Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  But after some of the other police involved in the operation gave evidence about conversations they had with them on the day, it seemed bizarre that they should not be called up to answer questions.

  The families of the siege victims wanted to know every possible detail about what happened, and by the end of the inquest, all three were in the witness box.

  One whole fortnight-long section of the inquest, starting on 25 May 2015, was dedicated to trying to work out who Man Monis really was. A lone-wolf fanatic who carried out a terrorist attack or an unhinged person with a personal axe to grind? We heard from a range of people who knew him including his lawyers, psychologists, ex-girlfriends, flatmates, police and some of the siege hostages.

  I was surprised to learn that he had gotten away with using many different names and had been on ASIO’s radar since 1996 when he first sought asylum.

  We learned that he was granted asylum in Australia in 2001 after moving from Iran and leaving a wife and two children behind. He had claimed to have been persecuted for converting to Ahmadi Islam — but counsel assisting said that was probably a lie to support his asylum application. Monis had alleged he was in trouble in Iran for publishing a book of poetry, but there were also allegations that he was involved in fraud and sexual misconduct there.

  The inquest heard Monis lied about being courted by the United States intelligence when he was on a business trip to Russia, and lied about being given a secret code and a CIA telephone number.

  He frequently changed his phone number and married his Australian wife before divorcing her in 2003.

  Incredibly, less than a week before the siege, Australia’s national security hotline was given eighteen tip-offs after Monis declared his support for Islamic State, calling the group ‘Caliph of the Muslims’ on Facebook.

  Witnesses testified that Monis not only used different names and was very secretive, but conned his girlfriends, doctors and authorities, made good money out of his bogus ‘spiritual healing’ business, owed his flatmate money and drove a range of fancy cars.

  One social worker who saw him in 2012 aptly described him as a martyr who wanted to be ‘a hero in his own story’.10

  He was taken to Canterbury hospital by ambulance in 2010 after collapsing in the street. A psychiatrist there put him on antipsychotic drugs after he told her he had been followed for fourteen years and was being watched in her office and in his own bathroom. Another psychiatrist he was seeing around the same time said he was not psychotic but showing symptoms of depression.

  The family of a former girlfriend reported him to the national-security hotline because they thought ‘something was wrong’, but they were told he ‘wasn’t a threat’. The girlfriend’s cousin said Monis always refused to have his photo taken, even at Christmas lunches. Monis told the family he was an accountant in the Sydney CBD but refused to say where.11

  A parole officer said Monis wrote a two-page letter saying a female supervisor was picking on him because of his prayers while he was doing some community service at the Bankstown PCYC for the offensive letters crime.

  We also learned that he had been a nuisance outside Channel Seven’s Martin Place studio, opposite the Lindt café for years, regularly holding protests there, giving out flyers and once screaming at presenters as they stood out the front signing autographs. Monis ran at breakfast presenter David Koch, calling him a terrorist and a killer, before being stopped by security guards.12

  He was also rejected when he tried to join the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang because they thought he was weird.13

  On Friday 5 June 2015 — the last day of this May–June 2015 section of the inquest — the legal teams representing siege victims Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson had a big win with the coroner ruling that the inquest would examine why Monis was on bail for serious sexual assault and accessory to murder charges before the siege.

  At the time, the issue of Monis’ bail was a headache for the DPP who had tried to exclude it being dealt with at the inquest, arguing that it was too ‘wide’. However, the families of Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson insisted that the bail issue needed to be addressed. They wanted answers about why this monster was allowed out into the community despite the serious charges he faced.

  The New South Wales Coroner Michael Barnes said, ‘It is relevant and not too remote for an inquest to inquire into whether a person charged with numerous offences of violence was appropriately released on bail if, soon after that release, he is involved in further violent offences resulting in deaths.

  In both cases the decision makers are required to assess whether the person to be discharged/released is likely to harm others.

  When such harm ensues it is reasonable to review the basis on which the decision to release the person was made.’14

  Coroner Barnes also agreed that some of the police statements related to Monis’ bail were covered by legal privilege and should be kept confidential. The identities of some of the officers who responded to the siege were suppressed and some of their evidence was heard in closed court — meaning it couldn’t be reported. This marked the end of this segment of the inquest which ran in instalments for almost two years. The next segment resumed on 17 August and ran until 4 September 2015. A public opening of the third segment which looked at ASIO and security issues relating to Monis was on 18 November 2015 but the rest of that segment was heard in closed court. I started covering it again during the fourth and final segment which ran from 21 March 2016 until 17 August 2016.

  Personal challenges

  That same day, 5 June 2015, I was setting up with a camera crew to do a live cross for the ABC News Channel from the Goulburn Street car park, which is just across the road from the John Maddison Tower Court building.

  With my battery pack in my jacket pocket and microphone clipped onto my lapel, I was told in my ear piece by the Ultimo studio that we were a few minutes away because another live cross had been slotted in before mine. My phone, which was on silent in my other jacket pocket, started to ring, and thinking it was someone from the newsroom, I answered it.

