Before I Sleep (27 page)

Les Radcliff's nine-year-old daughter vanished from the Adelaide Oval a few years before we started VOCS. She and another girl had been at a sporting event with Les. The girls had gone to the toilet. Les waited and waited for them to return, but they never came back. Judy Barnes brought Les to our first VOCS meeting. I liked Les a lot, but he had one overwhelming obsession: he thought he would be able to recognise the man who had kidnapped his daughter. I questioned him about this and in reality he only had a very vague idea of the features of the man he suspected. Indeed, I was not sure that Les had any valid recollection on which to base his conviction.

Les felt the loss of his daughter very deeply and I suspected that he was experiencing guilt over her disappearance, that he felt he should have looked after the girls better at the oval. The disappearance totally dominated the Radcliff family for years after the event. Les used to take his son to Rundle Street and wait outside the picture theatres, watching the patrons emerge after a film because he felt sure that if the man appeared he would recognise him. He did this for years, going anywhere there was a large crowd. It really was a complete obsession.

Les and I became friends, although I didn't see as much of him as I'd have liked. I was fairly busy with other victims and Les felt he had this duty to find his daughter's kidnapper. The case was a complete mystery and remains so to this day. Some years ago, Les's wife rang me and said that Les had not been well for some time. He had cancer and only had a few days to live. I went out to their home and knocked on the door with some trepidation. I wasn't sure in my own mind what I could say to Les. I had never faced such a situation. Their son came to the door and welcomed me and led me into the lounge where Les's wife told me Les was in bed and expecting me. I went through into the bedroom and found Les in a nicely made-up bed, propped up with pillows.

Les said: “Come in Ray, sit down.”

I said: “Les, I've just come to see if there is anything I can do to help you.”

He said: “No, it's all arranged. I've drawn up a list of pall bearers. I've been through the service with the minister. It's all organised, Ray, you needn't worry. Now, what about you? It seems to me you haven't spent all that much time on yourself these last few years. What would you have liked to do?”

I said: “I'd have liked to have gone fishing. I'm no sailor, I'd have had to fish off the wharves.”

He said: “Ray, you're one of us. I really enjoyed the time I spent fishing down at Port Adelaide.” He turned to his son and said, “Go and get the street directory.”

The lad got the street directory and Les opened it at the map that showed the Port Adelaide wharves.

“When the tide's high,” Les said, “you fish here, at this spot, I'll mark it with an X. But if the wind's blowing from the north you have to transfer over to the other side and fish there. Now, there's a seasonal change you have to take into account, but my son knows all about that. So when you next want to go fishing, ring him up and he'll take you down to the wharves.”

Then Les asked his son to bring him his supply of hooks and the lad fetched a glass jar of fishing hooks. Les went through the collection, placing some aside in a smaller, vaseline jar. He said: “Now, Ray, these are special hooks. The best I've got. I'll give you two samples of each. My son will show you how to rig up the line, and which hooks to use and which sinkers to use. And I hope you have many happy years of fishing.”

I suppose I must have spent an hour with Les, fifty-five minutes of which involved Les seeing how he could help me get fun out of fishing. When I left Les and his wife and son, I left in a much happier frame of mind than I'd been in when I arrived. Les died two days later. I couldn't get to the service because I had to visit another VOCS member who urgently needed to see me. But Les's complete disregard of his own situation when he knew he was dying touched me deeply and has stayed with me ever since. I've not yet been able to take up his offer of having his son show me where to fish, but I still have those hooks in a glass jar. They occupy a special place in my study.

By 1993, VOCS had become recognised by the state government and was in receipt of a substantial annual grant which enabled it to employ a full-time professional staff of seven people. Mavis and I were given a public dinner in recognition of our contribution to the founding and developing of VOCS. Over two hundred people attended, including the state attorney-general, judges, barristers and many crime victims.

11
But presently …

T
HE South Australian government appointed me to the Prisons Advisory Committee for a three-year term. Once a month, the committee visited a prison and reported on conditions and made recommendations for improvement. On one occasion, we were visiting the medium security prison near Murray Bridge. I was already experiencing difficulties with my hips and was not looking forward to the brisk walking that our visit would involve. I suggested to the other five members that they undertake the full inspection while I just pottered around on my own. I went out into the grounds and discovered a prisoner digging with difficulty a garden out of very hard-packed earth. He was using four heavy sleepers to establish a border to his patch. I fell into conversation with him and he told me his name was Big Jim Smith. He was indeed big, a fit bloke, pleasant to talk to. He didn't appear to be an experienced gardener, but he said he was determined to grow something in the dirt. I suggested that he try to get hold of some manure or fertiliser. Later I sent him a copy of
Yates' Garden Guide.
I asked a few questions and discovered that Big Jim Smith was in the last two years of a life sentence imposed because he had drowned his wife and two children in a bath.

