MURDER G E T T I N G AWAY W I T H
T H E T R U E S T O R Y O F J U L I E R A M A G E ’ S D E AT H
MURDER G E T T I N G AWAY W I T H
T H E T R U E S T O R Y O F J U L I E R A M A G E ’ S D E AT H
PHIL CLEARY
A Sue Hines Book ALLEN & UNWIN
First published in Australia 2005 Copyright text Phil Cleary 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given remuneration to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. A Sue Hines Book Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication entry: Cleary, Phil. Getting away with murder. ISBN 1 74114 691 7. 1. Ramage, James - Trials, litigation, etc. 2. Murder - Australia - Case studies. 3. Provocation (Criminal law) - Australia - Popular works. 4. Murder victims Australia. 5.Trials (Murder) - Australia. I.Title. 364.15230994 Cover and text design by Phil Campbell Typeset by Prowling Tiger Press Edited by Jo Jarrah Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To all those women who suffered at the hands of the legal lie of provocation and those who brought an end to it.
CONTENTS Into the trap A perfect day Bush burial Bad tidings in Research At the gravesite Daddy’s rich, Mummy’s good looking Early years Mr Dunn arrives The trial begins Jane Ashton is called Her mother’s daughter If Your Honour pleases The jury’s back Little murders everywhere Provocation crumbles
1 8 38 47 64 69 88 102 110 122 141 165 181 199 224
Endnotes Acknowledgements Picture credits
245 247 249
INTO THE TRAP
You have to experience murder to truly understand the anger it generates. I can’t remember when I first saw the photos of my 25year-old sister’s body on the trolley in the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Gruesome, humiliating photos of a rough-sewn cut running from her belly to her chest, where the surgeon had tried to stem the bleeding. Knife wounds to her hands and face. Murder always speaks of unassailable hatred.Witnesses in Cameron Street, Coburg heard her scream, ‘Help, someone help,’ as her former boyfriend brandished his knife. It was just after 8 am onWednesday 26 August 1987.At 10.40 am she was pronounced dead. Sixteen years later in a kitchen on the other side of the class divide, Julie Ramage experienced the same primordial fury of a spurned man. From that moment it was inevitable that I would meet her twin sister.When Jane Ashton told me the story of her sister’s life and death my mind was awash with memories.‘Help, someone help.’Were these the words Julie Ramage found as her husband rose from his chair and lunged at her? 1
Unable to control himself, James Ramage was in a killing mood. More than six feet tall, with a large, broad face, his general bulkiness contrasted starkly with the symmetry of his wife’s face and the elegance of her form.As his right fist crashed into her eye socket he paused only long enough to see the blood squirt from the split on her nose before landing a thumping second blow to the left side of her head. Terrified, she could hardly speak. Unrepentant, he didn’t believe what he was doing was wrong. It was her fault. It was always her fault.All he could think about was how she’d ruined his plans. Everything he’d worked for, lost because of a stupid woman who didn’t know her place. How could he face the parents at the prestigious schools where his children were now enrolled if his wife appeared in public with a battered face and people were whispering he was a wife basher? And after the fall from grace what would he say to his two children? To make matters worse, perhaps he could see Julie’s twin, the ‘mad aunty’ he called her, running around the place saying,‘I told you so, look what he’s done to my sister Julie.’ ‘What will my friends think of me then?’ Is this what he thought as he weighed up his options? Finish her off and outsmart everyone or be humiliated by Julie’s gaggle of mates and Aunty Jane? There was only one way out. Whatever thoughts crossed his mind, Julie had no hope. Stunned by the attack, his wife was already in free fall as she began her descent. No sooner had her head crashed onto the shiny pine floor than he was upon her, his massive hands gripping her neck, his knees pinning her to the floor. So fierce were the blows, blood and fluid were already filling the tissue between the knuckles of his right hand. Ramage was immune to the pain as he landed another blow to the left side of her head where she was now haemorrhaging beneath the skin. Despite the ferocity of the assault she refused to submit. As he compressed his wife’s 2
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neck and pressed his left thumb into her thyroid cartilage, Julie’s teeth dug into her tongue. As much as she clawed at his fingers with her girlish, dark pink fingernails, she couldn’t release his hand. A few scratches weren’t going to stop this man. Only Ramage was witness to how many blows he landed as she lay beneath him fighting for her life.Although he would later say Julie didn’t resist for long, the trail of marks and grazes told another story.The bruises on her neck and left wrist and another on the third knuckle of her right hand bore testament to a fierce struggle. Fit and strong from horse riding and exercise, and desperately keen to live, Julie fought to dislodge him and protect herself from the blows. With her right arm pinned to the floor and her left wrist immobilised by his grip, the best she could do was claw at his right hand while the thumb of his left hand dug deeper and deeper into her neck. As much as she dragged her girlish, dark pink fingernails across the fingers of his hand she made no impact. A few scratches were not going to stop this man. Then finally, like a criminal dangling from a hangman’s noose, her legs twitched one last time. Unable to speak or alert the world outside, she did what most people facing death do. She grabbed a few treasured moments from her life. Sadly, it was a life that had never been truly fulfilled. Samantha and Matthew, the children she so loved, and her devoted sister Jane would have been there as the last vestige of life was expunged. ‘Jane, Jane, please save me. Will I awake and discover it’s a dream?’ Jane had always been there when it mattered. It had been a violent, prolonged battle. A barren, unfinished room in an Australian dream home in middle class Balwyn had become her coffin. In the middle of a crisp, sunny winter’s day in Melbourne, Ray and Patricia Garrett’s daughter suffered a brutal death. At best, strangulation might take thirty seconds.At worst it could be INTO THE TRAP
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up to three minutes. Dr Matthew Lynch thought the marks on Julie’s neck were consistent with a struggle considerably longer than thirty seconds. At the trial he couldn’t say how long. In his report he drew attention to a small area of yellow-brown discolouration on the right side of her neck and a line of bruising running six centimetres across the left side that started around her Adam’s apple. It was here that Ramage had planted his left thumb, while simultaneously subduing his wife with blows to the head with his right fist. When asked whether rope might have been responsible for the marks on her neck Lynch replied ‘I can’t exclude it’. A person being strangled first experiences severe pain followed by unconsciousness and then brain death. Professionals who study this form of murder say it’s the embodiment of a man’s power to control and ultimately silence a woman. Unless she did as he said, Julie was in grave danger. If she’d said ‘yes’ to his feigned pleas of love and told him she loved the renovations he’d masterminded for his Georgian castle, he’d have welcomed her back. If she’d said, ‘Pour me a glass of wine and ravage me,’ how different it would have been. All she needed to do was let him rip her trousers off and swoon as he consumed her and she’d have been safe. Conquest, that’s all he ever wanted. Julie Garrett had learnt to be very careful with her words. It was so rare for her to ever say ‘no’ or to question her husband. Not even when he pushed her face into the pillow every morning at 6 am, demanding she tell him how much she loved his favourite kind of sex, did she say ‘no more’. After six weeks away from his bed she could no longer say ‘yes’ to him.There’d be no more faking it and no more lies about the marriage. On Monday she repeated what her husband already knew:‘I’m not coming back.’ No matter what would be said in the coming days and weeks by lawyers and friends, it was this declaration of independence that 4
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had compelled James Ramage to knock her to the floor. He was not prepared to have her say she wasn’t coming home. ‘If there’s another man or she’s not back one hundred and fifty per cent, it’s the end,’ he’d told friends. Suddenly, it was calm and he could now survey the damage. For a man who never allowed a speck of dust – let alone a drop of blood – to find solace in his home, the death of his wife was a messy affair. ‘I’ll make it look like someone from her riding club did her in.They won’t know it’s me,’ he reassured himself as he looked down upon the woman who only minutes earlier he’d said he loved. Apart from the bruised hand, the blood on his jumper and a broken watch, he’d survived relatively unscathed. Still, he was in trouble. Six weeks earlier his life had looked so different. On Monday 9 June 2003 he’d left for a business trip that would take him to Korea and Japan. With a flourishing company, two handsome children and a glamorous wife, 43-year-old Ramage thought he had the world at his feet.While he enjoyed the luxury of a seat in business class his 42-year-old wife set about photocopying financial documents and preparing to move into a flat in Toorak. At the Target store in Camberwell she laughed when Jane told her to make a splash and spend up big on James’s credit card. Years of badgering from her thrifty husband ensured that Julie would do no such thing. It wasn’t the first time Julie had fled her husband. On a Wednesday in February she’d rung Annette Luckman, a friend at the Hurstbridge Adult Riding Club, to say she was preparing to leave the marriage that day. Later in the afternoon, in a hushed whisper punctuated by breathlessness, she told Annette she’d decided to stay. She sounded scared and traumatised.Threatening to leave, or leaving only to return the next day had been the story of Julie’s life since returning to her husband after the first INTO THE TRAP
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decisive separation nearly twenty years earlier. In June, though, she was going forever. She’d had enough. As much as an erotic affair had opened Julie’s eyes to life’s sensuous riches, she hadn’t left the marriage to be with her lover. Locked in his own marriage, he offered nothing more than adoration and illicit, secretive sex. She loved the sex and the carnal praise, but it wasn’t for this reason she’d left her husband. She wanted to be free of her husband’s violent attitude, the insults and his stultifying control. Julie’s dreams were reflected in a 700-word farewell letter she’d left for her husband on the lounge room table.The opening paragraphs should have left her husband in no doubt as to her intentions: ‘After a lot of heartache I have decided to leave you because too many things have gone on over the years with you, and I feel we would both be happier on our own…I feel young and gregarious…you are staid and conservative, and people only get worse as they get older’. Terrified of growing old with her husband and being imprisoned in his spartan world of goal setting and sex on demand, she couldn’t stay another day. A lot of water had passed under the bridge since the day 17-yearold Julie Garrett caught the eye of the big, self-assured boy from well-to-do Cuffley. Bursting with money and self-confidence, Balwyn was a long way from the quaint, unpretentious semirural village where they met, forty miles north of London. In beauty and temperament she had been the classic fairy princess. Imposing and athletic he was her bold black knight. Once the pursuit of his princess was accomplished, he scaled the social ladder. While he made money and accumulated influential friends she accepted her lot and learnt not to question the man who had rescued her from obscurity. When Ramage returned home from overseas to find his wife had withdrawn $100 000 from their joint bank account and 6
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moved to a flat in Toorak with their daughter, he told everyone he was shattered. From flowers to promises in front of marriage counsellors, he tried everything to win her back. Julie was unmoved. On Monday 21 July, she had agreed to make her first visit back to Marock Place. On show were the latest renovations to the couple’s $900 000 house. For his wife’s visit Ramage had placed lunch on the pine table in the semi-renovated family room. Lying on the lounge room sideboard was a catalogue for one of his favourite aphrodisiacs, erotic videos, and in the garage was a roll of blue rope from which he had cut a piece two feet long. Whether the rope had a sinister purpose or was for some sadomasochistic game he’d dreamed up after watching one of the videos in the catalogue, no one would ever really know. Julie wasn’t coming back and he knew it.There was only one reason for the visit.Alone with his wife, he was going to vent his spleen.
INTO THE TRAP
7
A PERFECT DAY
The day had started so differently for Julie. As always, she’d driven her daughter to Lauriston Girls’ School in Armadale. Along the way she passed 30 Mercer Street, the house where local socialite Margaret Wales-King and her husband were living when their murder engrossed Melbourne in April 2002. Julie’s ex-lover was on the phone bright and early. During a fortyminute phone call made from his mobile he learnt every detail of Julie’s trip to Geelong with her husband on Saturday and how she’d told him she had a new man and the marriage was over. In explicit, handwritten letters, invariably signed ‘forever and always, Davey’, her lover fantasised about their moments together. During the summer of 2002 he bombarded her with words. ‘Rubbing you…imagining your fantastic body with a sexy belly ring…I hope you are not training too much in the love making area to be ready for me. You are fantastic so you don’t have to practise. Just the green eyed monster rearing his head.’ Davey’s words and the sex that came with them so enticed her, she would eventually tell her sister ‘sex with James is repulsive’. 8
There was nothing the lovers did in bed that couldn’t find a place in the letters. Julie would collect them from the post office in Lorne and on the way back to the family’s cliff top beach house in nearby Eastern View she’d read them to her friend Gilda Pekin. She never tired of them. Only the joy that came with the birth of her two children and that first year with her husband rivalled those ten months with Davey. Julie knew she was playing with fire. ‘He’ll kill me if he finds out,’ she told Gilda. Possessive and self-absorbed, James Ramage had a nasty streak. After the separation he admitted to five marriage counsellors that he’d been violent to her before. Although Davey shared Ramage’s love of money, he had an eye for the arts and the world of books.‘I’ve been to see the film Frida. The cinematography and the way they incorporated the art of the artist to become part of the scene was something really different and artistic.Would you love to see it…so we could talk about it later?’ Julie’s husband would never have considered a film as a prelude to sex. Sex came with marriage and was something to be taken when and where he wanted it. Davey’s erotic seduction of his wife is not all that would have infuriated Ramage. Julie’s lover was a Jew, and Ramage had crossed swords with Davey’s people in a couple of business ventures. Davey enjoyed discussing world affairs and had an eye for the hypocrisy of the pious. ‘Bush seems obsessed with Iraq, but I think he’s going to have more trouble with North Korea…I guess N Korea doesn’t have oil. That’s what it comes down to, oil and $$,’ he’d written in another letter. Her lover was not a man in Ramage’s political style.The Englishman admired Prime Minster John Howard and President George W Bush and had little time for Julie’s ‘do-gooder’ friends. While the former lovers chatted Jane rang her sister’s phone several times and eventually gave up. If only she’d had that one A PERFECT DAY
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conversation. Davey says he was just catching up and that they liked to talk. Some of Julie’s friends are less charitable, quick to point out that a previous lover had described him as a pest.The real purpose of the phone calls, they say, was to see whether he still rated as a potential lover. The story of a new man wasn’t what Davey wanted to hear. Unbeknown to Julie, he was extremely jealous.As a teenager in England she’d seen boys fight over her. Secretly, she loved it. Having two lovers fuss over her again so distracted her she seemed to forget the dark forces that sex triggered in her husband.They were far more perilous than anything teenage love could ferment. Compounding the danger, she told her husband she’d left the marriage to escape his control. Yet all he could see were men trying to seduce her. To Ramage it was an act of treachery. ‘I went horse riding with Laurence and we had dinner at the Panton Hill pub. I’m on cloud nine,’ Julie had told workmate Tarsha Warren that morning. As forthcoming as she had been about her sex life, she didn’t describe how she’d twice made love with her new boyfriend, Laurence Webb, before leaving his cottage on Sunday night. So besotted was Webb, he promised her the world and even set about refining his riding skills. At 10.45 am on the day of her alleged murder Julie had left a message on his voice mail. They were planning a trip to Noosa and she wanted him to know how happy she was. He rang back fifteen minutes later to declare his undying love. Although they’d been together a mere ten days and had made love only half a dozen times, Webb was convinced they’d spend the rest of their lives together. Some of Julie’s friends agreed. Others believed it would have petered out within a few months. Julie’s mood that morning was nothing like her husband’s. While she basked in the attention and told everyone about her weekend and her new love, her husband was grumpy and sullen. 10
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He’d arrived at the Thermo-Glaze factory in Collingwood around 8 am, but his mind wasn’t on work. After facing bankruptcy in a previous business he’d struck gold with Thermo-Glaze. He could hardly believe that recoating bathtubs could be so profitable. Now he was genuinely rich and getting richer by the day.Without his attractive wife by his side, though, it suddenly counted for nothing. He’d become a shell of his normal self. Work colleagues tried to humour him, but Ramage remained distracted and preoccupied. For the first time in nearly twenty years he no longer had control over his wife. On the weekend he’d been told unequivocally that she wasn’t coming back. Worried that she might turn her back on the lunchtime meeting he rang his wife at work to confirm what time she would arrive.At 11 am he drove off for Marock Place. She was expected at 12 noon. After a morning of bubbly phone calls and optimism, Julie appeared at Tarsha’s first floor office door. It was 12.10 pm and she was already running late. In keeping with her general happiness, her words were cheery, almost carefree.‘I’m starving, didn’t have any breakfast, just going to pop out and get some lunch. I won’t be long.’ Tarsha had been working with Julie at the fashion house, Eco-d, in upmarket Glenferrie Road, for three and a half years. From her blonde hair to the tip of her high heeled shoes she was a young woman without a blemish and was blessed with candour and an understanding of her friend’s life that surpassed her twenty-six years. She’d heard all the intimate details of Julie’s disintegrating marriage and after the split had become an even more trusted confidante. Tarsha had only met James Ramage five times. She considered him to be an overbearing man and heard how he dictated A PERFECT DAY
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the colour of his wife’s nail polish, the way she wore her hair and how Julie even faked orgasms so that the sex he routinely demanded would end sooner. ‘Take care, Julie,’ her friend had told her when Ramage began appearing unannounced at Ecod. Tarsha didn’t see Julie slip into the Mini and disappear along Park Street that day. Nor did she know that lunch involved a meeting with James Ramage at the house in Balwyn to look at the new renovations. Then again, she hadn’t asked where her friend was going when she left on Friday for lunch. Nor did she ask why lunch had lasted three hours. She probably wouldn’t have been surprised to know that Julie had spent lunch in bed with her new boyfriend, Laurence Webb, at her flat in Toorak. Julie was in love.Today she hadn’t turned off her computer, and as it was a cold day she’d also left her heater on. It was only going to be a short chat with her estranged husband. At approximately 12.22 pm, Julie swung her Mini into Marock Place, a circular court of six houses in the upmarket section of Balwyn. It’s almost Canterbury, James would say. Today, his Jaguar was parked next door outside number 6, facing Boston Road. Surprisingly, the builder Graeme McIntosh’s Mitsubishi van was nowhere to be seen. Graeme was a creature of habit. Every day at midday he would hop into his van, unwrap his thickly cut sandwiches and three pieces of fruit, and open the Herald Sun. An hour later he’d be back on the tools. ‘Why isn’t he here, snuggled in his van?’ she must have thought. Only the day before, Ramage had told a friend, Dr Kate Clark, they were to meet the builder at the house. As always, McIntosh had arrived at 7.45 am. Inside the front door he found a note asking him to ring Ramage. When he called he quickly realised how desperate the owner was to be alone with his wife.‘Julie’s coming around so I’d rather there was no work going on. I’ll ring back and tell you when she’s com12
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ing so you’ll know when to finish,’ said Ramage. Around 9 am he was back on the phone. ‘She’ll be coming at around 12 pm. So I’ll need you gone before that,’ he said. McIntosh’s offer to wait around the corner until Julie had left had been met with a stony ‘I’ll pay you, but I just want you to take the afternoon off.’ McIntosh was genuinely surprised by Ramage’s persistence. He said the offer of a payment without work being done was ‘a first’. A man who loves a chat and a cup of tea in the company of women, the builder had an eye for the businessman’s excesses.‘If you give him a special treat, he might finish the kitchen off sooner,’ Ramage had quipped to his wife, causing the builder to blush. This comment, and Ramage’s offer to ‘shout at the massage parlour’ when the kitchen was done, rang in his head after Julie’s brutal death. On Monday, McIntosh did as he was told and was gone from the house by 11.30 am. When he returned on Tuesday morning the house was an official crime scene. His absence would become a point of conjecture when the facts of the day were pieced together, and he would tell everyone how guilty he felt at not being there when Julie needed him. Julie’s fondness for Graeme McIntosh wasn’t enough to kindle an interest in the renovations. ‘They’re just another ploy to get me back.What will he try next?’ she said jokingly to her sister. She’d once told her neighbour, Debbie Webb (no relation to Laurence), she’d never expected to be living on the flash side of Whitehorse Road. Now all she wanted to do was leave it behind. Mock Georgian, with symmetrical windows and fake weather-beaten shutters that clung to the dark, clinker brick walls, it was a house in her husband’s image. A doll’s house, she called it. ‘Barbie doesn’t live here anymore,’ she’d laughed as she caught a glimpse of her face in the car mirror the day she left. The ‘Ken and Barbie’ lampooning of her marriage from the A PERFECT DAY
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more bitchy of the Scotch College set had become a distant memory. Six weeks on from fleeing the marriage she was pleased at how she looked and that some of the signs of stress had disappeared from her cheeks and eyes. She felt fit and thought she looked young. As she passed her husband’s Jaguar and prepared to turn into the driveway, she spotted Milka, her cleaning lady, across the court in front of Debbie Webb’s house. ‘How are you, Milka?’ she yelled across the court as she stepped her way along the path. Quietly spoken, with perfectly groomed light brown hair and a classically Slavic face, she always looked a picture.‘I’m sorry I can’t chat longer. I’m in a rush,’ said Julie apologetically. Milka was taken by how happy and attractive Julie looked.The cleaning lady lived in the working class west of Melbourne and was naturally deferential in her relationships with the well-to-do people whose houses she cleaned. It was no impediment to her taking a keen interest in their lives. She’d always found Ramage polite and she genuinely loved Julie, but she knew there was trouble in the marriage. In the coming days she looked for someone who might want to hear what she knew about Julie. Milka so much wanted to tell people how every week Julie would give her extra cash, always hidden somewhere in the house, and make her promise not to tell James. ‘He’ll go mad if he finds out I’m paying you more,’ Julie would say. Shy and heartbroken, at night Milka would cry silently and ask why the rules of evidence were such that she wasn’t allowed to tell the court her special stories. ‘Mr Fastidious isn’t doing such a good job keeping up appearances, now that number one slave has escaped.’ Might this be what Julie thought as she eyed the unkempt garage and the winter leaves in the driveway? She felt sorry for Matthew, who had stayed with his dad after the split and was being bombarded 14
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with his father’s continual questioning and outbursts of emotion. As she approached the porch she thought about how she’d resurrect her relationship with her son. ‘Being entombed in that house with Jamie will bring him to understand what I’ve endured,’ she’d told her twin sister. All those days spent standing on the banks of theYarra watching her big strong son row. How she wished he’d get over her departure from the marriage. For a change, the heavy, white metal bar gate on the porch was open. Had her departure forced him to relax some of the rules? Usually, visitors had to ring the bell while standing on the path outside in all weather before the front door was opened and the gate unlocked.‘I’m the king of the castle,’ she would sing to herself as he went through the ritual of looking out the window before opening the front door and then the security door. Not that people dropped in much. He didn’t like surprises and hated mess so much even the children had learnt not to have friends over when he was home. In the midst of the separation Julie had sat down one night and listed all the things her husband didn’t like. ‘He doesn’t like much at all, really. I don’t know why he wants me back,’ she concluded. She wasn’t coming back this time. The relationship was over and nothing he said or did could change that. How to free herself without earning her husband’s wrath – that was what occupied her thoughts. Eight days earlier, on the afternoon of Sunday 13 July, her best friend, Gilda Pekin, had let slip a dangerous piece of information. Over a coffee at her house she told Ramage how Julie had met a businessman from Sydney at the Botanical Hotel in South Yarra and been out with him several times. She also told him about Laurence Webb.‘I’m here with you, that doesn’t mean we’re doing anything,’ Gilda told him when he pressed the issue. Although she tried to hide the significance of men showing an A PERFECT DAY
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interest in Julie, the damage was done. Gilda well knew that Julie had made love with Webb on Friday and Saturday and had revelled in it. As much as his wife had told him she wanted to end the marriage, Ramage had never seriously believed Julie could live without him.The conversation with Gilda rattled him. For the first time since their six-month separation in 1984 it seemed his wife was genuinely free of him. What Gilda didn’t realise was that the thought of another man frolicking carnally with his wife made Ramage sick in the stomach.That’s why Julie was furious when she found out what Gilda had divulged. Jealous and possessive, James Ramage was not a man to be played with. His wife knew that much.That’s why she told people he’d kill her. Believing things might be moving fast, Ramage was on his best behaviour as he prised information from Julie’s circle of friends, speaking of his love for her and asking how he might win her back. Bit by bit the facts of an irrevocably broken marriage were sinking into his head.The once haughty, nit-picking and domineering Ramage was now begging his wife to forgive him. There was only one card left in the pack. Seventeen-yearold Matthew, his adoring son, was his only hope. Matthew had made it clear to his mother he wanted her back in the family home. Desperate to please her son, Julie had agreed to attend a session with psychologist Rosemary De Young in Hawthorn on Tuesday 15 July. De Young had been recommended by a close friend of the Ramages, Dr Rob Moodie. Ramage sat impassively as his wife told DeYoung the marriage was over.The psychologist gave him no comfort. ‘You have conflicting agendas. Julie wants separation.You want reconciliation,’ she said. De Young noted that there ‘was no goodwill on Julie’s part to revive the marriage and counselling was inappropriate’. Desperate to find a psychologist who’d pressure his wife to return to the marriage or at least say she should refrain from 16
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meeting other men, Ramage was frantic. No sooner had he left the session with De Young than he was on the phone to sixtyyear-old psychologist Tom Paterson.When he received a call in the early evening from Paterson informing him of a vacancy at 5.45 pm he immediately rang his wife. Julie told him it was no use, but she agreed to attend. At 5.38 pm Ramage was back on the phone to the psychologist.They spoke for fifty seconds, during which time a meeting was set at his Hawthorn office. As brief as the phone call was there was enough time for Ramage to make a remarkable admission.‘Julie’s ninety-nine per cent sure she’s not coming back,’ he told the counsellor. By the time he’d driven from Collingwood to Hawthorn he’d made three further calls, at two minute intervals, to Julie’s mobile. She was a woman under siege. Rosemary De Young recorded that there’d been previous violence, but didn’t document any specifics. Paterson, however, heard about Ramage head-butting Julie and breaking her nose in 1991 and that he broke glasses, had an explosive temper and she feared he might hurt her horse or punish her. Neither psychologist told Julie she might be in danger. When Paterson suggested it was ‘not a good idea in the short term’ for either of them to go out with anyone else, Ramage felt vindicated. As equivocal as it was, Paterson’s comment was pounced upon by Ramage and used against his wife. This fictitious promise, supposedly made by Julie, would become a cursed thing and would be used to tarnish her character in the trial. Paterson would tell me he only offered this advice because men sometimes responded violently to the news that their wife was having sex with another man. ‘I’ve shot myself in the foot, the counselling didn’t work,’ a dejected Ramage told Jane Ashton over lunch at her home in Research two days later. It was now Thursday 17 July and Julie’s A PERFECT DAY
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life was rapidly drawing to a close. ‘It’s quite innocent with Laurence. She’s only spreading her wings,’ said Jane when the conversation turned to the boyfriend. She didn’t tell him she knew the marriage was over and that Julie was telling everyone she genuinely fancied the new boyfriend. The girls had made a pact. Ramage was to be let down gently and no one was to say anything that might rile him. Committed to seeing her sister leave an unhappy marriage, Jane stuck to the script and told him he should continue to see counsellors and try to change his behaviour. It didn’t matter to Ramage that his sister-in-law had little time for him. As humiliating as it was, he had no alternative but to throw himself at the feet of Julie’s girlfriends.What else could he do? A few weeks earlier Ramage had met his sister-in-law in the restaurant at the Yan Yean Driving Range in nearby Arthurs Creek. He was wearing his blue Ralph Lauren jumper and sat with his back to the panorama of mountains that bordered Yan Yean. Although the mountains had caught his eye when he arrived, he made not one comment about their beauty. In a few days they’d assume a new significance. Jane had no idea she was a pawn in Ramage’s game and that he was gleaning information from all her sister’s friends. If they fell for his promises she might be persuaded to return to the marriage. That was the strategy. In the restaurant that day Ramage was forced to listen. It wasn’t something that came easily to him. He didn’t believe anything Jane said. It was Julie’s problem, she just didn’t understand his work and had trouble communicating her real feelings, he said. When Jane explained that Julie’s dismissive ‘whatever’ in the face of his hectoring was an act of surrender, he nodded. He just didn’t understand. He never had. Nineteen years earlier Jane, who was still living in England then, although the twins’ parents had migrated by this time, had received a prophetic letter from her sister in Australia: 18
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We both felt we needed a break and time to ourselves to decide what we really want from life. Hopefully we’ll grow together again, but it would be a completely different relationship. I just feel as though I’ve stepped off a Merry Go Round and can’t believe how uncomplicated life can be on your own. If I want to buy something I buy it, if I want to go out I just go. I’m seeing Jamie on Sunday and we are going horse riding at Diamond Creek…Mum and Dad have been really great over the whole thing and haven’t interfered at all. They are quite happy whatever I decide and Jamie has appreciated that and there are no ill feelings…Connie and I went to the pictures today – Sunday.We ended up seeing ‘Friday the Thirteenth’ which was really scary so I didn’t see much through my fingers! Anyway I got home by six and managed to tidy-up and do the ironing before Mum and Dad got home from the ‘Pokies’ looking rather tired. I have bought a nice little car which goes really well, it’s a Mazda 808 Delux Coupe 1300cc, white in colour. So I’m really mobile now and drove 100 km this weekend. Bye Bye for now
‘Horse riding in Diamond Creek’.Whenever his wife threatened to leave him, the offer to go horse riding with her was Ramage’s gift to Julie. Little did she or anyone else know how important Diamond Creek would be in the story of her death. After lunch at Jane’s house in Research on Thursday 17 July, Ramage rang his son’s mobile on five consecutive occasions. It was part of a campaign to harass Julie into travelling with him to Geelong on Saturday to watch Matt play football with the Scotch College senior team. That goal achieved he insisted on picking her up from the flat. Under further pressure she said A PERFECT DAY
