Chapter 13

Whale in the Bay

As September collided with October, David Donohue found himself with his hands full. For reasons not entirely clear, he’d been left to carry the lead on the investigation as his more experienced running mate, Wayne Mathes, faded into the background.

The revelations in the Guider case had attracted quite a bit more media attention than anyone had anticipated. It meant an inordinate amount of the younger detective’s time was being spent fronting TV cameras, taking calls from journalists and wading through feedback from the public. As a result, almost a fortnight had passed and he still hadn’t even looked into the Roberts communiqué.

Another response to the publicity had seriously diverted Donohue’s attention as well. Reading the initial story about the unnamed suspect, convicted robber Tim Guider had guessed that it was referring to his brother. He contacted Bondi police station, hoping either to put paid to the idea Guider was a killer or, if he was, to at least sort out what needed to be done about it.

After some consideration, Donohue decided to bring Tim on board, sounding him out on the idea of driving out to Malabar and speaking to Guider in person. It wasn’t especially sophisticated as investigative strategies go but who could tell what might come of it?

Tim was no stranger to the Bay. He’d spent most of a six-and-a-half year stretch there in the 1980s and it was also where he’d discovered his talent for painting. In fact, some of his murals still adorned the high security facility’s courtyard walls.

During the visit, the younger Guider brother didn’t pull any punches, apparently asking Michael straight out whether he’d had anything to do with what he’d been accused of. The answer, though, was a deadpan ‘no’.

Tim later said he didn’t believe what he’d been told because the two had looked each other in the eye and he’d simply known Michael wasn’t being honest. For the time being, however, it was as far as any such discussion between them would go.1

***

On Wednesday, 2 October , Donohue finally got an opportunity to drive down to Long Bay himself and check out what Bradley Roberts had to say first hand. He took an offsider with him, Detective Senior Constable Jason Gordon, arriving around 10.30 a.m.

Starting from the top, Roberts told them he believed Samantha’s death was the result of Guider giving her an overdose of Normison. He said he suspected he’d buried her body somewhere in Cooper Park and that Guider had even suggested that if it had been searched properly in 1986 they might have found her ‘around the salt bushes’ in the place.

One potentially startling piece of information he had for them was that Guider had told him he had photographs of Samantha which he’d taken after she went missing. On their location, Roberts said his cell mate had been deliberately vague but had reckoned they were stored along with some of his Aboriginal artefacts being kept in a Sydney factory.2

There was certainly enough in the brief but telling account to work with. After consulting Tim again, Donohue obtained authority to search some factory-type premises Guider had possibly had access to on the city’s Northern Beaches at Dee Why, near the Warringah Council Depot. The warrant was executed that afternoon but produced nothing.3

The following day the detectives quickly switched their focus to Cooper Park, the thickly wooded 15-hectare reserve maintained by Woollahra Council and just a short walk from the western end of Bondi Road. After surveying records of various Aboriginal burial sites within the precinct, they spent three hours on foot inspecting each one or at least those where they considered it possible to bury a body without being seen. Again, however, the two men came away empty-handed.

When it later came time for others to assess the hastily convened effort, it would be described as ‘cursory’ and noted for having involved no digging. Questions would also be asked about Donohue’s opting not to take an official statement from Roberts or even make informal notes of their conversations at Long Bay in his police-issue pad. His explanation would be that it had been his mindset at the time only to have recorded such information on investigative running sheets. When this was checked, however, it was found he’d actually typed up a summary back at Waverley station on a piece of foolscap paper.

When the suggestion was offered to Donohue that he may have been influenced by the fact Roberts’s report hadn’t actually constituted a murder confession, he would readily agree. He’d also acknowledge that he might not have regarded the information all that highly because it was, after all, jailhouse intelligence. In other words, he’d probably doubted its credibility because of who it had come from.

In any case, the struggling Bondi detective team made no further inquiries into what Roberts had put to them besides the two wasted afternoons of searching.4

***

Anyone who’d been digesting the considerable publicity sur­rounding the rebirth of the investigation since Sunday afternoon could only have anticipated one outcome: the imminent arrest of Michael Anthony Guider. Yet all would be left scratching their heads.

