Ladykiller (8 page)
According to the ransom note, the kidnappers would make contact within three days of this with further instructions. The investigators were hoping Burrell would make a move—and he did. Around 9 a.m. he drove to the BP service station at Marulan, just outside Bungonia but did not buy a newspaper. A decision was made to continue to run the advertisement for the next seven days.
That night Smith stayed behind the Catholic church where the 24-hour surveillance team had set up a command post in the unfenced grounds of the old building. It was the only place from which they had a radio signal through to Richmond. Detective Allan Duncan and Detective Senior Constable Ricky Agius and a couple of technicians were camped in the churchyard in cars wired with equipment, waiting for Burrell. One advantage of Burrell’s isolated locale was he had to drive some distance to get a newspaper.
The next day around 9.20 a.m., Burrell motored up the road, this time in a Mitsubishi Pajero. The Pajero was filthy, covered in mud and dust. Smith followed Burrell up Mountain Ash Road, past the gates of properties—Kangaga, Pinelea, Storyvale—and radioed ahead for his fellow officers to join in the covert pursuit.
At 9.43 a.m., Burrell arrived in the main street of Goul-burn and turned off to the Woolworths shopping centre and into a petrol station, where he filled his vehicle. Smith could see a dog, Burrell’s grey kelpie, Rebel, in the back seat. Smith filmed Burrell from the car as he paid for the gas and drove to another petrol station, where he bought a sandwich and a
Daily Telegraph
. Was he looking for the advertisement, Smith wondered as he followed the suspect back to Bungonia.
Detective Sergeant Allan Duncan reported to Smith that their mobile command post was the talk of Bungonia and that they must move to a new location, an old tip site off Marulan Road. The team lived there out of one vehicle, with only basic provisions and no running water; each afternoon with the change of shift, a new car would be brought in via Marulan Road, to try to keep the locals guessing.
For the next two days there was no movement through Hillydale’s gate and detectives and the State Technical Intelligence Branch team were uptight. Burrell was holed up inside his house, but what was he doing in there? Destroying evidence, perhaps. Surely he needed milk and bread, beer at least. Police needed to get into Hillydale to look for some sign of Mrs Whelan. Everything was in place for a covert search of the farm.
At 9.35 a.m. on the morning of Friday 16 May, Senior Constable Smith radioed through to Richmond that Burrell was on the move. He was in his Pajero driving towards Goulburn. Bray alerted Goulburn Highway Patrol officers of Burrell’s pending arrival in town. Smith followed; on Goulburn’s main street, he watched Goulburn Highway Patrol Senior Constable Paul Morsanuto activate his police lights behind Burrell, who pulled the Pajero into the kerb.
Burrell wound down his window. ‘Good morning, fellas,’ he said to the officer who had alighted from the police vehicle, ‘what’s the problem?’
Morsanuto said, ‘Is this your car, sir? According to our computer systems, you have the incorrect numberplates on the car and the vehicle is not registered.’
‘It should be.’ Burrell looked surprised.
Morsanuto asked him again.
Burrell’s face was turning red. ‘Okay,’ he said eventually, ‘the plates are off an old car that I had on the farm. It’s not registered.’
Morsanuto informed Burrell that he was now under arrest and would have to go to Goulburn police station for an interview. ‘Lock up your car and leave the dog there,’ Morsanuto told him. ‘We’ll be a couple of hours.’
Parked a short distance away, Senior Constable Smith watched Burrell take one long look around him before he bent down to get into the police van. Smith radioed through to taskforce HQ. The covert search could begin.
With a car full of SPG officers tailing them, the search group drove towards Hillydale. In the four-seater utility were Allan Duncan, Ricky Agius and two female scientific officers. The team’s job was to ascertain whether Kerry was somewhere on the property, or at the very least find evidence which would convince a magistrate to grant police a formal search warrant.
Allan Duncan parked at Hillydale’s gate and they began the walk up to the house. Dressed in jeans and T-shirts the group members posed as two couples walking arm in arm, pretending to chat and laugh on their way to visit their friend, ‘Charlie’. Duncan looked at Agius and the women. They all seemed composed, but if they were like him, their pulses were racing and their palms sweaty. Duncan had no idea what he was walking into—the so-called ‘international’ team of thugs implied in the ransom note, or perhaps an armed gang guarding a tied-up Kerry? The foursome had guns in their ankle holsters and the SPG parked just up the road as back-up, but still they felt vulnerable.
