But there would be no such breakthrough with the Kennedy case.
Senior scientific police officer Neil Raward’s duties have involved the examination of the scene and collection and examination of exhibits. He has made a thorough examination of the grandstand area at the park and the area around the toilet block. Raward has also noticed that one of the pins in the nappy was in a closed position, but that the other nappy pin was open and placed into the nappy itself. Whoever had done this must have been in such a rush that he had only taken the time to open one side of the nappy before removing it. It was drenched with urine, but Deidre’s pyjama pants were dry, consistent with her having worn pilchers. But Raward hasn’t been able to find those pilchers.
Nine months later, pilchers would materialise on the roof of the RAAF units where the Kennedy family had lived. No one would ever be able to explain how they got there, or whether they belonged to Deidre.
The Department of Health’s supervising bacteriologist, Neville Stallman, has been given the clothing and underwear Deidre was wearing to check for sperm, blood and saliva. He finds nothing, save for two saliva stains in the panties. There is little he can do with saliva: at that time, testing for its source is in its infancy. He also received from Raward two hairs in an envelope, labelled ‘pyjama pants and nappy’ and four hairs in a container labelled ‘PM23433 Kennedy’. Using microscopic examination, he finds that one of the hairs in the envelope looks like a pubic hair.
A week after Stallman finishes with it, the hair is returned to Raward. He does not get the clothing back.
Reaction to the murder from local residents is overwhelming. Parents escort their children to and from school. Kids are barred from going outdoors and neighbours gossip about who may be responsible. Ipswich may be called a city, but country town parochialism and paranoia still prevail. Once a leafy recreational area widely used by locals, Limestone Park is now known as the Devil’s Playground.
9
The first weeks after Deidre’s death are a blurry haze for Faye and Barry. People coming and going, friends and relatives ferrying food and flowers, the press camped outside on the street and countless police in and out of the unit. Deidre’s family is under suspicion, though they don’t know it. Barry, Faye and Stephanie are fingerprinted and cleared and all accessible surfaces in the flat dusted for prints. Endless photographs of the unit are taken. Endless questions asked, always with the same polite preface. ‘Sorry for the intrusion, but we need to know …’ How long has the family lived in Ipswich? Why had they gone to Longreach? Could they please retrace their steps from the moment they arrived home? Had they had any babysitters? Any recent visitors? Had they noticed any strangers loitering around?
Answering by rote in a faltering voice, one word painfully following the other. We chose that time to take the girls to Longreach because my mother was leaving the area and Barry was going into hospital to have knee surgery. I don’t drive much and so it would have been difficult to visit him in hospital with the children. We returned to Ipswich by early Friday morning because Mum was superstitious about Black Friday. She had insisted we were all safely home by that date. We’ve only lived here a few months and we hardly know anyone. We have never used a babysitter. We don’t go out at night. We don’t drink or smoke. We haven’t noticed any strangers loitering around. There is an odd household of people who live close to the units, but I didn’t see them that day.
Two days after Deidre’s body is found, Barry speaks to the press. ‘The brutal murder of our daughter is just something that my wife and I will have to overcome. No matter where we go or what we do, we will never forget what has happened. My wife and I are mature enough to overcome this as best we can. But how do you ever forget that one of your children has been murdered?’
Such a private family, such private people, they want to crawl away with their grief, cringe from the constant questions, the news reports, turn inward to mourn in peace. But it is impossible. The level of repulsion at the nature of the murder has opened a floodgate of letters to the newspaper editor and to the family. The public has taken Deidre Kennedy to its heart, and they want retribution.
Faye is asked to fold a nappy for the police exactly the way Deidre had worn it, and to hand over an identical singlet to the one she was wearing when they found her. Everything Faye says, everything she does, is an excruciating wrench. She cries and cries without end, feels as though she is on automatic pilot. ‘The emptiness I felt was overwhelming. I couldn’t stop crying. But Barry never did; he bottled it all up. We could so easily have lost two daughters that night. Barry just felt so guilty that he’d let us down by not protecting Deidre.’
