Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

Robbie and Anthea and the two girls have a big house on the Ascot hill, an old Queenslander with wide wrap-around verandas, four bedrooms downstairs and a massive, renovated lounge, dining and kitchen area with polished wooden floorboards and some very modern hip art and, on one of the walls, a breathtaking display of mounted butterflies. More than a thousand of them, the most extraordinary array of shimmering colours. A hundred wooden framed cabinets, each with specimens from South America, Africa, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, India, Australia – from across the globe – carefully pinned to a white acetate backing and encased behind glass. Shimmering, translucent, colourful beauties, once flying, now frozen.

  The kitchen is gleaming white and modern, and in the evening they usually drink Cloudy Bay Sav Blanc at thirty dollars a bottle but on a special occasion they might reach into the cellar for a Soave or a Chenin Blanc or, on very special occasions, a Margaux White Burgundy. They have floor-to-ceiling windows that offer a view of the back yard, a sweeping lawn and lush sub-tropical garden, dominated by a hundred-year-old mango tree. Pink wisteria drips from the wooden side fences. They met at a mutual friend’s party around the corner and have been married for eight years. Anthea was shy about socialising but one of her loyal old school friends told her to get out more and stop living through the shadow of her older sister. Robbie’s Porsche is parked down below in the ‘car accommodation’ as the real estate agent put it, and her BMW, big enough to take the kids to school, next to it. Robbie is negotiating a job with HSBC, which will stratosphere him even further into the rarefied world of global finance. He has three iPhones.

  ‘Were you? Tell me.’

  ‘Yes. I did. She is my sister.’

  ‘Don’t get all defensive on me. She is also a serial killer.’

  ‘She’s innocent.’

  ‘Hey, you wanna have this conversation again, sure; I’ve got to get up at three in the morning to talk to Lagos, but if you think it’s more important to have a conversation about your sister, then fine; I’m with you.’

  ‘Mum!’ from down below.

  ‘You want to hurt my career prospects,’ he said, ‘then go ahead; you want to be loyal to The Slayer, go ahead.’

  ‘Don’t call her that!’

  Anthea stepped forward and leaned in, pinning him with a hard glare. He took a step back. Sometimes Robbie got a little scared around his wife; she had a cold intensity. Sometimes he felt as though she might do to him what she’d done to the thousands of butterflies they had in the house. ‘I told you, when we were dating, I was the sister of a convicted killer. I told you that if it was a problem, walk away. I told you I would remain loyal to her because she was innocent. I told you I would not advertise it but I told you she was part of my life. And you said?’

  ‘Mum!’ Getting closer. The girls now coming up the stairs.

  ‘I said, okay. All right! I said, okay.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘And remember what else I said? I could have told you about my sister while we were naked in bed, after sex, when you were in the flush of love, but I chose to tell you over lunch in a formal situation. Because remember what else I said? I said that, in the years to come, you being cool with my sister might wear off and you might start to change your mind, and remember what you said?’

  ‘Yes. Fuck! All right. I said I would be good to my word forever.’

  ‘Mum!’

  Parents are good at a rapid and complete abandonment of tension and distress when it comes to the kids – if they want – so Robbie and Anthea (because they did want) turned to the munchkins and said:

  ‘Hey girls, what’s up?’

  ‘Mum! We found this.’

  One of her photo albums.

  ‘Who’s this? She’s in, like, every photo with you when you were growing up.’

  —

  BEING THE YOUNGEST of two sisters was, for Anthea, about being second. Second best, second last, second in line. But, as she now well knows, given she’s a mum herself, it also meant you got away with a lot more, because the anxious-parent smothering has been expended on the first born. This she remembered when her own little Jen came along, vowing to keep a balance in her care and not to put the second born in second place.

