Ladykiller (42 page)

Two weeks into the trial, the last known person to see Dottie alive—her builder, Kenneth Hulse—was called to give evidence. Hulse was working on Dottie’s Lurline Bay home on 30 May 1995, when around 1 p.m., Dottie told him she was going out. ‘She was going to visit a friend that’s had or got cancer, and was going to walk around there because it wasn’t far,’ Hulse told the court. The friend was female, Dottie told Hulse, and had lost her hair through chemotherapy.

A 75-year-old woman who had just got out of hospital lived near Mrs Davis. Under cross-examination by Philip Young, SC, the builder acknowledged that he had originally told police that Dottie said she was going to see a friend who had just got out of hospital. Police later interviewed the woman, Blanche May, but while she said she had seen Dottie in the neighbourhood—and not on the day of her disappearance— she was not her friend or acquaintance.

A Buddha-like Burrell sat in the dock, his eyes glazed over as he listened to witness after witness give evidence he had previously heard during the inquest. But his back suddenly became rigid as James Chittendon, then branch manager of a bank in Maroubra in Sydney’s south-east, revealed some startling new details about a conversation he had with Burrell in 1994.

Chittendon told the jury that Burrell deposited a cheque at his branch for $100 000 on 12 July 1994, and at the time made mention of applying for a loan because he was interested in buying a property near his home. Eight days later, Chittendon said Burrell made a cash withdrawal of $90 000 from the account. Not only that, but Burrell had told him ‘a lady was waiting outside for him to take the cash out’.

On the morning of 12 August 2007, Burrell’s ex-wife, Dallas Bromley, was driven by detectives into the grounds of the Supreme Court to avoid the media glare. Wearing the same outfit as she did for the Whelan trial, Dallas’s face was strained, angry that her former husband Bruce Burrell continued to haunt her. Inside the court she avoided all eye contact with Burrell, and where previously in the legal arena she had referred to her ex-husband as Bruce, now it was as if she was talking about an acquaintance—Bruce Burrell, she repeated throughout her evidence.

Dallas said that Bruce Burrell told her in early 1995 that Dottie had asked him to set up a bank account with $100 000 of her money, and to then withdraw $90 000 for her and keep $10 000 for his trouble. ‘I think he said he had done it to help her,’ Dallas said.

Burrell told her that Dottie did not want her to know what she had done. ‘He was adamant that I didn’t tell her I knew,’ she told the court. ‘He said that she had been very specific that I wasn’t to be told.’ Dallas said she was not happy about this, but did not say anything to her then husband because he was ‘a very volatile person’.

Questioned by Tedeschi about Burrell’s trips to Hillydale, Dallas said he would sometimes ‘just go and call me when he was there’. But, Dallas added, it would have been unusual for him to do the five-hour round trip on consecutive days.

When the trial resumed the following week, Burrell’s former boss, Peter Grace, took his place in the witness box, telling the jury of a series of conversations he had with Burrell after Dottie went missing. During the chats, Burrell claimed to Grace that Dottie had lent him a sum of money and she was demanding he pay it back. ‘[Bruce] claimed he had received the money from her and she wanted to get the money back from him,’ Grace told the court. ‘He said that she was an annoyance . . . he was annoyed at her temerity. He told me that she had gone as far as saying: “I’ll take legal action to get that money off you” .’

Tedeschi: ‘Did he tell you whether or not he’d said anything in response to the demands?’

Grace replied: ‘Bruce said that he’d eventually gone to her and confronted her, [telling her] to back off with her threats. I got the impression he was very serious in the way he approached her.’

Tedeschi pressed Grace about Burrell’s alibi but Grace was confused about the dates and under cross-examination by Philip Young he wilted in his memory about Burrell’s movements on Dottie’s last day alive.

Grace said that after the lunch, Burrell had gone back to the office with everyone, leaving between 4.30 p.m. and 5 p.m. Luckily, Tedeschi had Burrell’s mobile phone records which showed Grace must have been wrong in his recollection, because data showed Burrell made a phone call from the Mittagong area at 4.30 p.m. The records showed Burrell had come back to Sydney on the night Dottie was last seen, only to return to his property the next day.

At the start of the trial’s fourth week, a dark-haired man with an anxious expression took the witness box. Martin John Meagher had been in courtrooms quite a few times before but never in the witness box. The former chloroform addict had convictions for assault and resisting arrest.

