Ladykiller (7 page)
Ruming’s officers were positioned inside and outside the house according to the classic tactical squad grouping: a six-person assault entry or emergency action team, a six-man deliberate action team and a four-person perimeter team of marksmen whose sights were trained permanently on the ‘stronghold’—in this case, Willow Park, in the rooms of which semiautomatic weapons were neatly stacked. Bernie was wearing a bulletproof vest, which an SPG officer kindly explained was really only bullet ‘resistant’. A projectile might still penetrate the vest; at the very least he would probably fall over from the impact if a round whistled into his ribs.
Adrenaline-charged, Bernie swaggered around his house exchanging talk with some of the officers about calibres and ammunition types. His father-in-law Leo Ryan was not impressed. ‘This isn’t a bloody movie, Bernard,’ Leo Ryan told him. ‘We’re not going to Luna Park. I just want my daughter back.’
Bernie realised he was overwrought. His sleeplessness and growing exhaustion only added to the singularity of the situation.
The atmosphere in the Whelan house was electric as everyone waited for the kidnappers to call. Police believed there was a chance the kidnappers would make contact before the seven-day deadline for Bernie to place the advertisement in
The Daily Telegraph
. Bernie sat in the lounge room with six negotiators, his eyes focused on the telephone, praying for it to ring. When friends called wanting to speak to Kerry, his voice was calm and discreet: ‘Kerry is away at the moment,’ Bernie repeated; he wasn’t lying.
Civilians are not normally allowed to be involved in covert major operations, but Bernie was needed. He had to be there to talk to the kidnappers and deliver the money. A recording device had been placed on the Whelans’ home telephone and Bernie’s mobile, and the negotiators gave Bernie clear instructions on what to do when contact was made: ‘You must remain calm, Bernie,’ chief negotiator Graham Abel told him. ‘Most importantly, you’ve got to ask for “proof of life”. You want to speak to your wife and you must insist on hearing Kerry’s voice.’
Bernie’s Mercedes had been wired up with tracking devices and radio equipment, in preparation for the delivery of the ransom money. Bernie and his Maltese terrier, Little Bob, were surrounded by the most highly skilled police officers in Australia and perhaps the best equipped team gathered, until that date, at a crisis point in Australia. To Bernie’s eye, everywhere he turned there were men ready to pounce. And they sometimes did.
On the afternoon of 11 May, Bernie, desperately tired, tried to get some rest, but he barely had his head on the pillow when he heard a tap-tap-tap on the window. His heart started racing. There it was again—tap-tap-tap-tap . . . Bernie ran from his room and called out to officers, who raced towards him, barking into their two-way radios as they pushed Bernie to the ground. The house was suddenly alive and crackling with static and muffled shouts. Officers crawled to the side of the house outside, soon discovering the tapping was caused by a sprinkler which had come alive on a timer and was hitting the downpipe.
Another afternoon, a man approached the Whelans’ mailbox to deliver a leaflet, and was thrown to the ground by an armed figure in charcoal uniform. The specialist teams were clearly on edge, and becoming increasingly agitated and restless.
Bray and Howe ordered that a series of dummy, or practice, runs be conducted in the middle of the night to ensure the operation was successfully constructed. Everyone, except Bernie, was involved. The dummy runs not only helped to hone their skills but provided an outlet for some of the tension. They were played out as if they were the real thing, from the second the call came from the ‘kidnappers’ to the moment the money was delivered. More than fifty officers, including a stand-in for Bernie Whelan, would tail ‘Bernie’ in his Mercedes, which had been wired up with tracking devices, as he drove to a meeting point with the green garbage bag of cash. Helicopters hovered at a distance; the car’s electronics winked on a screen at Richmond air base and the snipers were poised, ready to shoot. Each operation took around three hours and, back at Richmond, Howe and Bray were determined to do it until they got it right. ‘We only get one go at this,’ Howe told his officers.
On the first practice, they discovered the sound over their two-way radios was poor. Another time, the negotiators could be seen during the money drop-off which, had this been the real thing, would have destroyed their cover. Bernie would hear the ransom team return well into the early morning. All the activity made him hopeful, despite the knot of fear in his stomach.
