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Networked Knowledge - Book Reports [This edited version of the report has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles] Debi Marshall homepage

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On 26 May 2007 the Sunday Times reported “Lost in the Devil's Garden” [Debi Marshall talks to Danielle Benda]. Under attack by WA Police for her yet-to-be-released book on the Claremont serial killings, true crime writer and journalist Debi Marshall talked to Danielle Benda: The usually hard-bitten police officer let his sensitivities show only occasionally as he took Debi Marshall around the significant sites in the Claremont serial killings. “Once having seen, you can’t unsee,” he says. “You can’t get rid of the visions from your head. They hang around and haunt you. Forever.” It’s a sentiment that resonated deeply with Marshall who, as a Queensland-based journalist and author, has built her career writing about some of the most awful crimes in Australia. Having just finished books about the Snowtown killings in South Australia and the abduction and murder of Queensland baby Deirdre Kennedy, Marshall, 48, says she already felt drenched in blood last year when she turned her attention to Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon who disappeared from the streets of Claremont in 1996 and 1997. “You can’t unsee what you have seen – I really related to that,” she says. “At the end of Snowtown I was having these really horrendous nightmares. We are all pretty tough as journalists, you know, we are trained for it, but some things we are not trained for. After that I thought ‘Enough. No more of these tales’.” But the Claremont murders had been on her mind since she first heard about a killer stalking Perth’s beautiful young women in the heart of one of its most comfortable suburbs when she was crime writer at a national weekly magazine. “I had been thinking about the story for ages,” she says. “I think the fact that my daughter was the same age (18) as one of the victims ... I kept looking at her and thinking ‘I wonder who took those girls in the West?’,” she says. “It’s a scary thought to think that if we ignore these things, they just go under the carpet.” And there was the old pull of crime. “I like writing about crime – it has a real fascination for me,” she says. “And I kept thinking about the parents, what they were going through. What it would be like to live with it?” And once more she found herself immersed in a tale of searing horror and bottomless sorrow. She was moved to tears, frustrated, scared and shaken to the core by her experiences researching this story. “I didn’t realise how hard it was going to be. It was complicated, heartbreaking and very, very scary,” she says. In the end it was her experiences with the parents of the missing women, torn apart by grief and not knowing, that made her most determined to follow the story through. “They get into your soul, the parents and the girls, you walk with them in the end,” Marshall says.“Jenny Rimmer said to me ‘I thought you may have given up. - it’s good you haven’t’. “I just really hope something comes of this book.” The book is The Devil’s Garden and it recalls the rising panic Perth people felt in January 1996 when 18-year-old Sarah Spiers vanished off a street near Club Bayview after an evening out with friends. A few months later Jane Rimmer, 23, went missing from the same area late at night. Then in March 1997, 27-year-old Ciara Glennon disappeared from the same place. The naked body of Jane Rimmer was found in bushland south of Perth. Ciara Glennon’s body was discovered in scrub at Eglinton to the north. Sarah has not been found. In the book, Marshall pulls together all the information she can find about the women, their personalities, their families and their last movements. She evokes the carefree party atmosphere of the area’s nightspots and the sickening shock of the women’s disappearances. Then she casts her gaze over the massive police operation that followed and the formation of the Macro taskforce to investigate the murders. And it is this aspect of her story that she found perhaps most disturbing of all. Marshall describes a police force which is highly secretive and defensive and which focused so much attention on one man – public servant Lance Williams – that it did not follow up leads and allegations about other possible suspects. “I believe there is a hell of a lot more that could be done. Should be done,” she says. “They (the police) seemed to become fixated with Lance Williams and I was unnerved about that. If they have the evidence they should charge him.” And further, Marshall believes that by releasing Williams’s details and constantly – and often overtly – tailing him, Perth people were given false assurances, believing that even if they could not charge Williams, the police had prevented further killings. “They led the public to think, ‘We’re OK, we’ve got our man’ and everything was geared to that end. I came out with a great sense of disquiet,” she says. “Someone is out there who is a serial killer. Where is he? Perth women can’t afford to be complacent. “He may have died, he may have gone to another city, but he could just as easily come back.” Marshall believes there are other assaults and murders that could be linked to the Claremont killer and there were other people – and one in particular – who also warranted further serious investigation. “I was gobsmacked at some of the leads that weren’t chased,” she says. “It was really disturbing for me.” While the police investigation also left the reputations of a few men in tatters, she herself was unable to include some of the information because of legal constraints. But