‘He was located in 20 minutes.’
Deidre’s older sister, Stephanie, was in Year 12 during the murder trial, and was 31 years old by the time of the perjury trial. On her wedding day, she cried for the sister she no longer had who should have been her bridesmaid. ‘It has had an enormous impact on all our lives,’ she says. ‘You can’t live with something like this and not be affected. How Mum has come through it as she has – with so much dignity and courage – amazes me. She is an extraordinary woman.’
Stephanie, formerly a nurse at a Sydney medical centre, tried hypnosis to see if she had locked any memories of the intruder’s face in her subconscious. It failed. ‘I thought that maybe I could have woken up and seen something, but I was scared and blocked it out. It spooks me still, knowing that someone was in that room where we both slept. I hoped hypnosis would return some childhood memories of Deidre and me, but they are all gone.’
Until Stephanie started high school, Faye walked her to school every day. Still obsessive about security and terrified of the dark, Stephanie locks the house like a fortress and keeps a close eye on her children. Even when she is home alone, she keeps the doors locked and rarely opens the windows. ‘My ritual is to kiss the kids goodnight, lock the house and then check the front door again.’ If she ever had to put washing on the line at night, she made her husband, Shane, stand at the back door.
Stephanie now has to call on her own courage. In early 2005, aged just 42, her husband, Shane, suffered a sudden heart attack at work. He called out to his mate for help, but, by the time he got to him, it was too late. Stephanie called Faye as soon as she heard what had happened. ‘Mummy,’ she said in a whimpering voice breaking with grief. ‘Oh, Mummy. Shane is dead.’ Faye’s screams reverberated around the room. Faye contacted Barry to tell him she had bad news. ‘Oh, God,’ he remembers saying to her. ‘Please don’t tell me something’s happened to one of the kids?’Barry flew to Sydney for the funeral. He hadn’t seen Stephanie since the perjury acquittal, but he was heartbroken for her and the children. ‘Shane was a terrific bloke,’ he says. ‘They are bereft. How much more do they have to suffer?’
Derek Kennedy won’t let his children out of his sight. He watches them all the time, even in the house. All the time. Faye, he says, bordered on obsession when he was growing up, not resting until he was home, but she tried to keep it in check. In early 2005, Derek and his wife had another son. He watches him all the time too.
The smell of roses reminds him of Deidre. Roses, from the times in his childhood when he went with his family to the memorial wall where Deidre’s ashes were originally held. He was too young to know why they went there, but he remembers the scent and the feelings. Roses, tears and a terrible anguish that he couldn’t quite understand.
Now 58, Barry Kennedy has been in a happy relationship with his partner, Jenny, for 10 years. He doesn’t have much hair left and his beard is grey, but he has cleaned up his act, no longer drinking or gambling to excess.
He discovered his weaknesses, he says, after Deidre’s murder, and he didn’t like them. Demonised and haunted by guilt that he didn’t get out of bed the night she was abducted, he self-flagellated for years. He was weak. Useless. He had failed as a father, a husband and a man. Self-forgiveness was a long, painful process, but one he has finally reached. What happened wasn’t his fault.
And it wasn’t his way to crusade for Deidre. Easygoing, placid, he doesn’t like attention and hates confrontation. The trials, the media made him nervous as hell. It was bad enough the first time, but the second? He sensed it was doomed from the start, that double jeopardy laws would be a stumbling block. He wants to see the law changed, but he will leave that to others to do. ‘I’m not obsessed about any of it,’ he says, quietly. ‘It’s happened. I have no control over events and so I just have to live with them.’ Everyone, he thinks, had a point to prove in the second trial and he wasn’t going to get on that band-wagon. It’s not his way.
He thinks about Deidre every day, the lovely little girl who scooted along the floor on her bottom and smiled up at him when she hugged his knees. That’s enough for him. That’s his way.
Faye had not seen her father since she was pregnant with Stephanie. He died of pneumonia in the early nineties and she went to his funeral, to get some closure. Her attendance caused an irreconcilable rift between her mother, Freda, and herself. She has not seen her mother since.