  Instead of the newsroom, it was a call informing me that my uncle, the former Illawarra premier league soccer coach Eric Thompson, had been found dead in his Wollongong unit after he failed to show up for a family visit. He had died unexpectedly from a heart condition, aged seventy-six.

  I digested the information for a moment, remembered to breathe, and then put it aside as I went to air and remained focused on talking about what I had just heard in court.

  That was a challenging Friday afternoon, but I was determined to get through it and so I filed my radio and online stories, did another ABC News Channel cross — and then headed to Wollongong that night to organise his funeral.

  The personal challenges kept coming around this time, because about three weeks later, covering an ICAC inquiry, I had my freak fall outside the ICAC building in Elizabeth Street.

  The most frustrating thing was spending the rest of the year away from courts and having to watch other reporters cover stories that I had been looking forward to doing as part of my round. Any reporter with a newsroom round would probably find that hard, but the fact is that we don’t ‘own’ news stories. There is always another story around the corner to cover and there is always someone waiting in the wings to replace you.

  Resilience

  As the year 2015 wound up, I was feeling immense gratitude for having recovered enough from my major hip injury to be planning to head back to the siege inquest when it resumed in early 2016.

  However, things would prove not that straightforward and the new year tested my resilience in ways I had never thought possible.

  On New Year’s Eve 2015, my mother, who had seemed unwell over Christmas, was diagnosed with stage-four metastatic breast cancer. There were few medical facilities in her home town of Cobar so she came to stay with me in Sydney. So 2016 kicked off with me helping her through what seemed to be endless, and at times bewildering rounds of invasive medical tests
and specialist appointments.

  One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life was to sit with her in an oncologist’s room and hear the words, ‘This is very serious Mrs Wells — your cancer is terminal.’

  I breathed and paused and asked all the questions that a frail and scared eighty-year old from the country could not bring herself to ask.

  Questions like, ‘How long does she have to live?’

  ‘Can you explain the point of chemotherapy and all its side effects at this stage of her illness?’

  That night, I put my arms around my mother and said, ‘I just wish I could make all this go away for you.’

  My mother stayed with me for a while and would be at home reading or watching television or listening to the radio during the day while I was in the JMT media room reporting on the siege inquest.

  One night I couldn’t stop laughing when I came home and busted her sitting up near the television in her fluffy, blue dressing gown with a bowl of popcorn and watching a late night marathon of Sex and The City repeats.

  ‘I didn’t know you watched that show,’ I said,

  My eighty-year old mother gave me a little smile I’ll never forget.

  ‘I watch it when your father goes to bed back home in Cobar. Samantha’s my favourite . . . you know . . . the cheeky one,’ she replied.

  The next part of the inquest in early 2016 started to focus on the police response. It included evidence that was frustrating to listen to because it revealed a lack of police resources, poor communication between police units at the scene and the inadequacies of the ‘contain and negotiate’ strategy that they used.

  Many of the police witnesses repeatedly said it wasn’t up to them to make certain decisions and others said they didn’t feel they had the authority to storm the café sooner and shoot Man Haron Monis.

  ‘Imagine having to shoot someone for a living,’ my mum said to me one night when I got home. ‘Their job must be so hard.’

  She somehow had had the energy to clean my kitchen until it sparkled that day, even scrubbing the coffee stains out of the white cups that used to pile up near my computer keyboard.

  One of the things that struck me during this section of the siege inquest was the bravery of some of the surviving hostages while they gave their evidence.

  Reliving their ordeal in the witness box was hard, with some bursting into tears, others telling the inquest they had not been able to return to work and some revealing they had health issues including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Some also understandably had a lot of built-up anger and I wondered how long it would take them fully recover from the psychological scars of what had happened to them.

  Some of the siege hostages sat in the public gallery on days when they weren’t required to give evidence and as I waited outside with other reporters for them to leave the building each day, I wondered what sort of lives they were going home to after the event.

  There were hostages who had made a brave bid to escape from the café, even though they knew Monis had a gun, those who tried to distract the gunman to let others escape, a hostage who bravely slipped notes under the café doors for police, hostages who the gunman forced to phone media outlets on his behalf and those who selflessly didn’t run when they had the chance to, because they feared the gunman would take it out on those left behind.

  There was a confronting moment when siege survivor Selina Win Pe said the hostages felt like ‘sitting ducks’ who were fighting for their lives during the more than sixteen hour siege, and that they felt they had been abandoned and left alone to die.

  She said, when police eventually did enter the café to shoot Monis, she remembered thinking, please kill him.

  Hostage Julie Taylor broke down while talking about café manager Tori Johnson’s bravery.

  ‘I believe he could have got himself out of the café safely and I admire that he didn’t do that,’ she said.

