Ladykiller (37 page)
‘I know criminals, I don’t associate with criminals,’ Bonnette said. He had worked in Kings Cross, yes, and ‘I have been involved in criminal activity, yes, many, many years ago . . . but that doesn’t make me responsible for murder, does it?’
The questions continued. No, he was not a criminal organiser, he did not know any corrupt police, he had not traded in illegal diamonds, nor had he been charged with extortion, kidnapping or been involved with an ‘international group’ engaged in crime.
Dalton listed his various aliases and nicknames, the most persistent being ‘The Godfather’. ‘It’s been written up quite regularly in the media, has it not?’ Dalton said.
‘It has,’ said Bonnette.
And why did he have several aliases?
‘Because I had a couple of ex-wives that I wanted to get away from,’ Bonnette said.
In the public gallery, Mrs Bonnette laughed out loud.
Eventually, Bonnette was freed from the courtroom. He departed the premises with his beaming wife, the press photographers snapping frames of a thoroughly happy couple.
The day’s proceedings marked the end of the Whelan trial’s first month and by the afternoon, Tedeschi had exhausted the list of available witnesses called to the court complex that day. That morning, the Crown had played the tape recording of Dennis Bray’s interview with Burrell at Hillydale more than eight years earlier, the last time police had spoken with the accused. It seemed to entertain everyone except Burrell, who was hunched over his notebook for the duration, writing assiduously, as if there would be an exam at the end of it.
On tape, Burrell sounded relaxed, almost blasé, in his responses to the questions bowled at him by the persistent Inspector Bray. It was the first time most people in the court had heard Burrell utter more than two words, and his replies were full of embarrassing detail. The three television journalists who had been in court that morning applied to use the tape on that night’s news. The judge ruled against them: it might discourage suspects from being interviewed at all, if they thought they might end up on television.
By the day’s end, Justice Barr had something to say about the running of the case: ‘I am pleased to say that we have progressed so smoothly today we have got through all our witnesses.’ The judge sounded triumphant. ‘The trial seems to be going at a good pace.’ A grinning Barr nodded his sheep-like head towards the jury. ‘That is due entirely, I think, to the way counsel have gone about their working pattern.’
Tedeschi was also smiling. Had the court known the Crown prosecutor’s plans for the following day, it would have understood his good mood. Mark Alfredo Guido Tedeschi was known in the law fraternity as a careful planner of trials. The following day would be a sensational one for the prosecution.
The sight of an ex-wife can make a man’s heart beat alarmingly fast, either with lingering lust, or with fear. An ex-wife entering a courtroom when the ex-husband is in the dock is bound to cause some increase in pulse rate, particularly when he is charged with murder.
Bruce had seen his wife when Dallas gave evidence at the inquest, but she had been more dowdy then. She was still as skinny as a beanpole and bespectacled, but Dallas had blossomed. Forty-four years old now and an internationally renowned painter, Dallas Bromley swished into the courtroom with the air of someone saying she was there on her own terms. For years, she had carefully avoided reporters who wanted to ask her about what life with Bruce had really been like. Now, after the years she had endured with him, Dallas was her own woman, and these days when she spoke to the press, it was not about her past.
Her paintings adorned gallery walls in Hong Kong, London, New York, Fiji, Noosa and Sydney. Their constant themes were storms over the ocean, or encounters in the cobbled streets and alleyways of medieval towns, whose skylines soared above tiny people. In solo or shared exhibitions, works by Dallas Bromley entitled ‘Elements’, ‘The Journey’, ‘The Meeting’, ‘The Return’ and ‘The Road Home’, sold for up to $6000 each. The website of one of her exhibitors, Phillips Fine Art, described her as an ‘avid traveller’ whose ‘passion for the sea fuels her art, with the shimmering light over the water integral to her work’. Dallas was ‘inspired by the location of her Sydney studio, perched on a cliff by the sea. From there she could observe the water from morning until night in its many guises and moods, which she captures with startling intensity’.
Dallas painted in the same Lurline Bay flat she had once lived in with Bruce and which she had kept in their property settlement. She had returned there after they sold the nearby duplex they were occupying when Dottie Davis disappeared. Following their divorce, Dallas fled overseas, travelling to America and Italy to study and to paint. Since then, she had also been to France, Spain and the United Kingdom. She won an international art contest with a painting titled ‘Distant Shores of Being’. In it, an androgynous figure lying prone on the seashore stretches one arm over its shoulder, in grief, abandonment, or plain old fatigue.
