Underbelly 2 Page 20

  Soon, New Idea, once a middle-of-the-road magazine that had developed the sex and celebrity edge to compete in the increasingly cut-throat women’s magazine market, was at her door, offering $20,000 for the exclusive.

  According to the singer the magazine included the promise that ‘as women we will treat this sympathetically.’ It was well known that she was short of money, so to New Idea $20,000 must have seemed a fair price for national shame and humiliation.

  ‘I have financial problems, but I wouldn’t stoop to that,’ she was to say. ‘They told me they would be sympathetic but all they want to do is sell copies with this sort of trash.’

  Having refused to do an interview she gave the magazine the name of the ethical standards policeman handling the case. For about two weeks there was silence. More in hope than expectation, she thought the story might die.

  She tried to kid herself the people with the tape would get bored and if she just got on with life everything would go back to being as normal as it ever gets for a celebrity.

  But when she went to perform at a charity function for the Royal Children’s Hospital and a New Idea journalist and photographer turned up she said she realised they were going to ‘do her over’.

  Days later she rang her former boyfriend – the man in the tape, Chris Bekker – to break the terrible news that they could be about to be exposed. She felt terrible that a man with no independent celebrity status could be embarrassed because of his relationship with her.

  But Bekker, apparently, had no such concerns. Having been knocked back by the ‘star’ New Idea went to the next best source – the support act.

  When he told her he’d sold the story for $10,000 she felt so ill she could hardly breathe. She said he showed her a transcript of the story that would be on news-stands around Australia within days.

  The day before the magazine appeared, New Idea took out newspaper advertisements trumpeting ‘STAR IN STOLEN LOVE VIDEO OUTRAGE.’ Alongside a picture of Byrne it said ‘The full story of Debra Byrne’s heartache, exclusive to New Idea.’

  The story was cunningly crafted to appear as if she was telling the story. Quotes were placed over pictures of Byrne although they were from the Bekker. Pictures of nonentities don’t move magazines, even if they are prepared to betray friends to sell tawdry stories. The article spoke of the ‘outrage’ of the tape being made public. Nowhere did it say that the woman on whose behalf they were so outraged had actually knocked back $20,000 to tell her story.

  ‘I don’t want to be known as the bloke in the Debra Byrne video,’ Bekker told New Idea. ‘The fact that people are making money out of this is disgusting,’ he said, apparently without a hint of irony.

  ‘It’s just another tragic event in her life,’ he said.

  Byrne spoke to The Age newspaper in Melbourne days before New Idea hit the streets. If the story was to come out, she reasoned, she wanted it on her terms. She wanted to expose the invasion of privacy and to stop the magazine profiting by touting an ‘exclusive’ story on her private life.

  ‘New Idea will make a big story out of this and then move on, leaving me to pick up the pieces,’ she said bitterly.

  For an entertainer struggling to regain momentum in her career, the pirating of the video was another body-blow.

  ‘It’s been the worst year of my life, but I think its toughened me up. I feel like I could handle anything. The next few weeks are going to be hard but I’m not going to hide away.

  ‘This is not a real story about an entertainer but they’ll run it even though they must know it could damage my family.

  ‘I’ve been betrayed three times. By the person who burgled me when I tried to help them, by the police, and by the man who sold his story.’

  She said the only way to stop magazines intruding into people’s private lives and causing distress was for decent people to stop buying them.

  ‘They’re filled with rubbish. We’d all be better off without them.’

  On the Monday New Idea was published, radio 3AW’s top-rating breakfast announcers, Dean Banks and Ross Stevenson, spoke to the magazine’s editorial director, who rejoices in the name Bunty Avieson.

  AVIESON: ‘Chris Bekker, Debra Byrne’s boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, the man who appears in the video with Debra, chose to speak out on behalf of them both. After we printed the situation changed and Debra decided that she did want to speak.’

  BANKS: ‘Did you originally offer her money?’

