The Devil's Garden (26 page)

Escorted into the house by Symonds, Weygers hears his phone ringing. It automatically switches over to the answering machine and Weygers hears Grant Milner, his lawyer, start to leave a message. He tries to go to the phone but is stopped, he claims, by Symonds who warns him, 'Don't answer that fucking phone!' When the occupant of the other half of the house, Chris, comes over to speak to Weygers, they are pushed apart.

The phone rings again. This time the caller is Robin Napper. Again, Weygers alleges that Symonds prevented him from answering the telephone.

Outside his house, Crane announces to the waiting media that Weygers has been 'taken into custody'. Channel 7 reporter Alison Fan calls out to Weygers, 'You're not under arrest. You can talk to us!' He seizes his chance. Wearing his trademark tie with the Australian flag emblazoned on it, he claims the raid is part of a state government plot to discredit him. 'This is a gross invasion of privacy. This is a gross invasion of rights. I have no idea what their excuse is for this absolutely disgraceful conduct.' Weygers also alleges the raid was motivated as a payback for the suicide of Penny Easton and that he had been used as a scapegoat to prove the government was getting tough on crime. Crane urges journalists to keep pursuing their line of questions to Weygers.

'Keep at him,' he whispers. 'Keep him talking.' More loudly, he rejects the accusation that the raid is politically motivated. 'Police don't take directions from politicians,' he responds, cool disdain evident in his tone. It is, he says, simply a process of elimination; Weygers is a 'person of interest' who had himself attracted the attention of the press.

With a large press contingent watching their every move, within two hours police have roped off Weygers's Claremont house with crime-scene tape while a forensic team swarms like bees, removing rugs and unrolling them on the driveway and pulling tiles from the roof to examine inside the roof cavity. Press photographers, standing behind the crime-scene tape, click frame after frame while journalists furiously scribble in notebooks. As night falls, police use Luminol in the house and seize items. 'One of the things they grabbed was a laptop that belonged to the student son of Weygers's Filipina girlfriend, Vicky, who he has since married,' Lawson says. 'The lack of computer seriously hindered his studies, and it took correspondence with the police minister to get it back. The other computer contained the records for the Council of Civil Liberties. When his goods were eventually returned, no explanation was given as to what police had or had not found.' In a council meeting, Weygers slammed the police actions. 'The intent has been to terrorise, traumatise and criminally defame me,' he seethed.

A psychic claims credit for the raid, telling the
Post
that she had shared with police a vision that she had of Weygers's and Jane Rimmer's faces. In defensive mode, Martin Crane states that the raid on Steven Ross's house was about the property they seized and was unrelated to Weygers, who did not own the property in the two years that the girls disappeared.

Civil libertarians again join the debate. The raid, one said, is simply an exercise designed to cover Macro's arse. 'It came just a few weeks before the so-called Schramm review in 2004, but you'd have to ask why the bloody hell they hadn't done all this stuff in 1996 if they figured it was so important? The truth is, they hadn't thought about it then.'

Weygers's lawyers also join the fracas. In less than a week, the lawyers have found two more possible suspects. 'If it's taken us only one week, why has it taken police eight years?' one asks. Tom Percy QC, known as much for his utter disregard for political correctness as for his support of working-class Irish ideals, typically does not temper his comments. 'This latest stuff is just a way of police shoring up their own reputations,' he snorts. 'If they want to charge Peter Weygers with murder, then come and arrest him.'

Two weeks after the raid, police arrive at the Claremont council offices with a search warrant. It all seems an exercise in futility to Weygers. Following Sarah Spiers's disappearance, he had suggested to the council that they immediately establish a safety and security committee. In a case of bureaucratic buck-passing, they in turn suggested that any committee of that nature was the domain of the police and state government. The exercise then became farcical. Claremont council's then-chief executive officer strolled over to the nearby police station and suggested that police augment the safety council. 'This duly happened,' Lawson recalls, 'but like a lot of things the police do regarding Claremont, it was closed to the public. Police took notes of the meeting, but it wasn't without its drama.' At the meeting, the former owner of Club Bayview seized the opportunity to serve Weygers with a writ for defamation. 'He claimed that Weygers had outed him as being responsible for lack of security in Claremont. Everyone was working to a common goal but the faction fighting was amazing.'

