TRISH Carl’s ten-year love affair with policing died the night she shot dead a disturbed, drunken woman armed with two knives.
What began as just another mundane nightshift in the provincial border city of Wodonga ended with a fatal confrontation that made headlines in two countries, and ultimately cost Senior Constable Carl her job, her house and her sense of well-being.
Carl and her police partner, Barry Randall, were called to a noisy party at 2.55 am on 12 November, 1995, a Sunday morning. They were confronted at the front door of a modest defence forces house by Helen Merkle, who was drunk, irrational and ready to fight anyone in her path. She had already assaulted her husband, a quiet Australian soldier, before police arrived. Merkle charged screaming from the house and attempted to attack the policewoman. Senior Constable Carl ran backwards down the drive and yelled at the woman to drop the knives before firing three shots, the last from a distance of one metre.
The third shot hit the berserk woman in the heart, killing her instantly.
The Merkle killing was the second since the safety-first police retraining program, Project Beacon, and the twenty-fifth since 1988. To add to the controversy Helen Merkle was a Papua New Guinean national with strong political connections.
She was the niece of the PNG Foreign Affairs Secretary, Gabriel Dusava, which led to extraordinary political fallout after the shooting. No less than the PNG Prime Minister, Sir Julius Chan, and his High Commissioner to Australia, Sir Frederick Reiher, disputed that Mrs Merkle was armed when she was shot, even though her husband, Mark Merkle, confirmed the police version of events.
A PNG paper was even less subtle, and carried the inflammatory headline: ‘It was murder.’
Even the Australian Foreign Affairs Minister of the day, Gareth Evans, seemed to be infected by the rush to prejudge the incident without knowledge of the facts. Evans was quoted as saying: ‘It just staggers the imagination that something has not gone fundamentally wrong in the way in which the police are administering themselves.’ It was politician-speak for joining in the chorus of accusations aimed at Trish Carl.
For eleven months Senior Constable Carl could not defend herself from public attacks. She was finally vindicated by coroner, Jacinta Heffey, who found the shooting justified and described Helen Merkle as ‘a walking time bomb ready to explode and kill someone’.
The day after Carl was cleared by the coroner her six-year-old daughter went outside to play and found daubed in paint on the lawn and front fence of their Albury home the words: ‘COON KILLER.’
Senior Constable Carl continued to work and tried act if nothing had changed. But she felt that something had been stolen from her and that she was the real victim.
She was short with her two young children and was apprehensive when working. She was frightened that her husband, Andrew, also a policeman, could be shot on duty. But she told friends and family she was getting better and time would heal her problems. The answer, she thought, was to throw herself back into policing to regain her enthusiasm.
But she found she was living a lie.
‘I was putting on a brave face, trying to keep going.’ The shooting was always at the back of her mind, and on duty she would think of it constantly. She had that numbing emotion that can paralyse – and that police rarely talk about – fear.
‘I lost it. The fear never goes away. It is there all the time. You fear for your own safety and you fear you may have to shoot someone else,’ she said.
‘I lost confidence, even when we had to pull over a car. The feeling was there every time I put on the uniform.’
She said she resented the woman she shot. ‘Her stupid actions changed my life for the worse. It has turned my life upside down. I could only react to her actions.’
She told people her enthusiasm was returning but in July, 1997, she was called to a routine disturbance. It turned out to be a mentally disturbed woman with a knife.
Trish Carl persuaded the woman to drop the knife and drove her to a hospital, where she was committed. ‘She didn’t want to hurt us, but she would have killed her husband if he had been there.’
The incident took her back to the Merkle shooting. ‘It was the eyes. She had the same scary look as Helen – the eyes of death.’
Carl was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and was placed on sick leave. By November, 1997, she knew her career was finished. Her husband Andrew also quit the force and, a few weeks later, they sold their house (at a loss) and moved to Queensland.
They both felt the family needed to move from the Albury-Wodonga area to leave the shooting behind. In Queensland Carl feels she is no longer the policewoman who killed, but just another parent trying to bring up a couple of kids. ‘No-one here knows. I think we are slowly getting it behind us and want to get on with our lives.
‘I wasn’t sleeping well and I was really cranky with the kids. We had to try and start again.’ But while her state of mind has improved, small things can still trigger flashbacks.
If she sees even low-level violence on television she dreams about the shooting. And she still simmers with anger at the media and politicians who, she believes, condemned her before the inquest.