  AVIESON: ‘Those things we try to keep private despite what we see in The Age this morning.’

  BANKS: ‘The Age says New Idea offered her $20,000 to tell all.’

  AVIESON: ‘We were talking to her lawyers and Debra spoke to us, but she decided not to go and do the full story at the time. But she has since changed her mind.’

  BANKS: ‘Presumably Mr Bekker then put his hand up and said “look, I’ll tell the story, give me a cheque”.’

  AVIESON: ‘Well, Mr Bekker has been having phone calls from all across Australia saying, “I believe you’re in a video I’ve just seen” from friends. He’s read about it in newspapers and heard about it on radio. He felt that the way he wanted to approach it was to come out and say ‘stop all watching it, stop all talking about it.’ There’s peculiar stories about what’s in the video and from what I understand and from what he says it’s not that peculiar. But he wanted to come out and speak about it to say it was done out of love and it is not something either of them are ashamed about and they feel quite betrayed and they are keen for the police investigation to pursue the matter’

  STEVENSON: ‘Did you pay him $10,000 for the story?’

  AVIESON: ‘That’s something I wouldn’t go into.’

  STEVENSON: ‘Did you pay him for the story?’

  AVIESON: ‘Yes.’

  STEVENSON: ‘Do you have any idea as to whether he is intending to give half to Debra Byrne?’

  AVIESON: ‘I have no idea what their relationship between them is.’

  DEBRA Byrne was to receive letters and phone calls from strangers supporting her and some readers contacted New Idea to express their disgust. But it has often been said that you can’t go broke underestimating the public’s taste. Even while the police internal inquiry was continuing, the vice squad raided a series of Melbourne sex shops and seized about twenty pirated copies of the tape. They were selling for $40 a pop.

  CHAPTER 20

  After the smoking gun

  The other side of police shootings

  ‘The fear never goes away. It is there all the time. You fear for your own safety and you fear you may have to shoot someone else.’

  TRISH Carl’s ten-year love affair with policing died the night she shot dead a disturbed, drunken woman armed with two knives.

  What began as just another mundane nightshift in the provincial border city of Wodonga ended with a fatal confrontation that made headlines in two countries, and ultimately cost Senior Constable Carl her job, her house and her sense of well-being.

  Carl and her police partner, Barry Randall, were called to a noisy party at 2.55 am on 12 November, 1995, a Sunday morning. They were confronted at the front door of a modest defence forces house by Helen Merkle, who was drunk, irrational and ready to fight anyone in her path. She had already assaulted her husband, a quiet Australian soldier, before police arrived. Merkle charged screaming from the house and attempted to attack the policewoman. Senior Constable Carl ran backwards down the drive and yelled at the woman to drop the knives before firing three shots, the last from a distance of one metre.

  The third shot hit the berserk woman in the heart, killing her instantly.

  The Merkle killing was the second since the safety-first police retraining program, Project Beacon, and the twenty-fifth since 1988. To add to the controversy Helen Merkle was a Papua New Guinean national with strong political connections.

  She was the niece of the PNG Foreign Affairs Secretary, Gabriel Dusava, which led to extraordinary political fallout after the sho
oting. No less than the PNG Prime Minister, Sir Julius Chan, and his High Commissioner to Australia, Sir Frederick Reiher, disputed that Mrs Merkle was armed when she was shot, even though her husband, Mark Merkle, confirmed the police version of events.

  A PNG paper was even less subtle, and carried the inflammatory headline: ‘It was murder.’

  Even the Australian Foreign Affairs Minister of the day, Gareth Evans, seemed to be infected by the rush to prejudge the incident without knowledge of the facts. Evans was quoted as saying: ‘It just staggers the imagination that something has not gone fundamentally wrong in the way in which the police are administering themselves.’ It was politician-speak for joining in the chorus of accusations aimed at Trish Carl.

