Hellbent: Ces Waters & Me

by Margaret Wentworth

  To ask me to try and forget that nasty letter I never shall. I will tell you this. I was very ill over it and I have given up work and have retired. But I have very good friends. So I am not lonely.

  But there is one thing I must write about, you left this country overdrawn at the bank. They kept writing to you at my address. So I have done what you always told me to do, tear them up, and did not reply to any of them. But to make sure that I got one they sent the police round with one. Then the bank manager started. They wanted me to pay the money. I was questioned about you, did I know where you were? I told them I did not know and that I had not seen you. Well Christine they put the matter into the hands of solicitors, and I still refused to pay. They looked back at all your cheques and mine and told me the amount and date of the last payment I gave you.

  So you see your address nobody will know. So don’t worry about that. I should hate to see you go through what I went through.

  So with that nasty letter and the other business, I don’t feel I can trust him anymore. And as for spending a holiday out there, never.

  But I feel no ill feeling towards you. So long as you are happy and in the best of health, I will feel OK. The only thing is, I feel ever so upset at times thinking that things have to be like this.

  But I will give here one word of advice. If ever I got another one like that, it goes to the solicitor with the other one. So I will say goodbye to you. You may write again.

  Yours truly, mum.

  Christine

  Laverne: Christine first knew Ces when she was 16. She fell pregnant and Ces arranged an abortion. It was a botched job and Christine found she could never conceive again.

  Terrey Hills

  Laverne relates events when she was 25 and had come out to Australia to stay with Ces for about six months when he was living in Terrey Hills. She stayed in a caravan at the side of the house with her husband Don, and their two-year-old son. Laverne was seven months pregnant. For the first three months, both of them thought that Ces was a great guy.

  Laverne became aware that after 7 pm, the doors of the house were locked and all Windows closed. The children were told to take their clothes off and go naked around the house. Ces played them home videos of the nudist camp. (This is perhaps not surprising in view of Ces’s nudist interests.) However, Laverne said Ces used to humiliate the kids, especially Dean. Ces would grab Dean’s penis in a dominating, mocking manner.

  One time Laverne was in the house with the kids at night. Ces took Tracey into her bedroom to say goodnight and locked the door. He stayed an hour. Laverne thought this a very long time to say goodnight and suspected something ‘was not quite right’. She also suspected that Dean and Christine did not have a normal foster mother-son relationship either.

  The routine of the household was significantly different from the way Ces told it. Ces would take the children running at 6 am, then drive them to school. Ces would tell the children he had a busy day of work ahead. In fact, Laverne noted he came home and went to bed till 3 pm when it was time to pick the kids up from school again. The kids were not allowed to play with friends or talk about the family to anyone else. If Ces went out of the house, he locked the phone in his safe. Only he and Christine had keys. Ces had a locked mailbox so the children could never access mail without him knowing.

  Laverne once saw inside Ces’s safe. It had pornographic material as well as letters and photos from overseas. From discussions with the kids, Laverne sensed they had no contact with their overseas relatives. Ces made sure they were isolated. He had told his kids that their mother was dead. They had asked Ces about their mother several times since coming to Australia but Ces made it clear to them that the matter was closed and he did not want to discuss it anymore. Laverne knew Gloria was alive long before the Waters did.

  At that time Ces used to buy and sell cars. Don sometimes went to the car auctions with Ces. Ces, who claimed to be a vegetarian, would eat hamburgers and hot dogs and tell Don to keep this secret from the children.

  Christine was often absent from the house three or four days at a time, coming home in the very early hours of the morning. When Laverne inquired as to her occupation, Ces told her she was a taxi driver. Soon, Laverne put two and two together: Christine was on the game. She saw Ces taking money from her and realised Ces knew all about it.

  One time, towards the end of their stay, they heard Tracey crying out and investigated to find Ces whacking her with a rubber hose with a brass coupling attachment on the end. Apparently Tracey had forgotten to untie a horse which she should have done 20 minutes earlier. Christine had discovered this and screamed at Ces: ‘She needs disciplining!’ Laverne felt that Ces would have beaten her to death had her husband not intervened. Tracey was so black and blue she couldn’t go to school for three weeks.