in her efforts to discover just who and what the police had looked into, she ran into a blue wall of silence. While the WA police verbally agreed to talk to her, they refused once she arrived in Perth last year researching the book, claiming there was nothing to be gained by talking about an ongoing investigation. Just weeks before her deadline late last year, they switched again and Marshall was allowed to speak to some of the senior investigators who had worked on the case. But not Dave Caporn, the high-profile head of the Macro taskforce for several years. Part of the reason given for this was the ongoing Corruption and Crime Commission investigation into the wrongful conviction of Andrew Mallard for the murder of Mosman Park jewellery shop owner Pamela Lawrence in 1994, a case in which Caporn was also closely involved. “And the police culture was like a real boys’ club. - they would almost pat me on the head and say, run along, your boyfriend’s waiting,” she says. “I think this sort of attitude really hindered the investigation, a terrible arrogance, a blind arrogance. “I don’t believe there was any corruption, I think they suffered from tunnel vision and this arrogant attitude of ‘We know what we’re doing and we’re not going to share it with you’ – ‘you’ being anyone outside the taskforce. “And then they would say, ‘Well, how does she know what we did?’. It was a merry-go-round. There was one name (that) when I mentioned it, they would smirk at me enigmatically and say, ‘It’s an ongoing investigation, we can’t tell you that, we are not going to admit that’.” One exception to this was Paul Ferguson, head of Major Crime at the time of the Claremont murders who, Marshall says, tells it like it is. Others were open but not prepared to be identified. But Deputy Commissioner Murray Lampard defends the WA Police’s position with Marshall, confirming that they refused to let her inside the Macro investigation. “Does she truly believe that investigators of any major case, never mind serial killings, should be talking about sensitive information and operational tactics in public and in the media?” he asks. “We don’t believe the public, nor the victims’ families, want that.” He says WA police wear the “blue wall of silence” tag surrounding Macro as a badge of honour: “It is a practice used widely by law enforcement agencies throughout the world.” Mr Lampard also accuses Marshall of being insensitive towards the victims of the Claremont serial killer and their families. “WA Police have endeavoured over the years to protect the sensitivity and integrity of the families involved,” he says. “This book really is a crass attempt to cash in one of WA’s biggest tragedies.” Mr Lampard says he believes Marshall has unfairly targeted Dave Caporn, one of four officers who headed the Macro taskforce. “The personal attacks on Dave Caporn are quite frankly shameful,” he says. And he strongly denies that the investigation ever got tunnel vision: “The Macro investigation is not, and has never been, focused on one line of inquiry or one individual.” But Marshall says she is not the only one unimpressed with the police attitude. While she says Don Spiers and Denis Glennon would not tolerate criticism of the police, in whom they had placed their trust to find their daughters’ killer, Jane Rimmer’s parents were not so convinced. “They were not happy,” Marshall says. “Trevor Rimmer said ‘Where is my daughter and what are they doing?’. They (the police) forget that the taxpayers are funding them. We’re paying these guys and we have a right to ask, we have a right to know, what has actually been done.” Marshall also believes the investigation into the Claremont killings was a casualty of a changing police culture where career police officers were promoted over old-school coppers. “The overriding problems were two-fold. First, it was so secretive, and still is, and they were not inviting the feedback that you need to get. And that was combined with all that change in policy where administration was to the forefront,” Marshall says. Mr Lampard points out that Macro has been reviewed 11 times, making it the most reviewed investigation in WA history. None has identified any errors or oversights, he says. Each review made recommendations which were accepted and implemented. Those recommendations sought to enhance investigative and forensic work already done. Mr Lampard says Marshall writes about Macro as “a catalogue of disasters” yet the review team (which was made up of forensic, profiling and homicide experts from the UK, the US and Australia and headed by Superintendent Paul Schramm) found there were no problems with the taskforce work. But Marshall says most of the reviews were conducted internally. “There were so many reviews and so much money spent, but you have got to ask ‘Who is marking the report card?’. That struck me, who’s doing it? They are not very independent – you are getting coppers looking at coppers,” she says. Marshall believes another reason for this investigation’s lack of accountability is the small pool of journalists in Perth who rely on having cordial relations with police to get stories. “The reality is that they need to go out and deal with the police on a day-to-day basis. I’m not attacking journalists. That’s not what I wanted to do. They are probably not in the position I’m in. I can fly in, kick up a bit of dust and fly out again,” she says. “But I did have the situation where people would say ‘No one’s ever asked us these questions before’, which used to alarm me a little bit.” Marshall says it is impossible to look into the Claremont investigation without taking a wider look at police culture in WA and the large number of miscarriage of justice cases going back as far