see starting to form high in the sky she could still vividly remember Lester’s stale smell - a combination of body odour, stale beer and cigarettes - as he lay on top of her and rutted furiously. She had screamed in agony as pain arced through her abdomen but he clasped his hand over her mouth, not that there would have been anyone within earshot to come to her assistance anyway. It was over in two painful minutes but the memory of it would remain with her to her final day. Lester left without a word and Kylie had curled into a ball and quietly cried and hoped for the pain to subside. It was her first sexual encounter.
She spoke to no-one about that night, hoping that it was a one-off moment of madness and perversely wanting to give Lester some benefit of the doubt. But sure enough, a month later when her aunt went on her next road trip, Lester returned to her bedroom. Again she tried to fight him off but again he hit her, always with an open hand. There would be no obvious marks to alert anyone or add weight to any claims she might want to make.
After several months of abuse she finally raised the courage to tell her aunt. She wasn’t sure what reaction she expected to receive but she certainly hadn’t expected her to fly into a blind rage and accuse Kylie of trying to drive a divide between her and Lester.
“After all the things we’ve done for you. No-one else would have taken you in. If it weren’t for us you’d be dead.”
“But he’s been hurting me.”
“Look Kylie, I don’t know why you’re saying these stupid things, but if you cause us anymore trouble, or if you say these things to anyone else, I swear I’ll turn you over to the foster care people where things will be a lot worse for you.”
It was a vacant threat because unbeknown to Kylie, Aunt Maggie was being paid thirty thousand dollars per year from the solicitor who acted as trustee for Kylie’s dead parents’ estate to house and care for Kylie. Although they had little to show for it, it was money that Maggie and Lester had become accustomed to spending.
Kylie desperately wanted to call her aunt’s bluff and take her chances in the belief that things couldn’t get any worse for her, but fear of the unknown held her back. She also contemplated running away, but apart from a life on the street there was nowhere to run to. She considered going to the police but argued reasonably that if her own aunt didn’t believe her then they might not either. And so she decided to stay, not from choice but from a perceived lack of options.
After that she never mentioned Lester’s nocturnal visits to anyone. Lester took Maggie’s defence of him as a sign of consent and continued his monthly visitation rights, becoming more confident and acting out all of his sexual fantasies with the fifteen year old Kylie.
In time, Kylie learned to become numb to his visits and an uneasy and unholy truce of sorts was arrived at. He did what he wanted with her and did it quickly, inflicting as little discomfort as possible. And in return she didn’t fight him and didn’t complain. On one occasion as he penetrated her from behind she had seen him in the mirror which sat in the corner of her room. The look of primal atavistic joy on his face scared and disgusted her and from then on she would close her eyes, pretend she was somewhere else and wait for it to pass.
She thought about her parents often to keep their memory alive in her heart and mind, and in an effort to honour them, vowed to survive and triumph over her current circumstance.
She locked herself away in her room as often as she could and concentrated on her secondary school studies. In the process she became a better student than she had ever been at the private school she had attended in her previous life in Canberra. She found casual employment at a local outlet of a fast food chain and welcomed as many shifts as she could get which kept her away from the small house several nights a week and weekends. She saved her money and even stole a little from the register to supplement her hourly wage and planned for the day when she would have enough to make good her escape and start a new life.
Her big break came just a month before she was due to finish her secondary studies. While cleaning the house she came across a letter from a Canberra based solicitor. The official looking letterhead seemed out of place amongst Maggie’s other papers and piqued her interest. As she read she came to understand something of the financial arrangement that had brought her to live at her aunt’s house, an arrangement that had never been explained to her. Something snapped in her head and a cold rage swelled inside her as she realised the irony of her situation. She laughed aloud savagely in the empty house as she realised that her dead parent’s money was being paid to the people who had made her life into a living hell. She thought of Lester drinking and gambling away the money, her parents’ money, and then coming home and molesting her in anyway that he saw fit. She thought of her aunt who had provided her with basic clothing, food and shelter but had never bothered to extend her an ounce of kindness or belief. Kylie had known nothing of her parents’ assets at the time of their deaths and to that day had wrongly assumed they left little behind. From the moment she read the letter however, she realised some options were open to her. Her plans for escape began to accelerate and she smiled grimly to herself as she made them.
Chapter 23
Although it had been a relatively quiet night on the streets of Parramatta and surrounding areas for a Saturday night, the puking drunks, the banging cell doors and the yelling and screaming of the drug induced ensured that Craig Thoms didn’t get a moments rest, let alone a moments sleep. He shared his five metre by five metre concrete floored cell with up to eight others depending on the comings and goings in the night and the noise was a constant and irritating companion. He sat in a corner and tried to get as comfortable as possible while he waited.
After six hours of incarceration, at eight a.m. on Sunday morning, Detective Nelson arrived, signed for custody of one Craig Thoms and escorted him to an interview room on the first floor of the station. The interview room was minimalist to say the least and consisted of only one table, bolted to the floor, and four lightweight plastic chairs. Behind the obligatory one way mirror made of near half inch thick glass, was a viewing room that contained a video camera on a tripod which was also connected to two microphones located in the ceiling of the interview room.
“Just wait in here please Mr Thoms. I’ll go and ask your Legal Counsel to join us. Won’t be long.”
When Craig had initially been brought to the Parramatta police station he had been provided with a copy of the Yellow Pages to find himself legal representation. He had phoned a small firm of solicitors who had in the past successfully defended him against an assault charge. Although he wasn’t sure if the solicitor who had handled his case in the past was suitably qualified to defend him against a charge of murder he was the only person he could think of at the time. He had been relieved and grateful when the solicitor, Martin Warnock, arrived at his cell at seven a.m. and seemed confident of helping him navigate his way out of the hole he was now in, or at least that was the plan.
Martin Warnock was around five feet six inches tall and barely nudged the scales past fifty kilograms. He had a penchant for wearing bowties and despite being forty-eight and still living with his mother, was still unsure of his sexuality. He had worked for the law firm Venter and Coward for ten years and while he only had a moderate success rate with his cases and brought very little new business into the firm, he remained upbeat about his chances of one day becoming a partner in the firm. He considered that the Fogliani murder was opportunity knocking.
Initially, he had been lividly angry at being woken up so early on a Sunday morning to come down to the drab, brown brick, Parramatta Police Station, but when he learned the details of the case his ears pricked up at the enticing thought of being involved in the Emilio Fogliani murder case. It had already received a lot of airplay on television and radio news the previous day and had featured prominently in the newspapers. Journalists had been crawling over each other to get exclusives and eagerly pushed the angle that it might turn out to be yet another underworld gang war. Warnock was glad to get a foothold in the case before one of Sydney’s many high profile celebrity solicitors inevitably waded in to offer their services pro bono and get their face on the evening news.
Warnock had spoken briefly to his client through the bars of the holding cell but was only able to elicit the barest of details as to why he had been arrested. He guessed correctly that he would learn a lot more about how strong the case was against his client during his first formal interview.
Detective Nelson double checked that the recording equipment was working and entered the interview room with Robards trailing behind. A Detective Sergeant from the Parramatta station named Braxton, had been roped in to monitor the interview and the equipment from the viewing room.
Detective Robards commenced the interview by getting Craig to confirm a number of details about who he
