Ladykiller (31 page)
Burrell’s lawyer was furious. His client looked deeply troubled at the prospect of a public shaming. Perhaps his pride was crushed. It would get worse for him when Detective Bray took the stand, carrying two heavy folders containing new evidence. Burrell may have left behind no witnesses, fingerprints or DNA from his crimes, but he had left a trail of a different kind on the day Dottie vanished.
On 29 June 1995 Burrell had told police that he was working at Crows Nest on 30 May that year. His alibi was never properly checked, until recently. Bray could prove that three hours after Dottie was last seen, at around 1 p.m., Burrell was driving to his property at Bungonia. At 4.30 p.m. Burrell rang his wife. The call was transmitted through a mobile cell link on the Hume Highway at Mittagong, the last spot with mobile phone coverage before the turn-off to Hillydale. Four hours later, at 8.46 p.m., Burrell, irrefutably, was still in the Southern Highlands region because he called Dallas from his mobile. At 9.43 p.m. he called his wife again, this time on his way back to Sydney, passing through the Bargo billing area. By 10.16 p.m. he was almost home when he phoned his wife. The extensive log of telephone calls, Bray suggested to the court, proved that Burrell had not been where he said he was.
Burrell fidgeted in his seat.
Mobile phone records for the following day, 31 May, threw up new possibilities for Burrell’s whereabouts. He phoned Dallas at 9.22 a.m. from Sydney’s eastern suburbs. At 12.37 p.m. he phoned his wife again, but this time he was near Bowral. By 1.29 p.m. he was calling her from the Campbelltown Tower, placing him further south, near the Bungonia turn-off . Bray surmised that Burrell’s destination may not have been Hillydale on that date, but a ‘location south of Mittagong, for reasons known only to himself ’. In other words he was disposing of Dottie’s body. Records showed he returned to Sydney at 4.33 p.m.
Wherever Burrell was heading that day, he was not at work. His phone records had provided a trail as accurate as an eyewitness. Bray had done the calculations and ascertained that Burrell had had more time—at least thirty minutes longer than first thought—to dispose of Dottie. Had previous searches gone far enough? Had Burrell gone deeper into the forest to dispose of her body? The following week, the disappearance of Kerry Whelan would be the focus of the coronial enquiry. Bray thought about the possibilities on the way home, as he ate dinner and all night, as he wrestled mentally with the case and with his hopes for the inquest’s outcome.
Matthew Whelan, eighteen, and his younger brother James, sixteen, looked like they were dressed for a funeral. Sitting alongside their sister, Sarah, the boys wore black suits, shiny new shoes and their hair was slicked back with gel. It was the first day of evidence at the coronial inquest into their mother’s death.
Winter sunlight filtered through the high windows of the court, lighting up a photograph of Kerry’s smiling face, which was magnified onto the wall.
‘Today we formally commence the inquest into the death of Kerry Patricia Whelan,’ Coroner Abernethy began. ‘I propose at the outset to tender as Exhibit One the brief of evidence, the exhibits and the transcript of evidence of the inquest into the death of Dorothy Davis.’
Detective Dennis Bray was called to the stand. The chief inspector walked with a slight limp, the result of a football injury sustained as a junior officer when he played in the police rugby league team. As he detailed the case and the people involved, photographs flashed onto the screen: a Whelan family portrait, the Whelans’ Kurrajong property, the Parkroyal Hotel, the person of interest Bruce Burrell and his Bungonia property. The contrast between Kerry Whelan and the ‘person of interest’ Bruce Burrell, was stark. Kerry, the court heard, was a devoted mother and wife, a loyal friend and a generous community worker. Burrell was lazy, a liar and a thief and a man with a split personality who was prone to temper tantrums, abuse and violence.
The Whelan boys listened intently. Their young faces were sombre, except for one moment when James’s face cracked into a smile at the unflattering description of Burrell that he had given to police when he was eleven: ‘fat and balding’. The public gallery was growing restless but sat up when Bray delivered the final words of his statement: ‘I believe Mrs Whelan met with Mr Burrell . . . and was taken by him to a location known only to himself. Mr Burrell has acted alone.’ He cleared his throat. ‘It was always his intention to murder Mrs Whelan in any event, as he could be identified.’ His motive, Bray said, was ‘greed and the desperate need for financial gain’.
