Body of evidence: dealing with the trauma of homicide
After her son Wayne was kicked to death at work, Denise Davis had no idea what she was in for. This is the other side of murder.
She holds a rose stem cremation urn to her chest. She keeps her son’s ashes in the rose bud. “He’s in a better place,” she says. “This is hell here, isn’t it? On Earth, I mean. Unless you can stand up for yourself.”
Denise Davis has a confession to make but she doesn’t know how to put it into words because it’s all so horrifically graphic and difficult to dwell upon. She wants to talk about the other side of murder — the compounding waves of homicide trauma, the days directly after January 6, 2008, when 28-year-old Wayne Williams seemed to stop being regarded by the world as a son, brother, uncle, friend, and became, simply, “The Deceased”. First name, “The”. Second name, “Deceased”. He became a file number in the Queensland courts. Her son became a thing of scientific study resting on a gurney.
Denise places the rose gently on the outdoor table of her home in suburban Logan, south-east Queensland. The stem rests on the edge of a photo album devoted entirely to images of Wayne, who was beaten and kicked to death at the Rising Sun Hotel in Rosewood, where he worked as a chef. Denise was driving along western Brisbane’s busy Centenary Motorway when she received the call from her brother, Ken.
“Pull over,” Ken said.
“What is it?” asked Denise.
“Just pull over.”
Her first reaction was all physical. She processed the news of her son’s murder by halting traffic on the motorway, exiting her driver’s side door and wildly punching her car bonnet until her fists bled. She was told to drive to a police station near Rosewood but lost her way because she felt her body wasn’t even inside that moving car but on some other plane of existence where she was holding her son’s head in her arms, rubbing her fingers through his hair. She stopped at a petrol station to ask for directions, then collapsed on the forecourt.
“I had to wait a few days, then I got the call to say that Wayne’s body was ready for us,” Denise says. One of her best friends, Kerry Oestreich, sits beside her, nodding supportively with every word. Kerry’s younger brother, Jonathan, was stabbed to death in Surfers Paradise in 2011 when he intervened in an argument between two male acquaintances. Kerry has walked every awful step in the coronial process that Denise details today.
Wayne’s body was at the John Tonge Centre, the mortuary for Queensland Health’s Forensic and Scientific Services facility in south-west Brisbane. Denise tried to visualise what he would look like in the mortuary viewing room. “I closed my eyes and all I saw was my son sleeping and I was hoping that’s what he looked like,” she says. “Just my son sleeping.” She shudders. “I had no idea what I was in for.”
In the centre’s waiting room she was greeted by a counsellor from Coronial Family Services, which provides support to relatives and close friends of people whose deaths are investigated by a coroner. The counsellor carefully and gently detailed the coronial and autopsy processes. “She takes me outside and says, ‘I have to tell you that we’ve had to do further tests on Wayne because it’s going to trial.’ And then she said, ‘His brain won’t be going with the body’.”
The counsellor outlined the brutal realities of the Coroners Act. In a homicide death of any kind the coroner will likely order a full internal autopsy examination of the victim, and the family’s consent will not be sought. “Oh,” Denise said, stunned by this information.
If a homicide victim’s organs or bones need to be retained then the views of family members must be considered but the retention decision rests ultimately with the coroner. Many homicide victims are buried without their brains.
Kerry shakes her head knowingly. She recalls viewing her brother’s post-autopsy body in a funeral home. She reeled at visible signs his brain had been examined. “I didn’t understand why they did that to Jonno when he was stabbed to death,” she says. “But it was a homicide. That is what’s expected after a homicide. It’s that simple. That’s the rules. No one ever asked me. You don’t get any say. They have all the rights over that dead body and that’s how it is.”
“Would you like to delay the funeral?” the coronial counsellor asked Denise. Until after the coroner was finished with her son’s brain, so his remains could be cremated whole, as Denise had intended? Her immediate thinking was all logistical. Funeral plans were already underway. Family had travelled from interstate. She thought of her son’s body resting for months on end in the mortuary. “I said, ‘No, I can’t delay the funeral’. And then I went in to see Wayne and there’s a big glass window and there’s Wayne laying there on a slab and he had what looked like a turban on his head.”
Denise shifts a cigarette box on the outdoor table, rests her left elbow where the cigarettes were. “We had the funeral and they rang me weeks later and said, ‘We’ve finished doing tests on Wayne’s brain, what do you want us to do with it?’” Tears fill her eyes now. “I said, ‘Can you get it cremated and I can keep the ashes at home’, and they said, ‘Denise, it’s wet tissue’.”
