Call Me Cruel (10 page)

Eventually, he formed the view that the police had lied about what had happened at Redfern (several officers were very forgetful during a subsequent investigation). He wondered if Kylie might have learned the truth from Wilkinson, possibly by accident, and whether she had been killed to keep her quiet. Leanne told him that Kylie had called her in early 2004 and asked if she knew any police officers she could really trust, because she had some information about dishonest police she needed to pass on.

Another of John's speculations was that Wilkinson might have killed Kylie for some other reason, and was being protected by police in return for his silence over what he knew about the death of TJ Hickey. This didn't make much sense, but John was now living with three confusing nightmares. One was the simple fact of Kylie's disappearance. Then there was the police silence and the strange nature of the little he did know, such as the alleged rape and Wilkinson's story about Kylie burning down his house. On top of all this, there were now the conspiracy theories John's fevered mind was building.

‘I was starting to go crazy,' he later admitted. ‘I really needed to pull back, for my own sanity.' But he didn't know that then. Not the least of his problems was that, despite some of his theories, he still couldn't believe in his heart that Kylie was dead.

By the end of 2004, the police investigation had almost stopped. Houlahan and Craig had reached a dead end, convinced Wilkinson was a killer but, despite months of looking, lacking firm evidence they could take to court to support a charge of murder. Their bosses were no longer prepared to let them put time into an investigation that had already consumed a lot of resources but was going nowhere. Craig had the feeling that Wilkinson was slipping away from them.

Christmas 2004 was a sad time for the Edwards family, with everyone remembering the party they'd had at Kylie's the year before. Carol and John were shattered, desperately trying to maintain hope that their younger daughter was still alive. John spent Christmas alone, crying as he looked through photographs of the children when they were growing up.

‘I felt so ashamed of myself for not being there for Kylie over all the years,' he says. ‘I wanted to be able to let her know that I was sorry for not being a normal father to her. I remember praying to God to take good care of her, wherever she might be, and to forgive me.'

Carol was suffering depression. Leanne had to struggle to tell her young daughters why their aunty was no longer part of their lives. Michael had become unable to focus on his life and gave up his spot in a team in the Newcastle Premier League. Kylie's disappearance was tearing apart the lives of those left behind.

Sean thought Kylie had done an excellent job arranging their wedding in February 2003: everyone said it was the most organised wedding they'd been to. She had also organised their work-related moves since they'd been living together, and he was impressed by this too, her ability to set herself up in a new area so easily. In retrospect, maybe it hinted at a certain lack of stability, an unusual capacity to detach herself from her surroundings and move on, but at the time he was just grateful.

Not long after the wedding her Bell's palsy recurred: Sean came home from work one day and saw one side of her face had dropped. They walked to a local doctor, who gave her some medication.

Over the next month or so, Kylie grew moody. Sean asked her what was wrong and she told him there was nothing to be planned any more, nothing to be achieved. She started to look around for another goal, and they talked about having children. Sean wondered if it was too soon, but Kylie became very keen. Before they'd even agreed to try to have a baby, she'd bought a cot and fitted out an entire nursery in their Melbourne home, complete with clothes and powders and lotions. It was, Sean thought, an example of her love of organisation. It was also an example of how marriage had done little to reduce her inability to compromise. According to John, she was very disappointed when she didn't fall pregnant during the following months.

Sean became a little concerned about Kylie's solitary nature. Being independent was one thing, but she took it too far. He knew it must be difficult when he was away at sea, and urged her to make some more friends, explaining how it was important to build up her own social life. She said she found this hard. One reason was that she was a strong-willed personality who wanted her own way, and she had little experience of the concessions and pleasantries needed to socialise successfully. When she encountered difficulty in relationships she often just walked away, rather than trying to work them out.

This was certainly the case at work. She was on the books of a job agency but none of the positions she took lasted very long. After a while Sean saw a pattern: Kylie would always be hugely enthusiastic about a new position and the people there, and offer to do night shifts and other unpopular work, which would impress her workmates. But after a few weeks, something always went wrong. Usually it involved a clash with a supervisor, when Kylie would take some comment the wrong way—she was oversensitive to criticism—and speak her mind. Sometimes there would be conflict with other colleagues too. At around the one-month mark, the job would become intolerable and Kylie would move on. She failed to make any lasting friendships at work.

