Chapter 10

An Evil Man

If Denise had wandered around the corner and up Elizabeth Street instead of going to her coffee meeting with Wayne Mathes and David Donohue on 12 September 1996, she might have chanced upon a spectacle quite beyond anything she could have imagined.

Two blocks away, in one of the city’s sandstone quarter courtrooms, before a judge and gallery, was the same man she’d spend the next two hours discussing with the police; the man she’d visited in Long Bay jail the previous weekend; the very man who had been her friend of almost four years.

However, Michael Guider was about to reveal a side of him­self Denise had never seen before. Dressed in drab green and sporting the beginnings of a greyish beard, she might have thought how much he’d suddenly aged, certainly well beyond his 45 years.

With all eyes upon him, Guider shuffled across the floor into the elevated timber-panelled witness box beside veteran judge Paul Flannery. Softly, he cleared his throat. What he had to say would fill the front page of the following morning’s Daily Telegraph.

‘I can’t give back what I have taken [from my victims] and that’s the bottom line,’ he began in a shaky voice. ‘I wish I could turn back the hands of time and that I didn’t exist in their lives. I really do.

‘I have to accept responsibility for my actions, as disgusting, depraved and sickening as they are. As much as I would like to believe that’s not me, it is. There are aspects of my life that are totally disgusting, abhorrent and just absolutely shameful.’1

Those listening had earlier been told the police search of Guider’s Castle Cove flat had recovered more than 3000 illicit slides and photographs and around 100 rolls of film.

Asked now what had led him to such a life of depravity, he said, ‘Well, I can’t offer anything. All I can say is that in child abuse there are no excuses, not now or ever.

‘I am fully responsible for what I have done,’ Guider added, choking back tears. ‘Why I did it, though, I don’t know. If his honour here gives me the maximum, that’s what I will have to deal with.’

Arguing that his sentence should approach the full 25-year limit, Crown prosecutor Margaret Cuneen said the images Guider had spent his lifetime gathering would ‘literally turn the stomach of any parent and revolt any decent member of the community’.

As Guider stepped back into the dock, slumped into his seat and buried his face in his hands, his own barrister, Max Pincott, conceded that Guider’s behaviour ‘could not be condoned in any form’.2

By tabloid newspaper standards it was spellbinding stuff. The Tele could hardly have hoped for a more obscenely compelling narrative with which to lead its Friday morning edition. Its headline writers topped the copy with ‘20 years of shame – courtroom confession of an evil man’.

***

Back at school, trying to wrap up a busy week after arriving home late the previous night, Denise didn’t see the story first off. Nor did she hear it mentioned on radio until catching an afternoon bulletin in the car. After racing to the nearest newsagency, though, she absorbed every awful detail while standing, utterly dumbfounded, outside on the footpath. Phrase by horrible phrase, it was as if she were listening to Guider reciting it himself.

‘Some people have described me as a pedophile,’ the article quoted. ‘Now I am here before you all in public admitting that, yes, that’s what I am.’3

The idea of him actually saying these words was enough to steal her breath away. How incredible that Michael had so publicly purged himself as she’d sat just a stone’s throw away, obliviously enduring Mathes and Donohue’s spiel about him, Denise thought. For that matter, how incredible was it that he hadn’t uttered a single syllable about planning do so when she’d been to visit him just days before. Was it a sign that he was on the verge of losing it?

Yet the more she read of her erstwhile friend’s courtroom declaration, the less authentic it seemed. From one line to the next, it increasingly smacked of inconsistency. He seemed to be throwing his hands up but in the next moment trying somehow to explain his actions away or at least diminish their severity.

As apparent evidence that he’d undergone some kind of moral awakening, Guider had claimed that coming clean was ‘something that I could not do before’.

‘I don’t think I am a totally evil person,’ he added, and despite conceding that he’d taken his camera, sleeping pills and Coca-Cola with him whenever he visited his victims’ homes, he also insisted his actions had not been premeditated.

In any case, he assured Judge Flannery, he was indeed now a changed man and facing his criminality ‘head on’.

If demonstrating remorse was one way to earn a reduced sentence, then on the surface at least, Guider appeared to have shown it in spades, Denise conceded. Yet at almost every turn, it seemed he was also trying to rationalise his depravity or invoke pity: yes, he admitted being despicable but not completely so; yes, he’d done everything he’d been accused of but hadn’t really meant to; and yes, there was a mountain to climb if he was to rehabilitate himself but he was already in the harness. It was a masterful performance.

In stark contrast to the fanciful proposition being put forward was the considerable body of expert opinion about Guider’s state of mind that had earlier been presented in the case. In its dramatic coverage of the proceedings, the Tele left such material wholly uncited. But had she known about it, Denise might have been less inclined to afford Guider any leeway at all.

According to one of the psychologists who’d assessed him following his arrest, Guider had actually had the gall to complain of his own distress. He’d whined about feeling ‘vulnerable and hurt’ because all his ‘perversities had been laid bare’.4

A psychiatrist who’d interviewed him said Guider had unquestionably been aware of his deviant sexual urges but failed to show any corresponding abnormality in his thoughts, beliefs or perceptions. In other words, he was fully cognisant of what he was doing but did it anyway.5

A second psychologist who’d spoken to him in Long Bay claimed he’d displayed no real contrition for the hurt he’d inflicted at all. ‘He didn’t show any remorse,’ she said. ‘He blamed the mothers all the time for not caring about their children. They were out having a good time and didn’t care who was with their kids.’6

One problem, at least as far as the police were concerned, was that in this regard, there was actually some truth to what Guider was alleging. In fact, at least several officers felt he would have been caught much earlier had some of the parents involved had the fortitude to take proper action.