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she’d visit the house on Monday to look at the renovations.‘Matt will be so happy,’ he’d said when she finally conceded. By Sunday, Ramage’s two children, Gilda Pekin and their mutual friends the Moodies and Farleys knew about the lunchtime rendezvous at the house. The Geelong trip on Saturday was particularly taxing for Julie. Beyond the prying eyes of other Scotch parents Ramage had bombarded her with a series of questions and promised to do whatever it would take to bring her back. She was unmoved. Dr Kate Clark, an anaesthetist by profession and Scotch College parent, happened upon the couple during the course of the afternoon. She described them as looking distressed and solemn. Day and night over the previous weeks Ramage had rung her seeking advice about how to get Julie back. She would later say he oppressed and controlled his wife and that he ‘didn’t really talk about missing her’.All he was interested in, she said, was the effect of her departure on ‘the state of the family’. The picture painted of the pair at Geelong by Dr Clark, a gentle and unobtrusive woman, presaged the violent act that lay ahead.And while Ramage had taken up his traditional role at his wife’s shoulder, no longer did he have the look of the confident lord protector. He’d lost his fairy princess. Unfortunately, as events would show, he was not a man to take any kind of slight lying down. Despite Julie knowing this about him, the next day she would tell her twin sister he seemed to take the revelation of a new boyfriend very well. ‘I’m glad I gave James the benefit of the doubt and didn’t take out a restraining order,’ she said. Although he pressed her about the relationship she was optimistic that the visit on Monday would pass without too much angst. When Julie spoke with Laurence Webb on Saturday night, she said it had been a difficult day and that she was too tired to go out. In fact she attended a friend’s fiftieth birthday party, 20
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while Ramage went out on a blind date. His version of events was that he eventually told the woman he didn’t have his heart in it and went home alone. That night he was so distraught his fifteen-year-old daughter Samantha hopped into bed to comfort him. He said the thought of a new man on the scene had cut him deeply. Little did his daughter know that simmering anger lay beneath the tears. ‘When I hopped into bed he told me he loved Mum and wanted her back, then he goes and does this,’ she would wail on Monday night. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’m not silly. I won’t see him on my own’. As she reached the front door did Julie remember the promise she’d made to her parents? Did she remember the words and reassure herself that he wouldn’t do her any harm? Only a week earlier she’d told Tarsha her husband would kill her if he found out about Webb. So why did she let her guard down? Later, her appearance at the house would be used as evidence that she had nothing to fear from her husband. ‘No, he won’t hurt me.’ I remember my own sister reassuring me with those bouncy, unequivocal words.Three months later she was dead. In time we’d all discover she knew her ex-boyfriend was capable of such violence. It’s impossible to believe Julie Ramage would have gone to Marock Place if she’d known she was going to be alone with her husband. After the separation she told her daughter she was scared of him and would only meet him in crowded places or with other people. The trip to Geelong was the first time she’d been alone with him since she moved out of the family home. She must have expected Graeme McIntosh to be at the house. Ramage would subsequently tell his police interrogators the lunchtime rendezvous had not been confirmed until Monday morning and that, up until he rang her that morning, the meeting was scheduled to take place at nine in the evening, when of A PERFECT DAY
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course Matthew would be home. If it was a cunning lie it was designed to convince the doubters that the meeting was spontaneous and that he’d not acted with premeditation.The note for the builder confirmed that Julie had agreed to meet him for lunch. All that was in doubt was the exact time. A decisive piece of information had unwittingly come Ramage’s way on the weekend. While waiting for her in the Toorak flat on Saturday the disconsolate Ramage had looked for anything that might give him a clue about the future. In the kitchen he saw a calendar with the words ‘holiday with Laurence’ circled around a date in the school holidays. It was the last straw. For the first time since they were married he knew she was impervious to his tricks and fake promises. During the course of the day she confirmed what he’d seen and said that Laurence was now her boyfriend. She had told her friends she was no longer going to hide her life from him. For many years she’d tolerated her husband’s sins because, deep down, she admired him. The regret she felt at having to leave the marriage was reflected in the final letter: I could hate you so much for some of the things you have done and said to me over the years but I also understand that you are a very good person and that you work hard and most importantly that you love our kids very much…
The kindness of these lines didn’t weaken her resolve to leave him behind. Nor did it stop her laughing with her twin sister as they tried to second guess what he would do next. Week after week huge, expensive bunches of flowers had arrived at the front desk of Eco-d. James Ramage wanted everyone to know how much he loved his beautiful wife. If only you’d told me privately and meant it, she thought, as she searched for a place to hide the 22
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flowers. ‘If only he’d said how much he loved me years ago and that I was a great mother,’ she told friends. Respect and genuine love would have been enough. In an earlier time a hand-picked flower with the single word ‘sorry’ might have done the trick. The homemade CDs of ‘their’ favourite songs that arrived on her desk were a pitiful recompense for all he’d done over the years. Nor did it cut any ice with her twin sister.‘Asking his son Matthew to burn the CDs only gave Jamie another opportunity to show him how hard he was trying to win his mother back. It was straight manipulation,’ said one of her friends. On Sunday 20 July, Ramage spent more than an hour grilling close friend Nick Farley at Marock Place. Farley and his wife Jen had been to dinner at Julie’s flat on the Friday night. She told them it was over with Ramage. Although Farley knew that Julie had been sleeping with her new boyfriend, when Ramage asked if it might be the case he said, ‘I wouldn’t have a clue.’ This wasn’t all he knew. In November 1997 the Farleys had been at lunch at Marock Place when Julie divulged to Jen that she was having an affair with a mutual friend, banking executive Sean Mays. For some reason he thought this was something the police should know and had included it in his statement. Like Julie’s other close friends, the Farleys had heard first hand that Julie believed her husband would kill her if he found out about the affair with Mays.They knew it wasn’t a throwaway line. That’s surely why Nick Farley vividly remembered Jamie Ramage’s ominous, ‘I’m angry with Julie’. Farley’s comment to the police that there was nothing about Ramage’s demeanour that ‘alarmed’ him reads like the words of a man who, with the value of hindsight grasped what Ramage had really been saying.As history would show, there had been good reason to be alarmed. At 9.15 pm on Sunday 20 July, after more than an hour discussing the prospects of Julie returning, Farley bade his mate farewell. A PERFECT DAY
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‘You just have to accept what happens, James. Make sure you look after your kids. Look, Matt’s still with you,’ he said, in an attempt to reassure his friend one last time. Ramage shrugged his shoulders. Farley remembered that shrug and those ambiguous words when Tuesday’s edition of the Channel Ten News reported what Ramage had done. He also vividly remembered how his friend had said it would be his decision as to whether he’d have his wife back. Ramage’s words bore all the hallmarks of an angry, brooding man. A primary school principal, Farley wished his understanding of the dynamics of relationships and Ramage’s ‘male chauvinism’ had set the alarm bells ringing. When James Ramage said he was ‘angry’ it was a far cry from what Farley understood it to mean. It would have been enough to worry Julie, though. If Farley had divulged what he knew to Jane Ashton she’d have tried to stop her sister walking into the trap her husband had set. To those who’d never thought about why a man kills his wife, Ramage was no threat to his wife. He didn’t have any convictions for violence and apart from losing his licence for drink driving had never been in trouble with the law. Some friends knew he had a temper and was aggressive when drinking, but he wasn’t a pub brawler or pugilist. And his business partner Tony Brady had never divulged the secret that might have got them thinking. What they didn’t know was that he was a wife basher. It wasn’t chronic, but he’d done enough to his wife to be capable of inflicting unimaginable violence. Three weeks had passed since Ramage told his confidant Dr Rob Moodie, he’d once hit his wife. When he lied and said it was only minor, Moodie didn’t press the issue. It was the same on Sunday 20 July when Moodie called in at Marock Place for lunch. During the conversation Ramage said he intended to ask Julie whether the new boyfriend had been on the scene before the separation. They 24
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were ominous words. Upon hearing that Ramage had killed his wife, Moodie offered one very perplexing observation. He said he’d been so concerned about his friend’s state of mind he considered ringing him on the Monday. He thought he might be suicidal. It never occurred to him that Julie might be in danger. The man who waited for the unsuspecting Julie Garrett carried all the deep anxieties of the worst of men. Psychologists and experts in family violence say offenders learn their violence from their father. Had James ever seen violence in his own family? Whatever the truth of the speculation about his father, James Ramage could not be trusted to control himself. And what his male friends didn’t know was that he had no aversion to using his head as a weapon. Anyone who’s felt the force of another man’s fists or seen the violence in a bully’s eyes knows that men who head-butt can never be trusted. If Moodie or Farley had been knockabout blokes they’d have known that Ramage was on a dangerous path. Julie’s friends still wonder what Ramage was thinking when he walked upstairs and slid into his brass bed that night. If his dreams were fired by wild thoughts of revenge, his bed gave nothing away.As always, he stretched his long body neatly down the left hand side, where he always slept. Ramage wasn’t one to roll about or throw the bedclothes around. There was no sign that he grabbed the pillow where his wife had once put her head and cuddled it. When he awoke, he stepped from the bed and ever so neatly folded back the doona a few inches.Was it an invitation to his wife? Whatever the reason it was in keeping with the James Ramage people had come to know. Methodical and clinical, he wasn’t one to be consumed by flights of fancy. Tense and belligerent, he would have been standing at the window when his brazenly happy wife exchanged pleasantries A PERFECT DAY
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with Milka. Although he hated her being late, at the front door he greeted her calmly, laid a kiss on her cheek and looked for a sign that she might be his. It was now approaching 12.23 pm and Felicity Holding, owner of Eco-d, had organised a meeting for 1 pm. ‘You’ll have to get used to me not running on your timetable.’ When he looked at his watch and admonished her after she’d been out horse riding on Wednesdays she’d so much wanted to utter that line. She told her friends having to live by his timetable drove her mad. Today, he said nothing to prompt such a response. After escorting his wife on a tour through the renovations, Ramage offered her a place at the pine table. He would later claim she dismissed the renovations as unimportant. It was almost 12.30 pm by the time they took up their places at the table. Ramage sat at the head of the table with his back to the glass windows, while she sat with her back to the large cabinet that stretched along the wall. To reach the front door she would have had to pass him. The king of the castle didn’t like to waste money on heating, so as always it was chilly in the house. To ward off the cold he was wearing his fashionable navy blue Ralph Lauren jumper. Julie took off her black leather jacket and placed it on the chair. Today she was wearing navy jodhpurs, a pale blue polo-necked jumper and the leather jacket. On her feet was a pair of RM Williams boots. As always, gold jewellery adorned her neck and hands. She was not wearing a wedding ring. Tarsha Warren said she looked gorgeous when she arrived for work in the morning.Yet there was nothing about the way she’d dressed that might have led him to believe today was anything but business. She was also menstruating. As if nothing had changed, she did as her husband wanted. Under his watchful gaze she lifted his peace offering to her mouth. There was no bottle of Moet or plate of caviar to induce his wife to think well 26
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of him. All that was on offer today was a salad roll from the deli next door to his factory. There was also nothing she could say today that she hadn’t said on Saturday or in front of the marriage counsellors.The day before, her husband had told Rob Moodie the marriage was virtually over. So what did happen in those 10 to12 minutes before he began his murderous attack? She didn’t want to go to war with him or fight about the children or property. Desperate to avoid trouble, she tried to steer the conversation away from her private life.The more she tried to change the topic the worse it became. Alone at Marock Place wasn’t the time for Julie to tell him anything about her private thoughts. Although the sun was directly overhead, it was bright in the family room and the expanse of glass at the western end framed every blink of an eye as they sat at the table. If only the builder Graeme McIntosh or the wise Debbie Webb had walked through the back gate.As she grasped the uncontrollable anger in those bristling, angry eyes, did she think of making a run for the back door? ‘He’s an absolute pig,’ she’d told a neighbour the night in 1987 when she fled their house at 33 Percy Street, Balwyn. Pregnant and terrified, she thought he was going to kill her. How she must have longed for a reassuring hand on her shoulder.Today, the men who admired her generosity and beauty were nowhere to be seen. She was alone and he was in an unforgiving mood. Aware that the renovations were not going to bring her back, Ramage moved to the matter of the children. His daughter’s attitude to spending time at Marock Place and finally the so-called promise to be faithful – that’s where he wanted to take the discussion. Ultimately, Ramage had his sights set on one major question. He wanted to know about the new bloke and offer her one last chance. If she said ‘no’ she was going A PERFECT DAY
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to pay. Ramage’s actions showed he was incapabe of constraint. The intransigence of his demands was in total contrast to the conciliatory nature of her farewell letter: I know that you would really try to do anything to keep us together but that is not the point because it’s what’s in your heart that truly matters and I know you can’t help yourself and the real you bubbles to the surface and I don’t like that person. If you care for me please let me go without a horrible fight for the kids’ sake. Let’s prove to them that we are better than all the other separated couples that we know…
In Ramage’s world, sex was power. As Julie unzipped her jacket and placed it on the chair he must surely have imagined what Laurence Webb was doing with her. The idea that some interloper was consuming her would have fired his anger.To be sure his wife truly enjoyed being overpowered by him in the marital bed the king of the castle insisted the light be left on. He wanted to see the pleasure in her face when he devoured her. It was no secret that he was increasingly interested in sadomasochistic sex and what Julie described as ‘acrobatics’.‘The sex is getting scary,’ she confided to a riding club friend, Robyn Watson, during a brief exchange in the toilet at a restaurant prior to the separation. After a burst of tears they each fixed their make-up and returned to their husbands at the table. Every morning he would roll over, tap her on the shoulder and demand sex. She told Tarsha it felt like rape. Was he thinking about sex today? An accomplished horse rider, Julie loved competing at the Hurstbridge Adult Riding Club. In the foothills of the Great Dividing Range she was free. He despised the horse riding scene and the friends she made.‘Bush pigs,’ he called them.As much as 28
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he hated her mixing with the ‘bush pigs’, he wasn’t unhappy about what the exercise did for her body.Yet such was Ramage’s arrogance he’d been oblivious to his wife’s secret life. As he sat pounding her with questions and sullenly weighing up his options there was so much he didn’t know about the woman who sat opposite him. Sean Mays and Davey had told her she was irresistible. He had his suspicions, but he’d always found it hard to believe she could have sex with another man. Her newly found independence and her refusal to return to the family home had shattered the illusion. He’d seen his power evaporate in the blink of an eye. No longer could he bludgeon her with his arrogance and tell her how lucky she was to have him. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been listening to your mad sister,’ he used to chide his wife, in front of the children. Now, the days of savaging Julie’s friends and her sister were over. No matter what he told the counsellors about wanting to change, history would bear testament to his capacity for violence. Every time she defended her sister and said she needed space, did he want to smash his head into her face? Is that why his wife said he’d kill her if he found out about the other men? Whatever the answer, she was going to pay.This was what he was thinking as the conversation, and ultimately the relationship, reached its finale. By 12.35 pm, less than fifteen minutes after arriving at the house, Julie had had enough of the discussion.‘I must go, I have a meeting,’ she said, grabbing her jacket and beginning to move past him. The force of his hands gripping her from behind was everything she feared. ‘Come on, you’ll enjoy it,’ he liked to say in the marital bed. ‘I’m not having sex with you anymore. Don’t you get it? We should have separated ten years ago,’ she’d already told him in front of a marriage counsellor. Did she repeat that declaration in the kitchen? A PERFECT DAY
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‘My relationship with Laurence is none of your fucking business and, anyway, Laurence is much nicer, and sex with you would repulse me.’ Did she really deliver this brutal coup de grâce and send her husband into a state of loss of control? Friends say Julie rarely swore, and psychologist Tom Paterson said she never said or did anything provocative during the marriage counselling session six days earlier.‘She was being very constructive and very open, and was prudent and civilised,’ he said. Paterson’s picture of Julie Ramage is a far cry from the woman who, Ramage says, belittled him throughout the lunch. ‘What hope does Sam have when she’s got a slut of a mother?’ Ramage had roared during an argument about their daughter’s attitude to boys. Did the word ‘slut’ pierce the air as he drew his hand from her jodhpurs and began his attack? If only he’d smashed his forehead into her face as he had done twelve years earlier and said, ‘Fuck off out of my house.’ But there would be no reprieve today. One after another the punches crashed into her head. The day he left for the overseas business trip she swore she would never again feel the weight of his naked body on her. ‘I can’t stand his little dick and his hairless pink body,’ she told a friend. If it had only been rape she’d have gritted her teeth and let him have his way. For once he wasn’t interested in sex.The chilling sound of Ramage’s right fist crashing into Julie’s face confirmed that. Only violence would have his wife ‘shut the fuck up’. Her kicking and clawing and her gasps and cries for help didn’t tug at his heartstrings. There was no way he was going to stop. Bleeding and bruised, Julie hit the floor only a couple of feet from the glass doors, in full view of the back yard. A neighbour chopping an overhanging branch or a child chasing an errant football would have seen every frame. It was like a scene from the Hollywood classic Rear Window. 30
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Thinking she was dead, Ramage stood up and checked his clothing for blood.The clock had clawed its way to 12.37.As the adrenalin rush that accompanied his violent attack waned, he began to grasp the gravity of his situation.‘Where will I put the body?’ he must have wondered, as he pondered his next move. Like thermoglazing a bathtub in the family business, time was the essence of the matter. How quickly could he mastermind a cover-up? With son Matthew due home around 6.15 pm there was no time to waste. First he had to ring the plumber, Patrick Leonard, and tell him not to come to the house. A straightforward kind of bloke, Leonard had seen the aggressive side of the man of the house. The plumber was no dandy, but he told the builder he was genuinely stunned to hear Ramage call his daughter a ‘fucking slut and a moll’ after an incident during the renovation: Samantha had flushed the toilet causing an unsavoury blockage and her father had gone feral. There was nothing feral about him as he calmly walked through the kitchen and into his office to find the plumber’s number. On the circular table was his briefcase and on the walls a collection of photos and drawings that appeared to confirm the normality of life in this suburban home.Two of the photographs were of his daughter’s rowing team and another featured a shop front bearing the brand name Jazzies, the business venture that had set him on the path to riches. Even without his wife, Ramage had plenty to live for. ‘It’s James Ramage here. Look, Patrick, I’m just ringing to let you know I don’t need you at the house today,’ he said.The conversation was over in thirteen seconds. It was now 12.38 pm. In his rush to grab his Filofax the killer was oblivious to the bloodstains he’d left on two company documents in his briefcase. With much to do, Ramage put his clinical mind to work on how to solve the little problem he’d created. Just what he did A PERFECT DAY
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next isn’t entirely clear. Debbie Webb would later tell police that she drove into the court around 1 pm. It was probably a few minutes before 1 pm when she parked her car in the garage across from Ramage’s house. She said she noticed her neighbour’s Jaguar outside number 6 and was surprised to see Julie’s Mini in the driveway at number 5. If these times are correct, it’s likely that Ramage was still cleaning up the blood and his wife was lying alongside the rear door to the garage, under the valance he’d pulled from a cupboard. In his police interview, Ramage wasn’t asked to chronicle with any exactness the sequence of events. Everything he said was designed to enhance his defence. He would tell Detective Darren Wiseman he dragged Julie out of the house and put her in the boot of the Jaguar. If his car was still outside number 6 at 1 pm, twenty minutes after he’d killed her, this is impossible.The story about dragging Julie out of the house and throwing her body in the boot reads like the actions of a man out of control. The methodical shifting of cars as part of an elaborate cover-up reeks of cool-headedness. It was not the story Ramage wanted to tell. There was no blood in the cabin of the Jaguar, but there was some on the armrest of the Mini Cooper.This indicates the Mini was the first car he touched after the savage killing. One thing’s for sure: he had to move Julie’s car before he could dump her in the boot of his Jaguar. It’s possible he backed the Mini out of the driveway and drove the Jaguar into the garage, dumped Julie’s body in the boot and returned the cars to their original positions, then went inside and cleaned up. If this is the sequence of events then Julie’s body was in the boot of the Jaguar when Debbie Webb drove past and saw both cars at 1 pm. It seems unlikely he’d move two cars in this manner and risk drawing attention to activities at the house. 32
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Debbie had gone shopping with her son at 11 am and wasn’t home when Julie parked in the driveway. If she had been home the sequence of events might have been much clearer. It’s unfortunate the police didn’t press Ramage on the moving of the cars. If only someone had said ‘Debbie Webb saw your car outside number 6. How did you get your wife’s body into the boot when her Mini Cooper was in the driveway?’ Such a question would have exposed the clean-up and the shifting of cars for what it was: a cold-hearted attempt to get away with murder. Julie was dead by 12.38 pm, yet at 7.50 pm that night Ramage would tell her boss, Felicity Holding, she’d been at the house until 2 pm. His version of events was that Julie had driven away and he knew nothing of her whereabouts.Whatever lies he told regarding the killing, it was important to lie about the amount of time Julie spent in the house. If Julie was attacked after only ten or so minutes inside, at worst it would seem like premeditated murder and at best like the actions of an intolerant and domineering thug. A long lunch suggested he had seriously tried to win his wife’s heart, only to be hurt by her callous contempt for him and the renovations. There was no long lunch. Were Ramage’s actions those of a man who’d been bristling with thoughts of revenge? Whatever the truth, he was certainly smart after the event. The real story isn’t that hard to uncover. Once he was sure there’d be no unexpected visit from the plumber he could deal with the body without fear of interruption.With her ankles resting against his hips, Ramage dragged his wife across the floor, through the side door and across the gravel that led to the garage.The gravel cut into her skin so much that she looked like the victim of a flogging. By the time he dumped her alongside the garage door her jumper had been pulled almost from her back. Had he tried to smother her with the jumper or cover her face while he strangled her? Behind was a trail of blood from the A PERFECT DAY
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injuries to her nose. It was now approximately 12.42 pm. How different she looked from the woman who’d radiated such warmth in a brief exchange with a cleaning lady outside her house fifteen minutes earlier. When Senior Constable Stephen Lake cast an eye over Marock Place at 3.25 pm the next day, the crime scene was framed by a shaft of light that sent long shadows from a defoliating silver birch tree into the court. A large rubbish bin and a smaller crate sat benignly alongside the driveway and the front garage door was up. It looked like any other suburban home. Among the photographs Lake requested from police photographer Senior Constable Lisa Cook was one of a roll of blue rope next to a set of cricket stumps on a shelf in the front eastern corner of the garage, and another of a droplet of blood at the back of the garage.The photographs added a touch of mystery to an otherwise ordinary ‘domestic’ murder. The blood in the garage proved one thing. Julie had spent some time on the floor of the garage. If she’d been carried out of the house and dumped straight in the boot it’s unlikely there’d have been blood on the garage floor. Exactly what happened next is telling. As he prepared to return to the house and wipe up the blood, did he wonder whether she was dead? Did she heave or move in such a way as to leave him thinking she wasn’t dead and that she might be gone when he returned? And did he then grab the rope, cut a piece, burn it at both ends and wrap it around the neck of Julie’s jumper and tighten it until he was certain she was dead? No, says Julie’s twin. She thinks the rope was already cut (and burnt, to stop it fraying) in preparation for the murder. Whether he cut it before or after the murder matters little. Did he use it to finish his wife off? That’s the question. In February 2005 Maria Korp was found unconscious in the boot of her car near the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance. 34
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Her husband Joe and his girlfriend Tania Herman were subsequently charged with her attempted murder. Maria had been strangled in her garage. Unfortunately for whoever was responsible, Maria wasn’t dead when she was dumped in the boot.This macabre attempted murder proved one thing: it takes an experienced killer to know whether their victim is dead when strangulation has been the method of execution. With his wife now certainly dead, Ramage moved to his next challenge. Cool as a cucumber he walked inside, grabbed a couple of tea towels and a little red bucket and began wiping away his wife’s blood. It was now 12.45 pm. All that Stephen Lake could find the next day were three tiny droplets of blood near the window in the family room and another in the garage. His wife’s blood gone, Ramage packed a change of clothes, eyed the street and waited. It was characteristically quiet in Marock Place as Debbie parked her Volvo in the garage. She wondered momentarily whether she should walk across the court and say hello, just as she’d done when the Ramages moved in eight years earlier. As jaundiced as her view of Ramage was, it would have been hard for her to imagine the mayhem inside her neighbour’s house at that moment. Six weeks earlier she’d seen the top of the removalist’s van above the line of her front fence as Julie shifted her possessions from the house. She knew James Ramage ruled the roost and that he wouldn’t react calmly to his wife leaving him. She recalled the time Julie went to a school function with red hair only to revert to her mousy blonde the next day. Ramage had hit the roof.‘I’m a businessman. I can’t be seen with a wife looking like a tart,’ he told Julie. Although she thought him overbearing, it had never crossed Debbie’s mind that he’d hurt his wife like this. Once Debbie had parked her car in the garage and disappeared into her neat, modern house across the court, Ramage A PERFECT DAY
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walked to his wife’s Mini, opened the door and pushed back the seat. As he shut the door a tiny droplet of blood was deposited on the armrest. It takes only a couple of minutes to drive from Marock Place to Colombo’s pizza restaurant in Whitehorse Road, Balwyn. It was here, in a parking bay alongside the back door of the restaurant, that he would leave Julie’s car.When the coast was clear he calmly stepped from the car and hurried home across Balwyn Park. At around 1.05 pm he hopped into his Jaguar and reversed into the garage where his wife’s body lay. Debbie Webb didn’t see him walk into the court or drive his Jaguar into the garage. Neither did the eagle-eyed Harry Testro at number 1 nor Max and Betty Muir at number 3. No one saw or heard a thing.Testro has lived at the entrance to the street for thirty-two years.A considered man who doesn’t appear opinionated or likely to thrive on gossip, Harry has seen plenty in Marock Place. ‘Julie was lovely, but he was an angry man, and arrogant as well.’ An angry man, I thought? So too did I ponder what Harry meant when he said it was ‘all very clever and premeditated’. So, was Ramage all bad? On one occasion he’d sent Matthew across to clean the leaves from Harry’s roof gutters. ‘Don’t pay them.They need to learn to help people without getting paid,’ Ramage had told his neighbour. Harry was impressed. ‘What’s he doing moving his car into the garage in the middle of the day?’ Harry might have thought if he’d walked into the street. Hidden from his gaze, Ramage looked down on his wife and opened the boot of his 1998 Jaguar. By now, Julie’s left eye socket was blue and there was blood over her face. It was just as she looked on 18 February 1991, the day he slammed his head into her face. So traumatised was his wife, Ramage was forced to ring Dr Jillian Webster and have her visit the house. She would record that Julie was ‘quite shaken by the episode’ and was suffering a broken nose and a laceration that needed plastic surgery. 36
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The doctor recommended they visit a psychotherapist.After one visit Ramage convinced his wife it would never happen again, and that was the end of the matter.Twelve years later and only a few blocks away, he finished what he’d started that night. We’ve all seen pictures of a distressed husband in a war-torn country wrapping his arms around a loved one in a sea of wailing. And haven’t we all prayed that it would never be our lot? James Ramage could have been any distraught husband as he reached down and lifted Julie Ramage’s body from the ground. If his son had walked in to the garage, Ramage might have been a loving father who’d returned home to find his wife murdered by some evil stranger. ‘Quick, call the police. Mum’s in trouble,’ he might have said, wiping a tear from his eye. Today, Ramage wasn’t a sad or grieving husband.The absence of a tear in those barren green eyes proved that. He’d killed someone he hated, not the woman he loved. If he’d been able to order a servant to dispose of the body he would have done so. Instead, her head sat on his shoulders, so close he could have kissed her lips and run his hands across that engaging face and through her thick blonde hair. Now she was a dead weight and a burden. In death, just as in life, she was yet again an inconvenience. God only knows what was he thinking as he squeezed his large frame between the rear garage door and the boot of his Jaguar, dropped his wife’s body in the boot, prodded her one last time and covered her with the valance. His wife safely secured in the boot, he walked inside and collected his change of clothes.When the family went on holidays Ramage would spend several hours meticulously packing and designating tasks for his wife. Disposing of his wife was as simple as packing for a holiday. At around 1.10 pm he drove his car out of the garage and headed towards Heidelberg.
