The Devil's Garden Read online

  The officer in charge of the FOI unit acknowledged the blunder, citing administrative issues and said the problem was now rectified. He asked that nothing be written about the mistake.

  ***

  Psychiatrist Dr Tim Watson-Munro describes the Claremont killer as a psychopath who could survive high stress levels. 'He is not psychotic, which rules out paranoid schizophrenia and manic depression,' he tells the press. 'People like that would not be able to plan and kill so efficiently.' He appeals to the Western Australian police to be less limited in their thinking and to allow him to look at the case investigation. He does not mince words. 'You have a major problem,' he warns. 'This person is going to strike again.' He is not in the same mould, he says, as the backpacker serial killer, Ivan Milat, who killed his victims on site in the Belanglo State Forest and left them there. 'Broaden the scope of your resources. Sooner rather than later there may be a fourth abduction.'

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  Police don't take kindly to advice from outsiders. Shortly after Ciara's body is found, Assistant Commissioner Bob Ibbotson makes a direct plea to the media not to report the comments and opinions of criminal profilers or criminologists not designated by WA police. They are not, he says, armed with the facts and their comments can only serve to unnerve and distract the public. Captain David Caldwell, special agent in charge of forensic science services, South Carolina law enforcement division, has been summonsed to Perth to help advise police and is there when Ciara's body is found. Claude Minisini is also in Perth. These men, Ibbotson says emphatically, are advising police. They are the best in their fields.

  But Paul Ferguson has grave concerns. 'Minisini was injected directly into the investigation at the say-so of the commissioner. He would brief me and I'd brief the media. But I often felt that we were being too narrow, and so did the media. There was a lot of sniggering that car washing was a national pastime, and not necessarily the tell-tale signs of a serial killer. It didn't always help what we were trying to do.'

  Best known for his handling of the Susan Smith case in 1994 – the American mother who strapped her two children into their car seats and drowned them by sending the car into water – David Caldwell has no doubt about what the Claremont killer will do next. Slow talking with a distinct southern drawl, his assessments are delivered as though he has just ridden into town on a horse and is chewing a plug of tobacco. 'This guy's gonna be really nervous,' he says, staring straight down the camera lens. 'He's probably watching this now.' Caldwell has seen 'a lot of bodies', he boasts, and he figures the WA police need all the help they can get. This person is a cunning, intelligent and adaptable predator who is undoubtedly acting alone.

  'These three abductions took place near popular nightspots, but there's no guarantee that future ones will be in the same location. The method of operation can be altered to fit their program. Unless he's caught or incapacitated in some way, he still wants to do this. He likes it. He likes it a lot. There'd have to be an awfully good reason for him not to do it again.' And that, Caldwell warns, could be as early as in a couple of days. He faces the lens again. When this bloke is caught, he says grimly, people will be absolutely astounded at who it is. 'They're gonna say, "I worked with this guy! He's my next-door neighbour! It can't be!"'

  He recounts some chilling tales that speak of the banality of a serial killer's psyche. US killer Leeroy Martin, who terrorised his community and murdered five women in a short time, regularly gave his next-door neighbour a lift to work. 'It was kinda neat,' Martin told Caldwell when he was arrested. 'Here she was thanking me for the lift because she was scared to death that this killer was on the loose.' Another killed only in December and June. Asked why in those specific months, he shrugged. 'My wife goes to see her folks twice a year. December and June. That's when I've got the house to myself.'

  Caldwell throws out a warning to the Claremont killer. 'I think he's a bright man – but everyone makes mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes.'

