The Devil's Garden Page 2

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Part Two: The Dark Harvest Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Part Three The Lonely Lilies Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Epilogue

  UNSOLVED, MISSING OR MURDERED

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Part One

  The Devil's Garden

  'God has come into our garden and picked the most

  beautiful rose.'

  Denis Glennon, in his eulogy to his daughter, Ciara

  1

  The taxi driver circles the phone box from where Sarah Spiers had called requesting a cab. That's odd. There is no one here. He checks his watch. 2.06 am. The radioed request had only come in six minutes ago and he had driven straight to the pick-up site at Claremont. It is dark; virtually no street lights illuminate the phone box on the corner of Stirling Highway and Stirling Road. He circles again. There is definitely no one here. It's bloody odd. And bloody annoying. The girl must have changed her mind and got a lift with someone else. He curses to himself: now he will have to take his chances with a random fare from one of the young partygoers leaving the nightclub up the road.

  They spill out from Club Bayview into the balmy January night. Girls in short dresses and perilously high heels, flushed from dancing, too much alcohol or party drugs, giggle as they drape themselves around their friends and walk unsteadily up the street. Many are continuing the party from yesterday – Australia Day, 1996 – in the languid first month of the New Year. Claremont, the well-heeled heart of this gentle city where a violet sky winks to ruby sunsets that wash over the Swan River, is home to the ritzy clique; the big end of town where upmarket boutiques with upmarket prices nestle alongside trendy cafés. Perth's wealthy citizens – playboys in sporty BMWs and young women boasting platinum credit cards and solarium tans – shop here during the day and cruise, carefree at night.

  Shaped by its status as the most isolated city in the world, Perth is more than remote. Sequestered from Australia's eastern states by time and distance – its closest city, Adelaide, is a three-hour flight – it is bordered by the vast Nullarbor Plain, Simpson Desert and the Indian Ocean. Up north, the Pilbara – a place of blistering heat and ochre rock – churns out vast wealth for mining companies, and the Kimberley, famous for its port town, Broome, and its pearling industry, attracts tourists to its beautiful, rugged coastline.

  They party on Bayview Terrace while the rest of Claremont, with old houses built on old money, sleeps. The nearby Stirling Highway is virtually deserted, the odd car heading east toward Perth, ten kilometres away. Perth's aquatic play-ground, the Swan River is inky black in these pre-dawn hours, lapping gently on the shoreline.

  2

  Don Spiers started with nothing, leaving school at 14 and working relentlessly to ensure his family never wanted for anything. His daughters, Amanda and Sarah, were educated at a private school, Iona Presbyterian, and stayed close, sharing a flat after they left home. The family lives in an apartment in salubrious South Perth and Don runs a highly successful shearing company in Darkan. It's a tight ship: blokes who apply for a job at his outfit know better than to mess with him. No grog. No drugs. No brawls. Many a time he has stood toe to toe with tough shearers half his age who haven't abided by his rules. 'Get this through your head,' he warns them, 'or you'll come off second best. Either shape up or ship out.' He works the men hard but expects no more from them than what he delivers himself, shearing up to 200 sheep a day. An old man who had lived in Darkan all his 80-odd years paid Don a compliment just before he died. 'I've lived in this district all me life,' he said, 'and I've never seen a man work as hard for his family as you do.' Life in the Spiers household is simple, and happy.

  The road is glistening with summer rain. Don stares out the window, struck by a bleak thought. This weather can only hinder any search for his daughter Sarah, who has now been missing for more than 12 hours. The windscreen wipers move rhythmically like a metronome as he flattens the accelerator, barrelling along the country roads on the three-hour drive home to Perth from his shearing contracting business in the rural town of Darkan. His wife, Carol, had left an urgent message with an employee that morning for Don to return her call, immediately. There was panic in her voice. 'Sarah is still not home. You had better come back.'

