Justice In Jeopardy Page 4

  Diagnosis of fetishism involves a determination that the patient has fantasised, over a period of at least six months, about the use of non-living objects. It is a compulsion. These recurrent and intense fantasies interfere with a person’s ability to function and are not limited to cross-dressing or stimulation using sex aids. Subconsciously, the fetish is associated with people of importance in childhood, whether they are remembered in a negative or a positive light.

  What psychiatrists don’t know is the exact cause of the disorders. Perhaps memory of a disturbed childhood experience, replayed? One psychiatrist recorded that he had seen patients who, during their sexual stage of development, had watched their sister put on underwear and then developed a bizarre connection with pants and bras. Another had a patient who, in early adolescence, repeatedly broke into neighbours’ homes and stole underwear and lingerie. He would then sneak home, dress up in the stolen booty and masturbate. Raised in a foster home, as a toddler he had been dressed in female clothing and treated as a girl. He could not remember his past, but it stayed in his subconscious, re-surfacing years later. Fetishists often go to extremes, including theft, to add to their collection. But many don’t seek treatment because they want to; often, their partner forces them to get help, they collide with the law, or are caught going through a girl’s underwear drawer.

  Harmless on the surface, a fetish can often be the signal of much darker tendencies. As a teenager, American Jerome Brudos started stealing lingerie from neighbours’ yards and within a few years had developed a foot fetish. He eventually became a serial killer, choosing his victims by their footwear. On occasions, he would cut the feet off his victims and keep them in a freezer. When the mood seized him, he would take the foot out of the freezer and dress it in different shoes for sexual excitement.

  The indications were strong that whoever had killed Deidre Kennedy had delayed psychosexual development. What had caused that delay would not be so clear, but psychiatrists know that once conflict and fear has filtered through the child’s mind into memory, these are not easily erased. In their search to understand a mind unbalanced by fetish, many psychiatrists turned to Freud for answers.

  Soft and sensuous, with more nerve endings than any other part of the body, the mouth remains very important to our psychosexual development and sexual expression. The first stage of a child’s development is sucking, the oral phase; people who do not mature beyond this are fairly common. The sucking reflex is required for survival, but people with derailed psychosexual development do not move beyond this stage. But why inflict bite marks? In a playful manner, biting is normal in lovemaking. But in the mind of a person with disordered development, anger and aggression frequently simmers over into acts of sado-masochism.

  Psychiatrists knew that the person who bit Deidre wasn’t consciously thinking about doing it; instead, he was highly aroused and following uncontrollable urges to gratify his deviant sexual expression. And, while there may have been some ejaculation or climax involved (masturbation during, or at the end of the sexual act) that was by no means necessarily what drove the compulsion to bite the baby.

  Strangling is often another step in the sadistic ritual – not an act to silence the victim, but a further element of gratification. It is the ultimate dominance, like snuff movies where girls or boys are murdered on video. Psychiatrists theorised it was quite likely that Deidre’s killer may well have spontaneously ejaculated as he strangled her. Because no ejaculate was found, it didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  Was the abduction and murder planned or opportunistic? Predators plan their activities. Paedophiles may take months to insinuate themselves into a family to gain access to children, but that does not mean they would look a gift horse in the mouth. If something tantalising is offered to them by chance, they will accept it.

  Having achieved his goal to abduct Deidre, the killer’s next step would have been to immediately examine her clothing. The pilchers – the plastic pants that cover the nappy to stop urine soaking through to the baby’s clothing – first would have had to be removed. Vulnerability is a key element of the excitement and the pilchers were an unwanted barrier against that. He would have removed the pilchers but would not have thrown the pyjamas away, because they were a symbol of the child’s defencelessness. And then he re-dressed her. Panties first. Then step-ins. And finally the half slip.

  She is ready now, dressed for the taking. All his. A vulnerable child with skin as smooth as a woman. A sensuous, sexual woman who can’t say no.