News of shootings involving police brings back her resentment at the system that she believes let her down. ‘Do people really think police think, “Oh, it’s a bit boring today, I might go and shoot somebody,”?
‘They try to crucify the poor coppers who are just trying to protect people.’
Carl is acutely aware that often when police are involved in a shooting self-appointed community watchdog groups are contacted by the media and offered the chance to pass judgment, even before the police involved in the incident, and any eye witnesses, have been interviewed.
That pattern was followed after the shooting of a man in the Melbourne suburb of Bentleigh on Good Friday, 1998. Two police on the afternoon shift in a divisional van on routine patrol were sent to check a report that two men were trying to break into an automatic teller machine.
In the divvy van was a constable, with about nine months experience, and a more experienced senior constable. When they drove down Centre Road they were flagged down by the man who had made the original report.
He said the one of the two men had actually been interfering with a telephone box, and not an ATM.
The police drove slowly towards the men, who had left the telephone box. The two suspects split and walked in opposite directions, and the police approached one of them, John Stewart McConnell, 34.
According to the police, when McConnell saw the police vehicle he changed directions and headed back towards his friend.
The constable said he left the car, walked towards McConnell and asked him to stop. He said the man started to jog away from him, despite being asked not to run.
The police version of events is that the suspect turned right into a small shopping mall and the police followed. According to police, the constable, who was directly behind McConnell, turned the corner, drew his extendable baton with his right hand, but did not open it to its full length. The senior constable, who was standing off to the side then yelled, ‘Drop the hammer.’
McConnell then turned around and moved towards the constable, who dropped his baton and pulled out his police issue .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. The senior constable also pulled out his handgun. Both were to claim they repeatedly yelled on McConnell to halt.
Police say he had the hammer above his head and screamed ‘Shoot me, shoot me’ as he gathered pace.
The constable backed away on to Centre Road, but said his escape was blocked by passing traffic. Police said McConnell continued to run towards the policeman, who then fired two shots – hitting him in the chest and killing him instantly.
After every police shooting two homicide crews, comprising a total of up to fourteen detectives, are called to investigate.
Interviews with police involved in the shooting are conducted only by senior members of the homicide squad and each interview is observed by investigators from the ethical standards department. The coroner also attends.
Police psychologists are called to counsel police involved, who are also routinely advised by police association lawyers not to participate in any filmed re-enactment.
Homicide squad detectives are acutely aware of the need to be thorough. They remember that Detective Sergeant John Hill was charged with being an accessory to murder in relation to his 1988 investigation of the police shooting of the armed robber Graeme Jensen. Devastated, Hill committed suicide two months after he was charged.
FORMER policeman Cliff Lockwood has moved interstate and changes his telephone number regularly to avoid the crank calls he still occasionally gets. It’s just one of the prices he pays for shooting and killing a suspect in a Carlton flat in 1989.
It was a famous case, a tragic footnote to the Walsh Street shootings in which two young uniformed police were gunned down in a South Yarra street, apparently in reprisal for the Graeme Jensen shooting by detectives a day earlier.
Lockwood’s sudden fall from grace happened after he shot Gary Abdallah, aged twenty four, while he and another detective searched the flat. Police said Abdallah was armed with a replica handgun. He died forty days later. Lockwood was charged with murder and later acquitted by a Supreme Court jury.
In 1994 Lockwood left the police force after twelve years service because he believed he could never live down his involvement in the shooting. He believed he would always be seen as Gary Abdallah’s killer and resented the groups that continued to condemn him over the shooting, although he was cleared of any wrongdoing both at the Coroner’s and Supreme Court. ‘People still bring it up and it was ten years ago,’ he says.
But in 1998 he began to have second thoughts. He missed policing and began to talk of going back to the job that had once been his life. ‘I went as far as getting the (application) papers sent out to me. But I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t go back to driving the van and dealing with the public.’
He said that when his thoughts drifted back to the shooting he would consciously block them from his mind. ‘I just get really angry so I try and set them aside.’
Lockwood said he rarely talked about his feelings over the Abdallah shooting. ‘I don’t want people to think of me as a bloody great sook.’
He said when there was a police shooting he would not watch television news or buy papers. ‘I get really angry at the way it always seems to be the fault of the coppers.’
