Into the Darkness

by Robin Bowles

  Len also rang Natalie, who said she hadn’t yet heard from Phoebe. Reassured by Jeannette’s texts, Natalie hadn’t given Phoebe much thought, as she was preoccupied with preparations for young Nik’s eighteenth birthday party next day.

  After Len called, Natalie rang a couple of Phoebe’s mates, including her close friend Brendan (Bren) Hession. Bren said he hadn’t seen Phoebe since Monday night, when the two of them had gone for a drink together. Phoebe had been on a bit of a bender.

  Meanwhile, Len decided not to drive over to St Kilda Road and look for Phoebe, but instead went home to his city apartment to have a cup of tea and change for dinner.

  *

  At Balencea, Ant rang the Golden Triangle to order a takeaway dinner delivery for one.

  Just after 8 p.m., he buzzed the delivery boy up to the twelfth floor.

  ‘Man, what’s going on here?’ the delivery boy asked.

  ‘What do you mean, what’s going on?’

  ‘The front of the building is swarming with cops. There’s police cars, ambulance — I had to prop my bike up the street. Hope your dinner isn’t cold.’

  To have swarms of police at Balencea was a unique event. Leaving his meal to get colder, Ant went down to the foyer and approached a detective.

  ‘I live here,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

  The policeman, Acting Senior Sergeant Andrew Healey, told Ant that a woman’s body had been found in the rubbish compactor room.

  ‘Oh, no!’ Ant said. ‘My girlfriend is missing! Could it be her?’

  Ant said he’d been at work all day but calling Phoebe every couple of hours on the home phone because her mobile was broken. He said she was suffering from depression and was taking medication. He’d made a couple of calls to try to find her after he’d arrived home, but he said she usually turned up by herself. Phoebe had left some Post-it notes, but no clues as to where she might have gone.

  Healey asked Ant whether Phoebe had any distinguishing features. Ant told him she had a tattoo on her right wrist to match one on his own wrist, which he showed the detective, and a stud in her upper lip. After sending Ant back to his apartment to find a recent photograph, Healey viewed another officer’s photos of the body.

  He then followed Ant up to the apartment, where he asked if Phoebe had a tattoo on her stomach. Ant said she had. Healey examined a recent photo and confirmed that Phoebe’s facial features matched those of the dead girl in the rubbish room. At this point, he told Ant that he believed the dead girl was Phoebe.

  The detective later reported that he had no mobile reception in the apartment, so he went back downstairs, leaving Ant behind, and spoke to the other police, then returned with another detective to examine the apartment and its surrounds.

  They noted several things of interest. Healey observed that there was a broken glass and some blood on the floor. They also saw the Post-it notes allegedly left by Phoebe. The dog was in the process of ripping up another cushion.

  Ant said he was devastated. He was too upset to view the body.

  The detectives kept looking around Level 12, now focusing outside the unit. They found blood on the floor of the twelfth-level refuse room, which contained the rubbish chute, and a spot of blood on the door handle.

  Left alone again, Ant rang his mother Suzanne Owen and stepfather Robert. There was no point asking for help from his father and stepmother, retired judge George Hampel and Justice Felicity Hampel, because they were out of town.

  Ant then rang Len to tell him Phoebe was dead. He suggested that Len contact Phoebe’s brothers and come over to Balencea.

  Len said later, ‘I was in shock at this and just sat there on the floor.’ He called his son Tom in tears, but didn’t say what was upsetting him. ‘I didn’t want to tell him on the phone,’ Len said.

  ‘There’s nothing that can be done,’ he said to Tom. ‘Just come home.’ Not knowing what had happened, Tom left his girlfriend’s house in East Malvern and headed for the city.

  Len also tried to call Natalie again, but she didn’t answer. A little later, Natalie was unloading her car near her home in Clifton Hill when she noticed she’d missed two calls from Len. She rang him back. ‘What’s happened? Have you found Phoebe?’

  Len said in a broken voice, ‘I hope you’re sitting down. She’s dead. They found her near the rubbish bins at the apartment.’

