Perfect Victim (18 page)

The detectives knocked on the door of the tiny one-bedroom apartment in Trinian Street. It was a second-floor flat, around 120 metres from the tram stop on the corner of High Street and Williams Road where Rachel had last been seen. Despite repeated attempts by the police to raise a response, there appeared to be no one at home.

The officers made inquiries at the scene before returning to their office, where David dePyle had more information for them. The young woman worked for a telecommunications service provider in St Kilda Road, where she had been employed in an administrative role since November 1998. The detectives moved on to the young woman’s workplace.

But Caroline Reed Robertson was not at work either. The officers talked briefly with her colleagues. Robertson appeared to have taken an unusual amount of sick leave over the past ten days or so – quite out of character for a young woman who rarely stayed away through illness.

But colleagues said that Robertson
had
mentioned the missing girl whose story was across the news. One worker recalled her saying that she had babysat Rachel, and that she was not worried because the girl was always running away. She had treated the disappearance as a joke – Rachel would turn up as she had in the past. But police knew that Rachel Barber had never gone missing before.

Later that morning police went to the offices of Peter Isaacson Publications, where Robertson had worked before starting her present job. The police then went to see Caroline Robertson’s father, David Reid, a businessman, and spoke briefly to him about his daughter. He told the officers that she suffered from epilepsy, and mentioned owning a holiday property out at Kilmore, north of Melbourne. If the two girls had run away together, pondered police, then perhaps they had gone there.

Back at the St Kilda office David dePyle, waiting for the Barbers to arrive, had begun a random ring-around of all the real estate agents in the Prahran area in a bid to trace the agent for the Trinian Street flat. His efforts paid off, and the leasing agents agreed to lend the police the spare key to assist in their search for the tenant believed, at that stage, to be on the premises.

In the meantime, David dePyle contacted the Barbers on a mobile phone. They were not far from the St Kilda Road police complex where they were to meet dePyle for lunch. Did the name Caroline Robertson mean anything to them? Try ‘Reid’. They knew a Caroline Reid. But Rachel didn’t know her particularly well. She would be unlikely to regard her as an old friend.

By Friday afternoon the police were convinced that they were on the verge of finding Rachel. There was still no hint of foul play, but they were quite sure that Caroline Robertson was the ‘old female friend’ Rachel had told Manni about. They didn’t have a motive for Rachel’s disappearance but thought, perhaps, that the two girls had decided to run away together.

David dePyle did not want to see the Barbers wandering around the streets searching fruitlessly for their daughter, especially when police inquiries looked like locating her at any moment. Giving them lunch in the police canteen, and obtaining helpful information from them while the officers did their ‘legwork’ was probably the only constructive thing he could do. As a parent himself he certainly empathised with them, and recognised that they were worn out and anxious from twelve harrowing days of searching for Rachel.

They chatted well into the afternoon, dePyle believing Rachel’s return to be imminent: it was just a matter of time before he could give the Barbers some good news. So he urged them to go home and wait.

At 5.25 p.m., dePyle, Waddell and Paterson had made a second visit to the Trinian Street flat. They were joined by Rae and Thatcher who had just completed inquiries with Rachel’s family doctor. This time armed with keys, they made several attempts to alert the occupant of the flat by knocking on the door. No answer.

Paterson tried the keys in the lock but the door would not open. It appeared to be deadlocked from the inside, so someone must have been there. Neil Paterson made several calls to Caroline Robertson’s telephone number. But on each occasion the answering machine cut in. He left a message asking her to come to the door.

‘At this stage I had concerns for the welfare of the occupant of the flat,’ said Neil Paterson in a later witness statement. ‘I could see that a window was slightly open and subsequently the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade were called to assist in gaining entry.’

A fire officer put an extension ladder up to the window and was able to open it. He told the waiting officers he could see a female lying face down on the floor of the bedroom. He entered the flat via the window and let Neil Paterson inside. Paterson found Caroline Robertson lying at the foot of her bed. He detected a strong pulse in her neck and shouted to the other officers to ring for an ambulance.

