‘Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.’
—Duane Michals
CAPTURING the right tribute to scrawl on a colleague’s farewell card is a tricky business. You are expected in about two minutes to come up with something witty, kind, relevant—and pithy. Everyone you work with will inevitably read your offering. Too earnest, and you will look like a suck. Too glib and flippant, and you will look like a putz. Go for humour and what you find hilarious others might find offensive and inappropriate. Few are masters of the difficult art. And it’s safe to say Derick John Sands was not among the select few.
The press photographer with a local newspaper was a high-profile suspect in the murder of an Adelaide woman when the card of a departing female work colleague landed on his desk. If everyone knows you’re a murder suspect, getting the sentiment right in the farewell tribute gets even harder.
Derick Sands wrote: ‘Good luck for the future—keep out of trouble—Ra Ra Ra, and I didn’t do it.’
CORINNA Marr was working hard for the money. She was a trainee real estate agent who had just sold her first house. The bubbly blonde was also working as a part-time model and promotional assistant.
On Friday 4 July she knocked off from her main job in the mid-afternoon to prepare for a promotions gig that evening. The twenty-five-year old was booked that night to work at the Woodville Hotel handing out promotional gimmicks for alcoholic cider. The marketing plan was to use a pretty face to lure beer drinkers to try a rival beverage. Had Corinna made the appointment, the barflies at the Woodville would not have been the first men to have their heads turned by her pretty face. Ms Marr’s private life was as thriving as her business activities and, like an Adelaide version of Holly Golightly, she seemed to have all the men in her life in a tizz.
It seemed it had always been thus for the trail-blazing eldest of three sisters who had won a clutch of trophies for gymnastics as a kid. ‘Corinna didn’t really like school but she put up with it,’ her mum, Denyse King, would recall. ‘Her favourite lesson was lunch, when she could chat to boys.’ Her school friends would often meet at her house and spend up to half an hour applying make-up before walking to school. Corinna left school after finishing Year 11, worked with her father in his stained glass business for a couple of years, left that, and battled on in a series of different jobs before landing on her feet in the real estate industry. She remained close with her parents and would sometimes call them three or four times a day.
Corinna had been married eighteen months. Her husband, Robert Marr, was a 27-year-old air-conditioning technician. Though married, Corinna was a flirtatious young woman who told friends she was having an affair with news photographer Derick Sands. She had even been to his mother’s house. Corinna would ascribe ratings to her sexual conquests. But Sands, who also had a longstanding partner at home, rated ‘less than five’ out of ten on Corinna’s measure, a friend said.
At about 2 p.m. Ms Marr’s boss, Colin Todd, helped her load a box of plastic sampling glasses, giveaways and cider promotional gimmicks into her car. Mr Todd, a divorcee who said Ms Marr was his best friend, was also going to pick her up at about 4.15 p.m. and chaperone her to the pub for the promotional job. Mr Todd was helping out because Corinna’s husband Robert was working and Corinna did not like going to such jobs by herself. Her husband was aware of these type of arrangements. Sometimes both Marr and Todd escorted Corinna to jobs that had the potential to go bad.
That afternoon she had showered and blow-dried her hair. She had dressed for the job—in a cat suit emblazoned with the Strongbow cider logo—but had not yet left home. She was sitting on the edge of her bed when her killer entered her Collinswood flat, walked into her bedroom and shot her several times at close range with a semi-automatic pistol. She fell back onto her bed and died. There was no evidence of a break-in, robbery or sexual assault. Police believed she knew her killer. Neighbours heard no gunshots.
Forensic scientists estimated Corinna was killed at the latest about 3.30 or 3.45 p.m. She was sprawled across her bed when she was found by her husband upon his returning from work. Marr told police and relatives he walked into the open unit and grabbed a business card folder from their bedroom. The room was dimly lit and his wife was dressed in black on black sheets with a rumpled quilt disguising the shape of her body. He did not initially notice the corpse and took the folder to the phone in the lounge to make two calls. He walked to the top of the driveway to see if Corinna, whose car was home, was at the mailbox. He then returned to the unit.
