Into the Darkness

by Robin Bowles

  Despite all the negative evidence at the inquest about Phoebe’s state of mind — and Natalie had sat through all of it — she was still convinced that dark forces had been at work and that someone had killed her daughter.

  I’d heard all the evidence too, and I wasn’t convinced that Phoebe had put herself into that chute. With an alcohol level of .16, she would probably have been too drunk to walk, never mind climbing in that opening. Sure, Lorne had proved it was possible, but you needed to be fit and sober.

  The emails I’d just read didn’t indicate depression or a desire to escape her situation by suicide. They were more of her resolve, having decided to make a change, take charge, and get away.

  Natalie was counting on the inquest delivering an open finding so that the door to further investigation wouldn’t be permanently shut. I didn’t say anything, but in my experience an open finding wouldn’t guarantee anything. In the case of another dead girl, Jenny Tanner, after the Coroner handed down an open finding, the file disappeared. Further investigation is often governed by who is more powerful in the ‘need to find out’ stakes. The police are so busy that it’s easy to bury a file under overwork excuses.

  But, to be honest, I really thought there’d be no other finding possible, so we talked a bit about what avenues would be open to Phoebe’s parents after the Coroner had decided.

  Natalie told me of their struggle so far — of the difficulty gaining access to the computer and the police’s failure to rescue Phoebe’s emails and other documents.

  I’d been less than impressed by the evidence from the police IT specialist. He’d said he didn’t have training or expertise in Macs. Well, get someone who can, I’d written in my notes. Macintoshes are widely used these days. You’d think someone in the IT section of Victoria Police could fish deleted items out of a Macintosh. I’ve been told that unless you select ‘Don’t save’ when you’re finished with a document, everything will be there somewhere. Once it’s saved and closed it’s on the hard drive. And if I knew that …?

  I later found out that Victoria Police had tried to obtain Phoebe’s stored Gmail messages from Google. The police had to go through the Australian Attorney General’s office, as US laws govern Google and they are very strict about privacy. To have the information released, the police had to convince the US authorities that there was evidence in the emails that a crime had been committed. ‘A strong likelihood’ probably wasn’t going to cut it.

  Natalie also suggested I contact Andrew Chiodo, formerly the partner of Ant’s sister Kristina. Krissy had been a bit of a shadow in this book so far, although several people had told me that she and Phoebe were friendly.

  Apparently, Lorne had been to see Andrew, who’d told him about Krissy and her cocaine habit. After that, Lorne persuaded him to make a sworn statement to the police in charge of drug trafficking. Andrew had already been to see the police the previous year and was ‘disgusted’ that they’d taken no action on his information.

  Natalie told me how to contact Andrew and recommended I speak with him.

  She also told me of a strange coincidence. Krissy had a former partner called Joey who committed suicide in strange circumstances on the eve of the Melbourne Cup in 1992.

  Natalie said that Lorne had contacted Joey’s sister Cira about Phoebe’s death, and Cira had said she’d been thinking how unusual it had been for both partners to suicide.

  Natalie thought I should talk to Cira myself.

  After all this discussion of drugs and suicide, I reluctantly left the lovely ambience of Natalie’s ‘tree house’. Although our conversation was about sadness and loss, I’d learnt a lot during my visit and come away with a few surprises to follow up.

  *

  I also caught up with Jeannette, who came with Natalie to our apartment for Boxing Day drinks on the terrace. The foreshore was already sprouting a few tents, and on the street below, kids riding Christmas presents up and down punctuated our conversation with gleeful cries.

  Jeannette is everybody’s idea of a warm-hearted grandmother. Looking much younger than Lorne, to whom she used to be married, she is gentle and softly spoken.

  We chatted generally and specifically about Phoebe. Jeannette was just as convinced as all the other members of her family that Phoebe hadn’t killed herself. She told us about Phoebe’s plans for the future, which involved living in Mallacoota for a while and working at the golf club, then volunteering in India. It all seemed to tie in with her attempts to leave Ant and her question to Natalie about her overseas ticket. Jeannette said their conversations had been about Phoebe getting her life back on track and doing something with it.

