Into the Darkness

by Robin Bowles

  Finlay replied, ‘It would be the closest available at the time the call is made. So if you make a phone call and go through one tower and then a couple of minutes later make another call, if that first tower was congested, or something had happened to it in the meantime, you would go to the next available.’

  Galbally asked him to look at Phoebe’s phone records and try to detect what time the last call was made from her iPhone.

  ‘The last one I can detect being made by the number ending in 8133 was on 30 November 2010 at 1.37.32. It was an unsuccessful call made to the number ending in 6000’ — that was Ant’s mobile.

  Moglia asked, ‘Can you tell whether the call rang out on the receiving handset before being forwarded to voicemail or whether the receiving handset was turned off? Or, a third alternative, whether the receiving handset was faulty or broken and unable to receive calls?’

  ‘No. From these records we’re unable to determine why a call would be forwarded.’

  This witness knew a lot about mobile phone processes, but I won’t bore you with all the details. I don’t think the Coroner used many of them to reach his finding.

  *

  The next witness was a young woman with light hair worn in a bun with a deep fringe framing a serious face. She was in the uniform of the Metropolitan Ambulance Service and took her seat holding a sheaf of papers. Her name was Kristie Cooke, and she was the paramedic who’d attended Balencea the night Phoebe died.

  She said she and her partner had received a message, ‘Unknown problem. Life status questionable’ at 7.20 p.m. At that time she’d been a full-time paramedic for two and a half years. She’d graduated from Monash University as a Bachelor of Emergency Health (Paramedic), and her partner was also a qualified paramedic.

  She stated that as police ‘had declared the room a crime scene, I was unable to access the patient. From the doorway I was able to ascertain that the patient was lying supine with a visible laceration to her right thigh and left hip and what appeared to be a fractured right ankle due to her foot’s position to her leg. The patient showed generalised cyanosis, showed no spontaneous respirations and appeared deceased.’

  She said the ambulance had arrived at the same time the uniformed police, 7.27 p.m., but the police had got into the building first, because the paramedics were delayed getting their gear out of the truck.

  She said she was stopped by an older police officer. ‘He had a few stripes, so I assumed he was senior, and he said, “This is a crime scene. You’re not allowed past here.”’

  She asked him if the police wanted her to attach a heart monitor, to see if she could detect a heartbeat.

  ‘He said, “No, we believe the patient is deceased”, and we agreed.’

  ‘What did you base that decision on?’ asked Ms Siemensma.

  ‘From what I could see. We could basically see, just from poking my head around the corner, the patient was lying next to the wall and the bin. We couldn’t see her full body, probably 90 per cent of it.’

  ‘Could you have reached and touched her?’ Ms Siemensma asked.

  ‘I wasn’t allowed to.’

  ‘But could you have reached her neck, from where you were standing?’

  ‘Yes, but we weren’t allowed to touch her at all.’

  This contradicted what Jason Wallace had said when he suggested that the paramedics weren’t prevented from attending Phoebe.

  Kristie said that from where she was standing, Phoebe appeared pale ‘and sort of a more grey cyanotic colour’.

  So she’d based her conclusion on the way Phoebe looked, her unmoving position, the apparent absence of respiration, and the amount of blood she could see in the room.

  Ms Siemensma produced a letter sent to MAS from Detective Brendan Payne. ‘It says here, “Ambulance paramedics Jade Mintern and Kristie Cooke attended the scene and pronounced the female dead.” Is that correct?’

  ‘No. We’re not able to certify that they have died, but we are able to fill in a piece of paper that verifies death. It involves undertaking about seven different steps, including attaching a monitor, listening for breathing, checking the Glasgow Coma Score’ — a score rating the subject’s level of consciousness — ‘and other tests before a verification of death. But only a medical practitioner can certify death.’

  The Coroner asked whether the ambulance service had an arrangement with Victoria Police about access to crime scenes.