Marjorie Minton-Taylor was watching Bernie with mounting concern. He was not eating and hardly sleeping. She called a doctor who prescribed sleeping pills. Marjorie and her daughter, Amanda, had stayed on the property to help look after Bernie and tend to the horses, which still had to be fed twice a day. The police, Marge quickly realised, were eating rather more often.
To check on the horses, Amanda and Marge would set out from the house accompanied by one of the armed policemen and go to the stables and the six lush paddocks where the horses grazed. And once a day, the women would drive out of Willow Park in Marge’s work van, which bore the logo ‘Wagner’s Saddlery’, with two or three SPG men lying down in the back. With the officers’ change of shifts Marge would drop them back at the RAAF base to sleep and drive on with Amanda to the shops, alternating supermarkets so as not to spark suspicion. One day it was Bi-Lo at North Richmond, the next the local Coles, the trips always resulting in a full trolley to feed the hungry horde.
As dusk fell and officers with night scopes stretched out in trenches around the perimeter of Willow Park, Marge roasted, baked and boiled up a virtual conveyor belt of quiches, joints, casseroles and desserts, leaving a bench full of tasty meals for the night team before she crawled off to bed. Her aim was to keep the cops fed and focused, but the cooking was also her way of coping in an unreal situation.
Marge’s biggest fan was an officer called Peter Walsh, whose job was to guard the ransom money. They played cards while Marge ensured a constant supply of food. When Mick Howe arrived at the house one night he did a double-take when he saw Walsh who, at the end of his shift , was wolfing down another of Marge’s lamb roasts.
‘God, haven’t you put on some weight?’ Howe pointed at the waistband of Walsh’s overalls.
Marge smiled; it had been one of her jobs in the horse business to fatten up show hacks.
For a while, the adrenaline of being in a house with the police kept Bernie going, but as the days ebbed away he knew they took with them his chances of finding his wife alive.
Back at the Richmond command post, the taskforce had moved into the high risk phase of the operation. Each detail was planned, down to the police station where the kidnappers would be charged, the officers who would interview them and the court they would face. The detectives drew up a list of twenty-six ‘what if ’ scenarios and procedures to deal with the situation. The myriad scenarios included the possibility that the extortionists would make contact with Bernie but refuse to allow him to speak to Kerry, or would fail to make contact within the specified time.
The taskforce had consulted Scotland Yard, London’s Metropolitan Police Service. Chief Inspector Laurie Banner, a kidnapping specialist, analysed the ransom letter and concluded that the author had tried to portray that the demand was ‘a highly planned and sophisticated operation’ by an international group. Banner also thought that the method of communication this kidnapper was using—a letter and a newspaper advertisement—was highly unusual. In nearly all cases, phone communication was used by the extortionist to make further contact.
Around 200 kilometres to the south, on the outskirts of a country village, an SPG team was covertly making its way onto Bruce Burrell’s property. Bungonia was a flyspeck on the map and Burrell lived five kilometres out of town.
Around midnight on 11 May, officers wearing dark coveralls and balaclavas crawled silently up his driveway. When they reached the weatherboard house, one officer slid up a wall until he could see through a chink in the curtains of the lighted window. It was the lounge room, and Burrell was there with his dog; they appeared to be alone, with no sign of Kerry. The officers slunk away.
In the township of Bungonia itself, surveillance police were attempting to operate covertly in a community so tiny it did not have a shop. Remaining undercover in a ten-house town would be a challenge.
Strange things were happening down in Bungonia on the afternoon of Sunday 11 May 1997. Each time Raymond Dole emerged from his house, he could see a man poke a very long camera lens at him from a car window. It was giving Raymond the shits. Whenever he moved, he felt the lens follow him. He rang his father, Ray Dole. The phone line clicked twice and he assumed their phones were being tapped—by someone.
Around the corner, Mrs Lorraine Brooks, the schoolteacher’s wife, was staring at a car parked on the main street. Whenever Lorraine glanced up Oallen Ford Road at the dark-coloured vehicle, the driver seemed to dip his head down quickly. Bushwalkers and campers often passed through Bungonia on weekends on their way to the State Recreation Area, drawn to the beautiful but treacherous sprawl of limestone territory to the south which was cleaved by a deep and spectacular chasm. Bungonia Gorge was honeycombed with ancient caves. Lorraine Brooks knew those kinds of visitors passed quickly through the village. They did not park in the main street, or loiter in town. Few people did, apart from the population of around thirty-five who found this rural backwater charming.
