True Stories (23 page)

I called my husband to eat, but he had turned on the TV and got interested in a documentary about the World War II campaigns of the great Russian general Zhukov. I carried the meal into the living room and sat down beside him. He took his plate and thanked me. I said, ‘No sweat,' but he didn't laugh. His eyes remained fixed on the screen, where the camera was roaming disconsolately through the gashed and gaping ruins of Berlin.

1993

The Violet Jacket

IN HOBART, ON
my way to a more remote spot for some walking, I went to a bushgear shop to buy myself a waterproof jacket. A young man in his early twenties served me, friendly and knowledgeable. He showed me a jacket of a pretty violet colour. ‘It's specially designed for women,' he said. ‘The sleeves are not too long, but they come right down over your wrists, to keep you warm. And the whole thing isn't too…voluminous.'

I put it on.

‘See how it's made?' he said. ‘They've sewn it so that even when your rucksack strap comes across here, in front on your shoulder, you can still get things out of your top pockets.'

‘How clever—isn't it clever!' I was zipping and unzipping and ripping the strips of velcro. I got it all done up and swanned about in it, in front of the long mirror. The young man laughed. Together we admired the ingenuity of the jacket, its simple practicality, the outcome of somebody's careful thought. The price tag made me wince, but I said, ‘I'll take it.'

As I slipped it off, I noticed among the wall display of heavy hiking boots a strange shoe, which was dangling toe down, hooked to a peg by a little loop of leather stitched to its heel. Its upper was of stiff cloth firmly laced, and its sole was made of black rubber, moulded so closely to the curves of a human instep that it looked as light and tight as a ballet slipper, but tougher: springy, graceful and peculiar. ‘What sort of shoe is that?'

‘It's for rock-climbing.'

‘You'd think it was made for a dancer,' I said. ‘It's strong, but it's almost dainty.'

‘Beautiful, isn't it,' he said, taking it down and passing it to me. ‘You have to buy them tight. Your foot has to be right up against the end, so that when you get the top of the shoe over a hold, your toes are over it as well. You have to be able to get a
grip
.' He made clawing movements with his bent fingers, laughing, and glanced back over his shoulder as if into a yawning chasm. My hair stood on end. I put the shoe back on its hook and followed him to the counter.

‘Are you going walking?' he said.

‘Yes—do you think the weather will be good?'

He flashed me a joyful look. ‘Last weekend I was down at Freycinet,' he said, ‘and I could see snow on the Hazards! Maybe you'll be lucky!'

At the cash register a woman customer was telling the other shop assistant, also a woman, that she had just that morning got out of doing jury duty.

‘Didn't you want to do it?' I asked.

‘I would have—but I was challenged.'

‘Why?'

She shrugged. The woman assistant and I ran our eyes up and down her. She was in her forties, with a lot of flustered wiry blonde hair and a big smiling mouth full of uneven teeth. She wore a rain jacket, a money belt, heavy boots.

‘Maybe you looked a bit…alternative?' I suggested.

‘Or were they getting rid of the women?' said the assistant. ‘Was it a rape case, maybe?' She shuddered. ‘I'd hate to have to do a rape case. I'd be so outraged—I don't think I'd be able to be objective. Or imagine if you were on the jury of that bloke who killed his wife and cut up her body into pieces.' She lowered her voice. ‘He put bits of her down the drain. Some of her he put into a blender.'

We three women looked at each other without speaking, our eyebrows raised and our lips stretched back off our clenched teeth, through which we sharply sucked in air.

‘A friend of a friend of mine,' continued the woman shop assistant, who was wearing spectacles with unusual, sophisticated frames, ‘knows someone who knew the social worker that the wife went to. Apparently the social worker warned her. The wife came to her and said, “I'm leaving him.” And the social worker said, “Well, get help—because you could be in real danger.” But the wife said, “Don't worry. I can handle it.” '

‘She
told
people he was violent,' cut in the rejected juror passionately. ‘She
told
people, but no one would do anything about it.'

During this exchange, the young man was right in the middle of us, shoulder to shoulder with his colleague, working modestly and efficiently, keeping his eyes down and filling out the credit card docket, folding my new coat and sliding it neatly into a big paper bag with string handles. He waited till there was a pause, then handed me the pen, to sign.

