21
‘Did you kill Deidre Kennedy?’.
There is a collective intake of breath in the court. Carroll has opted to speak in his own defence, taking the witness stand with a seemingly calm demeanour. It is his right to refuse to give evidence; that he has chosen to do so, Copley will now deftly turn to his advantage. Fluffing his gown, he stares at his client, his voice steady and firm. ‘Did you kill Deidre Kennedy?’
Raymond John Carroll returns the stare without blinking and answers immediately. ‘I did not.’
‘Did you have anything to do with that child’s death?’
‘I did not.’
Staccato questions. Name, age, address. He is 29 years old. Stationed at Amberley Air Base since 1979 with his second wife, Jennifer Anne Carroll, their five-year-old twin girls, Raylene and Samantha, and son, Saun, 18 months.
Bland, ordinary in beige trousers and shirt. A 29-year-old father of four in the witness stand, watched by lawyers, strangers and the press, answering questions about events from a long time ago.
Carroll reiterates what he told John Reynolds. He was 17 years old when he joined the air force. At the time of joining, he had lived with his mother and family at 13 Quarry Lane, East Ipswich. He did not go to Queensland in April 1973 and did not go to Ipswich. He never took any compassionate leave during training. He does not have a good memory for things he deems unnecessary. He did not march on the parade but he can’t recall the reason why he didn’t.
‘Do you now recall?’ Copley asks.
‘I think I either asked the member if I could be excused from the parade or I was told to excuse myself from the parade.’ He watched the parade from the sidelines, he says, just beyond the march-on area, and he wasn’t present when the photograph was taken.
‘When asked by the police about not marching, you made mention about a blank file?’
‘That is correct.’
‘What can you say about this blank file?’
Copley has been looking down at his papers, and slowly raises his head. This is theatre: let the jury think that what they are about to hear is casual, unimportant. A mere slip of the tongue from a young man with a bad memory.
‘That reason that I gave the police is just absolute stupidity, as any member of the air force will know,’ Carroll responds. ‘As regards a blank file or not, you will still march. The reason I told the police that – they asked me questions and they wanted answers, I thought, and it was about the first thing that came to my head and, without actually thinking about it like I have done now, it seemed a possible excuse.’
It seemed a possible excuse. Gundelach takes note of the answer. A possible excuse?
Carroll continues with his evidence. He travelled from Edinburgh by service air to Richmond. Caught a train to Sydney and then on to his new station at Wagga. He never bit his daughter, Kerry-Ann on the thigh, the leg or any other part of the body. Never hit her across the face or head. Carroll’s mouth moves, but his face remains impassive when asked what he thinks of these allegations by his former wife. ‘They’re just a bunch of lies,’ he says. He produces six photographs of Kerry-Ann, taken when she was 12 months old. She is smiling, happy in a swimming costume. No marks on the child. Anywhere.
It is Gundelach’s turn for the questions. Didn’t Carroll tell his section commander in Darwin that his second wife, Jennifer, had accused him of murdering Deidre Kennedy, and cried as he told him the story? Carroll does not change expression. ‘That is incorrect, because I did not murder her. My wife has never accused me of that, Sir.’
They have moved through all the evidence, and now Gundelach is asking why Carroll had looked at a photograph during his records of interview with the police and pointed to someone who may have been him. ‘Are you seriously suggesting to this court that you mistakenly identified someone else as being you in that photograph?’
Polite, his voice even as though addressing a Commanding Officer. ‘That’s possible, Sir. They showed me a photograph, I studied it, and I said it was possibly me who I pointed out; I didn’t say 100 per cent certain it was me. I only stated possibly me.’
Gundelach struggles to keep the sneer from his voice. ‘Do you agree with me now he looks nothing like you?’
Carroll nods. ‘Having studied the photograph, no, there isn’t much comparison at all between us.’
Gundelach is staying in the past, on the topic of Carroll’s first marriage. Why did he and Joy argue when he returned to Darwin from a trip home?
‘One of my NCOs at the section I was at at the time had been propositioned by my wife and he confronted me with the facts to that effect, and then I confronted my wife over it.’
