‘This is like a jigsaw puzzle where you don’t have the end picture.’
—Detective Senior Sergeant Jack Lee
A PARADE of crime in all different shapes and sizes had passed before Lloyd Rayney. As the chief crown prosecutor for Western Australia—the state sometimes referred to as the wild west—he had seen a lot. Social detritus, vicious villains and unnatural death were all part of his working day as he toiled to put away small-time crooks and dangerous criminals. In one case Mr Rayney was seeking an upper-end sentence for cruel killer Richard Leatch, who had tortured and murdered a 14-year-old boy. The judge reminded Mr Rayney of the litany of carnage both men had been witness to in their wood-panelled courts and offices. ‘I believe you have seen, as I certainly have, offences which are far more drastic in their seriousness than this,’ the judge said.
Mr Rayney, thin, bespectacled and with a wry countenance, had been born in the Yemen city of Aden but was of mixed Irish–Indian descent. The woman he made his life with—his wife Corryn—was also a lawyer and also of Indian descent. Corryn was nine when she and her younger sister, Sharon, migrated to Perth from Uganda in 1973 with their parents, Ernest and Laura Da Silva. (Her dad Ernest was originally from Goa, India.) Her parents told how they had fled Uganda for Perth to get away from Idi Amin’s violent regime. Twelve years after emigrating as a young girl Corryn had graduated with a law degree from the University of Western Australia.
Colleagues told how Corryn and Lloyd had met working in the Australian Government Solicitor’s Office in the late 1980s. Lloyd immediately took to the social, friendly woman with a similar cultural background and a permanent smile. Mr Rayney said it was love at first sight when he, a junior lawyer aged twenty-four, first cast eyes on Corryn. She was an articled clerk and he confessed to thinking up any excuse to go past her office to get another glimpse of her. Wedding bells, a marriage of nearly two decades and children would follow.
Together they were a Perth power couple: Lloyd’s star was on the rise and Corryn had a senior position in the Western Australian justice system as a registrar of the state’s Supreme Court. Corryn had spent a dozen years at the Federal Court in Perth as a deputy district registrar before moving to the Supreme Court in 2002. During the same period Lloyd Rayney was making his name as an ambitious barrister and prosecutor. He seemed gentle and unassuming but he played a long game and he played for keeps.
Rayney had prosecuted a $2.5 million pink diamond heist from the Argyle mine in the Kimberley. He prosecuted a babysitter who had nearly boiled a baby in her care to death in an overheated bath. He prosecuted drink drivers who had killed with their cars. And at the spectacular inquest into the death of iron-ore magnate Lang Hancock he was counsel assisting the coroner.
If history really does repeat, as the adage goes, first as tragedy, second as farce, then Lloyd Rayney’s legal life was like history’s cycle in reverse. One of the most colourful cases in the Perth prosecutor’s stellar career was not about balaclavas or burglars but a now notorious incident involving noted expat art critic Robert Hughes, a bluefin tuna and a car crash. In May 1999 Hughes had been filming a fishing documentary at Echo Beach. He had snagged a tuna and was returning to Broome—120 kilometres to the north—when he was involved in a horrific collision. Hughes’s rented Nissan Pulsar was on the wrong side of the road when it struck head-on a Holden Commodore carrying a Colin and two Darrens. Each driver had tried to warn the other. The Commodore had honked. Hughes had flashed his lights. And then the cars smashed together. Hughes suffered multiple injuries, including a fractured sternum and ribs, and several fractures to his right leg. The passengers in the other car ran to Hughes’s rescue, helping free him from the wreckage. The driver of the other car suffered leg injuries in the smash. A 24-year-old passenger and Hughes were airlifted to Perth for emergency treatment. Hughes remained in a critical condition in a coma for five weeks.
Hughes was charged with two dangerous driving offences and later caused great controversy by referring to the men in the other car as ‘low-life scum’. It was part of a series of sprays that reportedly included a claim by the self-described elitist that the Broome volunteer fire department stole his tuna after the crash (although Hughes denies he made this comment on the record). A portrait of the wounded critic during this time, hobbling on crutches and glowering out from the shadows, became a celebrated Archibald Prize contender.
There was a lot of speculation that Hughes had been on the bottle. Asked later in an interview if he had been drinking before the crash Hughes said a witness at the trial testified that he had had only one lager at lunch. It’s possible the art critic’s American habits simply made him default to travelling in the right-hand lane. (The accounts of petrified interviewers riding shotgun with Hughes on other occasions would seem to back this up.) Nevertheless Hughes put the prosecution to their proof and pleaded not guilty to the charges. But before Hughes’s court hearing the Colin and one of the Darrens from the crash and a private eye were charged by police for trying to extort $50 000 out of him. The men had apparently approached Hughes’s lawyers, offering to give sympathetic evidence to help the critic off his charges in return for a big payout. Police were alerted and the hero-rescuers-cum-financial-opportunists were nabbed.
The crown’s key witness being charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice was a big blow to the prosecution case. But Mr Rayney insisted the show would go on and the self-assured expat critic would still face court. When Hughes’s hearing date arrived Rayney told the court he would not be calling the charged Colin and Darren to give evidence against Hughes because they were unreliable and untrustworthy. (It still left the witness evidence of the untarnished Darren—actually Darryn—and some other witnesses.)