as the 1960s. Key parts of the book are set against the backdrop of the Andrew Mallard case and the Kennedy Royal Commission into police corruption. “It was a very complex tale,” she says. “It was like working on a big jigsaw puzzle – the more I got into it, there were just layers and layers and layers. There were tentacles going out into other stories everywhere.” Marshall also includes the cases of Hayley Dodd and Sarah McMahon who disappeared in 1999 and 2000. She believes the police have not exhausted the possibility that they – Sarah, in particular – could also be victims of the Claremont killer. “I do think she could be a victim, yes, I do. There is no way you can wipe it out,” she says. But Mr Lampard dismisses this allegation out of hand. “Ms Marshall speculates often about how many other victims of the Claremont serial killer there are, yet the world-renowned Schramm review panel of experts found no evidence of any links with 24 other cases of murdered or missing women in WA,” he says. “The book devotes many pages to rehashing the handful of well-documented miscarriage of justice cases in WA over the past four decades or so. To even hint that there is any connection between those cases and Macro is misleading and dishonest.” Marshall believes the police are unwilling to admit there could be more victims because it would expose the shortcomings of their investigations. “My opinion is that there are more than three victims," she says. "The police are doing a good job of keeping that as tightly wrapped as possible. But, say there is a best-case scenario where someone puts their hand up and the case is solved but they say ‘I did eight’, it’s not going to look real good is it? “I know it sounds alarmist, but if people in Perth aren’t feeling unnerved, they should be. I was unnerved. I talked to young people at Claremont and asked them if they knew about Sarah Spiers, but it was like she was a ghost – not real any more. They think it’s not going to happen to them, but there have been cases where they (serial killers) have been lying low for up to 20 years and then suddenly - bang. “I hope people in WA will read (this book) because I think they need to. It needs to be read and talked about by the public and the police as well. I would like to think there is a broader readership across Australia as well. It is an Australian story. “When I first said I was going to write this story people would look at me astounded and say ‘You can’t do that, it hasn’t got an ending. It’s unsolved, the readers are going to want to have a resolution’. Well, they can’t have one. We can’t have one. That’s the point. “It needs to be remembered how hideous this is. It could be our daughters. That is the reality. I do think he is out there.” MURDER MOST FOUL In February 2006, Debi Marshall was told that police involved in the Claremont serial killings investigation would finally talk to her for her book, and she was taken to the sites where the bodies of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon were found. Here is an edited extract of that first emotional day: Detective Senior-Sergeant Anthony Lee and Senior-Sergeant Ken Sanderson, a forensic specialist, meet me near where I am staying. Forty-year-old Lee, with rugby player shoulders, is imposingly tall and wears a slightly arrogant air. Sanderson – older, ginger-haired and with a gentler attitude – does not appear as hard-bitten. Forensic investigation is a less abrasive field than working the mean streets as a detective. Sanderson swings the unmarked police car out of South Perth and heads toward Stirling Highway. It will be a long day, starting with the disposal site of Jane Rimmer, moving to Claremont and on to where Ciara Glennon’s body was found. There is a tacit camaraderie between Lee and Sanderson. That’s not surprising: police work is tough, the reason why camaraderie is so entrenched in the force. They protect each other and protect themselves, as soldiers did in the trenches; part of their mateship ethos. Police work their way up through the ranks, coming into daily contact with the sordid side of life. But it’s this that bedevils them most, the murder of innocents and the girls who never came home. The despair on their parents’ faces when they knock on the door with the news. “I’m sorry to tell you, we believe we have found your daughter.” Lee is only too acutely aware of it all, and it is in talking about this that his sensitivities show. “Once having seen, you can’t unsee,” he says. “You can’t get rid of the visions from your head. They hang around and haunt you. Forever.” We cruise along Stirling Highway. With Lee free to talk, it’s a good time to start the taped interview.“Why is this investigation so secretive?” I ask him. He turns from the front seat. “If we open up the case to journalists, how does that help the investigation? It doesn’t. It just means the paper has got a good story. If they are critical of the police, we’re not interested. That’s not arrogance – it’s just that we’ve consulted with all the people we should be consulting with. “The fact is, with unsolved cases we’re always going to reach a level of controversy. That’s the nature of the beast.” It seems a reasonable point. “And you’ve reached it, have you?” “We’ve well and truly reached it. We probably reached it after two years in the Claremont case. People are asking ‘Are we competent? Are we good enough to do the job anyway? Are we big enough to handle this?’. And my answer is I’m confident that police have been innovative in their approach and looked at the case as broadly as we can. And the review came out and said the things we are doing are world best practice. Designed and innovated here in Western Australia.” DM: “What sort of things?”

