by Zane Lovitt
18
Cheryl Watersloe married Piers Alamein in 1984. Their wedding photo has them gawkish and washed-out but grinning in that lipsticked way. On the night of the ceremony they caught a plane to Vanuatu and honeymooned for a week, spent most of it indoors at the whim of Cyclone Hayley. They must have found something NSFW to do in there because nine months later Rudyard Christopher Alamein was born.
The totality of information I return on Rudy Alamein, after hours of searching, using every google dork I know, relates without exception to a killing that took place thirteen years ago. Also during a storm.
With the usual blast of heat in my face and a left hand funnelling fried goods into my mouth, I launched into a brick wall: Rudy Alamein had no online presence. Not any. It took hours to determine this. There was no social media profile linked back to him, no registration of a name change, not even an email address. The chips were finished, the tea brewed and drunk and dry at the bottom of my mug before I found this exchange on Facebook from seven years ago.
PenAm: u look like Rudy
Alamein in that pic
Kath8su94: wut who?
PenAm: u have to remember
from school his dad went to jail
Kath8su94: fuk u k?
On Ancestry.com I picked up the names Piers and Cheryl Alamein, didn’t need google dorks to search them. There was so much commentary on what happened that I resolved to read none of it, flipped off the banshee news sites and made for the eternal mother-lode of crimes and criminals, the all-singing all-dancing electronic database starring every Victorian who ever went to prison: the Adult Parole Board. It stores the sentencing remarks, the court transcript, the prosecution opening at plea, all the written submissions and all the statements-to-police, wrapped up in a bow and left somewhere vulnerable to a cross-site attack. Chalk it up as one more mark against my name when the party van knocks on the door.
The sentencing remarks are the wikiest.
The Alamein family was cashed up in the 1990s. Piers was a jeweller and he rented a workshop opposite the Galleria and the family moved into an Edwardian terrace in Albert Park. No more children popped out but they bought a puppy and Rudy attended a wealthy private school and the three of them returned to Vanuatu more than once to escape the Melbourne winter. It might sound like Disney-tier good times, but within this house of bliss was a fissure. The centre had collapsed.
The murder of Cheryl Alamein by her husband was the climax of animosity and reproach that had bottlenecked since the end of the marriage in 1997. He’d moved out, rented an apartment in South Yarra, saw his family often enough and no one could say that he and Cheryl weren’t getting along. Nor could the Crown say that, prior to this separation, Cheryl had suffered so much as a Chinese burn at the hands of her husband.
Piers waived professional privilege and his lawyer gave evidence. She said the process was amicable, mercifully straightforward, that Cheryl and Piers seemed close. They suffered not from irreconcilable differences but a kind of holistic FOMO, had grown cross-eyed with boredom and pictured for themselves the life of singlehood and liberty wagged in their faces by television and billboards. Over the next two years the divorce was finalised and the parties began to work towards a property settlement; in the interim it was agreed that Piers would contribute a thousand dollars a week in child maintenance and Rudy would spend every second weekend with him in South Yarra.
Exactly how Rudy felt about this, about any of it, about anything at all, is not chronicled. Rudy’s existence is a ghost, more a memory to the characters of the story than a living player. Perhaps that’s the life of a thirteen-year-old whose parents are circling the wagons. Like I’d know.
On Monday the third of June, 1999, the last ever Monday with Cheryl Alamein alive in it, Piers saw Rudy to the Grand Street house, as arranged, as he had done every second Monday for more than a year. He glimpsed a flash of white in the mailbox and removed the envelope. This was habit, he claimed, having lived there himself for almost a decade. It was a letter to Cheryl from the ATO, obviously a tax statement. At this point, Piers told the police, habit was no longer a factor—he wanted to know Cheryl’s income, now that she had returned to teaching and while he continued to fund the entirety of Rudy’s upbringing.
Cheryl opened the door to receive Rudy, found Piers tearing at the envelope and Did. Not. Want. She leapt at him. This is how she told it:
There ensued a brief, physical altercation. I demanded the envelope. He insisted he had the right to read the contents. Piers pushed me down the stairs that led up to our front door and I have a very bad bruise on my thigh.
