Worse was to come. In mid-2005, Geoff was told he was being investigated yet again, because of a new and very serious complaint, a Category One. He was given no other details—not even the name of the complainant—which is standard procedure, but it added to his stress. Assuming Wilkinson had struck again (he was right: this was the murder allegation made to the PIC), he complained to his superiors about this latest example of harassment. He was told the complaint process would have to take its course. It occurred to him that Wilkinson was using his knowledge of the police complaints systems to exert emotional pressure on him; he would be fully aware of the stress caused by the drawn-out, secretive nature of the procedures involved. Had Geoff been anything other than a cop, Wilkinson would not have had this hold on him.
In December 2005 there was yet another strange coincidence. Geoff was out one night, and Sue—who by this point didn’t like being at home by herself, from fear Wilkinson might call—had gone with friends to a nightclub in Cronulla. There she began a conversation with a stranger on the dance floor. This turned out to be Julie Thurecht. When Julie realised who Sue was, she said she used to know Geoff but had lost touch. Sue recognised Julie’s name. Geoff—fortunately—had told her about their brief fling. Now Julie said she had something important to tell him, and Sue gave her his number.
The next night, Julie came to their house and gave them a copy of the nine-page statement Wilkinson had given the Police Integrity Commission six months earlier, accusing Geoff of the horrific murder of Kylie and other serious crimes. The Lowes were astonished and distressed. When Julie had gone, Geoff rang the duty officer at Miranda, who came over that night. He advised Geoff to show the document to the officer investigating the Category One complaint, which he did.
For weeks over Christmas and into January 2006, Geoff heard nothing about the matter from anyone in the police service. Sue and he were now very worried about their safety: from the PIC statement, it was obvious there was something seriously wrong with Wilkinson, who had a burning hatred of Geoff and lived in the next suburb.
Finally, on 9 February 2006, Geoff was interviewed by Glenn Smith and Andrew Waterman at the Sutherland Police Station. Waterman was there to provide senior oversight, given that Lowe was a fellow officer.
Geoff denied every allegation Wilkinson had made to the PIC and said, ‘I believe that for whatever reason, Paul Wilkinson is either jealous or resentful of any relationship I had with Julie a long time before Julie had even met him. Why he has this hatred towards me I have absolutely no idea. This bloke has dead-set made my life a living hell for the last couple of years. I’ve had to change my phone, I’ve had to sell my car, my wife’s car. My wife is living in dread because I’m a shift worker and sometimes at night she’s at home alone, she’s just out of her mind sometimes that this bloke’s going to come around.’ He said he felt sorry for Julie because ‘I know that she split up with him now and I would hate, if I was a female, to have an ex-husband like that who’s just—he just seems to have some serious anger management issues’.
After the interview, the detectives visited Geoff’s home and took away items of clothing resembling those Wilkinson said Geoff had worn while killing Kylie: five red and white St George football jerseys and two pairs of black tracksuit pants. They were later examined by a forensic expert and no traces of blood were found on them.
Geoff learned two terrifying things from talking to the Homicide detectives. The first was that Wilkinson, apart from all his other problems, was probably the murderer of Kylie Labouchardiere. He was, in other words, capable of extreme violence. The second was that he had been watching Sue at Loftus Railway Station on her way to work. He knew her car, her registration number and the time she caught the train.
The detectives urged him to pass on this information to his superiors, which he did; he was told that the police could put an alarm in his house. He said he already had an alarm but that Sue and he couldn’t turn it on because they had two cats that kept triggering it. Geoff says the superior suggested they get rid of the cats.
