The Devil's Garden Read online

  The street where she has asked to be dropped off is just ahead. 'Just here will do, thanks,' she says, her fingers already on the door handle. It is deserted and dark; not a soul in sight. He looks at her again. She is so stupid.

  'Look, I don't want to drop you off here. It's not safe.' She doesn't listen, smiles at him as she quietly gets out of his car.

  'Thanks, I'll be fine,' she says again, and disappears into the shadows.

  The decoy police officer flown in from interstate has done her job well. 'Shit,' she says when she gets back into the squad car parked around the corner. 'There's something very weird about him. He wasn't concerned that I was walking alone out late while there was a serial killer around. He was so detached. All he did was talk about himself the whole trip.'

  They decide to take Williams out.

  36

  He is curb crawling again. It is two months after the decoy, 3 am in the quiet hush between midnight and dawn. Sunday morning, 5 April 1998. Williams is following a woman walking south from the Stirling Highway – the same route Ciara Glennon had taken; following her as she strides into the southern part of the Claremont suburbs, deeper into the darkened streets. He has driven past her numerous times, not braking or slowing down but accelerating out of her line of sight, doubling up around the back streets and approaching her again from the rear.

  The Tactical Response Group officers watch him, their radar primed. Something is about to give.

  They pounce, pointing loaded Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns at Williams's head. 'Stop the car! Don't move! You are under arrest!' Terror grips Williams and a warm rush of urine is soaking through his underpants, seeping through to stain his trousers.

  'What have I done?' he stammers.

  Officer Nello Iopolo orders him out of the car. 'Stand still. Don't move.'

  Williams feels the cold nuzzle of a submachine gun at his neck as he steps from his vehicle, eight armed officers pointing guns at his head. Spread-eagled against the car bonnet, he is ashamed that the wet stain is noticeable. His face is bleached of colour. Too frightened to articulate proper sentences, he can barely stammer out a question. 'What's this about?' Surrounded by officers, saliva samples are taken from his mouth before Williams is escorted into the Beaufort Street police headquarters.

  He walks past Macro team leader Stephen Brown, sitting in his office. Struck by what he will later describe as Williams's nonchalant demeanour, Brown doesn't notice that Williams has wet himself. Police would have cleaned him up, he says, if that had happened. It is part of their duty of care and not in the best interests of police for a person of interest to be uncomfortable throughout an interview.

  Williams does not remember this consideration.

  Detective Senior-Sergeant Paul Greenshaw and Detective Senior-Constable Peter Norrish, the liaison officer for the Rimmer family, are waiting for him in the interview room. Refusing a request to videotape the interview, for 13 hours Williams answers questions that are hammered at him. He does not have a lawyer present, even when hair samples are taken from his head.

  He does not ask for one.

  While Williams is at police headquarters, police execute a simultaneous rollout of their forensic teams at his beach-side unit, his parents' home and his workplace. His car is impounded. The relentless questioning continues. Known by lawyers as the 'squeeze him until he pops' method, there is one problem: he doesn't pop. Even as he is forced to rigidly sit with his hands on his knees and to look at photos of the victims that police place on his body, he doesn't pop.

  The questions are relentless. What were you doing at Claremont? Why are you cruising around the streets late at night? Are you married? Have a girlfriend? Any kids? Heard of Sarah Spiers? Jane Rimmer? Ciara Glennon? Tell us again what you are doing cruising around Claremont? Relentless, on and on as dawn gives way to daytime and morning fades to afternoon. The good-cop, bad-cop routine. Cajoling him, friendly, gentle. 'Come on, Lance, why don't you just tell us where Sarah is? Get it over and done with?' He can't, he shrugs. Because he doesn't know. He didn't even have a licence when Sarah went missing. That doesn't wash, either. 'You wouldn't be the first person driving around without a licence. Try again. Did you pick up Sarah Spiers?' No, I did not.

  The bad-cop routine, yelling at him if he is too slow answering questions, yanking his elbow if he appears to be nodding off. 'Wake up! Answer the question!' Forcing him to look at pictures of the girls. 'Don't turn your head away! Take a good, hard look!' Why is his car, a white Hyundai, in such immaculate condition inside? Why is it washed and polished outside?