Despite portraying him the previous day as Public Enemy No.1, the Telegraph was suddenly left on 2 October holding a quote from Donohue to the effect that Guider’s ‘possible involvement’ in Sam’s disappearance was ‘only one of many lines of inquiry’. The Herald’s latest instalment was relegated to the fourth entry on the broadsheet’s briefs page and simply said police were still investigating an unnamed former Bondi resident who’d been known to the Knights. Similarly, he was now regarded as ‘just one of several new leads in the case’.

Taking the remarks at face value, it seemed Guider was no longer quite the evil fiend everyone thought him to be, and maybe there was someone else responsible for the crime. If the bizarre coverage could be believed, Sam’s decade-old disappearance had gone from stone-cold mystery to the verge of being solved and then lost in a maze of possibility again all within 72 hours.

It made no sense and wasn’t likely to for a good, long time.

Some with an eye on the investigation put it down to posturing, the idea that the police were simply creating the illusion that there were new leads and suspects at play so they couldn’t later be accused in court by some smart defence solicitor of having tunnel vision. For these pundits, the belief was that the Bondi team was probably still gunning full-on for Guider behind the scenes, with a view to slapping him with a murder charge as soon as they were good and ready.

However, the smokescreen theorists were bowled over four days later when Sergeant Mathes made an unexpected return to public life – again, in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph. He had some even more startling news to impart, too. Not only was he keen to reiterate that there were indeed various avenues of inquiry being conducted, Mathes indicated that he was prepared to step beyond what was normally confidential in such circumstances and discuss one particular development in some detail.

He told the paper another important and previously unknown witness to Sam’s abduction had been prompted to come forward. The 69-year-old man had visited Bondi police station several days earlier to get some ‘disturbing information’ off his chest. He’d also wanted to apologise for not speaking up about things much earlier but said he hadn’t realised that what he’d had to impart would be classified as so crucial.

‘When you consider the welfare of a child was at stake, it’s hard to comprehend,’ Mathes said of the elderly gentleman’s ten-year silence. ‘Nonetheless, we are extremely grateful he has chosen to come forward. We would remind the public … any information is better late than never.’

Just what the ‘disturbing information’ was that had been received, Mathes didn’t say. In fact, no one would ever explain what it was, how it was relevant or why it was so disturbing. Indeed, beyond his mention in the story, the mysterious 69-year-old wasn’t heard from again.

What followed this passage of the article, though, was so entirely contrary as to defy happenstance. The real news conveyed by the piece was actually buried five sentences from the end, as if almost an afterthought. It read: ‘Police say they have also eliminated a convicted paedophile from the inquiry into Samantha’s abduction.

‘Sgt Mathes said he hoped people had not been misled by the naming of Michael Guider in connection with the Samantha Knight case. Yesterday, detectives confirmed they had interviewed Guider at length before he was convicted of 60 sex attacks on 11 children.’

That, it appeared, was that.5 In the blink of an eye, Guider was once again yesterday’s news.

***

Irene Moss must surely have been thoroughly intrigued by what had been disseminated over the previous eight days. Placed in context, there was much about it to cause her alarm.

In the first place, it would have occurred to her that the appearance of the initial Sunday Telegraph story on 29 September was either an almighty coincidence or that there were some curious agendas at play. What other explanation could there be for the fact that a mere ten days after she’d received Denise’s complaint, Samantha Knight had rocketed back into the news for the first time in almost 18 months?

Moss knew Denise had first told the police about Guider way back in February. She also knew they’d done very little about it until July, when they’d gone to visit him in Junee. They’d then even branded him a dud suspect during their coffee shop routine in mid-September.

Within a fortnight, however, Mathes and Donohue had experienced some kind of epiphany. All of a sudden Guider was smack in their sights and, as if to prove it, a ‘source close to the case’ had seen fit to leak a certain version of Denise’s story about him to the media.

Moss might have noted with some interest that it was a version that sought to explain why no one had discovered Guider’s connection to Sam much earlier.

‘It is apparently not a case of something the initial investigators missed but something they could not possibly have known,’ the article had stated. ‘Something, in fact, no one but the man himself and a victim could have known.’

Moss surely would have pondered exactly what had triggered such an erratic change in the police attitude; from having not the slightest curiosity about Guider one day to declaring almost wholesale fascination with him the next. Had it been the pending complaint? Assistant Commissioner Schuberg had only been informed of Denise’s grievance by her office on 3 October, well after all the initial fanfare, but had others somehow already known it was on the way?

