Ladykiller (21 page)
Bernie took a while to digest the revelation. He was preparing for the anniversary of Kerry’s death and did not know how to mark it. With no body to bury there was no ending for the case. The Whelans were in a kind of limbo. Bernie considered holding a memorial service on 6 May, but the police warned him that it could turn into a media circus. The Whelans had become household names.
Matthew despised the attention. ‘I hate being famous because my mum’s missing,’ he confided to his Uncle Brett. James did not like it much either, but he was able to use it to his advantage. One afternoon when Marge picked him up from school, she noticed the other children were paying James plenty of attention. When James hopped in the car he said, ‘Ever since I’ve been famous I’ve been popular.’ Marge smiled. Kerry would have loved that.
Bernie was proud of how his children had handled the tragedy. They had to endure a bodyguard accompanying them everywhere. They had to watch their father put on a bulletproof vest each morning before work, and each month the family leased a new car, to ensure their security. A further operation lay ahead for Sarah, but she remained strong for her younger brothers, although privately, she was suffering. The teenager had forgotten what her mother looked like. Her mind went blank whenever she tried to think of Kerry, and she had to look at photos to remind herself.
Family life became more strained when a woman entered Bernie’s life. His friends had tried to set him up with a number of women, but he gently rejected their offers. He preferred to be in control, and decided to telephone an old friend who had sent him a sympathy card. Debra Johnson had first met Kerry and Bernie while they were holidaying at Port Macquarie in 1993. Bernie employed Debra’s husband to landscape the garden. Kerry and Debra were around the same age and they developed a casual friendship. They had lost touch due to Debra’s divorce and move to the New South Wales central coast with her two children. Debra was petite, blonde and had a vibrant personality, the perfect antidote for Bernie’s sorrow.
In December 1997, Bernie took Debra to Fiji for a holiday but did not tell Marge Minton-Taylor, who was now the Whelans’ full-time housekeeper. When Bernie called Marge to report that ‘our luggage has been stolen’, she thought he was suffering a mental breakdown, or amnesia. ‘The poor man, he thinks Kerry is with him. He’ll get an awful shock,’ Marge told Amanda. They laughed about it later.
Bernie had attracted a bit of attention at Sydney airport before he and Debra flew out. An airport worker, Russell Smith, called Crime Stoppers and reported, ‘I’ve just seen Bernie Whelan leaving the country with a young woman and both appeared to be very friendly. I thought it would be of some interest.’
Bernie had informed the taskforce about the trip before he left, but Mick Howe called him anyway, just to stir him up. ‘Who’s the blonde sheila you’re with in Fiji?’ Howe said.
‘How the bloody hell do you know she’s blonde?’ Bernie was shocked.
‘Because everyone’s telling me you’re the murderer now,’ Howe told him.
Debra and Bernie began to spend more time together. For the Whelan children it was hard. Nobody could replace their mother. Debra did not try to, but the children did not want to give up hope that Mum might walk through the door. One day.
Kerry’s father, Leo Ryan, who was suffering from cancer, found it hard too. When Bernie invited him to dinner, he left heartbroken at seeing another woman where his daughter should have been.
Bernie tried to defend his new relationship. ‘In these six months I’ve lived six years,’ he said. He also knew that Kerry would have approved. She had always said, ‘Bernie needs a woman. He’s just that sort of guy.’
Kerry’s brother, Brett Ryan, was dealing with his own demons. He knew his sister was dead, but he found himself constantly looking for Kerry in crowded shopping centres or at sporting events.
Amanda Minton-Taylor still felt immense guilt for letting Burrell into the property on 16 April. She was chain-smoking and surviving on sleeping pills. In a bid for answers, Amanda consulted a clairvoyant. The woman sat in the Land Rover that Kerry had driven to the Parkroyal Hotel. Holding the keys in her hand, the clairvoyant told Amanda that Kerry’s body was buried 132 kilometres from Parramatta. Amanda checked and found that Bungonia was roughly that distance.
Kerry’s close friend Michelle Douglass, who knew little about the area police were searching, was being visited by a strange, recurring dream. In it, Kerry was ‘buried in a mineshaft in a clearing with twiggy trees . . . She was banging on the wall, alive,’ Douglass said. ‘It was built into the side of a slope, on the outside of the mineshaft at a clearing in the wood. People were walking over it all the time. Kerry was dug into the side of a little slopey road, shoes discarded on the floor, clamouring at the walls. “Help, help,” she was yelling.’
