The Accusation

by Wendy James

  KIDNAPPER’S S&M PAST.

  Ellie Canning’s alleged female abductor, Suzannah ‘Gypsy’ Wells, arrested in Sydney raid in nineties. Connections with drug lord Eddie Levant revealed.

  I scanned the story. While it was surprisingly light on scurrilous innuendo, it somewhat less surprisingly failed to mention the fact that the charges had been dropped. There was some background on Eddie Levant – his underworld connections, his 2005 conviction for money laundering – and then the history of my alleged part in Ellie’s abduction was related again. Though no links between the two events were made explicit, they didn’t need to be. The damage had been done.

  The story was accompanied by another photo – one that I’d never seen before – taken at Edward Levant’s party. It hadn’t appeared at the time; I really had been small fry, not worth the newsprint. I didn’t recall posing for the shot, but then I didn’t remember much about the night in question at all. The picture was so hazy, so out of focus, that I suspected I wasn’t even the intended subject. Still, it was recognisably me – a much younger and thinner version maybe, but indisputably me. I looked more silly than threatening, dressed in what looked like costume-party bondage gear – a leather belt and shiny chaps, a whip in one hand, plastic handcuffs in the other. I was topless – another detail I’d somehow forgotten – and in a gesture typical of the confusing times we were living through some puritan at this absurd scandal rag had felt compelled to cover my pert little breasts with a black modesty strip.

  The following day, there was more. Again, it was on 180Degrees, and again it was the sort of story that no reputable newspaper would dare touch.

  EXCLUSIVE: SUZANNAH WELLS’ INAPPROPRIATE RELATIONSHIP WITH STUDENT REVEALED

  A former student at an elite NSW private school has told 180Degrees that Suzannah Wells, the Enfield Wash drama teacher charged with the abduction of 18-year-old Ellie Canning, was forced to resign from her teaching position in 2015 after developing an inappropriate relationship with one of her senior students.

  The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that Wells was forced to resign from Manning College after complaints were made by the girl’s parents. ‘There were rumours flying about that they’d had a lesbian relationship, but it was all kept really hush-hush. No one could really work it out.’ While both the girl and her parents have refused to comment, there is some speculation that Wells may have been grooming the girl as a potential surrogate.

  After her departure from Manning College, Wells worked as a casual teacher in Sydney. In 2018 she took up a full-time position at Enfield Wash High School.

  Even with the distance of years, I still couldn’t see what I’d done wrong when it came to Taylor Abbott. Or locate the precise moment I’d overstepped. Or why I’d been chosen to be the scapegoat for her failure. Taylor Abbott had come to Manning College from a boarding school in Sydney. I hadn’t been told the full story, but there were rumours that she’d been asked to leave the school for one of the usual reasons: drugs, boys or booze, or a combination of all three.

  It was true that I’d encouraged her in class, given her good marks for her performances. She was good, a natural. But she was in no way favoured, a teacher’s pet. She was far too spiky, too cool for that.

  I’d been made her mentor. New senior students were assigned a teacher for the first term, which meant weekly meetings. These were conducted in a classroom – in my case, the drama room – at lunchtime, the door left open as it must be when you’re alone with a student. The meetings were never what you would call private. There’d be other students in and out, other teachers, sometimes a bunch of kids queued outside, waiting to use the room for rehearsals. These meetings were always brief, always quite formal, the mentor’s job circumscribed – a matter of box-ticking, really. Was she settling in? Was she having any difficulties with any of her subjects? With other students? Staff? With course content? I was just there to answer any of her concerns – but as far as I was aware, and as far as she let on, Taylor was settling in well enough.

  I’d met the girl outside of school just once, by chance, at a cafe. Taylor had been there alone, waiting for a friend, she said, and I was on my way out, but I sat down at her invitation, and chatted for a few minutes. We discussed school, the timing of assignments, her logbooks. I remember saying something encouraging about her proposal for her individual performance piece for her final exam – she’d decided to do a monologue from a modern adaptation of Medea. It was a little bold perhaps, more confronting than the usual student fare, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle.