  Phoebe had also confided that she’d been told Krissy was under investigation for dealing in cocaine. She said Ant had sworn her to secrecy about this and told her not to get in touch with Krissy. He’d cut his own contact with his sister due to the alleged investigation. Since then, Jeannette and Natalie had wondered if Phoebe’s attempts to leave Ant had anything to do with her knowledge of Kristina’s activities.

  I wondered if there was some kind of connection here. What if outside sources had decided to put the frighteners on Phoebe and it got out of hand? What if someone in the drug trade had decided that Phoebe needed ‘talking to’? Word gets around pretty quickly in those circles, and people who feel threatened will sometimes react badly.

  I was looking forward to talking to Andrew Chiodo.

  *

  By the time we left Mallacoota a few days later, the grassy foreshore had vanished under dozens of abutting tents, there was an all-day queue at the bakery, and the newsagent had sold out every morning before I trotted downstairs to get my paper. We weren’t sorry to farewell the post-Christmas Mallacoota, but we left with fond memories of the peaceful week before.

  *

  I took with me a small legacy of my visit to Natalie’s house. I’d seen a lovely pen-and-wash drawing pinned on Natalie’s bedroom wall and asked if I could photograph it. I had an idea it might be perfect for this book.

  CHAPTER 27

  WAITING FOR THE FINDING

  The wheels of justice grind slowly, especially when you’re awaiting a decision. But I still had much to do. My first goal was to visit Lorne and his wife Amanda so that he could guide me through the mountains of interviews, test results, DVD material, and correspondence he’d accumulated during his own investigation over the past four years.

  Late in May 2014, Miss Deva and I drove up to Milawa. It was what my husband would call a ‘soft’ day. The fields were misted with a fine rain, and in the distance, fog curled around stands of greenish-black cypresses, planted as windbreaks many years ago.

  Milawa is in the heart of Victorian dairy country, and the district is renowned for its cheeses. Fat cows, oblivious to the damp, were munching on rich green grass in almost every paddock as we drove along.

  ‘Very rural,’ I commented to Miss Deva, who is very much a town dog. She didn’t reply. Dogs are good company, but they don’t say much.

  Lorne and Amanda welcomed me with hot soup, warm bread, and a blazing fire. Miss Deva made a beeline for an unobtrusive spot near the fire and barely moved for two days.

  Lorne was still suffering the aftermath of his granddaughter’s death. He didn’t smile much, and I occasionally saw tears in the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes when he discussed the case. In spite of the warm welcome and the friendly ambience, I did feel a bit like an intruder, bringing it all up again, asking for his opinion on this and the results of various lines of enquiry on that.

  He’d left nothing undone as far as I could see. The thoroughness of a canny old cop had been overlaid with the focus of a man on a mission. He sometimes spoke dismissively of various key players in the saga, but even so, he was thorough.

  He had very strong views on how the Coroner’s finding should be expressed, and he outlined them over a few drops of local red.
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  He said that no evidence had been led at the inquest that a third party wasn’t involved. ‘If he finds that Phoebe got into that chute on her own, that will be speculative,’ he said. ‘Not one shred of actual evidence was presented to allow him to reach that conclusion.’

  ‘What about the aberrant behaviours attributed to Stilnox?’ I asked.

  ‘She had to have taken it a day before she died,’ he replied. ‘Because Ant said he took the pills the day before. Even the aberrant effects of Stilnox only make you do what you always do, but differently, like sleepwalking or driving. That’s evidence from his own medical experts.’

  Certainly, getting into the garbage chute wasn’t a routine activity for Phoebe.

  The Coroner had asked Dr Lynch if Phoebe could have tried to ‘climb down’ or break her fall once she was in the chute. Dr Lynch wasn’t prepared to hazard a guess.