This time he noticed Corinna on the bed. He thought she was asleep but there was a trickle of blood coming from her nose. He put his hand under her head. It felt strange and when he pulled it out it was sopping wet with blood. Marr tried to resuscitate his wife. He then phoned 000 for an ambulance. Paramedics arrived at 4.07 p.m. They tried to revive Corinna but without success.
The phone in the unit had rung at about 4 p.m. Robert Marr had answered it. On the line was Colin Todd. He was calling to say he was running late to pick up Corinna. ‘Corinna’s dead,’ her husband told her best friend. ‘What the fuck have you done?’
BOTH the husband, Robert Marr, and the work friend, Colin Todd, were immediate suspects for police. With Corinna as flirtatious as she was, both men might have had a reason to be seething. A neighbour had claimed Mr Marr arrived home 45 minutes before they heard the ambulances arrive with sirens wailing. But this seemed mistaken as police had evidence from the husband’s workmate that he had been with Marr until 3.45 p.m. Marr’s work clothes, which it seems he had not changed, were also tested but showed nothing.
Mr Todd was repeatedly questioned and had his clothing tested for gunshot residue. But police also cleared him as a suspect. Todd later told the press:
There have been accusations we were lovers. That wasn’t the case. I wasn’t her lover, there was no sexual relationship. We liked each other very much, bounced off each other, knew each other’s feelings—we were mates. She was a bubbly, happy, very intelligent bright young lady who got along with everybody. It’s been hard coming to terms with her death, and as far as those rumour mongers are concerned, any suggestion of a love triangle is ridiculous. She used to pick me up when I was down and vice versa, and we had been through a lot together. She was dedicated to her marriage, certainly I think she was working hard at the marriage.
The investigation dragged on and became yet another unsolved homicide in the corpse-ridden city of churches. By the middle of the following year police had exhausted all lines of inquiry. The fat lady was singing, and the tepid case was rapidly becoming a cool one. And that, quite likely, could have been the end of the matter.
Then much later, investigators decided to have another look at the Corinna Marr murder mystery. With fresh eyes they saw something—nothing explosive, perplexing or even mildly exciting, but just a little thread sticking out that, if tugged, could reveal more … perhaps even unravel the mystery.
Police had been told by a number of people, including one of the dead woman’s friends, that she had been having an affair with Derick Sands, a news photographer from a suburban Adelaide paper. It was not a big deal. There had been a number of men in Corinna’s life and all of them had been looked at and cleared. In the immediate post-murder police probe Sands said he was at work at the newspaper all afternoon on the day of the killing. It seems that alibi may have been confirmed generally by police at the time and become accepted. But it had not been put under the microscope. Meanwhile the years passed and the murder investigation became a cold case.
The man leading the Marr probe, Detective Sergeant John Keane, said the apparent work alibi had in the first instance knocked Sands off the suspects list. ‘When the statement was taken in August 1997, we … were already under the belief that his alibi was verified,’ Detective Sergeant Keane said. On closer inspection things were not so clear. Work colleagues of Derick Sands had noticed he was missing from the office for a period on the afternoon of the murder. When police interviewed him in 2002, Sands said he might have briefly left the office at the relevant time to buy a drink. It would not be the last time the photographer would Photoshop his alibi to make it look prettier. ‘He didn’t appear to have a good answer for his movements on that day, he seemed to chop and change around,’ Detective Sergeant Keane said.
Years after the murder, Sands was now becoming the prime and only suspect in the killing of Corinna Marr. The photographer denied to police ever having a sexual relationship with the dead woman. It made investigators more suspicious than if he had admitted the hanky-panky while denying pulling any trigger. Sands said he and Corinna Marr were friends and had kissed but that was it. But the dead woman’s boss said Sands had told him that he and Marr had ‘ended up naked in bed together’ after a lunch at a Tea Tree Gully hotel. Others also told the police the pair were having an affair. ‘Basically, I think he’s lying about his relationship. He is trying to distance himself from Ms Marr,’ Detective Sergeant Keane said.
