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WHAT DRIVES a woman to smuggle drugs, break a prisoner out of jail, or commit a crime as serious as murder? How can someone who has led a totally unexceptional existence find herself suddenly ducking and weaving to dodge the media and police? Don’t be fooled that it could never happen in your family or community, because it can happen to anyone anywhere.
I’ve met most of the women whose cases are discussed in Jail Birds, and I’ve had long phone conversations with another. All of them are ordinary. None of them would turn your head if they passed you in the street. Almost all of them have been married and had children. They’ve worked in unremarkable jobs and lived unremarkable lives, until the day when everything changed. And when it changed, it changed not only for them, but also for everyone they knew.
First among the victims are the women themselves. In a moment, they’re exposed to the glare of publicity, the relentless pursuit of information by police and the media when a crime has been committed. The quest is especially persistent when the accused is a woman. In an era when their prejudices on talkback radio, there’s often an immediate, hostile reaction when a woman is accused of committing a crime. In law, people are innocent until proven guilty, but the court of public opinion is governed by different rules, and tends to move straight from suspicion or accusation to condemnation and guilt. There’s an element of double jeopardy here: as in the medieval witch trials, the accused woman is guilty if she sinks, because otherwise God would save her, and guilty if she floats, because the devil must be helping her.
How far have we really come from those days? In many cultures, something doesn’t seem to sit right when a woman commits a serious crime, because a woman is seen as going against her natural instincts to care and nurture. Whether a crime is premeditated, the product of careful plotting and scheming, or is committed in the heat of the moment, we seem to judge similar crimes more severely if a woman commits them than if a man does exactly the same thing.
Prejudice and pre-judgement are especially influential when a court is considering circumstantial evidence. An accused person can only be convicted on circumstantial evidence if there is no other explanation for the sequence of events. All alternative explanations have to be ruled out. As Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ Unfortunately, juries don’t always see it that way.
Susan Neill-Fraser was convicted on circumstantial evidence. Hers is a celebrated story for all the wrong reasons. Here is a woman serving a 23-year prison sentence because she was accused of killing her partner – and because she talked too much, ‘helping police with their inquiries’. If she’d said nothing, admitted nothing, the police wouldn’t have had a case. As it is, she’s now in prison for her partner’s murder, despite the fact that there was no body, no cause of death, no murder weapon, no motive, no witnesses and no confession. No nothing, actually, except a missing man and a woman who told stupid lies, which the prosecutor was able to massage into evidence of guilt.
Sue was a member of Tasmania’s establishment, but now she’s been consigned to a government establishment, possibly for a long time. I say ‘possibly’ because she has a tireless team of supporters outside prison working on her behalf. In November 2015, they succeeded in having the Tasmanian government change the laws about appeals in their State. This may give Sue another crack at freedom, as she has exhausted all the traditional avenues of appeal.
The evidence against Tania Herman was far more persuasive. In fact, she’d pleaded guilty to attempted murder and an array of related charges. Tania gained Australia-wide notoriety as the lover of a man called Joe Korp, who persuaded her to lie in wait for his wife, Maria, as she left for work, and strangle her. It didn’t quite work out that way; Tania only succeeded in making Maria unconscious, at which point she stuffed her into a car boot and abandoned her, still living, to suffer alone for four days.
I first heard that Tania wanted to tell her side of the story after I met her lawyer at a function. It was the first time that Tania had told her story outside a courtroom. The lawyer told me that Tania had been very upset about a TV movie purportedly recreating the dramatic events that had landed her in jail. She said the telemovie was full of errors. For example, it showed her as being friends with Maria before she killed her, which was wrong. Tania was concerned that her two daughters, who were estranged from their mother at the time, would see this movie and be persuaded to believe stories about her that were even worse than the truth, which was bad enough. She was keen to talk to me and have the real story told.
Tania was warm, friendly, very remorseful and accepting of her punishment. When I first met her, she was six years into her nine-year non-parole period and said she was now ‘on the home run’. She’s a person you’d befriend, trust with your kids, or go to a movie with. So why did she do such a terrible thing? Her explanation is that Korp had played on all her fears and illusions to persuade her that Maria’s death was the only way for them to be together. By the time she saw through his deception, it was too late.
