Underbelly 6 Page 6

  McGuinness claims Clark hit her ‘around the top of the head’ with one hand while he held her with the other. Then he raped her, she said. She screamed to the absent Charlie for help, but he didn’t come. When it was over, Clark ordered her to put her clothes on, then threw her into the back of the car, she was to state.

  ‘I was really shocked – I knew what he had done to me was wrong. Charlie and Angie came back. Angie didn’t look at me. I can’t remember when it was that I spoke to Angie about what had happened but it must have been either before we left the beach or in the car on the way back. I remember Angie saying that she “didn’t want anything to do with it” and we have never to this day spoken about it again. In fact, I have never seen Angie again to this day.’

  Much later, investigators established that Angie left Warrnambool soon after the rape. She was sent to Melbourne to live with a relative, later moved interstate and is now overseas. For her parents, local shopkeepers, this meant she was away from the people she was mixing with in Warrnambool. It also made her less easily available as a witness. This suited all concerned – except the victim, Joanne McGuinness.

  Exact times and sequences are now hazy and the subject of dispute, but McGuinness insists on two things. One is that she reported the rape soon afterwards. The other is that Geoff Clark paid for her to go to Perth – to get her out of the way, she says.

  McGuinness claims she went to Warrnambool police station at night ‘about a week’ after the rape and made a one-page statement to a policewoman. Soon afterwards, she says, she was ‘sent’ to Perth on a one-way air ticket that, her family says, Clark paid for.

  Long-serving Warrnambool detective Fred Hughson flew to Perth to interview her about the rape, but she declined an offer to fly her home to help the investigation.

  After McGuinness returned to Victoria by bus some weeks later, she states, she was picked up in the street in Warrnambool by Hughson and another detective, Peter Mackay. They took her to the scene at Logan’s Beach to look for any proof of the assault, such as lost jewellery. The detectives must have known it was a long shot, but they went through the motions.

  Nothing happened. ‘The Mackay detective saw me in town not long after this and told me that he’d spoken to Geoff and Geoff claimed I’d provoked the rape,’ McGuinness was to say. ‘I never heard from the police again.’

  That is, until 19 years later, when she walked into a Melbourne police station with her counsellor and started talking. It was the first of three statements she made over the next two months, each providing another layer of detail.

  Clark was charged in early July by a Warrnambool detective. The sexual offences squad was called in at short notice to investigate the allegations and probe fresh ones.

  Under pressure to be ready for the looming committal proceedings, the squad hurriedly investigated ‘similar fact’ evidence of other rapes allegedly committed by Clark. Two detectives travelled around Victoria and interstate and interviewed several women, two of whom were willing to make statements. Others said they couldn’t remember, or that they were too frightened to commit themselves.

  The committal, held in Warrnambool, took three days. Clark’s formidable legal team was led by Robert Richter, QC, one of the most expensive silks in Australia. In a masterful closing address, of a kind rarely heard by Warrnambool magistrates, Richter spent more than an hour weaving an argument supporting his contention that Joanne McGuinness had a ‘psychotic ability (to) create falsehoods’.

  The Crown prosecutor, Jeremy Rapke, QC, agreed with Richter about one thing: it had been a ‘pathetic’ police investigation in which Clark hadn’t even been interviewed.

  The magistrate, Terry Wilson, seemed to agree. He noted that no one else in the car that night had given evidence – including, ‘remarkably’, Charlie Clark.

  Given that ‘Mad Charlie’ had spent much of his adult life in jail, including time for rape, and relied on his cousin Geoff for housing while outside, it would have been remarkable, indeed, if he had given evidence against him. Significantly, perhaps, neither Frank Abrahams nor Angie were called by the defence either.

  (Abrahams had told police his memory had been destroyed by alcohol. Angie told police she had ‘blanked out’ parts of her past and that although she could remember knowing Joanne McGuinness and Geoff and ‘Charlie’ Clark, she couldn’t recall the alleged rape. She was to repeat this claim before returning overseas. She seemed genuinely troubled by her memory loss, and said she had no reason to doubt Joanne McGuinness’s account.)

