The Devil's Garden Read online

  Hagan's panel reviewed nine terms of reference, including an examination of the direction and primary focuses of the taskforce and resource allocation. No bad practices were identified; the operation, the panel concluded, had utilised best practice and Caporn and his management team were totally open and honest. 'No request from the panel was refused,' Hagan wrote. 'In fact, the enthusiasm, honesty and accountability exhibited by the management team is a credit, not only to themselves but to their senior officers and the Western Australia Police Service.' Hagan's analysis of their work is constantly shown to me as proof of what Macro had done.

  'I draw your attention to the following extract,' Neil Poh wrote me. '[He said that] the review conducted is without doubt the most comprehensive ever undertaken since the inception of the Macro Taskforce . . .'

  Macro examines the Granny Killer's modus operandi. He acted out his fantasies in a specific area. The North Shore. So does their offender. Claremont. This doesn't mean he won't move to another metro area, but there is something in Claremont, something intrinsic to and part of his psyche; some-thing that relates to his life, past, present or both. Something that seduces him, time and again to return to his own killing field. Something. But what?

  33

  Three times a year, the Federal Police run an intensive four-week course on the management of serious crime, using investigators from Australia and New Zealand to speak. For seven years, former Macro team leader Paul Coombes was invited back to lecture on the unique aspects of the Macro investigation. 'For all the critics of this taskforce,' he says with more than a hint of chagrin, 'there are those who continue to recognise the immense work that was done. It's not over yet.'

  In 1997, internal police advertisements go out for contenders for the rank of inspector. Working on the assumption that he has runs on the board as commander of both homicide and the Macro investigation, Paul Ferguson puts his application together in between working a 13-hour shift. Other officers – including Dave Caporn – take time off work to research for the interview. That isn't an option Ferguson takes.

  A short while later, in a highly unusual move, Ferguson is summoned to Deputy Commissioner Bruce Brennan's office, who discloses the results of the interview. The news is not good. Dave Caporn, then Acting Senior-Sergeant who still headed up Macro, had gained the inspector's position and was going to catapult over the top of Ferguson in rank. 'This put us in a precarious position,' Ferguson recalls. 'I was leading an investigation, but one of my officers was going to outrank me.' Brennan's solution is cut-throat. He wants a seamless transition, he tells Ferguson. He must take leave.

  Devastated at losing out on the promotion and with the system's decision not to acknowledge his hard work, Ferguson refused. 'I didn't have any animosity toward Caporn,' he says. 'The feedback was that I was too specialised in the crime area. But I wasn't about to take leave when there was so much work to be done.' Others are less charitable about the reasons for Ferguson's lack of promotion. He was, they say, thrown over in the desperate bid for the West Australian Police Service – acutely embarrassed by the lack of resolution to what is now becoming a long-running and closely watched murder inquiry – to be seen to be making changes in the Macro investigation by elevating a new face on the parapet to keep the public satisfied. Ferguson, they say, is proof of the old adage that no matter what a man does in public life, in political life he is just collateral damage.

  Ferguson reaches a compromise with the commissioner. He will go to Broome and overview the Sara-Lee Davey case: yet another girl who is missing, presumed murdered. Last seen driving a 4WD vehicle in Broome on 14 January 1997 around 5 pm – 13 days before Sarah Spiers vanished from Claremont – police intelligence shows that further alleged sightings of 21-year-old Davey in Darwin are incorrect. She has not touched her bank account since she disappeared.

  The shifting of personnel like pieces on a chess board and the feverish, secretive activity behind Macro barricades are of no interest to the general public. They only want answers to two questions: who is the Claremont serial killer and when is Macro going to make an arrest?

  And if Ferguson is disappointed at missing out on the promotion, he will be gutted at what follows, later.

  Part Two:

  The Dark Harvest

  Tread lightly, she is near under the snow,

  Speak gently, she can hear the daisies grow...

