Dark Horse (20 page)

‘You’ve testified that you and my client engaged in various sexual activities over the course of three days. I understand that this line of questioning is difficult. I have a few questions with regard to the nature of the sex. Who instigated it, Mr Heatherton?’

‘We both did,’ he answered monotone.

‘Did you pressure my client into sex?’

‘No.’

‘Could you please give an example of my client instigating sex?’

He sniffed, kept his arms folded. ‘I was lying in bed, I’d just woken, she touched me.’

‘Touched you . . . comfortingly, looking for comfort?’

‘Touched me.’

‘She engaged willingly.’

‘Yes.’

‘You testified you had intercourse the one time, and engaged in a combination of oral sex, digital penetration and mutual masturbation on various other occasions. Can you tell us how many times exactly you and my client engaged in sexual acts together?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You’ve testified the sexual activity took place only over the course of three days, Mr Heatherton. Was it . . . once a day?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Twice a day?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Answer the question, Mr Heatherton,’ the judge warned.

‘It was about three or four times.’

‘Overall?’

Brody’s arms pulled in tighter. He sucked his teeth. ‘A day,’ he murmured.

‘I’m sorry, louder for the court . . .’

‘We had sex three or four times a day,’ Brody said in a raised voice.

A satisfied thrum lifted from the media throng.

Behind her, Sarah didn’t hear so much as a rustle from her parents. It wouldn’t surprise her if they’d gone. She didn’t look around to find out, for fear that they were still there, seeing that look in her mother’s eye – detached disapproval.

‘And these interludes would last how long?’

‘I didn’t time them.’

He glanced across at Sarah. She could tell it wasn’t only that he feared he’d lost her the case, but that he was concerned, too, for what this testimony meant for his family – the Heathertons had guarded their privacy in the months leading up to the trial, they’d maintained their dignity, this stripped them of it. The media could not write down Brody’s responses fast enough.

‘I’m just thinking,’ Sarah’s barrister said, ‘your food was running low, you were hungry, it was a stressful environment, it was uncomfortable, you hadn’t had a warm shower in days – from a woman’s perspective, I can’t imagine it was conducive to sex. But my client was willingly engaging in this excessive amount of sex. Mr Heatherton, do you look back and question the sex that you shared, and the amount of it? Do you find it strange?’

Brody’s posture unfurled. He clicked to what Sarah’s barrister was doing. ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘It was strange.’

‘Your Honour, I have no further questions. And I wish to recall a previous witness to the stand – Dr Haynes.’

Dr Haynes had been informed the day before that she might be required again. She’d been waiting to be called. The bailiff readministered the oath.

‘Thank you so much for returning to the stand, Dr Haynes.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘I can assure you I won’t take up too much of your time. To remind the court – you specialise in the effects, symptoms and treatment of schizophrenia?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I ask your expert opinion then – when a person is suffering an intense psychotic episode, how does that affect the libido?’

‘It can affect it in various ways.’

‘Could it lower it?’

‘It can.’

‘Increase it?’

‘Yes. More often it increases it.’

‘How so?’

‘A sufferer can suddenly engage in overt, aggressive or obsessive sexual behaviour. Sex can be as much a part of a psychotic episode as hallucination or paranoia.’

Sarah’s barrister turned to face the jury. ‘So someone experiencing an episode of extreme mental illness could actively seek out sex and engage in it excessively?’

‘Yes, and there are many cases of that happening.’

‘Thank you, Dr Haynes.’

O
n the final day the Crown Prosecutor had shined his shoes. Below the bottom of his robe the cuff of his trousers fell at the perfect length. His wig wasn’t the dog-eared one he’d worn at a jaunty angle for the trial; it was a neat, new one. His manner of speaking was sharper too.

‘Sarah Barnard murdered her estranged husband in cold blood. We know this because we have the proof.’ He had in his hand freeze-framed images of the shooting, he displayed them one after the other to the jury. ‘The security camera had been put in only two days prior to this footage being taken, the surveillance system had gone in at the request of the victim, Dean Barnard.’ He had a photograph of Dean. He held it up. ‘We heard testimony that Dean feared his estranged wife would steal the horse. The defendant didn’t know the security camera had been fitted. The defendant
did
know that her husband was staying at the Alice Joyce property, sleeping at the residence, a house the defendant had to walk right past on her way to the stables. It was 3:47 a.m. on Christmas morning when she arrived. It was a day when the stable staff were not due in. The defendant walked from her home with an unlicensed, unregistered gun, through the town, under the cover of darkness, a two-kilometre walk, passing conveniently by the victim’s bedroom window, walking on a further five hundred metres to the stables, and, once there, now that Dean had been woken by her passing and had rushed to stop her, the defendant murdered him, and then stole his horse.’ He lowered the photograph. ‘Dean Barnard, dead at 4:05 a.m. Christmas morning.

