Bad

by Michael Duffy

  Tuno was hampered right from the start by the reluctance of criminal informants, so essential to solving many crimes, to come forward. That Falconer had possibly been killed because he was an informant himself had sent out a clear message to even the slowest crook. This shutdown of traditional sources of information was to hamper Tuno for years.

  Even the New South Wales Crime Commission was unable to break through this silence. It was working on some bikie killings at the time, and one of the people it had talked with was Terry Falconer. In 2001 and 2002 it assisted Tuno on the investigation into his murder, and tapped a number of phones and held hearings of people including Liz and James Falconer, and Rob Institoris. But despite its special powers and deep knowledge, the commission was unable to indentify Falconer’s killers.

  One thing on Jubelin’s mind from when he first heard about the murder was that it would have been much easier just to shoot Falconer dead. The fact he’d been abducted could suggest a desire to extract information from him, and this guided Tuno’s thinking as the detectives pondered the long list of persons of interest. There was a strong possibility Terry Falconer had possessed information someone else wanted to know. But what?

  In the first half of 2002, little progress was made even though an enormous amount of work was done. The packages in which Falconer’s body had been found were examined minutely. Every piece of tape and wire and plastic and flesh, every hair found in the parcels, was pored over by experts in the government analytical laboratories at Lidcombe, a job that was to take years and—unfortunately—yield absolutely nothing of significance. In April 2002 someone found Falconer’s anklet on a vacant block of land at Ingleburn, cut through and wrapped in an old singlet. This too told them nothing.

  Jubelin’s bosses in homicide began to wonder about keeping Tuno going. Unfortunately for the investigation, Crime Agencies, the Homicide Squad’s umbrella group in the New South Wales Police Force, was undergoing a budget crisis, and resources dried up. For a period in 2002 there was limited overtime and it was difficult for officers to travel out of Sydney. Tuno didn’t even have its own permanent office, and was first placed in an office of analysts who spent their days looking at computers. The noisy homicide detectives were not a welcome addition and were soon asked to move on.

  The investigators talked to most of the seventy persons of interest and dozens of others they thought might know something. After a few months they had spoken with a majority of the state’s toughest criminals. They went in hard, telling the crooks this was a personal one: ‘They’ve dressed up as police, so now people are pointing their fingers at us. They think they can fucking get away with that and make us look bad, especially after the Royal Commission? We are going to come after them hard.’ Jubelin wanted the word to get around that he and his team were determined to solve the crime no matter what.

  Often when several people are involved in a serious offence and realise it is being pursued by police with especial vigour, one will get nervous and roll over to avoid jail. Or one will talk to a criminal associate not involved in the crime, who will give the information to police to gain some advantage such as avoiding prosecution for his own criminal activity. The investigators thought one of these outcomes might occur here, because the kidnapping had been so well planned and complex that more people than just the three kidnappers might have been aware of it. They were trying to increase the chance of this happening by keeping the pressure on. But the months rolled on and no one was offering anything.

  Jubelin and some of the team went out to Lightning Ridge to talk to a man who’d cooked with Falconer. They didn’t have much luck—they’d pull up in an unmarked car at a mine where he was supposed to be working, and all the blokes hanging round would disappear into the mine shaft like rabbits down a hole. On one occasion Jubelin looked at the desolate surrounding countryside and then into the black hole at his feet. I’m not going down there, he thought. Later they went to a bar, just a corrugated iron shed in the bush, and everyone else there fell silent and just watched until they’d had their drinks and left.

  The investigation continued to struggle for information. Jubelin had not given up, but after eight months he still had no idea who had killed Terry Falconer. He was facing the prospect of failure, and this upset him.

  •

  Gary Jubelin was born in 1962 in Sydney’s north-west, and went to the local public high school. His adolescence was rocky, and there were times when he broke the law. He got into fights at school and on the sports field because, although tough and not one to back down, he was a quiet person and sometimes people mistook this for weakness. It was a mistake because, after being pushed for a while, he would react strongly. To some degree this continued once he grew up, and even today he confuses some people, which can be a problem but also an advantage.

  Jubelin was friends with an Aboriginal boy named Anthony who’d been adopted by the white family next door. Anthony had a troubled childhood, often being sent back to the orphanage when he was disobedient. One day, at the age of about fourteen, he turned up at Jubelin’s house to say he’d just had a fight with his foster mother and was going on the run. Did Gary want to come? Jubelin declined the offer.

  After leaving school he became an electrician, working mainly on building sites. It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but he had no idea what that might be until the day he climbed out of a hot roof one lunchtime and saw some cops chasing a bloke through the streets of Ryde. That looked like a better job than the one he was doing, and the next day he applied to join the force.

  Six months later he was a policeman at the age of twenty-three, working at Hornsby in Sydney’s north, and soon knew it was what he wanted: it matched his personality. Like many cops he has a strong feeling for justice, an understated but confident manner, and considerable tenacity. He enjoyed the ordinary uniform work and also the more exciting action as a part-time member of the Tactical Response Group, a job where the physicality attracted him. After a year of this he was tapped on the shoulder and invited to join plain clothes, the training ground for criminal investigation. He jumped at the chance: he had found himself envying the detectives who would turn up to every serious crime the uniforms discovered and take it over just when it got interesting. The following year he married Deborah, whom he’d known since childhood.

