Chapter 17

Getting Tough

It was now two-and-a-half years since Guider had been locked up. Denise had visited him 14 times in three different jails, and every occasion left her feeling more empty and depressed than the last.

‘It nearly killed me each time I went to see him,’ she says. Her heart condition was a constant worry, she’d twice been seriously ill and had operations. She’d gone without sleep for days on end and often feared she was becoming neurotic.

‘It was soul-destroying but I kept on,’ she explains. ‘The possibility of never knowing for certain that Michael was involved in Sam’s disappearance meant I just couldn’t leave it alone.’ For how much longer, though, was another matter.

On the way back from Lithgow, Denise had asked Tuckerman what the next step was but he’d been non-committal.

‘We have a few suspects,’ he said, repeating the line he’d used ten days earlier on the phone. ‘We’ll just slowly work our way through each one.’

It kind of felt like they were back where they’d started again, clutching at straws. But by now Denise knew better than to think the game was over. This time, a full week lapsed before the expected call came: Tuckerman, of course, wanting to know whether she’d consider going back up to the jail to give things another try the following Saturday.

She knew facing Guider again after he’d been so horrible was likely to fuel her anguish to its limit but she agreed to do it anyway. There was no other choice, really. Samantha now pervaded her thoughts. It was almost as though the dear little thing was urging her from the beyond to elicit the truth so that her family would finally have somewhere to take their grief.

***

As the three of them set off again on the 120 kilometre drive that second September weekend in 1998, Sydney’s start to spring felt more like a wintery pall. Mercury levels had plummeted 17 degrees overnight and the frosty pre-dawn gloom threatened to thwart the sun altogether as it slid obliquely into the morning sky. Inside the car there was warmth but only sparse conversation.

‘I can remember thinking perhaps there was something foreboding about it all,’ Denise says. ‘Maybe it would just be another waste of time, I wasn’t really sure. To be honest, at the time I didn’t feel certain about anything.’

Arriving at the little cottage near the jail, the trio braced themselves against the chill and walked up to the door together. Once inside, however, she sensed a subtle shift in the dynamic between them.

Tuckerman suggested she bring her bag and other bits and pieces into a small room off the kitchen. He then turned to Leach and asked if he wouldn’t mind waiting outside while he and Denise had a quiet word alone. She presumed the younger of the two detectives simply wanted to go through their objectives for the day and to reassure her again. But the look on his face said there was something else.

‘We’ve found something out,’ he announced with a kind of suddenness that took her by surprise. ‘For about two years before Samantha disappeared, Michael was sexually abusing her. The assaults took place at a house she used to visit in Manly and we’ve found photos.’

‘As the words sank in, this wave of numbness just washed over me,’ Denise recalls. ‘I’d known in my heart all along that Michael hadn’t been truthful with me but being told it was so devastating. The only thing I can liken it to is if someone had violently attacked me from behind, knocking me to the ground. But the moment was significant for me, I guess, in that I might not have known exactly where or when but at long last I was positive Michael was responsible for Sam’s death…that he’d murdered her.’

As she tried to regain her focus, Tuckerman began explaining what it all meant in terms of their strategy. ‘We need you to turn up the heat, to start asking him some more direct questions,’ he began. ‘We want you to concentrate on what he did to her.

‘We need a confession. It will save us years of investigative work.’

Suddenly Denise grasped what was being asked of her, that she was being thrust into the role of interrogator rather than someone supposed to simply engage him in useful conversation. It was a role she was ill-equipped to play, and a role, to be truthful, that intimidated the hell out of her. Yet she felt herself nodding in agreement.

For obvious reasons, Tuckerman stressed that Denise needed to make sure Guider sat at the same table again. But when she arrived on this particular day and saw how many other visitors there were she knew they had a problem. By the time she reached the final waiting area during the entry process, there were already more than a dozen people in front of her about to take up seats.

‘I more or less figured my best bet was to break from the queue and quickly buy something from the vending machines on the other side of the visiting rooms,’ she recalls. ‘On my way back into line, I would then carefully place the items on the bugged table, and in doing so, reserve our spot.