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BUSH BURIAL
It’s a fifty-minute drive from Balwyn to the bushland off Running Creek Road in Arthurs Creek where James Ramage had decided to bury his wife. He took a direct route via Rosanna and Greensborough Roads and then drove due north along Yan Yean Road. It was while out riding here in 1984, during their first major separation, that he made a stunning promise to his wife:‘I’ll never bully you again. Please come back to me. I promise I’ll change,’ he said. It was one of only a handful of trips to the area. As coincidence would have it, he’d met Jane Ashton to discuss the marriage breakdown nearby, in Yan Yean Road, a couple of weeks before the homicide. She would forever wonder whether he surveyed the territory on his way home in preparation for the final solution. If he were to get away with his murderous attack, it would help if his wife were found in the vicinity of the grounds where she rode. In his wildest dreams, Ramage imagined Laurence Webb as the prime suspect – his wife dead and Webb 38
charged with murder. That would have been the perfect Hollywood ending to the problems they’d created. Once his escape from Balwyn was completed, Ramage made a series of phone calls. At 1.19 pm the East Ivanhoe tower recorded him ringing a mobile number, 0438 559 141.The call took twenty seconds.There was no way the owner of the phone could take the call. Julie Ramage was well and truly dead, and her phone was buried in her Oroton handbag in the boot of the car. James Ramage didn’t know what he might have said if she’d answered the phone and asked where he was taking her.Would he have apologised and asked her forgiveness? Or might he have said, ‘Serves you right for forcing me to lose self-control, you slut’? Exactly one minute after ringing Julie’s mobile he rang her direct line at Eco-d. The call lasted two seconds, with Ramage hanging up before the call went to voice mail. It was the last call he would make until after he buried his wife. Around 2 pm he brought his luxury car to a halt at the gate to an isolated track off Running Creek Road. The locals call it Stolen Car Gully. After opening the gate, he drove 134 metres along the rough bush track past a small dank pond alive with insects. Here the track turns to the left, leaving a clearing to the right, out of sight from the road. With his Jaguar hidden from view he stepped seven metres in an easterly direction and pressed his spade into the soft earth. For a bloke whose only physical exercise was a gentle game of touch rugby and cycling, it was hard work.‘I’d call it an accountant’s grave,’ said one cop. By the time he’d excavated a hole that was one and a half metres in diameter by half a metre deep, his businessman’s body was spent. This would be his wife’s grave. Digging a grave ‘was stupid’, he would later tell his police interrogators. Is that what he really thought as he lifted his wife from the boot of the car, carried her across the bracken and threw her into BUSH BURIAL
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the pit? Did ‘stupid’ explain why he’d crudely dragged her by the feet from the house rather than carrying her or lifting her by the arms? ‘I hated myself,’ he said to the police. Did this brutality speak of a man who was sorry? To squeeze her into the hole it was necessary for him to turn his wife on her side and bend her legs. As a memento of their time together, Ramage left the bloodied blue jumper he’d worn to the Yan Yean meeting with Jane alongside his wife’s battered head. Near her right wrist was the leather jacket she’d removed when she arrived at the house. His wife dispensed with, Ramage then hurriedly dug a small hole in which he buried the bloodied tea towels, valance, the striped shirt and chino trousers he’d worn at lunch, and his black shoes and watch. And there too was the piece of blue rope. For a brief moment he stood semi-naked, like Adam in the Garden of Eden after the fall.There was, however, a major difference. In keeping with the Scottish Protestantism of his ancestors, he believed the killing of his wife was not his fault. It was really God’s work. It was preordained. Later he would explain exactly what he meant. Even as he dumped her expensive Oroton handbag in the hole, changed his clothes and pulled on his Blundstones, he didn’t believe he’d done anything wrong. It was stupid and he hated himself, he would say, but he never said he was sorry.The word ‘sorry’ had no place in his life. The police didn’t ask him why he dug two holes or whether they might have been dug the day before. Nor did they ask him why the shovel was the only item he brought home. Might the holes have been dug the day before? Only the killer knows the answer to those questions. With a change of clothes he was ready for the next leg of the journey.At 2.35 pm he rang the receptionist at Acropolis Marble and Granite, Despina Panagakis, to say he was in Balwyn and would be in Reservoir to look at a granite benchtop around 40
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3 pm. At 9.30 am he’d rung Despina to say he wouldn’t be able to make it to the factory.Was the nine-thirty call proof that the killing of his wife had never entered his head until the alleged argument in the kitchen? Maybe he fancied his chances of enticing Julie into his brass bed for an afternoon of wild sex. Or was it all about deception? Was his call to Despina a way of hiding some premeditation of the Arthurs Creek solution? Was he pondering the possibility of killing Julie and dumping her in a bush grave, and that’s why he created this illusion? At around 3 pm he pulled into the Diamond Creek petrol station. Here he spent $56 on petrol using his NationalVisa Gold credit card. It left him with a balance of $28 000. Then, as if he was washing away his sins, he sat in the driver’s seat as his green Jaguar was submerged in a swirl of car wash soap. Was there method in Ramage’s madness? Purchasing petrol in the vicinity of his wife’s makeshift grave was either madness or a stroke of genius. Might it have proved that he was looking for her? Maybe! Jane Ashton still wonders whether a man with no experience in manual work could begin digging two holes at Arthurs Creek at 2 pm and be over in Reservoir by three-thirty in the afternoon. Were the holes already partially dug? Had he imagined killing another person, maybe Laurence Webb, and dumping him in the second hole? Or are these the fanciful thoughts of a grieving and vindictive sister? Whatever the truth, Ramage must have set a frenetic pace. He was in Bundoora when he rang his business partner Tony Brady at 3.17 pm to say he’d be away for the rest of the day. At 3.28 pm he again rang Acropolis Marble, this time to tell Despina he was stuck in traffic on the Broadway, a well-known thoroughfare only a few minutes away. ‘It was weird,’ she said, that he would ring again when he was only a few minutes away and there’d been no exact time for him to be at the factory. BUSH BURIAL
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Eventually she’d realise that it was all about alibi and that Ramage was methodically trying to build a story that might save him from being accused of murdering his wife. At reception she noticed he was ‘fidgety with his hands’. Was he thinking about what to say to the manager, Lena Tzimas-Koroi, should she offer an outstretched hand and ask how he’d bruised his right hand? Although she didn’t notice his hand she did recall that he’d removed his Blundstones to dislodge a thistle and was wearing blue work socks. He’d been in a hurry at Stolen Car Gully. For all his haste at the gravesite he was unfazed as he confirmed the multicoloured green granite for his kitchen. He was, said Lena ‘well mannered, polite and calm’. Just as Ramage was never asked to explain exactly how he found Stolen Car Gully, so he never clarified the route he took back to Balwyn. The easiest way home was to follow Malua Street into Newlands Road and head south. This route would have taken him past the Coburg Drive-In and within 100 metres of the house where I’d grown up. In the distance he would have seen the northern wall of the old Pentridge Prison. Until it closed in 1999, Pentridge had been home to some famous murderers, some of them wife killers like Peter Keogh, who murdered my sister Vicki. For men who couldn’t fight or wield a weapon, it was a hellhole. What thoughts must have crossed Ramage’s mind as he turned left at Murray Road and, under the shadow of those grim bluestone walls, drove towards Fitzroy and the entrance to the Eastern Freeway? It was close to 4.30 pm when James Ramage’s Jaguar cruised into the driveway at Marock Place.With Matt not due home till after 6 pm he had time to do a little spot-cleaning, throwing his clothes in the washer and running the bath before addressing a matter that had concerned him for some time. Some months earlier Julie’s phone had rung while she was in the shower. He 42
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rummaged in her handbag to find the phone but missed the call, so he pressed the redial button. It was her lover, Davey. Ramage was suspicious. When he grilled his wife she said it must have been the boyfriend of her colleague Jo McLean from Eco-d. It was one of several near misses. On another occasion she’d accidentally dialled her husband’s mobile number during an outing with her lover and was petrified that her husband might have heard their conversation. As good friends do, Gilda Pekin and Jo McLean agreed to cover for her. Worried about what might eventually happen, Gilda told her she should leave the marriage. Thirty-four-year-old Jo McLean is yet another of the goodlooking blondes who formed Julie’s network of friends and acquaintances. She knew her way around the nightspots. A few weeks after the separation she’d taken a very nervous Mrs Ramage to the Botanical Hotel in SouthYarra.While Jo spent the evening with a high-profile AFL footballer, Julie was left chatting with a businessman from Sydney. Ramage’s defence counsel Philip Dunn would pounce upon the meeting when the time arose. Whatever his failings, Ramage was not a fool. He wasn’t fond of Julie mixing with women who frequented bars and liked men. He knew they were hiding things from him. As the days passed his resentment of them would only increase. In the aftermath of the killing he thought of them as he prepared his defence. In Philip Dunn’s monologue, Julie’s girlfriends would become the weak link. Desperate to build a case against the charge of murdering his wife and to satisfy his doubts, Ramage had rifled his wife’s phone, before burying it in the hole at Arthurs Creek. At 5.40 pm, as he waited for his son, he rang the mobile number he’d found under the name Davey. For whatever reason, he didn’t wait long enough for Julie’s former lover to answer the phone. ‘Unfaithful slut,’ he thought as he ended the call. A few minutes BUSH BURIAL
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later Samantha Ramage appeared outside Lauriston Girls’ School. The weather had turned nasty and it was cold and windy in Huntingtower Road,Armadale. Her mother was due to pick her up at 5.45 pm and she was never late.When Samantha rang her mother’s mobile it went to message bank. After a short wait she rang her boyfriend then caught the tram to the flat in Toorak. While his daughter fretted about her mother, the killer had other things on his mind. At 6.15 pm his son Matthew arrived home from football training. Ramage, who had good reason to be watching events in the court, greeted him at the front door. There was nothing out of the ordinary in his father’s manner or disposition.‘I’ll take you to dinner at Colombo’s,’ he told his son. ‘I’ll have a bath first,’ he replied. Like his father, Matthew Ramage was fond of a bath. It was a remnant of the Englishness that James secretly believed made him superior to the colonials. At six thirty-five Ramage was back in the Jaguar, this time without his wife’s battered body in the boot. It felt almost normal and he was proud to have his tall, intelligent son alongside him. Bill Kurban emigrated from Lebanon in 1971 and has been the owner of Colombo’s for twenty years. Laconic with a dry sense of humour, Kurban oversees his restaurant like a good publican runs a hotel. Those patrons who remember the US TV detective Colombo are quick to point out the striking resemblance. He has an amusing grasp of the character of his clientele and, like most Lebanese, loves football. ‘Why didn’t you play for Carlton?’ he quipped when I visited his restaurant looking for clues. Ramage had been a customer at the restaurant since he moved to Marock Place, and Bill knew him well. Ramage usually parked in the rear car park and came in via the back entrance. On the night of Julie’s death he remembered Ramage 44
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walking through the front door at 6.35 pm with his son and taking up a spot at table 40. Although Ramage was his usual serious self as he ate his veal parmigiana and sipped a glass of red, Bill noticed the somewhat intense nature of the conversation. He didn’t hear Ramage step his son through his immediate challenges and prioritise their respective aims and objectives. Nor did he hear Ramage tell the young Matthew he was everything he could have wanted in a son and that his most pressing personal goal was to get over the break-up with his mother. It was close to 7.30 pm when they finished and Ramage walked to the counter to sign for the $35 meal. ‘Where’s your wife?’ asked Bill. ‘She’s away for a few days,’ replied Ramage. Bill’s not sure whether Matthew heard that final comment. If he did he never made mention of it in his police statement. What tale might Ramage have spun if Bill had seen his wife’s car parked outside the back door? ‘How could you eat a meal after murdering your wife?’ Bill said to me with a shake of his head.Whether this was Ramage’s version of the Last Supper and an opportunity to say goodbye to his son, or an act of callous insensitivity, depends on which camp you’re in. To Jane Ashton it confirmed what she’d always thought. He was a man without a heart.To the men who would stick with him it was the action of a sad and lonely man savouring his last moments of freedom. Several times during the evening he would tell his son,‘I love you lots.’ As they drove back in the Jaguar, James Ramage appeared not to have a care in the world. In the passing of a suburban afternoon he’d killed the boy’s mother, dumped her in a pit like a piece of garden refuse and, while sipping a glass of red over dinner, compared how he and his son had scored on their aims and BUSH BURIAL
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objectives for the week. The restoration of his pride was surely worth a few points on any evaluation sheet. Having reinstated his authority over 5 Marock Place, Ramage continued with his red wine and contemplated his next move. Elsewhere, people who knew Julie were beginning to panic. ‘Have you seen your mum?’ asked Laurence Webb when Samantha answered the phone around 7.30 pm. Once he explained that he’d been ringing her all day she knew there was trouble afoot. Only ten minutes earlier she’d rung her father who’d said, ‘She’s probably off with her boyfriend, Laurence. If she doesn’t come home in an hour, give me a call.’ It was a callous lie to a daughter who would soon be hysterical about her mother’s disappearance.To convince everyone of the righteousness of his actions Ramage had chosen to emphasise her alleged wrongdoings.
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BAD TIDINGS IN RESEARCH
In the peaceful village of Research, just south of Kinglake National Park and the Hurstbridge Adult Riding Club, friends were arriving at Jane Ashton’s house for a committee meeting. It should have been a bright and bubbly night, and would have been, but for the phone call. ‘Hello, Jane Ashton speaking,’ said Julie’s twin. ‘Laurence here, Jane,’ he said, his well-modulated English accent disguising his anxiety. ‘Laurence, how are you?’ ‘Sorry to bother you, Jane. I’ve been speaking with Samantha at Julie’s flat. Julie was supposed to pick her from up from school before six and no one’s seen her. Felicity Holding says Julie didn’t return to Eco-d for a meeting after going out for lunch. I’ve rung Julie on the hour since twelve-thirty and she’s not answering,’ said Webb. Smitten by his new love,Webb was hoping Jane might soothe his fears. She had a different view. ‘Julie’s missing. My sister is dead. He’s killed her,’ she 47
screeched as she dialled Felicity’s mobile number. ‘Is there any news on Julie?’ asked Jane. ‘I’m at Julie’s flat with Samantha and I’ve got Jamie on the other line,’ she replied. ‘Jamie!’ ‘Yes, he thinks Julie might have had a car accident. She left the house at 2 pm. I’m taking Sam back to my place and he says he’ll pick her up there.’ ‘Felicity, don’t let him near her. Don’t let him near her. Say she’s sick. Say anything, but don’t let him take her. I’ll have to go, but please don’t let her go anywhere.’ ‘Liar, bloody liar, he’s killed my sister,’ thought Jane as she put the phone down. It was now 7.50 pm and no one had seen Julie since she left Eco-d for lunch. As much as she agreed to follow Felicity’s advice and ring Missing Persons, Jane Ashton knew it was pointless and ridiculous. Julie wasn’t missing. Her husband had hurt her. ‘Find Jamie and we’ll find Julie,’ she said. Against her better judgment and the weight of evidence she tried to convince herself her twin might still be alive. Hurt and maybe battered, but still alive. The animosity and the fear that fired Samantha’s ‘no, no, no’ when her father had initially said he’d pick her up from her mother’s flat convinced Ramage the game was up. In his police interview he would say, ‘I had a quick meal and then Sam rang up worried about where Julie was and that’s when I thought, I’ll go and see Dyson.’ It was a lie. Ramage had only one goal, to save his skin: ‘Dyson’ was barrister Dyson Hore-Lacy.The killer wasn’t worried about his daughter. She was a mere fifteen years of age, yet he’d left her waiting at school for her mother and knew she’d be panic-stricken. Not once did he try to contact her. And when she rang all he talked about was rowing and trivia. Samantha Ramage knew about her father’s violence. Not 48
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only had her mother told her about it, she’d experienced it herself.The day he backhanded her leaving her with a black eye was enough for her to know he was dangerous. She knew he’d done something to her mother. Lorna Cleary was only fifty-four years of age when she picked up the phone at eight-fifteen on the morning of 26 August 1987 and heard the words ‘Peter Keogh’s stabbed Vicki, you’d better come quickly.’ In her dreams the night before, my mum had seen a vision of a coffin. As much as she searched, Mum couldn’t identify the face or the body. Once she heard those words, it all made sense.The news that a man has killed the woman in his life is never really a surprise to those who’ve watched the relationship collapse. Lorna Cleary, Samantha Ramage and Jane Ashton had seen it coming but were incapable of stopping it. Jane Ashton wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Ramage had chillingly told Felicity Holding, ‘You don’t know what’s been happening over the past month.’ ‘I don’t care about that. I’ve got a hysterical girl here and you need to do something about it,’ the uncompromising Felicity had told him. While his frantic daughter pleaded with Felicity to reassure her that ‘Daddy wouldn’t hurt Mummy’, the killer plotted a course and filled his head with hatred for his wife.As he did, Jane dialled the 000 police emergency line and explained that her sister was missing. It was the first of a stream of phone calls in a night of despair. Highly organised like Julie and rarely known to cry in public, Jane had work to do. She and her friends, who’d soon be joined by Webb, began ringing hospitals for word that Julie might be lying injured in an emergency ward. At the same time others set off for Ramage’s factory in Collingwood and the beach house near Lorne. Jane knew her sister would not be found alive. BAD TIDINGS IN RESEARCH
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Around 8 pm the man Jane had already fingered for killing her sister put the phone back on its receiver, lifted the crystal glass to his lips, took a sip and placed it on the table. ‘I’m leaving now. I love you lots. I’ll see you soon,’ he said to his son, squeezing the cork into the half-empty bottle of wine and grabbing his keys. Despite his apparent calm, the killer knew things were afoot and that he needed help. His daughter had seen enough to suspect he’d killed her mum.And if she suspected this then it was only a matter of time. Out of earshot, he quickly dialled the mobile phone of Dyson Hore-Lacy. Ramage was a social climber who liked to brag about wellknown people in his circle. So often did he speak about the barrister, many people concluded that they were best of mates. Hore-Lacy says they were only acquaintances. Whatever the depth of their friendship, it was a frenetic conversation. His version is that Ramage said he needed professional help and that when he asked whether it might wait until the morning Ramage gave an emphatic ‘no’. ‘Can you come round?’ said Hore-Lacy. ‘I’d rather meet somewhere,’ replied Ramage. It was agreed they’d meet at the Harp Hotel, which was just up the road from where the barrister was having dinner with his female companion. ‘See you shortly, in the gaming room,’ said Ramage.The eminent silk will tell you a criminal barrister is never really shocked by the trouble that can engulf people. He says Ramage didn’t elaborate on what had happened until they met. Given the phone call lasted one minute and twenty-one seconds, I think the killer must have done more than say, ‘Can we meet to discuss a problem?’ As Ramage backed his car out of the drive he half expected to see a police car, sirens wailing, roar into the court. ‘Must get 50
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away, she’s on to me,’ he thought as he drove down Boston Road and turned into Mont Albert Road. Around 8.45 pm Felicity Holding rang Jane to say Ramage hadn’t turned up at her house to collect Sam and that he’d been gone from Marock Place since 8 pm.‘He’s probably trying to leave the country,’ thought Jane as she banged out her sister’s phone number at Marock Place. ‘Hello, Matt, it’s Jane here.Your dad hasn’t picked Sam up. Can you check the filing cabinet and see if his passport is still in the house,’ she said. Confused by the rapidly unfolding events, the boy did as he was told. ‘It’s still there,’ he said upon his return. What a disaster, she thought. When constables Leanne Booth and Mick McGill arrived at Jane’s home at 8 pm her version of events was straightforward. ‘He’s strangled her and put her in the boot. I know it. He’s been violent before. Just go and find him,’ she pleaded with the two young officers, when they placed a Missing Persons form on the table. ‘We have to search the house and have you complete this form,’ they said. If she’d had her way there’d have been a police car blocking Ramage’s retreat. Instead, Ramage had made his escape. ‘Search the house? We’ve got ten acres. Have you got a torch?’ she replied, her frustration growing.When they asked her what clothes Julie had been wearing her anger was almost uncontrollable. ‘I don’t know. I’ll ring and find out.’ While the police rummaged around in Jane’s house the phones ran hot. By 8.16 pm they’d completed their report and established that Julie Ramage, bookkeeper and mother, was now officially a missing person.A few kilometres away a stony silence, interrupted only by the steady fall of rain, had enveloped the track where Julie lay. Like a cat with a dead rat, Ramage had left his wife’s body on her sister’s doorstep.An act of revenge against the woman he believed had been complicit in his humiliation, it BAD TIDINGS IN RESEARCH
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was the final insult and an affirmation of his ultimate power. If his wife loved the area so much she could be buried there. Horse riding in Hurstbridge had offered Julie the freedom she craved. What better way of crushing that freedom than burying her in the place where she had frolicked with her boyfriend? Sometime after 8 pm, Dyson Hore-Lacy walked into the Harp Hotel in Kew. A man with a distinctive presence and an alluring voice, he is known as a fearless defender of human rights. In 1994 he’d represented serial woman killer Paul Denyer in the appeal court. At the Victorian coronial hearing into the 1989 police shooting of Gary Abdullah in inner suburban Carlton, he delivered a withering attack on the police. No theatre, just hard nosed indignation and logic. ‘Would Gary Abdullah really point a toy pistol at his police captors?’ Dyson had asked rhetorically.‘No, he was shot like a dog on a leash,’ he said. Abdullah had been accused of driving the getaway car after the murder of two young policemen in South Yarra in 1988. Dyson’s accusations made him no friends in a police force bent on revenge. He knew a victim when he saw one. At the Harp Hotel he was in no position to take the high moral ground.The man he’d met as a Deepdene Primary School parent was now a killer. Hore-Lacy says that after he told Ramage his friendship with Julie precluded him from acting as his counsel, he rang barrister Steven Pica and some time later moved to another table to avoid any conflict of interest. If Ramage chose not to take the witness stand and be cross-examined at trial the only version of the alledged murder available to the crown prosecutor was his police interview. The next three hours were spent ensuring that his interview would not be incriminating. By the end of the night Ramage knew exactly what to say once the cameras were activated at the Homicide offices. 52
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A busy looking man with a wave of brushed back, black hair, Pica looks like he’s stepped from the set of West Side Story or Grease. He is no stranger to the sins of the rich and famous. Only two months earlier Pica had sat opposite Michael Tovey QC in Court 2 of the Melbourne Supreme Court delivering snippets of information for the defence.Their client was Matthew Wales, the killer in what would become known as the Wales-King ‘society murders’. Representing Matthew’s wife, Maritza, in court was Philip Dunn QC. Maritza Wales, who found out about the murders on the night they were committed, had been charged with perverting the course of justice. Soon Pica and Dunn would be reacquainted, this time as part of the defence of James Ramage. While the killer built then rehearsed his case at the pub, it was business as usual across the road in the Boroondara police station. Constables Pickett and Lowe were driving the streets of Kew while Constable Peios manned the front counter. It wasn’t until close to midnight that Lowe and Pickett, unaware that Ramage was on his way to Boroondara police station, received instructions to go to Marock Place. What a difference it might have made if they’d happened upon Ramage before Pica got to him.Would he have dispensed with the lies and simply told the truth? And what was the truth? That after some discussion, his wife repeated what he already knew, that she wasn’t coming back, and at 12.34 pm she said,‘I must go, James, I have a meeting at work’? At 11.40 pm, Ramage and Pica left the Harp Hotel and walked across the road to the Boroondara Police Station at 34 Harp Road in Kew. As they did, Ramage pointed to his Jaguar, parked about 100 metres down the road. Unbeknown to the killer, a further 100 metres beyond his car was a little weatherboard house with a similar tale of murder. Here on the night of BAD TIDINGS IN RESEARCH
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19 November 1987, Kevin Crowe shot dead his estranged wife Christine Boyce, in front of her two young children. She was only twenty-eight years old. At trial Crowe would be granted a defence of provocation and be found guilty of manslaughter. A little further up Harp Road is the Life Development Centre. The centre specialises in the treatment of all manner of psychological ailments, including those that allegedly cause men to kill. On the Friday before the killing, on the advice of Rob Moodie, Ramage visited the centre looking for help. It was his fifth visit to a marriage counsellor since his wife had left him. After rating his anxiety level at ten out of ten he went on to tell director Pauline McKinnon he would never again hit his wife. As with so much Ramage had said over the previous month, it would turn out to be a lie. He was due back on Tuesday for a meditation session. After three hours with Pica at the Harp Hotel, Ramage was prepared for the ordeal that lay ahead. He now knew that the only way out of the predicament was to plead provocation.That meant painting a picture of victimhood and, when the time arose, convincing a jury that the dead woman had insulted his sexual prowess and his dignity. Ramage was ready to tell that story. ‘My name is Stephen Pica. I’m a solicitor. I’m here with my client who wants to hand himself in for a homicide,’ Pica told Constable Jimmy Peios.The official story of the murder of Julie Ramage had begun. Constable Peios asked Ramage and Pica to take a seat while he sought assistance in the form of a superior officer.At the same time, Sergeant Paul O’Connell was making his way to Marock Place. Stationed at Doncaster, O’Connell had received a call at 10.45 pm from Acting Sergeant Carl Stella at Eltham police station in relation to a missing person. He soon knew that the 54
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woman was Julie Ramage and would record that there was a history of ‘violence between the missing person and her husband’. It was a curious way of describing Ramage’s violence towards his wife. It was also recorded that the woman’s ‘estranged husband, James Ramage, drove a Silver/green Jaguar registration RJG 414’. More than three hours had passed since Jane Ashton had notified police her sister was missing and told them she was sure Ramage had ‘strangled her and put her in the boot of his car’. In the hours that followed, his car sat like a beacon in sight of the Boroondara police station, until at midnight it was wrapped in crime scene tape. After a rendezvous with Constables Lowe and Pickett at the corner of Boston and Mont Albert Roads, Sergeant O’Connell pulled up at 5 Marock Place. In the driveway was Gilda Pekin’s silver Honda. It had been a bad night for Julie’s best friend. She’d tried unsuccessfully to contact Julie during the day and at 8 pm had taken a call from a clearly distressed Samantha. It set the alarm bells ringing.All she could think about was what he might have done and whether her revelation a week earlier about Laurence Webb had backfired.When Jane rang at 9 pm and said ‘Jamie’s gone missing, can you go round to Marock Place to look after Matthew?’ she feared the worst. Gilda was so frightened she took her son with her. Gilda and Julie had first met in 1985 at the health centre in Cherry Road, Balwyn. Julie was impressed that her friend had studied law as a mature age student and would often talk with her about engaging in further studies. A sometimes pessimistic woman with a quietly understated strength of character, she was genuinely scared of the physically imposing and hot-headed Ramage. She’d heard all about his violence and intimate details of Julie’s sex life. She told Julie that what her husband demanded in bed amounted to rape and she should leave. Her friend BAD TIDINGS IN RESEARCH
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agreed, but shrugged her shoulders as if it was her lot in life. While Ramage rehearsed his defence a few blocks away at the Harp, Gilda Pekin sat in the lounge room and remembered the dinner parties with James at the head of the table, and the same men dominating the conversation; she saw it so vividly. And as the time passed her imagination only became more florid. On the family room floor she’d seen stains she thought looked very much like blood. No amount of corporate legal training would have fortified her had the confident and imposing Ramage arrived at the door. She was nervous and worried. It was 11.40 pm when the phone rang. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can I speak with Matt?’ was the dismissive reply. There was nothing unusual about James Ramage’s perfunctory demand, and Gilda was not so brazen as to ask any questions. Women quickly learnt their place in Ramage’s world. And it was to the apple of his eye, son Matthew, not some feminist interloper, that he’d confirm what had happened. In what Matthew described as a stuttering tone, his father said he was ‘on the way to the police station and probably won’t be home tonight’, to which his son replied, ‘Where’s Mum?’ ‘That’s why I’m going to the police station now. Make sure you tell your sister I am going to the police station and that I love her lots. I’ve got to go, but I love you lots,’ were his father’s last words. It was a puzzling conversation. It seems strange that he didn’t press his father to elaborate on why he wouldn’t be home and where his mum might be. No sooner had Gilda rung Jane with the news about Ramage than Sergeant O’Connell was at the door of 5 Marock Place. Within a few minutes of his arrival at the house the sergeant received a phone call from Boroondara police station informing him that James Ramage had ‘surrendered himself ’ and admitted 56
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to killing his wife. Julie had been dead nearly twelve hours. In the same conversation O’Connell learned, through Pica, that Julie had been killed in the family room and was ‘buried in the Kinglake area’, a vast tract of bushland northeast of Melbourne. ‘He can show you where but he doesn’t know how to tell you how to get there,’ said Pica, when asked the exact location of the burial. When Sergeant O’Connell delivered the news of his mother’s death to Matthew, he stared into the abyss then plunged his face into his hands. In response to O’Connell’s request for a statement he simply replied, ‘OK, OK.’ It wasn’t until 4.45 am on Tuesday morning that Matthew Ramage gave his account of the previous day’s activities to the police. Notwithstanding his tiredness and the trauma he’d undergone, his police statement raised so many questions. Not once did he make a specific or even passing reference to his mother’s visit to the house. If it was so important for Julie to like the renovations and for her son to know she did, why didn’t James talk about it with his son? It’s hard to believe that when Matthew arrived home he didn’t ask his dad about the lunchtime rendezvous – after all, he knew she was coming to the house. If Julie had belittled Ramage at lunch then surely he’d have told his son during the dinner at Colombo’s. It might even have been the time to say he’d killed Julie.Was it because it was a fabrication that Ramage didn’t tell his son Julie had ridiculed him and the renovations? At the time of the dinner Ramage could hardly have known that such a story might form the basis of a provocation defence. Surely he only learnt about the mysterious laws of provocation when he met Hore-Lacy and Pica? Although the defence team had sought sympathy for their client by claiming he’d wanted to plead guilty, no such sympathy was warranted. Julie had done nothing to hurt him except say she wasn’t coming back. Instinct and common sense told him BAD TIDINGS IN RESEARCH
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that the only way he could escape a murder charge was by burying her body and covering up the killing. Ramage’s so-called interest in pleading guilty didn’t place him in a good light. It was an admission that he’d killed his wife in cold blood. Prior to Matthew Ramage making his statement Gilda Pekin offered him some well-meaning but strange advice.‘Nothing will bring your mother back, but you don’t need to put your dad in a bad light,’ she told him. Coming from a woman who’d lost her best friend to a man for whom she had little regard and knew to have been violent to Julie, it was very strange. Nevertheless it might explain why Matthew appears to have excised his mother from his statement. Even at 7.20 pm when he became aware that his sister was looking for their mother, he appears not to have asked his father whether she had told him where she was going. Not even the phone call in which his aunt asked him to look for his dad’s passport was recorded in his statement. Whenever the police investigate spouse murder they make every effort to record prior violence by the killer.When it came to retelling the story of his father head-butting his mother in 1991, Matthew’s response was apologetic. ‘Dad punched Mum, which resulted in her having a broken nose. I was aware that this had been sorted out and both parties regretted the situation. Dad also said that Mum said the nastiest things to him and questioned his ability.’There was no place for the word ‘sorry’ in Matthew’s account of his father’s wrongdoings. Sadly, Julie’s son had become a victim of his father’s selfish manipulation. It was something that would trouble Julie’s friends and family. No matter what Ramage said to his son that night, there was one irrefutable fact. Julie Ramage was officially dead and Marock Place was now a crime scene. No one in the street had ever expected to see blue and white police tape across a neighbour’s front yard. But there it was, running from above the little white 58
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letterbox, around the garbage bin to the western fence.At 1.40 am, the man responsible for putting Marock Place on the map was escorted to the toilet then taken to an interview room in the homicide offices in St Kilda Road.‘Where are my children?’ asked an otherwise emotionless Ramage. After some preliminary interviews and a further wait while the police went about their business, Ramage agreed to show them where he’d buried his wife. At 2.50 am, Detective Senior Constable Darren Wiseman handed Ramage a Melways street directory. In the top right hand corner was Arthurs Creek Road and an arrow with directions to Running Creek Road, on the edge of the Kinglake National Park. On the same page was the location of the restaurant in Yan Yean Driving Range where he’d met Jane Ashton a few weeks earlier, and where Julie used to have coffee with Davey. It took Wiseman, Detective Senior Sergeant Jeff Maher and Detective Senior Constable Mark McCann forty-two minutes to reach the 200-acre bushland property, Majella. They arrived there at 3.42 am. Ramage didn’t tell his captors the property next door belonged to Julie’s good friend Louise Barry. Louise had enticed her to begin jumping at the Hurstbridge Adult Riding Club. I met Louise at the gravesite during the trial and heard all about Julie’s courage and determination on a horse and how she’d once become almost hysterical when her car broke down and she feared she’d be late home. Louise Barry suffers from MS and has battled it for years.These days there’s a special trophy on her mantelpiece. Louise was the first recipient of the Julie Ramage Memorial Award for best club member. Once inside the entrance to the bushland property the police were led to the clearing where Ramage had parked his Jaguar. The property is so large and isolated, Julie’s body might have lain there for years. From the clearing, Ramage pointed to a green sapling in a sea of bracken. ‘That’s where I buried her,’ he said. BAD TIDINGS IN RESEARCH
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At no point did he mention anything about a second hole. Nor did he break down and cry. It was now close to 4 am on the morning of Tuesday 22 July. Robert Ellks is the sergeant in charge of the Kinglake police station and was rostered on duty from midnight on Monday night. At 3.30 am he answered his mobile and was requested to attend Running Creek Road. Here he met Detective Senior Sergeant Maher, who explained that a woman was in a rough grave up the track.At 4.28 am Ellks took up a post alongside the gate and began the process of filling in his crime scene log. At 4.30 am, after nearly an hour at the burial site, Ramage was bundled into the police car and driven back to Boroondara police station, where he was placed in a cell. From 5 am until he was roused at just after 10 am, he acquired his first real taste of prison life. He would later say he didn’t get much sleep. From here he was taken to the Homicide offices in St Kilda Road and led to an interview room. At 11.33 am on Tuesday 22 July the video camera was activated and Ramage gave his first account of what had happened almost twenty-four hours earlier. ‘I was totally devastated when she moved out. I didn’t understand it. The relationship was fine,’ he told Senior Constable Darren Wiseman and his partner Detective Mark McCann. From his wife snubbing him on the renovations and gesticulating a ‘wank, wank’ motion with her hands, to the final belittling words ‘sex with you would repulse me’, Ramage’s onehour confession followed the script. It was the kind of rambling story, studded with feigned remorse and memory lapses, that a defence lawyer loves. ‘I just can’t believe…and I can’t remember getting off,’ he replied, when asked if his wife fought back as he strangled her. ‘I think she held her arm up. I…I can remember hitting her and holding her neck. I can’t remember anything else.’ 60
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‘I got – yeah, I got up off the…and I couldn’t believe what I’d done, and I wandered around and then I dunno, it was plain stupid…just stupid,’ he said, when asked whether he let her go during the struggle. And why didn’t he contact anyone? ‘I just realised – stupid. I should have done something.’ And parking her car at Colombo’s restaurant? ‘I know the whole thing was just stupid…cos I knew I would be…It was just stupid.’ What about the choice of burial site? ‘I know that area a bit and just drove until I came to that spot. I knew I was gonna do something stupid…Julie rides up there and just would be, no, no reason.’ And when he got there? ‘Dug the hole and put Julie in it and then hated myself.’ When you run a careful eye over Ramage’s offerings, there’s a stench of deceit that no smartarse lawyer can hide.There’s no way that Julie Ramage would use a ‘wank, wank’ gesture with her hand on an imaginary cock. Such pranks are the work of men, not women. Equally, a woman who told everyone she feared her husband would kill her was hardly likely to say ‘sex with you would repulse me’. In any case, thirteen days earlier Ramage had told psychologist Sharon Marcus that his wife could no longer imagine having sex with him. There was no sudden revelation.The so-called sexual taunt was nothing more than a dressed-up version of what she’d already told him. She was over him and wasn’t coming back. Between 11.33 am and 12.54 pm on Tuesday 22 July Ramage was asked 403 questions. Many of the questions amount to little more than an ‘Mmm?’ with answers like ‘Yeah’, or others that run for a couple of lines. Unlike the crime shows that dominate our TV sets it’s far from an interrogation and there’s little if any BAD TIDINGS IN RESEARCH
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pressure from the police questioners.The killer rambles and the police gently seek out the information they think they need. Even when Ramage deliberately fumbled with his recollection of the killing there was little attempt by Wiseman to nail him on facts. The police had their man and he’d admitted to strangling his wife.What more did they need? Julie’s friends thought this was an open and shut case of murder. But was Detective Wiseman thinking provocation as he led the killer through his questions? I don’t think so. The prosecution would need a lot more evidence to weather the accusation that ‘promiscuous’ Julie Ramage had taunted and provoked him. Ramage was now fighting for his life and well understood what he should say to build a provocation defence. His response to Question 283 offers a snapshot of the preparation that had gone into his defence. ‘What did you do once you got there?’ asked Detective Wiseman. ‘Dug the hole and put Julie in it and then hated myself. And then drove back and all the way I was thinking I should just go and see someone…gonna go and see Dyson, who’s a family friend…and then I thought, well I’ll go back and see Matt and we went and had a quick meal and then Sam rang up worried about Julie and that’s when I thought I’ll go and see Dyson.’ Strip away the feigned confusion and the answer bristles with deceit. Dyson wasn’t a family friend. He was an eminent defence barrister. And the only reason Ramage decided to see him was because he knew that after his daughter Samantha’s emotional phone call at 7.50 pm, the game was up. A more significant act of deceit was his attempt to hide the existence of the second hole. In the police interview Ramage told Detective Wiseman ‘I dug a hole’. In fact, he dug two holes.The longer the police were in the dark about the second hole the better it was for the killer. Eventually they would have found it, but if they’d known about 62
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the second hole when they drove him to Running Creek Road, they’d have known much earlier about the rope. It wasn’t until just before midday, almost twenty-four hours after Ramage strangled his wife, that Detective Wiseman came upon the existence of the second hole.Although Ramage had earlier said he’d changed his clothes and left his bloodstained jumper ‘out there’ he’d steadfastly avoided mentioning that he’d buried the clothes in a second hole. Not until question 289 was the impasse broken.‘You said the jumper, what about your chinos and shirt, where did you take [them]?’ asked Wiseman.At this stage the detective was unaware of the import of the question. ‘That in – in another hole,’ replied Ramage. After a series of short questions regarding the location of the second hole, Wiseman then said,‘Alright, what did you put in that then? What about the towels, where did they go?’Thinking there was nothing of interest in the second hole, the detective had lost the opportunity to entice Ramage to either lie about the contents of the hole or tell the truth and mention the rope.The revelation of a second hole seemed to pass without any alarm bells going off. There is no reference in any of the police statements to someone at Homicide ringing Sergeant Ellks at Running Creek Road and asking him to search for the second hole. At 12.14 pm, approximately fifteen minutes after the detectives learnt about this second hole, the interview was suspended. It would be resumed twenty-four minutes later at 12.38 pm and conclude at 12.54 pm on Tuesday afternoon, without a single question about the rope. Presumably, by the time the interview resumed the detectives at Homicide were made aware of what was in the second hole. If they weren’t, you’d think they’d surely have held on to Ramage until the contents were known. It seems the rope wasn’t considered that important.
