Killing Time (3 page)

– ROBERT SOPALSKY,
JUNK FOOD MONKEYS

I cast my eye around the unit. I recognise a number of faces I have only ever read about. Some of the state's most infamous rapists, murderers and child molesters are in this unit. What have I done to deserve this? I am a middle-aged ex-lawyer who had a raging cocaine habit, no dishonesty or violence. If I am going to get through this I am going to have to play my cards very carefully.

Not only am I banged up with Andrew Davies; I look straight across from me and there is Leslie Camilleri, the infamous Bega-schoolgirl murderer. Camilleri, while on an amphetamine-fuelled binge that went for some days, abducted, raped and murdered two schoolgirls, Lauren Barry, aged fourteen, and Nicole Collins, sixteen, who were hitchhiking home from school. Camilleri and a co-offender who gave evidence against Camilleri took the girls, held them hostage for days and tortured them. Camilleri and his co-accused Lindsay Beckett ultimately killed them. He was sentenced by His Honour Mr Justice Vincent to life with no minimum – that is, never to be released.

For some reason, when I first met Camilleri in Sirius East, he immediately took a dislike to me. I did not know the bloke from a bar of soap and had never met him. The very next morning he walked up to me at the nuts and bolts table, chested me and said “You're a cunt and I'm fucking well going to kill you.” Here we go. Day one and I have already copped a death threat – terrific! Welcome to the nick!

At first I found this comment somewhat off-putting, but I soon realised just what sort of bloke Camilleri was. He is a big man, but unfortunately for him he has a brain and a heart the size of a split pea. Every night Camilleri thought it was hilarious to fart on muster. Of course, that means everyone has to wait until muster is completed without being interrupted. He is dumb, stupid, and petulant and is prone to throw what you would describe, if he was a child, as a tantrum. The difference is that, with a child, you tell them to get on with it. In jail Camilleri throws a tantrum and everyone runs around trying to calm him down. The whole performance is attention seeking. Personally, if he threatened to neck himself in front of me I would give him the rope. The reason for the panic by the screws is the amount of paperwork they need to complete if there is a death in custody, and work is the natural enemy of screws! They may also have to answer a lot of awkward questions when the coppers investigate these deaths.

Camilleri was a keen painter and whenever he spat the dummy, the first thing he did, in an act of petulance, was to throw all his paints in the rubbish bin. Given that nobody ever visits this man and he has no money apart from what he earns in jail, to throw away his paints like that was a huge statement but it also indicated that the bloke was an idiot who didn't think things through. That's probably what landed him in jail. Why anybody bothered to help to retrieve his paints, I do not know. But I soon saw that for all his bluff and bravado he had no dash at all. It was for that reason, and that reason alone, that he was only capable of torturing and killing defenceless young girls.

One day I did in fact see Camilleri have a go at a bloke out in the garden with the prison's pitchfork. He couldn't even do that properly and the other bloke, who was fairly handy with his fists, turned around and decked him. The screws did nothing about that. Nobody ever asked how this evil bloke got hold of the fork, which was supposed to have been under lock and key at the time.

After Camilleri threatened to knock me the first day in Sirius East I gave him a wide berth because, while I wasn't scared of him, he was unpredictable and therefore capable of the odd bit of rash behaviour. The only other time I had a problem with him was towards the end of my time in Sirius East when, just before the final muster for the day, he appeared at my cell door holding a jug of boiling water which, he announced, he was going to throw over me before killing me. This is a commonly used tactic in jail as the boiling water disorientates you and you are then defenceless against attack. On looking back now it is obvious to me that I had become a product of my environment and was usually hyper vigilant. People have made the observation that upon my release I was as jumpy as a jack rabbit, forever wary, whereas I thought that I was normal and coping with my release beautifully.

If I was vigilant, you might ask, why was I sitting with my cell door open? The answer is simple: it was the end of the day and all doors are to be open for lockdown muster. More importantly the lolly trolley (medication trolley) had been, and by this time all and sundry (with the exception of my good self) were usually knocked rotten by their medication and were out like lights in their caves.