  ‘I don’t know of an exact protocol,’ Cooke replied, ‘but we tend to follow the senior officer, and if the police say that it’s a crime scene and we’re not allowed in, then we’re not allowed in. We’re not going to try and force our way in there.’

  Moglia asked, ‘At the time you viewed Phoebe, you couldn’t be certain whether she was dead?’

  She said she couldn’t have been 100 per cent certain without having done all the tests she’d mentioned. She felt Phoebe was deceased, but she admitted that she’d probably only observed Phoebe for a minute or so and couldn’t see all of her body to assess injuries.

  Moglia took her through the steps she’d have had to take one by one, and established that Phoebe’s body wouldn’t have needed to be moved to conduct most of them, especially feeling for her pulse on her neck by reaching in through the doorway.

  ‘We would have done that if we had arrived first,’ she said.

  The Coroner mentioned that she’d said they all arrived together, but Kristie said there were police already at the compactor room by the time they got there, so she must have seen a second lot of police arriving.

  ‘Were you able to observe anything about the blood — for example, how dry it was?’

  ‘It appeared dry, but I didn’t touch it, so I’m not sure how long it had been there. I don’t know.’

  Galbally had no questions, which didn’t surprise me. The less time we dwelled on the drama of Phoebe’s death the better from his perspective. What if she had been still alive? That would change the timeframes considerably.

  O’Neill stood up. ‘Ms Cooke, my name’s O’Neill. I appear for the Chief Commissioner of Police in this inquest. The preservation of life is really the essence of your role, would you agree? That’s what you are there to do?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a point at which we’re able to help and there’s a very, very small window.’ She explained that if patients are beyond a certain point, paramedics may not commence resuscitation. ‘Given that the concierge that called us, she refused to start CPR, there has been quite a period of time in which there’s been no circulation and things like that.’ She seemed to think it was likely that the small window had already closed for Phoebe.

  ‘So if you could help, you would have said something to the police to that effect, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘If we had arrived first then I would have checked for a pulse. There’s certain things that we use to assess whether or not a resuscitation is going to be successful, and timing is one of them.’

  The Coroner said, ‘Dr Lynch testified yesterday that it would take between five and ten minutes for Ms Handsjuk to lose sufficient blood to go into a state from which she wouldn’t recover. I’m perfectly at ease with accepting the evidence that’s been given about what the police found when they got there in terms of whether there was life.’

  Moglia queried this line of reasoning. ‘I think Dr Lynch’s evidence was that five to ten minutes could have seen her incapacitated. I don’t think he went so far as to say in this case it was.’

  The Coroner said, ‘My understanding was that he was saying that she would reach a position within a maximum of ten minutes following the infliction of these injuries from which she couldn’t be saved. He certainly didn’t say longer than ten minutes,’ he said firmly.

  Moglia replied, ‘I’m not suggesting that there is evidence that says she was alive. But it’s about whether or not it could be excluded and whether t
he practice at the time was sufficient.’

  ‘OK,’ said the Coroner, who was obviously over this discussion. ‘Go ahead,’ he said to O’Neill.

  O’Neill seemed to be losing patience too. He said that if Moglia was attempting to suggest there was at least a possibility that Phoebe was still alive when their examinations were made he should make that submission ‘more squarely’.

  ‘Are you suggesting that this witness might have made an error in regard to whether or not Phoebe was alive at the time she arrived?’ asked the Coroner.

  Kristie Cooke was looking at her hands in her lap. I thought she might be crying.

  Moglia said, ‘I asked if she could be 100 per cent certain given the tests she would usually have done to arrive at that conclusion, and she agreed she couldn’t be 100 per cent certain.’

  The Coroner had had enough of this argy-bargy. He turned to Kristie and asked, ‘Were you satisfied when you saw Phoebe, having regard to what you could see and tell, that she was deceased?’

  ‘Yes, I believe she was deceased.’