  When the magistrate ruled that he should go free because the evidence was too weak for a jury to reach a verdict, Clark was visibly relieved. There were a lot of Clark’s supporters in court, but fewer in the local community.

  Afterwards, a Warrnambool woman asked for a card to be given to Joanne McGuinness. She had written on it: ‘I don’t know who you are, but I do know you are a hero. You can and must hold your head high. You had the courage to do what you believed in. You took on Geoff Clarke (sic). He may have won the case but you have won the day. Let me assure you – you have the support of most of the Warrnambool community. People who grew up in the Geoff Clarke era know what he was like …’

  Joanne McGuinness felt a mixture of anger, relief and fear. In a statement three months earlier, she had told police: ‘I still try to stay out of (town) because I feel embarrassed and paranoid (about) what has happened with Geoff, especially since it’s been in the news. I don’t know who I can trust at the moment and I don’t want anything getting back to Geoff about where I am and what I’m doing. It’s crossed my mind that he might try to come and get me or my kids because of all this.’

  SHARON has had a few surnames in her 36 years. The name she wants to use is her maiden name, Handley.

  A slight figure, she doesn’t yet look like someone who has had a hard life and seven children, but she’s working on it. Her brown hair is cut short over the ears, longer at the back, she has two rings in her left ear and a bangle on her right wrist.

  She sits in an empty hotel lounge, floral shirt and jeans still wet from the tropical rain lashing down outside. On the table are two damp, dog-eared documents: police statements whose plodding prose records in relentless detail two of the sad, bad things that have happened to her.

  Handley is a long way from home, and glad of it. She grew up in Nullawarre, a township just outside Warrnambool, with her mother, stepfather, two brothers and her sister. She went to the local primary school and then to Caramut Road High in Warrnambool. She left school in early 1982, a few weeks after beginning year 12, and started work as an assistant at a childcare centre.

  In January, 1983, she moved out of her stepfather’s home, where she and her sister had been frightened and miserable, and moved into a flat in Denny Street, Warrnambool. She shared it with a student who had advertised for a flatmate.

  She started going out with a group of a male cousin’s friends. Around the streets on Friday and Saturday nights, she became aware of Geoff Clark. He knew a family of brothers who, in turn, knew her cousin.

  One night, about two months after moving into the flat, she met some of these casual acquaintances at the Grand Hotel. About 11pm she saw Clark come into the hotel and talk to one of the males in her group, she told a policeman much later. Clark looked at her then left.

  Later, after midnight, Handley left the hotel. One of the young men she had been drinking with offered her a ride home, and she got in. Instead of taking her home, he drove to Cannon Hill, a local landmark.

  ‘When we got to Cannon Hill I saw that there was another car there,’ she was to state. ‘I don’t know what sort of car it was …’ A man was standing beside the parked car.

  The driver got out, spoke to the other man then told her to get out of the car. She suddenly realised two things: the other man was Geoff Clark, and she’d been set up.

  ‘I knew that (the driver) had taken me up there so Geoff could have sex with me.

  ‘Geoff then grabbed me b
y the top part of my left arm and pulled me into the bushes. As Geoff was pulling me into the bushes, I said, “I don’t want to do this.”.’

  He dragged her into the bushes, forced her to lie down by pinning her shoulders, then wrenched off her jeans and underclothing. ‘While Geoff was doing this I said, “Don’t do it. I don’t want to do it”.’

  In the police statement she made years later, Sharon then describes each brutal, anatomical detail in the way required by the law, ending with the sentences: ‘My vagina felt like it had a burning knife being pushed in and out of it when Geoff was raping me. I just laid back and let him rape me so that he would not bash me.’

