It is the first time that Faye and Barry have had to face the man accused of murdering their daughter. Faye averts her eyes, trembling violently as she gives her brief, heartbreaking evidence about tucking the children safely into bed. Barry, visibly uncomfortable with the attention, fiddles with a button on his shirt and grimaces when he admits he had not locked the unit.
Faye sees her immediately: Carroll’s second wife, Jennifer, walking straight toward her in the court passage. She looks Faye straight in the eye and asks, ‘And how are you today, Mrs Kennedy?’ and keeps walking.
Over the course of the week the witnesses have differing recollections. Detective Morris testifies that one of the Kennedys’ neighbours had told him he saw a ‘clean-cut person, like a serviceman’ walking down toward the flats. Police admit that prints of Carroll were not found in the flat where Deidre was abducted. Forensic scientist Kenneth Cox says some hairs found on Deidre’s body are similar to Carroll’s. He describes the texture and colour comparisons as quite a good match, and the hair diameter as similar. ‘They could have come from Carroll and he could not be eliminated as a suspect.’ But, he admits, ‘that’s as far as I can go.’ Reynolds quietly curses under his breath. He is sure that if the hair samples had been sent to Hong Kong as he had requested, Cox may well have been able to make a more definitive identification. One way or the other.
Carroll’s Quarry Lane neighbour, William Jordan, looks bewildered and bemused that he has been called as a witness. He doesn’t know, he says, whether Carroll was in Ipswich at the time the baby was murdered. ‘He used to come and go all the time,’ he shrugs.
Many former RAAF recruits are called, the first occasion they have collectively been together in years and had the opportunity to share recollections. They bounce around memories of course 1203. Who had been there? Who had to repeat the course? Who was not in the passing-out parade? It is a get-together that makes Carroll’s defence particularly uncomfortable. Having the chance to trade memories could lead to people adding missing pieces together that perhaps do not exist.
As many other RAAF recruits testify, Trevor Kitson tells the hearing that Carroll was disliked by his colleagues. ‘Virtually everyone had very little time for him,’ he announces dismissively. ‘It was just one of those physical things. If you don’t like someone, you don’t like someone.’ Carroll’s former Commanding Officer, Lesley Meacham, admits that orderly room staff may have caused an oversight in the paperwork, not recording that Carroll had gone on compassionate leave. It is good news for the defence.
Kon Romaniuk is clear in his evidence that comparisons between Carroll’s dentition with photographs showing the bruise marks are almost a ‘perfect fit’ and were likely made by a person aged 17. It is, he tells the court, ‘highly likely that the teeth could have produced such a bite or bruising pattern’ and that the possibilities of another dentition existing like Carroll’s would be astronomically low. But he admits to defence barrister Phil Hardcastle that he had had very little experience with bite marks in 1973 and could not be absolutely certain then that Carroll had made the marks.
Police prosecutor Senior-Sergeant Pat Youngberry hands up 51 exhibits, including the underwear found on Deidre’s body. He tells the court that a recruit had gone on leave but that his departure had not been recorded. It is, he testifies, ‘highly unlikely that anyone else other than the defendant caused the bite marks on the girl’s body.’
The defence, funded by Legal Aid, is scathing. The case against his client is purely circumstantial, Hardcastle objects. ‘There are no written records to show Mr Carroll was granted leave at the time of the murder. There is no evidence to suggest anyone can identify him or that he was even in the area at the time. And there is no evidence of an admission in the records of interview; in fact, Mr Carroll says quite categorically: “No, I didn’t do it,” in the police interview.’
But the defence argument does not sway Magistrate Bill Pullar. On 13 July 1984, the same day 17-year-old Boris Becker sensationally becomes the youngest tennis champion ever to win Wimbledon, Pullar holds over all charges against Carroll involving the theft and destruction of women’s underwear at the women’s quarters but hands down his decision on the counts of abduction and murder.
‘I have taken into account the defence evidence and it has not, in my view, been sufficient to justify me acquitting the defendant. Accordingly, he will stand trial.’