  After a few years in plain clothes, Jubelin was promoted to detective and assisted in his first murder investigation. He found it totally fascinating, and decided that one day he would join the homicide detectives. He didn’t share his ambition with any of his colleagues: it would have seemed out of place in one so young. The attraction of homicide, for him as for many others in the job, was not moral; it had little to do with the nature of the crime, except that murder was the worst crime and investigating it was the height of police work. Jubelin was an ambitious man, not in a career sense but in the sense of wanting to push himself to the limits of whatever he was doing. He wanted to play A grade.

  But there was still a long way to go. In his late twenties, he was invited to join the Armed Hold Up Squad at Chatswood. The squad’s members were seen as being tough—they were the cops who got things done by confronting criminals head-on. Their reputation was also linked, rightly or wrongly, to the exploits of corrupt cops such as Roger Rogerson, and accusations of bashing and loading crooks were not uncommon. When Jubelin arrived he was told, ‘We work hard and we play hard,’ and this was certainly true. He realised it would be a tricky learning curve, but knew he had to get major crime experience before he would be considered for homicide work.

  Deborah and he now had their first child, Jarvis, and Jubelin continued to be heavily involved in sport. As drinking was a big part of the Armed Hold Up Squad culture, a good work/life balance was difficult to maintain, especially as he had to get home to Dural every night. After little more than a year he realised things weren’t working out and decided to move back to Hornsby detectives, in 1992, a hard decision because major crime was his passion and he though
t he might be burning his bridges. He also enjoyed the camaraderie of working with hard men doing a tough job. There were some flawed characters in the squad, but there were also people he had great respect for, yet he figured the squad was not only bad for him but that its best days were over, and so it was to prove: when the Police Integrity Commission struck a few years later, some of Chatswood’s colourful detectives were out of the job.

  Jubelin did his best to make a go of it back at Hornsby, but after a year he was frustrated and returned to Chatswood, although not the Armed Hold Up Squad. This time he joined the Organised Crime section. It was a busy life: in his spare time he coached a soccer team and was heavily involved in kickboxing and martial arts. On top of that he was finishing a degree in policing. One night while waiting to catch a gang of professional thieves in a darkened unit block, he hid in a kitchen cupboard and completed an overdue assignment by torchlight.

  Soon he did his first murder investigation as a major crime detective and it was a terrible case. Eileen Cantley, who was eighty years old, was sexually assaulted and killed near Hornsby. Homicide was too busy to take it and Jubelin was put on the job along with Jim Williams from Hornsby, an old workmate and mentor. They caught the killer, who turned out to be a serial predator, a couple of months later.

  After this Jubelin applied for a homicide posting and in 1995 got a job with the Chatswood squad, working under some of the state’s finest investigators, including Paul Mayger and Paul Jacob. Another was Andrew Waterman, who was struck by Jubelin’s extreme determination, which was unusual even by the standards of homicide. He would later conclude, after observing Jubelin for two decades, that he was the most competitive and focused detective he’d ever come across. Not all the challenges of homicide can be met by simple determination, though. The work requires persistence because many investigations take a long time; it requires attention to detail because every case ends in a court of some kind, the Supreme Court or the coroner’s, being scrutinised by experts; it involves constant contact with grieving families, which many police find hard; and it tends to be more complicated than much other police work, with multiple lines of inquiry and persons of interest. There is also the need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the defence, especially when compiling a brief.

  There are two main parts of a detective’s job: first, solving the crime and, then, preparing the brief of evidence to go to the lawyers at the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, who will take the case to court. The strength of the brief determines whether the accused persons will be prosecuted, and can strongly influence whether they plead guilty and whether they’re convicted if the matter goes to trial. So a strong brief is a thing of great importance, but it is something the public almost never sees. Jubelin began to learn how to prepare a case for court, how to look at it from the outside and spot its weaknesses. This flowed back into his investigative work and he acquired, as all good detectives must, the ability to be objective as well as passionate.

  Another murder he worked on involved the disappearance of Martin Davidson, a paedophile who ran an indoor slot car track at Hornsby. He had been reported missing by one Bruce Matthews, who ten years earlier had reported his wife, Bernadette, missing. This seemed like too much of a coincidence, and to make things worse, when Jubelin reviewed the investigation into Bernadette’s disappearance he found serious flaws. Matthews hadn’t even been interviewed at the time.

  He interviewed Matthews about his wife and told him they weren’t going to let the matter drop. Matthews went on the run. The detectives tracked him to Queensland and flew up and brought him back. He was in Parramatta jail and Jubelin drove out to talk to him one day, to try to get a confession to the murders of Bernadette and Davidson. Matthews knew he was coming. While Jubelin was still in his car he received a call from Waterman to say the interview would not be proceeding: Matthews had hanged himself in his cell.

