52

Dr Ian Sale is a quietly spoken, thoughtful psychiatrist, slight of frame and not given to the flashes of theatrical showmanship or the glib persuasiveness that mark some others of his profession who seek media exposure on high-profile cases. A quote from Scottish poet Robbie Burns, he says, best describes his personality: 'A man of independent mind, he looks and laughs at all that.' Dr Sale possesses a modest charm, characterised by the slightest tilt of the head as he listens and takes notes or a small chuckle when he is amused. That he worked, amongst other major cases, on one of the most infamous stories in the world, the 1997 trial of Port Arthur killer Martin Bryant, seems to be of little account to either his professional or personal ego. Though semiretired, he graciously agrees to come into his office on a hot January morning to talk to me about Derek Percy, whom he has not met and about whom, he says, he knows very little. 'I googled his name this morning,' he admits, ushering me to a chair. 'I was only just out of high school when it happened.'

Dr Sale and I have never met, though our paths have undoubtedly crossed many times at Port Arthur and in the corridor at Hobart's Risdon Prison, euphemistically described by those incarcerated there as the 'Pink Palace'.

'Do you remember the case of Rory Jack Thompson? The CSIRO scientist who murdered his wife in 1983 and chopped her up into 80 pieces?' he asks me. How could I forget? Rory Jack, a CSIRO scientist with a high IQ, had ambled up to me one day at Risdon, where he was tending the garden, and started whining about the media painting him as a 'black beast'. 'They only ever want to talk about how I cut my wife's body up into pieces,' he said, as much to himself as to me. 'What they don't understand is the actual killing only took a few seconds. Chopping up the body was just plain hard work.' Alcoholics in delirium, just arrived at the prison hospital, shuffled past us and wild-eyed young men, distressed and agitated by the chanting of voices in their heads, moved him only to utter a contemptuous sneer. 'It's so boring in here. I will never again see the sky as a free man.'

Rory Jack, in an attempt to mitigate what he had done, read a two-page statement to the jury at the conclusion of his trial. 'I don't recommend murdering people,' he whined. 'It doesn't work very well.' Deemed not guilty by reason of insanity, he was detained at the Governor's Pleasure. In 1990 and 1992 the Mental Health Review twice recommended his release, a recommendation that was refused and which caused considerable political angst. By September 1999, tired of the twenty-year battle to be released, he gained freedom his own way, tying his shoelaces from the cell rafters and stepping softly, quietly, into mid-air.

Dr Sale is convinced that Rory Jack was not insane. 'Like Percy, he must have got that verdict because the jury thought that what he did was so abhorrent they rationalised that he had to be mad. But he wasn't. He murdered his wife and in his scientific mind, he needed to get rid of her. So he chopped her up. The jury was obviously horrified by that.'

'What childhood trauma could have caused Percy's aberrant behaviour?' I ask. 'The hit on the head when Elaine fell off the kerb; is that a possibility?'

'Yeah,' he says, sounding vaguely unconvinced, 'it's a slight possibility. But he sounds otherwise too organised, too smart. I'm sure that the death of Brett was a major influence in his life. The death of a child is always hugely distressing. The question is, how was it handled for Derek and Lachlan? What were they told? What did they understand of the cremation? Did they go to it?'

'Elaine can't remember.'

'Derek was seven years old then, on the cusp of when children begin to get a handle on death. Until then, it is impermanent, but by seven they understand that it is irreversible. Brett died at a crucial age for Derek, when death has meaning.'

I change the subject. 'The household seemed sexually repressive. How would that impact?'

'Remember, this was the '50s, the era when sex education didn't really happen,' he chuckles. 'So, Mother is telling Father to tell the boys about sex, and he gives lip service to it only because it's too embarrassing.' Now he laughs out loud, a laugh that means wasn't it all preposterous, back then. 'But surely Mum must have known something,' I persist. 'Like, Derek is spending inordinate amounts of time in his room masturbating?'

'Sure, but you need to keep it all in the context of the '50s. How they behaved back then about sex.' Now I'm laughing. 'Pardon my ignorance, but didn't boys masturbate in the '50s?'

