Justice In Jeopardy Page 3
Reynolds, who had joined the force six years before, in 1967, passes the information through the chain of command before he heads to the park. Detectives from Brisbane are immediately mobilised to Ipswich, a 40-minute drive away. Senior-sergeants from Reynolds’s station had gone straight down after they received his report and a few bystanders are craning their necks to see what has happened. Reynolds moves in to join his colleagues, bowing his head, shocked and sickened when he sees her. Through all his years in the force and long after he leaves it, it is an image that will haunt him. She is only a baby, an innocent, defenceless child about the same age as his own daughter. Just like a little doll with blonde hair. So very tiny. Dressed in a pink pyjama top with rabbit motifs. Bashed, judging by the bruises on her face. Marks on her leg that look like human bites. No lacerations or indentations, just bruising. But the way she is dressed, the sick, sad way she is dressed below the waist, makes him recoil. Women’s panties, a half-slip and step-ins that reach down toward her knee. Reynolds has no doubt that the poor tot has been the sexual plaything of an extremely deranged individual. He silently prays that she was suffocated before she was interfered with.
Police officer Robert Burns takes photographs of the dead child in situ. He places the camera on a tripod to keep it steady and to get clear photographs of the bite marks that are at randomly different angles and distances from her knee. He attaches a graph – known as a ‘G scale’ – to the picture, a standard reference that enables police photographers to reproduce a negative to the same size as the original object.
Reynolds looks at his colleagues, who are also fighting back tears. No amount of police training can prepare an officer for this. ‘Oh my God,’ he says, half to himself. ‘Who would do this? What sort of sick monster would do this?’
Reynolds returns to the station. It’s 7.35 and he can knock off shortly. But someone out there has lost a child.
His thoughts are interrupted as a man runs through the door, heading straight to him at the counter. It is the Kennedys’ neighbour, Ian Lay. He is perspiring, beads of sweat shining above his top lip. ‘There’s a baby missing from the RAAF units at 12 Short Street,’ he blurts. ‘About 17 months old. We don’t know how long she’s been gone. She wasn’t in her cot this morning.’
Policemen are walking toward Faye’s unit. She knows, with a mother’s instinct, that something is wrong. Knows by the look on their faces, the hunch in their shoulders, that it is bad news. The policeman’s name is Kennedy, a small coincidence that she will always remember. A kindly older man with two younger officers.
She stamps her feet, stumbling backward and cowering from them as though they will physically hurt her. Covering her ears and face with her forearms, she now lurches forward, pummelling her fists into the older policeman’s chest. She feels she is at the edge of the planet, stepping off into a dark void, an alien, terrifying darkness from which she will never return. The world is spinning, metallic sky meeting ground, and she feels she will fall. ‘No, no, no!’ she screams, a tortured, primeval wail that escapes from deep within her. ‘No! Oh, please God, no!’The policemen look to Barry, Faye now crumpled limp in his arms. ‘We’re so sorry, Mr Kennedy. We think we have found your daughter.’
6
Dr William Josephson, called to urgently attend at Limestone Park, also initially thinks that this is a doll lying on the ground, somebody’s idea of a perverse joke. He blanches when he sees it is a child, her temples, head and neck covered in extensive bruising and with abrasions over her left eye and upper lip. He notices that haemorrhaging is evident in the tissue under her skin and that she has obviously been strangled, though the small bones in her larynx are not broken. The doctor’s eyes are drawn to the baby’s upper left leg, covered in bluish marks between the knee and hip. He runs his ungloved hand over the marks to see if he can feel any indentation. Heavy bite marks would indent the skin, but a lighter bite would leave only bruising. Josephson is satisfied that there appears to be no indentation.
Josephson is shattered by what he sees. He has been a doctor for many years, and has been called to attend at numerous scenes: murders, suicides, a plane crash. But he is staggered by the murder of this tiny girl, colour draining from his face as he looks at her.