They self-flagellate, consumed with guilt. The prowler had got in because the door was unlocked. What happened is their fault. They should have taken more care. They should have sensed someone was in the unit. They should have woken up. They should have got up.
Over and over, consumed with grief and guilt.
Their family arrives as soon as they hear the news. Faye’s mother, Freda, drives 15 hours non-stop from Longreach; by the time she arrives, the deep shock of her granddaughter’s death has already taken a huge toll. ‘I looked at her and thought, what have we done?’ Faye recounts later. ‘I had seen her only two days before, but the shock had put years on her life. She suddenly looked ancient. It took a shocking toll on all of us.’
Going over and over things in their heads, answering police questions, trying to remember the smallest detail. Is it possible that either Stephanie or Deidre had been the target? ‘We’d only been in that flat such a short time,’ Faye says. ‘We kept to ourselves. Why would we be targeted? What would they want with us?’
Why would we be targeted? Why our family? Why our beautiful little daughter? Over and over, but never any answers.
A week has passed and the police have taken Barry aside, away from Faye, quietly quizzing him. Relentless and determined, investigators have now zeroed in on a particular family member as a possible suspect. Keith Kennedy, Barry’s first cousin. Their fathers are brothers and Keith and Barry are the same age. Keith often visits Faye and Barry, driving or catching the train for a day trip from his home at Auchenflower, an inner-city suburb of Brisbane, where he lives with his sister and brother. Auchenflower, on the direct train line to Ipswich. The day before Faye and the girls had come home, Keith had picked up Barry from the hospital and taken him straight to the unit. And now police are telling Barry his cousin is a possible suspect.
‘You’ve got it all wrong, Faye. Keith would never hurt our child.’ Faye is cradled in Barry’s arms, trying to take some comfort in his soothing words. But the thought is niggling.
Keith’s actions had all been so hush-hush. Faye and Barry were still living in Longreach when it happened three years ago, but the family didn’t discuss it. Keith’s father, a decent and quiet man had been crushed, humiliated by his son’s disgrace and the country community closed ranks to protect him. No one talked about it. And, until it came to trial, no one knew the extent of what Keith had done. Faye and Barry would hear only snippets of the story.
The jury had found Keith not guilty, on the grounds of insanity, of unlawfully and indecently dealing with a little girl at Gladstone, north Queensland, in April 1970. Exactly three years before Deidre’s murder. Found him not guilty on the grounds of insanity for biting a three-and-a-half-year-old girl on the vagina.
‘What does it mean?’Faye wants to know. ‘What does it mean, not guilty on the grounds of insanity?’
‘It means the jury found he did it, but he was insane and therefore not responsible for his actions,’ Barry explains. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Faye. Keith would never hurt our child.’
Police look at a family photograph. Keith is blond, about 177cm tall. Not a bad-looking bloke, but his features are marred by slightly protruding front teeth with a wide gap between them, what dentists call a ‘diastema’. They rake through descriptions taken immediately after the murder. Witnesses had said t
hey had seen a blond man walking toward the unit. Someone who looked like he knew where he was going. Keith knew the family, and knew their movements. Most importantly, he had form.
More than 30 years after his daughter’s murder, Barry Kennedy still fiercely defends his cousin, now deceased. ‘Keith told me he’d been out partying and drinking the night he did that to that little girl,’ Barry says. ‘He’d just stumbled into the wrong place, and …’ There is a pause and the flick of a cigarette lighter on the other end of the phone line. ‘I never thought for a minute it was him. He knew that the cops would go hunting for him, because of what he’d done. As soon as he heard about Deidre, he knew they’d bang on his door. And, sure enough, they did.’
John Reynolds remembers the buzz around the police station when Keith Kennedy’s form came to light. ‘They jumped straight on to him; spoke to him very early in the piece. They worked out how he could have got from where he lived at Auchenflower to Ipswich and then back again in time to watch the television show he said he had watched with his family the day he picked up Barry from the hospital, the day before the family had arrived home. They gave him a cast-iron alibi.’ Keith’s hair, teeth and fingerprints did not match any found at the scene. He was exonerated. For now.