On the day Dottie disappeared, Meagher told the court he had been ‘off his face’ after sniffing chloroform in a toilet block near Maroubra Beach. He was picked up by police for loitering in the shower cubicles of the women’s toilets and, after being released, Meagher arrived back at the area—which was not far from Dottie’s house—about midday to collect his bicycle and the remains of his chloroform.

Meagher endured a grilling from Burrell’s defence about his criminal history and whether he had seen an old lady on the day, before stepping down from the witness box, believing his civic duty was over.

In his closing address to the jury the next day, Tedeschi rejected as ‘manifestly absurd’ the possibility that Dottie was abducted and killed by Meagher. He told the jurors they could be satisfied Dottie was on her way to Burrell’s home when she was last seen. ‘We submit she was going to the Burrell house thinking she would see Dallas,’ Mr Tedeschi said. ‘We know from the evidence that Dallas was at work that day. There was only one other person who lived in that house at this time, that was Bruce Burrell. In all probability she was killed in the [Burrell] house on that day,’ he said.

Mr Tedeschi said Burrell, within 24 hours, made two short trips to his remote property, Hillydale. ‘The crown case is he probably hid the body on the property on May 30 and came back the very first thing the next morning to finish disposing of the body.’

Tedeschi said Burrell’s mobile phone records tracked his movements during this time, and destroyed his alibi that he was at his workmate’s 40th birthday lunch in Sydney on the day Dottie disappeared.

Tedeschi said Burrell was motivated by money. The evidence that Dottie was pressuring Burrell to repay the $100 000 loan was ‘a very cogent motive’ for Burrell to kill her, he told the jury. ‘He preyed upon Dorothy Davis in the sense of using her deep affection for Dallas as a tactic of extracting this money from her.’ Burrell somehow ‘induced’ Dottie Davis to his house, perhaps by saying he had the money for her and Dallas would love to see her.

Defence counsel Phillip Young, who called no witnesses, rose to give his final address, telling the jury the Crown case could not lead them to convict Bruce Burrell.

Young said the case was based ‘almost wholly on circumstantial evidence’. He said the Crown had not eliminated the possibility of the chloroform addict being responsible for Mrs Davis’s disappearance. ‘I would suggest to you he was in a condition, he was in the area, he is a potential explanation— that is as high as we put it,’ Mr Young said. ‘There is nothing the Crown can say about Mr Meagher that rules him out as an alternative explanation.’ Mr Meagher had convictions for assault, Young continued, and asked the jury to consider the possibility he decided to grab the elderly woman’s handbag.

Young said the prosecution has been unable to pinpoint who Dottie was going to visit on the day she vanished. Too much time, Young insisted, had passed between Dallas Bromley’s cancer treatment in August 1994 and Dottie’s disappearance for Dallas to be the ill person with no hair that Dottie was planning to visit. Instead, Young suggested Dottie was heading to her neighbour’s house, Blanche May, who was recovering from cancer.

Thirdly, Young told the jurors, they could not eliminate the possibility that Burrell was at a colleague’s 40th birthday lunch at the time Mrs Davis disappeared. Even though phone records showed his client was in Mittagong on the afternoon Dottie disappeared, a logical alternative explanation was Peter Grace got the day of the lunch right and the time wrong. ‘It remains for your consideration and if that is the case, you cannot exclude the fact Mr Burrell has an alibi,’ Young said.

On Wednesday 5 September 2007, at 12.40 p.m., the jury retired to a back room of the Darlinghurst complex to begin its deliberations. At 4 p.m. the following day, the jury indicated it needed a bit more time and Justice Kirby sent the ten-man and two-woman jury home for the forthcoming long weekend. Sydney had been turned into a fortress for the arrival of world leaders for the Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC). The city was deserted for the country’s biggest security lockdown with US President George W. Bush the star attraction.

Dennis Bray was feeling positive as he embarked on the four-day break, confident a guilty verdict was imminent, but as had become a pattern of the Burrell trial, nothing ran to plan. And nothing had prepared Bray for the twist that was to come.