Gundelach does not take his eyes from Carroll. ‘What is this NCO’s name?’
Carroll can’t recall.
‘You are making it up,’ the prosecutor snorts.
Carroll’s denial is insistent. ‘No. No, I am not, Sir.’
Desley Hill’s love letters to Carroll are spread out for the court to see, the sad, lovelorn writings of a woman at first hopeful of romance, and then rejected. Aren’t these letters, Gundelach accuses, the real reason the marriage ended? ‘Your wife intercepted some letters from your girlfriend, Desley, didn’t she?’
‘She didn’t intercept them, Sir; they were written to her.’
‘Did you ever promise Desley that you would buy her an engagment ring?’
‘Not that I can recall, Sir, no.’
Gundelach produces one of the letters, in which Desley asked him if he was serious about buying her a ring. ‘I will ask you again; did you promise to buy her an engagement ring?’
‘Not that I can recall, Sir, no.’
‘Did you ever talk to her about going to Darwin with you?’
‘I don’t recall it, no, Sir.’
‘Did she ever ask you?’
‘I don’t recall, Sir.’
Gundelach scratches his head at the base of his wig and raises his eyebrows. Perhaps Carroll will recall more of why he asked John Reynolds, during the records of interview, about fingerprints found on the body? ‘You said,’ Gundelach reminds him, ‘“In my mind, I am innocent,” and, in relation to fingerprints, you said that “the prints on the body are not necessarily those of the offender …” Where did you get the idea that fingerprints had been found on the body of the child?’
‘I have always assumed –’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I have always assumed, and when Mr Reynolds was talking about the scene of the crime, I thought the body was also included and I thought that they could lift prints from the body.’
Gundelach doesn’t believe a word of it. ‘I am suggesting you made that answer because, in your own mind, you knew that you had been very careful with respect to prints being left at the Kennedy household and also at the park, but, when you touched that young girl’s body, you were worried that you had left fingerprints there. What do you say to that suggestion?’
Carroll stares at the prosecutor, his eyes betraying nothing. He says that that suggestion is incorrect.
Gundelach addresses the bench. ‘No more questions, your Honour.’
Faye and Barry watch snippets of court evidence on the nightly news, and read about it in the newspaper. It is hard to stomach, and mostly they can’t. Eleven-year-old Derek had only been told of the trial just before it started, sitting down with his father who explained what had happened to Deidre 12 years before. Barry left out the terrible details, spared his son the horror. There would be time for him to learn them, but he didn’t need to know yet. Stephanie is 17, old enough to perfectly comprehend what is happening in court, old enough for the full implications of her sister’s murder to sink in. Whoever had taken Deidre had loitered in the same room where Stephanie had also been sleeping. Why had he chosen Deidre, and not her? Was it because she was younger, unable to form sentences, less likely to create a stir in the sleeping household? If Deidre were alive, she would be 15, experimenting with Stephanie’s make
-up, borrowing her clothes. Stephanie struggles to understand any of it. She watches her mother stumbling around, eyes blank, reliving every moment; sees her father staunch and silent, holding back an emotional dam. It is like a wound in the family’s heart, which no one can heal.
22
Jennifer Carroll is so nervous in the witness box she admits she can’t remember anything properly. She wipes her hands on her sleeve, stares fixedly at the prosecutor. No, she does not know that her husband had been spoken to by police about this matter in October 1983. He did not mention it to her for a couple of weeks afterward. Gundelach lets the ramifications of her statement sink in. He did not mention it for a couple of weeks afterward. The wily prosecutor resists asking why. Why would a man who had been questioned by police about the murder of a baby not mention it to his wife?
Jennifer says that Raymond is an excellent father. He rarely disciplines the children; instead, he leaves that for her to do.