Mr Rayney explained why the tarnished Darren and Colin had been pulled. ‘They have demonstrated a preparedness to give perjured evidence in order to assist [Hughes’s] case and in order for them to benefit financially,’ he said. ‘This is not a decision that has been made lightly—this is not a tactical decision.’
Hughes’s legal team argued the crown had not rebutted the reasonable possibility that the accident was caused by mechanical failure in the critic’s car. It worked. The magistrate threw the prosecution case out of court and ordered the prosecution to foot Hughes’s pricey legal bill of $36 085. The magistrate slammed Mr Rayney for not calling the two discredited witnesses. ‘You certainly impeded the court,’ the magistrate said. ‘In this case, it is my personal opinion it was a blunder.’
Outside court Hughes described prosecution officers as turkeys and accused the director of prosecutions, Robert Cock QC, and Mr Rayney of pursuing him—‘the expatriate elitist’—for their own political or personal gain. ‘Lloyd Rayney was doing this as a heaven-sent opportunity to do a bit of tall poppy slaying and try to advance his own career,’ Hughes said.
There were also reports he had called Rayney, a ‘curry muncher’ in reference to his Indian heritage. Hughes denied the reports but his clarification did not help his case: ‘What I said was, “That’s what really gave the prosecution curry for coming so badly prepared into the case, which I guess is appropriate because one of the head-prosecution lawyers is an Indian gentleman”.’ Mr Cock said that the accusations were an ‘absolute slur on the integrity of the prosecutions service’ and defended Rayney as a man of ‘considerable integrity’. Cock and Rayney then lodged writs suing Hughes for defamation over Hughes’s comments and media outlets for broadcasting them. Hughes returned overseas following his whirlwind tour of the great southern land that had been about as charming and successful as Frank Sinatra’s decades earlier.
The Western Australian paper The Sunday Times channelled the local feeling about Hughes in the following terms: ‘The solitude of the moon would be seen by many West Australians as a good place for international art critic Robert Hughes to take a holiday following his visit to the town.’ The feeling, it seemed, was mutual. In New York, Hughes was saying, ‘Tow Australia out to sea and dump it, for all I care.’
Hughes later attempted to defend his labelling of two of his rescuers-and-would-be-profiteers as scum. ‘Incredibly, some … seem to think that my description of Bow and Kelly as low-life scum is arrogant and/or unfair,’ Hughes said. ‘Bow is doing a long jail term for armed robberies committed since the crash, and both are now facing trial for plotting to extort $30 000 from a near-fatally injured and now crippled man—myself—by offering to perjure themselves at his trial.’
But the untarnished Darryn told how one of the so-called ‘scum’ had saved Hughes’s life. Darryn said in the aftermath of the horror crash the carburettor of Hughes’s wrecked Nissan Pulsar was on fire. He said the other Darren, who had a broken foot from the accident, took off his shirt and smothered the flames, saving Hughes from incineration. Darren then tried to pull Hughes out of the car, Darryn said.
Hughes thought he had left his Western Australian dramas behind him. But the tenacious Mr Rayney and the crown appealed the magistrate’s decision to throw out the case. The Supreme Court agreed with the prosecution’s view that Hughes should be tried again over the dangerous driving incident. There was months of to-ing and fro-ing and finally, in April 2003, one of the dangerous driving charges was dropped and Hughes pleaded guilty to the other. He was fined $2500 and banned from driving in Western Australia for three years.
On the same day that the plea deal was announced it was revealed that Cock and Rayney’s defamation proceedings had settled out of court but that the details would be kept secret. There was a minor controversy over the cloak-and-dagger nature of the public administration of justice involving Rayney and Cock. But in the end the public narrative was that, under the glare of the spotlight, the prosecution had won the day. Lloyd Rayney had got the result he wanted, he had defended his state’s honour against an interloping blowhard, and he had presumably got a tidy little payout in the secret defamation settlement.
Rayney left the prosecutor’s office and went on to represent a police officer at the WA Corruption and Crime Commission hearings (in relation to the wrongful conviction of Andrew Mallard), and Australia’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, in a mining dispute. But neither those cases nor the Hughes episode would be the biggest criminal case to rock Mr Rayney’s world. That title would be taken by a crime much closer to home.
TUESDAY 7 August 2007 was a day like many others for Corryn Rayney. The ebullient and attractive 44-year-old mother of two spent the day at her work as a Supreme Court registrar, spent some time with her family, met a girlfriend for dinner at a tavern in her home suburb of Como, and then went bootscooting.
Corryn was an admirer of what similar-minded people call both kinds of music: country and western. She would change out of her professional attire into her bootscooting garb before attending the two-hour dance class. Her passion for the oft-mocked pastime was typical of her all-embracing spunky personality. Her legal position had earnt her $215 000 a year but friends said the money had not ruined her. She treated all-comers graciously and equally, whether they be hardened prisoners or Supreme Court judges. ‘She did everything with a smile. I never saw her raise her voice. She was always very professional and diplomatic,’ a fellow lawyer said.
And if boot scooting was her vice there was plenty of virtuous compensation. She had been a Sunday School teacher and member at the Westminster Presbyterian church in Bull Creek for twenty-six years. For that particular Tuesday night’s boot-scooting Corryn chose a light-brown long-sleeved shirt with tassels running across the chest, blue jeans with a belt, and big black boots with a white or silver emblem. Corryn went to her regular dance class at a hall in the southern Perth suburb of Bentley. She had been attending the two-hour Urban Cowboys Line Dancing class twice a week for nearly five years. That night she left at 9.30 p.m. but no one saw her drive off. It was a 10-minute drive back home but she promptly disappeared.