AL: “I’ll leave that for Dave Caporn to talk to you about.” Dave Caporn. As the face of the investigation during its most critical period, he is the one Macro officer I am most hoping to speak with. DM: “Macro has copped a lot of criticism, not least over the fact that these crimes are still unsolved. What is your reaction to that?”

AL: “I think I’ve just given you an insight into that. The reviews weren’t critical.” Those reviews. They rear their heads at every opportunity. DM: “But isn’t that part of the criticism? That the police have been too insular, in waiting too long to look outside Western Australia? Isn’t that intrinsic to the criticism?” He leans around from the front seat of the car again. “How long’s too long?” DM: “Ten years, probably.”

AL: “It hasn’t been 10 years!” It is February 2006. The first known disappearance was January 1996. The murders have been unsolved for 10 years; the first complete and independent review in 2004 – eight years. He is splitting straws. I let it go. DM: “I would like to know what has been done, and by whom and when.” Lee nods. “It is the public’s fundamental right to ask, are they getting the service they pay for from the state?” “That’s right.” I agree. “Certainly the people I’ve spoken to in the short time I’ve been in Perth – general members of the public say they feel discouraged, ripped off. The attitude is ‘Why don’t the cops do something?’. They seem to deeply resent the lack of transparency.” Lee noticeably bristles. “Why should we lay bare the facts if it’s going to compromise the investigation? Why should we?” DM: “Because people are saying they feel they have a false sense of security, they are blindly walking around in the dark and that no one, least of all the police, knows who this serial killer is. They want the investigation back on track.”

AL: “How do you know it’s not on track already?” He has taken his sunglasses off and is in a half-turn, staring at me. “How do you know it’s not on track already?” DM: “But it isn’t, is it.” “Does the perception of the community outweigh the needs of investigation?” Lee asks. He doesn’t wait for my response. “If we did release information, what purpose would it serve and will it help our case? The simple answer, I believe, is no.” I ask “(Why) would you stay on overt surveillance of Lance Williams for years and years? The community knows you’re looking at him, he knows you’re looking at him.” AL: “Yep.”

DM: “He’s never charged...”

AL: “Yep.”

DM: “Bucketloads of money have gone into it.”

AL: “Yep. Relatively large amounts of money.”

DM: “Which the taxpayer is funding.”

AL: “Yep. Fair enough.”

DM: “So the community has a right, doesn’t it, to demand to know why you did that. Where their money has gone? To ask what has it achieved?”

AL: “Yep.”

DM: “So what has it achieved? Anything?”

