10

WHITE PLAINS

Sarah’s phone rang in Melbourne at 8.30 pm. She picked up. It was Anne.

Anne loved the telephone. She had spent so much time in exile, running her group from afar, that it had always been her main means. Landlines crisscrossed between Hawaii, the United Kingdom, Hurleyville, and Melbourne. Sometimes, back in the Uptop days, after ordering punishments be given to particular children by the Aunties, she would allegedly want to hear the beatings being administered, over the phone.

But this call would be her undoing.

It was 27 May 1993 and, where Anne was, in hiding in Hurleyville, it was 6.30 am. Sarah was a medical student at the University of Melbourne — where the cult was galvanised in 1962 — on her way to becoming a doctor.

They chatted amiably. Sarah and Anne had been in infrequent contact since the raid. It was unusual for Sarah to get a call from Anne, but Sarah indulged her, and talked, and listened. They spoke mainly about one of the former Family children, who was by then in Chile teaching English. Anne said some in the cult had turned against her. Bill took the phone from time to time. When Anne said goodbye, she added, ‘Tell Marie Mohr I love her.’ This was her arrogance on full display, a sarcastic dismissal of one of those pursuing her to find justice for the children Anne had imprisoned.

But during the course of the conversation, Anne had let slip where she was: ‘I’m in America, darling.’ Anne said she and Bill were off to Broom Farm in two weeks. It seems incredible that Anne would reveal her whereabouts, and it seems to be that arrogance again — a notion that she was above the law — mixed with a simple mistake, a throwaway line, delivered and then forgotten.

Sarah then made a call of her own: to Operation Forest. Now, finally, after the likely near miss with the screaming child at Broom Farm, they knew where she was.

The FBI had been on standby for several months. The communication methods between the FBI and Operation Forest seems archaic now — but this was old-fashioned policing, 1990s-style, before the internet, before email was in such widespread use. Lex and Operation Forest worked the facsimile machines all night to suit the UK and US timezones.

After Anne’s mistake, the FBI mobilised special agent Hilda Kogut, who worked for the New York office of the FBI from a satellite station in Orange County, NY. She specialised in violent crime — armed robberies and kidnappings. ‘A lot of the cases that I got were strange and off the beaten path. This was normal-weird.’

The key for her was that this case involved children as victims. ‘Children are, for the most part, unable to defend themselves, and they trust adults. So when adults violate their trust, it gives you the incentive to really make it right.’

Hilda came up with a cunning plan to see if she could eyeball Anne at the house. She couldn’t just knock on the door or try peering through windows in case it put the frighteners up. There had been sightings of Anne walking her dogs through Hurleyville, but not for a while. Hilda decided to go undercover on the mail run. Not only did she want to see Anne and Bill and verify they were living at the house, but she also wanted to see the lie of the land, literally. She knew she would be asked — if they were there — to arrest them, so she wanted to see what the house was like, where to go in, points of exit, potential escape routes, the condition of the roads.

‘I introduced myself to the local postmistress, and then I rode in the post office car with the rural letter-carrier. In those types of communities, the postal service usually knows exactly what’s goin’ on.’

The postie had a beaten-up old car with only one seat. Hilda sat on a box. ‘It’s a very large, undeveloped county. There’s not a lot of industry up there.’ Most of the old resorts are closed, and unemployment is high. ‘It is very rural where that house was located, on a quiet road, in a very rural setting.

‘I rode with her for a good portion of the day. She was very animated as we drove. She described to me two people, two elderly people, who lived in the house.’ Anne was 72, Bill a year younger. ‘Her descriptions seemed to be pretty close to what I knew Anne and William might look like. So I felt very comfortable knowing that they were actually living in the house.’

There was mail: for Anne, for Bill, and for Megan Dawes, Leon’s daughter, who was living there temporarily. The mail van pulled up at the house. It was quiet. There was a Cadillac parked outside, and Hilda took down the number. It was registered under ‘Hamilton-Byrne’, she would later find.

Often, the postie told Hilda, either Anne or Bill would come out to collect the mail as she pulled up. She had spoken to them numerous times. But this time, no one came out, or not straightaway. The letters were put in the mailbox and the rusty old car pulled away. As they drove off, Hilda saw a young woman — Megan — walk out of the house, towards the mailbox. It was not Anne; she knew that from photographs. But she knew it was Anne’s house.

‘A home run would’ve been for one of them to come out and pick up the mail while I was sitting in the van, but that didn’t happen. And it’s just as well that it didn’t, because my guess is if one of them had come out to get the mail, more Anne than her husband, their interest might’ve been raised by the fact that there was a second person in that vehicle.’

Back in the FBI squadroom, she told her boss there wasn’t a problem. Entering the house would be easy and safe. Hilda triple-checked the street address in Houghtaling Road against her records. ‘We had no reason to believe that she and William were not there.’