On 14 September 2005, alighting from a shiny black car driven straight into the court complex, was Dallas in high-heeled sandals, her head high, her eyes hidden behind a pair of black Versace glasses, her hair the colour of Fanta. Her slight frame was swathed in a cream pants suit, and she clutched a tiny matching bag. She sat between two friends on the wooden benches outside court three, waiting to be called.
Inside, Bruce was shifting nervously in the dock. He was bursting out of his coat. He popped a mint and his double chin worked up and down as the jury filed back in. He did not look up as his ex-wife entered, but stroked his right cheek and became very interested in his pen. When the sheriff swore Dallas in, Bruce pulled at the knot of his tie and swallowed.
Dallas Lesley Bromley gave her name in a low and steady voice. As Tedeschi worked her through the basics—her former husband’s name, their married life, their assets and their income—Bruce threw in another mint and chewed. The Crown established that it was Dallas’s wage, even while she was hospitalised for cancer and afterwards, when she was undergoing chemotherapy, which paid for everything in the Burrell couple’s home.
‘I was still being paid in full . . . because I hadn’t had any sick days,’ Dallas said. ‘[Bruce] did from time to time have, he told me, freelance sort of jobs, but . . . it was fairly spasmodic.’
In the dock, the accused coughed and blew his nose. Several members of the jury stared at him, their faces pinched with disapproval.
‘Would you be able to summarise what Bruce’s source of income was from some time in 1992 or 1993 until the time you separated in 1996?’ the Crown said.
‘Well . . . during 1992, 1993 and since that time, I basically supported him as he had no income coming in,’ she said.
When Dallas started her own business and as it was becoming more successful, was ‘Bruce . . . spending more time at Hillydale?’
Tedeschi ticked off a few more items: the post-marriage financial settlement, whether Bruce had a typewriter, Bruce’s back injury.
Dallas believed he may have complained about a sore back, but it was nothing serious.
Phil Young stood to cross-examine Dallas Bromley for the defence. He was a more comfortable performer than Dalton, but although he persisted for several minutes, he failed to pin down an admission from Dallas that Bruce had a serious back injury; nor did he elicit any evidence of a reasonable contribution to the couple’s finances made by Bruce’s efforts on the farm. Basically, Bruce was shaping up as a shirker. The next two voices in court would confirm the impression.
Just before the lunch break, Tedeschi played a taped conversation between Burrell and Lawrence Brown, a Bungonia neighbour. The call was recorded on a listening device on Burrell’s telephone on the afternoon of 22 May 1997, the day before the phone call from the kidnapper was made to Crown Equipment from a Goulburn phone box. By then, Burrell’s property was under siege by Detective Inspector Couch’s search team and Burrell’s cars had been impounded. Burrell sorely needed a vehicle to get into town. Neverthless, his voice on the tape is light-hearted and blokey.
‘Hello, mate,’ he says to Brown, ‘the reason I rang is I was talking to Charlie this morning. I’ve got a little bit of a problem at the moment. I haven’t got a vehicle. Charlie suggested you might have a spare vehicle there at the moment.’
Brown did not. ‘You haven’t?’ Bruce sounded hurt. ‘. . . Jesus Christ.’
The Bruce Burrell in the courtroom had flushed red and was coughing and blowing his nose. But the Burrell on the tape was talking on, dominating the conversation, with only short replies from Brown. Burrell sounded cocky despite his circumstances: ‘Fuckin’ oath . . . how much rego? Yes, mate . . . errrghhhh . . . can’t lend me some money, can you?’ Burrell said, and complained about Dallas.
Lawrence Brown: ‘What has she done to you?’
Burrell: ‘Aw, mate, all sorts of strange things . . . have you got a lazy fifteen grand in your back pocket . . . ?’ There was a long pause before Brown agreed he did not have that sort of money. Burrell continued: ‘Oh, mate, not a lot of joy . . . bloody hope so . . . not a lot of joy . . . anyway I’ll tell you about that when I see you.’ Bruce mentioned a mutual friend of his and Brown’s: ‘He’s still running away like a fucking lunatic . . . oh shit, mate, oh, mate . . . money at the moment. Oh, mate, long story . . . tell me about it . . . Thanks, Lawrie, see you, mate.’