'Look they did, they clearly did,' Sale agrees. 'But people were just emerging from the conservative cocoon, and it was only later on that it became almost universal that anyone who said they didn't masturbate was lying. I suspect most women prior to that would not have had much knowledge about it, unless they grew up in a family full of boys.'

'No, Elaine was an only child. So does that partly explain at least the response to his filthy writings that they found?'

'Yes, partly. That, and the incredibly strong instinct, denial.'

I don't understand why, beyond the obvious sexual connection with his own faeces, Percy also smeared it over Yvonne, an act so repugnant to me that it seems primitive. 'It's about contempt,' Sale says. 'It's saying up yours.' He recounts a story of returning home to his house in Adelaide years before to find his family had been burgled. 'Things that the thieves couldn't take, like large items of furniture and walls, they smeared with faeces,' he says. 'The police told me it was commonplace.'

I want to try and get to the heart of what makes Percy tick, to find out why a bright, intelligent young boy would turn into the man he became. To date everyone I have spoken to, with the exception of the one police officer who had an unconfirmed recollection that Percy may have been locked in a cupboard, has told me there are no indications in his background to explain his behaviour, that he had a normal childhood. 'Dr Sale,' I say, 'if you had to take a punt, without examining Percy, could you tell me what you believe has made him like he is, a fantasist who acts out his fantasies?'

'You really have to wonder, for this boy to have developed the extreme paraphilias he did, what was going on. His behaviours and fetishes are highly unusual. That degree of sexual sadism is extraordinary. My guess is sexual abuse.'

For an inexplicable reason, tears sting my eyes. I think of that hastily scribbled note, written almost a year ago now, next to those depositions. Normal childhood, my arse. Sale is watching me, closely. 'Is there any chance of that?'

'I wish you could tell me! If it did happen, who is the most likely abuser?'

'Statistically, a male figure. Father, step-father, family friend. Someone the child knows and trusts. Fondling, groping, that sort of thing. Penetration is less common. What did his father do?'

'Worked at the SEC. Shift worker.'

'So there may have been opportunity.' If Dr Sale had appeared amazed at the level of Percy's depravity, by comparison he seems blasé on this subject. 'It's much more common than you might think, sadly, and people are often psychologically blind to what should be bleeding obvious. You know the old story – Dad emerges from young Kylie's bedroom three nights a week and says he is tucking her in. Mum doesn't want to believe any different, so she believes him.'

'What about a woman? Is it possible that one of Derek's grandmothers abused him, one way or another?'

'It is certainly very uncommon. Not impossible, but very uncommon.'

'Physical degradation? I've heard it rumoured that Derek may have had his hands tied behind his back for punishment and been locked in cupboards. His mother, Elaine, had her hands tied behind her back by her own mother, although she claims it only happened once. But she denies vehemently that this happened to Derek.'

'Yes, physical degradation is very possible. If tying of hands behind the back was an accepted practice in the family network, then it could have happened.'

'He tied his known victim Tuohy's hands behind her back.'

Sale nods. 'Fear can cause a child to dirty their pants. That in turn can lead to emotional degradation, comments like, 'You dirty little boy, you've pooed your pants and we'll teach you a lesson by making you keep them on. And we'll tie your hands for further punishment.'

I haven't yet told Dr Sale of Derek's leaning toward wearing multiple pairs of underwear in which he sits after he has defecated, but it seems now to make some vague, sad sense to me. He raises his eyebrows when I tell him of this fetish. 'He wasn't wearing nappies?'

'I've been told by a psychiatrist who saw him that he did wear nappies at times, but I only know of him wearing underpants. His own or female panties.'

Elaine's face, a study of aggrievement, comes back to me, her irritability when questioned about the children's childhoods and insistence that she and Ernie had a perfect marriage. 'She would have to deny anything ever happened to Derek, if it did,' Sale says. 'It would be unbearable for her to live with, otherwise, wouldn't it? Truly unbearable. That is why she sat outside court. She couldn't face going in.'

'Is that why she would have insisted on reiterating that Derek was never out of her sight?'

Sale gives a wry smile. 'Well, there's massive denial there, no doubt about it. It's the old case of "Can you believe it? The one time I wasn't looking and he went and offed someone."'