Camilleri was one very enthusiastic lolly consumer but for reasons unknown on this night he was still up and very much about! I was sitting reading (as per usual) in my cell. Here we go, young Fraser, time to stand up and be counted! Camilleri made one mistake: I saw him hesitate, albeit momentarily. I jumped up, grabbed the plastic barbecue chair I was sitting on and belted him as hard as I could over the head. He almost dissolved before my eyes and he bolted. The screws could not have missed this incident, yet nothing was ever said to me about it.

I should at this stage indicate how muster is conducted. Although this is the age of the microchip, and we have sent people into space, muster is still carried out with a muster sheet. This is the system that was used on the First Fleet when convicts were first sent to this country. Two hundred plus years later the same system is still being used. Two screws walk past each cell, one with the muster sheet, to record the number of prisoners in the cell. When they come to a single cell, the other officer looks in and says “one”, then the officer with the muster sheet marks that cell off as having one person in it; at a double cell the officer says “two”, and two are marked off. You have no idea how often the count is incorrect, meaning that the prison officers who mustered my unit, Sirius East, with a maximum of thirty-eight men in it, could not count to thirty-eight correctly, believe it or not. When the count is not correct there is a recount, which, more often than not, is again incorrect. They then have what's called a lockdown count. A lockdown count means every prisoner throughout the entire jail is locked in his cell and then counted in situ. If that is not correct, they do it all again. When the count is finally correct, the number of prisoners in each unit is rung in to the nerve centre of the jail (and I use that term advisedly) where some genius adds up the numbers in all of the units and often also comes to the wrong answer. Given that Port Phillip is a jail of over 700 prisoners, it is incredible to think that muster is not done electronically.

In the cell opposite Camilleri was his arch nemesis, Peter Dupas. When I first met Dupas he was serving life with no minimum for the murder of Nicole Patterson, his treating psychologist. He has since been convicted of two more murders, which I will deal with in greater detail later.

Next door to Dupas was Raymond Edmunds, the infamous Mr Stinky. Edmunds is a great mate of Dupas and they formed the basis of one of the “crews” (in jail gangs are called crews) that ran Sirius East. He is now an old man, fat, no hair, no teeth, in poor health but with an amicable disposition: apparently the complete antithesis of the monster he clearly was when he murdered the teenagers Abina Madill and Garry Heywood in 1966. For those offences Edmunds was sentenced to life without a minimum sentence being set. At the time, that was the only option available to a sentencing court for murder, but during the course of Edmunds's imprisonment, the legislation was changed and a number of crooks had made applications for minimum sentences and had been successful.

It was an eye opener for me to meet this old man, who was repentant and remorseful, and try to create a mental picture of what he must have been like when younger and committing those horrendous offences. He asked me whether I thought he should apply for a fixed term. I said that, at that stage, having done well over twenty years in jail and given his age and his health, he would probably have at least some chance of receiving a fixed sentence. However, when I had this discussion with Edmunds I was not aware of the remainder of his past. It turns out he is suspected of at least thirty other rapes, including one where he threatened, and then raped, a woman in front of her five-year-old son. He was later convicted of three rapes and two attempted rapes. It was afterwards that he received the life sentence without a minimum. With new technology available police are investigating Edmunds for his involvement in other rapes and potentially other murders. Stay tuned.

Edmunds subsequently made an application to receive a fixed term but the Director of Public Prosecutions, being armed with all of the facts, opposed it. The application was refused by the Supreme Court and Edmunds will now never be released – he will die in jail, a general prospect that I personally have considered many times, both while in jail and after release. If I was in that position, bereft of hope, I think I would probably end it all. By contrast, Edmunds appears to be able to kick along with it. He still has the support of his family and does receive visits from them. One wonders what goes through his mind at night, in the long dark hours between lockdown and let-out the next morning, when a prisoner is very much alone with his thoughts. I sincerely hope that he regrets his behaviour to the day he dies, having brought so much pain and suffering to so many people.

