Ladykiller (17 page)
In 1959, 21-year-old Bernie married his first wife, Helen, and after being told that she could not have children they adopted Trevor, and then Shane. Against the doctor’s findings, Helen would later fall pregnant with Marita.
Bernie’s rural business was beginning to thrive but it ended suddenly when he had an accident on the bulldozer and his right leg was crushed. With a family to feed, he moved— still on crutches—to Melbourne and worked three jobs: selling Pinnock sewing machines door to door, as a private investigator repossessing properties and as a machinery salesman for Cameron & Sullivan.
‘If you sold you got a quid, if you didn’t you starved,’ Bernie recalled. He was a great salesman and when Cameron & Sullivan went bust, businessman Neville ‘Ned’ Kelly asked him to join machinery company Davies Industrial Equipment. It was there that he got his big break. The pair of ambitious salesmen had identified a gap in the market and approached Crown Equipment, a large American forklift company based in Ohio, to open an arm of the business in Australia. Crown’s head, Jim Dickie, flew out to Sydney and during a meeting at the Chevron Hotel, gave them the go-ahead.
‘We sat around drinking beers and Mr Dickie handed us just $10 000 and said: “There, now get it done”. What we did was we got them to agree to allow all the profits to be kept in Australia,’ Bernie said.
Crown Australia opened on 18 January 1966 and began to market a pedestrian-controlled forklift which didn’t require the operator to possess a licence.
A young advertising salesman called John Singleton convinced the pair to advertise on television. Singleton’s jingle, ‘Up, down, turnaround. There is nothing like a Crown. For picking it up, turning it round’, drew an immediate reaction. Australians swamped Crown with orders and a multimillion-dollar company was launched, as was Singleton’s career.
Bernie moved to Sydney in 1972 when Ned Kelly, his health deteriorating, appointed him the company’s sales director. The Whelans settled in Castle Hill but while Bernie’s business flourished as Crown Australia entered a booming Asian market, his home life was a shambles. Long hours and frequent travel meant he hardly saw his family. His marriage was disintegrating and Helen was drinking heavily; when Bernie would arrive home from work or business trips Helen sometimes threw bottles at him. Two years later, in 1974, Bernie was appointed Crown Australia’s boss.
Helen’s alcoholism was actually borne out of a terrible secret: she had been sexually abused as a child, but Bernie did not know it. One night when he walked in the door, Helen pointed a pistol at him and pulled the trigger. A bullet lodged in the wall. Bernie put the children in the bathroom, and called the police and Helen’s doctor. Eventually she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, but she signed herself out after three days.
Desperate for a change of scene, Bernie moved the family to Cottage Point, where he signed up as a volunteer coastguard. Bernie loved boats and, for a time, the Whelans were happy. Bernie established a mobile flotilla and as the boss of Crown Australia, donated the first water ambulance in 1974. His weekends were dominated by search and rescue operations to aid stricken vessels. Helen revelled in the job of operating the coastguard radio. She was a natural on air, talking to people up and down the east coast of Australia. She took mayday calls and saved lives. For a while it worked, but Helen started drinking again; she became a liability on the radio and an embarrassment to the flotilla.
The Whelans moved back to Castle Hill and their marriage went downhill fast. Bernie would find empty wine casks and bottles in the wardrobe. One day he came home from a business trip and found Helen passed out on the floor. Twelve-year-old Marita had not been fed or bathed for days. Shane, fourteen, and Trevor, nineteen, had moved out into a flat, unable to cope with their mother’s drunken tantrums. Now Bernie moved out too. For the moment, Marita would stay with her mother.
While his twenty-year marriage was ending, Bernie’s business dreams were being fulfilled—Crown had an annual turnover of several hundred million dollars. And then he met Kerry. Bernie thought the 21-year-old had real class. Kerry had grown into a vivacious, confident woman. She had a sharp tongue, a clever wit and style.
Bernie telephoned Kerry a few weeks after they met. He had been away, travelling. He asked her to meet him in Adelaide for a drink, saying, ‘Your flight is booked and the plane leaves at 5.30 p.m.’ Kerry was impressed. Looking across the table at her in the Adelaide bar, Bernie was smitten. Their twenty-year age difference troubled neither of them, although it worried Kerry’s parents.