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AT THE GRAVESITE
On the morning of Tuesday 22 July, Stolen Car Gully was a hive of activity. Forensic expert Stephen Lake had arrived at the site of the burial at 8.30 am. Sandy haired and with a degree in applied chemistry, it was Senior Constable Lake’s role to gather anything, visible or otherwise to the naked eye, that related to this apparent murder. The sun was up and there was a shaft of light through the eucalypts that marked the spot where Ramage had covered his wife. Lake described it as ‘a pile of scrub, logs and bracken 134 metres north along the track and 7 metres in an easterly direction’. He went on to say that a ‘small portion of the deceased’s blue pants and arm were exposed from the soil covering the rest of the body’. Before the excavation began, Lake was photographed standing knee high in bracken with his left hand pointing towards the base of the tree in front of which Ramage had put his spade to work. The excavation of her body, as documented by Senior Constable Lisa Cook’s camera, is a sad and humiliating story. At 64
first we see her lying, almost peacefully, on her left side in the pit under the shadow of the sapling. She could have been a clay statuette. It’s when Cook steps forward and photographs her from the front that the true horror of what Ramage did is inescapable. With her jumper wrapped around her left wrist, her upper body naked except for a blue bra and her head tilted back, she looks almost grotesque. Her husband always knew she took her appearance seriously. The picture is a grievous insult to her dignity. Not even the gold chains around her wrist and neck and the ring in her ear could camouflage the humiliation. Julie Ramage was a pitiful sight. How could the young bride have imagined that one day she’d be found smattered with blood and clay in a hole dug by the man who pressed a ring on her finger in the Northaw Church and promised to love and honour her? Once Lake rolled her onto her right side there was no mistaking the ferocity of the attack. Although Dunn would cajole Dr Lynch into saying Ramage had used only moderate force to kill Julie, the photos spoke of savagery. It may not have been a mass grave such as those in the Balkans or Nazi Germany, but it reeked of the same hatred. So much of her blood did Ramage spill, it was matted in her hair, congealed on her back and spread over the patch of dirt where her head had been. While Lisa Cook’s camera documented the unearthing of Julie Ramage the killer waited for the question that might destroy him.‘What about the rope, James? What was the purpose of the rope you buried in the second hole?’ It was the one question for which he had no answer.When Detective Wiseman said, ‘I’ll conclude the interview. Do you agree that the time is now approximately 6 minutes to 1 pm in the afternoon by my watch?’ Ramage simply said,‘Yes.’ He might not have shown any emotion, but he must have been very relieved. AT THE GRAVESITE
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Ramage knew that if a jury genuinely suspected he’d wrapped a piece of rope around his wife’s neck and finished her off, he was in trouble.Without the rope in the picture he had a much better chance of convincing a court he was just an ordinary man out of control when he strangled her. Five minutes after the interview with Ramage ended at the Homicide offices, Stephen Lake handed Julie’s handbag to Detective Senior Constable Andrew Payne at Stolen Car Gully. It was just after 1 pm on Tuesday afternoon.The rope was then placed on a piece of brown paper with the two tea towels for Senior Constable Cook to photograph.Twenty minutes later in St Kilda Road Dr Marginean examined the killer and concluded that he was ‘alert, oriented and generally composed and that his right hand was swollen and there were a few small red abrasions over the knuckles’. Ramage said he’d acquired them rowing on Sunday. Just after 2.30 pm Detectives Wiseman and McCann drove him to the Magistrate’s Court, where he was remanded in custody to reappear in the court for a committal mention, on 25 November 2003.At the committal mention Ramage’s counsel would learn the names of the witnesses being called by the crown and be provided with their statements. Under Victorian law an accused person cannot be reinterviewed over the same offence once he has been formally charged. Ramage had made his last public utterance on the question of what he’d done to his wife.The usual legal procedural issues, including Ramage’s right to sufficient time to prepare his case, meant that his next appearance in the Magistrate’s Court would occur on Wednesday 5 May 2004. Although it was a mere formality that Ramage would be committed to stand trial for murder, it would be a long and arduous wait for the Garrett family. While Ramage was being processed at the Melbourne Remand Centre alongside Spencer Street Station, Detectives Maher and Wiseman were in discussion with forensic man Stephen Lake at 66
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Marock Place.There’s no record of what they said as they walked across the garage floor and pointed to the roll of blue rope. It wasn’t the first time Maher had investigated a ‘domestic murder’. He’d been part of the Homicide crew that arrested Robert Parsons in 1997 after the murder of his wife. Not even the bluster of Philip Dunn could convince Justice Cummins to give Parsons a provocation defence. Although Maher thought it was possible the rope had a role in the homicide, he didn’t put great store on it. In his mind Ramage had planned the murder of his wife and strangled her with his bare hands. It was an open and shut case. He couldn’t countenance the idea that the killer would be granted a provocation defence. With her mum and dad in Queensland and her husband Howard and daughter Charlotte in England, it could not have been a more catastrophic and lonely time for Jane Ashton. After ringing Gilda on Monday evening she steeled herself to talk to her parents, who were in their caravan getting ready for bed. How nice of Jane to ring for a chat, her mum thought when she heard her voice. It was around 9.30 pm and they’d spent a wonderful day at the beach. The futile question, ‘Have you heard from Julie?’ was all that was needed to break her mother’s state of calm.When Ray Garrett saw the colour drain from his wife’s face he knew it was bad tidings. Julie was missing. They knew she would never be found alive.While they sat in a caravan waiting for further updates from their daughter, the man who’d ruined their lives trawled back and forth through the story that might save him from murder. It was just after midnight when Jane rang to tell her parents the awful truth.‘I’m sorry, Dad. She’s dead.They haven’t got the body. But James has admitted killing her. Julie’s dead.’ ‘Oh no, Jane,’ said her father, age suddenly seeming to have caught up with him. AT THE GRAVESITE
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At 6 am on Tuesday 22 July, Sergeant Paul O’Connell knocked on Jane’s door in Research. She and Laurence Webb listened as O’Connell explained all that had happened.The body had been found and Jane now officially knew that a shallow grave alongside a bush track a few kilometres away had been her sister’s last resting place. Her mirror image was dead. She couldn’t believe it.As much as she’d never trusted James Ramage, Jane still found it hard to believe he could kill the mother of his children and dump her under a cover of dirt and bracken. ‘You liar.You cowardly liar. My father was right.’As the events of the last twenty-three years tumbled through her mind she remembered her dad’s words: ‘He’s no good. Only harm will come of it’. She thought of the day Julie had stepped between Ray Garrett and his son-in-law at a social gathering to stop blood being spilled, and the telephone conversations and lunchtime meetings with Ramage in the weeks before the kiling. She couldn’t get them out of her head. He was always going to kill her. It broke her heart to have to tell her husband. Howard Ashton took the news with a mixture of disbelief and fatalism. He’d never liked Jane’s brother-in-law. The son of an identical twin sister, he understood the unique bond between the women. A week after leaving Australia, Howard Ashton was back in Research with the woman he loved. Do men who kill the woman they claim to love ever think about how many lives they hurt? And why do they do it? Jane Ashton didn’t need to ask that question. She had always known what made James Ramage tick.
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DADDY’S RICH, MUMMY’S GOOD LOOKING
On Sunday 20 July 2003, the sun was shining, the temperature was around seventeen degrees and there was hardly a breath of wind in Melbourne. There was no AFL football that weekend, so the city wasn’t reverberating with the roar of wild fans at Optus Oval, the MCG and Telstra Dome. The Richmond Football Club had organised a game between the Tiger legends of yesteryear and the Allies, a collection of former footballers, me included, at the famous old Punt Road Oval. One of the Tiger legends, and a star of the 1967 and 1969 premierships, Bill Barrot, had collapsed under a barrage of chest pains. ‘I hope they’ve booked a bed at the Epworth Hospital for me,’ Billy had remarked with a laugh as we took up our positions after quarter-time. Half an hour later a heart attack went close to killing him. It was touch and go for Barrot for the next few days. Julie Ramage didn’t care too much for football. It was the last thing on her mind as she frolicked with her lover Laurence Webb in the Kinglake foothills and made erotic, uncomplicated 69
love on Sunday. Death seemed a million miles away. ‘The next forty years are going to be different and they’ll be on my terms,’ she told her friends.The next day, as Barrot fought to stay alive, Julie was driving towards Balwyn and her own demise. While the football world celebrated Barrot’s escape from potential death, a small piece appeared in Wednesday’s Herald Sun newspaper about a Balwyn businessman who’d strangled his wife and buried her body on a dirt track north-east of the city. Exactly twenty-four hours after Barrot collapsed Ramage was parking his car at the Acropolis marble factory, off Newland’s Road, Reservoir, two kilometres north of the working class neighbourhood that had been so much a part of my childhood. If Jane had chosen to ring me the day before Ramage set his trap, rather than after her sister’s death, things might have been different. From the moment Justice George Hampel granted Peter Keogh a defence of provocation, then sentenced him to three years and eleven months in gaol for the manslaughter of my sister, my attitude to these matters was changed forever. Treat every man harassing an ex-partner as a potential killer.That’s what I told Julie McAllister, four years before Julie Ramage was killed. McAllister had begun living with Keogh soon after he was released from gaol in 1991.When she kicked him out of her home in Lake Tyers in 2000 he became threatening.Ten months later he torched her home. Fearing he’d be charged with arson and face a long gaol sentence, Keogh gassed himself in his car. At least McAllister wasn’t dead. Sending killers to gaol isn’t the solution to wife murder. Stopping them before they inflict their act of humiliation is the challenge. ‘Get an intervention order and don’t let him near your sister. Don’t let him near her on any account,’ would have been my advice to Jane. In a letter written to me after the trial Jane lamented not telling her sister to take such an escape route: 70
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Don’t let him down gently. Don’t worry about the children. Don’t worry about protecting family and friends. Don’t leave a note you’ve agonized over, in a clean house, with a freezer stocked with food. Don’t go to counselling so you can get away safely. Just leave a note saying,‘Fuck off you dickhead I’ve had enough’, and then run away, as far as you can go, and never ever come back.
Although the details were sketchy, I knew Ramage would plead provocation. Outside Canterbury and Balwyn and the school communities of Scotch and Lauriston, no one was talking about Julie Ramage. A photo of the couple and a few lines in the newspaper had been enough to satisfy everyone. A man killing his wife, even on the turf of lawyers, judges and the captains of industry, was not an affront to bourgeois sensibilities.And the private school boys who made the laws weren’t running around King Street’s legal precinct expressing outrage about wife murder.A man’s home was his castle and Ramage had rights. For now it looked like yet another run-of-the-mill wife murder. Because of the need for an autopsy, Julie’s funeral couldn’t be held until ten days after her death. Jane Ashton described the wait as a nightmare. From his prison cell the killer was still pulling the strings. Although his name was never invoked James Ramage was adamant it would be a society funeral. Having assumed that it was the responsibility of the Garretts to bury Julie, the family chose Montsalvat, an Eltham reception centre that had begun its life as an artist colony. The beautiful Gothic buildings were near where she rode and it was a place her family loved. It was also synonymous with her freedom. Ramage eventually had his way and it was agreed that St John’s Church in Toorak would host the funeral and Montsalvat the wake. In his gaol cell, one week after walking into the local DADDY’S RICH, MUMMY’S GOOD LOOKING
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police station and admitting to killing his wife, James Ramage, businessman and associate of the well-heeled Canterbury set, would run a self-serving eye over his son’s funeral speech.‘Make sure you mention our happy family life and don’t forget to put a red rose on Mum’s coffin for me,’ he would tell his son. The final dinner at Colombo’s had been part of the plan to save what was left of his family. His son’s acquiescence gave every indication it had worked. There were no camera bulbs flashing and no television cameras tracing the steps of Ramage’s children and the dead woman’s friends at the church on Thursday 31 July. A crowd in excess of one thousand, mostly drawn for the same social class as the Wales-Kings of Mercer Street, descended on the church. Built in 1862, St John’s is no stranger to praise. As one Internet site puts it: St John’s is one of Australia’s most famous churches. Prominently sited in Australia’s most exclusive residential area, the imposing bluestone church building houses many unique features, which include a wealth of splendid wood and stone carvings, impressive memorial stained glass windows, and the acclaimed pipe organ.The organ was built by the distinguished English organ building firm of William Hill & Son in 1913…The organ was given to St John’s by the Connibere family in memory of their father George Connibere, who had died in 1911.
The beauty and status of St John’s was little consolation for Jane Ashton. Not even the architectural and spiritual splendour of the church could camouflage the gulf emerging between the Garretts and Ramage’s defenders. Nor was it lost on Julie’s friends that a number of people at the service had been visiting 72
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gathering of guests that all refugees should be towed out to sea and their boats sunk. If he hadn’t left England in 1978 he’d have voted Tory and rated British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher one of his heroes. The only human rights that mattered to him were business rights and his ability to hire and fire employees. It was reflected in a comment to a friend that if any of his employees became pregnant at an inconvenient time he’d tell them to have an abortion. ‘I’d even give them the phone number of the clinic,’ he growled. If only he’d known that his own wife had had an abortion in the months before the fortieth party. My discussions with Dyson at the time of the trial were a game of cat and mouse. He was clearly unhappy discussing his conversations with the killer during their time at the Harp. When I asked why he didn’t give evidence he said that if the police thought he had anything to offer they’d have spoken to him. Maybe! The truth is somewhat less clear, for Ramage carefully avoided identifying Dyson Hore-Lacy as the ‘friend by the name of Dyson’ he was ‘going to see’. At no point in his police interview does he say exactly who ‘Dyson’ was or that he was a barrister. The moral conundrum aside, one important question still rattled in my head. ‘What would you have done if you’d bumped into Jane Ashton or one of Julie’s friends had rung looking for James on the night of the murder?’ I asked. ‘Sorry, Phil, I can’t help you,’ he told me. The question was one of a number I emailed Dyson in relation to what had happened at the Harp. None of them involved him offering me privileged information. The best he could say was,‘I am not sure why the info is necessary unless you are thinking of doing a chapter on legal ethics.’ A book about legal ethics might question how Dyson HoreLacy could use emotive, passionate language such as ‘shot like a dog on a leash’ when talking about the police shooting of Gary 74
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Abdullah but seek refuge behind legal protocol when the victim is an estranged wife. It might also question why defence barristers are more affronted by the treatment of refugees and the suffering of women and children in detention centres than the violence behind the clinker brick of a suburban home. Julie had never committed an act of violence and her death was slower than Abdullah’s.And one telling fact remained.While Dyson and then Pica talked with Ramage, Jane Ashton was going out of her mind.Was she asking too much to think Julie’s friend might have said, ‘Sorry, James, you’re on your own, mate’? Our final conversation took place in March 2005. I was trying to clarify what Margaret had meant when she told me that on the afternoon of the murder Dyson had said, ‘I have some shocking news, but I can’t tell you anything.’ Unless it was after the meeting at the Harp or the next day, it just didn’t make sense. When I pressed the question, he said, ‘You’re pushing a friendship, Philip, I’m going to hang up.’That was the end of the matter. Margaret obviously got the days confused. As good a man as Dyson Hore-Lacy is, he’d not have been welcome at the funeral if Julie had been my sister. Also at the funeral was Rob Moodie, a friend of the family and CEO of the Victorian Health Foundation. Educated at Scotch College, the alma mater of former Victorian Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, he told Julie’s friends he’d visited Ramage in gaol to find out why he’d done it. Jane was astounded when she heard about the visits. She said it made her ‘feel sick’. Nor did it help when she read in the Age newspaper that Moodie thought Ramage was a victim of ‘the fundamental problem of the poor mental health of men who are not comfortable in their identity’. She desperately needed him to say Ramage took a woman’s life because he was a bully and a chauvinist. The last thing Jane wanted was for her sister’s children to think their DADDY’S RICH, MUMMY’S GOOD LOOKING
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father’s actions could be explained away. If Rob had picked up the phone and rung the Garretts he’d have heard first hand of the physical and psychological impact of Julie’s murder. Maybe then he’d have understood. It was to be the start of a painful journey for Moodie. The damning words Jane would save for Ramage in her victim impact statement were not those that readily sprang to mind for Rob Moodie in the immediate aftermath of the murder. In a conversation with me almost two years later he said the verdict was wrong and that he sympathised with the Garretts over their ‘terrible loss’. He went on to say that it was ‘a terrible act’ and that he didn’t want them to think that the evidence he gave in court, what he’d said in the press or his gaol visits meant he ‘condoned what Ramage did’. No one had ever suggested Rob Moodie might have condoned what Ramage did. Even Ramage’s mother wouldn’t be that silly. The real problem was that Moodie’s visits to Ramage in gaol were a grave insult to the family and helped Ramage legitimise his crime to his children. Archdeacon Newman, his grey hair parted neatly on the left and his glasses and bright robes radiating authority, began proceedings. No one told him what to say or asked which version of Christianity would be on display. They soon realised it was not going to be an Old Testament sermon.Today there would be no talk of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.‘It seems unreal. How do we approach it, in the face of such tragedy…what are we doing here…why did it happen …could we have done anything…we want to find answers.’ The Archdeacon didn’t divulge that he’d visited Ramage in gaol and had agreed to act as a character witness. Such was the nature of the words that had a stranger wandered into the church they’d have had no idea what fate had befallen the woman in the 76
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coffin. No mention of murder or a violent death, or that the name of the killer was James Stuart Ramage. No sense that Archdeacon Newman’s god might have something to say in another court or that anyone should think about the vexed question of justice or how the community might protect women in future. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ This was the Archdeacon’s solution to the perplexing issue of ‘finding answers’.We must have faith, for faith is the basis to understanding suffering, he added. The Archdeacon’s words would have fallen on deaf ears if Ramage had been let out of prison for his wife’s funeral. He paid homage to only one god: Mammon. The funeral service might not have been the time to publicly condemn James Ramage, but was it the time to treat the murder as a mystery or imply that Ramage’s violent act was inscrutable or beyond condemnation? ‘Place aside any thought and speculation about the manner of her death,’ said the civil celebrant as she introduced the eulogies. For those who’ve experienced familial murder this is something you never imagine saying. To deny what Ramage did was to offer comfort to all wife killers, past and present. Such was the depth of the killer’s denial he’d told his son to place a red rose on the coffin. ‘I wished that my sister’s hand had emerged from the coffin and pushed it away,’ said Jane. Seated in the front row, Jane looked at the coffin and remembered how slim her sister had been and how despite being strong and well nourished she’d have been no match for his violent attack. How could she not think about the way her twin sister had died when she knew the gruesome details? She pondered so many things. How he never accepted no for an answer. How he’d cunningly gathered information from her friends about his wife’s activities and then, on the fatal Monday, had sent the builder away. She could well imagine the despair Julie must have DADDY’S RICH, MUMMY’S GOOD LOOKING
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felt when she saw the look in his eyes that day. ‘The minute she said she wasn’t coming back Julie would have known she was going to die. Even before he laid a hand on her she would have known. I’ve seen that look in his eyes and so had she,’ Jane would tell me. I believed her. Jane couldn’t bring herself to view her twin sister in the funeral parlour. She wanted to remember her as she’d last seen her. Three days after the killing, she’d come home to seventytwo telephone messages. Night after night she dreamt about her sister. In one dream Julie was in bed dressed in purple pyjamas with white spots. Lying alongside her was the sleeping Ramage. When Jane tries to rescue her twin sister Julie is transformed into a grotesque zombie. At other times her sister is alive, laughing and smiling, and Jane is desperate not to wake up. How could she paint these pictures for her niece and nephew as they stood alongside her? How could she make them understand that their father’s actions were not those of a man in love but a man consumed by hate? Today, no one was about to mention the word murder or killing. Julie’s confidante, Gilda Pekin, spoke of the beautiful woman who took her children to the park so she could rest while looking after her sick father. She called it ‘Julie’s caring recipe’.As much as she disliked James Ramage and hated him for what he’d done to her best friend, she too didn’t step on the Ramage name. Remember VicKick and the basketball at Kew High School? Julie was there with the same style and smile, proud of her kids. Julie was inclusive and generous. Julie came for dinner Thursday, a week or so ago. Gorgeous, black high-heel boots, that black ruffled skirt and the black and silver jumper. I looked at her boots. She looked at our new timber floor and 78
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began to take the boots off saying, ‘Oh, oh, the glam’s gone now.’ And the thick woolly black socks were revealed, complete with holes. No one cared. Our beautiful friend, Julie, just happened to be beautiful on the outside as well.