There is no question in Dr Josephson’s mind that the marks, clear against the baby’s soft flesh, are bites but he is not absolutely certain as to when they were inflicted. He would later surmise they were inflicted at or around the time of death, but it may have been earlier. What he did know was that Deidre had died several hours before he saw her. Hypostasis – the medical term for when fluid and blood accumulates in the lower parts of the body – had already set in. That only happens hours after death.
Barry Kennedy has to identify the child found in the park. Deidre is now re-dressed in her pyjamas, her small body lying on a tray and covered in plastic in the back of the undertaker’s vehicle at the police station. Senior police gird themselves for his reaction, turning away in silent respect when they fold the plastic back. Barry stumbles, his knees faltering beneath him, before he nods. That’s our baby. That’s Deidre. They momentarily leave him with his daughter and his grief, his desolate cries shattering the quiet of this secluded area of the station. A detective gently takes his arm and leads him away.
Deidre is taken to the Brisbane morgue, a 40-minute drive from Ipswich. The State Health Laboratory’s deputy director, Dr Justin O’Reilly, has already started the post-mortem when Dr Josephson arrives from Ipswich. But, even with his years of experience, Dr O’Reilly is visibly shaken by the examination that spells out the extent of the child’s injuries. Whoever was responsible for her injuries definitely tried to rape her and perhaps succeeded. With the evidence before him, O’Reilly has no way of being sure either way.
In his post-mortem report, death, O’Reilly surmises, occurred about 12 hours before he saw the body. He checks police notes and begins to write:
The lower part of the body was dressed in a pair of blue panties and a pair of elastic step-ins. On the genital region of the body and on the crutch region of the panties and step-ins I found a few hair-like fibres and what appeared to be a grass seed. One of these hair-like fibres was found between the lips of the vulva. I collected these and handed them to Detective Senior-Constable John Morris.
Just inside the vagina the lining was superficially torn and it appeared that this region of the vagina had been forcibly dilated. There appeared to be some irregular bruising of the skin in the region of the anus. The dilation of the vagina and bruising around the anus could have been caused by fingers or by an erect penis. It would not have required great force to produce these injuries. The vagina contained a small amount of pink fluid which I examined but could find no spermatozoa. I also took smears from the vagina which were subsequently examined in the State Health Laboratory and no spermatozoa was found.
O’Reilly continues to detail the injuries. Two curved lines of bruising that resemble a bite mark, each 1.5cm long and about 2.5cm apart, on the front of the left thigh just above the knee. The skin is not broken and the bruising not clearly defined. His impression, he notes, is that these marks were inflicted about the same time as the other bruises seen on the body, but they could have been inflicted some hours previously. There is a bruise on Deidre’s forehead about one centimetre in diameter, several poorly defined areas of bruising near the left temple, and bruising, also, on the right temple. The bruises appear consistent with pressure applied by objects similar to the tips of fingers.
The litany of injuries continues. A tiny abrasion just above Deidre’s left eyebrow and some bruising of the left lower eyelid. A superficial scratch on the right cheek and small abrasions of the upper and lower lip. A small haemorrhage on the right side of the neck. A line of bruising on the left side of the neck extending from just below the jaw to the back of the neck.
O’Reilly pauses before he continues detailing his results of the internal examination. Haemorrhage into the scalp and in the so
ft tissues of the neck, both under the line of bruising seen on external examination. Small haemorrhages in the lining of the upper air passages, indicating that pressure had been applied to the neck with enough force to cause obstruction but not enough force to cause any significant injuries to this area. Numerous haemorrhages into the lungs and over the surface of the heart. Deidre’s stomach contained a small amount of partly digested vegetable material and some milk curd. ‘In my opinion,’ he writes, ‘death was due to asphyxia from strangulation.’
The doctor puts down his pen and rubs his eyes, now strained with fatigue. Some days he wonders at the savagery of human beings.
Senior Lecturer in Oral Biology at the University of Queensland, Dr Kornel Romaniuk – known to all as Kon – responded immediately to his colleague O’Reilly’s call. ‘I’ve got a small girl here,’ O’Reilly had told him. ‘Very nasty business. Not yet two years old. She has been murdered, and there are bruises on her left leg. I think they are very possibly bite marks. Can you help?’
