Into the Darkness

by Robin Bowles

  ‘There certainly wasn’t any evidence at that stage, that’s right. Look, I can’t recall the actual conversation. It was certainly explained that Brendan Payne would be taking it over and preparing the inquest brief.’

  ‘Can you tell me then, you hadn’t checked the telephones or the computers?’

  ‘No, I hadn’t.’

  ‘Did you know if Phoebe had thrown anything in the garbage bin that afternoon?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you know whether when Mr Hampel arrived home from work his front door was locked or unlocked?’

  ‘Um, I can’t recall.’

  ‘Did it occur to you to ask about that matter?’ the Coroner asked.

  ‘It certainly did, Your Honour, and there was nothing from any members attending about suspicious circumstances or break-ins or anything like that.’

  The Coroner had a reason for that question. He was exploring whether Phoebe had gone out of the apartment and had left the door unlocked, because she intended to return and her keys were on the kitchen bench.

  ‘Was that possibility explored with Mr Hampel?’ His Honour asked Wallace.

  ‘Not by me, Your Honour, no.’

  Deborah Siemensma was on a roll. She asked him in rapid succession: did he conduct any measurements of the entry hatch; did he do any experiment to see if the police hypothesis of Phoebe climbing in was possible; did he blow up a photo of the compactor room to check if the compactor switch was on auto or manual; did he speak to Ant’s car park tenant; did he ascertain what, if any drugs were in Phoebe’s system; did he interview people who’d seen her in the days before she died and had he spoken to any of Phoebe’s or Antony’s work colleagues; and did he know about the bruises on Phoebe’s shoulders, wrists, and neck?

  What could he say? His answer to each question was ‘No.’

  And did he agree, she continued, that issues such as whether the door was unlocked or locked and what the computer showed may have had bearing on the investigation and the decision as to whether it was a homicide or a suicide?

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Wallace replied.

  The Coroner had a few questions. He asked, ‘Was the fact that Phoebe had depression and alcohol problems significant information in deciding that the death was not suspicious?’

  ‘Part of it, yes.’

  ‘Was it significant?’

  ‘Certainly something we have to consider.’

  ‘But was it significant?’

  ‘I would say yes.’ At last he’d answered the question!

  Ms Siemensma moved on to questions about the iPhone after it was given to Wallace.

  ‘Leading Senior Constable Neil Daley has prepared a statement saying he received the iPhone and the SIM card on 9 December. And he says that the software didn’t read the SIM, and he told you that when he gave the phone back to you on 9 December. What do you say?’

  ‘I don’t recall being told that it couldn’t read it. My recollection was that it had no data on it.’

  ‘Do you have a positive recollection of that or are you saying you don’t remember whether or not Daley said that to you?’

  ‘No.’ He flustered about a bit then said he’d made a note about it somewhere, but he’d given it to Brendan Payne with the file.

  Mr O’Neill announced he had copies and promptly distributed them to all parties.

  ‘What is this document, Detective Wallace?’

  ‘It’s a few brief notes in relation to the file that I had given to Detective Payne later that week.’

  Ms Siemensma continued, ‘Did Mr Daley give you a report about his examination of that iPhone on a DVD and did you read that report?’

  ‘I had a look at it, yes.’

  Then Ms Siemensma read from the report, ‘“The device uses a SIM card but no SIM card was provided. Data was acquired with no SIM card in the device and therefore the device couldn’t communicate with the cellular network.” You’re confident there was a SIM card in the phone when you collected it?’

  ‘Yes, there was a SIM card with it.’

  ‘Was it recorded in a property book showing the SIM card?’

  ‘No, not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘Did you or anyone take any steps to follow up with any other sections in VicPol?’

  ‘No. I thought there was no data on it. Nothing significant, like contacts, SMSs.’

  ‘Did you read the bit that said, “The device uses a SIM card. No SIM card was provided. Data was acquired with no SIM card in the device”?’ Ms Siemensma asked him.

