Underbelly 5 Page 4

  The couple lived happily in Orlando, Florida, according to Nicole Taylor’s later evidence, for more than two years. Smith’s subsequent version of events was that he’d grown unhappy with the marriage – a claim dismissed by the prosecution as a ploy to explain his behavior before and after the fire.

  In early 1994, the RAAF project team was moved from Orlando to the Palm Bay area. The secretary at the new office was a local, Donna Wilkinson. Single, young, blonde, pretty and popular, she became friendly with several of the team, including Smith. She became pregnant at an office party later that year.

  Nicole Taylor once called at the office to pick up her husband and found him washing Wilkinson’s car, an incident she then ignored, but was later to recall in a harsher light. Taylor, who had feared infertility for medical reasons, also fell pregnant in late 1994. This, she believed at the time, made her husband happy, although they had an argument when he told her he had accompanied Wilkinson to the doctor’s when she’d (Wilkinson) had an ultrasound scan. In the heat of the moment, Taylor accused him of being the baby’s father (not true; another Australian was) but the argument blew over.

  They returned to Australia around Christmas, 1994, and moved to Hoppers Crossing, near Werribee, in the new year. Adrian Kingsley Smith was born on 25 July, 1995. Smith seemed delighted. But he kept in touch with Wilkinson who, meanwhile, arranged a sham marriage with another Australian airman, so that she could come to Australia in early 1995 in time for the birth of her daughter, Melissa. She stayed in a rented unit in Queanbeyan, near Canberra, where she knew other members of the RAAF project team she had met in Florida. This seemed an odd arrangement, and not one that was explained in court.

  There has been no evidence that Wilkinson travelled to Australia to see Smith, nor that he visited her in the first months of her stay. But, on 3 September, he went to Canberra for a conference, leaving his wife and six-week-old son home for several days. It was then, the prosecution argues, that Smith’s private ‘obsession’ with the American woman turned fatal.

  The accused, Morgan-Payler told the jury, wore a white tuxedo to accompany Donna ‘in an evening gown’ to a dinner. Later they, with others, shared a spa at the hotel where Smith was staying.

  Back home in Hoppers Crossing, strange things started happening. Two weeks after the conference, on 17 September, Taylor noticed a smell of gas in the house. A plumber found an unexplained leak near the main stop-cock and mended it. On 22 September, Smith’s 32nd birthday, Wilkinson returned to the US. Four days later, late at night, there was a mysterious fire in the Smiths’ kitchen rubbish bin.

  Taylor’s recollection of the incident was that she was woken by a smoke alarm and went to the kitchen, where her husband was standing over the burning bin with a fire extinguisher. His version was that he woke to find Taylor at the burning bin with the fire-extinguisher. Morgan-Payler said the jury should believe Taylor, that the fire was a ‘dry run’ by Smith.

  The next day, 27 September, Smith signed discharge papers – but didn’t tell his wife. When police later asked about this, Smith claimed that filing the papers didn’t mean he had to leave the air force when his three months’ notice ran out, because the papers could be held by his immediate superiors as long as he wanted, and be sent to Canberra for approval only when he found an outside job.

  However, on 3 October, Smith’s superior officer noted that he ‘can’t be talked out of leaving’ the air force, apparently indicating that Smith firmly intended, at that point, to resign.

  On 4 October, the second mysterious fire in eight days struck the Smith house, but this time there was no extinguisher. Some time between 7.20am and 7.30am a neighbor heard a smoke alarm, and saw smoke coming from the house. She woke her husband and ran next door, where she found Taylor slumped on the patio, half in a doorway. Her hair was burned off, and her right arm badly burned, the charred skin peeling off. Taylor was conscious and distressed. ‘My baby’s in there,’ she moaned.

  The neighbor’s husband went into the house several times, but couldn’t find the baby near the bassinette in the living-room, where the distraught mother told him he should be. He wrapped a wet towel around his face and fought his way through smoke to the bedroom door, which was hot to the touch. He was too late. When he opened it, he saw the baby’s body burning on the bed.