  How could an adult male defile and then murder such a small baby? What sort of sex drive would the killer have? Very possibly high, but not for a mature adult on an equal footing. The preference of paedophiles is for children; paedophiles often have a low sex drive with adults, failing to maintain mature heterosexual adult-to-adult interest or performance. They dominate children because adults threaten them and they don’t like that. They like to do the threatening. But it is only in the realm of sexual expression that people with psychosexual problems need display anything abnormal at all. With people such as family and friends, they are normal.

  Whether planned or opportunistic, the murder of baby Deidre Kennedy was a gross, predatory act carried out without emotion. This was not a crime of passion: the goal was the cold-blooded taking of a vulnerable baby. There was virtually no chance that this killer would come forward with a confession. Apart from the fear of detailing his crime to police and the fall-out that would follow from confessing, the murder had not made him feel guilty. On the contrary: it had energised and excited him.

  Psychiatrists now understand that adult-child sexual contact is far more common than it was known to be 30 years ago. But, in 1973, psychological profiling was still in its infancy and it would take years for therapists to work out diagnostic criteria for the perpetrator’s profile. Right now, with the killer at large and a hysterical public demanding justice, the police had to figure a way to beat the murderer at his own game. And they had to do it fast.

  8

  Calls are issued for the driver of four cars, seen in Limestone Park on the night of the murder, to come forward. A van seen around 11pm, close to where Deidre’s body was found. A Ford Zephyr in the same area around midnight. A 1958 Station Sedan seen parking at approximately 12.30 and leaving again 10 minutes later. A small Japanese car parked on the west side of the park and sighted earlier near the Kennedys’ block of units.

  Time is of the essence. Every hour of an early investigation is critical. They have now lost four days.

  Mobilising 17 detectives, six uniformed police, and scientific and fingerprint experts, police begin the most intensive search ever undertaken in Ipswich. They face, one wryly notes, a ‘long, tough slog’. Most police do double shifts in an attempt to sift through the avalanche of information pouring in from the public. They access the database of known child molesters in Queensland and interstate but, without the technology of computers, it is a laborious and often thankless task, linking up with their national counterparts and checking the whereabouts of strong possible suspects over the weekend of Friday the 13th and Saturday 14th. Patients at local mental institutions are checked for fingerprints, and as many leads as possible are followed up. Nugget is shown photographs of different male persons, but he can identify none of them as being the prowler he saw on the veranda. ‘Nup. Nup. Nope.’ He shakes his head as each photograph follows the last. Police do not publish an identikit picture of the person Nugget has described seeing on the veranda and give no explanation why. Instead, an artist draws a sketch of a prowler who has plagued a woman some distance away from the scene and publishes the image in the local paper. Police are interested in all prowlers, but this one proves elusive.

  In the week following the crime, John Howard, the officer in charge of the Fingerprint Bureau in Brisbane, has examined the Kennedy flat and the scene for fingerprints. All males in Ipswich and surrounding areas are asked to volunteer prints, and more than 3500 people come forward.

&n
bsp; They all return a negative result.

  Swamped by calls from the public but with no worthwhile fresh leads, police issue a call for people to be vigilant. Inspector McNeil clears his throat and adjusts his tie before staring down the lens of a television camera to ask that people consider their conscience if they are protecting a sadistic killer who could strike again. ‘Whoever abducted and killed Deidre must have shown some reaction later, either at home or with friends,’ he intones. ‘Do you remember anyone who acted strangely the next day? Last Saturday? Was that person out alone on Friday night, probably well into Saturday morning? If so, he is worth considering as a possible suspect. And if he has some background of sexual misbehaviour, then he becomes a real prospect for suspicion.’

  Police also face another pressing problem. While the public bray for the killer to be found and the media keeps the story on the boil by giving it daily front-page coverage, the police have more questions than answers. And they know that each day the crime remains unsolved, the more difficult the investigation becomes. If a strong lead is going to break, it very often happens in the first 72 hours.