‘Nothing in the sugary display behind the glass took my fancy so I grabbed what was familiar – a couple of cans of Coke and some Mars Bars – and laid them out where everyone could see them.

‘It was quite a clever little strategy even if I say so myself, and it worked perfectly. But what I had no way of knowing was that what I’d done had probably also just ruined my chances of ever talking Michael around. No one had told me that the exact products I’d purchased were also Michael’s favourite lures. They were the very same drinks and sweets he’d used to entice each of his young victims before drugging and assaulting them.

‘As soon as he saw them, he assumed I’d been talking to the coppers again and that they’d instructed me to choose them on purpose so as to provoke him.’

Unfortunately, Leach and Tuckerman had revealed very little to Denise of what they’d learned of Guider’s modus operandi precisely in order to avoid what had just happened. The fact that it had was purely down to rotten luck.

Within two minutes it was obvious the visit would be a time-wasting exercise. For Denise, it was also about to get nasty.

As she ventured into the annex to use the tea urn, as she normally did, Guider followed. Before she realised what he was doing, he was standing so close they were nearly touching. He then pressed his face even closer, so she could almost feel his breath.

‘I told you never to come back, never to mention that girl,’ he whispered menacingly. ‘You’re making life very difficult for me. Your visit could result in my death.’

Until now she’d never been openly scared of him, not even when he’d taunted her years earlier during the rock fall incident. This time, though, there was no two ways about it. Guider was angry and disturbed and had delivered his message so as to frighten her.

In hindsight, he’d obviously realised immediately that Denise had never brought food into the visiting rooms before and didn’t eat chocolates or drink Coca-Cola anyway. At that moment, however, she had no real idea why he was exhibiting such hostility. All she knew was that she couldn’t succumb to her urge to cut and run. She had to hold it together.

‘Back at the table I noticed one of the doors outside our room had been cut from underneath, leaving a largish gap from the bottom to the floor. It also seemed to be slightly ajar. I hoped Neil and Steve were on the other side but knew that even if they were, they wouldn’t have heard what Michael had said to me because he’d made sure he was out of camera range and had spoken so softly any hidden microphones wouldn’t have picked up his voice either.’

The hours that followed were as surreal as they were ugly. Guider launched once again into his dreadful stories about attempting to kill his brother. He then particularised how he’d been sexually brutalised in some of the charitable homes he’d been left in by his mother. The details he forced Denise to listen to were so explicit they made her stomach churn. He then began to enlighten her about several of the more notorious inmates he was currently keeping company with, the likes of granny killer John Wayne Glover, who was serving the term of his natural life for murdering six elderly women on Sydney’s North Shore. Guider claimed the infamous serial killer had received visitors in the very room in which they were now sitting.

On and on he went with his vile monologue until closing time, blocking her out so she couldn’t ask him any more questions.

As Denise once again walked back along the prison’s curved drive to the old stone cottage, she felt exhausted and defeated. She’d learned nothing new and was sure she never would. Guider surely knew what she was up to and why she’d become more probing about Samantha and her family. He probably even suspected there were bugs in the room although she felt he would have known her well enough to believe she hadn’t been wearing the device herself.

‘The scenario placed me at a complete loss,’ she says. ‘Neil and Steve had emphasised that it would be almost impossible to charge Michael with murder without a body yet there seemed no way he was ever going to hand over a confession.’

As she sat out on the old verandah of the stone house, Leach brought Denise a hot cuppa and a Tim Tam. The big bearded copper knew she was emotionally spent and sat quietly with her for a while before leaning across and gently wiping melted chocolate from each of her fingers with a washer.

‘Funnily enough,’ she offers, ‘it still serves as perhaps my most poignant memory of the whole wretched day.’

Guider had won the battle but at least everyone agreed that Denise had done her very best to bring him down. Tuckerman praised her efforts, telling her that under the circumstances, there was little else she could have done.

As they put Lithgow behind them that afternoon, she gazed out the car window at the blurring scrub and wondered if anyone would ever get to place flowers on Samantha’s grave. It was becoming increasingly likely that landing Guider in the dock was going to come down to years of foot work and the hope that he would survive prison long enough to face his day of reckoning.

***

To her astonishment, on 15 September, two days after the visit, Denise received a package from Guider in the mail.