When Burrell was called to the stand, Matthew and James craned their necks to see him. Burrell knew the drill. He did not like Hobart and did not want to be there, but he intended it would be his last time in a witness box. This ‘person of interest’ would refuse all future opportunities.
The coroner turned to Burrell and said, ‘As your counsel says you have received certain legal advice, what is that?’
‘That advice, sir, is that I won’t be answering any questions.’
‘Nevertheless,’ the coroner said, ‘I’m going to allow Mr Hobart to put some questions, and you are entitled to change your mind if you wish.’
Burrell would choose not to. In total, one hundred and three questions were asked by Hobart. All but twenty-two were answered the same way, ‘On legal advice I will not answer.’
Again, Hobart was unrelenting.
‘On May 6, Mrs Whelan went to Parramatta and parked her car at the Parkroyal Hotel car park. At that time, sir, you were waiting outside for her, weren’t you?’
‘Did you use chloroform to disable Mrs Whelan? Chloroform, I’d suggest, is not something you’ll find in every Australian household, is it?’
‘What I suggest to you, sir, is that you wrote this ransom note and that you posted it on May 6 after you kidnapped Mrs Whelan. What do you say about that?’
Burrell removed his glasses and repeated that he would not answer. Throughout, he wrote liberally in his black folder. One journalist joked to another that he was writing one hundred times, ‘I’m a very bad boy’.
Hobart plugged on. ‘I suggest that you were in possession of pistols at your property, were you not? You told friends something about the burying of a body near your property and nobody would ever find it, do you remember?’ . . . ‘You told Bernie Whelan that you had a place where you could hide such things as pistols where nobody could find them, did you tell him that?’
Hobart’s voice was getting louder and angrier. ‘You were in the same phone box on the same morning as it was used by Mrs Whelan’s kidnapper. Isn’t that a remarkable coincidence, sir?’
Mostly, Burrell was calm. He rolled his eyes and sniffed the air as if this questioning was tiresome and irrelevant. When Hobart asked him about a UBD street directory found on his property, Burrell actually started to laugh. Hobart was riled.
‘You find that amusing, sir, do you?’ Hobart said.
‘Not at all, Mr Hobart.’
‘Well, sir, you smiled.’
‘Yeah, somebody has obviously put it there, haven’t they? It’s not even in my writing.’ Burrell sounded like a schoolboy in trouble with his teacher.
‘You posted the ransom note. It was you, wasn’t it? Because you had kidnapped Mrs Whelan in your two-door Pajero and you had then posted the kidnap note, hadn’t you?’
‘On my legal advice, I won’t answer.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
After forty-four minutes the interrogation ceased. Burrell ambled towards the exit. Coroner Abernethy’s patience was worn. ‘I’d like you to stay in court though.’
Burrell, who had just pulled the heavy door open, turned and did as he was told. He slouched in his seat in the front row, sulking, next to Tonia.
Hobart told the court there was a reasonable prospect of a jury convicting a known person in relation to the murders of both women. ‘And that known person is Mr Burrell.’
Burrell lost his cool. ‘Bullshit,’ he mouthed to his sister.
Hobart said the phone records proved that Burrell had lied about his movements on the day Dottie disappeared. As to the case of Mrs Whelan, Hobart said, ‘I don’t need to go through it,’ and sat down.
Abernethy then delivered his findings: ‘I am satisfied that there’s an indictable offence and a reasonable prospect that a jury would convict a known person of that indictable offence, in respect to the deaths of Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan. I think it’s inappropriate to say anything more about the strengths or lack thereof of the evidence, but to terminate the inquest and forward to the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr Cowdery . . . the evidence taken at the inquest. I propose to take that course.’ Abernethy had not said Burrell’s name, but there was no mistaking he agreed with Hobart.
As the court was adjourned, Bernie tried to take in what had just happened. For the first time, both women were no longer missing women. They were murder victims. Not only that, they were victims of the same killer. Bruce Allan Burrell was now officially their likely murderer. The realisation that came with these words—spoken out loud—suddenly hit the Whelan family. Bernie looked over to see Matthew wipe tears from his eyes. It was a rare, albeit brief, sight; Matthew usually made sure his emotions were kept in check. Matthew knew, deep down, that his mum had been killed, but to hear it said in open court, by a coroner, made a tremendous impact.