  Williams answers in his monotonous, dreary tone under-scored with a pout. 'I like to keep my vehicle clean. I wasn't doing anything wrong last night. I was just concerned for the safety of these women who wander about at night in that area and that's why I followed them.' Why did he pick up the woman he dropped at Mosman Park? 'I didn't think there were any buses. I was simply being a good Samaritan.'

  They think it's bullshit, and tell him so. 'Give us a break, Lance. We know your routines. You may as well tell us.'

  Stephen Brown admits they do not trifle with suspects. 'Williams digested everything we asked him, make no mistake. He thinks of everything before he answers, and has long, long pauses before he does so. We're never fooled by stuttering or awkwardness, but we were surprised that he didn't request legal representation. If we suspect someone of murder, we'll ask the hard questions and shove it right up them until we get the answers.' But they do it, he says, within the law. He defends his former boss, Dave Caporn. 'Caporn was holding the strings for this operation and he's of the highest integrity, genteel and approachable. He takes the gentler approach, putting his hand on someone's forearm, saying "I know you did it, you can tell me," and more often than not he'll get a confession. He didn't run the Williams interview but listened to the audio and watched through the one-way mirror. There was no "bash and crash" going on behind the scenes, no offering of deals. It was straight down the line.'

  Not everyone agrees. 'They should never have run that interview the way they did,' the former hostage negotiator says. 'It required the skills of a negotiator to get the best out of him, not a police officer ping-ponging questions back and forth. In the end it got them precisely nowhere. But there was no point ever trying to get Caporn to look at other alternatives. This was a huge case and he was going to run it his way. There were a lot of senior police watching for the outcome.'

  Williams did not flinch throughout the interview. 'The media reckon that he would have been scared stiff, but he wasn't,' Brown says. 'He was nonchalant, cool and detached as if it was happening to someone else. Everytime we brought him in, his demeanour was cool.'

  Former Sergeant Con Bayens, who would later head up 'Operation Bounty' to clear prostitutes from the nearby Northbridge area, recalls what he heard of the Williams takeout. 'Caporn was back at the ranch – police headquarters – directing the troops by mobile phone and waiting for Williams to be brought in. He was so shit-scared, apparently he just about melted into his car seat, and he promptly wet himself. Who wouldn't? Faced with that amount of police pressure and with loaded guns in your face, you'd confess to being on the grassy knoll, wouldn't you? But he didn't. He didn't confess to a bloody thing.'

  The police can't win. Fighting allegations that they were under pressure to charge a person of interest because of esca-lating costs, the service is adamant that this is not the case. But they also have to battle sniggers from within their ranks at their choice of decoy. 'Here's this woman in her mid-30s, a brunette about 172 cm tall and with a buxom build. Well, straight up it's bloody obvious she doesn't look anything like the Claremont victims,' one snorts. 'She's too tall and too old. To quote comedian Rowan Atkinson, putting on decoys seemed like a ''cunning plan''. But in reality, it was more like fly fishing for trout with a brick on the end of the line.'

  The Claremont investigation, Bayens says, became known outside the taskforce as the best documented and best serialised failure
the Western Australian police force has ever had. 'There just seemed,' he says, 'to be a ready list of excuses for every failure.'

  The police keep going, holding Williams until late after-noon before releasing him without charge. It is only the beginning. Norma recalls the last words an officer said to Lance as he left the station. 'We'll hound you, Williams. We'll hound you.'

  37

  Lance is late for lunch, and Norma and Jim have no idea where he is. They ring his unit but there is no answer; by 1 pm they decide to go over to see him. He isn't home. 'That's strange,' she comments to Jim, in the whining tone she uses when confronted with things outside her control. 'Where do you suppose he is?'

  On her return, Norma answers her front door, squinting through the flywire at the two police officers, Detective Senior-Sergeant John Brandham and Sergeant Julie Hansley, standing on her doorstep. 'Hello, Mrs Williams. We'd like to have a talk to you about your son, Lance.' Brandham is in control; it is a demand, not a request. Norma takes up her customary stance, moving an arm across her waist and holding onto her right elbow.