  He looked at O’Neill. ‘Go ahead, Mr O’Neill.’

  O’Neill had no more questions, but Len Handsjuk had a couple. I saw Kristie look up at him. She was very pale.

  ‘I’m Len Handsjuk. I’m Phoebe’s father.’ He told her he was a medical doctor with experience in resuscitating people in clinical and other circumstances. ‘You didn’t have the opportunity to actually apply the protocol of determining if someone is deceased, have I got that right?’

  ‘We didn’t, but it’s not applied to everybody. We don’t always undertake the verification of death certificate, depending on circumstances, but we always put on a monitor to determine whether or not they have any electrical activity going in their heart, check for a pulse and check for breathing — ABC, airway, breathing, circulation.’

  ‘So if there’s no pulse and no breathing and you’ve got a flat ECG —’

  Cooke explained that if the ECG showed a flat line, they wouldn’t attempt resuscitation. ‘If there’s any activity that would indicate an arrest situation, we could provide CPR, defibrillation and what have you.’

  Len Handsjuk told a little story. He said he’d been out driving on a rainy day when he’d seen a man lying on the pavement. Len knew the man had been there for some little while, because he could see him as he approached in his car. He stopped, and he and a passer-by did CPR for 40 minutes before the ambulance arrived.

  ‘They presented with not a dissimilar sort of protocol to what you’ve said and they said after 30 minutes there’s no point. I insisted that they give the man some intravenous bicarbonate and some oxygen. Then they gave him a shock and he sat up. They loaded him up. He had another five arrests at casualty, but he turned up about six months later at my house to thank me for saving his life. So I think there’s a need for the protocols to be revisited and that’s the point of my questioning. Because I’m not satisfied that you could actually be certain, other than through hearsay, which I think doesn’t do justice to your qualifications, that she was not alive, and that maybe a litre or two of Hartmann’s solution and we wouldn’t be having this inquest. I mean, that’s my question.’

  Well, it hadn’t exactly been a question, but Len is a doctor not a lawyer.

  Kristie looked a bit confused. ‘I don’t really understand what your actual question is,’ she said.

  The Coroner summarised the question for her. ‘Are you saying, Dr Handsjuk, that a more complete analysis by the witness and her colleague may have disclosed that Phoebe was alive?’

  ‘Yes, if they’d just followed their own protocol, but you didn’t actually,’ Len said to Kristy.

  She replied, ‘If I was allowed into the room, then that would have been done.’

  Len asked, ‘Can’t you say to someone, “Hold on. I’m more qualified than you to assess whether life is savable”, and just barge in?’

  ‘If there is a police officer saying, “You’re not allowed in, this is a crime scene”, we follow their instructions.’

  The court adjourned for lunch. From the witness box, Kristie Cooke made a beeline for Natalie in the front row of spectators. In tears, she told her that if she could have done anything to save Phoebe, she would have. Natalie hugged her. They both stood protected by the family group, crying and hugging. Len stood aloof and angry.

  *

  I discovered after lunch we had the dubious pleasure of hearing again from Detective ‘Um, ah, can’t recall’, otherwise known as Detective Jason Wallace. If I had a transcript of his evidence, I’d produce it, so you’d know I’m not being unfair. But I only have my notes, which are not all that complimentary.

  Wallace was again being examined by Ms Siemensma. He agreed he hadn’t asked Bone for a statement, but said he didn’t recall him saying that the machine would have to be switched from auto to manual for a body to emerge in one piece. He also disagreed with Bone’s comment that the police didn’t seem interested in what he had to say.

  Wallace had told His Honour last time that his notes of the investigation were ‘largely contemporaneous’. (That’s what police say in case they’ve left something out, so they can add things if they’re challenged later; ‘largely’ covers what they didn’t write down.)

  Sure enough, Ms Siemensma put it to him that the only time he’d written ‘watch CCTV’ was on the morning of 8 December, the day after the families had been informed that Homicide would no longer be involved.

