Chapter 23

Vince and Nick

Most of the guys Vincent Dekker† had done time with were so called ‘intractables’ – violent, hardened men destined to stay on the inside for the rest of their days.

Dekker wasn’t one of them, though. The main reason he was in segregation was because he couldn’t hack it in the jail’s general population, where he was too soft and easily targeted. Shut away instead with the worst of the worst, where staff could at least keep an eye on him, he eked out an existence writing up request forms, or ‘blueys’, for former Kings Cross tsar Louis Bayeh. In return, the illiterate heroin trafficker acted as his minder.1

In his previous life, Dekker had been a market researcher. His big mistake was accepting $14 000 from someone he didn’t know to fly to Sydney via London in July 1996 carrying a suitcase crammed with more than $2 million worth of ecstasy. In attempting to explain the case’s excessive heaviness to customs officers, the somewhat eccentric Dutchman insisted it was lined with lead and that he was going to use it to smuggle cash back to the Netherlands on his return flight. When they took it apart, however, almost 29 500 tablets were inside.

Adamant he hadn’t knowingly entered the country as a drug mule, Dekker agreed to help police conduct a controlled ‘delivery’ of the pills in a bid to catch the buyer. Background checks revealed that he had no previous criminal record and had also been diagnosed with clinical depression several months before the bust. As a result, he was found guilty of commercial importation but handed a reduced sentence. Instead of ten years, he got five and three months.2

Dekker met Guider in J Wing, the protection unit at Lithgow, where he’d been given the job of sweeper. Guider, by now, had been allowed full time status as a student inmate, and the two of them began spending their days together while other prisoners were out on work detail. In an unlikely scenario, they enjoyed watching the kitschy American serial The Bold and the Beautiful, playing chess and attending mass and bible study groups.3

Grateful for the companionship, Dekker began telling Guider his life story but, initially at least, Guider declined to reciprocate. Eventually, however, he started opening up by mentioning a little about his brother and father, whom he said was a ‘very harsh man’.4

In early 1998, Dekker heard other inmates call Guider a term he was unfamiliar with: a rock spider. When it was explained to him, he confronted Guider, who insisted he only took photographs of children and did not assault them. Although hardly thrilled, Dekker found himself sticking up for his cell mate and copping some abuse from others for doing so. The truth was that he was lonely and continuing to struggle with depression and Guider was at least nice to him and spoke to him.

He asked Guider how he’d gotten away with doing what he’d done for so long. By not hurting anyone, he said. He claimed the kids hadn’t actually suffered, because he’d given them something to drink that was drugged and none of them even knew he’d taken their picture.

Following one of their bible-study sessions soon after, Guider told Dekker he’d been reading a particular passage in the good book, the Second Letter of St Paul to the Thessalonians. Its theme was coming clean on one’s sinfulness. As he introduced the subject, he started pacing up and down.

‘Sometimes it’s very hard to tell everything,’ he began. ‘I have prayed and told God what I have done but it was an accident. It shouldn’t have happened but it did happen.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Dekker asked.

‘One day I had a girl. I picked her up late in the afternoon and I gave her something to drink and some tablets,’ he said. ‘I took her to a shed.’

‘What is this shed?

‘It’s a place where you put tools.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then a friend came. I’ll call him “Mr G” because that’s what his name starts with. He came and stayed for two hours or so and after he left I went and did some shopping.

‘But when I came back I found the girl dead. She was on a small couch.

‘Vince, I panicked. I really didn’t …’

‘What did you do?’

‘I went to see my friend again, we came back and we buried her in the park, in the area where I was working.’

‘Please, why did you tell me this now?’ Dekker blurted. ‘I didn’t need this because I have my own case and I am struggling for my life already.

‘You have to do something about this,’ he urged Guider. ‘You can tell somebody.’

‘No, no, no,’ Guider said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t want to die in jail and there’s nothing left of her anyway. There’s nothing to tell. Forget it.’

Guider said when the police had searched for the girl he’d been one of the volunteers who’d helped them. However, 18 months later there had been another search, which had come close to finding her.