John Reynolds steals a sharp look at Carroll. He notices that his face hasn’t changed expression. He is emotionless, just as he had been on the day Reynolds had charged him with murder.
Reynolds had tried to find the original reel-to-reel interviews they did five months before with Carroll. They had disappeared into smoke. The officer who had done them, who worked undercover for the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, was killed in a head-on car accident and police couldn’t check with him where they were. All the audio was simply gone. Whether they were lost when the police moved buildings, Reynolds does not know. But he has the typed up interviews to work from.
If Reynolds is struggling to find evidence, Carroll is also doing it tough. Bailed pending trial, he is treated as persona non grata when he returns to work and most of his colleagues snub him. In the lunch room, they skite that they intend to lock him inside the fuel storage area and not let him out. He would be dead within minutes. But privately, they admit they are just big-noting. No way are they going to go up on a murder charge. Not for Raymond Carroll.
PART TWO
Murder trial: 1985
‘Court procedure has little to do with truth or justice. Once we are in court, we play this game called Courtroom. The idea is to win this game using this set of strange – at times, impenetrable – rules.’
John Dobies, Sydney lawyer
17
Themis, the Greek goddess of Justice, guards the leafy entrance to Brisbane’s Supreme Court. It is a statue that many a defendant facing trial has afforded a nervous passing glance as they leave behind the sunshine and traffic on busy George Street and enter the sombre cloisters of the court’s interior.
It is a statue that former Supreme Court Judge Angelo Vasta passes daily. Before the Fitzgerald Inquiry, before the night of the long knives in 1989 when he ignonimously became the first Australian judge ever removed from the bench by Parliament, he wore the judge’s robes.
Justice. Angelo Vasta wonders if he will ever get it in Queensland. Hounded by Fitzgerald’s anti-corruption crusaders and excluded from the hallowed inner circle of the legal fraternity, he wonders whether he will ever clear his name. He wonders, too, if there will ever be justice for Deidre Kennedy.
His was an ambitious climb to the bench. The son of poor Sicilian immigrant parents, who had left a Europe fractured by pre-war tensions and come to the lucky country in search of a happier life.
His father Salvatore’s hard work eventually paid off: he could proudly boast that on a meagre wage and with no government handouts, he had paid for his three sons’ education in Engineering, Medicine and Law, and his daughter’s training as a dressmaker.
Married with three children, Angelo was admitted to the Bar in early 1968, and he quickly rose to the position of Crown Prosecutor, a move that created huge ripples in the small pond that was the Queensland legal fraternity. Once dismissed as a ‘wog’ and a ‘dago’ by Anglo-Saxon schoolmates, he was now outcast by those who regarded him as an interloper from down south.
At 38, he took silk and the resentment amongst his peers deepened. Just 16 years after he was admitted to the Queensland Bar, he became its first Superior Court judge of Italian ancestry and the first judge not appointed by the Bar. Now, the animosity spilled out in unparalleled venom. Once whispered behind closed doors, the battle cry from the Queensland Bar was now loud and overt. Vasta, they sniffed into their brandy balloons, was an undesirable appointment. He should go.
But he didn’t.
The Deidre Kennedy trial is finally starting today. February 1985, and Angelo Vasta is the
judge who is to sit on it. Before Mr Justice Vasta, Court No. 4, 1st floor, 10am: Queen v Carroll. Trial.
Today’s headlines have drawn crowds to the court. Many still remember the murder, how scared they were for the safety of their own children, and where they were at the time. I was visiting my sister in Brisbane and heard about the baby on the radio. I thought, how hideous … I cried when it came on television. Those poor parents … I still remember thinking, if it was my daughter, I’d string the bastard up with my own hands …
Public defender Kerry Copley tries to sway the court to grant bail to his client. Since his arrest and being committed for trial, Carroll has neither taken flight nor refused to cooperate, he argues. ‘In my submission, there is no need for him to remain in custody …’ Justice Vasta doesn’t agree. Bail is refused. For the duration of the trial, Carroll will be held in the remand section at Brisbane’s notorious Boggo Road Prison.