  Around this time Jubelin qualified as a member of the State Protection Support Unit. Officers attached to this unit usually worked elsewhere, but when necessary were called out to provide support for the State Protection Group, the police section that deals with armed, dangerous offenders and high-risk situations. The pressure of work—and his busy life—began to take a toll on him and his marriage. Deborah was pregnant again. Despite having achieved his dream of working in homicide, in 1997 he put in a request to return yet again to Hornsby, with its more predictable work hours and shorter travel time to Dural.

  His request was knocked back, and a month later he was given a job that was to see him away from home for much of the next eighteen months. He was offered a place on Strike Force Ancud, which was being set up to reinvestigate the deaths of three Aboriginal children at Bowraville, west of Nambucca Heads on the north coast. It was one of Australia’s greatest unsolved murder cases.

  In September 1990, sixteen-year-old Colleen Walker had gone missing, followed in October by four-year-old Evelyn Greenup and in February 1991 by Clinton Speedy, also sixteen. The bodies of Greenup and Speedy were found dumped in bushland, each killed by a blow to the head. Walker’s body has never been found, although her discarded clothes turned up in a local river.

  Despite the fact there was only ever one suspect, a local white man seen near each of the children shortly before they disappeared, there were problems with the original investigation, and when Jay Hart was tried for the murder of Clinton Speedy in 1994, he was found not guilty. His trial for the murder of Evelyn Greenup was then no-billed, meaning the attorney-general withdrew the prosecution.

  The families of the victims were deeply unhappy with these outcomes, and it was widely said that if the children had been white, their murderer would have been in prison long ago. Following a small riot, Police Commissioner Peter Ryan went to a public meeting at Bowraville and decided to hold a second investigation. It was a tough assignment, and reviewing other detectives’ work is not something all cops are keen to do, but Jubelin didn’t regard it as a punishment. He’d got the job by chance—Bowraville was part of the north region where he worked, and the other homicide detectives were tied up on other jobs. Waterman, for instance, was involved in the investigation into the disappearance of seven backpackers, which would ultimately see Ivan Milat convicted of murder.

  Jubelin’s second child, his daughter Mia, was born during the many months he was away at Bowraville. The distant job pushed Deborah and him apart as he lost himself in the task of re-interviewing the large number of witnesses and uncovering new information about the three murders. It was there he met Jason Evers, who also worked on the reinvestigation, and began a friendship that continues to this day. The two worked well together, Evers admiring Jubelin’s relentlessness and contributing his own humour and tact to put out the spot fires the sometimes angry Jubelin created.

  Finally, in May 1998, Strike Force Ancud submitted a brief of evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions suggesting Jay Hart be charged again, this time in connection with the disappearance of Colleen Walker. Jubelin was told he’d done a good job and could pick his next assignment. One Saturday morning, while coaching his son’s soccer team, he was rung by Rod Lynch, the senior officer who allocated work. Lynch said that although he’d promised Jubelin would not have to do another reinvestigation in a hurry, one had cropped up that was so interesting he might want to be involved. This was the death of Caroline Byrne. The initial investigation had been cursory and concluded the death was suicide, but Byrne’s father, Tony, had been claiming publicly for years that his daughter had been murdered. Paul Jacob was running the reinvestigation, and Jubelin joined and ended up being one of the team that flew to London and interviewed suspect Gordon Wood for five hours.

  Around 1999 Jubelin’s marriage ended and he moved out of the family home. It would be too simplistic to blame his job for the breakdown, something he did not think would happen and for which he continues to feel shame. He is uncomfortable discussing it except to acknowledge he was the one who changed during the relations
hip. Deborah and he grew apart before he even realised.

  In order to deal with the pain of the separation, he threw himself even more intensely into work, trying to shut out his emotions by focusing only on what was in front of him. He also put considerable effort into trying to be around for his children as they grew up, moving into a place close to the family home and attending school functions, sometimes while juggling the pressures of work. Many times the children would find themselves heading to a murder scene as Jubelin made phone calls to find a family member who could look after them.

  Meanwhile, there was bad news on the Bowraville front: the Director of Public Prosecutions announced he did not think the evidence was strong enough for Jay Hart to be charged as a result of Strike Force Ancud’s work. The matter would now go to the coroner. Jubelin and Jason Evers were bitterly disappointed.

  In September 2000 there was a need for extra police to provide security for foreign dignitaries attending the Sydney Olympics, so Jubelin did the training needed to qualify in Close Personal Protection, building on his experience in the State Protection Support Unit. He figured it would be a good way to see lots of sport, and he was not disappointed: his assignments during the games ranged from protecting Prime Minister John Howard to looking after the president of Bulgaria. The latter job was cut short when a Bulgarian weightlifter who’d just won a gold medal tested positive for drugs, and the president and his entourage left Sydney on the next plane out.

  Towards the end of 2000 Jubelin was promoted to sergeant. It was late coming—he’d always assumed promotion would follow good work, but now realised he had to learn certain buzz words and expressions to present at interviews in order to be considered for more senior positions. It was a lesson he would need to come back to later in his career.