After this, he said, he’d gone back to the park and retrieved her remains. At the time, he was working on a big gardening job where there was a lot of rubbish and he’d placed what was left of her remains in a bin on the site. He then took the bin to a garbage depot where everything was incinerated.

As Guider went on, Dekker noted that for the first time, he gave the girl a name: Sam. He said she had lovely eyes and that he knew her before he’d taken her away.

Dekker suggested that Guider could perhaps write to her parents, telling them what had happened but his response had again been to refuse.5

***

By mid-1998, Dekker’s mental health had again deteriorated. Before coming to Australia he’d already once attempted to take his own life, and when told he was being shifted from the relative comfort and safety of Lithgow to Junee, he tried again.

As soon as he was well enough, however, he was transferred anyway. The move was a disaster. Just after his arrival, Dekker witnessed the bashing murder of a child molester in a neighbouring cell. He was initially too afraid to say anything but opted to become a Crown witness after video footage showed him walking from the vicinity of the attack.

It was now that he decided he should perhaps also speak up about Guider’s revelations. Requesting that he contact detectives, Dekker approached one of his jailers who instead referred him to the prison’s intelligence officer. Before anything could happen, though, he was shipped out on short notice to Berrima, on 18 September.

The matter quickly lost some of its urgency and Dekker did nothing further with the information for the next 12 months. In fact, he might never have come forward had he not happened to have seen the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald on 4 August 1999. Across the top, it carried a dramatic entrée to Phil Cornford’s long-awaited exposé based on the material Denise had entrusted to him the previous September. The article named both Samantha Knight and Michael Guider and stated that police had managed to obtain photographs he’d taken of her and one of her young friends.6

After reading the piece, Dekker bit the bullet and reported his concerns to one of the Berrima staff who, like himself, was Dutch. The officer had then arranged for him to speak directly to Darren Sly.

***

The Cornford story had been prompted by the veteran scribe’s certainty that Harrisville was about to charge Michael Guider with murder. He explained in the piece that Guider had been brought to Sydney the week before and grilled by the crime commission following several searches conducted in national parkland.

His information was almost correct; the trip down from Lithgow had been to attend the all-day interview at the SPC 15 days earlier, on 19 July. The Harrisville detectives had indeed also taken part in a fresh examination of Cooper Park in the company of the head gardener and with some help from a police cadaver dog. The party especially targeted several overhangs that might loosely have qualified as ‘caves’ but found nothing.7

Berry Island was also scoured. To everyone’s surprise some skeletal remains belonging to a child were located yet they appeared and were quickly shown to be Aboriginal.

Cornford’s belief that the strike force was ready to rest its case, however, was somewhat premature. There was still plenty of work ahead.

Steve Leach took a formal statement from Vince Dekker at Berrima on 21 October. It was now the third supplied by one of Guider’s prison buddies and probably the most significant.

While each of the informers had relayed quite different versions of where Samantha had been taken after the abduction and how she had been disposed of, they claimed unanimously that Guider had confessed to taking her, drugging her and ultimately causing her death.

While the details of the account reported by Nicholas Evans† had already been summarised and collected from Goulburn counsellor Michelle Tremaine, his statement proper had only been taken a month prior to Dekker’s, on 10 September.8 Evans said Guider had helped him prepare a manuscript in 1997 for his upcoming NSW Parole Board hearing. In doing so, Guider had seen a copy of his ‘rap sheet’, noticing two charges relating to the sexual assault of a minor. The matters had actually been alleged by the son of Evans’s former de facto and were unproven, but Guider read into it that they were of the same ilk. ‘We’ve both been there and done that,’ he’d said.

After this, Guider had relaxed some and begun talking about his own affairs. According to Evans, these had included having taken and sold pornographic images of children.9

Before discussing sensitive matters, Evans said, Guider would make sure the intercom outlet in his cell was either taped up or plastered over with toothpaste. The system allowed the staff to monitor inmates at any time of the day or night. A little red light flashed on the wall supposedly whenever they were listening in but no-one really believed they couldn’t be heard when the light was off.

‘It’s easy to con a kid,’ Guider had supposedly boasted. Once you knew what they liked it was pretty straightforward but you had to get them while they were young. Once they turned 12 or 13 they were too old.

Evans said Guider had introduced the subject of Samantha’s disappearance without being cued.

