Into the Darkness

by Robin Bowles

  He doesn’t record times and now he’s asking His Honour to believe his estimates? I was starting to understand why Lorne had got into a lather about the investigation.

  Mr O’Neill asked Healey to look at a photograph of the kitchen in the apartment and asked whether it showed what he had seen when he arrived. The policeman couldn’t remember seeing three of the items shown in the photograph: a $50 note, a key, and a plastic bag of the kind you’d use for a takeaway meal.

  Without a touch of irony in her voice, Ms Siemensma asked her final question. ‘I was just wondering, Detective, when you became a detective?’

  ‘It was around 2001.’

  ‘2001, thank you.’

  I guess Mr O’Neill felt he had to try to put a good light on this evidence. He said, ‘Your Honour, I do have a question that arises from a combination of your questions and my learned friend’s last questions. On that night at Balencea, Detective Senior Sergeant, were you there in a role as a detective?’

  ‘No, I was a 265.’

  ‘What was the nature of your role?’

  ‘As a 265 my job is to attend the scene and see that everything that needs to be done has been done, do they need any assistance — any more units, any more staff to assist. Normally, if that was all done — which it was at the time — I would then leave straight away. I happened to be standing near the lift and ended up being more involved when Antony Hampel spoke to me.’

  ‘And you’ve given evidence that you weren’t in uniform that day but despite that, is it fair to describe the 265 role as a uniform role rather than a detective’s role?’

  ‘Yes. It’s shared equally but it’s more of a uniform supervision role.’

  I was sceptical about that answer. So does that mean that nine years of being a detective goes on the back burner? You don’t notice and note things? Hard to believe as a layperson. Every time I visit a hospital, my eyes are automatically everywhere, checking things, and I haven’t worn a nurse’s uniform for years.

  *

  We heard from one other police officer that day, Detective Senior Constable Howells, who had been dispatched to Balencea from the Stonnington Crime Investigation Unit. His recollection of events was similar to the previous evidence. He arrived around 8.40 p.m., went up to 1201, saw a lot of people in the apartment, and suggested they move out, as he didn’t want further contamination of a potential crime scene.

  He read out from his statement that he saw ‘small fragments of glass by the corridor entrance leading into the living area and blood smears about shoulder height on the doorway of the study. It was then decided that this flat was to be treated as a crime scene and all persons were removed.’

  Howells also checked the other apartments on the floor. There was no answer at units 1202 and 1203, and the occupant in 1204 had been away from about 6 to 7.15 p.m. and hadn’t heard or seen anything. All the Level 12 residents had returned home and been interviewed by 11 p.m., but none could offer any clues. Someone told Howells the apartments were very soundproof.

  He said he’d noticed blood at shoulder level on the study doorframe, but ‘I wasn’t the investigator, my sole concern was to maintain the security of a potential crime scene, so I didn’t look around a great deal. I wanted to lock it down with as little contamination as I possibly could. So I didn’t search around or touch anything or look for anything that was untoward outside of the immediate area that I was in. That was for Crime Scene and Homicide to do what they do.’

  His notes from the night were read to the court. ‘On carpet in hallway is matter from bottom of shoes spaced too far for walking pace (running).’

  Ms Siemensma said, ‘So, in the hallway, you observed matter from large shoeprints. Did the police get to the bottom of whether those marks had anything to do with this incident?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t privy to the investigation or the evidence that was obtained. It was just possibly dirt from a shoe, but looking at the distance between the footprints themselves, it struck me that someone was either very, very tall or was moving over a distance that was greater than a normal footstep. Possibly running.’

  Howells had also spotted a cigarette butt in the hallway outside 1204, which seemed strange, as the hall was carpeted. We didn’t hear about that butt again, which was a pity. It would have been a good source of DNA, as most people know.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE BLOODY DETAILS

  Detective Senior Constable Angela Sorrell, who was part of the first police response team under her former name of Hay, didn’t have much to add first thing the next day. When the Coroner queried some of her evidence, she replied, ‘I honestly don’t know, Your Honour. Can I just say at the time that I attended this crime scene I was a very junior detective, and all I did was follow people around and do what I was told. And I’d never been to a homicide before, and that’s what it appeared to have been to us at that time.’