  After this incident, Ces turned icy towards them and began to make threats. Ces told her husband he used to help the Kray brothers dispose of bodies in Finsbury Park crematorium and that he would dispose of Don’s body too if he didn’t leave the country.

  On another occasion, when her husband Don was smoking outside, Ces said he’d take his head off his shoulders with a bayonet.

  They realised it was time to leave. Tracey and Dean wanted them to stay; in their mid-teens, they enjoyed talking to people roughly their own age. Troy was into soccer and Guy into running, neither socialised much. Laverne and her husband were the only people who were allowed to take the kids on outings, and showed them a different sort of life. They took them swimming, which they really enjoyed.

  Tracey was treated the worst by Ces, who acted like he couldn’t stand her and didn’t want her around. At times he was vicious towards her.

  Dean was completely brainwashed by his dad. The other boys were also very obedient.

  Christine was a ‘geisha girl’ who would obey Ces without question. Ces had to be careful striking Christine because of the nudity involved in her work. So when he was angry he would abuse her verbally instead, and say very cruel things to her. Ces was a dictator. If he. came back to the house singing then the kids could relax. However, if he came back in a bad mood everyone would tiptoe around.

  Ces would occasionally beat the children, Tracey more often. The kids accepted the beatings as part of life. Laverne felt he was an animal who kept his kids imprisoned in that place. When the kids wanted to go out more, Ces moved to Kulnura. Laverne felt it was to isolate the kids more.

  Three or four months after Laverne and her family left the Terrey Hills address, Ces was determined to get Don deported. He wanted them out of the country. One time, while they were living at a caravan park at Camden, on the south-western outskirts of Sydney, the police arrested her husband. It was Ces’s eye looking through the peephole in the cell door, identifying him. Don was released 24 hours later when the police found out he was a legal immigrant. However, both he and Laverne were getting scared, especially after Ces started threatening them. They changed their name and went over to live in a caravan park in Perth.

  Ces, the father

  The children were all frightened to stand up to Ces with his rule of fear, his tactics of physical and psychological abuse. Tracey, being the oldest and more gutsy, needed a firmer hand than the others and ended up being punished more often. The boys coped it too. A neighbour at Kulnura heard screaming and, through binoculars, saw Ces whacking the boys with what looked like a hosepipe. Ces used scare tactics very effectively with the boys. He woke one of the boys in the dead of night, a handgun pressed to the ear. On another occasion at Kulnura the boys all fled outdoors while shotgun blasts went off from the house. They ran to a neighbour’s place for protection.

  Ces was a master at psychological cruelty. He’d keep the boys awake at night to control them. One time, when Troy was 13, he was trying to study at home. Usually his room and Guy’s room were dog-free zones, and there were about 30 or 40 dogs living in the house at the time. Ces objected to the boys excluding dogs from their rooms. Troy needed some peace and q
uiet to study so asked his father to take the dogs out of the house so that he could concentrate. Ces sat beside Troy and soothingly told him he’d do anything for him as Troy was his favourite son. Then Ces left the room. After a while Troy heard a lot of dogs noises coming from outside his door. When he opened the door he found the room full of dogs. Ces had locked all the dogs inside the house and kept it that way all night, maybe to show Troy who was the boss. Troy was very upset and never forgot that incident.

  Tracey felt Ces was preparing her for a life of prostitution.

  When she was 12, Ces allowed his friend Reg, the photographer from the naturist camp, to take nude photos of her. The photographer started off with innocent photos and then wanted to shoot Tracey with her legs spread, doing distasteful things with his wife. Tracey told Ces she didn’t want to go to Reg’s anymore.

  When Tracey was 19, she had a 16-year-old girlfriend called Tara who moved in with them for over a year as she had problems at home. Ces began making sexual approaches to Tara and was once seen by Tracey and Christine coming out of this young girl’s room, Ces’s clothing dishevelled.