I was very much in fear for my personal safety and it is possible that Piers would have injured me further if not for the intervention of a local tradesman who appeared on the street and spoke words to the effect of, ‘Leave her alone.’
Having wrought the letter from Piers, I insisted that he leave. Which he did, with words to the effect of, ‘Go to hell.’
The following day, Cheryl made that statement to police as part of her application for a Family Violence Intervention Order. She said her level of fear, on a scale of one to three, was ‘3—very fearful’, and the likelihood of further violence was ‘3—very likely’. Piers’s lawyers couldn’t keep the statement from being entered into evidence at his trial. On the witness stand, Piers claimed he hadn’t pushed her, she’d just lost her balance, but by then the mysterious tradesman couldn’t be found to break the tie.
Piers also refuted the allegation that he saw his ex-wife again. According to him, words to the effect of ‘Go to hell’ were the last words he ever spoke to her.
The order was served on Piers that same Monday. It prohibited communication with Cheryl and featured an exclusion condition that he wasn’t to come closer to the house than one hundred metres. A court date of June fourteenth was nominated, where he could contest the order if he chose.
His response, according to his friends and to his browser history, was rageface fucking lunacy. He grawlixed at being demonised because his wife had tripped over, was particularly assmad at the discovery that Cheryl would get more in the property settlement if she could prove domestic violence. Piers convinced himself, over the following days, that this had been Cheryl’s plan all along.
That Friday, Piers returned to the house to hunt for proof of Cheryl’s plot. And her income. If nothing else, he would find that tax statement. The Crown conceded that Piers had no intention of harming Cheryl Alamein when he made entry into the house, using his own key, at 11.45am. Moreover they conceded that, while Cheryl had been sufficiently frightened of Piers to apply for the intervention order he was now in breach of, she had not been so frightened as to change the locks.
This was the Friday of the Queen’s Birthday weekend and Cheryl wasn’t supposed to be home; she was supposed to be away for three whole nights, at a friend’s holiday house in Lorne. The friend, Maria Bonniano, had offered the empty house with a promise to look in on Rudy over the long weekend. It was supposed to be a holiday for Cheryl; arrangements had been made long before the stairs incident and Piers had been apprised. He believed the Grand Street house would be empty until Rudy returned from school.
But with dark clouds moving low and fast, overtaking other, friendlier clouds, combined with her guilt at leaving Rudy and Busby the cocker spaniel to fend for themselves—Busby always freaked his nuts at the sound of thunder—Cheryl sat around in Lorne for all of two hours before she struck out for home again. She called Maria Bonniano to relay as much. According to Bonniano’s evidence, there was nothing wackadoo about the call, nothing suspicious or frightening, just Cheryl’s regret at not taking advantage of the house and her concentration on the difficult drive, the apocalyptic nightmare of the Great Ocean Road as a storm mustered and broke overhead. What a relief it must have been to make it home safely!
She arrived at 12.17pm.
What the judge wrote next is almost impossible to believe. This is what he pronounced in court, at the
conclusion of the plea, as everyone waited to hear the sentence handed down to Piers Alamein, as reporters scratched in their notebooks, as Piers himself stood in the dock and as the door to the whole shitberg creaked shut. What the edgy edgemaster judge said was this:
‘Little did she know the terrible fate that awaited her within.’
Lolwut?
Sure, judges get eccentric. But eccentric and lame?
19
Scuffing sounds on the concrete landing outside. I’m willing it to be Marnie, mentally urging her to see the glow of my displays under the door. Telepathically I’m pleading with her to chance a visit. To say hi. And I’d tell her everything, just to have someone listen.
That unique jingling of keys that no other keys could replicate, then her door opens. Closes. In the silence I realise there is no storm outside. It’s a regular night and I’m the hikikomori dingus swept up in someone else’s story, snapped out of it by the sound of footsteps passing me by.
