Call Me Cruel (16 page)

In the middle of the afternoon on 16 May, Paul was about to drive Julie and Bradley to her parents' place, where they were to have dinner. As they were leaving the house, he put two family photo albums into the car.

‘Why are you giving me these?' asked Julie.

‘To show your parents.'

‘They've already seen them.'

Paul left them in the car anyway and drove over to Illawong, where he dropped Julie and Bradley off, saying he was going to find his mother at the Engadine RSL to see if he could borrow some money: they were broke and out of nappies for the baby. He didn't return in time, so Julie and her parents started dinner without him. At 7.00 p.m. someone rang Julie from the Bankstown Police Station to say there'd been a fire at her house and that Paul had been taken to hospital. Julie was distraught, concerned about their house and belongings, and about Paul. She called his parents and told them the news, and learned that they hadn't seen Paul that afternoon, at the Engadine RSL or anywhere else. Ron and June came by at 8.30 p.m. and gave Julie a lift to Bankstown Hospital.

When they arrived, Paul didn't look too bad and joined Julie for a cigarette outside. He said two men had broken in and set the fire. He told her a dramatic story about his scuffle with one of the men, and how the place had filled with smoke after they'd left and he'd had to break his way out.

Paul was discharged soon after and the couple went to Bankstown Police Station to make statements. Julie told the police what Paul had said to her, and she learned that their pet cockatiel was alive. At least, she thought, the people who'd hurt Paul had been nice enough to take the bird outside before setting fire to the house.

A week later, Julie was talking on the phone to a friend who was a police officer. The friend was at work and had access to the COPS database, and he read her the report on the fire. It mentioned that Kylie Labouchadiere had allegedly been there. Later, Julie told Paul this and asked why he hadn't said anything about Kylie before. He said, ‘I couldn't tell you what was going on because they threatened yours and Bradley's lives if I told you anything.'

At this stage, Julie was trying to keep her marriage together and still had some feelings for her husband, despite his trying ways. She believed his story about Kylie and the fire, and felt angry that another woman had been prepared to burn all Bradley's things. But she was also angry with Paul for having given her a false account, leading her to make a wrong statement to police. As always, there were limits to what she would do for him.

‘I was trying to look after you and Bradley,' Paul said. ‘Do you know how hard it was for me not telling you? Part of the reason I didn't tell you is because you're so jealous.'

Maybe in other circumstances Julie would have wondered why Paul would think she'd be jealous of Kylie. But at the time she had other things on her mind, trying to cope with the fire and sorting out where they were going to live. In any case, by now Paul's behaviour could be so odd that it was easier for her to switch off and just concentrate on the demands of her young baby.

Later he said to her, ‘Can you go to a pay phone, ring Crime Stoppers [a police contact line], tell them you're Kylie and say that you're safe and don't want to be found.'

She said, ‘No, Paul, because they can trace calls.'

‘Oh, forget it, then,' he said. ‘I'll get someone else to do it.'

They moved in with his parents at Yarrawarrah, where he talked continually about the fire as part of a pattern of victimisation by corrupt police. The fantasy grew with each telling and he convinced his parents of its truth. But Julie questioned it, and after a month she had an argument with her father-in-law that was so bad that she moved back to her parents' home. Although it was not clear at the time, this marked the beginning of the end of their marriage.

Julie still visited Paul with Bradley, and later that year, in October, he came out with the most disturbing thing he'd ever said to her. It started with a vague comment: ‘You don't have to worry anymore—I've taken care of things and you're safe.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Geoff Lowe organised for the Aboriginal guy from the house fire to kill Bradley and you,' he said. ‘Kylie told me what time it was going to happen, so I sat up at the car park at the top of Menai High near the sports fields. I saw Lowe's car pull up down near the tennis courts and drive off again, then I saw the Aboriginal male—Lowe had dropped him there. I caught up with him as he was walking across the oval and killed him, and then I rang my uncle Alan and told him that I was in a spot of bother. He said he'd meet me at the oval, he arrived about an hour and a half later and we took the body up to Mooney Mooney and buried it under Mooney Mooney Bridge.'