  Julie Taylor described how Monis at one stage threatened to shoot one person for every hostage who escaped.15

  One day heading into the media room, I was stopped by hostage Louisa Hope who had heard about my ICAC accident and had been asking my ABC colleague Karl Hoerr, who was also reporting on the siege inquest, how I was going. Given that this woman had been through a traumatic near-death situation, I was blown away by her kindness and generosity in thinking about the welfare of someone else she didn’t know very well.

  Louisa had come into the CBD the night before the siege to celebrate Christmas with her seventy-two year old mother, Robin. A former bank executive, Louisa could not move quickly because of her multiple sclerosis so Monis had used her and her mother as human shields in the café. Louisa had been forced to stand at the café window at gunpoint and at one stage had had the chance to escape, but chose not to go because her mother was not following her.

  They were near Monis throughout the ordeal and he forced them to stand on either side of a kneeling Tori Johnson while he shot him in the back of the head. Louisa told the inquest she heard Monis psyching himself up and breathing heavily before the shooting. She said she heard Tori Johnson crying but she could hear no words before he was shot.

  Both women were injured by shrapnel at the end of the siege and Louisa had many surgeries to repair a big hole in her foot.16

  She started to come up to the media room door to say hello at the start each day of the inquest, and after one of our conversations about my mother, she brought in business cards for health professionals, including an acupuncturist that she had found helpful for dealing with chronic pain.

  As the evidence from the hostages during this stage of the inquest wrapped up, I thought about the calmness in café manager Tori Johnsons voice in the triple 0 call that was played to the court. In the call he read the operator a message from Monis saying Australia was under attack by Islamic state, that there were bombs in three locations across Sydney.

  Like the other hostages he must have been terrified, but tried not to show it.

  At the end of March 2016, the challenges in my personal life stepped up again. After a routine check that I probably would not have even bothered going to, had I not been confronted by my mother’s terminal cancer, I received an early stage breast cancer diagnosis myself. My life came to a grinding halt for an hour or two that day as I sat in my car outside the hospital to take stock of what I had just been told.

  I remember thinking, It doesn’t get much worse than this then also thinking that I wasn’t alone in the world in dealing with juggling a job with sickness and caring for loved ones and started to write down what I needed to do.

  Foremost in my thoughts was my promise to my mother, who wanted to go home to the country to die, that I would go back to Cobar to be with her at the end of her life. That thought, that I needed to be on deck to help her, gave me focus and the reporter in me kicked in and I started making decisions. I never told my mother about my own diagnosis before she returned home to Cobar because I thought she had enough to deal with.

  In hindsight, she had equipped me with the knowledge I needed to make quick decisions about my own treatment because I was able to use all the research and the specialists’ opinions that I had already sourced for her.

  So I sat in the car making medical appointments and got on with it, focusing on caring for my mother and the story I was covering to get through.

  Looking back it was a lot to handle, but I made it work the best that I could.

  Having spent so much time the previous year in hospitals after my ICAC fall, I was starting to get to know their routines off by heart and was confident with questions and sifting through the different medical opinions.

  My mum died on 12 September 2016, just three weeks after my surgery and I had recovered enough to keep my promise and head back to Cobar to be with her.

  As I sat next to her hospital bed, I thought about how she was dying in a ward not far from the one that I had been born in, in the same hospital. The hospital
staff, who mostly knew her, were incredibly kind, despite limited palliative-care facilities. The messages the local nursing home staff had left with the nearest palliative-care team, (who were four hours away in Dubbo) were never returned, showing how under-resourced some of these teams are.

  Organising the funeral was another challenge. There was no longer a permanent Catholic priest or a florist in the town. The funeral director and priest had to come from Nyngan and freight trucks carrying everything from food to furniture on their way through Cobar to other places like Bourke and Broken Hill, pulled up out the front of our family home at random times of the day and night to drop off flowers sent by friends and family from out of town. Neighbours baked and left mountains of food on our kitchen table. That’s one of the great things about country towns like Cobar where everyone knows you. People are kind and they always want to help. Family friends who had moved away from Cobar and who I hadn’t seen since I was a child came back for the funeral to pay their respects.

  The inquest findings

  Taking the advice my mother had given me, I made sure I stayed busy after she died.

  I was back at work and grateful to have fully recovered myself, the day Coroner Michael Barnes handed down his 600-page report on the Lindt café siege on 24 May 2017.

  Hostages Louisa Hope, her mother, Robin, and Paolo Vassallo were in court to hear what the coroner had to say, along with Tori Johnson’s partner, Thomas Zinn. Katrina Dawson’s parents Jane and Alexander were also in court.

  I saw Louisa Hope and her mother Robin, together that day, and was reminded that my mother watching me on her television at home, was the missing link.

  The coroner said police had waited too long to enter the café after the first shot was fired by Man Haron Monis. But he said, although police responding to the siege made mistakes, the blame for the deaths and injuries that occurred rested entirely with Monis who had initiated an extremely dangerous situation.