29 November 2017: 32 years in
The hearing date for the Bowraville murders approaches, 18 months after the Attorney General’s decision to send the case to the appeal court.
It’s difficult handing over 20 years of work to the lawyers at first and, when I go to meet them with Jerry Bowden, the other detective on the strike force, I am nervous. Their team, led by the fierce, austere barrister Wendy Abraham QC, sit in a crowded, cluttered office, which looks like it was somewhere a lot of work was done and ask us a lot of questions. My nerves begin to settle, I like their approach. When Wendy says she doesn’t like to lose, I smile.
I also watch how heavily the lawyers come to rely on analyst Bianca Comina, the third member of our strike force. That makes me glad, as Bianca’s knowledge of this case is matched only by her commitment. The three of us, Jerry, Bianca and myself, wonder how the lawyers are going to run the case, only they won’t tell us. Then, four months out, I’m asked to take part in a charity boxing match, raising money for the families of dead police officers. I go to mark the date on my calendar and realise the fight would be on the night of the third day of the appeal court hearing.
I hide the fact that I’ll be fighting from the lawyers, so they don’t think I’m distracted. Preparing properly for court, or for a fight, is hard work; it should be all-consuming. I’m also worried about being called to give evidence in court. If that happens, I’ll need to be at my best, and I’ve been in enough boxing rings to know that your brain gets rattled for a few days if you cop a bad beating.
* * *
The first day of the court hearing comes and row after row of weary black faces take their seats in the public gallery, opposite the three white judges. This is the Banco Court, the State’s biggest, ceremonial courtroom. The judges wear red robes and white horsehair wigs. The Bowraville families wear brightly coloured footy shirts, printed with large photographs of their long-dead children, Colleen, Evelyn and Clinton.
On three sides, the high walls are hung with heavy, gilt-framed paintings of other, long-dead judges. I have a sick feeling in my stomach – I’ve been around courts my whole career and I’m still intimidated walking in here this morning – but I can’t help feeling hopeful.
A court hearing is like tossing a coin, I’ve learned. You throw the facts up into the air, while the two sides, prosecution and defence, argue about which way they should land. There’s really no predicting.
Wendy stands and outlines the argument for overturning the previous not guilty verdicts. She says there is so much evidence suggesting the same person must have murdered all three of the children. That is the first step in her argument. The second is trying to convince the judges that James Hide was that person. The families shift uncomfortably, frowning as they try to follow the bloodless legal argument, despite this case being about their children. At times, I also struggle to understand it.
To my surprise, the lawyers have decided not to rely on the Norco Corner evidence about a white man standing over the body of a black teenager on the morning that Clinton went missing. They say it doesn’t pass the test of being ‘fresh and compelling’ because the police did know about it at the time of Clinton’s trial, although they never followed it up. Instead, Wendy argues, the evidence we’ve gathered about Colleen’s death was not used during the separate murder trials over the deaths of Evelyn and Clinton, which means it is still ‘fresh’.
It is ‘compelling’ because of the similarities between all three of the murders.
I look up at Colleen’s mum, Muriel Craig, who sits surrounded by her children. Near her sits Rebecca Stadhams, Evelyn’s mum, who is watching the judges and twisting her greying hair around the fingers of one hand. Thomas Duroux, Clinton’s father, sits in the front row, with his arms crossed, listening intently. When I first met each of them, their hair was darker, their faces less lined with time and sorrow. But working this case has changed me too.
Before going to Bowraville, I was a young cop caught up in the idea of catching crooks. I was naïve. I would say stupid things, like calling somebody an Abo, without thinking. That changed.
I also used to think my fellow cops and I were part of one team, but this case has made me realise I’m heading in a different direction. When I was starting out, I was taught not to connect with the families of crime victims, because it made it harder to do the job, but now I think you have to.
You have to take a murder on as if it happened to your family. You have to open yourself up and let some of the hurt in. Their pain might drive out your own feelings, but that only makes you tougher. It is your compassion for how the victims’ and their families are feeling that makes you want to solve the crime.
I look back at the judges, while they and the opposing lawyers debate the meanings of ‘fresh’ and ‘compelling’. How many of them know what it’s like, I wonder, to sit down with a family whose child has just been murdered? Certainly, none of them has taken on the load of finding a loved one’s killer. Nor have they carried the weight, as many other cops have, of taking part in an operation where somebody dies. In my case, I went through the door of an apartment where a man was shot while I was talking to him.
Without this real, direct experience of life and death, the judges’ and the lawyers’ words seem weightless. To me, at least, and to the children’s families, this is real. This is their lives. In Bowraville, I’ve learned things that were simple, the people there taught me values: tolerance, humility, a refusal to give up and accept injustice. I’ve tried to teach the same things to my children.
In black law, if one man kills another he accepts there will be payback. In this court, such certainty seems to slip through our fingers and rise instead into the air, twisting around the different meanings of words, as quick and tricky to grab hold of as is the breath that carries them.
* * *
On Wednesday evening, after three days of court hearings, I make my way to the boxing match. Dave Letizia, the boxer I trained with in Perth, has flown over to work my corner with another fighter, Glenn McDougal, and I’m grateful. I can think of no one better. Craig, who I count as a friend despite our disagreements over the William Tyrrell investigation, is also here supporting me. Jake and Gemma are among the spectators. So are the Bowraville mob. As the announcer calls my name, I can hear the families cheering, calling me their ‘Gumbaynggirr warrior’ and shouting out, ‘Knock ’em down, Bowra!’
How good would it be if Dad could see me here, like this? I ask myself. I owe him so much. He made me unbreakable.
Never give up.
It helps me find the confidence to win.