On 4 June 1993, the FBI and New York state troopers descended at dawn. They came in cars and stopped short of the Hamilton-Byrne house to brief all the officers about where they should be and which exits they needed to cover. Then they drove up and parked outside the house. ‘[It was] early, a cold morning. Enough to put them at a disadvantage almost immediately.’

Hilda Kogut approached the door with backup. Dogs were barking inside. A wind chime hanging from the porch moved in the breeze. ‘[There was only] a lousy wooden door,’ she recalls. As a female police officer on the front line for 20 years, she had learned that she didn’t need to scream and shout. Let the men do that — ‘I had to kinda be controlled and confident in what I did.’ As she pounded on the door, she said, ‘FBI! Open the door, we have arrest warrants. Open the door immediately.’

It opened almost straight away.

‘I walked in, I showed William the arrest warrants, I asked where Anne was. And she had just come into the living-room area with a robe on. My guess is she had just stepped outta the shower.’

Anne asked for a lawyer. Hilda told her that as soon as she got to the nearest court — at White Plains, in Westchester County — she would have one.

Then the agents told the pair they needed to get dressed, which they would have to do under supervision. Anne fussed over choosing an outfit and wanted to do her full-makeup. She was cooperative, says Hilda, but fussy. ‘She was very, very concerned about how she looked before we left that house. I kept telling her, “We have to move, we have to leave. Let’s hurry up.” But she was really quite meticulous in getting dressed that morning.’

Hilda noticed Anne’s hair. In the arrest news pictures, taken later at the court, her hair is long and a light, dulled red, her hairline disconcertingly high on her head after years of facelifts. She told Anne she couldn’t wear a wig.

What was failure for Anne, and what was success? She had kept repeating her message of ‘walk on’ to her followers: follow me into the oneness. Did she perceive this as a failure, or did she see it as just another trial of a spiritual leader? Was she, in her mind, that image of Jesus, betrayed and persecuted by those she thought were the closest?

Anne and Bill were taken to the New York State police barracks, in a nearby town by the name of Liberty, and then onto a court in White Plains. There they waited in custody all day and into the afternoon until, at 4.00 pm, they appeared before a judge. But their state-appointed lawyer couldn’t make it, so they were held in the Westchester County jail in a town called Valhalla for three days.

The aim of police was to keep them in custody — no bail — until an extradition was ordered. But any potential extradition from America was going to be conditional. Anne and Bill were only, as the Australian police had decided, charged with one count each of perjury and one count each of conspiracy to defraud. These were paltry charges, but to satisfy extradition clauses, spare the children the task of testifying, and simply get them back into an Australian court, these were the only charges that would work. Part of the legal rules in the United States meant that no further charges could be laid.

Hilda phoned Lex in Melbourne. It was 3.30 am and the Forest office was full. Marie Mohr was there; Sarah was there. Ed Ogden was there. ‘We’ve got the bitch,’ said Hilda.

Finally this woman — whom Lex calls the most evil person he has ever encountered — had been arrested. What started at the school fire in the hills had, for him at least, reached a conclusion.

Lex put the phone down and walked into Forest’s kitchen, picked up a couple of chairs, and threw them into the wall. It was an incredible emotional release. ‘I broke down,’ he says. He threw everything off the table — he ‘just [had] an emotional outburst of tears and screaming’.

The others let him be; they knew he needed this. ‘I was absolutely, totally obsessed, remembering that we’d gone through the change of leadership, remembering that I’d given a commitment, remembering that I said with the right team we’d get a result. And I had that challenge, “you won’t find her, you won’t charge her, you won’t get a conviction” — those words at the back of my mind from the journo [Marie]. Absolutely, I was obsessed.

‘Four years of anguish, probably hate, everything that I’d come to understand about what this woman had done to people’s lives. How she’d destroyed, how she’d effected the theft of these kids from birth — having spoken to a number of the mothers of these children and the deception that occurred with them, you can’t but be human to get emotional and let it out. So anyone that thinks coppers are harsh bastards and shouldn’t get involved, they’re fooling themselves. It does impact on you.

‘That was my release valve, and I was emotionally and physically drained after that. It took me a few days to get back on track.’

Michael quotes the gospels when we ask how he felt when Anne was arrested. Specifically, he quotes Mark 6: ‘But Jesus said to them: A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country.’

He was at home in the hills when he saw news photographs of Anne and Bill handcuffed and in chains, being walked to and from court. Yet he says he still felt her guidance even though she was being ‘abused’. He felt her light around him. ‘I knew that Anne was strong enough to deal with it. And that, in fact, she was in that position in jail, to reach certain people in jail, that she needed to. People in prison are in need of the light, just like any one of us, because we are all in prison.’

