I asked, ‘When did you first meet Tony?’
‘When he was admitted to us about 48 hours after his arrest,’ he said. ‘He asked me to kill him. He was initially quite agitated, and wound up, and paranoid. He was talking about using large amounts of P. He gradually came down.
‘And then it all took a really interesting twist. About a year later, Barry Hart had obtained two independent psychiatric reports, one from Karl Jansen and another from Paul Mullin, and they basically said, albeit in rather guarded terms, that the guy didn’t seem very well and wasn’t fit to stand trial — or, in the words of the law, would have been “under a disability”. That’s interesting. The court only needed two such opinions; if you’re found “under a disability”, that’s the end game. There’s no trial. The Crown was alarmed, so he was transferred to us again, for another assessment, and that’s when I cared for him full-time. I ended up with him for 30 days in total.
‘That was the time I really got to drill down and see what was going on. There was an observation written about him every hour, regardless of day or night, and I interviewed him incessantly every working day. And things had altered. Things had changed. He still had this core paranoia of being followed, but he kept presenting these really odd symptoms which didn’t make any sense. In fact, I was sure after about two weeks that he had been coached. That he’d done some reading, or had been meeting somebody trying to work out how to present certain things.’
‘Is he mad?’
‘He’s not mad in the psychiatric sense. He’s a person with a damaged personality and a paranoid view of the world, and has great difficulty maintaining normal relationships.’
I asked, ‘Is he interesting?’
‘Moderately so,’ he said. ‘He’s not somebody you have scintillating conversations with. But he genuinely does try to make contact with you as a person. He’s good at reading people. He’s very good at getting information from people. In fact, he’s excellent at that.’
‘Is he charming?’
‘Occasionally, when he was after something, or was just having a good day. He could be quite pleasant. But you do see that a lot in these psychopathic individuals. That they do have the superficial charm, and the ability to engage with people. It’s only as the relationship develops over time that the more unacceptable stuff comes out. He was consistently violent in all of his relationships with women.’
‘What forms a “psychopathic individual”?’
Dr Goodwin replied, ‘His early life was pretty damned miserable. His childhood was awful. He was extraordinarily ambivalent about his mother; she’d beat him, but at one level he probably cared about her. He was certainly upset when she died. He did have some attachment.
‘He was exposed to violence from a very young age. Not only from his mother, but from his father when he was around, and the boarders, and people from the Jehovah’s Witness — they’d regularly dole out beatings at the instructions of his mother. Violence was something he grew up with. And sexual abuse, too. It gives you a background that everything else is built on.’
I said, ‘You diagnosed him as having a severe personality disorder. What does that mean?’
‘He sees the world as a place he has to try to control. But the rest of him is functioning. He was a very successful car thief. He was a self-taught mechanic. He had a good work ethic.’
‘Was that undone by P?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He had been functioning before that. For instance, he was quite well versed in martial arts.’
I asked, ‘Is that why he had a Samurai sword?’
‘Well, at the age of 15, he was found with two Samurai swords under his bed. He had a real interest and training in martial arts. But mostly he was interested in cars.’
‘What did you find about him that was likeable?’
He said, ‘Not a lot I would say was likeable. He was personable, and reasonable most of the time.’
‘Do you think he’s at risk to himself?’
‘When you go to prison, you get control taken away from you. It’ll be really difficult for him. If he can’t exert some control, I think he does represent a risk to himself.’
‘Were you astonished when he appeared in court wearing that haircut?’
He laughed, and said, ‘I was! But I thought he’d do something. One time we found he’d secreted a razor blade in his rectum, and he later told me it was his intention to go to court and slash himself up in front of the judge.’
I said, ‘The night of the crimes in 2003 — what the hell was all that about?’
He said, ‘I’ve looked for an explanation. In my position, you’ve got to make sense of it. Here’s somebody who has a fairly damaged personality, constitutionally paranoid, all the time, and then he gets heavily into P, and becomes increasingly wired. And rather than it being free-floating, he starts to latch onto specific things that confirm his paranoia. And the thing that really triggered the violence in the end was his conviction that he couldn’t trust Renee and Simonne.
‘I think once he started it, once it had happened, he realised just how serious it was. And what he started to do was to work out, “Well, I might as well get a bit of notoriety out of this.” I think that appealed to him, to keep the night going. I have no doubt his intention was to take out more than one person that night. He was trying to generate a fairly spectacular event.’
‘Did he ever show remorse to you?’
‘I didn’t see any,’ he said. ‘He never said sorry about Te Aute. I think he did regret what had happened to
