by Leigh Sales
‘I pray in front of that,’ Steve tells me as I look at it. ‘That’s a wonderful photo of the pain of our world. I don’t know if she’s lost relatives or what’s blown up. You have a substance to your life if you’ve felt pain. You’ve got understanding, that’s where compassion is. It makes you a deeper, richer human being.’
‘How do you stand to be around the suffering all the time, though?’ I ask.
‘Well, I got burned out,’ Steve confesses. ‘I was eighteen years in the Cross. I don’t like that term “burned out”, actually. But I needed a change. I was emotionally so exposed there. It’s like a bombsite, with people walking around; you get these waves of people just not coping all that well.’
‘So what did you do when you burned out?’
‘I needed some space. I got into a car and went driving on my own, living in country hotels. Bourke, Brewarrina. I was about sixty-five, I’d got to that stage of my life where I thought, Well I’ve got twenty years left. What do I want to do? I want to live with people coming out of prison, I want to break bread and share our lives in community. I saw that as a real need.’
And so that’s what Steve does now. He lives with prisoners transitioning back into the community after they’re released from Bathurst Correctional Complex, and other nearby prisons.
‘I’m a Jesuit, so I belong to a community. I have a life. I’m not a homeless person, I’m not addicted to drugs. I’m claimed by my Jesuit companions, we have a structured community life where we pray together and eat together and share our lives.’
‘Does that replenish you?’
‘Yeah. I also spend a couple of hours in the morning doing things for myself. I used to get up at 4.30 and go and swim at Bondi and come back and pray. Prayer is very important. I suppose it’s just like shedding, it’s just letting go. I just sit and breathe and count. I count my heartbeat.’
‘The jargon is about “living in the moment”,’ I venture. ‘Are you like that? Do you worry about the future, do you have regrets about the past?’
For once, Steve doesn’t pause. ‘I wish I wasn’t such a coward. All my life, still I’m a coward,’ he says.
There follows the longest silence of our conversation. It lasts about twenty seconds, mostly because I am absolutely dumbstruck that this man, this man, eighteen years on the streets of Kings Cross, planning to spend the rest of his life helping ex-prisoners, considers himself a coward. I finally manage to splutter out a response.
‘Steve, a lot of people would look at what you do and say it would be the least cowardly thing they could ever imagine – sitting with people when they’re experiencing moments of intense suffering, going with them to say goodbye to the dead bodies of people they love. That’s not cowardly.’
He thinks for a while. ‘No. But I do admire people who speak up. People who sit in a tree to stop it being cut down. People who speak out against how we treat refugees. They’re not cowards. I haven’t been hit, I haven’t been shot, I haven’t been criticised. In fact, people think I’m wonderful!’
I think he’s quite wonderful too, I must admit. I find it hard to process some of what he says, but there’s something about him that makes me wish I could spend more time with him. Steve makes me feel like I could be a better person.
When I meet Graham Norris a few weeks later, he’s easier for me to ‘get’, because I have met many police officers over the years and his ‘type’ is more familiar to me. The first thing to note about this former homicide detective is that he’s off-the-charts likeable. Within about five minutes of meeting him, you think, I’d love to have a beer with this bloke. Graham is tall with a shaved head and a long, full grey beard that reminds me of a bushranger. He has a broad Australian accent, a straightforward way of speaking and a larrikin sense of humour. He tells me about his old boss in the force, the amusingly named – and, I might add, highly respected – Inspector Hans Rupp (Get it? A police officer named Hands Are Up.) Rupp kept showing up at daily briefings during a large-scale manhunt after a double homicide declaring, ‘I’m 100 per cent certain [the suspect] is dead, we just have to find the body,’ until one day, the suspect was sighted withdrawing cash at an ATM, and when Rupp arrived at that day’s briefing, he opened with, ‘I’m fairly certain the suspect is alive.’