Royal Commissioner James Wood had recently examined the practice of officers alerting colleagues to internal inquiries by warning of a ‘whale in the bay’. He found the coded phrase had been used to such an extent it had become part of police folklore.6

Unfortunately, though, Moss simply didn’t have the resources to get to the bottom of such issues.

***

In mid-October, Guider was still recuperating. Denise hadn’t heard from him since her visit the morning he’d been outed as a rock spider, several days before the bashing. She thought it might be time to see how he was getting along.

By coincidence, she’d asked one of her friends to go with her, perhaps for a little moral support, but also because she had a special talent. Gwen Jansen was a master in the Japanese art of energy therapy known as Reiki, or palm healing. Denise had been studying the techniques involved for some time as well and hoped Guider might let the two of them perform a stress treatment upon him. She had no idea he had more serious problems.

‘We were told at the main entrance we’d need to be taken to the hospital wing,’ she says. ‘As we sat waiting and wondering what was going on, Michael was wheeled out in a chair, his extended right leg encased in plaster. I couldn’t believe the injuries he’d sustained. His limb was smashed and his face was almost unrecognisable.

‘His forehead looked caved in with stitches through the middle of the wound and his right hand was broken and still very bruised and swollen. It was also obvious that part of Michael’s ear had been sewn back on. He was still in a fair bit of pain.’

The guard who’d brought him in rolled the chair over to a table where Denise and Gwen could sit down with him. Guider seemed nervous, less than happy to see them, but agreed to tell them what had happened.

‘He said the attack had been totally unprovoked,’ Denise says. ‘The fellow responsible was his cell mate, a huge, mentally unbalanced Tongan guy. He’d beaten him without mercy as Michael had first tried to sound the broken emergency bell beside his bed and then hammer on the door.

‘Luckily, a guard eventually heard his cries for help.’

The women wondered if they might try the Reiki on him. Guider consented but changed his mind about 15 minutes into the session, citing discomfort. When they lifted their palms from him a pool of sweat had accumulated on the table, where his hand had been resting.

Denise left the jail convinced it had been sheer luck that the truth about what had happened to Samantha had not perished along with Guider as a result of the potentially fatal beating he’d received.

‘I kept thinking to myself how many bloody times I’d rung Long Bay and virtually pleaded with them to keep an eye on him because of the precious secret he was keeping,’ she says. ‘Obviously they didn’t pay me the slightest bit more than lip service. Then they didn’t even call to tell me that what I feared would happen to him did. He could have been killed and Sam’s disappearance would never have been solved.

‘I wondered who it was that wanted him dead.’

***

By now, Denise’s complaint against the police had left Geoff Schuberg and been sent to Bondi via the desk of Eastern Suburbs District Commander, Chief Superintendent Bob Waites. The officer eventually handed the job of conducting the preliminary inquiry requested by Moss was Senior Sergeant Ted Ellis.

The first thing he did was call for a transcript of the Junee interview, which clearly showed Denise’s and Rob’s names had been canvassed. Presented with the document, Mathes and Donohue were left to agree they’d clearly been mistaken in claiming they hadn’t blown Denise’s cover. However, they told Ellis they were unaware anyone had requested confidentiality before conducting their interview.7

Several days later, Ellis questioned Adam Purcell, who confirmed that he’d failed to warn the two detectives of the sensitivities involved.

Ellis’s next stop was to phone Denise. He said although she had been identified to Guider, no reference had been made to her supplying information about him. There hadn’t needed to be, she retorted. The mere fact her name had been used meant her dual position as Guider’s ‘friend’ and police informant had been compromised.

After consulting one of Moss’s investigations officers, Fiona McMullen, on 1 November, Ellis recommended all three detectives receive managerial counselling.8 McMullen, however, also sought an apology.

On behalf of the service, Superintendent Waites would oblige the request but it was a gesture that again seemed to create more problems than it extinguished.

***

Denise was and is not the kind of person to be easily put off. After speaking with Waites, she told McMullen he’d not only relayed to her a contradictory version of what punishments would be issued, he’d hinted at a lack of enthusiasm among some of his colleagues when she’d offered further information about the case. If they couldn’t get their act together, she said, maybe she should speak to the Wood Royal Commission about the whole affair, after all – or the press.

In an effort to clear things up properly, McMullen tried to organise a more formal mediation in the New Year but by then events would once more have overtaken the situation.