Call Me Cruel (18 page)

These vicious references to Kylie's family are difficult to make sense of. Wilkinson had never met Carol or John or Michael or Leanne. He had no reason to dislike, let alone hurt, them.

The word ‘theres' in the text is ambiguous. It could mean the family but probably refers to the police, because sixteen minutes later Wilkinson sent Julie another text: ‘The weapon they can hav, hopefully they do themselves ova with it the MONGREL DOGS.' What was this weapon, if indeed it existed? Was it the fictional one he'd claimed Lowe had used or was it one he'd used himself? As with so much Wilkinson said, the detectives had no idea what was true and what was not.

On 13 February, Julie, despite police warnings to be careful when with Paul, asked him if she could visit the grave, and he texted back: ‘Fine. Ill show u.' But he didn't—not then, anyway. He was using his knowledge of the grave site to taunt Julie, just as he'd used it to bignote himself to the PIC and would later use it to taunt lawyers and the police and the courts. In the end, it would be the only thing he had that anyone wanted.

Wilkinson seems to have guessed that his phone was being tapped, as he dropped in puzzles and even messages for the police. Once Julie was asked by Smith and Craig to visit Menai Police Station to listen to some intercepts to clarify a few things. Suddenly she heard Wilkinson ranting, ‘You pox-ridden slut, Rebekkah!' It wasn't the only time he'd inserted abuse of Craig into his conversation.

Smith observed, tongue in cheek, ‘I didn't get a mention.'

On 20 February 2006, Wilkinson asked Julie to bring Bradley up to see him at his parents' holiday house on the Central Coast. When she arrived and they were alone, he told her that Geoff Lowe had ruined his life and talked about Lowe killing Kylie.

‘I know where the murder weapon is,' he said. ‘When I decide to give it to the police it will prove my innocence.'

‘Where is it?'

‘There is a creek that runs down beside Geoff Lowe's house—at the creek there is two big pipes, the murder weapon is about halfway along one of them, wrapped in a rag and put in a plastic bag.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I followed Geoff home and watched him put it there.'

This was new. As Paul seemed in the mood for disclosures, she asked about the body of the Aboriginal man he'd once told her he'd killed and buried under Mooney Mooney Bridge.

‘I've moved him,' he said. ‘That slut Rebekkah and Pace have been to Alan's four times. I think they think [Kylie's] buried there, so I moved him in case they let the dogs out down there and they pick up a scent.'

‘How did you move him?'

‘Alan's car.'

‘So he knows as well?'

‘No, Alan was down south and I know where he keeps the spare keys.'

‘Where did you move him to?'

‘I'm not telling, 'cause if the police turn up the heat on you, you'll crumble and lag me in.'

‘I can't believe you think I'll do that.'

The next day Julie reported this conversation to police, who searched near Geoff Lowe's house at Loftus. Five metres from the driveway, a steep track plunges into the nature reserve and then splits, with one branch crossing a watercourse coming down from the street. Two pipes run under the track at this point, one of concrete and one of metal. It was here that Wilkinson said Geoff had hidden the knife with which he'd killed Kylie. The police did not find a knife.

The pipes cannot be seen from the street, so to know their location Wilkinson must have explored the bushland around Geoff's house.

Wilkinson continued to try to keep his hold over Julie, even pretending to tell her where a large quantity of drug money was buried. On 23 February he texted some coordinates: ‘26W 49S from the manly theme song its your. Workout the theme song & what that means locationaly and u a filthy rich woman. My departin gift 2 u.' Later that day he added: ‘I shouldv said when u hit 26W walk 200m left til u get euc three with my teams name knifed in2 it on the stump, 3 metres rite of stump 1-1.5m down. On sons life it's the truth.' Julie could not have used the information even if she'd wanted to, as it made no sense at all to her.

The reference to a ‘departin gift' suggests Wilkinson felt the police were closing in on him. His ravings were becoming increasingly erratic.

Glenn Smith was frustrated by the lack of firm information and decided to get an undercover officer to befriend Wilkinson, in the hope they might develop a relationship and Wilkinson would tell him where Kylie was buried. It was not a strong hope, but by this point the investigation had pretty well exhausted all other options. Smith and Craig and the undercover officer, whose name for this operation was Brad, decided he should claim to be making a film about police corruption. Brad was provided with a recording device and had a number of meetings with Wilkinson.