Yet, he says, she never dropped her head. She was statuesque and imposing still. ‘Anne was terribly disrespected, and terribly treated, and thrown in prison out of blatant lies. Anne never lost faith, lost trust in who she was. She was totally abused, but lots of great people have been in the past.’

David Whitaker has kept a photograph of her in chains — handcuffs and chains. He cut it out of the front page of The Age. ‘She was looking very dishevelled.’ He smiles. ‘Which would have bothered her big time.’

Four days after she was arrested, around 50 cult members in Melbourne met at Santiniketan Lodge in an emergency meeting to plan their response. Anne and Bill were in custody. One former child of the cult, who was living in America, visited them in jail. Another tried to leave Australia and was stopped at the airport in Melbourne. Then began a tense waiting game between Operation Forest, two embassies, and lawyers for both the US government and Anne and Bill, over bail and extradition.

Kerry Lawrence was the American government prosecutor assigned to the case. He was still a young lawyer; this was his first extradition case. He was briefed by police and by the prosecutors in Melbourne. ‘I thought these allegations were pretty horrific, of what they had done to these young people and the families that were affected by their abduction and brainwashing. [It was] about as horrible as anything I’d worked on as a prosecutor, including murder cases and gigantic financial frauds and organised crime cases. This was about as bad as it gets.’

Although he knew the horrific backstory, he only had the perjury and conspiracy to defraud charges with which to work. The charges he was dealing with were minor in comparison to what he’d heard about Anne and Bill. ‘On the face of it,’ he says, ‘it didn’t seem that serious. But obviously the underlying conduct that led to the charges in Australia was extremely serious, dealing with allegations of brainwashing, and administering of drugs to these young children. [Yet] the only thing we were permitted to do was take whatever charges were filed in the country where they were sought, and then file those with the court and seek their extradition.’

Lex told us, ‘I’m not a religious man, but I was praying that the US legal system would not let us down.’

But initially, all did not go as Lex hoped. The US court needed documents sent from Australia via the Australian embassy in Washington. They were supposed to have been couriered to the court. But they didn’t arrive in time. ‘There was an administrative stuff-up,’ says Lex. ‘Right at the critical point. We could have lost the whole thing.’

At their first appearance at White Plains court, Anne and Bill were thus given bail, meaning they didn’t need to be held in custody. They were ordered to wear electronic bracelets on their ankles.

Anne sent a discourse to her followers, raising the spectre of failure. ‘The invisible forces are guiding us and leading us on, my friends. It is also important for you to know that it has been revealed … certain tests in which we had failed. So this has given renewed trust and confidence because it showed a lot of people that despite apparent failure — all this stuff that has gone on with the Hamilton-Byrne kids — by maintaining a steadfast mind and keeping our face turned to that wondrous light.’

She said the cult must fight evil and the ‘lower nature’ but it was hard and getting harder. She had, she said, been put in jail for no reason. ‘Oh yes, it hurts. We have come to the conclusion that the only way victory is possible is turning to the holy spirit, and all those who have been wicked, evil, we want them helped too. We put ourselves on the side of victory. We may fail many times and we may stumble frequently and we may appear to have failed miserably but if we remain steadfast … the enemy finally retires, finished. All these tests are necessary. They form part of our initiation. All the powers of darkness rise up and try to overwhelm us, but it is in a sense a performance. We are divine children on our planet.’

Lex was mortified they were awarded bail, to put it mildly. He had investigated the case for four years and was stymied right at the last possible moments by documents going missing from a courier.

‘They [Operation Forest] were in a state of extreme panic,’ says Lawrence.

But two days later the documents turned up, and Anne and Bill faced court again, seeking bail once more. Their American defence lawyer, John Tigue Jr, from the New York firm Kostelanetz, Ritholtz, Tigue & Fink, argued there were no grounds to keep the couple in custody because the offences they had been charged with were minor and non-violent and that associates (specifically Don Webb, Christabel Wallace, and Liz Whitaker) had faced similar charges in Australia and got off lightly.

He told the judge that the Australian government had been irresponsible because they sought extradition on minor charges while suggesting a raft of more serious ‘sensational’ charges, but these suggestions, he argued, were nothing more than speculation. There was talk, too, of the pair’s ill health: Anne’s apparent heart condition and Bill’s kidney stones. They were too sick to fly back to Australia. This was despite their visas expiring five months earlier.

The two were examined by police doctors and deemed in good health.

It was ‘just so much nonsense’, says Marie Mohr. ‘There was nothing wrong with her. She was as healthy as an ox.’

Lawrence had little to do with Anne except legal formalities, but of course he met her in court, which allowed him to form his own judgements. What he noticed most was what he calls Anne’s charm: ‘A certain strong sense of charm. She did have a captivating persona and seemed like she could charm the pants off of anybody. She clearly had a very magnetic personality.’