Faye is relieved. She has not seen Carroll since the committal hearing, but finds it extremely traumatic to be in the same room as him. This was the man who police had charged with murdering her baby and, to Faye, he looked so arrogant, sitting there with his arms folded and his legs crossed. She wanted the earth to open up and swallow him.
Carroll’s defence also seeks to exclude two pieces of evidence from being aired before the jury: the slashing of undergarments belonging to female members of the RAAF, and his former wife Joy’s allegations regarding his biting their own baby. This, they say, is highly prejudicial and outweighs any probative value. Vasta allows the former to be excluded, but rules that Joy’s evidence should stay.
Justice Vasta surveys the jury, pared down to six men and six women after intense questioning to weed out people with prejudicial extremes. They appear a moderate group, ranging in age from their early twenties to fifties. They have a hard task ahead of them: any murder trial is tough, but one involving an infant can be emotionally overwhelming. Vasta warns them early about what they may face. ‘I might mention that this charge of murder relates to a matter that occurred in 1973 and is a matter which received a good deal of publicity … reported in the paper as the murder of a Deidre Kennedy, a child of very tender years. Now, there may be some reason altogether separate and distinct from your knowledge of any one or more of the witnesses that may cause you to feel that you cannot deliver an impartial verdict in this trial. If so, now is the time to speak up.’
Vasta pauses to give them time to answer.
Silence.
Unable to cope with the emotional trauma, Faye and Barry choose not to stay for the duration of the trial. John Reynolds advises them to give their evidence and then go back to Richmond, where they follow its progress through the press. Barry knows the horrific details of Deidre’s death, but he has sheltered Faye from them. What he cannot shelter his wife from is the graphic, heartbreaking press reports of the details revealed in the trial, and it is in this way that Faye learns that Deidre was dressed in women’s underwear the morning she was found. Horrified at the implications, she sobs for days.
It is a packed court – police sneaking a few moments on their shift to have a listen and young lawyers sent to watch the 38-year-old Crown prosecutor on his feet. Imposing at 185cm, with a barrister’s wig perched atop dark brown hair and a large, open face compliments of his Germanic heritage, Adrian Gundelach naturally commands attention. Known for his cheerful disposition and passion for criminal work, he started as a judge’s associate at 18 and was a clerk to the Crown Prosecutor by 1968. Graduating with a law degree in 1972, he has prosecuted some nasty cases since graduating with his law degree in 1972, but nothing as abhorrent as the Deidre Kennedy case.
His case is three-pronged. To prove opportunity – that Carroll was not, as he claimed, on the base at Edinburgh when Deirdre was murdered. To demonstrate his predilection for biting young children on the legs. And to focus on the opinion of the three forensic odontologists that the prosecution would call, that Carroll’s teeth had caused the contusions on the baby’s thigh.
Emotion is high, even before the opening address. It is a hybrid mix that fills the public gallery. Mothers have come to ogle this person accused of murdering a child, shaking their heads as they see Carroll for the first time in the dock and providing home-spun commentary in the breaks. The media has outlined the gruesome details of the crime and those in the gallery have already made up their minds. Forget the trial, the Westminster system that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. Carroll did it, they think, and they are here to witness his metaphorical public execution. The men stand beside their women, faces grim. John Reynolds hears them talking in the corridors outside the court. ‘Bring back the gallows,’ they huff. ‘Hang the evil bastard.’ The case seems to have touched a raw nerve, Reynolds thinks; everyone seems to have an opinion. He realises Carroll’s family must feel this sentiment and that the trial must be a shocking ordeal for them.