Burrell bolted from the courtroom and out onto the footpath, his two sisters scurrying after him. A herd of television cameramen and photographers closed around him in a scrum, as reporters hurled question after question at him.
‘Where did you hide the bodies, Mr Burrell?’ a young reporter yelled.
‘Did you kill Kerry Whelan and Dorothy Davis?’ asked another.
‘Are you a predator of wealthy women? Are you, Mr Burrell?’
Mark Hobart’s assault on Burrell and Burrell’s refusal to answer questions had emboldened the media into attack and aroused in them a self-righteous sense of duty to the families of the dead.
When Burrell drove off in a dilapidated Ford sedan, the press pack turned to the Whelan and Davis families who were walking out, arm-in-arm, in a show of force.
‘This is the first time Dot’s death and Kerry’s have been linked together formally.’ Bernie’s voice was barely audible over the trucks rumbling past.
‘What does today mean for you?’ a reporter asked.
‘We’ve been waiting five years to see Mr Burrell in the witness box. That’s a big step forward but we still have a long way to go. We want this to be put before a judge and jury. It’s been a very emotional day. No one can understand what we have been through. Kidnapping is the cruellest of crimes.’ Bernie started to cry.
In the third week of July 2002, Dennis Bray sent a submission to the New South Wales Deputy Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, for a fourth search. It would cost $70 000, Bray stated. On Wednesday 28 August, the police announced a third and more extensive search of the Bungonia Recreation Area would be made. ‘We owe it to the Whelan and Davis families to ensure all possible avenues are explored so that in time the family members may finally enjoy some closure,’ Bray said.
Detective Inspector Bruce Couch and the Operational Support Group would again be searching along the seven-kilometre section on the south-western front of the Bungonia State Recreation Area adjoining Burrell’s old property, but this time they would be pushing deeper into the forest. Couch’s twenty-five officers began their two-week search on 2 September. Burrell had been forced to sell Hillydale at the end of 1998 and the property’s new owner allowed the police to set up the command post in tents on his front lawn. Some of the property had been subdivided and fenced off, but the white-panelled house with its green tin roof looked as Detective Inspector Couch remembered it.
The air was mild compared with the freezing conditions of the last search, yet on the first morning a low fog rolled across Hillydale’s frost-blanketed fields and it began to rain. The water bucketed from the sky onto the forest canopy and swirled around the base of the tree trunks. In a couple of hours, flash floods were canyoning down the creeks, sheeting off cliff edges to the Shoalhaven River below. Detective Inspector Couch cursed the sky from under a tarpaulin at command post. By midday, he could sit still no longer. They set off on a slow three-kilometre drive for New Chum Ridge, which rose 660 metres above sea level.
Where Burrell had been, Couch said, they would go further.
Maree Dawes heard the engine whine into a higher gear as they climbed over Hillydale’s last rise, then rolled down past the hayshed to the gates. Maree, her brother Lessel and his wife, Tanna, were silent in the car as they took in their surroundings. Beyond them lay hundreds of square kilometres of dry schlerophyll forest rising out of hills and ravines that could be dangerous for anyone other than the sure-footed.
It was the morning of Tuesday 3 September. Couch and his team were engaged in their final search of Hillydale and beyond, although it was Maree and Lessel’s first visit to the property. A half-hour earlier they had driven by the thicket of tripods at Hillydale’s gates and paused a minute for the waiting media and cameras. ‘This is a tough day for us,’ Maree told reporters. She was driven on where she was introduced to Couch, who took Maree’s arm and guided her towards a seat in the police four-wheel drive. ‘Come on, Maree, come for a ride,’ he said.
They drove through Hillydale’s back gate into the Bungonia forest on the Great South Fire Trail Road, bumping up and down a narrow track made boggy by the rain, to their first stop, Depression Village. Maree looked down at the slippery quartz-studded ground and back up at the trees. She remembered her mother describing Bruce Burrell’s prowess on his quad bike, how he could travel over any territory, and how on occasion he would offer to take her for a ride. Dottie declined due to her various conditions. It was completely still but for the leaves dripping rain from the red gums, box gum, ironbarks and scribbly gums, and the air was dank with the smell of wet earth and leaves. One of Couch’s young officers had fallen that morning, injured his leg and had been taken to hospital. It was treacherous, ugly country.