Kerry’s brother Brett was the first to meet Bernie. Brett had ended up in Gosford Hospital after a serious motorbike accident. He woke from surgery to find Kerry standing beside his bed with a grey-headed man. Bernie had a pile of motorbike brochures under his arm. ‘I want to buy some new bikes for the farm, mate,’ he told Brett. ‘You know all about bikes.’ Brett was impressed. God, you are smooth, he thought.
Leo Ryan gave Bernie the once-over and thought he was not too bad. Despite the grey hair, Bernie looked young for his age, which seemed to narrow the gap. But Bernie was the opposite of Leo. Where Leo came from Struggle Street, Bernie was ensconced in a world of money. Leo hated expensive cars, Bernie had a Mercedes and a boat, yet the two got on marvellously, helped by the fact that while Bernie had wealth, he never flaunted it.
Kerry dropped out of teachers college and began travelling on business trips with Bernie. His clients loved her vivacious personality. She was assured, amusing and she loved a verbal joust. When Kerry became pregnant in 1980, they decided to get married. Bernie would later recall, ‘Kerry was happiest when she was pregnant and having babies. She could have had ten.’ After Sarah, came Matthew three years later, then James.
When Sarah started horse riding and the Whelans met Marge and Amanda Minton-Taylor, it just seemed like an extension of their family. Kerry and the Minton-Taylor women were more like sisters than just friends, and they always seemed to be having adventures. Kerry was outgoing and at times quite gregarious but Marge had also seen her nervous, overcautious side. While driving one night, Marge and Kerry noticed a horse on the road. They chased it down a laneway and into a property. Marge got out and opened the gate of the stranger’s property to drive in. Kerry was panicked, and extremely hesitant. ‘You can’t drive down someone’s drive. Don’t go in, Marge, you don’t know what could happen.’ She was shaken, and Marge, who had always admired Kerry’s outgoing personality, was shocked at her timidity.
Kerry and Bernie idolised one another. During their seventeen-year marriage Bernie would often arrive home with flowers; every Friday was ‘date night’, when they would go to dinner without the children. Bernie had found the loving, stable family life he had yearned for. Kerry never worried about ‘other women’ and had once told her brother, Brett Ryan, ‘It’s not exactly his character. He is more than happy to be at home playing with the kids than doing anything like that. Bernie is the most uncomplicated person I know. If you had told me seventeen years ago I would still have been happily married to the one man, I would have laughed at you.’
But Bernie’s wealth was unimportant to Kerry, whose family was her focus. She loved being around people, and always tried to see the best in them, although at times she suffered for it. ‘I’m sick of being a walking chequebook,’ she told Marge after someone had tried to rip her off on the sale of a horse.
Leo and June were concerned that some people put it over their daughter and Bernie. They worried that supposed friends turned up for the toys and the high life.
‘You’re too trusting and open with people,’ Leo told his daughter. ‘Be careful, love. You get too close to those people and something will happen. It’ll end in tears.’
Sarah Whelan lay in the Sydney Adventist Hospital under an assumed name. The fifteen-year-old had never felt more vulnerable in her life, despite her mask of feisty indifference. It was 30 June, the eve of her second major operation. In twelve hours, Sarah would be undergoing surgery and her mother should have been there to reassure her, sit with her while she waited for the operation and be there when she woke. Sarah was resentful that she wasn’t. Life had never seemed so unsure. She was not even herself anymore. So intense was the media obsession with her mother’s kidnap, the hospital had registered her under a pseudonym. ‘Sarah Merrick’ read the clipboard above her bed. Merrick was her grandmother’s maiden name.
Security guards at the hospital were keeping a special watch out for reporters disguised as nurses or doctors and checking the CCTV cameras regularly. A tabloid magazine had offered the Whelans $50 000 for an interview and photographs of Sarah in her hospital bed. Furious, Bernie had told the magazine he would have none of it. For the next week, Bernie would pose as a doctor himself, with a newly minted, fake hospital pass pinned on his jacket for easy entry and egress. Security guards were on alert at the hospital entrances for people pretending to be staff members or anyone carrying a camera.
