Underbelly 4 Page 9

  He left home at eighteen years old to go to the Australian National University in Canberra, where in 1974 he met the woman who was to become his first wife. They married in 1977, the year he took his arts degree, and later had three daughters.

  Intelligent and meticulous, Dunstan had ‘obsessional traits’ that became more pronounced with age – and which, his psychiatrist noted drily in a report tendered in court, were shared by ‘most good public servants’.

  He later took woodwork, cooking and electronics classes in his own time. A lean man who kept fit and dressed neatly, he was good with his hands as well as his mind, and was attracted early to information technology. He came to be seen as something of a computer expert before a wave of younger, computer-literate staff entered the public service in the 1990s, by which time his star was rapidly dimming.

  Dunstan’s troubles began when he transferred to the Tax Office from another department in 1987. At age thirty-two, his psychiatrist was to testify later, he wanted a ‘fresh challenge’. That is, a fresh challenge by public servant standards.

  He didn’t want to become a skydiving instructor or trek through the Andes. He didn’t even want to do anything that would alter his daily routine of going to work in Canberra’s rabbit warren of anonymous offices. All he wanted was to be appointed a Data Base Administrator.

  He got the job, but trouble came with the territory. A married woman he had known slightly in 1982 in another department was one of his subordinates. She began, he was to complain later, to plague him for advice about problems. She contrived excuses to see him in person, and made it clear she was infatuated with him.

  It was the beginning of a bizarre interlude in which the woman – whose name has been suppressed by court order – allegedly began to stalk Dunstan and his family. Dunstan’s wife received mysterious ‘hang-up’ telephone calls and the woman once confronted her. When Dunstan’s psychiatrist later described this period in a report, he put it under the heading Fatal Attraction.

  Dunstan became depressed and rattled; it showed in his work and his behavior. He fell into a shortlived affair with the woman, who had pursued him for four years. This aggravated his problems and was eventually to end his marriage and his career. He became isolated from friends, family and workmates.

  In early 1992, he moved out of his family home and into a flat and attempted suicide with an overdose of prescription painkillers. His worried wife, meanwhile, approached the other woman’s husband to try to end what she saw as years of harassment.

  The already bizarre situation spun out of control and began to involve others when the woman complained to an equal opportunity officer, who allegedly took her side and wrote a letter suggesting that the Dunstans had ‘intimidated and harassed’ the woman.

  Dunstan’s version of events, as told to his psychiatrist and lawyers, is that the woman orchestrated a revenge campaign against him by making spurious complaints to his superiors and to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission.

  The Tax Office responded by trying to make it go away – transferring both Duncan and the woman to other sections.

  Dunstan recovered from his suicide attempt and continued his struggle against the system with renewed bitterness. By then divorced from his wife, he met and married another woman in 1994 who encouraged his belief that he was a victim. It seemed to him that while the other woman continued to be promoted, his own career had been stalled, if not derailed. In his mind, he’d been made a scapegoat for a mess not of his making, while the real culprit was going unpunished.

  And he believed that other people now involved in the dispute had unfairly sided against him, pre-judging his case so that the more he tried to prove his point, the more they opposed him. All of which might have sounded like just another paranoid delusion, but the factual basis of Dunstan’s dilemma was not lost on the judge who sifted through the facts. Though nothing excused Dunstan’s actions, the judge was to say, it was clear why he had such a grievance against the system. But that was later.

  FOR Nelly Campbell, it was just another nightshift at the Canberra mail centre in Fyshwick, the faintly industrial underbelly of the model modern city.

  On December 1, 1998, a Tuesday evening, the thirty-five year-old mother started at 6pm sharp, as she usually did, intending to work until exactly 1.51am next morning.

  Nelly Campbell and three workmates started the shift by moving a big steel crate of unsorted parcels into what they call the ‘bull ring’, then sorting them into a series of tubs. At 7.45pm, they switched to ‘indexing’ – typing postcodes on envelopes so that they could be easily and accurately sorted. At 9.25pm, the crew had a rest break, starting again at 10pm on a new task. At midnight, they started the last job of the night – sorting small parcels. The crew sorted the first crate of parcels in about fifteen minutes, then Campbell fetched another bin and they started work.

