Ladykiller (34 page)
‘By that stage, the police already had the accused under surveillance,’ Tedeschi said. ‘On 21 May 1997, the police conducted a massive search of the Hillydale property . . . they found two particularly significant pieces of evidence . . . the dot point notes.’ He instructed the jury that they would get a chance to look at the original dot point notes and the ransom letter, contained in plastic sleeves ‘so you don’t get Ninhydrin on your hands’. Inquisitive jurors had been known to pull exhibits from the plastic sleeves for a closer look at the genuine article. ‘If you do, wash your hands . . . particularly before you eat. It is highly toxic,’ Tedeschi warned. One juror lifted up her hands like paws. It was like being part of a Nancy Drewe mystery.
Tedeschi went through the content of the dot point notes, which he said were written in the accused’s handwriting. He explained how each point related to the stages outlined in the ransom note. He described the days of the first police search. ‘Bruce Burrell was under intense pressure. Not only did he have a large contingent of police encamped within view of his house, not only did he realise he was under surveillance whenever he left . . . but there was a large contingent of media camped just outside his front gate at Hillydale. It was because of this intense personal pressure, the Crown says, that he made a terrible mistake on 23 May, right in the middle of the search.’
On the morning of that day Burrell borrowed a car and drove into Auburn Street, Goulburn. The jury looked at a map of Goulburn’s main street with its telephone booths marked.
‘Now what he did was this,’ Tedeschi continued. He had the jury’s full attention as he described the call made by the kidnapper to Crown Equipment that morning, asking Bernie to ‘call off the media and the police today’. Police had traced the telephone call to the box outside the Goulburn Empire Hotel, Tedeschi said, and he related to the jury Burrell’s admission to Dennis Bray that he was in that exact phone box at that exact time.
Tedeschi explained to the jury how the trial would run. He would ‘call witnesses by topic’, and some of the topics would be unusual. The Crown would have to establish in the minds of the jury members that Kerry Whelan was actually dead and had not just been travelling the world for the last eight years while her family grieved. Tedeschi would have to call what he described as ‘false sighting witnesses’, people who believed they had seen Kerry Whelan days or weeks after her kidnap. ‘The Crown case is that all of these witnesses are mistaken. Why is the Crown calling these ones? Because the defence has requested it.’
A ‘second unusual area’ was Burrell’s alibi: the sore back. Tedeschi quoted the phone intercept of 8 August 1997, when Bruce appeared to be shoring up his Rabbit Ears alibi with Kevin Cooper. ‘You will hear evidence from Mr and Mrs Cooper,’ Tedeschi told the jury. ‘The Crown case is that the accused has deliberately inveigled the Coopers into his false alibi.’
Before the jury filed out for the day, no doubt a little punch-drunk from the Crown’s hit-a-minute opener, Justice Barr said with some dramatic emphasis, ‘Please get right away from the building straight away. Get out of Taylor Square!’ It was a warning he would reiterate during the trial.
Twelve good men and women, now slightly bored, sat dully in the jury box listening to the defence open its case. David Dalton was a man well liked among public defenders, and regarded as a hero by Legal Aid advocates who admired his committed representation of those who could not pay for learned counsel. Under his wig, Dalton had thinning dark hair and a chiselled nose which gave him the side-on profile of a cartoon dog. He was in his forties, shortish and padded around the waistcoat region.
Dalton’s co-defence counsel, Phil Young, who would be awarded senior counsel status by the New South Wales Bar during the trial, was the dead spit of Australian actor Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell. He lacked Tingwell’s thespian vowels, but his Australian accent had a comforting ring. Dalton had told the jury the Crown case was circumstantial, weak and flawed and ‘does not bear close objective analysis’ and Young proceeded, in a rambling way, to support his argument.
In the afternoon Tedeschi called the first witness in the trial. It was Janet Rose O’Hanlon, personal assistant to Bernie Whelan. She had taken the phone call on 7 April 1997 when Burrell telephoned Crown Equipment to speak with Bernie. According to the prosecution, it was Burrell’s first interactive move in setting up the kidnap of Kerry Whelan.
The trial proper had begun.
All Sarah Whelan wanted was for Bruce Burrell to look at her. Once would do. On one of the hearing days, the 23-year-old had seen him furtively smoking down the side of the Darlinghurst complex. Burrell had sneaked a glance at the groups gathered up in the sunshine of the forecourt, but not at Sarah.