The next time the committee visited the prison, the plot was looking quite respectable. Jim told me he was doing well, he'd read
Yates' Garden Guide
and had high hopes for his little patch. He reckoned that by the time his two years were up he'd be able to leave behind a well-established garden. But on the next visit, the garden was gone. It might never have existed. There had been a break-out from the prison and the escapees had used the timber sleepers from Big Jim's plot to get themselves over the wall. The prison guards were of the opinion that Jim had only pretended to be interested in gardening to get his sleepers into position. Jim protested and managed to get himself transferred to Cadel, an open farm prison near Renmark.

In Cadel he was put in charge of the chooks. There were two types: egg-layers and meat chooks. When the committee later visited Cadel, I asked Jim how he was doing. He was full of enthusiasm, saying “Come and look at this, Ray” and showing me his chook sheds. “Of course,” he said, “these screws are numbers mad.”

I said: “What do you mean?”

He said: “We have a roll call in the morning and a roll call at night, and if the numbers are right, things are fine. But if we're a bloke short, there's all hell to pay. The guy might be on the toilet or at the doctor's or something, but the screws go bananas. The screws are just mad about numbers. They're even making things difficult with the chooks.”

“How come?” I said.

“Last week,” he said, “I had a batch of eating hens to go to Eudunda.”

I said, “Why do they have to go to Eudunda?”

Jim said: “That's the central dressing place. It's fully-automated. You put your chooks in live one end and they come out packaged in plastic at the other. I had to take down a hundred and the screw came to me and said: ‘You got a hundred ready to go, Jim?' and I said: ‘Yeah,' but the bloke went and counted them all and said, ‘There's only ninety-nine.' The guy was carrying on, reckoned I'd eaten the last chook. So he did another count and there was still only ninety-nine. So then the screw said the truck couldn't leave, not until there's a hundred on board. So when the screw wasn't looking I grabbed one of the little laying hens and stuck it in with the meat chooks. Then I said, ‘Let's do one last count', and whad-dayou know, there's a hundred in there.”

Jim and the warder had left for Eudunda in the truck. At the chicken processing plant it was necessary for the growers to place their chooks on the conveyor line, hanging them upside down by their feet. The first stage in the line was automatic beheading by a machine set at the right height for meat hens. After that the bodies were plucked, disemboweled, dismembered and packaged. The trouble was, the single laying hen was shorter than the others. The blade missed its neck.

“You can guess what happened,” Jim said. He thought it was a huge joke.

In the meantime, Big Jim had fallen in love. He had been exchanging letters with a social worker in the United States, one thing had led to another and they had agreed to get married. The young woman left the United States, much to the dismay of her parents, arrived in Adelaide, married Jim in gaol and found work in the Government Insurance Office. She rented a house and set up a home in anticipation of Big Jim's release. One day Jim rang me up and said that he was in Renmark hospital after a hernia operation. “It's a pity I can't get my wife up here,” he said, “just for the day. Because I can scrounge an extra day in hospital by saying I'm not fully recovered. We haven't been together since we were married. The doctors are very sympathetic.”

I told Jim I'd see what I could do. I rang his wife and suggested that Mavis and I drive her up to Renmark hospital. This we did. We met Jim wandering around the wards and I told him that Mavis and I would go and have lunch down by the river. We had to leave at about three o'clock in the afternoon, but this would give the newlyweds a few hours together. Jim said that this was excellent; the hospital had given him a private room. We left them to it.

Jim was very grateful. He wrote me a letter saying how much he appreciated what we'd done for him and his wife, and what great friends Mavis and I were to them. Eventually his time was up and he was released. He moved in with his wife and not long after he rang and invited Mavis and me to be the first guests they entertained in their home. We went out to their house; it was a warm and friendly place. Jim's wife had gone to great lengths to make it a real home, putting photographs of family and friends on the walls. We had a very nice meal. Jim and his wife were both beaming. Jim thought he would be able to get a job in a few days' time. Mavis and I left, full of hope for them.

About three days later I read in the
Advertiser
that Jim Smith had been arrested and charged with rape. He had picked up a hitch-hiker on the road and raped her in the back of his wife's car. When he let her go, she went straight to the police with his description and that of the car. From a police point of view, it was a very easy case to solve — they arrested Jim almost immediately. He was sentenced to five years in gaol. His wife went back to America and sued for divorce.

One can only speculate, but my feeling is that Jim wanted to go back inside. I think he had already spent so long in prison that he had become institutionalised. He wanted to go back to where he knew the ropes and the meaning of things. The tasks of living permanently with a woman and functioning in the world of gainful employment or unemployment were just too much. He still sends me the odd Christmas card. Shortly afterwards, the
Advertiser
published a photograph of Mavis and I celebrating our diamond wedding anniversary and I received an attractive little postcard from Big Jim Smith. The message read:

Dear Ray and Mavis,

What a wonderful photo of you both that appeared in the
Advertiser
one day last week. Reading the story of you both and to see the love that sparkled out of your eyes for each other really made my day. It is so very rare in this day and age to read warm stories in our papers as the story on you both was depicted. I hope that you both have many more happy years together and I wish you both all the best.