Lloyd Rayney was at their home with their 10-year-old daughter that Tuesday night. The older Rayney girl, twelve, went to a Gwen Stefani concert and was dropped home by her friend’s parent at 10.45 p.m. The parent was met at the door by Lloyd Rayney. That night Corryn Rayney was murdered and her car was dumped. In Perth a hard rain fell and the downpour likely washed vital evidence from the dead woman’s vehicle.
Lloyd Rayney said he was home all night. No one contradicted him. The next morning he was up early and asked a neighbour if Corryn had gone there for a cup of tea. He later said he thought his wife had either not come home or had come home late and left early.
FROM THE outside the Rayneys looked like a functioning family unit. Lloyd and Corryn had been married for seventeen years. They both still lived under the same roof with their two daughters. But things were not as they seemed.
Lloyd had made it to chief prosecutor in the interim but in 2003 he was beaten to a senior Perth prosecutions job by a rival. The reaction of the father of two was to take a job in the Caribbean. Corryn stayed behind with the girls and her own career until Lloyd returned and the family was reunited a year and a half later. Corryn struck up a close friendship—but not a romantic one—with a single father at her daughters’ school during the Caribbean period. ‘Lloyd came back [from Bermuda] and heard she was seeing someone, but that wasn’t true,’ the school dad said. ‘We were as close as you could get, but we were just friends. She was just a wonderful person.’
It is possible the Rayney marriage, which by mid-2007 was on the rocks, never recovered from Lloyd’s long absence in the overseas posting. Despite sharing the house the pair were estranged and disagreed over how their property and the custody of the girls should be divided. They tried to keep up appearances for their daughters while living at the same address and trying to negotiate a settlement that both lawyers could live with. Friends said that, before she was killed, Corryn was worried about imminent divorce proceedings and was working up to demanding that Lloyd move out.
The morning after Corryn went missing Mr Rayney—after enquiring whether his neighbour had seen his wife—went to work. He was due at the Corruption and Crime Commission to represent his police client in relation to the wrongful jailing of an innocent man. Later that morning he got a call from the Supreme Court telling him Corryn hadn’t shown up for work. ‘I was sitting next to Lloyd at the hearing,’ a barrister friend recalled, ‘when he left abruptly at about 11 a.m. and said, “Something urgent’s come up, I have to go.” He was very concerned. I learnt later that Corryn had gone missing.’
At 3 p.m. on Wednesday 8 August, Mr Rayney went to the Kensington Police Station and reported his estranged wife missing. When a female barrister friend called that evening to see if Lloyd was coming to their weekly legal eagles bridge night, he told her: ‘I can’t talk. The police are here. Corryn’s gone missing.’
As hours became days, fears for Corryn’s safety grew. Police thought the fact that the 44-year-old mother had not contacted anyone, including her 10- and 12-year-old daughters, did not bode well at all. She had joined that exclusive club to which few seek membership: missing persons. The police release described her as ‘164 centimetres tall, with brown eyes, black hair, of medium build and dark complexion’.
Corryn’s family said she had been happy and had no problems at work, so it did not look like suicide. She rarely carried her mobile phone, so there were no leads there. And no one had touched her bank accounts, so it didn’t look like she had run away or become the victim of a financially motivated crime. Investigators looked into people who had dealings with her at court and might have borne a grudge. But Corryn was the archetypal liked-by-all-hated-by-none character. And it seemed, despite dealing daily with the pointy end of the criminal justice system, she had left no enemies in her wake.
Corryn had vanished on the Tuesday night. Wednesday passed, then Thursday, and then Friday. The first priority for investigators, who knew from the start the case might not end well, was to find the missing woman’s car. Corryn had driven her silver Ford Fairmont to dancing and it, like her, had not been seen since. ‘The vehicle is crucial—it’s got to be parked somewhere,’ police spokesman Graham Clifford said. ‘When people are out this weekend walking, jogging or picnicking in the city or bushland, we ask them to keep an eye out for it.’
Most professionals in Perth know each other by at most two degrees of separation. Lloyd Rayney had several friends in the Western Australian media and on the Sunday after Corryn went missing an unshaven Rayney—with Corryn’s sister Sharon—made a public call for help. ‘All the family really urge anyone with any information, however insignificant, that may help find Corryn, to call Crime Stoppers,’ Mr Rayney said. ‘We’re especially appealing for anyone who has seen Corryn or her car recently,’ he said. ‘Obviously, the family is very, very concerned about her welfare. All of us are deeply distressed and extremely concerned for Corryn’s welfare.’
The following Tuesday night, exactly a week after Corryn vanished, authorities got their first breakthrough. A citizen had called in saying they had seen the dead woman’s car. Police found the silver Fairmont locked and abandoned in leafy Kershaw Street, Subiaco, just one small block to the north of Kings Park—Perth’s thousand-acre green mega-block. Neighbours said they had seen it there since the previous Wednesday.
An eagle-eyed officer noticed a strange line on the road leading out from behind where the car had been parked. The trail had been made by the car dribbling oil. The killer, who had otherwise covered up the crime remarkably well, had likely not seen the marking in the dark of night. Amazingly the trail had also survived the nearly 40 mm of Perth rain that had bucketed down since the murder.
