Perfect Victim (27 page)

In that carefully constructed plan, Robertson refers to the final phase of the fictitious psychological study. It’s clear she’d given this some detailed thought because she instructed Rachel to pack a small backpack, as if she were running away. She also told the teenager to bring her wallet, her ID, photographs and clothes. Even her teddy and ballet shoes. She stressed the confidential nature of the study: ‘you can’t tell anybody about this,’ she writes.

It appears from the plan that Robertson had intended to meet Rachel Barber outside Melbourne’s Flinders Street station, but this idea is punctuated by a query about cameras in the area. The motive behind the secret meeting then becomes apparent: Robertson reveals a plan to lace a pizza with ‘drowsy powder’ before going through some relaxation techniques. ‘Then toxic cloth over mouth – use army bag,’ continues the plan. It appears she’d already contemplated dumping her victim’s body far way, concealed in the bag that police assumed must be some sort of body bag. But the last line of the plan puzzled everyone. ‘Dump bag separately – then I’ll drive you home.’ Drive
who
home? Since Robertson had no driver’s licence she wouldn’t have been able to drive anyone anywhere.

The tale Robertson spun must have been very convincing, and Rachel obediently kept the study secret. She did not tell her parents about this highly confidential work; even Manni just got a vague story about a job that would earn her ‘heaps’. To Rachel, eager for her first pay cheque, $100 was a huge amount. She’d already earmarked the money for the shoes her parents could not afford, and she would soon be wearing them. So Rachel went along, and in keeping with the secret nature of the study, she did not mention the name Caroline Reid. She was just an ‘old female friend’.

Rachel, court evidence later revealed, was ‘somewhat shy and reserved’ with strangers, and was more comfortable and talkative around those she knew. Because Caroline was no stranger to Rachel, she had no reason to suspect the older girl of ill intent.

Despite Robertson’s lack of assistance in police inquiries, investigations revealed that after leaving her dance friends in Richmond, Rachel walked a short distance to a toilet block on the corner of Lennox Street, where Caroline Robertson was waiting for her. The older girl had earlier caught a taxi from her flat in Prahran to Richmond, walking from Erin Street – not far from Rachel’s dance school – to the appointed meeting place. Rachel followed the instructions she’d been given, taking along her dance bag, ballet shoes and the teddy bear she took everywhere with her. She was also wearing the commitment ring Manni had bought her at Christmas, plus tiny diamond earrings and two gold necklaces.

The girls caught the tram to Prahran, as Robertson intended, with Rachel excitedly telling her about the new kitten and her boyfriend. But Robertson had not counted on the presence of Alison Guberek. Her sighting of the two together was to prove more than a hiccup in Robertson’s scheme to commit the perfect murder. After reaching Prahran the two girls ordered pizza and went off to Robertson’s flat, Rachel probably being keen to get on with the study and head off home with her $100.

Robertson’s murder plan mentioning the toxic cloth over the girl’s face and lacing the pizza with ‘drowsy powder’ was probably designed to render the victim unconscious so that the rest of the plan could be executed without attracting attention. Robertson could carry out the disfigurement she wrote about before putting Rachel’s body into the army bag she had prepared. She would dump the body and Rachel’s belongings in different remote locations.

Whether she actually used ‘drowsy powder’ to dope her victim is unclear. But toxicological tests conducted on Rachel Barber’s body twelve days after her death revealed traces of diphenhy-dramine in her system. This antihistamine compound found in cold and flu preparations has side effects of drowsiness and impaired mental alertness. Rachel was also found to have a blood alcohol reading of 0.05. This reading, said the pathologist, could have been a result of biological changes in the girl’s body after death, though she could not rule out the possibility that Rachel had drunk alcohol beforehand. Robertson did recall buying alcohol for them to drink at Trinian Street, but Rachel, she claimed, had declined. There was no obvious explanation for the antihistamine. Rachel’s family told police she had not been sick or on any medication at the time she disappeared.

