They move back to Ipswich when Kerry-Ann is a few months old, living with Ilma at Quarry Lane. Carroll is stationed at Amberley but when Cyclone Tracy rips through Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974, thousands of military personnel are posted to help in the clean-up. He is one of them.
But Joy isn’t happy. She has joined Raymond in Darwin, living at the RAAF base with Kerry-Ann, who has recently had her first birthday. The marriage is in trouble, but she can’t put her finger on what is wrong. Raymond had gone down to Amberley for a course and their relationship has been seriously strained since he returned. Joy had discovered a letter sent to her husband by his ex-girlfriend, Desley Hill, in a childish hand complete with spelling mistakes. This and other letters written by Desley would later be aired in court.
‘Hi, tall dark and sexy,’ she begins. Desley bombards him with anxious questions. Did he land safe in Darwin? Does he think of her? And did he mean what he said about buying her an engagement ring? If so, she writes, the size is A. What, she continues, did his mother have to say when he went home on Sunday afternoon? What are his intentions? ‘Do you realy wont me to go up to Darwin with you or was it only talk because I would realy love to go up there and to be with you.’ There is an underlying anxiety in the letter. Is he going to stay true? Desley closes with lots of love from herself and ‘your adopted Natasha. Xxxxx OOOOO’.
Joy had also received a letter from Desley telling her she was having an affair with her husband, but Raymond denied it when Joy confronted him, a denial that would never change. But there is another reason why Joy is unhappy, something she can put her finger on. Something much worse that she would later report occurred about three, four times over the course of their marriage. Years later, she would tell her story with blunt simplicity, repeating it verbatim. Never any change in the details. Never missing a beat. In court, when Carroll’s defence tried to rattle her, break her, dismiss her, I put it to you … I suggest to you …, she would never miss a beat. ‘You may suggest it, but I don’t agree with it. I know what I’m saying.’
Kerry-Ann is screaming again. Joy has asked Raymond to change her nappy and he is in the bedroom with her, with the door locked. Joy can’t see into the room through the louvre shutters but she can hear her daughter crying out in distress. Pacing outside the bedroom, waiting for him to open the door, she snatches the baby from him when he comes out of the bedroom and demands to know what has happened. Kerry-Ann’s face is blotchy with tears and Joy rocks her gently to soothe her. ‘Why is she crying, Raymond?’ she pleads with him. ‘What’s wrong with the baby?’
He doesn’t answer, just stares at her in a strange way, what she would later call his ‘bad look’ and takes off outside. Saunters back in a while later, casually asking what has happened to the baby, why is she still crying?
There are bruises on Kerry-Ann’s little legs. Sometimes on both thighs, but mostly just on one, toward her hip. Joy has no doubt what they are. Bluish bite marks that last a few days before they subside. Sometimes, she would later recall, there were bruises on different parts of her body, and once there was a cut above her eye. Bleeding a little, the blood would be smeared on Kerry-Ann’s face from where she touched it to show her mother where it hurt. Too little to put proper sentences together, to say what had happened, her pain showed in her eyes that were red from crying and in her breath that caught in sobs.
It happened about three, four times by Joy’s reckoning. Always the same: Raymond in the bedroom changing the nappy and the baby crying loudly. Joy pacing outside the room, waiting for him to unlock the door, asking ‘What’s wrong with Kerry-Ann? What’s happened to make her cry?’, and him sauntering past with that bad look.
Desley Hill has got the message. There is no engagement ring, no trip to Darwin. She writes another letter, this time sad and desperate, addressed to Raymond and family.
She got his letter the other day, she writes, with all of the things in it. She was surprised to hear from him again, and tries to analyse her feelings. She had wanted someone to want her, is not sorry for what she did but is very sorry for saying those things in that letter she wrote to Joy. Desley’s fghting spirit surfaces, but only for a brief moment. She had copped nothing but people giving her lectures after Raymond went back to Darwin, she writes, and she was very mad. ‘I’m glad that you still love Joy,’ she concludes, forlornly. She would really like to be friends with them both. She understands the situation.