As Matthew and Sam stepped into the aisle, Julie’s closest friends braced themselves. Privately, many were of the view that Matthew was under his father’s control.There is nothing in any book to guide children, even those of the rich, when their father is accused of murdering their mother. Matthew was visiting his father in gaol and driving the Mini Cooper James Ramage had planted behind Colombo’s as part of a pathetic attempt at an alibi. On the door’s armrest the police had found a droplet of blood. No man had stepped forward to explain to the boy how his father was manipulating the situation or that it was his responsibility to uphold the memory of his mother.There were no Garrett uncles to honour her name or make threats to his dad. Friends such as Christine Howgate believed that Ramage had forgone his rights to a relationship with the children. His refusal to say sorry only hardened their animosity towards him. It mattered little to him. He didn’t like or respect strong women. Julie’s friends never tried to stand between Ramage and his children.When a male friend of Julie’s gave me the DVD of the funeral, I was left wondering whether they wished they had.Tall like his dad, and impeccably dressed in a dark blue suit, Matthew spoke calmly and deliberately, the occasional gulp and a tilt of his head punctuating the lines. His fifteen-year-old sister stood silently at her brother’s left shoulder.Women’s words were never given pride of place in Ramage’s household. In spirit she was clearly her mother’s girl and had been her ally before and after the separation. It was a shame that Julie’s loving daughter didn’t have the opportunity to repeat the intimate, girlish lines she writDADDY’S RICH, MUMMY’S GOOD LOOKING
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ten in a letter in November 2002 from boarding school. In the letter she’d lamented how her father had made her mum look ‘unreasonable’ and after changing his attitude for a couple of weeks would go back to his ‘old ways’. Life was not just about cleaning and cooking – it was about being happy, she’d told her mum. If only the congregation had heard these words. It was a far cry from the ones they were about to hear from her brother. Beginning with the awkward ‘Our mum was a beautiful and amazing lady’ Matthew tried to sing his mother’s praises in a way that avoided confronting the manner of her death. In Matthew’s eyes she was a woman with a passion for horse riding and swimming. She was a woman who loved a glass of wine with friends and enjoyed cooking for a dinner party. A mother whom he remembered kissing him and his sister goodnight.A mother who did everything with all her heart. She was a perfect mother. Honest and firm, she gave her children boundaries that were defined by love and patience, he said. So, why was she dead, thought Christine Howgate? Delivering a eulogy for your dead mother when your father has killed her makes George Bush declaring war on Iraq seem almost trivial. For all the difficulties such a task posed for the seventeen-year-old Matthew Ramage, it was a eulogy that raised more questions than it delivered answers. Matthew didn’t use his sister’s name. She was always ‘my sister’ rather than ‘Samantha’. It was the same anonymity James Ramage had foisted on Sam in his telephone conversation with Matthew on the night of the killing. Matthew’s closing words fell from his lips like hand grenades. She was a great mother and a great wife to the greatest family, from which we draw our fondest memories. A family, which we can say with all our hearts, is one that we are 80
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proud to be a part of and one that we would not swap for the world.
What did he mean when he said he ‘wouldn’t swap his family for the world’? His father had bashed and strangled his mother and dumped her in a bush grave. Is that the kind of family we all want? Soon one of Ramage’s friends would let the secret out of the bag. The speech had been written by James. Like the headline ‘Love pulls the trigger’ that accompanied a newspaper account of the murder of Christine Boyce in 1987, James Ramage had found a set of words that absolved him of any guilt. And the swine had left his son to deliver them.Worse still, while Matthew sang the praises of a ‘great mother and great wife’ his father was building a mountain of stones to throw at her. To those close to Julie it was a declaration of war by the killer. Even on the day they were under no illusion as to who had written the eulogy.To conclude, Matthew asked that the gathering listen as he recited the final stanzas from the song ‘Summertime’.The words, he said, encapsulated ‘the vivid image we hold of our mum’. Donna Carrodus couldn’t hide her disbelief. A social worker by profession and dubbed a ‘bohemian’ by Ramage, she knew why the killer loved it. It was an affirmation of his power. Once a favourite lullaby in the Garrett household in England, James Ramage had turned ‘Summertime’ into a ghoulish defence of the murder of their daughter. ‘Your daddy’s rich and your mummy’s good looking.’ Angie Hayes, widow and Scotch parent, also cringed as the words echoed through the church. She’d met Ramage for lunch on the Friday before he killed Julie. She was so concerned with his attitude she later rang another Scotch parent, Dr Kate Clark, and asked whether she thought Ramage might hurt Julie. The next DADDY’S RICH, MUMMY’S GOOD LOOKING
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day Clark was a witness to the ominous Geelong rendezvous. As Matthew uttered the final words – ‘with your mummy and daddy standing by’ – he lifted his head, his nervousness palpable. ‘Make sure you redeem the family name,’ his father had told him.Young and confused, Matthew simply wasn’t able to escape his father’s control. In the Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess, for which ‘Summertime’ is famous, the cripple Porgy falls so in love with Bess he kills the man who tries to take her from him. For all the wrong reasons it was the right song. When all the anger of Julie’s friends is swept aside, it’s just plain tragic that a son’s love of his father should have been exploited in this way. In time their relationship might have evolved into something quite special. It wasn’t Matthew’s responsibility to protect his mother from a bullying father, but it was truly sad he couldn’t speak freely for his mum at her funeral and so confront the scourge of family violence. Had it been a working class funeral there’s little doubt some awful curses would have been uttered. Here at St John’s in Toorak, no one dared lift the cone of silence that had been placed over Julie’s coffin. From the Scotch College boys in their imperious red coats to the authoritative archdeacon, not a soul fired a salvo at James Ramage. Only Susie Walker, a friend from the riding club, went close to smashing the lie of Julie’s death orchestrated from gaol by the killer. For a few moments it appeared the distraught Susie would be unable to compose herself sufficiently to speak. Eventually she uttered the words so many people wanted to hear: ‘She learnt to hide well her anguish and fear.’ Not long before she left the marriage Julie had appeared at the riding club with the remnants of a black eye.‘I walked into a door,’ she told her friend. No mention of that at the funeral. The day after the killing, Neil Cracknell, head of Year 12 at Scotch College, told an assembly of boys Julie 82
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Ramage had ‘died in tragic circumstances’. If any boys needed counselling the school would provide it, he said. No public forums on the scourge of family violence were scheduled and no special classes run. Is it true, as one teacher claims, that ‘the switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree’ with Scotch mothers seeking counselling for boys who’d seen violence at home? No one will say. Jane Ashton was the last speaker. The burden she carried was written across her taught, strained face. There was so much she wanted to say. How could she talk about the pain when her sister’s children were foremost in her mind? Already she knew Ramage had been delivering instructions from gaol and that Matt had visited Julie’s flat in the company of several Scotch parents and removed everything except Julie’s clothes and underwear. In her victim impact statement she described it this way: There was no time to reflect…and respectfully sort out her belongings. Men who didn’t even know her had gone in and ransacked the place. Even the cleaning materials had all gone. So we had to make do with what we had brought, to hoover the carpets, clean the bathroom and toilet and polish the cooker.We always knew our side of the family was good for something. And here we were again reduced to the lowest in the pecking order.
Jane also knew that Matthew had found his mother’s love letters and had read a few lines.When he told his father what was in the letters Ramage couldn’t believe his luck. Jane Ashton was different from her sister in so many ways. She hadn’t rushed into motherhood. Charlotte, the first of her two children, was born in 1992, seven years after Julie’s first child. She had no desire to be a teenage bride and had revelled in university. Tertiary educated and respectful of his wife’s independence, her DADDY’S RICH, MUMMY’S GOOD LOOKING
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husband was nothing like James Ramage. None of this protected her from the grief of losing her twin sister. In the ten days that preceded the funeral and the months that followed, she was unable to sleep and was back and forth to the doctor for check-ups, counselling, sleeping pills and treatment for depression. By the time it came to bury her sister, she was a physical and emotional wreck. Tense and hurt, she refused to cry as she dragged a little speech from her handbag: My dear Julie, my twin, my friend, my playmate.We learnt to crawl together, walk together, run together, climb together and play together. We took the bus or walked to school together, we went to the movies together, we had many other friends, but never suffered doubts about being alone, you were my shadow, and I was yours. We played netball together, and pushed each other on. We were together, freezing, muddy and wet on those famous English hockey fields. We sailed and capsized, but always went down laughing.We swam for hours and hours in pools, rivers and the sea until our skin began to wrinkle. We made a pact together to avoid cross-country at all costs. We fell off ponies each week, if not exactly together, then usually shortly after each other. We explored our early world together, school camps together and Europe together. Always confident that Julie’s ability of speaking very slowly in English would make up for any actual knowledge of the language. Together we shared our highs and lows, never judging each other, but always pushing forward.A problem shared is a problem halved; two heads are better than one. We laughed so much we would cry and never took life too 84
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seriously. My dear Julie is your friend, your playmate, your companion, your ally, your support. Julie met many of my friends and became a part of their lives. Being able to share her with them was a joy to me at the time and a terrific support to me now. Today we tend to pigeonhole our friends, our family and all the many different parts of our lives.Think about your brothers, sisters, children, parents and friends and simply be there for them. Do not be afraid to open up those boxes and let people get close to you and each other. God has given us all a tremendous capacity for love and understanding. Julie had those qualities and I know that her strength has gone into me, and all of you. I shall move on, always with her in my heart, and never ever alone, and I hope and pray that you will all be able to do the same.
Christine Howgate watched the proceedings with a mixture of sorrow and anger. She’d walked with Julie and heard every detail of her friend’s disintegrating marriage, including the sexual abuse. Although she and her husband were property developers with an office in Hawthorn, she voted Green and was staunchly pro-refugee. A good-looking mother of three with a quiet, almost girlish voice that belies her intellectual combativeness, she’d begun to tire of the hypocrisy. ‘I couldn’t understand why the school children clapped after the eulogies,’ she would later say. Why doesn’t someone tell the truth about James Ramage? Why doesn’t someone speak of the broken nose, the sexual abuse and the put-downs, she asked? More than five hundred people gathered at the former artists’ haven of Montsalvat for the wake. Julie’s friends from the Hurstbridge Adult Riding Club had prepared Julie’s and Sam’s DADDY’S RICH, MUMMY’S GOOD LOOKING
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horses and were waiting in full uniform when people arrived.At the wake her friends decried James Ramage’s bullying and wondered what would become of him. They wondered why they hadn’t been able to save their friend. Another close friend of the twins would relate a bizarre story. In 1978, when Julie Garrett and James Ramage were racing towards marriage, Kay was striking up a friendship at Newlands High School with my murdered sister,Vicki. Most people aren’t touched by murder, let alone the murder of a friend by her partner or former partner. Kay had now experienced it twice. She says it has made her paranoid about the safety of women who separate and that she can’t understand why the most beautiful and generous women end up murdered. Lindy Weir, another friend of Julie’s from the riding club, was so shocked when she learned about the killing she dropped the phone and couldn’t speak. She’d been on the Hurstbridge Riding Club committee with Julie. Lindy never forgot seeing Ramage hover over his wife as she prepared a salad at the Christmas 2001 riding club barbecue.‘He watched every move and I could see her hands twitching,’ she said.And what was her opinion of him? ‘He was a pompous bastard.’ Still, she wondered why her friend had once said,‘Jane has no money, but they’re happy.’ Julie’s twin lives on a beautiful ten-acre property in Research that by anyone’s standards is far from modest. It must surely have been Ramage speak. And there too was ‘Ruby’, who in the aftermath of the killing would announce that the first fifteen years of her marriage had been ‘marred by domestic violence’.A parent at Scotch and married to a successful businessman who was also a member of the Masonic Order, Ruby had spent the evening discussing the marriage breakdown with Ramage at Marock Place on Thursday 3 July. During the conversation he admitted that he’d regularly hit his son in the past and if Julie was having an affair it would ‘be 86
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the end’. Not even her own experiences with violence were enough for her to conclude that Julie was in danger. On Tuesday 22 July, after a neighbour told her Julie had been murdered, she drove to Marock Place to see for herself. When she found the house cordoned off by the police, she was flabbergasted. As the Garretts stumbled towards their first Christmas without Julie, Ray Garrett became seriously ill and was placed in intensive care at the Austin Hospital.While Ray was in hospital Jane had her appendix removed. She’d been unwell since August, but ultrasounds had not picked up anything. Her doctor said it was due to her not eating properly for the six weeks following her sister’s death. Then Pat Garrett broke down. The grief was killing her. I didn’t meet Julie’s mother until the day Justice Osborn delivered his sentence. It was 9 December 2004, a day after my birthday. So often, the strength of a handshake or the warmth of a hug says everything about a person. Pat Garrett hugged me like I was her son, and her husband spoke to me with such a level of trust, it was impossible not to love them. It seemed inconceivable that this lovely woman could have been overwhelmed by such trauma. She didn’t look like the kind of person to be found wandering aimlessly through the corridors of a mental hospital. An abundance of intelligence and a career as a statistician and accountant counts for nothing when your daughter is murdered. While Ramage and his defence counsel prepared their attack on Julie’s character, her parents prepared to move into a retirement village. It should have been, says Jane, a happy occasion and a benchmark of the next step in their lives. Instead it was a solemn occasion in which there were no ritualistic sad goodbyes. ‘The memories of Julie being there and those of her children staying over when they were little were too painful for them,’ says Jane.
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EARLY YEARS
Like Lorna and Ron Cleary, the Boyce family and all the others that preceded them, the Garretts never thought it would be their lot to receive the paralysing news of the murder of their daughter. It was a far cry from the early days of North London, where they and their little twins were part of a bustling working class community. Pat Kellett and Raymond Garrett were young children when the Second World War exploded all over Europe. They were evacuees, pushed onto a train with a label around their necks, never knowing if they would see their parents again. Then they were repatriated to London and yet another home, the previous one a pile of burnt-out rubble. Cockney singsongs deep below London in the relative safety of the Underground railway stations while they waited for the bombs to stop became their lullabies. Ray had very little formal education during these turbulent years, and only had a few carefree years as an apprentice before he took up his military service with the Royal Scots Greys in 88
North Africa. Pat, an only child, received a scholarship to the local grammar school and was ready to go to university at sixteen years of age. Outstanding at maths, she was dux of the school. Unfortunately it was a time when girls couldn’t go to university until they were eighteen years old and with the family dependent on her income she put university on hold and went out to work. As was the case in postwar Australia, most women in England drifted back into the home once the demand for labour subsided. Not so Pat, who took up a position at London Transport and then at the Department of Defence, doing statistical modelling. Pat worked with Douglas and Valerie Lovelock, who later became Sir Lord and Lady Lovelock.Valerie was to be the twins’ godmother and Douglas ended up Treasurer of the Church of England.The British Establishment would also be shaken by the outcome of R v Ramage. Pat and Ray were only teenagers when they met. Ray’s love letters, sent from Africa, cemented their growing affection and soon they were thinking about marriage. By the late 1950s they were part of a new generation that had thrown off the shackles of their working class forebears.Through a small grocery shop they’d opened in Edmonton, North London, they’d freed themselves from the hand to mouth existence of their parents. The twins arrived on 11 September 1960.A male obstetrician of the old school watched on as Pat struggled to give birth to twins, both breech, with no intervention. ‘Stop crying, woman,’ were his only words of encouragement as the girls finally arrived – Julie five minutes before Jane, so that for the rest of her life she would be referred to as the eldest. Ray felt so bad about the state he found his wife in when he arrived at Barnet Hospital, he promised they would have no more children. The twins spent many hours in a big old-fashioned twin pram outside the front of EARLY YEARS
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the shop. Women passing by or coming in to buy something would chat away to them and say,‘’allo darlings.’ Like a couple of parrots on the perch they were so taken by the greeting,‘’allo’ was the first word they uttered. On Saturday mornings Nanny Kellett, or ‘Little Nanna Kellett’ as she was known, and her husband Grandad Kellett would collect the twins and take them to Miss Maureen’s Dancing School in Tottenham. A dilapidated old hall behind a huge rundown Victorian home would instil in them a lifelong love of dancing. Ray had been the eldest of four brothers, all five years apart. There was little love and affection from his mother and he yearned for it. In his life with Pat this dream was realised. She was from Welsh and Yorkshire heritage and belonged to a large clan of vivacious, fun loving men and women. Parties above their small shop in Raymond Street, Edmonton would go on until dawn.They had friends from all over London and jazz and blues would be played and they would dance, play cards and talk politics till the shop needed to open the next day. Long before the film Bend It Like Beckham, Jane joined a girl’s soccer team. Already her mischievous sense of humour was her trademark: ‘It’s not strange. I still wear my lippy and mascara on the field, unless of course it’s raining.Then it’s just the lippy.’ Jane was never one to let feminist ideology curtail her instinct or her femaleness. In the aftermath of the trial it would be one of her great strengths as she fronted a ravenous media. The Kellett and Garrett clans followed Tottenham Hotspur in the English football league. Both sets of grandparents lived within a short walking distance of White Hart Lane. On Saturday afternoons the twins would play in Little Nanny Kellett’s garden, bordering the railway line, waiting to hear the crowd roar. Men from both families would meet at the football and then walk back to Newlyn Road, cold and wet, ready for 90
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tea. Once the footy ‘Pools’ had been ticked off the girls would be bundled into the back of their father’s black Austin and taken home. It was an idyllic setting in which the English football hooligans had yet to make their mark. At Miss Maureen’s they’d stumbled across the floor in their pink leotards, and played Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the legendary American Andrews Sisters. After dancing on Saturday, Nanny and Grandad would take the girls shopping to the same Jewish bakery in High Street.Years later, making love to a Jewish man who loved food and wine would give Julie the added confidence to leave her stuffy English husband. It was 1977 and the North London bus was bursting with noisy, awkward teenagers acting out the courting ritual when James Ramage made his first play for the pretty Julie Garrett. The other boys said she was a real catch. Imposing, strong and full of confidence, he believed he was the man to take her out of parochial Goffs Oak. Ray Garrett didn’t think his children needed to be taken anywhere. His corner shop in working class Edmonton, near Tottenham, had been such a success he’d been able to move up the social ladder, first to Cheshunt, where he made a nice nest egg from two supermarkets, and then to Moorhurst Avenue in Goffs Oak in tranquil Hertfordshire. Here, Ray thought his family would be safe from the violence he envisaged would one day beset Tottenham and its surrounds. James Ramage wasn’t Julie’s first boyfriend, and she wasn’t a virgin when they met. She’d had a number of boyfriends before a local bloke, Maurice Saggars, asked her out. Maurice, or ‘Mole’ as he was called, due to a large mole on his neck, was the leader of the pack. His dad was a bookmaker with lots of East End connections. Saggars was huge and was weight-lifting at sixteen to increase his bulk even more.Very intelligent at school, but a troublemaker, he was a ‘lover and a fighter’. An Arsenal supporter, his EARLY YEARS
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idea of fun on a Saturday was being a football hooligan or bovver boy. Right wing in the ‘Alf Garnet’ mould, he supported the National Front and wore Doc Martens boots, laced up to just under his knee with re-enforced toecaps. Julie soon realised that women were little more than ‘chattels’ in the world of Mole Saggars.When she dumped him her family was not displeased. Already she seemed to have a habit of falling into the arms of boys who wanted to control or own a woman. Roy Collins and Nicky Smith, who followed Mole, were better looking than the National Front thug and less violent, but they didn’t mind a bit of fisticuffs after the disco on a Saturday night.Young cockney men with cars and money, and older than Julie, they did nothing to please Ray and Pat Garrett. One night at Cuffley Youth Club all of Julie’s ex-boyfriends met up and there was a huge fight in which bottles were broken and the police had to be called.Although she was frightened and shaken at the time, she felt powerful. Strange as it seems, it made some women swoon and feel secure. A victim of a culture that calculated a woman’s value according to how many men were fighting for her, Julie Garrett had fallen for the lie. She just loved being desired. James Ramage was neither cockney nor as boisterous as Julie’s cousins. The Garrett boys were big, loud and abrasive. They were also very protective of their women. Ramage lived ‘up the hill’ in Cuffley, the second most expensive suburb in the district. He wasn’t from old money, but it’s where he wanted to be. His father’s success in business had given him a start, and with an attractive woman by his side he fancied he could go anywhere. Julie’s mother knew early on that her daughter was besotted with her flashy boyfriend. She also knew they were having sex. Pat Garrett had walked down the aisle in Tottenham with her husband Ray in 1956, when she was only twenty-one 92
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years of age and her husband was twenty-three, so she knew about young love. It’s just that she didn’t think Ramage was right for her daughter. As much as James seemed more agreeable than the wild boys Julie had known, the Garretts soon began to have their doubts about the boy from Cuffley. In his police statement twenty-five years later, Ray remembered how one night Ramage ‘charged upstairs like a madman and started shouting at Jane’. He was, said Julie’s dad,‘a hothead’.Was it this challenge to a father’s authority that eventually drove Ray to tell his daughter, ‘If you’re old enough for sex, you’re old enough to work’? Ray had quickly realised that the Ramages were different. He remembered how their house was mostly full of people who discussed business. He also noticed that Ramage’s mother talked constantly about Jamie’s brother Clive, ‘who was a very good tennis player’. James regularly boasted about his sporting talents and how he’d tried out for county rugby. And the Garretts heard how his father had set up the Norwich Union insurance company in Australia and had taken his family around the world and had even lived in Africa. Long before Ramage laid a hand on Julie there were signs that the Ramages and the Garretts were two very different tribes. Pat Garrett had genuinely hoped the relationship with Ramage would run its course. On 11 September 1978 she received the news she never wanted to hear. It was the twins’ eighteenth birthday and their parents had hired the local community centre to celebrate the event. When Julie grabbed hold of her mum, presented her an outstretched hand and said,‘James gave me it.We’re engaged,’ her mother could only offer a stony-faced nod. In her police statement she said the sight of the diamond solitaire ‘broke my heart’. Ramage hadn’t asked Ray for his daughter’s hand in marriage. It was a bad start and in time the uneasiness would give way to a bitter feud between father and lover. The EARLY YEARS
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twins may have been identical, but they’d reached a fork in the road. From here on their lives would be remarkably different. Within a few months of the engagement, Ramage left for Australia, where he hoped to make his mark. His father had organised for him to live with a business acquaintance, Bill Martin, and learn about commerce and making money. Bill had set up Arnos Australia Pty Ltd during the Second World War and had made a mint selling map pins to the US army. Eventually the company expanded until it had offices in Canada and France and sold products to forty-four countries worldwide. The young James Ramage lived with Bill Martin’s family in Black Rock. Here he began to taste privilege Australian style, and learnt that the median price for a house in Black Rock at that time was double the median price for the rest of metropolitan Melbourne, and that the suburb had a well-appointed yacht club frequented by Melbourne’s rich. Ramage soon understood how the class system worked and the way the nouveau riche networked through golf, yachting, the Masonic Order, the right private schools and institutions such as the Melbourne Cricket Club. He wanted to live like this, and his immediate goal was to start the climb up the ladder of success.With a pretty blonde wife by his side he reckoned it was possible.The girl who wanted to be his wife was so desperately in love she saved every cent made from working in the ANZ Bank so she could join her hero in Australia. In mid March 1979, after a few months apart, the couple was reunited in sunny Australia, where Jamie had organised a flat for his fiancée. She told her sister in a letter written from her flat at 9 Stayner Street, Beaumaris: Please excuse my writing as I am sunbathing in my little garden. I spent all weekend cleaning up the flat. It now 94
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looks quite good.There is a new fridge and a small electric cooker.The weather is beautiful and I don’t mind being on my own all day as I can sunbath. Bill [Martin] has been very helpful and is only charging me $22 a week, about 12 pounds, which is good for this area. On Monday Bill took us to lunch to one of the best restaurants in Melbourne, after lunch he rang a friend of his who is one of the directors of the ANZ, I spoke to him on the phone and he said I could go for an interview in 5 minutes. We rushed there on a tram and I saw him. He told me I would have to wait a month probably, but it doesn’t matter because I am working in the printing department of Bill’s factory.
Sometime later she was living with her mother’s cousins, the Kelletts, in Preston. Friends say it was after a fight with her husband-to-be. Alf and Mavis Kellett lived at 15 Dunstan Street in a brick house built by Alf. The block was twice the size of his neighbours’ Housing Commission properties, so Alf had reason to think he was doing quite well. It might not have been wealthy Beaumaris, but it was no poky little shack. At the East Coburg end of the street was the Kodak factory, where thousands of immigrants from Europe and the UK found work after the war. The Preston of 1979 was a working class suburb dotted with factories, warehouses and Housing Commission estates that produced their share of Melbourne’s criminals. It wasn’t the Wild West, but rape and violence were no strangers to the area. As much as Alf Kellett wasn’t a criminal or a rough and tumble man, and his house was comfortable, he was very much cut from working class rock. James Ramage took a clinical view: a man who worked in the revenue section of theVictorian Tramways at the Preston depot was not going to introduce him to men of influence.The relationship with the Kelletts had to be severed. EARLY YEARS
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Eventually, Julie and James resumed their relationship and began planning the wedding. Already they were savouring the delights of middle class Melbourne. Soon it would become a pilgrimage. In the middle of 1979 Julie rang her parents to organise a date for the wedding. With 5 January 1980 set as the big day, the couple duly arrived in England on Boxing Day 1979. It proved to be an emotionally charged eleven days, during which ominous signs appeared and some began to think the relationship between the Garretts and Ramage might be tumultuous. The Garretts had organised a relatively quiet and quaint wedding that suited their budget and what they thought were the interests of the couple. Ramage wanted something bigger and more ostentatious.When it came to finding the extra money for the additional guests, the about-to-be son-in-law displayed another trait that would become synonymous with his style. Pat Garrett still remembers him walking in and throwing an envelope filled with the money on the table then strolling out of their kitchen. On a pleasant winter’s day nineteen-year-old Julie Garrett married her sweetheart.The bride wore a white lace gown and the groom a three piece grey suit with a red carnation on the lapel. As would be her wont throughout her short life, Julie offered only a half-smile for the camera. His right hand on her tiny waist and his left hand on the knife as it sliced into the wedding cake, the princess was his.Who’d have thought those hands would unleash such terror twenty-three years later? St Thomas of Canterbury’s church in Northaw was a picture. A beautiful fairytale church with an elegant spire, it dates back to 1881, the year fire damaged the original building.When Thomas à Beckett was canonised by the Pope, 1173 churches were built in dedication to him throughout the Catholic world. The acclaimed English satirist Geoffrey Chaucer would call him the ‘blissful martyr’. In time Julie’s friends would see the irony. 96
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Julie’s cousins in England did not share Ray and Pat Garrett’s dislike of their new son-in-law. Peter Garrett, a tall, strongly built man with a robust tongue, had put Ramage up in his house when he visited a year before the killing. ‘I liked him. I didn’t know what he’d done to Julie,’ he told me in March 2005, during a short trip to Australia. While in Melbourne he met Matt and Samantha Ramage. ‘Looking at their teeth and Sam’s $200 sunglasses, I’d say they don’t want for much,’ he said. He didn’t discuss the murder or tell the children what he might have done to their dad if he’d had a chance. While Julie flashed her wedding ring and thought about love, her sister was poring over Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. And when she wasn’t reading she was partying and smoking cigarettes. From organising student protests in Trafalgar Square to working in a women’s refuge in Swansea, Jane Garrett threw herself into an array of social causes. Two months after her sister’s wedding she was in the back of a truck in an eye-catching Farah Fawcett bodysuit spruiking for donations for charity. At every pub she’d jump off the truck and run in rattling her tin. She’d been crowned the Rag Queen of Swansea University.Although she’d not spent a lot of time thinking about her brother-in-law, she considered him rather conservative. He fancied that her belief in human rights and equality between men and women might be his Achilles heel. It was a friction that never really subsided. Within three years of the marriage, Ray and Pat Garrett had migrated to Australia. In 1986 Jane and her husband Howard Ashton joined them. It had been a roller coaster ride for Jamie and Julie since their wedding in 1980. Already there’d been a separation during which they found other potential partners. Although there is no documented account of violence, Gilda Pekin believes it was physical assault that led to the first separation. From this EARLY YEARS
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break-up until Julie’s death, there would always be a sniff of violence in the marriage. A letter in August 1984 to Jane leaves little doubt that this was an unlikely marriage: I don’t know whether Mum told you, but I have been seeing a really nice guy called Chris Wilks, he is very genuine and has really spoilt me and we’ve had lots of fun in the last few weeks. I’ve met most of his family and they all know I’m separated, but they’ve all been lovely to me. Chris lives at home with his parents, but they’re away a lot of the time with business so he tells everyone his parents have left home…I’m still seeing my girlfriends too but plan to take it a bit easier for a while as it’s very tiring being a single swinger especially as I’m getting on a bit. Jamie and I still keep in touch but the longer we’re apart the less chance we have got of getting back together because our personalities (especially mine) are changing all the time. So far Jamie’s organized half the money for the Datsun for me, but he still hasn’t decided whether he will sell the house or pay me out for my half. I haven’t taken anything from the house yet because he might as well have the use of it until I get my own place and need things too. I can’t wait for the summer weather the new fashions look great don’t bring or buy too many summer clothes because you’ll be able to go shopping with Mum and I when you get here. I have decided to really concentrate on finding a new job as I’m rather bored and a complete change would do me good, new people etc. so I am going to sit down and write out a good resume this afternoon and go from there.