In fact, despite her handwritten reference to ‘drowsy powder’, Robertson strenuously denied carrying out this part of the plan when questioned by Buddhist monk, Greg Sneddon: ‘Jee, if I’d wanted to make the girl drowsy, I mean, I could have easily stolen it [drugs], just easily got pills from my mum’s place, much more powerful pills than something like that.’

Mr Rapke, for the Crown, told the subsequent plea hearing that while it was ‘not possible to say with any degree of certainty’ when the prisoner murdered Rachel, forensic tests showed that the girl most likely died very soon after her disappearance on 1 March. He said that some helpful information could be gleaned from a report by Robertson’s treating psychologist, Michael Crewdson, which detailed a conversation Crewdson had had with the killer. ‘Caroline has given me an account of the way in which Rachel Barber died, but was only able to do it reasonably recently. Caroline told me she had asked Rachel to do some meditation exercise … she told Rachel it would help with unpleasant things and told me she had been in a daze and did not want to do it. “I was in so much trouble now, I had to.” ’

Robertson told the psychologist that she had strangled Rachel Barber with a piece of telephone cord from an obsolete handset, then kept her body hidden in the bedroom wardrobe for two days, the cord still around the neck. When her father visited the flat the following day, he noticed that she took an ‘unusually long time’ to answer the door, and that the door to her bedroom remained firmly closed. Robertson later told Mr Crewdson she had shut the door to discourage her father from entering and perhaps finding the body.

Mr Rapke, in his later summation of the case to the Supreme Court, was to say that this killing had been executed ‘in a particularly cruel and callous fashion. Manual strangulation seldom leads to instantaneous death. It requires an application of some force, applied at close quarters for some seconds or minutes’.

Even more distressing to the Barber family was the revelation at the plea hearing that Rachel might have had some forewarning of what was to happen, pleading with her killer just before she was strangled, ‘Please, please don’t.’ Robertson had volunteered this information when talking to her psychologist in prison.

Though it is unclear when Robertson actually carried out the strangulation, Steven Granger, an occupant of the flat below, said he had been woken early on Tuesday morning by crying and sobbing coming from the bathroom area above his flat. He thought it was a young female, possibly a child, having ‘a furious tantrum’. He said he lay awake listening to the wailing for about ten minutes before falling asleep again with the noise still going. The Crown later concluded that while the sounds possibly came from Rachel, no one could exclude the possibility that they were the cries of her murderer.

The day after the killing Robertson went to work as usual, but was notably quiet. Police investigations revealed she telephoned the Victorian Transport Corporation twice that morning from work, and again the following morning from home. Oddly, at 9.48 that morning when Robertson was at work, her workstation telephone was used to call her own home number. But it did not answer.

Subsequent police checks on Robertson’s telephone line showed that on Wednesday, 3 March she had made calls to a local taxi truck company, though no record of them was ever found at the company itself. The Supreme Court was later told that it was reasonable to conclude that the prisoner transported Rachel’s body to Kilmore that day.

In spite of the ‘cock and bull story’ Colin Lovitt, QC, said she had originally given to her lawyers about having help with the actual killing, it transpired at the Supreme Court that she had acted alone. Mr Lovitt said that once Robertson had decided to ‘come clean’ she’d even admitted that her earlier version had been ‘bullshit’. She then admitted to hiring a truck and telling the driver that she wanted him to help move a statue, or sculpture, to the Kilmore property. He probably had no idea that the figure wrapped in blankets and concealed in an army bag, lifted out of her wardrobe and into the truck, was the body of a dead girl. At Kilmore, she instructed the driver to drop the bag off next to the house. She told Crewdson she then dragged it to the clump of trees, burying it ‘in a hastily dug shallow grave’.

The van Robertson claimed she had hired was seen by neighbours at the Kilmore property on that Wednesday afternoon – two days after Rachel’s death. It was sighted near the clump of trees where the girl’s body was later found. One neighbour claimed she saw the faded white older-style van in the grounds late that afternoon. She had been driving to collect her children at a nearby pick-up point just before 4 p.m. that day, when she noticed the van moving away from the clump of trees. She described seeing two people walking alongside the van, apparently talking to one another. The van was moving, she said, so a third person must have been driving it.