Our eyes met. The sparkle had gone out of his open, cheerful face; it was closed and sombre now. He was carrying in silence the load of the horrible story. I signed quickly, thanked him, took my parcel, said goodbye, and hurried out on to the street.

There are two men in this story. Two. Out of all the many sorts of men that exist in the world. And so I'm determined that I will acknowledge and value and remember the young man who laughed with me and showed me the clever jacket and the beautiful shoe, for at least as long as I'll remember the other one, the murderer and dismemberer.

1993

Killing Daniel

WHAT SORT OF
a man would beat a two-year-old boy to death? Paul Aiton, thirty-two, who stood trial in Melbourne in 1993 for the murder of Daniel Valerio, is a very big man, a tradesman who wears colourful shirts, thin ties and boots decorated with chains; but at first glance, in the dock, he looked oddly like a child himself. On his heavily muscled body, with its overhanging belly and meaty hands, sat the round, hot-cheeked face of a boy who'd been sprung, who was in serious trouble, but who glared back at the world with eyes that sometimes threatened to pop out of his head with indignation and defiance.

Often his head, with its moustache, its reading glasses, its hair cropped short in front and curling over the collar behind, would be invisible behind the dock, where he appeared to be doodling or taking notes. Outside the court, especially during the retrial, when a spirited performance by the defence QC led many to believe that the verdict might be the lesser one of manslaughter, Aiton would occasionally make mocking gestures, leering and waving, towards the dead boy's father, Michael Valerio, a huge, simmering but powerfully restrained man who attended court each day with his wife. Something about Aiton persistently called to mind the word
infantile.

At least there was a certain intensity in his demeanour. When Cheryl Butcher, the dead boy's mother, was called to the witness stand, she displayed the dull eyes and defeated posture of a woman whose path through life is joyless and without drive. She had her first child at seventeen. Her relationships with men have been chaotic and soon broken. Now she has lost one child through violence and had two others (Candice and Benjamin, then seven and four) taken from her and given into the custody of her previous de facto, Michael Valerio.

Cheryl Butcher has not been charged with any crime. But she intrigued people who followed this case through two trials. How could she not have known what was being done to Daniel? What deal did she make with herself to allow her child to suffer the brutality of her boyfriend Aiton in exchange for his company, his pay-packet—for the simple fact of not being manless? And how could she, the night after her little boy died, agree to marry the man who had killed him?

Butcher was out of the house when Daniel met his end. At lunchtime on Saturday 8 September 1990, on the Mornington Peninsula, southeast of Melbourne, she drove to collect her other son from his grandparents, leaving Daniel in bed sleeping off the remains of a three-day wog. Aiton had been out in the yard all morning running a garage sale. When Butcher returned half an hour later, Daniel had been rushed to hospital by a family friend. By the time Butcher got there, the boy was dead. The doctor at casualty refused to sign a death certificate. He took a proper look at Daniel and called the police.

An autopsy that evening showed that Daniel had died of internal bleeding from abdominal injuries. A pint of blood was found in his abdominal cavity. Many of his organs were bruised, his duodenum was ruptured, and the mesentery (the membrane that anchors the intestines to the back wall of the abdomen) was torn in several places.

Aiton was taken in for questioning. He held out for quite some time. According to Butcher, when she visited him during these hours he was ‘very clinging' towards her. He told her several times that he loved her. He asked her to marry him. She asked him whether he had hit Daniel. He said he had not. But on the Sunday morning early, after a second conversation with Butcher, Aiton at last admitted to the police he had struck Daniel.

He claimed that he had not meant to harm the boy, and certainly not to kill him; that he had merely wanted to stop him crying. He had been having a bad morning: he was stressed out by the garage sale, by the fact that the toilet had blocked and by an angry phone call from a tradesman about a cheque that had bounced. Daniel had started to cry and scream just as Aiton was passing his bedroom door. Aiton had gone in, slapped him, then when he would not shut up, punched him several times in the stomach while Daniel lay there on his back.

Everybody knows that a child's crying has the power to derange, and that some people—especially those who, like Aiton, have been mistreated as children—lack the resources to control their own violent tendencies. It seemed at the time a simple case of a bloke's having ‘lost it', as Aiton put it, gone berserk under pressure, lashed out. The charge at first was manslaughter.

