Chapter 10

The Painful Truth

On Monday, 25 June 1974, John Lewthwaite decided to brave the cold and go out for a drink after dinner.

Of medium build and 173 centimetres, Lewthwaite’s eyes were deep set, his nose prominent and his hair cut short with a slight flick that made his forehead look rectangular. He was the youngest of four children of a working-class family, with fraternal twin brothers one year older and a sister two years older than him. Born on 19 October 1955 in Coffs Harbour, where his father was a fisherman, he and his family moved to Parramatta when his father changed careers. He was seven at the time of the move. His 54-year-old father now collected bridge tolls.

Falling within the normal IQ range, Lewthwaite completed his School Certificate despite behavioural problems at school, such as truancy, which had led to suspension leading up to his final examinations. At 16, he left school and was apprenticed for six months as a printing compositor. Not content, the teenager left his initial employment choice and sampled a variety of jobs, but had never settled down to anything.

At Greystanes Hotel, Lewthwaite downed eight or nine schooners, and when closing time came, he bought a dozen cans of beer. Not wanting to go home, and having no real plans, he stumbled along Merrylands Road to Sherwood Grange School. He sat on a school bench and drank a couple of cans of beer. He thought about buying a gun and shooting some of the people at the pub. Gradually, his thoughts turned to boys.

Lewthwaite was frightened of girls, but from the age of 12, he had been attracted to boys, which was combined with an urge to stab or strangle them. Drinking always made this desire stronger. It had begun with him snow dropping or masturbating into stolen underwear, but quickly progressed to his paying boys for fellatio. The boy he had had anal sex with earlier that year, while on parole, had been about 12 years old.

Suddenly, the 18-year-old needed to go for a walk. Hiding the cans under a bush, he headed for the road. As he walked, he remembered a boy he had seen about two years earlier. At that time, it hadn’t been uncommon for him to peep into boys’ bathrooms and bedrooms or expose himself to them. When he left school at 16, he had filled in his free time chasing boys, sometimes exposing himself as often as three or four times a day.

Anthony Hanns, then seven, had been in the bath when Lewthwaite had come to the window. It had been wound out enough for the youth to fit his head up between the glass and the fly screen. There were no curtains, so he didn’t have a problem attracting Anthony’s attention. ‘Come over here,’ he had commanded. Instead, the little boy had raced from the bathroom, shouting for his parents. Lewthwaite was gone before they arrived. But all that had occurred before he’d been imprisoned for arson.

Lewthwaite and his twin brothers had set alight seven schools, excitedly waiting for the fire engines to arrive and reading about their endeavours in the newspaper. In December 1972, one of the twins had been caught near a fire and confessed. All three had been sentenced to six years, with a non-parole period of 15 months. Lewthwaite had served his time at Minda, being a juvenile, where at least he had been able to go to technical school. On 29 March 1974, he had been released on parole. Less than three months later, on 25 June, he was headed for trouble once again.

The 18-year-old took the shortest route to the Hanns’s house along the pedestrian bypasses and hid in a neighbour’s yard, patiently waiting for everyone to go to bed. A maple tree and an outside toilet kept him well out of view until the lights went out. Not long afterwards, he climbed into the Water Board grounds where he removed his trousers and underwear before jumping the Hanns’s back fence. He quickly befriended their fox terrier and quietly tried both the rear door and the laundry manhole, without success. Finally, he found a window that was slightly open. He stuck his fingers underneath and, grabbing it by the two corners, bent the frame backwards and forwards until the glass cracked.

The noise startled him so he raced across the road, where he hid behind a parked car, and waited. No one came out, so he returned and gently took out the slivers of glass, placing them under the house. He kept one tapered piece aside to use in case he needed it. When there was enough room for him to fit through, Lewthwaite pulled out the fly screen, pushed aside the venetian blinds and stepped into Nicole’s room. The room was pink and there were dolls everywhere: Barbie dolls, Dina dolls, Goldilocks, dolls with hair that grew, dolls that talked and dolls that giggled. Even the pink bed was filled with dolls.

Lewthwaite glanced at the little girl who was tucked under the bedcovers, before wandering further into the house. The next room he entered was the kitchen, where he rifled through the drawers until he found a carving knife. He then went to check the back door, in case he needed to escape. He managed to undo the door lock, but there was also a security bolt on the top of the door, which had no key. He drifted back towards the bedrooms. He looked into the parents’ room and contemplated killing them so he could stay in the warmth of the house with the little boy. Outside, a cold frost was already on the ground.

