Perfect Victim (30 page)

Robertson seems to have spent a considerable amount of her spare time ruminating on perceived slights or injustices – raging, furious thoughts about a world in which she saw herself as an innocent victim. She felt herself to be badly mistreated always. She poured her heart out with angry words on paper – page after page of them. Long before she turned her attention to Rachel Barber, she had begun to develop a weird and warped view of her world and everyone in it.

Many of these lists too were organised and orderly. On one page she listed her school friends, dividing them tidily into columns according to how kind they had been to her. Those who had been downright cruel; those who were followers; those who were nice. Then she gave them points in the form of fractions, prioritising them into a vengeful list with their scores reflecting how she perceived their treatment of her.

Back then, Caroline Reid’s life appears to have taken a wrong turn into poor self-image, low self-esteem, shattered confidence. Before this, at the age of twelve, she had written an introductory letter about herself, a type of personal profile. It has a cheerful tone, and demonstrates her pride at winning a scholarship to Camberwell Girls Grammar, where she is enjoying school. She even had
likes
in that period of her life. She talks about her family, at that time still a unit, and extra drama classes. It is a normal-sounding letter from a girl whose idol is Kylie Minogue, who has posters of pop stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna on her bedroom wall. She loves the new TV show ‘The Simpsons’, and playing guitar and piano. In that letter Robertson mentions the Gulf War and how she enjoys reading. She’s clearly interested in life. Perhaps there’s one note of foreboding: at that very early age she announces her love of Agatha Christie thrillers and prides herself on watching horror movies ‘without getting freaked’. The only hints of dislike in the letter relate to homework – and her view that she is ugly.

By the following year, however,
ugly
is a tame word in Robertson’s abusive vocabulary. Just one year later, by the time she is thirteen, things have changed so dramatically that she holds herself and her life in absolute contempt. She hates everything, especially herself, and cannot find a single positive thing worth writing about. Over the coming six years, a desperately unhappy, lonely little girl matures into an angry, friendless, depressed adult. Throughout her teens she hates school, and by adulthood her only contacts, outside her family, appear to be with her colleagues at work. By now we see a deeply damaged young woman, brimming with intense self-loathing. Little wonder that she wished for transformation. In one of these disturbing, undated letters to her father, in childish handwriting, she claims apologetically that she’s facing the end of her life. Burdened with so many bad things, she finds nothing positive to make her life worth living. ‘I’m sorry I can’t stop the end of my life,’ she says flatly, explaining that ‘everything’ has ended it. There is a pervading sense of isolation and hopelessness about the letter as she says that nobody understands her pain, a pain most people couldn’t even begin to imagine. She acknowledges that people think she is immature, but swears ‘till I’m dead that today was the end of my life.’

In another similarly worded letter, Robertson’s desperation is evident even in her style of handwriting: her enormous scribbled uncontrolled words almost spilling off the pages as she again pleads for understanding, and asks him not to be angry with her for saying her life is over.

A photocopied bundle of these writings was presented to Justice Vincent to illustrate how prolific an author of lists, letters and notes Robertson became during those early formative years leading up to Rachel Barber’s murder. Seven long years of venting her rage on paper.

In one letter she says she finds it difficult to discuss her feelings with her family, preferring to put her thoughts on paper as a safe outlet for them. ‘I heard a saying ages ago, “Paper is more patient than man”. I suppose it’s real.’

Most of the writings appear to date back to Robertson’s very early teen years which Lovitt claimed were ‘disastrous’. And the majority refer quite dramatically to her relationship, as she perceived it, with her mother Gail Reid.

Among these documents were the letters from as far back as 1992 when Caroline Reid would have been only about twelve years old. Some of these too indicate the despair she felt about her family and her life. In a letter written late one evening during the school holidays of April 1993, Caroline tells her father she has spent the entire break feeling horrible. She repeats bitterly the belief that she’ll never achieve anything worthwhile in life and lashes out in distress, claiming everyone yells and ‘bitches’ at her. ‘I’m so sick of everything!!!’ she writes angrily, before adopting the same persecuted tone in which she states school life is hell and she’s tired of being a victim. Then she denigrates herself, saying she is viewed as an ugly, weird girl who’ll never fit in.