  'He isn't here. What's this all about?'

  'He's helping with our inquiries.'

  'Inquiries? What sort of inquiries? Has he been a witness to an accident or something?' Her voice is thin, plaintive and she doesn't move to open the flywire door.

  'No,' Brandham replies, holding her stare. 'We believe your son to be the Claremont serial killer.'

  They return that night with search warrants, six police officers with torches raking through drawers and cupboards. Norma stands back and watches in horror as their personal belongings are ransacked. 'There was nothing we could do,' she recalls. 'They had a warrant to search.' They cart away clothes and other possessions for testing, but find nothing. They also scour the now-vacant beachfront unit that had been owned by Williams. Again, nothing.

  Norma, who had never had any dealings with police, is still shaken by the turn of events. 'We were living a normal life one day and suddenly it's all turned upside down. The trouble was, Lance didn't have an alibi for the two nights that Sarah Spiers and Jane Rimmer went missing. The night Jane was murdered – 9 June 1996 – we had been out for dinner with him and he dropped us home around 9.30 pm. He was perfectly normal. Just acted perfectly normal.' Her voice has taken on its wheedling tone, etched with bewilderment. 'It was the same with the night Sarah disappeared – no alibi. But with Ciara Glennon, that was different. He was home with us all night. Most definitely home with us, all night.' Their bathroom, she says, is right next to Lance's bedroom. 'We can hear every creak. And if he had gone out in the middle of the night, we'd have heard the car start up, wouldn't we? I mean, even if he rolled it out, quietly, like the police seem to think he did, well, we'd have heard it, wouldn't we? It's right outside our bedroom window.'

  Not everyone in Macro buys Norma's argument. 'I don't think anyone believes for a moment that she knows her son to be the Claremont killer and is covering for him,' Stephen Brown says. 'But don't Mums always have a sixth sense about things?'

  Luke Morfesse broke the story of Williams's takeout and the fact that a 'knife' was found in his vehicle. He also detailed that the only significant item discovered during a search of his flat was a receipt, dated only days after Ciara Glennon disappeared, for detailing a car. He recalls the story not just because it was an exclusive, a great 'get' in reporting terms, but also for the way in which a Perth television news director betrayed his trust by breaking the story ahead of an agreed time. 'I made an agreement with the approval of my editor, that they could run a brief in their late news at 10.30 or 11 pm,' he says. 'The agreed proviso was that they would not run the story until after our first, country edition – which goes out at 9.30 pm – had hit the streets. But instead of waiting, they started promoting the story through the evening and ran a 15- or 20-minute special report around 9.30.' The breach caused a huge fracas. 'My wife, who was four months pregnant at the time and one of their newsreaders, was so upset she threatened to quit.'

  The story ran in The West Australian.'Senior police denied last night that the decision to pounce at the weekend came because of mounting pressure about the ever-increasing cost of what has become WA's biggest murder hunt,' Morfesse wrote. 'The Taskforce was told several months ago by experts that the offender may be of such a nature that he might never kill again.'

  But not all of the story rang true. 'The suspect has obsessive compulsive disorder which requires medication,' Morfesse continues. 'Because of the disorder police have been unable to bug his flat. They fear he may notice the slightest change in surroundings.' Listening devices were placed inside Williams's parents' home. Given the secretive nature of the investigation and knowing Williams would read the news-paper, had police fed the media a line to throw Williams off the scent? Given deliberate misinformation?

  With gritty determination, taskforce officers elucidate their opinion. The circumstantial evidence against Williams for the Claremont killings, Tony Potts says,is compelling. 'Not everyone agrees, for sure. But my personal opinion is that I can't rule him out. And I won't unless I am given good cause.'

