Ladykiller (25 page)
The Crown and investigating detectives pose for a photograph while the jury deliberates. From left to right: Chief Inspector Dennis Bray, Sevinch Morkaya, Laura Wells, Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, Detective Senior Constable Nigel Warren.
A judilant Maree Dawes (front) leaves court following the conviction of Bruce Burrell for the murder of her mother, Dottie Davis. Behind her are brother Lessel and his wife Tana. (NEWSPIX)
Bromley. When Bruce told Susan in 1984 he was moving out, Susan was shocked. She could hardly believe that it was Bruce who was leaving her. But she was relieved and ‘glad to be rid of him . . . It was a godsend. He had found someone with more money than me.’
Burrell took what he owned and, in an uncharacteristically generous gesture, left $150 in a joint account for Susan. By no means did it make up for all the money and grief he had cost her.
Dallas Bromley was different from the sorts of girls Bruce usually courted. She was not beautiful or modest or retiring. She was a flaming redhead with an opinion, and she challenged Bruce’s idle confidence. He also knew for certain that Dallas had family money; her parents were working-class people, but from what Dallas said, Bruce reckoned they were loaded. Bruce respected anyone with money; it was the most important part of their attraction.
In 1984 Dallas was twenty-three years old and already working as a graphic designer at Media Advertising Services on Broadway in central Sydney when Bruce was hired as an advertising salesman for the same company. At the time he was still married to Susan but that didn’t stop Bruce. He set his sights on Dallas and laid on the charm. The plain, red-haired Ms Bromley did not resist. The work romance blossomed, Burrell left Susan, and the two moved together in 1985 to another company, for better paid jobs at The Advertising Works in Clarence Street, not far from Sydney’s Town Hall. Dallas was the art director and Bruce landed a job as an account executive and was later assigned to the Crown Equipment account.
The Advertising Works’ group chief executive officer, Frank Towsey, had known Crown’s South-East Asia chief executive, Bernie Whelan, since 1970, when Towsey ran a business supplying display and exhibition equipment for Crown and other companies. Mrs Towsey had become good friends with Kerry Whelan and the two families got together for boating trips and barbecues. In Burrell’s new role, he would come into frequent contact with Bernie at meetings and business lunches.
At ‘Ad Works’, Dallas and Bruce’s romance puzzled some colleagues, who thought they were an odd couple, or perhaps just two odd bods who had found each other. The painfully thin Dallas and the fleshy Bruce were a contrast in style, manner and approach to life. Both were earning a good wage, but Bruce always seemed short of a dollar and drove a battered old BMW which ended up being stolen, burnt out and abandoned near French’s Forest. Bruce claimed on the vehicle’s insurance. Dallas always had enough money, although she adored dressing up to the point where some of her outfits bordered on being theatrical costumes. Dallas and Bruce could both be extravagant and revelled in the glamour of their jobs.
Dallas was hardworking and conscientious and, with business contacts, she helped clinch the big accounts, such as the advertising for all the apartments in the old Grace Brothers building on Broadway. She seemed to be going places. One colleague from Ad Works, Gary Gent, described Dallas to friends as capable of promoting her own talent, a woman who had ‘lots of front’. Bruce was affable, though not very industrious, and Frank Towsey found him loyal. He was known in the office as the ‘gentle bear’, although this was a contradiction. His colleagues had seen him lose his temper. Bruce astonished Towsey one day by asking him to be his best man, and by making another request: could Bruce also borrow some money to buy Dallas an engagement ring? Bruce and Dallas were married on Saturday 12 October 1985, at St Jude’s Anglican Church, Randwick. Dallas wore her mother’s wedding dress. Tonia Burrell and Dallas’s sister were bridesmaids and a sprinkling of old friends from Goulburn attended, including Spiro Pandelakis and John MacCulloch. The bulk of the wedding guests were colleagues and business associates, including Crown boss Bernie Whelan and his wife Kerry, and Dorothy Davis and her daughter, Maree Dawes.