  Afterwards, she says, Clark told her to get dressed then walked away. She heard both cars start up and drive away. She walked home. She told nobody, and pretended it didn’t happen. Then it happened again. This time, it was Clark and three other men. Two weeks later, her doctor told her that she had caught genital warts. She told the doctor she had been raped, but did not say by whom. The doctor asked if she wanted to tell the police. She said she was too scared.

  Five years later, in 1988, she told her natural father about the rapes. In 1991, she started going to a sexual assault counsellor in Warrnambool. She told the counsellor she had been raped, and who by. The counsellor, a methodical woman, took notes. By the time she sought counselling, she was married, with children. Later, she separated and moved interstate in the first of a series of unhappy de facto relationships. Early in 2000, her father visited her. He told her that the daughter of a woman he’d met was considering laying rape charges against Clark. Handley asked him to pass on her name to the other victim.

  On July 10, 2000, a local detective called at her house, said charges were being laid against Geoff Clark, and asked her to make a statement. Ten days later two officers from the Victoria Police sexual offences squad arrived and took a longer statement.

  When the police returned to Victoria they went to see Handley’s former counsellor. She produced her file from 1991. In it were notes about the rape. On them she’d written two names. One was Geoff Clark.

  BERNICE Clarke has known Geoff Clark almost all her life. She is his mother’s first cousin, and they grew up together at Framlingham. Until they both left school, she says, she saw him every school day and most weekends, but she tried to avoid him because of his reputation for violence. She has never forgotten the night in 1972 he threatened to sexually assault her.

  Then 18, she was staying in a house in Warrnambool with her older brother Ian and her baby son.

  One night her brother was not home. After putting her baby to sleep and going to bed, she was alarmed to hear Clark calling to her and banging on the front door. She locked her bedroom door and stayed silent, hoping he would leave. He didn’t. Instead, as she was to discover, he opened a window and climbed into the darkened house.

  She realised he was inside when he started punching and kicking her bedroom door. ‘I can still see the bottom of the door moving,’ she recalls. ‘I had a waddy (club) with me and I would have used it. In the end I called out and told him that.’

  Clark eventually left, unlocking the front door from inside to let himself out. When she heard him outside, Ms Clarke left her bedroom, locked the front door and turned on an outside light. She looked through the window, and saw Clark walking through the gate on to the footpath.

  CAROL Stingel is a tall, loose-limbed woman with dark eyes and the lithe grace of a catwalk model. She is in her late 40s but looks younger. She has never married, nor had a successful long-term relationship with a man – for reasons, she says, that rushed back to confront her in July, 2000.

  Stingel was watching television news at a relative’s Queensland home when she saw an item about Geoff Clark being charged with a rape that had allegedly occurred in 1981.

  Stingel was shocked but not surprised. She had come a long way from Warrnambool in 30 years, but the story forced her to face memories she’d tried to suppress, and to make a choice she’d avoided all her adult life.

  She went to bed late, but didn’t sleep all night. She had to choose between revealing an incident that had blighted her life, and continuing to hide it. ‘I’d never had the guts to do it, even though Mum had been dead for seven or eight years. But I thought that someone had finally had the guts to tell the truth, and I just wanted to let that other woman know she wasn’t on her own.’

  Next morning she called Warrnambool police. They gave her the name of a social worker, who encouraged her to talk. The social worker wrote down her story and faxed a copy of it to the police at Warrnambool. Soon after, two officers from the Victoria Police sexual offences squad arrived. This is what she told them.

  On a weeknight in March, 1971, about two weeks after her 16th birthday, Carol Stingel went to the Warrnambool greyhound races with five other teenage girls, whose names she recalls. About 8pm, Stingel left the group and the greyhound track to walk home.

  Minutes later, a sedan pulled up near her as she walked past the swimming pool near the Warrnambool Botanic Gardens. Crammed into it were eight young men and youths she knew by sight.

