Suspenseful summer reads: Call Me Cruel by Michael Duffy
When I began to attend murder trials as a journalist, I was curious to find out how real murder differed from fiction. Like most people, I was fortunate that my only knowledge of violent death came from crime novels and television dramas. I knew reality would be different, but how?
I found many differences, but the main one was the character of the murderer. In fiction, killers are often psychopaths who plan their crimes, have multiple victims and are adept at avoiding capture, sometimes even taunting their pursuers. These characteristics satisfy the need to personify evil, for greater dramatic and moral effect.
Most of the murderers I’ve seen in the dock are not like this. In real life, murder often involves an action committed on the spur of a moment created by unusual circumstances. Because of their lack of experience and intent, most killers are caught fairly easily and often plead guilty. They are very different to the psychopaths and gangsters of fiction, tending to be either mildly unstable individuals or relatively normal people who did something terrible but might easily not have. Although killers receive some of the longest sentences going, most are among the least criminally inclined of jail inmates. Many deeply regret their crimes.
Paul Wilkinson is different. He was an Aboriginal Community Liaison Officer with the police force and used his special knowledge to help him kill and evade arrest for years afterwards. His most striking behaviour, before and after he strangled Kylie Labouchardiere, was a propensity to tell massive and complex lies, which those around him believed. He was charming and persuasive, yet some of his lies were so bizarre—essentially, he turned his own life into a work of fiction—that one of the most curious aspects of this story is that it took so long to catch him. The investigation lasted three years and, even after he was locked up and examined by psychiatrists, he was never declared insane.
Wilkinson’s lies fooled his wife, Julie, into moving out of their home so he could conduct an affair. They lured twenty-three-year-old Kylie Labouchardiere away from her husband. Like most good liars, he was clever at identifying gullible people and getting close to them—in Kylie’s case, partly through the exchange of an extraordinary 23,000 text messages over four months. But finally he fooled himself too, and his lies blossomed into complex fantasies he no longer controlled. They came to control him, and in the end they drove him to murder. This is a story about the power of stories, about what can happen when we lose the ability to tell the difference between fact and fiction.
One way to lose touch with reality is to stop feeling anything for other people. Paul Wilkinson has never revealed where Kylie is buried. This book’s title is taken from a chilling text message he sent his wife during the police investigation:
‘Everybody has reasons 4 hiding a crime. Mine is the family can live not knowing where and why 4 What they hav don. Call me cruel, call me nasty and YES Id agree, howeva my knowledge ISNT goin 2 b theres. It will hurt them NOT me.’
In the four months of their affair, Kylie Labouchardiere and Paul Wilkinson exchanged over 20,000 text messages. She was a trainee nurse; he worked in the New South Wales Police Force. Although Wilkinson eventually killed his lover to save his marriage, his main weapon was always words. He was a frighteningly convincing liar and left a trail of devastation across the lives of many he met.
The victims of Wilkinson’s stories included his own family and those of his wife and his lover. Another was policeman Geoff Lowe, whom he tried to frame for Kylie’s murder. Thanks to Wilkinson’s lies, Lowe lost his home, his job, and his family.
It took five years to bring Wilkinson to justice. His lies continued to the end, when he sent police to five different locations in the search for Kylie’s body. He once texted his wife: ‘Everybody has reasons 4 hiding a crime. 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.’
Kylie’s grave has never been found.