Using dental impressions, Romaniuk had helped identify three murder victims in outback Queensland in 1965. Seven years later, he had been called to help in the identification of a skeleton found near Charters Towers. The 18-year-old woman would earn an ignominious place in Queensland’s criminal history as one of the state’s first hitchhiking murder victims. But this was Romaniuk’s first bite mark case and he needed to follow particular steps to match the bite mark on Deidre Kennedy with the offender. First, photograph the bite mark and the suspect dentition – the arrangement of teeth in the mouth – and then compare the two. Second, note and explain similarities and dissimilarities. Third, rule out a suspect if any dissimilarities could not be explained.
Romaniuk bent to the task. He noticed small bruises in the connective tissue. As he examined the body, he spoke to O’Reilly. ‘The marks are caused by human teeth, but they are not the result of a heavy bite. How can I tell this? Because there are no depressions in the skin. A definite type of dentition has produced this mark. Whoever did this has peculiar-shaped teeth.’
When Romaniuk finished his examination, O’Reilly handed him a copy of the black-and-white photographs taken of Deidre’s body at the post-mortem. In death, she looked even smaller than she had been in life.
It all feels so surreal. Falling into a dark hole, a bottomless pit, watching people’s mouths move but unable to absorb what they are saying. Sliding into a black emptiness, separated from the world. Stumbling around the unit, staring into space and washing Deidre’s nappies in the middle of the night. They had found her in the park only that morning and a friend is guiding Faye away from the laundry and back into the lounge room, trying to find words to comfort her. ‘It’s OK, darling, sit down. You don’t need to do this. Deidre is safe now. She doesn’t need her nappies any more.’
It all feels so surreal.
7
Limestone. Captain Patrick Logan, commandant of the convict settlement at Brisbane, recognised it immediately as he navigated and explored the Bremer River in 1826. Five convicts and an overseer were dispatched to quarry the mineable rock and build a lime-burning kiln, signalling the start of the convict era that lasted fifteen years. Conditions were harsh: stinking hot in summer, with no sea breeze to cool the air, and extremely cold in winter, the area was open to drought and flood. Named ‘Limestone’, the small outpost 40 kilometres west of Brisbane existed for little else than provision of a convict base camp for quarrying lime and farming sheep.
Opened to free settlers in 1842, the area was renamed Ipswich the following year and declared a city in 1904. Her fortunes waxed and waned; the region was severely affected by shocking drought, the Great Depression and then World War II. But the war brought its own particular needs: a military airbase was built at Amberley with air-raid shelters and other installations, operating on a skeletal staff from June 1940. Today, Amberley is Australia’s largest operational airbase, employing more than 3500 people and expected to double in size by 2012.
Head south, hit Brisbane; head north, Toowoomba. On quiet weeknights, Ipswich streets, wide enough to turn a tandem semi-trailer in, are used by hoons doing wheelies in front of the sombre heritage buildings. On Sundays, the streets are virtually empty, apart from the odd churchgoer and tourists who wander about, in search of a coffee.
It is a city cut in half by an invisible demarcation line, between the militarised, staid conservatism of the RAAF serving personnel in their air-force blues and the raffish, disorganised civvies. Caught at the crossroads between the growing sophistication of Brisbane and the rural charm of Toowoomba, Ipswich is perched in between, straddling yesterday and tomorrow. Changes in the Queensland economy have eroded her traditional mining, industrial and agricultural base.
In 1973, Ipswich was no more than a big country town that proudly called itself a city. Apart from the transient military population, neighbours knew each other, families stayed close together and kids played on the streets. The brutal murder of a defenceless baby was inconceivable.
