Call Me Cruel
Michael Duffy reports trials and crime for the
Sun-Herald
. He has written two Sydney crime novels,
The Tower
and
The Simple Death
.
First published in 2012
Copyright
©
Michael Duffy 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian
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When I began to attend murder trials as a journalist, I was curious to find out how real murder differed from fiction. Like most people, I was fortunate that my only knowledge of violent death came from crime novels and television dramas. I knew reality would be different, but how?
I found many differences, but the main one was the character of the murderer. In fiction, killers are often psychopaths who plan their crimes, have multiple victims and are adept at avoiding capture, sometimes even taunting their pursuers. These characteristics satisfy the need to personify evil, for greater dramatic and moral effect.
Most of the murderers I've seen in the dock are not like this. In real life, murder often involves an action committed on the spur of a moment created by unusual circumstances. Because of their lack of experience and intent, most killers are caught fairly easily and often plead guilty. They are very different to the psychopaths and gangsters of fiction, tending to be either mildly unstable individuals or relatively normal people who did something terrible but might easily not have. Although killers receive some of the longest sentences going, most are among the least criminally inclined of jail inmates. Many deeply regret their crimes.
Paul Wilkinson is different. He was an Aboriginal Community Liaison Officer with the police force and used his special knowledge to help him kill and evade arrest for years afterwards. His most striking behaviour, before and after he strangled Kylie Labouchardiere, was a propensity to tell massive and complex lies, which those around him believed. He was charming and persuasive, yet some of his lies were so bizarreâessentially, he turned his own life into a work of fictionâthat one of the most curious aspects of this story is that it took so long to catch him. The investigation lasted three years and, even after he was locked up and examined by psychiatrists, he was never declared insane.
Wilkinson's lies fooled his wife, Julie, into moving out of their home so he could conduct an affair. They lured twenty-three-year-old Kylie Labouchardiere away from her husband. Like most good liars, he was clever at identifying gullible people and getting close to themâin Kylie's case, partly through the exchange of an extraordinary 23,000 text messages over four months. But finally he fooled himself too, and his lies blossomed into complex fantasies he no longer controlled. They came to control him, and in the end they drove him to murder. This is a story about the power of stories, about what can happen when we lose the ability to tell the difference between fact and fiction.
One way to lose touch with reality is to stop feeling anything for other people. Paul Wilkinson has never revealed where Kylie is buried. This book's title is taken from a chilling text message he sent his wife during the police investigation:
âEverybody has reasons 4 hiding a crime. Mine is the family can live not knowing where and why 4 What they hav don. Call me cruel, call me nasty and YES Id agree, howeva my knowledge ISNT goin 2 b theres. It will hurt them NOT me.'
Just what did he mean by that? Obviously he was being cruel, and knew his actions appeared cruel. But did he actually have any feeling for the misery he was causing Kylie's family? Whatever the answer to that question, a layperson might well feel that the man who sent that text was crazy. Yet after his arrest he was examined several times by several psychiatrists, who found he was responsible for his actions.
Another major difference between real murder and fiction lies with the victim. In reality, victims are often men and know their killer. In fiction, they tend to be young women or even children, often selected almost at random. Just as fiction exaggerates the evil of the murderer, it heightens the weakness and innocence of his prey.
Kylie Labouchardiere was a vulnerable young woman, but it was more complicated than that. Some terrible things had happened in her life, and because of her character these had been even more devastating than they might have been for most women. Her sister, Leanne, says that as Kylie was growing up it became obvious she was drawn to dangerous situations: âalarm bells just didn't ring for her'. Tragically, she never grew out of this behaviour.
The word âtragedy' does not only mean something awful or horrific. It can also mean a personal disaster that occurs partly because of a flaw in an individual's character. This does not mean that victims deserve what happens to them; it is simply an acknowledgement that some people, due to a combination of character, upbringing and circumstances, are more likely than others to be victims. This sad truth is on display in Australia's courts every working day, a reminder of the enormous role luck plays in all our lives.
Kylie Labouchardiere's death was a tragedy, in the full sense of the word. It was terribly unlucky that Paul Wilkinson should kill and that she should die. But in retrospect, I believe we can see that if Wilkinson was ever going to kill, his victim was going to be someone like Kylie. It would be someone prepared to enter his weird fictional worldâsomeone who didn't hear the alarm bells.
This makes her sound gullible, and in some ways she was. But in many ways, so too was the justice system, which took five long years to convict Paul Wilkinson, despite the fact that the police strongly suspected him almost from the start. The institutions we have created to protect societyâthe police force and the courtsâhad great trouble dealing with Wilkinson. The individuals involved often knew he was taking them for a ride, but because of the rulesâand Wilkinson's capacity to abuse those rulesâthey were unable to do anything about it, which extended the period during which he was able to hurt people.
Indeed, one of the most disturbing things about this story is not only that he left a trail of broken careers and marriages and lives in his wakeâa trail of misery and devastationâbut that he almost got away with it.
The final and perhaps greatest difference between murder in fiction and in life is pain. In fiction, the suffering, not just of the victim but of those left behind (whose pain is often worse because it lasts so long), is largely left out. In life it is achingly, shockingly apparent. Paul Wilkinson has created enormous pain in many peopleâhe has shattered lives that can never be made whole again. To what he has done by killing Kylie Labouchardiere he has added the cruelty of not saying where he buried her.