  Natalie fell on her knees in the gutter next to her car. ‘No! No! No! It’s not true! I can’t talk …’ and she hung up. When her partner, Russell Marriott, came out to look for her, he had to pick her up from the ground and carry her inside.

  Russell then phoned Jeannette, Natalie’s mother, who had come to Melbourne from Mallacoota that day for Nik’s birthday celebrations. Russell asked her to come to the Clifton Hill house immediately.

  Jeannette’s first thought was for Phoebe. ‘Is she OK?’ she asked. Russell just told her to come soon.

  When Jeannette arrived at Clifton Hill, Natalie told her that Phoebe was dead. Jeannette was probably closer to Phoebe than anyone, and she was devastated. No one could understand it. Jeannette showed Natalie two texts from that morning. She’d sent Ant a message asking how they both were, and he’d replied at 8.32 a.m., saying, ‘Thx Marm, she is sleeping beauty right now and not the beast she was! Resting well n I’ve explained now is the time to heal, then when she feels OK we’ll work out a plan.’

  But there was no plan to work out now. Phoebe’s family could only nurse their sorrow at Clifton Hill, waiting for further news.

  *

  The scene at Balencea had been chaotic ever since Beth Ozulup’s frantic Triple-O call.

  Intergraph, the emergency despatch service, had allocated the job to South Melbourne Police Unit 303, the afternoon shift van, at 7.14 p.m, and the shift supervisor’s car, Unit 251, also attended. South Melbourne is very close to St Kilda Road, so the building soon saw its first team of police — Acting Senior Sergeant Healey, Detective Senior Constable Paul Thomas, Senior Constable Justin O’Brien, Constable Clare Hocking, and Sergeant Graeme Forster, the shift supervisor.

  Beth met them and held out the keys to the rubbish room.

  ‘I can’t go in there,’ she said. She returned to the comforting arms of a couple of female residents, who’d seen her distress and were looking after her in the office until her sister Banu arrived. Some time later, after Banu came to take Beth home, a police officer told them both not to worry too much. He said ‘the girl had committed suicide and put herself down the rubbish chute’.

  Eric Giammario and Tony Basile, the manager of the company that operated the apartments, had arrived soon after the police, between 7.15 and 7.30 p.m. Eric went straight to the office and saw how upset Beth was. He didn’t go to the compactor room. He wouldn’t have been allowed in, anyway. He saw a ‘distraught’ Ant Hampel come down with the police, who asked for a room to do interviews.

  Eric was trying to be as helpful as possible, and it occurred to him that the building’s security cameras might assist police, but he knew they’d need to act quickly, because he’d been having trouble with the CCTV. The looping time for the recording was too short, so the machine was recording over the top of relatively new tapes.

  He recalled, ‘I suggested to the police that if they needed any CCTV, they should start downloading.’ He later said that the police ‘didn’t really respond to me suggesting this’, although they did watch some footage with him in the office.

  An ambulance had been called at 7.20 p.m. and arrived seven minutes later. The paramedics’ presence added to the confusion in the relatively small foyer and the corridor to the rubbish compactor room.

  Kristie Cooke, one of the paramedics, ran to the focus of all the action — a doorway along the corridor, where an inert body was visible. The police officer guarding the door told her the room was a crime scene and she wasn’t permitted to enter. This went aga
inst all Kristie’s training and instincts, but the police were in charge and wouldn’t let her in. She observed from the doorway that a female was lying on her back with cuts to her right thigh and hip and with her right foot in an unnatural position, leading Kristie to believe there was a fractured ankle. She noted the body ‘showed generalised cyanosis [a bluish tinge], no spontaneous respirations and appeared deceased’.

  Kristie wasn’t happy about being prevented from trying to assist. She lost a lot of sleep about it in the months to come.