  Don nervously drums his calloused shearer's fingers on the steering wheel. Sarah, their ebullient, affectionate daughter, would never go anywhere without notifying them. Her flatmate and sister, Amanda, two years older than Sarah, is distraught. Sarah hasn't contacted her since she went out to Claremont with friends on Saturday night. It is completely out of character: extremely close, the sisters have not had one fight in their life. Sarah was in fabulous spirits, excitedly planning Amanda's forthcoming twenty-first birthday party before she went out. Amanda had dropped Sarah at a Cottesloe hotel before she took her to Club Bayview around 12.15 am. The area was teeming with young people, celebrating the Australia Day long weekend.

  Amanda peeked into Sarah's room on Sunday morning and noticed her bed had not been slept in. 'Sarah hasn't come home,' she tells her mother. 'She doesn't love me!' It is said tongue-in-cheek. Sarah adores her, she knows.

  Her bed remains empty on Sunday night. Don churns through the possibilities of where she might be as the car swallows up the kilometres on his way home. Did she impulsively decide to go for a trip to the country? She hasn't got a mobile phone; has she lost her purse and can't call home? Has she been assaulted and is too ashamed to show her face? She has no boyfriend; has she met a bloke and is simply preoccupied?

  Sarah. A Hebrew name meaning 'princess', Sarah is responsible and loving, virtually running the household, doting on her family, cooking meals for them even after she had moved out. She was, Don recalls, a giver not a taker. On weekends, she would snuggle up with him and watch the footy, cheering on their team. It bonded them closely but now raw fear binds the family in a vice. Where the hell is she?

  The police arrive, cognisant of the family's grief but wary, too. All too frequently, the perpetrator of a crime is a person close to the family, or a family member. Don is quizzed closely but ruled out. He was nowhere near Perth the night his daughter went missing. They run through the normal questions. Could she have run away with a boyfriend? Was she suicidal? Did she have enemies? Any problems at home or work? They draw blanks at every turn.

  The investigation falls under the command of the Major Crime Squad. Sergeant Mal Shervill is the case officer. By Sunday, police have all the relevant details. Name. Age. Last seen by friends leaving Club Bayview. Last call made from a phone box near the corner of Stirling Highway and Stirl
ing Road to a taxi company. Sarah Spiers is now, officially, a missing person. The family mounts a 24-hour vigil, monitoring the phone at all times, snatching to answer it as soon as it rings. An army of volunteers distributes her photograph on 35,000 posters around the city. 'Have you seen this girl? She is 18 years old. A secretary for an engineering consultancy. She disappeared from a roadside telephone box in Claremont. Have you seen her?' Up to 35 people a night, roaming the streets of Perth, endlessly asking questions.

  Post newspaper proprietor and journalist Bret Christian recalls that time. 'What is often forgotten is that Sarah Spiers was treated as simply a missing person for two weeks. Her friends, family and journalists worked bloody hard to prove that she hadn't just simply taken off somewhere. It's a major problem in investigations; until police realised she wasn't going to turn up, it wasn't prioritised.'

  The Spiers family is appointed a liaison officer with whom they can direct concerns or information and who helps bear the burden of their grief. The responsibility falls to OLC of Major Crime Paul Coombes, who walks the tightrope between the family and the media, 'When a body is located, we immediately contact the family,'. 'But sometimes the reporters get to them first.' One journalist rings Don Spiers informing him that a female body has been found in the bush. Not knowing if it is Sarah or not, he is devastated until he speaks to Coombes. 'Police had already briefed the media off-the-record that they knew it wasn't Sarah,' he says. 'That irresponsible search for the big headline didn't help anyone in those early days.'

  The phone jangles in the darkness. Don Spiers, instantly awake, snatches it from its cradle, magnetised by the voice on the other end. That voice: smooth, precise, confident. He quickly hauls himself up on the pillow.

  'Is that Mr Spiers?'

  'Yes.'

  'Mr Don Spiers?'

  'Yes.'

  'You are Sarah's father?'

  'Yes.'