No kisses or hugs end this letter.
Joy doesn’t tell anyone about what is happening to Kerry-Ann. She has ample opportunity to do so, but never does. Even when people occasionally query how her daughter has got the bruises, she remains silent. She would later say that she was only a young woman and that she had wanted to keep her marriage together. But it is impossible. By November 1975, just 17 months after their wedding and shortly after Raymond’s return from his field training course at Amberley, Joy has returned to Wagga with Kerry-Ann to live with her mother.
Raymond stays in Darwin and moves into the single men’s quarters. He rarely sees his daughter, Kerry-Ann, in the years that follow, and does not contest custody of her at his divorce hearing in 1977.
In a document written for his legal team in 2000, to dispute Joy’s allegation that he had an affair with Desley Hill whilst they were married, Carroll adamantly expressed that she was wrong. When he returned from Amberley, he wrote, he gave Joy the option of staying or going. ‘She decided to leave. It would have been late 1975 to early 1976 that I began to have contact with Desley again. I had no contact with Desley whilst I was married.’
What was certain was that Desley Hill was now, herself, a mother. In late July 1973, she had given birth to a daughter, Natasha. ‘I did not know [Desley] was pregnant until after she had Natasha …’ Carroll countered. ‘I remember seeing her for the first time after she had had the baby.’
12
South-east Queensland is submerged in water, triggered by the backlash from Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy and Cyclone Wanda, which crossed the Queensland coast late in January 1974. By Australia Day, the deluge in Ipswich has resulted in major flood levels, a treacherous rising tide that saturates building basements and sets objects afloat in main streets. The flood takes all before it, including the doorknock investigation records from the Deidre Kennedy case that were held in the basement of the Criminal Investigation Bureau. And it is at this time that the inquest into the death of Deidre Maree Kennedy is held.
The police file is 60 foolscap pages, presented on 30 January 1974 at Ipswich Court. A formality, a necessity, its details are raw, obscene. Sixty foolscap pages, hideous details of a baby’s murder and the smaller, inconsequential memories of those called as witnesses. And when it is over, when the police go back to the station and Faye and Barry return home, the result leaves them with more than disquiet, more than heartache: a peculiar emptiness, just words hanging in the ether and no finality.
The floods have hijacked any other news coverage, reporters too busy covering the disaster to do courts. The inquest has not been covered. ‘The result would be at the State Archives Office in Brisbane,’ a librarian at the Ipswich Library tells me. ‘Check there, but be warned that this sort of information has been restricted since 1964.’ The State Archives Office notes the information I require, and calls back. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid. The inquest file on Deidre Kennedy was here, but there is a notation to advise that it was removed many years ago by the Queensland Justice Department. It has not been returned. You will have to contact them.’
The Justice Department calls back. ‘There is no records of the file here and we don’t have any idea where it is. We have checked with the Coroner’s Office and they don’t have the information. They only store these files for 30 years. You are out of time and will need to go through Freedom of Information to access what you need.’
‘Why is it that so many files relating to this case can’t be located?’ I ask. ‘Why doesn’t Justice know where it is when the archives office has noted th
at that department has taken the file? All I need is the actual finding.’
Going FOI will take too long: it will be faster to contact a lawyer who was involved in the case. ‘I don’t know what the result was,’ Barrister Peter Davis says. ‘But under the Coroner’s Act 1958, a coroner had to determine only a number of specific issues. Cause of death. Identity of the victim. Whether anyone should be charged. This one was straightforward. The cause of death was obviously murder. Identity of the baby was never in question. In January 1974, no one had been charged so it’s a safe bet to assume that the finding was that Deidre Kennedy was murdered by a person or persons unknown.’
Barry goes out to check on the flood levels and returns with an old couple he has found huddling in a bus shelter, their home totally flooded. They stay with the Kennedys for a few days, the old man, an ex-boxer, devastated that his lifetime memorabilia has been lost in the flood. There is another reason Faye particularly remembers this time. Soon after the old couple leaves, she discovers she is pregnant again.
