Call me cruel, call me nasty

Senior Crown prosecutor John Kiely SC says this was one of the most complicated and unusual cases in his long career.

It took five years for Paul Wilkinson to be convicted for the murder of Kylie Labouchardiere. His unusual capacity for fantasy and deception, along with his inside knowledge of police procedures, allowed him to torture her family by stretching out the investigation and judicial proceedings. Along the way, he set fire to his house, fabricated evidence that Kylie was still alive, and accused a police sergeant of her murder. He sent police to five alleged grave sites, but her body has not been found.

"Everybody has reasons 4 hiding a crime," he wrote in a text message when under investigation. "Mine is the family can live not knowing where and why 4. ... Call me cruel, call me nasty ... her family can live their lives in misery 4 all I care F--- THEM."

At the time of the murder, Wilkinson was 28 and a NSW police Aboriginal community liaison officer. In 1999 he was stabbed in the stomach with a syringe and feared he had contracted HIV/AIDS. He was diagnosed as having a major depressive disorder, and spent more than a year on stress leave.
Despite his problems, a female colleague in 2003 described him as "funny, charming, attractive and intelligent". She said he had a strong sexual appetite, and had sent her an enormous number of explicit text messages. After a few months she stopped seeing him because she did not want a relationship with a married man. Wilkinson had refused to leave his wife, who was about to have a baby.

In late 2003 Wilkinson was a patient at Sutherland Hospital and met Kylie, a trainee nurse he had come across a few times before. An attractive 23-year-old with shoulder-length hair, she was married to Sean Labouchardiere, who was in the navy. Kylie was not happy in her marriage, and soon Wilkinson and she began an intense affair, both physically and by text: in the four months until she disappeared, there were more than 23,000 phone contacts between them - an astonishing average of 168 text messages a day. When Sean asked why she was on the phone so often, she gave strange stories about involvement in a police operation.

Kylie was torn between her marriage and her affair, and sought expert help, saying she felt suicidal. The psychiatrist described her as "feeling helpless and trapped" but concluded she was more distressed than depressed. Perceptively, he concluded that if harm were to come to her, it would probably be from "misadventure or impulsive action", rather than being self-inflicted.

Kylie's confusion was expressed by the two newspaper ads she placed on Valentine's Day 2004. While she told her husband "I love you with all my heart", her message for Wilkinson was: "I know there is a future for us and can't wait to spend it with you."

In late March she left her marriage and job and went to stay with her grandmother on the Central Coast. On April 13 she learnt she was pregnant with Wilkinson's child, and sent him 119 text messages. He sent 91 in return. Police said Wilkinson now agreed to leave his wife and move to Dubbo with Kylie. She did not tell her family about being pregnant to Wilkinson, but made arrangements for her furniture to be moved. On April 28 she packed two bags and took the bus to Gosford railway station, telling her family she was joining the police force. The last known contact from her was a phone call from Central Station at 8.30pm, saying she had arrived safely.

The next day Kylie's surprised grandmother received a call from furniture removalists at Dubbo, saying Kylie had failed to meet them as arranged. Over the next week the family became increasingly concerned that she was not answering her phone. They, and later the police, were confused by a number of things that happened and which suggested she was still alive.

On April 30 her estranged husband Sean received a text message: "See you soon I love you." On May 3 her mobile phone was turned on near Menai. (In both cases Wilkinson was almost certainly responsible.)

Checks of one of her phone bills revealed the frequency of her recent contacts with Wilkinson, and they called him in search of information about her whereabouts. On May 7 he rang Kylie's brother, Michael, and said he had received a text message from Kylie saying she had moved to Adelaide to be with another man. Unconvinced, Michael and Kylie's father, John Edwards, went to police and reported her missing.

Police contacted Wilkinson and asked him to make a statement at Gosford police station on May 17. The day before, his house was set alight and he, with hands tied, escaped the flames and claimed he had been attacked by Kylie and an unknown male. He told detectives Kylie had been dealing drugs and having an affair with a policeman. Wilkinson had arranged to meet her at Sutherland railway station on the day she disappeared but had not planned to go away with her. In any case, he said, she had not turned up.

Police inquiries found Kylie and Wilkinson had been in frequent contact on the day she disappeared, during her train trip to Sydney. Records showed that at the end of the trip, at 9.11pm, their mobile phone calls bounced off the same tower in Sutherland, indicating they were in the same small area. It was the last time either of them rang the other.

There were grounds for suspecting Wilkinson. A few hours before the house fire, for instance, he had sent his wife and child away, and told her to take the family's photo albums with her. But despite their suspicions, the police had no firm evidence. Missing were a crime scene and the victim's body, with all the forensic and other evidence they can provide.