One mother interviewed by Jadette admitted she knew Guider had been assaulting her daughter but said she chose to order him from her house rather than report him. Unfortunately, almost four more years would pass before he was apprehended.

‘We talked to a few mothers who we believed knew that Guider had been interfering with their children, who felt guilty or simply didn’t care enough to do anything about it,’ one of the task force detectives later confirmed to the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘They said nothing at the time and they still refused to admit the truth when we spoke to them. It’s horrible, it’s tragic but it’s true.’7

According to the psychologist who interviewed him at Long Bay, in some cases Guider had openly accused the parents of complicity. ‘She was bad,’ he’d supposedly said of one. ‘I was screwing her two kids and she asked me to do it to her after I’d been doing it to them.’8

After reading the Telegraph story over and over, Denise tossed and turned late into the night. Before finally succumbing to sleep, she decided she would go out to Long Bay again the following morning. Perhaps it would be an opportunity to win back some of the ground she’d lost with him, she told herself. Maybe Guider would even forgo some of his resentment and tell her a little more of what Mathes and Donohue had said about her at Junee. It was worth a shot.

***

The drive down from the Hills seemed to take longer than it had the Saturday before. Denise had more to think about, she supposed. As she made her way through the weekend traffic, 14 September shaped up as a cool, clear-skied day.

Led into the visiting area where Denise was already seated and waiting, Guider was in a sullen state. Yet at least he’d agreed to see her – it was his prerogative to refuse access if that’s what he wanted – and so she mistakenly took his presence as a good sign. It was only much later that she learned he’d acquiesced purely so as not to attract notice. With his certainty that she’d spoken to the cops, Guider figured it would look too suspicious if he now declined to receive her visit. He was playing an astute hand.

It quickly became apparent there was little point in trying to elicit information so Denise resigned herself to mostly engaging in small talk.

Under the circumstances, developing any sort of conversation was hard work. However, she put it down to the rigours of Guider having to so painfully shed his skin in court. She wrongly reasoned that the experience had inflicted serious emotional wounds.

When the subject of Mathes and Donohue did finally rate an obscure mention during the rather strained exchange, Guider was only willing to repeat what he’d said the previous week: they’d questioned him at length and named ‘Denise and Rob Allen’ as having come forward and made statements.

For the first time since she’d begun visiting him, Denise didn’t stay until closing. Their farewell was low key and without the usual requests to write or promises to visit again. For all his standoffishness, she hoped there might still be something between them to salvage but knew it would take more than a while for Guider to give any ground. It was all so bloody frustrating!

Behind the wheel in the car park, Denise’s thoughts drifted to the troubling conversation she’d had with Mathes and Donohue two days earlier. They were the ones to blame for the whole damned fiasco. Despite their denials, she was certain it had been the two detectives who’d blabbed about her. There was no other way Guider could have found out what she’d been up to, and the last couple of hours she’d spent with him basically confirmed it. But why on earth had they given her up? What was the point to it? She felt more perplexed than ever.

As she coasted along Anzac Parade towards the city, Denise wondered if her best option wasn’t just to call it quits. Guider wasn’t talking to her, justifiably or not she couldn’t help feeling the cops had betrayed her and, worst of all, the case was going precisely nowhere.

It certainly wasn’t her responsibility to solve Sam’s murder, she told herself. On principle, she felt more strongly about it than ever but she was just so sick and tired of being dragged through the mud for her willingness to take a stand on a difficult issue. She’d had a pretty good crack at it, so perhaps enough was enough.

Above all, though, Denise realised she was so upset for a slightly different reason: despite everything she’d told them, why had the police continued to insist Guider was of zero interest as a suspect? She’d laid it out for them, hadn’t she? So why on earth couldn’t they see it? The question began playing on an infuriating loop inside her head. Intuitively, as much as anything, she turned her focus to the account Mathes had given her of Guider noticing Tess Knight working in the bookshop, and decided it simply didn’t make sense.

In the first place, there was no way Guider would have gone shopping in Dymocks, Denise reasoned. It was true he loved books but never to buy, only to borrow. He’d spent days and weeks in the State Library yet she’d not once, in all the time she’d known him, seen him buy a book either new or second hand. Nor had he even mentioned buying one. In fact, it occurred to her that he didn’t purchase anything he could get use of without having to cough up. It was the same stingy reasoning he always used when he’d conducted their archaeological surveys: if he could do them during work time while being paid to garden, he would. Better still if he could ‘borrow’ the boss’s ute, too, so he didn’t have to pay for his own petrol.

The other thing about Guider was that he didn’t do anything on a whim, not even drop into a shop and browse. If he had gone into Dymocks on Pitt it was because he had reason to, Denise believed. And the reason had to be Tess. There was no coincidence involved. He knew she worked there, knew the days she was rostered on and the times her shifts started and finished. He’d been stalking her.

It was a startling enough revelation in itself but what to do about it? If the police weren’t prepared to look at the possibility, no one else was likely to either. That much was obvious. Maybe the next best thing, then, was to find someone to examine why they were so disinterested. Denise would quickly discover the force’s brand new commissioner, British import Peter Ryan, wasn’t the answer. Despite his appointment having much to do with restoring public confidence in the devastating wake of the Wood Royal Commission, Ryan’s office would quickly inform her that he didn’t meet with ordinary citizens. And so, with no recognisable alternative left, she would eventually decide to make a formal complaint.

In the prevailing climate, it would be a serious move.