The next door was Anthony’s. When he turned on the light, Lewthwaite noticed a blue room full of cars and trucks. He went up to the boy, but this wasn’t the one he remembered. He turned and continued to roam around the house for three-quarters of an hour, at times hoping the boy’s father would wake up so that he could kill him. Finally, he returned to Nicole’s room. He turned on the light and, putting down the glass, began to adjust the venetian blinds so that he could escape easily with Anthony. It was at that moment that Nicole stirred.

‘Be quiet and go back to sleep,’ Lewthwaite said, moving toward her. She nodded drowsily. Angry that he had been disturbed and still aroused by thoughts of sexual aggression, he covered her mouth, raised the knife and began to stab her in the back. He didn’t stop until the knife was bent in half, by which time he had stabbed the little girl 17 times. Abruptly, he jumped from the window and, dropping the knife in the dirt, hurried to where he had left his underwear and trousers. Despite being unworried by the murder, after re-dressing he ran to the canal where safely inside the storm water drain he exited the quiet residential suburb of Greystanes.

At Wentworthville Railway Station, Lewthwaite went into the women’s toilets and washed off the little girl’s blood under the tap. He then hid in a vacant allotment opposite the station and waited for the train. When it finally arrived, the teenager boarded and travelled to the opposite side of the city. He had been working as an assistant gardener at a grammar school in North Sydney, and it was there he intended to abduct one of the students. His daydreams had revolved around abducting a boy, taking him to an isolated bush area, engaging in sex with him, and then killing him by strangulation or stabbing. Again, he removed his lower clothing and sauntered around the outside of the dormitory but was unable to get into the building. Patiently, he waited, undressed, in the shadows, his bare shaved legs occasionally reflecting a distant outside light. He planned to grab the first boy who woke and came outside, or to expose himself to the first group of boys he saw. While he waited, he ejaculated, lost interest, got dressed and left.

Suddenly remorseful, Lewthwaite entered a couple of churches on Burwood Road hoping to confess, but unable to find a minister he headed for his parole officer in Parramatta. At 11.00 a.m. on Tuesday, 26 June, he nervously arrived at the parole officer’s office.

‘I’m in trouble,’ said Lewthwaite. ‘Can you help me?’

The officer had met John Lewthwaite three months previously, when Lewthwaite was released under the officer’s supervision. He had seen Lewthwaite a number of times since then and impressed upon the parolee that he was always there to help.

‘I did a break and enter last night,’ Lewthwaite went on, ‘and did something very wrong. I struck a girl in Greystanes in the back. Have you heard it on the radio? Do you know if she’s dead or alive?’

The parole officer had heard something on the radio, but he didn’t know what her condition was. After hearing his full story, the officer advised Lewthwaite, ‘You need to report this to the police ... to surrender. I’ll go with you.’

At 11.15 a.m., Lewthwaite turned himself in to the Parramatta police. That was almost an hour before Gwen and Peter were released.

 

The Hanns’s neighbour Clive Ford had hoped that the family would have been released earlier. This was one of the reasons why he had gone to the police station that morning to tell them what he had. He and his wife, Audrey, had woken to a street teeming with reporters and police. It wasn’t until about 7.00 a.m. while he was showering that Audrey heard the news on the radio, and then told him the night’s grim events. Concerned, he got out of the shower and told his wife that he had seen someone hanging about the night before. He headed outside to tell the police.

The street had been full of cars. He had wandered about until he saw what looked like a police car with some men hanging around it. ‘Are you the police?’ he had asked.

‘No, mate, we’re journalists,’ one of them had replied.

‘See you later,’ Clive had replied, going home quickly. From there, he had driven to work, and then on to the police station, where he had told them what he knew.

The night before Clive had been on the stairs, outside the back door, undercoating his model plane. His wife and four daughters had gone to bed, and not wanting to disturb them with the rattling of the spray can or the paint fumes, he had opted for the chilly outside venue. Just as he had finished spraying, he looked up and noticed someone between the big pine and the Volkswagen across the road. He had watched a little longer. It had been obvious that the lad wasn’t trying to break into his neighbour’s place. The young man had been facing back across the road. Moments later, the figure had risen and headed for the other side of the road. Must be one of the Ponsford boys, he had decided, playing hide and seek. After all, they did have two teenage boys, and that was the direction in which the figure was headed.

