The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  Dr Reid, a neuropsychologist, had found no evidence of cognition impairment, and Dr Sim, a geriatrician, had scored Turnbull 30/30 on a cognition test. Nielssen explained that the tests are complicated and address cognition and dementia, not depression. They had been done, he pointed out, just after the shooting, and were limited in diagnosis to the moment of the test itself.

  Alexis asked about abnormality of mind, the key phrase required for a defence of impairment. Had an abnormality of mind affected Turnbull’s capacity to understand events, his perception and his ability to judge the morality of his acts at the time? The court listened attentively. ‘Yes,’ said Nielssen, ‘by normal standards.’ Depression had affected Turnbull’s decision-making and thus his self-control.

  Pat Barrett stood to cross-examine. He proposed that it was unsurprising that Turnbull, in jail on murder charges, seemed depressed in the week after he committed a violent crime. The man had sought no treatment for depression before the shooting, Barrett pointed out, nor afterwards. Dr Hearps, the staff specialist psychiatrist at Long Bay Prison hospital, had examined Turnbull and found no major depression. There were other explanations for the insomnia, tiredness, anxiety, weren’t there? For example, the peripheral neuropathy in his legs, which tingled and ached or went numb in the night.

  Nielssen replied that insomnia is very typical of melancholic depression. He referred to the sociable world traveller Turnbull was formerly and the decline since.

  Barrett reprised the lucidity Robert Strange had reported at Talga Lane. The apparent determination and resolve.

  That afternoon, Dr David Greenberg took the stand. He had also examined Turnbull after eighteen months on remand and diagnosed him as suffering major depression. He believed Turnbull also suffered a background ‘adjustment disorder’ – a group of physical and emotional symptoms caused by multiple severe stressors. Greenberg listed some of the stress factors for Turnbull. He’d been in drought for three years. He’d mortgaged his own property to help his son and grandson, and that investment was at risk. He had large legal bills; significant fines, and more to come; huge piles of paperwork; impending court appearances; mortgage repayments. He spent long hours working in isolation, a general risk factor for mental health issues in the farming community.

  Greenberg conceded that in their conversation, Turnbull had denied he’d been depressed at the time of his actions. Greenberg said this was an argument against any kind of deception or exaggeration. There had been some discussion, in a pre-trial debate over admissibility of the recorded phone calls, of jokes Turnbull had apparently made about misleading the health professionals. But, ‘he’s not trying to fake that he’s unwell. He’s doing the opposite. He presents himself as coping, and not having anything wrong with him mentally.’ As for not seeking treatment, his cohort doesn’t traditionally seek out medical help for mental or emotional problems.

  Turnbull was ‘distressed’, not just obsessed, by Turner. ‘He’s not a stupid man, he’s a highly intelligent man. I think he can understand it.’ However, Greenberg went on, ‘emotionally, I don’t think he’s really in touch with his feelings or what was internally happening to him’.

  Dr Adam Martin, consulting forensic psychiatrist, was commissioned by the prosecutor rather than the defence. He had been asked to prepare a report on Turnbull’s mental health. To assist, he was given police statements; material from the New South Wales Land and Environment Court cases; Dr Nielssen’s report from a week after the shooting; Dr Greenberg’s report; the assessments by Dr Reid, Dr Sim and Dr Hearps; statements from Turnbull’s personal GP in Moree; and other material provided by the Turnbull legal team. He also twice interviewed Turnbull at Long Bay in February 2016, just two months before the trial.

  By that time it was nineteen months since the crime, and Turnbull had been held in Cessnock, a regular jail, as well as in the hospital wing of Long Bay. Martin said that in his interviews with Turnbull he did not perceive symptoms of melancholic depression. The old man had done those nine days’ bulldozing: he’d risen early each morning, checked conscientiously on his sleeping wife, driven to the site, worked for six hours and come home tired. On balance, there just wasn’t enough evidence to support the idea that Turnbull had gross mental disturbance at the time of the crime. ‘He appeared to be functioning pretty well,’ attested Martin. ‘It just wasn’t consistent with a person with major depression or a melancholic-type depression.’ Perhaps there was a mild adjustment disorder: that is, an exaggerated or greater than expected emotional response to an event. Reactions under an adjustment disorder do continue beyond the event: stay with a person, inflated and enduring. But it is not usually possible, he explained, to have both an adjustment disorder and melancholic depression at the same time.

  There was nothing to demonstrate a lack of self-control, said Martin. Turnbull’s imperviousness to Strange went against the idea that he was affectless and depressed. He had refrained from shooting a stranger: this showed he could make decisions. His comments about waiting for the police suggested he knew he had committed a crime and that there would be consequences. The long duration of the attack, building to the final shots, wasn’t typical of the impulsive mania of a mental health breakdown. He was calm at arrest, calm in custody.

