Gary Jubelin ‘Badness’ extract: Police chief claims Gary Jubelin left Tyrrell investigation in ‘a bit of a mess’
Gary Jubelin reveals his shock as he realised the police investigation has also become about making him a scapegoat in the missing William Tyrrell investigation.
NSW
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All day, my phone will not stop ringing. Family, friends and journalists are calling to ask for my reaction.
What do I think about the news that the cops have a suspect over the disappearance of William Tyrrell? Do I know who the suspect is? Can I explain it?
No, I tell them, I can’t explain it.
Like everybody, I want to see this case solved and whoever is responsible in prison.
But as a cop, this makes no sense. Imagine that you have a suspect; why go to the newspaper? You risk warning your suspect the cops are coming for them.
You risk them destroying evidence or preparing a false story.
If you ever manage to get them into court, you risk their lawyer pointing to this newspaper article and arguing the scandal it created means your suspect can never get a fair trial.
I say that I always worry when I see unnamed police sources leaking to the media. There has to be a reason why they do it.
In my mind, I’m turning the pieces of this puzzle over, trying to fit them together. The police could be leaking information to provoke a reaction in their suspect. As a cop, I saw that happen.
NO SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE
Trying to figure the problem out, I think about what’s changed between me leaving the strike force having cleared William’s foster parents and this announcement.
During that time, the foster mother has gone public, saying that her family’s relationship with the police has changed, from empathetic to cold.
She’s criticised senior police, including those at the top of the organisation, demanding more be done to find William. She has demanded more resources be given to the investigation and that it not be shut down and sent off to Unsolved Homicide.
In all my 34 years as a cop, I’ve never seen a suspect do that. I know that many senior cops do not respond well to public criticism, and it sometimes seems like the higher people reach within the police force, the thinner their skin gets.
Calling her a suspect silences a critic, I say, during these telephone conversations.
Have you got any evidence, they ask me.
No, I say. I haven’t.
So why else would they do it?
Unless whoever leaked that story just wanted to make the cops look good.
I can tell from their silence on the phone that most people do not agree with my reaction. Even my close family are thinking that if the cops say they’ve got a suspect, then they must have the evidence to back it up.
I imagine them asking themselves another, unspoken, question: Gary, you led this investigation for four years without finding who took William. If the police have got it right now, how did you get it so wrong?
BADNESS HAS BEEN DONE
The seventh anniversary of William’s disappearance is on 12 September 2021, less than a week after that newspaper front page saying the police have a new suspect. My replacement as the head of the investigation, David Laidlaw, marks the date by taking some of the detectives on the case to visit the house where the three-year-old went missing.
They walk around like they have never seen the building, looking at the front deck where William was last photographed in his Spider-Man costume, and at the garden, sloping steeply down towards the road, where his foster mother says the boy was playing at being a tiger.
David seems to be limping slightly as he follows behind the others. They are filmed by the police force and the footage is released to the media. It plays out on newspaper websites. It’s on Facebook and Twitter. People send me links to it in text messages. It is repeated on every channel that evening during the TV news.
In it, the detectives also visit what the film calls Location #2; a stretch of road where they go through another pantomime of unrolling an aerial photograph, laying it out on the bonnet of a pristine white four-by-four that just happens to be waiting for them, and standing round and pointing at something in the photo.
In the background, street signs and a property name are clearly visible. It’s a few hundred metres from the house where William was last seen.
This only provokes questions. Why are there two locations?
What do the police know about that street? Rumours soon spread. I get more calls from journalists, trying to add the different things together. I watch the footage over and over, part of me thinking of the stick I would have got from inside the police if I had paraded myself like that for a B-grade piece of television, part of me thinking that there is something going on here, but I can’t see the whole picture.
This is how you build pressure on a suspect, I think. It feels more like part of a considered plan to provoke a reaction than that wild, accusatory front-page story.
My phone starts ringing again but I ignore it, thinking there isn’t much I can say. The footage is obviously staged but I can only guess at the reason. Either the cops want to demonstrate how hard they are working or I’m right that this is something they are doing to gather evidence, by watching to see what their suspect does next. Either way, it’s not going to help anybody if I start mouthing off.
But if this footage is being released now to gather evidence, it tells me the cops aren’t confident in what they’ve got already.
If so, then it was wrong to leak that story saying the police now have a suspect they believe is responsible for the death and disappearance of William. Whoever is in the right or wrong here, I fear some badness has been done.
SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT
Monday, November 15. The police announce a new, “high intensity” search of the house where William Tyrrell disappeared.
It’s been searched, I think. It was searched at the time he went missing. We conducted another long forensic search in 2018, before the inquest started.
This time, the search is different. Bigger.
There are TV cameras recording every moment as the cops go through the property again and pick at the bush with rakes and forks near the area they called Location #2 in the film footage released on the anniversary of William’s disappearance.
Once again, the news is on every TV channel and repeated in the constant phone calls from people asking if I’ve seen it.
