Chapter 15

Beer and Pills

Guider, surely, couldn’t believe his luck. Again he’d been implicated in Samantha’s abduction and murder and again he’d fallen on his feet. This time he hadn’t been blithely quizzed by phone or politely confronted during a closed interview, either. It was the real deal. He’d been vividly shamed in a metropolitan newspaper boasting a million readers, even if only for a day. Yet not only had he weathered the storm, he’d somehow been exonerated.

Incredibly, the police had once more failed to unearth the ties that inexorably bound him and Samantha together. The telling details offered by Denise, Bradley Roberts, the Clarkes and hospital worker Phil Black had delivered Wayne Mathes and David Donohue to a threshold beyond which they should have made their case. But for some reason the same threshold seemed to constitute a kind of impenetrable barrier.

Members of a brotherhood mired in scandal, answerable to a gutted hierarchy and surrounded by fractious, self-indulgent colleagues, the two Bondi detectives never really left the blocks. They challenged their suspect and he rebuffed them; they asked Tess about him but she drew a blank; they presumably also checked in with Lisa Harrison, the woman who’d introduced Tess to Guider at her daughter’s beachside birthday party in 1983. And it took them nowhere.

Once Denise’s complaint entered the equation, the ruined inquiry briefly stirred but this had more to do with perception than anything real. The two men driving it came no closer to catching a killer, and in some respects spent as much energy sating the media and keeping the ombudsman at bay.

The bottom line was that by eliminating Guider the police had thrown their prized catch back into the water. They’d got it wrong.

***

A month after unveiling their important new witness – the elderly man furnishing the mysterious and ‘disturbing’ information – Mathes and Donohue quietly conceded in late 1996 that their investigation had once again stalled. For all the apparent promise arising from their most recent inquiries, according to a somewhat truncated follow-up report in the Sunday Telegraph the trail had come to nought.

Guider took immediate heart from the news. ‘On February 27th (next) … I will already have served a year’s jail so there’ll only be nine to go before parole,’ he wrote in his final letter to Denise for the year.1 Obviously, he was no longer fretting about spending the rest of his days behind bars. In fact, the realisation he was off the hook had prompted a whole new outlook.

‘I’m devoting more time to prayer now and one day I’d like to become a healer,’ he enthused. ‘I feel I have a natural aptitude already, many people are drawn to me for counselling and even here [in Lithgow] I’ve been able to help two inmates just by listening.’2

Even the burden of confinement no longer seemed quite so despairing.

‘We are locked in at 7.30 p.m. and let go at 8.15 a.m. the following morning so you are free to wander about the wing all day. They have a large kitchen and a small laundry in the wing and only 26 inmates in our area so it’s a lot better than the 60 odd we had at Long Bay. This gaol seems to be a lot more civilised … the officers seem to be friendlier and so far I’ve had no trouble apart from a few comments from some inmates when I arrived but that is to be expected.’

Around the time of his first anniversary in February, Guider also announced that he’d successfully enrolled as a degree student with the University of New England at Armidale, with a view to working as an archaeologist after his release in 2006.

‘I’m thrilled,’ Denise wrote in reply, ‘and I want to offer all the help I can.’

His renewed optimism was exactly what she’d hoped for; her offer of support was designed as a first step towards winning back Guider’s trust so she could find a way to get him talking.

Despite everything that had happened over the previous few months, Denise refused to consider that Guider was innocent. She knew him too well to think otherwise. The police might have accepted his story but as far as she was concerned he’d given too many different versions of where and how he’d met Samantha for a man so meticulous about important matters. He was clearly lying about the extent of his relationship with her. She was far more inclined to believe what Di Michel had originally told her, that he knew her ‘very well’.

As for Bob Waites’s advice to drop her involvement and move on, it was the last thing now on Denise’s mind. She didn’t particularly like hearing what he’d had to say and didn’t much appreciate how long it had taken for the police force to issue the apology he’d delivered. For that matter, she still had serious doubts about the official line that an honest mistake had been made in revealing her identity either. She wrote to Guider in March 1997 and promised to begin visiting again as soon as she could.

It did the trick, as he embraced the offer immediately. ‘Remember I’m with you always in spirit,’ he replied. ‘I know you haven’t forgotten me.’3 The letter, like the ones that followed, made no reference to his crimes and reflected no guilt or concern for his victims. He wrote as if nothing unusual had even happened to him and he seemed to think that by being in jail for ten years his slate would be wiped clean.

***

Denise would discover Lithgow Correctional Centre was actually located slightly further along the Great Western Highway at a little place called Marrangaroo. It had been built just six years earlier as the state’s maximum security flagship at a cost of $60 million and supposedly represented something of a departure from the system’s Draconian past.

From the get-go, she hated it. The place terrified her. Yet over the coming months she would become a regular visitor.

According to her best recollection of the trips, ‘the drive up took close to three hours but felt longer because I was riding solo again. Like the previous March when I’d travelled to Goulburn, I didn’t tell anyone what I was up to.