Gundelach delivers his opening address to the jury in strong voice and with raw force. No histrionics, no courtroom theatre, just a powerful, stark rendition of the facts. ‘On Saturday April 14 1973, about 6.20am, little Deidre Maree Kennedy’s bruised and sexually abused body was found dumped on the roof of a toilet block in Limestone Park, Ipswich. Her death at 17 months was due to asphyxia from strangulation.’ It was, he continues, a warped and sadistic attack on a defenceless child – ‘a child that would never have been in a position to identify or speak out against her assailant. This type of murder is the most abhorrent of murders … The facts indicate quite clearly there’s a deep disturbance in the man who committed that crime.’ He tells the court the motive was some sexual fetish known only to that man and that, if Carroll was guilty, the jury should give him no sympathy.
Already, women in the public gallery have started weeping.
Carroll, unable to afford a lawyer with the knowledge and experience to challenge the Crown prosecutor’s, has had no recourse but to come through the Legal Aid system. QC Kerry Copley, though in private practice, opted to take the high-profile brief. A strong believer in the ‘cab rank rule’ – first come, first served – Copley is known to his colleagues as a compassionate, charming master of spin and equally known for his legendary cross-examination skills, meticulous research and encyclopaedic knowledge of the law. He has never refused a brief because the cause – or the client – was unpopular. Raymond Carroll – a man already branded a paedophile and baby murderer by the public – was proving a stand-out as one of the most unpopular clients of his career. But he was prepared to fight as hard for him as he did any other person he defended. Who killed Deidre Kennedy? It was his job to convince the jury that it was not Raymond John Carroll.
Copley tells the court that the case against his client rests on circumstantial evidence and that there is no evidence to prove he was in Ipswich at the time of the murder. The central issue, he says, is identity: the murderer is the same person who stole underwear from the veranda of the house next door. Carroll does not fit the descriptions given at the time, and nor were his fingerprints found at the scene or the Kennedys’ unit. Evidence has been destroyed and the opinions of the forensic odontologists are unreliable. His client is caught up in a nightmare that is not of his own making.
Arresting officer John Reynolds is first on the stand and is attacked by Copley. He shows Reynolds no mercy.
‘Included in the documents that have been lost, I would suggest to you, would be details of statements obtained from the defendant’s family back in 1973 at the time of the murder …?’
‘If it refers to the doorknocks, yes, they are lost.’
‘No complete records presently available of statements obtained from the occupants of 13 Quarry Lane?’
‘No. Just some on the running sheet.’
‘That does not show the defendant was at Quarry Lane on the night of the murder … Police records that have at all times been in police custody, gone … So it is not only air-force records that are lost, police records that are lost, it was in fact pa
rt of a systematic process of the investigation with a doorknock?’
Reynolds nods after each question. Correct.
‘The defendant maintained to you at all times that he was not in Queensland on the date of the murder … there is nothing to show he was at home, seen at home, or present on the weekend of the murder … Nothing in air-force records to suggest he was not at Edinburgh, travelling by service air to Amberley, or being given compassionate leave … not one document showing he was in Queensland at the time Deidre Kennedy was murdered?’
‘That’s correct.’
By applying reason, Reynolds tries to salvage the damage Copley has wreaked. He fights to keep the irritation from his voice. Coppers have worked hard on this case; bloody hard. Many have taken it home with them, for years, sometimes unwittingly; going to work the next day tired but desperately wanting a resolution. Reynolds is one of these. Sometimes, in the twilight juncture between sleep and waking, he sees a rag doll, lying on the ground. Drawn to it against his will, he walks up, almost on tiptoe, to where it lies on a carpet of leaves. And the pale, forlorn figure that is not a rag doll but a battered child, looks surreal and terrible, dappled sunshine blinking on her bruises as if she is under a strobe light. He struggles to back away but can’t, riveted to the spot, wanting to gag and when, fully awake he does finally leave her to go about his business, she stays with him, clinging. Deidre has stayed with him for years and is a nocturnal visitor to a lot of the coppers. But Reynolds doesn’t tell Copley any of this. Courts are factories for airing facts, not nightmares.
Justice In Jeopardy Page 11