Graham was a late starter in the police, joining the force in 1997 at the age of thirty-five after a career in sales. He had always wanted to be a policeman but his parents were opposed to such a dangerous job, so he’d taken a different path to keep them happy. Over time, though, he couldn’t let his dream go and so, thinking better late than never, he headed to the New South Wales Police Academy. His first assignment after graduation was general duties at the station in Mount Druitt, a fairly depressed area in Sydney’s south-west.
‘It was the happiest I’ve ever been,’ Graham says. ‘You never knew what was going to happen. Every day was a blank canvas. I loved the variety, the intensity, I really liked the physical aspect of it. It was good, it was a challenge.’
In 2004, he moved into the State Crime Command, where he specialised in child protection and sex crimes, and four years later he joined the homicide squad.
‘Often,’ he says, ‘there’s an intrigue with people and the police and what they do. I mean, there’s a thousand cop shows on telly, people are interested in it. And they always ask, “What’s the worst murder you’ve ever been to?” They’re all bad.’
‘When you went to homicide, did you have any fear about things like being around dead bodies and going to crime scenes and seeing foul stuff?’ I ask.
‘The only thing I was a bit apprehensive about was seeing the post-mortems, because at that time, I’d have to lie down if I was going to get a needle,’ Graham says (while I’m thinking, Wow, big call to move to homicide!). ‘You have to go to post-mortems in the cops and you can’t go, “I’m gonna spew,” or, “I can’t watch this.” It’s just a fact of life, you gotta do it. It’s really crucial to the investigation to find out certain things. And so once I got that in my head, I didn’t mind, it was just part of the job. Seeing dead people, you see some horrendous things, but you can look at it and go, “Bloody hell, that’s nasty.” It’s part of the job. But it’s no good saying, “I want to work in homicide,” or “I want to work in sex crimes,” if the thought of going to a murder scene or speaking to a sexual assault victim is too much for you.’
‘What about having to deal with families at that really heightened period when they’ve just discovered somebody they love has been killed?’
‘That’s challenging, there’s no doubt about it. Going to tell somebody that. Death messages are always hard.’
‘Do you get any training for that?’
‘Oh yeah, at the academy, you get lots of things. But how can I put it? You get taught a lot at the academy and then they put you in the real world and you start learning.’
‘If you had to go and see somebody and break that sort of news, what was your general approach?’
‘I found over time the best way was to be fairly direct about it. When you’re going to do your first one, you don’t wanna say the words, you know; you’re a bit afraid about how they’re gonna respond. But the reality is, if you get it out early and clearly, then you deal with the emotions that come after that,’ he says.
‘And is there any predictability to the way people respond to news like that?’
‘No. You get everything. I’ve had somebody, you wake them up, two in the morning, you know, your father’s dead, or your brother’s dead, and they’re like, “Mate, you’ve made my day, come in and have a coffee, you want some biscuits?” ’
I gasp. ‘Wow!’
‘And you’re like, “Nah, we’re good, thanks,” ’ says Graham, making an alarmed face and backing-away motions with his hands.
‘I had one,’ he goes on, ‘I don’t know what nationality she was, she didn’t speak a whole lot of English – her son had committed suicide and I was telling her and she’s got to her
knees and she starts punching me and she’s whacked me right in the boys! I’m going, Eufffff.’ Graham makes a strangled noise and has me cracking up again.
In 2009, Graham found himself officer-in-charge on the Waterlow murders. We get to talking about the day of Nick Waterlow’s funeral and how he helped Juliet by telling her that she was protected.
‘I’ve heard what was going through her mind. What was going through yours?’ I ask him.
‘It was stressful for us as well,’ Graham admits straight up. ‘We didn’t know where he [Antony] was. He was clearly dangerous, he’s murdered two people and nearly killed a little girl along the way. While it was unlikely that he would attack at a big event like a funeral, you don’t know. What if he comes charging in? So you’ve got to prepare for the worst.’
‘What would you have done if he’d shown up?’ I ask.
‘Depending what he did or what his actions were, we would have had to respond accordingly,’ he says, in a bit of classic copper-speak.
‘Were you guys armed?’
‘Oh yeah, yeah, always.’