This situation continued for more than a year, and Wilkinson's behaviour became increasingly erratic.

His most bizarre action occurred in June 2005, when he gave the Police Integrity Commission a nine-page statement claiming that on May 20, 2004, a police sergeant, Geoff Lowe, had kidnapped him at gunpoint and driven to the Royal National Park, where Lowe had taken a tied-up Kylie from the utility, cut off her fingers and toes, raped her, stabbed her four times in the stomach, cut off her head with a shovel and burned and buried her body. Wilkinson said Lowe then drove him to the Princes Highway and "told me that my mouth had better stay shut or what I had just witnessed would happen to my wife and son".

Wilkinson's allegations were proved false. A search of the relevant area of the national park found no grave. It emerged that his wife, Julie Thurecht, had had a brief affair with Lowe before her marriage.

Learning of this much later, Wilkinson had become intensely jealous of the policeman, who figured prominently in a number of his crazy allegations of police drug dealing and violence after Kylie disappeared. Lowe became so concerned he changed his phone number, sold his car, and eventually moved house, to minimise Wilkinson's chances of tracing him and visiting his home when his wife might be alone.

In August 2005 the officer in charge of the investigation moved on. Colleagues were not keen to take over the case, due to the frustrating nature of Wilkinson's stories (only some of which have been described here) and the lack of firm evidence.

The officer who got the job was Senior Constable Glenn Smith, a detective in his early 30s who had been with the homicide squad before transferring to Gosford. Smith worked the case hard, putting an intercept on Wilkinson's phone and placing an undercover officer near him. He also received information from Julie Thurecht, who had left Wilkinson but saw him from time to time. Her husband trusted her, to a point: the year before he had asked her to call police and say she was Kylie and did not want to be found. On February 13, 2006, he sent her the "Call me cruel" text message. And in May 2006 he drove her to a spot in the Royal National Park and told her Kylie's grave was nearby. He also asked her to make a false entry in an old diary claiming she had been raped by Geoff Lowe. She refused to help him, and secretly passed information to police.
Smith worked with minimal resources, often in his free time. Finally he believed there was enough evidence to charge Wilkinson but lawyers at the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions did not agree.

He arranged a meeting to try to change their minds, and spent the weekend desperately trying to bolster his case. Trawling through the database of information gathered in the course of the investigation, he came across a misfiled list of exhibits that revealed Kylie had had a second phone. He found the phone in the evidence room and powered it up, only to discover he needed a password to use it.

He obtained this from the phone company and, on the morning of his meeting at the DPP's office, came to Sydney early and asked police technicians to download the phone's contents. They did it while he waited, and to his great joy there were several important text messages from Wilkinson. One had been sent the week after she told him she was pregnant: "2day & Wednesday then it's DB [Dubbo] u and I are 2getha 4eva". This contradicted Wilkinson's claim that the couple had never planned to go away together.

Smith went into his meeting with this new information, and the lawyers agreed they now had enough evidence. On April 17, 2007, almost three years after Kylie's disappearance, Paul Wilkinson was arrested and charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty.

Wilkinson continued to lie, knowing police were obliged to follow up any possible lead on the location of Kylie's body. The following February, now aware of his wife's role in the police investigation, he said she had helped Geoff Lowe kill Kylie and took police to Mooney Mooney, where he said she was buried. No body was found.

Whenever one of these searches occurred, Kylie's mother, Carol Edwards, would be informed in advance. "I was inconsolable each time," she later said in her victim impact statement. "I waited by the phone, only to be told that they had not found her."

During this period Smith recorded a number of conversations with Wilkinson. Transcripts of the conversations reveal a man desperate to maintain some shreds of his self-respect by attempting to manipulate and string out the police investigation. The man speaking sounds like he suffers from delusions, and has little connection with how other people feel.

Just before the trial was scheduled to start, last October 13, Wilkinson announced he would plead guilty to manslaughter. Declared fit to plead after being examined by psychiatrists, he signed a statement purporting to describe how he had killed Kylie. He conceded that they had met at Sutherland railway station on the night of April 28, 2004, in order to move to Dubbo, and that Kylie had asked to return to the Central Coast because she had left behind her digital cameras.

On the Old Pacific Highway, north of the Hawkesbury River, he said, "Kylie and I became sexually aroused and one thing led to another and I stopped the car just past the old Mooney Mooney bridge and we made love. During intercourse she said to me, 'If you're not going to have Julie killed then I will. I've already organised it."'