Julie told Paul she didn't believe him (and there is no evidence Alan did anything like this), and he said, ‘Don't ask Alan, he won't tell you anything. If you don't believe me, I'll take you and show you the body.'

This remarkable conversation ended when some of Paul's friends arrived. Julie dismissed it at the time. Eventually, she would ask herself, as others who heard Wilkinson's ravings have asked, whether it was all false or whether some of it described what he'd done to Kylie. Apart from anything else, the way an unnamed Aboriginal man kept cropping up in his stories was odd.

Much later, Julie would also ask herself why she'd stayed with Paul through all this stuff. But the weirdness had crept up on her over a long period. She was like the frog which is gradually boiled in water: if the change takes long enough, you can forget what's normal and lose your capacity to respond as you might once have done. There was also a fear of Paul. Maybe a certain wildness had been part of his initial attraction for her, but it had become fear, although she tried to ignore it. But it kept her with him longer than she should have stayed. She says now that for a long time the fear stopped her from allowing herself to even think about how bad he might be.

In October 2004, Paul was arrested outside the Engadine RSL. He'd been thrown out and was being aggressive to the bouncers, yelling and shirtless. It was a night of confusion, not least because, by coincidence, one of the officers who turned up to deal with the incident was Geoff Lowe. Paul had never met Lowe before. Now, when he realised who he was, he went off. He started to scream and accused Lowe of rape in front of the small crowd that had gathered.

Around midnight, Kevin and Jenene were woken by a call from police asking where Julie was. Apparently, she'd been at the RSL with Paul but had disappeared. The call came from the police station, and Kevin could hear June Wilkinson going on in the background. He told the police Julie wasn't there: it turned out that instead of following Paul to the station, she'd gone back to Yarrawarrah, where Ron had been looking after Bradley. At the police station, Paul was charged and allowed to go home.

The next month, on Melbourne Cup Day, Julie and Bradley were at Illawong while Paul and his parents celebrated at the Arncliffe RSL. Julie called him a few times that morning, and again after the big race to see if he'd had a win. His phone was off so she called his mum, who started to abuse her. Paul had disappeared and June believed it was Julie's fault, saying she and Paul must have had a big argument. He might be dead in a gutter somewhere. Julie brushed this off: it was typical Wilkinson talk and there hadn't even been an argument. A few hours later, Julie got through to Paul, who told her he was in Dubbo. He said he had no idea how he'd got there.

In fact, he'd won some money and on impulse had gone to the airport and taken a flight to Dubbo, where he was staying with relatives. Bradley's birthday was coming up, and Julie had to buy Paul a ticket back so he would be there for the occasion. He and his parents came over to Illawong on 18 November to celebrate the boy's first year.

By early 2005, Julie and Paul hadn't lived together for months. He still wasn't working and they were having rows all the time. This was disturbing for Bradley, who was the centre of Julie's emotional life. He needed a stable home to grow up in and Paul was incapable of providing one. At last, she summoned the courage to make their separation permanent. When she told her parents what she'd decided, Kevin was happier than he'd been in a long time.

On 6 February 2005 Julie told Paul she wanted a divorce. The next day Jenene answered a knock on the door to find two women who identified themselves as officers from the Department of Community Services and said they had come to investigate a phone complaint. It was a bit embarrassing: one officer was a client of Jenene's dry-cleaning business. They asked to speak to Julie and told her they'd received a complaint that she'd been abusing her child. She began to cry and rang Paul to tell him what was going on. Then she sat down in the lounge room with the officials, who went through the allegations they'd received. Bradley was toddling around the room and it was obvious he was healthy and unharmed, unmarked by the cigarette burns the officials had been told to expect. They said they'd guessed it was a fictitious complaint: extreme abuse of the sort the caller had described rarely goes unnoticed for eighteen months, which is how long the caller said Julie had been mistreating her child.

