LONG after midnight she hears the familiar rattle of a vehicle crossing the cattlepit at the front gate, the drumming of tyres on gravel, the hum of a motor. She sees a man in the moonlight and, for a second, her heart leaps. Then she realises it’s not her husband. It’s the local policeman. She goes to the door, sick with fear. She knows it’s bad. When he puts his arms around her, she knows it’s the worst. ‘Rob’s not coming home,’ he says gently.
NOT all love stories end in tragedy, but many a tragedy begins with a love story.
Darina Pasco’s begins when she’s seventeen, the week she arrives from New Zealand to train at the Sydney Adventist hospital. On her first Saturday night in Australia she meets Rob Foots.
That was in 1971. ‘We’ve been together ever since,’ says Darina. She corrects herself. ‘I mean, we had twenty-four years together …’ The generous face clouds and hardens. ‘We should have had another twenty-four.’
She often switches tenses – and moods – when talking about the love of her life, the father of her four children. She is kind and open, but something else lurks close to the surface, now, a weariness and a wariness that at any moment can wipe away the happiness of remembering the good times. Before 8 August, 1995.
The boy she meets in the early 1970s is big and strong, but so baby faced it’s hard to believe he’s already on the way to owning his own electrical business. Pictures taken of them show a pair of awkward big kids gazing into each other’s eyes.
They’re teenagers in love, but they take a more traditional route than many through the permissive society eddying around them. They marry at Wahroonga, in Sydney, in 1974.
Rob Foots is a goer, and always was. Youngest child and only boy in a big family, at eight years old he sells eggs from his own hens, and has a milk run. At fourteen he leaves school and starts work in the family electrical business.
As he grows up, he manages a difficult balancing act between living life to the full and observing the principles of his family’s Seventh Day Adventist faith.
Like the business, young Foots thrives. He becomes the sort of man of whom people say he never preaches his religion, but lives it. He is generous. He does nothing by half measures. He believes right is might, that God helps those who help themselves.
And so, in a sense, Rob and Darina are pioneers without a frontier to go to. They do the next best thing. In 1981, after their two daughters are born, they move to the country.
THE first stop in the Foots family adventure is a five-hectare block at Tabletop, near Albury. There they set up their business – and have their third child, Justin.
They prosper, and buy a bigger place, sixty-five hilly hectares on the Victorian side of the border, on the banks of Lake Hume in a district called Talgarno. The view of the drowned valley is sensational. But you can’t live on a view.
They call the place ‘The Foothills’. Their commitment to it is almost biblical. They plant trees down the drive, and build a huge shed, where they live for nine months while building the first stage of the magnificent sprawling house they had dreamed up for the point overlooking the lake. It becomes a ‘granny flat’, where they rig up four tiny ‘temporary’ bedrooms – and live in it for six years.
As Rob Foots expands the business over the Riverina he spends every spare moment building the dream house. Typically, he thinks big. It’s all solid brick and soaring ceilings and tall chimneys, deep windows, a spa and ensuites.
Along the way, a fourth child is born: another boy, Carl. ‘He’s the image of his father,’ Darina says. She says he’s ‘a Godsend’, and means it literally.
They move in two days before Christmas, 1993. They’ve been married twenty years, and this is their present to each other.
So here they are, a happy family in a new house. The children go to the Border Christian College, where Rob is on the school board. He’s also taken up singing, practising as he drives his ute to distant jobs, and wins medals at local eisteddfods. They have a canoe and a ski boat and a labrador dog.
Every morning at dawn, he takes the dog, Jake, for a jog. Every evening, after a family dinner, he goes to the shed to prepare for the next day’s work, then shares a spa bath with Darina to talk over the day’s doings. They are content; true believers in their promised land.
It lasts one year and eight months.
BEFORE church on Saturday, 5 August, 1995, Rob Foots goes for a morning walk along the Talgarno road, which lets him check his cattle and fences. He has rigged a temporary fence along the roadside so his cattle can graze down grass that would otherwise be a fire hazard.
The fence is basic: a few wires strung on star pickets, known by farmers as steel posts. The posts are light and strong, and can be driven into the ground with a sledge hammer or post driver. And, at about $3 each, they’re cheap.
But few things are so cheap that a thief won’t steal them. Several times in the previous five years, someone has cut the wire and stolen Rob Foots’s posts. It always happens on moonlit nights in winter, when the ground is soft, out of sight of the house.
