Inside Their Minds: Australian Criminals

ROCHELLE JACKSON was born in Melbourne and grew up in a police family. She is an author and a journalist. Rochelle published her first book In Your Face: The life and times of Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley (ABC Books) in July 2005. This book was shortlisted in the 2006 Ned Kelly Awards for Australian Crime Writing and the 2006 Davitt Awards.

Rochelle is an experienced investigative journalist. She began her career in country Victoria and Sydney working in television and radio. She has been a TV producer and investigative journalist for Today Tonight, Australian Story, Watchdog, George Negus’s New Dimensions, SBS TV and Radio services, and TV NZ’s 60 Minutes. She specialises in crime and police stories and produced a four-part series about bushfire arson for the ABC’s Radio National.

Rochelle also worked for the NSW Police Service producing internal TV bulletins and promotional videos. Rochelle is currently based in Melbourne and working as a freelance journalist. Her new book, Partners in Crime, will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2012.

Visit Rochelle’s website at www.rochellejackson.com.au

This revised and updated edition published in 2011

First published in 2008

Copyright © Rochelle Jackson 2008, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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Acknowledgments

Introduction

Martin Bryant, mass murderer

—‘From little things, big things grow’

Karen Ellis, sex offender

—‘A crime of passion’

Ivan Milat, serial killer

—‘Like father, like son’

Peter Burgess, arsonist

—‘Burning ambition’

Brenden Abbott, armed robber and escapee

—‘Catch me if you can’

Kathleen Folbigg, serial killer

—‘One in a trillion’

Matthew Wales, murderer

—‘Mother knows best’

Carl Williams, gangland killer

—‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’

Epilogue

References

Many thanks to Sergeant Mark Wakefield for his assistance. A special thanks to Bob and Joye Godden for all their help and hospitality. Many thanks to Clive Small and John Stewart for their help with the Milats.

A big thank you to Sergeant Bill Green and Superintendent Brett Henderson for their help and patience. Thank you to Charlie Barham, Detective Sergeant Jeff Beaman and Detective Inspector Ian Robertson. Thanks to Detective Sergeant Glenn Swannell for his help. A special thank you to Derek Pedley for his help with ‘the Postcard Bandit’ and thank you to Thelma for trusting that I’d get it right.

To Mandi and Brian Welch and their family; Elly, Zachary and Jye. Thanks for your great hospitality and a special thank you to Brian for driving me around the state! A huge thank you to Gerry Billing for her wonderful support and hospitality every time I visit.

Thanks to Lea and Ted Bown for their courage to speak to me. Thanks to Detective Inspector Bernie Ryan for his assistance. Thanks very much to John Warren for his help with the Bryant chapter. Thanks to Detective Sergeant Henry Van Veenendaal for his help with the ‘Society Murders’ and a big thanks to Jim O’Brien for his assistance. A special thanks to George Williams for letting me into his world.

A heartfelt thank you to my wonderful agent, Selwa Anthony, and to Allen & Unwin’s Editorial Director Rebecca Kaiser for their belief in my concept and for their incredible support. Thank you to editor Lauren Finger for her skill, patience and endless support.

Finally, a huge thank you to forensic psychologist Ian Joblin for all his help, support and expertise in the writing of this book. Without his assistance, it simply wouldn’t have been written. Thank you for all your time and effort in what continues to be a fascinating journey!

I’ve always been fascinated with ‘the story behind the story’. As a journalist I’ve worked on many crime and police stories about missing persons, international fraud, armed robbers, organised crime figures and murder investigations. What’s always intrigued me is the psychology and motivation of criminals to commit their crimes, but I had little chance to pursue this fascination when working as a journalist; you often don’t have the time or the luxury to analyse the complexities behind the basic premises of who, why, what, where and how.

The opportunity to explore my interest came when I wrote my first book, the biography of Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley, a man described as Australia’s godfather of crime. As I wrote his story I became engrossed in what had ‘created’ Billy. The book required extensive research and interviews with his family, friends and foes. Surprisingly, this old-time villain and convicted murderer came from a stable, law-abiding, middle-class background. So, what happened? Was it in his nature or the way he was nurtured? Was he born ‘bad’ or did he become a criminal to survive?

I explored and researched Billy’s background and interviewed him many times, but at the end of writing his biography, I still wasn’t able to answer these bigger questions. Today, knowing more about the criminal mind, I believe Billy turned to crime out of necessity and because of the tough Depression years. This, combined with being a natural rebel, having a violent temper and a hatred of being ‘stood over’, created the person he became.

