FOR eleven months Senior Constable Trish Carl had to live with the allegation that she was a murdering racist. When a coroner finally cleared her of any wrongdoing, nearly a year after she had shot a woman three times, the country police officer thought what had blown into an international political controversy was finally finished, and she could get on with life. She was wrong.
The day after Trish Carl was officially exonerated, her daughter, Jessie, then six, walked out the front door of family’s comfortable home into the neat front garden and found, freshly daubed in paint on the lawn and the front fence the words; ‘COON KILLER’.
‘It was supposed to be the first day of the rest of our lives, but it started in tears,’ Trish was to recall. The brutal graffiti was probably the work of local youths, several of whom were seen around the area. But for the Carls it was a double blow. Their privacy had been violated, and it was the first indication Trish had that some people would always doubt her version of what happened.
All police shootings create controversy, but the events in Wodonga, in north-eastern Victoria, on that early November morning in 1995 conspired to turn a tragic death into an international incident. Senior Constable Carl shot dead a black woman, a Papua New Guinean national with strong political connections, at a time when Victorian police had a reputation for being gun happy.
It was the 25th police killing in Victoria since 1988 and the second since police had undergone a massive retraining program, called Operation Beacon, designed to minimise armed confrontations.
The Coroner, Jacinta Heffey, found the victim, Helen Merkle, was armed with two knives and that she had chased and attempted to attack Senior Constable Carl, who fired three shots in self-defence.
‘I am satisfied that in all circumstances that the shooting of Helen Merkle by Constable Patricia Carl was justified,’ the Coroner found.
Trish Carl was working night shift at Wodonga early that Sunday morning. A few hours earlier she had been called to the Wodonga Hospital, where a man had committed suicide by jumping from the roof. At 1 am she went to the dead man’s home to speak to his wife. She wanted to know answers to the unanswerable. These are the tragedies of night shift that appear as only a few lines on a police running sheet. A man dies, a family is left devastated, but there are no suspicious circumstances to report, only heart ache. By 1.10 am Carl and her night shift partner, Barry Randall, were back on the road. By 2.30 am they were back in the station, hopeful that things would begin to slow down. After all, this was Wodonga, a relatively quiet country town, not Kings Cross or King Street. It is a good place to police and bring up a family.
About 2.55 am the station telephone rang. It was a call to attend a noisy party at 17 London Road by irate neighbours. They had reasons to be upset, having called the police in similar circumstances on the two previous Saturdays. For police it was a routine call. There are hundreds like it throughout the country every night.
But this one would be different.
As the police pulled up they could see light behind the front blinds, They could also hear a baby crying and loud, aggressive adult voices.
For the police, this was a simple matter. Knock on the door, have a quick chat, ask people to quieten down, write down the owner’s name and then go away. They went to the porch and knocked. Two men came to the door, but behind them was Helen Merkle, 27. She began to scream abuse at the police. It was only because the two hefty males were unintentionally blocking the doorway that she couldn’t get out. As the abuse continued the men held her back.
‘All we wanted to do was to get her to be a little bit quiet and then we would have gone,’ Trish Carl said later.
The screaming woman’s husband, Mark, an army corporal, stepped out onto the porch to talk to police. He was carrying their two-year-old son, Joshua. Like so many routine police calls the lines become quickly blurred. Police went to the house to quieten down party goers. Now they were on the front porch acting as social welfare experts and marriage guidance counsellors. Mark Merkle was telling them he couldn’t control his wife, and pointed to a scratch on his face claiming she had attacked him earlier.
Trish Carl had her back to the front door. She then felt her partner grab her jacket and pull her backwards and say, ‘Let’s get out of here, she’s got a knife.’ Helen Merkle had gone into the kitchen and armed herself with two knives. She then ran screaming at the policewoman.
Senior Constable Carl began to run backwards down the driveway. With her torch in her left hand she could see one of the knives in Helen Merkle’s right hand. She screamed at least three times at the woman to drop the knife. But Merkle, irrational with alcohol, kept coming, and gaining. It seemed that a crazy woman running forwards travels quicker than a frightened one going backwards.
Trish Carl unholstered her firearm, automatically slipped off the safety catch and fired when Merkle was within one metre. One shot from the hip, a second as she brought the gun up and a third from in front of her body. Each shot hit Helen Merkle, the third hitting her heart, killing her almost instantly.
Senior Constable Carl said: ‘She could have stopped. I fired once and she kept coming. I fired again and she didn’t stop. I fired the third time and then she fell.’ Her husband came to the fallen woman. Her breathing was erratic. She was dying. He found a knife in her hand and threw it way. Trish Carl moved the second knife away from her. Mark Merkle was with his wife. He was crying. The last thing he said before she died was, ‘I love you.’ A large group of Papua New Guinean friends of the dead woman gathered and their grief soon turned to anger. The situation threatened to turn ugly. Senior police who attended ordered Trish Carl to get inside the divisional van and lock the doors. The dead woman was the niece of Papua New Guinea’s Foreign Affairs Secretary, Gabriel Dusava. Senior PNG officials, including the then Prime Minister, Sir Julius Chan, and the PNG high commissioner to Australia, Sir Frederick Reiher, disputed whether Merkle had been armed, even though her husband was adamant that she had carried the knives. Even the then Foreign Minister, Senator Evans, saw fit to express an opinion. ‘It just staggers the imagination that something has not gone fundamentally wrong in the way in which the police are administering themselves.’