  For eleven months Senior Constable Carl could not defend herself from public attacks. She was finally vindicated by coroner, Jacinta Heffey, who found the shooting justified and described Helen Merkle as ‘a walking time bomb ready to explode and kill someone’.

  The day after Carl was cleared by the coroner her six-year-old daughter went outside to play and found daubed in paint on the lawn and front fence of their Albury home the words: ‘COON KILLER.’

  Senior Constable Carl continued to work and tried act if nothing had changed. But she felt that something had been stolen from her and that she was the real victim.

  She was short with her two young children and was apprehensive when working. She was frightened that her husband, Andrew, also a policeman, could be shot on duty. But she told friends and family she was getting better and time would heal her problems. The answer, she thought, was to throw herself back into policing to regain her enthusiasm.

  But she found she was living a lie.

  ‘I was putting on a brave face, trying to keep going.’ The shooting was always at the back of her mind, and on duty she would think of it constantly. She had that numbing emotion that can paralyse – and that police rarely talk about – fear.

  ‘I lost it. The fear never goes away. It is there all the time. You fear for your own safety and you fear you may have to shoot someone else,’ she said.

  ‘I lost confidence, even when we had to pull over a car. The feeling was there every time I put on the uniform.’

  She said she resented the woman she shot. ‘Her stupid actions changed my life for the worse. It has turned my life upside down. I could only react to her actions.’

  She told people her enthusiasm was returning but in July, 1997, she was called to a routine disturbance. It turned out to be a mentally disturbed woman with a knife.

  Trish Carl persuaded the woman to drop the knife and drove her to a hospital, where she was committed. ‘She didn’t want to hurt us, but she would have killed her husband if he had been there.’

  The incident took her back to the Merkle shooting. ‘It was the eyes. She had the same scary look as Helen – the eyes of death.’

  Carl was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and was placed on sick leave. By November, 1997, she knew her career was finished. Her husband Andrew also quit the force and, a few weeks later, they sold their house (at a loss) and moved to Queensland.

  They both felt the family needed to move from the Albury-Wodonga area to leave the shooting behind. In Queensland Carl feels she is no longer the policewoman who killed, but just another parent trying to bring up a couple of kids. ‘No-one here knows. I think we are slowly getting it behind us and want to get on with our lives.

  ‘I wasn’t sleeping well and I was really cranky with the kids. We had to try and start again.’ But while her state of mind has improved, small things can still trigger flashbacks.

  If she sees even low-level violence on television she dreams about the shooting. And she still simmers with anger at the media and politicians who, she believes, condemned her before the inquest.

  News of shootings involving police brings back her resentment at the system that she believes let her down. ‘Do people really think police think, “Oh, it’s a bit boring today, I might go and shoot somebody,”?

  ‘They try to crucify the poor coppers who are just trying to protect people.’

  Carl is acutely aware that often when police are involved in a shooting self-appointed community watchdog groups are contacted by the media and offered the chance to pass judgment, even before the police involved in the incident, and any eye witnesses, have been interviewed.

  That pattern was followed after the shooting of a man in the Melbourne suburb of Bentleigh on Good Friday, 1998. Two police on the afternoon shift in a divisional van on routine patrol were sent to check a report that two men were trying to break into an automatic teller machine.

  In the divvy van was a constable, with about nine months experience, and a more experienced senior constable. When they drove down Centre Road they were flagged down by the man who had made the original report.

  He said the one of the two men had actually been interfering with a telephone box, and not an ATM.

  The police drove slowly towards the men, who had left the telephone box. The two suspects split and walked in opposite directions, and the police approached one of them, John Stewart McConnell, 34.

  According to the police, when McConnell saw the police vehicle he changed directions and headed back towards his friend.

  The constable said he left the car, walked towards McConnell and asked him to stop. He said the man started to jog away from him, despite being asked not to run.