In 1986 Bruce’s business relationship with Bernie extended beyond the office, through their mutual interest in shooting and the country generally. Dallas and Bruce were invited to the ‘Lunch and Tennis Tournament’ Crown held annually at Willow Park for employees and clients. Dallas startled both the women and men by turning up in a white mini-skirt and a pair of red high-heeled shoes.
At a Goulburn Rugby Club reunion in 1987, Bruce bragged to John MacCulloch about all his rich new mates who owned country properties and big Sydney houses. Bruce also told a business associate, Heather Lee, who worked at Crown, about his friendship with Bernie the boss. Following an office lunch, Bruce pulled her aside and made a remark which took her completely by surprise. ‘Bernie Whelan is a pot of gold,’ he said, ‘you just have to know how to tap into it.’ Although it struck her as ‘totally inappropriate’, Ms Lee was new at Crown and just feeling her way; she resolved not to tell anyone. From that moment, however, she did not trust Bruce Burrell. Heather watched him at the Ad Works Christmas party that year, enjoying a drink with Bernie and Kerry Whelan, Frank Towsey’s special guests at the celebration.
At the Ad Works office, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Bruce was not the most talented of advertising copywriters. His grammar and spelling were poor, he was not an eloquent writer, and in his verbal communications he replaced substance with flourish and a certain amount of pomposity. Following ‘Black Tuesday’, when the Australian stock market tumbled on 21 October 1987 after the global equity market crash of the day before, Ad Works slid into liquidation. As the company folded, Dallas Burrell decided to jump ship and joined another advertising company, Derek Keane & Associates, in Crown Street, Darlinghurst. She took with her Jennifer Ettia, a 22-year-old graphic designer she had hired in 1986. Their relationship had spilled outside working hours into a friendship.
Bruce, meanwhile, had gone into business with an old industry acquaintance, Stan Blackwell. The pair set up Bay Communications in the same offices in the Sydney waterside suburb of Balmain where Blackwell already operated an advertising company. Burrell threw himself into pitching for business and won an account to make a promotional video for Crown products. Blackwell’s other company filmed the video.
Soon afterwards, Burrell stopped showing up at the office. On his rare appearances, he explained that he had a brain tumour, but that he did not want his wife to know because she would worry. Bruce had dreamed up the disease for himself, but Blackwell did not want to challenge him and when Bay Communications did not generate any profit, Blackwell decided to shut it down. He excused Bruce of any financial liabilities connected with the company because of his so-called illness. Notwithstanding this, Blackwell continued to receive invoices in the name of Bay Communications for work Burrell charged up to the company. Blackwell referred the invoices back to Bruce, but they were never paid and the friendship between the two men ended.
Despite his lack of income and contribution to the couple’s finances, Bruce and Dallas were acquiring property. They owned an apartment in Lurline Bay, which they expanded by buying the adjacent flat and knocking through a wall. In 1988, they bought a rural property in concert with Dallas’s parents, Les and Shirley Bromley, although it would be paid for by Shirley and Dallas, whose names were on the title. The farm was a couple of hundred hectares of fairly unimpressive land with a house and outbuildings; it was an easy drive from Bruce’s old home town of Goulburn. A white sign attached to a dry stone wall at the farm gate was painted with a stylised tree and the property’s name, Hillydale. It appealed to both Bruce and Dallas to play country squire and lady, although when the Bromleys visited, the in-laws occupied the main bedroom.
In 1989, Bernie Whelan hired Bruce to head Crown’s advertising department. Bernie knew Bruce’s previous employers and his resumé appeared sound. Not long after Burrell began work at Crown Equipment, Heather Lee resigned. She thought him ‘inept and a sleazebag’ and she had no intention of working with him, although she did not tell that to her superiors at Crown.