  The use of outside assessors so infuriates the WA Police Service's head of the Criminal Behaviour Analysis Unit, Mark Devenish-Meares, that two days before Caldwell delivers his assessment, he resigns in high dudgeon from the position he has held for 18 years. Recently returned from studying at the University of Liverpool's Investigative Psychology Unit, under the tutelage of Professor David Canter, a foremost expert in criminal behaviour, Devenish-Meares is incensed that his credentials are overlooked in favour of US-flavoured profiles. He snorts at what he regards as the wrong approach to the problem. Police should stick to the facts, such as crime-scene analysis, he says, instead of trying to read the mind of someone they haven't met. 'Police can't arrest a type, they can only arrest an individual. Trying to get into the mind of the killer is like scriptwriting for The X-Files. The media loves it to death, but it's wide open to confirmation bias.'

  Caporn bristles at the criticism. 'Ninety-eight per cent of the investigation is traditional, but we're doing things we've never done because we're not prepared to get up to double figures of victims without trying to force a breakthrough.'

  Driven to get results, the taskforce officers work a 24/7 rotating roster, racking up so much overtime they see little of their families. After the initial high hopes that the case could quickly be solved and despite a grim determination to find the offender, the fear of crippling despondency and sense of failure becomes an occupational health issue and one that gets worse as the months drag on. To keep the troops motivated, senior staff organise runs together in the local park, 6 am volleyball matches and the occasional barbecue. They know this predator will always pick off the least able from the edge of the flock, will follow, chase and fell the person least able to get away. There is an all-pervading sense, born of a sickening knowledge of the serial killer's modus operandi, that his clock is ticking toward the end of his cooling-off period. With every passing week, the situation becomes more urgent. They need to try to get to him, first.

  A 7 am start and 7 pm finish is regarded as a good day. More often, officers are calling wives and partners with news they are going to be home late for dinner, again. While the non-commissioned officers can claim overtime, no one ever claims their full entitlement. 'There is no way we can underestimate what was going on after Ciara's disappearance,' Paul Coombes says. 'We knew by her victimology that she just would not go missing for no reason. The entire community was in shock, and people were genuinely petrified. The stress on everyone – the families, the public, the police – was enormous.'

  Police are also battling another unseen enemy: public perception. They are only too aware that the Macro taskforce is regarded as a disembodied, faceless entity. Security considerations have prevented the media filming footage of the task-force squad room and there is now a pressing need to show the public that Macro consists of a large number of real people working on solving these murders. Police video technicians and photographers are directed to take specific footage and still photos, which are released to the media. The rationale is simple: it is harder to knock real people than a faceless, large bureaucracy.

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  The police PR machine rolls on, trying to placate the public. 'We do have a lot of clues, we have a lot of indicators of exactly where to go with this person,' Detective-Sergeant Tony Potts, the Macro taskforce's dedicated media spokesman, tells the media. 'But invariably and historically offenders of this nature have taken some time to track down and apprehend.' They are words that will prove chillingly accurate.

  The media are proving problematic, a huge juggernaut that police liaison needs to get on top of, quickly. Incorrect media reports and the uncontrolled flow of information allow no room for guarantees that the information is true, unlikely to jeopardise the investigation, is worthy of comment or serves any real purpose other than to feed the public's appetite for a fresh news angle on a salacious story.

  'There were so many incidences where the media got it wrong,' Potts recalls, 'that we really needed to rein them in.' He cites examples. 'It was reported that Ma
cro officers had asked witnesses to identify a blond man who was captured on the Continental Hotel security video. The inference was that we had a strong suspect who was a blond male.' The reality was very different. 'The officers were tasked with identifying every person who appeared on the security video. One of the people interviewed contacted the television station and told them of parts of the interview he could remember. He had blond hair. But a person with a suspicion about someone with dark hair discounts that suspicion and does not contact police because they think we know that the offender is a blond man.'

  Sometimes the reports threaten to seriously derail the investigation. Days after Ciara is found, the taskforce calls for the anonymous persons who had contacted them with information several days before to re-contact Macro investigators. 'Their information was believed crucial, hinging on movements around Pipidinny Road just after Ciara disappeared,' Potts recalls. 'The media supported our call for additional contact and called for those persons to once again come forward. But one of the television stations ran with the story that these people were two girls in the area late at night with their boyfriends. Needless to say, we didn't hear from them again. They were hardly likely to come forward after that.'