  'Requiescat', Oscar Wilde

  34

  October 1997. Warm spring nights. He is trawling along Claremont's Bayview Terrace in his white Hyundai sedan. Curb crawling. Circling, trawling again. Past the Claremont Hotel, opposite the railway station. Doing a U-turn. Driving back down the street, slowly, deliberately. Following a woman, visually locking on to her, accelerating and driving past. She doesn't know she is being watched. He swings back around side streets, starts all over again. Watching. Trawling. Parking off a side street, discreetly. Pulling the car back into traffic. Watching. Up and down the street, sometimes up to 30 times a night. Watching all the beautiful young girls. These young things out so late.

  Ciara Glennon's murder has turned the axis of the investigation yet again. The taskforce decide to 'walk the girls' – police-speak for turning out decoys as human bait in a controlled environment. Decoys trained to walk, talk and dress like the victims, to look like potential targets.

  They had noticed him in the last week of September, when he bumbled into the police net and they started covert surveillance immediately. His ability to stalk women without being noticed is highly skilled, learned behaviour: it is obvious he has done this many times before. And he is always out and about around the same key times and days that the victims went missing; on weekends between midnight and 2 am. The same time when the offences always occurred. If he is not the offender, they reason then he is at least a chance of being a witness.

  Police run a licence test on the curb crawler. Name: Lance Kenneth Williams. Forty years of age. Owns a beachside unit at Cottesloe although he more often lives with his parents in the same area. Public servant with the Department of Main Roads. Lance has lost his licence twice, though regained it two days after Sarah Spiers disappeared. No licence at the time of Spiers's disappearance, but he had a car at the time.

  There is the beginning of a cool nip in the night air. Williams is amazed. The chill doesn't seem to stop them. All these girls out so late at night. Young things with midriffs showing and wearing low-cut tops. Exposing way too much cleavage. Very intoxicated, some of them, weaving around the streets as though they haven't heard there is a killer out here. As if there is no danger. Perhaps they think the security cameras will save them. Ciara Glennon also disappeared just two blocks from this area only 13 months ago. Don't they read the newspapers, watch television? Still they wander along in groups, in pairs. Or on their own.

  Lance Williams is always on his own. Always has been. Even through North Cottesloe Primary and Swanbourne High he was a loner. At 14, he fell off the ropes at a Scout meeting and hit his head hard on the floor. Taken to the doctor, he was treated for concussion. Very bright, particularly at maths, but that doesn't help him socialise. He joins a bank as a teller at 17, stays there until he is 28. The work suits him: separated from the public by a security grille, he doesn't have to make eye contact or even speak, beyond a perfunctory hello, to customers. He works in the bank for 11 years, and no one gives him a second glance. At 23, he suffers his first nervous breakdown. It won't be his last.

  He appears nondescript, ordinary. So ordinary. Brown hair with a wavy kink cut into a severe short back and sides. Slightly protruding, doe-like eyes. Healthy pink fingernails, perfectly trimmed. Soft hands, testament to a working life spent in an office. Average height. Medium build. Mr Average.

  The oldest of five children, Williams is very close to his second brother, although his relationships with his other siblings are amicable. But they don't have a lot in common. They are all married, with their own lives and have all left home. His few other friends are n
ow married, too and they have drifted apart.

  Macro uses the expertise of consultant psychiatrist Aaron Groves to assist the negotiator's unit to build up a profile of Williams. He also has another crucial role: to counsel, advise and debrief officers before they succumb to the stresses of this high-profile case.

  It is now April 1998 as he cruises up and down the Claremont street as he has done for months. Lance is 41 years old. He had a crack at living on his own from late 1995, but it didn't work out. Loneliness eats at him, drives him out to the casino at all hours of the night where he wanders around and watches people gamble. It is an instant crowd. There is no point him trying to go to pubs or clubs to meet people; he is so non-descript, no one ever notices him.

  Police tail him through the casino, covertly at first and later, overtly, watching him move soundlessly amongst the slot machines. He used to gamble heavily but gave it up cold turkey. No self-help groups. No Gamblers Anonymous. Cold turkey. Now if he has the itch to take a punt, he no longer indulges it. It is, police will later claim, a measure of his self-control. If he sets his mind to do something, he does it. Lance Williams, they say, possesses a remarkable degree of self-possession, self-control.