  The police version of events is that the suspect turned right into a small shopping mall and the police followed. According to police, the constable, who was directly behind McConnell, turned the corner, drew his extendable baton with his right hand, but did not open it to its full length. The senior constable, who was standing off to the side then yelled, ‘Drop the hammer.’

  McConnell then turned around and moved towards the constable, who dropped his baton and pulled out his police issue .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. The senior constable also pulled out his handgun. Both were to claim they repeatedly yelled on McConnell to halt.

  Police say he had the hammer above his head and screamed ‘Shoot me, shoot me’ as he gathered pace.

  The constable backed away on to Centre Road, but said his escape was blocked by passing traffic. Police said McConnell continued to run towards the policeman, who then fired two shots – hitting him in the chest and killing him instantly.

  After every police shooting two homicide crews, comprising a total of up to fourteen detectives, are called to investigate.

  Interviews with police involved in the shooting are conducted only by senior members of the homicide squad and each interview is observed by investigators from the ethical standards department. The coroner also attends.

  Police psychologists are called to counsel police involved, who are also routinely advised by police association lawyers not to participate in any filmed re-enactment.

  Homicide squad detectives are acutely aware of the need to be thorough. They remember that Detective Sergeant John Hill was charged with being an accessory to murder in relation to his 1988 investigation of the police shooting of the armed robber Graeme Jensen. Devastated, Hill committed suicide two months after he was charged.

  FORMER policeman Cliff Lockwood has moved interstate and changes his telephone number regularly to avoid the crank calls he still occasionally gets. It’s just one of the prices he pays for shooting and killing a suspect in a Carlton flat in 1989.

  It was a famous case, a tragic footnote to the Walsh Street shootings in which two young uniformed police were gunned down in a South Yarra street, apparently in reprisal for the Graeme Jensen shooting by detectives a day earlier.

  Lockwood’s sudden fall from grace happened after he shot Gary Abdallah, aged twenty four, while he and another detective searched the flat. Police said Abdallah was armed with a replica handgun. He died forty days later. Lockwood was charged with murder and later acquitted by a Supreme Court jury.

  In 1994 Lockwood left the police force after twelve years service bec
ause he believed he could never live down his involvement in the shooting. He believed he would always be seen as Gary Abdallah’s killer and resented the groups that continued to condemn him over the shooting, although he was cleared of any wrongdoing both at the Coroner’s and Supreme Court. ‘People still bring it up and it was ten years ago,’ he says.

  But in 1998 he began to have second thoughts. He missed policing and began to talk of going back to the job that had once been his life. ‘I went as far as getting the (application) papers sent out to me. But I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t go back to driving the van and dealing with the public.’

  He said that when his thoughts drifted back to the shooting he would consciously block them from his mind. ‘I just get really angry so I try and set them aside.’

  Lockwood said he rarely talked about his feelings over the Abdallah shooting. ‘I don’t want people to think of me as a bloody great sook.’

  He said when there was a police shooting he would not watch television news or buy papers. ‘I get really angry at the way it always seems to be the fault of the coppers.’

  He has tried several businesses after leaving the force, but five years on he remains unsettled. ‘If it wasn’t for what happened over the shooting I would still be a policeman.’

  Like Trish Carl, Cliff Lockwood craves anonymity and wants to leave the shooting in the past. His business now often take him to Bali. ‘I love it there. No-one no-one knows you and no-one cares about your past. You can just disappear into the wilderness.’

  Distance from Melbourne helps. That is one reason why he has toyed with joining the Northern Territory police force. It might be one way of being a policeman again, and yet to leave the Abdallah controversy behind. He hopes that in the ‘Top End’ no-one would remind him of the Carlton shooting.

  Police involved in shootings often want outside reassurance that they have done the right thing. One policeman who killed a man he believed was armed with a gun was shattered when he learned he was mistaken. It was only when a senior policeman went to him at the scene and said ‘Son, you’ve done nothing wrong,’ that he regained his composure. The senior policeman was criticised at a later inquest for being less than objective.