Police followed the trail and found that it led all the way into Kings Park—a mixture of parkland, botanical gardens and natural bushland overlooking Perth and the Swan River. Due to its size—bigger than New York’s Central Park—different parts of Kings Park are occasionally quiet or secluded. But the park is also smack bang in the centre of the business district of a thriving modern city containing 1.7 million residents. Roads cut through the park but anyone seeking brazenly to dump a body there and get away scot free would be either deluded or self-confident to the point of audacity. The oil leak had been created by the killer driving over bollards to enter bushland at the park and in the process damaging the underside of the car and its gearbox. The vehicle might have even needed to be dumped so close to the disposal scene because of a transmission seizure due to loss of oil.
Even narrowed down to Kings Park, a search of the whole area could have still taken days. But the lucky trail made even that unnecessary. Following the trail backwards like modern day Hansels and Gretels, investigators were led out of the Subiaco street and into a section of the park 20 metres from Lovekin Drive. The oil trail stopped near a patch of disturbed soil. Police excavated the patch and found it was a shallow grave containing a woman’s body.
Detective Senior Sergeant Lee said that police might never have found the grave if oil from the car had not left a trail on the bitumen: the lead had been an ‘extraordinary amount of good luck’. ‘Had the oil run out sooner than it did, we may have never linked the two scenes,’ he said. DNA checks confirmed that the buried woman was Corryn Rayney. Her two pre-teen daughters, husband and blood relatives were informed.
‘We’re just all extremely distressed and not able to talk now,’ Lloyd Rayney told media. The dead woman’s sister, Sharon, later said Corryn’s girls were suffering. ‘At first they were just expecting her to walk straight back into the house,’ she said. ‘It is unthinkable. She was always devoted to her two daughters, making their school lunches every morning, taking them to and from social events and sporting events, shopping for special outfits at any opportunity,’ she said. ‘Girls of their age need their mother most. How will they cope? Now she is my murdered sister. My family and I want to know why.’The luminaries of the WA legal and political system expressed their dismay and condolences. ‘To have a senior officer from the state’s superior court murdered is absolutely shocking and I’m sure it will send shockwaves through the whole of the court system,’ Attorney-General Jim McGinty said.
Corryn’s body was unable to be immediately exhumed from the shallow grave her killer had dug because forensic experts were analysing the scene. ‘Depending on how long the body has spent in the ground, the mite community around the body will change,’ said Detective Senior Sergeant Jack Lee. ‘We’re looking for microscopic material, we’re looking for DNA, we’re looking for hairs, for fibres. It takes a long time.’
The all-star cast of forensic investigators involved in the posthumous process included entomologists seeking to use insects to catch the killer. Insect expert Professor Ian Dadour said: ‘The type of insects that may be on the body can tell us how long it has been in the ground. If the body has been transported from somewhere over a long period of time, then different sorts of insects, like flies, might have landed on the body.’
There was blood in the Fairlane and police were trying to establish whether Corryn had been murdered among Kings Park’s sugar gums or somewhere else entirely and then moved to the park. Forty police recruits were called in to comb the park in search of a primary murder scene away from the grave. ‘I think she clearly did meet with someone and that person was her killer,’ Sergeant Lee said. ‘We believe the person involved in this murder was at this scene for some time.’
Eventually Corryn’s body was removed and taken to the state mortuary. On the same evening, nine days after she had vanished, police let slip—in terms of gender and number—the basic profile they thought fitted her attacker. ‘He should be concerned. We are coming,’ Sergeant Lee said.
The murder had rocked Perth’s circles of power and on Friday police announced a specific taskforce devoted to investigating the crime. Authorities could not say whether they believed Corryn had met foul play at the hands of a seemingly motiveless stranger or someone known to her. They did not know whether the ‘substantial’ grave in the city park was excavated while the corpse lay in the Fairmont—putting the murderer at great risk of being caught in the act—or whether it was one prepared earlier by a killer whose actions were highly premeditated.
A friend of the dead woman told The Sunday Times he believed it was not a random attack on Corryn. ‘I think she was targeted, for whatever reason,’ said the man, who did not want to be named. ‘It was just all too coincidental with some of the things she said and told us. It’s known that their marriage was on the rocks and that they were going through divorce proceedings. I think that side of it was on her mind … she used the dancing as an outlet, something she could just [use to] express herself.’
Corryn was remembered by her fellow bootscooters in a memorial line dance at the Bentley hall a fortnight after her death. And then things turned truly shocking.
WHILE random homicidal psychopaths do exist, they are not quite so prominent in real life as they are in films or pulp fiction. Most people in Australia are killed by people known to them as a result of grubby personal or domestic disputes. Standard operating procedure for homicide detectives is to look for a wedding ring on the corpse and then look to the partner as their best live suspect. This might be standard, but when the spouse has been the state’s chief prosecutor—the man responsible for getting the worst crooks locked away—it is shocking all the same.
On Wednesday 22 August, three weeks after Corryn vanished, her estranged husband Lloyd assisted detectives and forensic police as they executed a search warrant on their family home. Police went out of their way to say the man helping them with their enquiries was not a suspect.
‘This is a process of elimination, which is a normal line of inquiry,’ Sergeant Lee said in a statement. ‘Mr Rayney is fully cooperating with the police in this investigation. I wish to emphasise that Mr Rayney is not a suspect and any further speculation regarding his involvement in this offence may be detrimental to this investigation.’