For Dennis Bray, his nightly visions were less emotive. He was dreaming in black and white. In the early hours of 21 May, the restless detective’s mind turned to the CCTV cameras at the Parkroyal Hotel, and he sat up with a start. ‘The security cameras,’ he said out loud.
The investigators had been focused on the grainy images of Kerry emerging from the hotel car park, but nobody had bothered to look closely at the footage from the other six closed circuit security cameras and, in particular, the images reflected on the glass doors. Had the cameras captured Burrell in the vicinity of the Parkroyal Hotel? Perhaps there was evidence of Kerry’s encounter with him. Morning could not come soon enough for Bray, who arrived at work tired but hopeful.
A team called Strikeforce Bangara had recently begun investigating a spate of armed robberies in Penrith. Bangara had new technology for studying security film, which enabled Bray to move slowly through the CCTV footage frame by frame. For the next twelve hours, with the light off, Bray stared at a screen. Over and over again, the detective paused and rewound the video cassettes taken from the seven cameras. It was painstaking work. The small, monochrome images were of poor quality and fraught with the movement of people hurrying by.
Then Bray saw it: a two-door Pajero pulling into the front of the Parkroyal at 9.01 a.m. on 6 May 1997. It was the same car seized from Burrell’s property, he was sure of it. The taskforce had assumed Burrell had driven his Jaguar to meet Kerry, and for months, had been looking for proof. But here was another of Burrell’s vehicles, captured by hotel security’s camera number 6, which was located in the lobby and focused on Phillip Street. Large cement columns and bushes blocked part of the view of the vehicle but Bray could clearly make out the rear section of a two-door Pajero. Thirty-two seconds later the vehicle moved forward, although its view again was obscured. But Bray kept rewinding until he saw the Pajero appear again at 9.38 just as another camera captured Kerry Whelan walking out of the hotel car park. Forty-five seconds later (at 9.38.45 a.m.), the camera had captured the vehicle pulling away from the hotel. Incredibly, these final two images had been picked up as reflections in a glass door.
Camera number 7 was a fixed camera, which faced inwards to the entrance of the hotel nightclub. By day, when the nightclub was closed, its glass door reflected all that was happening on the outside. Cars coming and going, workers rushing to work. And now Bruce Burrell, waiting. Bray could not believe his luck, the first piece of evidence to place Burrell at the Parkroyal Hotel on the day Kerry Whelan disappeared.
Bray called Mick Howe. ‘You’re not going to believe this. I’ve found footage of a two-door Pajero at the Parkroyal. It’s pulling away from the kerb forty-two seconds after Kerry leaves the top of the ramp,’ Bray said.
The discovery created a hefty new workload for the taskforce, who began a nationwide search, questioning 1640 people who owned a two-door Mitsubishi Pajero four-wheel drive. Bray wanted to know their whereabouts on 6 May, 1997. Were any of them in Parramatta, near the Parkroyal? None of them had been.
Bellaire believed it now had enough evidence to charge Burrell with Kerry’s murder, but the DPP was reluctant to rush in. It was extremely frustrating for the taskforce but they had another plan to outfox their person of interest. Very soon, Bruce Burrell would find himself in a four-by-three metre prison cell. Standard size.
The two-tone Mitsubishi Pajero in the car yard had an unfortunate registration number, given that it was about to be lifted—HOT-007.
In October 1993, Bruce Burrell wandered into the Sydney Mitsubishi showroom on Parramatta Road, Glebe, where salesman Timothy Thng had just finished his six-month probation period working for the car company. Bruce Burrell, wearing black wraparound sunglasses which he did not remove, even indoors, knew what he wanted, and made a beeline for Thng.
‘Good morning, sir, how can I help you?’ said Thng. Burrell claimed he had already teed up a test drive with the manager, John Ryder, of a Mitsubishi Pajero. Burrell was interested in the model with an asking price of $45 000; it was fitted with factory extras, including air conditioning, a sunroof, a bullbar and tinted electric windows.
Thng could not find his manager, and although he would normally have taken a photocopy of any potential customer’s driver’s licence before letting them test drive a car, he waived the rule on this occasion because Burrell had spoken to Mr Ryder. ‘I thought I was doing the manager a favour,’ Thng would later tell police.
