Chapter Eighteen #2
Okay. That wasn’t getting her anywhere. Judith tried again.
Murder family father mother child Melbourne Victoria 2007
This time she got hits about a gangland killing, and something about a cold case investigation into the possible murder of a wife by her husband. There were also a few hits on academic papers examining the phenomenon of filicide, the killing of a child by a parent or a parent-equivalent.
Hmm.
She still wasn’t getting anywhere. Judith took a sip from her beer. She needed to think big. A sealed file meant a story that was seriously newsworthy. Something so big that journalists couldn’t be trusted to stay away from two little girls in its aftermath.
Biggest crime story Melbourne Victoria 2007
Immediately, her page flooded with results.
POLICE ARREST SUSPECTED BACKPACKER KILLER
CHARLIE PALMER ARRAIGNED
FOUR MISSING, NO BODIES FOUND
Judith clicked on the first result and quickly skimmed through the article, before moving on to the second article, and then the third.
Charlie Palmer. She remembered the case.
She would have been, what, twenty-three?
Two years into her career as a cop, she’d still been very much in uniform, working traffic with Bob Johnson, a fifty-six-year-old Queenslander with a drink problem and a deeply engrained resentment of ‘women, Asians and Aboriginals’.
Bob had been an equal-opportunity hater and Judith had had her hands full.
The Palmer case had also been way beyond her pay grade, but she remembered some of the details of the case, and reading through the articles quickly brought it all back.
Charlie Palmer had been a forty-five-year-old surf shop owner from Fairhaven Beach, a small seaside town near Lorne in Victoria.
Palmer had been married to a woman named Anita Fournier, and they’d had two daughters.
Anita was only eighteen when she first met Palmer, who was thirty-three at the time.
She’d fallen pregnant and they’d got married, had a daughter, then another.
From the outside, everything had seemed great.
Anita had raised the girls and helped out with the surf shop, and Palmer’s business had boomed.
Later, people said that he had a reputation.
That he slept with young women who came to his surf programs, that he had a temper, that he was slow to pay suppliers and got violent, at least twice, with suppliers who had an issue with that.
But all of that only came out later. The truth was, no one thought there was anything at all wrong with the Palmer family until Anita took herself to the only police station in their small town late on Friday night, eighth of June 2007.
It never became clear exactly what Anita reported to the police that evening, but the officers she’d spoken to were later accused of negligence.
People said that they should never have let her leave the station.
That they should have taken Anita and her girls into protective custody straight away.
People said that her evidence wasn’t taken seriously, that she was ignored because she was a woman, that it was assumed that she was after some kind of revenge for marital infidelity.
Judith didn’t know how much truth there was to those accusations.
Even parsing through all of the articles written in the months and years after it all went down, there were only a few ascertainable facts.
One. Anita went to the police to report her concerns about her husband. She said she was worried about two young women, both of whom had taken Charlie Palmer’s surf course, both of whom had then supposedly left town, neither of whom ever made it to their next destination.
The first girl was nineteen-year-old Susie Deacon. She was English, from a small town in Pembrokeshire. Susie was travelling alone, but she was due to visit her aunt in Sydney and she never arrived.
The second girl was Bianca Rossi, a twenty-year-old Italian who had also been travelling alone.
Bianca had bid a cheery farewell to the friends she’d made at the hostel in Lorne, and had left the following morning, bound for Melbourne.
But she was not seen boarding the bus, and, at the time of reporting, had never been seen again.
Two. When Anita Fournier came to the police station, she had a black eye. She said her husband had hit her. That he was frequently violent.
Three. Anita said that her husband had slept with both Susie and Bianca. That he was frequently unfaithful.
Four. After she had given her statement, Anita left the station and returned home to the house she shared with her husband.
What happened after that was disputed. Some said that Palmer had followed Anita to the police station, and that that’s how he figured out she had betrayed him.
But others pointed to the fact that Declan Harrison, one of the two cops on duty in the station that night, was a friend of Palmer’s.
They surfed together. They drank together.
Harrison was a frequent attendee at the bonfire beach parties Palmer threw for his young surf course attendees.
If you believed the other side—and Judith thought it had an ugly ring of truth about it—Harrison had called Palmer as soon as Anita left the station, to let him know that his wife was on to his many affairs, and that Anita had come up with a crazy story about Palmer being some kind of serial killer—maybe for revenge, or maybe just because she was losing it.