  ‘We had only been sorting this particular bin for about a minute or two,’ she was to recall, ‘when I picked up two small white-colored parcels. I checked the suburb and postcode and tossed the (first) parcel in the Queanbeyan area bin. As soon as I had done this I realised I had mis-sorted the parcel – meaning I had tossed it into the wrong bin. While I still had one of the parcels in my hand I picked up another parcel which looked exactly the same as the one I had tossed and the same as the one I still had in my hand.

  ‘I checked the suburb and postcode and this time leaned so I was closer to the tub and wouldn’t mis-sort and tossed the parcel into the tub. Within seconds I heard a huge bang, which was similar to a huge firecracker being let off in a small space. At first, I saw a white light coming from the tub and then I saw smoke. (It) filled the area where I was standing. I could smell what I thought was gunpowder … I felt things hitting me but I didn’t realise what they were.

  ‘I looked down and saw a lot of blue plastic pieces. That’s when I realised what had hit me.’ Two senior mail officers grabbed the tub and moved it away from the workers.

  Nelly Campbell’s ears were ringing, one arm felt numb and she was gripped by the shock that was to stop her working for eight months. But she remembered she’d seen more than a dozen parcels identical to the one that had exploded, and said so. They were all about the size of a computer disc, she said, but about two centimetres thick, and wrapped in white paper, with addresses neatly printed. Each had two stamps – a two dollar blackwood tree stamp and a thirty-cent saltwater crocodile stamp.

  All neat and tidy, like scones from the same perfect batch.

  ACTING Sergeant Mark Johnsen, of the Federal Police, took the call about 3am. By the time he got to the mail centre, the bomb experts and forensic police had secured the scene and started the painstaking job of gathering evidence. Which, in this case, meant more than just using vacuum equipment and tapelifts to gather explosive propellant residue and broken plastic.

  They had to look for letter bombs and disable them. The police worked all night. By seven o’clock that morning, they had twenty-one identical white parcels and were satisfied there were no more in the mail exchange. But the police knew what the public didn’t: that a letter bomb had been detected and defused in Sydney the day before, and that it matched the twenty they now had.

  So how many more were there in the postal system? There was no way of knowing how many had been sent, or where, until the offender was found.

  The police hit the telephones. The first lead: the return address on each of the suspect parcels had the name ‘D. O’DONNELL’ and a Canberra street and suburb. Then there were the names and addresses on each of the twenty-one parcels.

  It didn’t take long to establish that one Daniel O’Donnell had nothing to do with sending the letter bombs – but there was a connection. His mother was a public servant who’d had dealings with someone known to twenty-one other potential recipients.

  By mid-morning, a flurry of telephone calls, followed with flying visits, had established that they were all linked by one thing. When each was asked if he or she kn
ew anyone who might make and send letter bombs, most nominated Colin Dunstan.

  The police converged on Dunstan’s house in Palmerston in early afternoon. First, trained negotiators had telephoned the house to ensure that Dunstan was not holding his wife hostage. He wasn’t. Knowing police were on the way, Dunstan’s wife, Sokkha Hac, took some computer disks and threw them over her back fence, a court was later told.

  The police recovered the disks, but there was no retrievable information left on them. There was, however, other evidence in and around the house that matched grains of gunpowder, pieces of plastic and other material they’d found at the mail exchange.

  Now they were sure of their man, but not where he was. One thing was sure: if his wife knew, she wasn’t saying.

  POLICE in every state were watching for the Canberra letter bomber. His photograph and description had been circulated nation-wide; every airport was alerted in case he tried to flee the country. But the wanted man was closer to home than anyone imagined.

  On the Tuesday morning, more than twelve hours before the furore at the mail centre, a man driving a undistinguished blue Toyota Corona drove into the Curtin Budget Motel, a small motel near a riding school about ten minutes from the city.