One conversation occurred on 14 March 2006 at the United Services Club in Sutherland. Wilkinson told Brad about his work history, how he started at Redfern and went on secondment to Malabar to help the ACLO there, who was ‘having problems with the community and they weren't trusting him and they'd give him a bit of curry every time he went out to do a job so I just went across there to sort of stabilise things out there'.

Then he returned to Redfern, where he was stabbed in 1999 and went off work for eight months. He returned and in October 2001 was bitten on the hand by a junkie. ‘We got him back to the charge room and he started laughing at me and I said, “What the fuck are you laughing at?” He said, “I've got hepatitis A through Z and I've got HIV.” '

Brad: ‘Oh yeah, that would've given you a bit of stress.'

Wilkinson: ‘After that I went a bit, went a bit funny.'

Then he had another twelve months off work. He said he had no support at all from the police: it was just, ‘Oh, okay, we'll put you down on HOD [hurt on duty] and we'll see you when we see you.' Finally he went back because he was sick of ‘turning on the fuckin' news every night and seeing Redfern and all the kids getting portrayed as little criminals, which they are, but with wrongly, wrongfully bloody portrayed.' But, he continued, ‘nothing had changed. Redfern's always going to be Redfern, that's for sure.'

The transcript of the conversation with Brad reads like a summary of Wilkinson's parallel universe. You can see how he'd knitted all his resentments and the killing of Kylie together into a version of events that put him at the centre, as a victim. It's an extraordinary and elaborate fabrication, and you can see why Geoff Lowe, who'd become entangled in part of it, talked about being in the twilight zone.

And yet whatever else Wilkinson was, he was smart enough to have killed someone and, several years after the event, to have got away with it so far. But however smart he was, he couldn't let go of what he'd done, which would have been the smartest thing of all. In his conversation with Brad—most of which was a series of monologues—he kept coming back to it, but in different forms, as though he could change the past with words, as long as he kept talking.

An important part of his imaginary world was still his continuing delusion about Julie's rape by Geoff Lowe. He told Brad how this complaint had gone nowhere, just like the complaint about Lowe threatening him at the traffic lights. When the officer who'd investigated that rang to give him the result, Wilkinson said he'd responded, ‘Let me guess, Geoff Lowe's sitting in the office with you now, isn't he? . . . I guarantee you he's in there. He's under the desk, giving you a blow job.'

As usual, at least in his own mind, Wilkinson's problems stemmed from his superiors' refusal to take him seriously.

‘If they were charged in 2001 for the complaint that I went to, to the police minister about,' he told Brad, ‘it would have been all over and done with. If it wasn't such a boys' club and it is that corrupt, they didn't want nothing to do with it. So you've come down the track five years on, what have you got? You got a major drug syndicate, still a lot more people than what it originally was . . . you got more crime in, in, in, in the sense of, um, well, it's a crime to pass a sheila around from bloke to bloke . . . It's certainly a crime to fuckin' kill someone.'

Brad: ‘Mm.'

Wilkinson: ‘So, instead of being stopped at the rape—'

Brad: ‘It could have been avoided.'

Wilkinson: ‘These other things should not have happened.'

Brad: ‘Mm.'

Wilkinson: ‘And who's responsible for all that? The commissioner is responsible for it, as is the police commissioner, as is the, the, the, as is [former premier] Bob Carr at the time, 'cause he was in charge of New South Wales. You cannot tell me that he did not know about it.'

Wilkinson's raving was full of bravado. After he'd witnessed Lowe kill Kylie, he said, ‘I packed Julie up, Bradley up, me boy.'

Brad: ‘Yep.'

Wilkinson: ‘We took the fuckin', took off up to Walgett, where Mum comes from.'

Brad: ‘Yeah.'

Wilkinson: ‘'Cause I thought, you know, they might come up here, there's a lot of wild blackfellas here and they won't get past them.'

Brad: ‘Yeah.'

Wilkinson: ‘So we've basically been running, running ever since.'

Brad: ‘Right.'

Wilkinson: ‘Until I made a decision, I said to them, “I'm not going to run no more.” '

Brad: ‘Yeah.'