  Outside, he could not tell Taylor her baby was dead. He rang Smith at the Laverton air base, about ten minutes’ drive away, and told him his son was missing and his wife had been taken to hospital by ambulance.

  Smith drove straight to the hospital rather than going home to find baby Adrian – indicating, the prosecution contended, that he was worried by what Taylor might remember about how the fire started. When Taylor was transferred to the Alfred Hospital by helicopter, air force colleagues drove him there, and he spent several days at her bedside.

  The defence says this was the act of a devoted husband whose wife had lost her baby and an arm. The prosecution says he wanted to find out – and cover up – what she remembered about the fire. That Smith was already planning to leave her while she was in hospital somewhat weakened the devoted husband theory, the prosecution argues.

  What the unfortunate woman remembered was enough, ultimately, to swing suspicion towards her husband. She recalled having something held over her face against her will and smelling a pungent chemical odor she associated with dental surgeries. She did not recall asking Smith to get the aromatherapy burner she had bought two days earlier, put it on her bedside table and light it. Nor did she support Smith’s explanation that, because she had a cold, he had put Vicks Vaporub on a handkerchief and put it over her face as she slept, accidentally scaring her so that she reared up, throwing him across the bed.

  They did have Vicks Vaporub in the house, but he had never before put it on a handkerchief over her face. Smith concocted the Vaporub story to explain away his wife’s increasingly dangerous recollections, Morgan-Payler argued. The defence countered that Taylor’s memory was suspect and that her sensory perceptions were disturbed by her ordeal, and so couldn’t be relied on – especially in view of her subsequent separation from her husband, which would make her hostile and vengeful.

  There were other holes in Smith’s story, according to the prosecution. Although the baby had often been in bed with both parents, Smith had never before fetched him from his bassinette and put him in bed with Taylor when he left for work.

  Smith made a statement to a detective called Andrew Bona, then of the arson squad, a week after the fire. For Bona, it was the beginning of a long and complex investigation, complicated by the need to interview witnesses interstate and in the US, which he was to visit twice in compiling the brief of evidence against Smith. As, bit by bit, he learnt more of Smith’s behavior, he and other police grew increasingly suspicious.

  A WEEK after the fatal fire and three days after his child’s funeral, Smith wrote to Wilkinson: ‘Hi Donna, I was worried you wouldn’t be able to read my writing. But then I remembered that you had to interpret my scribbles back at Harris.

  ‘As you can see, here is another cheque. I’ve put it in your mum’s name so she can easily put it in her account.

  ‘I checked out a few things yesterday, about Nicci. All her expenses are paid by Medicare, and she will be entitled to a disability pension. I think I was a bit worried about that. I don’t love her, but I’m not cold and heartless either.

  ‘I am looking forward to so many different things when we get started in the US. I can’t remember if I said this, but any amount of money I send over can be used for whatever purpose you see fit. (Including your personal loan). You would manage money better than me anyhow. Give Melissa a kiss for me, and say hi to your mum and dad. Talk to you soon.’

  On 22 November, seven weeks after the fire, he paid for a one-way ticket to Florida – a reservation he’d made weeks before, and wrote a letter which included the line: ‘Yay! One month and one week to go.’ He also sent $2000 (not the first time he’d sent money) and a
sked for the address of ‘our place’. Two days later he opened a separate bank account in which to deposit some $110,000 in superannuation and severance pay, leaving only a few thousand dollars in the joint account held with Taylor.

  Three days later, on 27 November, he told Taylor – still in hospital – that he was leaving his job and their marriage. He didn’t tell her he would soon be transferring almost all their money to Florida.

  ‘And on 27 December,’ said prosecutor Morgan-Payler grimly to the jury, ‘he flies out … three months to the day after lodging his resignation papers. He never once wavered in his intention of going to Florida to join Donna Wilkinson.’

