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Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis
Читать онлайн.Название Inside the Law
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780648293729
Автор произведения Vikki Petraitis
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
At this point Fergus interrupted himself and said, ‘I forgot to include earlier, I first told her [Beth] I loved her in December 1985 and she was immediately reciprocal.’ McFayden duly recorded this fact.
According to Fergus, Beth was willing to wait until the end of the year to see what happened with his marriage. However, Fergus was anticipating that he would be leaving Vivienne and the children to live on another part of the Island. He wouldn’t contemplate living with Beth because, he said, it would not be fair on her family.
‘It had got to the point that if I had any sexual relations with Vivienne it would have been an enormous feeling of guilt towards Beth. Although Vivienne didn’t say anything, I could tell that she felt rejected and I tried to compensate by doing all the things a loving husband should do, such as making her comfortable and making her wanted and needed in other ways and I used to confer with her in everything but our own personal relationship.’
About seven weeks before Beth’s murder, on a Monday morning, Fergus recalled, he was late picking up his younger son to take him to kindergarten. Fergus said Vivienne was furious and had abused him for spending his time with Beth. ‘She said she had had enough.’
He recalled that Vivienne had, once again, asked him to get help to save the marriage, to which he had replied: ‘Don’t be stupid’. Driving her own car, Vivienne had then followed Fergus to the Phillip Island Race Track where they had another heated discussion.
Asked by McFayden what it was about, Fergus said, ‘I have no idea’.
McFayden thought it odd that, while Fergus could remember the time and date of the argument, he couldn’t remember what was said.
Now that he had the background, McFayden needed Fergus’ account of the night Beth died. Fergus said Beth had been sick with the flu and feeling down, but on Monday night, she seemed more cheerful. She had met him at the back door after he’d finished his shift at 8pm at the Penguin Parade. Fergus commented on the fact that the security door wasn’t locked when he got there. ‘I told her to be more security conscious and keep the door locked.’
Fergus said that he and Beth had discussed their relationship optimistically. He said that he left around 9.05pm and said that while they had ‘kissed and cuddled’ each other, they hadn’t made love. He admitted having sex with her on the Sunday night, but not the Monday night.
Fergus left Beth promising to visit again the next morning. When he got home, he found Vivienne sitting at their kitchen table with his sister, Marnie. He described Marnie as being ‘very agitated’ and Vivienne was ‘visibly trembling’. Apparently, the two women had rung the Penguin Parade looking for him at 8pm only to be told that he’d left for the evening.
Marnie left a short time later and Fergus said that Vivienne had launched into him as soon as his sister was gone, screaming at him, ‘Where have you been?’
‘I just said, “I’ve been talking to Beth.” She then raced at me with the glass of wine and screamed, “I knew you were with the little bitch.” I think she hit me with the wine glass which broke on the left side of my head and cut my left ear. I turned my back away from her and she hit me two or three times with the broken glass.’
Fergus said he had been standing in the doorway between his dining room and the hall. He then turned and walked to a bedroom at the top of the house, where he sat on the bed. Blood was later found on and around the bed. However, forensic tests later showed it wasn’t his.
He told McFayden that Vivienne had followed him to the bedroom. ‘She was screaming out things including, “I knew what was going on. I’ve been watching the number of hours you’ve been working. I suppose everyone out there knew what was going on.” She said a lot of other things but I can’t remember what they were.’
Fergus said Vivienne’s rage had quickly changed to concern, ‘as there was blood everywhere and she wanted to take me to hospital immediately.’ Forensic tests would later show that Fergus’ blood was only found on the shirt he had been wearing, on a pink tissue in his bathroom and on a blue pullover belonging to Vivienne – but McFayden didn’t know that yet.
Fergus said he agreed to go to the hospital and they rang Marnie and asked her to come back and mind the children. They left before she got there.
He said Vivienne was calm as she pulled up at the hospital, but, ‘As she was turning off the ignition she turned to me and said, “I’m just going to get the little bitch”.’
Fergus claimed he hadn’t taken the threat against Beth seriously.
When they got back home, Marnie left them, and Fergus said Vivienne suggested: ‘that we separate immediately, that she resign from her job and move to Melbourne [and] that I have custody of our children. I agreed to this and she said that I was an excellent father. She wasn’t a very good mother and I disagreed and she gave me two warnings, one was not to be too stern with the children, and not to take it for granted that Beth was going to make an excellent mother.’
Fergus said that he and Vivienne had parted amicably when she drove him up to stay at Marnie’s house. He said that was the last time he’d seen her.
The next morning, he got a phone call from Pam Cameron who said that Vivienne had called a friend to come and get the children in the middle of the night.
‘My anxiety was further increased when I was told that Vivienne had taken the Land Cruiser, which was parked in the shearing shed. On hearing the Land Cruiser, Beth would automatically think it was me and open the door. The two people who drove the Land Cruiser were either Beth or myself.’
The crime scene examiners did a search of Vivienne and Fergus’ house. Brian Gamble sketched a floorplan, then examined every room. According to Fergus’ statement, he and Vivienne had argued in the kitchen where she had attacked him with the wine glass.
Gamble found bloodstains in the hallway and spare bedroom, the bathroom and located the pink bloodstained tissue that Fergus said he had used to stem the flow of blood from his cut ear.
There was blood on the floor in the bathroom, and bloodstained clothing in the laundry. The front passenger seat of the Cameron’s Holden Kingswood was also bloodstained.
Gamble also noted the blood splatters when he walked through the doorway of the spare bedroom.
His notes record: ‘I then entered the front spare bedroom… scattered over the bed were a number of papers. I observed a number of blood stains in the room. On the floor between the western side of the bed and the western wall, were a number of blood droplets. On the bed spread and papers on the bed were a number of blood droplets. On the front of the chest of drawers was a blood smear’.
Gamble recorded no trace of the broken wine glass.
A backlog of cases meant that it was a month after the murder before Dr Bentley Atchison, a scientific officer with the Victoria Police State Forensic Science Laboratory, analysed material collected from the Barnard and Cameron homes.
At the crime scene and the Cameron home, the blood trail matched the stories. Beth had been attacked in bed and had bled in her room. The killer had washed up in the bathroom leaving blood around the taps. This blood would probably belong to Beth, but the drips on the path outside the backdoor might mean that the killer had bled at the scene.
At the Cameron home, Fergus said that he had been attacked by Vivienne and had walked into the spare room and then cleaned up in the bathroom. Accordingly, the blood found in these areas would be expected to be his.
In the analysis of the forensic evidence in pre-DNA days, scientist Dr Atchison