In the US court, she presented as impervious and calm, ‘as if none of this was really phasing her, and that everything was going to be fine’.

We ask Lawrence if he could see Anne as the spirit she said she was. A holy spirit; Jesus Christ reincarnated. He laughs. ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone as Jesus Christ reincarnated.’

She seemed too relaxed for the situation, he says. ‘She seemed so non-stressed about what was going on that I did wonder about her mental health. And I guess part of that could be a very strong, solid personality. And part of it could be some type of manifestation of mental illness.’

This time, the successful bail application was overturned, and Anne and Bill were taken to jail again to wait for an extradition hearing. An Australian reporter described Anne as looking ‘tired and bedraggled’ in court, in a yellow sweatshirt and khaki trousers. Her hair was waist-length but tied back. Bill wore jeans and a blue patterned sweater, with tortoiseshell glasses.

They continued to fight the extradition order. But a weariness took over, and perhaps a realisation that if they did go home to face what they knew were minor charges they could either get off or be fined only a small amount. Then an inmate at Westchester County jail, who was being held close to Bill, was murdered. At that point, they put their hands up and said, ‘Okay. Extradite us.’

Bill told his lawyers that he didn’t feel safe in the American jail. ‘It created a sense of panic,’ says Lawrence.

‘Maybe,’ says Lex, ‘luck and justice were going to be on our side.’

Lex and two other detectives from Forest, plus an Australian police doctor, flew to New York. Lex saw it as a game of wits: if Anne reckoned she was sick, he would take a police doctor to check her out. The female doctor was also on board in case the fugitives claimed ill health again on the long flight home. ‘Checkmate,’ says Lex. ‘Outwit her and outsmart her. When I got over there, I didn’t want Anne to play the medical card again.’

She didn’t. Lex spent a few days with the extradition team and the FBI tying up the paperwork. Then, on the last day of the assignment, he met Anne for the first time. Under US law, those being extradited need to be accompanied by US Marshalls until the moment of departure. ‘We’re on the forecourt outside John F. Kennedy airport in New York and this brown van pulls up and a US Marshall gets out and comes around and slides the door open,’ he says. ‘So for the first time, here are the two people that I had been investigating with my team, the two people that we’d been chasing.

‘And here is this frail old little lady, and a gentleman who was frail, and one look at them, you think, How could this be Anne and Bill Hamilton-Byrne? But it was. Anne didn’t have any make-up on. She didn’t have the obligatory trademark, the blonde wig. And I looked at Anne and I said, “Anne Hamilton-Byrne?” She looked at me and said, “You must be Mr de Man. I thought you’d look a lot older.”’

Outwardly Lex was all business, but inwardly he was jumping out of his skin. He was proud and excited, but also uneasy. ‘It was rather surreal meeting her for the first time when I knew the evil that she had committed. I knew the evil type of person she was. I’d seen her on footage, I’d heard her voice, I’d seen her in photos, but to see her in person was really mixed emotions.’ Visions of what he had heard — the stories of abuse and cold manipulation — reeled through his mind. ‘I’m thinking to myself, How could this person I’m looking at be so evil? But evil she was.’

He had to get Anne and Bill flown across the United States to Los Angeles and change planes to a Qantas long-haul flight to Sydney, and then to Melbourne: around 22 hours all up. On the flights back, the two sat not next to each but in front and behind, at the windows, handcuffed. Detectives were beside them, and followed them into the toilets when they needed to go. The temptation for Lex was to start asking questions — why did you do it? Why did you drug them? Why do you say you are Jesus? — but he didn’t. Anne and Bill barely spoke. Bill checked on her occasionally, but that was all.

A couple of hours out of Sydney, cabin crew asked Lex and another detective if they wanted to go up to the cockpit and meet the pilot. ‘He said he knew who we had with us and how proud he was as captain of the Qantas jumbo that would be bringing Anne Hamilton-Byrne and her husband back to Australia to face justice. So that was a bit of a poignant moment in the investigation for me. And a pat on the back for the team. We did well and it was noticed. An Aussie saying to another Aussie “well done”.’

In Sydney, the team and the captured fugitives got on a humble domestic flight for the hour-long trip to Melbourne. They needed to go straight to a court to get bail conditions set.

After they landed, in the morning on a Tuesday in August 1993, media chased the team from the airport into the city, trying to get photographs of Anne and Bill in a police car. Then at the court, where they arrived around 10.00 am, there was another large group of bustling media. The couple’s Australian lawyer, Patrick Tehan, told the court they were not guilty and wanted bail and would go straight to trial at a higher court — the County Court.

They got their bail on the condition they could not leave Victoria, and they had to hand over their passports. Anne and Bill-Hamilton-Byrne, exhausted and weary, were then driven by a cult member back up to the hills that had hidden them for so long.