  About halfway through the year, things changed. Taylor began to miss classes, and she turned up once or twice very obviously hungover, sometimes drunk or stoned. She failed to hand in several assignments, missed an assessable performance. I tried to talk to her, but she brushed me aside. When I finally informed the head of department, she told me that Taylor was in danger of failing, not only drama, but most of her other subjects too. Mandatory work wasn’t being completed; she was disruptive in class. Her attendance was only sporadic. She wouldn’t get the marks she needed for university; indeed it was unlikely she’d receive any leaving qualifications at all.

  Eventually the situation reached crisis point and her parents had to be informed. She was failing every subject by this time, but her downward trajectory in drama, where for a short time she had been coming top of the year, had been the most profound.

  When the complaint came, shockingly out of the blue, her parents were gunning for me. I was accused of breach of care and additionally of inappropriate behaviour, of attempting to establish an inappropriate relationship, whatever that meant. The accusation was ludicrous, dismissed in private by the head of school and all of the staff, by everyone who knew me. But the girl’s parents had money, and clout. They would take it no further, they said, if I left the school. They had done their research; they knew who I was, and knew my background. I’d been up-front about the arrest when I applied for the job – it had been a youthful indiscretion, the panel had agreed, and not one that was likely to be repeated. And it would in no way colour my behaviour with the students. The head and numerous teachers came to my defence when the allegations were made, but ultimately it was a board decision. The board were naturally more concerned with the reputation of the school than with the truth or the well-being of staff, and I was asked to resign. It wasn’t a sacking, that was made very clear. I was offered a reasonable, in fact generous package – six months’ salary, additional superannuation – ensuring I’d go quietly. They gave me a stellar reference, I signed a non-disclosure agreement, and took a few months off to nurse my wounded pride. I moved back to Sydney, and worked as a casual until Mary turned up like a bad penny, and the job in Enfield Wash came along. The piece in 180Degrees insinuated that the girl at Manning College had a fortuitous escape, that I’d obviously had my eye on her as a possible surrogate – that it was a near-miss for her. I genuinely enjoyed teaching teenage girls, but when I looked at them – their clear eyes, their not-quite-formed faces – what I saw wasn’t a potential breeder of a longed-for child, but my own child, my own daughter.

  Sometimes it was impossible not to allow the fantasy, to imagine my own girl at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen – miraculously, gloriously, incandescently alive.

  This time I’d seen the piece before Hal, and rang to alert him. And this time he wasn’t surprised – I’d told him the story yesterday, when he’d asked whether there was anything else in my past that might provide a headline.

  ‘Twenty, even ten years ago it wouldn’t have been an issue,’ he sighed. ‘Sub judice actually meant something. But it’s a new world. These online outlets don’t let a minor thing like the law get in their way.’ Like the Levant article, there was little we could do in the way of damage control. ‘We could try and sue them, but even though that arsehole Hemara lives in Australia, the site registration is impossible to determine. There’s nothing we can do. If the case goes to court we can ask that the ju
ry refrain from taking any of these stories into account . . .’

  ‘But can’t we just tell them the truth – maybe get the head in to tell them what really happened?’

  ‘I suppose we could get her in as a character witness if it comes to that, but we can’t address this specific allegation. We just have to hope that no one in the jury has heard about it.’

  ‘But it’s not true. There was a girl, and there was an accusation, but I only resigned to make it all go away. If it’d been true I’d have been charged. And I certainly wouldn’t still be teaching. Doesn’t the truth matter?’

  Hal took a while to answer, ‘I’m afraid truth isn’t the only thing that matters in law, Suzannah. And out in the real world it doesn’t matter at all.’

