A rock and a hard case for Gary Jubelin

Gary Jubelin has plenty of enemies, even among former colleagues, but you’d would want him on your side.

Former detective Gary Jubelin. Picture: AAP

Gary Jubelin wasn’t one of those kids who grew up thinking: I want to be a cop. His father was in the building trade, so he figured he’d follow him, and he was working on a building site when he saw two police officers chasing a bad man down.

Jubelin watched, mesmerised. And he thought: that’s for me. Catching killers. Chasing bad guys. That is 100 per cent for me.

Jubelin applied the next day, and the NSW Police Force took him on. He made it easily through the training — even now, in his early 50s, he looks immensely strong and terrifically lean — so they gave him a badge and a gun.

He can still remember the instant authority it conferred on him. “I went to cross the road, not at the crossing, and all the traffic stopped,” Jubelin told the audience at the BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival on Sunday. “And I thought, oh, OK!”

The traffic had stopped because he wasn’t Gary the builder’s labourer any more. He was a uniformed policeman — later, a top homicide detective — whose job it was to uphold law and order.

He went about it with gusto.

Obsessive cop

Jubelin has been accused — many times — of behaviour that borders on obsessive. There are the big things, such as working 15-hour days, seven days a week; and there are the little things, such as tending to wear the same outfit every day: a sharp black suit, with a glossy black tie, to go with the glossy bald head, along with the slick sunglasses, the broken nose and the menacing mien.

Asked by his interlocutor, Jana Wendt, whether he’d agree with those people who have described him through the years as a “hard-arse”, Jubelin said he was happy to wear the label because that’s what people want in a homicide detective. A determined bastard.

It’s difficult to disagree. If your child were murdered, you’d absolutely want somebody such as Jubelin working out in the kickboxing gym and then around the clock to find the killer.

There’s a tendency in modern society to feel for the perpetrator. Maybe they had a tough childhood or they’ve been otherwise hard done by. Jubelin has been known to feel empathy for some of these people, too, but he’s no social worker. He knows whose side he’s on. The victim’s.

Tough tactics

He told a story about the time he was tasked with solving the murder of a Sydney woman. Everyone suspected the husband because, let’s face it, when a woman is murdered it’s often the husband.

“So I got him in and it was a hard interview,” Jubelin said. “And when I say hard, nothing untoward. But it was intense. Some might describe it as aggressive. I describe it as getting to the truth of it … I really put the pressure on him.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t the husband.

“It was a tragic case of her (the wife) being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Jubelin said, “and it was a robbery gone wrong. And I spoke to the husband after, and I apologised for what I put him through.

“He said to me, ‘Gary, that interview gave me the confidence that the right person was looking to find out the murderer of my wife.’ ”

Who wouldn’t feel the same? The families of victims want the cops to go hard, and why wouldn’t they be? They want justice.

Jubelin honed tough tactics across many years and he had a lot of success in his career.

He put the Perish brothers, Anthony and Andrew, in prison over the murder of drug dealer Terry Falconer. He also helped locate the body of Matthew Leveson, a young man who had disappeared after leaving a Sydney nightclub in 2007.

Little boy lost

And then came the case of William Tyrrell, the little boy in the Spider-Man suit who went missing from the town of Kendall, on the mid-north coast of NSW, on September 12, 2014.

Thursday will be the fifth anniversary of William’s disappearance. He was a funny, lively, cheeky foster child. One minute he was bouncing around the garden, roaring like a tiger, the next minute he was gone.

It’s as baffling a case as anyone in policing has ever come across. For years there were thought to be no known witnesses to William’s abduction.

Police have no forensic evidence. Nobody has confessed and not a trace of William — not a hair, not a shoe — has been found.

The temptation for somebody such as Jubelin to take the case was absolutely overwhelming.

It’s 100 per cent the kind of thing he’s driven to try to solve.

The case did not go immediately to him. It went first to the cops in Kendall and nearby Taree and Port Macquarie, who treated it like a missing persons case. Little boy lost.