On 14 April 1973, the afternoon edition of the Ipswich newspaper heralded the news: ‘BABY GIRL HORROR IN IPSWICH PARK: Manhunt for Sex Maniac’. Ipswich District Chief Inspector McNeil, who was heading the investigation, described it by dint of its circumstances as the most brutal murder he had worked on in his career. Whoever had done this, he told the press, was a deranged pervert. The police would do everything possible to catch him. Someone, McNeill suggested grimly, possibly knew who the killer was. He appealed to the public to think, where does my son, or my brother go when he is out all night? Based on the information supplied to them by Nugget, who police interviewed the day Deidre was found, they had pieced together a description of a youth wanted for questioning. About 17 or 18 years old. Long blond hair. Slim build. Arthur Borchert’s 12-year-old son, Paul, volunteered information to police when he was interviewed. He was returning home from a barbecue, he said, when he saw a youth in his late teens carrying a baby over his shoulder. The infant, Paul said, had something white on its head. Police investigations later ruled out his information. Paul Borchert had not told the truth. He had seen no one. Why had he lied? Police would never know.
The Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, waded in with his opinion, adding weight to the story on prime-time television. ‘We must apprehend the person responsible. It is hard to credit that anyone could do a thing like this.’
What was immediately clear to police was that whoever had murdered Deidre was a psychopath compelled toward deviant behaviour. They did not need the latest technology in forensic-crime profiling to tell them what they could see from the stark photographs: that biting, sexually assaulting and dressing a baby in women’s underwear was the handiwork of a perverse, sick man. But if police were looking for a psychopath, they first needed to understand psychopathic behaviour. What sort of person would behave like this?
Until the 1940s, psychiatrists defined psychopathy as ‘insanity without delirium’. But as research advanced, so too did psychiatrists’ understanding of a psychopath’s behaviour. Overwhelmingly, the psychopath – now referred to amongst psychiatrists as ‘personality disorder, anti-social type’ – lacks empathy for other human beings and has a callous disregard for their pain or anxiety. The cries of victims, or their family’s pleas for mercy, do not move them. They not only don’t care; they quietly salivate at the attention.
Self-centred, shallow and predatory, the psychopath finds it easy to manipulate others into their way of thinking. They lie effortlessly and are irresponsible, like a child who tries to shift blame. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me. Their ability to deceive is so fine-tuned that they easily hoodwink people into believing they are normal. A nice person. The boy next door. Their range of crimes, wider than other criminals, is usually more violent, and their response to treatment frequently unresponsive. Of most concern for police in the Deidre Kennedy case, the violent psychopath is often a recidivist. If the person who murdered Deidre did not kill again, it was very possible h
e would do something of a violent nature. But when, and what, they did not know.
What they did know was that her killer was a paedophile psychopath with tendencies to fetishism. This did not help narrow the possibilities; the most common form of fetishism is dressing people up, and, of that, 58 per cent involves underwear. The range of paedophiles is also wide, commonly falling into three distinct age groups: males over 50, the mid-to-late thirties, and teens. Most paedophiles are heterosexual and many are married fathers. Typically, the frequency of paedophiliac behaviour often fluctuates with psychosocial stress. Emotional stress can trigger unconscious conflicts; people are more likely to behave differently when they are aroused or frightened. Frequently, they do not experience any self-loathing or distress at fantasising about children, or acting out their urges. The act is predominantly about dominance: the adult has the power and there is always an element of sadism. And whilst only a small percentage of paedophiliac encounters result in injury or death to the victim, aggression and sadism by the perpetrator are always inherent.
Paedophiles don’t usually change their behaviour: the majority re-offend. The paedophile’s physical superiority over a child fosters the erotically tinged aggression that is linked to arousal. The aggression may be under control, or subconscious, but it is never far away. Where the victim is a vulnerable child, injury may be inflicted in perverted passion, panic or cold blood.
The stealing of women’s underwear for sexual gratification – ‘paraphilia’ – typically becomes more defined during adolescence and early adulthood. The paraphile is usually male, has more than one fetish and has multiple victims based on each perversion. Frequently, the shy male who has difficulty forming person-to-person relationships is pre-disposed to paraphilia. If they have partners, their sex lives are mundane, dull. The object is needed, or preferred, for sexual arousal; without it, erectile dysfunction is common.