Chapter 6

The Day After

This chapter chronicles the movements of the players in this saga immediately after they’d been told of Jenny’s death. It’s important to establish what happened that day because the second inquest was dominated by two new claims from Bill Kerr: that Denis Tanner had not been at home at 1 am, when police tried to deliver the death message, and that he cleaned up the house at Springfield before the police could examine the scene. Analysis of the evidence shows that both claims were inaccurate.

According to Kerr’s 1984 and 1996 statements and his notes taken at the time, the efforts to notify Denis Tanner began at 3 am, when Kerr called central police communications at D24. As a result, a Footscray nightshift unit manned by Sergeant Bob Devers and trainee constable Arthur Firipis was asked to ‘call the board’. Death messages were never passed over the police radio because of the possibility that a relative might be listening. When Devers and Firipis called, they were asked to deliver a message to Denis Tanner advising him that his sister-in-law had committed suicide.

Just on daylight, at around 5.30 am, these policemen knocked on Tanner’s door at Spotswood. Lynne was already up feeding the baby, and Denis Tanner answered the knock. The police came inside and delivered the message.

At the second inquest, Bill Kerr said he was told on the police radio that there was nobody at Denis Tanner’s home at 1 am, but this wasn’t correct. Tanner and I spoke to Sergeant Devers, who confirmed that he’d delivered the message at daylight.

When the police left, Denis rang his parents, then he and Lynne started cancelling their planned arrangements. Denis phoned Detective Ryan Collins and arranged for him to come around when he finished night shift so he could take care of Tanner’s part-time commitments and some domestic issues. Collins told police he arrived at the Tanners’ home at 7.30 am. Lynne called Helen Golding to tell her the sad news and make other arrangements to deliver the food for her grandmother’s wake. After Collins left, Denis packed their car and spoke to a neighbour to arrange for him to look after his dog for a few days.

Denis and Lynne then left for Mansfield around 8 am in Lynne’s car, with baby David in the bassinette. They had to buy petrol and don’t recall whether or not they stopped to change or feed the baby, but it is logical that they would have. Travelling in peak morning traffic, they drove through residential and industrial estates from Spotswood to Tullamarine, then took Mickelham Road to join the Hume Highway at Donnybrook. In the traffic at that time of morning, it would have taken them close to an hour to reach the highway; their journey to Mansfield would take another two hours, making a total of around three hours from the time they’d left home. In 1984 there was no Western Ring Road and no Craigieburn bypass on the Hume Freeway as there is today.

At Donaldson’s Road, seven kilometres on the Melbourne side of Springfield, the fan belt on their car snapped and the car overheated; it was at least 10.15 am, and more likely later. Denis tried to replace it with a makeshift belt using Lynne’s pantyhose from the suitcase, but that didn’t work, so he eventually flagged down a car and hitched a ride, intending to go to the Bonnie Doon garage and buy a fan belt.

It was at least 10.40 am when he passed Springfield and saw his elder brother Bruce leaving. Bruce had called in to check on the house and to see what he could do to help, because his mother told him that the police had said it was her job to clean up the blood. The couch was a mess, and Bruce had unsuccessfully tried cleaning it with cold water. He’d locked the house and was leaving when Denis arrived at the gate. Denis changed cars and he thinks he might have grabbed some spanners from Laurie’s shed. Bruce then drove him to Bonnie Doon, where he purchased a fan belt, borrowed a container to fill with water, then returned to Donaldson’s Road and fixed his own car. This would have taken over half an hour. When the car was repaired, Lynne followed the brothers to their parents’ Mansfield home, about thirty minutes away.

There was no time for Denis Tanner to have cleaned the house and burnt the couch, as Senior Constable Kerr alleged at the second inquest. In fact, the couch was only burnt two years later, in a gully half a kilometre south of the house; the remains are still there.

Denis, Lynne and Bruce arrived at their parents’ home in Mansfield about 11.40 am. They carried the baby in and settled him, unloaded their baggage, offered condolences and had a discussion about the night’s tragic events. One of the Tanners, most likely Denis, phoned the police to tell them that Springfield was now locked and the keys were at his parents’ house.

All of that is very simple logic, and the actions of Denis, Bruce and Lynne are such as one would have been expected of any aggrieved and caring family in these sad circumstances.

•••

At Mansfield police station that day, Sergeant Neil Phipps and Senior Constable Don Fraser both started work at 9 am. It was a local court day, and Fraser had to go to court. Bill Kerr was on a rest day, so he wasn’t there. All the other police at the police station thought Sergeant Phipps had attended at Jenny’s death scene the previous night; only Fraser and Kerr knew he’d been absent.