  'This is the same man,' a Macro insider confides, 'who gave up smoking and alcohol as well. He used to be an extremely heavy drinker but just gave it up, cold. Same with the smokes. No crime in any of this. But what we wanted to know was, does he have a deep resentment of women and particularly women who drink because in his eyes it renders them lower-class, worthless? Who knows? But we certainly wanted to find out more about him.'

  Once, following a bout of depressive self-doubt, he tried to hang himself with an occy strap. Another time, he made a feeble attempt to slash his wrists before walking down to the beach and into the cool waters of Cottesloe beach. But self-preservation kicked in; unable to go through with the suicide attempt, he returned home. His father drove him to hospital.

  Police monitor his every movement. They follow him so closely. It is like living in a high-tech prison, without the gates.

  Lance battles the bottle through the 1980s and halfway into the 90s, an addiction that costs him dearly. His first two drink-driving convictions – two before he is 20 – warrant small convictions, but when he racks up his third in 1984 he is not eligible to drive again until 1994. He won't bother even trying to get it back then. His drinking exacerbates the maudlin, clinical depression that hangs around him, cloying and stale. In mid-1995, one of Williams's few friends died, a traumatic event that triggered him to stop drinking and smoking. Was this, Macro insiders ask, the emotional lever that tipped him over the edge into a killing spree? Living in his own seaside unit from mid-December 1995, by June 1996 he is plagued with the black dog – depression – and admitted to a psychiatric hospital in July.

  His mother, Norma, recalls that time. 'He had more pressure at work, a lot of pressure with added responsibilities, and he was on a lot of tablets, for depression and the like. He was just not very well at all, and spent most of this time sleeping in the room down the back. He had to go to hospital.' By 26 September he moves back home with his parents, where he will stay until June 1997 when he again attempts to live on his own. But this time will prove as hopeless as the last. By June 2002 he is home again, where he will stay, although he still owns the unit.

  Williams's parents managed a service station in Mosman Park, six kilometres from Claremont, when he was a young boy. He worked there for a time when he was old enough, helping out at the bowsers, taking customers' money. Well-to-do customers, mostly in flash cars, and young people dressed up on their way out to party. Williams is never invited to party, but he knows the streets in the area better than any postie.

  Once, at high school, he took a girl out to the movies and held her hand, but it didn't go beyond the first date. She wasn't interested, she told him and she meant it, meeting another bloke soon after. He hasn't tried to take a woman out since. His mother claims he is acutely shy, that he wouldn't know how to approach someone and strike up a conversation even if he wanted to. It is an assessment directly contradicted by police. His voice, too, is as bland as his appearance. No highs or lows, just the same dreary monotone in a river of words. He avoids eye contact when he speaks and wears a melancholy air like a cloak. He is innocuous, non-threatening.

  35

  With a view to building a brief, the taskforce chooses a codename for their operation: Damocles. The tale of a sycophantic attendant in the royal court of the Greek tyrant Dionysius, Damocles is so in awe of Dionysius's excessive wealth and happiness that the tyrant decides to teach Damocles a lesson. At a sumptuous banquet, Dionysius invites Damocles to sit in his place of honour. Entranced with the riches surrounding him, Damocles looks to the ceiling and is horrified to see that a sword, suspended by a single horse hair, is hanging over his head. Dionysius has made his point: those with position and power also face constant danger; tragedy is forestalled only by chance and can strike at any moment. For the police, the legend is a perfect symbol. The stakes are incredibly high. Two girls are dead. One is still missing. All it takes is one mistake; just one mistake. But the sword isn't hanging over Lance Williams. It is hanging over them.

  Police aircraft tracks the decoys, who walk up to 15 pre-arranged routes a night, from Thursday to Sunday. The air-wing is up so frequently over the western suburbs, there are concerns that the plane's incessant drone will alert residents that something is going on. The constant use of the plane four nights a week also causes rumblings of discontent within other sections of the police. When an explosive device is found at Geraldton Hospital, Perth investigators have to find alternative transport to get them there.