Now is when I first try to call Tyan. To fill him in, to catch him up, to win his fucking approval. But no answer. It’s late for him to be out, but dafuq do I know about his habits? Maybe this is normal. I don’t think so; my sense is that something is wrong—
No, Jason. Don’t catastrophise. You’ve got work to do…
They knew what time Cheryl had returned home because her neighbour heard the front door. Her name was Lucille Nguyen, a plump retiree whose strategy for sitting out the storm involved rice wine, a calico cat asleep in her lap and a magazine about gardens. This was on the settee in her front room that shared a wall with the Alameins. Their heavy oak door shuddered closed and it woke up the cat and Nguyen checked the time because it was early for Rudy to be home from school.
What else she heard was Cheryl calling her ex-husband’s name. The terrace walls were not thin, but Cheryl was shouting to be heard on the next floor, above the roar of the rain.
The Crown claimed Cheryl had spotted Piers’s car on Grand Street, the same green Volvo that has a role to play more than a decade later. She clocked that Piers was inside, had gained entry with his own key, was at that moment scrutinising her email. Or her bedsheets.
Whatever he was doing, he was doing it in the master bedroom. That’s where Cheryl found him and that’s where the angry voices came from. Nguyen thought nothing of this at first and the muffling of the rain prevented her from discerning actual words. But when the cat stirred and carried itself to the back of the house, Lucille Nguyen sighed and did likewise, regrouped in the kitchen, made tea and continued to read about bonsai trees by the light of long windows that sulked with rain.
Had she remained in the sitting room, she would have heard those voices abruptly cease.
It isn’t known what Piers had been doing in the house because he never confessed to being there. Obviously Cheryl confronted him, got gaping assmad and so did Piers, still committed to a belief she was defrauding him in the settlement. And amid the heat and ego of the fight, fuelled perhaps by the drama of the lightning outside, Piers picked up a vase from the dressing table.
Within these documents there’s a PDF of a xerox of a xerox of a xerox. You can just discern the outline of a thick glass milk bottle. On the base is embossed the word IKEA and below that mouth blown by Lulu Kismet and one side is blackened with blood because Piers used it to kill his wife.
They didn’t find any prints on the vase—not Piers’s, not Cheryl’s. Instead they found smears of detergent, the same lemon-scented stuff that lived under the kitchen sink. It was concluded that she’d recently cleaned the vase and that Piers had worn gloves when he came to the house that day, though it was unclear why he would.
The pathologist at the trial said the blunt trauma cracked her skull, jolted her temporal lobe and triggered her brain to swell. A damaged skull can’t expand like it’s supposed to in response to a swelling brain and she haemorrhaged. No one could say how long it was before she died, but she must have been unconscious for several minutes. Then she died.
What was conceded by the Crown was that the cause of death was a single blow to the head. This led the jury to find Piers guilty of manslaughter, not murder. Even so, the judge slotted him for fifteen years. Because of what he did next.
Piers twigged that Cheryl was dying. As much would have been relayed by the blood pooling around her on the bedroom floor. But Piers was based. Didn’t panic, clung to the vase, padded downstairs, ignored Busby driven wackadoo by the cracking of thunder and dug a hole in the backyard with a garden trowel, even as the rain kept on and must have soaked him through.
I scroll through colour photos of the ferns and the creepers that hedge the path to a bungalow at the rear of the property—thirteen-year-old Rudy’s private fiefdom, including his bedroom. Amid the rows of lush garden is an excavation too small to house a dead body. The Crown argued that Piers had intended to bury the murder weapon.
But something stopped him. Having dug the hole, he left it as it was, water pooling within, dropped the trowel right there and buried nothing. No one knew whether he got spooked or if he chose to keep the vase for a souvenir. What was for sure was that, according to Rudy, this improvised little trench had not been there when he’d left for school that morning.
Piers came back inside, leaving footprints on the kitchen floor that matched his shoe size, though the shoes themselves were never found. He departed by the front door, deep within the deluge, quietly bashing in a small stained-glass plate near enough to the door lock to present as some drug-addled thief ’s paltry means of entry—an attempt by Piers to set up a ‘burglary-gone-wrong’. Man…clichéd much? His grace note was to leave the door ajar like criminals do on TV. Then, behind cooperative curtains of rain, he hightailed it in a green Volvo.