Lucy Dudko was another young woman led astray by passion. Of Russian extraction, she was living in Australia in the midst of a failing marriage when she fell for a loveable, knockabout bank robber called John Killick. He helped her move out of the family home, and for eighteen months they lived together, constantly on the run, until John was nabbed robbing a bank and jailed in Sydney’s high-security Silverwater prison.
Lucy soon decided she couldn’t bear to live without him. With amazing panache and coolness, she hijacked a helicopter while ostensibly on a joyride, forced the pilot at gunpoint to land in the prison exercise yard, collected John, who had been alerted to be on standby, and spirited him away from among his gobsmacked fellow prisoners. Most of the guards were too scared to fire in case they hit the pilot and brought the chopper crashing down on top of everyone. So John and Lucy were again on the run.
It was Lucy’s first offence, and it would be her last. After 46 days of freedom, the runaways were tracked down and arrested at a caravan park on the outskirts of Sydney. Lucy was sentenced to a maximum of ten years in Mulawa women’s prison. She was released in 2006, after seven years. She rediscovered religion in jail and is now living a quiet life on her own. But the authorities are still taking no chances. When John Killick finally obtained parole at the beginning of 2015, his parole conditions specified that he mustn’t contact the woman who’d tried to spring him more than fifteen years before.
A lot has been written about the Bali Nine, but not much of it has been sourced on a mobile phone direct from Kerobokan prison. The inmate who spoke to me from the prison is Renae Lawrence, a suburban girl from Newcastle in New South Wales who became caught up in one of Australia’s most widely publicised drug-smuggling events. While the media focused on Schapelle Corby, who’d been convicted in Bali after marijuana was found in her luggage, no-one was interested in Renae Lawrence’s story. One member of the media described her to me as ‘that ugly, fat lesbian’. These days, it seems, even criminals aren’t of interest unless they’re attractive, slim and heterosexual.
It was by sheer coincidence that I discovered Renae’s version of events. My husband and I were on a road trip and had stopped for a meal at a truck stop, where we shared a table with a middle-aged gay couple. We got talking, as you do, and I said I was researching a book.
One of them said to me, ‘If you’re a writer, would you be interested in Renae Lawrence’s story?’ It turned out that they visited Renae twice a year and were in regular contact with her. They said, ‘We’ll get her to give you a ring.’ Just like that. And she did.
I quickly realised that Renae too had been overtaken by events that were beyond her control. After she came out as a lesbian, she spent many years estranged from her family. The rift had barely healed when an acquaintance used threats against her family to pressure her into acting as a drug mule. In the end, her love for her family and her desire to protect them led her to take part in a dangerous, ill-conceived scheme. It inevitably went wrong, and she is still paying the price.
The saga of Roseanne Beckett, formerly Roseanne Catt, has been going forever, unlike those of the other women in Jail Birds. It is more than 25 years since she was first jailed. Roseanne was convicted unjustly, not on circumstantial evidence but on dodgy forensics and a bunch of witnesses who lied.
Why did they lie? Years later, some of them admitted that they were threatened by the police officer who charged Roseanne. He’d told them that if they didn’t toe the line, they’d be sitting in the dock next. He was very persuasive and quite scary. Even now, some of them are sticking to their versions of what happened, though years of investigation have shown that their stories can’t possibly be right.
There were also some witnesses, including Roseanne’s former husband Barry Catt, who just wanted her put in jail. And she was. The judge who heard the bitter five-month trial summed up by saying there must have been a lot of lies told, but she didn’t stipulate whether Roseanne or the police witnesses had been doing the lying in the courtroom. Unwilling to believe that the boys in blue would perjure themselves, the jury opted for the police version of events and sent Roseanne off to jail for twelve years. From jail, she began a crusade to clear her name. None of the blokes on the other side believed she’d pull it off, but she did.
All the women in Jail Birds are strong women who have copped the full force of the law. Some have suffered because of their own weaknesses, while others have experienced the failings of the legal system. But one thing I note is the criticism these women have faced when they stand up and fight for themselves, become assertive rather than ‘warm’ or ‘feminine’, and meet the police and public with an unruffled demeanour rather than throwing themselves into the arms of a justice system panting for remorse. Seeing the anger vented against them makes you think that we haven’t come so far from those witch trials after all.