Then in September 1993 a miserable fourteen-year-old Caroline Reid drew a portrait of herself. She called it ‘Misfit’ and surrounded her sketch with a list of adjectives summing up her appearance and emotions. Of all the writings tendered to the court, this picture of intense self-loathing speaks most eloquently of the turmoil in her mind. She brands herself an idiot, funny in the head, calls herself ‘Spotty Dotty’, and claims to have a brain tumour. She believes she’s boring, weird and jealous. She even writes some verse down the side of the drawing: ‘If the plastic surgeon lived overseas, what a good swimmer Carrie would be!’ Her desire to remove herself from the person she most hated – herself – was clearly very strong indeed. There is also an earlier drawing from 1992, where Robertson has smothered her face with hundreds of dots representing her pimples, not neat pin-point dots created with a steady hand, but marks made by the apparently frenzied jabs of a sharpened pencil.

She writes in one undated note, ‘I get yelled at and hated … I don’t let people get close to me …’ Faintly, at the top of the note, are the words ‘I Hate Caroline Club – President; Caroline.’

In another deeply disturbing letter, entitled ‘School is Hell’, Robertson writes of her childhood dreams of becoming an actor. Written in giant, simple, childish print, it begins almost apologetically, saying she doesn’t want to burden her father with more ‘childish crap’. But she reveals pathetically that she is haunted by a particular problem that has been ‘pissing her off’ for some months and she needs to share it with someone.

She then details an incident in which she has told her friends about her secret dreams of becoming a singer or an actor, and how she is humiliated when they respond by laughing at her. Crushed, the teenage Robertson notes that her friends have always been more ‘striking, more unusual and more attractive’ than she is. ‘I just keep dreaming that one day everything would be almost perfect (as perfect as things can be)’, she concludes.

By the time Robertson reached her mid-teens she had become a totally frustrated and unhappy young woman, stated Colin Lovitt. She writes of her feelings and problems in a barrage of ‘outpourings’ tinged with despair. Some of the letters she asks to be thrown away or burnt; others, including diary entries, she wrote to herself and kept. Occasionally, after writing, she would mention her intention to destroy the document, stating that putting her feelings into words relieved her despair.

There are indications in the writings of intense anxiety about herself and her future – and grave concerns about achieving many of the often impossible goals she has set for herself.

In a sad letter riddled with enormous anxieties, she expresses the constant inner turmoil and confusion that dogs her life. It’s clear, from the struggle Robertson describes, that she’s now finding it increasingly difficult to express her feelings to anyone, or even to understand them herself. The letter is loaded with concerns for her future and is marked by a depressive perception of what life is likely to hold for her. By now it appears she is recognising that perhaps a nose job may not provide her with true happiness. But she replaces this goal with an equally unrealistic one. This time, she claims, becoming an actor is the only thing that will bring relief and a happy life. Then she cries for help, saying, ‘What am I to do?’ She is so far away from reaching her goal that it seems almost unattainable.

In another tragic letter, under the heading, ‘Life is Torture in Its Purest Form, aged 14’, she repeats the following negatives about herself: ‘Funny in the head, ugly, deformed, stupid, doormat, loser, dickhead’ and again claims to have a brain tumour.

Two psychologists and a psychiatrist assessing the defendant told the court that they had read the material, which gave them a helpful and very revealing glimpse of Robertson’s disturbed thinking. Mr Lovitt stated that though the court might reasonably hold the view that these were the typical scribblings of adolescence and expressed the sentiments of many young people, there was something far more troubling about them that should be considered when examining the background of the case.

One particularly unsettling letter demonstrated this, he said. The letter, which Robertson signs ‘Spotty Dotty’, is indicative of the despair that now tinged every aspect of her life.

