The Devil's Garden Read online

  But they are not all strange calls from strange people. An Irish woman sends a CD of Irish lullabies to the Glennon family. They may, she hopes, be of some comfort to them. Denise's wedding goes ahead, but not as planned. No black-tie reception, no bridesmaid; just a quiet ceremony, private and sacred. Denis thanks the guests for attending, and the bride and groom go home. This is a time for prayers, not celebrations.

  ***

  Fear is paralysing commonsense and women react in different ways. Petrified of strangers, one who lives in Claremont is chased by police after refusing to stop at a roadblock on a country road. An intoxicated teenager walking alone through Claremont late at night gives police a spray of abuse when they warn her she should take more precautions. They let her walk, following her from a discreet distance.

  Radio station Triple M kicks off a personal safety campaign for women. 'The best plan is to have a plan. Decide before you go out how you'll get home.' They keep hammering the messages. 'Meeting Mr Wonderful is every girl's dream, but sometimes connecting in a smoky nightclub can cloud your vision. If you think you want to go home with someone you've just met, tell your friends, and if he won't give his name or phone number, go no further! Don't walk alone. Tell your family and friends where you are going. Write down the taxi number if a friend gets in. Key an emergency police number into your mobile phone. Be alert. Be careful. Take no chances.'

  And the young heed the warnings. For a time.

  23

  3 April 1997: four days after Easter. There is a body lying in the scrub, slushy in death. Jason, a 24-year-old labourer, is wandering through the bush, jarring to a halt as he sees her. It is not yet lunchtime but the sun is high and the sharp, hard light morbidly illuminates the pitiful scene. Despite being concealed by branches and twigs, he can just make out a partly naked body. He turns away, fearful and distraught, and runs to the nearby house of his former boss, George Kyme, to call the police. He can barely articulate what he has seen, shaking and gibbering that there is a dead woman out there. He splutters it out the best way he knows how. 'Whoever did this,' he blurts, 'is one sick fuck.' Taken into the station where he is questioned by police, he is made to sign a confidentiality agreement that he will not divulge to anyone what he has seen. Ever.

  Telstra workers in the area had smelt the decomposing body days earlier but had reasoned it was a dead kangaroo. Ciara Glennon has been missing for 19 days. This time, it is Assistant Commissioner Bob Ibbotson himself who knocks on the Glennons' door.

  If ever the family need to call on their faith, it is now.

  Don Spiers's family hears the news through the media, his wife, Carol, hears it via a friend. A woman's body has been found in the bush and police are yet to identify who it is. Within a short time Don is told it is not Sarah, but the shock elicits a heartbreaking response from him. 'Every time I hear of a similar case, I know what those parents are going through and I relive it. It's an endless, endless torment.' But he is angry, too. It's not good enough, he grimaces, to hear news like that through the press. The media should consult first with police to see whether the victims' families will be distressed by the reports. They are pariahs.

  Across the river, the Rimmers watch and listen to the news on radio and television, silently uniting with the Glennons in their despair. Is it Ciara?

  Driving back from the funeral of a business partner who had died of cancer, Neil Fearis hears that a body, believed to be Ciara's, has been found in the scrub. He calls the police and offers to identify her body. 'That won't be necessary, Mr Fearis,' they tell him. 'Thank you, anyway.' He has the impression there is perhaps little left to identify.

  He calls to see the Glennons two hours after they have received the news. There was, he remembers, a heartbreaking sense of loss in the room, a mixture of sadness and resignation but relief, too, that the uncertainty was finally over. Denis is composed, grateful for the visit. It is a composure that will not last.

  The forensic team know only too well what they will find. Ciara has been here for 19 days, dumped to become a banquet for foxes, crows and other wild creatures: dogs, cats, rats, pigs. Lying here through an uncharacteristically hot March, with autumn temperatures in the mid-30s and torrential thunder-storms that drenched her semi-naked body. Her flesh will be fetid and decomposed; insects would have started feasting within 20 minutes, laying eggs within 12 hours. This weather is a perfect incubator for nature's creatures. The hideous sight of Ciara in situ will return again and again to haunt the police officers who are first at the scene, turn their stomachs and make them determined to find whoever did this to her.