10
Faye and Barry were carefree country kids, born and raised in Longreach, a central western Queensland town in the parched outback, almost 1200 kilometres from Brisbane. Where the men say g’day in a lazy drawl and wear Akubra hats to ward off the savage midday sun, this is pioneering territory built by cattle kings. Harsh though rich country of verdant plains and Flinders grass, the town derived its name from the ‘long reach’ of the Thomson River that runs nearby. The streets are all named after land and water birds – eagles, jabirus – and the landscape dotted with coolibah trees. Only a few thousand residents live there permanently, the population bolstered when cow-cockies, drovers and tourists wander through for a taste of outback Australia.
When they were children, Faye and her siblings would grab a blanket and head out to the lawn, sleeping out under the stars and watching the moon glide across the sky. Faye’s father worked with the Postmaster General’s office after his return from the war in Egypt, a hard desert war where he served in the army. Faye, christened Lynette Faye, was a post-war baby, born 31 July 1949 before her father’s war nerves got the better of him and shattered the household’s former peace. The family lived free as a bird in a house in the scrub out of Longreach, Faye the second eldest child. Two sisters and a brother followed.
The family moved into town when she was 12, but Faye hated school. Her elder sister was the scholar; Faye only went for the sport. Landing her first job at 14 with the local jewellers, she was too shy to even ask to use the toilet. A tomboy, she also worked at night at the local pharmacy and eventually worked there full time. Travelling around the district, competing in basketball and tennis games, Faye and her friends toffed up once a year for the Longreach Show ball, a rural hootenanny where elders from the local Church of England diligently acted as unpaid moral chaperones lest the country lads got too frisky.
An edge had crept into Faye’s household. Her father had started drinking heavily, talking incessantly about the war. Arguments between her parents were increasingly frequent and increasingly escalating into violence. Her sisters jumped out the window when the blues started but Faye, now in her mid-teens, stood up for her mother, many times copping what was meant for her. She had a stubborn streak that showed most at times like this.
Most nights her father was passed out, drunk as a lord, but Faye never took the chance that she may wake him, tip-toeing back into the house after a night out with her shoes in her hand and hopping into bed fully dressed. He never touched the kids apart from the odd strap, but it was a household on tenterhooks. Once, when her mother had ordered that she wait by the bedroom door, her father went rushing past Faye with a cutthroat razor in his hands. Faye still believes that if her mother hadn’t locked herself in the bathroom that night, her father would have killed her.
Her dad, she reflects, was a decent man haunted, like many of his generation, by memories of war and dead mates. He was always sorry after his bitter, violent outbursts: sober and sorry; but the marriage couldn’t survive. By the time Faye was 15, it was over.
From the moment they met on a basketball court in Longreach when Faye was 17, she and Barry were inseparable. Both quiet and private, they loved sport and the outdoors, particularly camping. Married 18 months after they met, on a balmy late October day in 1967, Faye was completely lacking in sophistication. ‘I wouldn’t say boo to a goose when I was younger. We shared a house for a short time with another couple and my eyes used to pop out of my head, some of the things the woman said. I thought she was so worldly.’
Locals waved to Faye as she stepped out in her white wedding gown, hanging over their front fences and calling out good wishes. Most had known her since she was a tiny girl. The newlyweds honeymooned on the Gold Coast for a week before returning to married life at Longreach.
Faye knew nothing of the sordid side of life. She and Barry were innocents, country people who never locked their doors or windows and didn’t even own a television set. Police, unsullied by allegations of corruption, verballing and bashings in custody, were still trusted and welcome in the community. The Church was a sanctuary, its priests and ministers God’s holy messengers. Politicians didn’t tell lies; courts punished the guilty and psychopaths, predators and paedophiles lived in another world, completely outside their understanding.