Denial. Dictionary definition: a refusal to grant the truth of a statement or allegation; an unconscious defence mechanism characterised by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts or feelings. A refusal to truly acknowledge what her son did. And perhaps what was done to him. 'Mums always defend their sons, Debi,' Sale adds, breaking into my thoughts. 'Martin Bryant's mother, for example: despite all that he did, she visited him. She was the only person who ever visited him.'

Sale expresses uncertainty as to whether Derek could be responsible for the abduction of the three Beaumont children. 'You'd have to question how at seventeen he would control three children. You don't get that good straight away. It's escalation. You have to be at the top of your game to risk that sort of multiple abduction at a crowded beach.'

'His writings talk about tying multiple children together,' I offer.

'Yes, I know. I'm not saying he definitely didn't do it. I'm just questioning how he might have.' It's the million-dollar question.

'Percy spent his adolescence in the high country. He knew how to negotiate the bush and also spent time in cities on holiday. He could slip in and out of places, like he was never there.'

'Of course. He's organised, smart. Clever.'

And, I think, as cunning as a fox. 'Is he insane, Dr Sale?'

'No. There is nothing in Percy's behaviour that indicates that to me and you'd have to wonder if people who still maintain that he is are looking after their reputations.' We run through what I know of his background, Sale stopping me when I mention Derek's brothers. 'Lachlan lives in another state from mum. Elaine adores Leon.'

'Have you spoken to either of the brothers?'

'No,' I admit. 'Lachlan doesn't return my calls and Elaine has made it very plain that neither of them wants anything to do with this book on Derek. Why the interest in his brothers?'

'The family is such a formative part of one's life,' he says. 'Also there is a huge stigma involved in what he did that impacts enormously on other family members for life. To use Martin Bryant again, as an example – his sister kept moving around after the massacre, so that she could try to remain incognito.'

We spin quickly through the chain of events from the moment Percy spied Yvonne Tuohy until police picked him up at Cerberus. 'This is when Percy starts claiming forgetfulness in the interview, what the three psychiatrists at his trial labelled Hysterical Repressive Amnesia.'

'Did they? It is possible, I suppose; the theory, mostly Freudian, being that things move out of your conscious awareness because they're too horrible to keep there. But more likely, certainly with the crims I've met, it is common for them to say they don't remember and that they must have blacked out. Repression? It does happen, but not often.'

'You've had a long career in psychiatry, thirty-one years. How many people have you met that actually have been insane?'

'Dozens. Often I see them for minor misdemeanours brought on by their schizophrenia.' He hands me a piece of paper on which is written the part record of interview in 1983 of an alcoholic in psychosis, a man he did not treat.

Police:	I am going to ask you some questions about the death of an old lady in Braddon this afternoon. We believe that this lady may have been murdered, that you may have been responsible for her death . . . Do you clearly understand that?
Prisoner:	Yes, you do not have to keep telling me, hurry up.
Police:	Do you know anything about the death of this lady, Bernie?
Prisoner:	Or course I do, I had to do it, they told me to do it.
Police:	Who told you to do it?
Prisoner:	The voices in my head, come on, hurry up, it's going to blow up, the bombs are everywhere.
Police:	What did the voices tell you to do?
Prisoner:	To kill women and children . . . That desk has got radar in it, it's blowing my head off. I can feel the radio.

'Now that man is truly delusional,' Sale says. 'But there doesn't seem to be anything about Percy to suggest that he is anything other than a sexual psychopath, full stop.'

The interview is winding down. 'How do you know if someone is insane or if they are just putting it on?' I ask.

'Your antenna goes up,' he answers without hesitation. 'You just know with people who are genuinely insane that this person is not really on the station.'

I recall one of the most bizarre stories I ever wrote about, many years ago. 'Do you remember the Tasmanian case of the young man from Granton, in Hobart's northern suburbs, who put salami over a relative's dead body after he killed him?' I ask.

'No, the Granton case you're thinking of was the young man who killed his mother by impaling her to the floor,' Sale corrects me. 'The salami case?' He leans back in his chair, thinking. 'Actually, it was salami and fruit.' The gallows humour common to anyone who works in crime takes over, momentarily. 'Salami and fruit!' I chortle. 'A real feast!'