Although separated by death the Rayneys were suddenly the talk of the town. Rumours flew thick and fast about the case—about who killed Corryn and why, about threatening emails and secret lovers—and the police did not always quash the wrong ones. It was claimed in the media that Corryn had forwarded to close friends a series of threatening emails she had received, with the instruction they should be passed to police in case anything happened to her. Police were initially tight-lipped about the revelation and refused to answer questions about the emails. Lloyd Rayney said he did not know they existed and was forced to deny he was behind them. But their existence was later discounted by police. It seems there was a grain of truth to the false claim in that the separating couple had exchanged terse but non-threatening emails.
Friends said they did not think the dead woman had a new boyfriend. But chatter about the murder was reaching fever pitch. The punters could not help but notice the attractiveness gulf between glowing Corryn and gaunt beanpole Lloyd. They put two and two together and got five—or, as the case may be, a secret boyfriend. But police would not hit that possibility on the head either, for fear it would offside potential tipsters.
‘She had a lot of friends, both male and female. Whether any are intimate friends? I’m not prepared to comment on that,’ Sergeant Lee said. ‘I’m not saying that she did, but if we were to say she did have a boyfriend, some people might morally judge her.’ Corryn’s close friend the school dad was found. A secret lover, though, was never found.
Western Australia Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan said it was likely Mrs Rayney knew her murderer. ‘We don’t believe there’s any rampaging killer out in Perth at the moment,’ Mr O’Callaghan said. ‘We think this is probably some sort of person who is known to Mrs Rayney.’
Police interest in the dead woman’s estranged husband seemed to be growing. In their public pronouncements he seemed to be moving from cooperative with police and completely uninvolved in the murder to the darker end of the spectrum. Detective Senior Sergeant Lee told reporters that, while there was no evidence against Lloyd Rayney, he remained a person of interest to the inquiry.
‘A “suspect” indicates that there is some level of evidence against a person having committed a crime,’ Sergeant Lee said. ‘There is no evidence against Mr Rayney having committed any crime. He is not a suspect in this matter.’
The Kings Park murder scene became a blossoming shrine to Corryn’s memory as friends and members of the public left floral tributes. The results of the dead woman’s autopsy were finalised but kept restricted to police. Her body was released to family. At the church in Bull Creek, where Corryn and Lloyd had married in 1990, the murdered mum was farewelled, her mahogany casket decorated with a bouquet of red roses. More than 500 mourners attended the funeral, which was followed by a private cremation service.
At the funeral Lloyd Rayney said: ‘Corryn had a real presence … I have known and loved Corryn for twenty years. Corryn has been stolen from us in her prime. No words can express the horror of what has happened.’ He told the mourners: ‘To know Corryn was to love her.’ And then he paused to wipe away tears.
The dead woman’s daughter Caitlyn, by then thirteen, said she thanked the Lord for giving her the best mum in the world. ‘She was not only my mum, she was my best friend,’ she said. Heartbreakingly, her 10-year-old sister Sarah added: ‘Thank you Lord for giving me a mum who has always been there for me. She never let me down. Thank you for the special times we had together.’ Corryn was a big Jimmy Barnes fan and the former Cold Chisel singer sent his own tribute.
But the most moving tribute was from the dead woman’s little sister. ‘Corryn, we miss you so much,’ Sharon Coutinho said, ‘and we can’t comprehend what you have been through. No one can ever hurt you again. Rest assured I will protect your girls.’
WITH Corryn laid to rest, the investigation took a major turn. Police had what Barnesy would have described as a change of heart. Major Crime Squad detectives said they now believed Corryn had made it home from line dancing and had been killed there while her daughters were home. Police alleged they had found a phone tap at the Rayney home. Authorities were no longer denying that Western Australia’s former chief prosecutor was their chief and only murder suspect.
‘He is our prime suspect because our evidence at this time leads us to believe the offence occurred at that house, and he is the occupant of that house,’ Sergeant Lee said. ‘We are interviewing Mr Rayney in relation to the murder of his wife. I’m not suggesting the phone tap links him to the murder. I’m simply saying that, as a result of our investigations, we’ve uncovered an illegal practice and we are prosecuting in relation to that.’
The police backed up their talk with action, knocking on Lloyd Rayney’s door at 8 a.m. They said that he refused to answer their knocks. ‘We demanded entry, we tried to contact the house, we were aware Mr Rayney was inside the house. After knocking several times, we forced entry,’ Sergeant Jack Lee said. Detectives kicked in the back door and entered. There was a discussion inside and four hours after their first knock, just after noon, Lloyd Rayney emerged in a grey double-breasted suit and walked calmly behind three detectives to a waiting police car. Police interviewed him at the station for four hours. Officers also raided his city law firm.
Police sought to interview the 10- and 13-year-old Rayney girls, who they believed had the key to unlocking the murder mystery. But their dad stymied the attempt by refusing parental permission. The Rayney home in Como was cordoned off as a crime scene. Lloyd Rayney was charged under the Surveillance Device Act with illegally using a listening device to monitor his wife’s telephone calls. Police interviewed a trio of young professionals, including a lawyer friend of Rayney’s, over the phone tap. It appears they were suspected of planting the device to help their friend Lloyd, who feared Corryn was planning to make false and damaging claims against him in their divorce proceedings.
