Excuse 7
‘We were just having sex’
For three years and nearly eight months, Jill Cave’s body slowly mummified in a 44-gallon drum of garden lime.
When police finally smashed the padlock on Ms Cave’s yellow drum-tomb, they found her corpse clad in a matching black bra, crotchless panties, suspenders and stockings. Earrings still dangled from the long-dead woman’s ears. A necklace still adorned her neck. Police particularly noted that a rope was looped around each of her ankles and tied in the middle. A dental check confirmed it was Ms Cave.
The lime powder had kept the corpse remarkably preserved, but this was nothing like the respectful mummifying of ancient Egyptian royals. This was the shameful opposite of those ancient preparations for the afterlife. No dignity had been left here. No respect here for Ms Cave as a living person and absolutely none for her dead body. Her raunchily dressed body had been dumped in black plastic rubbish bags, wrapped in plastic sheeting and shoved in the barrel of garden lime.
The drum with its bizarrely gruesome contents was found during a police search of a small farm in Mt Eliza—an outer rural bayside suburb of Melbourne—on 2 June 1993. Police stumbled upon it during a routine investigation into Ms Cave’s disappearance. They had not been holding out much hope of a breakthrough. Ms Cave, after all, had been an official missing person since 20 October 1989.
That the police were even actively investigating Ms Cave’s disappearance was due to the remarkable persistence and amateur detective work of the dead woman’s father. Ernest Cave was 70 years old when his beloved 34-year-old daughter failed to turn up at Perth airport on Wednesday 18 October 1989. She was supposed to fly over from her Melbourne home for her sister’s wedding three days later.
On that day Ernest and his wife, Renee, went to Perth airport to meet Jill, but they were already dreading something was amiss. The night before, Mrs Cave had heard some unsettling news when she phoned her daughter’s flat in George Street, in inner-suburban Fitzroy. Jill’s flatmate, Nobuko Hasegawa, told Mrs Cave she thought Jill was already in Perth. Ms Hasegawa told Mrs Cave she thought that Jill had changed her plans and flown to Perth the day before—Monday 16 October. She said that she thought Jill’s live-in boyfriend—Michael Jeffrey Rice—had driven her to Melbourne airport on Monday morning. Despite this news, the Caves decided to go to Perth airport the next day at the originally scheduled time. Ms Hasegawa might have got her wires crossed. Maybe Jill had changed her mind, or couldn’t get the earlier flight. Just before they left for the airport, however, their fears increased when they got a phone call from Rice. He told them he couldn’t understand why Jill was not in Perth already. He said he had changed her flight to 8 am, Monday 16 October, and had driven her to the airport for that flight. He said he had even paid $400 to upgrade her to a first class seat.
Still the Caves—clinging to fading hope—went to the airport and waited and waited. Their hopes dwindled as each person who was not Jill came through the gate. All around them other families were hugging and kissing, exchanging time-worn happy airport arrival clichés. ‘It’s great to see you again.’ ‘My! You have grown.’ ‘Gosh the last time I saw you, you were yay high.’ ‘How’s everybody—Mum? Dad? The kids?’ The sorts of things they should have been saying to their daughter. But there was no: ‘Hey Jill, you’re looking great.’ ‘So pleased you could make it.’ ‘Everyone’s looking forward to seeing you.’ ‘Oh the wedding’s going to be fine. Your sister’s a bit nervous but it’ll be fine.’ ‘So how have you been? Good?’ ‘How was the flight?’ ‘You should see your sister’s dress, it’s just beautiful.’ None of that. Instead, it was waiting, waiting until long after the gates had closed. Then it was: ‘Where is she?’ ‘What’s happened?’ The dawning of an unspoken dread.
Back home, Mr Cave phoned Rice and asked him to notify police that Jill had gone missing. He asked Rice what had happened over the weekend. Rice told him that he and Jill had been away for the weekend and arrived back home late on Sunday night. He said he had helped her pack her bags for her early morning flight and had driven her to the airport the next morning.
The next day Mr Cave phoned Rice again and asked him if he had notified the police. He hadn’t. Once again Mr Cave quizzed him about the weekend away with his daughter. Oddly, Rice contradicted what he had said the day before telling Mr Cave, ‘I was away and so was Nobuko but Jill was at home’. That day Rice had told one of his superiors at work that Jill’s parents had called to say she had not arrived at Perth. He repeated the same story—Jill had booked a Wednesday flight but had decided to go Monday instead, there were no economy seats left on the Monday flight so he paid the $400 to upgrade her to first class and dropped her off at the airport that morning. When his superior said he found it surprising Rice had not gone into the airport with his girlfriend, Rice told him, ‘I just stopped outside and in she went’.
The next day Rice reported to the police that his girlfriend of three months was missing.