But Daniel's end was not so short and simple. At the morgue they counted one hundred and four bruises on his tiny corpse, inside and out, distributed liberally over his head, face, neck, chest, abdomen, arms, legs and back. Both his collarbones were broken, and had partly healed without ever having been diagnosed, or treated. Many of Daniel's injuries, said the pathologist, were more than twenty-four hours old. He spoke of ‘bruises upon bruises'. Daniel also had an undiagnosed condition of the bowel that would have caused him, doctors said, bouts of excruciating pain, and which appeared to have been present for some time. Daniel's slide towards the day of his death, it now became clear, was a long, slow process.

Through the witness stand at the Supreme Court poured a stream of people who had seen on Daniel Valerio the marks of the violence that infected this already broken family, once Aiton met Cheryl Butcher through an introduction agency in February 1990 and soon afterwards moved into her house. People who noticed the boy's afflictions—monitored them, in some cases—included neighbours, tradesmen, social workers, teachers, family friends, doctors, nurses, police, a photographer. Over these months, Daniel was seen by twenty-one professionals.

These witnesses are not ‘bad people'. They are ordinary citizens who go about their daily business as best they can, trying to sleep at night. They saw the marked child, they harboured suspicions. Their instinctive response was correct. What stopped so many of them from speaking or acting?

Was it fear, squeamishness about dobbing? Were some of them inured to suffering by the terrible things they encounter professionally every day? Or were they captives of the resilient myth of the nuclear family, the ability of the most pathetic and vicious collection of children and parents to throw up a stockade around themselves, a force-field that repels outsiders?

The doctors, for the most part, impressed in court by their lacklustre quality. Their manner appeared limp, their language feeble and non-committal. What they conspicuously seemed to lack, and what Aiton perversely seemed to possess, was
energy.

From about June 1990 Daniel was exhibiting an ever-renewed array of black and blue marks. Three different doctors at the local clinic remarked on this. The tenant in the flat behind the Aiton–Butcher house used to hear screaming ‘over the sound of the television'; it was so intolerable to her that she would go out driving in her car until it was over.

So frequently did Daniel display bruises to the temples, eyes, forehead and back of the head that a family friend and sometime babysitter, Wayne Williams, bought some strips of wetsuit material and constructed for the little boy a child's version of a boxer's headguard: a lime-green strip of rubber ran round his skull, a dark blue one passed over the top of his head, and the thing fastened under his chin with a black velcro strap. When this colourful contraption was shown to the jury, onlookers sobbed. It seemed a gesture of helpless kindness by a good, gentle man—but wasn't it misdirected? Wayne Williams used to change Daniel's nappy. Hadn't he seen the bruises in places where the normal bumps and trips of toddlerhood don't reach?

Williams' wife Sylvia was Cheryl Butcher's best friend. She had a special feeling for Daniel, who called her ‘Mum'. Sylvia found a large scrotal swelling on Daniel. She said Cheryl told her ‘she didn't know it was there'.

Cheryl repeated to the court—as she had over these months to anyone who asked her about the child's constant bruisings, black eyes and mysterious pains and stumblings— her explanations that Daniel was ‘clumsy and accident-prone', that ‘all small children bump into things', that his older brother ‘headbutted him and played roughly with him', that Daniel ‘often fell from his stroller', that he often ‘walked into the furniture' (in particular, a dangerous table with edges at the exact height of his temples). The theory she was most at ease with was one that several doctors took seriously: that Daniel must be suffering from ‘a blood disorder'. They put him into hospital and ran tests.

During his five days in hospital Daniel displayed, according to his paediatrician, the classic behaviour of the neglected, emotionally deprived child: not at all shy, he would go eagerly to total strangers, such was his need for cuddling and attention. No fresh spontaneous bruises appeared on Daniel in hospital; on the contrary, he put on weight and ‘generally blossomed'. The only thing the tests picked up was a slower than normal blood-clotting time. Daniel was discharged on 29 July. Cheryl Butcher did not bring him to his follow-up appointment. Daniel's blossoming period was brief. Around this time, Wayne Williams, who was fond of Daniel, backed away from any further babysitting. He said in court that Daniel was too sick for him to want to take the responsibility.