It contained what he described as ‘an early Christmas present’. There were actually several items. One was a rather haunting pencil sketch he’d done of a young girl’s face, her eyes opened wide in a kind of dead stare. A second drawing depicted a pelican sitting on a pier.

Also enclosed was an oil painting by another inmate by the name of R.M. Williams. It was a bush scene featuring a pathway sweeping by a small cottage in the background. Guider had written on the back of the canvas, The Silent Walk, and underneath it, June 15, 1998. The card accompanying the offerings was signed ‘Love Mike’ instead of the usual ‘Michael’.

‘It was confounding to say the least,’ Denise adds. ‘I asked myself why he’d bothered after our awful encounter in the tea room. And, you know, just what was it that he was trying to tell me. I also wondered whether the image of the girl could be Sam. It certainly resembled her. Perhaps the water etching had something to do with where she was buried. It seemed to be somewhere on Sydney Harbour but the question was where. Michael had suggested in his note that the painting should remind me of somewhere in the Baulkham Hills Shire but this didn’t really seem likely either.’

Over the next week or so, Denise couldn’t sleep, trying to unlock hidden meanings and recall clues she might have missed in their recent conversations and letters. The only respite she got was by curling up on the lounge and dozing fitfully for a few hours each day.

Something else now occurred that gave her further cause for concern. Wandering out onto her verandah one morning, Denise found what appeared to be an alphabet cut from plywood inside a plastic bag that had been left on her top step. Many of the letters still had the centres attached and, in fact, there were quite a few extra pieces, making about 40 in total. They were unpainted and looked new.

It occurred to her that maybe they were meant to spell out a message.

That evening, Brian explained that he’d found the bag hanging from a tree branch in their garden on his way to work and taken it down. One of the kids then told them that she’d actually seen the letters scattered on the front lawn the night before as she left to visit a friend. She’d intended picking them up when she got back but forgot because it was dark and she didn’t notice them again.

Piecing things together, it seemed someone had collected the letters during the night, put them in the bag and looped it over the tree limb next to Brian’s car.

Denise was at a loss as to what it all meant, if anything. Had Guider crafted them in the prison workshop and had someone deliver them to her? Actually, she remembered that he’d had a friend in Bathurst jail who’d carved a series of small animals from wood.

It sounded crazy, but what else was she to think?

Around the same time, the strike force received some interesting second-hand mail of its own, but which had at least come from a readily identifiable source.

Michelle Tremaine, a degree-qualified counsellor at Goulburn jail, had made contact to report that one of her clients had given her a lengthy account of several discussions he’d had with Guider in lock-up.1

The inmate in question was a recovering heroin and amphetamine addict named Nicholas Evans† who’d been in and out of prison over the past several years, mostly as a result of breaking and entering offences.

Tremaine said Evans had told her Guider had claimed that he’d kidnapped Samantha Knight and taken photographs of her, and that she’d died when he’d given her some sedatives. Although he’d escaped, been caught, released and then returned to custody since first meeting Guider, and was up for parole yet again in 18 months, Tremaine said Evans had seemed genuine.

Despite everything, perhaps he was. However, things were at a delicate stage and it was decided to proceed with caution.

Neil Tuckerman and Darren Sly, a young detective who’d recently been assigned to help with the investigation, drove to Goulburn, spoke with Tremaine and took a statement from her. On the idea of direct contact with Evans, though, they opted to hold off for a while. The one scenario they couldn’t afford was Guider somehow finding out how close they were.

Another bit of prison intel also reached them. One of the guards at Lithgow got in touch to tell of hearing about Guider relating a story regarding King’s Cave near the lower Blue Mountains village of Linden. They sent an officer up to investigate but he returned, telling them the cave was actually a large overhang surrounded by scrub. As far as he could tell, there was nothing of interest to be found there.2

***

By mid-October, Denise could bear the agitation no longer. She sat down and typed Guider a letter. There was no point mentioning the alphabet – if he had sent it, he’d done so anonymously and for good reason. So she decided instead simply to appeal to him to stop playing games.

‘I’m sure you know some things about this little girl [Samantha] which you are keeping to yourself,’ she wrote. ‘I only wish you could talk to me about it.