  Lorne obviously thought the idea ridiculous. ‘Leaving aside the extreme physical difficulty of this suggestion, there was very little dirt on her hands or clothes in the PM photos. The inside of that chute is filthy. Once she went in legs first, she shot down that chute. If she’d been trying to break her fall, her singlet top would have ridden up and she wouldn’t have hit the bottom with such force. She had some pretty severe injuries from hitting the bottom, as well as the severed foot.’

  Lorne felt aggrieved about this supposition for another reason. The live re-enactments had shown that there was only one way Phoebe could have entered the chute, if indeed she’d done it on her own. ‘The only way to get in by yourself is feet first facing the wall, legs down the shaft, with arms trailing behind and above the head. You would immediately start to fall and be unable to brace against the sides, because your arms would be above your head. I’m totally confused about why the Coroner would ask Dr Lynch about her being able to slow her fall by pressing her arms against the sides. Even Dr Lynch couldn’t support that theory when he was giving evidence.’ Lorne is very passionate about this case and to be honest, I don’t blame him.

  Anyway, waving that possibility away as ‘an extremely improbable theory’, he said that the Coroner had to look at whether there was any definite proof that no other party was, or could have been, involved.

  ‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘nobody, including you, has been able to prove anyone else was there either. It’s like trying to prove a negative.’

  Lorne was still inclined to look at Ant, given that he’d arrived home at 6.05 p.m. and Phoebe wasn’t found until about an hour later. He was also keen on the guy in the blue T-shirt Ruth Foster had spotted pressing the Level 12 lift button, indicating he’d been buzzed up. Ruth didn’t see him get out of the lift at Level 12, though. And late in the inquest, police said he’d been found and interviewed and was of no interest. If that was true, someone should have told Crimestoppers and the police media unit, who told me they had no record of anyone having come forward after three separate media releases. A visit by Blue T-shirt in his dusty boots, however, could have accounted for the dirty footprints Howells noticed on the carpet outside 1201.

  We also discussed the anomalies of the computerised system that records entry and exit at Balencea. Lorne had often mentioned to me that the records Eric gave him had no record of Ant having buzzed Sue and Robert Owen up when they arrived in response to his phone call. Lorne extrapolated from this unanswered question to suggest that the system was faulty. Healey’s evidence put Sue and Robert upstairs and coming into his ‘crime scene’ before he rounded everyone up and shepherded them down to the room on the entry level, but this seems to be the only time anyone got in undetected.

  One bit of solid evidence Lorne had in favour of his hypothesis was the broken glass. The broken glass in the hall wasn’t complete, but there were no fragments in the bin or the rubbish chute. Nobody could work out what happened to the rest of it. There were no cuts on Phoebe’s hands from picking up glass, and there were two empty glasses on the kitchen bench. Ant told police one smelled of vodka. It must have contained straight vodka not long before he got home, as vodka barely smells. It’s what people drink when they want to disguise their drinking.

  Perhaps Phoebe was entertaining. Maybe someone threw a glass at her, or she dropped it in a struggle. Or did she throw it at someone? Lorne’s point was that there was no evidence about the glass, only supposition. ‘The wall was stained,’ he said. ‘Never tested. The presence of two glasses raises further questions. The obvious one being, was anybody else there?’ He said that neither the broken glass nor the ones on the bench were tested for fingerprints.

  ‘He surely can’t find she did this herself,’ he said plaintively after we’d spent a couple of harrowing hours talking through his theories. ‘There’s no evidence she did, and no evidence someone else didn’t.’

  Ant’s counsel had made a submission to the Coroner asking him to specifically exclude the possibility of Ant Hampel’s involvement in Phoebe’s death.

  In reply, Lorne had made his own submission to the Coroner. He’d outlined his continuing concerns about the broken glass (dropped or thrown in a violent physical encounter?); the unexplained bruising; a laceration along Phoebe’s right jaw; and a subdural haematoma on the left side of her head, which could have been caused by her bumping her head during a scuffle. All these injuries could have arisen from unrelated causes, but they could also have resulted from violence by another party.