Each theft, though not a big financial loss, leaves Rob more angry. Which is why, when he returns from his walk, he says ‘the buggers have knocked off more posts’. After church they drive down the road to have a look. They find some loose steel posts leaning against a tree, as if the thief has forgotten them. ‘They’ll be back to get the rest,’ Rob predicts. But he doesn’t mention it again.
Tuesday, three days later, is the same as any other in the family’s well-ordered lives. Joanne has just started at Avondale College at Coorambong, north of Sydney, leaving the three younger children at home. They have their evening meal together, as usual, then watch Funniest Home Videos and Just Kidding on television.
At 8.30 pm Rob goes to the shed, about a hundred metres from the house, to do his accounts and pack his utility ready for the next day’s work.
At 9pm the telephone rings. Corrine answers it. Using the Commander system, she puts the call through to the shed and tells him it’s ‘Uncle Ray’, a family friend also on the school board.
Darina realises there is a school board meeting that night, and that Rob has missed it. At 10 pm, she fills the spa, ready for the nightly ritual of a bath and a talk before bed. But, this time, with Rob working later than usual, she has it alone.
By the time she finishes, the time is creeping towards 10.30 pm. She rings the shed telephone extension. She tries her husband’s mobile telephone, then the two-way radio fitted to the ute. No answers. She feels the first pang of fear.
It’s a freezing August night. She puts on her dressing gown and walks towards the shed, thinking he might be stuck underneath a vehicle. But the shed is empty. No Rob. No ute.
Darina decides he might have suddenly gone to the school board meeting after all. She tries to ignore the fact he never leaves the property without telling her. Stomach knotting, she rings the school, to see if the meeting is still going. No answer.
She recalls, later, each action and each thought. ‘I looked at my watch,’ she is to say. ‘It was 12.30. I thought, if he’s not home by 1am, I’ll go and look for him myself.’
That doesn’t happen. Ten minutes later, someone comes looking for her instead.
IT HAS been a bad time for the de Hennin family, and about to get worse. This Tuesday night, Jim and Julie de Hennin, who live on a property past the Foots’s, have been to Albury to see one of their daughters, whose husband was accidentally electrocuted two weeks earlier. They drive home in separate cars, Jim ten minutes behind his wife. It’s some time after 9.30 pm.
As he takes the bend past Foots’s gate, de Hennin sees a vehicle on his left, skewed on a steep angle to the road, headlights shining into the paddock. He thinks his neighbor might need help with stray cattle, and stops.
He recognises the vehicle as Rob Foots’s Holden Rodeo. Its motor is running and the driver’s door wide open. Inside is an open briefcase, with a jacket lying across it, a mobile telephone, and, barely visible, a notebook.
De Hennin calls out. No answer. He walks to the front of the ute and peers outside the wedge of light. Then he sees his neighbor, face down on the ground just to the left of the beam.
‘He was lying almost as if he was asleep,’ de Hennin is to recall. ‘That he might be dead was the last thing that entered my head.’ But as soon as he picks up Foots’s hand he realises it’s all wrong. There’s no pulse, and the hand is cold.
He calls the emergency number on his mobile telephone. The ambulance people say to keep the patient warm. He calls home. His wife knows first aid and his daughter, Kirsten, is a trainee nurse. They come quickly and work furiously at resuscitation.
Not until they roll the body over to get at his mouth does de Hennin suspect foul play. There are spots of fresh blood on the green grass. And, under the shirt, a neat hole in his chest.
Pat Garrett, the local policeman, arrives. ‘Keep working on him,’ he says. ‘Don’t give up.’ He and de Hennin see the grass and the soft ground is torn up where a vehicle has reversed past the ute. A perfect set of tyremarks, etched in red mud, leads onto the bitumen, towards Albury.
Much later, after a detective arrives from Wodonga, Garrett goes off to face the toughest job a cop has to do.
AFTERWARDS, Darina sits in the silent house with the policeman for a long time. She forces herself to ask the question. ‘How did it happen?’
He finds a gentle way to speak the unspeakable. ‘He had a small hole just here,’ he says, brushing his chest with his hand. He didn’t use the words ‘died’ or ‘dead’ or ‘shot’. Darina knows what he means, but is grateful.
She often ponders, later, the coping mechanism that gets her through that night and ones that follow. When Garrett offers to call her closest friends she says firmly, ‘No, you won’t. I will.’ She doesn’t want a stranger breaking the news.