  Ces would spy on Tracey when she was naked. He thought it was his right to give her no privacy. The boys had no privacy either. He would walk into their rooms at any time without knocking, even if he knew they had their girlfriends with them.

  Ces sometimes used Dean as ‘muscle’ to scare off creditors wanting payment. Dean was uncomfortable in this role but went along with it to placate his father.

  Ces, the trainer

  As a trainer, Ces was a harsh and cruel disciplinarian. As far as he was concerned, second best was as good as failure.

  Ces would get angry when the children did not perform up to his expectations Once, when Tracey came second in a state race, he dragged her out of bed very early in the morning and made her run around a racetrack, whipping her with a hose pipe.

  He would often run the boys down and call them ‘losers’ or `failures’ when they didn’t perform up to his standard. That was his way of motivating them.

  Ian Batty, aside from promoter and cornerman roles, often massaged all three boys before fights throughout their pro careers: ‘If they received the bashings they alleged, I would have seen marks on them.’

  Ces, protector of moral values

  The children grew up to stories of Ces’s adventures and criminal activities. They also grew up to stories of past violence, such as Ces boasting he had once killed a man and cut the breast off a woman, throwing it down a well.

  Ces hated his children mixing with the opposite sex. At Kulnura, Tracey developed a crush on Phil, the boy next door. She once sat on Ces’s bed with Phil watching television. It was innocent fun. Ces caught them together. He was controlled at the time but plainly angry. The following day he took Tracey to the doctor to check if her hymen was still intact. Soon after Tracey noticed Dean talking to Phillip. She never saw him after that, and assumed Dean was acting on Ces’s instructions to scare him away.

  Sharon, Guy’s girlfriend, said Ces threatened and insulted her. She was very upset when he said that if she partnered with Guy she would give birth to retarded children. She kept out of Ces’s way as much as possible. One evening when Guy wanted her to sleep over at the house, they had a terrible row with Ces. He completely lost control and yelled with such venom that it was a wall of noise. He raised his arm to hit Sharon. Guy interjected and said if Ces hit her he would flatten Ces. Ces raised his hands in the air and said to Guy, `Typical that you would side with a female.’ Guy still insisted on Sharon spending the night, which she did, rather nervously. Eventually, it was his love for Sharon that gave Guy the strength to leave home. Ces never got over the fact that Guy chose a woman over him.

  Dean said in court that after his first date, he was brutally beaten by a hose with a brass attachment on the end. Lee confirmed this. Dids’ family settled in a caravan park at Toukley on the Central Coast and over the years Lee occasionally saw Ces’s sons. Most of the time the boys were so locked into their boxing and fitness training routine that they had no time for pleasurable social outings. Lee found the boys were very suppressed by their father. Ces’s fanaticism was so extreme that he had arranged for all three boys to have nose operations to prevent bleeding in the ring. Ces would also make Dean pee in a pot and then take hold of Dean’s penis and force him to hold his urine back; probably to teach him mind and body control. Lee visited them up at the farm and was shown electric shock equipment that Ces had given the boys as a special Christmas present. You held on to a couple of handles and when the machine was turned on an electrical current surged through your body. This equipment was designed to improve muscle contractions. Lee had a go on it and said that it ‘made his heart go mad’.

  Lee relates that when Dean was 21 he had never had a girlfriend before. One night he went out with Lee’s brother, Johnny, to see some speed drag racing. Dean had never been out after 9 pm and Ces had given him midnight as curfew’s end. Johnny was quite experienced with women and encouraged Dean to socialise. They met a couple of girls, one a nurse Dean fancied. He talked with her until after midnight. He even made a date to meet her the next day.