  Desperate to work out how to get over the problem of persons contacting the media after being spoken to by Macro, they hit on a simple solution: giving them 'thank you' cards and asking they maintain confidentiality. The solution was in the problem.

  With the discovery of Ciara's body, John Turner, whose daughter Kerry was murdered in 1991, publicly links the crimes. 'Kerry was dumped, like the other girls, on the edge of the city and had been to a nightclub,' he tells a British news-paper. 'There can't be that many people going around this city killing young girls in this way. The circumstances are almost identical.' Paul Coombes doesn't believe that Turner's murder is connected to Claremont. There is more than a hint of exasperation in his voice. 'We are constantly having people double-guess us, but they forget police know the facts. The crime scene and methodology for this murder are in no way similar to the Claremont girls. Everything is possible, of course, but we have to deal in "probable", "most likely" and "known facts". Anything else is just conjecture.'

  Bret Christian scours old records of past abductions, rapes or assaults in the Claremont area. Some incidents had already been reported, but he is alarmed at what is not.

  In the early hours of New Year's Day, 1994 – two years before Sarah Spiers disappeared – a young woman was dragged from her car after she left Club Bayview. The attempted rape failed only when the woman fought off her attacker, who ran into the shadows and vanished. The man was never found. It was not the first sinister incident in Claremont. Three months earlier, a woman had hailed a taxi in Bayview Terrace. She sat next to the taxi driver in the front seat and, within seconds, was attacked by a man who was crouched down, hiding in the back. Using remarkable presence of mind, she jumped from the moving vehicle onto Bayview Terrace, sustaining a broken ankle. By the time she managed to stand up, the vehicle was out of sight.

  The most chilling incident was in February 1995, 11 months before Sarah vanished. A tall, pretty 17-year-old girl who had been partying at Club Bayview was abducted around 2 am as she was walking alone, back to her house in Claremont on the road that runs parallel to the railway line. At a park on the edge of a reserve, a man jumped out, put a bag over her head, tied her hands with telephone cable and threw her in the back of his van. The attack happened so fast, she neither saw the man nor heard his voice. The van turned into nearby Karrakatta cemetery, which is open all night. In a deserted section of the cemetery, he turned off the van's motor and violently raped her, driving off with her clothes and leaving her on the ground when he had finished. Terrified, the teenager ran naked toward the first light she could see, at the nearby Hollywood Private Hospital. Like the other attacks, the case was never solved. The area from which she was taken, the swiftness of the abduction and the obvious possibility that her attacker knew Claremont could not rule out that this was the Claremont serial killer's handiwork. A dress rehearsal for murder. He was never found.

  In the same year, a young woman got into a taxi at Claremont and the driver drove her over the railway line to the golf course. Forcibly stripped of her clothes, she managed to escape, banging on the door of a nearby house and screaming for the couple who lived there to let her in. Completely traumatised, it took an hour for her to finally splutter out what had happened. Bret Christian, whose suburban newspaper incorporates news in the Claremont area, took a call from the couple on Monday morning. 'They asked what had happened to the girl as they had seen nothing in the media about it; nothing on television, radio or in The West Australian news-paper. We rang the police to ask about it and they told us that local police had attended,' Bret recalls. 'They fobbed us off, putting us onto the cop who was on duty. The truth was, it was never properly investigated and was never linked to the other abductions. We didn't find the name, the police report or the cop who attended. We didn't realise the significance of it at the time but when Jane Rimmer went missing, it obviously became vitally important.'

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  Paul Ferguson, now at Major Crime, is at police headquarters when a call comes through from Casuarina Prison. 'Prisoner David Birnie would like a word with you,' the prison officer tells him. Ferguson knows intuitively that if Birnie is offering information, he will want something in return. He can apply for parole in 2007 and will use anything he can as a lever to gain it. The parole board could be very impressed with the fact that he helped the Macro taskforce in their hunt for Perth's serial killer.

