The Killer Within Read online

  I have been given about fourteen skin names so far and have never remembered one. I do not want to be a spotted moth or a mangrove maggot. Not that I’m ungrateful, it’s just not my world. It’s hard enough being human. Besides, in this instance I was not flattered at the prospect of being tribally assimilated by a man who wouldn’t remember me in the morning. What he really wanted was a drink and a cigarette. I was more than happy to comply because it meant he would go away. I complied. Like magic, the lawman faded from view.

  Alvin was talking like a post electric-shock therapy patient, his words not really making it into the open air. ‘Black men are my brothers,’ is what he seemed to be saying. I took this as a warning that he had protection, rather than any statement about people needing to get along in the great big melting pot of a world. He kept slapping Neville’s back, calling him a ‘black cunt’. Each time he heard this, Neville would stiffen and grimace. But then he would also laugh. It must have had something to do with the money in Alvin’s pockets.

  ‘People are starting to look at us. Let’s get out of here,’ said Neville.

  I’m tall with short hair; they didn’t want anyone to think they were hanging around with a cop. Neville wanted me to tag along. Alvin wanted to lose me. Unhelpfully, for Alvin, I didn’t offer to disappear. As we exited the Roey looking for a taxi, Alvin ripped out $50 and handed it to Neville, who was just in time to catch the start of a dog race. A few minutes later, three shredded betting slips fell to the ground. Alvin had a high disposable income. We entered a minibus taxi, the driver asking everyone if they wouldn’t mind not smoking in the vehicle. Neville, Alvin and Brad agreed. They smoked with their heads out the windows.

  We pulled up in front of a house in Anne Street on the west side of Broome, Alvin fumbling fifties as he tried to pay the driver. A young Aboriginal man stepped out of the house holding a baby and gave the upturned, openpalmed hand signal which can mean various things to Aboriginal people, including, ‘What’s up?’, ‘Where are you going?’ or, in this case, ‘Have you got any?’ Nods from Alvin and Neville in the minibus.

  Neville spotted an open-top Toyota short-wheel-base cruising past, packed with young Aboriginal men. Neville shouted and made the hand signals but the Toyota didn’t stop. ‘Tahnu,’ declared Neville. ‘Don’t worry – I know where he’s going. We’ll go and find him soon.’

  Up a flight of stairs to Alvin’s housing commission flat in the so-called Bronx of Broome, Alvin suddenly found his voice. On home terrain he transformed, jogging around his unit and actually flapping his arms like wings as words, recipes for marinating beef satays and how marijuana is solving the nation’s problems streaming forth. Two pretty Aboriginal girls, one sullen and the other smiley, were lying on ripped vinyl couches, too hot to move. They looked to be about the same age but it turned out they were mother and daughter. One got up to wander past to the toilet and Alvin grabbed a great handful of her butt. She didn’t seem to notice. ‘My girlfriend’s daughter,’ Alvin explained.

  Neville took a seat at the laminex table and declared his hand. ‘You know what we do here?’ He was a solemn bloke who talked quietly and buried his words so that sometimes you’d have to ask him to repeat himself. I told Neville that I was getting an idea. ‘We’re drug distributors,’ he said. ‘All right,’ I said, wondering what this was really about. ‘I said I’d take you to Tahnu Sahanna,’ said Neville, ‘and I will, but for the meantime I recommend you just sit here and watch. You’re going to meet some interesting people.’

  Two full plastic sandwich bags of tight marijuana heads arrived on the table. When the clip seals were opened the house became infested with that vile purple smell. Alvin ordered one of the girls to grab a pile of pre-cut sections of foil from beneath a bookshelf which was not home to a single book. Into the foils Alvin began shaping $30 deals. Good deals.

  I was offered a pipe but declined. This was possibly diplomatically unwise, but I was not a marijuana enthusiast. As it turned out, no one was offended. It wasn’t like refusing horse-milk alcohol in a Mongol’s tent. Only two people in the room actually smoked – Neville and the sullen young girl. The dope looked like strong skunk. Alvin continued to foil up, but he was becoming increasingly unhappy with my presence. He wanted to see my ID, my ‘press card’. I told him I had nothing apart from a driver’s licence – besides, if I was a cop, I’d already have hit the buzzer. Then wanted to see the driver’s licence. I showed him. He pretended he could read it, like it had a hidden barcode.