‘The defendant had, a few short months before, found out about the victim’s infidelities, the defendant had blamed the insolvency of the trail riding business on the victim, the defendant believed her estranged husband had no right to take the horses, least of all the black mare. The defendant wanted
that
horse back. After murdering her husband and taking the horse, Sarah Barnard walked the animal to her house, along the roads, leaving no tracks whatsoever. Once at home she attempted to load and float the horse. But the horse wouldn’t load. Tyre marks tell us that Sarah tried to ferry away the animal. We believe it is now, not at some unspecified, earlier time, that Sarah Barnard received her facial injures. Beneath the cap, in the security vision, we maintain that her lower face is
without
bruising, when she touches her jaw, she does so without flinching, it is a firm wiping action across her jaw and mouth. Blood,’ he said, ‘there is no blood that can be seen on her shirt in the security vision. The blood, discovered later on her shirt, is from an injury sustained
after
the murder, and not before it. And the bruising becomes a problem for Sarah Barnard. Floating the horse quietly out of town, returning before sun up, going about her Christmas Day as though nothing has happened, suddenly can’t be done. She was always going to be a prime suspect; a swollen, bruised face is enough to put the nail in her coffin. A change of plan: she will take the weapon and the horse into the wilderness. She panics. The sun is coming up. The victim’s body will be found soon. Sarah showers and changes into a new set of clothes. She bundles the bloodied and soiled set into the washing machine, cap and all. But this doesn’t remove all traces of the victim’s blood, or her blood. We have that evidence.’

The prosecutor walked over to where Sarah was sitting in the dock.

‘This woman knew what she was doing. This woman remembers everything. She has no previous history of schizophrenia, no history of mental illness as defined by the court. She
has
suffered depression, as a teen. She had developed a drinking habit since the breakdown of her marriage. Depression and substance abuse, though, do not stop a person knowing the nature of what they are doing. Depression and substance abuse do not stop a person knowing that their conduct is wrong.’ He turned to the jury. ‘The defendant is caught up in the biggest rain event ever recorded in the Mortimer Ranges. She survives – seeks shelter, lights a fire, breaks into a caravan, gets warm, heats food, boils water and helps a hardened hunter to safety. Infirm? Deranged? A disordered mind? It is on the sole testimony of her co-survivor that we are expected to believe that she is suffering a psychotic episode at all. We are given no other evidence to support this. It is on one person’s testimony alone. All the video footage shown to us, all the evidence we have seen, shows the defendant in full control of her faculties. And, as for Mr Brody Heatherton, Sarah Barnard’s co-survivor, well . . .’ the prosecutor raised his eyebrows, ‘That sure was some surviving they were doing up there. Was the young man we saw in the witness box so depleted of moral fortitude and standing that he would take advantage of a woman in the grip of a schizophrenic episode? His own brother suffers the condition; you would think this would make it clear that the defendant was not in the right state of mind to be embarking on a passionate, sex-fuelled relationship. Or did the knowledge and experience of his brother’s condition introduce an interesting option to this isolated and bonded couple? Did the defendant’s heartache hit a nerve? Did the story of her husband’s cheating invoke sympathy, compounded when the defendant saved the young man’s life? Was the sex a symptom of something everyone in the court can relate to – attraction, lust and love? Why was the sex hidden from us if it was such a great example of psychotic behaviour? We have to rule by what we know is fact. We don’t know what happened between Sarah Barnard and Brody Heatherton on Devil Mountain between 25 December and the 1 January; only they know that. We don’t know what surviving an ordeal like that does to two people, how close it brings them. We can’t relate. And I doubt we can pick apart that bond. We have to put it aside. We have to judge what we know, what is in front of us.’ He lifted his hand to the screen, where the image of Sarah shooting Dean had been paused. ‘That is what is in front of us, Sarah Barnard pulling the trigger while her husband’s back is turned.’

‘The prosecution likes things to be easy. But mental illness isn’t easy.’ Sarah’s barrister walked out from behind the bench and approached the jury. ‘Waking from a nightmare and trying to recall the details of it – those are the words of my client to her psychotherapist. And when we hear testimony from the different witnesses, it does sound like something from a nightmare.