The whole business, according to Weygers, took on an air of high farce when he realised exactly what documents police would have seized when they served a warrant on the council for documents. 'All they are likely to have found is minutes of the safety and security committee that they recorded them-selves,' he scoffed. Seeking to obtain the nature of the warrant, and what police were searching for,
Post
newspaper made a request under the Freedom of Information laws for all documents relating to the search. It took 12 months of wrangling to end up with very little: a 14-page decision from the information commissioner denying access to most documents on the grounds that showing the material may prejudice the ongoing investigation. What they did learn was what they already knew: that Macro taskforce officers had executed a search warrant 'for the purpose of gathering further evidence as part of the ongoing investigations into the abductions from Claremont . . .' Bret Christian wrote in the
Post
: '. . . the officer in charge of Macro strongly objects to the disclosure of the specific terms of the search warrant, any material provided by Claremont [council] in compliance with the warrant and any information that would confirm the purpose of the search warrant in respect to the line of inquiry then being conducted by the Macro taskforce . . .'

While Weygers could not provide an alibi for his movements the night Spiers and Rimmer disappeared, he had a watertight alibi for Ciara Glennon. Witnesses verified that he was at a council meeting a distance from Claremont until well into the early hours of the morning. Photographs taken at the time prove it, but they weren't always enough to placate the public. At the height of his dealings with police in 1997, a severed cat's head was left in Weygers's letterbox and death threats on his answering machine when he was taunted to reveal what he knew. 'There are two holes in the ground,' one message said. 'Where is the third body?'

Stories abound in Perth of Weygers's sometimes inappropriate behaviour toward young women; innocuous remarks but ones that are often embarrassing to the women con-cerned. 'He does things like comment to young reporters on their beautiful eyes when they approach him for a story,' Bret Christian says. 'Things like that are foolhardy for a man in his position but while he is known to be big and brash, he is also committed to helping other people.' Christian believes there are reporters in Perth who wanted Peter Weygers to be the serial killer, because it would make such a good story. 'He's from an old Claremont family, he was mayor, he is highly intelligent and has a reputation as a man who likes women but who is transparently open with them. It's almost the novel you couldn't make up. I don't believe he's the serial killer, no way. He would have to be the world's best liar, to expound like he does on every subject but be able to cover up murders in his conversation.' Bret pauses. 'Imagine if that happened to you, if you were taken down to the police station in such a dramatic fashion and the press films the coppers taking things from your house. That would be the end of your life as you know it, wouldn't it? Look, if a person is guilty, fine. But what if they're not? What if they're not?'

Grant Milner laughs at the suggestion that Weygers could be the killer. 'In my view, there is simply no way,' he says. 'He is absolutely innocent and I have no idea where the police dredged this idea up from. It happened just prior to the external review and I believe it was done as a show, because they needed to be seen to be doing something. It's unlikely there are grounds Weygers could go them for harassment or the like, because everything they do they call being in line with an "ongoing investigation". But it has left a terrible stain on Weygers and his reputation and that is not fair.'

Milner, too, heard the rumours that ghastly things had been done to the girls' bodies after death. 'The rumours didn't come from any official source but they circulated for a long time,' he says. 'The trouble is, these sorts of rumours grow legs of their own. It's impossible to know the truth.'

Ironically, much of Weygers's public railings have been on the subject of the Claremont killings. He was the first civil libertarian to champion Lance Williams's rights against the constant police presence, warning that overt surveillance could drive the already depressed man to suicide. He demanded answers about mass DNA testing of taxi drivers, labelling it a futile exercise if police did not already have the DNA of the offender. If that was the case, he demanded, what was the point of taking DNA to match? 'It must have been awfully embarrassing for police to admit they didn't have anything to match against,' Lawson says. 'It made for a combative relationship with Weygers, who would not back down.'

In late 2004 Weygers is confronted by a carload of women who slow down outside his house and yell at him. 'The guy who is the murderer lives here, doesn't he?' one woman screeches before the car takes off. Fed up with the constant intrusion and the smear on his name, he makes a formal complaint to then-Premier Geoff Gallop, demanding both a public apology and a public police clearance. 'Weygers had moved out of the house by then and his tenants were severely traumatised by the whole business,' Lawson recalls. 'They didn't know what was going to happen next, who was going to suddenly jump over the back fence. A cop told one of the tenants that he was being "paranoid" – a bit rich given what they had to go through.'