  ‘I told you I vouch for him, man,’ Neville told Alvin. He was clearly group bodyguard. ‘Don’t let me down, eh?’ he said to me. I explained to Neville that I didn’t actually ask to see any of this. ‘You gotta see this,’ he said.

  An Aboriginal woman turned up to drop off two skinny kids to be babysat in the drug flat. They were placed on a sofa-bed in front of the video player. Alvin kept on foiling up on the table, but every few minutes he’d suddenly jump up and jog around the room. On one such sortie he noticed the kids were watching two actors in a deep tongue-kissing session which was rapidly turning into a crotch-grabbing sex scene. The characters were tearing at each other’s clothes. ‘What the hell is going on here, kids?’ he yelled, standing with a cushion over the screen, peeking behind it now and then and giving the all-clear once the scene had ended. Alvin jogged back to the table with his arms straight down by his sides, his hands making little birdie flaps.

  ‘Man, I am out of it,’ he said. ‘The cops have been watching this place all day. A couple of hours ago I thought they were coming in to bust me so I dropped ten eccies rather than flushing them.’

  ‘Ten ecstasies?’ I queried, betraying my doubts about the feasibility of such immense drug ingestion.

  ‘One day I had thirty,’ he said, daring me to contradict him.

  I was tiring of Alvin and wanted to find Sahanna. I didn’t have long in Broome. Brad Murdoch was, at that moment, standing trial for the rape of a mother and daughter in South Australia. The trial was fast drawing to a close. If he was acquitted, he was to be extradited directly to Darwin to face committal for the murder of Peter Falconio. The chances of him being acquitted of the rapes seemed remote given the facts, which pointed to Murdoch as an unusually organised and cruel predator. But juries are strange creatures. If Murdoch did get off, word was already out that he was to be paraded through Darwin airport in handcuffs, for the media’s benefit, before being taken to the remand section of Berrimah prison. I wanted to be there for it.

  ‘Relax, man,’ counselled Neville. ‘Before this night is through, you will begin to know about Brad Murdoch.’

  ‘Who’s Brad Murdoch?’ The sullen girl was staring at me over a pipe.

  ‘Murdoch,’ I told her, ‘is the guy that Northern Territory police have fingered for the murder of Peter Falconio.’

  ‘Who’s Peter Falconio?’ she said.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I asked.

  ‘Here,’ she said.

  Falconio, I told her, was the British backpacker who was shot on the Stuart Highway near Barrow Creek in the Northern Territory, in July 2001.

  Her face registered nothing.

  ‘Falconio, whose body has never been found. Police think this Murdoch, who used to live in Broome – in fact, for a while, in this very street – did it.’

  ‘So?’ she says.

  ‘So, Murdoch is also on trial in South Australia for a double rape. Of a mother and her twelve-year-old daughter.’

  ‘Did he do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘Police seem to think so.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think anything. All I know is they have some of Murdoch’s DNA on Joanne Lees’ t-shirt. And it looks like he was in the area at the time.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  I couldn’t believe she had never heard of Joanne Lees or Peter Falconio. ‘Have you ever read a newspaper?’ I asked. What really gets to a jour
nalist when people display total ignorance of stories they have worked on is: this person has never heard of me. Journalists are the vainest of creatures, second only to lawyers. Still, you’d think she’d have heard of the case. And what had happened to that supposedly all-seeing rag which bears no journalist’s by-line, the famous all-seeing Bush Telegraph?

  She shrugged. Get on with it.

  ‘Joanne Lees was Falconio’s girlfriend,’ I told her. ‘They were hijacked on the highway in the Northern Territory. On 14 July 2001. Falconio was executed. She was tied up by the attacker, who they think is this Murdoch guy, but she managed to escape. Murdoch – well, they think it’s him – was photographed refuelling at the Shell Truck Stop in Alice Springs a few hours after Falconio went missing. You remember how there was a picture released of a bloke going into the shop?’