  He booked in, giving his name to the duty manager as Ron White, and was shown to room six. The motel owner, Les McCabe, was interested to see the name in the ledger because he had worked with a Ron White in Sydney years before, and wondered if it was the same man. McCabe was left wondering that day because the man stayed in his room.

  A long-term resident in the next room noticed an odd thing about the quiet man in number six. Each morning that week, ‘Ron White’ got up when his alarm went at 6am, started his Toyota precisely fifteen minutes later and let it idle for quarter of an hour before driving off in the direction of the nearest McDonald’s store. In an era when few people bother warming car motors, it seemed an elaborately painstaking routine.

  The guest had paid $150 in advance for three nights. On Friday, his last morning, he went to reception and offered $20 to be able to check out late, at noon. The McCabes noticed he still hadn’t left when they began their lunch, but they weren’t overly concerned. When Les McCabe returned to the office the guest was waiting for him. He was sitting outside the door trying to hide the fact he was holding a bloodsoaked wad of paper to one wrist.

  McCabe grabbed the paper and had a look. There were two deep cuts in the man’s arm. He had obviously lost a lot of blood. McCabe bundled him into the car and drove him to hospital.

  Left to cool his heels in the casualty waiting room, McCabe started to sense something odd when he inquired about ‘Ron White’ with a nurse, and no patient of that name came up on the computer screen. McCabe also noticed that the nurse looked unusually flustered. What he didn’t know until later was that she had just called the police because the suicidal patient virtually admitted he was the letter bomber, and had asked for his lawyer to be called. He also said he had taken a drug overdose and would die of liver failure within days.

  Still unaware of the drama unfolding around him, McCabe left the mysterious guest to it and drove back to the motel – only to find it surrounded by police cars and news crews. The police blocked his way, and when he identified himself they put him in a car with two detectives who questioned him.

  It was then he found out that the guest in room six was Australia’s most wanted man. It turned out that while he was at the hospital his wife had gone to clean the room. She found blood in the bathroom and a note on a table saying there were no weapons or bombs in the room and requesting the finder to tell his wife that he’d put money in the bank to pay the mortgage.

  Mrs McCabe knew the guest had to be the letter bomber. She called the police, only to be told that she was probably mistaken because they believed Dunstan had fled to Queensland.

  Half an hour later, a constable turned up and acknowledged that the blue Toyota looked like Dunstan’s car, but had the wrong number plates. But when he found the car’s correct plates in a bag in the front seat there was no doubt about it. He had a quick look at room six and locked it to preserve the scene.

  When the bomb squad arrived later they started, to the McCabes’ disgust, to break down the door instead of asking for the key. The bomb men were disappointed – there was nothing in the room except the note and the bloodstains, and there were traces only of what turned out to be gunpowder in the car. Forensic evidence, maybe, but nothing that would go bang.

  ON Monday, December 7, Bob Platt was taking a drive in his lunch hour from a concrete works on the western outskirts of Canberra. He was in Urialla Road, a semi-rural area favored for picnics, when he saw something sitting underneath a tree close to the road. Curious, he stopped his car and got out.

  He found five plastic bags, but they weren’t full of rubbish of the sort often dumped in quiet spots. It was a strange collection of hardware: tools, wires and electrical components. There were also hundreds of rifle bullets in various calibres ranging from the common .22 to .243 to .308, and twelve-gauge shotgun cartridges. Some of the bullets and cartridges were empty, and there was a bag of bullet heads, lead shot, and wads. It was obvious someone had been extracting gunpowder.

  But it wasn’t the ammunition that alarmed Bob Piatt. It was the small plastic device the size of a computer disk. He’d seen a picture of the devices found at the mail centre seven days before, and this looked awfully like it. He left quickly and quietly.

  When the police came they found something else in the bags: a list of names and addresses of people, including the twenty-eight to whom letter bombs had been mailed the previous week.

