THE POLICE RELEASED me after interviewing me and completing their forensic procedures late that night. I had spent about eight hours at the station. All my clothing and footwear had been taken from me – I was in my bare feet and naked but for the blue paper overalls they provided.
I was told that nothing could be removed from the unit, which was completely reasonable considering the circumstances, although it meant that my wallet and clothes were inaccessible. I could not even buy myself a pair of shorts and a t-shirt.
The night of the murder, when I finally managed to fall asleep at a friend’s place in borrowed clothes, I had dreams of severed feet. I could not tell if they were a memory of the event or just a bad dream, and I called the police and told them I might have failed to tell them there might have been a severed foot. They told me that there were no such injuries.
In the days that followed the event, I did not know what to do. People who knew I had been in the house regarded me strangely from a distance. There was subsequent talk about my acting ‘normal’. Maybe they wanted or expected me to cry and wail publicly like in the movies. It was one of those ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situations, I guess.
In truth, I wasn’t feeling very normal. You cannot un-see things. I just kept to myself for the most part, and interacted only with a small group of close friends. People who know me know that I am not an emotional guy; sharing problems and asking for help does not come to me easily.
Initially, I did not even tell my family that the murders had occurred in my house. They had called asking about the incident because they heard ‘Barker Street’ on the news and knew I lived there. I told them it was a house down the street, and they would not find out about what I had been through until half a year later.
Even my girlfriend, with whom I had shared more about that day than anyone besides the police, only got the complete picture of what had happened that day after my arrest. I had asked her to collect the audio tapes of the ERISP at Maroubra Police Station after I was arrested and she decided to listen to them. The next time she saw me, she was aghast. “Why didn’t you tell me it was so bad?” she asked, shocked that I did not lean on her for support.
A small group of very close friends were aware of what had really happened because I told them, but they were thoughtful enough to never broach the subject in my presence. Others were not so discreet, and I quickly discovered that people have a fascination with the macabre, and that distancing myself from the event was a convenient way out of uncomfortable descriptions of the crime scene.
Most people whom I met after the incident never knew that I was connected to the incident at all. Some, such as the housemates at the new place where I was staying, found out after a while. My solution was to tell them that I simply returned home to the crime scene, and was spared from narrating more garish details.
In my naivety, I had no idea that the police would ever seriously consider me a suspect and exploit my discomfort at narrating the details about the murders as fodder for allegations of ‘changing my story’. Because I was at the apartment when the murders happened, I understood it was inevitable that the police would have to consider me a suspect prima facie, but to this day I still do not understand why they would pursue me as the prime suspect at the expense of all the other leads that they had.
One of my good Australian friends, Richard, was not as naive. Some time after the incident, he suggested that I consult the lawyer employed as a student legal advisor on the UNSW campus. I tried to get in touch with the lawyer, but the appointments were repeatedly cancelled on me just prior to our meetings. Eventually, I gave up on meeting him. Or her. I don’t know – we never met. So much for a student support structure.
But I did not give it much thought – why did I need a lawyer, anyway?