Chapter 26

Castlefield Lane

Guider’s lodgings at 61 Upper Pitt Street, Kirribilli, were hardly luxuriant but captured an eye-catching angled view of the harbour towards Circular Quay. Flat number four within the Federation-style double-storey block featured one-and-a-half bathrooms, with the downstairs facilities housed in the laundry. However, there was only one bedroom.

A blanket draped over a length of chord to create a partition meant Melissa had her own mattress along with a little makeshift privacy. While not ideal, it was at least an arrangement of her own choosing, or so she told herself.

In the cramped quarters, Melissa noticed something rather odd amid Michael Guiders’s clutter – what appeared to be a stash of transparent orange tablets next to his refrigerator. Instead of being capped tight inside a bottle, they were stored in a small bowl, like other people might keep lollies or nuts. Guider explained that they were sedatives. He said he required a script for them and that it was best she didn’t touch them.

Although it seemed, to her knowledge at least, that Guider had never had trouble sleeping, Melissa thought nothing more of the strange little pills and certainly didn’t make any connection between them and the bottles of Coke he always seemed to stock his fridge with.

In the first few months they lived together, she came to realise how dependent she really was upon Guider’s charity. While she’d gained a certain kind of freedom by moving in with him, there wasn’t that much she actually did for herself. He paid the rent, bought the groceries and took her wherever she needed to go.

Sensing her guilt about the predicament, Guider sought to use it to his advantage. Now that he finally had her where he’d always wanted her, he set about talking Melissa into having sex with him. She didn’t want to but gave in when he pointed out that not only was she now 16 and ‘legal’, she ‘owed’ him.

‘He made me feel as though I did owe him a lot,’ she would later tell the police. ‘He had done a lot for me.’1

The upside, if you could call it that, was that following the transaction, Guider only once or twice asked her for sex again. After this, he quickly lost interest.

During the day, Melissa was more or less left to her own devices. At the start of 1985, Guider was working two jobs. Of an early morning, he was a cleaner at the National Australia Bank in St Leonards and in the afternoons he mowed lawns. His first gig started around 3.30 a.m. and finished four hours later. Often, he’d go for breakfast with a work mate, Peter Bulgin, at a café in Crows Nest called the Cosmopolitan.

Melissa had first met Bulgin a couple of years earlier, when he’d helped her family move to Chippendale by taking some of the loads in his utility. He would also occasionally drop by Upper Pitt Street to see Guider.

In late 1984, Tim Guider was jailed for six-and-a-half years for armed robbery and bestowed Michael his truck – which was actually an old ambulance – a mower, some tools and a rough list of clients. With some help from Bulgin, for which he would later claim he was never paid, Guider kept things going for a while before the vehicle’s clutch began to capitulate. The little business kept him busy enough while it lasted but within several months, he sold everything up.

In between times, Guider seemed always to have somewhere to go and something to do. For a good while following his brother’s conviction, he was convinced Tim had stashed the unrecovered proceeds of one of his bank jobs somewhere. Naturally, he was keen to find it.

First up, he checked Tim’s flat in Flood Street, Bondi, and then took Melissa with him to rummage through a garage Tim had rented in nearby Curlewis Street. He reckoned he needed to find the loot before the cops got onto it and so recruited her to help sift the contents of various bags, cases and boxes. Unfortunately, though, they found nothing of interest except a surfboard, Tim’s paint kits and some camera equipment, including a tripod and several lenses.

Throughout 1985, Guider drove a cream or beige 1977 Holden Kingswood sedan. He tripped around Sydney frequently, even if for no other reason than just to go what he referred to as ‘lapping’. In to Kings Cross, up to Manly, over to Bondi or Waverley, around to Mosman and down to Taronga Zoo; he’d go just about any time and on any day. Apart from taking photos, it was his favourite pastime. Guider would often take Melissa with him and they’d sometimes collect Cathy as well.

There were also regular short journeys here and there to run errands. Sometimes they’d pop over to see Peter Bulgin at his mother’s home unit on Old South Head Road at Rose Bay. Then there was the camera shop in Ashfield that Guider would later tell Peter Phillibossian was located in Granville; run by an Asian man, it was one of the places he would go to have his films developed. There was another place on the corner of the Pacific Highway, beside the railway station at St Leonards and also a couple of camera shops he liked to visit in the city in Sussex Street and at Wynyard.

There was a particular excursion in mid-1985 that would stay in Melissa’s memory. It was a weekend and she and Michael had set off for Manly. However, he had no intention of taking in the sights, breathing in the fresh salt air or cruising the local retail strip. Instead, he had some people to see and an opportunity to organise.

The place he took them to was over near Manly Oval, up a big hill, past the rugby club. It was a large house, partly built of sandstone. It was afternoon by the time they got there and there was a gathering of both kids and adults in the yard. Melissa wouldn’t recall Guider trying too hard to introduce her to anyone but there’d been three little girls, two brown-haired and one blonde, and he’d told her one of them was named Amy. He’d explained that she lived at the house and pointed out her bedroom window.