Glen Pulley was the 35-year-old national sales and marketing manager for Crown when Bruce arrived to head the advertising department. Pulley, an associate director, had previously met Bruce when he held the Crown account at Ad Works. It soon became evident to Pulley that Bruce ‘was not the type of person who could get things done or take the initiative . . . He would not make decisions and, in short, appeared lazy.’ As the months stretched on, Pulley found he continually had to confront Burrell, who failed to meet deadlines or do anything, other than delegate his own work to Pulley. Bruce’s desk was in complete disarray. Files were strewn about and documents piled up on the desk, topped by the day’s newspaper, which consumed all of his attention. Pulley encouraged him to ‘set a good example to the other staff ’; instead, Bruce gained a reputation for slovenliness and indifference. Pulley was frustrated.
Each day Bruce would do the crossword and ignore the work going on around him. One of Crown’s advertising secretaries could not see any point in having Burrell there at all because he ‘did nothing at the office all day except read newspapers and ask me to make cups of coffee’. She reckoned he was ‘fucking useless’. Another employee noticed Bruce would usually mention Bernie Whelan’s name, as if it was the talisman that protected him. He regarded Burrell as ‘lazy, untidy, self-opinionated, unethical and a name-dropper’.
Meanwhile the recession had begun to hit mid-1989. High interest rates and an economic downturn resulted in hundreds of people in advertising and thousands in other industries being sacked or offered redundancy as high profile corporations and ordinary companies alike went under. Bernie Whelan weeded out the lesser performers from the ranks—including Bruce, who was retrenched on Christmas Eve 1990. ‘Bruce cost the most and did the least,’ said Glen Pulley, who recalled Burrell was ‘very disappointed and surprised . . . Bruce thought if there were going to be retrenchments, he would be the last to go in the advertising department and his staff would precede him.’ Bernie had some idea about Burrell’s work behaviour, but he believed Bruce was an outgoing, friendly type who, with Dallas, was independently wealthy, and perhaps that accounted for his loafing. After Burrell’s departure, Bernie learned from his staff that Bruce was a bully who stood over women to work so he could take credit. Everyone was relieved at Burrell’s departure; they talked about their Christmas wish having come true.
Over drinks at the Burrells’ apartment, Bruce told Jennifer Ettia that he felt angry ‘and rejected’ by the sacking.
The following year, Bruce worked at the advertising company Cooke Collins, in Sussex Street, which was operated by one of Bernie Whelan’s associates; after a few months, he was retrenched.
In 1992 he was hired as a sales representative by Carole Lee at another Crown-related company called Printout. Carole remembers Bruce asking whether Printout could claim for theft of the company car. He claimed he had parked the car in the city, where it was broken into and the thief had stolen $300 in cash and two rifles from the boot. Bruce said he had been getting the firearms fixed for Bernie Whelan, but they had been ‘quite safe because the bolts had been removed’. Carole was surprised, because ‘firstly, he never had any money and was always borrowing to buy his lunch and, secondly, there was no damage to the vehicle’. Ms Lee had never mixed socially with Burrell and ‘found him to be a liar’ who ‘wanted to appear to be smooth’ but ‘was extremely lazy and foul-mouthed’. After four months, Printout decided to ‘let him go’.
After that, Bruce drifted from one job to another. Any work he did, and that was minimal, was not really in a paid position. He just turned up at an office, where it was up to him to generate business. It was not until April 1995 on Cooke Collins’ recommendation, that Peter Grace offered Burrell the position of business salesman with his advertising company, Peter Grace & Associates, on the basis of a fifty-fifty profit split. Almost immediately Grace’s new employee demonstrated he would not work out. He tended to arrive late and leave early and sometimes he would not appear for several days. Grace believed Burrell was travelling down to the property he often talked about, boasting that he would organise a shooting weekend there with his old friend, Bernie Whelan, to drum up some business.
Burrell began asking for money and Grace gave him $1000 cash, as well as permission to use his service station account. Grace was beginning to believe that Bruce could not work a computer, as he never used the office machines, preferring to type on a small, electric typewriter he carried to and from work. Grace also noticed that Burrell’s copy was of a distinctive style that was long-winded, ‘old-fashioned and more flowery than what I would use’.