Three days later Mr and Mrs Cave flew the five hours to Melbourne to search for their daughter. Their first meeting with Rice was not a happy one. As Mr Cave later said, they did not hit it off with the 35-year-old from Baltimore, Maryland, on the US east coast, just south of New York.
Mr Cave: I wasn’t impressed by him.
It was one of those instances when you see a person for the first time and you dislike him.
He’s very persuasive. He’s smarmy. As soon as you hit a raw nerve, he virtually does a backflip.
He made comments about her sexuality, which naturally I knew nothing about and wasn’t interested in. It struck me as very weird and queer.
Rice had told his girlfriend’s elderly, desperately worried, father that Jill had a ‘wonderful sexuality’. At that meeting Rice also told Jill’s parents that she had been worried about losing her job and was in financial difficulties. Both were lies. He said he had lent their missing daughter two suitcases because hers were too travel-worn to use, but Mr Cave found one of his daughter’s suitcases in the flat, and it was far from travel-worn. When Mrs Cave directly accused Rice of not taking Jill to the airport, he did not reply.
Mrs Cave: He [Rice] just looked at the floor and never answered me.
In looking through the flat his daughter shared with Rice and Ms Hasegawa, Mr Cave found a set of glasses in the box they had been bought in. He suspected these were a wedding present. For him the biggest shock in that meeting came when they were leaving—a callous remark that Rice tossed at them, confirmed him as their enemy, as their major suspect. Over the next three years and eight months, whenever their search for Jill seemed particularly hopeless, that would be the remark that would spur them on to greater efforts. They would remember the day their missing girl’s boyfriend told them: ‘Well what are you worried about? She was only adopted’.
The Caves remarkable quest to solve the mystery of their missing daughter over the next few years included going to clairvoyants, and numerous flights to Melbourne—especially during the annual Missing Persons Week—to call for public help.
Ms Cave’s 30-year-old sister, Alison Dearn, also phoned Rice, but found him defensive and aggressive when it came to talking about how her sister went missing en route to her (Mrs Dearn’s) wedding. When she asked how he was feeling, Rice said he couldn’t sleep or get an erection. Another grossly inappropriate remark.
Jill Cave and Michael Rice’s weekend away to the Ringwood Lake Motel in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs on 14 and 15 October 1989, had been no secret. Ms Cave had told her flatmate—Ms Hasegawa—the weekend was meant to patch up problems that had developed in their three-month-long relationship. A few weeks earlier, Rice told Ms Hasegawa that he was sad because he suspected his relationship with Ms Cave was in trouble and could end soon. With her flatmate away, Ms Hasegawa invited her boyfriend David Thompson to stay the night. Ms Cave also told another friend—Paul Juraszek—that the weekend at the motel was to ‘patch things up’ and she showed one of her girlfriends the $200 lingerie she bought for the weekend.
On Friday 13 October 1989, Ms Cave—a conscientious and punctual public servant, as a well as part-time rock ‘n roll dance instructor—told her superiors she would finish the report she was writing when she returned to work after the weekend.
The next day Ms Cave was apparently alone when she checked into Room 21 of the Ringwood Lake Motel. Early the following morning—between 5.30 and 6 am—back at the Fitzroy flat (about 40 minutes drive away), Ms Hasegawa was woken by a loud banging on her door. To her surprise she found it was Rice. She didn’t see anybody else. He muttered something that sounded like, ‘So sorry’ before walking away. She returned to bed. Later that day Ms Hasegawa said she did not see Rice in the flat, but did notice that someone had been reading a newspaper—and left it open on the kitchen table—and that several cans of beer had been put in the fridge.
About 7 pm that evening, Rice visited Mr Juraszek at his home in nearby Collingwood. He appeared a little agitated and depressed. When asked why he wasn’t at the Ringwood motel with Ms Cave, Rice said she was packing to go to Perth and that he was going to go back and help her and then drive her to the airport early the next morning.
The Ringwood motel receptionist later undercut Rice’s story by saying that he had definitely checked out of Room 21 alone on the evening of Sunday 15 October. She said Rice had said he was leaving early on the Monday morning.
All up, Rice told nine people that he had left Ms Cave at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport early in the morning of Monday 16 October 1989.
Someone giving the name of Michael had called the airline just before 5 pm on Sunday 15 October, and changed Ms Cave’s flight to Perth from the Wednesday to early the next morning. He had also arranged for her to be upgraded to first class and said she would pay the $400 difference when she picked up the ticket. That ticket, however, was never collected.
On about 17 October, when Rice told Ms Cave’s friend Mr Juraszek that she had not arrived at Perth airport the day before, he offered his own theory of her disappearance. He said he thought she had run off to be a prostitute and showed photographs of Ms Cave in a red outfit with buttons undone to reveal her underwear. Mr Juraszek said Rice told him he thought he (Rice) had ‘liberated Jill sexually and that she was going off exploring things’.