My fascination with criminal psychology continued when I produced a series for Radio National’s ‘Bush Telegraph’ program about bushfire arson. I managed to convince a convicted arsonist, ‘John’, to speak. John had been found guilty of lighting 25 fires in Australia. It was an intriguing interview and I wasn’t the only one interested in what motivated the former volunteer firefighter. After the interview our program was swamped with listeners’ calls. People were compelled by John and his story—it’s rare to get a glimpse into a criminal’s mind and motivations and when we do, we’re intrigued.

The middle classes have always been fascinated by the edgy world of crime and criminals. You only have to look at the huge popularity of ‘true crime’ books, TV series and movies. We love experiencing the darker side of humanity from a distance—but we don’t want to live it. We want to explore the underbelly and peer into the worlds that we can’t, and really don’t want to, access.

Psychologists and sociologists have been questioning why people commit crimes for centuries. Throughout the ages, theories about what motivates a criminal changed as frequently as the dominant school of thought. For example, during the mid-nineteenth century, it was believed you could identify a criminal by the shape of their head and facial features. It was also thought individuals were responsible for their circumstances, so a life of crime was their choice. This theory was later rejected and reversed, and it was suggested that it was actually a person’s circumstances which were responsible for turning someone into a criminal. More recently, it was believed a person’s biological make-up and genetics were to blame.

Although most police will tell you crime is the result of desire plus opportunity, those who scientifically examine crimes and criminal behaviour, the criminologists, look for a deeper explanation. They examine a person’s biology and genetics, but also explore other sociological factors, asking questions like: are social class and crime related?

When I decided to write this book, I approached one of Australia’s leading forensic psychologists, Ian Joblin, to assist me. It was crucial I work with an expert and someone able to understand the psychology of some of Australia’s most infamous criminals.

Forensic psychologists are concerned with the criminal mind and behaviour. The term ‘forensic’ comes from the Latin forensis meaning ‘of the forum’. It refers to the ancient Roman Forum and the functions of its court. Today, the forensic psychologist is a key player in the criminal justice system, whether they are working for the prosecution or the defence.

In the 30 years he has worked as a forensic psychologist, Ian Joblin has assessed 32000 offenders. He collects, examines and presents evidence about criminals for judicial purposes. He does this by interviewing the offender until he understands what has motivated them to do what they’ve been charged with. He explores their background, childhood and personality. He will diagnose them according to the mental health professional’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition. The DSM IV Manual is a clinical tool written by the American Psychiatric Association. Health professionals use this manual to diagnose their patients’ mental and behavioural disorders. Joblin must work out if his ‘client’ is fit to plead, understands the charges against them and can follow legal proceedings. To do this Joblin may assess their intelligence and sanity by conducting a number of neuropsychological tests. He then prepares a report for the courts which is read by the judge. His reports often influence an offender’s sentence.

After working with Ian I’ve learnt you can’t define what makes a criminal. There are no definite circumstances, biological traits or social settings that determine a person’s likelihood of becoming a criminal. However, we do know the way in which someone is brought up greatly influences their psychological imprinting. We learn from our immediate family or caregivers about love, conflict, violence, relationships and the world around us. The way we view the world mirrors our background, behaviour and attitudes. You can’t separate a person’s background from the person, any more than you can the crime from the criminal.

I’ve discovered that as a child, any major trauma or violation of our expectations and perceptions of how we think the world should be can create significant psychological conflict that needs to be resolved. This trauma could be caused by divorce, personal violence, alcohol or drugs, and how the child responds to this violation depends on their personality, make-up, history and environment. One way of coping is to copy the behaviour they see—so they may become violent, abuse substances or do other antisocial things which mirror that pattern of behaviour. Mental health problems can lead to criminal behaviour—but just because someone is mentally disturbed, it doesn’t mean they’ll become a criminal.

Most criminal behaviour is a response to an identifiable problem. It’s how we as a society deal with these people that reveals much about us. In Australia in the last decade, our jail populations have nearly doubled, most inmates are illiterate or have drug and alcohol addictions, and close to a third have a mental illness, physical disability or intellectual disability. Over half will reoffend. If we understood more about offenders, their psychology and why they turn to crime maybe we could stop the cycle. There are no conclusive answers to this increasingly complex problem, but jails aren’t working. Our corrective services are more about punishment than rehabilitation and proving to be a costly and unsuccessful way of dealing with crime. Most police I spoke to in the course of writing this book agree with this view.

This book examines the backgrounds of eight well-known Australian criminals, from mass murderer Martin Bryant to sex offender Karen Ellis to serial killer Ivan Milat.

