Chapter 24

Loose Ends

On 11 February 2000, NSW District Court Judge Jack O’Reilly sentenced Guider to six-and-a-half years’ jail for the repeated assault of Amy Harrison and Anissa Morel between January 1983 and May 1985. He described the 17 offences in question as ‘appalling’. According to O’Reilly, Guider was undoubtedly a ‘compulsive paedophile’ who had molested his victims despite having been trusted with their care.1

For anyone looking on, it might have seemed Guider had been dealt a deserving blow but the reality of the situation was something else again. The result was actually another reprieve for him.

Technically, Guider was only convicted of half the charges Strike Force Harrisville had brought against him: three counts of indecent assault and five counts of sexual intercourse with a victim under the age of 16. The other nine matters, which involved acts of indecency – both perpetrated and incited by him – were only taken into account by the court on something known as a ‘Form 1’. It meant O’Reilly could consider them when it came to calculating his sentence but nothing more.

The scenario had come about because Guider had again played his plea card. In return for admitting to having committed the eight primary counts of assault, he basically received a pass on the rest.

In addition, the deal allowed for him to withhold any admission in relation to stupefying the girls with Normison as a means of facilitating his molestation of them. Potentially, the use of the drug made the offences that much more serious again, and had he been convicted of it Guider would have spent real extra time behind bars.

As it was, O’Reilly was also obliged to conclude that had the series of assaults been dealt with by Justice Flannery along with the other 60 matters he’d sentenced Guider on in 1996, there would have been little added to the ten years issued on that occasion. In effect, this led to him handing down an almost wholly concurrent sentence. Even though he was by now four years into his initial ten-year stretch, the ‘extra’ six-and-a-half years therefore meant Guider’s stay in jail would be extended by just six months.

Crown prosecutor Sean Fliegner argued that Guider had a relatively long history of paedophile behaviour and that the prospects of him being rehabilitated were not encouraging. He said Guider had also effectively misled the court four years earlier by not admitting that he’d committed the additional offences. If he had, surely the sentence he’d received would have been greater.

O’Reilly said he couldn’t be sure.

‘There is little point in my imposing any additional term,’ he said. ‘He’s already looking at six years or, on the regime that I had in mind, perhaps a little less than six years additional term, which is long enough to deal with any problems he will have.’2

The judge noted Guider had personally written to him, drawing attention to the fact that he would be willing to undertake every sex offender’s program made available to him.

While this was desirable, O’Reilly also recommended that Guider receive an appropriate course of the hormonal drug Depo-Provera in order to control his compulsions; in other words, that he undergo chemical castration.

***

While expecting little, Neil Tuckerman and Darren Sly had been there in person to witness O’Reilly bring down his gavel. More significantly, though, they’d brought someone with them who they were keen for Guider to notice from the dock: Tess Knight.

In its former life, Sydney’s Downing Centre Court complex was named The Piazza. However, the somewhat majestic six-storey department store was better known simply as Mark Foy’s, after the household merchant who both owned and occupied the building. Despite what amounted to a rather radical refit, its main entrance on Liverpool Street had retained a kind of old-world splendour and included as its centrepiece a grand staircase.

Courtroom G-3 was tucked snugly under the imposing flight of steps, in the rear corner, on the ground floor. Inside, Tess sat quietly in the back row alongside the two large coppers in their suits, taking in her first real look at the bloke she knew had stolen her daughter from her. If she felt anything beyond a kind of stoic resignation, she didn’t show it.3

The Crown’s agreement to accept his plea of guilty had once again allowed Guider to avoid having to give evidence or face the girls in open court. At the same time, it more or less also guaranteed that Samantha’s name went unmentioned throughout the proceedings.

Seated several rows in front of her, however, Guider must have sensed Tess’s presence acutely. Bearing down on him as it was, he had to have known that his race was all but run.

***

The Harrisville team had been pretty well flat out since the SPC interview with Guider the previous July. Driving their efforts had been a much-anticipated decision to submit a brief of evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions seeking advice on a murder charge. Considering the long and winding road travelled by various investigators since 1986, themselves included, Neil Tuckerman and Darren Sly knew it might take some time for the DPP to get back to them. It was important, therefore, that they take every opportunity still available to bolster their case.

So too, it was vital that they were able to address the one loose end, which, left untied, could unravel their best laid plans: Ellen Bryce.

The job of finding her fell to Sly.

Beginning with the proposition that Guider hadn’t plucked the girl’s name from thin air and that she was indeed a real person, he reasoned that he was looking for a young woman probably aged in her early 20s, who had at least had some kind of connection to the Raglan Street house 15 years earlier. It wasn’t likely that Lisa or Amy Harrison were going to offer help, so this left him to consult the group of prospective witnesses who’d already provided them with extensive insight into the comings and goings at the address.

Unfortunately, though, none of them seemed to recall her. Anissa Morel, of course, knew that there had been no one other than herself, Amy and Samantha present on the occasions Guider had molested them. This didn’t mean other children didn’t occasionally visit the house but she either wasn’t around when they did or she simply couldn’t remember who they were.

By mid-1985, the Watts had been living in Melbourne for the best part of a year. Their room had been taken by Andrew Chadwick but he only had a very basic memory of Samantha let alone any need to be able to remember another little girl who in all probability had visited Raglan Street far less frequently. Cliff Allan had definitely been around but didn’t think the name Bryce rang a bell.