  'Sarah's dead, and her body is at Gnangara Pine Plantation.'

  The caller hangs up.

  Don replaces the phone on the hook, lying in the darkness trembling and distressed. He glances at the clock. Just after 2 am. He has not recognised the male caller's voice, but he would know it again, instantly. Educated. Modulated. So confident. He has slept only fitfully for weeks, from that terrible moment when he was told Sarah went missing. He knew then, with a father's instinct, that something was horribly wrong.

  Gnangara Pine Plantation: more than five-and-a-half thousand hectares of inhospitable, desolate scrub. A grave-yard for stolen cars, wrecked and dumped. A place of stunning fauna and birds, and of ticks and snakes and spiders. A place of winds and shadows and impenetrable parts. Don wills the male caller to ring again. To clarify information. To tell him all he knows. To be specific about her whereabouts. Ring back. Ring back. Please, ring back.

  Sarah's disappearance tips the family's axis. But they can't know, in those early days, just how bad it will get.

  The police will theorise that Sarah was abducted within two minutes of making the phone call for a taxi – the amount of time it takes for a cab to travel from nearby Eric Street, Cottes-loe, where the taxi logged the job-call. But when the scene is checked in a re-enactment scenario at the same time of night as the phone call was made, the police discover that the caller could barely be seen from the roadway, if at all. This raises a disquieting, though distinct possibility: that Sarah could have been in the vicinity of the phone box for a lot longer than just two minutes, and that her presence was simply missed by the taxi driver. The taxi drives away; someone else pulls up.

  But who? Some taxi drivers come forward with leads on people they have had in their cab. One is Steven Ross. An unsophisticated, slovenly man whose vehicles are notoriously untidy, in 1996 Ross volunteered to police that he had picked up Sarah Spiers in his taxi the night before she disappeared. In the taxi was another woman, who was dropped off in the next suburb and a man – apparently unknown to Sarah – who had indicated he wanted to go to the city. Sarah got out of the cab, Ross said, at the hip Windsor Hotel in South Perth, close to where she lived. The man, having changed his mind about going to the city, paid the fare, unceremoniously pushed her out of the taxi and followed her. Ross forwarded his theory to police that the following night, the man had returned to Claremont, found Sarah Spiers and murdered her.

  Ross was not unknown to police. In the early 90s his partner, a former Austrian beauty queen, housebound after being severely injured in an accident, died. Ross inherited her property and during the police investigation into her death was extensively questioned until it was proven she died of natural causes.

  3

  Despair and hope render the Spiers family pitifully vulnerable and clairvoyants hover like crows at a feast. Don Spiers does not believe in clairvoyants, but for years he will continue to take their calls, locked in a vicious circle. One of them, he reasons, one day may just have the answer. Or they may be his daughter's abductor, offering cryptic clues as to where she is.

  One offers a vision of Sarah, her body entombed in marshy reeds at Salter Point, a small distance from the family's Perth home. Don should search this area, the clairvoyant suggests. He must search tonight. He drives to Salter Point immediately, thrashing and fumbling around with a torch in the darkness, alone and knee-deep in rushes and mud. Parting the reeds, looking for a sign, crying softly at first and then sobbing, calling out her name. Sarah, Sarah. He struggles home after a few hours in the water, soaked, distraught, empty-handed.

  Up to 300 clairvoyants contact Don, all with their peculiar, specific visions. One advises that Sarah is in a house with a tree in the garden and a 'For Sale' sign out the front. Don becomes obsessed, driving around Perth suburbs, peering up at houses. But there are so many with a tree in the garden and 'For Sale' signs out the front that he becomes disorientated, distressed, his car his place of solace where, away from his family, he buries his head in his hands and weeps.

  The clairvoyants' obscure visions weary him. One couple has him driving all over Perth with them in the car for two days. Every time their 'vision' is proved wrong, they change the location. After days of fruitless driving, the last insight they share with Don is that Sarah is at a weir where there is a flock of wild geese. The geese are there, but nothing else. 'There's the geese,' Don points upwards. 'And this is a wild goose chase.' He returns home, dismayed.