Towards the end of the year, Sean was posted to HMAS
Newcastle
, and the couple moved back to Sydney. He was often away at sea, and he became more concerned at Kylie's isolation. When they were together she was the dominant person, and yet she had almost no life outside their marriage, wanting to spend all her time with him. While he was away she seemed to do nothing at all, as though her life was on hold. Although she didn't visit him at work as she had before, she still wanted to be with him as much as possible. When the ship sailed in to Garden Island, Sydney's main naval base, Sean would see her sitting on the wharf, waiting for him. This was unusual: wives weren't supposed to be on the base, but Kylie was able to sweet-talk her way past the guards. Sean found this irregular, although he also thought it was a bit of a compliment that Kylie wanted to be with him so much.

His colleagues found it irregular too. Kylie often called him at work for long conversations. She would also discover which bars he went to with male friends and turn up. For a while he had a female boss, and Kylie became intensely jealous, telling him she didn't like him working with this woman. One day when the ship came in, Kylie as usual was on the wharf watching. That night she told Sean he'd been standing too close to his boss on deck.

Despite Kylie's sometimes odd behaviour and lack of friends, Sean recalls 2003 as a good year. There was the holiday in Tasmania, the wedding and the move to Sydney to occupy their minds, and Kylie had decided to study nursing the next year, which gave her a new goal. The marriage appeared to him to be going well. They continued to enjoy each other's company, and would often go out to the back yard and kick a soccer ball around, wrestle and have a laugh. They had few arguments, and the ones they did have were soon over.

Carol liked Sean and thought the marriage was good for Kylie, who had gone through a rough time after the armed hold-up at the bowling club but now seemed to have turned some kind of corner. She was beautiful and kind, Carol says now, ‘and I think it made her happy too that I was settled . . . While I was with Robert she used to worry I'd be killed, I wouldn't be around to see her get married. She was glad she'd got me out of that relationship and I was settled up on the Coast.'

The couple were living in a townhouse provided by the navy at Sylvania. Kylie was a keen housekeeper, almost obsessively so. Leanne noticed when she visited that the place was spotless and everything in it precisely placed, as though with the help of a ruler.

Kylie got a job as a nurse's aide at Sutherland Hospital, not too far away. This followed the usual pattern. At first she loved the place and often worked double shifts. Tina Kulevska was a nursing unit manager at the hospital. She later told police that the twenty-three-year-old Kylie struck her as looking ‘quite young, but when you spoke to her you realised she had done quite a bit. Everyone seemed to get along with her [at first] and there were no dramas, if you asked for help she would help straight away without complaining. She seemed like a really nice person.' Kylie told Kulevska that some of her family had suffered from depression, but she seemed cheerful and content during her first weeks at the hospital in late 2003.

The first indication Sean had that something was wrong occurred one night in December 2003. He doesn't recall the exact date, but it was probably soon after Kylie met Paul Wilkinson when he was a patient at Sutherland Hospital. Kylie had been out without Sean, apparently to a hospital Christmas function at Cronulla, and when she came home he asked how it had been. She exploded in anger and accused him of suspecting her of cheating on him, something he had never considered.

From that night on, he says, the anger never really went away. If he asked a question about what she'd been doing, no matter how innocent, Kylie would accuse him of suspecting she was unfaithful. She began to send and receive a lot of text messages, and she refused to say who they were to and from. Some people would have been suspicious of all this, but Sean seems to have been an unusually trusting man. For a long time he was simply puzzled and upset by the changes in his wife's behaviour.

There's a photo from this time of Kylie and some of her nursing colleagues, all wearing their scrubs. She stands out, and it's not just because we know what was to happen to her. It's because of her grin, the nervous uncertainty of it, as though she half-expected to be caught out for something she'd done. Smiling but knowing she doesn't really deserve to be happy.

After Christmas, Sean found her distant and increasingly aggressive. It was as though she'd had some sort of personality change. She was often angry, yelling and swearing. On 19 January, on the Captain Cook cruise on Sydney Harbour to celebrate his birthday, he told her he might be posted interstate. It was just another piece of navy news, another move in a job full of them. But this time her reaction was very different to before, when she'd been excited about the prospect of change. She refused to contemplate leaving Sydney, saying she had family and friends here. When he asked who these friends were, she didn't reply. She talked about a police officer she'd nursed at Sutherland Hospital recently, and she seemed to have acquired an increased interest in police work. He asked if the new friends were police but she denied it vehemently.