I hope this book gives different perspectives about these criminals and fresh insights into their lives. I want to encourage readers to think more broadly about what makes people criminals. I certainly don’t condone crime or acts of violence against anyone, but it’s not black and white and I discovered the more you look, the more you see. It’s always more difficult to understand people than to sit in judgment of them.

I was working for a TV current affairs program in April 1996 when I heard about the massacre at Port Arthur in Tasmania. The footage that came down the line will stay with me forever.

It was late Sunday afternoon. Twenty-nine-year-old Martin Bryant was holed up in a cottage named ‘Seascape’, against 20 police officers from the elite Special Operations Group (SOG) drawn from the Victorian and Tasmanian police force. The SOG are a highly trained, specialist crack unit designed to protect, rescue and resolve high-risk events such as kidnappings, bombings and counter-terrorism incidents. Earlier that day, Bryant had established himself as Australia’s first mass murderer by killing 35 people at Port Arthur.

At the siege in the fading light, there was a lot of confusion among police ranks. Mobile phones didn’t work in the south-east corner of the state, so communication between the command post at Port Arthur and the SOG commander at Seascape was almost impossible. No-one knew what was happening. Bryant was shooting at the police with two semi-automatic assault rifles—one with a 30-round capacity and another with a 20-round potential. He’d also hidden nine guns in the cottage’s roof-gutters. Bryant was firing rounds repeatedly and bullets were whizzing past, just missing police on the ground. Throughout the night, he would fire 250 rounds out of the windows. All that night, two young uniformed policemen who’d been shot at would lay huddled in a ditch covered in leeches, in fear of their lives.

Tasmania Police had never experienced a situation like this. They had no idea how many hostages the gunman had, what he wanted or even who he was. Experienced police negotiator Sergeant Terry McCarthy had to find out. A special telephone line from Hobart was set up. Bryant was calling himself ‘Jamie’. He told the sergeant he’d taken three hostages: Seascape owners Sally and David Martin, and another person, Glen Pears.

McCarthy: Okay, you say that all three persons are in the same room?

Bryant: Yes.

McCarthy: Okay, and there’s nobody hurt at this stage?

Bryant: Um none at all, no.

McCarthy: What about yourself, are you alright?

Bryant: Yeah I’m fine.

During these conversations, Crown forensic psychiatrist Dr Ian Sale helped the police negotiating team. He expected to hear the usual—a very angry, intoxicated and depressed male making all sorts of threats—but was astonished when he heard Bryant’s voice. ‘There was a lack of affect; it was casual, there was no anger, no paranoid feeling, no signs of intoxication. The voice was effeminate and playful. I must say this utterly bewildered me and threw me into an absolute spin as to what we were dealing with.’

McCarthy: Right, you’re gonna let the two go for the helicopter are you?

Bryant: [Inaudible]

McCarthy: Why are you going to take Sally?

Bryant: Oh she easy isn’t she; she’s a female isn’t she?

McCarthy: Right, well okay.

Bryant: I mean she’s going lash out at, she won’t lash out at anything or me?

McCarthy: Well, I don’t think anybody’s going to lash out with you if you’ve got all those guns you’ve got.

Bryant: They’re not all mine, a lot of them I found them upstairs here so.

LATER

McCarthy: How’s things going in there mate?

Bryant: Fine, couldn’t be better, just like on a Hawaiian holiday.

McCarthy: Hawaiian holiday?

Bryant: Yes, that’s correct sir.

McCarthy: Oh, I’m sorry I don’t understand what you mean by that.

Bryant: Well I’m looking forward to my helicopter ride, man. When are you gonna tee up this helicopter ride?

**

The memories of dealing with mass murderer Martin Bryant still haunt retired Tasmanian policeman John Warren. I interviewed the tall, barrel-chested former detective who headed up the Port Arthur Task Force and found the case had a profound effect on him. He’s been unable to revisit the historic site since the tragedy and doubts he ever will.

On 28 April 1996, Detective Inspector John Warren was doing some fencing on his block at Collinsvale, out of Hobart. ‘The phone rang and they said I would have to come in, there had been a report of 12 people being shot at Port Arthur.’ He called his second-in-charge, Detective Sergeant Tony Bennett. Twenty police from the Eastern Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) and uniform sections met at police headquarters. They were told there was ‘a gunman at large’, which was all that was known at the time. The SOG was placed on standby. Detective Warren and his team headed down to Port Arthur, unaware of what they were heading into.

It was dusk as John Warren and his crew drove past the Port Arthur tollbooth. They were almost run over by a speeding ambulance, several cars and an SES truck full of emergency service workers desperate to get out. ‘I asked them What’s going on? They said, We’ve just got word the gunman is coming back towards the cafe! It was chaos. No-one knew what was happening.’