The counsellor explained that wet tissue disintegrates in the cremation process. There would be no ashes. “So, of course, all these things started going through my head,” she says. “My son’s gone to heaven without a brain? How will he be able to think? I was very delusional, very depressed, just thinking strange things. I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t know what to do. I said, ‘I just don’t know’.”
Denise cries freely now. “And I’ve never told anyone this before now,” she says. “But I don’t know what happened to my son’s brain.” She wipes her eyes, shrugs her shoulders. “They just disposed of it themselves. I don’t know what happened to it. It probably got thrown in the garbage.”
There’s a lot of life in all this death talk that senior counsellor Pat Clements is sharing in this room in the Forensic and Scientific Services facility, where for the past 10 years he has guided mums, dads, sisters and brothers through that impossible moment when they realise murder trauma is for life and the second wave of it hits somewhere around the moment they walk into the room with the big glass window on the other side of a closed door.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures say there were 247 murder and manslaughter victims across the country in 2017, and 256 the year before that, almost every one of them with loved ones left behind who were forced to wander, spent and raw, into rooms like this. Pat recalls the couple who sat on this couch explaining how hard they tried to have a child through IVF and, eventually, their child was born when the mother was in her late 40s and they were certain that child’s arrival was a miracle. “And that child was murdered,” Pat says. “I remember they told me their life was over and I was very worried they, too, would end up here having committed suicide.”
This, Pat says, is the other side of murder. He recalls the time a person who could not visit their deceased relative in person asked him to stand beside the body in the mortuary and pass on a message of love. “So what are my options?” Pat ponders. “My options are to say, ‘Yep, of course I will’, and then put down the phone and not do it — but of course I’m going to do it.” He’s a father. He’s human. “I will go to their cold room and I will find the trolley with their name and I will stand with them at the trolley and I will say, ‘Mary asked me to let you know that she loves you’.
“I have stood at the end of a trolley at three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon because the family said they had a spiritualist who was going to organise for their child to rise from the dead and they were having this prayer session and they asked if I could please stand by the trolley at three o’clock because then I could tell them that he had risen. So I did. And he didn’t. And I told them.”
Rule one: utmost care and respect for the living and the dead. Rule two: no false hope. Ever. “We don’t lie to families,” he says. “Some will literally say, ‘So, how many wounds were there? What was the entry point?’ They want lots of details. A very common question is, ‘Did they suffer? Was it quick?’ We are honest with families. We might say the advice from the pathologist is that death would have been instant or rapid. If the reality is that we can’t confirm that, then that’s what we tell people.”
It’s a brutal business. Incomprehensible. He starts from the point that this is and will forever be, unequivocally, the worst moment in the family member’s life, and works up from there.
This is Pat’s side of Denise’s story. “There’s no one pathway through this,” he says. “We can’t make it better. We try to get people through it with minimal damage to them on top of everything else that’s happened. If it’s a homicide or suspicious death, this process is going to happen and so the first thing to note is that the family’s permission or consent is not sought.” The brain is the most common organ kept, he says, because of the wealth of information it holds. “The pathologist takes samples of the brain or any other organ to assist in the investigation,” he says. “If we contact a family to talk to them about an organ recommendation then that’s because the pathologist is recommending the whole organ be retained. It’s the same all over the world. It used to be a disaster; basically the pathologist kept lots of bits and never told anybody. But that all changed about 10 to 15 years ago and we have a much better process now. But, again, it’s not consent, not permission-based.”
The increasingly invasive and traumatising autopsy process, Pat explains, is a product of the times and the sophistication of legal defence teams. “In a suspicious death or homicide, regardless of the mechanism of death — whether it’s a stabbing or gunshot or blunt force trauma — the coroner will order a full internal autopsy examination. The purpose being that not only are you wanting to definitively determine the cause of death but you are also needing to determine that there couldn’t be any other factors that might … be argued to be contributing factors. The defence will say, ‘You’re saying he died from injuries to the head — how do you know he didn’t die from heart damage?’ It seems absurd and extreme but that’s the world that we live in.”
Kaye Eden wishes she could stop seeing the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz singing in her head. This is the world she lives in. The “upside down world”, she calls it, the twisted and sickening world where her sister, Kym Cobby — a 51-year-old Gold Coast mother of three — was allegedly killed by her estranged husband on November 12.
“You know, the scarecrow that doesn’t have a brain,” she says. “I think these stupid things and it haunts me every day.” If Kaye’s family were forewarned about the possibility of Kym’s brain being retained during the grief-stricken hurricane spin of the days following her death, they can’t recall it. “We thought we got Kym back,” she says. “They’d already done a pretty big autopsy on her, which is disturbing enough to know. But you run with it because you know you don’t have any say.