She calls John and Julienne Bullock. It’s after lam. John answers, sleepy and apprehensive. She says: ‘Rob’s been shot and he didn’t make it.’ After a second’s pause, it sinks in. ‘We’ll be there.’ They live twenty minutes away, by normal reckoning, on the other side of the lake. They make it in ten.
The policeman goes home after they arrive. The three sit for hours, talking. They veer from tears to laughter. They don’t wake the children – there will be enough sleepless nights for them in the weeks and months ahead. But, after daybreak, they can’t put it off any longer. They wake them and break their hearts.
Darina calls her sister and brother-in-law in Sydney, and they agree to drive to Coorambong to tell the oldest daughter, Joanne, then bring her the 650km south to Albury.
Recalling that first day of the rest of her life, Darina says: ‘Rob did everything in a big way – big wife, big house, big family. Even departing it was in a big way. That morning there were planes and helicopters flying overhead and I thought “Goodness me, darl, you really know how to do it”.’
THE homicide squad knows about Rob Foots’s death before his widow does. Three detectives on the on-call crew are paged in the first hour. By midnight they’re driving north.
Detective Senior Sergeant Jeff Maher is in charge, with senior detectives Graeme Arthur and Phil Shepherd. When they get to Talgarno it’s after 4am and minus-six degrees. A local detective and two crime scene experts from Wangaratta shiver in the frost.
At first light, traffic starts to trickle by. The detectives block the road and speak to drivers to see if, being locals, they had seen anything useful the night before. Some did. This narrows the time of the shooting to less than an hour, after 9.30 but before 10.30. At breakfast time they speak to Darina, and ask to see any firearms in the house. It’s painful, but their job is to eliminate potential suspects, and the first people to eliminate are family members. Then they doorknock neighbors. No-one knows anything, except that Rob Foots isn’t the sort of bloke who gets shot.
Shepherd, who is to see the case through to the end, has a long talk to the dead man’s friend, John Bullock, who is close enough to know if he had any enemies in business. Meanwhile, the body is moved and sent to Melbourne for a post mortem, and a metal detector turns up a freshly-fired .22 calibre bullet case.
The only obvious motive seems to be that Foots interrupted a thief. But the detectives are cautious about this, because steel posts are used by farmers – and, as Shepherd says later, ‘cockies don’t tend to pinch stuff from other cockies.’
So who would want to steal the posts, apart from legitimate farmers? It can only be someone who wants to build a fence. The police wonder if it could be marijuana growers stealing posts rather than arousing suspicion by buying new ones.
Next day, there’s more to work with. The bullet the pathologist removes from Rob Foots’s body matches the .22 shell from the scene. It went through the heart, then downwards through the liver and lodged in the tenth rib.
The muddy tyre tracks are identified as being made by near-new Kuhmo KH-832 Powerguards, a tread pattern available for only eighteen months. The axle width indicates the vehicle is a light Japanese four-wheel drive. The fact the tracks turned towards Albury-Wodonga, and that the shooting happened on a weeknight, means it’s probably someone local.
It isn’t a flying start, but it’s something. The detectives ask every tyre dealer in the border area for records showing who has bought Kuhmo Powerguard tyres in the previous six months.
As this information trickles in, they start cross-checking registrations of four-wheel-drive owners against licensed shooters, looking to draw up a short list of locals who own guns and four-wheel-drives. Such methods can get results eventually – providing the process of elimination is strict enough not to let a suspect slip through the net with a plausible manner and ready alibi. By the time Rob Foots’s funeral is held six days after his death, many routine inquiries have been made, but there’s little to show for them. The funeral is at the Seventh Day Adventist church in Albury. There have been thirty death notices in the Border Morning Mail, and more than 500 mourners crowd the church. When a video tape of Rob singing a hymn is played on a big screen, people weep.
Two days later, the police retrace their steps. They go back to Foots’s farm to check the dead man’s possessions. When a detective goes to fetch Foots’s diary, he’s given the notebook that had been lying on the briefcase in the utility. He notices, he says later, what could be a car registration number scrawled faintly on the plastic cover.
The number is that of a Nissan four-wheel-drive twin cab utility … registered to an address in Firebrace Track, Granya Gap, about twenty minutes away up the road running past Foots’s property.
Shepherd and fellow detective Steve Tragardh drive to Granya Gap. They find the property. There is no house, only a locked shed. But there are tyre tracks. And the tread pattern matches the muddy ones found at the crime scene.