  Dr Hearps, Dr Sim and Dr Reid had had no concerns over Turnbull’s mental state; a CT scan had shown no issues. His own GP hadn’t assessed him as disturbed or depressed. He had had no treatment, despite constant monitoring and several assessments, for mental health problems while in custody. His composure, said Martin, was good. He did not appear suicidal or hopeless, even after nearly two years isolated from his family in remand, facing a serious charge. Martin had been given recordings of over a hundred phone calls made by and to Turnbull in custody after the crime; all seemed normal. ‘So to me,’ said Martin, ‘the weight of that suggested that he probably hadn’t been suffering a major mental illness. He may have been unhappy; he may have been stressed. My view is that it didn’t really support that he was significantly mentally ill beforehand.’

  Todd Alexis pushed Martin on cross-examination. He questioned him about the evidence he’d read: how thoroughly had he digested it? He recited a string of statements Turnbull had told the other psychiatric experts, and got Martin to concede he hadn’t heard them directly. ‘He didn’t tell you that …’ Alexis said over and over, and Martin kept admitting, ‘No.’

  ‘Your conclusion that Mr Turnbull was functioning pretty well … is based on nothing more than the fact that he was working during the months and weeks before the shooting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Alexis probed Martin on whether he’d read with scepticism an affidavit from Robeena about her husband’s behaviour in the lead-up to the crime, alert to the possibility that Turnbull was faking his illness and looking for inconsistencies. He hammered the point of Martin’s possible bias. He pointed out that Greenberg had been Martin’s teacher at university, implying that Martin was junior in experience and qualification.

  Martin had put a note in his report that he saw the violence as ‘instrumental’, not ‘planned’ as such but considered beforehand. Alexis challenged him: by that, did he mean to imply premeditation? Martin had to retreat.

  Dr Hearps hadn’t had access to the affidavits from the Turnbull family attesting to their concern for Turnbull before the shooting, Alexis observed. The accused, he suggested, was stoical and not quick to show emotion to Hearps, though he might have been more candid with his family. Dr Hearps, Martin insisted, was an experienced professional and would have been alert even during a protocol check, and would have absorbed the subject’s history.

  Back and forth it went. Alexis pushed the case for his client’s severe mental health issues back in 2014, in contrast to his client’s lucidity now, after months spent in custodial care.

  There was a strange parallel with the Turnbulls’ land-clearing court cases: the varying analyses, the dramatically divergent interpretations, the vying experts. Todd
Alexis, adroitly probing, testing inconsistencies, asking ingenuous questions. The subject, the flattened landscape, the silent man in the dock: so much talking about them, so much peering at the damage, arguing what it means.

  Dr Martin testified that Turnbull had spoken to him about his feelings now. ‘I can’t undo what I’ve done.’ The old man had gazed at him across the videolink. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry about it now, but I’m at the end of my life. I’m just about buggered.’ He expected, he said now, to die in jail.

  ON 26 MAY, JUSTICE Johnson summed up matters for the jury to consider. He said the onus was on Turnbull to prove he’d been substantially impaired; the jury had to credit that his capacity to understand right and wrong and control himself had been impaired, and to believe the impairment was so severe that his criminal responsibility should be reduced from murder to manslaughter. He told the jury to think of community standards, of common sense; to make a ‘value judgement’. ‘It’s the state of mind of the accused at this time which is the central point of this trial,’ he said.

  The jury shuffled out to deliberate. In the observer seats, Alison McKenzie and Fran Pearce looked at each other nervously. It was eight weeks now since the start of the pretrial hearings. They had flights booked for Tamworth the next afternoon, a Friday, but Pat Barrett warned them they might not make it: a jury, they learned with surprise, might stay secluded until late on Friday, and through the weekend. Turner’s mother, Coral, had been in Sydney for the gruelling week; she had to leave.

  Stay close by, Barrett told McKenzie and Pearce on Friday morning, when they turned up to the court to be told the jury still hadn’t returned. It might be any minute.

  ‘I just want it to be justice for Glen, I want a guilty verdict,’ McKenzie told Gregory Miller. ‘Because that’s what it is and there are no, there are absolutely no excuses.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘No excuse.’

  Chris Nadolny was there too. He wasn’t part of the cluster around McKenzie and Pearce but sat alone. He had escaped media attention; an unobtrusive person, he wasn’t the sort to leap before a camera. But he had felt threatened by Ian Turnbull, and had met the man more often than most others in the room. He might have joined Robert Strange, but the two men, indelibly linked by Turner and Turnbull, barely knew each other. Nadolny sat alone, and felt it.

  And then, abruptly, it was announced that the jury had returned a verdict.

  McKenzie and Pearce, Nadolny and Strange returned to their seats in the courtroom. The jury filed in.

  The verdict was announced. It was murder.

  Turnbull showed no emotion. Watching him, McKenzie was shaken. But she and Pearce couldn’t hide their relief. They sobbed.

  Turnbull glanced at her for a moment. Then he was taken away.

  The women’s faces, as they walked out of the building to face reporters, wore a different kind of composure: the taut, pressed-lips dignity of vindication stretched tight over brimming distress.

  ‘We expected the trial to be about the murder of Glen Turner,’ Pearce read from a statement. ‘A good man, doing his job on behalf of our community. Instead it was hijacked by the defence into an attack on Glen’s character and a platform for the Turnbull dynasty to continue their grievance in regard to the native vegetation laws.’ She drew breath. ‘The murderer was portrayed as the victim, a poor, depressed, respectable farmer driven to despair by the Office of Environment and Heritage. In reality, he is a wealthy property developer who simply refused to accept that the law applied to him.’