What those officers saw that evening would remain etched in their psyche. ‘It was like we were driving into a war zone. Everyone was dead. So many people had been killed. Bryant had used a high-calibre weapon so the bodies weren’t a pretty sight. Inside the cafe, at one exit point, there were five bodies stacked on top of one another.’

As they drove further inside Port Arthur, stopping to cover the bodies and take notes, the senior detective wondered what sort of a person was capable of doing this?

It wasn’t a typical day for Martin Bryant. He rose earlier than usual—at 6 am, having set his alarm clock the night before. He and his girlfriend, Petra, didn’t eat breakfast or go for a walk like they normally did. Bryant seemed keen on getting her out of the house. He placed three high-powered semi-automatic guns in the boot of his yellow Volvo sedan with the surfboard on top and kissed Petra goodbye, promising her he’d see her tomorrow morning and ‘they’d do something’. It was 9.47 am when Martin Bryant left his New Town house—he was a man with a mission. But as he headed to Seascape cottage, he had time to stop and buy a cup of coffee and $15 worth of petrol, and to gaze at the natural wonders of the nearby Roaring Beach. At 12.30 pm, he reached Seascape. He left ten minutes later, having killed owners David and Sally Martin in cold blood.

Bryant was heading towards Port Arthur. At 1.10 pm he reached the tollgate, telling the security guard he wanted to ‘park by the water’. He parked in the lower car park and around 1.20 pm was seen waiting in a line for food at the Broad Arrow Cafe, holding a large bag and a video camera.

At 1.30 pm, after eating his meal outside and trying to talk to a female tourist, Martin Bryant re-entered the cafe and took out his AR-15 rifle. The first two people he killed were tourists from Malaysia. He fired 17 shots, killing 12 people. In the next 75 seconds, moving through the cafe and gift shop, he killed eight more and wounded many others. Time froze in the sudden horror taking place. A man having his lunch was shot dead, still holding his cutlery—food suspended on the end of his fork. Bryant fired 29 rounds in all. He shot methodically and at times was less than two metres from his victims.

Maree Broome was one of many people having lunch with friends at the cafe that day. ‘He was quite a tall boy and very slim. And he was so pale. And pretty. But nothing in his face. No face. Just blank. There was nothing at all, no expression, no hate, no joy. The thing that really got me was the way he moved—he was prancing, sort of loping.’

Bryant exited the cafe, firing shots towards the penitentiary ruins and the bus parking area, before getting another rifle from the boot of his Volvo. He walked to the bus parking area, killed another four people and wounded several others. He then returned to his vehicle and drove to the tollbooth where he killed seven people: three members of the Mikac family and the four occupants of a BMW, which he commandeered.

Bryant then drove to the Port Arthur shop. He walked over to a car and forced Glen Pears out of that vehicle and into the BMW’s boot. He returned to the car and shot the woman in the driver’s seat—Pears’s friend, Zoe Hall—before driving off, returning to Seascape cottage. The stand-off between him and the SOG began.

**

The siege finished the next day at 8.35 am with Bryant setting fire to the cottage. As he ran out, partially naked and on fire, the SOG marksmen lowered their weapons. It was hard to tell if the man fleeing the cottage was the offender, but what they saw in their telescopic sights determined their next move—he was unarmed. Bryant was grabbed and pushed to the ground by several SOG officers. A blanket was thrown over him. He was handcuffed and immediately transported to Royal Hobart Hospital.

After so much horror and bloodshed, it would make sense if the world paused that day. It did for Detective Inspector John Warren. He was walking back to the office they’d set up some distance away from the cafe, when he stopped. ‘It was like I was standing in a painting, because it was such a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky, but it was quite eerie; the trees were absolutely still and there were no birds singing. Here was this lovely morning with all this carnage behind me—but no sounds at all. I wouldn’t even try to explain why that was.’

That afternoon, detectives Warren and Bennett paid Martin Bryant a visit at the hospital. They walked into the ICU area. He was lying in bed with his left arm bandaged. Warren’s reaction would be similar to Ian Joblin’s when the psychologist met Bryant: ‘Bryant didn’t look like a mad gunman. I thought, this person doesn’t match what I know he’s done. But I quickly worked out he wasn’t going to be cooperative with us because he wouldn’t acknowledge us or even open his eyes. We’d taken a video unit and set it up—but he pretended he was asleep!’

The detectives turned off the video and left the room. Detective Warren told Bryant’s doctor they’d be back the next day. To their surprise the doctor