  In the engine room of the police station, they hug coffee cups and fill ashtrays to overflowing as they work through the long nights grappling with their queries. Aerial shots of Ipswich are laid out on the table and maps covered in arrows point to all entrances and exits to Limestone Park and its proximity to Short Street.

  For the third time in as many days, they run through the questions again. Does the killer have local knowledge of the area? The general consensus is that he does. The toilet block in the middle of the park seems to have been chosen as a specific target. How likely is it that a stranger from out of town would know where that is? The sexual assault and murder: were they planned or opportunistic? If planned, had the killer known that Barry Kennedy had been in and out of hospital, was incapacitated on crutches and that his family had returned to Ipswich around dawn on the morning his daughter was abducted? If not planned, did the killer, perhaps frustrated by an unsatisfactory visit to a house of ill repute close to where the Kennedys lived, instead impulsively seize the opportunity to abduct the sleeping baby? Both scenarios seem equally possible, and the police keep a question mark next to these.

  ‘Any chance that there was more than one person involved? Maybe even a woman, which might explain how the baby was kept so quiet?’The question, asked by a young cop, hangs in the air before it is answered. The idea has been mooted before but while there seems little reason to believe this is the case, the sheer audacity of the crime means the possibility can’t be ignored.

  ‘In some ways we want to hope that there were two people,’ a senior sergeant replies. ‘At least that way there’s always the chance that one person may break, split on the other. But, for my money, this bloke acted alone.’

  The questions continue. Where was Deidre taken immediately after she was picked up from her cot? Was she sexually assaulted and murdered either in a private home or caravan and later dumped on the toilet block? With no eyewitness or information coming from the public to support this theory, they have no way of knowing. Did the killer get into a vehicle parked away from the unit after he abducted her, or leave on foot? The balance of probabilities is that he walked away from Short Street, but again, there is no proof.

  An officer wearily checks his watch. It’s 2am and he has put in only a brief appearance with his family in the past week since the murder. ‘Anyone want another coffee?’ he asks, and a heap of hands rise in unison. He wishes he hadn’t asked. At this rate, they will definitely see the sun come up again today.

  A detective has now hijacked the questions. What about the foreign seed found on Deidre’s body? It didn’t come from the park, so what was its origin? There are two possible explanations: either the killer unwittingly passed the seed on to her at some stage during the night, or she had picked it up from another place outside the park after she was taken from her bedroom. ‘And what happened to the pilchers? Why weren’t they with the rest of her clothes? Any clues?’ The detective looks around the room, and silence answers that question.

  How did Deidre get on the toilet block roof? Had her killer suddenly panicked after he killed her and thrown her up there, hoping she would not be found, or did he drive his vehicle to the block, stand on the seat for added height and deliberately place her there where she would be found? Or a third scenario: was she dragged up by someone who had first climbed on the roof? This last seems highly unlikely, judging by the sceptical looks on the coppers’ faces, but the question has to be asked.

  ‘OK,’ the detective says, recognising the officers are showing signs of extreme fatigue, ‘last question. If Deidre was not strangled at the same time she was abducted, why didn’t her cries wake her sleeping family?’

  ‘Because whoever did it was hardly going to announce his arrival and make a racket getting in and out of the unit,’ an older officer responded, with some exasperation. ‘And look at the facts. The father had been in hospital having an operation, the mother was exhausted from looking after two kids on a bloody long bus trip back from Longreach and Deidre’s sister, only five years old, was fast asleep. I reckon that might explain that question.’

  They will run through all their questions again tomorrow night. And the night after. More than 30 years later, there will still not be any answers.