In considering an appropriate jail term, His Honour the Edgy Edgelord declared that a particularly aggravating factor was the decision to allow the murdered woman to be discovered by their thirteen-year-old son upon his return from school.
Rudy did get back earlier than usual because of an altercation at recess: he’d tolchocked another student, one of his regular tormentors, drawn blood with the follow-up swipe of a pen lid. The response of whichever fuck-my-life disciplinarian, unable to raise Rudy’s parents on the phone, had been to send him home in the rain at 11.30am.
He didn’t get there until after one. By then the storm itself had retreated but the downpour continued and he was drenched when he alighted from the Grand Street tram. The house door was wide open, broken glass across the entryway, and calling Busby’s name didn’t return a howl or a whine or a shaky pet clumsily thankful for Rudy’s homecoming. It was later determined that the animal had run terrified into the street, permitted now by the open door, pursued by thunder overhead. This is the childhood pet, I realise, that Rudy has continued to search for ever since. This is how he met Elizabeth Cannon.
Parked right there on the kerb, his mother’s BMW went unseen. He hadn’t looked for it since she wouldn’t be back until Sunday, so his first move was to call her from the phone in the kitchen to say that the house had been burgled and Busby was missing. He heard her phone ring through the receiver. And he heard it ring upstairs.
Rudy left the phone off the hook, followed the siren. This is what he said in his statement to police:
I saw no other people in the house until I reached the bedroom. I found my mother on the floor. She was dead. I went downstairs and hung up the telephone. I called triple zero. I went outside to look for Busby.
Rudy didn’t take the stand. It was considered sufficient that his statement was entered into evidence without a fight. This scanned document is typewritten, double-spaced beneath a VicPol header. He hadn’t exactly gushed—the whole thing is just a page and a half long. At the end Rudy didn’t sign his name so much as doodle it.
Beside that, in smaller type and signed by a hand that knows what a signature is, there is this:
Statement procured by: Detective Glen Tyan
I try to call him again.
Still no answer. Images of the worst possible scenario rain down from the cracks in my ceiling.
20
I’ll give Tyan five more minutes. If there’s still no answer, should I call triple zero?
It might have happened last night. If Rudy watched as Tyan and I sat in the food court, if he was waiting to get Tyan alone, he could have ambushed him in the carpark of Doncaster Shoppingtown. I doubt I could conceive of a worse place to die.
Maybe Rudy knows who I am. Maybe right now Glen Tyan is dead in the boot of his car and Rudy is lurking outside my door, awaiting the same opportunity…
Calm the fuck down, you gaping wanksock.
I sift the tabloid sites for the murder of a white male in his sixties. Nothing.
Maybe I won’t call triple zero. His faith in me will nosedive if the cops have to track him down to the Good Times on Cemetery Road…
I continue reading.
Detective Glen Tyan was clueless as to what had been used to murder Cheryl Alamein. The who was less of a mystery—Piers Alamein would have been the prime suspect even if, when a woman is murdered, nine times out of ten it’s not her husband who did it. He couldn’t account for where he’d been all day other than lying on his couch, listening to the rain.
On the morning of Saturday the eighth of June, detectives searched Piers’s apartment and returned nothing.
They interviewed him at the Flinders Street complex, said they were tracking down the killer, not that he was the killer, so it was Piers himself who pointed out, poring over photographs of the crime scene, that a clear-lacquer vase in the shape of a milk bottle was missing from his dresser by the fireplace. ‘Could this be the murder weapon?’ he asked, dripping with Hollywood sincerity.
Eight hours later, Tyan led a group of officers to Piers’s workshop—with Piers’s permission because in 1999 it was hard to process a search warrant on a Saturday; they even used his key to get in—whereupon the blood-smeared vase was discovered inside an unlocked deed box. This is how a cheap Ikea milk bottle, the one in the grainy xerox of a xerox of a xerox, became the linchpin in the case against Piers Alamein.