  It is a terrible story. The defence case, of course, was that it missed a vital passage on which everything hinges. No-one could prove that Smith obtained ether or a similar volatile liquid and used it to knock out his wife. Nor could they prove that the fire, despite all the expert evidence suggesting otherwise, wasn’t accidental. It just looked that way.

  But the jury found otherwise.

  JUSTICE Vincent gave no clues of what he thought of the evidence until the jury had returned its verdict, but, weeks later, when sentencing Smith, he was free to speak his mind.

  ‘You placed a cloth impregnated with a volatile anaesthetic, possibly ether, over the face of your sleeping wife. She awoke and struggled as she inhaled its acrid fumes, but you held her down until she lost consciousness. You then took Adrian from the bassinette, in which he had been placed by Nicole in the loungeroom after he had been fed at about 5am, and put him into the bed beside her. Then, using an aromatherapy burner that had been purchased only a few days earlier, you staged a setting, designed to indicate that an accidental fire had occurred and set fire to the bed. You left the house and went to work as if nothing abnormal had happened.

  ‘After considering the substantial body of evidence adduced in the trial, including the letters set out, and having observed you over a period of several weeks in this court, I have concluded that you are a self-centred individual who, lacking any sense of compassion for your wife and child, and possessing a great deal of confidence in his own capacities, simply decided that the deaths of your wife and child in an “accidental” fire would resolve all such issues and leave you completely free.

  ‘Your action in attempting to conceal the money that you received when you resigned from the air force is consistent with this approach. More significant in the same context, is the creation by you, at some stage, of a family tree in which Donna Wilkinson appeared as your wife and her child, Melissa, as your natural child, with no reference to Nicole and your own child, Adrian. They were disregarded as if they had never existed.

  ‘You are, I consider, a calculating individual who, having decided what he wanted, was prepared to let nothing stand in the way of the achievement of his desires, not the life of his child and certainly not that of a wife of who he had grown tired.’

  Justice Vincent sentenced Smith to a minimum of 22 years. Smith says he didn’t do it.

  CHAPTER 3

  Getting away with murder

  ‘By the way, it was me that killed Granny Hocking.’

  FOR many of those who gathered at the Springvale Cemetery that muggy spring day, it was not Phyllis Hocking’s death that was the shock – her health had been fading for years. It was the senseless way the old lady died – the seemingly random victim of a prowler, who found her in the lounge room of an average house in an average street in middle Melbourne.

  There were hundreds of mourners there to say goodbye. It was the day before the Melbourne Cup and Mrs Hocking’s birthday. She would have turned 80 had she not been clubbed to death a few days earlier.

  No burglar needed to fear her, slowed as she was by three hip replacements, a stroke and failing eye sight. Yet, instead of escaping, he bashed her again and again with a tyre lever, until she was lying dead in her son’s Box Hill home.

  The ferocity of the assault told police the attacker had not planned to stun his victim. The blood found splattered on the walls, book case and ceiling of the room, from at least three – and up to 10 – savage blows showed his sole desire was to kill. But why? If robbery was the motive why hadn’t he bothered to take the $400 she had in the bag she was clutching when he attacked from behind? If it was a burglary, then why was the stereo equipment still stacked in the laundry, waiting to be loaded into a robber’s van?

  The death of Phyllis Hocking reflects the concerns we all face as we grow older. It is not so much death we fear, but that we might no longer be able to make our own way in life.

  Widowed and increasingly immobile, Phyllis Hocking had to rely on others – and they let her down.

  Some of the mourners noticed her adopted son, Philip, at the chapel. A friend who had known Phyllis for 50 years was to later observe: ‘He didn’t speak to anyone at the funeral and he left out the side door straight after the service. I couldn’t understand his behavior at all.’

  Some assumed he was a grieving son who was too upset for small talk.

  Others, who had known him as a child and later as the man, were not prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  PHYLLIS Hocking was the middle child of a close family, which spent the 1920s and 1930s moving around Victoria. Her school teacher father, William Wannan, took country postings before settling as English and History Master at University High School.