Wilkinson: ‘If they want to kill me, they can go ahead and fuckin' kill me. I don't care.'

At times you wonder if one reason for Wilkinson's stories, repeated again and again to different listeners, was a need to inject some excitement into his own boring existence, now that he was unemployed and living with his parents. It was as though he was trying to turn his life into an action movie, in which he played the heroic survivor.

As to why he had not shown the PIC where Kylie was buried, he told Brad: ‘I said to them, “You can have the location providing two things happen . . . no Sutherland police are involved, no Miranda police are involved . . . But I knew that they were going to fuck it up, they were gunna piss [in] me pocket . . . So I gave them a location which was a false location . . . and I'm glad I did that. Sutherland and Miranda police were there . . . mate, the, the, the place was swarming with Sutherland and Miranda coppers.'

Brad: ‘So you know the location, do you? The real location?'

Wilkinson: ‘Yeah. Nobody's going to get it until I get some satisfaction from [the] PIC.'

At the end of the meeting with Brad, Wilkinson said he thought his phones might be being tapped. So, he said, ‘Well, what we, what, what I, what I do with people now, we, um, from now on your name is Fred.'

Brad: ‘Right.'

Wilkinson: ‘Right, and, and—'

Brad: ‘So when I ring, you just call me Fred?'

Wilkinson: ‘And my name, my name's Fred. We're both Fred.'

Brad: ‘All right.'

It seems that Brad, to encourage Wilkinson's interest, offered him money for his appearance in the documentary he said he was making. On 4 April Wilkinson texted him: ‘If I may ask a favour, may receive
$
2000 2day 2 escape on my return & body . . . Body location and full story u keep the agreed
$
15,000. Ill expose all 4 fuck-all Im desperate chap 2 get away til im 100% fit & out of harms way.'

The next day he texted: ‘Maandowie Creek Loftus is a piece 2 the puzzle. In the event anything should go wrong or u fail 2 get a msg from me check that spot out.'

But despite all this teasing, he never told Brad where Kylie was buried.

After six months working in the Homicide Squad office, Smith and Craig did not have enough evidence to charge Wilkinson. It was now two years since Kylie had disappeared. The bosses brought them back to Gosford, where they were expected to do other work as well. Totally committed to the job of finding enough evidence to charge Kylie's killer, Smith resented this.

Whenever he wanted to do something using police money, Smith would have to argue his case with Ray Northcote, Gosford's Local Area Manager. It got to the stage where Smith would walk into his office and Northcote would say, ‘No,' before he'd even heard the request. But it was just a joke: Smith would haggle and always got what was needed in the end.

One thing in Smith and Craig's favour was that the Wilkinson investigation was so unusual it captured the interest of many people in the job. Craig remembers that she would explain what she was doing and fellow officers would be intrigued. This helped them jump the queue sometimes when asking for assistance from different sections of the police service. A lot of people were aware of the ACLO who'd gone off the rails, who had killed and so far got away with it.

But even so, time was running out. One day a boss talked to Smith about the Wilkinson investigation and said, ‘We're going to have to put a sunset clause on this.'

‘Excuse me?'

‘Just lock him up. He'll probably throw his hands up.'

‘No,' Smith said with exasperation. ‘He's got a solicitor and barrister. There's no way he'll plead guilty on what we've got. We actually have to prove this.'

The detectives had submitted a report to the coroner saying they believed Kylie was dead. This meant that at some point they would have to either charge someone or ask the coroner to conduct an inquest, at which they would need to demonstrate that they'd exhausted all avenues of inquiry. Smith didn't believe they'd yet reached that point, but it was getting close. Before long, a decision would have to be made, and it would be terrible if, due to insufficient evidence with which to charge Wilkinson, the matter went to a coronial inquest and a finding that Kylie had been killed by a person or persons unknown.

To Brad and others during these months, Wilkinson kept dropping hints about the grave. One text to Cheryl Kaulfuss read: ‘Fun Funs Zwanzig /Zwolf/Elf/Drie. Fritag Nacht. K translate and keep 4 your records. It's a co-ordinate.' On 18 May 2006, Paul and Julie met up, and in the car outside her parents' place he said, ‘Do you want to see where Kylie is?'