A fire officer began to administer assistance to Robertson, who appeared to be drowsy. Police then noticed a packet of Tegretol, a drug commonly used to treat epilepsy, near the semiconscious woman. They believed at the time that Robertson might possibly have overdosed. As the police waited for the ambulance, they began to check the flat for signs of the missing teenager. They thought that perhaps the two girls were in cahoots, and half expected to find evidence of Rachel’s presence in the untidy apartment. Paterson looked around, opened the door to the built-in wardrobe in Robertson’s bedroom. But there was no sign of Rachel anywhere.

He telephoned Caroline’s father, David Reid, asking him to come to the flat. The other officers continued the search. It was clear that a number of things had been carefully packed away. It appeared that Robertson was moving – packing up to leave, or just arriving. The video and lots of other things were in boxes.

Detective Sergeant Thatcher noticed two packed bags in the lounge room, and what appeared to be a container of hair dye lying on the floor. Caroline’s hair showed signs of green rinse. They found a number of notebooks, some apparently blank, lying around, and a bag of size 8 clothes – obviously not clothing belonging to Caroline, who appeared to be quite overweight.

Perhaps the clothing belonged to Rachel? Had she been there then? The clothes were collected to show to the Barbers for identification. Shortly afterwards David Reid arrived. Ambulance officers were giving his daughter medical assistance. He told police it was possible that Caroline had had an epileptic fit.

At 6.55 p.m. Paterson accompanied Caroline in the back of the ambulance to the nearby Alfred Hospital’s Emergency Department.

But police were already beginning to wonder what was going on. They had noticed Rachel’s name on a number of handwritten documents found lying around the flat. Was it Rachel’s handwriting or Caroline’s? They saw a reference to what appeared to be a planned train trip to Sydney. So maybe Caroline
was
about to leave Melbourne – or perhaps both girls might have been planning to leave … together. Perhaps Rachel was staying somewhere else, and had already left with her train ticket? Perhaps Caroline was covering for her and planning to join her later? But there was no evidence of that, either. There was really no hard evidence of anything at all. And what were all these notes about? There were so many of them … and lists. Caroline Reed Robertson was obviously a prolific listmaker.

The detectives gathered up the two packed bags and another bag of size 8 clothes. Later that evening, the Barbers received a call from police asking them to come in and identify a few items, including the clothing which did not appear to belong to Robertson.

The detectives also seized some rubber gloves, a few bank receipts and other items – including the handwritten notes. They took a couple of notepads, some partially filled, others with pages missing. It was hoped that these documents might hold clues to Rachel’s whereabouts. But the notes appeared to be of a far more personal nature. Baffling really. They were scribblings
about
Rachel Barber.

20

‘A
LL
T
HINGS
C
OME TO
P
ASS
’

Detective Sergeant Thatcher had the giant rubbish bins at the front of the flats searched, as well as the laundries on each floor. But there was no indication anywhere that Rachel had ever been at Trinian Street. Steve Waddell decided to arrange for an unmarked police car to monitor the region, just in case she was near by. He wondered if she might even be in the vicinity now, perhaps watching activities and waiting for a safe moment to return.

After finding the handwritten document referring to a Sydney trip, Steve Waddell instructed someone to direct police in the Victorian country town of Benalla to halt the Sydney-bound train later that evening before it crossed the border into New South Wales. Just after 8 p.m. local police officers stopped the train. No sign of Rachel.

The flat was secured and remained under police surveillance throughout the coming weekend. Thatcher and Rae remained behind until back-up could be sent from Prahran police station.

The remaining detectives from the Missing Persons Unit returned to the office, taking some of the material they’d found – a couple of notebooks, a diary, and some scribblings on loose sheets of paper. They hoped that these might lead them to Rachel. But all along, dePyle could not help feeling that there was something more to this case than he’d originally envisaged.