They had missed the idealism of the ’60s, the revolutionary fervour of young anti-war protestors who had love-ins for peace, wore flowers in their hair and chanted on their stoned path to hypnotic grace. They did not know that around the world, the ’70s heralded a shift in attitude, becoming a decade of disillusionment when the hopes and dreams of the hippy generation soured into the harsh reality of international terrorist threats, preventable third-world famine and wars that exploded like powder kegs in hotspots around the globe. Cocooned in outback Queensland where the sun appeared as a halo against the super-fine ochre dust, disasters were acts of nature and gossip was traded at the post office. Faye taught Sunday school and dreamed of starting a family. Barry, an air-conditioning mechanic, played footy and came straight home after the match.
A year after they were married, on 20 April 1968 their daughter Stephanie was born. By late 1970, looking for a career change, Barry joined the RAAF as an instrument fitter and the family moved to Wagga. Soon after, they were thrilled to discover Faye was again pregnant.
Deidre Maree was born at Longreach Base Hospital where Faye had returned to give birth close to her family, at 6.20 on the night of 22 November 1971. Admitted to hospital weeks earlier with alarmingly high blood pressure, Faye had been induced early that morning. At 5 o’clock, right on the nurses’ teatime, she went into labour. ‘I was so alone in that labour ward,’ she remembers. ‘The nurses said to me, “You’ll be right,” and off they went to tea. By the time they got back, there was no skin left on my elbows from hanging on through the contractions.’ Drug-free, the birth was, at least, blessedly short.
Driving home that evening, Faye’s brother Ken had passed the town doctor heading toward the hospital. In the laconic way of small communities, he became the town crier. ‘I’ve just passed Dr Murphy on Eagle Street. I reckon he’s on his way in to see Faye.’ And he was. Everyone knew that if the doctor was heading to the hospital at teatime, it was a sure bet there was a baby on the way.
Thrilled at the birth of another healthy daughter Barry, unable to leave Wagga for another three weeks, sent a congratulatory telegram. They had already settled on the name of the new baby. If it was a girl, they would christen her Deidre. They liked its gentle sound, its old-fashioned, soft texture, like an autumn leaf fluttering in the breeze. Dei-dre. The name meant ‘sorrowful’, from a legendary heroine in medieval Irish literature. But, from the start, the family affectionately called her Dee
Dee, a Hebrew word meaning ‘cherished’.
A cherubic baby who inherited her mother’s shy ways, Faye and Barry proudly announced her arrival in the local paper as ‘a beautiful sister for Stephanie’. From the moment she was born, the girls were inseparable.
A contented, smiling baby, Deidre celebrated her first birthday in Wagga, where they lived permanently. When the family again returned to Longreach for Christmas, she was christened at the local church on Christmas Eve.
In December 1972, the family was posted to Amberley RAAF base at Ipswich. Deidre was 13 months old, Stephanie not yet five years old. It was the start of a new life.
Sixteen-year-old Raymond Carroll was looking for a new life, as well. He had been mooching around Ipswich, in and out of odd jobs since his family had returned from Darwin late in 1971. A loner who preferred his own company, he had to find something to do, soon. Perhaps he would follow in his old man’s footsteps.
Raymond’s father, John, had proudly worn the RAAF blues. At first glance, his parents were an odd couple: his mother, Ilma, was 189cm tall; John 162cm, struggling to reach her shoulders. Even Ilma found it a little strange at first, peering down from her lofty height at the man who would become her husband, but she soon got used to it. They were young and happy.
Married in the winter of 1951, their first child, Sandra, was born at Casino, northern New South Wales, in 1954. The following year they moved to Toowoomba, then a quiet backwater in country Queensland, where Ilma gave birth to Raymond on 17 August 1955. Raymond was bestowed with his father’s name: Raymond John Carroll. The year of his birth heralded the worst natural disaster in Australian history, when catastrophic floods in northern New South Wales wreaked unprecedented havoc, killing 100 people and displacing 50,000 from their homes.
Justice In Jeopardy Page 5