The call ended. Bruce sneaked a look at the jury. The jurors were looking away from him, as if they were embarassed.
Tedeschi called his next witness. John Dennis Fogarty had grey hair, wore a grey suit and glasses and carried a briefcase. He looked like an accountant, and he was—a forensic accountant employed by the New South Wales Police’s fraud squad to analyse financial information related to crimes.
Mr Fogarty had examined Bruce Burrell’s bank accounts from 1993 to 1997. In the months leading up to 1997, when Burrell would incur the $127 000 mortgage on Hillydale as part of his financial separation, his bank balance dwindled from $16 000 in July 1996 to $6700 in January 2007. When the mortgage repayments began to feed on the account, the amount dipped further. By April 1997, he had just $1188 in the bank and a monthly mortgage repayment of $1016.
‘Now do you agree with this,’ Tedeschi put to Fogarty, ‘as at the beginning of April 1997, the accused in these accounts did not have enough to both live on and to pay that month’s rent?’ The evidence would allow Tedeschi to sum up: as of April 1997 Burrell was a desperate man of little means.
To top off his day, Tedeschi called three more witnesses. Kerry Whelan’s friends, Tony and Mary Garnett, affirmed she was a ‘devoted mum’.
Brett Ryan, Kerry’s brother, said she was ‘very clucky . . . her life basically focused around her three children’.
‘And what did you observe about Kerry’s and Bernard’s relationship?’
‘Particularly strong,’ Brett said.
Tedeschi left the court grounds smiling and returned to his chambers. Mark Alfredo Guido Tedeschi is said to very occasionally like a drink after a long day.
Peter Buckley was quite a handsome man, aged in his forties with brown hair and glasses, but there was a sharpish quality to him that made him unlikable. He had a cocky air, an uppity way in which he answered questions, even those of the Crown prosecutor, who had called him as a witness.
With less compelling evidence to give, Buckley might have appeared like many a twenty-first-century businessman— slick, confident, perhaps full of himself—but he caught everyone’s attention, not least for the string of profanities which streamed from him into the court. They were not Buckley’s own words, but those of the accused, which Buckley quoted from an encounter between the two men almost a decade earlier. A short series of questions from Mark Tedeschi had brought Buckley to this point. How did he know the accused?
As the owner-director of a company called Ultra Tune, Buckley said he was introduced to Bruce Burrell in 1995, and over half a dozen lunches, they had discussed advertising campaigns for Buckley’s company, though little came of it. In early 1997, Burrell asked Buckley for a favour to enable him to secure a bank loan of $125 000. Burrell wanted a letter stating—falsely—that Buckley paid him an annual salary of $60 000 to $80 000. Buckley refused, but it did not deter Burrell, who put the bite on his associate again when he sensed an opportunity.
Buckley’s company had become involved in legal proceedings which landed Ultra Tune in a court case. This time, Burrell asked for a $15 000 fee in return for giving sworn evidence in an affidavit to be presented in the court. Buckley was not interested in an affidavit from Burrell, or being bribed.
Over several months, Burrell again approached Buckley. The answer was always no. As Buckley now told the court, he was probably ‘a little bit weak in not cutting him off straight away’. On the occasion that Burrell made his last unsuccessful approach for a $15 000 loan, Bruce was ‘very hostile’.
Tedeschi nodded at Buckley: ‘When you say hostile, what did he say to you?’ The witness gulped and looked up at Justice Barr. ‘Your Honour, am I allowed . . .?’
‘As best you can,’ Tedeschi interrupted, ‘would you use the actual words the accused said?’
‘He said . . .’ Buckley paused, ‘. . . “I want you to give me the fucking money. If you don’t give me the fucking money you’d just fucking well better or else” and threatened me on the phone.’
‘Did you have any further contact with him?’
‘I tried to avoid him and, other than him tricking me one day, I always managed to avoid him.’
The jury stared at Buckley in the witness box, their mouths open, astonished, yet wanting more. But Tedeschi ended his questions and let silence fill the room. His witness had just inflicted a gaping wound on the defence case and he was happy to let it bleed.
When Phil Young stood to cross-examine Buckley, or at least to dent his reputation as a completely honest operator, the barrister’s fatherly voice turned a little nasty. ‘You’re changing your position now, sir,’ Young said, and accused Buckley of altering the evidence he had given at the hearing during which Burrell was committed for trial.