AustraliaToday.com
Sister pleads for help in finding Bella’s killer
May Norman
8 April 2015
The grief-stricken sister of murdered Strathdee woman Bella Michaels has pleaded for public help to bring the 25-year-old’s killer or killers to justice.
Standing between homicide detectives outside Strathdee police station, Chris Rogers’ voice broke as she responded to a journalist’s question about how she felt on identifying her sister’s body. ‘You seem to be a human being. Try imagining what it would feel like for you. Then understand that this feeling will never go away. That moment when I saw her, it’s forever. It’s part of me now.’ She then began to sob and appeared to lose her balance and stumble towards the microphone stand before a female police officer steadied her and led her back inside the station.
After Ms Rogers departed, Detective Sergeant John Brandis continued the conference by briefing the assembled media on the facts of the case. Police believe Ms Michaels was murdered on Friday night or in the early hours of Saturday morning after being abducted outside the nursing home where she worked. Her body was found near a highway exit on Monday morning.
Det. Brandis confirmed that Ms Michaels was sexually assaulted multiple times in the hours before her death and said that it is possible more than one person was involved in those assaults.
Responding to questions, Det. Brandis said police had interviewed ‘a number of people’ in relation to the crime, including several local residents with records of physical or sexual assault, but that they had yet to identify any suspects.
Before she gave the answer that resulted in her breaking down, Ms Rogers had read from a prepared statement. ‘All who knew Bella are shattered by her death,’ the statement said. ‘Words can’t come close to describing the hell we’re experiencing knowing that her last moments were likely full of suffering.
‘Bella was a gentle, sweet soul who worked hard, cared deeply for her patients and was adored by her family and friends.
‘We will miss her every minute of every day.
‘Nothing can ever heal the hurt we’re feeling, but we desperately hope that the person or people responsible for taking her from us can be found, both so that justice is done for Bella and so that no one else has to go through this unending pain.
‘It’s of utmost importance that anyone with information about the events of that night contact the police immediately. Anyone with information is urged to call Crime Stoppers or the Strathdee police.’
I’d taken the first two nights off work. I could’ve taken more – Old Grey at the Royal is a softie at heart and God knows I’ve put enough years in there to have earned some downtime – but why would I want to spend any more time than I have to alone in my bloody house thinking about my poor bloody sister?
Anyway, the pub is more home to me than anywhere else, really. I’ve worked there, geez, thirteen years? About that, anyway. I started in the kitchen and then moved to the bar once I got my alcohol service card. I know every last in-and-out of the place, could run it, easy, but I’ve got no desire to. I like my job as is and could happily do it until my legs give out from under me.
A while back the manager at the Imperial tried to get me to come work for him. Cheeky bugger he was, coming in and ordering a beer and then giving me the hard sell right under Grey’s nose. He offered me more money and a full weekend off a month and for a day or so I considered it, but in the end I figured why fix what’s not broken, you know? Besides, the Imperial is right in the centre of town so they get all the after-five office and shop trade. We’re closer to the truck stop, caravan park and motel near the Sydney off-ramp, which means we get most of the stopover traffic. It’s not like it was before the bypass, but we still get a good number of truckies and travellers and I do love having a chat with someone from a place I’ve never been. Even better, a place I’ve never heard of. You can learn a lot that way.
And, yeah, no denying it at this point: I do have a bit of a thing for truckies, the long-haul variety especially. I mean, physically, most of them could be in better shape, but there’s something about thick, sun-wrecked arms and bristly cheeks. Plus the kind of patience it takes to stay on the road ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, and the skill needed to manoeuvre those monster things in and out of all kinds of nooks and crannies, well, let’s just say patience and manoeuvrability in the truck tend to translate quite bloody nicely to the bedroom.
Anyway, turns out tragedy is good for business. I’ve never seen the place as full as it was that Wednesday night of the week they found Bella. The usual scattering of folks passing through and then half the goddamn town. Honestly, more people than we’ve had on a weeknight in a decade.
Nobody said anything more than ‘How you holding up, love?’ but when I answered that I was okay, I could see the disappointment in their faces. They wanted tears or rage. They wanted details. I could see that, too. I could see that every one of them had read the papers and put real effort into imagining her. Everybody was respectful and sombre when they approached the bar to order, but as soon as they got back to their tables they dropped the act. It was like, ‘How you doing love?’ in almost a whisper, but then ten seconds later yahooing with their mates over fuck knows what.
It did hurt a bit, if I’m being honest. I’d known many of them all my life. Janie, who’d been my best mate all through primary but then went off to the Catholic school in Year 7. Her husband Mick, who wet his pants in kindergarten and was a swimming champion in his teens and who almost died of meningitis a few years back. Patrick, who was my kind-of-boyfriend when I was fifteen and who later married wall-eyed, stuttering Jenny, who we all tried hard to like in high school because she was the only person we knew with a pool. Mr and Mrs Creighton, who lived next door to us when we were kids and who I’d never in all these years seen inside the Royal.