  ABDUCTED: THE ELLIE CANNING STORY

  A documentary by HeldHostage Productions © 2019

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: MADISON COSTELLO*

  VOICEOVER

  Despite the risk of legal action, a number of accounts that shed a less than flattering light on Suzannah Wells’ character and past were made public while the case was sub judice. These included Wells’ daughter’s tragic death from SIDS, her sham affair with gay actor Sebastián Mendes, and her arrest on drug charges in 1996. In September 2018, the news website 180Degrees published an interview with an anonymous source who claimed that Wells was dismissed from a NSW private school due to her ‘inappropriate relationship’ with a teenage girl in 2015.

  MADISON COSTELLO

  Um, yeah. So this was all a while ago now; I was only a kid, just turned seventeen. I’d had to move from a boarding school in the city to this shitty little private school in Manning. Like, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Manning? You may as well be dead. Most of the kids at the school were morons, and the teachers were crap. The only halfway decent one was Miss Wells, the drama teacher. Well, anyway, that’s what I thought. It started off okay, I mean she was my mentor, and we’d have these meetings where I’d just tell her what was going on – you know, with friends, school work. And I was doing pretty well in drama too. Like actually coming top for a while. I got really into it, and I was rehearsing every afternoon. I’d go down to her office, and I’d go through my IP – that’s the individual piece for the exams – and she’d direct.

  But then it got sorta weird. She started asking if I wanted to meet outside school. At first it was only coffee, but then she suggested I come over to her place to rehearse, and I thought yeah, why not? She said not to tell anyone, so I should have known, shouldn’t I? Anyway, when I got there it was clear that she had something else in mind. She was dressed really weird, way too sexy for someone that old. She gave me a drink – something alcoholic – and I think there was something in it? Anyway, she started to make like, moves or whatever, and I . . . well, it was hard to, you know, it was hard to resist. It makes me sick just thinking about it.

  And that’s when things started to go bad. In my life, I mean. I didn’t want to go to school after that – I couldn’t face it, y’know? And I started getting into drugs, and drinking. All that shit. And fighting with my parents. I guess I was pretty traumatised. I know she’s a woman, but . . . it was still child abuse, wasn’t it? And now, after what she did to Ellie Canning . . .

  SUZANNAH: OCTOBER 2018

  CHIP FLINCHED AS I WALKED PAST THE KITCHEN TABLE, WHERE he sat reading something on my laptop. I looked over his shoulder, saw the flash of the browser screen minimising. He turned, said something banal and cheery, which only made his attempt to hide whatever it was he’d been looking at even more obvious.

  Later, when he’d gone to bed, I looked through the browser history, clicked through until I found what he’d been reading. It was an old article written a few years back, from some syndicated pop psychology website. It had been reposted and updated since the abduction, and had more than a million reads by now.

  The Psychology of the Female Kidnapper

  We were a rare breed apparently. Usually suffering from some combination of personality disorders, including narcissism, generally in combination with Machiavellianism and psychopathy, which meant we were honourable possessors of the Dark Triad. That was if we weren’t also suffering from actual diagnosable mental illnesses, which was also on the cards. Diagnosable mental illness aside, we might just appear to be regular members of the community, or even work in the ‘caring’ professions (nurses, teachers) with no apparent social or psychological difficulties. We might have had trauma in our younger days – abuse, neglect, tragedy – but then again we might not. The article provided very little in the way of reassurance – these women were almost impossible to detect, being naturally secretive and masters of disguise who were able to hide their real selves very effectively.

  Most often females involved in kidnappings were working with others, usually men, as one half of a folie à deux, or because they were in some sort of hostage situation themselves. On the odd occasion that such women worked alone, the victims were almost always children, taken for reasons that had more to do with love, than money or sex.

  There were numerous instances of infertile women murdering mothers and taking their babies to satisfy either their own thwarted maternal instincts, or at the behest of their husbands or lovers. However abductions involving enforced surrogacy were incredibly rare; indeed, until the notorious Canning abduction, they had received very little in the way of scholarly attention.