  A couple of days later, Ces and Dean paid Dids’ family a visit. Lee noticed how quiet and withdrawn Dean was. He asked Dean if he had a good time the other night and Dean just bowed his head. Lee sensed that Dean did not want to say anything in the presence of his father, so waited until later when Dean was alone with him before bringing up the subject again. Dean showed Lee black bruising on his buttocks, thighs and back. Dean said that because he had come home late, his father had beaten him with a hose pipe surrounding a lead rod. The rubber surface prevented breaking the skin. (Ces had apparently been introduced to this type of weapon 30 years before.) Lee asked Dean what he was going to do about it. ‘I just can’t walk away, he’s my father.’ Lee found it amazing a very large and fit young man, the national and Oceania heavyweight boxing champion no less, could be completely dominated by his short father.

  Ces didn’t like Lee’s influence. Lee was a motorcycle rider at the time and influenced Dean to get his own bike. For a short time Ces allowed Dean to ride around the property, then the bike was banned. Ces also didn’t like the influence of Lee’s brother Johnny and dobbed him in to police as an illegal immigrant. Johnny was forced the leave the country.

  Sons, as boxers

  Laverne felt that the boys only remained boxers out of pure fear.

  Ces, householder

  There was scarcely any furniture in Ces’s place at Kulnura. The family shared their house with many dogs. The smell was overpowering as the dogs often soiled in the house. Ces would routinely hose the bare concrete floor of the house to remove effluent. The walls were bare, dirty and cobwebbed.

  Eventually, one dog-free room was set aside and carpeted. The boys kept their trophies there and it became the family room. Visitors only saw this room.

  Ces was the only one allowed to use the toilet at Terrey Hills. Christine and the boys had to use a bucket instead. Once again, there was no privacy. Ces would sit down and insist that his children put his socks and shoes on his feet.

  Tracey was made to do housework and farmwork while Ces protected the boys who had to get their sleep and train. He constantly ordered her around.

  Ces was the king of their place at Kulnura, but he was a lazy king. He would insist Tracey and Christine get up in the early hours most mornings to groom and train the horses, while he slept. Twice a week he’d also rise early to drive down to the track. While the boys were training in the morning, Ces would go back to bed. He always got other people to do the dirty work.

  Ces, husband

  Ces arranged for Christine to go into prostitution and demanded she continue with it, against her wishes. Often the kids would ring Christine at the place in Potts Point, using her alias, Mrs Durall. They all knew Ces kept a pornographic magazine featuring Christine advertising herself in it, under his bed.

  Once, when the m
an on top of Christine died during a session, she rang Ces for advice. He told her to remove all personal items such as jewellery and money and hide them, then ring the police. The police came round and Christine was eventually allowed to go home.

  Christine was a good mother to the children. She hated going off to prostitution but felt she had no choice and wanted to improve the quality of their lives.

  Ces, dog-lover

  Tracey felt that Ces wasn’t the dog-lover he professed to be; he used this as a front to gain kudos. If an animal was sick, Christine and Tracey had to tend it. She believed that many of the dogs were kept alive when they should have humanely put down. At one stage there were over 250 dogs on the farm. They were living off bread and water, many had diseases and were sick. They would rarely get dog biscuits. Hunger made a lot of dogs very savage. Another informant said some of the bitches even ate their newborn pups.

  Leaving home

  When Tracey ran away from home at Kulnura, she went searching for Laverne and Don but could not find them as they were in Perth. Laverne thinks Ces was glad to see her go because Tracey was a loose cannon and had the potential to cause trouble.

  Tracey described how she went to live with a horse training family who had previously offered her sanctuary. She formed an attachment to the son but the father made her uncomfortable, so she moved out.

  Dean turned sour on his father when Gloria came to visit and he learned about the abuse she had suffered. When Ces realised that Gloria was saying too much, he told Dean to ask his mother to leave, which he reluctantly did and has regretted ever since. When Gloria suffered a cerebral haemorrhage some months later, Ces would not permit any of the sons to visit. Dean used mounting friction between him and his dad, and his love of a woman, as an excuse to leave. The murder trial gave the younger boys their first opportunity to leave.

  Sylvia’s last contact with Ces

  When Sylvia came out from England to visit Ces, she was shocked at the primitive conditions under which Ces lived. What did he have to show for all his years in Australia? He always boasted about being highly respected, but he was roughing it in a caravan with scarcely enough to eat.