Regards
Jim B-Smith

Interesting comments from a man who was convicted of murdering his wife and two children and of a recent rape.

In 1993, I began research for a PhD in psychology. I initially planned to investigate the plight of very elderly victims of crime who were required to give evidence in court. Did they need special consideration of the sort that is routinely given to very young witnesses and victims? But a short spell in hospital with bladder problems changed my mind. There was a two-day wait between the operation and the results of the biopsy being known. It was a tense, uncomfortable time. There was blood in my urine and the possibility of cancer was never far from my mind. I was sharing a ward with three other men and the bloke in the next bed was in the same boat as I was — and he just
knew
that the results of his biopsy were going to be malignant. On the morning of the third day in hospital, my urologist arrived in the ward and said to me rather brusquely: “Oh, Ray, yours is negative” and walked on quickly to the next man. My initial reaction was one of total dismay:
negative
means failure, I've got cancer. My spirits sunk. I knew little about cancer, but I was well aware that people died from it. Then I became dimly aware that the urologist was speaking very gravely to the man in the next bed: “I'm awfully sorry,” he was saying, “but your biopsy is positive. I really am very sorry.” I realised with a feeling of total relief that
negative
meant I was clear — I didn't have cancer, I was not dead yet. It was an entirely selfish feeling, but no less heart-felt for that. But then I realised the bloke next to me just had all his worst fears confirmed. I listened as the urologist said again before leaving the ward how very sorry he was. My companion looked devastated. I did my best to talk to him. I'd studied psychology, I knew about counselling and how to help people. But I did not know what to do in this circumstance. I got out of bed, went over to him and put my hand on his shoulder and said how sorry I was. I said we'd talk about it some more later. But I felt incapable. I'd been in distressing situations hundreds of times in my police work, but for some reason this was a very personal thing — partly, I suppose, because I felt guilty for feeling so relieved that it wasn't me who had cancer.

I was released from hospital that afternoon and went straight to the Adelaide University library and checked the holdings on prostate cancer, which were next to those on breast cancer. I found a whole shelf full of books on breast cancer, but I found next to nothing on prostate cancer. I eventually hunted out some figures that showed there were as many men dying from prostate cancer as there were women dying from breast cancer. I went to my PhD supervisor and suggested I change my research topic from elderly witnesses to the ways men deal with prostate cancer.

The outcome of this was the formation of a number of successive small groups of men with prostate cancer who met at our home for several years. Mavis always made these men feel welcome and always offered refreshments, never reproaching me for the time I spent with them rather than with her or on household chores. Some of my subjects are now dead. One, Peter Schade, died recently in the Wagga Wagga hospital after surviving just over four years with stage 4 cancer. Peter had been the first to telephone me when I spoke about my proposed research on the ABC. One Sunday I had happened to ask a fellow church goer if he knew anyone with prostate cancer because I wanted some subjects for research. He said that he did not know anyone, but asked why I didn't appeal over the radio. He offered to mention it to Philip Satchell. On the next day, Monday, I received a call from Satchell saying he had a vacancy on that day's program which I could use. I would have to go into the studio immediately. I hurriedly shaved, made my way to the studio and, without any preparation and gave my little talk appealing for volunteers. Peter was a goldbuyer in his car on the way from the east coast to Coober Pedy opal fields when he tuned into the Philip Satchell program. He told me later that he always listened to the commercial stations but he happened just then to be in a remote region where only the ABC could be picked up.

As well as Peter, another dozen men called in to volunteer to form a small support group meeting at my home fortnightly with me as an observer-participant. Peter was a great help. He came to Adelaide and stayed for two weeks to get the project off the ground. He had benefited from being a member of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and so we initially used that as a model, calling ourselves Prostates Anonymous. Peter was also suffering some added stress. His partner of some years had just died from breast cancer and he was himself already at stage 4 with his prostate cancer. He had become accustomed to sharing his woes and victories with fellow sufferers in AA and looked for something similar for prostate cancer victims.

Our group found that meeting together and sharing difficulties and knowledge did benefit them. Peter left to return to the east coast where he spent the next three years forming similar small support teams in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. When he occasionally visited me in Adelaide, he would encourage the local teams. He did this at our own expense until he was able to gain a worthwhile sponsorship which enabled him to begin producing and circulating a very professional journal at regular intervals. With his continual appeals on all media channels and at public meetings, and my occasional academic input, we managed to raise the level of public interest in prostate cancer, and there is now a well-organised effort by the established cancer foundations to provide better support and knowledge.