  No response.

  ‘Anyway, he was one of your neighbours. As for the rape, we’ll know soon. Whatever happens, the Northern Territory police will extradite him to Darwin to stand trial for the murder of Falconio. You know what a trial is?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s where cops make up a whole lot of bullshit to put blackfellas in jail,’ she said. I looked around at the mostly black faces gathered around the laminex table. No one was laughing.

  ‘That woman is suss, man,’ said Neville. He’d heard of Lees. At that time, in Australia, it didn’t matter whose table you sat at no one much liked Joanne Lees. Not her and certainly not her story. Lees, who made an extraordinary escape from what would have undoubtedly quickly transformed into a horrific sexual assault ending, almost without question, in her death, was regarded as suspicious.

  It wasn’t suspicious. It was miraculous. But it was hard to call to mind too many stories of famous women survivors. No one talks about women who’ve survived domestic violence. Perhaps men are not comfortable with stories of women making it themselves. The North Americans had a shot at it by carefully producing the story of Private Jessica Lynch, a US supply clerk who sat cowering in a Humvee after running into an Iraqi ambush in Nassiriya in 2002. It worked, for a while. The story of Lynch, who had been unable to lift a finger to help herself, became arguably the single most reported incident in the Iraq war prior to the capture of Saddam Hussein.

  Lynch was with the US’s army’s 507th maintenance group, which took a wrong turn and fell to an ambush. Nine of Lynch’s comrades were killed but Lynch did not die and was taken to a local Iraqi-run hospital. The Pentagon would later claim she had a bullet and stab wounds. She had no such injuries – just run-of-the-mill road smash pummelling. Iraqi doctors attended to Lynch for eight days and then tried to deliver her, in an ambulance, to a US roadblock. The mercy vehicle was fired upon by the Americans and the ambulance had to retreat back to the hospital. Even though it became known to the US authorities that doctors wanted to hand Lynch back, it was decided the US Marines would raid the unguarded hospital and ‘rescue’ Lynch. Private Lynch had shown all the self-preservation instincts of a road bollard, yet she came to represent triumph and survival to the American people at a time when things weren’t going well. Perhaps they needed Lynch. But Australia did not need a Lees. Nor did the British.

  The Australian public seemed to have made up its own mind about Lees without the assistance of the press, who had played the early reportage with little comment or innuendo. The British public were force-fed a weak but sufficiently cloudy stream of urine about Lees, including the notion that Lees was insane and had ‘lost’, in similar fashion, a previous boyfriend. Some British reporters seemed to like the idea that Falconio wasn’t dead at all but had pulled some insurance scam and was hiding out in a tropical island hellhole – New Guinea, perhaps – where Jo Lees would later hook up with him and they’d live gloriously ever after on a nonexistent insurance payout. Australian reporters liked it, too, but were by nature more circumspect than the ruthless British press. Still, we were prepared to learn. Yet there was always Lindy Chamberlain to remember. She sat there on our shoulders, wagging her finger.

  Lees, unlike Jessica Lynch, had never been trained to expect the worst, and had suddenly found herself alone and in the most dangerous kind of peril an individual could ever face. Her boyfriend had been shot dead – or, at least, she had good reason to believe he had been. She was sure she was about to be raped. She was not in a war zone, nor had she turned the wrong corner into a dangerous neighbourhood. She was on a friendly open highway in a supposedly welcoming land. She’d been bound and gagged and set to one side while the killer scuffed red dirt over the bitumen in a half-hearted attempt to conceal the pooling bright-red brain blood of her dead boyfriend. Lees had not only lived to tell the story but would soon point the finger at Brad Murdoch, the man she believed was her attacker.

  Hero is a word easily pinned to any survivor, and space was quickly made on the uniform of the clueless Private Lynch. They would not cast that medal for Joanne Lees. Surviving was not a sufficient gesture on her part. Being raped and thrown to the dingoes might have done it.