  After a lot of repetitious evidence, Mr Moglia asked her, ‘At 9 a.m. on 3 December, when you handed over your responsibility to Homicide officers, you were still of the view, were you, that this was a suspicious circumstance?’

  ‘Yes, I think that that was what I was still thinking at that time.’

  Before Ms Sorrell withdrew, there was quite a long discussion between the Coroner, Ms Siemensma, and Mr O’Neill about the rubbish shown in various photographs of the compactor room.

  The Coroner observed that much of the rubbish found in the refuse room was in a particular kind of rubbish bag, and he instructed Mr Galbally to ask his client whether that was the kind of rubbish bag he used. He explained that he was particularly interested to find any evidence indicating whether or not Phoebe took rubbish to the refuse room that day.

  *

  During an enquiry, the Coroner has to hear a lot of evidence that professionals take for granted, but graphic descriptions of a loved one’s demise can often upset relatives in the court. The next witness was Louise Brown, the forensic biologist who’d examined Phoebe’s clothes, which were likely to be tendered as exhibits. The Coroner had already expressed concern to Mr Moglia that Natalie and Phoebe’s brothers might find Ms Brown’s evidence difficult. He said they were at liberty to leave the court now, or at any time if they wished.

  Louise Brown’s profession is very exacting. She read a long, meticulous statement to the court, and I struggled to identify the pertinent details. She’d done a lot of tests on material supplied from the apartment (bloodstain swabs from the architrave and the computer mouse), the inside of the rubbish chute and the compactor; the wheelie bin lying beside Phoebe; the lift and the B2 garage (later found not to be Phoebe’s, but probably belonging to a workman who’d cut himself). There were more samples from the Level 12 rubbish room and further samples from the compactor room downstairs.

  A test sample had been obtained to identify appropriate DNA markers. Scientists rarely work in absolutes, especially in the field of DNA matching. They don’t say ‘we have a match’ these days, but rather ‘the deceased cannot be excluded as a contributor’. What they can do with a high degree of certainty is exclude, which was the case with the builder’s blood marks.

  Ms Brown, who was also a qualified blood-pattern analyst, analysed the bloodstain patterns using photographs and video from the scene and assuming that all red-brown staining was blood. She said she’d chosen the areas of staining that might provide some interpretive information about the circumstances of this case. She noted that because her interpretations were solely based on photographic and video evidence, the lack of some fine detail and distortions of distance and perception could have influenced her conclusions.

  Her description of the compactor room and Phoebe’s position in it was the most detailed I’d yet heard. She’d written: ‘There was only one door in and out of this room. The floor appeared to be concrete with a drain towards the left wall as the room is entered. In the centre of the r
oom was a large waste processing machine.’ Phoebe’s body was to the right of the door as you entered the room, between the wall and a fallen bin.

  On the floor were numerous bloodstains. It seemed that some pieces of garbage had landed on the bloodstains after they were formed. The clothing around the lower part of Phoebe’s body was saturated with blood.

  In several parts of the compactor room, Ms Brown found transfer stains — marks left when a bloodied object comes into contact with something else. There were transfer stains on the lower part of the wall near Phoebe’s legs, and Ms Brown also believed there were some on the opening of the garbage chute. On the floor near the opening were deposits of fleshy tissue.

