Call Me Cruel (11 page)

In fact, Sean had not said he was leaving her. Presumably Kylie had started to think about leaving him but preferred to present this to others by posing as the victim. Kulevska and another nurse took her out for dinner at a Thai restaurant, where they were struck by her odd appearance and behaviour. Normally, Kylie dressed conventionally, in casual clothes and without much makeup or jewellery. She had a gold charm bracelet with an anchor on it, and a few simple gold necklaces she sometimes wore when going out, but that was about it. On this occasion, though, ‘she was dressed right up,' Kulevska recalls. ‘She was wearing a lot of makeup and I thought she had gone off the rails. The makeup made her look like a psychiatric patient, with bright eye-shadow, bright lipstick, and her hair was done up.'

Kylie said her husband had asked where she was going and she'd told him she was going out—and what did he care anyway? During the meal, she received and sent text messages, holding her phone under the table, and also went out of the restaurant to answer phone calls.

After this, Kylie's behaviour at work grew more aberrant. ‘She was scattered, she couldn't get it together or manage a shift,' Kulevska told police. ‘She still got some of her work done but she was struggling to cope. Her behaviour was over the top. For example, if she saw me she would come up to me, very happy to see me, and give me a hug, which was very manic.'

On 22 January, Kulevska arranged for Kylie to see Lynne Baker, the hospital's employee counsellor. Normally, records of patient interviews with mental-health experts are confidential. In Kylie's case, some of them became part of the Crown's case against Paul Wilkinson, which is why they are now on the public record.

Kylie walked in to Baker's office and said, ‘I'm suicidal.' She said she was having marital problems and demanded to be admitted to a psychiatric unit, and then asked that Kulevska come and sit with her.

When Kulevska arrived, Kylie looked unkempt and was crying a lot, plainly very upset. She said her family blamed her for the marriage breakdown and she wanted to jump off a bridge and end it all. Baker and Kulevska talked about her being admitted to a psychiatric ward, and she said she'd been in one when she was living in Melbourne. She kept crying and sobbing.

A few hours later, Kylie was seen by Dr Jarrett Johnston, the psychiatric registrar. She had calmed down and was lounging in her chair. The psychiatrist found her co-operative but sometimes evasive. She said she smoked ten cigarettes a day and two or three cones of marijuana. Her marriage was in trouble due to verbal abuse from her husband. She said she and Sean had not had sex for three months, and that she had been having an affair for one month. She had become irritable, had a poor appetite and was waking up during the night.

For several days she'd been feeling suicidal because her lover had been demoted at work ‘because of acts of poor judgement related to me'. She said this made her feel guilty, and she was also not sure just how serious he was about their relationship. She had begun to drive recklessly. Johnston's conclusions were that Kylie tended to talk around the point and showed poor problem-solving skills. Her insight and judgement were poor and she minimised the seriousness of her choices. She said she felt helpless and trapped in her current domestic situation. However, she had ‘no loosening of associations that would indicate more serious thought disorder'.

Johnston diagnosed her as having adjustment disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (on account of the armed robbery in 1999) and borderline personality disorder, the symptoms being ambivalence and impulsivity. He decided she was not at high risk of killing herself or harming others. If anything bad were to occur because of something she did, he thought this would occur not deliberately but ‘by misadventure or impulsive action'. This was to prove perceptive.

Kylie was not admitted to a ward. A management plan was put in place by the hospital and staff kept in touch with her. A few days later, she faxed them a sort of ‘pros and cons' sheet she'd drawn up regarding a central problem in her life: the choice between Paul and Sean. This made it clear she loved Paul and hoped they would move out west together, but she was uncertain of the strength of his love for her.

She was frustrated by his request that they keep their relationship secret. In her mind, they had reached the point where she could imagine them living together in a happy new life: ‘When he can't visit me I feel hurt, angry and let down . . . He used to come and visit me a lot at first. That is now not consistent.' She wanted to strengthen their relationship, ‘try to impress Paul by doing certain things.'