AL: “I don’t know.” He smiles. “There hasn’t been a murder since then.” His smile turns to outright laughter and now I’m finally getting what he is saying without him articulating it. DM: “Right. So there apparently hasn’t been a murder for 10 years. If you take that by extension then it could be Lance Williams, but you just don’t have enough to charge him with?” Now I’m laughing. “It does sound a little like ‘We let John Button go, but we still know we had the right bloke’.” “How do you know we don’t with Claremont?” he asks, before turning back to look out the front window. We move to another topic. “Why won’t the police release modus operandi?” The modus operandi, he says, needs to be kept secret so that in the event of someone coming forward and making admissions about a murder, police can validate that admission. “And as for suspects: a number of people in Perth, by virtue of their odd behaviour, have been extensively investigated, in effect creating a database of information about their activities,” he says. I ask if they have investigated a particular individual, whom I name. “No comment,” he says. “You’ll have to talk to Dave Caporn about that.” Caporn. I am starting to feel as if I am shadow-boxing with a silent partner, a phantom. Lee concedes the individual I have named is known as a character in Perth, that he is a possibility. But he wants to return to discussing miscarriage of justice cases in Western Australia; he can’t understand their relevance to the Claremont story. I can’t understand why he needs to even query why. “Because,” I remind him, “people are scared. If police can get it wrong in other cases – and there is no doubt they have – what does that say about how they have handled Claremont?” We come upon it, suddenly, a white cross on the verge of this overgrown rural track. No lilies now in the scorching heat of this summer day, but trees that grow wild, their branches entangled as if united in prayer. A freight railway line is close, rusted iron sheeting abandoned on nearby slips and horses graze in paddocks high with brambles. Woolcoot Rd at Wellard is still and quiet, even in the prime of the day. Still and quiet, even as the softest breeze whispers that we should step carefully, here in front of the cross that marks Jane Rimmer’s disposal site. I close my eyes and try to imagine what had happened 10 years earlier. A car creeping along this track under cover of darkness and crawling to a halt, just here. The driver checking there are no signs of headlights from an approaching vehicle, no one watching his furtive movements as he drags Jane’s lifeless body out of the vehicle and down into this lonely verge. He would be hurried, perhaps now slightly panicked, as he covers her with light foliage. It is obscene to imagine that the Rimmers’ beloved daughter and adored sister was picked up and tossed away. This awful place doesn’t fit the smiling young woman whose photos adorn her family home, whose spirit lingers over all her parents’ conversations. The highway leading to Eglinton is ringed with houses now, but it wasn’t always so. In 1997, when Ciara Glennon was in the vehicle in which she travelled to this place, it was a long, lonely stretch of emptiness. To travel through the city traffic from Claremont, stop at red lights, cruise through the suburbs and head out to the bush, would then have been a one-hour drive. A high-risk drive, with a young woman in the car who was either scared for her life, or already dead. One mistake and a police car could have pulled the driver over. Just one error of judgment, the smallest slip. Or was her killer so confident, so psychopathic, that nothing bothered him? The police car turns off Pipidinny Rd and turns left into a rough dirt track before it comes to a stop. From this vantage point, the killer could have seen headlights approaching; fishermen or sporting enthusiasts on their way to the sea. It is an uncomfortably hot day and Lee advises I take care as I follow him and Ken Sanderson through the scrub to the site. The area, he warns, is teeming with ticks that latch on like leeches and which can cause a nasty infection if not carefully dislodged. I gingerly pick up my feet as I follow Lee of the track and into deeper scrub. Then, suddenly, there it is. A white cross, placed by the police as a sign of respect and as a marker for future officers who need to find the site. A terrible reminder of a life cut short. I stare down at the cross and feel a roiling somersault in my gut. Ciara Glennon – brilliant, young, vibrant – dumped here where she would lie for 19 days before she was discovered in this godforsaken, remote place. God only knows what happened to her before her killer wrenched the claddagh brooch from her as a trophy, a memento. Crows wheel overhead, their harsh caw piercing the still air and the cloudless sky offers no protection from a fierce sun. It feels like we are in Hades. Anthony Lee, privy to the terrible facts of Ciara’s murder, has set his jaw hard, and grimaces. Sanderson shakes his head, staring down at the cross. I realise I am crying, and turn from the desolate place before they notice, and stumble back to the car. There is a bleak silence before any of us speak again, nothing to say of any consequence: nothing, except to speak of the futility of it all; the terrible, tragic futility. Ken pulls the police car off the track, gripping the steering wheel hard. When he speaks, his voice is barely audible. “It could have been anyone’s daughter,” he says. “Anyone’s daughter.” It has been a long, sultry and emotional day. My understanding is that the next morning Lee will facilitate interviews with other officers who had worked on Macro and furnish material to me that I had requested. It isn’t to be. Instead, I am afforded only a telephone call. “You’re not going to like this, Debi,” Lee begins with a hint of genuine apology. “No police officers are allowed to speak to you.” I am stunned. “Why not?” “Sorry, I can’t tell you that. I am not at liberty to discuss it with you any further.” “Why wasn’t I told this before I came to Perth?” “Sorry.” I sense that he is. Younger, less entrenched in the patronising attitude often afforded the media by older officers, Lee can see the benefits of a healthy relationship with the press. But his hands are tied. “I can only advise you to put your grievance in writing to the commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan.” Bewildered, I take his advice. Top of Page The materials on this site are the copyright of Networked Knowledge. Copyright Notice The Networked Knowledge web site is hosted and maintained by Howstat Computing Services as a community service. Enquiries to webmaster@howstat.com