  ‘That Lindy Chamberlain, she did it,’ said the sullen girl.

  ‘A lot of people still think that,’ I said.

  ‘She just did it,’ she challenged, big eyes sharpening.

  I considered telling her how it was curious to me that people who have themselves experienced prejudice – as she may well have, being a person of Aboriginal descent – were often the first to employ its insidious broadsweep vagaries upon others. You’d think, I didn’t tell her, that a person in your position might cut an outnumbered person some slack.

  Instead of being a white man lecturing a black girl on prejudice, I outlined a pro-Lindy case. I did this not to dissuade the girl of her views, only to show I had the sort of knowledge of the Chamberlain case which they – particularly Alvin, who was breathing down my neck, still wanting to see that press pass – might ascribe to someone more like a journalist than a cop. However, listening to myself, it began to occur to me that I did sound like a cop. So I drummed home the point that the cops thought Lindy did it, whereas I had always thought Lindy was innocent. Or, at least, not guilty. If they could get the distinction. Which they didn’t.

  They were all looking at me. Alvin’s jaw had dropped, partly because he was entering an explosively warm and love-festooned paradise, but mostly because he was not used to anyone besides him dominating a conversation for so long. He slammed a small white pill on the table. Take it, he challenged. Prove you’re not a cop. I took it and continued, outlining the famous ten minutes in which Lindy’s movements were not accounted for at the camping area. It was in that ten minutes Lindy was supposed to have killed her baby daughter, Azaria.

  In that short time after Lindy left the Ayer’s Rock barbecue area, making sure her little son Aidan didn’t follow her, as a child sometimes does with their mother, she would have had to change into fresh clothes, go to the car with her baby taking a pair of scissors, sever the baby’s throat, wait for the baby to die, hide the body, clean up the front of the car where the baby would have bled a warm jugular spray, change out of her clothes which were most likely bloody and back into what she had been wearing before, hide her stained clothes, go into the family tent and drip her daughter’s blood around the place to make it look like a dingo had taken her, go back and sit down happily, pretending nothing at all had happened. In ten minutes.

  Still, being Australian meant you had inherited that horrible unblinking shark’s eye. You circled, studying the subject with all sorts of doubts and wonder. You were DNA-obliged to look for any weakness. It was only sporting to consider ways in which Lindy might have killed her baby. If not with her own hands, how then? A contract killer? Certainly not. There were no suited Mediterranean types in that camp site. But it was well known at the time that dingoes were becoming brazen and cheeky and sneaking around in tents. There were indeed signs warning tourists not to feed them.

  ‘So how did she do it?’ said the sullen girl, insistent.

  ‘I didn’t say she did. But what if Lindy
had lured one of the dingoes into the tent with a trail of fresh meat – sausages, let’s say – so that the dog would snaffle the baby, the baby she didn’t want?!?’

  ‘That’s the perfect crime!’ cried Neville.

  ‘It was before I told you about it,’ I told him.

  The sullen girl leaned forward. ‘So you think –?’

  ‘I don’t think anything. It’s just an angle.’

  The Crown never offered a motive in the case. It only gave up an absurd explanation of how Lindy might have done it. And the stupid jury bought it. Lindy should never have gone to jail on the evidence, but that old Darwin jury reached deep into its heart and pulled out a lot of small-town hate. The press is still blamed for Lindy’s conviction. That’s too convenient. The jury did not do the bidding of the press. It did the bidding of the nation.

  Lindy Chamberlain was not an argument that could be won. No one ever made him- or herself available to be persuaded to the other’s point of view. Minds were made up and most were anti-Lindy. ‘Lindy’ became such a personal issue it was as though everyone’s own child had been killed. Parents wondered, ‘How could she?’ Non-parents did too. And missing from every conversation, just as it would prove absent in the Falconio case, were a few spared words for the victim. No one said, ‘That poor Azaria.’ Instead they said: ‘That woman…’ The matter, to this day, was beyond mediation. And I’d never heard anyone say, ‘Poor Pete.’ Except for Lees. And Pete’s family. And the cops. Well, maybe a few more than that.