‘Once I’d get inside the front door of the jail, the same security routine was always enforced no matter what. They’d immediately issue me with a locker key, remind me that no personal items were allowed past the entry point, do my photograph and fingerprint checks and then tell me to “go take a seat”.’

It was a procedure that smacked of being thought guilty by association and the officers who policed it seemed invariably cold and disinterested.

‘The longer I was made to wait, the more anxious I’d feel,’ Denise says. ‘I often thought of leaving but dared not to because it would have meant driving all the way home again empty-handed. By the same token, I never spoke to anyone for fear of having to tell them I was visiting a paedophile.’

Paralysed, she would simply sit in silence.

The routine allowed four visitors to be called every 20 minutes but no one knew when their turn was due. When it eventually came time, they were walked down a hallway, made to empty their pockets and scanned with a metal detector. Their arms would be stamped, and again they would be told to sit and wait. The room they were left in was tiny. It made Denise feel claustrophobic and dirty, as if she were one of the crims.

‘To make matters worse, I’d often find myself joined by young mums with their babies and small children there to see their fathers. It was hard not to be overcome with pity for them.’

Next, a guard would arrive and escort the group outside and down a narrow path hemmed by mesh and barbed wire. At the end was a huge steel gate that opened onto yet another waiting area.

‘Usually scared stiff by now, I’d finally enter one of the visiting rooms wondering who might be there to confront me. Each room was designed to seat six inmates and their “guests”. At the far end they featured small tea areas with these ancient urns that were half-filled with cold water and required several hours to heat up. Beside them were stacks of polystyrene cups and no-frills tea bags that were scattered about, uncovered. Yet there was no milk to be seen.

‘Across the way there was a soft-drink machine and, like, a chip and lollies dispenser but it took all my courage just to scoop up the coins from my purse and walk past the hundreds of inmates in adjoining rooms so I could use them.’

Six hours was a long time to spend in such a horrible place but Denise always stayed because she knew she had a job to do.

‘With the realisation that murderers and rapists were sitting so close to me, it often felt like I was frozen to my seat. I kept thinking what it would be like to be locked up with them for hours at a time in a small room on my own. I’ve always suffered with claustrophobia and I knew it was something I’d never be able to endure but this idea that I was stuck in there with them all, I just couldn’t shake it until I was released at the end of the visiting period.’

***

Guider was always pleased to see her but Denise could sense the fear in his eyes. He was nervous in front of the other prisoners and often talked about how they loathed him and wanted to bash him because he was a child sex offender.

One Saturday morning he slid past the stool she was sitting on and opened the bar fridge behind her. Without saying anything, he then stepped back so she could read the message scrawled in large red print on one of the shelves: ‘WE KILL ROCK SPIDERS’.

Denise wondered who might have been responsible, as the room was normally locked out of visiting hours. Was it Guider, trying to frighten her, or was it genuine? And how did it get there if all the inmates had been strip searched before entering the room?

As the weeks passed, Denise grew less convinced Guider would ever drop his guard.

‘I could tell he was still withholding his trust in me,’ she says. ‘He steadfastly refused to discuss even the crimes he’d been convicted of let alone any knowledge that he had of what happened to Sam.

‘It never ceased to amaze me that instead, he could spend the entire day while I was there with him, holding up a one-sided conversation about prison life and how dreary it was for him, or about his archaeology courses, in which he was achieving high distinctions, or about his letters petitioning various Sydney councils to record new Aboriginal sites.’

Denise supposed that on this point at least she should be grateful that Guider’s amazing powers of retention allowed him to carry on with some of his valuable survey work. He was still managing to submit reports to the National Parks and Wildlife Service almost entirely from memory.

***

Eventually, Denise figured it might be worth trying to get Guider to speak to someone else.

‘My first thought was one of the prison psychiatrists but he refused to consider it. Then I found out [Michael] was friendly with this Catholic nun who was a regular visitor to the jail, after meeting her one morning in the main waiting room. She was lovely. It was obvious to me that she knew Michael quite well and I felt she was sympathetic to his situation, being able to under­stand the upbringing he’d endured, in and out of foster homes.

‘Unfortunately, though, I realised her religious vows would probably prevent her from divulging any of his secrets even if she could get him to talk.’

It was a pity, as Guider had been harping on about finding God practically every day since his arrest. Denise didn’t for a minute think it was anything more than his way of coping with everything but she thought he might at least be susceptible to the idea of making a confession if the right circumstances could be arranged.

‘I told him forgiveness would only come if he openly admitted to all his crimes. I said I’d be prepared to help him deal with it if only he’d tell someone, anyone, what had happened to Samantha, but the more I encouraged him, the more Michael denied having anything to do with her at all.’

Guider said flat out that he was sick of being held responsible for Sam’s death and had come up with a plan to avoid further publicity once he finished his sentence.

‘He told me he was going to take all the money he would by then have scrimped and saved and head off into the wilderness somewhere along the Hawkesbury River,’ Denise says, rolling her eyes slightly. ‘It’s quite fascinating when I think back on it; he said he was going to go and live out the rest of his life as a hermit. Overhangs would shelter him from the rain and he was going to feast on a diet of fish, yabbies and bush tucker just like the Aborigines did before European settlement.’