“She was buried in late November but we didn’t get told about her brain being kept in the lab until February this year. You have a bit of closure on having them buried whole. You feel like you got them back and then you get told they still have her brain. It was just so disturbing when my mum told me. It was another horrendous shock. I just wanted to run away.”
Kaye’s family expect court proceedings to carry on well beyond a year from now. “Then we face the next step of what to do with the brain. Do we try to bury it with her? Do we cremate it? You have no idea until you go through it just how upside-down it makes your world go. I often think to myself that I hope I don’t end up in a mental home after all of it because it just sends you crazy. I know the process is necessary but I think the system is wrong. But what can we do to change it? It’s completely out of our control.”
Dianne Hawkins was beaten and stabbed to death in her unit at New Farm, inner-city Brisbane, on June 9, 2010. Dianne’s only daughter, Kally Hawkins, can vividly recall arriving at the John Tonge Centre days after the murder. She had flown over from her home base in Perth. “The last expression I saw on mum’s face was her eyes were still open and her mouth was wide open like she was screaming.” Kally says she didn’t speak for six months after seeing her mother like that. She was mute. Her marriage nearly ended because of her chronically insular behaviour. She quit her job as a dental assistant because she couldn’t stomach all those people laying back in dental chairs, open-mouthed.
“They later found the killer’s DNA in one of those stab wounds,” she says. “I was told I had to go back to the John Tonge Centre and view mum’s body again.” She weeps when she says this. “They wanted to keep mum’s head for the trial. They kept half of the skull all the way down to the middle section of the backbone. They’d found the killer and they said, ‘Look, we’d really like to keep your mum’s skull area and backbone for two years while the trial is on’.” Kally agreed. She wanted to see the killer behind bars more than anyone.
“But, in saying that, it was exceptionally distressing some three years later when I faced the choice of me cremating Mum’s skull or having them do it for me. I looked up how much another funeral was going to cost me and it was $3000. I couldn’t afford it and I was living in another state. I said, ‘You guys do it but can you ring me when it’s going to happen because I want to go and sit on the beach and just think about Mum.’ I went to the beach and I waited and waited and then they phoned and said, ‘She’s going in now’.”
Kally shared her story some time ago with Bruce and Denise Morcombe, whose son Daniel was abducted and murdered in 2003 while waiting to catch a bus on the Sunshine Coast. The Morcombes are renowned in homicide victim circles for the unexpected but deeply appreciated gentle phone calls they give to families traumatised by all sides of murder. Fifteen years on from his son’s murder and four years on from the widely-reported trial of Daniel’s killer, Brett Peter Cowan, Bruce says he remains no less traumatised by the way necessary forensic and legal processes stripped his son of his humanity, reduced him not to “The Deceased”, he says, but, “The Evidence”.
“I know that there is a process but I can tell you, and this is all these years later, it just makes me cringe,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of Daniel’s remains retrieved but whatever was is incredibly precious to us and, yes, I understand all the processes to identify conclusively with DNA evidence and they must take slivers of bone for sampling at different labs around the country and even in New Zealand, but it is a terrible, terrible process to go through and almost half a dozen years later since all that’s behind us, it still makes me very uncomfortable when I relive it.
“We had to fight ‘the system’ to have Daniel’s remains released to the family for his funeral. This was cruel and unjust. We were told at a private meeting in a very firm and confronting manner that Daniel would not be released until all avenues of appeal had been exhausted by [Brett Cowan]. We knew that could be, and indeed was, years. The Queensland Police, State Coroner and DPP were all arguing over who in fact had ‘control’ over Daniel’s remains. He was treated as evidence. A very sad situation indeed, and regrettable. We were horrified. Daniel was not a recovered stolen TV. We felt bullied by the system.
“Not many know this sequence of events and the battle behind those closed doors. It was just really untidy. We had protested enough and put enough pressure on them about a substantial media story that was imminent, and thankfully everyone buckled and they released Daniel.”
Bruce has little doubt the seed of this very specific compounding trauma is planted in the courts. “In the argy-bargy of preparing for court we’re dealing with people’s reputations,” he says. “It’s their job and they’ve staked an enormous amount on the fact this is the man and he’s going to be found guilty. It is very high stakes for those people and, perhaps, they just waver a little bit and forget the family along the way.”
Pete Simpson has been discussing this form of trauma for 25 years. Pete’s daughter, Ebony, was nine years old when she was abducted and murdered on her way home from school in Bargo, south-west of Sydney, in 1992. The system’s not to blame for his trauma, he says. Ebony’s killer is. But the system can always be improved.
