Ladykiller (35 page)
There was muffled laughter from the public gallery.
By late afternoon, Mark Tedeschi seemed upbeat. David Dalton was mired in questions to Inspector Bray about his investigations into old hit men and ancient extortions. The members of the media whispered on the benches that Tedeschi seemed to have Dalton’s measure. The defence’s pursuit of ‘the affair’ seemed a damp squib.
After the jury retired for the day, Burrell lingered for a moment in the dock, laughing at something with David Dalton and exploring one nostril with a stubby finger.
It was 23 August 2005, the ninth day of the trial and the first in court three, a far from grand auditorium despite its classical
flourishes, to which His Honour had moved the case because it was somewhat more commodious than court five for a long trial. Greco-Roman stencils bordered the ceiling and a wooden canopy carved with fleur-de-lis jutted out over the judge. Much cruder carvings—by journalists—of their names and the murder trials they covered in past years—were etched into the press benches.
Dennis Bray was in the box at one minute past ten when Justice Barr nodded to Sergeant Warren, who pressed the ‘Play’ button on a video recorder. On a television screen in front of the jury, footage of a series of Mitsubishi Pajeros appeared on screen in black and white. Reflected in the doors of a Parramatta night club, they pulled away from the kerb into the eye of a video camera held by one of Bray’s fellow detectives. The purpose of making the video was to compare slightly different makes and colours of Pajeros—all in black-and-white film—with the actual Pajero on the security camera footage.
Court stenographer Michael Campbell delicately punched the keys of the note-taking machine clasped between his knees as the Crown talked Bray through the tape. By day, Campbell sat silently covering major trials, but in the evening he was known to occasionally swathe himself in sparkling lamé, blacken his face and don a wig, dressed as the American disco singer Donna Summer. Campbell was planning a forthcoming trip to Las Vegas to see the real Ms Summer. He left theatrics in the courtroom to the barristers.
Behind him, two sheriffs were slumped against the fireplace. The jury, however, was transfixed, or at least frowning in concentration at the screen mounted in front of them. Despite the denseness of the evidence, the proceedings had a fascination. Perhaps it was because when the jury was asked to make comparisons between these car images and the original footage of a car leaving the Parkroyal, captured in the hotel’s CCTV, they would be watching a split-second snapshot of the murderer waiting for his prey outside the Parkroyal.
In the dock, Burrell leant on his left hand, his lips pursed, his eyes slit in that imperious manner of his, like Henry VIII at Hampton, pondering matters of state while the trivia of his court passed beneath him. Burrell seemed to have piled on several kilos just since the beginning of the trial, a result of a slab of beer a night, some members of the press bench had joked, making crude references to his capacious belly: twenty-four stubbies stockpiled each evening, just in case he was soon sent to a place where it was impossible to get beer at all. Still, he seemed confident, almost blasé.
The Crown called to the stand a balding man with a closely cropped grey beard and plain-rimmed spectacles very like Justice Barr’s own. Iain Pierre Robilliard was a Mitsubishi Motors Australia employee of thirty-seven years and the nation’s expert on the minutiae of his company’s vehicles. He knew everything about colours, from Hanover green, to Venus red, Majorca black and La Guardia silver, as well as rear fender garnishes, wheel rims and bullbars.
Tedeschi showed him the security footage of the car outside the Parkroyal on the morning of 6 May. The sliver of film had caught what the Crown submitted was Burrell’s vehicle: a short-wheelbase four-wheel drive GLS model Mitsubishi Pajero.
The Crown was now about halfway through its call of witnesses, although a Herculean amount of finicky evidence lay ahead to serve up to the jury. There were the particulars of vehicle parts, typewriter ribbons and daisy wheels, print fonts and envelope types. The police had consulted voice experts, those experienced in writing advertising copy, writing styles in capitals, as well as DNA and fingerprint boffins. At times, the jury members would shift in their seats and mutter—often during Dalton’s cross-examinations, as he continued to blur fact with supposition and attempted to lay the foundations of doubt in their minds. But there was a bright spot on the horizon: a site inspection of Goulburn the following week.