Julie had told her mum she genuinely liked Wilks and would have given Ramage up for him. Unfortunately her flashy new 98
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boyfriend wasn’t quite ready to settle down.With regret and disappointment she returned to her husband. She really was a girl who couldn’t stand being on her own. Without a man in her life she didn’t think she was a real woman. Chastened by her departure, Ramage knew he had to act. Five months after telling her mother she didn’t love her husband she was pregnant with his child. It was a master stroke by Ramage. Now she wasn’t going anywhere.Yet strangely enough, he clung to an affair with a local Catholic girl while luring his wife back to the marriage. It continued until Julie rang her and politely explained the situation. The woman didn’t even know he was married.Although Julie would tell her twin sister she felt hopeless and trapped, she decided to try and make the marriage work. For now there would be no other men in her life. When the Garretts arrived in Australia in 1983 they lived with James and Julie in Percy Street, Balwyn, a few blocks away from Marock Place. It was here that Julie’s parents experienced the hot-headedness they’d seen in their home in England. It came one night while they were in bed.They never asked their daughter exactly why he’d been shouting and screaming during the night.When Julie sheepishly said he’d punched a hole in the wall, her parents didn’t know what to say. ‘Going off to war’ was one of Ramage’s favourite expressions when he shut the door behind him every morning. Only Julie knew the extent and depth of the war. When she went into labour with Matthew on 27 October 1985, his response was consistent with every step of his march through life:‘You’ll have to drive yourself,’ he told her. He’d lost his licence after a drink driving offence. Many people say James Ramage was aggressive when he’d had too much to drink. A political discussion with Ray Garrett over dinner would spiral into a war of words and create a torrent of bad blood. It scared Julie’s mother. In a rage he’d smash glasses EARLY YEARS
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and anything else he could get his hands on. He was probably drunk and angry when he destroyed a depiction of Northaw Church painted by Julie’s uncle. Julie was petrified to bring home ornaments of any value.The exquisite Limoges china she’d received as a nine-year-old during a visit to France was left with her mum. The thought that the artless James Ramage might smash it was simply too much for his wife to contemplate. From neighbour Harry Testro to the marriage counsellors who listened to him before he killed Julie, it was agreed that Ramage’s temper was a problem.The head-butt in 1991 was not an isolated incident. It might have been the only time he broke Julie’s nose, but it wasn’t the only time he went on a rampage or knocked her to the ground. Although the Garretts didn’t know about the violence, Ramage was scarred by it. He knew it was his weakness and it made him a coward. And the thought that Julie’s father or other men might know cut him deeply. For all his failings, Ramage never damned his wife when he sought the help of psychologists after the separation in 2003. If it’s true that she just ‘lay there’ when they made love, it’s hardly surprising he was annoyed. If he’d known about the affairs, god only knows what he would have said or done. Julie was cheating on him. And, as Philip Dunn was about to show, her girlfriends were a party to the deception. His response to the tension within the marriage was to drive Julie’s family away and isolate her. She didn’t attend the christening of Jane’s first-born child, Charlotte, in 1992 or her parents’ sixtieth birthday parties or William’s christening in 1994. The funeral of Alf Kellett, who’d shown her so much love in Preston after her arrival in Australia, was another special event she was barred from attending. It was heartbreaking for Julie’s family. After years of conflict, the Christmas before Julie was killed offered some hope. It was their first Christmas lunch with the 100
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extended family for ten years. The erotic affair with Davey and the excitement of her growing status at Eco-d had given her the confidence to demand that they share Christmas with her family. There were thirty-two people at Jane’s house, lots of laughs and plenty of alcohol. ‘He seemed to have a good time and I enjoyed his company and his humour. It was like the good old days,’ said Jane. It wasn’t exactly how Ramage saw it. As they drove home down the dirt road he proceeded to lampoon her dad. It broke Julie’s heart. Six months later she was dead.
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Like the rest of Melbourne, the Canterbury set had pored over the Wales-King murders, a year before Julie was killed. Many read Hilary Bonney’s book The Society Murders. Not one of them seriously thought that James Ramage could ever have acted like the brutish, stupid Matthew Wales. Ramage was clever and independently wealthy. He wasn’t a killer. Ian Dicker, president of the Hawthorn Football Club, had been so taken with the Ramage myth he bought a ten per cent share in Thermo-Glaze in 1999. Keen to see him kick on, he encouraged him to join the Young Presidents Association, a worldwide society of aspiring movers and shakers. On 23 March 2004 I met Dicker at the Hyatt Hotel to discuss a business project. On the same day the Age newspaper published an article I’d written on the rape allegations that had rocked rugby and Aussie Rules football. Dicker had read the article. He said the allegations were of great concern to football clubs and society at large. Out of the blue he told me that a business 102
friend had killed his wife. He didn’t say he’d visited the killer in gaol, nor did Dicker recount how he’d cried during the encounter with his friend. Although I was aware of the case I’d not yet spoken to Jane Ashton, and as the committal hearing was still just over a month away, I didn’t make the connection with the Ramage case. The reluctance of male friends to tell Ramage there was no excuse for what he’d done left Jane Ashton sad and confused. Unlike Dicker and Moodie, Jane and her friends decided there’d be no sympathy for the killer. As the committal approached, the women had met to organise rosters for the hearing. ‘We should dress in black,’ Christine Howgate had said. At the lunches that followed the committal a list of names of women angry about the killing and how Julie was being blamed was compiled. When Jane Ashton received word that everything was in order for the committal she organised a meeting with Anne O’Brien from the witness assistance program. A feisty woman with an eye for the horrors of the justice system, O’Brien stepped her through the rules of evidence and the purpose of the committal hearing. A committal is considerably different from a trial. Its essential purpose is to determine whether an accused person has a case to answer.The rules of evidence are such that evidence potentially prejudicial to the defendant is allowed to be aired in order that the magistrate can best determine whether the accused should be committed to stand trial and on what charge. Unfortunately, so strict are the laws governing admissibility of evidence at trial, crucial evidence often doesn’t make its way to the Supreme Court on the grounds that it is prejudicial to the accused. Nothing O’Brien said prepared Jane or Julie’s girlfriends for the barrage that Philip Dunn QC would deliver. Dunn had cut his teeth in the legendary Frank Galbally’s office and was admitted to the bar in 1968. He’s a member of a MR DUNN ARRIVES
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high-powered team of barristers known as Foley’s List.The presence of ‘so many women from the pony club’ had caused Dunn to raise the spectre of a conspiracy and ask Magistrate Greg McNamara to request that the women leave the court while Ramage’s children were giving evidence. Out of respect to the children, Jane did leave. So too did the majority of the women. Jane knew the real reason Ramage didn’t want the women in court was because he hated the idea of Julie’s friends hearing what he’d done to his wife. In his blinkered eyes the killing of his wife was a private family affair in which other women had no place. ‘Did you speak to anybody else before making your statement? So Julie had Wednesdays off so she could go horse riding and do whatever else?’ The implications of Dunn’s questions to the female witnesses throughout the committal were always the same. The women were part of a plot to discredit Ramage and defend a selfish, adulterous wife. And what did he mean by the rhetorical question about her activities on Wednesdays? She was off fucking the lover.That much was true. Unfortunately no one would hear that she’d become a nervous wreck of a woman who could only survive by popping Valium tranquillisers. Desperate to protect their friend’s name from Dunn’s character assassination, Jane Ashton, Gilda Pekin, Joanne McLean, Tarsha Warren, Rhonda McMurtrie and Felicity Holding fought the defence counsel every step of the way. It didn’t matter. The affairs were Julie’s Archilles heel and Dunn was obsessed with airing them. Julie’s girlfriends had never considered these affairs would form the foundation of Ramage’s defence or that the lovers Laurence Webb and ‘Davey’ would be Dunn’s ace of spades. Soon they realised that very little evidence unfavourable to Ramage would make its way to the Supreme Court.The narrative in which Julie was transformed into at best a promiscuous 104
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wife and at worst a slut who’d abandoned a devoted father had begun. Jane offered some telling observations: I was shell-shocked at having to relive the death of my sister, with absolutely no compassion or regard for our loss. The witnesses were all articulate, intelligent and honest people who were there on oath to answer questions. We were not there because we were on trial, but because we had unfortunately lost a loved one and had been asked to help the police with their investigations.
What upset Jane immeasurably was that Mr Daryl Brown, who prosecuted the police case at the committal hearing, seemed unable to protect witnesses from Dunn’s attack. All Brown did was ask each witness if their statement was true, then resume his seat and allow Dunn to unleash his bullying. On Friday 7 May 2004, after three days of evidence, Magistrate Greg McNamara advised the defendant he was not obliged to plead guilty or not guilty and that he could reserve his plea until the trial. In response Ramage declared that he was ‘not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter’. Although the charge of murder stood, Ramage had flagged his intention to argue that he’d been provoked to kill by his wife’s taunts and that he should only be found guilty of manslaughter. Provocation was on the agenda again. The mothers at the riding club and in the Scotch and Lauriston milieu knew nothing about the law of provocation.As unpalatable as it might be to some, the law has survived only because its victims have been the powerless. Working class women disconnected from the epicentre of power don’t change laws. As long as it was those women whose rights were trammelled, the law could be hidden from the public gaze. MR DUNN ARRIVES
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If Christine and the girls had read my book Just Another Little Murder, they’d have been prepared for Dunn’s tirade. Published in late 2002, less than a year before Julie was killed, the book followed years of campaigning against the law of provocation and documented some of the worst acts of criminal law bastardry. If the girls had sat through R v Crowe or cast an eye over what defence barrister Bob Kent said about the murdered Christine Boyce in that trial, they’d have known the courts take a dim view of any woman who enjoys sex outside the marriage. In this disgraceful and barbaric trial the Boyce family suffered humiliation almost unparalleled in Victorian criminal justice history. It reached its lowest point when Kent argued that naked photos of Christine should be admitted as evidence: We would submit it is a proper and valid argument to say it is relevant to know that the person who is deceased in this case was an attractive woman both in face and body and was in fact the wife of the deceased man. And that in those circumstances a juror might say, ‘an ordinary man in this man’s situation may well have acted, lost control and acted in that way [the photos show] she is somebody whom we could understand him having a great passion for.
The photographs had been taken as a birthday present for Crowe at his request.They were in keeping with the way many couples now use digital cameras. US celebrity Paris Hilton and Melbourne singer Debbie Byrne would be stunned to learn that their sexually explicit home videos could be used as defence evidence should an estranged partner kill them. A couple of years before he shot her dead Crowe had broken Christine’s jaw.Wife killers are never cleanskins. Born into a middle class family and educated at a private 106
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Catholic school, Christine never became a cause célèbre of the Canterbury set. Prior to her murder, she had begun working as a prostitute. Her sister says she was so financially poor as a result of the relationship with Kevin Crowe that it was the only way she could survive. Kent’s reason for wanting the photos admitted had nothing to do with understanding how her beauty might have impacted on the killer.The purpose of the salacious photos was to assassinate her character. She was a harlot or, as James Ramage had said of his wife, ‘a slut’. And the murder of sluts, adulterers and prostitutes can never be as serious or morally repulsive as the killing of a chaste or ‘good woman’.That’s why the jury found Crowe guilty only of manslaughter and he was out of gaol in less than four years. History told Philip Dunn that trawling through a dead woman’s affairs only enhanced a killer’s chances. The story about Julie’s Eco-d colleague Jo McLean meeting an AFL footballer at the Botanical Hotel was typical.The events of the night had no bearing on the alleged murder, yet Dunn salivated at the prospect of alluding to the man’s identity. Although prosecutor Daryl Brown objected when Dunn said ‘you’d had a relationship with the prominent footballer’, the point had been made. Despite neither the events of the night nor the footballer’s name throwing any light on the killing, Dunn twice cited the man’s Christian name. Everyone knew he was married. That Julie, who’d hidden so much from her husband, would tell him about Jo’s flirtation mystified her friends. It shouldn’t have. He browbeat her so much about the man she met it was her only escape route. She could never have imagined Jo’s alleged fling would be used against her. Julie should have known better. At the committal hearing Dunn used it to intimidate the female witnesses and, by association, to besmirch Julie’s character. It was testimony to Jo’s confidence and courage that MR DUNN ARRIVES
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she didn’t cower. So powerful was her defence of Julie, Dunn was left in her wake. A modern woman, she was not about to be silenced by his puritanical cross-examination. Descriptions of Julie as ‘fearing’ Ramage convinced Dunn that Jo McLean might do his client untold harm if he tried to intimidate her at the trial. This probably explains why he didn’t ask her about the night at the Botanical, when she took the stand in the supreme court on 18 October 2004. The joust between Dunn and McLean at the trial was a tame affair. Sounding old and out of date, like the law of provocation itself, Dunn was no match for this young woman. A man of traditional values, Ray Garrett was devastated by the portrayal of his daughter at the committal. For a protective father who’d never wanted his daughter to marry Ramage and had been implacably opposed to her having sex with him as a seventeen-year-old, the trial evidence was confounding and humiliating. In the face of Ramage’s aggression and violence his daughter’s loyalty made her look like a helpless victim, a woman so weak that she couldn’t leave the marriage.Then when she did seek romantic comfort outside a loveless marriage the whole saga looked so undignified and sordid. After he gave evidence on 5 May 2004, the first day of the three-day committal hearing, Ray’s health went into a spiral. On the Saturday he had to be taken to the Austin Hospital by ambulance suffering severe stomach pains and a dangerously high temperature. A proud father helpless to protect his daughter and denied the right to advise anyone on how to represent her. Abandoned and forgotten, like all the dead women before her, it seemed Julie Ramage had become just another victim. Shocked and rattled by Philip Dunn’s bullying of witnesses, Christine Howgate was the first of Julie’s friends to ring me. It was late May 2004. ‘Would you mind speaking with Jane?’ she 108
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asked.When Jane rang a few days later it was all so familiar. He’ll get manslaughter – I didn’t say it, but I knew it. Already Christine had fired off a letter to Dunn: Matthew and Sam don’t need a father who killed their mother, but they do need to hear what a wonderful person their mother was. They need to know that she was proud of them and that she endured the condescending taunts and abuses of James because she knew that if she were to leave he would try to poison her children against her and would make their lives difficult in order to punish her. He had a track record of doing just that whenever she did anything for herself that he didn’t approve of. Matt and Sam testified that their parents had a ‘normal’ marriage.You would have to agree that ‘normal’ is very difficult to define and of course those kids knew nothing else. But we all know what isn’t normal.
Julie’s friends didn’t realise what a difference they were about to make and how this murder would capture the public’s imagination. Everywhere Julie Garrett went, people took to her. From Eco-d to the pony club, she made people feel good.That’s why her friends were in court in defiance of the bullyboy Philip Dunn.This was a murder case with a twist. It was a middle class murder in a society where class is as powerful a force as it has ever been. Just as the murder of the wealthy matriarch Margaret Wales-King and her husband Paul King in 2002 had everyone talking, so the story of Julie Ramage would soon dominate the headlines.
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I didn’t meet Jane Ashton in person until just before 10.30 am on Tuesday 12 October 2004, the first day evidence was heard in the trial. She was seated on one of the church-like pews in the foyer outside Court 12, in Melbourne’s Supreme Court building on the corner of Lonsdale and William Street. The court was on the opposite side of the Supreme Court complex from where Vicki’s killer had been tried.The memory of a gruelling committal hearing flooding her head, she looked almost comatose as a witness assistance officer hovered over her. Jane had emailed me the day before to say she would be giving evidence. Now fully aware that her brother-in-law would be pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds that his wife’s provocative behaviour had caused him to lose control, she was genuinely fearful of what lay ahead. We spoke only a few words before I stuck my head in the empty, silent courtroom. No matter which court or foyer you’re in, they all look the same. It’s like being lost in Venice, where 110
every canal looks identical to the next. It could have been yesterday that I was in the supreme court listening to Keogh’s defence unfold. George Hampel’s fine-boned face – ferret-like, said Mum – embellished by the white wig and the splash of red around his shoulders.The pictures were all so vivid. Keogh at the back, fixated on every word. He couldn’t sit still in school and as a kid was legendary for terrorising teachers, yet in court he didn’t miss a beat. It seemed like yesterday. The reminiscing was brought to an end when a gruff female security guard burst in and said, ‘Move away, please.’ She was doing a security reconnoitre for the arrival of the killer. I stepped out into the foyer. If those walls could talk they’d relate some gut-wrenching stories about the killing of women.Terrible stories, hidden away in the vaults of the Office of the Public Prosecutor. It was the first time I’d been inside one of those courts since 1989. For the first two weeks of February my family made the almost religious pilgrimage to the court for the ponderous and sublimely fictitious reconstruction of the murder of my sister Vicki. On the last day, Detective Barry McIntosh burst into tears near the window that looks out on Lonsdale Street and the new County Court building. He took the manslaughter verdict as hard as my family did. ‘I thought I might see you here,’ Crown Prosecutor Julian Leckie said as I took his outstretched hand.A quietly spoken and methodical man, educated at Ivanhoe Grammar, Leckie had been assigned the task of countering the theatrical windbag, Philip Dunn. Dunn had built a name as an animated, combative defence lawyer. His critics said it was all show. ‘So, what are you going to do about the provocation? You’ll oppose it going to the jury, won’t you?’ I said as Leckie prepared to squeeze his slender body through the narrow swing doors leading to the court. THE TRIAL BEGINS
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‘Don’t want a retrial,’ he replied with a sort of nervous grimace. ‘What’s that mean?’ asked a friend of Julie’s who’d overheard the conversation. How do you explain the absurdity of the law of provocation, I thought as I set about unravelling the real meaning of the words? ‘If Leckie convinces the judge that provocation shouldn’t be left to the jury and Ramage is found guilty of murder, he’ll appeal and ask for a retrial. So Leckie will agree to Ramage running provocation, but he’ll tell the jury they should reject it and find him guilty of murder,’ I replied. The bloke looked bewildered. So he should have. It was the wrong decision by the crown prosecutor and would come back to haunt him. There was nothing flamboyant about Julian Leckie and he wasn’t a risk-taker. The ruddy-faced man with a penchant for interrupting any woman, who didn’t give him the answer he wanted, would be the risk-taker in this case. While Dunn was bombarding Julie’s friends at the committal hearing, Crown Prosecutor Julian Leckie had been up to his neck in R vYasso. Mazin Yasso, an Iraqi living in Meadow Heights, had stabbed his estranged wife, Eman Hermiz, to death on 8 May 2001. So terrified was Eman that she’d taken out a restraining order against Yasso. Her niece, Susan Kalandos, says that the day before she was murdered, Eman rang 000 and asked for help.The police ethical standards department say they have no record of the call. Susan swears that the call was made. A piece of paper made no difference to Yasso. Outside the language centre where he corralled Eman he showed her who was boss. Later he would claim she spat at him and that this caused him to lose control. His counsel said he was entitled to the defence of provocation. Leckie wouldn’t hear of it. Justice Coldrey agreed and the jury found the killer guilty of murder, whereupon Coldrey sentenced 112
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him to fifteen years’ gaol. On 5 August 2004, two months before the Ramage case was set to open, an appeal court overturned the verdict. In a two to one ruling, with Justice Frank Vincent dissenting, judges Stephen Charles and John Batt ruled that Justice Coldrey was wrong to deny Yasso a provocation defence and he should therefore be retried. It was another example of backward thinking on the bench. The appeal court’s Justice Stephen Charles captured the spirit of the judiciary when he observed ‘in the present case there was much evidence that the alleged affair between the deceased and Nasir Haba had brought shame and humiliation to the applicant and caused him much distress. All of this would have provided a basis for suspecting that the applicant in speaking to the police may have down-played or lied about the deceased’s relationship with Nasir Haba.’ Charles was so far off the mark it was embarrassing. There was no affair. Nor did Yasso think his wife was having an affair. All Eman was doing was confiding in a man she’d met at language school. In any case, it didn’t seem to register with Justice Charles that ‘an affair’ is not an excuse to murder or a reason for allowing a provocation defence. That John Howard, George Bush and the so-called coalition of the willing had taken us to war in Afghanistan and against so-called ‘fundamentalist Muslims’ elsewhere to free women from oppression seemed to carry no weight when a Taliban-like warrior murdered an Australian woman on home soil. In his summary Justice Charles justified his decision as follows: Mr Tehan, who appeared for the applicant, submitted that the following matters of Chaldean culture had been established in evidence and were relevant. Chaldeans live under a code of strict traditions and customs that have continued THE TRIAL BEGINS
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for many hundreds of years. In Chaldean tradition marital fidelity is of paramount importance. Divorce is not allowed, nor remarriage upon the death of one of the spouses. And no distinction is drawn between married parties who live together and those who live apart. In Chaldean tradition the wife’s marital infidelity is a source of strong, social disapproval not only for the wife but for the husband with the potential to result in a lifelong smear upon the husband who is considered responsible for the acts of his wife.There was evidence also that the act of a wife spitting at or upon her husband is an act of almost unthinkable insult of such gravity that there would be an expectation that the wife would be beaten or killed if not by her husband then by her family.
Not one of the defenders of the war in Afghanistan or Iraq put pen to paper in condemnation of the appeal court’s decision to take a sympathetic view of ‘cultural murder’. Nor did they ask any of Eman’s family whether it was true that Chaldeans were religious or fundamentalist. Jamal Kalandos, Eman’s brother-inlaw, told me it was ‘bullshit’ that Chaldeans live by strict rules. ‘They’re Christians not strict Muslims and they divorce in Iraq and in Australia,’ he said. Eman Hermiz didn’t wear a veil. She went out to work as a hairdresser, wearing jeans and clothing no different from any other working class girl from the northern suburbs. This wasn’t an ethnic killing.To describe it that way, as Justice Charles did, was to ignore the fact that Australian men kill their wives for exactly the same reasons. The murder in Meadow Heights was an honour killing. It was honour killing founded in western patriarchy, not ethnicity. When the appeal court couldn’t find any ameliorating factors in Yasso’s slaughter of his 114
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estranged wife they imagined some. Patriarchy, dressed up in the strictures of Chaldean culture, had triumphed again. If an affair doesn’t condemn a woman, then separation will. If that fails, there’s always something to save a man.The excuse for the redhaired, freckly Balwyn businessman was ‘a rigidity of thinking’. According to the textbook, provocation murders turn on whether a man has lost control, as any ordinary man might do after being subjected to insulting words and actions. For Ramage it was the provocative words of his wife.When the cant is stripped away, the law of provocation is all about a woman’s defiance and has nothing to do with provocative words or gestures. Eman Hermiz stood 152 centimetres tall and weighed 47 kilos. If she was so frightened of Yasso that she’d taken out an intervention order and was regularly ringing 000 in desperation, was she likely to spit at him? Like Julie Ramage, she didn’t stand a chance. It was left to the appeal court’s Justice Vincent, an established critic of the provocation defence, to provide the truth as to the extent of provocation in R v Yasso: In my view it was clearly open to his Honour, who clearly had regard to all of the relevant legal principles and evidence addressed in the trial including that concerning the cultural background of the applicant, to conclude in effect that, as Brooking, J.A. found in Parsons:‘no reasonable jury could have failed to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the applicant’s reaction to the victim’s conduct fell below – indeed, fell a long, long way below – the minimum limits of the range of powers of self-control that must be attributed to the ordinary person.’
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Garretts. All the ingredients existed for another swine to be excused of murder. He wasn’t an unemployed, tattooed Peter Keogh or a struggling Iraqi whose swarthy skin was a symbol of inferiority.This was a ‘society murder’ and a soap opera in which money, glamour and the deadly sin of adultery would fire every frame. Ramage had struck the first blow with provocation being left to the jury. Whatever they might have thought deep down, the twelve men and women of the jury now had to ask themselves one very perplexing question. Might an ordinary man with the characteristics of James Ramage kill his wife if, as he alleged, she taunted him about his sexual prowess? If they believed the prosecution had not proved beyond reasonable doubt that an ordinary man could not do this, then Ramage would walk with manslaughter and reduce his sentence by up to ten years. Philip Dunn QC understood the real meaning of Justice Charles’ ruling onYasso. It’s always infidelity or alleged infidelity, not words or gestures, that form the basis of provocation. And what better way to explore the issue of infidelity than with an inquisition of Julie’s identical twin, Jane Ashton. Jane faced her day in court and the prospect of another round of bullying from Philip Dunn with great trepidation. Prior to the commencement of proceedings she’d sat with Matt and Sam Ramage and her dad in the little witness room. It was tense and uncomfortable as they waited for the crown prosecutor to explain their roles.When Leckie arrived he advised the children of their right to avoid giving evidence if they felt it might jeopardise their relationship with their father. They nodded then said they wished to take the stand. Some of Julie’s friends were surprised that Leckie had decided to take this course of action. Jane had pleaded with the prosecution team not to put the children in the witness box. From his gaol cell Ramage had been 116
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placing his children under increasing pressure. They’d lost their mother. What was to be gained from losing their father for twenty years, said Phil Dunn? As the months rolled on the children had come to the realisation that they should make the best of a bad lot. As much as Jane longed for them to defend her twin, she wasn’t hopeful.‘If I get a long sentence I’ll commit suicide,’ Ramage had told his son. She prayed that it would backfire and his son would disown him. While the discussion with Leckie was taking place I grabbed a seat in the court almost identical to the one I’d had in court 3 in 1989. From the end of a long pew just inside the doors I had a panoramic view of the court and a direct view of the jury. Between the killer and me was the female security guard I’d seen earlier. Ramage was so close I could have spoken to him without raising my voice.When he was led through the foyer past the little pole that gives directions to the various courts he was anything but imposing. Gaunt and drained of colour he looked poorly. He was a big man; around 6 feet 2 inches (188 centimetres), but he looked more like a businessman down on his luck than a hardy plumber or a construction worker.‘Coward,’ I thought. What made him tick and what really happened when Julie sat opposite him in the kitchen that day? Why did a man with assets worth $2.5 million and a bathtub thermoglazing business making money hand over fist need to kill his wife? So many questions, so few answers. None of the men whose acquaintance he’d made in pursuit of his wealth were in the court.Although Ian Dicker and Rob Moodie had visited him in gaol, they hadn’t found time to hear the evidence or mix with the grieving family in court. Despite scores of manipulative letters to friends and parents at Scotch College, Ramage had hardly a friend in the world. Ramage had chosen to send his son to the prestigious Scotch College for all the wrong reasons.The all-boys ‘army on the hill’, THE TRIAL BEGINS
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as Scotch was known locally, was the place where men of influence networked and deals were done, sometimes by way of the secret Masonic handshake. In these circles Ramage had fanatically sought out those who might help him make money. And there he was, a truly pathetic and lonely man, caged in a little platform at the back of a courtroom. If only we could ‘wind back the clock’ and start again, Ramage had said in his police interview on the night of the alleged murder. Unfortunately he didn’t mean it. ‘I’ve been too controlling. I wish I could wind back the clock,’ he’d told psychologist Tom Paterson in front of his wife six days before the murder. The prospect of Ramage being convicted of murder and going to gaol for fifteen years was of little comfort to Julie’s family. A simple ‘sorry’ would have been more comforting. Why wasn’t he stopped? Where were the men when Julie needed them? Suburban thug or Balwyn businessman, it made no difference.The challenge was to stop them. Before he could cross-examine Jane Ashton, Philip Dunn had faced one major hurdle. He had to expunge from the trial as much evidence as possible prejudicial to his client. The test wasn’t only whether the evidence was verifiable fact or hearsay. Might it unfairly prejudice a fair trial and was it relevant? They were the questions Dunn would ask Justice Robert Osborn. For the duration of the week before the jury was empanelled, Leckie and Dunn had put their cases before the judge. Dunn knew his best chance of a manslaughter verdict lay in dragging Julie’s affairs with Sean Mays and Davey and her relationship with Webb backwards and forwards past the jury. He also knew that Ramage’s documented head-butting of his wife in 1991 was damaging. It was too long ago to be of relevance, said Dunn. After five torturous days of what in legal circles is pompously known as voir dire, Justice Osborn ruled that the jury would not 118
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hear how Julie had told her friends her husband would ‘kill her’ if he found out about her affairs. It was considered prejudicial to the accused. Julie’s friends were dumbfounded. Although the affair with Davey had no connection with the killing, Dunn wanted it in. He argued that even if Ramage didn’t know about his wife’s sexual dalliances, their existence added veracity to the claim that his wife had insulted his sexual prowess in the kitchen before he killed her. In other words, if she’d had affairs before and in the weeks after the marriage break-up, Julie was more likely to be in a position to belittle his sexual prowess. It didn’t matter that Ramage had never once in his police interview suggested his wife had used her affairs to insult or belittle him. Nor did it matter that she’d been terrified that he’d find out about David and that the only man mentioned by Ramage was Laurence Webb, who he already knew about. To ensure that the defence was not denied ‘evidence considered most favourable to the accused’, as the law deems it, Osborn said the jury should hear about the affairs. The admissibility of the steamy affair with Davey was a massive strike for Ramage: ‘Well, one way of avoiding upsetting her husband would have been to have not had an affair,’ Dunn would quip before the trial was over. And while Julie’s affairs were admissible, the same did not apply to Ramage’s violence. Despite a doctor’s report that he’d head-butted his wife and broken her nose in 1991, and evidence at the committal that he’d given his daughter a black eye, the prior violence could not be led. It was too long ago according to the rules of relationship evidence. If relationship evidence was desgined to help a jury better understand the origins of an act of violence, it was a disgraceful failure in R v Ramage. With Julie’s frantic ‘he’ll kill me if he finds out’ ruled inadmissible, the best Leckie would be allowed to induce people to THE TRIAL BEGINS
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say was that she was scared he might kill her horse and maybe hurt her. It was odd, but not entirely surprising that Justice Osborn allowed the jury to hear about Julie’s affairs. This is the stuff of ‘wife murder’ trials. It isn’t just about a jury hearing ‘all evidence favourable’ to the accused. It’s about the sanctity of marriage and the power of sex and adultery. For Jane Ashton and Christine Howgate and the women who made up Julie’s social set, the decision was baffling. For those who’ve seen a provocation defence unfold in a so-called civilised western court, it was unremarkable. Whereas Ramage had hired Dunn before the committal, Julian Leckie had only picked up the case five days before the trial. A veteran of the circuit, with a considered and highly critical view of the operation of the law of provocation, he genuinely thought Ramage would go down for murder. There was a body and little mystery if any, and the killer had not only strangled his estranged wife, he’d buried her. Although Leckie had to familiarise himself with the facts of the case in a hurry, his instructing solicitor, twenty-eight-year-old Jordana Millman, had been with it since the committal. Educated at Wesley College, Jordana had been involved in only six murder cases, none of them involving provocation. She’s a young woman with a phlegmatic view of the law and its nuances. ‘I can’t afford to be overly passionate if I’m to think straight about the facts,’ she told me. Millman’s not one to make rash or colourful statements or throw the word ‘misogyny’ into a public conversation.‘Prosecutors must be objective at all times.’ To the family of a murdered woman, detachment of this kind can be akin to insensitivity. When I noticed Dunn and Leckie laughing, if only briefly, in the doorway to the courtyard during a break in proceedings my heart sank. Murder does that to you. 120
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There was nothing phlegmatic or dispassionate about Philip Dunn.When interviewed on Channel Seven’s Today Tonight program after the trial he described as ‘bullshit’ the claim that his client had three hours to construct his case.The young reporter didn’t bother to ask him to elaborate. It was typical of Dunn’s bravado. Which part of the assertion didn’t he agree with? Was Pica only there for two hours? Did they not discuss the murder or the defence of provocation? A woman had been murdered and the best Dunn could do was offer a smartarse riposte. I lost a sister to murder and saw her killer found guilty of manslaughter due to provocation. I wouldn’t laugh with Dunn in the foyer or anywhere else.