The Chief Commissioner, Neil Comrie, said he hoped that the people who condemned the police actions would be as quick to apologise when all the facts were known.
When Trish Carl was cleared the Police Association wrote to Senator Evans asking for an apology. He responded: ‘While I am pleased from the point of view of your membership and Senior Constable Carl in particular, that the Coroner found that there was no wrong doing in the Merkle incident, I remain of the view that my comments of 15 November were fair in the circumstances as they were known at the time.’
In the days and weeks that followed the shooting Helen Merkle’s friends and relatives eulogised the dead woman. She was, according to them, the victim of a police force that no longer valued human life and was too quick to go for the gun. Trish Carl had to suffer in silence. With an inquest scheduled, she could not speak out in her defence.
The headlines in the local paper read: ‘Police Shoots Mother Dead’.
‘They didn’t say: ‘Mother Shoots Mother Dead,’ Senior Constable Carl, a mother of two, said.
A headline in a PNG paper was even more judgmental. ‘It was Murder,’ it stated.
What emerged from the coroner’s hearing was that Helen Merkle was a bright, well-educated former teacher with a drinking problem.
Sober, she was a lovely woman. Drunk, the Coroner was told, she was a ‘walking time bomb ready to explode and kill someone.’
An hour before she was shot, she was disarmed when she tried to stab her husband with a carving knife. She had previously attacked people with fists, broken stubbies, knives and a truncheon.
The international after-shocks from the incident continued. Expatriate Australians in PNG were warned by the Foreign Affairs Department to be careful, as they feared a revenge killing as a payback over Helen Merkle’s death.
Australian Military Intelligence feared that PNG soldiers, training with the army at a base near Wodonga, could also plot a revenge. They feared a raid on the military armoury followed by an attack on the police station. The armoury was quietly emptied of all weapons and guards placed on the area. The Wodonga police station was locked every night from 11 pm to 7 am even though the station was a 24 hour centre. The tension was great.
But in some ways Senior Constable Carl was lucky. Her husband, Andrew was a local policeman, so she has been able to discuss the shooting with a partner who understood the mental torment. She developed a shorter temper and her memory deteriorated but she and her family worked through the problems.
Some police involved in shootings don’t recover well. Several in Melbourne have resigned after being involved in killings.
‘I haven’t suffered from the what-ifs, what if this happened or that had happened? I know I had no choice,’ she said.
In America one policeman lost the use of his right arm, although there was nothing wrong with him physically, after an armed robber shot his partner dead. He returned fire and killed a child playing in a park behind the bandit.
Police and so-called experts have been trying to find non-deadly weapons to use against mentally-disturbed offenders. The New York police have tested a spiderman-type sticky net which can be fired from a gun or thrown by hand. The net is designed to immobilise offenders. Capsicum spray, which temporarily blinds offenders, has been introduced as standard issue for Victorian police. Stun guns have been given trials, but the facts remain straightforward.
Police are paid to do a job and have the same rights as anyone else. If their lives are in danger they can kill on the grounds of self defence. They do not have to be heroes.
Trish Carl’s duty that morning was to stay alive and to come home to her family. While she knows she did nothing wrong, the events of 12 November, 1996, have left their mark on her family. Having always told their children that police don’t hurt people and are there to help those in trouble, the Carls had to tell the youngsters their mother had killed a woman.
Jessie seemed to understand. She drew pictures of her mother and wrote of a lady with a knife who died. At the time, they thought her younger brother, Jake, then three, was too young to understand.
Almost 20 months after the shooting the family was playing. Trish asked her son, ‘What does dad do?’ Jake replied proudly, ‘He’s a policeman.’ Then she asked ‘What does mum do?’ He answered, ‘She kills people.’
‘It sort of knocked me for six,’ said the boy’s mother.
But Jessie obviously dwelled on the matter, too. She was at a family friend’s house when she helped clear up after a meal. An adult commented on how helpful she was and she said, ‘Oh yes, I’ll do anything except kill someone.’
Even though Trish Carl wanted to tell her story publicly, she was advised by her lawyers not to give evidence at the inquest, a decision she understood, but it still left her frustrated.
‘I feel I was deprived of my chance to say what happened, to have my say. All I wanted to do was to say what happened’.
For a year after the shooting she dreaded policing. ‘I loved it before the shooting, but I lost interest in work.’ She admitted that if she could have found another secure job, she would have quit.
She decided to throw herself into her work, to get the buzz back. ‘I’ve started to enjoy it again, but it’s not the same.’ With both partners working in the same station there are ups and downs. They understand the pressures, but are acutely aware of the dangers.
When his wife works nightshift, Andrew drifts over to check the roster. If her partner is a good copper he rests a little bit easier, but if he has doubts about the ability of the partner he worries and is restless until the week of shift work is over.
Trish says she cannot sleep when Andrew is on nightshift. ‘It’s worse than doing the shift yourself.’
Nearly two years after the shooting, Trish Carl was called to a mundane disturbance. She found a mentally unstable woman with a knife. She talked her around and took her to hospital, where she was certified. It was all in a night’s work.