Although the women I lived with at the cottage were responsible for killing no fewer than five people between them, we all got on quite well. One of them, a forty-year-old chronic alcoholic named Wendy, had actually killed two people – young sisters – when she crashed her car into theirs in Chirnside Park. Wendy had fifty-five drink-driving charges against her, was unlicensed, driving an un-roadworthy and unregistered car and was blind drunk when she careened into the girls as they were driving home from a shift at McDonald’s. Wendy got six years with a non-parole period of four. She had wiped two young lives from the face of the earth … and yet she received a shorter prison sentence than me. Go figure. The community was outraged, however, and the prosecutor appealed, so in the end she got eight years with a non-parole period of six.
Although we were both peer support workers, Wendy treated me like a princess, no matter what I said to her. If I lost patience and snapped at her she didn’t seem to mind. She would constantly talk about how no one cared about her kids. ‘Well that’s right, Wendy,’ I would say, ‘they don’t. You’ve got to understand that that’s because you’re responsible for taking another family’s children off them forever.’
Still, I generally got along well with her in prison and enjoyed her company. Quite often there’s a marked difference in the person a woman is in prison from the one she is on the outside.
Sue was a very calm and quiet woman who we were blessed to have in the unit because she was an excellent cook. A great lover of ballroom dancing, Sue was dubbed ‘The Dancing Assassin’ after she was convicted of murdering her husband. She’d convinced another man to kill for her, hoping to cash in on her husband’s demise. Unfortunately she discovered he had written her out of his will. Worse, the bumbling hit man she’d found had attempted to make the death look like a suicide but the victim’s body was found floating next to his car in a reservoir near Castlemaine. Very few people take their lives by drowning, and forensics later found haemorrhages behind his eyes consistent with strangulation.
Like Wendy, Sue treated me well, and although few people liked her I got on with her for the most part. She was forever sitting and quietly knitting, but she was always listening to what was going on and she never dropped a stitch. She was like a smiling, sitting, knitting, dancing assassin who took it all in and filed it away to be used in some later campaign to her advantage. She endured the pain of seeing her family grow in her absence, and became a proud but heartbroken grandmother behind bars.
One of the loveliest killers I ever met was Jo. I lived with her for quite a while in the unit. She was a tiny, bird-like woman who possessed one of the most gorgeous natures of any inmate I got to know inside DPFC. She loved anything that grew: the grass, flowers – even the Deer Park weeds. She was jailed for killing her lesbian lover with a single, fateful thrust of a knife. Apparently Jo’s girlfriend was a much bigger woman and one night they started fighting in their kitchen. During the scuffle Jo grabbed a knife off the bench and lashed out at her lover, striking her in the chest. After I got to know Jo I came to believe she did indeed act in self-defence because she literally would not hurt a fly – she’d try to usher them out of the cottage instead. But presented with a bloodied knife, a stab wound and a dead lover, the police charged her with murder.
One day a woman from a Christian church came out to speak to Jo. At the time she was working with lawyers to have her charge downgraded to manslaughter on the basis she acted in self-defence. Jo hadn’t entered a plea at that point and so the lady from the church saw an opportunity to do God’s work. She told Jo the only way she could save herself from eternal damnation was if she repented in the eyes of the Lord. ‘You must confess before the Almighty! Thou shalt not kill! It is a sin! Repent, repent, repent!’ It had been one hell of a fire-and-brimstone performance because she convinced Jo to plead guilty to murder. As soon as she came back to the cottage and told us I went ballistic. I marched straight to the Visitor Centre and grabbed hold of Sister Sue Idiot. ‘Who do you think you are, to play God with people’s lives?’ I snarled. ‘I’ll make sure you never set foot inside this prison again.’
I left her standing there, mouth agape, and went straight to the governor: ‘You need to get that woman out of here permanently,’ I said, ‘because if you don’t I’m going to put it out on the compound and let everyone know that she almost got Jo sentenced to life. Not even Jesus would be able to save her after that.’ The governor was appalled and agreed wholeheartedly, and Sister Sue Idiot was advised her service was not further required at DPFC and told to never return.
I had nothing against people ministering to inmates and have always thought one’s personal religious beliefs are sacred and to be respected, but I did have a problem with anyone who sought to use some higher power to influence how a woman should plead. Fortunately it was a position that had the full support of the DPFC inmates and management alike. A few days later I ran into Brendan Money on the compound. ‘So, I hear you’re going after nuns now, Kerry,’ he said with a smile.
‘She asked for it,’ I replied.
After dodging that bullet from heaven, the prosecution agreed to downgrade Jo’s charge to manslaughter. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years non-parole. That was half a year shorter than my non-parole period. Go figure again.
Perhaps the trickiest roommate I had was a stocky bottle-blonde woman named Jodi, but I will always think of her as ‘Dolphin Girl’. She killed her partner by strangling him with curtain wire before stringing him up to a tree branch so everyone would think he’d hanged himself. Jodi was powerfully built with fingers like sausages, but she had the mental capacity of a twelve-year-old girl. This explained how she was able to hoist a man’s body up a tree by herself – and also how she could think anyone would be convinced it was suicide.
Like Janice before her, Jodi seemed to feel safe around me and that’s partly why she’d been put into our unit; so I could babysit her. It was the last thing I needed, but, just like everyone else in there, she was a lost and trampled soul and I felt compelled to help her in any way I could. The problem was that not everyone was as patient with her as me. It could make things tricky. Sue didn’t care for her at all so whenever she went for Jodi, I’d go for Sue. Like Janice, I thought Jodi had no place being locked up in an adult prison. As much as she annoyed me from sun-up until sun-down she’d then say something like ‘I wish I was like you, Kerry’, and my heart would melt and I’d think about making her a cup of tea.
Sometimes, though, my patience would run out. I walked in after a particularly challenging day on the compound to find Jodi going off her head at the TV. There had been a report on the news about a dead dolphin with stab wounds that had washed up on the coast. ‘Oh my God! OH MY GOD! They killed a dolphin!’ Jodi wailed. ‘What sort of person would do such a thing to a poor, defenceless little dolphin? What would a dolphin ever do to make someone stab it? Oh my God!’
She was starting to hyperventilate and get extremely agitated when I decided enough was enough. ‘What in the fuck are you carrying on like that for?’ I sniped. ‘It’s a fucking fish! You killed a man with curtain wire, for Christ’s sake!’ I took a breath and was about to offer Jodi some more advice on not being such an idiot about the stupid bloody dolphin when I caught sight of the other girls looking at me in alarm. Some were making the silent slitting gesture across their throats in a clear sign for me to knock it off. Jodi stormed off to her cell in tears.
‘Kerry,’ someone said, ‘have you looked at her wall lately?’
I walked down to Jodi’s cell, pushed the door open and found her sobbing on the bed while the smiling eyes of several dozen dolphins looked down on her from photos she’d cut out of newspapers and magazines and stuck on the walls.
‘Oh.’
Jodi was freed after three years. I didn’t resent the fact these killers were doing shorter sentences than me at all – each woman’s case was her own business. No one else knew what it was like to walk a mile in their shoes. Besides, soon I would have a real friend to hang out with.