I should also mention that prisoners who are serving life sentences with no minimum are not left in the one maximum security jail for their entire life. Every one or two years the authorities move them between Port Phillip Prison and Barwon Prison outside Geelong, which is the other maximum security jail in Victoria, to give them a bit of a change of scenery. These men, it must be borne in mind, will never, ever leave maximum security or protection. They cannot go into the mainstream because of their crimes and they will never be removed to a prison farm. Their whole existence is spent in maximum security under the very strict regimes that apply. Considering the total lack of rehabilitation, or effectively anything to stimulate them or educate the prisoners, is it any wonder that the existing jail politics often blow over into violence, usually purely out of frustration and boredom?

Paul Gorman is a serial rapist who was quite unrepentant about his offending. He was one of Dupas's mates and also was part of the Dupas crew. They were the dominant crew in the unit and the other inmates were justifiably wary of them. When I met Gorman he had served about eleven years out of a thirteen year sentence in maximum security for rape. As I wrote in my previous book, not long after I had been placed in Sirius East, I was pacing up and down in the small exercise yard referred to as the “chook pen”, wondering how in God's name I was ever going to get through my sentence. Gorman was sitting in the yard and said to me the only way that I would get through the sentence was to never have my mind outside the walls of the prison; my mind must be fixed inside the walls and I would get through it all.

In maximum security all you can see is barbed wire, concrete floors and concrete walls topped with razor wire. It is a mentally devastating sight. The desolation of it all presses in on you, every moment of every day. I looked at Gorman, who did not present a very palatable sight: he is overweight, doesn't wear his false teeth, does no exercise and does nothing constructive with his day except smoke cigarettes and play billiards. When he is released into the community, having done his thirteen years, he will have done absolutely nothing to improve himself.

I looked at Gorman and realised suddenly that had provided me with my first very important lesson in jail. What he had said was obviously incorrect, so for me to survive all I needed to do was the exact opposite of what he stated. Namely, the authorities may well have my body, but they would never have my mind, and from that moment forward I changed my attitude to serving the remainder of my sentence.

Every waking minute I spent pursuing matters that were on the outside. With the exception of crime reports (for obvious reasons), I read the newspapers from cover to cover each day, even the obituaries! I kept in contact with friends on the outside. I wrote letters and I received a lot of letters from a wide range of people. You can have no idea what a joy it is, as an inmate, to receive a letter from an old friend out of the blue, telling you about their kids, what's going on in their life, and including you in it and hoping that you are fit and well. Many people wrote once or twice, and that was more than sufficient, believe me – just to know that you hadn't been forgotten was enough. To all those who did head for the hills, I always remember the line from George Orwell's famous novel
Animal Farm
: “And the pig got up and slowly walked away”!

One inmate who stood out because he was so inconspicuous was Christopher Hall. I know that might sound odd but the mere fact of his introversion made him noticeable. Christopher Hall is a serial rapist and was serving a huge sentence. Hall did nothing with his time except watch television, was not involved in any activities and was merely marking time until his release. My belief is that people like this should not be released unless they have undergone compulsory sex offenders' programs – and even these can be useless in some cases. I really wonder whether chemical or physical castration for these violent recidivist sex offenders is not an answer.

In any event Hall was a mate of Camilleri's, and together they formed the core of the crew opposing Dupas et al. For some reason Camilleri had a real set against Dupas and it was mutual. There was a constant power struggle between them. They would not talk, they would not eat near each other. They would not even stand in the medication line together. This created huge pressure in the unit, and on more than one occasion there were fights. As I've said, Camilleri is a big man but can't fight. Dupas is a small man, fat, but with immense power in his hands. He is a very dangerous person. He would not fight toe to toe; he would wait his chance and jump you. That is the sort of person he is.