As for Sean, she was not sexually attracted to him, and her thoughts reveal a high level of naivety and confusion. ‘I told him that I am involved in an undercover case in order to see Paul,' she recorded, ‘and to continue to see Paul. I can't tell Sean what the case is because it is undercover secret squirrel stuff. And naturally he got the shits and that is how this all came about. But why couldn't he just say OK that is what you are involved in fair enough and leave it at that. Why so many questions.'

It was a volatile combination of naivety, wilfulness, and frustration. Despite this, Kylie told Lynne Baker she was feeling better, and repeated this twice in the following weeks.

*

But things had got worse at home. In early February, Sean was checking their joint email account and found a message for Kylie, which he opened. It contained sexual innuendo and was from someone he hadn't heard of before, a man named Paul Wilkinson. When he asked Kylie about it, she told him this was the policeman she was working with, and that he was nothing more than a friend.

‘You've got female friends,' she said. ‘I'm sure you've sent them emails like that.'

‘No,' Sean replied.

Kylie reacted by becoming angry again and abusing Sean for opening an email addressed to her. She began to tell him some amazing tales about Wilkinson and his police work. These conversations would occur out in the car because she was afraid their house was bugged. She said Wilkinson was in an undercover section of the police force's State Protection Group, based at Redfern. Kylie said she had met his colleagues, including a girl who had been raped at the police academy and who later killed herself.

When the Redfern Riots occurred in the middle of February 2004, Kylie devoured the media coverage and cut out articles from the newspapers, keeping them in a manila folder. One front-page photograph showed a line of police in Redfern, facing the mob with their backs to the camera. Kylie drew a circle around one of the cops and told Sean it was the fellow she was working with, Paul Wilkinson. Sean asked her how she could identify him, and she said Wilkinson had told her.

If he had, it was untrue: ACLOs were not involved in this sort of dangerous work, and in any case Wilkinson was no longer working at Redfern. But Kylie seems to have believed it, because she had the picture laminated and later showed it to some of her family.

In early March, Kylie told Sean she had been raped by Gary. He wonders now if the rape allegation might have been an attempt to drive a wedge between himself and family members who had begun to comment on Kylie's strange behaviour. Certainly it did not bring the couple any closer together.

‘When I'm on the phone [to someone],' he said to her one day in a conversation she taped, ‘I've told you a million times, do not speak at all, and do not say, “Sean, Sean, Sean.” '

‘Sean!' she said. ‘I wanted you for something. Shit. Fuck me dead!'

‘I'm sick of tellin' you: we do not speak [to each other] when we're on the phone.'

‘You fuckin' speak to
me
when I'm on the phone!' she said.

‘Not unless I'm meant to.'

‘Now what type of fucked-up thing's that?'

‘Well, maybe that's the way it goes,' he said.

‘Well obviously, obviously your method of speaking has failed miserably because every time we do it we fight.'

Kylie said she was worried about what Sean would say when he got into the witness box if Gary went on trial for rape. ‘I've stood behind you 100 per cent,' said Sean. ‘End of the day, if [Gary] did this to you, he should pay for it.'

But it turned out that what Kylie was really concerned about was whether Sean would mention Paul Wilkinson. We now know—although, of course, Sean didn't at the time—that this was due to Wilkinson's insistence that their relationship remain completely secret—he didn't want Julie finding out what he'd been up to. But Kylie told Sean the reason for the secrecy was Wilkinson's involvement in undercover activities, and so Sean agreed to keep him out of it if the matter ever went to court.

‘We're going along that track [of keeping quiet about Wilkinson] because of the bullshit you're involved in,' he said. ‘So, yeah, I'm gunna do it because I want to support you, but no, I do not agree with it and I never will. Because it's wrong. Simply that.'

They changed the subject and Sean mentioned the stress he was experiencing over the rape matter and other things. Kylie said she was under a lot of stress too, and Sean sounded sceptical. ‘You don't even work,' he said.

She said she was on sick leave: ‘I sit at home, that's what I do now . . . You think they're not hounding me to come back to find out what I'm doing? You think that, you know, it's all clear sailing? That's not pressure?'