‘What gave you the insight to think, I’m going to have a reassuring word to Juliet? Did you know she was scared that he might show up, or did you just intuit it?’
‘I think that was ever-present with Juliet, that fear that he was going to turn up somewhere, that he was going to leap out and attack her. You’re trying to reassure her but we don’t have crystal balls. You’ve got to try to placate someone’s fears and nerves as best you can without being dismissive or insensitive to what they’re saying, because it’s 100 per cent real to them.’
Until I contacted Graham out of the blue, he had no idea that he’d been so instrumental to Juliet’s survival.
‘It’s a nice feeling,’ he tells me. ‘I was talking to my wife about it and I said I don’t even remember some of the things Juliet says I did, and my wife said maybe that’s just cos it’s what you’re always doing, day to day, and it wasn’t out of the ordinary for you to treat someone that way. For me, it was, This is a family member of a victim, I’ve gotta look after her, that’s my job.’
‘What do you mean when you say you felt you had to look after people, that it’s your job?’
‘To me, it was to put them in cottonwool because this is a long process they’re entering into. The legal process is going to be counted in years, not months, and for them, it’s a lifetime of change. I always felt a strong responsibility, a heavy responsibility, to look after these people. You’d love to be able to say, “I’m gonna get you the outcome that you want, you’ll be happy at the end of all of this,” but that just doesn’t happen. So if the person that I’m looking after, if we get to the end of whatever process, and it’s not the outcome they wanted or expected, they might feel disappointed in that, but at least they won’t feel disappointed in the way I’ve looked after them.’
All through our interview, the thing that strikes me most about Graham is that only rarely does he call anyone a victim. He calls them ‘the person I was looking after’, in a way that seems to me unmeditated. He seems genuinely driven to care for others. He tells me about a case of which he’s particularly proud – the successful prosecution of a violent serial rapist who targeted sex workers.
‘This group of women, they hated the cops, they had never had anybody who would spend time with them and look after them,’ Graham says. ‘One of them lived in this horrendous housing commission unit in Redfern and she was told she was being evicted. So she’s rung me in tears, What am I gonna do? So I rang the guy from the housing department and said blah blah, This is who I am, she’s a victim in a rather serious matter, it would be really helpful if you could just keep her there. And he’s gone, Yeah mate, no worries, and she thought I’d turned water into wine. And over time, the women built enough trust in me that they would come to court. I got the relationship strong enough that I could get them there. And that resulted in the fellow getting over twenty years for it.’
I listen to Graham and I think, This is a really good man sitting here. Drug-addicted sex worker or educated middle-class woman like Juliet, he sees the humanity in all of them and treats them in ways that respect their dignity.
Like almost every other person to whom I speak in the death business, Graham hates the word ‘closure’.
‘I’ve never felt comfortable when people say closure. Their normal is shattered. I tried to talk to people about, “This is your new normal. We’ve got to find a way of making life with this new set of circumstances.” You can’t get them back their old life,’ he says.
The great tragedy of Graham’s own story is that this wonderfully wise bloke who was so clearly fantastic at his job is no longer a police officer. He didn’t burn out or get PTSD, he injured his back during a training exercise in 2010, and by 2014 it was so bad the police medically discharged him. He now lives with chronic pain.
‘The difficulty for me is that there’s reminders every day. You turn the telly on, there’s cops on the news. You see a job, somebody’s been murdered, it’s like, That’s my team. I’m still wrapping my head around the retirement word. It’s difficult. I loved my job, I just loved going to work. I don’t wanna say I was good at it, but I felt I was okay at it,’ he says.
I know the loss is partly Graham’s but I can’t help but think the bigger loss is ours, not having such a caring person in frontline policing. It’s impossible to think that Juliet Darling was in any way lucky in the situation in which she found herself, but she was certainly extremely fortunate in having Graham Norris and Steve Sinn on either side, holding her up.