  Ciara's disposal site, on a sandy track off the unsealed Pipidinny Road, is isolated, remote, the nearest house 500 metres east. Acacia trees and a sudden drop conceal the area from traffic that passes day and night on the track. Police know that, on average, offenders travel 27 kilometres to dump their first body, a distance that becomes shorter as the murders continue. Ciara's killer has travelled even further: 40 kilometres. He would have turned his car onto the track and dumped her, not hanging around the area unless he wanted to.

  Mick Buckley recalls the information passed on from Dr Dunn's patient, that Ciara's murder would take place at Yanchep. 'When they found Ciara's body, she was only a few kilometres from Yanchep. That was very, very odd.'

  The media are camped two kilometres from where Ciara's body was discovered, held back by a strong police presence. A television crew desperate to break from the pack and get exclusive images sneaks around another way, walking on sand tracks and getting within 70 metres of Ciara's body before they are spotted and told by a ropable Tony Potts to piss off. The reporter, spying a blonde hair on a tree trunk, feeds the public the story that police are searching for a suspect with blonde hair. It is not only frustrating for police; the information is dangerously wrong, leading the public in a scattered direction and giving the killer further confidence. A confident killer will strike again, soon. It isn't human hair. It is horse hair.

  The tension and pressure are so palpable, Tony Potts – media savvy and usually placid – threatens to arrest Rex Haw when the reporter swears at him for wanting to call a news conference in the city at 4.30 pm. They are 40 kilometres away; it will take them at least an hour to get back to the city. And they have a news broadcast to get out by 6.30 pm.

  Forensic pathologist Karen Margolis and Macro officers Richard Lane and Paul Ferguson attend at the scene. By six o'clock, when their sad business is done, Ciara's body is taken to the city morgue.

  24

  Jane and Ciara's disposal sites follow a pattern. Eighty-six kilometres apart, but both around 30 minutes drive from Perth's centre and both not far from a major arterial road. This killer is cocky, arrogant. He knows the bodies are going to be found, probably sooner rather than later.

  Eglinton. Bordered on the Indian Ocean and named after the barque Eglinton that violently smashed on nearby rocks, Aboriginal legend claims the Pipidinny swamp was created from the meat and blood of crocodile tail. Covered in banksia woodland, scrubland and heath, it is so lonely that the area registers a nil population. There is a beach at the end of the road, and the track that passes where Ciara is dumped is a popular route to a fishing spot. Who uses this area? Who would know it? Swimmers, anglers, divers, surfers, bush-walkers, 4WD enthusiasts. It doesn't narrow the field. But the fact that access is only available via Pipidinny Road – meaning the killer could not have got out any other way – may help.

  The incessant rain over the Easter long weekend has eroded tyre tracks and footprints and a strong sea breeze has deposited fine layers of salt and sand around the scene. Like Jane Rimmer's disposal site, the area is afforded the same critical care as an archaeological dig, a radius of five kilometres sealed as police spread out in sections searching for minute detail.

  After the family has been briefed, Paul Ferguson does a live cross to the media from police headquarters. Without forensic proof, police cannot yet publicly acknowledge the identity of the body,
but the media have guessed and are told, unofficially. It gives them time to prepare tomorrow's headlines.

  Perth wakes to the headline splashed on the front page of The West Australian on 4 April 1997. It is personal, poignant. 'Ciara's body found in bush. A state mourns.' There is no need for surnames, now. The entire city is on a first-name basis with these women. Sarah. Jane. Ciara. The entire city is in mourning.

  The hours and the stress are taking their toll. Driving home, Paul Ferguson's thoughts are consumed by Ciara's murder. The bastard's got another one. Right under our nose. The media will crucify us. And another family is left to pick up the pieces. Normally a careful driver, he doesn't notice the speedo accelerating to well over 100 kilometres an hour as the car barrels over a causeway and runs straight through a red light. An oncoming car screams on the brakes a second before they collide.