  ‘Yes, I understood there was no data on the SIM card that was obtained.’

  The Coroner asked what had become of the SIM card.

  ‘It was handed back to Mr Hampel, Your Honour,’ Ms Siemensma said. She turned back to Wallace and said it appeared from his notes that on 9 December he left a message on Ant Hampel’s phone to arrange the return of the iPhone and then read from his notes again, ‘“10 December, 9.45, 454 St Kilda Road re return phone of deceased to Antony Hampel.” Is that the date you returned the iPhone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She asked Wallace if he thought that he should have passed the phone to Detective Payne.

  Wallace said that the iPhone had been taken by consent for analysis, the analysis had been done, and he ‘had no right to keep the phone’.

  The Coroner said, ‘But the SIM card hadn’t been analysed.’

  Wallace told him that he thought it had been analysed but it had no data on it.

  I was feeling pretty frustrated by this line of questioning. Here you have a suspicious — or at least highly unusual — death of a 24-year-old who was known to be using her phone day and night, and this detective accepts that there was nothing on her phone when her partner took it for repairs while she was sleeping, with no forewarning that gave her time to clean it up.

  But there was more. Detective Wallace told the court that he’d returned the iPhone to Ant on 10 December, three days after meeting Detective Payne, who’d been given the role of informant. So he had the iPhone in his possession days after Brendan Payne had taken on the case, but he didn’t hand it over. He didn’t hand over a whole swag of important stuff, according to all his negative answers earlier about what evidence he’d collected. It must have been a very slim brief!

  Moglia asked lots of questions about how the internal hierarchy of the police department handled cases like this. ‘Allocating an informant to an investigation is a fairly key step to take, isn’t it, in managing an investigation?’

  Wallace agreed.

  Moglia established that when Wallace and Clanchy were briefed on 6 December, the file they received only contained the information handed over by Mark Butterworth three days earlier, on the morning after Phoebe’s death.

  Wallace didn’t seem to remember much about what was in it. ‘It’s been some time,’ he said.

  He also said that Clanchy’s handover to him was oral. Sounds a bit like Chinese whispers to me!

  Galbally really only wanted to know about the iPhone handover. ‘On 7 December, while you’re at the apartment in the company of Antony Hampel, Linda Cohen, Sue (Antony’s mother), and Detective Clanchy, Antony Hampel’s father George Hampel arrives holding Phoebe’s iPhone in his hand?’

  ‘Yes, I recall him handing it to Antony and then him handing it to me.’

  ‘And did George Hampel indicate he’d just picked it up from the repair shop?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘You asked Antony Hampel questions about the phone. Did he tell you that he’d dropped it into the repair shop on the Thursday prior?’

  ‘He had indicated that he’d dropped it in there. I can’t actually recall the day.’

  Galbally is too wily to ask a question to which he doesn’t know the answer. Detective Clanchy’s notes, taken while Wallace was ta
lking to Ant, show that he took the iPhone to the shop on Thursday. When asked which shop, he said Victoria Street, Richmond, on a corner. George had a receipt, so they got the address.

  O’Neill tried to resurrect some value from Wallace’s evidence, but he wasn’t very successful. It wasn’t his fault; the witness just wasn’t Perry Mason material. He had ‘intentions’ to do things like interviewing witnesses; it wasn’t his fault that the CCTV wasn’t collected (to be fair, that’s true, but he could have accessed the hard drive); he barely watched the CCTV that was collected; he ‘perused’ Mr Daley’s report about the iPhone and no SIM but ‘didn’t read it cover to cover’ and so on. He expected Brendan Payne to take over doing all of that.

  The Coroner said, ‘When I referred the matter back to the Homicide Squad for review and the matter was reviewed by Sergeant Solomon, were you consulted at that point?’

  ‘Not at that point, Your Honour. Sergeant Solomon received the brief and reviewed it himself and I became aware he was doing this during his enquiries. I had spoken to him a couple of times, but he pretty much conducted an independent review of it, Your Honour.’

