Raymond and Jennifer’s third daughter together, Tabatha, is born in early November 1989, but the marriage is in trouble. Jail does strange things to a person, breeds paranoia. After they move to Leeton, he goes out playing cards on a Friday night but Jennifer doesn’t like it. When he tells her he is going to go to Mildura to watch the bike races for three days, she tells him to go, but warns if he does, not to bother coming back.
He goes.
Jennifer has a neighbour Marilyn, with whom she often associates on a friendly basis. When Raymond goes to the bike meeting, Jennifer tells her she is going to put his stuff out the front, cut up his photographs and his personal items. Marilyn responds that that’s not a nice thing to do. On Tabatha’s second birthday in 1991, Jennifer and Raymond’s marriage ends. Within a short time, Marilyn and Raymond are together.
Faye and Barry had returned to an Ipswich posting in 1988, but their marriage has been quietly eroding, sliding away beneath them. In 1992, the year they celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the union that had started with passion and love collapses under the weight of unresolved sorrow and guilt.
Barry has fallen apart. Since the acquittal, he has simply shut down, as if a light has been turned off in his eyes. Not living, just surviving, with a blank, pensive look that never goes away. He carries all his hurt inside, and it has consumed him. Haunted by guilt that a stranger entered his home and abducted his daughter, he has constantly berated himself that he should have done more. He feels it is his fault. He feels he is a failure.
The RAAF had offered some counselling sessions, but they were of little help to Barry. He found unburdening his soul to a virtual stranger awkward and embarrassing. He is a private man, who deals with his problems in his own way.
Alcohol blurs the pain. He is drinking heavily now, rarely home. Month after month, Faye goes looking for him. He had always been spotlessly turned out, his shirts starched and ironed; always an exemplary serviceman. But now he has gone AWOL, and the service police pick him up. They barely recognise the bleary-eyed, dishevelled man as Barry Kennedy.
Faye’s old fears resurface when she sees Barry drunk. Just the smell of the alcohol is enough to bring back the dread she had felt with her father, and how the drinking had destroyed her parents’ marriage. But Barry has never been violent, never even raised his voice. Just quiet, maudlin, drowning his demons.
Money is haemmoraging from the household, swallowed by his gambling habit. They don’t bicker, but icy silences last for days and there is simmering resentment. Faye tries to understand, asks him why he does it. His answer stuns her. When he is drinking and gambling, he says, he can block out the real world. He doesn’t have to think about Deidre. Doesn’t have to think about what happened.
But he will stop. He will straighten out. Everything will be all right.
‘You need to get help, Barry.’ Faye seems to be saying it all the time, now. ‘Please, Barry, get some help.’
I will, mate, I will.
He props a goodbye note on the sideboard and quietly closes the door behind him.
The house is so empty without him. Faye is still in love with Barry, and desperately lonely years follow as she withdraws with her grief. Barry was all she knew; they had done everything together since they were teenagers, and it is such a waste of a good man. She thought they could get through anything together, and after Derek was born, they tried to make their lives full. The years they had before the first trial were good, wholesome years as a family. But it wasn’t enough.
In her darkest moments, feeling as though she is disintegrating, she flirts with the idea of suicide. There is a cliff in front of her, beckoning. She won’t turn the car, will keep accelerating and free-fall into oblivion. She plants her foot on the accelerator, grips the wheel tighter.
But she can’t do it. She sits at the steering wheel trembling, crying. After all the grief Stephanie and Derek have been through with her, she doesn’t want to make them suffer any more. She sits sobbing for hours in the quiet womb of the car, before she drives home.
There is solace in the familiar comforts of home, and in hard work. But peace does not always come easily. She is stunned, inconsolable, when a stranger approaches her in the street and berates her for being a bad mother because she hadn’t locked the doors and window on the night Deidre was abducted. Right up close to her face, spitting out her venom. ‘It’s your own fault. You can’t blame nobody else. You’re a bad mother, Faye Kennedy.’
Faye weeps for days.