Like the priest and the detective, some people are blessed with instinctive emotional intelligence. They just seem to know the right things to say and do at times of grief and loss. Undoubtedly, experience helps too; the nature of their jobs taught Graham and Steve how to behave. Most of us probably aren’t so adept around the bereaved. We bumble about, sometimes making things worse, as Juliet and Walter found. Emotional incompetence isn’t limited to individuals, either. If you’ve ever spent time in hospitals or courts, or rung a bank when a loved one has died, you’ll know that institutions can be particularly bad at compassion. Navigating an impersonal bureaucracy can seem bewildering at the best of times and downright heartless at the worst. Imagine if we could get big, lumbering bureaucracies to act more like Steve and Graham. Is it possible? What if we could institutionalise that type of kindness?
The legal profession has made a big effort to do something like that during the past twenty years. It’s called therapeutic jurisprudence. The term came into common use in the 1990s, after it was coined by an American academic, David Wexler. He believed that the law should try to aid the recovery of people caught in the system, that it should work with other professions, such as psychiatry, social work and criminology. Under this approach, lawyers and judges are encouraged to bear in mind that the law is a social force with consequences for individual psychological wellbeing. Those considerations never trump legal obligations, they fit in wherever they can alongside. The law still comes first.
Every day, judges and lawyers witness the impact of the legal system on the people who land in it, often through no fault of their own. Numerous studies in Australia and overseas have catalogued the ways in which the justice process causes stress and trauma. Its impersonality can be cruel – form letters sent by coroners, names spelt incorrectly in correspondence. Courts frequently grind through cases very slowly, prolonging the agony of those waiting for answers. The experience of appearing as a witness can be troubling. The inquisitorial nature of a trial or inquest can make any witness, even those with nothing to hide, feel as if they’re being judged or attacked. I saw this at the Lindt Café inquest. Blameless witnesses sometimes seemed defensive and perplexed, even angered, when barristers challenged their recollections. People can step down from the witness box feeling humiliated and confused about what has just happened to them.
For observers, especially the families of people at
the centre of inquests or trials, the process can be even more traumatic. They may hear distressing information they’ve never heard before, have to listen to their loved one described in ways that are foreign to them, or hear and see evidence of that person’s final moments. They may be seated a few metres from somebody they believe caused the death. When evidence is presented, the family may feel judged for decisions they did or didn’t make, when often they already feel guilt about what has happened. The loss of privacy in having intimate personal matters publicly exposed can be excruciating. And if the case is a high-profile one, the family and friends may find themselves besieged by journalists and television cameras every time they enter and leave the court precinct.
A particularly confronting experience for many bereaved is the autopsy process. In 2001 in Australia, major reforms were made to forensic practices after investigations revealed that body organs had been retained for use in research without consent. The head of the Glebe morgue in New South Wales was forced to stand down after an inquiry found that more than 25,000 organs had been removed without permission from the next of kin. They were kept in hospitals, universities and museums. The inquiry also uncovered evidence of looting of the deceased’s belongings, along with experimentation on bodies for research purposes, including stabbing and applying blunt force (supposedly to give forensic researchers insight into how certain injuries might present). The NSW Department of Health had to deal with dozens of anguished families hoping to trace lost organs and stolen possessions. A similar scandal unfolded in the United Kingdom, prompting the same outrage and reform there.
These revelations acted as a wake-up call to authorities on the need for change, but they did little to ease the fears of people about what might be happening to the dead bodies of loved ones behind closed doors.
Once you accept that the pursuit of justice can cause people further pain, how do you apply therapeutic jurisprudence to mitigate that harm as much as possible? It doesn’t have to be elaborate. The way that Jane Mowll talked Juliet through the viewing of Nick’s crime scene photos is one example. Or it can be as simple as allowing a family to rearrange their seating in a courtroom to be closer together, or asking them how they would like the coroner to refer to the deceased. It can be allowing them to display a photograph in the courtroom, even though it serves no forensic purpose. It can be double-checking the spelling of a name before a court notification is sent out. It might be granting a relative permission to make a statement in a hearing so that they feel they’ve had a say – something Juliet did.