  Ms Brown also detected a lot of swipe patterns, indicating that something was bloodied but moving. Inside the overturned bin were stains she interpreted as showing transfer, swipe, and pooled characteristics. The floor near Phoebe’s feet was heavily smeared with blood, and among the smears were ‘numerous swipe marks with apparent toe impressions’. There were also swipe patterns on the floor, moving away from the door, with areas of pooled blood and transfer stains to the sides of the swipe blood trail. Ms Brown wrote, ‘In my opinion, transfer patterns with the appearance of finger impressions were observed on the wall behind the door, on the lower portion of the white pipe and the handle of the mop to the right of the room. There were transfer stains with swipe features to the lower portion of the back of the door.’

  Very exact and very depressing. Ms Brown’s evidence indicated that Phoebe had fallen from the compactor into a bin, landed on the floor after the bin tipped over and fell off the conveyer system, then crawled around, found the door, and perhaps tried to reach the handle. I felt sick.

  I looked across at Natalie, who was sitting with a frozen expression. She hadn’t left the court. She was in this, for better or worse.

  There was a lot more about the tests on all the other swabs, most of which were a likely match for Phoebe, but I sat there trying to get the vision out of my mind of a broken young woman crawling around in the dark, maybe seeing a line of light under the door, desperately trying to reach the handle. Maybe she did reach it, only to find it locked.

  Ms Brown moved on to what had been found in the apartment. There were transfer stains on the architrave of the doorway to the study, about 10 or 20 centimetres above the middle hinge, and she thought there was some striation in this bloodstaining, which could be ‘a fabric impression or ridge detail from the skin’. There were also transfer stains on the desk and computer mouse, and she believed there was diffuse staining on the mouse pad. Finally, there were transfer stains on the floor of the refuse room near the garbage chute on Level 12, with some of the stains having a smeared appearance.

  Before discussing Phoebe’s clothing, Ms Brown reminded us all that damage to clothing will not always match injuries to the wearer. With this proviso, she took the court through the places where the damage to the clothes did and didn’t match Phoebe’s injuries. There were cuts in the jeans matching an injury to Phoebe’s buttocks, and also damage to the lower right leg of the jeans, where Phoebe had sustained her worst injury. Ms Brown believed that this damage indicated that the jeans were in their normal position when the injuries were inflicted. But if that was the case, how did Phoebe’s jeans get down below her knees, and who undid her belt?

  Ms Brown also said that many of the bloodstains on the jeans could have come from the blood on the floor. She believed the damage to the jeans was most likely to have been caused by a blunt instrument, but she couldn’t comment on whether the compactor blade would fit the bill, because she hadn’t seen it. The main point was that it wasn’t something sharp like a kitchen knife. She also said the damage to Phoebe’s clothing wouldn’t have been caused by friction as she slid down the chute unless the nuts holding the chute sections together were particularly sharp.

  In response to questions from Ms Siemensma, Ms Brown said there was no damage to the belt loops, the buckle, or the belt itself.

  The Coroner asked, ‘Can you explain how the belt may have got into the position shown in those photographs?’

  ‘I don’t think it would have fallen into that unfastened state. Chances are the jeans and belt may have been unbuckled by the wearer.’ That was her ‘best guess’, she said, ‘but I’m just surmising.’

  Well now, so are we all. Why would Phoebe undo her belt like that? It didn’t make sense.

  One witness had conjectured that Phoebe’s jeans might have been dragged down by a nail head protruding from the floor of the compactor room, but Ms Brown thought it unlikely.

  Mr Moglia then indicated that Natalie and Lorne wanted to look at the jeans during the next adjournment. She’s got guts, that woman, I thought.

  We adjourned for lunch. I, for one, wasn’t hungry. I went for a walk instead.

  *

  After the adjournment came more questions about blood and damage to clothing. There were no questions from Galbally. When the other lawyers and the Coroner had all grilled Ms Brown, we weren’t left with much more than the knowledge that Phoebe had died injured and alone in the dark, trying to help herself but failing. None of the photos could provide much more specific information than that.

  It had been a long day. I was straight out the door when the Coroner called it quits.