Five days after reporting Jill Cave missing, and just two days after being quizzed by her parents on 25 October 1989, Rice bought six bags (200 kilograms) of hydrated lime called Limil. On the same day he also rented a two-by-three metre self-storage warehouse in inner-suburban South Melbourne. He rented that small room for the next 17 months—until 17 March 1991. In that time he visited it 54 times, sometimes staying there for two hours at a time. (‘Why is she decomposing so slowly?’ ‘Maybe more Limil?’ ‘What am I going to do?’) When Rice finally finished renting the room, its floor was covered with Limil—three-quarters of an inch deep. Limil was later found surrounding Ms Cave’s body in her drum-tomb.
A couple of months after his girlfriend disappeared, Rice casually talked of learning to kill people during his three years in the Israeli army. One of the things he said he learnt was that, if garden lime were used in burying a body, it would speed up the decomposition of the body. Rice obviously did not pay enough attention to that army lecture because garden lime powder—at least the sort he had used—tends to preserve corpses, not speed up their decomposition.
In March 1991, around the time Rice stopped renting the storage room, he refused a police request to make a statement about Ms Cave’s disappearance nearly a year and a half earlier.
Policeman: His [Rice’s] reply was that he didn’t want to give a statement because he couldn’t be specific about things that occurred at the time of the disappearance because he was worried that the family might take it the wrong way and think that he had been involved in her disappearance.
Just before returning to the US in March 1991, Rice asked an acquaintance whether he could leave some stuff at his Mt Eliza farm. He said he was going back to the US for six to nine months to visit his ill parents. The acquaintance agreed and Rice parked his car full of personal belongings in the shed of the Mt Eliza farm. He left the car keys with farm’s owner.
As well as Rice’s things, in that car was also Ms Cave’s wallet including her bank card, her Medicare card and her business cards. Also, there was her unused plane ticket for Wednesday 18 October 1989.
The next weekend Rice turned up at the Mt Eliza farm with a 44-gallon yellow drum in the back of a ute. He said it contained his computer packed in powder. He put the padlocked drum into a room in the shed. The farm owner had the key to the shed, but Rice kept the key to the drum’s padlock.
On 19 March 1991, Rice returned to the US.
Back in his homeland—while Jill Cave’s body mummified in that yellow drum on the other side of the world, while her parents continued their desperate search for her—Rice married. He cared for his two children and his increasingly dependent parents. He did not, however, completely forget his Australian nightmare. In April 1991, he phoned 73-year-old Renee Cave and berated her for talking to the media about Jill’s disappearance.
Finally, in September 1994—15 months after Jill Cave’s body was discovered in that drum—Rice was arrested in Baltimore, Maryland. The head of the Victorian homicide squad flew out to interview him. A US marshal spokesman said, ‘We took him by surprise. He was not armed or anything. Public defender Michael Citara Manis said his client strongly denied the murder charge: “He…protests his innocence and maintains he’s innocent of the charge’’’. Rice applied to a US judge for bail pending his extradition battle. He said his family was willing to put up $1 million worth of property, and that he feared ‘harassment, physical abuse and injury’ in jail while awaiting extradition to Australia. Finally, Rice gave up his extradition fight and was brought back to face Australian justice.
In September 1995—nearly six years after Jill Cave went missing, and more than two years after her body was found—Rice pleaded not guilty to her murder in the Victorian Supreme Court. He admitted putting her in the drum of Limil. He just denied killing her deliberately.
His killer excuse? She had died accidentally—while they were having bondage sex.
The main problem for the prosecution was in proving how Ms Cave died. Pathologist Anthony Landgren said that because Ms Cave’s body was fairly well preserved, he was able to conclude that she had not died of natural causes. The only abnormality he found was that her hyoid bone—a small horseshoe-shaped bone at the base of the neck—was mobile. Dr Landgren told the court that the most common way of causing this was compression of the neck—strangling. He said, however, there were rare cases—about one in 5000—of a congenital abnormality causing this bone to float. He, therefore, refused to come up with a definite cause of death.
Prosecutor Graeme Hicks said what Rice did after Ms Cave’s death—his litany of complex lies, his cruel, inappropriate jibes at her family—proved he had a guilty conscience. Only someone who was trying to hide an unlawful killing, a murder, would have gone to such extraordinary lengths to hide the death.
Mr Hicks: The more one delves into the tissue of lies Michael Rice spread, the more one sees the consciousness of guilt.
This cock and bull story…was put out to cover the fact he had unlawfully killed Jill Cave, was an insult to the Cave family and an insult to your own intelligence.