He has tried several businesses after leaving the force, but five years on he remains unsettled. ‘If it wasn’t for what happened over the shooting I would still be a policeman.’
Like Trish Carl, Cliff Lockwood craves anonymity and wants to leave the shooting in the past. His business now often take him to Bali. ‘I love it there. No-one no-one knows you and no-one cares about your past. You can just disappear into the wilderness.’
Distance from Melbourne helps. That is one reason why he has toyed with joining the Northern Territory police force. It might be one way of being a policeman again, and yet to leave the Abdallah controversy behind. He hopes that in the ‘Top End’ no-one would remind him of the Carlton shooting.
Police involved in shootings often want outside reassurance that they have done the right thing. One policeman who killed a man he believed was armed with a gun was shattered when he learned he was mistaken. It was only when a senior policeman went to him at the scene and said ‘Son, you’ve done nothing wrong,’ that he regained his composure. The senior policeman was criticised at a later inquest for being less than objective.
THERE was no controversy when Constable Wayne Sherwell shot dead Ian William Turner near St Arnaud in June, 1988. The country traffic cop, whose daily routine was to book speeding drivers, simply waved in a car to issue a ticket when he was confronted by Turner, who was armed with two guns.
After a terrifying hand-to-hand struggle, Turner, who was later found to be an armed robber, was shot dead. Wayne Sherwell won the police Valour Award for bravery. He was a hero whose name appears on the Honour Board at the Victoria Police Centre.
But, seven years after the shooting, Wayne Sherwell feared he was cracking up. He took six months off on sick leave and considered resigning. ‘I had reached rock bottom,’ he was to confide.
‘Taking a human life is the most serious thing you could do.’ He said that for years he thought about the shooting every day and even now thought about it every second or third day. ‘I have to remind myself that Turner was the architect of his own demise.’
He thought about every split-second action he took when struggling with Turner. ‘If I had belted him over the head with the gun it may have been different. If I’d been a bit nastier he would be alive.’
Wayne Sherwell was counselled days after the shooting but, still filled with adrenalin, he felt on top of the situation. ‘I didn’t feel bad at all. I felt bad about not feeling bad.’ He had a cup of coffee and a chat with the counsellor and then went home. But in the days, months and years that followed, his mental state deteriorated.
Promoted to senior constable, Sherwell was unable to leave the shooting in the past. ‘I was consumed by it. I thought I was going around the twist.’ He said he suffered from broken sleep and became moody for years. It was only when he read a newspaper report that quoted a Victorian policeman involved in another shooting that he realised his feelings were natural. ‘I thought “that’s exactly what I’m going through, I’m not going nutty after all”.’
He believes that only police involved in shootings truly understand the trauma and is a strong supporter of peer group counselling. In 1998 when police shot dead a man armed with a rifle at Maryborough he rang the station and left a message. ‘If you want to talk, talk to me.’
He said that he now tried to force the shooting out of his mind. ‘I’m dealing with it differently.’ But he can never pull over a car without thinking of Turner. The police force has to confront conflicting demands when there has been a police shooting. The police involved may need immediate counselling, but the investigators into the actual incident must be given priority. They must not only do their job professionally, but be seen to be doing so. It is no easy thing.
Senior police psychologist, Gary Thomson, says counsellors are available immediately after shootings but they make sure they don’t intrude on the investigation.
He said police involved in the shootings usually went into shock but, while some suffered emotional problems for years, others remained relatively unaffected.
‘Some people can become fixated and it can be a turning point for the worse in their lives’. He said counsellors tried to ‘be supportive without being judgemental.’
US law enforcement studies showed that most police shot in the line of duty remained psychologically scarred for up to fifteen years.
A study at the Los Angeles police department found that seventy six per cent of police involved in shootings retained vivid memories of the incidents for years.
About seventy five per cent suffered from crying depressions and eighty five per cent suffered from sensory distortion, where they felt incidents were happening in slow motion.
Some of the main symptoms included depression, crying for no reason, withdrawal, paranoia, irritability, flashbacks, and fear of going insane.
An example. Two Massachusetts policemen were ambushed in the street by two burglars. One of the police officers was shot dead and the second fired four shots, wounding one of the burglars. But one of his bullets accidentally killed a six-year-old boy, playing in a nearby yard.
The policeman who fired the shot was shattered. Although he suffered no physical injuries one hand became paralysed. It was the hand that held the gun that killed the child.