Dr Kon Romaniuk is walking across a busy road in Sydney, dodging the frantic traffic of weekend drivers rushing to enjoy the hot January 1994 day. He doesn’t see it coming, can’t remember feeling anything as a motorbike slams into his side and he lies sprawled in the gutter.
Months in hospital follow, and the best the doctors can say is he is lucky to be alive. So visually impaired as to be legally blind, he has damage to the frontal and back lobes of his brain and has lost all cognitive ability.
Romaniuk never works again. He becomes a shadowy figure who goes into the university office, like a homing pigeon, but cannot always remember why he is there.
The years turn slowly, season after season through the 1990s. The snap of winter, when dew forms diamond drops on windowsills; spring, when flowers peek shyly from their buds; summer, when butterflies float in the warmth of blazing sunshine; and autumn, when leaves turn russet. Year after turning year, Faye’s four grandchildren – two each from Stephanie and Derek – grow older and the pages of her photo album start to wither at the edges.
Faye lives quietly. Late on summer afternoons, she sits out alone on the back patio of her suburban Ipswich house on the fringes of bushland, watching time pass with the heralding of a changing sky. At dusk, the harsh blue infused with streaks of watermelon, and then darkness encroaches, gently. It is at these times she feels the loneliness most, an exquisite loneliness when she aches for all she had lost. Losing Barry has been hard enough. But whoever had abducted her daughter had also kidnapped the sunshine.
She keeps to herself, wary of strangers. When one of the uniformed police from the original investigation approaches her in the street, she shies away, skittish and scared. He only wants to wish her well, says he kept up with proceedings from a distance. She thanks him, abashed at how many people have looked out for her, without her even knowing.
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Queensland journalist Peter Hansen has been in the game so long there is little he doesn’t know about the Kennedy case. But Hansen is of the old school. Don’t boast about who you know, and never burn a contact. Off the record means off the record. With a voice as smooth as warmed whiskey, an old-fashioned turn of phrase and a brain that zeroes like a radar on to a good story, he lacks the brash abrasiveness often seen in younger reporters. Seduced back to part-time journalism from retirement, Hansen is mindful of sensitivities, particularly those of Faye Kennedy. He frets for her that, already debilitated by grief, each time something new breaks in the inquiry into Deidre’s murder, her hopes soar only to be dashed again in despair. Journalists, he ruminates, should walk gently on this patch.
Could computer technology be used to solve the Kennedy case? Senior-Sergeant John Garner, specialist in forensic imaging and freehand drawing with Queensland Police, was determined to find out. Devising a digital analysis system in 1997, he and forensic odontologist Dr Alex Forrest, a lecturer in Oral Biology at the University of Queensland, believe they discovered that it elicited information about the bite marks on Deidre’s thigh not seen at the 1985 murder trial. The Deidre Kennedy case, in theory unsolved and re-opened since Carroll’s acquittal, has, in reality, been sitting gathering dust for 12 years through lack of leads or suspects. It is a reality that is about to change.
John Garner trusts Hansen. He is, he reasons, the perfect person for him and Alex Forrest to speak to about the new technique they had devised to reconstruct a human face from a skull. And, while they were there with him, they would mention the bre
akthrough they had made in the identification of bite marks using digital technology. Perhaps it could help solve the Deidre Kennedy murder?
Garner is more scientist than cop, a lateral thinker who grates evidence to shreds and re-builds it, piece by piece, as if it were a Lego set. Each piece on top of the other, layering, gluing them in place. And when the pieces don’t fit, he mentally sets them aside. There are pieces that don’t fit in the Kennedy case, and he is dying to have a crack at it.
The technology had discovered two more bite marks on Deidre’s thigh.
Forrest and Garner go over what they know. Bite mark number one was the obvious bruising referred to in the dental evidence at the first trial. But closer to the back surface of the thigh, to the right on the photograph they can now see a faint bite mark bruise. They will call this bite mark number two.
On bite mark number one they can see a curvy mark, near the top of the thigh that almost touches the bruise made by one of the lower teeth. This, they have ascertained, is a bruise made by the clip attached to the step-in in which Deidre was dressed. It is close to the bite mark, but independent of it.