‘You know, they’ll never find her body,’ he’d said.

When Evans asked what he’d meant, he’d replied, ‘They’ll never find her, I know they won’t.’

In his cell again several weeks later, he’d asked why Guider had mentioned this to him.

He’d replied, ‘Well, Nick, we’re both in the same boat. I’ve never told anyone before. I know I can trust you because you’re my kind … I took photos of her.’

In the days following, Guider had continued at length about what he’d done. He said he’d picked the child up about a block from her house and bought her a soft drink and some lollies, which calmed her down.

He’d then driven her to an area where he had to carry her to a cave, and left her.

‘I didn’t do anything to her,’ Guider had insisted. ‘She died. I didn’t want her to … not then.’

He said he’d taken naked photos of her in the cave and claimed she’d been prettier than her mother ever would have been.

‘They will never find her body,’ he’d repeated. ‘The police can’t get me; they don’t know where to look. They can’t touch me.’

When Evans asked him how he could be so sure, Guider had allegedly said, ‘I know they won’t find the body, I know.’

He’d said that he’d actually seen Samantha the day before she went missing and then went back and picked her up about a block from her mother’s house. He’d said he’d taken the girl down to the local shops and not returned with her. Instead, he’d bought her some drinks and lollies and taken her ‘bush’. Actually, he’d mentioned that he’d taken her to a cave that he said was like a home away from home for him over at North Sydney. It was a place ‘decked out’ and full of everything he needed.

He’d also boasted that because he worked at the time at a hospital on the North Shore, he had access to medication. He’d said the best drug to relax kids and keep them quiet was called Normison.

When Evans had asked whether Guider had tried to sell any of the images he’d taken of the girl, he’d told him no, he hadn’t because this would have made it obvious who was responsible for her death.

Otherwise, offloading photographs of kids had been easy for him. He had a large clientele that would sometimes even offer him prepayment, he’d bragged. His best sellers were children aged between nine and 11 but no older than 12 or 13. Apparently the best location to do such business was in the landmark dive at the top of Kings Cross known as the Bourbon and Beefsteak.10 The place had started life in 1967 as a sanctuary for soldiers on R&R during the Vietnam War, but by the 1990s it was little more than a buck’s night venue and a hangout for gangsters, hookers, bent cops and legal types, and assorted sexual desperados.

There were some obvious questions to be asked about Evans’s credibility. The detectives readily noted that his addiction to heroin had begun at age 15 and that he had habitually injected speed as well. He was currently trying to wean himself off methadone but was, in fact, back behind bars after being paroled in July 1997 because he’d begun using amphetamines again.

While he’d taken some time finding his voice, Evans said there’d been several reasons why he’d initially failed to come forward about what Guider had told him. Not the least of these was the fact that at the time he was undergoing a series of personal difficulties with his ex-wife and children. Also, his brother and sister-in-law had been murdered in a drug rip-off in 1994.

For all his flaws, it was evident that Evans’s story had a ring of truth about it; combined with those tendered by Vince Dekker and Bradley Roberts, it helped to evoke a convincing picture.

When the time came, all three jailbirds would be called upon to retell their tales under oath alongside the more respectable Michael and Wendy Watt, Denise Hofman, Rosemary Kinna and several others, in a bid to prove murder.

But, for now, there was a preliminary courtroom verdict to deliver. In late 1999, Guider agreed to plead guilty to the Raglan Street assaults. He knew that trying to deny the offences was futile and so threw up his hands in the hope it might earn him some favour with the courts.

It would have been nice to think his surrender went a way to hastening Harrisville’s march towards the end game but it didn’t.There was another factor that would also make it that much harder from here on to get the investigation across the line.

On 21 August, Steve Leach prepared a statement outlining his own role in Harrisville since its formation in May the previous year, and filed it. His receipt of Dekker’s story several weeks later would mark his last real involvement in the case. He’d decided to take a secondment to the European War Crimes Tribunal based in The Hague. As a senior investigator with the body, his team in the Netherlands would be responsible for bringing to justice former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. He would spend the next two years walking through massacre sites and talking to survivors.

From now on, Tuckerman and Sly would need to step up and run the show.