  There was more, but I stopped taking notes. His score up until then was fifteen instances of ‘can’t recall’, nine of ‘I think’, and only five ums.

  When he finally stepped down there was a bit of planning about the next day, Friday, when we’d be hearing from Ant Hampel. To help cushion the impact on his client under examination, Galbally wanted to swap places with Ms Siemensma and go first. His witness, his lead — more like a trial process. He’d already discussed it with Ms Siemensma, but the Coroner wasn’t too keen on that idea.

  He said he’d prefer counsel assisting to lead the evidence as usual, with the proviso that he’d allow Galbally to confer with Ms Siemensma if there was material he thought should be included in Ant’s evidence in-chief, in order to bring it out before the other counsel followed on.

  The long day was over. I decided that at the weekend I’d track down the phone shop in Richmond and find out why no receipts were issued when an expensive phone was dropped off, but a printed receipt with date and time accompanied the collection. Just wondering …

  CHAPTER 22

  THE STAR WITNESS

  The media table was almost full, but I’d arrived early, because I guessed the journalists would be there in force.

  But the media didn’t get it all their own way. Before the witness they were waiting for took the stand, Dr Len Handsjuk was finally called to give evidence. The Coroner wanted to gauge his reaction to an assessment given by Phoebe’s treating psychiatrist, who said Phoebe might have been ‘progressing to a full-blown personality disorder’ when she died. The Coroner asked most of the questions, trying to establish how closely Len might have observed Phoebe in a non-clinical way, probing his professional observations of his daughter, and assessing the possibility that as a loving father, he might have overlooked her psychiatrist’s suggestion of a personality disorder as a possible diagnosis.

  Len said that after his marriage to Natalie ended, he and Phoebe weren’t close. But then, at her psychiatrist’s suggestion, she wrote to him in August 2008 expressing her distress about the divorce. ‘And from there on,’ he said, ‘we started a very evolving and close relationship, so I actually saw her most weeks, either for a coffee or she’d come to dinner. In 2008, Phoebe was living in Noosa with her boyfriend for a while and we visited them most of the seven days we were there.’

  The Coroner asked whether he had formed an opinion about whether Phoebe was progressing towards a borderline personality disorder, as her psychiatrist has suggested.

  Len hesitated a bit, then said, ‘It’s actually quite a complex question, because the whole issue of borderline personality disorder is a vexatious one within the profession.’ He said people with that disorder used to be referred to as ‘borderline psychotic’, and they’d require hospitalisation and treatment.

  He didn’t think that Phoebe was at that stage. ‘If affected by alcohol and really pushed and cornered and confronted, Phoebe would verbally explode and get angry, but that settled. It didn’t require the sort of treatment that borderline personality requires.’

  Len said a fear of abandonment was the main issue with people experiencing borderline personality disorder, and they could see abandonment in the smallest things. If they felt someone wasn’t listening to them, for example, it could set off an ‘explosive volcanic eruption’.

  The Coroner asked the question again. ‘Do you reflect now that there were aspects of borderline personality in Phoebe during the last 12 months of her life?’

  Len replied, ‘I’m a bit formatted by 40 years of daily experience, and I’m obsessional enough to look for the smallest hints.’ He said that when he heard what Phoebe’s psychiatrist had said, ‘I was very surprised, even if it was a comment rather than a diagnosis.’

  He said he’d discussed personality disorder with a psychoanalyst colleague who’d known Phoebe all her life, and he hadn’t concurred with that provisional diagnosis. ‘One always has doubts, especially in retrospect, you know, have I missed something or was I blind to some idealisation or something, but really I think you’d have to really scratch very hard to find that as a sustainable diagnosis.’ He looked as if he’d had a lot of sleepless nights doing just that.