Police said Rayney refused to answer police questions and still refused consent for his daughters to be interviewed. But after the Robert Hughes case, Mr Rayney was used to high-pressure, high-stakes public battles. The difference was that this time he was not with the police—he was potentially the defendant. Rayney hit back at investigators by issuing a statement through a lawyer.
‘He is enormously distressed that the police, in focusing their attention on him, may never catch the person who robbed his and Corryn’s children of their beloved mother,’ the statement said. ‘It is wrong to claim that Mr Rayney has refused to cooperate with police. He has done everything he can to assist them from the very start. The police made a number of allegations which were factually wrong and gave a very unfair impression of him.’
Western Australia Police treated that comment as a complaint and launched an internal probe into Sergeant Lee’s public comments that ultimately cleared him of wrongdoing. In the meantime the WA Police chief, Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan, upped the ante by challenging Rayney to let his daughters be interviewed. The girls had provided signed statements when Corryn was deemed a missing—not murdered—person, police said, but that was it. Detectives wanted the chance to interview them about that night.
‘If he’s saying “I’m innocent”, could we have access to the kids to ask them some questions?’ the Commissioner said. ‘It would assist with our inquiry and unless he’s got something to hide, why wouldn’t he let us have access to the children with an appropriate guardian present? We would be happy to have them supervised by someone nominated by Lloyd.’
The murder investigation was rapidly becoming a clash of titans, and the police would not have the last word in the verbal stoush. Lloyd Rayney still had some powerful and persuasive friends from many years in the legal profession. The Law Society of Western Australia called a press conference to criticise police and the media for naming Rayney as the chief suspect before he had been charged with any offences relating to his wife’s death. Law Society President Maria Saraceni claimed that Lloyd Rayney had as much chance of a fair trial as Lindy Chamberlain did over the death of her baby Azaria. ‘If he is ever going to be charged, there are obviously real issues as to the ability for him to have a fair trial,’ Ms Saraceni said. ‘Can I point back to Lindy Chamberlain?’
Criminal lawyer Tom Percy QC said police had acted reprehensibly and might have caused irreparable damage to the case. ‘It is quite a low standard of proof to arrest someone,’ he said. ‘You wonder what sort of evidence they are getting, if they have evidence other than a gut feeling. If he is not charged, the damage to his psyche, not to mention his personal and professional standing in the community, is beyond repair.’
Lloyd Rayney and his murdered wife had become the number one topic of conversation among Perth’s cafes, dinner parties and armchairs. Crime scene tape and ongoing searches at Kings Park provided Perthlings with a constant reminder of the crime. It seemed Lloyd Rayney was becoming an inkblot test for larger divisions in the city. There were two sides. There were those who took the commonsense ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide let your daughters speak’ police view. And there were those who took the on-principle lawyerly view of ‘Why should a man with a presumption of innocence have his name muddied and have to do anything he doesn’t want?’And for every punch from one side there was a counterpunch from the other.
WA Opposition justice spokesman Rob Johnson defended the police handling of the investigation and said legal groups were being protective of their friend. ‘If it had been any other person, Mr Joe Public, you wouldn’t see all the lawyers acting [how they are] and making the comments they are,’ he said. ‘The police have acted properly throughout, and if they have a prime suspect, I think they have a duty to inform the public.’
BY LATE October police were still not in a position to back up their talk by charging Lloyd Rayney with murder. Instead they upgraded his phone-tapping charge to the federal equivalent, which meant that, if he was convicted, he could face two years’ jail—double the maximum penalty under state law. Investigators were working through hundreds of phoned-in pieces of information but not really getting anywhere. Early in the investigation police had seized Lloyd Rayney’s legal files. Over weeks and weeks they looked at the potential involvement of violent criminals he had encountered in his career as a barrister. It was a long, hard and ultimately fruitless process.
Police raided the house of an underworld figure accused of a bikie murder, whom Rayney had helped beat the rap. They interviewed the man for hours and seized his bed sheets. In the end the man had a verifiable alibi for the night of the murder that cleared him of any involvement. Police also looked into a man accused but acquitted of kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach. He too had a rock-solid alibi and had to be crossed off the suspects list. The single school dad who was friends with Corryn was interviewed—police took his shoes and a print of his bare feet—but he was discounted from involvement too. Even the Claremont Mayor was investigated, following a tip-off, and was once again cleared of any involvement.
Three months after the killing of Corryn Rayney the murder trail was getting decidedly cold. Things were even colder for the chief investigator of the homicide. Although Sergeant Lee had been cleared of wrongdoing for naming Rayney as the prime suspect, police confirmed that he was to be transferred to a remote country station in the new year regardless of where Corryn’s homicide investigation was up to. Police said the move was neither a penalty nor reflective of the quality of the murder probe. Lee would be transferred 1500 kilometres from Perth to the Pilbara town of Karratha. Population: fewer than 12 000.
Sergeant Lee’s prime suspect was also on the move, but his destinations were a bit more exotic. For the first Christmas holiday without their mum, Lloyd Rayney took the two girls on an overseas trip encompassing Asian beaches and a visit to Oxford University—where Caitlyn, by then fourteen, hoped to study in the future. Police feared he was laying the groundwork to move overseas and had him followed.