They pray it is a boy, so they will not compare the child with Deidre. The delivering doctor had treated Deidre for repeated bouts of tonsillitis; when Faye went into labour, he kept up a mantra to the nursing sister. ‘This has got to be a little boy,’ he repeated. ‘We need this baby to be a boy.’ It is. On 9 September 1974 they are blessed with their son, Derek, who would grow into the image of his father. Faye wants Derek christened in the same church as the girls, but the minister refuses because she doesn’t belong to the diocese. ‘I’ve led a Christian life,’ Faye tells the minister. ‘I’ve brought my children up that way. God knows me, he knows who I am. That’s good enough for me.’ Totally affronted, Faye does not have Derek christened and never returns to church again.
The Kennedys patch up their lives the best way they can, re-building the family unit, slowly filling the hollow void with happy moments together. They go camping again, pitching a tent under a canopy of sky the same way they had done when they were young lovers at Longreach. Faye, Barry, Stephanie and Derek, lying on their backs with a warm breeze stroking their face, quietly talking and counting the stars. Faye points out the brightest, and warms herself with a thought: Deidre was up there somewhere, polishing them like diamonds. Stephanie, now eight, looks out for her two-year-old brother and understands her mother’s fears when either of them are out of her sight. Nothing will ever subdue the pain of losing Deidre, but Barry and Faye have to try for the sake of their other two children. And they try hard. They are good years; they are a good family. Everything would be all right.
Everything is not all right with Raymond Carroll. Now 21, and separated for almost a year, single life holds little appeal. Still a loner, he does not comfortably mix with his RAAF colleagues, who invariably leave him out of social invitations. And he needs dental work. In late September 1976, RAAF dental surgeon Brett Halliwell examines his teeth, an examination he does not readily forget: Carroll’s breath is malodorous, protrusion of his top teeth – a condition dentists call an ‘overjet’ – extremely pronounced and some teeth discoloured as charcoal. Halliwell restores the outside corners of both upper teeth, building and repairing them so they will become square. He instructs his nurse to record what he had done on a dental chart and tells Carroll that further work is required.
Whilst in Darwin, Carroll meets Jennifer Russell, who will become his second wife. Jennifer likes a verbal stoush, and it is a volatile union from the moment she and Carroll meet. ‘She liked fighting,’ Raymond would later say. Married on 29 July 1977, exactly a month after Carroll’s divorce from Joy, 13 months later they start a family. Jennifer announces the news to Raymond after a trip to the doctor. ‘You’re going to be a father again,’ she grins. ‘Twice. We’re having twins.’
The girls, Raylene and Samantha, arrive in August 1979. Four years later, their son, Saun is born.
Raymond Carroll is now the father of three daughters and one boy.
John Rowley hails from Wolverhampton, in Britain’s west midlands, one of four gritty, working-class boroughs known as the Black Country. Steeped in history from its Saxon settlement, locals drink ale in ancient pubs and speak in their local burr, thick with inflections. They boast of the county’s industrial heritage, and of the days when the south-east of Wolverhampton had the world’s largest coal output and the town’s damp back lanes were filled with men trudging home from the pit, faces darkened with coal dust. Locals are footy mad, too, though their famous team, the ‘Wolves’have lost their great form of the ’50s and ’60s. The young John had played for the Wolves as an amateur, but he had no interest in staying in the Black Country and following his father into the steel industry. Dark haired, athletic and with boundless energy, he had wanderlust. At 15, he joined the army.
In 1963, aged 20, Rowley married a lovely lass, Christina, whom he called Nuala – Gaelic for Christmas – because of her December birthday. Still in the army, he was away a lot for work, but homecomings were always good, and a baby always followed. Altogether they had six children, five daughters and a son. In 1970, the family emigrated to Australia.
With its working-class roots and small population, Rowley felt at home in Ipswich from the moment they arrived. It reminded him in some ways of the Wolverhampton he knew as a boy: no four-star restaurants or uppity pretensions, just a good working-class town, easy to live in. And warmer than England’s west midlands, where winter’s cold seeped into his bones. He still wants to kiss the ground whenever he returns to Queensland from a trip overseas.