  The Coroner read from the report by Phoebe’s psychiatrist. ‘His comments were, “Phoebe’s behaviour and sufferings were consistent with a diagnosis of early stages of a borderline personality disorder characterised by unstable intense relationships, unstable identity, impulsivity in regard to substance use and sexual relations.” So what is the impact upon the depressive illness that borderline personality disorder may also cause?’

  ‘I think it’s unpredictable,’ Len replied. ‘A depressive illness has a periodicity extending over months, over years, whereas a borderline personality symptomatology comes in and fragments periodically. So I think if you had a really good-going depressive disorder as well as a borderline personality disorder, you’d probably be pretty non-functional.’

  Moglia asked him if there was anything in the doctor’s notes or the reports that made it clear there was a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.

  Len replied, ‘The cutting and self-mutilation is one of the number of alarm bells that makes us think about possible personality disorder, but all of the diagnoses in psychiatry are problematic, because you have to identify a cluster of symptoms to get a sort of diagnosis.’

  But he added straight away that Phoebe had never been formally diagnosed as suffering from a personality disorder.

  There were no questions from Galbally or O’Neill, so Len left the witness box. Face white and fists clenched, he was like a coiled spring ready to snap.

  *

  Ant Hampel was called. He was wearing a pale-green shirt, which made him look a bit sallow, and his high forehead was shiny with sweat. It’s always stressful appearing in court as a witness. It’s harrowing when all eyes are on you, with eloquent and articulate lawyers putting on the pressure, and you’re trying to avoid making errors of fact. The pressure usually shows no matter how innocent you feel. I couldn’t identify any friends or family who’d come to support Ant. But he had Galbally, who was worth a small army!

  Ms Siemensma established that his relationship with Phoebe started on 13 July 2009, while Phoebe was working at Linley Godfrey’s hairdressing salon, so it was ‘just shy of 18 months in duration’. She moved into his apartment on 23 October that year.

  Ms Siemensma asked Ant to describe their relationship.

  ‘It was very up and down a lot of the time. We were very fond of each other, but we were also trying to battle with her illness. When she wasn’t drinking, which could be for weeks at a time, it was very good and the relationship was a great one, but when she was affected by drinking it would often become very strained.’

  Ms S
iemensma observed that Phoebe’s psychologist had described the relationship as ‘volatile’. She asked him to respond.

  ‘I disagree that the relationship in general was volatile,’ Ant said. ‘I think that when she drank and when there were discussions around that, then it did become volatile.’

  Ms Siemensma asked, ‘Would you describe the relationship as a rocky one?’

  ‘Not generally, no.’

  ‘Phoebe’s mother’s statement says that you and Phoebe broke up four times in the last six weeks of her life. What do you say?’

  ‘There was never a formal break-up. We had four short separations from October up until December.’

  ‘Did she say at the time of those separations words to the effect of “This is over”?’

  ‘No.’

  Ms Siemensma pointed to Phoebe’s parents’ statements, which both said that on 23 November, she’d told her father that Ant had thrown her out. ‘She’d packed up her suitcase and her guitar and was waiting on the street for her dad to collect her.’

  ‘She was never thrown out,’ Ant replied. He has a well-modulated public-school voice and was answering the questions very calmly and precisely. ‘I don’t recall being at the apartment that day. And the short times she did leave, maybe two or three days at a time, I guess you could call it time out or some space. We were trying to work through the relationship. Not once did she ever take all of her belongings.’

  She didn’t leave much behind, though, going by what Natalie had collected.

  Ms Siemensma said, ‘In the last four to six weeks of Phoebe’s life, Phoebe discussed her intention to leave the relationship with Linda Cohen. Did you know that?’

  ‘We had discussions about having to work through the issues in our relationship and how we’d find solutions, because we’d acknowledged there were problems. But she didn’t say to me “The relationship is over. I’m leaving”, no.’

  Ms Siemensma ran through the occasions when Phoebe had stayed at her mother’s house, at her father’s, her grandmother’s, and Linda Cohen’s.

  The Coroner broke in, ‘And were these the periods of the short break-ups to which you’ve referred?