  In fact, no medically trained person attended Phoebe after she was discovered. No one laid hands on her to see if she was still warm or checked to see if she was actually dead. The first people to enter the room after it was declared a crime scene were the crime-scene specialists, who arrived some hours later. They revealed that, going by the blood trails, it was likely that Phoebe had survived the fall and crawled around trying to get out of the room.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE POLICE TAKE CHARGE

  Rumours flew around Balencea as yet more police arrived. At 8 p.m. a call went out for a Homicide team of detectives to attend, but none were available, so Detective Sergeant Mark Butterworth from the Purana Task Force assumed control of the scene. Butterworth had investigated many high-profile murders from the shooting of police officers Rodney Miller and Gary Silk in 1998 to the notorious Melbourne gangland killings.

  The South Melbourne crews were already there when Butterworth arrived at 8.45 p.m., but he immediately took charge as the senior officer, which is standard practice at a death scene, especially when the cause of death isn’t obvious. Healey, Thomas, and Forster told him what they’d discovered so far.

  They said that traces of blood had been found in the refuse room on the twelfth floor, in one of the two lifts servicing the building, and in the B1 car park. (There are three levels of parking.) A cabinetmaker had cut himself while working on some furniture in the car park the previous day, and the blood in the lift and on B1 was likely to be his. Nevertheless, Butterworth ordered police to seal the lift and the specific area in B1.

  Butterworth was then taken to the compactor room to view the body. His report says he saw the body of a young woman lying face-up near the doorway. Her jeans were pulled down below her knees, and she’d sustained a severe injury to her right foot.

  He also took note of the rubbish carousel system, which had brackets holding five wheelie bins rotating under a rubbish chute descending from the floors above. One of the wheelie bins had fallen from the carousel and was lying on the floor beside Phoebe’s body. Around the carousel, he could see ‘a smeared blood trail’.

  Butterworth went back into the corridor and was talking with Healey and Forster when he heard something fly down the rubbish chute and land with a bang in the bin below. He immediately ordered the refuse rooms on all floors to be closed until further notice. There was no sense messing up the crime scene with bags of flying garbage. Forster went off to ask Eric Giammario and Tony Basile to put up signs explaining that the rubbish chutes were out of action.

  Tony and Eric divided the floors between them and coincidentally met on Level 12.

  Eric says, ‘I observed a police officer was outside the door to the refuse room and he told me they believed the person went down the chute from this level … from apartment 1201. I was thinking about who lived on the floor, but didn’t immediately think it was Phoebe.’

  Healey briefed Butterworth on his discussions with Ant Hampel and the observations he’d made on the twelfth floor, especially the broken glass in the apartment, the blood on the floor, and the drops of blood in the twelfth-floor refuse room.

  Another officer, Detective Senior Constable Gareth Howells, said he’d noticed large dirty boot or shoe prints heading away from the door to 1201. Judging by the length of the stride, he believed that the person who left them was either tall or running. As the building was regularly cleaned, these prints were potentially a clue, but they were never photographed or followed up.

  Detective Senior Constable Paul Thomas reported that a woman who lived in the building had approached him and volunteered the information that she’d seen a young woman in her mid-twenties with spiky black hair crying in the bottom car park the previous Monday. With her was Ant. The resident said she had the impression he was trying to avoid being seen.

  Butterworth was also told about the two false fire alarms. Andrew Healey had spoken to Tony Basile, who said that after the first one, shortly before midday, he’d come down in the same lift as Phoebe and three firies. He told Healey he didn’t know Phoebe, but he remembered her because she had a ‘tan-coloured pit bull terrier’ with her.

  Tony had described her as very attractive and well presented, with a stud in her upper lip. He estimated her height at about five feet eight inches (173 cm). She followed the fire officers outside and stood with her dog on the nature strip at the front of the building. When the drama was over, a couple of firies approached Phoebe, patted the dog and chatted to her. She seemed fine to Tony, but police later examined CCTV footage of the evacuation and said Phoebe was visibly ‘unsteady on her feet’ in the corridor.

  *

  When Tom reached Len’s Southbank apartment at about 8.45 p.m., his father was still sitting on the floor, crying. Len had also phoned his closest friend, Charlie, known as ‘Chili’, who arrived soon afterwards and drove them both to Balencea.