The jury boarded a bus and, close to three hours later, they drew up outside Goulburn Courthouse, on the corner of Auburn and Montague streets. On the town’s main drag and without his wig and gown, the judge looked oddly suburban, like a pensioner on a daytrip. With him the twelve jurors, Inspector Bray, and prosecution and defence counsel made an odd grouping. The plan was to show the jury four locations: the Woolworths car park where Burrell bought beer on 23 May 1997, the telephone box outside the Empire Hotel where he made the phone call, his solicitor’s office, and the bank. Inspector Bray pointed out some modernisations which had taken place since 1997, but most of it was unchanged.
Barr was enthusiastically in charge. ‘We will walk down to the end of the street, turn right and walk one block . . . then we shall all turn around and walk back. I think we can start a gentle walk. We won’t go too fast.’
Goulburn still had the air of a prosperous old town. A painted stone bust of Queen Victoria gazed out from above the Italianate façade of the post office, from which it was an easy five-minute walk up to the next phone booth, outside the Empire Hotel. A dark little pub pulsing with TAB screens and decorated with
Footy Show
posters above a pie oven, the Empire’s main bar led up a drab carpet to a cabana-style bistro which looked utterly unused.
The group marched on, across the road to the Kmart in the mall and then turned back towards the post office. They paused at Belmore Park, the former market square from the 1840s which now sported an assortment of memorials, fountains and pillars marking the Boer War, Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, King Edward VII’s coronation and a centenary of local government. It was not a stop of any trial interest, but it was picturesque.
Even at this distance the old woman looked like a trapped animal. On the video screen in the Darlinghurst courtroom on Tuesday 6 September 2005, all you could see of her was a grey-green coat and a pair of glasses perched on a face pinched with fear. Occasionally, a pale crepey hand would float up to adjust her spectacles and touch the earphones which encircled her white-haired head. Beryl Winifred Cooper was in fact sitting in the Goulburn Courthouse, where a video camera was beaming her into Justice Barr’s domain. A sheriff at either end pressed a switch and an echo entered the courtroom.
The witness gave her name and the reason she was not in Sydney to give evidence: ‘I have been ill and I have disabilities in walking,’ Beryl said. In the eight years since Mrs Cooper had endured all the fuss about the search for a body on the neighbouring property, she had also been going blind. Now the day had arrived for her to give evidence at a murder trial, the Crown was frog-marching her mind back to the days of early May 1997.
It was vital for Mark Tedeschi to discredit Beryl and Kevin Cooper’s confirmation of Burrell’s alibi, that on the morning of Kerry Whelan’s kidnap the accused had telephoned them from Hillydale, his back too sore to move, and discussed the proposed Rabbit Ears pine plantation. Tedeschi would circle around the time between Sunday 4 May and Tuesday 6 May for as long as possible. It was not a place Beryl wanted to go to and her answers were vague or, when they were definite, unhelpful: ‘I do not remember!’
Mrs Cooper did remember the Sunday as the day Bruce came over with a bad back. She knew it was sore because he had refused to sit down and have a beer, and Beryl herself knew back injury. She could see the pain on Bruce’s face. Bruce stood in the doorway and proposed an inspection of his property, although Beryl could not remember exactly what day he had been suggesting that forestry workers, including Beryl’s stepson, come over to assess the land. Mrs Cooper did remember visiting Rabbit Ears with her husband on the Monday and leaving a message on Bruce’s phone, by way of country courtesy, to let him know that it was their tracks that he might see coming in and out of the gates. After that, the evidence became somewhat confusing.
Telephone contact between Burrell and the Coopers on the morning of 6 May was undoubted. It was just a matter of when and via what sort of phone. Had Bruce called from the two-way or his mobile? Statements Mrs Cooper had made to the police in 1997 and evidence given to a magistrate during Burrell’s August 1999 committal hearing were inconsistent, and Tedeschi was pressing her: ‘I suppose that back in 1999 your memory of the events of 1997 was clearer than they are now?’ the Crown prosecutor asked.
Beryl’s voice shook, but her tone was indignant, ‘Could have been.’
Tedeschi: ‘I will read you the question and answer. You were asked this, “Who did you speak to?” to which you replied, “I didn’t speak to Bruce. I don’t think, I can’t remember speaking, actually speaking to Bruce, whether I spoke to him or whether my husband spoke to him”.’
In the Goulburn courtroom, Beryl’s mouth set in a line. ‘I have thought about it a lot and I can remember speaking to Bruce that morning.’