The detectives examined the notes more carefully. Among the documents were some partly legible notes referring to Rachel, but they could not be properly deciphered. One appeared to be a carefully charted character profile of the missing teenager, containing personal information such as her date of birth and the name of the hospital where she’d been born.

Then there were other notes about Rachel’s family. They struck a particularly uneasy chord among the police. Listed neatly down the page, in impeccable handwriting, someone had noted the full names and birthdays of Rachel Barber’s younger sisters and personal background information on her parents, Michael and Elizabeth. The author of the notes appeared to know this family very well indeed. The notes revealed that Rachel’s mother Elizabeth was the daughter of prominent Australian children’s writer Ivan Southall. She was described in the profile as a religious woman and a ‘disciplinarian’.

If it was Caroline Robertson who had written this information, it was clear to everyone she’d been doing her homework. She made mention of Michael Barber’s birthplace in England, and noted he was a toymaker and knew something of his work history. The detail suggested an unusual level of monitoring. It charted Rachel’s progress through her childhood in the country, describing her romantically as a ‘free spirit’ who’d run barefoot. It followed her progress closely from her youthful dating habits and dancing to her subsequent decision to leave school in Year 9 to pursue a professional dancing career. It was up-to-date on Rachel’s more recent activities too: Rachel’s modelling, her love of classical ballet, and her boyfriend.

Robertson wrote in almost glowing terms about her young subject, describing her as a ‘strikingly attractive’ teenager with a dancer’s body, clear pale skin and ‘hypnotic’ green eyes. Rachel had experimented only recently with hair colouring. The author of the document had noted that too.

There was also the Barbers’ home address and telephone number on the bottom. And in the top right-hand corner was another notation: ‘Corner Church. Dance Factory Richmond.’ Overleaf, there was another even more peculiar list itemising personality characteristics. The police assumed they were those of the missing girl. There was a growing sense that the subject of this romanticised prose held some weird fascination for the writer: she seemed to be almost in awe of her. Rachel Barber, according to the notes, was a ‘wild free spirit’ who lived life on the edge; a simple yet complicated girl of enormous talent and contradictions. She was a fiercely independent girl who was ‘passionate, determined, cheeky, loyal and honest,’ with a moody and mysterious personality. She was described as argumentative and difficult, ‘eclectic and kooky, crazy, funky and cool.’ This was a teenager who didn’t suffer fools gladly but had, claimed the writer, a wonderful charisma. It was a list that brimmed with admiration.

But it was then that the police noticed something else. More ominously, in what appeared to be Caroline’s handwriting, they saw the words down the bottom of the page, ‘All things come to pass.’

‘It was fifty-fifty,’ recalls David dePyle. ‘At that stage we thought Rachel still might turn up at the flat after being out shopping or somewhere else, and maybe this older girl had just developed some unbelievable fascination with Rachel Barber. But then again …’

Nothing felt right about this case. The officers studied the notes again. But there were pages missing, and the indentations left behind were too faint to be legible.

Other scribblings listed dates of the month and figures. Scanty handwritten notes, a sheaf of documents. The police began to have a creeping idea that something untoward might have happened to Rachel.

Sitting in the back of the ambulance, on his way to hospital with Caroline, Neil Paterson knew nothing of the notes. He arrived at the Alfred Hospital around 7 p.m. and waited as she was admitted to Emergency. Caroline was conscious and answering questions from hospital staff. David Reid arrived about twenty-five minutes later and spoke to his daughter. After a brief conversation with Neil Paterson, Mr Reid left the hospital, returning a short time later. Caroline had a CT scan of her brain to rule out cerebral bleeding, a tumour, or build-up of fluid around the brain. She was given a lumbar puncture to check for an infection. She had also had an electrocardiograph and chest X-ray by the time her father returned. Neil Paterson then talked to him about Caroline and Rachel.

At 9.45 p.m. medical staff said that Caroline was responding well to questions and that it would be appropriate for Paterson to speak with her. He wanted to determine Rachel Barber’s whereabouts, of course. But he was not prepared for what transpired.