  The family has nothing to go on. Nothing but the mystery of Sarah vanishing without trace. Don angrily taps a finger on the table as he recalls the clairvoyant who described himself as 'No. 1' in Western Australia. 'He charged into our home without invitation, stood in our living room and started blurting out statements as though they were facts,' he recalls. ' "Sarah is deceased," he said. "Her head has been smashed in with a rock." We just stood there, amazed and disgusted. And then his mobile phone rang and he started doing business! "I charge $50 a session," he told the caller. When he hung up, he volunteered that there was normally a fee for his services, but under the circumstances he wouldn't charge me. We were so outraged at his insensitivity, we were all speechless.'

  Thousands of different leads pour in from the public. Information about a stranger offering lifts to young women in Claremont the night Sarah vanished; calls from people who want to assist the inquiry but only serve to hinder it further. Two weeks after Sarah disappears, Detective Senior-Sergeant Paul Ferguson, who heads the inquiry, is circumspect about her chances of being found alive. A popular copper with the press who avoids corporate-speak, he has a determined lack of ego and an approachable air that belies a sharp mind. 'Reality must take effect eventually that this young lady has come to harm,' he says. 'But we say to the parents, "don't give up hope, we're trying our hardest". The inquiry team is still working to try and find the lady alive.' From hard experience, Ferguson knows that this is unlikely. He reads and re-reads the motto stuck on his wall. 'Thoroughness + Persistence = Success.'

  If anyone knows about persistence, it's Ferguson. He is going to need it.

&nb
sp; 4

  Western Australia is the largest police jurisdiction in the world, covering often remote and barely accessible areas of 2.5 million square kilometres. The population of almost 5000 uniformed and non-uniformed officers is a far cry from the fledgling colonial service that from its earliest days developed in isolation. A fresh-faced copper in 1972 when he joined the force, Paul Ferguson was seconded to the CIB in 1976 and attained the pinnacle – officer in charge of the Homicide Squad – in 1994. Through the years, his personal motto hasn't changed. It is, he says, an absolute privilege to work in homicide and to speak on behalf of murdered victims who cannot speak for themselves. In 1986, Ferguson was handed the file on a case that defied description. The unrepentant killers would later be identified as husband-and-wife serial killers, David and Catherine Birnie.

  What David Birnie, an angular, thin-faced man, did to his victims was depraved enough. That he sought – and received – willing help from his wife, Catherine, in his debauched perversions was beyond comprehension. In early autumn 1987 the pair, both 35, pleaded guilty to the abduction, rape, torture and murder of four women in suburban Perth the preceding year. Three were strangled as they begged for mercy, their bodies tossed into scrub at Glen Eagle Forest, 30 kilometres southeast of Perth. Another was stabbed and axed to death, her body buried at a pine plantation north of Perth. The Birnies' murderous spree had lasted four weeks; the court hearing just 30 minutes. Details of the crimes are so horrific that, decades later, police who worked on the case still shake their heads in horror.

  Both highly dysfunctional adults with appalling back-grounds, the Birnies met in their teens, forming an intensely intimate relationship during which they embarked on a series of domestic burglaries, crimes that would become an ominous precursor to the serial killing spree that would follow years later. After they separated, David Birnie married and Catherine worked as domestic help in a house, marrying the owner's son. Despite having five children, Catherine yearned for David; when they reconnected in their 20s, she walked out of her marriage, leaving the children behind. Theirs was a volatile, highly sexual relationship in which David Birnie demanded intercourse or other sexual acts up to six times a day. As a twenty-first birthday present for his brother, James – who would also serve time for sexually molesting his 6-year-old niece – David offered Catherine as a sexual gift. In 1984, during a temporary separation from Catherine, David climbed into his brother's bed, demanding and receiving sexual gratification.