Faye has long accepted that nothing can fill the void left by Deidre’s death. In 2004, she visited a clairvoyant to try to calm the nagging ache, and find out if her daughter is safe.
‘My parents had such a bitter separation, and Dad didn’t ever contact me after we lost Deidre. I could never understand his silence, but he always asked other people how I was coping. The clairvoyant told me she could see a little girl with my father. She said, “Tell Mum I’m doing OK.” That’s what I always worried about – that she is OK.’
Faye’s voice is soft and light. Never loud, nor jagged with bitterness or anger. Often, choked with tears and caught in a purgatory of grief, her words are inaudible.
In May 2005 Faye and I again make contact. Her prolonged silence – 10 months – was, she explains, because of her grief. The memories were too hard to bear. Her grief contributed to the silence, and another reason we only lightly explore. We both know what it is, but best not to dwell on this. The most important thing is that I now again have Faye’s full trust and support. Deidre’s story, I tell her, is now complete. I have done what I said I would do, I assure her; I researched the nooks and crannies of the police investigation, the court cases, the characters. And it is done. Faye weeps, quietly, as we talk. Thank you, she says.
She is more media savvy now, stronger than the woman thrust into the limelight who shied from camera flashbulbs. Every time there was a turn in the investigation, police wondered how much more she could cope with, how many more hurdles she could jump. But, underneath, she is the same woman: emotionally fragile, amused and touched by simple things. Still the shy country girl who does not trust easily, who has a steely inner strength but is warm, loving with those she allows under her guard.
Those who know her – police, lawyers, friends – describe her as an inspiration. She understands pain, the gnawing, inconsolable emptiness reserved especially for those who have lost a child. She once worked with a woman whose 23-year-old daughter jumped off a bridge in Ipswich. They found her body the next morning, sprawled carelessly in death; no suicide note, no reason offered. Her mother turned to Faye to find a meaning for her loss, to help her understand the incomprehensible.
Faye once attended a victims of homicide meeting, where she found the pain in the room overwhelming. When she had to introduce herself, she wanted to run. It was the first time she had ever uttered that her daughter had been murdered.
She listened to a man speak about his murdered brother. ‘Things that are inconsequential to other people can become huge to those who have lost someone in sudden death. It concerned the man that he was wearing his brother’s shoes,’ Faye remembers. ‘I told him, if it feels right, wear them. Who are we to judge?’ So much pain in that room, she never went to another meeting.
So many things bring back memories. Derek’s young daughter bears a striking resemblance to Deidre, and she points at photographs in the family album. ‘Is that me, Grandma?’ she asks Faye. ‘Is that me?’
‘No, it’s not you. It’s your Daddy’s sister.’
‘I haven’t seen her. Where is she?’
And Faye has to explain. ‘I have to tell her that Deidre is dead. It shouldn’t be like this. She is only three years old.’
Faye has not been to church in years, but she calls quietly on her old faith for comfort. ‘Our children are only on loan to us. I remember an old lady once said to me, it is obscene for a mother to have to bury her child. I believe we all meet again in time and that there is somewhere safe where people go. I guess it’s what we know as Heaven. And the person who did this to Deidre
– he’s yet to meet his maker.’
Faye’s faith in God has been severely tested. ‘I have to believe Deidre was put here for a reason and that we have had to suffer like this for a reason. I refuse to believe that her little life was in vain. Perhaps the purpose of her being was that the laws of double jeopardy could be changed so that other families would never have to endure what we have.’
The victim, Faye says, deserves as much finality as the accused. ‘Families of murder victims are left with nowhere to turn when Appeals Courts overturn a jury’s decision. If we can change this law, other people won’t have to suffer. What is the point in juries if their verdicts are ignored? It is hard to understand the legal system.’
Deidre’s cremation negated any opportunity of a later exhumation that may, possibly have helped identify her killer. Graciously, Faye says that authorities didn’t know then what they know now.
They didn’t know then what they know now. And would it have made any difference if they had? What information was contained in those lost doorknocks? Would the RAAF records have yielded decisive clues? And the pubic hair; if the testing protocols had been applied correctly, would a DNA match have been found?