When they started work, Fraser acquainted Phipps with the night’s events. This was how Fraser put it in a statement to the second inquest:

 

The morning after Jenny’s death I had a conversation at the police station with Sergeant Phipps. I told Phipps that Jennifer must have had her hands over the end of the barrel when she shot herself.

 

Note that no superiors had influenced Kerr and Fraser to say the death was a suicide.

The station boss, Senior Sergeant Neil Walker, was on leave at the time, and Phipps was acting in charge of the station. A former homicide detective, Phipps was immediately apprehensive when Fraser told him that they’d found two spent shells.

Neil Walker also appears to have called into the police station early that morning, between 9.15 and 10 am – probably for a cup of tea, as was his habit. Phipps told him about Jenny’s death, saying it was a suicide. Walker simply presumed that Phipps had attended the scene because he’d worked the afternoon shift with Kerr and Fraser.

Walker was told that photographs hadn’t been taken, so he suggested that Phipps go to the hospital mortuary and take photographs of the body, particularly of the head and hand wounds.

Between 9.45 am and 10 am Phipps took Fraser with him to the Mansfield Hospital mortuary, where they viewed and took photographs of the body. They didn’t clean the blood to inspect the head wound; a pathologist would do this later. Because of the blood mass covering the forehead, both believed that Jenny had a single-shot head wound and that she’d fired the rifle with her toe, with the barrel in her mouth. They examined the hand wounds, noting that they appeared to be from the palm side to the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, suggesting that her hands had been cupped over the end of the rifle. They didn’t examine her feet for traces of blood on her big toes.

When Phipps and Fraser returned to the police station, Phipps decided to ring Detective Sergeant Welch at Alexandra CIB because the two spent shells concerned him.

During the second inquest, Fraser half-supported Kerr’s new claim that he’d phoned Welch a second time from Springfield to tell him they’d discovered the second spent shell, but Welch disputed receiving a second call. Fraser was with Kerr the previous night and with Phipps next morning; so why it would have been necessary to call Welch a third time to tell him about the two spent shells if they’d already told him the previous night?

When Welch was told about the two spent shells, he left for Mansfield immediately. He told me that he too believed that Phipps had been at Springfield the night before and assumed that Phipps or Kerr would have taken photographs because both were police photographers. Welch told the second inquest that he arrived at Mansfield around 10 am, but his memory was faulty because he wasn’t telephoned until after that time; allowing 40 minutes for his trip from Alexandra to Mansfield, he would have arrived about 11 am.

Welch claimed that when he arrived at the police station, he spoke to both Kerr and Phipps; Kerr had a rest day but had come in to finish his Coroner’s paperwork, probably between 11 am and 11.15 am.

At 11.30 am, Welch and Phipps inspected the body at the hospital mortuary. They left, intending to drive out and inspect the scene, and advised the police station by radio that they were heading to Springfield. While this was happening, Kerr was completing his correspondence in the station muster room, where he could hear these station-to-car radio conversations through a speaker mounted on the wall.

Welch told the second inquest that he and Phipps were on their way to Springfield when he received a radio message to the effect that the house was locked and the keys were now in Mansfield, at the Tanner parents’ house in Highett Street. The police did a U-turn and returned to the police station, where they met Denis Tanner out the front; Denis had walked from his parents’ home to see if he could help police with identification and any other formalities. All say the time was midday. Phipps went into the police station; Tanner and Welch had never met before, and they spoke briefly outside before following Phipps in.

Phipps, Kerr and Welch went into the sergeant’s office while Tanner waited at the front counter. Kerr showed Welch the rifle, the two spent shells and the baby poster. Phipps then invited Denis Tanner to join them; Phipps had already activated a microtape recorder, which he either kept on him or placed near where he was sitting.

This tape came to light before the second inquest, but the Coroner refused the Tanners access to it. Phipps was never examined about it or reminded of it. It was never played to him, nor was he given the opportunity to refresh his memory from it when making his statements or giving evidence. In terms of propriety, this was dirty pool, because the evidence Phipps gave from memory differed significantly from the conversation on the tape. The Kale Taskforce didn’t identify the speakers on the tape and they didn’t transcribe it. Neither the Coroner nor his assistant sought a transcript, and the Coroner ignored its contents in his finding. The full conversation ran for only twelve minutes, and my transcript was five pages long. It wouldn’t have been a lot of work over two years for an eight-detective team.