The harder police looked at Sands, the more they were convinced he was their man. A female colleague of the photographer said he spoke to her three days after Corinna Marr was murdered. It was the same woman whose farewell card he later signed. ‘She said he appeared nervous and he said he had spoken to [Ms Marr] on the phone on the morning of the murder,’ Detective Sergeant Keane said. ‘If in fact he did speak to Ms Marr on the morning of the murder, I feel that he would be aware that she was going to be home that afternoon.’
During his fourth interview with police in early 2004 Sands refused to provide his fingerprints, provide DNA, or take a lie-detector test. After being forced by court order, Sands provided his fingerprints, which apparently did not match samples taken from the murder scene. There was other fingerprint evidence, but police withheld it so as not to jeopardise the ongoing investigation.
Seven years after the killing, media outlets got wind that Sands was the police suspect and broadcast it. An ad for Channel Seven’s Today Tonight showed Derick Sands’s image next to Corinna’s to promote a story on the breakthrough in the murder mystery and the suspect’s connection to a prominent South Australian member of parliament. Sands had been the subject of hours of Adelaide gossip in media and political circles for his involvement with the dead woman and, as we shall see, another high-profile lady. The ad did not take things much further. Without naming him the voiceover identified the pictured man’s alleged involvement.
Sands reacted angrily, suing the broadcast networks for defamation. But his self-initiated action backfired. The ensuing case served only to heighten suspicions that he was the killer and further tarnish him in the public eye. Police had not got enough compelling evidence to have a case prosecuted. Under those circumstances what they did have on Derick Sands would never have got a public airing. But when he sued Channel Seven, and then the ABC, for defamation he ensured that every piece of evidence against him would be dragged into the town square and become common knowledge.
IF DERICK Sands was, as police believed, the real killer of Corinna Marr, he moved fairly easily from murdering his partner in one love affair to commencing another one that would have an unhappy ending.
Just a few years after the 1997 murder Sands had a taxpayer-funded tryst that would bring him further dubious publicity. While still with his long-suffering girlfriend of seven years, he had hooked up with another Adelaide woman—Trish Draper. All the photographer’s love affairs seemed to develop badly and this one was no exception.
Ms Draper was one of then prime minister John Howard’s ‘golden girls’—female pollies who had won in marginal seats, bringing the Liberal Party to power in 1996 after more than a decade of Labor rule. She held the South Australian seat of Makin, sometimes by the skin of her teeth, from then until her retirement in November 2007 shortly before Kevin Rudd became PM, in turn ending more than a decade of Liberal rule. In between, the federal MP had more fun than just wearing her Adelaide Crows scarf in parliament. She had a sexual relationship with Derick Sands, who at the time had been interviewed by police in relation to Ms Marr’s murder. She took her suspected killer lover on a 10-day publicly funded trip to Europe by pretending he was her spouse and getting him a diplomatic passport. The Australian taxpayer footed the bill for the murder suspect as well as the MP.
Sands later detailed how Ms Draper organised a diplomatic passport for him ahead of the 10-day journey in August 2000. He said he was unaware Ms Draper had nominated him as her spouse for the trip and when he raised the issue she said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s the way things are done.’ Ms Draper allegedly told him: ‘It’s fine. I’m entitled to take a member of staff or a friend along.’ He said the sexual relationship with Ms Draper was only brief and ended while they were in Europe. Sands said he ‘didn’t know exactly who was paying’ for the trip but he ‘knew it wasn’t me’. Ms Draper was embroiled in a political row over the trip in 2004. She had to pay back nearly $10 000 of the suspected killer’s expenses and the incident led to an overhaul of MP travel rorts. In well-chosen political language, she said what essentially boiled down to: I didn’t know I was bonking a killer. At the time of writing Ms Draper was still involved in politics at the state level.