Burrell slid behind the wheel of the green Pajero and took off with Thng for a test drive to the city. Burrell told Thng he had an office in the Queen Victoria Building and had arranged to meet his wife, Jane, on the eastern side of the building, where she ran a fashion store. Driving along busy George Street, Burrell looked puzzled as he squinted at the footpath in search of his wife. ‘Where the hell is she?’ Burrell said, as though muttering to himself.
They drove around the busy block in the heart of the CBD, dodging buses and taxis. Burrell did three loops but Jane was nowhere to be seen. He finally said to Thng, ‘Can you run upstairs and go to the office on the first floor and get her?’
Thng was hesitant, but because he believed Burrell knew Mr Ryder, he agreed to go. The young man twice searched the top floor and then went to the ground floor information desk to check. ‘I began to realise my worst fears,’ Thng would tell police. Thng called his boss to report the theft .
Burrell’s brazen car theft was not a one-off. He would do it again, using exactly the same modus operandi. In late 1995, Burrell showed up at the Artarmon showroom of New Rowley Motors, where Gavin Judd sold Jaguars. ‘This man just appeared in the yard, as if from nowhere. He introduced himself as Allan George,’ Judd would later recount.
‘Mr George’ appeared relaxed and confident. He said, ‘My partner has driven a Jag and likes them. At the moment we’re both driving S Class Mercedes Benz. We’re thinking of changing them over.’ Here was every car salesman’s dream: a customer with money to buy not one car, but two. He was no tyre kicker.
Judd was twenty-five years old and in his first job as a car salesman. He desperately wanted to close this profitable sale. He worked on commission and could see a strong payday ahead, especially as this buyer was interested in one of the more expensive models, a Sovereign, which would normally retail for more than $170 000. Fortunately for Burrell though, Judd had two demonstration models on the floor and each was marked down by $30 000 to $139 950.
Judd took Burrell for a test drive, neglecting to follow the usual process of asking to see the customer’s driver’s licence. They were planning only a ten-minute run around the neighbouring suburbs.
As they pulled back into the car yard, Burrell turned to Judd and said, ‘I’m suitably impressed. Could I take the car to my partner for a look? He’s in the city.’
Betting on a jackpot, Judd agreed. As they crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge, they discussed business and their golf swings. Burrell said he was a member of the Australian Golf Club.
‘What do you do for a crust?’ Judd asked.
‘I’m a GO engineer.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, sorry, a geological engineer,’ Burrell said, ‘at Ferguson Allan.’
Burrell told Judd his office was in the Queen Victoria Building. It was the same story he had spun Thng, only this time Burrell was searching for his business partner, a chubby man with a beard. When Burrell suggested Judd run upstairs to fetch him, Judd proffered his mobile phone, but Burrell shook his head, ‘No, he’s very busy, he’s not likely to answer the phone. The secretary isn’t there. Quicker just to run up.’
Judd didn’t suspect anything. ‘I guess with selling people in excess of $300 000 motor cars, if they were to buy two, they expect a little bit of, perhaps old-fashioned service, and running upstairs to grab his partner didn’t seem like a tall task,’ he said.
Burrell said his office was at the top of stairs: ‘You won’t miss it.’
Judd climbed the three flights. On the third floor, there was no office for Ferguson Allan. ‘At that stage I was getting a little worried. It sounded a bit funny that there was no office there but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I walked outside to where he had dropped me off and waited there for about twenty minutes.’ But Burrell and the Jaguar were gone.
Judd was shocked. He telephoned his boss at Artarmon and was told to report the theft straight away. After leaving Town Hall police station, Judd flagged down a taxi to return to work, feeling angry and stupid.
Clearly Burrell could charm and, it seemed, con people into doing anything. Police only learned about Burrell’s masterful talent as a car thief with the advent of Taskforce Bellaire. Timothy Thng saw Burrell’s photograph in the
Daily
Telegraph
and telephoned his local police station. Dennis Bray’s detectives were already on the case of trying to match the engine numbers on Burrell’s seized vehicles, which they had deduced were both stolen, as well as identify his numberplates. When Bray was told about Burrell’s methods of duping car salesmen, it only worried him further. Burrell was daring and he played by his own rules. So how then had he lured Kerry Whelan to their secret meeting?