  They were met outside the front door by a policeman. Len said, ‘Someone has rung me and told me my daughter is dead.’ The policeman told them to wait and said someone would come and see them. Len and Tom then spoke to Eric Giammario, who said he couldn’t let them into the room where Phoebe’s body had been found. Eric felt dreadfully sorry for them, but he was under instructions.

  After they’d spent about half an hour waiting outside, another police officer, Detective Stephen Cooper, came up and told them that ‘a female had been located deceased’, and that she was likely to be Len’s daughter. Cooper immediately escorted them to the St Kilda Road police station, a short walk away. There they were placed in separate rooms, unable to comfort each other, until police came to take their statements.

  As the night wore on and the interviews proceeded, Mark Butterworth received a steady trickle of reports from other police. Mark Robertson had taken a statement from Ant Hampel, who told him that Phoebe had self-harmed in the past, that she’d recently taken ecstasy, and that she ‘self-medicated’ with alcohol.

  A broadly similar picture emerged from the interviews with Len and Tom Handsjuk. Len described Phoebe as having led a ‘somewhat troubled’ life. She had ‘alcohol issues’ and suffered from depression, as a result of which he’d referred her to a psychiatrist. He thought she was also taking antidepressants.

  Len remembered that he’d been surprised when Phoebe first began talking about her new boyfriend, Ant Hampel, who she said was the son of a judge. Len had met Ant’s father George some years before, and knew him as one of Melbourne’s most distinguished jurists.

  Professor George Hampel AM QC was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria from 1983 to 2000 and has had oversight of the education of a large proportion of Melbourne’s legal fraternity. He is president of the International Institute of Forensic Studies, even reportedly training war-crime prosecutors at The Hague. His second wife, Felicity Hampel SC, is one of Australia’s leading human rights lawyers; she is a serving County Court judge, a former law reform commissioner, and past president of Liberty Victoria.

  Initially, Len was a bit alarmed at the age difference between the couple — Phoebe was about sixteen years younger than Ant — but he hoped that the relationship might bring some stability to her life. According to Len, Phoebe believed Ant was ‘the one’.

  Later that evening, Andrew Healey spoke to one of Ant’s closest friends, Christo Van Egmond, who also lived in the building. Christo had arrived home about 8.30 p.m. to find police everywhere. When
he got upstairs, he asked his neighbours what was going on, and they told him that Phoebe had been found dead. Christo went back down and spoke to Eric, who confirmed the story.

  Christo later made a police statement saying that he and Ant had been at a meeting in the city from 3 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. Afterwards, Christo had asked Ant to give him a lift to Balencea, but Ant was going back to the Richmond office with one of his co-workers, Matt Flinn, so Christo went home separately.

  *

  At around 10 p.m., Butterworth met the forensic crew and showed them to the compactor room. Leading Senior Constable Bernard Carrick was in charge of processing the scene.

  Phoebe’s body was lying on the floor, with severe injuries to her legs and right foot. Carrick found blood inside the wheelie bin lying beside her, along with a single lens from a pair of Prada sunglasses and a blister pack of Diabetix 1000, a treatment for diabetes. On the floor was a plastic bag of rubbish, which had probably been in the bin before Phoebe fell. Significantly, it contained no fragments of glass, although the broken glass in the apartment was incomplete.

  Carrick then examined the waste compactor, which was located at the bottom of the rubbish chute. This compactor would become very significant in days and weeks to come. Its job was to chop up the rubbish that came down the chute and compress it so it would fit into the bins. The compactor had a big blade and was usually set to automatic, but it could be set to manual operation if a greater degree of control was needed — for example, when the carousel had to be stopped while staff dealt with a fallen bin. Photographs taken after Phoebe’s body was found showed the switch of the compactor set to automatic mode.

  There was blood inside the compactor and on the inside of the compactor-room door. Carrick took swabs from all these deposits.

  He then went to the lift that had been secured and found what looked like blood on the control panel and the floor, plus a probable trail into the B1 parking area. He swabbed all these marks as well.