Sue’s fear increased when she learned that Wilkinson had been watching her, and she started altering her travel times and arrangements. She was in a continual state of anxiety, scared if she saw an Aboriginal male about Wilkinson’s age when she was by herself. Whenever Geoff was on night shift, she would stay with friends. When they were apart, Geoff was always concerned for her safety. Finally, as Geoff’s superiors continued—in his view—to ignore their concerns, the couple decided they had to move to get further away from Wilkinson. It was a tough decision, and they bitterly resented being forced out of their home as a result of Geoff’s job. (He believed the PIC allegations had been triggered by his role in arresting Wilkinson at the Engadine RSL.) So they rented out their house and in June 2006 moved to a place in Helensburgh, just to the south of Sydney. Geoff asked the police service for financial assistance for the move, on the grounds that it was a forced relocation. He says his superiors refused, arguing that his problems with Wilkinson stemmed from his sexual relationship with Julie and not from his work as a police officer.
By now the detectives knew that Paul Wilkinson was a chronic liar, indeed a fantasist. They strongly suspected he had killed Kylie Labouchardiere twenty-two months ago. But although they had a large amount of material, they still knew nothing about what had happened immediately after Wilkinson had met Kylie soon after 9.00 p.m. on 28 April 2004. All the pieces of evidence were like arrows pointing at those hours. As to what had happened then, it was a black hole. There was not one piece of forensic evidence.
Glenn Smith and Rebekkah Craig still wanted to find Kylie’s body, which might provide that evidence, despite the time that had elapsed since her death. They continued to tap Wilkinson’s phone, and in February 2006 Julie asked him why he wouldn’t take the police to Kylie’s body. Surely, she said, Geoff Lowe’s DNA would be found on it, and this would support his version of how she’d been killed. Wilkinson’s reply was one of the most chilling of his texts recorded by police.
‘That evidence u referring 2 lasts 4-5 days only b4 being lost,’ he texted her. ‘Everybody has reasons 4 hiding a crime. Mine is the family can live not knowing where and why 4 What they hav don. Call me cruel, call me nasty and YES Id agree, howeva my knowledge ISNT goin 2 b theres. It will hurt them NOT me. It WONT b there the DNA, BE TOLD RITE . . . And Im NOT goin 2, her family can live their lives in misery 4 all I care FUCK THEM. Weapon they can hav, her NO.’
These vicious references to Kylie’s family are difficult to make sense of. Wilkinson had never met Carol or John or Michael or Leanne. He had no reason to dislike, let alone hurt, them.
The word ‘theres’ in the text is ambiguous. It could mean the family but probably refers to the police, because sixteen minutes later Wilkinson sent Julie another text: ‘The weapon they can hav, hopefully they do themselves ova with it the MONGREL DOGS.’ What was this weapon, if indeed it existed? Was it the fictional one he’d claimed Lowe had used or was it one he’d used himself? As with so much Wilkinson said, the detectives had no idea what was true and what was not.
On 13 February, Julie, despite police warnings to be careful when with Paul, asked him if she could visit the grave, and he texted back: ‘Fine. Ill show u.’ But he didn’t—not then, anyway. He was using his knowledge of the grave site to taunt Julie, just as he’d used it to bignote himself to the PIC and would later use it to taunt lawyers and the police and the courts. In the end, it would be the only thing he had that anyone wanted.
Wilkinson seems to have guessed that his phone was being tapped, as he dropped in puzzles and even messages for the police. Once Julie was asked by Smith and Craig to visit Menai Police Station to listen to some intercepts to clarify a few things. Suddenly she heard Wilkinson ranting, ‘You pox-ridden slut, Rebekkah!’ It wasn’t the only time he’d inserted abuse of Craig into his conversation.
Smith observed, tongue in chee
k, ‘I didn’t get a mention.’
On 20 February 2006, Wilkinson asked Julie to bring Bradley up to see him at his parents’ holiday house on the Central Coast. When she arrived and they were alone, he told her that Geoff Lowe had ruined his life and talked about Lowe killing Kylie.
‘I know where the murder weapon is,’ he said. ‘When I decide to give it to the police it will prove my innocence.’
‘Where is it?’
‘There is a creek that runs down beside Geoff Lowe’s house—at the creek there is two big pipes, the murder weapon is about halfway along one of them, wrapped in a rag and put in a plastic bag.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I followed Geoff home and watched him put it there.’