At one point this woman I didn’t recognise came up and rubbed my arm and started talking like she was my dearest friend. It took me until almost the end of the conversation (though it wasn’t long – just her asking how I was holding up and me saying fine and then asking how she was) for it to click that it was Fiona Willard, who told everyone at the Year 6 dance that I was wearing a dress her older sister had donated to the Salvos the previous week.
Very late in the night one of the regulars, Lynn, said my name and looked into my eyes, properly into my eyes. I almost started bawling right then, because I didn’t realise until that second that nobody had done that all shift.
‘Listen, love,’ she said. She was seventy-three, a widow, came in every night looking like the Queen, drank her body weight in gin and left looking like an unmade bed. ‘Listen. You shouldn’t be here.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said, trying to brush her off, because, seriously, I was going to bawl.
‘No. Listen. The papers said they don’t have a clue who done it. So it could be anyone. It could be any of ’em.’
My belly filled with ice water. It could be any of them. The men I’d been serving drinks to, taking roast dinner orders from, telling I’m holding up okay. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it myself. I don’t know what I was thinking or why in those days. Jesus. It could be any of them.
I’d not kept whisky in the house since the awful night a couple of weeks after Nate left when I drank a whole bottle and Bella found me the next morning sleeping in my own spew. That was the lowest moment of my life and I promised Bella I would go easy from then on, only drink beer when I was home alone. She would have preferred I didn’t drink at all, but she was realistic and understood about harm minimisation. We made a deal about spirits in the house and I’d kept to it ever since.
That third night that I knew Bella was dead I brought home a six-pack of beer and a bottle of Jim Beam. I drank one beer, one slug of bourbon, one beer, one slug of bourbon until there was only bourbon and then I kept drinking straight from the bottl
e.
I needed noise and distraction, but was scared of news breaks coming on the telly or radio, so I put on an old JJJ Hottest 100 CD. I pulled out my photo albums and looked through them all. I cried a lot. When I got to the wedding album and saw Bella, just a kid still really, but looking like a goddamn model in her pale pink satin mini, and me in my white slinky cocktail dress and there was Nate, one big hand on each of our shoulders, I nearly choked with the sobbing. I tried to call him but got his voicemail. Fuck knows what I said, but I said a lot. I think it was mostly about Bella, but it was possible I mentioned how sick I thought it was that he was up there fucking some other bird when his wife was down here grieving for her baby sister. It’s very possible.
I woke in the middle of the night, still sprawled on the floor in front of the open wedding album, my guts heaving. I made it to the toilet just in time. While I was chucking I noticed how sore my neck and back and hips were. I used to drink until I crashed on the floor all the time when I was younger; it never hurt this much. Bella had a sore back most of the time even though she was young and fit. It was her work, all that bending and scrubbing and reaching and lifting. They were meant to use a swinging trolley thing to move the patients but there was only one of those in the whole place and she couldn’t stand to leave some poor old bugger lying in their own mess for a minute longer than necessary, so she’d often just do the lifting herself. Most of them weighed less than a case of beer she reckoned. But I worried about her. Once your back goes it’s fucked for good, they say.
Her back. Jesus god help me jesus fuck her back oh god what she withstood what they did to her back. Jesus god fuck.
I cleaned myself up and staggered through to bed. My head was spinning and so I used the trick I remembered from my heaviest drinking days, kept my eyes open and focused on a single spot on the wall. I trusted I’d fall asleep and out of my misery as long as I didn’t force my own eyes shut. I stared and stared at the dark spot on the wall and then felt the ice in my guts again as I realised I’d never seen that spot before. My walls are white and I keep them clean, wiping away any scuffs and greasy hand marks as soon as they appear. I would’ve noticed this before, this dark patch, a dappled, airless football. I hadn’t closed the curtains and so the wall was lit by the full moon outside. A clear, light space marred by this terrible bruise.
I couldn’t move with terror. I can’t explain why. It was only a dark space on my wall but at that moment it felt like my life was about to end.
And then it was gone. Just like that, my wall was clean again. I pushed myself out of bed and touched the wall where the spot had been. It was like touching a hotplate you had no idea was turned on. It took me a second to understand my hand was being burnt and then I pulled back, dropped to my knees. I touched the wall near the floor and it felt like a wall. I reached up and with just my middle finger this time touched the spot that had burnt me. Nothing. I ran my hands up and down that wall and couldn’t find the hot spot, the dark spot again. The palm of my left hand still stung with the heat.
I needed to vomit, charged through the doorway, past the kitchen into the bathroom. I didn’t quite make it. Messed up the floor and the front of my nightie. I sat in front of the toilet until my heart stopped hammering and my stomach felt calm. Then I cleaned the floor, put my nightie in the wash, had a shower, took some Panadol with a big glass of water. I walked around the house, turned on all the lights, checked all the walls. Silly old drunk, I said to myself, but when I finally got back to bed and closed my eyes I knew with certainty that if I opened them again I would see it there, that impossible bruise.