By the time she wrote that letter, life had deteriorated into a black trough where she was questioning how much longer she could survive with her overload of intensely bad feelings and thoughts. ‘I don’t know how I have survived this long,’ she writes bleakly, hinting of suicide. She can’t envisage a happy future any more and says death might be her only escape from a horrible existence in which she feels embarrassed to be alive. In this letter her prolific lists which itemised the reasons for her negative thoughts have by now disappeared. She abandons any attempt to explain her thought patterns. Life, she says simply, holds no hope.

The most troubling aspect of these teenage scribblings is the mounting sense of detachment which surfaces repeatedly. She is flawed, different, less worthy, more loathesome and totally unlovable. All these negative beliefs appear to add momentum to her growing sense of ‘otherness’. In Robertson’s mind she’s become a ‘troubled, tortured soul’ thrown into an alien environment ‘full of angels’. She can’t even communicate her feelings any more … except from her letters. ‘Life for me sucks,’ she says.

While many of Robertson’s letters carry the same depressive trademark of hopelessness and helplessness, others can barely contain the mounting sense of rage she feels towards a world that has apparently abandoned her. Many open with a torrent of self-directed anger about her physical flaws. Others are outwardly angry – her giant writing dominating the pages of her notes. She tells herself it’s because she’s fat, weird, unattractive and stupid that she attracts victimisation and is an outsider at school. A lonely girl, she cries through her words that nobody understands or cares about Caroline the victim. Yet amid the barrage of illogical rantings she vaguely acknowledges that her mother has attempted to organise counselling for her and that her school teachers have repeatedly tried to talk to her about her moody withdrawal. She describes them asking if she’s okay, but seems hostile towards their approaches.

By now she feels out of reach. ‘All of the feelings and horrible things everybody says about me bottle up,’ she wrote, ‘and I have nowhere to explode everything.’ But with such powerful feelings even a disturbed teenager like Caroline Robertson noted that she wouldn’t be able to contain such angry emotions for ever. Murderous thoughts may not have been on her mind back then, but in a chilling prediction of the overspill of rage that would eventually erupt six years ahead, Robertson foretold the explosion inside her would get bigger and bigger, ‘until there is nothing left inside me.’

The reports written by doctors assessing the prisoner in jail support the difficulties Robertson had in relating to her parents, and they to her. Her relationship with her father, while apparently close at times, was often strained, and in several letters she directs her anger at him. In others it is focused on her mother, who had apparently suffered post-natal depression after Caroline’s birth. In her writings Caroline describes her as weak, powerless and dependent. Mr Lovitt said that in the defendant’s perception her relationship with her mother had broken down ‘many, many years ago’.

In one letter to her father, dated 11 November 1996, Caroline acknowledges in a defensive tone that she knows she’s rude and a ‘bitch’, but claims that these are defensive mechanisms. Again she expresses her desire for a happy life and laments that she is feeling isolated because there is nobody who understands ‘what it is like in here’.

Among the writings tendered to the court as part of the defence case was an extract from a letter in different handwriting from Robertson’s. It appeared to be written by Gail Reid to her estranged husband, expressing her concern for Caroline: ‘It is for my Carrie that I cry, she is so unhappy.’ In return, Caroline fumes about her mother in her writings and accuses her of carping criticisms – of telling her she could never do some things like dancing. ‘She said I was awful at ballet.’

At fifteen Robertson begged her father to let her move out of home. But she was clearly emotionally vulnerable and immature at that time, and he refused. Her repeated references to her parents’ marriage breakdown in her letters to her father make mention of his dealings with lawyers. These notes, said Mr Lovitt, paint a vivid picture of the trauma she experienced as she battled to cope with her parents’ divorce. In many of her letters Robertson refers to her parents by their first names, and she occasionally spells their names backwards.

These letters of misery escalate in intensity as the years pass and, though bizarre and disturbing, they do bear some degree of eloquence, depicting a literate and intelligent, if somewhat immature, author. As Caroline Reid matures, the entanglements in her unhappy home life cause her to resent both parents. She portrays herself as ‘the blame thing’ in one of her letters, and complains yet again that the pressures on her are ‘so numerous I just can’t humanly possibly cope with life’.