On the trail of Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfire arsonist
ON Black Saturday, a firebug lit two blazes in the Latrobe Valley that killed 10 people. The police hunt to find the culprit was swift, but, as Chloe Hooper reveals in this extract from The Arsonist, they still needed Brendan Sokaluk to talk.
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ON Black Saturday, a firebug lit two blazes in the Latrobe Valley that killed 10 people. The police hunt for the culprit was swift, but, as Chloe Hooper reveals in this extract from The Arsonist, they still needed him to talk.
AS the evening sky began to fade, the detectives waited in Morwell’s Subway for their dinner. Sergeant Adam Henry and then senior constable Paul Bertoncello had known each other only vaguely until now, but for the next three and a half months they would stay in the same motel, work the same long hours, eat the same takeaway. The clock didn’t really matter in these jobs. Living away from their families, with no real reason to leave the makeshift office, they ended up putting in sixteen-hour days. Everyone shoulder to shoulder in the police station’s incident room, forty investigators at the peak, dealing with the enforced intimacy and the inevitable clash of moods and personalities.
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The past twenty-four hours had been exhilarating. The Arson Squad had expected a long, drawn out investigation. Instead they’d connected Brendan Sokaluk to the start of the Churchill Fire with uncanny speed. But when the detectives turned on the tape recorder to interview their suspect, he began acting strangely, and the frustration with this interview opened up others. Henry’s wife was at home in Melbourne with their newborn, who had arrived early and was only a week out of intensive care. Bertoncello’s wife was caring for their four kids, all aged under ten (and all of whom they’d struggled to name, because each possibility reminded him of some delinquent he’d once arrested). Being a detective did not always make for an easy family life: the divorce rate amongst police is double that of the rest of the population.
While they waited for their food, a message came through: Sokaluk urgently wanted to speak to them. The men rushed back, scoffing down their enormous sandwiches in the twilight. They believed they’d twice witnessed the suspect behave differently on tape, so this time Adam Henry would wear a microrecorder into the cell.
‘What’s up, mate?’ he soon asked.
‘I want to start talking,’ Sokaluk replied.
To ensure that later it didn’t appear Brendan had been tricked into speaking, Henry decided to once more try formally interviewing him. He was brought from the watch house back to the interview room. It was nearly 9pm.
In the video recording of this interview, Brendan is sitting in a corner by a laminex table. There’s no natural light; a grey stripe winds along the claustrophobic walls. His shoulders are rounded, his belly protrudes from a baggy, stained sweatshirt.
On the other side of the table are the police.
When Brendan is read his rights and asked to explain them, he seems to better understand this time, although only slightly: ‘If I don’t [speak to you] I have to go back [to the cells].’
Henry asks him repeatedly if he wants a lawyer.
‘I don’t know any.’
‘We could make some arrangements, if you want to speak
to a lawyer, that’s up to you.’
‘There wouldn’t be any lawyers around at this time of night,’ he slowly answers.
‘We could try.’
‘No, because it would be wasting people’s time.’
Eventually Henry says, ‘Okay now, you said you wanted to talk to us?’
‘Yeah.’ Sokaluk speaks every word in the same dull, flat tone; a shh sound for s and f for th. ‘Want to tell you what happened Saturday, regards to the fire stuff. First, I was smoking in the car when I was driving.’ His sentences run together; only some are completed, and these fragments sound slurred. He explains that to, ‘get to my mate’s place, you can go the bitumen road or the gravel, and the bitumen road is dangerous because of hoons.
‘So, I go the gravel road, and I like to take shortcuts off the gravel, but when it’s rough it just shakes the car. And I was smoking, a bit fell down and so I grab a bit of paper to grab it and flick it out sort of thing, have to squish, flick that and it must’ve ignited. And I went up this track [Jellef’s Outlet], this road there that goes up; top of this was rubbish up there. I went up there and I reckon the car wasn’t working too well and stuff, and had to turn around. And then I noticed there was fire and I panicked, and I called triple-0 and I just tried to get away as quick as possible, just panicked.’
Here it is: the Arson Squad now have a confession, of sorts.
The undercurrent in the room changes. The detectives hang on every charged word. Large swathes of this strange story are delivered without any eye contact. Very little animates Brendan’s face, but he runs his fingers repeatedly along the top of the table and below it, again, again.
Sokaluk: ‘I haven’t been able to sleep properly after this. I like the bush, just didn’t want it to go up … Makes me sad inside.’
Henry: ‘Why is that?’
Sokaluk: ‘Because people died, was my fault and I have to put up with that.’
Henry: ‘How was it your fault?’
Sokaluk: ‘Because I was stupid. I burnt down one thing I loved in my whole life is the forest and my stupid actions stuffed it up. Now I have no place up the forest, going to sit and watch the fish, look at the creeks. Because my life gets hard from the stuff, and stress wise and that, I would go up there and sit, and this would to relax, I found. But now I’ve destroyed all those areas and all those poor people died, so stupid … I didn’t want my, my friends to get hurt. Next day I try to forget about it, try to … going to wish it would all go away because I want to be able to have some proper sleep.’
There is no provision for the senior officers to remotely monitor this interview. They can’t hear the pidgin-like sentences Bertoncello and Henry are deciphering. If the head of the Arson Squad wants to send them word, he has to slide a note under the door and wait for them to discreetly retrieve it. The detectives have previously decided to let Sokaluk give his account of events and to keep their questioning to a minimum. The more he speaks, the more he might incriminate himself.
It is clearer to them that Brendan is not quite right. His speech is childish, with words missing, syllables mispronounced, and it is all delivered in the same expressionless manner. They also figure, though, that he owns his own house, he’s apparently paid the bills, and can use a computer. He’d been canny enough to realise, in the cells, that his name hadn’t been pulled out of a hat. He then presumably calculated how much they knew about him — which isn’t much — and, in giving his story, he is now the one leading the interview. When, very occasionally, he darts a look in the detectives’ direction, it’s to appraise them. His eyes move as if behind a mask.
At 12.29am they have a 25-minute break. During this interval, the detectives are given a copy of a Crime Stoppers report. The digital imprint of his confidential statement had been found on Sokaluk’s seized computer. Two days earlier, he had submitted a form headed ‘What is your information about this crime?’ The form had various subheadings, also in the form of questions.
When the interview resumes, Henry reads them and Sokaluk’s answers aloud:
What is happening? a bad man lighten fires
When is it happening? on saterday
Where is it happening? glendonal road outside Churchill
Why are they doing it? on edge of plan tastion
How are they doing it? can, nt see his back is to me
Is there anything else you believe may be helpful? its a d, s, e [Department of Sustainability and Environment] firefighter lighten a fire why is he doing this bad thing 1 could of died
if the wind chance 1’d tryed to tell the police but they were to byse
Who is committing the crime? 1 saw a d, s, e firefighter light a fire on the edge of the road as 1 went pass 1’m sceared that the bad man will get me
There’s a silence after Henry finishes.
‘They said it was anonymous,’ Sokaluk offers.
Any contrition appears minimal. His tongue is moving around in his mouth like he’s cleaning something stuck there.
READER OFFER: Order The Arsonist — A Mind on Fire, by Chloe Hooper (Penguin books) for only $28 at heraldsun.com.au or post a cheque/moneyorder to: Herald Sun Shop, PO Box 14730, Melbourne VIC 8001
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