  I slammed the computer shut, not even remotely excited to learn that one day I might be credited with opening up a whole new area of study.

  Chip was lying on his back in the dark room, his eyes closed, arms folded under his head. Sleep gave an unexpected softness to his usually harsh features – the defined jaw, jutting nose, slightly hollow cheeks. I watched the slow rise and fall of his chest, felt my own constrict painfully. How quickly I’d become accustomed to having him in my bed, and how badly I wanted him to stay. How desperately I wanted this future – Chip, me, our baby – to work.

  His eyes flickered open. ‘What’s up?’ He sounded wide awake.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘Are you wondering whether I’m a psychopath?’

  ‘No.’ He didn’t turn his head to meet my eyes, but gazed at some point on the ceiling.

  ‘Do you think I’m lying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you actually think it’s possible that I did it? That I kept that girl here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you can’t really know, can you?’

  He took a while to respond. ‘I know you.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Not really. We’ve slept together and I’m carrying your child. But that doesn’t mean you know me.’ He went to speak, but I couldn’t stop. ‘You have to be wondering. There’s so much evidence, and none of it can be disproven. You must be wondering whether it’s all a fantasy – this me you think you know. You do understand that I’ve actually been trained to . . . to be other people. To pretend. That’s my job. So how do you know I’m not acting? How can you trust anything I say? How can anyone?’ I could hear my voice getting louder. Faster.

  ‘Suzannah.’ He was there beside me, holding my hand. ‘It’s okay.’ He led me over to the bed, pushed me down gently, then sat, his arm slung around my shoulders like a kindly big brother.

  He gave me a little shake. ‘Now, if you’ll just shut up and listen to me for a moment. Three things. Firstly, I was only on that site because some arsehole, and I’m not saying who, sent me the link and I stupidly clicked on it. Not because I was checking out whether you fit the bill psychologically. Okay?’

  I swallowed. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Secondly, I trust that you didn’t do it.’

  ‘Really?’ I could hear my relief.

  ‘One hundred and fifty per cent.’

  ‘Okay.’ His arm had tightened into a decidedly non-brotherly embrace, and he was moving in for the kill.

  ‘Hold on.’ I pulled away. ‘What’s the
third thing? You said there were three reasons.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ He sounded slightly reluctant. ‘Well, you were saying that you could be acting, that you could be putting this whole thing on.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t going to mention it, but I’ve been watching old reruns of Beachlife on YouTube.’ His tone was bland, his expression unreadable.

  ‘And?’

  ‘You were pretty hot back then.’

  ‘Thanks. I think.’

  Another pause. ‘Have you watched any of it lately?’

  ‘No. I’ve actually never watched it since.’

  ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. It’ll only depress you. I know it was a soap, but the plot was beyond bad. That episode where you won the surfing comp? I mean you looked pretty good, but you couldn’t surf for shit—’

  ‘Chip!’ I pushed him in the shoulder. ‘What’s Beachlife got to do with anything?’

  ‘I know I’m not any sort of expert, and I don’t want you to take this to heart, Suze, but frankly, if Gypsy is any indication, I don’t think your acting would be anywhere good enough to pull off something as serious as this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not exactly Meryl Streep, are you?’

  I was gobsmacked. ‘You know, I actually won a couple of—’

  ‘Now, don’t get your knickers in a twist, mate.’ His expression was deadpan, his rustic drawl pronounced. ‘I reckon it’s a good thing you’re a shit actress.’

  ‘How is that a good thing?’

  ‘It’s proof that you’re telling the truth. I doubt you could lie your way out of a plastic bag.’

  I wasn’t sure whether he was joking, and didn’t know whether I should be laughing or crying, but Chip was pushing me back on the bed, moving his body over mine, and now was not the time to do either.

  SUZANNAH: OCTOBER 2018