  He said that if Phoebe had climbed into the hatch unaided, there should have been fingerprints and smeared handprints on the surrounding stainless-steel surfaces. There were none.

  He also submitted that no one should be excluded from involvement in Phoebe’s death because no evidence had been presented that supported this conclusion.

  The Coroner had accepted Lorne’s submissions and said he’d give them due consideration.

  Lorne and I discussed Ms Siemensma’s role in the inquest. I said I thought she’d been pretty thorough.

  Lorne corrected me. ‘Outstanding! You know her closing submission was 68 pages,’ he told me. ‘And her advice to him was that he could only return an open finding. She advised against suicide, misadventure, an outcome of borderline personality disorder, against a finding that a third party either was or wasn’t involved in Phoebe’s death, and a finding that specifically exonerated Antony Hampel from complicity.’

  ‘Well, she’s counsel assisting the Coroner,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he’ll take note of all that advice. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.’

  It was a long wait for the family. Nearly five years had passed since Phoebe’s death. Ant had married and was getting on with his life, but Phoebe’s family was still stuck on the road to recovery.

  *

  While I was visiting Lorne in Milawa, I asked him about a couple of ‘outside the square’ interviews he’d done while chasing rabbits down burrows. Both interviews were related to Krissy Hampel. She’d always been there in the background, Ant’s shadowy, glamorous, fast-living older sister. He seemed close to her or not, depending on who you asked.

  Lorne had put together some information on Krissy’s former boyfriends. The first of these was Joey Occhicone, whose sister Cira had called Natalie after hearing of Phoebe’s death. Cira told Natalie she thought it a big coincidence that the Hampel siblings’ partners had both died in strange circumstances.

  In late 1992, Joey was living at home in Toorak with their father, having recently ended a seven-year relationship with Krissy. He’d been frequenting nightclubs with her, using drugs and being showered with free drinks, living the life of a movie star. ‘Everybody loved Joey,’ Cira said. During his time with Krissy, Cira felt he’d changed, which she put down to his smoking dope and using cocaine. But he’d now made the break and was keeping their father company after their mother’s recent death.

  Around 7 p.m. on Melbourne Cup eve, their father went to visit some friends nearby, leaving Joey sprawled on his bed
reading a book on meditation. Dad took the Vitara parked in the driveway, leaving Joey’s Alpha in the garage. He returned about three hours later and got out of the car to see if Joey had gone out so he could park the Vitara under cover, but the Alpha was still parked in the dark garage.

  Joey’s dad thought his son must still be home, but he wasn’t anywhere inside. Dad wasn’t concerned. Maybe Joey had been picked up by friends and gone out somewhere, he thought. He went to bed.

  The next morning, Cira rang her dad to see how he was. He mentioned that Joey seemed to have gone out and not returned. This gave Cira a bad feeling. She’d had weird dreams about Joey recently. She rang around and couldn’t find him.

  She and her husband went to her dad’s, to see if Joey had left a note anywhere. Looking through his room, all they found was a piece of paper with his bank account number and, neatly printed, ‘Krissy owes me a lot of money, get it off her!’

  Cira’s husband went to look in the garage and there was Joey in the Alpha with a vacuum-cleaner hose attached to the exhaust. He appeared to have taken his own life.

  His father was grief-stricken, but also mystified. The car hadn’t been running the previous night when he looked in the garage. It was possible that Joey had got into the car soon after his father left. In that time, the car could have produced enough fumes to kill him before it ran dry.

  Police and ambulance attended, but no statements were taken. His relatives were only asked whether they wanted an autopsy done, and they said there was no report sent to them from the Coroner’s office.

  *

  The next story from Lorne really interested me, as if I weren’t riveted already.

  On Sunday 9 December 2012, the Sunday Age had run one of several stories about Phoebe’s death by investigative reporters Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie. It was a story made for the media: the beautiful, grieving mother seeking the truth; the dogged old grandfather cop; the early dismissal of foul play by the police; the privileged boyfriend; and the family with position, wealth, and influence.