The Devil's Garden (14 page)

With a view to building a brief, the taskforce chooses a codename for their operation:
Damocles.
The tale of a sycophantic attendant in the royal court of the Greek tyrant Dionysius, Damocles is so in awe of Dionysius's excessive wealth and happiness that the tyrant decides to teach Damocles a lesson. At a sumptuous banquet, Dionysius invites Damocles to sit in his place of honour. Entranced with the riches surrounding him, Damocles looks to the ceiling and is horrified to see that a sword, suspended by a single horse hair, is hanging over his head. Dionysius has made his point: those with position and power also face constant danger; tragedy is forestalled only by chance and can strike at any moment. For the police, the legend is a perfect symbol. The stakes are incredibly high. Two girls are dead. One is still missing. All it takes is one mistake; just one mistake. But the sword isn't hanging over Lance Williams. It is hanging over them.

Police aircraft tracks the decoys, who walk up to 15 pre-arranged routes a night, from Thursday to Sunday. The air-wing is up so frequently over the western suburbs, there are concerns that the plane's incessant drone will alert residents that something is going on. The constant use of the plane four nights a week also causes rumblings of discontent within other sections of the police. When an explosive device is found at Geraldton Hospital, Perth investigators have to find alternative transport to get them there.

The police have had him under covert surveillance for months. Tracking him as he stalks women in his car, not taking his eyes from them. Up to 30 times a night. Police know his every move, sitting off the street to his unit, waiting until he steps into his car. 'Here he goes,' they say, starting the engine and slipping in behind him.

From Thursday to Sunday night, every week, he leaves his unit at Cottesloe at precisely 11.50 pm. It is the busy time, weekends, when people are out partying. Occasionally, rarely, he is later – exactly 12.30 am – but there is never any variation in these times. They can set their watch by him. He slips into the driver's seat, straps on his seatbelt, cruises a few laps through Claremont before making his regular drive-through at Hungry Jack's takeaway. Picks up a chocolate milk, sips it slowly through a straw as he drives on to North-bridge. He always takes the same route. Curb crawling, circling, watching, throwing the empty milk container in the same roadside bin every night, every week and then returning to Claremont. Over and over again, up to 30 times a night. Slowly, slowly driving his car through the red-light district.

Five hostage negotiators, part of the Tactical Response Group (TRG), are placed on the team from the moment surveillance on Williams starts. Each of them detectives, their role – though not full-time – is front-line and vital. Every time the TRG slips in behind him, they sit off about a kilometre behind, primed to action if they get an encrypted radio call regarding his movements. If a suspect takes a decoy and holds her hostage – a knife to her throat, an arm around her neck – they will need to start urgent though delicate negotiations geared toward achieving a non-violent outcome and not an armed conflict. 'In any situation like this, you have to also be aware of the potential for suicide,' a former Macro negotiator says. 'If people feel trapped, they can behave in very bizarre ways. But our over-riding concern was for the decoys, to ensure they were safe at all times.'

On any given night when Williams is under surveillance, there are approximately 50 police officers working. Surveillance, negotiators, TRG officers, aircraft personnel. It is a massive operation.

Not everyone on the hostage team is supportive of Caporn's methods. 'The reality was that about five detectives would track other leads, but the major resources went into this hounding of Williams. No doubt his behaviour was odd and, sure, Caporn was under enormous pressure to deliver a result. But the feeling was that that pressure led him into making decisions that weren't necessarily always right. Tunnel vision geared to getting a result.'

He believes that a better tactic with Williams would have been to go undercover at his workplace to find out if he had overtly violent or sexual tendencies that spilled over with his colleagues, to befriend him and get closer to finding out what made him tick. 'That wasn't an option for Caporn,' he recalls. 'A lot of people on Macro were textbook detectives, and they wouldn't step outside that. But there were opportunities there that in my opinion most definitely should have been taken.'

Williams is driving with the window down and has spotted a young woman at the T-junction of Gugeri Street, on the corner of Bayview Terrace. She slides over to the car, flashes him an apprehensive smile as she leans slightly into the car window. 'Hi. Can you tell me where the nearest bus stop is?'