The failure to transcribe the tape was an incredible oversight, because this was a tape of a disputed conversation central to the Coroner’s finding, in which he’d accepted Kerr’s evidence that Denis Tanner had said he was at the trots the previous night, then later given a conflicting alibi. Phipps had also claimed to remember a mention of the trots or the races.

This was at odds with the statements of Welch, Fraser and Denis Tanner, who all denied that the trots had ever been mentioned. Welch had taken detailed notes, which don’t mention the trots. This is the taped conversation at the relevant point:

 

Kerr: [Laurie] wasn’t real sure what time it was…you rang him…you said he better go and get the horse in.

Denis: [unintelligible] the two of us…I was out all afternoon doing a part-timer…

 

Kerr and Welch then had a separate conversation while Phipps and Denis talked closer to the recorder:

 

Phipps: Where’d you ring from…from work or…

Denis: No. It was from a phone box just near the racecourse in Caulfield.

 

The tape now has a couple of words erased after the word ‘Caulfield’, where somebody has pressed the record button.

This tape disproves Phipps’s speculation in his police statement that he and Tanner ‘might’ have ‘possibly’ had a lengthy exchange about the trots. All Tanner had said was that he’d been out in the afternoon doing a part-time job and that he’d phoned Laurie about the horse from a phone box near the Caulfield racecourse. Tanner, Welch and Fraser had been right.

During the second inquest, it was implied that Denis was ringing Laurie to make sure he wouldn’t be home later that night, the inference being that Laurie was also a party to Jennifer’s murder. It seems outrageous that the authenticity of Tanner’s call wasn’t tested by interviewing or calling the horsebreaker, Ron Purcell. It was Purcell who’d arranged to pick up the foal in his float on Thursday 15 November, and he did collect the horse the next day, so the call was very easily verified.

There was now another erasure on the enhanced CD version of the same tape. On the tape, Tanner’s words are: ‘I know she didn’t have guns inside the house u…’ Again the record button has been pressed, erasing the end of that sentence, but Welch recorded the full sentence in his notes: ‘I know that she didn’t have guns inside the house until the escapees were about.’

The erasure of the words until the escapees were about misleads the listener into believing that Tanner said Jenny didn’t allow guns inside the house. Those who listened to the tape didn’t inform the second Coroner of the strategic erasures. In his finding, the Coroner cited the tape as his source when he found that ‘Jennifer did not have guns inside the house’.

Tanner and his brother Bruce both listened to the tape overnight during the inquest, and they assert that these erasures – the first relating to Tanner’s alibi and the second about the guns – were not on the tape at the time. Tanner asked Mr Gullaci to raise the fact that on the tape he told Phipps he had been doing a part-time job that night. The tape was then played to the court, but the audio equipment used was so poor that the conversations were unintelligible. Later, after the Coroner had brought down his report, Tanner succeeded in getting a copy of the tape, but these crucial passages had been erased on the copy he received.

The tape shows that fifteen minutes after Welch, Tanner and Phipps arrived at the police station, Kerr left to resume his rest day. ‘I’ll toddle off now,’ he said on the tape, and away he went. Contrary to his second inquest evidence, Kerr made no attempt to return to Springfield and didn’t ask who’d authorised the house to be cleaned – indeed, he was never told that the house had been cleaned or the couch had been burnt. He’d simply misinterpreted the radio conversations he’d overhead from the muster-room wall speaker.

Kerr stored these tapes in his shed for twelve years, but lent them to reporter Andrew Rule before the Kale Taskforce came on the scene. Rule copied them and used parts of them in his SBS documentary. The Kale Taskforce took possession of them on 3 June 1996.

In their efforts to establish how and when the damage occurred, Operation Trencher asked Rule for his copies so that they could be compared, but Trencher told me that he didn’t hand his copies over. If Rule’s copies contained the same erasures as the tape now has, it would establish that the damage occurred before he had possession of them. If they don’t, then the obliteration occurred during or after that time.

It is also noteworthy that Kerr didn’t mention the two hand wounds during this conversation. The Tanner and Blake families wouldn’t be told about this, or about the two bullets in Jenny’s skull, for another ten months.

The Tanners didn’t clean the Springfield house until the afternoon of the next day, which was after the pathologist had told the police about the two head wounds. But at least one of the brothers (though not Laurie) would have gone to the property to feed and water the dogs, stock and other animals.