In 1971 Rowley joined the civilian police, but he only lasted 15 months. He recalls the pay was lousy, and the conditions abominable. The area had a high crime rate, with around a dozen detectives and 30 cops for 40,000 people. After baling out of the civvies, Rowley worked at a factory until he joined the RAAF police in 1977. It was a career move that would change his life.
A prowler is stalking through the corridor of the Women’s Quarters of the Amberley Air Force Base. He has stealthily climbed a tree, jumped over the WAAF fence, walked about 25 metres and then clambered up a drainpipe, his boot marks clearly visible on the wall. Now inside, he noiselessly zeroes in to where he wants to go.
WAAF Jackie Toigo is asleep. An attractive young woman, she had posed, scantily clad, for a photo shoot earlier in the week, and the photographs now adorn her bed head. The intruder looks down at her sleeping form, quietly removes the pictures and creeps up to the laundry.
He spreads the photos on the laundry ironing board, arranging them in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. He has also stolen women’s underwear and WAAF uniforms from the laundry area, and feels the rush of adrenalin as he picks up a sharp instrument and slashes the crotch out of the panties, front to back, leaving the waistband intact. He slits the nipple area from the bras and the uniforms in the crotch and breast areas. When he has finished, he sneaks out the same way he crept in.
One of 97 corporal investigators in the RAAF, Corporal John Rowley isn’t the first on the job on 4 February 1982, the night the Women’s Quarters are broken into. Military police Ian Harold and Peter Parrott had been on patrol and, in the early hours of the morning, noticed a car parked suspiciously some distance off the road near the base. It was an odd place to park, they thought; there were no buildings on that side of the road. They took down the registration number and noted boots on the vehicle’s rear seat.
Rowley becomes involved in the investigation the next day, and still remembers, years later, how furious the women were. Irate that a perverted prowler had done that to their private underwear.
The first step is to trace the owner of the vehicle. Rowley goes through RAAF records, and finds the car belongs to a 26-year-old electrical fitter who lives on the base. Married, with twin daughters. Name of Raymond John Carroll.
Carroll is unperturbed when confronted by Rowley. He had, he tells him, been to a function at the golf club earlier that evening and was home before midnight.
Rowley has details from the notes taken by Har
old and Parrot and his vehicle registration, but Carroll is in total denial about the whole thing. He never once gets stroppy; he is calm, detached. Carroll signs a statement the day Rowley interviews him, denying any involvement. ‘You did it, didn’t you?’ Rowley says to him, but he doesn’t change expression. He just looks at him.
Rowley also speaks to Carroll’s wife, Jennifer, about his movements that night. She is incensed, indignant at the suggestion that her husband had been out after midnight. He had, she says, returned home from the golf club around 11.30, and had not gone out again. She makes her feelings plain.
Carroll is not charged by RAAF police. They never get any feedback from people they speak with, and shortly afterward Rowley is posted to Brisbane. He doesn’t know what the outcome was, just that it was a very serious offence.
After he interviews Carroll about the break-in, Rowley sits, drumming his fingers on the table, thinking. Of the 97 RAAF Corporals, he is the only one with a close knowledge of Deidre Kennedy’s murder because he lived there at the time. He had left the civilian police force a year before it happened, but had occasionally asked colleagues if there were any developments. The hairs had gone up on the back of his neck when Carroll had sat in front of him, calmly, dispassionately telling him that before he had joined the RAAF in February 1973, he had lived with his mother at 13 Quarry Lane, Ipswich. Quarry Lane, about 500 metres from Limestone Park where the Kennedy baby had been found. Nine years afterwards, it is still an unsolved murder. Rowley vividly remembers the case: as a father of small children, he was shocked at the savagery of the toddler’s death. It was a case that seemed frozen in time, going nowhere. The only hope that police had, they told Rowley, was identification of the person who had inflicted the bite marks on the child’s left thigh, and a match of hair that was found on her vulva. There was nothing else.
Justice In Jeopardy Page 7