He hesitates for a fraction of a moment. When he speaks, his voice is strong but there is a hint of a stammer, an awkward shyness. 'There aren't any buses this time of night. Where are you going to?'

'Mosman Park.' Mosman Park, a ritzy suburb heading toward Fremantle, a six-minute drive from Claremont.

'Get in,' he says. 'I'll give you a lift there if you like.' She takes a sharp, surreptitious breath as she climbs into Williams's car. The air-wing is up, monitoring their move-ments and unmarked surveillance cars slip in behind them. She is hot-wired for any conversation but still, it's always a risk.

Williams cruises quietly out of the street and back onto the darkened Stirling Highway and steals a sideways glance at the woman sitting next to him. She is attractive. Stupid. So stupid, to get into a stranger's car while a serial killer is lurking around. She says little on the drive, listening as he makes small talk, staring ahead and crossing and uncrossing her legs. He steals another sideways glance. There's something wrong. He senses it. She is incredibly nervous.

The street where she has asked to be dropped off is just ahead. 'Just here will do, thanks,' she says, her fingers already on the door handle. It is deserted and dark; not a soul in sight. He looks at her again. She is so stupid.

'Look, I don't want to drop you off here. It's not safe.' She doesn't listen, smiles at him as she quietly gets out of his car.

'Thanks, I'll be fine,' she says again, and disappears into the shadows.

The decoy police officer flown in from interstate has done her job well. 'Shit,' she says when she gets back into the squad car parked around the corner. 'There's something very weird about him. He wasn't concerned that I was walking alone out late while there was a serial killer around. He was so detached. All he did was talk about himself the whole trip.'

They decide to take Williams out.

He is curb crawling again. It is two months after the decoy, 3 am in the quiet hush between midnight and dawn. Sunday morning, 5 April 1998. Williams is following a woman walking south from the Stirling Highway – the same route Ciara Glennon had taken; following her as she strides into the southern part of the Claremont suburbs, deeper into the darkened streets. He has driven past her numerous times, not braking or slowing down but accelerating out of her line of sight, doubling up around the back streets and approaching her again from the rear.

The Tactical Response Group officers watch him, their radar primed. Something is about to give.

They pounce, pointing loaded Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns at Williams's head. 'Stop the car! Don't move! You are under arrest!' Terror grips Williams and a warm rush of urine is soaking through his underpants, seeping through to stain his trousers.

'What have I done?' he stammers.

Officer Nello Iopolo orders him out of the car. 'Stand still. Don't move.'

Williams feels the cold nuzzle of a submachine gun at his neck as he steps from his vehicle, eight armed officers pointing guns at his head. Spread-eagled against the car bonnet, he is ashamed that the wet stain is noticeable. His face is bleached of colour. Too frightened to articulate proper sentences, he can barely stammer out a question. 'What's this about?' Surrounded by officers, saliva samples are taken from his mouth before Williams is escorted into the Beaufort Street police headquarters.

He walks past Macro team leader Stephen Brown, sitting in his office. Struck by what he will later describe as Williams's nonchalant demeanour, Brown doesn't notice that Williams has wet himself. Police would have cleaned him up, he says, if that had happened. It is part of their duty of care and not in the best interests of police for a person of interest to be uncomfortable throughout an interview.

Williams does not remember this consideration.

Detective Senior-Sergeant Paul Greenshaw and Detective Senior-Constable Peter Norrish, the liaison officer for the Rimmer family, are waiting for him in the interview room. Refusing a request to videotape the interview, for 13 hours Williams answers questions that are hammered at him. He does not have a lawyer present, even when hair samples are taken from his head.

He does not ask for one.

While Williams is at police headquarters, police execute a simultaneous rollout of their forensic teams at his beach-side unit, his parents' home and his workplace. His car is impounded. The relentless questioning continues. Known by lawyers as the 'squeeze him until he pops' method, there is one problem: he doesn't pop. Even as he is forced to rigidly sit with his hands on his knees and to look at photos of the victims that police place on his body, he doesn't pop.