The nightmare isn't over for Steven Ross, either. In mid-December 2004 police pull him over as he drives to a job and take him to Macro headquarters at Curtin House. Questioned again about what he knows, he is shown an electric stun gun that he once owned to afford himself some protection in the taxi after he was stabbed by a passenger. 'I only used the stun gun once, on a cat,' he told them. 'Then I gave it away because I'd dropped it in water and it didn't work.'

Pictures that Ross took of his former girlfriend lying in bed after she died and photos of her funeral service are placed on the table in front of him. The woman had died at his home while he was at a police station answering questions about a complaint a customer had made about a fare overcharge, later dismissed. 'They reckoned I was a sick sort of bloke for taking those pictures,' he said. 'But I did it because I wasn't with her when she died.'

Asserting that he had picked up Sarah Spiers on the night she went missing and not, as he claimed, the night before – the police also allege that Ross had organised to deliver her to Weygers. 'This is all crap,' Ross said. 'I mean, I didn't own a mobile phone in 1996, so how the hell would I have contacted Peter Weygers? How would I have known where to take the girl to? Until she got in the cab I didn't know myself where she was going. It's rubbish.'

With Weygers's complaint to Premier Gallop now in the upper echelons of government and being dealt with by Police Minister Michelle Roberts, police finally return the possessions they had seized. That, too, is not without its drama. Forensic examination of the two cars seized in the raid had 'yielded items of interest and were being examined forensically,' Crane tells the press. 'At the end of the day, it may well prove relevant or it may prove negative.'

There were few light moments in Weygers's final bid to regain his mayoral crown. Dogged by the smear of being a 'person of interest' in the Claremont case, he fought a hard but unsuccessful fight for re-election in mid-2005. During the campaign, a woman approached Weygers in a Claremont street. 'I'm voting for you,' she whispered to him. Weygers was chuffed. 'Thank you,' he beamed. 'Thank you very much.'

'That's okay,' the woman said. 'If you're the Claremont serial killer, you're very clever, indeed! And Claremont certainly needs a clever mayor!'

Following the Weygers and Ross raids, Bret Christian writes a scathing analysis of the Macro investigation. Why, in light of the imminent arrival of the 11th review team, he asks, are crime-scene samples being re-tested. 'Is this,' he writes, 'a desperate rearguard action to prevent any outsiders seeing, for the first time, the inner workings of the WA police Major Crime department? Are they hiding secrets, like in the John Button case, that will show this has been the most monumental stuff-up in investigation history? So many questions . . . Every single aspect of these murders has been treated as a case-sensitive fact, so is it any wonder rumour has run riot?...Perhaps the Perth public are sick of being fed controlled morsels by an organisation they pay for . . . Does anyone really have any idea what is happening, or is this just the last desperate grasping for skyhooks before the drowning man sinks?'

While police defend their treatment of Weygers, citing 'strange behaviour' and other reasons that they 'can't make public', he is still waiting to formally have his name cleared. 'The pressure to "get a result" led the Macro taskforce to deviate from good practice,' Lawson says. 'Rather than quietly building a case for the prosecution, Macro went for the "big bang", naming persons of interest.' He theorises about why Weygers was named. 'The most remarkable thing about the Weygers business is just how ridiculous it is. After reviewing massive amounts of documentation and listening to hundreds of stories, I am inclined to favour this specific hypothesis. While Peter was mayor, he used his then-good relations with the police to get a crackdown on one area in Claremont which was doing a thriving business in illicit drugs. This occurred shortly before the killings started. But others had agendas to protect and one way or another, he was named as a "person of interest", which led subsequently to him being ousted as mayor. The
only
reason he lost the election was because of the "serial killer" cloud over him.'

Lawson, tall when he unfurls from the restaurant seat, stands to leave. 'There is justifiable anguish in this city over the victims of the killer. Everyone would agree with that. But there is little public anguish over the victims of the Macro taskforce. And there should be.'