People told her that she was the image of her mother, particularly those big dark eyes. Sarah wanted Burrell to look straight into them and see her mother’s eyes. If he had done that when he killed her mother, she figured that when he looked into hers he would be seeing a ghost. Sarah did not hate Burrell. She simply had no feelings towards him and had resolved that if he was not locked up, it wasn’t going to ruin her life. He had taken her mother’s life—he wasn’t going to destroy Sarah’s, but as she waited in court for her father to give evidence she bored into the back of the accused’s head with her gaze.
Bernie Whelan did not feel particularly emotional when he was called to the witness stand for the first time. He felt little for himself and was more worried about his children, in particular Sarah, who was sitting in the gallery. He thought she was having difficulty watching her mother’s life and death played out in a courtroom. Seeing her father take the oath in the witness box made Sarah’s throat constrict. Her dad was a private man, gentle, with old-school manners. He never swore, didn’t even say ‘shit’, and she expected he would deliver his testimony with customary dignity. He held a standard, he told his children, which he expected them to hold. The Whelans would always act in a respectful manner, and from a young age he’d taught them: ‘I want you to do things like this because this is the way good people do things.’ Over the coming days in court, however, Sarah would have reason to wish he would shout back and that she could scream at the unfairness of what the defence was doing to him.
Under the gentle probing of Mark Tedeschi, the examination opened on familiar ground . . . marriage to Kerry, three children, moving to Kurrajong, financial comfort, life at Crown Equipment. Then it was on to the subject of Bruce Burrell: hiring him, firing him, hearing from him out of the blue and the Whelans’ plans to travel to Adelaide on 6 May 1997. Tedeschi examined the day in question, the hour when Kerry failed to turn up, and Bernie’s frantic trip to the car park in Parramatta.
‘I thought something was seriously wrong because Kerry just didn’t miss aeroplanes,’ Bernie said. ‘I went back to the car and found the keys in the ignition, which alarmed me greatly.’
Tedeschi asked for Bernie’s triple-0 call to be played. Bernie bowed his head and tears sprang into his eyes. The court heard his anguished voice; it was almost unbearable to listen to. In the courtroom Bernie wiped his face and with Tedeschi’s encouragement, recounted the long hours of that night and the following day before the arrival of the ransom note.
Tedeschi tendered the original note and envelope, tainted by the poisonous fingerprinting chemical and secured in plastic sleeves. The jury members passed them around, as if they were handling time bombs.
Tedeschi asked Bernie about the note: ‘Did you make arrangements after receiving the note to get the money together?’
‘Yes, I had in my safe a letter which had been given to me some years prior by the president of Crown Equipment.’
‘What did the president say to you when he gave you the letter?’
‘That it was highly confidential and it was only to be opened under special circumstances.’
Joe Scarcella, Crown Equipment’s solicitor, asked Justice Barr to close the court so they could discuss the confidential company document. His Honour complied and twenty people, including Sarah, moved out of the gallery, some members of the public pointing their noses high in indignation.
The jury listened intently to Bernie’s description of going to his home safe to retrieve a letter with instructions that he thought he would probably never need: what to do in the case of extortion or an act of terrorism. He remembered how ‘in a strange way I was frightened. Obviously the ransom note shook me quite drastically.’
The Crown asked Mr Whelan about the next steps he took, asked six further questions about a confidential matter and then Justice Barr reopened the court. Bernie resumed his evidence about the ransom note, describing the weeks which followed Kerry’s disappearance and how he placed the newspaper advertisements for the kidnappers, but no one made contact.
The next morning, Bernie was shown photographs of himself and Kerry with friends, taken just a few weeks prior to her disappearance. In each picture, Kerry and Bernie are smiling, relaxed, a happy couple.
‘We had a very strong marriage,’ Bernie told the court. ‘We were very much in love with each other. We had three wonderful children and my wife, my late wife, doted on the children . . . we enjoyed each other’s company immensely. It was not unusual for us to speak on the phone two or three times a day. We had a wonderful life.’
From the public benches, Sarah Whelan watched her father describe their plans for the future and the combined ‘hundredth’ party, for their respective fortieth and sixtieth birthdays. Sarah could see tears brimming in his eyes, again, and felt the beginning of her own.