The questions are relentless. What were you doing at Claremont? Why are you cruising around the streets late at night? Are you married? Have a girlfriend? Any kids? Heard of Sarah Spiers? Jane Rimmer? Ciara Glennon? Tell us again what you are doing cruising around Claremont? Relentless, on and on as dawn gives way to daytime and morning fades to afternoon. The good-cop, bad-cop routine. Cajoling him, friendly, gentle. 'Come on, Lance, why don't you just tell us where Sarah is? Get it over and done with?' He can't, he shrugs. Because he doesn't know. He didn't even have a licence when Sarah went missing. That doesn't wash, either. 'You wouldn't be the first person driving around without a licence. Try again. Did you pick up Sarah Spiers?'
No, I did not.

The bad-cop routine, yelling at him if he is too slow answering questions, yanking his elbow if he appears to be nodding off. 'Wake up! Answer the question!' Forcing him to look at pictures of the girls. 'Don't turn your head away! Take a good, hard look!' Why is his car, a white Hyundai, in such immaculate condition inside? Why is it washed and polished outside?

Williams answers in his monotonous, dreary tone under-scored with a pout. 'I like to keep my vehicle clean. I wasn't doing anything wrong last night. I was just concerned for the safety of these women who wander about at night in that area and that's why I followed them.' Why did he pick up the woman he dropped at Mosman Park? 'I didn't think there were any buses. I was simply being a good Samaritan.'

They think it's bullshit, and tell him so. 'Give us a break, Lance. We know your routines. You may as well tell us.'

Stephen Brown admits they do not trifle with suspects. 'Williams digested everything we asked him, make no mistake. He thinks of everything before he answers, and has long, long pauses before he does so. We're never fooled by stuttering or awkwardness, but we were surprised that he didn't request legal representation. If we suspect someone of murder, we'll ask the hard questions and shove it right up them until we get the answers.' But they do it, he says, within the law. He defends his former boss, Dave Caporn. 'Caporn was holding the strings for this operation and he's of the highest integrity, genteel and approachable. He takes the gentler approach, putting his hand on someone's forearm, saying "I know you did it, you can tell me," and more often than not he'll get a confession. He didn't run the Williams interview but listened to the audio and watched through the one-way mirror. There was no "bash and crash" going on behind the scenes, no offering of deals. It was straight down the line.'

Not everyone agrees. 'They should never have run that interview the way they did,' the former hostage negotiator says. 'It required the skills of a negotiator to get the best out of him, not a police officer ping-ponging questions back and forth. In the end it got them precisely nowhere. But there was no point ever trying to get Caporn to look at other alternatives. This was a huge case and he was going to run it his way. There were a lot of senior police watching for the outcome.'

Williams did not flinch throughout the interview. 'The media reckon that he would have been scared stiff, but he wasn't,' Brown says. 'He was nonchalant, cool and detached as if it was happening to someone else. Everytime we brought him in, his demeanour was cool.'

Former Sergeant Con Bayens, who would later head up 'Operation Bounty' to clear prostitutes from the nearby Northbridge area, recalls what he heard of the Williams takeout. 'Caporn was back at the ranch – police headquarters – directing the troops by mobile phone and waiting for Williams to be brought in. He was so shit-scared, apparently he just about melted into his car seat, and he promptly wet himself. Who wouldn't? Faced with that amount of police pressure and with loaded guns in your face, you'd confess to being on the grassy knoll, wouldn't you? But he didn't. He didn't confess to a bloody thing.'

The police can't win. Fighting allegations that they were under pressure to charge a person of interest because of esca-lating costs, the service is adamant that this is not the case. But they also have to battle sniggers from within their ranks at their choice of decoy. 'Here's this woman in her mid-30s, a brunette about 172 cm tall and with a buxom build. Well, straight up it's bloody obvious she doesn't look anything like the Claremont victims,' one snorts. 'She's too tall and too old. To quote comedian Rowan Atkinson, putting on decoys seemed like a ''cunning plan''. But in reality, it was more like fly fishing for trout with a brick on the end of the line.'

The Claremont investigation, Bayens says, became known outside the taskforce as the best documented and best serialised failure the Western Australian police force has ever had. 'There just seemed,' he says, 'to be a ready list of excuses for every failure.'

The police keep going, holding Williams until late after-noon before releasing him without charge. It is only the beginning. Norma recalls the last words an officer said to Lance as he left the station. 'We'll hound you, Williams. We'll hound you.'