There had also been a woman Melissa had especially noted and who she took to be Amy’s mother. She had shoulder-length brown hair, was very bubbly and friendly towards everyone and seemed perhaps to have been playing some kind of dress-up game with the kids. Her name was Lisa. Guider said he knew her quite well and had arranged to babysit for her that evening.

In all, they stayed for about half an hour before Guider took Melissa back to Kirribilli and then returned to Manly alone. She didn’t see him again until the following day.2

***

Towards the end of the year, a vacancy came up at the boarding house and Melissa moved into her own flat. Guider was still only a doorknock away and they saw each other every day, but she at least got to have some space of her own. By now, she also had a boyfriend, Mark†.

In early 1986, the young couple took a trip together to visit her dad’s mum, grandmother Clarke, who was living in Queensland. They were away for about three weeks.

In the meantime, Guider was busy with a new job. He’d landed a gardener’s position at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron in Peel Street, which was just around the corner from the boarding house. Most days he would start and finish reasonably early but seemed to be able to come and go as he wanted. The position also gave him access to a utility and so he decided to sell his old Kingswood.

By May, Melissa had had enough of being ‘out on her own’ and decided to move back with Liz and Cathy. However, home for her mum and little sister was now Lawson Street, Redfern, and would soon be McDonald Street, Stanmore. At the time, they were having trouble finding a place that was both affordable and available for more than a short-term lease.

Liz noticed that almost as soon as her older daughter returned, Guider resumed his visits. During the past year and a bit, Melissa had come to stay with them every so often and Liz would wander downstairs and occasionally find him there as well. Now, though, he was back with a vengeance.

She mostly encountered him in the evening. ‘What are you doing here?’ she’d demand, finding Guider by himself watching telly after everyone had gone to sleep. ‘Melissa let me in,’ he’d always answer.3

She wasn’t so sure he didn’t have his own key but couldn’t prove it.

No longer in a job that demanded he rise in the pre-dawn, Guider also took to driving the girls around late at night. He continued taking them to the usual haunts but would sometimes delay setting off until around 10 p.m. and bring them home well after midnight.

Even in a town as big as Sydney there was a limit to what they could see and do at such an hour. To anyone who happened to notice them out and about they must have looked an odd sight. Not that Guider cared, though. As far as he was concerned, the later they got home the more logical it would seem that he should stay the night. For a while, at least, it was a means of maintaining the access he so coveted.

Even so, Guider was always on the lookout for new oppor­tunities, and in the middle of 1986 he came to Melissa with a proposition of a different kind: Would she like to learn how to play the guitar? He’d already found a tutor over in Bondi and was even prepared to pay for the lessons.

‘Why not?’ she thought.

To get them there, Guider drove from the inner west to Paddington and then along the Eastern Freeway to Bondi Road. Just after Wellington Street, he went past the Westella Court shops, a place Melissa recognised because it had been a pit-stop on their recent lapping tours. Guider had pulled up there once or twice to buy ice-creams. Just a bit further along was a chemist where she remembered he’d bought film, and across the road there was a medical centre he’d once visited while she’d been with him on their way down to the beach.

Now, though, he went on past them all and turned left into Castlefield Street. The lessons were at the teacher’s house on the corner of the first cross street, Castlefield Lane.

Each afternoon lesson went for an hour. Guider would drop Melissa after work and collect her but didn’t actually wait at the house, preferring to go off on his own and find something to do with the time.

Melissa quickly realised she wasn’t really cut out to be a musician. Guider encouraged her to persist but she stuck it out for just four sessions before deciding she’d had enough. However, her retirement from guitar school didn’t blunt Guider’s enchantment with the neighbourhood.

Following Cathy’s 15th birthday on 4 August, he beckoned Melissa to go with him for another drive. Again he took her down Bondi Road towards the famous beach and swung left into Castlefield Street. When they got to the guitar teacher’s house, however, he turned left and into Castlefield Lane and headed back west. Then, just before reaching the next cross street, which was Imperial, he pulled over and parked. Again, it was mid-afternoon, just after Guider had knocked off for the day.

As they sat in the stationary vehicle, Melissa asked what they were doing. The only explanation he would offer was that they were waiting for someone. After about ten minutes, he then turned to her and said, ‘They’re not coming.’ He started the car and drove off.4

Some days later, Guider collected her from Stanmore and once again, they made the same trip, waited in exactly the same spot and left when no one showed up. The only thing Melissa figured he might have been interested in was someone coming or going from the unit blocks facing them from the other side of Imperial Avenue. There was a modern-looking light-coloured building off to the right with jutting balconies and a ground-floor carport. Directly across, though, was a 1940s-era dark-brick complex, three storeys high and with a waist-high brick fence along the footpath. On the front of the building between the first and second floors was a rectangular white nameplate with black letters which read ‘Adrienne’.

Each time they had come to the same locality over the previous weeks and months, it had been in a different vehicle. Sometimes they took a ute borrowed from the yacht squadron or Peter Bulgin; sometimes Guider had asked Mrs Kelly, the lady who ran the boarding house at Kirribilli, for a loan. One of the visits had even been in a rental car.

Seemingly, the trips had been for different reasons too. But then again, that was exactly what Guider wanted Melissa to believe.

But within days, the place would be the focus of national attention for one reason and one reason only.