Faye never questioned the police, never demanded answers. They treated her gently, kindly, included her in everything they did. They never gave up fighting to find Deidre’s killer. Cameron Herpich warned her on the first day of the perjury trial that, if she ever asked a question, to be sure she wanted to hear the answer because he would only ever tell her the truth. And, when the jury returned a guilty verdict, he thanked her for allowing him to turn her world upside down. But still, there were so many unanswered questions, things the family had been shielded from. The police had shouldered her burdens, become her saviours. It would be 29 years before Faye could summon the courage to finally ask details of what had happened to her baby.
She wished she hadn’t asked.
When doubts niggle, which they frequently do, her instinct is to offer clemency. It was a long time ago. Things were done differently in those days. They didn’t know then, what they know now.
She thinks about the day John Reynolds told her police were re-opening the investigation, and the call from Cameron Herpich that followed years later. Knowing what she knows now – that her marriage would end, the ongoing trauma her family would suffer, the obsession that people would bring to the case and their final, futile outcomes – she knows exactly what she would have done.
Under no circumstances would she have answered those calls.
Plagued with insomnia, Faye often wakes at night, padding quietly into the room where she keeps Deidre’s special belongings, and the soft pink chest that holds her ashes. Sitting on the edge of the bed in the darkness, talking tenderly to her daughter.
Happy birthday, darling. You would be 36 today.
It’s Christmas Day, bubby. I wish you were here with us.
And the anniversary of that terrible, bleak morning when Stephanie had roused her. ‘Mummy, wake up! Dee Dee is not in her bed.’
Sitting in the darkness, sobbing.
She is driven to keep fighting. ‘When my mind casts back to my last memories of Deidre, I know why I continue to do this. For a stranger to come into my home, where he wasn’t supposed to be, take my child that wasn’t his to take and do the things he did, is truly evil. If the double jeopardy laws are changed, they will always be known in my heart as Deidre’s Law.’
Faye now has a partner, a gentle, caring man whom she adores, someone she can talk to and cry without shame. Love, she says, has helped her restore some balance in her life. In 2004 she made the decision, finally, to leave Ipswich and move in with him. They will marry one day, but not yet.
Faye drives out of her street, glancing through the rear-view mirror at the council sign erected on the corner. ‘We love our children. Please drive carefully.’
It has taken years to decide to leave Ipswich, to sell the home she fought so hard to keep. She closes the front door for the last time, stifles her urge to cry. She will drive out the long way, as she has always done, avoiding Limestone Park.
No matter where Faye goes, her daughter’s memory is with her.
‘Deidre was too little to form sentences, but, if she was awake, she would have been crying. She was so shy, so very scared of strangers. This monster had no compunction about what he did. If he had a conscience, surely it would have kicked in, either at the time or in the years following. I know my little girl would have cried. Couldn’t he hear her?’
Couldn’t he hear her?
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to the many people who were wonderfully generous with their time and knowledge and who trusted I would do this story justice.
In Queensland: warmest thanks to Faye Kennedy, Barry Kennedy, their daughter, Stephanie, and son, Derek, who are at the heart of this story. Former judge Angelo Vasta, QC, for his dignified wisdom and help, and his staff, Rose Mather and Ellise Van Dam. Michael Byrne, QC, for his exceptional support, and his PA, Rhonda Lewis. John Reynolds, who was fabulous with his help and always got back to me when he said he would. Kon and Leona Romaniuk for a poignant interview. Defense lawyer Peter Russo, who gave an insightful and lengthy interview. Barrister Peter Davis for his time and for trusting me with precious appeal books. Barrister Adrian Gundelach for his knowledge and photographs. John Rowley for his memories. John Garner for mapping out this complex story and never losing patience with me in trying to understand it. Alex Forrest for his painstaking deconstruction of difficult scientific concepts. Criminologist Dr Paul Wilson for his insights into criminal behaviour. Former policeman-turned-lawyer Gordon Harris for sharing his overall knowledge of Queensland and its politics. Thanks to the Carroll family for allowing me the first interview they have ever given, the staff at Brisbane’s State Reporting Bureau – Scott Braidwood, Ben Russo and Ian McEwan for their help with transcripts and Florence and Jimmy Lee for accommodation in Brisbane.