When the story of the MP, the murder suspect and the shagadelic taxpayer-funded European trip aired on television, Sands’s girlfriend saw it, did the calendar maths and promptly dumped him.
BY LAUNCHING his legal action Derick Sands had put Channel Seven in a position where, to avoid liability and a big cash payout, they had to prove there were reasonable grounds for Sands to be the murder suspect. It was a case the respondents took to with relish. The resulting court contest was a civil dispute that seemed more like a criminal murder trial. Detectives working the criminal case sat in court scribbling notes from the civil one.
During the case the murder suspect was portrayed as a military nutter who was too nutty even for the reserves. His reputation went downhill from there. Sands’s ex-boss said he displayed an odd interest in military matters, wore army fatigues on work jobs and had attempted to join the army reserve. The boss said he recalled getting a call from an officer at Warradale barracks. ‘He said that [Sands] had proved to be unsuitable, according to psychological tests that they gave him, and that I should know that because they would not be accepting him,’ he said. Witnesses also testified that Sands was repeatedly counselled for making sexist and racist comments at work.
The suspect’s alibi had changed again by the time of his case. He told the court that, on the afternoon Ms Marr died, he now remembered running three errands that he had forgotten about in the earlier police interviews. Originally Sands had claimed to have been in the pictorial darkroom at work the entire afternoon. He only added the popped-out-to-get-a-drink rider after colleagues gave statements to police that no one could find him that afternoon. The court heard that when detectives put it to Sands that his boss had tried and failed to contact him on the day of the murder—both in his office and on his mobile phone—he answered: ‘Right, OK, well you know, fuck.’
And it was at court that the third version was born. Sands said he went to a bank in Elizabeth to cancel a cheque to buy a Ducati motorcycle, then took his girlfriend’s computer for repair, then had lunch, then returned to the office. After a dozen years it had all just come flooding back. There was no love lost between Sands and the cheated-on former girlfriend, and she testified to devastating effect: ‘What computer? I don’t have one.’ Under cross-examination Sands told the court he believed he left his workplace about 2 p.m. and returned about 3 p.m. That piqued the interest of detectives in court. It was the first time Sands admitted a lengthy absence from his office on the afternoon of the murder.
When asked about his tribute on the farewell card to the female colleague, Sands said he could not recall what he was referring to when he wrote ‘I didn’t do it’. ‘It could have meant that somebody had broken something and—I don’t know what it refers to exactly.’
Detective Sergeant Keane was asked on the stand if he still regarded Sands as a suspect. ‘Yes, I certainly do. I believe he is still lying about his movements on that day, his relationship, his non-contact on the morning of the murder,’ he said.
The dead woman’s boss and friend, Colin Todd, also suspected Sands was Corinna’s killer and fronted him about it. ‘I asked [him] whether he killed Corinna, and I looked him square in the eye and he responded “no” and, you know, I just wanted to ask him that,’ Mr Todd said. ‘I said to him, “I hope you tell the truth to the police, you know, because Corinna has been murdered and, you know, if you lie you’ll get yourself in the shit”.’
Sands had brought his action claiming he had lost respect, money, work and quality of life due to the defamatory representation that he was a murder suspect. He told the court he had been cut off by his friends after being identified as a suspect and that he had contemplated suicide on many occasions.
But Channel Seven’s lawyer, Will Houghton QC, mercilessly tore his stories apart, leaving Sands looking every bit the duplicitous murder suspect. ‘Protestations we heard, time and again, about how unfairly the police have treated him … are complete red herrings,’ Mr Houghton told the court.
The QC said Sands had claimed that 4 July 1997 was an ‘insignificant’ date to him but had then contradicted that with his own statement that the dead woman was one of his best friends. ‘The lie is exposed in his answers,’ Mr Houghton said. The two men went head to head in cross-examination. Mr Houghton concluded by asking Sands if his ‘real purpose in bringing these proceedings is to close down the police investigation of you’. The suspect replied simply: ‘No.’
DERICK SANDS’s action was thrown out in mid-2009. The judge slammed him as a serial liar.