“The killer was always ‘The Alleged Perpetrator’ and my Ebony became ‘The Deceased’,” he says. “The girl had a name. She wasn’t ‘The Deceased’. I was there when that girl was born. I watched her grow to nine years of age.”
In 1993, Pete established Australia’s first Homicide Victims’ Support Group with Grace and Garry Lynch, the parents of Anita Cobby, the nurse abducted, raped and murdered in Blacktown in 1986. He spends his days visiting police stations and legal offices across the country talking about the compounding traumas of Ebony’s murder. “I still find it incredibly difficult to regurgitate the story about my daughter and what happened to her and how we were treated,” he says. “We do it so people have a bit more balance with regard to how they approach families. It’s extremely important, particularly for the younger police, to understand that they’re the first contact that we have with our new life. You don’t go to libraries and find books about this. You go to any library and find a thousand books on child killers, of course.”
In a two-storey Queenslander in Brisbane’s north, a team of five counsellors from the Homicide Victims’ Support Group gather for a meeting. They work closely with the coronial counsellors such as Pat in the John Tonge Centre. “Most families who lose someone in such a traumatic manner are catapulted into a nightmare,” says Deborah Taylor, the group’s Gold Coast family support co-ordinator. “It’s an incredibly isolating place to be. We’re there when our presence is needed.”
Across from Deborah, fellow counsellor Elaine Henderson nods her head. “Compounding trauma is lifelong,” she says. “It’s not like other deaths where you can make sense of it, find some meaning in it. You can’t. How do you come to terms with someone who has cut the throat of your partner? Someone who has killed your child?”
There are no villains in it, the group says, beyond the killers. Everybody — from police to forensic scientists to prosecutors — is trying to work through an impossible process the best they can. Hurt is not intended but great hurt happens along the way. “I’ve got one chap I work with, he went through trial, his son was referred to as ‘The Deceased’ the whole time and he couldn’t bear to hear those words,’’ Elaine says. “To this day, he cannot bear those words, ‘The Deceased’. He just wanted to scream through that entire trial, ‘This is my son. He is not ‘The Deceased’, he is my son. Call him by his name!’”
Counsellor Leanne Murfitt recalls assisting families through two funerals for a murdered child whose tested remains had to be reburied. “One of my families was unaware there were remaining parts of the body,” she says. “They were devastated when they found out. But we talked about the second funeral and how beautiful this would be for the family.” It would be another remembrance of a life, of a deeply loved child whose remains were so much more than items of evidence.
“We’re so privileged,” Elaine says. “Everyone says, ‘Oh, how can you do that job?’ but we’re OK with it … you see them at their lowest ebb. We’re with them for so many years. You see all the challenges they have faced. You see their courage and their achievements.”
You see all the life in death.
Coronial counsellor Pat Clements opens a doorrunning off the mortuary counselling room. He gently explains what likely would have happened to Wayne Williams’ retained brain. It wasn’t carelessly tossed in the garbage, as Denise Davis’s worst visions depicted. “If we do it, it’s cremated,” he says. “End of story.” It’s done with care and respect. “But we also don’t come back and talk to you about it.” He shakes his head, sorrowfully. It’s a brutal business in which, in the last financial year alone, his team of five deeply committed counsellors have had no less than 1800 direct communications with families.
“Not everything we do turns to gold,” he says. “But I’m proud of the work we do. The best that we can do is lessen the damage the system can do to these people. Time doesn’t heal all wounds — that’s a myth. But time might diminish the sharpness of the memories of what happened in the coronial process.”
He opens a thick door to the mortuary viewing room. The glass viewing window forms an internal wall beyond which is a rectangular table before a sky-blue wall with three chairs and a small table holding a box of tissues. Sometimes, depending on the status of the autopsy process, families can sit with the body for as long as they need; they can touch it, embrace it, kiss it, care for it. Other times families must stay behind the glass wall. On the centre of the glass wall today there is a circle of condensation the size of a tennis ball. It’s the evidence of grief. Evidence of love.
When seeking the formal identification of a body from a family member Pat doesn’t need them to say, “Yes, it’s my son”; “Yes, it’s my daughter”.
“All they need to do is to indicate in some form that it’s their loved one,” he says.
In 10 years as a coronial counsellor he’s seen that identification conveyed in countless non-verbal ways. A mother collapses to the floor in tears. A sister screams in disbelief. A father puts his forehead against the viewing window for one last look at his son, banging his fists against the thick glass, leaving a circle of condensation as evidence he was here. Any sign of love and connection to the deceased will suffice, any human sign of life in death.