‘The last person to see Sarah before Christmas morning – the stable hand – told us of Sarah’s obsession with Tansy, the black mare. An animal that she believed was immortal – a horse that could not die, a horse that was one of only a handful on earth, a completely black coat with no identifying marks and therefore
was
the same black mare throughout the ages. Sarah referred to herself as the “custodian” of this mystical and important creature. Sarah’s reaction to the breakdown of her marriage, the discovery that the person she loved and trusted had cheated on her, a man who had been sleeping with as many as five different women at any given time throughout the course of their marriage, and had siphoned away money to pay for hotel rooms and all-night visits to brothels, lied about the state of their finances, but in the face of all that, Sarah’s response was a fixation on, extreme agitation about, the horse that lived forever. When this horse was taken from her it wasn’t just any horse being taken, it was a creature beyond any earthbound constraints, and no earthbound rules applied. Sarah’s derangement had developed into severe paranoid psychosis, destroying her ability to understand what she was doing.

‘It is our belief that Sarah
did
encounter the victim outside Alice Joyce’s house before reaching the stables Christmas morning. It was during this confrontation that the injuries to Sarah were sustained. In the security footage, Dean Barnard shows no surprise when he sees the gun. It is clear he hasn’t been suddenly woken. He is fully dressed. It is as though they had been fighting only moments before. If Sarah was capable of understanding, why not kill her husband when he’d hit her? Why walk away? In the footage we see her husband push her. Her own blood was found on her shirt. She
is
a battered wife. But she’s not crying self-defence. Instead, she’s admitting that she can not remember. From Dean’s own circle comes proof of his true nature. Dean Barnard gloated to friends about how long he’d deceived his wife. He bragged about how much he’d got away with during the course of their marriage. Eyewitnesses recounted times they’d seen him bully her, shouting at her if she ever questioned where he’d been. We heard an eyewitness account of how, on at least one other occasion, he pushed her as violently as we see him push her in the footage. Sarah’s husband ridiculed her, threatened her, manipulated her, abused her, and it is still the horse that consumes all her thoughts.’

Sarah’s barrister walked to the gallery. Sarah glanced over her shoulder and saw her father remained there. The space beside him was empty. Sarah’s barrister motioned to Sarah’s father, leaving her arm lifted as she spoke. ‘Mr Lehman talked with his daughter for ten minutes, two hours after the shooting.
Two hours
after the shooting for
ten minutes
– does that sound to you like someone rushing to cover up?’ She lowered her arm and returned to the jury. ‘Mr Lehman testifies that his daughter was, and I quote, “making no sense”. She spoke as though unclear what day it was. “Happy New Year” she said to him. Far from plotting and scheming a good day to commit a crime, Sarah doesn’t even know it’s Christmas morning. She doesn’t cover her tracks. She acts in plain view of a security camera. She behaves like someone unaware of what she’s doing, unaware of the magnitude.’

Appearing on screen was a picture of the collapsed hut. Followed by a picture of the toilet block, one of the showers, there were shots of the shed, the table and chairs, the potbelly stove, the interior of the van, and, finally, the bed. Each image was over-exposed, uncompromising and deliberately unflattering.

‘A love nest?’ Sarah’s barrister said to the jury. ‘The prosecutor is right when he says
he
can’t imagine what surviving on a mountain might be like. I look at those photos and it’s just like I imagine. Rough, hard, cold, dirty. The prosecutor wants us to believe that in this environment Sarah and Mr Heatherton were so lovestruck, so overcome with romance, that they spent their time rolling around, passionately intertwined, whispering sweet nothings and declaring their undying love. Does he think they had to move the chocolates from the pillow and blow out the scented candles first? I’m thinking the Crown Prosecutor might need a cold shower. What is shocking about these pictures isn’t that they’re grim, but that Sarah sought out sex while in that environment. Not comforting contact, but carnal, excessive sex, not once but multiple times a day over the course of three days. The other four days Sarah spent fretting about the insect invasion, the outlaws in the bush, the sea rising around the mountain, the world underwater, and her immortal horse. If those details confound us, is that not further proof of her unstable mind?’

Sarah’s barrister held out her hands like a pair of scales, one either side, hands open, palms facing up. She clasped her hands together again.

‘Not guilty doesn’t see Sarah Barnard walk free, not guilty keeps her in custody under the discretion of the Mental Health Review Tribunal. Not guilty doesn’t take away the pain or the fear or the devastation of a mind so infirm and unknowing that it led her to take the life of another. Not guilty sees Sarah Barnard continue the specialist treatment that enables her to be the functioning young woman you see in the courtroom today.’