Gundelach is on his feet, summing up. He will go in hard, discount what Jennifer has told the court. Raymond is an excellent father. He rarely disciplines the children. The prosecutor will paint an entirely different picture of this man sitting in the dock, this man accused of murdering an innocent 17-month-old girl. Raymond Carroll, he tells the jury, has a perverted interest in little children. He allows his words to wash over them, allows the magnitude of what he is saying to sink in. A perverted interest in little children. He knows the jury will be appalled. Sickened. It is society’s greatest taboo. And what, he asks, was the motive for the killing? Gundelach shrugs, nonplussed. It was a sexual fetish known only to her killer. A fetish involving stolen underwear.
This case, he tells the court, is based on identification of bite marks and circumstantial evidence that is overwhelmingly weighted against Raymond Carroll. The defence case has been nothing more than an academic exercise. ‘The Crown has no evidence to show he was in Ipswich, but [we] say his teeth identify him.’ Carroll, he continues, is no more than a shoddy liar who has created a web of lies and vagueness to protect himself over the years since the murder, a man who could provide no detail whatsoever that hangs together in a credible fashion.
‘The defence would have you believe that Carroll was dead unlucky and that a series of unfortunate mishaps came into his life in 1983 which led to this charge against him.’ The truth, Gundelach says, is that it was intensive police investigation that brought the charge. Warning the jury it would be wrong of them to guess why police interviewed Carroll almost 11 years after Deidre’s murder, he adds that they had started to find ‘astonishing coincidences’ in their early investigation. ‘Carroll’s interview with police,’ he continues, ‘must strike you as a bit of a damp squid. It’s not like the shows we see on television. The police are not permitted to trick people into confessing. They’re not allowed to belt them or force a confession out of them. They’re not even allowed to cross-examine them. The rules of propriety have obviously been observed. He was able to put his story over to the police with the greatest of ease – a story he has dreamt of for years.’ His responses to police questions were not those of an innocent man, he tells the court, but the evasions and circumlocutions of a very guilty one.
Gundelach moves through all the evidence. Why didn’t Carroll’s first wife report that their daughter had been bitten on the thigh? Because, he says, it is a sad truth that child abuse and incest is often kept silent within the family and that shame and fear prevent people from going to the police. There is no reason why Joy Meyers, a poorly educated woman completely out of her depth in legal proceedings, would wait nine years to invent a pack of lies about her former husband. She has re-married, started a new life. And what of Carroll, when he was accused of molesting his own child? Instead of denouncing it as a scurrilous lie, he had to be prodded into a denial during the record of interview with police. He knew perfectly well that this was the clearest evidence of his evil and perverted preoccupation with children.
What of Carroll’s family – his mother, present wife, and sister, Debbie? ‘Of course they’d stand by him. It is a very natural, although …’There is a bloated pause, deliberate, ‘one could think morally a wrong way for a family to behave. And,’ he adds, ‘it is certainly not essential to the Crown case that Carroll was staying in Quarry Lane with his family.’
‘What does the Crown know?’ Gundelach asks. He uses his fingers to tap out each point – that Deidre Kennedy was murdered and that whoever murdered her bit her on the thigh and dressed her up in underwear stolen from the clothesline next door. ‘The only question to be resolved is who committed it? The Crown says it was Raymond John Carroll.’
His closing address over, Gundelach re-arranges his gown and sits down. It would be interesting to hear what his opposite number, Kerry Copley, makes of this address.
Copley rises with a sombre air. His client, he says, has been ‘led like a lamb to slaughter’ in putting his trust in air-force records proving he was not in Ipswich in April 1973. He has poor recollection, but he had not been given compassionate or any other leave and had not asked people to support his story because he believed the RAAF records would do that. He has been cooperative with police at all times and volunteered hair, dental and fingerprint samples. These, he says, are not the actions of a guilty man. The teeth marks are not Carroll’s. Experts have agreed that movement of the baby’s body could have changed the position of the bite and there are too many variables to warrant positive identification. To compare the teeth marks in the photograph and Carroll’s plaster casts is comparing a two-dimensional picture with a three-dimensional object. There are just too many variables.
The defence rests.
Vasta’s summing-up is lengthy. Warning the jury that a great body of the evidence is circumstantial, he says if the jurors return a verdict of guilty based on this alone, then guilt must be the only rational inference they can draw. If not, it is their duty to acquit.