WA Police had played an open hand letting their prime suspect know he was just that. But they had been guarded with other details they hoped their suspect might accidentally spill. Where Corryn had been buried was revealed, as was the presence of blood in her car. But that was all. The cause of death, method of murder and weapons used in the killing all remained secret police business.
Minor evidentiary details possibly relating to the killing were released in a piecemeal fashion, drip-fed to the public or discovered by reporters. Police sought public help on the origins of a soiled Stanley Adams brand handkerchief found near Corryn’s shallow grave. They also circulated to 130 Kings Park staff a photograph of a leather torch holder found nearby, asking whether they had lost it. It later emerged that police had investigated a spade and a star picket found dumped in a street near where Corryn was buried shortly after the murder. Authorities did not believe the implements belonged to builders.
This approach to releasing information might have been tactical. Or it might have reflected just how much of a political and public relations sore spot the quality of the police’s evidentiary case against their named suspect had become. That issue became a legal sore spot as well when Lloyd Rayney finally issued his long-threatened defamation writ against Western Australia Police.
As part of his defamation action Rayney demanded that police hand over documents concerning the investigation into him. The case put the police in the bizarre position of having to justify their reasons for categorising him as a wife killer without potentially tipping off the man they regarded as a killer as to what they knew. Rayney’s high-profile lawyer, Martin Bennett, who had acted for disgraced WA businessman Alan Bond, said comments by the police ‘effectively amounted to a defamation that Mr Rayney had murdered his wife. That’s why strangers take his mail out of the letterbox and write the word killer on it and put it back in his letter box.’ Mr Bennett said his client had been left with the impossible task of proving a negative, namely that he did not kill his wife.
If successful Mr Rayney’s action against the state could win him millions. He was seeking general damages, capped at $288 500, aggravated damages for public harassment and special damages for loss of earnings. ‘It took more than twenty years to build my career and reputation and less than twenty minutes to destroy it,’ Rayney said.
At one point Rayney refused to front court on the phone-tap charge because, in his lawyer’s words, ‘he does get harassed and photographed’. The magistrate ordered him to turn up just like any other defendant. ‘I think he should be here. Everyone’s embarrassed by having to be here,’ he said. ‘If he doesn’t have to come here, then why should anyone else have to come here?’
Rayney eventually surfaced and when he left court there was the usual media pack. In the bustle a journalist running backwards tripped on a step, fell over and lost both shoes. Rayney saw the debacle, stopped and held out his hand. Rayney told how he had faced constant harassment by wild west vigilantes and ugly Perthlings since the police had cast him as a killer. ‘One afternoon I was sitting in the reception of an office in the city, not long after I was publicly named by police as the only “suspect”,’ Rayney recalled. ‘Two men in their twenties saw me and came to the entrance shouting: “You’re the guy who killed his wife! We know that you fucking killed your wife!” I was trapped with these men who were aggressive and loud. They only stopped when staff from the office came to help me.’
A Disney-themed child’s birthday party hosted at the Rayney house and complete with bouncy castle in the backyard was ruined by a similar incident. ‘Soon after the party started, I heard someone yelling from the front of the house and went outside to see what was happening,’ Rayney said. ‘At the front was someone who lives in the neighbourhood. When this person saw me they called out: “You’re celebrating her death!” I thought I had misunderstood. As I tried to process what I thought was said, [they] shouted even louder. “You’re celebrating her death, aren’t you? You’re celebrating her death, aren’t you?”’
They were scary anecdotes but it was not just random angry strangers who had changed their mind about Rayney. Sharon Coutinho, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with her brother-in-law when her sister was first missing, now said she had full confidence in the way police were handling Corryn’s murder investigation. ‘If they think he’s a suspect, why [are they not allowed to] say it? In these kinds of cases the husband is always a suspect,’ she said.
Corryn’s father, Ernest Da Silva, who had shepherded his daughter out of Idi Amin’s Uganda only to see her murdered in Western Australia, had changed his mind too. Mr Da Silva attended his son-in-law’s phone-tap case hearings, but not in a show of solidarity. He told reporters he had lost contact with his two granddaughters because he was not allowed to spend time with them without Mr Rayney being present. He recalled how, when Corryn was alive, every Sunday she and the two girls would meet with him, their cousins and the girls’ aunt Sharon at his modest family home for lunch. He said those Sunday gettogethers had stopped.
SO FAR WA Police had failed to get enough evidence to charge the man they had named as prime suspect. Now Lloyd Rayney had the wind in his sails and he was coming after them. The Corryn Rayney murder case was the biggest crime story in the state since the unsolved Claremont serial murders of three young women a decade before. It also had the potential to turn into the biggest WA police bungle since those murders. In that case a public servant was named in the media as the man WA Police believed was the serial killer responsible. To this day no one has been charged.
Richard Lawson, a lawyer friend of Lloyd Rayney’s, said: ‘The police are thinking “He’s estranged from his wife, he wants to know her movements, he’s knocked her off”. They named him to rattle him—it’s an FBI trick. It’s what you do if you’ve only got a hunch.’
In September 2008 self-described psychic Debbie Malone was in Perth for a ‘psychic roadshow’. She was approached by WA Police for help in their investigation after she claimed to have made unexpected contact with Corryn Rayney a year after her murder. The psychic said her first contact with Corryn Rayney was while in Perth working on the Claremont serial killer case. She said she was under hypnosis and initially became confused by the contact because she thought Ms Rayney was related to the Claremont case.