  *

  Over the next few days, we heard from the police crime scene examiner, Leading Senior Constable Bernard Carrick, fingerprint expert Leading Senior Constable Martin Koslowski, Detective Mark Butterworth from the Purana Task Force, and Detective Senior Constable Jason Wallace of Homicide. Wallace had had carriage of the investigation for a couple of days from Monday 6 December, until Homicide decided that Phoebe’s death was suicide and he handed it over to Brendan Payne.

  During his evidence, Wallace said that a Sergeant Shane O’Donnell was in charge of the investigation from Friday 3 December to the following Monday, but I couldn’t find any record of his doing any investigating over that weekend. Giving evidence, all the police outlined their roles in the investigation and none really added any extra information, save for Wallace attending Ant Hampel’s apartment on Wednesday 7 December to collect Phoebe’s iPhone. Nobody seemed concerned that all her texts and emails had vanished.

  *

  Neil Bone, the man from Wastech, had already made three statements to the police, each one providing more information about the compactor and the bin carousel, the system’s automatic and manual modes, and a lot of other technical material. He’d arrived with samples, diagrams, and photos galore. And of course, much earlier and at his own expense, he’d built the test chute for Lorne’s second experiment to ascertain if a person Phoebe’s size could traverse the chute.

  Mr Bone said he was a diesel mechanic by trade and had been in the waste industry for 30 years. He set up Wastech 20 years ago. He didn’t look old enough to me. Perhaps he’d started an apprenticeship at 15? That would make him about 40, but I’d have said he was younger. That’s the sort of thing you ponder when your mind wanders in court — how old is that person, who are they, why are they there?

  Ms Siemensma asked him to talk the court through the various parts of the machine and how they operate. He was ready to oblige.

  Bone began with the entry hatch, making sure that all parties had a diagram before he started.

  Ms Siemensma asked, ‘What happens when you put weight on the receiving tray of that chute?’

  He explained that there were springs on each side of the door to make sure it closed after waste had been thrown in, and they worked more strongly if there was weight on the receiving tray.

  The Coroner broke in, ‘Phoebe’s weight was, I believe, 57 kilos. Would that be a weight you would expect to impact on the way in which this spring system works?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Bone replied. He agreed that the force for closing would be stronger, though the door wouldn’t close faster
, as there were gas struts to stop it from banging and making a noise. The chute was 530 mm in diameter, and was made in sections that slipped inside one another so that all the sharp edges faces downwards. He’d brought along a section of chute, and one of the young women at the bar table stood up and easily slipped it over her body to let it fall to the floor.

  He said before the rubbish reached the compactor, it went into a hopper that was at a 45-degree angle to slow the rubbish down.

  He said there was ‘nothing stopping a body from entering the actual compaction chamber of the compactor’. The compactor had a sensor that detected the approach of a rubbish bag and triggered the automatic mechanism to start the compactor. Looking at Bone’s photos, we saw a big blade whose job it was to flatten and compress the rubbish, then retract so the rubbish could be ejected into a bin.

  A sensor pointing into the bin under the chute used ultrasonic waves to determine how full it was. When the bin was full, the machine would turn to rotate the full bin out of the way and replace it with an empty one. The bins were cradled in two big steel arms and rarely fell off the conveyor carousel.

  Ms Siemensma told him that Eric had said the bins fell off quite often at Balencea. Bone said that normally it shouldn’t happen, but there were particular problems at Balencea when people moved into the apartments. For example, they often threw long objects such as bits of timber down the chute.

  ‘If a long length of timber goes down,’ Bone said, ‘it actually sticks up out of the bin. So when the carousel starts to turn, the timber can catch on the machine and tip the bins over.’

  I knew just what he meant. Some people using our rubbish chutes are too lazy to carry recyclables down to the basement, and they’ll even throw old barbecues and pillows down the chute. Our receiving system at the bottom is different, but the chutes are often blocked.

  Neil said the blades were made of one-inch steel and would cut large pieces of rubbish in half so that the bags didn’t dangle out of the compactor.