  For a little while, up until she was twelve, Anthea resented the distant and dismissive older sister who enjoyed tormenting her, but when puberty kicked in, Jen changed and became what the rule book says an older sister should be: a caring person. After Anthea turned twelve the sisters became close and, instead of defining one another as the enemy, they united into a single force against their parents. That was when dad’s absences from home, for work, became less something to brag about (my dad is in Paris at an art auction) and more something to be ashamed of (my dad doesn’t even know what year I’m in). The glitz of his overseas trips and glamorous gifts faded and morphed into feelings of abandonment, not at all helped by Jen’s discovery of a tranche of nude photos of a woman – the girls named her Miss Serbia – and the realisation that his absences had more to do with an alternative life in Sydney, instead of life back home. Life with them.

  And mum? At around the time the sisters were recalibrating their attitude towards their father, they began to redefine their mother. Instead of her being hilariously absentminded, she now became a space-cadet addicted to pain killers and culpable for not doing enough to keep dad within the confines of home.

  As the years progressed, as the invisible countdown to Jen’s arrest and imprisonment crept towards them like a wraith, shepherding them both to that fateful time in 1999, when life and all it meant collapsed into darkness, between the ages of fourteen to sixteen for Anthea and fifteen to seventeen for Jen, their mum and dad increasingly acted out the roles the girls had defined for them. Everything they did was yet another confirmation in the minds of the sisters that mum and dad were spiralling away from them. All the while, of course, with smiles and love, sent from these other planets, gifts and trips, to keep up the façade in the minds of the girls.

  Jen’s arrest and imprisonment tore Anthea asunder. And, in the wake of their parents’ inability to deal with the momentum of inevitability but for the occasional flash of coherence – such as when they paid the legal team its massive weekly fee – Anthea became closer to her sister than ever. In a funny way, she thought, their roles had reversed. Jen was now like the second born, surviving at the behest of her sister because survival at the behest of herself was increasingly difficult.

  —

  ‘GUILTY’ WAS THE word that brought down the hammer. Jen had told her to expect it. Jen had told her that there was no other possible outcome, not even after the scary tattooed Mohican had taken the stand and given his evidence. One thing about her older sister, thought Anthea: she is deeply capable of dispassion.

  While Jen had been abandoned by everyone – Who would want to be associated with a gruesome killer? – Anthea kept a band of loyal friends; her close friends at school, a couple of boys from the brother school, with whom she’d hung out at the school dances, then in the mall and at the cinema. They were sympathetic. Some were curious. Some stayed quiet in their support. Some boasted. Many of her online friends in her Yahoo chatroom offered their support, but, to her horror, she developed a following, known as ‘Sister Death’. Which freaked her out and made her shut it down.

  The school had told Jen and Anthea to take a leave of absence. Jen was in Year 12, was just about to start her exams with plans of a gap year in 2000 backpacking around Europe before studying Literature at uni. Anthea was in Year 11 and had a dream that made everyone scoff with bafflement: she wanted to be a lepidopterist.

  ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ asked Jen when she was nine and Anthea was seven. Anthea shrugged. ‘I like butterflies.’ She didn’t know. Where does that stuff come from? It’s not as if it’s inherited. One December day when she was six, she asked Santa for a butterfly net. She got it; it was a peculiar shape, wrapped under the tree. All that day, after mum and dad had woken and they’d unwrapped thei
r presents and breakfasted on hot chocolate and French Toast with maple syrup, Anthea ran about the garden in search of – vainly – a butterfly to catch.

  Now she has thousands of butterflies, dead and mounted in wooden cabinets, behind glass, in the lounge room. Butterflies from field trips to PNG and South America and elsewhere. Now she is a lecturer with a PhD, at the University of Queensland, in her specialised field, in the Zoology department. UQ is the institution that her older sister always dreamed of attending, before going on to the Sorbonne and then NYU, to become a literary guru.

  —

  AFTER THE CONVICTION, and after her parents lost everything and moved away, Anthea dragged herself back to school, a new school, finished Year 12 and went straight to UQ. She graduated six years later with a Degree, a Masters’ and then the PhD. During the Uni years she waitressed and made money writing essays for other students. Through all of this – her reinvention – she changed her name to Anthea Black. It was the first thing she thought of and she wasn’t in the mood for greater invention.