  There were also three two-dollar blackwood stamps and three thirty-cent saltwater crocodile stamps. Investigators already had enough forensic evidence to convict Dunstan, but this put it beyond doubt. As long as the link was established with Dunstan, no defence lawyer could dismiss it as scientific mumbo jumbo, and no jury could ignore it.

  It would be a year before the scales of justice weighed the evidence against Dunstan, but his fate was sealed that day.

  COLIN George Dunstan, forty-four, was found guilty of nine of eleven charges relating to mailing twenty-eight explosive devices. He admitted making the devices, but insisted they were not dangerous and that he had taken steps to ensure they wouldn’t explode. Judge Higgins, of the ACT Supreme Court, sentenced Dunstan to nine years’ jail, with a non-parole period of five years, backdated to May 26, 1999.

  In his judgment, Judge Higgins noted: ‘It seems to be that the situation was encouraged by the absurdly complicated grievance mechanisms engaged in within the Australian Public Service generally, and the Australian Taxation Office in particular. He was not alone in being responsible for elevating a relatively simple workplace difficulty into an intractable and lengthy series of administrative and legal proceedings.’

  But, the judge said, ‘whatever wrongs the addressees may have committed, that could not remotely have justified the campaign of terror the offender planned.’ Dunstan’s actions, he said, were ‘a product of self-pity and a desire for revenge’ out of all proportion to the actions against him.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Gun Alley Tragedy

  ‘On the early morning of the last day of the year 1921 the dead body of a little girl of twelve, named Alma Tirtschke, was found by a bottle-gatherer in an L-shaped right-of-way off Little Collins Street. She had been violated and strangled, and her nude body had been placed in Gun Alley. On the morning of Saturday, February 25th, 1922, Colin Campbell Ross, a young man of twenty-eight, was found guilty of her murder, and on the morning of April 24th he was executed in the Melbourne Gaol. Face to face with his Maker, as he himself put it, he asserted his innocence on the scaffold in terms of such peculiar solemnity as to intensify the feeling, already widely prevalent, that an innocent man had been done to death.’

  WITH those words, a brave barrister called Thomas Brennan began the most terrible story he knew, and one that haunted him all
his life. It was a double tragedy that had elements of the crimes and punishments that stick in Australians’ collective memory … the Beaumont children’s abduction, Gary Heywood and Abina Madill’s murder at Shepparton, the politically-driven hanging of Ronald Ryan, the disgraceful police work and trial-by-media suffered by Lindy Chamberlain, the public outcry for Jaidyn Leskie.

  Brennan defied the rigid conventions of his own middle-class origins and the blind respect for authority that held sway in those days to give an unblinking account of how the police, the press, public opinion and political expediency hanged a man on evidence Brennan exposed as a farrago of falsehoods fabricated by prostitutes, thieves and police motivated by the promise of reward or advancement.

  It took just 115 days from when Alma Tirtschke, a Hawthorn schoolgirl, was raped and murdered until Colin Ross, a Footscray knockabout, dropped through the hangman’s trapdoor in the grim bluestone building where the National Trust now hosts corporate cocktail parties and sells souvenirs to sightseers.

  It had taken only a five-day trial for a jury to find the accused man guilty in an atmosphere that Brennan – his junior defence counsel – had likened to the ‘lynch law’ of some American states, where howling mobs still killed people without trial, hanging them from the nearest tree or lamp post.

  Two higher courts had thrown out appeals on the principle that, no matter how dubious the trial evidence might have been, a jury’s decision based on that evidence should not be overturned. The Attorney-General of the day chose politics over process by contemptuously rejecting permission to appeal to the Privy Council in England – giving his decision to a newspaper without bothering to reply to the condemned man’s solicitor.

  Those few weeks, in which public opinion was described by a contemporary lawyer as ‘inflamed as it has not been inflamed within the memory of this generation’, greatly affected Thomas Brennan, then fifty four. On the April morning that Ross hanged, Brennan stayed home and wept, one of his relatives told the author of this story. The lawyer with a conscience immediately started writing The Gun Alley Tragedy, a cool analysis of the evidence as compelling today as it was in 1922.