Tedeschi would not let up. If Mrs Cooper could not remember, or her memory had changed from her earlier statement, she would not be telling a lie, he suggested. ‘What’s happened between 1999 and today that has assisted your memory to recall that you spoke to him?’ he said.
‘I suppose I have thought about it a lot.’
‘When you gave evidence in 1999 you knew it was a very serious matter, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew you were obliged to tell the truth because you had taken an oath?’
‘Yes, well at the time I possibly thought that I was telling the truth. I wouldn’t be telling a lie or deliberately telling a lie.’ Beryl looked up at the camera hopefully. She was more than 160 kilometres too far away to see the resolve on Tedeschi’s face.
‘You knew that you were going to have to give evidence about any contact you’d had with Bruce Burrell on 6 May?’ Tedeschi was remorseless. ‘Do you remember making a statement to the police on 13 August 1997?’ . . . ‘You knew why they were there on that day’ . . . ‘You knew they were investigating the disappearance of Kerry Whelan’ . . . ‘You knew she had disappeared on 6 May 1997’ . . .
‘You knew Bruce Burrell was the prime suspect?’
Yes, Beryl said, she did.
‘Back in August 1997, you were unable to say whether you were there when that call was made?’
‘I suppose so, if that is what I said.’
The questions went around and around, forever returning to the fatal date: 6 May 1997. Beryl appeared to be caught in the spin and could barely keep her head up. Clearly, she wanted to be anywhere but where she was. If she could not remember what happened on the day, she did not want to admit it. She said her current story was the truth.
Tedeschi: ‘I suggest to you any call you received from Mr Burrell on 6 May was a phone call.’
Beryl dug her heels in. ‘I feel quite sure it was a UHF call,’ she said.
‘Have you spoken to Bruce Burrell about it?’
‘No, no.’
‘At any time?’
‘Not about the case, never.’
‘Didn’t he come to your home with a journalist at some stage?’
‘Yes, I would have spoken—no, I don’t know that I would have spoken to him. I can’t remember what was said as far as the phone call was concerned when Richard Carleton came.’
‘Do you recall in fact there were two reporters that came to your home?’
‘There were several reporters. There were a lot of reporters who came to my home. It was bugged.’
Tedeschi asked her to study a transcript of her husband’s interview with
60 Minutes
. She peered through a magnifying glass at the document.
A further twenty-four questions hailed down upon poor Mrs Cooper until she was fearful of answering a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at all. But the audience got the impression the Crown wanted to convey: Mrs Cooper was favourably disposed towards Bruce Burrell, no matter what he might have done.
Cross-examination was undertaken by Philip Young in the absence of David Dalton, who was ill. Young was solicitous towards Mrs Cooper, asking gently about her illnesses and how she met her husband. But when he asked her about a list of notes made by her husband of his memories of the day in question, she again became confused. Beryl had typed the notes up on one sheet of paper.
‘When you typed the document for your husband, did you type anything the contents of which you disagreed with?’
Mrs Cooper’s manner became imperious. She was quite insistent she was not a snoop. Typing did not mean reading the words of a document that might be someone else’s business, even if that someone was her husband. ‘I do not remember any words,’ she said. ‘I type things out or I photocopy things. I do not read them. I don’t retain that in my memory at all.’
When Young had finished, Tedeschi opted to further grill the old lady about her insistence that Bruce Burrell had a bad back on Sunday 4 May 1997. ‘In your view, do you think that in the condition you saw him on the Sunday evening, do you think that he would have been capable of carrying two slabs of beer to his car from a shop in Goulburn the next morning?’
Again her tone was high and haughty. ‘I don’t know what he could have carried. If you’ve got a bad back it sometimes depends on how you pick things up as whether you can take pressure on your back or whether you can’t.’
‘Did it look as though he was in any condition to carry two slabs of beer?’ Tedeschi repeated.
‘I couldn’t pass an opinion on that at all.’
‘Did he look as if he was capable of carrying shopping the following day?’
‘No. I don’t know.’
Tedeschi was finished with her. Justice Barr put on his courtliest voice. ‘Mrs Cooper, thank you for your assistance . . . I am going to sever the link between us now.’ Justice Barr switched her off.