The new technology took years to perfect, but the techniques were simple.
Garner is looking at the post-mortem photo of Deidre. Her skin has very faint, directional scratches caused, he thinks by the scraping action of the teeth over the surface of her skin just prior to the actual bite. If no pressure had been applied in the bite, that would explain the lack of indentation marks. There was nothing to cause them.
Deidre, Garner believes, was not lying down when she was bitten. Years spent photographing horrific scenes – murder, suicide, accidents – has hardened his shell, but he is still ashen when he explains what happened to her. He speaks in rapid-fire voice, layering his scientific knowledge of the case with insightful comment and opinion. As a circuit breaker to tension, using his skills as a free-hand artist, he often draws caricatures of people involved in different cases. Some have a sour edge, others are bleak. The Kennedy case affected him so deeply, he drew scores on the subject.
Garner illustrates with his hands how he believes Deidre was held. It is like watching a macabre puppet show, hynoptically following the strings as they move up and down. ‘She was picked up by her left leg, like this’ – he turns his hand over – ‘and held upside down. Picked up by this animal like she was a leg of turkey, her right leg flailing. She was in this positon when he bit her, raking the skin with his teeth. We can only imagine how distressed she would have been. The poor, pitiful little soul.’ His description is so vivid I am stunned speechless and tears dampen my shirt. It comes as a boot in my gut, and bile burns my throat, rising swiftly on a tide of horror and disgust. She was only a defenceless, vulnerable baby. The poor, pitiful little soul.
Forrest and Garner needed to solve some basic theoretical problems before they could move on. How best to analyse a three-dimensional dental model against a two-dimensional photograph? On a curved surface, such as an arm or a leg, the angle changes when teeth close, and a wave of tissue moves ahead of the upper teeth, which leaves an impression of the insides of those teeth. The lower teeth drag less and tend to leave more sharply defined wounds.
With the help of Dr. Peter Adams from the University’s Department of Mathematics, they devised a formula to calculate distortions made by curvature. Using the formula and taking a photograph of the thigh, they worked in reverse to ‘unfold’ the leg and show how the bite mark would look had it happened on a flat surface.
To demonstrate which tooth touched in which order as it came into contact with the surface of the skin, they placed the dental model into a Chinese takeaway food container and slowly poured in ink and detergent. It was rudimentary science, but it did the trick. Garner took photographs vertically from above, clicking away as each tooth in turn submerged until eventually they were all covered. The result was a series of pictures which showed the contours of the teeth at each given ink level, allowing them to analyse the parts of the dentition in contact with a surface as the bite became deeper. They then ran the digital image in reserve, watching as the teeth gradually grew and emerged from the ink.
They knew that Carroll’s front teeth could not come together without a lot of effort, if at all. He had developed a habit of biting on the side, off-centre. Because of that, Garner said, they knew his teeth were going to be at an angle when they hit the skin. They could not hit flat on, as someone with a normal bite does.
Another challenge was to compare similar things, to ensure they were precisely the same scale. Instead of comparing teeth with the wound, they produced a wound from the teeth and compared the simulated wound with the original. Both the teeth and the wound had to be scaled correctly, and they had to be able to demonstrate that they had been scaled the same.
To compare the drag marks on Deidre’s skin, they dipped the cast of teeth into powdered dental wax, dragged the teeth across a surface like fingers down a blackboard and took photographs which they then put on the computer. Irregular teeth would leave a barcode effect as they dragged. Garner superimposed the drag marks on the original photograph to see if there was a corresponding bite mark pattern. It was a visual test, and he was satisfied it worked.
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Peter Hansen is very interested in what Garner has to say. Where, he wants to know, would they use their new techniques?
It is Garner’s chance, a calculated opportunity to try to bring on another shot at the Carroll case. ‘Had this technology been around at the time of the Deidre Kennedy trial,’ he says, in a tone that he hopes does not give too much away, ‘I am confident that we would have had a different result.’
