Ladykiller (36 page)
The Crown had two more witnesses to call for the purpose of arguing that Burrell had a carefully constructed alibi of physical incapacity in the days leading up to his kidnap of Kerry Whelan. Tedeschi briefly questioned Chris Harmon, the doctor Bruce had called on 2 May 1997 to ask for a prescription for anti-inflammatory medicine. Dr Harmon said he wrote out a prescription but Burrell did not collect it.
Next up, Goulburn physiotherapist Robyn Doolan said Burrell had telephoned on 7 May to make an appointment for the following morning, but had called back to cancel it the next day, saying his back was so bad he could not make it. As Doolan left the stand, Tedeschi said, ‘That completes the evidence in relation to the alleged false alibis created by the accused.’
The next morning, a group of women had gathered in the forecourt. These were what the Crown called the ‘false sighting witnesses’. Each was sure they had seen Kerry Whelan, either on the morning she was kidnapped, or weeks after, in a hairdresser’s in the country, at a rural diner, or boarding a plane for overseas.
Sightings of a murder victim are not uncommon and tend to flood in after police circulate photographs of the missing person. Many of them come in weeks after the person has disappeared, and while the observer is only usually certain they have made a real sighting, by the time they give evidence, usually years later, they are adamant that they did. During the serial killer investigation that resulted in the capture of Ivan Milat, more than one hundred people claimed to have seen the slain backpackers after the date they were killed, and even after the day their remains were found in the Belanglo State Forest.
The false-sighting witnesses were useful for the defence, in order to cast doubt on whether Kerry Whelan had been murdered at all. It was even more important for the Crown to call them up, one by one, and kill their evidence stone dead.
There were more than a dozen of these witnesses in Kerry Whelan’s case, mostly women. The first to take the stand was Margaret Jean McMurray, who claimed not to have seen any publicity about Kerry Whelan’s disappearance until a week afterwards because she was ‘an ABC watcher’ and, according to her, the national broadcaster did not cover ‘sensation’. But when she eventually caught up with the news, she remembered an incident around 9.25 a.m. on 6 May 1997 in Parramatta, where she had been attending a legal matter as property manager for her local council.
Ms McMurray seemed anxious about being in a witness box. She spoke in stilted phrases about her movements that morning, ‘I turned right down Phillip Street, walking in an easterly direction, and then turned right into Horwood Place . . . I then proceeded further down . . .’
Tedeschi: ‘So, you were in Smith Street and you saw a woman? Did that woman have any particular importance to you on that day? Did you speak to her? Did you recognise her at the time?’
Yes. No, she didn’t. ‘No, I did not . . . No I did not,’ Ms McMurray answered firmly. When she approached police a few weeks later, she estimated the woman she had seen was in her ‘mid-fifties . . . [but] it’s very hard to tell women’s ages these days’. She remembered it had been a windy day and the woman’s hair was blowing about.
‘The woman that you have described could well have been the same as the woman Kerry Whelan that you saw on the television?’ Tedeschi asked.
‘Yes, it could have been.’
‘Is it also the case that it could well not have been her?’
‘That’s correct.’
A very short, brown-haired woman in a peacock-blue jumper and pearls was the next witness sworn in. When Frances Ann Carter was asked to move closer to the microphone, she laughed and said she could not even touch the floor, let alone move closer, because she had ‘duck’s disease’. Francie Carter was well used to joking about her height.
Mrs Carter had been a secretary in Parramatta in 1997, and had been out walking on the street on 6 May in an effort to dispel a headache when a woman ‘caught my eye’ . . . ‘She was staring very intently at me. She never looked away,’ Mrs Carter said. ‘I thought perhaps to start with that she was lost. Initially I was actually going to ask her if I could help her . . . she looked a little spaced out.’
Mrs Carter also noticed the woman’s hair was blowing about and that she wore no make-up, but a quantity of gold and diamond jewellery, which Carter later told police she recognised in photographs of Mrs Whelan’s jewels printed in the newspapers.
The woman, Mrs Carter said, was in the company of a man. Although she had not really been looking at the man, she thought he wore a jacket over a Fair Isle jumper. He had short hair and was shorter than the woman, to whom he stayed very close. Mrs Carter smiled at the woman but she didn’t smile back. She watched her for three or four minutes.
‘Could it have been more like ten seconds?’ Tedeschi said. Mrs Carter did not think so.