As they neared the house Duncan yelled out, ‘Charlie. Mate! You home? We’re looking for ya.’
No reply. Duncan listened at the door. Not a sound. The detective knocked. ‘Charlie. Wake up! . . . You been on the piss again? Let us in.’ Duncan could feel his heart pounding. He looked at the others. Was someone watching them? Ricky Agius raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
The scientific officers got to work on breaking in. With a soft waxy material and some metal, they began to fashion keys for the house. Duncan and Agius pressed their faces up against the windows of Burrell’s house, peering into the gloom for any sign of life. The men smoked and then Agius dug a hole in the lawn to bury their cigarette butts. The place felt eerie and isolated.
Once the detectives were inside, Duncan waited for his pager to beep, as per his instructions from the taskforce HQ. ‘Pick up the phone Al. Hendo,’ the text on the pager read. Two seconds later, Burrell’s telephone rang.
Duncan picked up the receiver with a rubber-gloved hand. It was Detective Sergeant Brett Henderson.
‘Hi, mate,’ Hendo said, ‘What can you tell us?’
Henderson was the investigations manager from Parramatta Local Area Command and was now attached to the taskforce. He instructed them to keep Burrell’s phone line open and, for the next forty-five minutes, Duncan and Agius went from room to room relaying what they could see. There appeared to be no trace of Mrs Whelan.
Strewn over the kitchen table were bills and documents, a packet of Panadol, prescription tablets for arthritis, and four packets of Ransom brand cigarettes. Among the papers were a number of ‘Safe’ brand and ‘Tudor Blue’ brand envelopes, marked ‘Confidential’.
Allan Duncan found a note. It read ‘cervical cancer, early June operation, laser/knife. Found out two weeks ago. BB spoke to SB Friday 9.5.97’.
Another note read, ‘Sometimes we stand hand in hand and . . . you come to me and I . . . see . . . and I say to myself wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, how wonderful you are do do do oh how wonderful my love’. Duncan smirked. If this was Burrell’s attempt at a love letter, he needed an editor.
In a walk-in wardrobe in the main bedroom, the officers found a metal gun cabinet. Among half a dozen or more firearms, Agius made an intriguing find. It was a brown chloroform bottle. Empty.
Back at Richmond, Hendo was revealing the news to the taskforce. Dennis Bray nodded, but he was too tense to smile.
Duncan and Agius began to search more feverishly. Agius photographed each exhibit, although he did not know how to use the camera and the pictures would prove useless, blurred and out of focus. In Burrell’s bedroom, there was a Canon typewriter and Duncan put in a sheet of paper and tapped on all the keys for the analysts to compare with the ransom letter. Then he and Agius returned to the stack of weapons—Burrell clearly was a gun nut.
Duncan laid a gloved hand on the phone receiver again and told Hendo to prepare for taking down an inventory. Duncan began: ‘a part-filled box of .44 calibre Magnum rounds, a number of 308 calibre rounds, one .222 Remington brand Magnum pistol, several 44/40 Winchester rounds, .22 calibre sonic rounds . . .’ He paused. Ricky Agius pointed out the firearms and listed the makes.
‘Let’s see,’ Duncan spoke into the receiver, ‘um . . . a Bennett brand Veloci Nash speed crossbow, one .303 rifle, a .223 calibre rifle, a .44 Ruger Magnum carbine with a single barrel, a .222 rifle with scope, a Winchester model bolt action .22 rifle, a double-barrell shotgun, a Sako .308 calibre rifle with scope and, last one, a Boito shotgun.’
The officers moved outside. Duncan and Agius were the eyes of the taskforce, waiting impatiently in its Richmond bunker. They began a search of the outbuildings, first the hayshed and then an old slaughterhouse. In it was a large mincer. Duncan looked at Agius. No, it was covered in dirt and rust.
Agius wandered into the first of two shearing sheds. Seconds later, Duncan heard a commotion and saw the terrified city cop racing to the far end of the shed, pursued by a charging wombat. Duncan started laughing, then banged on the shed wall to distract the animal. A Jaguar was parked in the middle of the shed, a blanket half-draped over its bonnet.
Back at the house, Hendo was concerned about the time it was taking. It was after midday. ‘How much more you got to do?’ he asked.
Duncan ran his hands through his hair. ‘It’s a huge place, mate. We’ve covered a lot. Unless you want us trampling over hill and dale.’