  Starting with houses around the streets closest to Limestone Park and then fanning further out, the doorknocks take weeks. Knocking, waiting, showing ID. How many people live in this house? Are there any males in the house over the age of 12? Would all males in this household voluntarily supply fingerprints? Where were they on the night and morning of April 13 and 14? Were there any visitors to the household on those days who have since left Ipswich? By the time the doorknocks are complete, police have spoken to thousands of people. But, if anyone has lied, or has been coolly protecting a friend or relative, it is very difficult to check. Police can only rely on fingerprint evidence and the theory that innocent people usually tell the truth. Usually, but by no means always.

  Stymied by a lack of leads, Kennedy investigators look to an English case solved 25 years earlier, charting the comparisons and bizarre coincidences of both crimes.

  In November 1948, sullen 22-year-old ex-guardsman Peter Griffiths was hanged in England for the rape and murder of four-year-old June Devaney earlier that year. Just after midnight, the small girl was abducted from her cot at Queen’s Park Hospital, Blackburn. Three hours later, her savagely mutilated body was found in a hay barn, less than half a kilometre from where she had slept. The girl had been raped in the hospital grounds, swung by one leg and killed by smashing her head against a stone wall. Police had few clues to work with: blood, hairs and clothing fibres found in the hospital grounds; fingerprints on a water bottle; a footprint on the freshly washed ward floor; and foreign hairs on the victim’s body. Against a backdrop of massive public hysteria, police were pressured as never before to find the killer.

  All but one fingerprint on the water bottle was identified and Scotland Yard mobilised all their resources to find a match for the lone print. None was found in the police database of known criminals, nor from the 2000 people who had access to the hospital. The decision was made to fingerprint every man who lived at Blackburn, a city of some 25,000 people. But, by the third month following the murder, all 40,000 sets of prints – the largest ever taken in England – failed to yield a match.

  But cross-referencing data showed that a few men in Blackburn had not yet provided their prints. One of those men was Peter Griffiths, who acted surprised when his footprints matched those found at the scene. Police had finally hit pay dirt: when his fingerprints also matched those found on the bottle, Griffiths confessed. He pleaded not guilty at his three-day trial but, with overwhelming forensic evidence against him, the jury took just 23 minutes to convict him.

  The similarities between the June Devaney case and that of Deidre Kennedy are overwhelming. A small child, probab
ly chosen opportunistically. Abduction from a cot, apparently witnessed by no one, despite adults being in the immediate vicinity. A stealthy entrance and exit by the perpetrator. Sexual interference followed by murder, probably close to where the kidnap had occurred. June Devaney had been found in the grounds of Queen’s Park Hospital; Deidre Kennedy at Limestone Park, part of the larger Queen’s Park in Ipswich.

  Ipswich police also have little evidence to work from. Fingerprints found on the toilet door at the park. Foreign hairs located on Deidre’s body. Their best bet, they decide, is to follow the English model and take fingerprints of every man in the Ipswich area.

  Every man.

  Police talk to likely suspects and Kon Romaniuk gives models of seven sets of their teeth to a panel of ten eminent dentists. He has considerable experience in forensic pathology, but human bite marks are outside his expertise. He wants other opinions.

  They will test for the identification of teeth marks using acetate tracing, a delicate method that is complicated and slow. First, plaster casts of both the lower and upper jaw will be made to produce a model of the teeth. Next, the model will be traced onto a thin sheet of semi-transparent material with a small amount of stretch superimposed over the teeth. Tracings will then be drawn and overlaid on the photograph of the bruise patterns.

  The government botanist analyses the plant fragments found on Deidre’s clothing, in the hope they might offer a clue to where the killer came from. Was Deidre taken miles from her home by car, murdered where this particular plant grew, and later dumped in the park? It is not beyond reason the plant material might help: in 1960, the kidnap and murder mystery of eight-year-old Bondi schoolboy Graham Thorne was solved in Sydney by analysis of the relatively rare plant material that was found on his body. Postmen were asked to be vigilant on their mail runs to see if the plant was growing in gardens on their rounds. It paid off: a postman found the plant in a suburb near Bondi and the killer, by then halfway to London, was returned to Australia, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.