  In his quieter moments, away from the hurdy-gurdy of the station, Paul Ferguson thinks about the families. It is his way to go to homicide scenes or disposal sites, to sit reflectively and try to reconstruct the moments, to make some sense of what was done to the victim and to put himself in the mind of the killer. He admits he can't cope at traffic accident scenes, the sudden deaths of people trapped in vehicles or spewed onto the road, but years of working the 'whodunits' have taught him to always expect the unexpected, to keep an open mind.

  The families are all so different. The Spiers: country people with organised lives, open, naïve and trusting. The Rimmers: easygoing, suburban, accustomed to the city, more broad-minded in their approach. And the Glennons: private, wealthy, empowered, accustomed to a life of privilege. Three families, joined by a tragedy outside their control. Three families, suddenly rendered powerless.

  The disappearances and murders are taking their toll on all the investigators. With robberies or non-violent offences, police can afford to sit back and wait until the offender makes a mistake. They can't do that with this maniac on the loose.

  By the following day, police have pulled out their big guns, Commissioner Falconer giving a lengthy, convoluted message to the public. Paul Ferguson's message is simpler. 'As terrible as this discovery is,' he says, 'it is a major breakthrough for investigators. Offenders of this nature have been found to be compulsive drivers who spend a lot of time with their cars and are concerned with the appearance of their car.' Did anyone, he continues, arrive home agitated between the hours of 3 am and dawn? And did they clean and polish their vehicle? The questions hang over police like a dark shadow. If they can answer them, they have some hope of getting close to this killer. If they can't, they are back to praying he – or they – make a mistake. Even the smallest slip-up can bring them undone.

  From which exit did Ciara leave the Continental Hotel? Where was she, and with whom during a 25-minute gap in her whereabouts at the hotel? Did she reach the Stirling Highway? Was she aware the other girls were missing? How did she plan to get home? Was she headed somewhere else when she left? Did she plan to meet someone? What are the similarities with Jane Rimmer's abduction? They know that Jane, like Sarah Spiers, was educated at Iona Presentation College at Mosman Park – near Claremont. Is there a link?

  25

  With limited information forthcoming from police, Perth residents resort to rumour-mongering, engaging in a game of Chinese whispers that is further embellished as time goes on. Fear and ignorance drive the gossip, and rumours that gross mutilation was visited on Ciara's body lead police to an early frontal attack, carried on the front page of The West Australian on 15 April. 'The fact that we keep under our hat what caused the death enables us to ID where a person is telling fact or fiction,' Caporn said. But the swipe at the public did not work. The rumours keep circulating, driven by the simple reality that facts can't be checked with police.

  Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows who the killer is. Urban myths spring up like mush-rooms: a teacher knows a woman who got into a taxi that turned out to be suspect; Sarah Spiers's wallet has been found in a car in Port Hedland; the killer dresses as a woman in order to seduce the victims into his car; police officers know the killer is a cop and protect him. Everyone is an armchair detective, the case endless fodder for dinner party conversations. The killer has removed the door locks from inside the car so the girls can't get out. They are trapped, ready for his next move. A gun or knife is held to their head and they are silenced with fear. They are injected with a sedative and wake later, tied and captive. They are knocked on the head with a blunt object and instantly disabled. Always conjecture, no facts. And the saddest, most damaging rumours of all: that the girls' bodies were dismembered and mutilated after death, their killer a doctor, a cop on the Macro taskforce, or a debauched couple seeking thrills through murder.

  'Channel 9 television had camera footage of where Jane Rimmer was found, and of her body,' Luke Morfesse says. 'There was a lot of speculation about dismemberment. Obviously they didn't air footage of her body, but my under-standing is that there was no gross mutilation.'