It seems, then, that Rob Foots has not just sung at his own funeral, but solved his own murder. But it proves a little more complicated.
Back at Albury police station, the detectives soon find out that the Nissan’s owner lives in the town. He is David Cox, a sixty-year-old grandfather who has worked forty years for the railways before being made redundant the year before.
On appearances, Cox doesn’t seem a likely killer. But someone who knows more about him than they do thinks otherwise. An anonymous tip which arrives, by coincidence, while the detectives are at Granya fingers Cox as a suspect because he has a four-wheel-drive, likes guns – and has an old conviction in NSW for stealing farm fencing materials.
Shepherd doesn’t want to show his hand – yet. He and Tragardh sit off Cox’s place, a bungalow behind his aged mother’s house in South Albury, a down-at-heels area near the Murray. They sneak a look at the Nissan’s tyres – and get a surprise. They are Kuhmos – but worn out, and a different tread pattern from the ones at the crime scene.
This is the first move of a chess game. Shepherd traces the car’s previous owner. He says he sold it to Cox just nine months before – but not with Kuhmos on it. Question: why would Cox replace one set of tyres with another set of old tyres? Answer: to cover his tracks. But how to prove it?
A few days later, Cox buys new tyres at the local K-mart – and leaves the old ones there. The police seize them, and take them to a tyre expert, who points out that the soapy lubricant used to fit tyres is on them, meaning they have been fitted some time in the previous month.
By this time, forensic tests prove the tyremarks at Cox’s Granya property are identical to those at the crime scene. But where are the new tyres that made them?
The police move. On 30 August they take out a warrant, go to Cox’s house, inspect the Nissan and search the house. They find fourteen firearms. They take Cox to the police station. He denies everything, convincingly. His wife, meanwhile, backs up his alibi that he was home all night on 8 August.
The last question Shepherd puts to him that day is if he has any idea how Rob Foots died. ‘Cox looked at me with the most earnest expression and said he was sorry he hasn’t, because he wanted to help.’
They take him home. But not for long. Early next morning, 31 August, they arrest him. This time they point out the damning inconsistencies in his story. He changes it.
COX admits stealing steel posts from Foots’s property more than once, and to being there on the night of the killing. But he claims that he and his adult son Phillip (who is slightly handicapped as a result of cerebral palsy) were shooting rabbits when confronted by the angry owner.
Cox’s story is that Foots assaulted him and his son, and that he, Cox, grabbed the rifle to scare him when he tripped over a piece of wood, accidentally firing a shot.
He can’t explain why the bullet hit Foots’s heart, then travelled downwards at an angle of thirty degrees. Or why there is no sign of a struggle. Why Foots’s hands weren’t grazed from throwing punches. Why neither father nor son suffered any visible cuts or bruises. Nor does he explain why steel posts were found already pulled from the ground, ready to load.
What he does explain is the mystery of the missing tyres.
Aware that the new Kuhmos – bought only days before the shooting – would be an obvious lead, he removed them himself, replacing them with the old tyres, which he had kept as spares. He then drilled holes in the new tyres and threw them in the Murray.
Cox takes the police to the river, and they retrieve one of the new Kuhmos. They are not so lucky with the murder weapon, which Cox claims he threw into Lake Hume. Several searches fail to find the rifle.
Cox’s son Phillip is no help. In the interview room he says he cannot even tell the time, let alone remember the events of the night. Sceptical detectives note he is competent enough to hold a driver’s licence, and is married with several children.
Darina is at the funeral parlor trying to choose a plaque when her mobile telephone chirps. It’s Shepherd, keeping his promise to tell her first about the arrest. ‘I laughed, cried, and clapped. I had tears streaming down my face. I drove straight around to the school to tell the kids.’
Later, Shepherd drives to Granya to check Cox’s property. He unlocks the shed. Inside it are bundles of brand new steel posts, bought and paid for.
DAVID Cox was found not guilty of murder at Wangaratta on 7 November, 1996. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years imprisonment with a minimum of five, and three months for stealing seventy star pickets valued at $245. His wife, Irene Mary Cox, distressed by the trial, died suddenly three months later. She is buried in Albury cemetery ten metres from Rob Foots. David Cox made an official complaint to the Victoria Police, demanding the return of a pair of pliers and a rifle magazine. Darina Foots put the family property on the market a year later.