Carroll stares fixedly at Vasta when asked if he has anything to say. This, too, is interpreted by reporters and onlookers as a cold, insolent reaction.
‘I didn’t do it. I am not guilty.’
Justice Vasta pauses for a brief moment before pronouncing the sentence in his trademark gravelly voice. ‘You have been found guilty by a very careful jury on what I consider to be the cogent and compelling evidence of the brutal murder of an innocent child. It was a killing in respect of which an outraged community had long since given up any hope of having the offender brought to justice. The fact that an arrest was made, some nearly 12 years after the slaying, is a tribute to the excellent efforts of the law enforcement authorities in this state, particularly the Queensland Police Force.
‘The law provides but only one penalty for this crime. I sentence you to imprisonment with hard labour for life.’
Ilma, stunned by the ferocity of the jury’s decision, cries quietly. She has punished herself throughout the trial for not having had the money to straighten her son’s teeth. Now he has been convicted, partly on bite mark evidence, and she blames herself.
Carroll’s wife, Jennifer, is so stunned she can barely move in her seat.
Carroll, held in custody since the start of the trial, doesn’t turn back to look at his family as he is led out by security guards. The only sound in the courtroom is the muttering from the packed public gallery and Sandra’s loud voice, catching with sobs. ‘I love you, Raymond,’ she calls after him as he disappears from sight.
John Reynolds regards the verdict as a personal and professional victory. In all his years in the police force, he had never seen such an emotional reaction from a jury. Every man and woman.
Reynolds had made a promise to Barry and Faye, who are still living at Richmond air base in NSW, that as soon as the verdict was in, he would ring them. They have purposely not been there for the verdict; Reynolds has to race right around to the other side of the building to use the phone and is near tears when he tells them the jury has found Carroll guilty.
By trial’s end, Faye, who has always enjoyed good health apart from high blood pressure during pregnancy, needs anti-depressants to try to clear the black cloud that hovers over her like a vulture. She breaks down when she hears the verdict, clinging tightly to Barry. Thank God it is over.
Legal experts immediately hail the trial as a landmark case because the circumstantial evidence has been solely forensic, based on the interpretations of dental experts of the bite mark on Deidre’s thigh. Like technology had reached out its hands from the grave. Bernard Sims speaks to the media outside the court. ‘We like to rule out people, to say to police, “This is not your man.” There are some cases where there are a number of suspects and some experts say that you can only determine who it is not, rather than who it is.’ This, he smiles, was not one of those cases.
Carroll’s wife, Jennifer, is not smiling. ‘Bastard cops,’ she spits. The media has been lying in wait outside the court, unsure who is who in Carroll’s family. It is an uncertainty that results in family members being badly misrepresented in the press: Sandra mistaken for her mother, Jennifer for his sister, his sisters for his wife. They cover their faces as they brave the onslaught, deliberately exiting through different doors to dodge the photographers. ‘Pack of vultures,’ they mutter as they hurry past, their heads down.
Military police and civilian coppers all head to the pub, saluting the victory with beer and backslapping. From 1973 until today’s verdict, the cost of the investigation and trial has run to over a million dollars. Now they can finally say it has been worth it.
Two hours into the celebration, John Reynolds calls for quiet. ‘Let’s raise our glasses,’ he says, ‘to the most important person in all of this. Deidre.’
PART THREE
Murder Acquittal: November 1985
‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken’
Oliver Cromwell
24
Carroll has never been so scared in his life. The prison guard is snarling, leaning close to his face. So close, Carroll can smell his fetid breath. ‘I’ve waited 12 years to get hold of you, arsehole.’
Well, you’re gunna have to wait another 12 years, mate, ’cause you’ve got the wrong bloke. It is what Carroll recalls saying to the prison guard, recounted with a swagger in his tone. But it rings hollow, smacks of false bravado. Scared men generally cower in silence.
Newly arrived, Carroll looks around the yard to see if anyone is watching. A seething audience of bored men, hungry for action, are leaning against the wire and leering at him, their tattooed arms folded and muscles taut. Ready to circle, watching, waiting.