  No-one knows, but for Robbie, that she was once ‘Sister Death’. She managed to erase that online profile. Because she was underage, there were no photos of her in 1999. And the press wasn’t overly interested in the little-sister angle; far more intriguing to them was how responsible the mum and dad were, for the killings done by their daughter.

  Robbie was okay, as okay as a man can be when his potential girlfriend ’fesses up after a few dates. Once that news had worn off and he’d said he was shocked but otherwise okay, she said it was important to her that she remained loyal and supportive to her sister behind bars. And again, he said, that too was okay, he understood loyalty but just don’t involve him and if and when she ever gets out, keep her away from him.

  At the time of that conversation between them, a couple of years before they got married, Jen was a decade away from being eligible for parole.

  Monstrosity of Nature

  IT GAVE ME A STRANGE, INVASIVE SENSATION WHEN I SAW JEN in the courtroom and watched her going down for the crimes I committed.

  I didn’t mean for this to happen. She was like a bunny, caught in the lonely glare of a massive spotlight, knowing she was going to be found guilty as so-called friend after friend took the stand and said things like:

  ‘She bragged about bathing in blood and chopping off men’s heads.’ That was Clemmie, who was seventeen years old and whose boyfriend was keen on Jen and so Clemmie’s testimony was riven by jealousy and revenge but not aggressively challenged by the QC and not at all by the judge.

  The people of Brisbane needed to know that The Slayer had been found and would go down – to allay those horrid fears, especially when so much of the city was still underwater and fifteen people had died in the floods on New Years’ Eve, everyone waking up on the first day of 2000 to find deluge and ruin.

  After Clemmie, the small Irish prosecutor who reminded me of an attack dog, brought forward another three school ‘friends’ who all gave roughly the same evidence: Jen was a dark and dangerous Gothic Celt who carried a flick-knife to school. In a moment of extreme drama in the court, flashed onto TV screens across the globe, one of the girls stood in the witness box and pulled up the edge of her school shirt while pushing down her school skirt, to reveal a scar she said was the result of Jen stabbing her.

  That was Donna. She told the court she was the person who rang the police. Which led us all to the here and now. Donna’s teenage flesh and victimhood in the courtroom. Gasps. Not even OJ and the glove could rival this as a glimpse of Donna’s naked hip was seared into the minds of men and women, good citizens all. Moments like these are the moments that condemn the accused; not evidence, or lack of it.

  Then there was Mary-Anne, who told the enraptured court that she had overheard Jen laugh about cutting the throat of a man and pulling back his head, sideways, through sinew and muscle as she sat astride him and watched him die.

  None of this should have been allowed, because none of this could be corroborated, but the judge ruled it all admissible.

  And then all that ridiculous and totally circumstantial ‘evidence’ about a flower from North Stradbroke Island called a swamp daisy and how Jen might have picked some while on a school excursion and left it on the scene of the first killing, and the details of how she was into the Goth and Celt scene and she knew who Taranis was, the god of thunder; her and a few hundred million others.

  But, as the Irish-accented prosecutor said: ‘It’s not our business to know why a set of heinous crimes were committed, but it is our business to ask by whom – and the evidence will lead to one person and one person only: Jennifer White, the accused. A monstrosity of nature.’

  But the bad part, the worst part, the part that meant Jen was going down, without question, was the knife.

  Bad, bad, bad.

  She was never going to break free from the knife.

  Which was obviously planted by one or both of the cops because my knife, the killing slicer, was back at home, in my army corps duffel bag.

  —

  PART OF ME felt sorry for her and part of me felt relieved that it was not me who was going to be found guilty. Another part of me, the unemotional part confirmed what I had already thought:

  Time to stop now. No more killings possible. You’ve had your run. Four dead and sliced. The first one, and the other three.

  I have to confess, I was having trouble with this. My head was telling me one thing: stop! and my heart was telling me the opposite: do it again, it’s so much fun!

