Call Me Cruel (19 page)

Again ignoring the warning she'd been given by the detectives, Julie said, ‘Yes.'

He directed her to drive to the Royal National Park. They went down the Meadows Fire Trail in a lonely part of the park, and according to Julie's memory, ‘I noticed that Paul started to become tense. His face looked rigid and he looked pale . . . Paul always clenches his jaw when he is either tense or angry.' They stopped along the track and he told her this was the place where Kylie was buried.

Julie looked around and suddenly realised how isolated she was, alone with Paul in the middle of nowhere. Just the silence of the bush, broken by the calls of a few birds. But he didn't seem to realise how strange the situation was, so she did her best to remain calm and interested. They didn't stay for long. When she got home after dropping Paul off, she immediately called Rebekkah Craig.

On 30 May, Wilkinson told Julie he was meeting with police at Sutherland the next day to tell them where Kylie was buried. Over the next fortnight he changed his mind several times, until a second search for Kylie's grave finally started on 13 June—almost a year after the meeting at the PIC. Smith and Craig held a briefing at Sutherland Police Station with numerous officers from the Public Order and Riot Squad (which is used for work like this when there are no riots) and the Forensic Services Group. Smith was mildly optimistic, hoping Wilkinson was about to lead them to the body but aware that even if they found it, there might not be much of forensic value, two years after Kylie's death. He knew that a lot of bodies of murder victims are buried in a hurry, which means the graves are shallow and often disturbed within months by wild animals, with the bones being scattered over the surrounding area. This, as much as the decomposition of the flesh, limits what police can learn.

The search occurred in an area near the Meadows Fire Trail in the Royal National Park, but drew a blank. The next day another search took place along the Gundamaian Fire Trail, not far from where the search of August 2005 had been conducted. The police examined the ground for fifty metres on each side of two-and-a-half kilometres of trail—a big job—but again nothing was found. These searches involved thirty-four people and cost
$
26,852.

Wilkinson, who was still living at his parents' place just over the railway line from the national park, was not present, but as the search occurred he ranted to his various callers, telling one that police were pointing the finger at the wrong person, and another that he himself had now forgotten where the body was buried, so how could anyone else find the spot. On 16 June (when the searches were over) he told Cheryl Kaulfuss he could hear helicopters flying over the national park, and two days later he said the police weren't looking hard enough: who was to say he hadn't moved the body? Anyone with a fuckin' brain would have moved it.

Reading the transcripts of some of these calls, you're struck again by Wilkinson's success in surrounding himself with people prepared at least to tolerate, and often accept, his persistent delusions. In a way, they were like mirrors, although what they were reflecting was an imagined version of himself, one in which he was still a ‘player' and not a man on the edge of madness, with the police closing in on him.

Later he said to Julie, referring to their drive to the national park in May, ‘Don't think I took you to the right place, 'cause I knew you'd run to them [the police] . . . Those cunts [Lowe and his associates] are setting you up—if I give up the location you'll go down, as they've planted stuff.'

‘Well,' Julie said, trying for the reasonable approach, ‘I'll ring Gosford Detectives and tell them I'm being set up.'

But Paul had lost touch with reasonable. ‘If you do that you'll bring yourself down.'

‘How am I being set up?' she said.

‘You don't need to know.'

In mid-2006 John Edwards left his position at Jobfind at Parramatta. The effort of being enthusiastic for job-seekers who needed him for inspiration, while his own life was falling apart, had become too much. He'd thought he'd been holding it together, but now, two years after Kylie's disappearance, he had to accept that he wasn't. He took a position with a plumbing company as general manager, embracing the challenge of turning a struggling business around. It was a job that needed a lot of commitment but did not require him to wear a smile every minute of the working day.

And yet although the detectives could not give John any details, the investigation was still making progress. On 27 June, Smith and Craig went to Marrickville Police Station and talked with an ACLO named Derek Wilson. He was a former colleague of Wilkinson (and Craig) and, like Wilkinson, had given evidence to the parliamentary inquiry into the Redfern Riots. Wilson told the detectives he had once had a conversation with Wilkinson about meeting someone named Kylie at Sutherland Railway Station, but he couldn't recall when it had taken place.