‘You don't work.'

Kylie became almost incoherent. ‘I don't have that closing pressure,' she said, ‘but what I have had when I was working in a clinical setting? But I still have the mental stability of the, of the pressure being outside of the setting. Right? . . . I still have to face the fact that I have to go back there one day. I have to deal with all that shit that I've had to deal with when I was there . . . Uni pressure, I've got the work pressure, I've got the home environment pressure, I've got the Coast pressure.'

‘Mmm.'

‘No matter what environment I walk into, I carry one pressure load onto another. Right? . . . I'm bloody sick of this shit.'

‘Yeah? Welcome to my world.'

‘Oh, your world? Oh, you ought to sit in mine sometime.'

Sean accepted an awful lot of bad treatment from Kylie. ‘At the time I believed what she said,' he later recalled, ‘but now I just don't know. Things just don't add up.' His frustration back then was mixed with sympathy for her clearly disturbed state. Sometimes she would go to Cronulla Beach by herself and sit on the rocks and look out at the sea. On other days she'd drive over to Sydney Airport and just watch the planes come and go.

Finally, Kylie agreed to Sean's demands that they have a serious talk about their marriage. She said she wanted to ask along a friend as a mediator. Sean said this was okay, and at the appointed time a casually dressed Aboriginal man in his early thirties turned up at their place. He was of stocky build, in his early thirties, with short dark hair, about 165 centimetres tall and with a bit of a pot belly, wearing a Rabbitohs football jumper, cargo shorts and runners. He seemed to Sean to be a pleasant enough bloke, and the three of them went out onto the back patio. Sean began to ask Kylie various questions. She responded angrily, jumping out of her chair and yelling, but the man was quite good at calming her down. But the conversation was non-conclusive and after a while the man left. Sean doesn't know who he was: he says he didn't look like the pictures of Wilkinson he saw in the press several years later. On the other hand, he did look like a picture of a guy he'd seen on Kylie's mobile phone.

If it was Wilkinson, you'd have to wonder why he'd have wanted to meet Sean in this manner. One reason might be a desire to experience some sort of thrill in deceiving his lover's husband in this way. Or there's the possibility he actually wanted Kylie out of his life: the relationship had become too intense, he feared his marriage was threatened and this was a way of ensuring Kylie talked to Sean about their problems. Whatever the case, and whoever the man was, this meeting was one of the most perplexing incidents in a story full of them.

Throughout March, Kylie was receiving phone calls and text messages almost all the time, sometimes nonstop for several hours. She would leave the house, telling Sean she was working with the undercover police. She said she was doing surveillance work in cars in the Sutherland and Menai areas, or taking photographs in Bondi. It got to the point where she insisted, before Sean took their car out, that she made a phone call first: she needed to ‘clear it' with someone in the police.

One night at 3.00 a.m. she received a phone call and told Sean that ‘Paul and another guy have been jumped and both beaten [during a police operation]. One has a cut to his head and one has a cut lip, they were talking to someone and someone came out of the dark and jumped them.' Kylie was in a panic, saying to the person on the phone, presumably Wilkinson, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right? Just relax and stay where you are and I'll come down.'

She grabbed the first aid kit and took off, saying, ‘It's only down the road—I'll be back in half an hour or so.' She came back about an hour later and there was blood on her hand and on her shirt. She told Sean she had to bandage Paul's head on the side of the road.

He asked why Wilkinson hadn't gone to hospital, and she said, ‘They can't—they're not supposed to be doing what they are doing.'

Again she told him, ‘They only answer to the assistant commissioner in the city.'

In mid-March, Sean went to Canberra for work and Kylie rang him, saying she urgently needed
$
2000. He said he didn't have that sort of money so she got her grandmother to give him a cheque, which he cashed. He asked Kylie what the money was for but she refused to say.

A week later she came to HMAS
Newcastle
and asked for another
$
2000, and again he asked what the money was for. Again she refused to tell him, but said, ‘If I don't have it by 4.00 p.m. today, I can't guarantee my safety.'