Murdered children haunt cop Barry Doherty

BARRY Doherty has attended some of the state's most horrific murders and accidents - beheadings, mutilations, drownings.

Has seen too much evil ... forensics police officer Barry Doherty.

IT is the children that are the toughest to deal with. Barry Doherty has attended some of the state's most horrific murders and accidents - beheadings, mutilations, drownings, drivers killed in road crashes.

But it is the roll call of the little ones - babies, twins, brothers and sisters - murdered at the hands of their parents or strangers that still haunt him after 17 relentless years as a crime scene investigation officer.

Mr Doherty talks of the feelings of fear, hopelessness and horror that go with the job.

Last week he was awarded $753,676 damages in the Supreme Court after being retired as medically unfit due to post traumatic stress disorder.

It was testament to the fact that a posting to the Police Forensic Services Group is one of the toughest in the force. Even the most professional hearts and heads - and Mr Doherty, 47, was one of the hardiest - can struggle to cope.

If this was CSI TV-style, the snow white overalls would never be marred by a spot of blood. On TV, nothing sticks, like coagulated blood. Nothing smells like real life - like real death.

"It's constant blood and gore and guts and damaged people. They never deliver good news, always bad," said NSW Police Association official Greg Chilvers, a member of the Critical Incident Stress Management Foundation of Australia which oversees many of the high-risk jobs such as homicide cops, accident investigators, ambos and fireys.

"No human being can cope with that on a daily basis."

Mr Chilvers said he had even seen crown prosecutors affected because they read all about the horrors.

"Why do they keep doing it? They feel they have to do their best to get justice for the victims and their families. People are relying on them to provide the answers," he said.

There was evidence that, of the 31 officers Mr Doherty worked with in the FSG based at Wollongong, 24 were forced out due to stress. One recently-appointed FSG boss didn't turn up for his first day in the job because he was off work with stress.

In recent years, the ballistics section, part of the FSG, lost six highly-trained ballistics police. They retired prematurely, suffering psychological injuries. Four former South African police who were ballistics experts replaced them, employed as civilians. One went off sick after months and never returned.

Mr Doherty's work diary reads like a run-down of the worst that NSW has had to offer since he became a policeman in 1985.

He progressed to the FSG within three years.

In October 1989 he helped identify victims of the Grafton bus crash: 22 dead. In December he helped identify victims of the Kempsey bus crash: 35 dead. Just six days later he was identifying those killed in the Newcastle earthquake: 13 dead.

In June 1994, he was called to a suburban house in Wollongong where Snezana Velevska, her twin three-month-old baby girls and their sister Zaklina, 6, were all killed - their bodies piled up, with the babies on the bottom.

"One of the things I struggled through my whole service is I struggled with jobs where there were children involved and I was unlucky to get a number of these during my time," Mr Doherty, a dad of two, said.

March 1996 and another triple murder. Matthew de Gruchy had lost his temper after he was forbidden from taking the family car and clubbed to death his mother Jennifer, sister Sarah and brother Adrian. He doused Adrian's body with petrol.

Mr Doherty recalled his most gruesome crime scene was the murder of Albion Park newsagent David O'Hearn. He had been mutilated. Nine days later, the killer Mark Valera bashed to death paedophile and ex-Wollongong lord mayor Frank Arkell. Valera had ambitions to be a serial killer, writing: "Who will be my number three? The possibilities are endless."

Undisturbed days off were as rare as murder confessions. When the officers were given psychological tests, they laughed them off, unwilling to let colleagues down.

Mr Doherty had looked down on officers forced out because they couldn't cope: "I had never thought this would happen to me."

It did. Mr Doherty would vomit before he went to work. He was hiding photos and exhibits so he didn't have to file them. He was having nightmares, flashbacks. A murder suicide on Anzac Day in 2005 was the last straw and he hasn't been back to work since May that year.

One reason he sued the police was for those still working the crime scenes. Justice Price found that the police service had breached its duty of care to Mr Doherty, who suffered psychological injury.