The interview pays dividends. Headlined ‘Give me Peace – Mum Wants Justice for Murdered Baby Deidre’, an article, printed in February 1997, trumpets that a breakthrough in the case that horrified Australia is now possible because forensic experts could identify the murderer from bite marks on the toddler’s body. Faye speaks with Hansen about her hope that Deidre’s killer will be convicted. Hailing the advances in forensic dentistry as a ‘modern miracle’, Hansen recounts how Garner and Forrest have identified a deceased North Queensland man by building a face from a skull with astonishing accuracy. ‘But,’ he writes, ‘the case that cries out for answers is the one which caused Australia-wide outrage 24 years ago …’
There is an incredible response to the newspaper report. Unlike the hundreds of reports that had been written about Deidre before, this one prompts a stream of people to telephone this newspaper and the police.
One of these people is Graham Bradshaw, a fair-haired, gentle-mannered man who had served in the RAAF. The story he tells the newspaper is astonishing. He had, he claims, been drinking with friends in the convivial atmosphere of an airmen’s club in 1974 when another RAAF member, whom he believed to be Raymond Carroll, approached him. ‘Do you know anything about the murder of a little girl at Ipswich?’ Carroll allegedly asked him. The question startled Bradshaw. ‘I said I had read about a baby’s body being thrown on to the roof of a toilet block in an Ipswich park, and he replied that was the one he was talking about. He then said, “I did it.”’
Bradshaw was stunned into disbelief. What sort of person would want to boast about something as evil and deranged as the sexual assault and murder of a defenceless baby? He looked at his mates, perplexed, and then stared hard at Carroll. ‘Are you really trying to tell us that you killed this little girl?’
‘Yes, I did it.’ Carroll, according to Bradshaw, was impassive, offering no explanation for the murder. ‘I didn’t know what to make of it,’ Bradshaw told Hansen. ‘It seemed so unreal and the man was as cool as a cucumber.’ Bradshaw’s drinking companions had apparently warned him not to believe Carroll, as he was unreliable. ‘The man’s a bull artist. A storyteller. Full of shit.’ He had not gone to police earlier, Bradshaw said, as he knew that Carroll had been arrested and everything was under control. He figured police had enough evidence already to get the murder charge through, a
nd afterward he became busy at work and never thought of the incident again until he read that Carroll had been released.
In 2000, conducting a review of cold cases stretching back 40 years, Detective-Superintendent Peter Barron, the officer in charge of Homicide, Brisbane, asks Detective Senior-Constable Cameron Herpich to look at the Kennedy file. ‘Let me know what you think,’ he instructs him.
Days after the Sunday Mail report appears, Barron receives another phone call from a man, who chooses to remain anonymous, telling him that a ‘certain person’ had admitted to him that he had killed Deidre. The level of detail he offers is chillingly accurate and Barron makes a public appeal to the man to call back. ‘I believe there are other people out there in the community who could provide us with valuable information,’ he said. ‘It has become quite obvious that at the time of the investigation people had information, but for one reason or another – through fear or not wanting to be involved – they did not come forward.’
Another man with a thorough knowledge of the park crawls out of the woodwork and contacts John Reynolds by phone, telling him that he had seen Deidre dumped on top of the toilet block. The killer, he says, was driving a white Holden panel van and had climbed on the roof-racks to reach the top of the block. He cries as he explains to Reynolds why he hadn’t come forward earlier, describing himself as ‘young, stupid and naïve’. Refusing to give his name, he promises to contact Reynolds again. He never does.
Two weeks after the Sunday Mail article is published, another titled ‘Exclusive – I Didn’t Kill Baby: Carroll Speaks Out’ appears in the same newspaper.
The man convicted and then cleared of one of Queensland’s most notorious child murders is living and working only kilometres from the death scene … Carroll, 41, was confronted by workmates at a meat-processing factory near Ipswich last week. They asked if he was the subject of renewed police interest in the murder and whether it was his photo in the Sunday Mail.
Justice In Jeopardy Page 17
