

The senior sergeant claimed that, having just arrested Patrick Nugent, he wanted to be even-handed.

Martin asked what had happened back at the station. “How did you get him out of the vehicle?”

Hurley: “I asked him to get out at first and then placed a hand on his leg or his arm to assist him, and when I say assist, whether I had to drag him I can’t recall, but whilst he was getting out I was punched. It was a shock.” It was a shock because he believed the community knew that he was tough but fair. “One of the reasons I like being in the communities [is] because you could build up that rapport, you weren’t just a number on the street, people knew who you were.” As for the punch, he wasn’t angry, just annoyed: “I was a bit fazed by it … a bit annoyed by it, yeah, but not angry. Anger is too strong a word.” In this state, he said, they struggled to the station door.

Martin: “And you fell down?”

Hurley: “Mulrunji fell down before me.”

Martin: “And did you also fall to the floor of the police station?”

Hurley: “Correct, I fell to his left.”

Martin: “You didn’t land on top of him?”

Chris Hurley: “Well, I now know that medical evidence would suggest that. That I landed on top of him. If I didn’t know the medical evidence, I’d tell you that I fell to the left of him … I mean, life doesn’t unfortunately go frame by frame, and if it did, I would’ve been able to give a hundred per cent accurate version. But the version I gave was my best recollection and the most truthful. It was the truth that I thought.”

Murrandoo Yanner moved to a seat in the gallery directly behind Terry Martin, in the senior sergeant’s line of sight. Hurley’s face flashed with recognition.

Murrandoo’s brother Vernon had told me that at the Burketown pub, Hurley sometimes stood by the jukebox daring blokes to come outside and rugby-tackle him. For four long years he’d been out of sight in Burketown, keeping the peace in ways that did not always bear mainstream scrutiny. He didn’t carry a gun, his brawniness was a kind of protection.

But in the courtroom Chris Hurley was controlled, urbane, inscrutable, with none of the aggression Vernon Yanner described. If Hurley was rocked to see Murrandoo, his mask hid it well. Here at the inquest Hurley was the good Catholic boy, all manners and discipline, grown-up. He was like T. E. Lawrence back from the wilderness, smooth and upstanding at the London club.

Hurley denied assaulting Cameron. And he was utterly convincing. Put aside the parts of his story that didn’t add up and there was no reason to doubt this man. His arrest of Cameron had been heavy-handed but his sincerity was compelling. The courtroom felt his self-belief, his conviction. I wondered if it were possible to feel innocent of a death that you had caused but that you did not intend. Could you be mechanically responsible but humanly guiltless? Any one of the police guarding the inside and outside of the courtroom could have been in Hurley’s position. Was it possible, then, for Hurley to convince himself that, since he’d behaved much as anyone else would have in the circumstances, he was no more guilty than anyone else?

Terry Martin reminded Hurley that in three police interviews—on the day of the death, the day following, and the week following—he had said he fell to the left of Cameron. There would now, Martin claimed, seem to be only two possible explanations for Cameron’s black eye and massive internal injuries: either Hurley had indeed fallen on top of him or he had assaulted his prisoner. Since he had repeatedly denied the former—until knowing the medical evidence—could the latter be possible?

Martin: “Just think back: was there a flash of anger whereby you got up first and drove your knee into him, and said something like, ‘Have you had enough, Mr Doomadgee?’”

Hurley: “No, that’s not correct.”

Martin: “Clip to the jaw and then, you know, with all due respect to the Court, you fell arse-over-tit through the doorway, but it didn’t make you angry enough to get up and …?”

Hurley: “No. No. I wanted him in the cell.”

Martin: “I beg your pardon?”

Hurley: “I wanted him in the cell. I was trying to pick him up after that.”

By “pick him up”, the senior sergeant was referring to standing over Doomadgee and pulling: this was his alternative explanation to Roy Bramwell’s claim that Hurley’s elbow had been moving up and down in a series of punches. Was Hurley now telling the truth, or was he covering himself against Bramwell’s allegation?

It would be seven months before these questions could be put to Hurley in cross-examination. His testimony was literally interrupted due to another legal battle taking place. The deputy coroner, Christine Clements, had decided to allow Hurley’s prior-complaints history to be used in evidence. His lawyers were appealing and the inquest was again adjourned until the appeal was heard.

Hurley slipped out a side door to again avoid photographers and disappeared in a waiting car. Giving evidence, he had been the model of a virtuous cop. If it was Roy Bramwell’s word against his, who would believe Roy? I tried to look at things from every angle. I took each doubt I had and tried to explain it away, then put it back in to test whether Cameron’s death could have been just an accident. Was it possible that Hurley was innocent?

O
NE AFTERNOON
—months after the August 2005 inquest had been interrupted—an officer invited me inside the police barracks on Palm Island. It was the wet season and water lay pooled on the ground. Plants looked close to drowning. Vines entwined fences as if intent on suffocating them. Out in the bay the rain had filled a boat and sunk it. The officer unlocked the heavy padlock, I entered the barracks through the Cyclone-wire gates, and he locked us back in. He led me to the social area, a tight garage space where the cops had retreated during the riot. There was now a half-sized pool table, a stereo, old office chairs, and a television playing
Video Hits
. Two dilapidated couches had been given over to one of the policewoman’s dogs.

The officer offered me a drink and went to a fridge filled with budget colas and beer. There was a notepad that he marked to pay later. He wanted companionship. He wanted to talk about music and travel and the things young men talk to young women about everywhere. I felt the whole building vibrate with loneliness. Outside, one of his colleagues had been gardening in the narrow beds alongside the barracks, the plants meticulously, lovingly tended. On the walls above were windows covered in protective screens.

This officer had been at the riot, but could not talk about it because Lex Wotton’s trial was still pending. “Do you think Hurley is innocent?” I kept wanting to ask, but since I was drinking his beer, it seemed unfair.

I thought of what I had learned. Chris Hurley could be a kind man and he could also be tough and uncomplaining, in ways that a good cop has to be. When a plane crashed not far from Burketown, Hurley and his deputy were first on the scene. They waited all night for the rescue crew. Later, he told a friend that he had dropped off to sleep and woke horrified to find himself among the eight incinerated bodies. Hurley could endure the most confronting experiences, but little things would wind him up, this friend said, and then compared him to a Vietnam veteran: close up, he could be alarmingly moody, unpredictable, easily irritated—and very intent on control.

I had heard some Palm Islanders say they thought Hurley started acting differently after his girlfriend left him. Narelle had followed him from Burketown. But early in 2004 she left the island. No one I spoke to knew why she had gone. I wondered if being on his own made Hurley more vulnerable to his tormentors.