This was new. As Paul seemed in the mood for disclosures, she asked about the body of the Aboriginal man he’d once told her he’d killed and buried under Mooney Mooney Bridge.
‘I’ve moved him,’ he said. ‘That slut Rebekkah and Pace have been to Alan’s four times. I think they think [Kylie’s] buried there, so I moved him in case they let the dogs out down there and they pick up a scent.’
‘How did you move him?’
‘Alan’s car.’
‘So he knows as well?’
‘No, Alan was down south and I know where he keeps the spare keys.’
‘Where did you move him to?’
‘I’m not telling, ’cause if the police turn up the heat on you, you’ll crumble and lag me in.’
‘I can’t believe you think I’ll do that.’
The next day Julie reported this conversation to police, who searched near Geoff Lowe’s house at Loftus. Five metres from the driveway, a steep track plunges into the nature reserve and then splits, with one branch crossing a watercourse coming down from the street. Two pipes run under the track at this point, one of concrete and one of metal. It was here that Wilkinson said Geoff had hidden the knife with which he’d killed Kylie. The police did not find a knife.
The pipes cannot be seen from the street, so to know their location Wilkinson must have explored the bushland around Geoff’s house.
Wilkinson continued to try to keep his hold over Julie, even pretending to tell her where a large quantity of drug money was buried. On 23 February he texted some coordinates: ‘26W 49S from the manly theme song its your. Workout the theme song & what that means locationaly and u a filthy rich woman. My departin gift 2 u.’ Later that day he added: ‘I shouldv said when u hit 26W walk 200m left til u get euc three with my teams name knifed in2 it on the stump, 3 metres rite of stump 1-1.5m down. On sons life it’s the truth.’ Julie could not have used the information even if she’d wanted to, as it made no sense at all to her.
The reference to a ‘departin gift’ suggests Wilkinson felt the police were closing in on him. His ravings were becoming increasingly erratic.
Glenn Smith was frustrated by the lack of firm information and decided to get an undercover officer to befriend Wilkinson, in the hope they might develop a relationship and Wilkinson would tell him where Kylie was buried. It was not a strong hope, but by this point the investigation had pretty well exhausted all other options. Smith and Craig and the undercover officer, whose name for this operation was Brad, decided he should claim to be making a film about police corruption. Brad was provided with a recording device and had a number of meetings with Wilkinson.
One conversation occurred on 14 March 2006 at the United Services Club in Sutherland. Wilkinson told Brad about his work history, how he started at Redfern and went on secondment to Malabar to help the ACLO there, who was ‘having problems with the community and they weren’t trusting him and they’d give him a bit of curry every time he went out to do a job so I just went across there to sort of stabilise things out there’.
Then he returned to Redfern, where he was stabbed in 1999 and went off work for eight months. He returned and in October 2001 was bitten on the hand by a junkie. ‘We got him back to the charge room and he started laughing at me and I said, “What the fuck are you laughing at?” He said, “I’ve got hepatitis A through Z and I’ve got HIV.” ’
Brad: ‘Oh yeah, that would’ve given you a bit of stress.’
Wilkinson: ‘After that I went a bit, went a bit funny.’
Then he had another twelve months off work. He said he had no support at all from the police: it was just, ‘Oh, okay, we’ll put you down on HOD [hurt on duty] and we’ll see you when we see you.’ Finally he went back because he was sick of ‘turning on the fuckin’ news every night and seeing Redfern and all the kids getting portrayed as little criminals, which they are, but with wrongly, wrongfully bloody portrayed.’ But, he continued, ‘nothing had changed. Redfern’s always going to be Redfern, that’s for sure.’
The transcript of the conversation with Brad reads like a summary of Wilkinson’s parallel universe. You can see how he’d knitted all his resentments and the killing of Kylie together into a version of events that put him at the centre, as a victim. It’s an extraordinary and elaborate fabrication, and you can see why Geoff Lowe, who’d become entangled in part of it, talked about being in the twilight zone.