‘I want to help you unlock the past so you can face each issue honestly and openly and change direction from the life you were involved in.’3

Several days later, he surprised her once again by replying in some considerable detail:

Dear Denise,

re Samantha. I have always told you the truth and I have nothing to hide. If you choose not to believe that then I cannot change your mind. If my story appears to have changed then I can only say you have not listened properly or misunderstood what I said.

Every time you ask me questions on your visits I feel you’re placing my life at risk. Other inmates hate me for my crime. I’m now a social outcast in and out of prison. As they say the walls have ears – that’s why I may seem evasive at times, not because I’m hiding something. I’ve already been threatened by lies and innuendo spread by inmates who make up stories about me. You have no concept of what the gaol system is about. I’ve been thrown in the deep end and have to swim free. Last week a paedophile was murdered at Junee by other inmates so now I’m even more paranoid than before.

Everything I know about Samantha has been told to the Police as for when I met Samantha and her mother they were always together and the Police have interviewed her mother about me. As for you not believing me, well, perhaps it’s better that you don’t visit me again. I don’t want you living in fear of me. I thought you knew me, obviously you don’t.

When you started on about Samantha on your last visit I felt you were seeking a way to end our friendship. Especially when you said you wouldn’t be coming up again. Well I’ll miss you Denise and yes I did TRUST YOU but from your letter which I’m now replying to I can see the seeds of doubt are in your mind. Any friendship not based on mutual trust and respect for each other cannot survive long.

Denise, my God knows my true worth. He also knows the truth about me and it’s my faith in God which has kept me alive despite two attempts on my life so far in gaol. I hope you liked the painting I sent you.

Your friend Michael4

As a matter of course, Denise showed the letter, the art parcel and the alphabet to Tuckerman and Leach. Both agreed The Silent Walk scene wasn’t of anywhere local. They did make some enquiries of R.M. Williams just in case Guider had ever confided in him anything of interest, but neither officer seemed that interested in the actual pictures, the writings or the plywood puzzle.

Leach at least thought each of Guider’s offerings showed a willingness to keep open a line of communication, but he was also concerned about the level of stress Denise was obviously experiencing.

He contacted John Merrick, a senior grief counsellor at the NSW Institute of Forensic Medicine at Glebe. Unassuming, quirky, warmly compassionate and with a reputation for going above and beyond the call in support of his clients, he was just the person Denise needed to talk to. He was also best placed to advise on whether she was up to taking one final run at getting Guider to come clean.

Merrick’s response was pretty forthright. He was alarmed Denise had already spent so much time challenging Guider emotionally without ever having undergone therapy. If she was to be tossed back into the cauldron, he insisted, it should only be with someone qualified on hand to help her through it, namely himself.

Leach and Tuckerman broached the idea with Denise the following afternoon at the Ferguson Centre. Her immediate reaction was that sending her back again would surely alert Guider that the game was up. Never had she visited him so regularly within such a short space of time. Nevertheless, the two detectives said they wanted to push ahead. They explained how they’d talked things over with Merrick and fully accepted his caveat that he go with her to Lithgow and provide her with professional support.

At the same time, Leach said that for the sake of everyone involved, they needed her to ‘get tough’.

***

Denise found Merrick to be a deeply caring man. Now that four of them would be making the trip in two cars, he’d offered to drive out to her house and chauffeur her to and from the jail.

The first thing she noticed about him under such ungodly circumstances was the kind of cheerful calmness he exhibited, especially behind the wheel. His driving was a bit like his advice: easy to take and trustworthy.

During the ride, they talked. She told him about Guider and the awful frustration and anxiety he’d caused her. She detailed her concerns about the failed investigations into the case and her loss to explain why so few people had ever come forward with meaningful information about it. She said she wondered if there had been a cover-up and if Guider had been protected by someone.

Merrick outlined his theory that Guider was a sociopath. He said he sincerely believed Denise held the key to getting him to admit his crimes but thought her visits had been too often and would have signalled to such a clever person that she was acting on behalf of the police to conspire against him. He agreed Guider was extremely intelligent and would have responded better to a slow approach with letters and visits only every now and again. However, he appreciated the fact the gloves were now off and that the police had little option but to crash or crash through.