Police dogs have been brought in, according to the TV reporters.
Cadaver dogs. Trained to smell out human remains. The police confirm it: “It’s highly likely that if we found something it would be a body,” says Detective Chief Superintendent Darren Bennett at a press conference, surrounded by a forest of reporters.
Darren’s the boss of State Crime Command, sitting above the Homicide Squad, meaning the decision to reopen the search has been signed off at the highest levels of the police force. “We are looking for the remains of William Tyrrell, no doubt about that,” he says.
The search is due to take three weeks, Darren continues. A huge effort. “This activity is in response to evidence we have obtained in the course of the investigation. It’s not speculative in any way.”
He’s saying that they have a target. That they know what happened. He says the police will look above and below ground in three locations around the house where William was staying.
That means they believe William was buried. It sounds, again, like they are trying to send a message. To put pressure on their suspect.
If so, the pressure is increased in the late afternoon, when the TV news reports the police are set to take out an Apprehended Violence Order against William’s foster parents. Again, this has been leaked to the media.
My phone rings all evening and on into the night.
The questions friends and family are asking are different now. They want to know why didn’t we look more closely at the foster parents. We did, I try to tell them.
It’s strange, people tell me. No one ever knew their names or saw them express any emotion. I try to explain that we weren’t allowed to name them because they were foster parents, and the only interview they were allowed to give for years had them in silhouette, so you couldn’t
see their faces.
It seems to make no difference.
After today, people seem to have made up their minds about the couple. If the police do have listening devices in place, I wonder if the cops monitoring those recordings are also thinking the same and how that might affect the way they interpret anything that is said. I barely sleep and, when I do manage to drift off, I wake up feeling sick, thinking, Something isn’t right here.
IN THE CROSSHAIRS
I stand a little taller after the morning’s training session. Wiping the sweat away with one forearm, I hear Adam and Dave laughing. The rising sun chases shadows across the oval. Walking back, past shops selling the morning newspapers, the headlines are all about William Tyrrell.
At home, the story still leads the news on the TV. The same images are repeated: uniformed cops sifting through dirt; digging in the garden directly underneath the balcony of the house where William went missing; in the forest stripping the ground bare of the young trees and undergrowth ahead of excavations due to begin that week
My phone pings, with one text message after another asking, “Are you all right?” That’s strange, I think, replying, “Yes. Why?” A reply back: the commissioner of the NSW Police Force is on breakfast radio. I turn it on. He’s criticising my investigation into William’s disappearance. “I think some time was wasted,” he says. “The investigation was looking at some persons of interest who were clearly not.” The team of detectives who took over after I was gone “inherited what was a bit of a mess”.
Although nobody names me, this feels personal. The commissioner knows I was the detective running the investigation then. The radio interviewer, Ben Fordham, also knows it. My phone starts ringing; another person out there listening to this and wanting my reaction. Everyone is being told I made a mess of the attempt to find a missing three-year-old. I wasted time. I feel the same anger rising in me as when I walked out of court after being convicted. It’s been almost three years since that day now.
And I’ve kept quiet. I’ve made a point of not criticising the cops in public. When will this stop? I don’t want it. Let me lead the life I’m making for myself outside the police force. Quit dragging me back in.
Later, I’ll be told that none of the cops actually working on the case was expecting the commissioner to call me out so publicly. Just like they weren’t expecting the newspaper story saying they had a new suspect.
During the radio interview, when Ben asks him about that, the commissioner confirms they are now looking closely at one person.
He’s confident the police working on the case now can solve it: “I truly believe that.” My editor at the Sunday Telegraph rings me: “I’ve been told to call you for a welfare check.” “I’m OK. These idiots aren’t going to break me.”
“What the f — k is going on?” he asks. I’m asking the same question. Neither of us has seen anything like this. A police commissioner criticising the running of an ongoing Homicide investigation.
For one thing, he must know that, if they do arrest somebody, this is now the first thing a defence lawyer will reach for: “But officer, your own police commissioner has described this investigation as a mess. So how can we trust you?”
For another, as commissioner, he was the boss. This case has been running the whole time he has been in that position. As investigation supervisor I wrote up monthly progress reports, setting out the work we’d done, our different suspects and our strategies. Each of these was passed up the chain and signed off by an assistant commissioner.
At different times, I also handed up fortnightly briefing notes for a deputy commissioner, outlining our progress. There were countless written situation reports, operational orders and a comprehensive investigation plan, which I kept updated. There were at least three formal reviews, where I outlined what we were doing in person to a panel of senior police. The cops still have all of this paperwork. No one can say they didn’t know what we were doing. If this case was a mess, then it’s also on him.
Badness by Gary Jubelin will be published by HarperCollins on September 7 and is available to pre-order now. For more, listen to Gary’s phenomenally successful I Catch Killers wherever you get your podcasts.
Originally published as Gary Jubelin ‘Badness’ extract: Police chief claims Gary Jubelin left Tyrrell investigation in ‘a bit of a mess’
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