Welcome to Boggo Road.
Two days after his unceremonious entry into the prison system, Carroll is given his marching orders from the Air Force. Bluntly told to ‘sign here’, kicked out because of civil incarceration. Automatic dismissal, no ifs or buts. It irked Carrol to no end. His career and retirement benefits gone, straight down the drain.
It starts as soon as he enters the yard. ‘You’re dead, maggot.’ Calling out to him everywhere he walks, sidling up to him as he eats his lunch and hissing in his ear. ‘You’re dead, maggot.’ The prison code is strong; despised by guards and prisoners alike, rock spiders – slang for those who sexually abuse children – are kept apart from the general prison population. The reasoning of the prisoners is basic: while they’re doing time, it could be their kid that is copping it from a paedophile. Difficult as it is, inmates invariably find ways to get protected prisoners. Their food is pissed on in the kitchen before they eat it, a sly fist crunched under their ribs when no one is looking, shit stuffed into their shoes. Carroll learns fast. He is scared for his life, told by other prisoners he should look out for himself and sooner or later those who picked on him would tire of it, told that if he cowered down, he’d cop it even more.
He cops it anyway. Relentlessly taunted, just as he had been at school. Hey Carroll, Sabre-tooth. This time the abuse is different. Calling out to him when he is in the toilet, hissing in his ear as they pass him in the yard. Scum bag. Child killer. Rock spider.
You’re dead, maggot.
Placed in the general area, Division One, which houses 550 other prisoners, Carroll is held in protective custody in a single-bedroom cell three metres by 1.8 metres. The cell walls are engraved with the desperate etchings of desperate men and the floor is uneven in parts where thousands have tried to out-step their claustrophobic demons by pacing up and down. Nothing but a desk and a toilet. But at least the toilet flushes. On the old side of the jail, prisoners only have a pan pail to use.
Escorted from his cell in the morning and returned in the afternoon, Carroll is locked down at 4pm until just after dawn the next day, when the same routine starts again. Lying on his bed through the long nights, his hands entwined under the nape of his neck, staring at the ceiling. Going over and over what had happened during the trial. The way they had spoken about his personality in court – he was disliked, a loner – and his teeth – stained, protruding. Like he was something out of a freak show. Paraded in court as if he needed a good hose-down. Seeing his mother’s face, gaunt and scrunched with pain, and hearing Sandra’s voice echoing after him – ‘I love you, Raymond’ – when he was escorted from the courtroom, down the stairway to hell. The voyeurs in the public gallery – curious, contemptuous – and Reynolds, hard as concrete, staring him down when the jurors came back with their verdict. Guilty, guilty, guilty… Standing there gawky, panicked, like the arse had fallen out of his world but registering nothing on his face. His entrails knotted, not moving, as the jurors’ voices enveloped him. Guilty, guilty, guilty … Vasta, sitting up there pompously pronouncing judgment, and feeling the relief in the court from everyone but his family. At least the Kennedys weren’t there. He couldn’t have dealt with them eyeballing him as well.
He has got to get out of this prison, this steaming hell-hole filled with ma
d, bad bastards and plastic gangsters who roam the periphery of the yard looking for trouble and usually find it, somehow. Brawls break out at the slightest excuse: a terse glance, an ill-chosen word, an accidental bump as someone walks past. The advice to the new blokes coming in is always the same: watch your back, watch your front and keep your peripheral vision clear. Standing high on the hill, Boggo Road is an illusion of grandeur, save for the wire that marks it as a fortress; inside, the men are trapped like spiders in sticky glycerine, subjugated to the bells and the orders and the sudden lock-downs: rhythmically, systematically institutionalised.
Carroll has told his solicitor to hit the ground running with any grounds for appeals he can find. It will take them a week to lodge it from the Public Defenders Office, and Christ only knows how long after that while it churns through the system.
The wheels of justice turn slowly.