AustraliaToday.com
A haunted place
May Norman
8 April 2015
Five minutes out of Strathdee, heading south on the Hume Highway, a series of unnatural colour bursts draw the motorist’s eye past the line of eucalypts to the ordinarily drab green and brown grass strip beyond. Pulling onto the asphalt verge it becomes immediately clear that the garish pinks and yellows spotted from the road belong to a makeshift memorial shrine surrounding a lean ghost gum. Twenty or so steps to the left of the tree is the patch of dirt where the naked, violated body of popular, 25-year-old aged-care worker Bella Michaels was found on Monday morning, partially wrapped in a blue tarpaulin.
The area was immediately sealed off by local police, then in came the detectives, the crime scene investigators and then the battalions of police, including trainees from the police academy at Goulburn, enlisted to search the surrounding area centimetre by centimetre. By 10 pm Tuesday the vans and floodlights and army of searchers were gone. All that remained of them was a series of indentations and skid marks in the asphalt and mud dividing the grass from the road.
Strathdee, population 3000, situated 450 kilometres south-west of Sydney and almost the same distance north-east of Melbourne, used to be the number-one stopping place for travellers on the road between the two cities. But thanks to the highway bypass completed five years ago, the thousands of cars, trucks and coaches that would once have stopped here for a stretch, bite to eat or overnight break now pass right on by. Several hotels and restaurants as well as a major service station complex have closed and a few hundred locals have moved, many of them to the comparatively thriving rural hub of Wagga Wagga, 50 kilometres west.
Still, Strathdee is no ghost town. Its retailers and small businesses serve the surrounding cattle and sheep farmers and on any given night its four pubs, two hotels and large, sprawling caravan park are kept busy by a mixture of locals, long-distance truck drivers on their compulsory driving break and tourists taking it slow, stopping off to enjoy the quintessential Aussie country towns that lie between Australia’s biggest cities.
On Wednesday, one such traveller, Glenys Morton of Cairns, was horrified to hear of the recent murder. ‘It’s such a lovely, calm little town,’ said Mrs Morton who, with her husband, is spending six months caravanning down the east coast of Australia. ‘It’s the last place you’d expect to hear about that kind of violence.’
Arthur Tomesberry of the Strathdee Historical Society, however, has a different view. ‘The town has been safe as houses long as I’ve know it, and that’s coming up on seventy years, but the history of this area is a dark one. I’ve always felt, whenever I head out into the bush around here, that it’s somewhat haunted.’
The ‘dark’ history Mr Tomesberry is referring to includes an alleged massacre of the Indigenous inhabitants in the early 1800s. ‘Bunch of newly arrived Scotsmen came through looking to set up farms. They cleared the locals off the land like they were vermin. There’s no documentation on it, but the stories have been passed down orally and every old family in the area knows something of what went on.’ Mr Tomesberry also points to the ‘reign of terror’ conducted by the bushranger known as Mad Dog Morgan in the 1860s as a contributor to the ‘eeriness’ of the area surrounding the quiet, tidy town.
For the first-time visitor it’s impossible to say whether the stretch of sparse, bristly grass by the highway five minutes from town has always felt as desolate and crushing as it does today or if the atmosphere of despair set in the moment Bella Michaels drew her last, no doubt terrified, breath.
Thursday, 9 April
May woke to her phone ringing, saw it was her brother Max and hit ignore. She made some coffee, slapped on some mascara and lippie, dressed in tight tan pants and a fitted, brown-and-white-checked shirt. Packing in Sydney she’d thought this outfit looked appropriately country, but now she was in the actual country she saw that it looked like a city stripper’s idea of a jillaroo. As if she didn’t already stand out here in the whitest bloody town in Australia. She swapped the tan pants for jeans. Now she looked like she was going to round up some senior citizens for a barn dance. Fuck. Tan pants, black t-shirt, black blazer. Not at all country but also not looking like she was trying to be. Okay.
Her phone rang again as she was leaving the hotel. She leant
against the car but it was already too hot for comfort. In April, for God’s sake. She unlocked the door and slid into the stifling interior before answering.
‘Hey, Max, I’m on my way to an interview so I don’t have long. What’s up?’
‘Why does your by-line suggest that you wrote your last two articles from a place called Strathdee?’
‘Huh, weird. I’ll have to talk to the sub desk about that.’
‘Yeah, well, thanks for letting your family know.’
May picked up the map from the dashboard and fanned her face. ‘I’m just covering a story. I haven’t moved here.’
‘Still could’ve let us know. It’s school holidays. I would’ve loved a road trip.’
‘Max, you would hate it here so much. It’s, like, ten degrees hotter than anywhere else on earth. No breeze at all. Plus, no banh mi, no craft beer, no skinny jeans.’
‘Sounds like Blacktown.’
‘Please, Blacktown had banh mi twenty years before your gold-hipster-plated hood did.’ May had never hated the suburb they grew up in the way Max did. But, then, she hadn’t been a smaller-than-average, fine-boned boy with soft curls and a tendency to forget himself in public and sing out loud. Not that she wasn’t bullied, but her tormentors were only at school whereas Max copped it everywhere outside their home. God, imagine how he’d fare here, where even preschoolers looked like Clint Eastwood.
‘Whatever. When are you coming home?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Ugh. I’m bored.’
‘You sound twelve.’
‘I might as well be. Nothing to do all day, no money, no car, no sex.’
‘I can’t help you with any of that. And I really have to go.’