The Crown asked Mrs Carter about a psychologist she had seen, prior to her contacting police, for the purpose of undergoing hypnosis so that she might remember more details about the man. Tedeschi elicited an admission from Mrs Carter that she had changed, on three occasions, the time she thought she had been in the street, added an accessory or two to the woman and seemed confused about the man’s appearance.
Under David Dalton’s questioning, Mrs Carter said she had worked in her father’s jewellery shop, hence her eye for the woman’s diamond ring. She thought the woman had been ‘on drugs’ or ‘in shock’ and perhaps she was pale rather than not wearing make-up and she had ‘big eyes’ which looked at her in an unnerving way. She had no doubt it was Mrs Whelan.
The evidence of the false-sighting witnesses would go for three days. Fifteen were called, including a woman who saw ‘Kerry’ in an Armidale hairdresser’s salon, except she was going by the name of ‘Sonia’. Pauline Dawn, a petrol station cook, swore she and Patty, the waitress, had seen Mrs Whelan looking ‘edgy’ in the Ampol dining room at Gilgandra in December 1997.
Norman Brierly Elliott, a sales representative, said he had been en route to Bankstown on 6 May 1997 when he needed urgently to go to the toilet. He was suffering from a bladder problem sustained in a car accident. Parking the company ute some 70 metres from the Parramatta Parkroyal at around 9.30 a.m., he noticed a dark-haired lady coming up the ramp of the car park. When Mrs Whelan’s kidnap hit the news, he was positive it was her and that ‘scampering’ ahead of her up the ramp was a thin young man. The man who was actually on the ramp with Mrs Whelan, as identified from the CCTV video, was Mr Poras Shah.
Mr Shah, who sat in the forecourt waiting to give evidence, was brought in for Mr Elliott to see. No, Mr Elliott said, Mr Shah was bigger, taller and, well, darker than the man he had seen ahead of Mrs Whelan on the day. As he had with Mrs Carter, David Dalton questioned Mr Elliott at length and with many twists and turns, ever waltzing towards the idea that Mrs Whelan had been in the company of a person who did not resemble Bruce Burrell. When he danced too close, Tedeschi objected. When Dalton attempted to rework the same territory, Tedeschi objected again. Mostly, Justice Barr overruled Dalton. However, he persisted, doggedly, for hours.
After Poras Shah’s account of what he saw that day, a woman named Robyn Rae Lambert was called. Mrs Lambert was a customs officer at Brisbane International Airport. On Friday 9 May 1997, Mrs Lambert was on duty, processing travellers’ outgoing passenger cards. A lady in a ‘distraught . . . emotional’ state jumped the queue and handed Mrs Lambert her passport, boarding pass and immigration card. The woman told her, ‘I don’t really want to leave’, and said she had been through a difficult time. The woman told the customs officer she didn’t want to leave her children behind because, ‘I don’t think I am going to see them again’. When the plane was filled, Robyn Lambert went back to find the woman’s card on which she told police later, she then placed a black ‘X’.
Around two weeks later, Mrs Lambert watched a television news report about Kerry Whelan’s disappearance and told her son she had seen that lady before. That night she went to bed and dreamed. It came to her in her sleep that Kerry Whelan was the woman who had jumped the queue. At work, she studied the surveillance camera footage for the relevant day, but could not find her woman.
Tedeschi asked her if the marked card had ever been found. ‘Is this the case: that no outgoing passenger card on that day, or any other days around that time that you were working, has been identified with your black mark on it?’
Mrs Lambert: ‘Correct.’
‘Is it the case that until about a month ago you were of the view that the card you had marked with this cross was the very card of this woman who had gone through customs?’
‘Correct.’
‘Is it the case that you recently visited a lady by the name of Fiona Harlock . . . she is a Hawaiian massage therapist?’
‘Yes.’
‘She is also a person who engages in cranic healing therapy?’
‘That is correct.’
‘And discovers blockages in your aura . . . and does treatments to massage your aura to relieve the blockages?’ Mrs Lambert agreed to that and to the next two propositions, that Hawaiian Fiona had massaged her aura and come to the view that Mrs Lambert had put an ‘X’ on someone else’s card, which was never found.
In the press seats, the reporters were grinning widely.
Tedeschi was almost taunting his witness now, but just before 4 p.m. he couldn’t resist a final dig: ‘So it has taken eight years for the blockage to go, has it?’
Dalton interrupted and beseeched the judge, ‘Does my learned friend have to do this?’