The same old abuse, every day and now Carroll says he heard a new, strange voice join the throng. ‘How would you guys feel if you were convicted of this crime and didn’t do it?’ It is something of a salvation for a man shit-scared, a man despised and condemned by prisoners, guards and the outside world. From then, according to Carroll, the inmates actually started listening to him. After that he was out in the yard, in mainstream, not protective custody but in a solitary cell at night. He was given the option and chose mainstream. Carroll didn’t want to be in protective, he says, with those sick bastards. Didn’t want protection with those pricks.
The prisoners, he reckons, started to make their own decisions, started taking notice of him. They came to their own conclusion – that he was fitted up.
Nine months in Boggo Road. Physically unharmed but the taunting rarely stopped.
Scum bag. Child killer. Rock spider.
You’re dead, maggot.
His family feels as though they are in prison, too. Stalked by the press who seem to materialise at every turn demanding comment, they are also verbally attacked in the street. ‘Your brother’s where he belongs. They should throw away the key.’ Judgments come in less obvious messages, too: people turning to look over their shoulder as they walk past them in the street, muttering to their companion; cold gazes from shop assistants who recognise their photographs; the wordless, malevolent thinking, expressed in their eyes, that the family must have known something. It is as though they, too, are publicly condemned and branded, as if it is somehow their fault that Raymond has gone down for killing a baby. Within a short time of Raymond’s conviction, his younger brother Peter is picked up twice on the same night for drink-driving. His mother, Ilma, tormented with grief and outrage that her son has been convicted, has aged overnight, her once brown hair fading to shades of grey. Raymond’s sister Sandra would shoulder the burden that gnawed at her nervous system until it collapsed and she had a complete breakdown.
Raymond has been at Boggo Road for seven months. The prison grapevine has been beating like a bongo drum that a jail verbal is coming down against him. Word is that a prisoner is going to grass him up, repeat something that Carroll has allegedly said, drop the information in the ear of a screw. Raymond Carroll told me … It is the currency of prison, to give and receive. Give information, receive reward. Whether the information is true or not is irrelevant; coming shortly before the appeal, it has made his lawyers extremely testy. He is shoved back into protection to try to head it off, but his counsel decide the date set for his appeal is too close to take the risk of any detrimental evidence that may adversely affect the outcome. They want their client moved to Wacol Prison on the other side of Brisbane. It suits Carroll just fine. Wacol is a dream home in comparison to Boggo Road – a five-star hotel with modern facilities.
His reception into Wacol is not much better than it had been at Boggo. He has a cell to himself, is woken early in the morning to work in the kitchen and returns late at night to his quarters. The kitchen is one of the most dangerous places in the prison to work: stainless-steel knives, boiling water and heavy pans make perfect weapons for edgy, caged men. He keeps mainly to himself, tense and cautious. It would only be later that he would find out that the inmates in the kitchen had been cautioned sternly that if anything happened to him, they would lose all their privileges. Sleeping in protection and working mainstream, he copped a bit of abuse, but nothing major. Same old shit that he got at Boggo Road, he felt.
Scum bag. Child killer. Rock spider.
You’re dead, maggot.
Lying on his bunk at night, staring at the ceiling, his hands entwined behind his neck, he wonders how much longer it will be until he knows whether the appeal will be allowed. He has to get out of here, away from this wild rabble.
25
Raymond Carroll is pacing the yard, waiting for word to come through from his lawyers. He has been told the Appeals Court would make a decision today: 15 November 1985. It is stifling hot, five weeks before Christmas, heat prickling already prickly tempers. The other inmates are circling, restless; just the sniff of another man’s freedom makes them edgy. Carroll had earlier boasted to them that he would be out of here by tonight, but they know better than to take bets. Many a man has mistakenly reckoned on his freedom on pre-judging what a jury or an Appeals Court will decide.
A screw is walking toward Carroll. The inmates lean against the yard wall, smoking, watching. Waiting.
Carroll’s counsel had clear instructions: to pursue each and every legal ground against the jury’s verdict. They have done so, raising numerous grounds for appeal: an attack on the admissibility of evidence, suggested defects in the summing-up, Carroll’s lack of knowledge about the Kennedy family, the description of the man seen on the veranda that did not fit his description, and the adequacy of the Crown case as a whole.