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Following a ten-minute break during which Leckie explained his instructions to Ramage’s children, His Honour Justice Bob Osborn asked that the jury be called back into the court.There was nothing out of the ordinary about this jury of seven men and five women. No young women, university students or men with dreadlocks. It was a very suburban collection; pious and censorious. Anyone looking vaguely feminist had been expunged. After describing herself as a retired journalist, Kate Baillieu was given short shrift by Dunn. Sister of Liberal politician Ted Baillieu and a child of one of Melbourne’s wealthiest and most prominent society families, Kate Baillieu’s history preceded her. The last thing Ramage needed was a woman with a deep vein of suffragette blood judging a wife killer. Nervous but determined, Jane Ashton looked straight ahead, her blonde hair resting in neat symmetry on her shoulders. Despite the tired eyes she looked fit and healthy in black trousers and a white blouse. It was the same outfit she’d worn to the 122
funeral.As much as she wanted to tell the real story of the killing of her twin sister, the best she’d been able to say to prosecutor Julian Leckie during her time in the witness box was that her sister ‘didn’t want to trigger any incidents of violence, and that she just hoped that he would accept her decision’. The cocky Philip Dunn,‘Dunny Boy’ to his mates, was itching to get at her.The moment he stood up to cross-examine Jane his intentions were transparent. ‘Mrs Ashton, on Sunday 20 July last year you had a conversation with your sister Julie, did you not?’ Before she’d finished the answer she knew what would follow. Laurence Webb was the reason for this tragedy. The man Dunn had labelled a ‘bounder’ and a ‘cad’ at the committal would play a crucial role in the case for the defence. Dunn didn’t waste any time. ‘During that conversation, she told you, did she not, that she had met the love of her life?’ ‘She said that she and Laurence were in love.’ Desperate to have Jane repeat the words ‘love of her life’ Dunn reminded her of an earlier statement and then asserted that she was now changing her statement. Even before she could properly answer, he was into her. Edgy and looking straight ahead rather than at Dunn, Jane tried to hold her nerve. Frustrated by Jane’s refusal to buckle, Dunn tried to portray her as a prejudicial witness.‘You don’t like James Ramage, do you?’ It’s a rhetorical question asked by every defence lawyer when a witness has something unpalatable to say about a killer. Ramage had killed Jane’s sister and she was being asked to confirm her evenhandedness to him. ‘Just because he slaughtered my sister doesn’t mean I don’t like him.’ Is this what Dunn expected Jane to say? Unperturbed, Jane told the truth. She disliked him. Had she disliked him for many years, asked Dunn? Again the answer was a powerful ‘yes’.The truth was that from the time they first met at the Garrett home in Goffs Oak, Hertfordshire in 1978, she’d been JANE ASHTON IS CALLED
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his nemesis. Bright, irreverent and independent, she was no man’s doormat and there was no love lost between them. A mirror image of the dead woman, it was as if Julie was speaking from the grave. With her good looks and her English accent, whilst not upper class, adding an air of authority, Jane’s cross-examination was as eerie as it was tense. Her vulnerability as a witness, however, was that she’d told Ramage the relationship with Webb was innocent and that it would be good for him to go to counselling. She was cast as a duplicitous matchmaker who hated Ramage so much she’d say anything to hurt his name. Hadn’t she offered the fragile James Ramage hope while secretly facilitating Julie’s abandonment of him for another man? From the first moment of the first day of evidence, Ramage was presented as a man in love, encircled by a gaggle of heartless feminists intent on wrecking his family. Bored, or feeling he’d exhausted that line of argument, Dunn turned the spotlight on Jane’s father. ‘Your father was a strict disciplinarian?’ he said. ‘Yes.’ ‘Conservative?’ ‘No.’ ‘Old-fashioned in some ways?’ ‘No.’ ‘When your sister was having an intimate relationship–’ It was enough for Leckie. ‘I object to this,’ he said. ‘Why?’ ‘How is it relevant? ‘Your Honour, I understood the psychological state of mind of Mrs Ramage was very relevant, and what I wanted to establish was that she’d been asked to leave school by her father.’ ‘It’s hearsay…ancient history…and it’s to get sympathy,’ said Leckie, rolling up his sleeves for a rare battle with his opposite 124
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number. Dunn had one parting shot.‘It had nothing to do with trying to get sympathy,’ he said. It was a bullshit answer. There could only be one reason for this question. He was trying to cast doubt on the state of mind of the dead woman. In 1991 a psychotherapist, Dr John Buchanan, had documented Julie as saying that ‘like her father James was too involved in business’. Dunn would have loved to refer to it as an example of Julie’s ungratefulness. The trouble was Buchanan’s report only came about because of Ramage’s violent head-butt of Julie, and Dunn didn’t want the jury to know about that. As Dunn attacked Julie’s state of mind I recalled Australian author Helen Garner’s book Joe Cinque’s Consolation, and how I cringed when she describes Anu Singh, the woman convicted of the drug-induced killing of her boyfriend in Canberra in 1997, as the epitome of what women fear in themselves:‘the damaged infant, the vain, frantic, destructive, out of control’. It was this poisoned chalice that Philip Dunn had handed to Julie’s twin sister at the committal. Now it was in her hand again and it was brimming with lust, love, vanity and betrayal. Dunn had to do more than convince the jury that his client was out of control when he strangled his wife. If Ramage was to avoid a verdict of murder, Dunn had to convince a jury that Jane’s sister was ‘vain, destructive and out of control’. Erotic letters from a lover would help prove Julie’s vanity and betrayal of her husband. Her declaration of love for Webb, after being intimate only five times, proved she was ‘frantic’. Julie was menstruating.Would that help prove that she was out of control? If he could paint her as an example of the ‘damaged child’ about which Helen Garner wrote, the jury might be sympathetic to the killer. After a series of inferences about affairs and deceit being the reason for the killing, Dunn attempted to bully Jane into saying there had been no violence in the marriage.To do this he had to JANE ASHTON IS CALLED
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concentrate on the past few years. If Dunn offered an open question, the only answer Jane could give was that Ramage had bashed her sister in 1991.This being the case, he asked whether she knew of any violence in the years 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. When she replied, ‘Sorry, could you repeat the dates?’ he restated the question again, without the dates. This merely prompted a further question from Jane. Whether she had planned her answer or it had come spontaneously, it was a brilliant strategy.‘The dates please?’ she said once more, whereupon Dunn decided to answer it himself. His ‘I know you say he does’ was met by the same question, ‘The dates please?’ It was an unambiguous confirmation by Jane that there was violence. It was just a matter of when. It wasn’t the answer Dunn wanted. Believing she needed rescuing, Leckie had interjected, ‘Let her finish, please, she was…’ Jane didn’t need help. ‘I want the dates, the years you were suggesting,’ she said. Dunn had nowhere to go except to repeat the years. Aware that there was no documented evidence of violence over the past three years, Dunn wanted Ramage’s enemy to utter the words ‘there was no violence’. Eventually he took the witness back to the statement she made at the committal hearing:‘the only incident I’ve heard about was when he pushed her around, pushed her off the bed’. Even if the rules of evidence prevented her from saying Ramage had bashed her sister, broken her nose and bullied her, it had been a brave try. Julie would have been proud. I understood Dunn’s position, but I just didn’t respect it.We all deserve to be judged by what we say and do. Dunn can hide behind the ‘only doing my job’ line as much as he likes. It cuts no ice with me.The endless salacious drivel about the men Julie had met and how James was having counselling threw not one shred of light on the homicide. Nor did the pigeonholing of witnesses’ answers allow the real truth to surface. As theatre, 126
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Dunn’s antics were worth a look. As pursuit of truth or fact, the whole trial was a disaster. Derisively portrayed by Dunn as having ‘fallen in love with a new beau’ Julie was being transformed into a femme fatale.Worse still, she was being made to look silly and capricious.Three brief affairs in twenty years had turned an otherwise ordinary suburban mother into a sex siren. Julie had met a man at the Botanical Hotel and agreed to meet him for dinner and she’d been out a handful of times with Laurence.And there was Dunn, his big square head crowned by a wig that made him look like a Cromwellian foot soldier and gave his words the ring of an antiquated old fart, floundering in a world he simply didn’t understand. Back in his office were all the signs that he was a man of the world and a defender of the downtrodden. The Aboriginal art and the leather trappings confirmed he was both a great advocate of the disadvantaged and a person of taste. Sadly, defending wife killers came with the territory. Watching Dunn parading before the court filled me with a mixture of anger and contempt. It was the same contempt that consumed me when I came across Bob Vernon’s words in Peter Keogh’s musty files at the Office of Public Prosecutions.Vernon had died prematurely in 2000, only three years after losing a scandalous case before the Crimes Compensation Tribunal in which he’d been accused of rapaciously seducing his fourteenyear-old babysitter, Barbara Biggs, in the early seventies.A couple of years after the sexual assault of Biggs he was defending Keogh against the charge of raping a nine-year-old girl. Vernon’s theatrical courtroom capers were legendary in the bars around Melbourne’s legal precinct. None was better than his performance in getting Keogh off the attempted murder of a police officer in 1964.‘Whatever he [Keogh] may be, he is not the sort of person who would normally take a dagger and attack people with it,’Vernon had implored Justice Monahan. JANE ASHTON IS CALLED
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In 2001 a letter from a young woman,Terri McNulty, showed just how wrong Vernon had been.‘We looked under the beds, in wardrobes…then we opened Mum’s wardrobe and all her clothes had been cut and her shoes cut…then Mum yelled to get out of the house…Mum came running out the front door with him [Keogh] chasing…he grabbed her with one arm around her neck and another with the knife at her throat.Then a truck came along and he let her go.’The incident occurred in Northcote, less than six years before Keogh used his knife on my sister. Terri’s mother had separated from Keogh. Defence barristers don’t tell the truth about wife murderers. Protected by a discriminatory law they create a lie. That’s why I’d always regretted not telling defence barrister John Champion that his version of my sister’s murder was almost as bad as the murder itself. This time there’d be no regrets. ‘Excuse me, Mr Dunn, I was wondering whether I could interview you,’ I said as he made his way towards the courtyard during the lunch break on Tuesday 12 October 2004. He looked a little perplexed until I identified myself. ‘Oh, Phil Cleary, you’re a legend,’ he said. ‘I’d like to ask you whether you see any similarity between your questions and the way women are treated by the Taliban in Afghanistan.’ It wasn’t anywhere near the most difficult question he’d been asked, but it struck a nerve. ‘Only doing my job,’ he said, scurrying off. It was a far cry from the bullying man who paraded before the jury. Christine Howgate was so stunned by Dunn’s cross-examination of Jane and his demeaning of Julie that she went to Jane’s home that night and cried until 2 am. Another friend was so distressed she began talking suicide. The women couldn’t believe that the true story of Julie’s life was being hidden from the world. Matthew Ramage, approaching nineteen years of age and almost at the end of his first year at Melbourne University, was 128
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the first of Ramage’s children to take the stand. Over the previous year James Ramage had bludgeoned his son into believing his mother’s death was the consequence of an unfortunate sequence of events. An accident brought about by his mother’s wayward behaviour. As much as Matt’s physical size created the appearance of confidence, he was snared in an intricate web. James Ramage’s share of Thermo-Glaze was calculated at around $1.1 million. Even if Dunn and his team wiped out $200 000 it was a nest egg few teenage children could ever contemplate. Ramage had told his son he’d be the recipient of the money. This and the pressure he faced to not damn his father, was a massive burden for someone so young. On top of the money from the business, their mother’s last will and testament bequeathed them a $900 000 house in Balwyn and other policies and investments worth close to $500 000.This was no family fighting over table scraps. When police photographer Lisa Cook turned her camera on the house she gave us a glimpse into the character of the inhabitants. From the Donna Hay poster above his bed to the Scotch College school photo on the wall, there was not a single thing out of place in Matthew’s room. No one could quite explain why a cookbook queen had pride of place on his wall. If nothing else, like his father he was a disciple of orderliness. No fraying posters with ripped corners for this eighteenyear-old boy. No clothes on the floor.The large photo of those proud Scotch boys, every single one and another of Scotch’s Cadet Unit bore testament to the path he was walking.Although his dad liked Prime Minister John Howard and Matt probably voted the same way at the 2004 election, his taste in music wasn’t conservative. The Australian band Powderfinger, who’d been known to take a swipe at Pauline Hanson and John Howard style politics, and the alternative bands the Black Eyed JANE ASHTON IS CALLED
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Peas and the John Butler Trio, all featured on the symmetrically decorated walls.Yet for all the flirtations with dissent it was said he was not a boy in revolt.As one family friend put it,‘Matt was malleable like his mum, whereas Sam was the rebellious partygirl.’ I waited to see if he was right. From the opening account of the events of the early evening to the dinner at Colombo’s it was obvious Matthew was not about to set his dad adrift. They’d driven to Colombo’s rather than walked because he had a physics exam the next day and was in a hurry. He couldn’t remember much discussion about his mother apart from their collective desire to move on after the separation. His parents had arguments ‘like any other couple’. His father had told him on the night of the Geelong trip that Julie was seeing another man. However his dad ‘didn’t know the full extent of the relationship at that time’, said Matthew. Did he mean before or after the Geelong trip? It wasn’t clear. Leckie would return to this vital question. By now it was obvious to Julie’s friends in court that everything Matthew Ramage said about his father would be considered and careful. They didn’t expect him to crucify his dad, but they did think he might stick up for his dead mother. They didn’t know he’d spent four hours with Dunn in his chambers before the committal hearing.When it came to the question of the phone call made by his dad as he walked to the police station, suspense gripped the courtroom. ‘He sounded, I suppose a bit jittery and worried and yes, a bit of a wreck,’ said the boy. Hearts sank in despair. ‘How could he be a wreck when he’s taken Matt out for dinner and spent three hours with a barrister?’ said Christine Howgate. When asked whether he knew about the serious argument that might have precipitated Julie’s decision to leave, Matthew offered the benign ‘they had arguments, like all people’. He told 130
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Leckie he knew about his father pushing his mother out of bed but couldn’t remember who told him. By now some of Julie’s friends were furious. There was hardly an answer he gave that pleased them. It was all about emphasis. In the face of concerted resistance the crown prosecutor went about the task with skill and quiet diligence. Despite the emotional tension he was experiencing, Matt had a sharp eye for the implications of every question. This was no more evident than when Leckie returned to the question of the relationship with Webb and what Matt’s father knew about it.‘Do you remember having a conversation with your mother around Friday 18 July just a few days before she died?’ asked Leckie. The prosecution desperately needed to quash the idea that Ramage only grasped the seriousness of the relationship when Julie arrived at Marock Place on the Monday of her death. And one person who knew the truth was her son. ‘Yes, I think I have to distinguish – I spoke to Mum on Sunday night as well,’ he said, as Leckie searched for an answer that put time between the killing and when Julie told her husband the relationship was over. ‘Did he say anything about it being obvious that the relationship was totally over?’ asked Leckie. ‘No, he didn’t.’ ‘Are you certain about that?’ ‘I can’t remember.’ ‘You can’t remember? Did you make a statement?’ ‘Yes, I made a statement.’ ‘I’d ask that you have a look at this document…you understand the line I’m referring to?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’d ask you again now …’ ‘Yes, I suppose that over the Saturday and the Sunday when JANE ASHTON IS CALLED
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we found out [about Laurence and the marriage being over] we talked a lot about it and I suppose we might...yes…he could have said those things. On Friday 18 July Mum told me that there wasn’t much chance of them getting back together. I feel that Dad felt very disappointed that Mum was already with someone so soon after the split up. I was extremely disappointed in Mum because she promised me that she wouldn’t be with anyone else. Dad and I spoke at length about Mum seeing another man and he made the comments such as “it keeps getting worse…it’s obviously totally over now”.’ ‘Thank you. I have no further questions of the witness,’ said a contented Julian Leckie. Julie’s friends had a mountain of questions. ‘How could Matthew possibly forget that he’d told the police this critical fact within hours of learning his dad had killed his mum?’ they muttered in the gallery. How could he be so certain his father knew about Julie’s new lover on Saturday or Sunday, then tell the court Ramage ‘could have said he knew’? Did pressure from a manipulative father leave this devoted son open to the accusation that he was hiding the truth? It was a tragedy that a boy’s love for his father should have come at the expense of the woman who’d brought him into the world. On 13 November 1985 his mum wrote to her sister about her love for her baby: ‘It’s hard to put in a letter just how much we both love him. He’s just so beautiful. He laughs and has a real personality already.’ Would reading those words have made any difference to what Matthew might have said? Who knows? The prosecutor didn’t want to be seen to be too harsh on a boy who’d lost a mother, but as much as he didn’t show it or make any public comments, in the foyer he was heard to say ‘it was like pulling teeth’.The generous would forgive Matthew and his aunty still loved him. Others, especially those who listened as Julian 132
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Leckie read the last line from Matthew’s statement, weren’t as generous. In front of two counsellors on Tuesday afternoon and on Saturday in Geelong, Julie had told her estranged husband it was over. She even told him there was another man.What more could she have done? Only one thing: return to ‘the boys’ and their fortress in Balwyn.The truth lay in the fine print. No one noticed Matthew’s use of the collective noun ‘we’ in his answer.‘Yes, I suppose that over the Saturday and the Sunday when we found out, we talked a lot about it and I suppose we might...yes…he could have said those things,’ said Matthew. These were the words of a boy under immense pressure from a desperate father. As much as Julie had tried to let her husband down gently, everything she did would come back to haunt her. If she stayed until her husband came home from the overseas trip he’d never have let her out of the house. If she’d hired a lawyer she’d have looked like a gold-digger. If she’d left with nothing, she’d have been a saint, but a poor one. And even that wouldn’t have saved her. ‘I have asked Sam to come with me as it would be hard to be on my own at a time like this, she is very upset and isn’t choosing me over you. Matthew is old enough to make up his own mind…I haven’t said anything to make them take sides and never will...I have tried to leave the house clean and tidy and prepared a meal for this evening,’ she’d said in her final letter. Although Julie genuinely thought her farewell letter conciliatory and her sister and her friends considered it kind and generous, there was more to it than met the eye. As Dallas Price, husband of her friend Christine Howgate, observed:‘It’s all about perception. He comes home from a work trip, which he sees as part of the next step in their elevation, and she’s left a letter saying she’s taken $100 000 and gone to a nice little house inToorak. JANE ASHTON IS CALLED
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And then there’s a boyfriend. He’s not going to like it.’ Dallas was right. It was all about perception. She’d taken his money and abandoned him.That was the story Dunn wanted to tell. ‘I think doing the renovations brought everything to a head. I just couldn’t get enthusiastic about something that should have been fantastic to do…I’m not saying you are a bad person or the way you want to live is wrong, it just isn’t right for me.’ Words such as these were hardly what Ramage wanted to hear.As the events that followed would show, it clearly played on his insecurities. The idea that she could be happy without him was dynamite. ‘You are a good person and you work hard and most importantly you love our kids.’This may have played to his ego, but the more saccharine and sanguine the farewell letter became, the deeper it cut into his pride. And what did she mean when she said ‘I know you will be mad when you realise I have left for good’? Was he entitled to be mad? Was the letter naïve and insensitive? As early as 1991 Ramage had told psychotherapist Dr John Buchanan that sex with his wife wasn’t all he expected. Were the affairs evidence that she stayed with him for the money alone? Although little was made of it, Ramage was fuming that Julie had taken money from an overdraft account. ‘Do you think you can have all this on a $40 000 bookkeeping job in a clothes store?’ he used to sneer.To him it was tantamount to robbery. And with what he perceived as robbery came a letter that read like the thoughts of woman who was ungrateful for what he’d given her.‘I feel I need to be my own person and that I let you run my life too much and that I’m stifled. If you said I could do anything I wanted, I couldn’t because I have become conditioned over the years to always worry about what your reaction will be to the things I do and say and therefore am never fully relaxed.’ In the eyes of the censorious, Julie’s desire for freedom 134
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was a euphemism for plundering her husband’s wealth while fucking a lover.To others these were the words of a brave woman who’d suddenly discovered there was more to life than being an obedient housewife. Despite the revelations, Julie’s letter maintained the myth that her man was indestructible. Jane Ashton says she and her sister liked strong men and that their father was such a man. If the teenage Julie Garrett was looking for a man with her father’s strength of character, it appeared she’d found him. Unfortunately, this was where the similarities ended.Twenty years of control had cemented in her head the belief that he didn’t need her, let alone love her.‘You have often said you would be happier on your own with a nice sports car, apartment and not such a great financial burden as us.’ Naïve and gullible, she thought he would get over her departure without pain. He’d be angry, yes, but certainly not fragile and pathetic.To her surprise, when the curtain went up on a lifetime of control he wasn’t just possessive, he was fundamentally insecure. A psychologist described him as suffering from ‘adjustment disorder’.To the street-wise and women experienced in family violence, it was code for ‘dangerous’. Julie’s friends felt only despair that Matt hadn’t been able to say how aggressive his father could be. And if she truly was the great mother he’d depicted in his funeral speech, then why didn’t he support her desire to find happiness away from the overbearing Ramage? The compassionate would say it wasn’t his fault, but still it hurt. In their eyes it looked as if Julie’s son had lost sight of the real victim.Why did he try to say he wasn’t sure when his father found about Webb? They were nonplussed. Even so, they wondered how the wily Dunn would counter the revelation that before the attack on Monday Ramage already knew there was another man in Julie’s life and that she wasn’t coming back to the marriage. JANE ASHTON IS CALLED
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True to form Dunn was on the attack. ‘You’ve been asked questions about a statement you made to the police…is it a statement you made to the police at 4.45 am…after you’ve been told your mother is dead?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Now the prosecutor has asked you questions about it, so the jury can understand he was interrogating you about...’ Leckie was not impressed by Dunn’s accusation that he’d interrogated Matthew and jumped to his feet. After a skirmish they moved on. Again Matthew confirmed that his mother had said it ‘was pretty much over with his dad’. As always there was one disclaimer. He hadn’t told his dad that. ‘Why not?’ asked Dunn ‘Because I didn’t want to hurt him,’ replied his dutiful son. During Dunn’s cross-examination the jury learnt that the upstairs bedrooms were all in close proximity. ‘What’s the relevance of this?’ thought Julie’s friends. She was killed downstairs. Again, to those who understand the logic of a provocation murder it made perfect sense. ‘I suppose if your parents’ voices were raised you could hear them?’ asked Dunn. ‘Yes,’ replied the boy. It was an answer in keeping with the fiction that this was a happy, smiling middle class family and that what happened downstairs was an aberration. If only Julie hadn’t left there’d have been no killing. Sadly it was probably true. Julie was the problem.Women are always the problem. It was this truth the defence barrister had in mind when he said, ‘Your father, can I suggest, imposed a curfew on you and your sister.’ The implication was clear. The reason for the argument in which Ramage called his wife a slut was that Julie wasn’t strict enough with the children. She was a promiscuous mother whose lack of sound moral fibre 136
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offended her husband and put the kids at risk.That’s what Dunn wanted the jury to believe. Although Leckie originally objected to the line of questioning he eventually allowed it.There’d be no mention of the word ‘slut’, only the imputation that Julie was slack. It was typical of how evidence favouring the accused triumphed during the trial. James Ramage was sexually active from a young age.Yet he went mad when he thought his daughter might be having sex in the months prior to the breakdown of his marriage.This was the real reason for the ‘slut’ insult. Ramage took the high moral ground in relation to his daughter and his wife, but no one asked him about his own sexual proclivities or whether he had interests outside his marriage.The hypocrisy of the rules of evidence prompted Jane to write in an email to me: If the legal system still managed to blacken my sister’s character and prevent her true nature from being seen, then heaven help anyone with a more colourful past. My sister led a pretty self-contained, boring middle class life. She didn’t have children from multiple partners. She had never smoked cigarettes or taken drugs. She wasn’t an alcoholic or a bad mother.
In an attempt to win his wife back, Ramage had recruited his son as a foot soldier. Night after night they’d discuss strategies, until the boy just wished it would stop. And when James talked with his wife he made a point of telling her that Matthew was unhappy about the separation. Philip Dunn milked it for all it was worth. It was no better illustrated than when he asked Matthew about his view of the separation. ‘Were you cross with your mother?’ said Dunn. When Matthew replied,‘Of course I was upset. I don’t know JANE ASHTON IS CALLED
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about, probably a bit cross…’ Dunn quickly reclaimed the moment. ‘Yes, upset is a better word. I’m sorry I said “cross”.’ The truth is Dunn saw nothing at all wrong with the use of the term ‘cross’. It was a Freudian slip that betrayed the patriarchal nature of the trial.The dead woman, not her husband, was on trial and Matt was entitled to be cross because his mother had engaged in a wrongdoing. I took a different view. Matthew Ramage had no right to be angry with his mother for leaving a controlling and domineering man. He had every right to be disappointed and upset, but no right to be angry. Dunn should not have been allowed to sanitise the crime and bestow such moral authority on Julie’s son. In this parable Julie Ramage was being chastised for leaving a domineering and aggressive man.Without this narrative, Ramage had no hope of beating a murder conviction. In the aftermath of the head-butt in 1991 Ramage had questioned his wife’s loyalty. Loyalty meant subservience. This was what Matthew Ramage was told should be his mother’s lot. Sadly he sounded like he believed it. A mixture of despair and disappointment overtook Jane as Dunn finished and the crown prosecutor rose again. He wanted to put to bed the idea that Julie only told her husband about Laurence Webb during lunch on the fatal Monday. It was the question that seemed to occupy everyone’s thoughts.‘When was it that you spoke to your dad when he told you these things, that it was obviously totally over now?’ Leckie asked. ‘I, as I said, I can’t remember. I spoke to him on various occasions, on the Saturday, Sunday, maybe even Monday morning. I don’t know.’ Again Matthew had prevaricated on the central question of when his father really knew about the depth of the relationship with Laurence Webb. If most of Julie’s friends weren’t already furious they were now. The others were simply 138
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sad. Julie’s son sounded like a witness for the defence. Three weeks after his moment in the witness box, Matthew joined his mates at the Scotch College Cadet Tattoo. Friday 12 November was a memorable evening for all, according to the school’s website. Boys in kilts, with the battle cry ringing in the air and a weapon at hand, imagined what it must have been like with real artillery and the whites of the enemy’s eyes in their sights. James Ramage could have told his son all about the adrenalin rush that came with such an attack. Unfortunately, the boy in the witness box had been shielded from the brutal reality of what his father had done. The day after Julie’s death Kate Clark had spoken with Matthew Ramage.‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Dad said there were words.’ If he hadn’t spoken with his father since the evening of the killing, how did he know that? And why wasn’t it in his statement? The morning after Matthew Ramage gave his evidence, Justice Osborn began proceedings with a curious instruction to the jury: You must not make your own investigations outside the court, either by way of making enquiries, or in this modern age, by going onto the internet and seeing what you can dig up that you think might help you in some way. If you did that you would not be deciding the case on the evidence you hear in the course of the trial or strictly in accordance with the directions I give you as to law.
Was it coincidence that my website carries many published articles I’ve written for magazines and newspapers on the law of provocation, and that Dunn knew I was in the court? Later in the morning the tipstaff, all dressed up and brimming with JANE ASHTON IS CALLED
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importance, made a trip to the gallery and asked me not to stand up during proceedings. Given I’d been as inconspicuous as everyone else and had only stood up to walk outside to cough, it was a ridiculous request. It wasn’t coincidence. Sometime after my exchange with Dunn on day one the defence team was heard discussing my presence in the court. They were of the view that it might influence the jury.