Tedeschi withdrew his question.
‘You really should not do that, Mr Crown,’ Justice Barr admonished him mildly.
Underworld figure Karl Bonnette stood laughing in the sunshine with Marjorie Minton-Taylor and his wife, a tanned and glamorous blonde named Cheryl. More than twenty years earlier, investigative journalist Bob Bottom had named Bonnette in his book
The Godfather in Australia
as the number two Sydney crime czar operating between the 1950s and the 1970s. He was also known as ‘Karl the Barber’, for it appeared he may really have once been a man’s hairdresser named ‘Carl Bonnetti’ who, as it was described in Bottom’s book by a crooked Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief, was one of a group of ‘enormous fucking dealers’ of every sort of drug.
Another book on Sydney crime credited him with hosting meetings of underworld bosses at his Double Bay premises in 1972. Bonnette and Sydney’s ‘Mr Big’, Lennie McPherson, had met with criminal associates George Freeman, Stan ‘The Man’ Smith and Frederick ‘Paddles’ Anderson to discuss their illegal poker machine business and connections with the US Mafia, according to David Hickie’s tome on organised crime’s rise in Australia,
The Prince and the Premier
. Burrell’s defence counsel, David Dalton, read these books with interest and was eager to link Bonnette’s one-time associates with Kerry Whelan’s kidnap.
A 1970s photograph of Bonnette in the Bottom publication depicted a man with a poodle-like mop of dark hair, thick eyebrows and a handlebar moustache. Bonnette had become more sophisticated with the years. His still-full head of hair was now white and he wore a moustache, tinted glasses and one gold earring. Dressed in a charcoal suit, royal-blue silk tie and a pair of shiny black loafers, he looked like a retired pirate. Court-watchers carrying styrofoam cups from the tea room stared at the Bonnettes. They were a sight not often seen around the Darlinghurst Court complex: carefree, rich and like something they could not quite pin down—characters from a film.
Karl Frederick Bonnette was sworn in and Mark Tedeschi cut straight to the chase. ‘Mr Bonnette,’ he said, ‘are you what is known as a retired colourful identity?’
Bonnette: ‘It has been said.’
Tedeschi: ‘What occupations have you had in the past?’
Bonnette: ‘Car dealer and horse trainer.’
Tedeschi took Bonnette through his friendship with Marjorie Minton-Taylor, who had called on Bonnette’s assistance after Kerry Whelan disappeared. He remembered telling Bernie Whelan around 6 a.m. the day afterward, ‘Look, keep your chin up. Everything will probably be okay.’
Six weeks later, when Marge arranged for Bonnette and Bernie to meet at her place for dinner, Bernie had a special request. Bonnette: ‘He said, “Do you know anyone in the underworld who may be of assistance?” I said, no, I don’t. I said if he posted a reward he might bring something out of the woodwork.’
David Dalton rose to his feet with relish. He wanted to do Bonnette slowly. ‘You agreed with the learned Crown’s description of you as a retired colourful identity?’ he asked.
‘Well, I don’t wear lycra shorts or anything. I don’t know what it really means.’ Bonnette smiled and there was a titter in the gallery.
Dalton continued, leaden in his cross-examination, deliberate, and determined not to let his subject play it for laughs. It was the defence’s intention to suggest Bonnette was a more likely kidnapper than Burrell. He asked about Bonnette’s connections with the Whelans, with the underworld and whether he went to the movies on Fridays or socialised at St Mary’s RSL Club, in Sydney’s western suburbs. When he asked where Bonnette was on the day of Kerry’s disappearance, the witness smiled and said, ‘Sir, I’m seventy years of age. I can barely remember my way home.’
Mrs Bonnette was seated in the gallery, enjoying the show. Dalton pressed gamely on. Bonnette agreed he could remember the evening of disappearance day, because of the momentous events and the presence of police around the restaurant at Parramatta where he dined that evening.
Dalton muscled him again about his nefarious connections.
‘I know criminals and I know police,’ Bonnette said, but he had no connections with the sort of criminals who were kidnappers.
Was it correct he was a retired leading member of the Sydney underworld?
Was he Sydney crime’s ‘main go man’ in the 1970s?
No, no and no.
Dalton meandered through some names . . . bikie gangs, Lionel and Adrian Pamplin, Stanley John Smith, the late illegal gambling kings Lennie McPherson and Jack Rooklyn, and convicted armed robber Bertie Kidd.