  They jumped out of the car. Two of them approached Stingel and said that ‘Geoff’ wanted to see her. She knew they meant Geoff Clark, as he was well-known as leader of the gang, and she had seen him walk ahead into the gardens with the others. She didn’t like going into the gardens at night and hesitated, but the pair took her by the arms and led her to where they couldn’t be seen from the street.

  ‘I asked, “What’s going on?” and they said Geoff had a game to play and that I’d really enjoy it. I was starting to panic, by this time,’ she recalled in a statutory declaration made in March, confirming details of her police statement.

  ‘Geoff Clark ordered me to take my clothes off. He said, “Get undressed,” and I said, “No” and he nodded his head and (names of two youths) undressed me. (One) removed my jeans and knickers and (another) my jumper and bra. I was in shock. I was surrounded by eight males, all heavier than me.’

  Before forcing her to lie down, she said, they made her stand, naked and shaking, with her arms out so that Clark could ‘look at me’.

  ‘They had to hold me down, with one holding each leg, one each arm and one my head.’ Clark raped her first, then six of the other seven followed. Thirty years on, voice hoarse with emotion, Stingel can recite the pack pecking order in which they violated her, right down to a teenager who, she suspects, took part only because he was afraid not to.

  She remembers details such as one of them running around saying, ‘Me first, me first,’ and sulking when ordered to take his turn behind Geoff Clark and three others. Only one did not rape her. She remembers that he warned the others not to hurt her. Whether this was a show of concern for her welfare or to lessen the risk of prosecution, she doesn’t know, but she was grateful at the time.

  If there were no marks of violence on her, it would be her word against eight. The odds were so far against her that when they’d finished with her body, she couldn’t even imagine telling her parents, let alone the police. Afterwards, the youth who hadn’t raped her told her to get dressed and pull herself together. While the others walked off, he drove her to some toilets behind a hotel to clean herself up, then dropped her near her parents’ housing commission house.

  ‘He warned me not to tell anyone because that would make things worse. It was late. My mother was in bed. My father was away working.’

  For years, Stingel indulged a fantasy that her father, a knockabout labourer who had fought in the Middle East as a teenage soldier, would have taken his shotgun and shot the youths who’d assaulted her. But she didn’t tell him.

  She was never sure, afterwards, whether her silence was because she was afraid her father would take revenge the way she imagined he might, or whether she was afraid of Clark and his gang. The Saturday after she was raped she saw one of the gang in the street and he warned her to keep quiet about what had happened. As he spoke, he drew his finger across
his throat, miming murder. It horrified her. It still does.

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone what had happened for nearly 30 years. In my 30s, I told friends I had been raped but not details of who had done it.’

  After the police visited her last year, Carol Stingel wrote about the crime that had changed her life. Part of it reads: ‘You feel fear, intimidation, dirty, ashamed. You blame yourself for the situation, and you blame them. Was it me? Was it them? What have I done to deserve this?

  ‘It is now 30 years since he raped me and I still ask the same questions. I still lie awake at night crying. I still have dreams with Geoff Clark’s face sneering in mine.’

  • Police re-investigated the rape allegations against Clark after this story was published in 2001 but were unable to obtain admissible evidence of a standard that would ensure a reasonable chance of a conviction if he were tried. No charges were laid, but the investigation remains open.

  Police charged Clark and two other men with multiple offences after a brawl in a Warrnambool hotel during the Grand Annual race meeting in May, 2002, in which Clark was admitted to hospital after being sprayed with capsicum spray by police.

  CHAPTER 4

  Top Gunn

  Gunn was an experienced detective who knew the dangers of drugs. But, like so many occasional users, he ignored the risk that one bad pill could kill him.

  BILLY Gunn was a natural … the sort of guy who made most things look easy. Even at school, while his mates had to study for exams, Billy would cruise though – always finishing near the top of the class. It was the same on the sports field. Gunn played senior football at 16, sparking the interest of AFL club St Kilda before bad knees and loose ligaments crushed any hope of a career in professional sport.