‘She showed me that she drove a silver vehicle and that she was extremely upset about her children,’ Ms Malone said. ‘She then began to show me how she had died and I felt a very sudden pain in the right-hand side of my head. I started to see visions of the woman’s two children and the sadness she felt about not being with them as they grew up.’
Ms Malone said two detectives accompanied her and a fellow psychic to the place where Corryn’s car was found and her bush grave in Kings Park. Police gave her Corryn’s diary as an ‘energy source’ so she could perform a technique known as psychometry, where people communicate with the dead and see past, present and future events, she said. ‘I was asked would I be able to see what I could see. She was very sad about [her daughters]. She was a great mum. That’s what I could see. That’s what came through under hypnosis—that [she] just loved her girls and that they need to know the truth.’ The revelation emerged as a passing reference in a book Ms Malone had written about life as a psychic.
The WA Police spin doctor initially denied that a psychic had been used in their probe and slammed the accuracy of the report. But the flak then had to backflip and say the unusual investigative technique—and breach of accepted practice for handling exhibits—was the result of one officer off on a frolic of his own. ‘This is one individual that took it upon himself to do it and that’s exactly what he did. He saw the program, saw the roadshow and decided to ring her,’ police said. The farce became downright comical, though, when authorities scrambled to explain why the officer involved would not repeat the strange episode. Police said: ‘The detective senior constable is no longer with the squad. He has been promoted.’
THEIR grandfather’s comments returned the Rayney daughters to the centre of the murder mystery. It was true that WA Police appeared to be sliding into keystone cops territory. But in the effort to negate the issue of what the girls knew, the Lloyd Rayney legal spin machine was as distastefully slick as the police were offensively haphazard.
When police resurrected their public mantra of ‘Why won’t Rayney allow his daughters to be re-interviewed?’ Mr Rayney promptly issued a media release, responding. ‘Caitlyn and Sarah do not want to be interviewed yet again,’ it said. ‘Their feelings have been reinforced by police conduct, which has been intimidating. For example, on a recent overseas holiday, police followed the children, photographed them and bugged their room.’
Lloyd Rayney then allowed his daughters to appear on the television program Today Tonight. It seemed designed to look spontaneous, as though the reporter had found the family entering church—Lloyd with bible in hand—and they had decided to open up. But the strange segment appeared stage-managed. The girls said they were unhappy with police suggestions that they had been prevented from being interviewed further in relation to the murder.
When asked if they had spoken to police, Caitlyn said: ‘Yep, we’ve spoken to them. We’ve spoken to them every day for ages and ages. They used to come to our house. They didn’t have to knock, they just walked in, and they talked to us and somehow they just seemed to have forgotten that all of a sudden.’
Others in the WA media noted that the reporter for the segment, Alison Fan, was a friend of Rayney’s who had known him for many years. They said Fan’s husband taught Rayney at school and Fan’s son, also a lawyer, worked alongside Rayney for Gina Rinehart.
TWO and a half years after Corryn’s murder there were still no major breakthroughs, only the constant drip of little bits of evidence that may or may not be relevant. Another review was in progress whereby police would again go over all the evidence and all the reports from the public.
And as the probe of Corryn Rayney’s murder dragged on with no major surprises so too did the war of attrition between Lloyd Rayney and WA Police. At the time of writing, Lloyd Rayney’s defamation action against WA Police had not been completed. Neither had the federal action over the phone tap, which Rayney was defending. It is not known which will conclude first. (Rayney’s defamation action is like an echo of the Hughes situation, in which state officials and a private accused are again loudly clashing in a high-stakes legal bun fight. They are two of the most bizarre cases involving public bodies in Western Australia, and Lloyd Rayney was the instigator of both.)
If prosecutors can get a conviction for the phone tap but have insufficient for a murder charge against Rayney, it will be a pyrrhic victory. If Rayney wins his defamation case but remains, in the minds of many, a murderer, that too will be a pyrrhic victory.
As for bringing the killer of Corryn Rayney to justice, the words of the chief investigator who transferred to the Pilbara had not yet been proven wrong. It was still a jigsaw puzzle with no end picture.
Corryn, in her short life, snuffed out as it was before its time, had been as sweet and smiling as she was intelligent. Where many of us acquire dozens of detractors in the hustle and bustle of modern living, she was, as friends said, a no-enemies type. Unfortunately you only need one enemy willing to do the unspeakable, and it seems that is what Corryn had.
One of the dead woman’s enduring lovable quirks was her passion for country and western music and bootscooting. As an Indian Australian in a high-paying legal job in metropolitan Perth, it’s safe to say this passion must have been as profound for her as it was unusual to others. It is possible that in her professional life she was teased with the old country-phobe joke based on the chestnut that heavy metal albums played in reverse yield satanic messages. The joke goes: ‘What do you get if you play a country music record backwards?’ The punchline: ‘You get your wife back, you get your job back, you get your dog back …’
Corryn’s prematurely ended life, it seems, had been mostly full of happiness. Unfortunately there is no playing her life backwards to give it a distinctly un-country-and-western happy ending. But it would be a nice something for her daughters, her parents, for society, to see her killer not evade justice.
For Lloyd Rayney things have slowly settled back towards normality. Well, not complete normality. Fourteen months after his estranged wife’s murder he decided to resume his stellar legal career. His comeback case? Defending a man accused of murdering his female partner.