  Ferguson eyes Birnie at the maximum security section of the prison in south Perth. It has been a long time since this gaunt sexual deviant so casually confessed to murdering his four victims: eleven years and still no sign of remorse. Birnie has followed the Claremont case through the media and wants to share his expertise with his old adversary.

  'You can read all the books you like,' he tells Ferguson in his familiar cocky tone, 'but you've got to use a serial killer to catch a serial killer.' They speak candidly, referencing where and why the Claremont killer has chosen his dump sites. Think, Birnie tells Ferguson. 'If you reverse the map – turn it up the other way – the disposal sites are identical. It is a pointer to the killer's thoughts. He has turned right on the Stirling Highway with Jane Rimmer, zigzagged and dropped her at Wellard. Turned left on the highway with Ciara Glennon, zigzagged in reverse direction and dropped her at Eglinton. Think. What does that say about where he has disposed of Sarah?' Birnie stretches out his skinny legs, leans back in the plastic chair. 'He felt comfortable when he dumped Jane, because Sarah hasn't been found. She will be down there in the Wellard area. For sure.' But, he cautions, be careful about profiles. 'You can't afford to be complacent. If that last girl hadn't got away, no one would ever have picked that it was me. No one.'

  David Birnie is a living resource that Macro cannot afford to lose. Dave Caporn will also travel to Casuarina to talk to this prisoner, trying to elicit information about the Claremont killer. Using a serial killer to catch a serial killer.

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  The first review of the Macro investigation, a month after Jane Rimmer disappeared – July 1996 – was chaired by Inspector Dick Lane, providing input regarding the future direction of the investigation and commenting on practices and media issues.

  It is the start of many internal police reviews to monitor the investigation's progress, reviews that are not open to public scrutiny. With intense external pressure from the media and government, four months later, in early November, the second review, chaired by Acting Detective-Superintendent Gregson, addressed issues such as status of the inquiry, resources, public perceptions and accountability of the investigation. By mid-January 1997 another WA police review, chaired by Acting Superintendent Lavender, looked at resources and direction. Three reviews. All internally chaired. Any criticism of the amount of reviews was met with the same response; that they are standard practi
ce. 'You wouldn't bring in an international or even national review panel in '96 or '97,' the commissioner's media adviser Neil Poh said, 'when it was all still so fresh and the investigators were ploughing through a truckload of information.' What it says, he adds, is that the senior officers who conducted those reviews – including officers senior to Dave Caporn – were tracking the course of the investigation.

  But by August 1997 – four months after Ciara Glennon's body was found – a police officer from outside Western Australia is called in for the first time to chair the most extensive review to date. Now retired, then Detective-Superintendent Mike Hagan of NSW police boasted 40 years of policing experience, including 26 years in Major Crime and ten years in homicide investigations. Hagan had headed the taskforce into the so-called 'Granny Killer', the vicious psychopath who over a 12-month period bludgeoned six women to death – all but one over the age of 80 – in Sydney's North Shore between 1989 and 1990. The Granny Killer had also assaulted many more women. The murders occurred on weekdays between 3 pm and 6 pm when the frail elderly victims were walking to their homes after shopping. They were all variously attacked with a hammer and fists or strangled with their own pantyhose. Some were left in obscene, staged poses.

  Psychiatric assessments of the killer, John Glover, showed the murders were ritualistic attacks, the symbolic killing of his own mother, whom he had once witnessed lying in the sexually explicit pose in which he staged his victims. Of equal importance for the Macro taskforce was that they were all carried out in the same area. Sentenced to life imprisonment, his file marked 'Never to be Released', in jail Glover copies the style of his old adversary, Hagan, sporting the same mutton-chop sideburns.