He said the disdainful way Rice treated Mr Cave’s enquiries about his daughter was not the action of a ‘caring, loving boyfriend’.
The prosecution lost one battle before the jury even got to consider its verdict. Justice George Hampel ruled that although the ‘consciousness of guilt’ evidence was strong, without any definite cause of death, it was not enough to prove Rice guilty of murder. He ordered the jury to acquit Rice of that charge, but allowed them to consider whether he was guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.
Rice was not satisfied with that. He pushed for a total acquittal on the basis that Jill Cave died accidentally during sex and not as a result of any dangerous act on his part. Despite being the only person who knew what happened to Jill Cave—Rice refused to talk.
He left it to his barrister—John Smallwood—to remind the jurors that they had to exclude the reasonable possibility that she had died accidentally, innocently.
Mr Smallwood told the jury his client may have put Ms Cave’s body in the drum of lime not because he was guilty of unlawfully but unintentionally killing her (manslaughter), but because he feared he would be wrongly accused of that.
Mr Smallwood: Are you prepared, beyond all reasonable doubt, to say she didn’t die during an act of sex?
He said that scenario, although ‘not pretty’, could explain why Ms Cave’s body was found wearing black lingerie and had a rope tied around her ankles. Another rope could have been around her neck and connected to the rope around her ankles, Mr Smallwood said. He said that if Ms Cave had died during bondage sex, that would help to explain Rice’s inappropriate sexual comments to her family soon after she went missing.
The barrister suggested a very weird and very grisly scenario.
Mr Smallwood: You don’t know whether it [putting Ms Cave’s body in the drum of lime powder] was an attempt to dispose of the body or to keep it. You just don’t know.
It’s a strange world we live in but you don’t convict people because they are strange.
He acknowledged his client could be regarded as ‘a mongrel’ for what he had done, but said it would be a ‘travesty of justice’ if he was convicted on that basis.
Mr Smallwood: She may well have died in his company. He may well feel responsible and, for reasons best known to himself, he may have wanted to keep that body intact. Who knows?
…
This simply remains a mystery which may be an unsatisfactory state of affairs but you can’t simply solve that mystery by applying a dislike to Michael Rice.
On 15 September 1995—after deliberating for a day—the jury of nine men and three women declared Rice guilty of manslaughter. When they did, he bowed his head. As he was led away, Ms Cave’s friends and colleagues hissed in disgust.
About a month later—almost six years to the day when Ms Cave was killed—Justice Hampel sentenced Rice. He said that what Rice did after Ms Cave died was ‘quite bizarre’.
Justice Hampel: There is a natural feeling of resentment and concern in the way you treated those who bore the loss of and those who were trying to investigate the disappearance of Ms Cave. But I must be careful to ensure that I do not make the punishment for the crime itself greater because of it.
The judge said that he had taken into account that Rice’s persistent concealment and lies had added greatly to the grief of the Cave family. He said, however, because the circumstances of Ms Cave’s death were ‘simply unknown’, he was bound to sentence Rice for ‘a killing by an unlawful and dangerous act without any aggravating features’—a low-level manslaughter.
Justice Hampel said he had taken into account that, at the age of 41, Rice had no criminal record and that he would have no visitors in jail because his family was in the US. The judge also noted that Rice’s parents were elderly and ill and that his wife had ‘some problems’, making her dependent on him.
He sentenced Rice to a maximum seven years jail and set a minimum non-parole term of four years.
From his Perth home, Ernest Cave told Herald Sun reporter Russell Coulson the sentence was not long enough, but that it was a victory for his long campaign to have his daughter’s killer punished.
Mr Cave: It was not our intention that he [Rice] should get away with it. My wife and I suspected from the start that something had gone wrong and there was foul play.
Four months later, Rice’s bid to overturn his manslaughter conviction boomeranged badly on him. Not only did the Court of Appeal find that the jury had been entitled to find him guilty of manslaughter, it found that he was lucky to not have been found guilty of murder. It found that Justice Hampel had been wrong to order Rice’s acquittal of murder.
Justice Robert Brooking: I would not have withdrawn the case of murder from the jury, having regard to the whole of the evidence, which in my view permitted a finding that the applicant [Rice] strangled the victim.
…
It was open to the jury to find that the applicant used unlawful and dangerous violence upon, and killed, Jill Cave in suite 21 at the Ringwood Lake Motel on the weekend of 14–15 October 1989.
His subsequent conduct, including his statements, was not reasonably to be explained on any other basis.
…
Any reasonable person must have realised that, by concealing her body and her death as he did, and telling the lies which he told, he ran a great risk that, if the body was found, he would be charged with murder.
Why should a man take such a risk if the explanation of the death was an innocent one?