Bungonia had been a township in steady decline since the middle of the nineteenth century, and while the Oallen Ford and the Lookdown roads featured grand buildings, they all dated from one brief glory period in the town’s history. A solid future seemed destined for Bungonia in the 1840s, when stonemason Patrick Kelly added what would become the Old Parsonage to the Hotel Victoria. In 1847, Kelly built St Michael’s Catholic Church, now one of the oldest standing Catholic churches in Australia. Settled by convicts and ticket-of-leave men, Bungonia once boasted butchers, shopkeepers, a schoolteacher, two pastors and a publican, as well as bushrangers who waited on the town’s outskirts and held up coach loads of visitors. Unfortunately the colony’s surveyor-general, Major Thomas Mitchell, cut short Bungonia’s prospects of becoming a major centre by relocating the main road west through Goulburn.
These days in Bungonia, there was nowhere even to buy bread and milk; the closest shop was in Marulan, 15 kilometres away. Bungonia’s quiet rhythm included a weekly sew-in of the Patchwork and Quilters Group at the village hall, a biweekly meeting of the Country Women’s Association and the Progress Association’s powwow. The intruders on the streets of Bungonia on Sunday 11 May knew they would stand out, but Detective Sergeant Dennis Bray thought it would be foolish for his officers to pass themselves off as adventure seekers or bushwalkers.
At first, the locals thought the car in Oallen Ford Road had broken down. But Raymond Dole had seen a second vehicle near St Michael’s Church and a sports car parked below the Anglican Church at the other end of Bungonia. He dubbed the three drivers ‘Huey, Dewey and Louie’. Residents noticed four other unmarked cars spread out on the arterial roads north to Marulan and west to Goulburn.
By late Sunday afternoon, Lorraine Brooks had had enough. The plain-clothes officer from the State Technical Intelligence Branch sitting in the car on Oallen Ford Road watched with resignation as she approached him. Lorraine was pleasant enough, though a little exasperated, but she listened as Senior Constable Malcolm Smith delivered a story concocted by Chief Superintendent Rod Harvey.
Smith told Lorraine he was investigating a drug gang trucking supplies through Bungonia and beyond. ‘Please keep this to yourself Madam,’ Smith told her and he knew she wouldn’t. Smith watched now as she went from house to house, her eyes alive with his tale and he smiled—it had gone perfectly to plan. As she retold the yarn, she might have added something about the possibility of Bungonians caught in a shoot-out; with every account, the story grew and by sundown the town was sure Bungonia would erupt, at some point, in a fiery high noon. Smith was relieved. As Bray had warned, the risk of the locals revealing the officers’ true purpose was great and could impact on the safety of Mrs Whelan, who was possibly a prisoner of Bruce Burrell, although in time, the residents ditched the drug gang story as ‘bulldust’.
So far there had been no sign of Burrell in the village, but on the morning of 12 May, a grey Jaguar turned onto Inverary Road, cut through the ghost gums and stringy-barks and neat rows of pine plantation and drove to Bungonia. Just after 10 a.m. the driver came into the view of the officer parked near the Catholic church. When the officer radioed through to Smith, he had already spotted Burrell at the wheel of the car, which turned right from Inverary Road and was heading towards Goulburn. For the next 22 kilometres, Smith loosely tailed the suspect.
In Goulburn, Smith found it easy to follow Burrell as he moved around the shops wearing jeans and a yellow jumper. Burrell remained in Goulburn for thirty minutes and then Smith tailed him back to Bungonia where Burrell turned left , heading towards his property. A police check of the Jaguar’s registration number revealed the plates were from a stolen Suzuki Vitari, yet despite this latest revelation, the taskforce still did not know whether Burrell was involved. A car thief he might be, but a kidnapper who was trying to pull off Australia’s biggest ransom demand?
Tomorrow was day seven, when Bernie Whelan’s advertisement would appear in the Public Notice section of Sydney’s
Daily Telegraph
newspaper, as directed by the ransom note. Bernie had phoned the
Telegraph
’s advertising department and submitted the ad. It read: ‘Anyone who witnessed a white Volkswagen beetle parked beside the eastern gates of the Sydney Olympic site at 10.30 p.m. on Tuesday 8.4.97 please call . . .’ The Whelans’ home number lay at the end of the ad.