  38

  Williams went to school with Julie Cutler, whose car was mysteriously found off Cottesloe Beach in 1988. Twenty-two-year-old Cutler was last seen at 12.30 am on 20 June 1988 when she left the Parmelia Hilton Hotel in Perth's CBD after a staff function. Her car was found floating two days later in the sea off Cottesloe beach. Cottesloe. The next suburb to Claremont. Despite extensive inquiries by police and family and comprehensive media coverage, there has been no information regarding Cutler's whereabouts since the night she disappeared. Wearing a black evening dress with a high collar and gold buttons on the shoulder, Julie was 162 cm tall, with dark brown hair and green eyes. Media reports consistently claim that police told Cutler's parents she may be the first victim of the Claremont killer, but in Macro's management meetings investigators failed to reach a conclusion on this either way. 'It's known she had two boyfriends of European extraction, and word from police is they are implicated in her disappearance,' a journalist tells me. 'Julie is definitely dead, no question. The location of her car, in the sea off Cottesloe beach – close to where Lance Williams lives with his parents – certainly went part of the way toward them building a circumstantial case against him.'

  For months I try but fail to locate Cutler's parents, drawing blanks at every turn. Eventually, I call a unit in WAPS that I think may be of some assistance. The police media officer yawns and asks me to repeat the name. 'Cutler. Julie Leanne Cutler. Car found in the water off Cottesloe beach, 1988. Her body has never been found.'

  He yawns again. 'Long time ago. Never heard of her.'

  'The woman,' I venture, 'who police claim may have been the first victim of the Claremont serial killer.' Now I've got his attention.

  'We've got heaps of missing high-profile girls on our books,' he snaps. 'Why the hell should one name stand out to me above the rest? And it's not my job to find phone numbers for journalists.'

  'No, I understand. Could you just try to see whether you have a contact for them and ask them to call me?' He assures me he will look into it and call me back, either way. I never hear from him.

  Lance Williams, according to police, has also driven past Pipidinny Road, where Ciara Glennon's body was found. That raises a dour laugh from Luke Morfesse. 'Look, to get to Yanchep where Williams apparently went to with his parents in 1996 for a leisurely Sunday afternoon drive, you have to drive past Pipidinny Road. There's no other way to get there.' Police won't confirm whether Williams has been to Wellard, but there is a protracted, pregnant silence after I ask the question.

  Dave Caporn's concerns about media interference reach critical levels in April 1998 when he criticises The West Australian for publishing details of Macro's covert operations. It is not a criticism that sits well with then-editor Paul Murray; he had emerged from an earlier meeting with Deputy Commissioner Bruce Brennan satisfied with the manner in which the story will run,
but he was equally concerned that the paper will be fitted up as a 'scapegoat' if Lance Williams slips through police nets.

  How did journalists know about the Williams takeout in the first place? The leak about him being taken in for questioning, according to a longstanding police reporter, came from a copper at a suburban station. In a scribbled note to his editor, the reporter wrote, 'Taskforce chief Dave Caporn is angry about what he describes as a beat-up out of all proportion by The West Australian newspaper. That's HIS problem ...we actually interviewed a suspect some time back who was pulled in by the taskforce several times, grilled for six hours, DNA swabs taken etc . . . this apparently is no different.'

  Not everyone inside the police force agrees that the case against Williams is overwhelming, either. For God's sake, they mutter. Are they trying to drive this bloke to suicide? It is a fact that offenders with an organised bent follow the progress of investigations through the media. In turn, police use the media to entice suspects to react in one way or another, to make a mistake or show their hand. And the best way to get them to do that is to leak information to the press.

  Fear in Perth that the killer could be a cabbie has reached hysteria levels. Drivers are randomly abused and accused of being murderers – many are spat at or assaulted. From the time Ciara disappears, there is a 40 per cent drop in the taxi trade, despondent drivers waiting outside Claremont hotels and clubs for non-existent fares. The streets are virtually deserted. With the taxi industry under intense scrutiny, the pressure is on to install video cameras in cabs. The first tender to install them is cancelled by the government, with doubts raised about the reliability of any video taken while a vehicle is in motion. After fierce debate between the taxi industry and government, digital cameras are eventually installed. But it will take a lot longer for the public to regain confidence in cab drivers. Police crank up the pressure. For the first time in an Australian criminal investigation, they augment mass testing of DNA. Their target: taxi drivers.