As Clive had re-entered the house, he’d pushed the incident from his thoughts. Even if he had wanted, he couldn’t have telephoned the neighbours across the road as neither he nor they could afford a phone. There had been no point in going to have a closer look, as the figure clearly hadn’t been a prowler. At the police station, there was little Clive could tell the police. There were no streetlights, so all he really knew was that he had seen a young man wearing what appeared to be light pants and a dark jacket. He couldn’t even be sure it was a young man; it was just the perception he had from the way the figure had moved.

The older police officer stood and chatted to Clive for a while before he left. It was better, he told him, that he didn’t imagine extra details; the mere fact that there had been someone else in the area at the time opened other areas of questioning. Clive left feeling slightly better knowing that he had perhaps saved Peter and Gwen from some of the questioning they were undergoing.

When Gwen and Peter were finally released, they were confronted with telling Anthony the news. Unable to go back to Monica’s to pick him up because of the media, they had asked Gwen’s sister to bring him to meet them outside the school at Doonside. As she let him out, Gwen stepped from the car to greet him.

‘Where’s Nicole?’ Anthony kept asking. Gwen ushered him into the car.

‘Anthony,’ said Gwen, sitting close. ‘Nicole is dead.’

Anthony looked in disbelief at his parents. Slowly, the realisation that the sister who had shadowed him for the past five years wasn’t coming home began to sink in and he started to cry. ‘But why, Mum?’

That was something Gwen would never know.

Anthony and his parents spent the days following Nicole’s murder with Gwen’s sister at Doonside. No one could bear to go home without Nicole. Journalists camped around the Greystanes house awaiting the family’s return, some impatiently helping themselves to photographs of Nicole without consent.

Peter took a month’s sick leave and used the time to look for work outside of Sydney. He was determined to move his family away, but he didn’t manage to find a job. When they finally returned home to Greystanes, he installed a burglar alarm, bought a Doberman and got a gun licence, but no gun. It would be years before he or Gwen could open a window at night, even in summer.

Peter was so distressed he didn’t know what to think. He tried desperately not to recall the details of what had happened to Nicole, but the question, ‘Why me?’ kept coming back. He had had to identify Nicole on the morning of Tuesday, 26 June. Towards the end of his interrogation, a police officer had driven him to the old hospital at Parramatta. He had been taken to the morgue and instructed to stand in front of a little window that led to another room. The curtains had been drawn and the room had been empty. A man in a white coat had wheeled in a table with a sheet over it. Pulling it back, he had exposed Nicole from the shoulders up.

‘Is that your daughter?’ someone had asked.

Peter had never seen a dead body before, let alone a body related to him. Nicole’s skin had been whitish blue. He had nodded, ‘Yeah ... that’s Nicole.’

‘Come on,’ the police officer had fidgeted, ‘let’s get out of here.’

Peter had stood there a little longer, absorbing Nicole. He and Gwen had wanted children desperately. Unable to have them naturally, they had sought them via adoption. When they had been given Anthony, then later Nicole, they had felt blessed. At the morgue, their precious gift lay behind glass, just out of his reach. He had known they’d have cut her open at the autopsy, and he’d wished he could have protected her. The curtain had closed and Peter had followed the police officer outside.

That morning, Peter had been so angry he’d sworn he would kill whoever had murdered Nicole. Later, when Lewthwaite had been charged, he had asked for ten minutes alone in the cell with the bastard, but the police hadn’t let him. Outside the morgue, the police officer had asked one last time, ‘Are you sure that you didn’t do it?’

‘I’m bloody certain I didn’t do it!’ Peter had barked.

‘Okay,’ the officer had shrugged. ‘Then I’ll see you back at the station.’

‘How am I supposed to get back?’ he had demanded.

‘Drive your car.’

Peter had traipsed back to his car, reefed a ticket off the window and torn it into pieces. ‘They can all go to hell,’ he had muttered to himself, he wasn’t paying for it.

However, Peter wasn’t the only one who was angry. The same morning, the police hadn’t let Gwen call her father from the station. He was elderly and she was worried that the news would affect him adversely. Her dad had heard it on the radio. Gwen’s father and sister had stood outside the police station for five hours waiting to speak to her and Peter. Gwen was now on sedatives. She and Peter had gone straight to the doctor’s after their release from Merrylands Police Station. They had arrived at 1.00 p.m. and the receptionist had told them the surgery was closed. But, the doctor had heard about Nicole and agreed to see them, prescribing something to help.