Paul turned up just five minutes after Julie rang him, along with his mother. This was odd, because the Wilkinsons' house was half an hour's drive away. The officials said the complaint had come in the day before, a Sunday, and been classed as urgent. The caller had said that if they didn't act immediately, he would go to the media. Paul always talked about going to the media over things that upset him: so far as Jenene was concerned, it was his catchcry. When the DoCS officials had gone, Paul said Geoff Lowe must have made the call. Julie replied that the officials had told her police might get a recording of the call and try to identify the caller. Paul didn't seem too happy with this idea.

On 5 March he called Julie to say he was going to Dubbo to live and needed a lift to the station. She went to Yarrawarrah, and as they were driving to Sutherland Railway Station, he announced that if she divorced him he would kill her. Julie was distressed and the fear of Paul's capacity for violence she had always suppressed came flooding to the surface. After she dropped him off she rang Jenene and asked her to call Paul's mother. Jenene rang June and realised she was at the club: the sound of poker machines was in the background. Jenene said she was going to the police to report the death threat but June begged her not to, explaining that Paul was on a good-behaviour bond because of the business at the RSL. If Jenene reported him, he would end up in jail. Jenene said she didn't care anymore.

When Julie came home she was still very upset and called Mark Polley at Bankstown detectives to tell him about the death threat. She chose to call him because he'd talked to her at the time of the house fire. As soon as she'd finished with Polley, her phone rang. It was another police officer, saying Paul had just called the emergency services centre, which takes triple-0 calls from the public. Paul had said that unless Julie met him right away, he would kill himself. The police came around and arranged for Julie to go to the place where Paul was, following her in an unmarked car. When she found Paul they picked him up and took him to the psychiatric ward at Sutherland Hospital. He was released the next day after the experts decided he wasn't really suicidal: he'd been making it up.

The drama went on for a long time, as Julie continued to see Paul frequently. In some ways, there wasn't much change in the nature of their relationship after the separation, given the amount of time they'd already spent apart on account of the alleged death threats. He still sent her text messages about his preoccupations and insisted on seeing her, often to get cigarettes or money. She says she went along with this partly because she feared what he'd do if she declined, and partly because she believed he had a right to see his son.

At about this time, Paul found out about another man Julie had had a relationship with before she met him, and as usual he hit the roof. They were driving through Jannali together and Paul raised his hand as though to hit her. She stopped the car in the middle of the road and told him to get out, but he wouldn't. Julie jumped out and saw a woman walking her dog, and asked her to call the police. Sensing a domestic, the woman shook her head and kept walking, and Paul got out of the car. Julie jumped back in and locked the doors; Paul was furious, yelling that if she drove off, he'd kill her.

On Tuesday 15 March 2005 the traffic lights incident referred to before occurred. Julie and Paul were driving along the Princes Highway in her parents' blue Hyundai Lantra and pulled up at lights, waiting to turn right into the Old Princes Highway. Next to them was a white Suburu Brumby utility, and to Paul's surprise the driver was Geoff Lowe. It was not a great coincidence they should find themselves next to each other: Lowe lived in Loftus, the suburb next to Paul's parents, and the highway was the main road connecting both places to the rest of Sydney.

Paul claimed that Lowe saw him and yelled, ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut, otherwise I am going to kill you.' Paul told police and the complaint was investigated by Detective Acting Sergeant Andrew Ryan at Miranda Police Station, who rang Julie and asked her about the incident. Her memory was different. Paul had been swearing and carrying on, trying to get her to look at the white Suburu. She'd recognised Lowe but he hadn't even seen them: he had just sat looking ahead, waiting for the lights to change. Paul was yelling out abuse—‘Cunt! Dog-fucker!'—but the windows were closed, and when the vehicles moved off, Lowe still hadn't noticed them. Julie had dropped Paul at his parents' house in Yarrawarrah and turned around to drive back. At Loftus she received a call from Paul, telling her to go to Sutherland Police Station. She drove there and waited for Paul to arrive. When he turned up he had Ron and June with him, and he told Julie to support his story of Geoff Lowe threatening them at the lights.