And yet whatever else Wilkinson was, he was smart enough to have killed someone and, several years after the event, to have got away with it so far. But however smart he was, he couldn’t let go of what he’d done, which would have been the smartest thing of all. In his conversation with Brad—most of which was a series of monologues—he kept coming back to it, but in different forms, as though he could change the past with words, as long as he kept talking.
An important part of his imaginary world was still his continuing delusion about Julie’s rape by Geoff Lowe. He told Brad how this complaint had gone nowhere, just like the complaint about Lowe threatening him at the traffic lights. When the officer who’d investigated that rang to give him the result, Wilkinson said he’d responded, ‘Let me guess, Geoff Lowe’s sitting in the office with you now, isn’t he? . . . I guarantee you he’s in there. He’s under the desk, giving you a blow job.’
As usual, at least in his own mind, Wilkinson’s problems stemmed from his superiors’ refusal to take him seriously.
‘If they were charged in 2001 for the complaint that I went to, to the police minister about,’ he told Brad, ‘it would have been all over and done with. If it wasn’t such a boys’ club and it is that corrupt, they didn’t want nothing to do with it. So you’ve come down the track five years on, what have you got? You got a major drug syndicate, still a lot more people than what it originally was . . . you got more crime in, in, in, in the sense of, um, well, it’s a crime to pass a sheila around from bloke to bloke . . . It’s certainly a crime to fuckin’ kill someone.’
Brad: ‘Mm.’
Wilkinson: ‘So, instead of being stopped at the rape—’
Brad: ‘It could have been avoided.’
Wilkinson: ‘These other things should not have happened.’
Brad: ‘Mm.’
Wilkinson: ‘And who’s responsible for all that? The commissioner is responsible for it, as is the police commissioner, as is the, the, the, as is [former premier] Bob Carr at the time, ’cause he was in charge of New South Wales. You cannot tell me that he did not know about it.’
Wilkinson’s raving was full of bravado. After he’d witnessed Lowe kill Kylie, he said, ‘I packed Julie up, Bradley up, me boy.’
Brad: ‘Yep.’
Wilkinson: ‘We took the fuckin’, took off up to Walgett, where Mum comes from.’
Brad: ‘Yeah.’
Wilkinson: ‘’Cause I thought, you know, they might come up here, there’s a lot of wild blackfellas here and they won’t get past them.’
Brad: ‘Yeah.’
Wilkinson: ‘So we’ve basically been running, running ever since.’
Brad: ‘Right.’
Wilkin
son: ‘Until I made a decision, I said to them, “I’m not going to run no more.” ’
Brad: ‘Yeah.’
Wilkinson: ‘If they want to kill me, they can go ahead and fuckin’ kill me. I don’t care.’
At times you wonder if one reason for Wilkinson’s stories, repeated again and again to different listeners, was a need to inject some excitement into his own boring existence, now that he was unemployed and living with his parents. It was as though he was trying to turn his life into an action movie, in which he played the heroic survivor.
As to why he had not shown the PIC where Kylie was buried, he told Brad: ‘I said to them, “You can have the location providing two things happen . . . no Sutherland police are involved, no Miranda police are involved . . . But I knew that they were going to fuck it up, they were gunna piss [in] me pocket . . . So I gave them a location which was a false location . . . and I’m glad I did that. Sutherland and Miranda police were there . . . mate, the, the, the place was swarming with Sutherland and Miranda coppers.’
Brad: ‘So you know the location, do you? The real location?’
Wilkinson: ‘Yeah. Nobody’s going to get it until I get some satisfaction from [the] PIC.’
At the end of the meeting with Brad, Wilkinson said he thought his phones might be being tapped. So, he said, ‘Well, what we, what, what I, what I do with people now, we, um, from now on your name is Fred.’
Brad: ‘Right.’
Wilkinson: ‘Right, and, and—’
Call Me Cruel Page 15