This book is dedicated to Wilkinson's other victims: to Kylie's grandmother Louisa; her parents, John and Carol; her sister, Leanne, and brother, Michael; and her ex-husband, Sean. It is also dedicated to those members of the police force, especially Glenn Smith and Rebekkah Craig, who through their persistence brought Paul Wilkinson to justice.
John Edwards' nightmare began when his phone rang at midday on Saturday 8 May 2004, and it has continued to this day. When he thinks about his life now, he divides it into the time before that and the time after.
John had three children, Leanne, Michael and Kylie, all in their twenties. They lived on the Central Coast near their mother, Carol, from whom he was long separated. It was Michael on the phone, ringing to say they hadn't seen Kylie since she'd gone away over a week earlier to stay with friends for a few days.
This was a worry, but not as much as it would have been with many people. Kylie, who was twenty-three, was something of a mystery to her family; for her to stay away without telling them was not necessarily cause for alarm. Until recently, she'd been married and living in Sydney, and they knew little of her life down there. A few weeks before, she'd walked out on her husband, Sean Labouchardiere, and also on the nursing course she'd just started, and come up to stay with her grandmother Louisa at Erina. She had no children and was not working. When she left ten days before, she hadn't said who she'd be staying with or for exactly how long. It was in keeping with her character that she'd change her plans and forget to call; her grandmother believed there was a new man in her life.
That was the positive view. But on the other hand, Kylie had been planning to go to Moree by train that morning with an uncle and aunt to attend a cousin's engagement party. The relatives had called Louisa to say Kylie had not turned up at Central: she'd missed the train, despite buying a ticket weeks ago. That was less like her, and thisâalong with the amount of time that had now passed without any communicationâwas why Michael had decided to call his father.
John considered what Michael told him. He felt uneasy, but he was not going to panicâhe was not the panicking kind. John was fifty-one in 2004, an ex-soldier, still fit and tanned. Since leaving the army he had held responsible positions, run businesses and dealt with crises and people under pressure. He loved his daughter but was fully aware of her private nature, and her sometimes headstrong behaviour. Still, there was enough that was odd about the whole thing to make him uneasy, and he decided to drive up to Erina and talk to other members of the family to obtain more information. In the army John had worked at Victoria Barracks in a top-secret job in communications; he knew the value of intelligence.
The first part of the trip took him through the tangle of roads in the city's west until he reached the F3, the big freeway connecting Sydney with the Central Coast. As he drove, he thought about the last time he'd seen Kylie, five weeks earlier. She'd come to visit him in Parramatta, where he worked with a company that helped people find jobs. He thought about her smile, because with Kylie the thing everyone noticed about her first was her smileânot just a grin but a big, toothy smile. She had inherited it from him.
When she was a child it had been a great smile, gaining her the nickname âSmiley Kylie'. With her light-brown hair and chubby cheeks, that look in her brown eyes showing utter contentment, complete trust, she was everything you hoped a daughter might be. John remembers her as a happy child who would always hug people when she greeted them. But just before she turned five, John and Carol had separated, and before long Carol took up with a man named Robert McCann, a criminal and a man of violence, who had turned her life inside out. The children had gone to live with their grandmother but they'd continued to see their mother and McCann, and what he did to her. The effects had been particularly bad on Kylie.
When she came out of her childhood, the smile was still there but it was very different, showing a lot of strain. If you knew the story of her life, you might say she'd been wounded and had not recovered. She was just above average height and slender, with an open, bright face and hair, dyed blonde now, usually at shoulder length. She had a lively personality, although sometimes she could be moody.
John loved her more than ever and he hated what had happened because of the divorce and her mother's decade of abuse by McCann. You could see from Kylie's smile that she desperately wanted to be happy, but things had occurred that made her doubt whether anything good in her life would last. For a while there, in the early days of her marriage to Sean, the family had thought she might have broken through into a new life. But it had all gone bad, although they didn't know why. It was as though the past had reached out and pulled Kylie back.
When they'd met, Kylie told him she was leaving Sean. John had been surprised. On Christmas Eve the couple had invited the family to their townhouse at Sylvania for a meal, and as far as John could see, everything had been fine. And now this. He wondered if their separation had anything to do with their failure to have a baby. This mattered a lot to Kylie: she'd actually made a nursery in the spare room not long after the wedding, even stocking it with nappies and baby lotions. But they hadn't been married much more than a year: it seemed early to cut and run. Maybe something else had happened, but Kylie hadn't offered any more information.
About halfway through John's trip to the Coast, there occurred the first of what were to be several coincidences in the story of the last weeks of Kylie's life. Not long after the Calga Interchange, the broad freeway dips and sweeps across the Mooney Mooney Bridge, reputedly the tallest in the southern hemisphere. Years later, it would turn out to be linked to Kylie's disappearance. It's even possible John drove over his daughter's grave, seventy-five metres below, on his way north that day, although that grave has never been found.
But all that lay ahead. For now he just concentrated on the road, worked his way up to the Gosford exit and turned off onto the long highway that runs down to the Coast. He intended to talk to the family and search Kylie's room, try to find out where she was. He was going to use all his skills to find her and bring her back, make sure she had another chance. Make some sort of recompense for leaving her all those years before, when he'd walked away from Carol. Everyone deserved another chance, but Kylie deserved one more than most.