On the evening of Sunday 9 September, Bray was sitting down to a quiet beer when he took a call from Mark Tedeschi informing him of a bizarre development in the trial. Court watcher Dennis Roberts had visited Burrell earlier that day at the Metropolitan Remand & Reception Centre at Silverwater Correctional Complex, where Burrell was residing during his trial. Roberts informed Burrell of a very interesting conversation he had with the court tea lady, Patricia Abbey.

Abbey said a witness, Martin Meagher, had told her he had seen Dottie on the day she disappeared, which contradicted his evidence to the jury. Burrell immediately informed his defence counsel, Philip Young, who alerted Tedeschi.

For the prosecution to ignore the matter would open up the possibility of an appeal down the track. The wheels had been set in motion and Burrell was delighted: Bray and Detective Sergeant Nigel Warren spent Monday taking statements from Patricia Abbey, Martin Meagher and Dennis Roberts.

On Tuesday morning, Justice Kirby informed the twelve jurors that their deliberations would have to be interrupted to hear some evidence. Until this moment, the Davis trial, which had run for seven weeks, had been very different from the unpredictability of the Whelan one; there had been fewer interruptions by legal argument on the road to a verdict. But the journalists who witnessed the events in Kirby’s courtroom that day could hardly believe what was happening— and all about a conversation the tea lady apparently had while serving one of her customers.

Patricia Abbey blushed as she entered the courtroom, and placed her hand on the bible to be sworn in. She was used to pouring tea for lawyers outside the court, not being cross-examined by them. Pale and slightly confused, Ms Abbey said Meagher had told her a different story in the court’s tea room before he entered the witness box. She said Meagher told her he had seen ‘the old lady’ on the day she disappeared. Ms Abbey later detailed that she had been hospitalised twice for depression and suffered from migraines, which affected her memory.

Martin Meagher was recalled and, looking even more pained than on his previous appearance, told the court he had not seen Dorothy Davis on that day, nor had he told the tea lady he had done so.

Roberts, on a disability pension for a speech impediment, did not make eye contact with Bruce as he took the stand. ‘[The tea lady] told me that she was in the tea room with Martin Meagher and Martin Meagher told her that he was in the park on the day that Dorothy Davis was in the park and he was talking to her,’ Mr Roberts told the court. ‘She said that Martin Meagher was talking to an elderly lady that was carrying a white handbag.’

But in her evidence, Ms Abbey denied Mr Meagher had ever used the name Dorothy Davis, that he had spoken to the woman, or that he mentioned a white handbag.

Maree Dawes was then recalled to be questioned on her mother’s fashion sense. Maree testified that her always impeccably dressed mother had never owned a white handbag. ‘She and I shared a joke about white handbags and white shoes: only Minnie mouse wore them,’ Maree quipped.

Mark Tedeschi told the jury that all evidence about the tea room conversation should be dismissed as an ‘irrelevant distraction’. Ms Abbey had given five different versions of the chat she allegedly had with Mr Meagher, he said. ‘What we submit to you is that a casual conversation in the tea room has been completely misunderstood, taken out of context and given a currency way beyond what was said.’ He attacked the credibility of Ms Abbey’s version of events. He said at various times in her evidence to the court, Ms Abbey recounted the conversation by saying Mr Meagher told her he had seen ‘the old lady’ at the beach, the park, twice in one day, near the beach and the park and near a toilet block.

Defence counsel Philip Young said Ms Abbey’s versions of events were consistent and she could not be dismissed as ‘a crackpot’. The tea lady’s evidence was ‘clearly something of enormous significance if it is accepted as fact’.

As reporters rushed outside to report the ludicrous developments, those involved could see the case appeared to be lurching towards high farce, and much worse, a hung jury. The jury returned to its back room to deliberate, the maddest moment of the trial had passed, but with the lingering potential to dramatically change the direction of the case.

Maree Dawes was fuming that Burrell had managed to so successfully distract the jury from their purpose of finding justice for her mother. And she was even angrier that the court system allowed ‘some hearsay’ from a tea lady, a chloroform addict and a court watcher to be brought into evidence. She could tell the jury was under pressure and felt the jury members were avoiding her glance and it terrified her that they were going to let Burrell off .

Burrell appeared to be harbouring a newfound confidence, as did his friend Roberts who sat alone on a wooden bench outside court three, far removed from the detectives, journalists and Dawes family milling on the grass awaiting a verdict.