Wilkinson told police he took this seriously, because Kylie had asked him several times during their relationship to "get rid of" his wife, and he thought this meant she wanted him to kill Julie. Therefore, he continued, "when she said this to me I lost it. I thought immediately of my son, Bradley, who would be with his mother, Julie, and that some harm would come to him... I grabbed her by the throat and I was thinking, 'You rotten f---ing bitch' and I choked her with my two hands around her throat but I did not intend to kill her. I thought I had been deceived and tricked."

Having failed to revive her, Wilkinson said he panicked, drove to some houses where he found a shovel in a backyard and used it to bury her. "I am very sorry for what I did to Kylie," he concluded, "and I have been lying and putting everyone else through a nightmare. I am very sorry for Kylie's parents and family as well as my own parents and family."

He drew a map showing where he'd buried Kylie. Two days later he told Smith, "Well, I f---ed with you for a while and I apologise for that ... I'm not interested in playing games any more." The police searched the location on the map, as well as yet another later identified by Wilkinson, without result. More than $120,000 has been spent on futile searches.

The prosecution refused to accept the manslaughter plea, claiming Wilkinson had killed Kylie because she had insisted, on learning she was pregnant, that he leave his wife, and had threatened to tell Julie of the affair herself. The prosecution believed Wilkinson lured her to Sutherland by pretending to agree to move to Dubbo, and killed her to preserve his marriage.

On November 12, saying he was unwilling to put his own family through the ordeal of a trial, Wilkinson pleaded guilty to murder. Just nine days later he gave police another false lead on the whereabouts of Kylie's body. Then, on December 8, he sacked his lawyers, and a week later announced he wished to reverse his plea: he was not guilty after all.

Over the next few months Justice Peter Johnson took evidence on whether to accept Wilkinson's plea reversal. Was Wilkinson mentally fit to change his plea? Had he been persuaded to do so by poor legal advice?

Wilkinson appeared in the dock every day. He is a handsome man with short-cropped dark hair. Much of the time he leaned forwards, looking at the low wall of the dock, but sometimes he sat up with a slightly supercilious grin.

Members of Kylie's family turned up every day. Kylie's sister, Leanne Edwards, later told the court of the effect these frequent trips to Sydney had on her family. "I was torn between being at court for my sister and being a mother to my girls ... " she said. "If he had pleaded guilty earlier, the last 18 months of my life wouldn't have been as stressful." Carol Edwards had to stop work for a while due to the uncertainty of the legal process, and is under a psychologist's care. She was deeply upset that Wilkinson "continues to play these games at the family's expense".

On April 21 Johnson decided the guilty plea stood (Wilkinson has said he will appeal against this decision) and began hearing sentencing submissions. The prosecutor, John Kiely, SC, argued the murder was in the worst category, deserving life imprisonment, and "so evil" because of Wilkinson's refusal to locate the body. "Often," he said, "the worst thing in life is not knowing." He said the lurid lie of how Kylie was killed by Geoff Lowe "denotes a certain depravity".

The defence barrister, Robert Sutherland, SC, argued there were worse murders: those involving rape or torture, for instance. He said there was no evidence Wilkinson's action was premeditated, and that his cruelty in not saying where the body was buried, while relevant to whether he was sorry, did not affect the seriousness of the murder itself.

Wilkinson will be sentenced this month.

Murder stories usually focus on the killer and the victim, and tend to overlook the terrible effect on family members. But the suffering of these "secondary victims" is now acknowledged by police and the DPP's office. They devote considerable effort and resources to doing what they can to help them.
Wilkinson's actions devastated Kylie's family. Carol Edwards has said: "Whatever sentence is given to Paul Wilkinson for murdering my daughter will never compare with the life sentence of grief he has given to me."

Kylie's father, John, was in the army for 25 years. He and Carol are separated but they attended court together until John collapsed and was rushed to hospital. He has not been back since. He has left two jobs due to the strain of the past five years, and lost his house because he could no longer pay the mortgage.

In the end he realised he could no longer live in Australia, "knowing that my daughter lies callously discarded somewhere in that soil". He now lives in a village in South-East Asia, drawn back to a country where he served as a soldier, in days when he was young and happier.

"I am," he told the court, "no longer the same person I was when Kylie was alive."

-- Sydney Morning Herald, 9 May 2009

(Wilkinson was sentenced to a minimum of 24 years in jail on 22 May 2009. See also accompanying article about his other victims, "He was violent and controlling. She knew he was a killer".)

Michael Duffy has now written a book about this fascinating and tragic case - find out more

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