  She was educated at Bairnsdale and Essendon high schools and later, at the Emily McPherson College before becoming a domestic science teacher who, like her father, enjoyed country schools and the rural lifestyle.

  While teaching at Maryborough she met a big, stern-faced local engineer, named Jack Hocking. They married and moved to Charlton, where Jack was appointed shire engineer in June,1942. As was the custom of the time, Phyllis gave up work as she prepared for her next role – as a supportive wife and, she hoped – a loving mother.

  The young couple became friends with the local newspaper owner, John Richardson, and his wife, Rena. They lived in the same street and the women became life-long confidantes. Phyllis was to tell her friend that while she was happy, there was a void in her life.

  ‘Phyllis knew she couldn’t have any children. They were going to adopt a little boy, but they only had him about six weeks when the mother wanted him back,’ Rena would tell police 51 years later.

  ‘Philip was a little boy when he was adopted, he wasn’t a baby. I found out later on that he had a sister. Phyllis had wanted to adopt both, but Jack only wanted to adopt the little boy.

  ‘Philip grew up in Charlton. He joined the Cubs and the Scouts and was very clever. He went to primary school in Charlton and then he went to Geelong College. Jack was strict with Philip but not overly so. He just demanded good behavior.’

  Older residents in the district still remember the tall and graceful Phyllis and her shy husband, with warmth and respect. Former St Arnaud mayor and editor of the North Central News, Ella Ebery, says Jack Hocking was not only a hard working engineer, but a conservationist long before it was fashionable.

  While the post-war, rural culture was to clear the land for crops and livestock, Jack Hocking helped plant thousands of trees along country roads, to fight erosion in central Victoria.

  ‘We were both environmentalists and he fought for the trees,’ Mrs Ebery said.

  The gums that Jack planted now stand tall along the St Arnaud-Charlton road, next to a stone monument built in 1991 to honor his foresight. Former newspaperman and long-time Charlton resident, Ian Cameron, said Jack and Phyllis Hocking ‘did everything together’.

  ‘He could be abrupt at times but she was a lovely, quiet lady.’

  While the Hockings were admired in the district, life at home was becoming tense. Big Jack was strict and the son was wilful. Philip was later to say that, when he broke his glasses playing cricket at school, he was too frightened to tell his father and used a broken piece of the lens to try to read notes from the blackboard.

  According to Phylli
s’s younger brother Bill, Jack was ‘a product of the old school tie who could be quite rigid. I think he was rather strict with Philip and was determined that he should have a first class education and that is why he sent him to Geelong College.’

  Bill said the adopted boy was always bright and quick to learn. ‘We said he was a near-genius in some of the things he did.’

  But even in the early years there were worrying signs. In the early 1960s Philip went with his cousin, Paula, to visit their grandmother at Portarlington. According to Bill, his mother, Ruby, was a tolerant woman who liked children but she had suddenly sent Philip home in the in the middle of the holiday. ‘I don’t know what happened, but she said something that was quite strange. She said that Philip was an evil boy.’

  WHILE Philip later often blamed his father for a miserable childhood, the Hockings did not give up on their adopted son. In 1960, he was sent to the elite Geelong College as a boarder. His parents hoped the schoolmasters would be able to nurture the teenager’s obvious, but largely undirected, talents.

  It didn’t work.

  He ran away from school in clouded circumstances and returned to Charlton. It was another black mark in his father’s book.

  Jack found it harder to relate to Philip as they both got older. The father was solid and dependable while the son was erratic and unreliable.

  Philip was to carry the scars all his life, claiming Jack Hocking was ‘an arrogant bully’. He increasingly blamed his adopted father for his own failings. ‘My lack of success in many things was due to him.’

  The shire engineer spent all his working life fixing problems, with a combination of strong logic and hard work, but he could never repair the frayed relationship with the boy. In the end they barely spoke.