You can’t blame them for that. William was visiting the house at 48 Benaroon Drive in Kendall when he went missing. He didn’t know the area and it is surrounded by bush. There is a cemetery at the end of the street, a house with a pool across the road, another with a dam not that far away.

Finding William. That was paramount.

Strike Force Rosann

Across time it became apparent that William wasn’t simply lost and not found. Something had happened to him. But what? The case got passed around a bit, before falling into Jubelin’s hands.

He formed a strike force, called it Rosann, and expanded it across time to become the biggest, most expensive missing persons investigation in NSW history.

Hundreds of cops. Thousands of leads. A million-dollar reward, announced not by the cops but by no less than the NSW premier.

Not every missing persons case gets that kind of attention, let alone those resources.

Cop charged

Five years on, William is still missing and nobody has been charged.

Correction: one person has been charged, and it’s Jubelin.

This decorated cop, this bull terrier of an investigator, was relieved of his duties in January, after more than four years as head of the strike force. He has since been charged with four offences under the Surveillance Devices Act for allegedly recording a conversation without a warrant. He has pleaded not guilty.

The charges will be heard on September 24.

Sunday’s event gave Jubelin a rare chance to talk about the case … no, not William’s. The case against him.

“I’ll choose my words carefully only because it is a matter before the court and obviously I’ll make jokes about it but that’s my way of coping with the situation,” he said.

“Those charges relate specifically to me carrying out my duties. It was within the scope of what I was tasked to do, investigating the William Tyrrell matter.

“I had a lawful reason to record those conversations, and an operational need.”

Jubelin will tell the court he was merely gathering evidence. He was hoping to solve the case. ­Nobody seriously doubts that. Yet the incident has cost Jubelin his career.

Sidelined on a desk

He spent four months on desk duty — literally sitting at his desk, drinking green tea, and listening to whale song — while the police conducted an internal investigation into his conduct. He’d have to have been blind to fail to see the writing on the wall.

Jubelin had already been accused, by some fellow ­detectives, of a terrific case of tunnel vision: chasing dead leads to the point of exhaustion while others went unexplored.

He disputes that.

He says he always kept an open mind. But he also knew in his heart that those who had succeeded in removing him as head of the investigation would never let him near the case again.

And you have to look at it from their side: the NSW Police Force had on its hands with the Tyrrell matter a case that had already reached the highest offices in the land.

The million-dollar reward is the largest for a missing persons case.

Media interest was intense.

The investigation, authorities decided, could not stand a whiff of scandal, not even the hint of wrongdoing, no matter how well intentioned.

And so Jubelin quit the police force.

And they had him charged. He could now go to jail. It’s unlikely, but possible — penalties for the relevant offences do include jail time — and he tried to make light of that last weekend, joking about how he’d know plenty of the bad people inside because, of course, he helped put them there.

It’s a way to ease the tension, but the spot he’s in, it’s tremendously difficult.

It’s lousy for William’s families — foster and biological — too.

Coroners Court

The investigation, on Jubelin’s removal, was sent to the Coroners Court — the last stop, usually, to cold-case status.

Jubelin has been in attendance most days, listening to other cops trying to explain the steps he took, and the calls he made. The missteps, too. Because there have been some mistakes. There always are in every investigation.

Jubelin talked last weekend of the impact on somebody like him of being unable to fulfil the ­promise he made to the families, to never give up the search for ­William.

“I have been a homicide detective for over 25 years, and a homicide detective, to me, has to be prepared to bleed for the case,” he said.

“I know if someone in my family was murdered, I would have an expectation that person responsible for finding the perpetrator would go above and beyond.”

He has found it “very difficult, sitting and watching something” from the sidelines.

He made the foster parents a promise, he said, to do everything in his power to catch the killer, and he can’t now keep that promise.

“And I don’t think we should accept that a three-year-old child can just disappear,” he said.

And that is correct. Children do not simply evaporate.

Five years ago something happened to William Tyrrell, and what that thing was — well, nobody wants to think about it. But we still need to know.