Christian - Presumed Guilty

The criminal law is replete with miscarriages of justice caused in cases reliant on circumstantial evidence, particularly when the heart of the case rests on the interpretation of forensic evidence.

Justice Brian Martin QC, 1 November 2012

CONTENTS

Chapter 15 Ripe for Prejudice

The year I turned twenty-eight, a ten-year career as a daily newspaper reporter took what I assumed would be a more leisurely turn. Courts, crime, police, politics, manhunts, fire, floods, every imaginable example of private and public tragedy in four Australian cities, and a demanding daily column with relentless deadlines were all to be exchanged for a tilt at capitalist enterprise and the experience of involved fatherhood.

My then-wife, a graphic artist, and I started our own weekly newspaper, the Post, which reported the rhythms of the inner suburbs around where we lived in Perth, Western Australia. We sold advertising space to pay the bills, operating out of the front room of our five-roomed terrace house, where I had filched half my one-year-old sons bedroom to build a darkroom.

Life as a suburban newspaper editor proved anything but tranquil. Furious, sometimes dirty neighbourhood arguments were taking place over the destruction of heritage houses to build profitable high-density home units, and this conflict was stretching the balancing act of a free and fair press more than anything I had encountered. Angry property developers would bang on our doors late on the night an edition went to print. Their objection was that I reported their activities with the same rigour and gravitas as I would national politics.

All the stories printed in the Post were close to home, and many were deeply personal. We often knew the players. It was not possible to remain remote, as I had done in my previous life, to go home, switch off and let the editor take care of any backlash. The people whose lives and work I wrote about I would likely encounter in the street next day, several barely restraining their impulse to throw a punch.

As the newspaper business boomed we bought bigger premises: a near-defunct wine bar, The Vintage, with a long history as colourful as the characters who drank there. We hired more people, shifted the desks and typesetting machines into the still-operating bar, and set up house in former publican Ted Slingers small flat behind rooms where, lately, he had boisterously entertained liquor law-enforcement police. In the backyard, orange, apricot and pear trees, my fishing dinghy and ancient motorbike all wilted from neglect as we worked sixteenhour days. Sale of the bars liquor licence had not been well advertised for years, scrubbed-up young men and befrocked, bright-eyed and perfumed young women would turn up at our home and office ready for a big Saturday night on the town.

Local crime turned into a challenge even more gruelling than labyrinthine town-planning brawls. Our papers catchment happened to overlay the hunting grounds of three serial killers, the first being one of Australias most notorious. He had been hanged thirteen years before the Post printed its first edition, but his evil deeds were still very much alive in the fears of our readers. Our little newspaper was up and running when another, David Birnie, with his partner Catherine Birnie, began plucking young women from our streets, torturing, raping and murdering them. His final victim, the one who got away and blew the whistle, later became a friend and partner in another business. Birnie long afterwards killed himself in jail, but, in the meantime, the infamous and still-at-large Claremont serial killer was on the prowl, preying on young women who had emerged from drinking spots after nights out. So traumatised was our readership by this latest predator we at the Post felt the community needed to better understand the psychology behind these crimes. We began to write and publish pieces that delved into how and why monsters emerge from among thousands of their contemporaries who do not become serial killers, and to find what was known about stemming this world-wide plague. Not much, was then the answer. A baffled and besieged Perth police department publicly criticised me for contacting former FBI criminal profilers in the US. Details I have discovered recently from other sources about this strange breed will startle most readers.

In my crime file is a collection of black-and-white photos, exhibits from the first serial killers old murder cases. They are from another century, and could be from another planet. Large detectives in hats and old-fashioned dark suits peer gimlet-eyed at the camera. In some photos the scarred murderer is showing how he killed women and men.

One image evokes a gentler age ruptured by tragic events. A press photographer caught it just half a block from our original terrace-house newspaper office in an inner-city lane, bordered by broken-down picket fences, two ragged, small boys pedal their tricycles into shot at the moment the photographer snaps police following the trail along which the serial killer had dragged a young womans violated body.

These monochrome images are leftovers from two old murder cases, both involving glaring miscarriages of justice that I had a big hand in reopening and solving many years later.

The serial offender concerned was so prolific that two unlucky innocent bystanders, and then a third person, as I much later discovered, were jailed for some of his crimes. The misery caused was immeasurable.

The heartbreaking story of Darryl Beamish was the grandfather of them all a case I discovered contained almost every element of what can, and does, go wrong with police investigations and the court hearings that follow. Darryl, born profoundly deaf, was adroitly framed for a murder he did not commit, then sentenced to hang.

The murder gripped and preoccupied an entire city for years and began Darryls downward spiral to Death Row, the broad details as vivid to me today as when I first heard them as a child from my parents around the kitchen table. This suburban cataclysm held special family poignancy the horrific killing of an innocent young woman had happened right where my mother and her six siblings had lived all of their carefree childhoods. Her family home, an old homestead named Cernay, after her fathers birthplace in France, had a few years before the murder been sold, demolished and replaced with what became the citys most notorious crime scene.

Decades later, chance led me to pick apart the police investigation into this senseless killing. What I learnt about the work of certain devious detectives shocked me to the core. Almost impossible to reconcile with this new knowledge was the high regard I held for the many police officers I encountered as a newspaper reporter and on the streets. Most cops I met were dedicated, hardworking, mostly smart, compassionate and justifiably proud of their work. They dealt daily with the crims people they called shitheads on our behalf.

The deeper I dug into Darryls case, with access to his personal story, his friends, family and police files, the more I realised that his suffering was far from unique. The wider I looked the more victims I met. The more files I read, the more behind-the-scenes information I found, and as I attended more and more trials it dawned on me that I was surrounded by a cluster of wrongful convictions that many of the worst elements of Darryls case had persisted into modern times. Men, and some women, had been sent to jail for crimes they had not committed. These people were not the victims of nuanced legal niceties, like the difference between murder and manslaughter, or between consensual sex and rape. They hadnt been there. They hadnt done it.