In Hobart, special thanks to forensic odontologist Dr Paul Taylor who spent weeks of his own time checking that the dental evidence in the book is correct. David Peberdy, whose translation of that evidence into simple language was invaluable. Dr Maree Wilson, who gave evidence at the perjury committal and entrusted me with transcripts. Forensic psychiatrist Dr Saxby Pridmore, who threw light on the darkness of human behaviour and helped me understand the psychopathic mind. Dr David Basser, for his kindness.
In Adelaide, Dr Kenneth Brown for his help in explaining the wonders of forensic odontology. Carmel Vowles, Daniel Vowles and Leonie and Mitch Williams, who opened their home for me to share for two months during the final edit. And the crew at SAS 7 for their fantastic support in allowing me to juggle the manuscript in tandem with a television project.
Thanks also to Janette Hughes, Ipswich Library and Ben Bartl, researcher at the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute, for helping me make sense of double jeopardy laws, Joseph Bondin for his continual battle with my jinxed computer and my brother, Wayne Marshall, for his terrific help checking the final manuscript.
Copyright of court transcripts belongs to the State of Queensland and the material is reproduced with permission.
Thanks to the many journalists who have gone before me, whose brains I have picked whilst researching this story. Particular thanks to David Nason, former Queensland Bureau Chief at the Australian newspaper who, ironically, gave me my start in journalism in Darwin in 1986. Also to Jamie Walker, Paula Donaman, Peter Hansen and the Australian’s editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell.
Huge thanks to the team at Random House publishing who nursed this story through to publication. Executive publisher, Jane Palfreyman, who backed my idea, again, and whose faith in this project made it possible. Former publishing assistant, Renée Senogles for her unending patience. Associate publisher Meredith Curnow for her buoyant enthusiasm despite some nail-biting setbacks, editor Brandon VanOver for reading and re-reading the manuscript and rights manager, Nerrilee Weir. Thanks also to freelan
ce editor Jo Butler, who didn’t miss a trick and lawyer Richard Potter, a font of legal wisdom.
Faye Kennedy requested that I thank, on her family’s behalf, MP Peter Dutton who keeps snapping at the heels of the Queensland government to change the double jeopardy laws; the Queensland Police Service; the RAAF; the University of Queensland and the John Tonge Centre, who have all, over the years, played an enormous part in this story. Barry Kennedy wishes to pay particular thanks to 3AD section at RAAF, Amberley, for their help.
For their unwavering support through good times and bad, my wonderful friends: Traceelea and David Peberdy, Jenny Robinson, Joanna Thyer, Glen Pears, Heather and Geoff Hocking, Kate Hansford, Mick Titley, Kevin Hunt. Thanks also to my family; Ralph Richardson Esq. for the crime books he gave me; Margaret Hawkins and Deb Martin for their awesome help in preparing the book launch and to Eilleen and John Breadon and Lyn Kelly for helping with my daughter when I was interstate researching. To my other friends and colleagues around Australia who helped me through some dark days and believe in me: you know who you are. Thank you.
Finally, special thanks to the two women to whom this book is dedicated. My mother, Monica: a fabulous travelling companion and an invaluable help with research in Queensland, who never complained about sore feet, long hours and no pay. And my own precious daughter, Louise, who had a lot to endure through my obsession with this story and for whose life and love I am truly blessed.
Bibliography
Brown, Dr Kenneth. ‘New Evidence in the Carroll Case’. Forensic Odontology Consultant, The University of Adelaide
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (DSM IV) ed. 4, American Psychiatric Association, Washington, 1994
Gundelach, Adrian. ‘Lawyer’s Reasoning and Scientific Proof: A Cautionary Tale in Forensic Odontology’, Journal of Forensic Odonto-Stomatology, Vol. 7, No. 2, December 1989
Justice In Jeopardy Page 35