  But Macro insiders believe the girls could well have been kept alive after the abduction, used as a plaything for the killer to satisfy his macabre lusts before he decided he had had enough of the game and moved up a gear. Perhaps he held them at his house, where he feels safe, or at a house he knows, if there is no one else home; in a caravan or deserted building, where no one can hear their cries. And perhaps he held them, too, after death, revelling in his power, relishing the chance to humiliate them, moving their limbs into different positions, keeping them close, like debauched mannequins, before tiring of this and tossing them away in the scrub.

  In the first instance, Morfesse recalls that all the Perth media understood that the cops had a job to do. But it wasn't always plain sailing. 'Early in the piece, Bob Ibbotson had a go at me, calling me irresponsible after we called the murders the work of a "serial" killer. The concern seemed to be about the fallout from the public, the drama it would cause in stirring up fear, more so than the fact that there was a serial killer out there. But they did some great things, went to painstaking lengths, like after Ciara disappeared when they plotted a street map of the Claremont area and spoke to every person who was in the area the night she vanished.'

  Mick Buckley becomes involved in checking other theories forwarded to him regarding suspects. 'I received a call from a woman who nominated her former husband, a taxi driver, as the serial killer,' he says. 'He was originally from Victoria, and she claimed he was responsible for the so-called "Lover's Lane" murders in the early '80s and that of another two females – a woman and a child. He then left Victoria and spent quite a lot of time in Queensland, driving into New South Wales. In one particular area there, there were a few unsolved murders, which she also believed was his handiwork. He then moved to Western Australia, living very close to where the prostitutes at Northbridge were murdered.' Buckley forwards the man's name to the Macro taskforce. 'They investigated him, but what they came up with I don't know. But they definitely tipped him over for a look.'

  Buckley tells of another informant who nominated three men and a woman as responsible for the killings and who passed the information to a university professor. 'One of the men was a taxi driver and the woman used to travel in the car with him. She had been a patient at a drug rehabilitation centre two kilometres from Wellard, where Jane Rimmer's body was dumped. The cabbie had been driving the night Jane went missing and couldn't explain his movements between critical hours late that night. The professor passed the information to police, but to my knowledge nothing was done about that. They ignored it.'

  Buckley also has dealings with psychics regarding the case. 'One woman actually paid us $3000 to go with her to a place she nominated. It was an old deserted flour factory, three-storeys high near Karrakatta Cemetery. We spent three days with her, looking through the place. We found nothing.'

  Another psychic told Buckley after Sarah Spiers disappeared that police should be looking for a serial killer. 'A journalist from the now defunct newspaper Vin
cent Times did a story on the murders I had covered and also interviewed the psychic. He gave the tape of that conversation to Major Crime,' he says. 'They didn't want to know about it and they certainly made no contact with me to see if I could throw any further light on anything. A week after they were given the tape, Jane Rimmer went missing.'

  Buckley is adamant that there should be an inquest into the disappearance of Sarah Spiers. 'Why hasn't that been done? I am very concerned about that. Western Australia police have stuffed up so many murder cases that victims' families often come to us, asking for our help. Do I think they have stuffed Claremont as well? I certainly do.'

  In his line of work, Buckley has encountered a lot of deviant people. 'You know, the worst thing about this whole story is not just that these crimes are unsolved. It's the amount of people in Western Australia who could be responsible for the crimes. So many people with form who could have done it. Educated, uneducated, it makes no difference. Taxi drivers. Police. Criminals. Sexual psychopaths. Doctors. Lawyers. When you start to investigate these sorts of horrific crimes, the sickos who crawl out of the woodwork are truly frightening.'

  Psychological profilers wade in. The finding of the body, they say, will have a significant impact on the killer's demeanour. That person may suddenly start missing work or leave early; lack concentration; change their plans; develop headaches, mood swings or display reclusive behaviour. Employers are asked to be vigilant, particularly of employees who can't account for their movements. Do they live alone? Have they had a recent emotional trauma such as a marriage break-up? Does their work ensure them flexibility and mobility? And, they warn, the killer may also revel in the notoriety, hoarding souvenirs or press clippings about the murders.