It was clear the net needed to be cast wider. Sly began looking for anyone who might have visited the house even incidentally via a connection with either Lisa or Amy that had been established elsewhere; perhaps through school or work. Eventually, the strategy led him to one of Lisa’s former professional colleagues, an architect named Michael Bryce. It transpired that he and his family had attended the cocktail party thrown by Cliff and Lisa just prior to their July 1985 departure for Honolulu.

When Bryce and his daughter were located and interviewed by Tuckerman and Sly in Canberra, they were quickly able to expose Guider’s sham for what it was: Ellen, now 20, assured them she wasn’t the child in the red stockings and that Guider hadn’t even taken her photo. However, it soon became obvious to the two detectives why Guider had specifically nominated her as the girl in the photo.

Although he and the child had only been alone at Raglan Street for a matter of minutes, there had indeed been an incident. Guider had managed to isolate her in one of the bedrooms during the party and indecently touch her. Luckily, her father had come looking for her before anything else happened.

‘You had to hand it to him,’ Sly would later reflect. ‘The bastard was good … as good as anyone I’d come across before.’ Fifteen years after the event and after having met the kid just once, Guider had been able to recall her name during a high pressure situation. He’d also known that the circumstances under which he’d met the girl would make it exceptionally difficult for the coppers to track her down.

He’d made a pretty good fist of sending them off on a long and taxing goose chase.4

***

The next items on the team’s checklist were to gather the best expert evidence available on the medical properties of Normison, and to make sure once and for all that they’d done everything possible to verify Guider’s tales about burying Sam in Cooper Park and then retrieving and depositing her in a waste bin at his work.

On the first score, they consulted Associate Professor Graham Starmer, a leading researcher within the University of Sydney’s pharma­cology department. He explained to them that Normison was the commercial formulation of temazepam, a sedative hypnotic, which hastened the onset of sleep and increased total sleep time. The acute side effects commonly encountered after taking the drug included sedation, drowsiness, light-headedness and lethargy. In cases where high doses were administered, this caused confusion and impaired mental and psychomotor function.

Starmer said temazepam could undoubtedly cause memory loss. It came from a family of drugs clinically used for this purpose. When patients had to undergo exploratory surgery or other unpleasant procedures, for example, they wouldn’t remember the pain involved.

Starmer said, generally speaking, temazepam was only administered to children prior to an operation and even then, that sedative antihistamines were preferred. He said temazepam did not have a pronounced taste. When acquired by prescription as Normison, Starmer explained, one could purchase the drug as either a tablet or a gel-filled capsule. To mix the contents of the capsule with Coca-Cola, all you had to do was pierce each end and squeeze. Starmer said Normison could, in fact be disguised in a whole range of beverages and to do so was relatively common. The capsules had been banned several years earlier in the United Kingdom because they were being used to commit date rapes.5 Starmer said temazepam would be toxic in overdose and trigger profound sedation. In children, who were more sensitive, doses had to be carefully controlled. If sedation caused by an overdose was deep enough, it could have an impact on breathing. However, the number of deaths reported after the administration of temazepam by itself was small, even in adults. Usually, there was another drug involved, such as alcohol.

The affable academic had been unable to advise what quantity would be fatal for a nine-year-old, but, starting with a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke, if someone was to continually add Normison, the solution would not reach a point where the drug was no longer absorbed, he said. When he’d conducted his own experiments, he was initially able to get 30ml into 60ml of Coke without producing something you could detect. He said such a dose would be large to administer to a child.

***

On 10 May 2000, Professor Starmer summarised everything he’d told the detectives in a formal statement that was added to the brief still being put through the ringer over at the DPP’s central Sydney offices in Liverpool Street.

The following month, Darren Sly contacted staff at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron at Kirribilli and checked Guider’s employment records. They confirmed that, at the time, large commercial dumpsters had been used by the gardening and maintenance staff.

According to the club’s house manager, in 1988 and early 1989 there was extensive landscaping work undertaken at the premises in preparation for an underground car park. He was able to produce a large folder of photographs showing the work in progress, including dump trucks removing unwanted fill.

A rudimentary search of the grounds was undertaken despite there being little prospect of finding anything.

A third and final examination of Cooper Park was also con­ducted. This time the 15-hectare parcel was given a systematic going-over section by section over a period of weeks. The job was completed in August without finding anything even remotely interesting.

A decision by the legal eagles on whether to proceed with the murder charge was still some months away. On a preliminary basis, however, they were of the view that there was a specific aspect of the two-and-a-half year Harrisville investigation that needed to be further developed.

Of the dozens of children whose lives Guider had trashed over the years, the Clarke sisters had always stood apart. Melissa, in particular, had been unknowingly abused by him for almost eight years. When she outgrew her usefulness as a prepubescent sexual plaything, Guider had made an exception to his usual rule and continued to secretly drug, photograph and molest her until her late teens. By the time Jadette came knocking in 1996, Melissa was 27 years old with a child of her own but still unaware of the horrendous things he’d done to her. She was still friendly and in touch with him.

Guider had managed to generally hoodwink Melissa, her little sister, Cathy, and mum, Elizabeth, into thinking he was an okay guy for almost two decades. But now that they knew the truth, there was much about him that the Clarke women could tell and show.