  The children would have to live the rest of their lives without their father, she continued. ‘Glen didn’t get a chance to go home to his family.’ And she summoned Turner for the mash of reporters and camera crew. ‘Glen was a man that was full of vitality and he had a passion for life. He was a loving husband, father, son, brother, uncle, friend and colleague. He was a respected member of the community.’

  They’d chosen bright colours that day: McKenzie, orange; Pearce, a luminous blue. Each also wore, proudly, a long necklace suspending a large Tree of Life image, made for each supporter of the family and worn by the women every day in court in memory of Turner.

  Lastly, they thanked Robert Strange and his crucial evidence. Many knew what it had cost him to speak. ‘We are very honoured,’ Fran Pearce read out, ‘that he had the strength to give his testimony, because we know that’s what got the conviction.’

  That night, the Turner supporters all went to a restaurant to celebrate. There were dozens of people. There were toasts to the legal team, to Strange; to Glen. McKenzie and Pearce sat together, and the two women pressed their faces into each other’s necks to hide the tears.

  17

  A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.

  —Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 1997

  The torn envelope that now homes the victim impact statements in the court archives has a sticker: R v Ian Robert Turnbull (2014/223920) / Sentencing Hearing Trial Exhibits and MRI Lists / (15 June 2016-ROP42). Inside is an A4 sheet of paper with an adult’s handwriting – large, clear, well-formed letters. ‘Something terrible happened in my life,’ it begins.

  Beneath is a little fragile sketch by a child: two blocky cars, a stick figure holding a stiff dark line with dotted lines dashing from its opening and two other figures. One of them appears to be lying down. This page is green-stickered: Supreme Court of New South Wales Exhibit F. A Post-it identifies the illustrator as Jack Turner.

  Another sketch shows Jack hearing about his father’s death. It is dinnertime: the boy in the drawing is holding a plate.

  There is also a drawing by Glen, a very detailed sketch of two billycarts, one large and one small. The smaller is ‘Jack’s billycart. Max. speed 7 ¾ miles/hour.’ The large one is labelled ‘Daddy’s billycart’ and has ‘special extra features – home brew cooler – blasters – boosters’.

  It was 15 June, two weeks after the verdict, and Alison McKenzie, Fran Pearce and Robert Strange were back in court. They were there to read their victim impact statements at the plea hearing.

  One of the aspects to be considered in Turnbull’s sentencing was the damage his crime had done to the community. The statements, said Justice Johnson, helped to illustrate how ‘the harmful impact of Mr Turner’s death on the members of his immediate family was an aspect of harm done to the community’. There are no victim impact statements made by microbes, by koalas or flowering groundcover for the harm done to them. But because Turnbull killed a man, he had, for the first time, to hear of the damage done.

  Alison McKenzie’s statement was carefully composed. It opened with a scene: a family dinner, celebrating Jack’s ninth birthday. The next morning, she recounted, she and Glen kissed the kids goodbye as they ran to the schoolbus. The parents drove to town, chatted, parted ways.

  She told the court of that evening: her thoughts as the emergency calls came through, the realisation that her partner was dead, the children listening to it all unfold. She spoke of her horror that his body was left on the ground in Talga Lane all night. ‘I should have been there to hold him,’ she wrote. ‘You expect to be by their bedside holding their hand as they take their last breath. I didn’t have the chance to do that for Glen when he needed me most, and he won’t be there for me.’

  She spoke of the loss to the children. The cruelty other kids showed towards them, their lack of understanding. Her daughter having no father to dance with at the school formal. Her son clinging to his visiting uncle when he tried to leave.

  Her partner had been a valued person, she said. Their lives together were severed, the family’s future blown to smithereens. ‘My husband,’ McKenzie told the listening court, ‘was taken from us by the actions of a selfish, arrogant man who thought of nothing but his own greed and desire to own more land and make more money. His wife spoke the words that should have been mine. Glen and I worked together on our farm, we loved being together, all he ever wanted was to own his farm, and Ian Turnbu
ll took that from him, he took that from us. And there is only one answer to the question of “Why?”. Because he wanted more.’

  Turnbull ‘took … from Glen and me and our children and our friends and family because he wasn’t happy with what he had’. She paused. ‘The only thing Glen wanted more of was time.’

  On the hard copy in the files she had written and crossed out whole paragraphs. Victim Support Services advises, ‘Don’t directly express your anger toward the court or the offender. Your goal is to express your hurt and your pain, not to blame. The blame has already been placed on the offender, so now is the time to talk about what you have been experiencing through your loss.’ The statements must not contain anything that is ‘offensive’, say the court’s regulations.

  The defence team, given its due preview, had objected to some of those paragraphs in court. ‘It is submitted,’ complained Todd Alexis, ‘that parts of them go beyond what is the “impact” of the death of Mr Turner upon Ms McKenzie.’ Justice Johnson overruled the objection. But McKenzie had still crossed out some of the things she had wished to say.