Gradually, she realised, Guider seemed to be developing a new strategy to repel her harassment. Because she’d been so persistent about questioning his motivations and behaviour, he began throwing up some of the darker emotional markers in his past as a way of challenging her resolve. Some of the stories were designed to repulse, others to disturb.

‘There was the one about the married woman he’d supposedly fallen for who’d left him for the other bloke,’ Denise says. ‘He told me he’d found them living together in a flat in Bondi and had tried to burn it down.

‘He never actually admitted it but I knew by the way he’d told me about it that he’d wanted them both dead.

‘Another Saturday, he went through his childhood obsession with getting rid of Tim so that he could monopolise his mother’s affections. He told me about dumping him in the surf in his pram and later trying to tip the washing machine on top of him.

‘Then there was the horrible story about the young boy, Billy. In Michael’s words, he was killed in his company while crossing the road on the way to school. But, again, the way he told it prompted me to wonder if he’d actually pushed the little fellow in front of the vehicle to see what would happen.’

After the yarn telling, Guider would often launch into even more bizarre talk about death and dying.

‘He said to me more than once that he was so fascinated by the concept that he’d wanted, before being sent to jail, to stage a photographic exhibition exclusively devoted to “the dead” and “dead things”. Someone, though, had apparently prevented him from going through with it.

‘However, the worst of what had become a really quite dreadful state of affairs was Michael attempting to get me to imagine what it would be like to have my arm cut off and then to see the blood dripping from it onto the floor.

‘He would say things like, you know, even though it was severed and had left my body it would still be a living thing. He took great delight in claiming that the blood and the arm had a life of their own. He said he saw beauty in death and was unfrightened by it.’

Perhaps it was aimed purely at heightening the emotional discomfort he was trying to create or maybe it was all Guider could do to admit what a horrible person he was without plucking up the courage to confess to murder. Denise couldn’t tell. She found it increasingly difficult to go on. Guider’s morbidity both frightened and depressed her and after hundreds of kilometres of driving and months of exhausting effort she’d come no closer to breaking him down. If anything, it was the other way around. On the way back to Baulkham Hills she would often cry uncontrollably – for the horrible childhood Guider had suffered, for his own victims and the devastation he’d brought to their lives, for the wretched little tots whose only contact with their fathers was restricted to Saturday visiting hours and for poor, long dead Sam, whose precious remains would probably never be found.

In July 1998, Denise decided her next visit to Lithgow planned for later that month would be her last. She was done.

***

As she drove through the chill on that final mid-winter morning, she assured herself she’d tried everything she could to get to the truth and that in all likelihood Guider would carry his secrets to the grave.

After tolerating the visitation drill for the final time, Denise took up her stool at the little table they would share and resigned herself to lasting it out until closing time.

‘Michael, you must talk to a psychiatrist about your past life with children,’ she implored him once more. ‘I cannot help you.’

‘Denise, I see so many people in here, you have no worries,’ Guider replied. As a throwaway he began listing some of the people he’d sought help from, including a drug counsellor.

As the information sunk in, goose bumps erupted on Denise’s arms and the back of her neck. She tried to stay calm.

‘Michael, why are you seeing a drug counsellor?’ she asked.

He paused before telling her about taking Normison, explaining that it was a pill prescribed to help him sleep. He said he’d taken it in large quantities for years and developed a resistance to its effects to the extent that they were reversed. In other words, taking the tablets would keep him awake. As a result, he’d become an insomniac, often staying awake all night and still going to work during the day.

Denise knew he had a sleep deprivation problem from when they’d first started their archaeological field work but she had no idea it was drug related.

Were there any other substances he had issues with, she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘beer.’

‘Looking back, I guess I really couldn’t believe what he was telling me,’ she says. ‘In all the time we’d walked the bush he’d been clear that he “never touched the stuff”. I’d even offered to shout him a schooner at the end of several of our summer expeditions around Kellyville Golf Club, there, beside Caddies Creek, and he’d always laughed at the idea.

‘I remember just wondering why after all that time he started peeling back the layers and I came to the conclusion that it could only be that he’d made a mistake in uttering the phrase “drug counsellor” to me.’

Telling was the fact that, at the time, there had never been anything in the media tying Samantha’s disappearance to Normison. Guider’s mention of his addiction to it, therefore constituted another link in the chain. It was like another little piece of the puzzle falling into place. Guider had always been careful not to reveal to Denise even the tiniest details of matters he wanted kept sensitive but it had been a slip of the tongue. After mouthing the words, though, he couldn’t take them back.

He went on that afternoon to explain that beer seemed to strengthen the effects of the Normison on him. He said he used to drink up to seven schooners each day during his lunch break with the Royal North Shore security crew.

‘They [the hospital administration] had no idea just how much time their employees spent at the pub,’ he’d laughed.

‘I knew that if Michael had kept his pill-popping and drinking from me all this time, he was capable of hiding other matters as well. But what was I supposed to do about it? There was no one left to turn to.’

It was time to go home.