Of the two walking people, the neighbour claimed, one was short and stocky with dark shoulder-length hair, while the other was taller and thinner, with shorter, fair hair. But she was unable to tell, given the distance, whether that person was male or female. When she returned a short while later the van was still at the property.

Another neighbour also reported seeing the van, but because it was moving she could not see who was driving. Later investigations failed either to identify or locate the driver, or the third person supposedly sighted in the area at the time.

On Friday, 5 March, four days after Rachel Barber’s disappearance, Robertson appeared to have recovered from her alleged illness. Using some of the free tickets handed out around her office, she attended a practice session for the Formula One Grand Prix. This was the same day the Barbers had attempted to visit the event as well, looking for their daughter.

Two days later she telephoned the Barbers’ house and spoke with Rachel’s uncle, Andrew Southall, for fourteen minutes. He recorded her name and number on a notepad along with those of other callers that day and, though he cannot recall what they discussed, he feels sure he would have informed Robertson – who gave him her old name, Caroline Reid – that the family was out, still searching for the missing girl.

On Thursday, 11 March and Friday, 12 March, Robertson left messages at work saying she was still sick and would not be coming in. But when the supervisor rang her home on the Friday requesting a medical certificate, there was no answer. Robertson had already left by cab for the city, probably to make arrangements for her train ticket out of the State. She was still in the city when detectives from Missing Persons first called at her flat during the morning. Returning home at around lunchtime, Robertson telephoned Donna Waters. She wanted the rest of her money, this time for a ‘musical session’. She rang Waters again that afternoon, just two hours before the police returned with the keys to her flat.

Robertson’s semiconscious state when the police found her in the flat was thought to have been the result of an epileptic fit induced by their forced entry. Manufactured symptoms could not be ruled out, however, said Mr Rapke at the plea hearing.

At the final plea hearing Jeremy Rapke told the court that in considering the mental and emotional state of the defendant at the time of the killing it should be remembered that Robertson had shown some degree of clarity in the days following the murder – chasing up money, working some full days, and her visiting the Grand Prix, where her employers observed her to be ‘in good spirits’.

‘If she’d been struck by immediate remorse or regret for what she had done, she was able to suppress such feelings to an extent that she was able to function normally and efficiently, even ruthlessly’, he said in his closing speech. ‘Her conduct after the murder was, therefore, particularly cold-hearted and calculating. She had set about creating the impression that she was leading a normal and unremarkable life, while having the body of a child that she’d murdered in her cupboard and planning and executing its disposal. And at the same time attempting to gain funds, presumably to assist her in her own escape from justice.’

Caroline’s profile on Rachel, her methodical death plan and the orderly checklists of a killer intending to get away with murder certainly added up to damning evidence. And the police, armed with this information for the Crown, were well prepared by the time the suspect’s name appeared on the committal hearing list.

A much thinner Caroline Reed Robertson arrived at the hearing before the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday, 31 January 2000. She was handcuffed to two prison officers. This was her first court appearance in several months. Her depressive illness combined with the stress of the pending court case had undoubtedly contributed to her weight loss.

For members of the Barber family, it was their first opportunity to glimpse the young woman accused of killing Rachel. They filed into court to ensure that Robertson felt their presence. But because the Crown intended calling them as key witnesses in the trial, still many months away, Elizabeth and Michael Barber were not allowed to hear any of the police evidence that would be aired over the coming two days.

It was at this preliminary committal hearing that the bizarre story of Robertson’s blueprint for murder emerged for the first time. It had all the elements of a thriller – and the media seized upon it. A weird, obsessive girl, hatching a macabre plan to kill a pretty young dancer. A contrived plot, reconstructed from old notes. Evidence penned by an apparently ordinary young woman from a middleclass family living in an affluent suburb. A quiet office administrator, a former babysitter.

Prosecutor Robert Barry outlined the strange case, calling witnesses to support the contention that this was a cold-blooded killing executed by a callous murderer. He called Robertson’s work colleagues, the neighbour who had heard the early-morning sobbing from the flat above, neighbours from Kilmore who had seen the van, scientists, pathologists and police.