The court was teeming with interested persons. Court-watchers nattered in small groups and then rushed into the courtroom when they worried there might be a premium on seats. The media benches overflowed and emitted a clamour which suddenly stopped as the judge’s associate knocked three times for Justice Barr and a sheriff commanded, ‘Silence, all stand.’
It was Dalton’s turn to question Bernie. He looked relaxed and alert as Dalton asked him about his work appointments in the weeks before the kidnap, including his overseas trip. Dalton then suggested that the Whelan family home at Kurrajong, now sold, had been on the market months before Mrs Whelan’s abduction.
‘I certainly have no recollection of that,’ Bernie said.
The defence moved on to the trouble with Bernie’s adopted son, Trevor, and the animosity between them over the breakup with Bernie’s first wife, Helen. Bernie’s composure began to slip. His answers were becoming short.
Had he traded in diamonds? Had he read a crime book about Karl Bonnette? Did he go out on his boat without his wife?
No. No. Yes, of course, for entertaining customers of Crown.
Was he aware that he was a suspect in the kidnap at the outset of the police investigation?
‘Oh yes, my word, yes,’ Bernie said.
The next question rolled out as languidly as the one before. ‘Were you having any extramarital affairs prior to your wife’s disappearance in 1997?’
Bernie froze and flushed at the same time, then stuttered as he spoke: ‘Mr Dalton, that is a . . . scurrilous suggestion.’
‘I think,’ Dalton said, ‘that is a practised answer to that question—’
Bernie interrupted, his face the colour of a beetroot: ‘I answer definitely not.’ He looked utterly unprepared for this line of questioning and, perhaps, his sincerity was thus undoubted.
Dalton: ‘I simply asked the question.’
Tedeschi intervened: ‘Might he be allowed to complete his answer?’
Dalton: ‘I asked a question which was capable of being answered in a “yes” or “no” fashion.’
Tedeschi: ‘And he was interrupted.’
Dalton: ‘Because he wasn’t answering in a proper form . . . and that said, you were not having an extramarital affair with Amanda Minton-Taylor, is that right?’
Sarah watched helplessly from the gallery. She gripped the back of the seat in front of her and ground her teeth, trying not to cry. Amanda Minton-Taylor was, at that moment, sitting out in the carpeted hallway, waiting to be called.
Bernie answered: ‘That is—I was not. She is a fine young lady. I take offence to that statement.’ The set of Bernie’s shoulders, leaning aggressively forward, underlined the point.
Dalton returned to his previous tack: ‘Is that an answer you practised in anticipation of a question of that nature?’
Bernie’s face went redder, but he managed to contain his anger and his voice was calm. ‘Oh, come on, Mr Dalton,’ he said, ‘that’s ridiculous. You’ve posed a hypothetical thing. I answered.’
The defence switched to other topics. After lunch, it returned to the subject of Bernie’s love life. When had Bernie got together with his current and third wife, Debra Lucy Johnson, whom he married in 1999?
About a year after Kerry disappeared, Bernie estimated.
Dalton seized upon this. Had they not gone overseas together on a holiday just before Christmas of 1997, a mere seven months after his wife’s kidnap?
Mr Whelan admitted the pair travelled to Fiji that December and were already in a relationship by then.
In the gallery, Sarah fumed. The pattern Dalton was trying to weave with his vile words was plain and ugly. She studied the jury, trying to read their minds.
The Whelans’ nanny, Amanda Minton-Taylor, finally came under Dalton’s attack the following day. The jury watched her walk past them, an attractive, blonde, athletic-looking woman in her thirties, dressed conservatively in a red tartan jacket and dark trousers.
Dalton asked had she had an affair with Bernie Whelan when she was working as the nanny and horse trainer at the Whelans’ property, Willow Park?
Amanda turned her head towards Tedeschi with a look that said, ‘get me out of this’, but got no response. She turned back to Dalton. ‘It wouldn’t even enter my mind,’ she said, ‘it’s ridiculous.’
Dalton repeated the accusation.
‘Nothing ever happened,’ Amanda said. She agreed she had been questioned by Dennis Bray at the time of the kidnap about whether she had been sleeping with Bernie. Amanda now recounted: ‘I actually laughed because if anyone knows me they know I like younger men. To me it was just an outrageous remark.’