  ‘Can we assume that that’s the only date and time that you watched the CCTV?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t agree with that.’

  ‘Are you saying that you don’t put everything you do in your notes?’

  ‘That’s right. It may be just at the office and sometimes it’s hard to account for everything as we do it.’

  That’s what they have the book for! Contemporaneous notes, for exactly this kind of occasion.

  ‘So except for that note, you don’t have a distinct recollection yourself as to when you watched the CCTV?’

  ‘No.’

  His Honour broke in. ‘Do you remember watching it more often than that particular occasion?’

  ‘No, Your Honour. As I said in evidence the other day, I can’t recall the amount of time required to view it all. So I can only be guided on the time that I’ve put there. But I’ve certainly spent some time viewing it.’

  But he’d already said that the amount of time was wrong. So what was the Coroner supposed to do — guess? I started tallying the number of times he said ‘can’t recall’, ‘I think’, and ‘um’, using groups of five marks like prisoners do on cell walls.

  Ms Siemensma turned to the security card records. He’d prepared his own summary from the one on the disk Eric supplied. She asked if they were the records for the whole building for 2 December or just for Ant’s apartment.

  ‘I can’t recall, I’m sorry. It’s been some time.’

  She referred him to the handwritten notes of Detective Clanchy, who’d written that they’d attended on 8 December and obtained those records. This differed from Wallace’s evidence of attending on 7 December.

  ‘Are you unclear which date you looked at those security card records? Was it on one of the days after 7 December?’

  ‘That would be correct, yes.’

  ‘So you were there on 7 and 8 December?’ asked the Coroner.

  ‘Yes, Your Honour.’

  Ms Siemensma asked him about receiving Phoebe’s iPhone from George Hampel. His notes said that at 3.10 p.m. he attended Ant’s apartment and retrieved the iPhone. But Ms Siemensma said that the receipt from the repair shop was dated and showed the time of pick-up as 3.08 p.m.

  I’ve heard George Hampel described in superhero terms, but surely he couldn’t fly? I made a note to find the repair shop and ask the man if he had a record of the phone being dropped off. If
their receipts were that detailed … maybe?

  Wallace said that George Hampel arrived with the phone while they were there. Wallace took it back to his office and ‘kept it secure in his possession’ until 9 December, when he found someone who could analyse it to find out when Phoebe’s phone was last used.

  He said he hadn’t considered taking possession of any computers during that visit to Ant Hampel, to look for a suicide note, time of last use, anything that might have a bearing on the investigation. But now he guessed in hindsight it might have been a good idea.

  ‘Did you know that some blood was found on the mouse of the shared iMac?’

  ‘No.’

  Ms Siemensma turned to his notes again and read out, ‘“Rang Brendan Payne and updated re investigation. File handover in next few days.” Had it been decided at that time that the file should be transferred to Brendan Payne?’

  ‘That was the decision made by my supervisors, yes.’

  ‘And who is that?’

  ‘I guess it’s in consultation with Sergeant Clanchy and probably our team leader and OIC of Homicide.’

  ‘And why did Mr Payne attend at the apartment complex on 7 December? Was he involved at that stage?’ Ms Siemensma asked.

  ‘Because he could become the informant.’

  ‘Is that normal practice?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Certainly something I’ve been privy to a few times.’

  Ms Siemensma put to him that the next day, 8 December, he and Detective Sergeant Clanchy met with Len and Natalie in Len’s apartment and told them that police had concluded that the death was a suicide and that it wasn’t suspicious.

  Surprisingly, at the time of the handover, Wallace didn’t agree that it was a suicide. He said that was one of the options open to Brendan Payne to explore. He said they told the Handsjuks it was being handed to Payne to prepare an inquest brief.

  ‘You told Mr and Mrs Handsjuk that the death in the police’s opinion was not suspicious?’