After the formal interview had finished, Wilson said to Craig, ‘Bek, come and have a cigarette with me.' Although not a smoker, she followed him outside, where he said, ‘Did this girl have any money on her when she went missing?'

‘She did, actually. Why's that?'

‘Wilko had a lot of cash on him around that time. I'm talking thousands. It was around the time of TJ, after that some time. Mate, we hit it, pokies, drinkin', you know, he was spending a thousand dollars a day at least, and this went on for maybe a few weeks . . . We were drinkin' from morning 'til night, on the Keno . . .'

Craig said, ‘Did Paul ever tell you where he got this money?'

‘No, and I never asked, you know. I thought he got six numbers in the Keno. He made it very clear that Julie was not to know about the money.'

Wilson later made a formal statement, about how Wilkinson had gone on a gambling and drinking spree in early April. The detectives never found out how he had persuaded Kylie to give him the money, but it had almost certainly come from her. They found a text Wilkinson had sent her on 31 March 2004: ‘I hav u now I WONT let u go and I WONT allow u 2 fail the tests set upon u howeva u r failing THIS IS DEFINATE LAST TEST.' It hints at how he manipulated her into borrowing
$
24,000 in the last months of her life, as part of her desperate effort to win his love.

Occasionally, the investigation threw up completely unexpected lines of inquiry, which led nowhere but involved further work. At one point there was attempted activity related to one of Kylie's bank accounts. The detectives discovered this was due to a criminal in Queensland named Jeffrey Cooper, who was a running a scam involving the bank accounts of missing persons. In September 2006 he was arrested and pleaded guilty to some sixty-five fraud offences involving the accounts of five missing people. He confessed that he had tried to transfer money out of one of Kylie's accounts, but without success.

Glenn Smith asked the police Missing Persons Unit to conduct standard searches to see if there was any trace of activity from Kylie. Some of these had been done when she first went missing, but that was now two years ago. Senior Constable Darren Conabeer checked with the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs to see if she'd left the country. The surnames Labouchardiere, Edwards and Wilkinson were used, but no records were found. He checked with the major banks and building societies, with Centrelink and Medicare, other missing-persons units around the country and the electoral roll. He checked with the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. He also checked his own unit's database of unidentified bodies, or parts of bodies. Everywhere he looked he drew a blank, but this ‘negative evidence' would be important if Wilkinson was ever to be put on trial for murder: it would be necessary to show that all reasonable efforts had been taken to see whether Kylie was alive.

Gradually, with months of hard work, the police were able to eliminate each of Wilkinson's fantastic claims. He was an unusually deceitful and imaginative criminal, but he was up against one of the state's most enthusiastic young detectives in Glenn Smith, and in Andrew Waterman one of its most experienced. There was also Rebekkah Craig, who'd been there since the beginning and provided valuable continuity—although the investigation went on so long that she was to go on maternity leave twice. Wilkinson continued to confuse and sometimes baffle with his weird statements, but at the end of the day he was only one man, while those opposing him were many: Strike Force Bergin was backed by one of the largest and best-resourced police forces in the world. Paul Wilkinson had got away with an awful lot in his life, but it was all about to catch up with him.

For over a year Geoff Lowe had been asking his superiors for an official threat assessment of the risk posed by Wilkinson, making a pest of himself, he felt, and the experience added to his stress. He'd never been particularly self-assertive, never one for pushing himself forward or even fighting his own battles. Having to take on his superiors was an entirely new experience, and an unhappy one. His sense of the camaraderie of the police service began to weaken. Given its previous importance in his life, he found this unsettling.