'You could say that. He is a classic example of a man who was definitely insane. Psychotic. No question at all, same as the man who impaled his mother to the floor.'

'What was going on in their heads?'

'One of them was found sitting in a tree with feathers stuck up his bum. He was communing with peacocks and had strange delusional figures in his head, like little raincoat men. It was clear to me that he was insane but the court didn't find him so; they found him guilty of murder. The salami and fruit man also proved to have clearly psychotic thoughts.'

'So if these people are psychotic, why is Percy not regarded as so when he disembowelled someone?'

'Disembowelling is not in itself a sign of psychosis or hallucination, it's an organised sexual feature with control. If a person tells me he disembowelled someone in the process of trying to remove the microchip from a Martian's brain, that's psychosis. But if it is done just to inflict pain and suffering, that's sadistic. In schizophrenics, the sexual drive isn't that flash. And they tend to kill family members.'

'People constantly ask me how I can write such dark stories,' I say, standing and collecting my papers. 'How do psychiatrists stay sane, when they spend their entire working life dealing with people who are off the wall?'

'Same as taxi drivers do, I suppose, or lawyers. Enjoy the footy, drink red wine, switch off and spend time with your family. And remember to laugh about things. That helps.'

I leave some examples of Percy's writings on his desk for him to peruse. 'There isn't much to laugh about in the Percy story, I'm afraid.'

'No, you're right,' he agrees, opening the door. 'Not much to laugh about at all. Ring me in a few days when I've had a look at his writings.'

Dr Sale gets straight to the point when I call him. 'These writings are so disturbing, so totally grotesque, that in thirty-one years in psychiatry I have never read, seen or heard anything like it. They are organised, detailed and leave me in no doubt that he was aroused when writing them and that he savoured every word. This man is definitely not insane, he simply has extreme sexual deviancy.'

'Are they enlightening about what may have caused that?'

'They are almost childlike, infantile, which indicates to me they had their origins in childhood.' Sale is right: Percy's fixation with women, with making babies and the juvenile way he describes sex and procreation seem very childlike, luridly confused with pornographic images. 'So I put my cock in your hole . . . then a certain stuff (sperm) mixes with some stuff . . . and makes a baby start growing. About eight months later, the baby comes out.' The way he describes imaginary conversations and writes about how he wants to cut all the hair off his victims – women, boys and girls – and put dresses on them.

'Percy indulges in fantasies of wearing plastics, for example, and of other children doing the same,' Sale continues. 'Look, you really have to wonder if this boy was exposed to the most unpleasant abuse. You really, really have to wonder.'

'The assumption is that these fantasies started in his adolescence,' I say. 'Do you think they could have started earlier?'

'Given what is known about him now, there are indications of long-standing paraphilias which in my belief would very possibly have shown itself in strange behaviours in primary school. Fire setting and cruelty to animals are classics in younger people. The risk is that the family dealt with it but did so with a sense of denial, perhaps failing to understand this boy's behaviour. Some people are born sociopaths, and sometimes you can't get to find out why that is.'

'Do you mean,' I ask, 'that we are, today, on a relentless quest for answers, for reasons, where there may be none?'

'Sometimes,' Sale agrees. 'Sometimes.'

He pauses. 'When we met the other day you used the word "alibi". That implies an act of trying to deceive. But very often, it is the defence that people erect to try and protect themselves from dreadful things.' A journalist once asked him, he continues, whether Martin Bryant was mad or bad. 'My answer was that he was wired badly. Derek Percy isn't. He's very bright and very, very deviant. In my opinion he has no prospects for rehabilitation. The recidivism rate amongst paedophiles, particularly those who victimise boys, is awfully high, higher than for any other sexual crime. Percy will remain at risk of re-offending until he is too physically frail to hurt someone.'

'I have one last question. What is your opinion of Percy receiving a pension?'

'Well, he's certainly not incapacitated for work in any way,' Sale says. 'It is inconceivable that it could ever be argued that his naval service was a cause of his problem. Perhaps pensioning him off as they did was simply an expeditious way for the navy to get rid of him for the embarrassment he caused.'