Kylie began leaving the house suddenly in response to text messages. It might be during the day or at ten at night. When she returned, Sean would ask where she'd been and she wouldn't tell him. She'd just sit down and have a meal or jump into the shower and get changed for bed, as though nothing had happened. She also took up smoking, something she'd never done before. In fact, until then she hadn't even liked being around people who smoked. But now she began to light a new cigarette the moment the last one was out. Sean didn't smoke and didn't want the smell in the house, so Kylie would be outside most of the time, in the back yard with a smoke and her mobile phone. In the period of not much more than a month, their marriage had turned upside down.

Sean began to press harder for an explanation of why she'd changed. At one point she told him she'd seen her old boyfriend Troy Myers recently. He asked if she was having an affair with anyone. She denied this and became even more angry. Finally, she told him she'd become friendly with a group of undercover police officers and was helping them with their work. Sean told her this sounded unusual and said he'd have a word with a cop he knew. Kylie exploded and insisted he say nothing, because that would get the officers she was working with in trouble: they reported directly to an assistant commissioner under a secret arrangement.

Today, Sean thinks Wilkinson must have seen how interested Kylie was in police work and lied to her about his own involvement in order to attract her to him. This, he believes, would have lured her ‘hook, line and sinker'. In the days when she'd first been attracted to Sean himself, she'd developed a similar fascination with the navy. He suspects the stories she told him were based on a genuine belief that Wilkinson was engaged in some sort of important secret police work.

Sean, who seems to have been the most patient of men, decided not to make the inquiry. He didn't have much understanding of how the police worked and says he didn't realise at the time just how implausible his wife's stories were.

Some time in January 2004, Kylie rang her friend Maxine Cahill and asked if she could come over. When Kylie arrived she seemed agitated and was continually receiving and sending text messages. She said she wanted to catch up with her old school friends but after only twenty minutes announced that she had to go.

A fortnight later she turned up at Maxine's house again, wearing the volunteer ambulance uniform she'd had at school. Maxine asked about this and Kylie said she'd wanted to put it on because it made her feel good. On this occasion, Kylie stayed with Maxine for a couple of hours, and she came back in early February for another chat. This time she said she'd developed feelings for a guy who worked in the police service; he was the person who was always texting her. They were planning to go away to Dubbo to live because he had relatives out there. This was dramatic stuff, especially as Kylie and Sean had been married only a year. Lots of marriages fall apart, of course, but rarely so soon. And then there was the idea of moving to Dubbo, so very different to anywhere Kylie had lived before. Maxine wondered what was going through Kylie's mind, what the reason for the sudden change could be, but it was impossible to work out. She wondered what had happened to her old friend, who as a teenager had been happy, often laughing. Now she seemed like a woman on the edge of a breakdown, agitated and nervous. And always texting.

Sean noticed another change in Kylie: a new passion for the South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league team. When the season began, she started going to games, apparently by herself, and bought a sticker of a leaping bunny for their car. There were other changes too, in what she did and how she looked: she even wore her hair short for a while. By this point it was almost a relief for Sean to go to sea, which he did for periods of up to a few weeks. He was worried about Kylie and what she might be doing while he was away, but being at home didn't help anyway.

It was a bizarre life they were leading by now and Sean became more disturbed. But he didn't know what to do: whenever he tried to talk to Kylie about it, she would get angry and tell him nothing, or else ramp up the level of drama. One day she announced that their lives were in danger but she couldn't guarantee his safety if she told him what was going on. She insisted again that he not make any inquiries into her police activities, as this would put them in more danger. It was crazy stuff. Later, John Edwards would resent the fact that Sean hadn't told the family what was happening. Sean seems to have felt it was something the couple needed to work out between themselves.

Some time in January 2004, Kylie called her boss, Tina Kulevska, to say her husband had announced he was leaving her. ‘Kylie was very upset,' Kulevska later recalled to the police. ‘She thought the world of him. She said she wanted to discuss it with him and he said he didn't want to discuss anything with her and it was over. I think at this stage she was still sending and receiving text messages, I don't know who she was texting.'