The formal risk assessment was finally done in September 2006, and it was a disappointment. Geoff says it involved ticking boxes on a form, the process taking just five minutes. By this stage, the Lowes had moved to Helensburgh, so Wilkinson no longer knew where they lived. Partly for that reason, the threat was assessed as low. Despite the fact that the police force had now recognised that Geoff's wife had been stalked by a suspected murderer who had an obsessive hatred of her husband, nothing was done. Geoff says no senior officer ever approached him or Sue to talk about what they were going through.

By the end of 2006, Sue was pregnant and the couple could not afford two houses. They sold Loftus in a depressed property market. It was the latest blow in Paul Wilkinson's secret war against Geoff Lowe.

In August 2006, a year after he'd taken over the investigation, Glenn Smith made a big decision: at last there was enough evidence to charge Paul Wilkinson. The general case was that Kylie had been gone for over two years, and the only plausible explanation was that Wilkinson had killed her: Smith and Craig believed they now had enough evidence to disprove any other probability.

The next step involved writing a ‘sufficiency of evidence' document, which, with other material, ran to several hundred pages. It was a huge job. Smith and Craig used the strike force room on the second floor of Gosford Police Station and covered three whiteboards with lists of the evidence that needed to go into the document. Andrew Waterman dropped by to look at what they had and suggested some other things that were needed, so even more evidence was obtained. Finally, it was ready.

What they had was a circumstantial case based on a hypothesis. Following the discovery of Kylie's pregnancy, they believed, Wilkinson had told her he would leave his family and move to Dubbo to live with her. She had left home on 28 April 2004 with the intention of meeting him at Sutherland Railway Station, from where they would travel to Dubbo. Wilkinson had met her at the station, and then killed her and disposed of her body at places unknown.

Evidence in support of this hypothesis included the facts that (proved by telephone records) the two had been in a close relationship for several months, that Kylie had been putting pressure on Wilkinson to leave his family, that she had recently learned she was pregnant with what was almost certainly his child, that she'd embarked on a major change in her life (indicated by the big announcement she'd promised her family but not delivered a few days before she disappeared, and by the cards she'd left in her room for her sister and grandmother), and that she'd moved her possessions to Dubbo (a city with which she had no connection, although Wilkinson did).

There was also the large amount of money she'd borrowed from family and financial institutions before her disappearance, over a period when Wilkinson had much more money than usual. Smith and Craig believed that this money had been given to him by Kylie, possibly for the purpose of establishing a new life in Dubbo. If this was right, the fact that he'd spent the money on gambling and a holiday for his family suggested he'd had no intention of going away with Kylie.

One problem with the hypothesis, apart from the absence of forensic evidence or a crime scene, was that Kylie had not told anyone she was going to live with Paul Wilkinson; he also denied any intention of moving to Dubbo with her. Smith and Craig suspected that Kylie had not told her family about the move on Wilkinson's instructions. If true, this fitted with their suspicion that he had lied to her about wanting to move to Dubbo. This raised the question of just how he'd thought the matter would be resolved, when he arranged to meet her at Sutherland Railway Station on the night of 28 April 2004. Possibly he'd intended to kill her all along. Or possibly he hadn't thought it through and killed her on the spur of the moment, maybe because they had an argument when he told her he wasn't coming after all and she threatened to tell Julie about their relationship and her pregnancy.

The next step for the detectives was to obtain the agreement of the state's Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions that they did indeed have enough evidence. This was necessary before Wilkinson could be charged, and it proved to be a fraught process. Initially, the brief was sent to the Gosford office of the DPP, but when the lawyers there saw Wilkinson's claims of Geoff Lowe's involvement in Kylie's death, they forwarded the document to their head office in Sydney. There it was handled by a solicitor named Janis Watson-Wood, the manager of Group Six, which deals with cases involving allegations of police misconduct and corruption. After considering the brief, Watson-Wood wrote a 130-page report in which she said it was one of the most bizarre matters she'd ever come across. She then moved to another position, and the solicitor who took over the matter, Meaghan Fleeton, referred the brief to a senior Crown prosecutor for an opinion. He decided the case was just too circumstantial—the chance of obtaining a conviction at trial was remote. Therefore it should not proceed.