Lawyers devour the issues, taking each apart thread by thread. Trevor Hartigan, QC, and Kerry Copley appeared for Carroll; Philip Nase, for the Crown.
The hearing lasts for two days. Faye and Barry are on tenterhooks, waiting for the result. Faye buries herself in work, in her management role at the local supermarket. Barry doesn’t say much, keeping his thoughts to himself, but Faye finds it almost impossible to concentrate.
Carroll doesn’t have to say a word. The other prisoners know, by the way he holds his thumb up in a victory salute, that he is out. Cool, detached, he doesn’t turn to say goodbye after he collects his belongings, exiting through the electronic doors. An inmate watches his disappearing back, crushes a cigarette under his boot and spits on the concrete.
Angelo Vasta is in chambers when one of the appeals judges advises him of the acquittal. It is a blunt summation of their decision, delivered by verbal guillotine. ‘We’ve rolled you, Angelo.’ Common courtesy dictates he be told before it is made public. But the decision is irreversible.
Vasta stares out of his chamber’s window, and ponders the appeal outcome. As Chief Crown Prosecutor, he has worked on hundreds of cases of rape and serious sexual assault, but never of a child of such tender age. It is, for him, truly a horrifying case. He doesn’t grieve for himself when he hears that Carroll has been acquitted; he grieves for justice, for the overturning of a jury’s decision. It was a decision which they took very seriously, believing that the evidence against Carroll was strong, and which Vasta believes has been overturned on technicalities and points of law. To his knowledge, this has not been done before. Usually a re-trial is ordered, which does not happen on this occasion. For Vasta, that raises serious concerns. Usually the Appeals Court says ‘the evidence as we read it is unsatisfactory’ and orders a re-trial; they didn’t do that in the Kennedy case. Instead, they allowed the appeal, quashed the conviction and directed a verdict of acquittal. The consequences of the appeal are the same as if the jury had returned a verdict of not guilty. Essentially, the appeal court’s verdict has locked the door on the case and thrown away the key.
He ponders a possible scenario. ‘Imagine if an Appeals Court overturns a jury decision and the next week the accused says, “I did it.” With our double jeopa
rdy laws as they are, it would not be possible for that person to be re-tried.’
Double jeopardy. The principle of law that says no person shall be twice tried for the same offence for which they have previously been either acquitted or convicted. The courts may also consider it an abuse of process for additional charges to be brought, following an acquittal or conviction, for different offences that arose from the same behaviour or facts.
Seated at a vast desk in a study lined with legal texts, Angelo Vasta does not have the slightest air of pomposity. Warm and personable, his face, creased with laughter lines and years of worry, appears as though it has been rinsed in eons of Sicilian sunshine. Look closer and it could be his father, cutting cane in the muggy heat of an oppressive North Queensland summer.
‘Look,’ he says, settling into his leather chair, ‘Appeals Courts do overturn decisions – that is a fact of law. It is the function of that court to look at evidence if an appeal is raised, and it is their right to decide accordingly. So I didn’t take it personally. But I knew the jurors would wonder at the decision. And they did wonder.’
Faye is at work when John Reynolds, who has been keeping track of the appeals process for the Kennedys, advises her of the appeal decision. A sound escapes her, like the noise of a wounded animal, a cry he will never forget.
It is Carroll’s first weekend of freedom in nine months. As he is walking out of Wacol Prison, his lawyer is representing him in the Ipswich Magistrate’s Court where he was granted bail on the 17 charges from the break-in at the women’s quarters in 1982. Ten break-and-enter charges, six of wilful destruction and one stealing offence. He finds out by telephone that he has been granted bail on the undertaking he reports weekly to police. Carroll has not taken any chances with anyone knowing his whereabouts. On his lawyer’s advice, he meets Jennifer and the children and scarpers straight into hiding.
Justice In Jeopardy Page 15