‘There’s enough for the search warrant,’ Henderson said, ‘get out of there.’
As they strolled back to the ute, a mix of emotions washed over them . . . relief that the job was done without incident, elation at the ‘treasure’ haul of guns and documents—but despondency that they had found no sign of Kerry.
Back at Goulburn police station, police were winding up the interview with Burrell, who was charged with receiving a stolen vehicle, driving it while unregistered and uninsured, and with having numberplates ‘calculated to deceive’. Burrell was angry and refused to admit he knew the car was stolen. At 1.51 p.m., Burrell strolled out, unaware that Taskforce Bellaire was closing in on him.
That afternoon, the streets of Bungonia were devoid of police. Dennis Bray had called off the surveillance; the officers were to make their way back to Richmond. The risks were too great to remain in Bungonia; it might be best to just let Burrell Bruce run and see where he led them.
It was now ten days since the abduction and the silence from the kidnappers weighed almost unbearably upon Bray, who was about to receive a phone call he could have done without. Word of a ‘million-dollar kidnapping’ had begun to circulate among police and, inevitably, been leaked to the media. A reporter phoned Bray. He knew just enough about the case—that a major kidnapping involving a wealthy Sydney businessman’s wife had taken place—and he wanted Bray to fill in the details.
Then another call came in, to the Major Incident Group office in Surry Hills. Next, a current affairs program contacted Chief Inspector Rod Harvey to say it was planning to air a story on the case. Over three decades Harvey had built up a good relationship with a number of police roundsmen and so he called in favours and stressed that no information was to be published as ‘lives could well be at risk if something goes wrong’. He promised each journalist early notice of the press conference police inevitably would have to call the following week.
By 18 May the taskforce knew it was time to call upon the public for help. However, measures had to be put in place to get Bernie Whelan out of the house, at least for a few days while the media descended and he had to leave a message on his answering machine in case the kidnappers called. Bernie sat in his kitchen and read from a script into his answering machine. He was nervous as he recited: ‘Hello, this is Bernie speaking. I’ve decided to go away for a few days and I will be on my mobile if you need me. If it’s about the white VW at Homebush, will you please contact me urgently, day or night. Thank you.’ SPG officers would remain at the Whelan home while Bernie went to stay with the children at the home of his friend, Tony Garnett.
Dennis Bray directed Bernie to amend the advertisement in
The Daily Telegraph
, to include Bernie’s mobile phone number. The detective advised everyone to get some sleep over the weekend. The lid was about to blow off the investigation.
The wait had gone on long enough. Thirteen days had passed; the seven-day deadline of the kidnappers extended again and again, but not met. Dennis Bray was concerned that crucial evidence was being lost. The detective knew that if Kerry was Bruce Burrell’s prisoner, her fate was sealed. Eventually Burrell would have to kill her because she knew him; she was possibly already dead. A move had to be made at least to preserve the crime scene.
Bray began rallying forces for a full-scale raid on Hillydale. A search warrant was obtained from Goulburn Local Court and Bray would need to call on the Operational Support Group, or OSG, led by Detective Inspector Bruce Couch. Couch had led the searches of the Belanglo State Forest that found the bodies of three of the seven backpackers who died at the hands of serial killer Ivan Milat. A nuggety-looking officer, with more than two decades of experience, Couch was tough and demanding.
On this day, Monday 19 May, the 42-year-old was at the Army’s Infantry Centre at Ingleburn training some recruits to his specialist unit. Day one of what was to be a week-long course was drawing to a close when Couch’s pager beeped. ‘Wherever you are ring Peter Dein on this number. It is urgent. URGENT’, the text read. Couch did so.
Detective Chief Inspector Dein did not waste time with a ‘hello’. ‘Is Bob Myers with you?’
‘Yeah, he’s here,’ Couch said.
‘I’m coming to see both of you, ASAP. Tell Bob to hang around.’
As they waited, Myers, the operational commander for the south-west region, joked: ‘What’s this about, Couchie? You in trouble for swearing at the constable this morning?’
Dein arrived and detailed the case. ‘We’ll be executing a search operation on a person of interest near Goulburn, at Bungonia, on Wednesday. A Mr Bruce Burrell resides on the property. Couchie, I need you to get thirty of your finest together by Wednesday morning. Tell them nothing. Just tell them to be in Goulburn,’ Dein said.