Bernie knew how tough this was for his rebellious little wild child who feigned stoicism for the benefit of himself and her brothers. The following day, a surgeon would remove Sarah’s bowel and large intestine and make a new bowel out of the latter. The operation would take six hours. Not only was his daughter facing a serious operation, Bernie could not help but compare the road she was about to travel with her previous experience in the same hospital and felt like an inadequate carer. Kerry had commandeered Sarah’s previous hospital stay like it was part-military operation, part VIP tour. Kerry was there to clasp her daughter’s hand, tell her the facts, fend away any unsympathetic interference and cushion Sarah’s post-operative recuperation with toys and visitors.
This bout of surgery was more serious. Afterwards, Sarah would have to wear a colostomy bag and heal in time for a third operation when, her doctor promised, the bag would be removed and her system ‘all hooked back up again’. She was very frightened: about the pain, about what it would do to her body, about the prospect of having a colostomy bag. The specialist had telephoned Bernie a few days previously to say she could postpone it. But Sarah told her father, ‘No, Mum would have wanted me to have it.’ Bernie agreed. At the same time, he was privately scared. He risked losing his daughter on the operating table, but he knew that without the surgery, she might die anyway.
The following morning when a nurse arrived with tablets to prep Sarah for surgery, she burst into tears. With her mother holding her hand, Sarah had previously ‘gone under’ with an injection. She was still crying when Bernie arrived with a teddy bear for his little girl. The surgeon assured her that ‘Teddy Merrick’ would be allowed into the operating theatre. Sarah felt she couldn’t let her father down. Two orderlies wheeled her off to theatre, where Bernie appeared, scrubbed up in hospital greens. Above his mask, Bernie’s eyes filled with tears and father and daughter wept together. They were crying for Kerry.
When Sarah awoke in the recovery room, the first thing she saw was her father, his head slumped on the shoulder of his suit, his tie still perfectly knotted. For the next two weeks, Sarah stayed in her hospital bed getting progressively more bored. Her usual stream of visitors was cut off because the hospital predicted that the arrival of relatives and friends might tip off the media. All Sarah wanted to do was get back to school. She had already taken three weeks off after her mum disappeared.
It was a bitterly cold night on 15 June when Detective Bray and two taskforce detectives drove out to Hillydale. The gate was kept padlocked these days. Burrell was virtually a prisoner in his own home, stalked by reporters and stared at by locals whenever he left the place.
Burrell was not expecting any visitors. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he bellowed from the verandah.
‘We want to have a talk with you about Kerry,’ Bray said.
Burrell looked at him and shrugged. ‘Come up then. It’s bloody freezing out here.’
Inside, near an open fire, Detective Bray continued. ‘Listen, we’d like you to come into Goulburn with us.’
‘Tonight? It’s too cold. Too late.’ Burrell hunched his shoulders.
‘But I’d like to record our interview on tape,’ Bray said.
‘Can’t we do it here? I don’t want to go to Goulburn at this hour. Can I ring my solicitor first?’
‘Yes,’ Bray said, knowing that Burrell’s lawyer would likely put an end to any questioning.
Burrell, who was wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt and dirty trousers, returned, confident and with his hands on his hips. ‘Well, I’ve spoken to David and he’s advised me that I don’t really have to say anything. But I’ve got nothing to hide. What do you want to know?’
Bray couldn’t believe it. His gut feeling told him that this was the last interview he was likely ever to get with Burrell, so he had better make it a good one. Better than that, he had to nail him. Earlier, he and four senior detectives had discussed the interview strategy. They desperately needed to prove Burrell was in the Goulburn telephone box on 23 May when Bernie Whelan’s secretary at Crown Equipment had picked up her phone to hear the kidnapper’s demand, ‘Call off the police and media today . . . Mrs Whelan is okay.’ The taskforce had pulled surveillance off Burrell only the day before that call, and Bray had kicked himself more than once for that. But his instincts told him another thing: that Bruce Burrell believed he was still under surveillance when he went to the telephone box, and he would invent a reason for being there. And if he did that, they had him. In the phone box and, Bray allowed himself the thought, in a jail cell. He looked across at Burrell and hoped his own face was as impassive.
Detective Constable Darren Deamer went out to the car and returned with an antiquated-looking cassette recorder and a few blank tapes. They sat at Burrell’s dining room table, Burrell at the head, Bray to his right, and Detective Sergeant Peter Walsh and Deamer opposite, to operate the recording equipment and take notes.