Reasoning that caution was best, Tuckerman and Leach had asked that Merrick drop Denise at the turn off to the cottage rather than drive another unfamiliar car onto the premises. He left her with his best wishes and headed back down to Lithgow, resigned to spending most of the day pointlessly wandering about, trying to occupy himself until Tuckerman got him back for the debrief.

When she arrived, Denise found Leach had been called away and had sent in his place Darren Sly. As Tuckerman was still there and she was so preoccupied, it didn’t really matter. It was taking all her determination and steeliness just to convince herself she could do what was being demanded of her. Everything else was unimportant.

An hour later she found herself once again at the surveillance table waiting to do battle. From the moment she saw him, Denise knew Guider was now openly aware of what was going on. She supposed he’d rather mulishly agreed to receive her for the sake of keeping up appearances but it was obvious he didn’t want to be there.

‘Steve’s words kept running through my mind about needing to muscle up, so I took a deep breath and got down to business,’ she says. ‘After asking how he was, I simply told him we had things to discuss.

‘I said he hadn’t been honest with me or with the police and that there was no point denying it. I put it to him that he’d initially said he’d known Sam and Tess “very well” but later claimed to have hardly met them. He couldn’t have it both ways, so who was he lying to?’

There was no room for Guider to answer without talking himself into a corner, so he refused.

‘I reminded him that the police weren’t stupid. They also knew he hadn’t been consistent in what he’d said and it was eventually going to catch up with him so why not come clean.’

Guider’s return serve was less than gracious.

‘They’ll never get me for this,’ he snarled. In less than eight years, he said, he’d be released on parole; he’d be 55 years old. He said he had $100 000 put away and he’d go and find himself a cabin in the bush. Like it or not, he’d be free. End of story.

Denise persisted. She told him all she’d ever wanted to do was try to understand and help him. She realised some of his problems were the result of issues that had affected him as a child, his mother’s mental illness and so forth. Yet with counselling and possibly medication, they could be treated.

None of what she said, though, made the slightest difference. The tension between them escalated to boiling point and still Guider wouldn’t budge. Monitoring the exchange at his listening post, Tuckerman was on the verge of pulling the pin. But in the end, the decision was made for him.

As the stalemate continued, Denise was aware of another inmate walking towards them, approaching the room. Guider noticed him too.

‘Look, John Travers,’ he prodded. ‘Here he comes. He murdered Anita Cobby.’

Denise was only too familiar with who and what he was talking about. The rape, torture and killing of the 26-year-old nurse by a gang of five drunken, cowardly and depraved men six months before Samantha’s disappearance was considered one of Australia’s most horrific crimes, and Travers had been the ringleader.

His brother, Brock, had also at one time attended Crestwood High School in Baulkham Hills where he’d been one of Denise’s pupils, so she had extra reason to know about him. In fact, Brock Travers was among a particular group of students she often took for swimming lessons at one of the local pools, just a few blocks from where she lived.

John Travers kept coming. He took a seat at one of the nearby tables, where a young woman had been waiting for him. As soon as he sat, she slid onto his lap and wrapped her arms around him. Hardly a word was spoken before the pair began tongue kissing and Travers slipped his hand under her clothing.

The embarrassing thing was they didn’t just embrace and then revert to conversation like everyone else. If anything, the display intensified. Denise was disgusted. Here was one of the vilest, most hateful men she’d ever known of, a sadistic rapist and murderer, being allowed practically to have sex with this girl in front of the whole room. It was the last straw. Two hours into the operation, she’d had enough.

‘I’ll go now,’ she told Guider as she gathered up her things. ‘I’m sorry.’

They were the last words she would speak to him. A look of sheer relief flashed across Guider’s face and he hurried from the room as Denise approached the guard and asked permission to leave early. Unfortunately she then had to wait some 30 minutes in the outside corridor before being escorted back to the waiting area. She was so wild it was all she could do not to scream.

Thank god John Merrick was waiting for her outside. His first reaction was simply to stand aside while she vented her anger by swearing and hurling stones from the driveway into the bush.

‘He did it,’ she sobbed over and over. ‘He did it.’