  The police have had him under covert surveillance for months. Tracking him as he stalks women in his car, not taking his eyes from them. Up to 30 times a night. Police know his every move, sitting off the street to his unit, waiting until he steps into his car. 'Here he goes,' they say, starting the engine and slipping in behind him.

  From Thursday to Sunday night, every week, he leaves his unit at Cottesloe at precisely 11.50 pm. It is the busy time, weekends, when people are out partying. Occasionally, rarely, he is later – exactly 12.30 am – but there is never any variation in these times. They can set their watch by him. He slips into the driver's seat, straps on his seatbelt, cruises a few laps through Claremont before making his regular drive-through at Hungry Jack's takeaway. Picks up a chocolate milk, sips it slowly through a straw as he drives on to North-bridge. He always takes the same route. Curb crawling, circling, watching, throwing the empty milk container in the same roadside bin every night, every week and then returning to Claremont. Over and over again, up to 30 times a night. Slowly, slowly driving his car through the red-light district.

  Five hostage negotiators, part of the Tactical Response Group (TRG), are placed on the team from the moment surveillance on Williams starts. Each of them detectives, their role – though not full-time – is front-line and vital. Every time the TRG slips in behind him, they sit off about a kilometre behind, primed to action if they get an encrypted radio call regarding his movements. If a suspect takes a decoy and holds her hostage – a knife to her throat, an arm around her neck – they will need to start urgent though delicate negotiations geared toward achieving a non-violent outcome and not an armed conflict. 'In any situation like this, you have to also be aware of the potential for suicide,' a former Macro negotiator says. 'If people feel trapped, they can behave in very bizarre ways. But our over-riding concern was for the decoys, to ensure they were safe at all times.'

  On any given night when Williams is under surveillance, there are approximately 50 police officers working. Surveillance, negotiators, TRG officers, aircraft personnel. It is a massive operation.

  Not everyone on the hostage team is supportive of Caporn's methods. 'The reality was that about five detectives would track other leads, but the major resources went into this hounding of Williams. No doubt his behaviour was odd and, sure,
Caporn was under enormous pressure to deliver a result. But the feeling was that that pressure led him into making decisions that weren't necessarily always right. Tunnel vision geared to getting a result.'

  He believes that a better tactic with Williams would have been to go undercover at his workplace to find out if he had overtly violent or sexual tendencies that spilled over with his colleagues, to befriend him and get closer to finding out what made him tick. 'That wasn't an option for Caporn,' he recalls. 'A lot of people on Macro were textbook detectives, and they wouldn't step outside that. But there were opportunities there that in my opinion most definitely should have been taken.'

  Williams is driving with the window down and has spotted a young woman at the T-junction of Gugeri Street, on the corner of Bayview Terrace. She slides over to the car, flashes him an apprehensive smile as she leans slightly into the car window. 'Hi. Can you tell me where the nearest bus stop is?'

  He hesitates for a fraction of a moment. When he speaks, his voice is strong but there is a hint of a stammer, an awkward shyness. 'There aren't any buses this time of night. Where are you going to?'

  'Mosman Park.' Mosman Park, a ritzy suburb heading toward Fremantle, a six-minute drive from Claremont.

  'Get in,' he says. 'I'll give you a lift there if you like.' She takes a sharp, surreptitious breath as she climbs into Williams's car. The air-wing is up, monitoring their move-ments and unmarked surveillance cars slip in behind them. She is hot-wired for any conversation but still, it's always a risk.

  Williams cruises quietly out of the street and back onto the darkened Stirling Highway and steals a sideways glance at the woman sitting next to him. She is attractive. Stupid. So stupid, to get into a stranger's car while a serial killer is lurking around. She says little on the drive, listening as he makes small talk, staring ahead and crossing and uncrossing her legs. He steals another sideways glance. There's something wrong. He senses it. She is incredibly nervous.