  What am I going –

  Oh, here’s Lara to give evidence! Wow, she’s dyed her hair back to her original black … as she walks to the stand.

  Doli Incapax

  AS ONE OF THE TWO LEAD INVESTIGATORS, I GAVE EVIDENCE for more than two days, studiously not looking at Jen. And trying not to look at Nils, who had somehow snuck in before I took the stand. He wasn’t meant to be inside the courtroom as he was a witness for the defence. Their alternative killer as a way to deflect focus on Jen and cast doubt on the case against her. What was he doing here? Trying to creep me out? I would have him removed after I’d given my evidence.

  Billy had already gone through the sequence of events, from the moment he and I arrived at the first crime scene to the day we charged Jennifer White with three counts of murder. My testimony echoed his. From the point of view of the prosecutor, a nutty little Irish guy from the DPP office, to whom I took an instant dislike, all smugness and condescension, it was important to hear reiteration, but also very important for him, aware and sensitive to some media reports of Lindy Chamberlain revisited, to have a young woman supporting his case.

  We arrested and charged Jen when she was seventeen. A minor. She was to turn eighteen in a few months’ time – great birthday party that would have been – whereupon she graduated into the real world, where her name and likeness was legally reported, where all the restrictions that were provided to a person underage were lifted and they could be – even though she already had been, thanks to Billy and the tabloid leakage – exposed to the public.

  The law is clear on this and it comes down to doli incapax, which is Latin for ‘incapable of evil’ because you are too young to understand the ramifications of what you have done. Mary Bell was eleven when she was brought before the UK courts for two murders; the background of her dysfunctional home life was irrelevant to the prosecutor, who did not care about the why but only the Did she do it? Did Mary understand what she was doing? When she killed those two little boys, did she have an awareness of ‘evil’ (if such a thing exists)? Did Jen White understand, even though she was much older than Mary Bell but still, in the eyes of the law, a child at the time, did she understand that the killing of three men by sawing into their heads to the almost-point of decapitation was an evil act completely alien and repugnant to society?

  In a case like this, even in the backwaters of Queensland, 2000, a tribe of psychologists was brought in to examine the accused. Sixty ye
ars earlier she would have been hanged from a tree branch in the Botanic Gardens, branded a witch. I’m not exaggerating; it’s Queensland.

  ‘Please tell us your name.’

  ‘Detective Constable Lara Ocean.’

  ‘You are with the Homicide Squad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You attended a crime scene at Kangaroo Point Park on the night of November the eighteenth last year, nineteen ninety-nine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please tell us what you saw.’

  Alotau

  IT’S A LITTLE-KNOWN FACT, BECAUSE IT’S HARDLY EVER observed, that the prosecutor of any case that comes before an Australian (or Commonwealth) court has a primary obligation and duty not to get a conviction, but to get the truth. It’s that simple. Even if the truth happens to imperil their chances at winning, it is what they must strive for. Because court cases have become battlegrounds of legal egos driven by a media gaze and big bucks on the defence side, the truth always takes a backseat to combat. Winning. At any cost.

  The defence, of course, has no such obligation, which is why Jen’s QC, a tall, elderly, distinguished-looking man, forced Nils onto the stand and why, when Billy and I briefed the DPP on the case against her, outlining all the avenues we had pursued including the other major suspects, he chose to ignore them.

  Miles and Nils were good for the defence. They each had a violent history, were scary looking and carried a male arrogance that tends to freak out ordinary jurors who’ve come from safe-town.

  Miles, and especially Nils, who looked terrifying with his body covered in tatts and his mohawk, were also brilliant diversions in one of the basic rules of defence: create reasonable doubt by throwing out some very solid alternatives as to the killer’s identity.

  Billy had given his testimony. I had given my testimony. I had ensured that Nils was removed from the court and would not be allowed back in until his time as a witness.

  Miles had given his testimony which was the same as the dead-end information that Billy and I sourced from him in our record of interview. Aside from being a slimeball, it and he didn’t have the same electric effect on the jury as did Nils.