Vasta later continues that there are two features that must be considered to bring in a verdict of guilty. If the jurors are not satisfied that Carroll was at Ipswich at the relevant time, then they must acquit. ‘The second feature,’ he notes, ‘concerns the evidence which was given by the three forensic odontologists.’ Referring to portions of their evidence, he says: ‘The issue for you is as to whether the Crown has proved to your satisfaction beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was the person responsible for the bite on the child’s thigh which caused the diffuse bruising … if you are in a state of reasonable doubt about that fact, it is your sworn duty to acquit …’
Is it reasonable, Vasta asks, that the accused would have forgotten as much as he says he has? Is a poor memory a convenient refuge? Counsel, he says, has mentioned that the matter of identification looms large in this case. How much weight could be placed on Cecil ‘Nugget’ Carroll’s evidence? ‘Mr Copley has submitted that the description of that person indicated that it would not have been the accused, Carroll. Now, that is perfectly correct … The question is: was it reliable, tested in the light of what you know of him from the evidence that is before you …?
Vasta sees fit to direct the jury with regard to the evidence of Carroll’s first wife.
‘Now, the sole issue in this trial is one concerning the identity of the person responsible for the murder. As I have said to you, the person who was responsible for the bite mark is undoubtedly the person responsible for Deidre Maree Kennedy’s murder. For this reason, it seemed to me that the evidence as to what the accused’s former wife could speak about concerning the accused’s treatment of their child, who was of an age similar to Deidre Maree Kennedy at the date of her death, would assist you with regard to the identity of the offender.’
Vasta has another warning for the jury. ‘All three forensic odontologists, although they reach the same conclusion, do so in a route which is different, and the counsel for the defence would say is quite inconsistent and also a basis for your rejecting this evidence completely …’
And s
o it is on the nineteenth day of the trial – 14 March 1985 – that the jury retires for its verdict. It is 10.47am. Carroll’s family paces outside the court, smoking and anxiously checking their watches as they tick into the afternoon. A jury can stay out as long as it needs, but legal wisdom dictates that the longer they deliberate, the more hope it gives a family of the accused that they are wrestling with some or all of the evidence.
Not, it appeared, this time. At 3.30, the court clerk gives notice that the jury is back in. The atmosphere in the court immediately shifts a gear. The tension is acute.
23
The jurors file into their seats, some glancing at the prosecution team and then to the defence. They do not look at Carroll, who is gazing intently ahead, mouth firmly closed, large hands resting quietly on his lap. One of the jurors, a portly man in his early forties, pulls out a hanky and wipes his forehead, sighing as he sinks into his chair. The weight of this duty has been onerous. Two female jurors quickly sweep their eyes around the court before they creep into one of the seats they have inhabited for the six weeks of the trial. This is judgment day, Reynolds, sitting in the public gallery, thinks to himself. His knuckles are white as he waits for the verdict.
The associate stands. ‘How do you find the accused: guilty or not guilty?’ One by one the jurors rise from their seats, staring straight at Carroll as they answer. ‘Guilty.’ ‘Guilty.’ ‘Guilty.’ ‘Guilty.’ ‘Guilty.’ ‘Guilty.’ Their voices resound in the silent courtroom. Twelve unanimous verdicts.
‘Guilty.’
‘Guilty.’
‘Guilty.’
‘Guilty.’
‘Guilty.’
‘Guilty.’
Sandra’s hands, that had trembled violently as she waited for the jury’s decision, now fly to her mouth in shock, and Ilma buries her face in her daughter’s shoulder, weeping. Sandra looks at Raymond, who has not moved. He is like a rock, she thinks. Protected by a pane of glass from the public gallery, the shock of the conviction – hearing those jurors, one by one, saying he is guilty – is so overwhelming, he stands stock still. The press would condemn it as a vacant, emotionless reaction, but his family see it differently, as a natural reaction for a man who always bottles everything up, who has never shown emotion.
Justice In Jeopardy Page 14