‘He lied to police if it seemed in his interests to do so,’ Justice David Bleby of the SA Supreme Court found. ‘He has been shown to have lied and deceived his closest friends and relatives. In all the circumstances I cannot accept the plaintiff as a witness of truth. He lied and misled the court in the witness box.’
The judge noted another attempted alibi trick by Sands in which he had provided police with job sheets from the afternoon of the murder, which he said could help show he was not near Collinswood at the time of the shooting. ‘One of them related to a job carried out by him during the afternoon, which, as the plaintiff well knew, was not carried out by him,’ the judge said.
Yet it was presented, along with the other job sheets of the day, as evidence which might suggest that he was engaged on that assignment at the time of the murder. The plaintiff’s evidence as to these events smacks of recent invention with further attempts to buttress it in rebuttal when it did not quite fit in with other evidence given after his initial cross-examination. There is nothing to corroborate his [alibi] evidence and, given that it was revealed for the first time in evidence in these proceedings, I have grave doubts as to its veracity.
The fact of the matter is that [Sands] has given, or has suggested, three different accounts of his movements on the afternoon of 4 July 1997. This in itself must cast grave doubt on the reliability of his evidence generally. It is inconceivable, in all the circumstances, that he would not have looked at his diary for any events of 4 July. I have little doubt that, if there was something exculpatory in his diary for that day he would have noted that and would have mentioned it to police.
Justice Bleby said Sands had been evasive, resorting to ‘cannot recall’ whenever confronted by an embarrassing event. But the judge stopped short of considering whether Sands’s lies made it more likely that he was the dead woman’s killer.
It is not for me to say why the plaintiff has lied. Although they may not be evidence of guilt, his lies may properly be included as grounds on which to base a reasonable suspicion. In my opinion all the circumstances I have described constitute reasonable grounds on which the plaintiff, as at May 2004, could properly have been suspected of the murder of Corinna Marr. I stress that these findings are made on the balance of probabilities and that they are not findings that, even on the balance of probabilities, the plaintiff in fact murdered Corinna Marr.
Sands was likely to be lumped with the legal costs of Channel Seven and the ABC, which included an expensive QC, for the period of the case, which had run for years. It was likely to cost the press photographer hundreds of thousands of dollars. Worse than the financial pain, Sands had thoroughly done in his own reputation and ensured that anyone who had missed the Channel Seven promo now knew he was prime suspect for killing Ms Marr.
THE NEW conflicting alibi raised by Derick Sands at the defamation case did not provide sufficient fresh evidence to prosecute the photographer for the murder. The murder weapon was never found. There were no eyewitnesses to the killing. And DNA evidence was not cracking the case.
The dead woman’s husband, who found his beloved’s murdered corpse, was undergoing counselling and trying to get his life back in order, his dad, David Marr, said. ‘He is coping to some degree—it fluctuates,’ he said. ‘We are proud of the way he has handled this most traumatic situation.’
Corinna’s parents are left to wait and hope for justice. Whoever robbed them of their sunny daughter is a ‘pathetic coward’, they say, ‘the lowest form of life’. With the real thing abruptly taken from them, Trevor and Denyse King cling to memories of their special girl.
They recall how Corinna, as well as an ebullient people person, was a vegetarian and an animal lover. She was a pet magnet, they say, and her favourite was a carpet python called Cleopatra. ‘She had Tutankhamen first but he wasn’t a very nice snake,’ Mrs King said. ‘She bought Cleopatra so they could mate but then got rid of Tutankhamen. Cleopatra is eight years old now and six feet long and is a lovely snake.’ Mrs King said neighbours or friends who found injured birds or animals would always take them to Corinna to care for.
‘She would give us a thump if we moped around too much because she wasn’t like that,’ Mrs King said. ‘The sun still comes up and still goes down and every day I see people around me getting on with their lives.’
In the meantime detectives hope they might get another breakthrough on another creature that was close to Corinna before turning on her. Someone else who, like Tutankhamen, was not a very nice snake at all.