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HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
The first witness on day two of the trial was seventeen-year-old Samantha Ramage.A charming girl with a lovely face and generous smile that was hidden from the court, she appeared anything but nervous. She began by confirming her name and age and that she was a student at Lauriston Girls and lived in Hawthorn. In the space of a paragraph of innocuous words she’d stamped herself as a girl with a story.The day before, Julie’s living image, Sam’s Aunty Jane, had mesmerised the court. Samantha’s allure came from being the girl her mother had been. Precocious, dark haired and grown up beyond her years, she’d rebelled against her father just as her mother had done with her own father. Such was the drama in the court it was like standing in the Louvre waiting to hear the Mona Lisa speak. With her dad watching from the rear of the court, the tension heightened as the riding club women and the Balwyn set waited to see whether she’d bury him.‘The fees at Lauriston are $16 000 a year,’ one of the women would later tell me. 141
A stream of the Garretts’ friends had made their way from the Green Wedge and the Yarra Valley in to the Supreme Court. Most usually came to town to shop at Myer and savour Christmas. They knew nothing about the maze that was the Supreme Court, but were soon acclimatised to the ritualistic nodding of the head in deference to Judge Osborn that preceded any departure from the court. Even in the gallery people did it. Also in the court were some of Julie’s closest friends. Immaculately dressed, and with the trademark blonde hair, they were impassioned in their defence of their friend. Throughout the proceedings they clung to every word, a bad answer drawing a gentle shake of the head. ‘Captain Chook’, owner of the Research chicken farm and head of the local CFA, went along. ‘Sorry I’m late, I’ve been cleaning out the chicken sheds since 4 am and then I got my hand stuck up a feed silo,’ he told Jane before finding a spot alongside Ray Garrett in the body of the court. Shan Schnookal, a gifted glass artist and Lauriston old girl tapped Jane on the shoulder and said,‘Hi.’ Not far away a man with a sad look in his eyes watched the proceedings. Was he a parent that Julie had known, or a teacher or a neighbour? No, he was her butcher, he would tell Christine Howgate. Heather Fisher and her husband Jim had taken holiday leave to be in the court. Neighbours and friends had come to see justice done. Con Mathews, the president of the Garretts’ Probus club, and others from their retirement village and the Research YMCA, sat and waited for Samantha to untangle the killing. Parents Julie had stood with on the banks of the Yarra watching their children row and others she’d sat next to at school socials and fundraisers were there too. However, not all were there. Jane had received a message of love and support from a Scotch College mother who apologised that because of Matthew she 142
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felt it better she didn’t come to court. She was one of many who stayed away. Still, the Garretts wondered what had happened to the twelve hundred people who had been at St John’s in Toorak for the funeral. If Julie had been killed in a skiing accident or ‘up at the snow’ or drowned at Noosa or Byron Bay there’d have been fundraising lunches at 9 Darling Street, the prestigious reception centre in Toorak, and coffee mornings at the private mansions where her friends lived. Murder in the family was a different matter:‘You know, Phil, in polite society no one wants to offend anyone. No one wants to give a clear message to their children, especially their boys, that domestic violence is out there and thriving behind nicely painted front doors and expensive curtains. Heaven forbid that something which has such working class connotations could be going on in such exclusive areas of Melbourne,’ Jane would lament in an email. The mere appearance of Samantha Ramage in the witness box fractured the myth that the middle class was immune to family violence.As she began her testimony I thought about the one and only Lauriston girl who’d crossed my path. In the spring of 1978 she and I had driven through Kinglake to the country town of Mansfield. In the car we listened to Van Morrison’s dreamy, poetic love songs and alongside a creek, not far from where Julie’s body had been buried, boiled a billy of tea. Her father was an engineer and the family owned prime real estate in Parkville and Hawthorn. She was kind and artistic. I never imagined murderers could be found on her side of town. I wished I could step back in time and have her tell me just what she knew. Gathering the story of Julie Ramage had drawn me into a distinctive social milieu. Women with lots of free time and an abundance of money to throw at spoilt, rich kids who’d one day HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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be running the country from boardrooms and parliaments. In the middle of the trial a Scotch College parent, a banker he said he was, told me he knew a string of judges and politicians who could be enlisted in the battle against the law of provocation. Among them was John Harber Phillips, former head of the Supreme Court.The banker was unaware that Phillips had once taken grave offence to the suggestion that the judiciary was gender biased. The accusation was ‘totally without foundation’, Phillips told the Herald Sun newspaper in 1994. In the banker’s eyes the killing of Julie Ramage was a story about a ‘cold, controlling and jealous man uncharacteristic of the highly moral and ethical people of Balwyn and Canterbury’. If he’d found a way through the maze of snobbery he might have realised that the very judges and barristers about whom he spoke had done next to nothing to address the problem. Sometimes they were the problem. His gratuitous ‘we mightn’t like your politics, Phil, but we’re happy about what you’ve done for Julie [in the media]’ kind of summed it up. If Samantha was angry with her father or desperate to protect her mother’s name, it wasn’t obvious in her cross-examination. There’d be no question about the black eye her father gave her in 2002 or how, in her police statement, she’d said her dad had hit her mum during both pregnancies. Nor would she describe his violent outburst when he read her diary and learned the truth about her relationship with a boyfriend. Such facts were regarded by the law as prejudicial to the accused. Relationship evidence can be heard, however there’s no rhyme or reason to it. As always it was a steady Julian Leckie who led her through the unhappiness that preceded her mother’s decision to leave the marriage. There’d be no questions regarding what she told her mother to do about her unhappiness. Yes, she knew about the ‘problems’ and her mother’s ‘unhappiness’ and that there’d been 144
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an argument between her parents in the weeks before she left. She was allowed to say her mother was upset, but not that the upstanding James Ramage had called her mum a ‘slut’.That too was regarded as unfairly prejudicial to the accused. Even if it wasn’t, it was also hearsay. When a man kills the woman in his life and pleads provocation, the crown must try to prove that the murdered woman is a saint. Constrained by the hypocrisy embedded in the law, Julian Leckie had to refute any suggestion that Julie was callous in her dealings with her husband.When Samantha acknowledged that her mother had hidden things from Ramage because she did not want to ‘hurt him or kick him when he was down’ but ‘let him down gradually’, he breathed a sigh of relief. However, when she restated the view that her father ‘would be upset’ if he knew too much, Leckie once more sought to drive home to the jury that it was Julie who was in danger.‘Did she express any anxiety…as to how he might react…?’ he asked.With a gulp that suggested she didn’t want to say it, the words tumbled out. ‘He might be violent towards myself or her.’ It should have been a mighty strike. It was one time when the rules of relationship evidence did favour the prosecution. Notwithstanding Samantha’s corroboration of her mother’s fears and her father’s capacity for violence, it remained a case on a knife-edge, for although the jury now knew Julie was scared, her daughter had painted the killer as being upset and capable of being even more upset if his wife told the truth about Laurence. While the matter of when her father actually learnt about Webb hovered in the court, one question nagged away at me. If Ramage was crying on Saturday night about the relationship being doomed, didn’t that suggest he’d been told it was over? Why didn’t Leckie ask Samantha to confirm that her father was crying as a result of knowing about another man and that the HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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relationship was over? He told Rob Moodie on Sunday the relationship was over. He obviously told his daughter the same story the night before. Intent on showing the jury the Ramages were a normal family with the usual contrariness, Philip Dunn began by enticing Samantha to admit that ‘everything seemed normal between her mother and father’ and that she ‘never saw violence or anything like that between her mother and father’. Her father was nothing more than a controlling, sometimes grumpy and generally conservative man. That was as much as Dunn would allow Samantha to say. It was as if he hadn’t even killed his wife. And naturally he was upset and crying and asking his daughter what to do when he found out about Webb on the Saturday. And yes, her mother hadn’t told her father ‘the full story’. It was also true that Sam had asked her to ‘slow down’ with Webb.Was Samantha reprimanding her mother? Was it true that Julie hadn’t divulged her real intentions in relation to Webb until the lunch on Monday? Dunn knew he had something for the jury. ‘It was your understanding from what your mother told you, that she’d told your father, and your conversation with your father, that he had no idea of the depth of their relationship?’ asked Dunn.Without batting an eyelid Samantha answered ‘yes’. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the Philistines on the jury were thinking. The news about Webb on Monday would have come as an absolutely thunderous shock. Leckie had to cross-examine her or lose the day. ‘Did your mother talk to you in relation to the period of time leading up to when she left and you went with her and why it was a secret?’ he asked ‘Because, he would just try and persuade her to stay, if she didn’t leave when he was away.’ ‘Did she ever confide in you about other worries?’ 146
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‘She was worried he might get angry…’ she replied, the real answer seemingly buried beneath her commitment to the man watching from the rear of the court. Desperate for the jury to hear the truth, Leckie pushed on. ‘Yes, worried that he might get angry, and anything else?’ ‘That’d he’d do something to try and hurt her, like, I don’t know, kill the horses or steal the horse float or control the money or something like that.’ It was as excruciating as pulling teeth, but it had finally been said. Her father was a possessive man of violent thoughts. It had finally been said with intimate knowledge and conviction. As much as it appeared as though his daughter didn’t really want to admit it, she had. Before he let Samantha leave the witness box Leckie had one last question. It concerned an incident in which she’d been unable to get into the flat in Canberra Road and her father had come across her in Toorak Village late one night. The cagey Dunn had implied that Julie was out with her boyfriend and not properly looking after her daughter.‘I didn’t have a key,’ she said. Leckie would have preferred her to say she’d lost her key.Was it good enough to show Julie wasn’t a bad mother? When a woman is murdered by her estranged lover the prosecution must prove she is decent. Had Leckie done that to the satisfaction of the jury? Her friends weren’t sure. In 2002 Samantha had boarded at Lauriston’s campus in Howqua in north-east Victoria. Julie had told her sister she believed her daughter was better off boarding in the country than being at home with a bullying father. In November her fifteen-year-old daughter had written an intimate and revealing letter to her mother. Fearful that the letter might be used to attack her mother’s character, the crown chose not to tender it.Addressed ‘Dear Mama’ it told a story so different from the truncated and sanitised one HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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heard by the jury. References to the letter being about ‘girly stuff ’ camouflaged a daughter’s deep understanding of her mother’s plight. Sam’s acknowledgement that her mother had wished she’d left Ramage years before would never make the light of day. And what had happened in her short life to give her the wisdom to conclude her letter with ‘a leopard never changes its spots’? With suggestions that her mother should have gone off and ‘had a wild affair’ and talk of secrets, the letter would have enraged her father. Yet when all this is swept aside, one fundamental fact remains. Sam knew her mother was miserable and wanted her to be happy. ‘You’re gorgeous Mum, inside and outside. And although I hate to admit it, I’d love to have a figure like yours when I’m 40+,’ she said before signing off with two hearts and the words ‘Love, your loving daughter + best friend, Love you Sami’. A fifteen-year-old girl encouraging her mother to have affairs and to leave her father for no other apparent reason than that she ‘wasn’t happy’ was not the kind of witness a mother needed. In Philip Dunn’s hands, said Leckie, the letter would have been used to portray Samantha Ramage as a spoilt little rich kid aided and abetted by a capricious, sex mad mother. Behind the beautiful candour of the letter is a sad tale. Desperately unhappy, Julie should have done what her friends had been telling her. She should have left her husband years before.The longer she stayed, the more she allowed herself to be pilloried as a gold-digger.And as much as affairs are a part of life and Ramage was no saint, such deceit is hardly edifying. Befuddled by her relationship with her husband, she didn’t need the drama of another man promising her the world. She needed time to reflect. Cast in her mother’s image, Samantha seemed to be travelling the same path as the fairy princess from Cheshunt. ‘It’s 4.30 am and I can’t sleep because I am constantly thinking about you and wishing…I could look at you and admire 148
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your beauty and sexiness.’ In the months before the separation, Davey had indulged her. Endless passages recreating their sexual experiences began to read like the manipulation of a gullible woman. It was as if all Julie could be was a sexual plaything. As urbane as he was, Davey was no less suffocating than Ramage. It was just that she loved the sex and had it on her terms.Then, no sooner had she left Davey behind than Laurence was talking about a life together. Married at nineteen, she’d never really learnt what it was like to be on her own without a man looking over her shoulder. It infuriated her sister Jane. Although she had introduced her to Laurence, Jane wasn’t trying to marry her off. She just hoped it would stop her returning to the marriage. There were so many ironies in Julie’s death and the trial that followed. In her office at Eco-d she’d left a copy of an article taken from She magazine. ‘Confessions of infidelity – Why one in five women cheat on their husband’ was an exposé on sexual affairs. Affairs, it said, were the product of ‘men withholding affection, not communicating and skimping on emotional support’. This offering, along with ‘people want to feel valued and loved and men often failed to notice the decline of intimacy’ was underlined. She had also drawn a pen under ‘forgo your nonassertiveness and give up the idea that you are unworthy and don’t deserve to be listened to’.As much as the underlined pieces captured her life, she remained an open book for a man on the prowl. In the wake of a suffocating and dominating husband had come men who seemed no less intent on owning her. Even though they hated Ramage and professed their love to Julie, they had become part of her problem. In Dunn’s eyes they were witnesses for the defence. Desperate to escape the man who ruled her life, Julie had taken to the affairs with Mays and Davey like a teenager. Although she told friends she was in love, Jane says she was the kind of person HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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who was in love with love and that some of her friends read too much into her capricious exclamations. She hadn’t sought a commitment from the unhappily married Davey and hadn’t left the marriage to be with him. Although she had dinner with him the day she left Marock Place and later made love with him, it was she who finished the relationship two weeks later. As fond as he was of Julie, Davey had offered her no future and no strategy for dealing with her husband if he became violent.As long as she told him only he genuinely fulfilled her, Davey was happy. From the day he stepped into her world it was turned upside down.They’d meet for coffee and at other times he’d watch her swim at a local pool.These moments were preparation for rendezvous in motels, secluded spots and, once, in her sister’s hayshed. Tantalised by the sexually explicit letters and his tricks in bed, she felt like a sex goddess. He simply couldn’t believe his luck. ‘Just know that in the first week back, I want to make love with you at my home. I want to share my home with you.’ Such tributes weren’t enough to compel Davey to defend the woman he ‘promised to love forever and always’. Desperate to hide the affair from his wife, he acquired a suppression order. It cost him $30 000.At the committal hearing Philip Dunn was quick to lay his cards on the table.‘You got talking to her and that blossomed into an affair?’ said the wily defence counsel. ‘Friendship.’ ‘An affair, I asked you.’ ‘Whatever, yes.Whatever you call an affair, yes.’ ‘You used to write her letters?’ ‘I just sent her a few cards at Christmas.’ ‘Affectionate letters?’ ‘Yes, just different things.’ ‘You wrote to her at Lorne?’ ‘Yes.’ 150
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‘You knew that she and her family had a holiday house down at Eastern View?’ ‘Yes.’ Wrapped in a shroud of deceit and infidelity, Julie was fighting a losing battle. The more he heard, the better Ramage felt. He’d always known that his salvation lay in besmirching his wife’s character.That’s why he’d rung Davey’s phone at 5.40 pm on the afternoon of the killing and two hours later told his daughter her mother was ‘probably off with Laurence’. Even before the lovers were hauled into court Ramage was explaining the murder away:‘I make no excuses and regret what I have done and I wish I could turn back the clock,’ he said in a letter to the Farleys three weeks after he killed his wife. Not once in the one-page letter did he say he was sorry. The reason he made ‘no excuses’ was because he genuinely believed he’d done no wrong.There was not a shred of heartfelt pain or grieving in the letter. Instead, he talked about the violence in prison ‘being exaggerated’: ‘As long as you stay away from the trouble-makers it seems to be OK.A little like the playground. There’s actually some quite interesting characters in here,’ he wrote.These didn’t sound like the words of a depressed man. Even when he spoke of his two children, all he could say was he was ‘proud of them’ and that he knew they’d ‘be strong’. There was not a word about the loss of their mother or what a great person she was. Not even a mention of her name. As the trial moved inexorably through the witnesses the Garretts became more and more pessimistic. Although Jane felt great optimism from time to time, the rules of hearsay evidence had drawn a curtain around the killer. Just after 2.10 pm on Wednesday 13 October, several hours after Samantha gave her evidence, the call went out for Dr Allan Robert Moodie. Five HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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months had passed since Moodie and I met at his VicHealth office to discuss a men’s health project. Towards the end of the meeting he mentioned how a good friend had killed his wife. He seemed genuinely hurt by what had happened. ‘They’ll run provocation,’ I said. Moodie didn’t tell me he’d visited Ramage in gaol or had been with him in the house the day before the killing.There was so much I didn’t know. Two weeks after our meeting and with the trial still five months away, Moodie launched a VicHealth report into family violence.‘It not only gives insight into the effects of violence on women’s lives [but] prompts the hard questions about how we inform, educate and change the behaviour that leads to partner violence,’ he said. The foundation stone of the report was that family violence was costing the community millions of dollars and should be treated as a community health issue. Moodie didn’t mention the name James Ramage or relate the story of how his friend had killed his wife. Nor did he tell the press conference he’d been visiting the killer in gaol. Like the nameless, battered women in theVicHealth report, Julie Ramage had become a statistic. I’d been invited to the launch, but chose not to attend. I had a straightforward view of family violence. It was a human rights, not a health issue. The VicHealth report made no finding in relation to how health institutions, including hospitals and doctors, have traditionally handled violence against women or how the courts have treated it. Nor did the report explore the role men might take in stopping a mate from murdering the ‘spouse’. Jane and her friends were asking how Moodie could visit Ramage in gaol then mount the hustings to publicly condemn such violence. He was not a popular man as he walked towards the witness box. When Moodie took the stand, Dunn treated him like a sage who’d deigned to throw pearls among the swine. ‘Do you hold 152
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any positions at either Melbourne or Monash University?’ asked Dunn. He already knew the answer. Moodie is a professor at both universities and had, said Dunn,‘worked in and around the health issue all his professional life’. As he believed Moodie was sympathetic to his client and would go soft on him, Dunn wanted the jury to view him as an expert and objective witness. Despite a challenge from Leckie, Moodie was able to say he ‘was surprised’ that the couple had separated. It was a personal opinion that had no place in the court and was prejudicial to the murdered woman. Osborn should have expunged it.The shameful thing was that it was so wrong.The only thing that surprised Julie’s girlfriends was that she had taken so long to leave and had finally mustered the courage to do it. Moodie would tell the court Ramage was ‘distraught’ about the break-up and on the day before the killing was ‘the most distressed’ he’d seen him. ‘Was he emotionally fragile?’ asked Dunn. ‘Yes.’ ‘Was he angry and upset?’ ‘He was upset and he was angry.’ ‘Why doesn’t that hurt the defence case?’ thought Julie’s friends. If he’s angry, doesn’t that mean his head might be full of dark and violent thoughts? The reason was simple. It wasn’t prejudicial to Ramage because the law of provocation has no respect for a woman’s rights. Julie should not have left her husband. It had been established that his wife was an adulterer and he was entitled to be angry. In 1707 an Englishman, Justice Holt, captured it succinctly when he said ‘adultery is the highest form of invasion’. Invaded and violated, Ramage had struck out against his enemies. Tony Brady went to the Christian Brothers in St Kilda, and since buying Ramage out after the killing is now the sole owner HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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of Thermo-Glaze.The pair met while working at James Hardie in the eighties and eventually threw themselves into a series of business ventures. Given the no fuss culture of the Christian Brothers, it should come as no surprise that Brady would tell Julian Leckie he ‘wouldn’t have thought he [Ramage] was too depressed’. Depression was a luxury among working class Catholics. Brady says that during the many hours the pair spent discussing business issues after the separation, Ramage treated the whole matter like a ‘business problem’. It was something he had to fix by hook or by crook. It was a far cry from Rob Moodie’s assessment. Brady also says he was amused when the media reported how Ramage was rich and owned a cliff top beach house at Eastern View. He didn’t think his partner was really that rich and the truth was that the beach house was jointly owned by them. Brady told the court that just after 3 pm on Monday 21 July 2003 he took a call at work from his partner James Ramage. He wasn’t coming back to work that day, he told him. During the call there was nothing unusual about the demeanour of the man he’d known for more than a decade. There was so much more he knew about the killer that would never be aired in court.Whilst the bulk of it has no place in a murder trial, it throws light on the real personality of the man who knocked Julie to the ground and strangled her. He wasn’t just ‘nit-picking, petty and grumpy’. He was a bully and a blowhard and had not one generous bone in his body. It was no secret among his acquaintances that Ramage had done financial deals with friends that were exploitative and mercenary and the reason he hated his wife’s passion for horse riding was because he was a ‘tight arse’.What kind of man would think it right that an employer demand an employee have an abortion in the interest of the company? A two-bit snob, the killer was obsessed with his public image and was clearly ruthless in business. 154
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From the showcase way he cuddled and kissed his wife in the foyer of a Japanese hotel, to the British Jaguar car and the Scotch College snobbery that infatuated him, his life was all about appearances. Beneath the Establishment façade was a man who didn’t know how to love or how to genuinely beguile a woman. And it was for these reasons, not because he was out of control, upset or in love that he could kill his wife and never contemplate saying sorry. Tony Brady knew nothing of the previous violence towards Julie and never seriously expected his partner to do her any harm. He’d never even seen the pair argue.Yet when he received the news that Ramage had been charged with murder he remembered an incident that had happened many years earlier. As they did at Thermo-Glaze, the two men had shared an office in Mont Albert in the nineties when they ran a company called Jazzies. One day they were sitting at their desks when out of the blue Ramage leapt up, threw his pen on the ground and lurched around the desk towards him. The next thing Brady knew, Ramage had landed a pounding blow to the side of his head that knocked him to the floor.‘What the hell are you doing?’ he said, jumping to his feet. Ramage said not a word. ‘Well you can go and get fucked,’ said Brady. Ramage had been stewing on a minor disagreement for days and had simply waited for the right moment to assert his power. Although things were patched up, his partner never really trusted him again. Brady was never allowed to tell that story. Whether the jury would have found any similarities between this violent act and the attack on Julie, who knows? All he could say was that Ramage ‘never expressed any sentiments of violence to Julie’. Yet, what happened at Jazzies bears a striking and eerie resemblance to the fatal attack in Marock Place. Brady had not said anything to cause his business partner to be upset.Worse still, he HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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says that Ramage looked perfectly capable of sticking the boots in and finishing the job. Just as he’d done before thumping Brady years earlier, Ramage had spent two days seething with anger. The news on Saturday at Geelong about the new boyfriend had set the clock ticking. By Monday he was ready to explode. His pride hurt and his gut bursting from the turbulence and anger, he was prepared for war. Brady says it’s ‘absolute crap that Julie provoked him’. ‘She’d have been too scared,’ he says. In the kitchen that day his wife didn’t have a chance. And she knew it. Despite the constraints faced by Brady in the witness box he offered some powerful insights into Ramage the man. ‘He told me that if she had spoken to him face-to-face about leaving he would have been able to talk her out of it.’That’s why Julie left while he was overseas. And was Ramage a victim of unrequited love? The killer’s conversation with his business partner tells another story. ‘There’s a small part of me that would like to say “to hell with it, I’m a good looking bloke who could find someone else” and get on with it, but there’s a big part of me that would like to get her back.’ It was all about honour. Trying to find people who would say a good word about Ramage was virtually impossible. Despite her aversion to what she called Ramage’s ‘blokey’ attitude, Dr Kate Clark was one person who did like him. Although she concedes that her status as a medical doctor qualified her as the kind of friend he needed, they shared a love of rugby and she thought he had good taste in music. From American Norah Jones to Irishman Elvis Costello, it was something about which they often talked. After the committal hearing the killer had written to her saying he ‘regretted’ what’d he’d done and that he was ‘sorry’ she had to go through it. At the hearing Dunn had begun his crossexamination of her with questions about the recent break-up of 156
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her marriage. She found it unsettling and intrusive. Ramage’s letter was like all the others he had written from gaol. ‘It was if he was talking about crashing his Jaguar after driving recklessly, rather than killing his wife,’ said Clark. Whilst she wasn’t interested in trying to forgive him or find excuses for what he’d done, she thought he was very much a man who’d never been loved. When it came to the events of 21 July, Dr Clark was unequivocal.‘Julie wouldn’t have abused him. It wasn’t in her nature. He’d have wanted to give her a good talking to. And once he started, we all know what that meant.’ Although she wasn’t able to offer this opinion in the trial, her evidence gave the defence no comfort. On the final day, Justice Osborn would describe Clark as an impressively impartial witness.There was nothing impartial about her at all. She couldn’t believe Ramage would kill his wife or that a court would allow him a defence of provocation. By the time she gave her evidence at the trial, the woman who’d once liked him hated everything Ramage stood for. When Dunn tried to infer that she was worried he might be suicidal, her answer was unhelpful. She knew he wasn’t the kind of man to ‘top himself ’. She went on to tell the court that the day before the killing Ramage had told her quite calmly that Julie was seeing another man. Despite instructing solicitor Steve Pica whispering a possible further question to Dunn, the defence counsel decided it was time to retreat. Clark was no witness for the defence. So what kind of man was James Ramage? His best man, Peter Ronchetti, captured the killer’s trajectory in a letter to me from England: I don’t remember much about the wedding. It was such a long time ago. I was best man, but I guess we were only 18 HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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or 19-years-old at the time. So with hindsight we were all very young.To my recollection it passed off well and without incident, as did the stag night. Julie and Jamie were quite ‘demonstrative’ about being a couple in love. Nothing really exceptional there though. Of all our old school crowd Jamie was always the most proactive and determined in all things (getting the girl – Julie was quite a catch – getting the most lucrative summer jobs, getting into the rugby team). He struck me as more mature and organised than the rest of the guys. He was very charming. On our ‘lads only’ holiday to Cornwall when we were 17-years-old he was the only one of six to ‘score’ with the local girls! He tended to be quite controlling of Julie from the start and would tell her what she could eat at BBQs. It wasn’t particularly sinister or anything but good behaviour was rewarded by kisses etc, and I can’t recall her ever standing up for herself or defying him in any way. She was very compliant, but I thought at that time she was because she was happy to be ‘managed’ in dress code and what to eat and the like. When they last came over together – I’m not sure of the date, but he brought her over circa 1997/8 when Australia played England at Twickenham – a couple of times they got into what looked like ‘set piece’ displays of affection. The strangest one was ‘snogging’ in the back of my car like a couple of teenagers as we drove from the ground. It seemed a little forced and as if done for display, lined up in my rear view mirror. It’s maybe no big deal but it’s just not a behaviour that my peer group display after all these years of marriage! Since he left for Aus I guess I’ve seen him about five times, but we always exchanged phone calls around key 158
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rugby matches between England and Australia and Xmas cards. He always came with, or sent photos of their ‘perfect’ life in Australia, perfect wife, kids, horses, beach house etc. It all seemed to be perfect!
Just before 11 am on Wednesday 20 October 2004, Dr Matthew Lynch took the stand. Ramage steeled himself for the doctor’s account of how his wife had died.There is absolutely no emotion in the way the description of a corpse is presented in court. Julie was yet another body on a slab when Lynch pulled on his rubber gloves and ran his hands over her naked body at the Coronial Service Centre at Southbank, the day after the killing. Dispassionate and scientific, Lynch said the dead woman weighed 67 kilograms and was 172 centimetres in height. ‘Was she resting on a yellow body bag?’ asked Leckie. ‘Yes’. ‘Was there a moderate amount of dirt and mud present and some dried blood on the right side of her face? ‘Yes.’ ‘Blue jodhpur-type trousers with the top button unsecured but the zipper fly fastened?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why the button?’ whispered one of Julie’s friends.‘I’ll bet he tried to grab her from behind,’ said a woman who’d heard some intimate stories about Ramage’s sexual habits.The killer watched intently.Was he thinking about how she looked before and after the attack? Frame by sordid frame, Leckie had the doctor step his way through the photos the jury had before them. There was nothing peaceful about Julie’s countenance. Her left eye was bruised and closed and her right eye and mouth slightly open. On the bridge of her nose was the cut Ramage had opened with the first punch. HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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Throughout the examination the expression ‘blunt trauma’ was used ad nauseam. Blunt trauma was a euphemism for ‘kingkit’ or ‘vicious punch to the head’. I was on the end of one in the Coburg Social Club one night in 1990. I was trying to pacify the bloke when he hit me. I didn’t see it coming.Although we’ve crossed paths since, I’ve never completely forgiven him. He’d been dropped from the Coburg side for a finals game and had it in his head another player’s father had influenced me to pick his son over him. It was ridiculous and fanciful. I’ve seen men at their worst and although someone who king-hits isn’t necessarily a wife killer, the same pathology drives the violence. There were no brothers or men of wild temperament in the court contemplating revenge when Dr Lynch gave his clinical account of Julie’s injuries.At seventy-one years of age Julie’s father was not in a position to challenge Ramage. In his prime he’d have been more than a match. Like most fathers of a murdered daughter his head was brimming with vengeful ideas. ‘Coward.’ I couldn’t get that word out of my head as I studied Ramage’s face and thought about what he’d done with those hands. ‘Red discolouration over the left collarbone,’ said the doctor, pointing to photo 146. Ramage had large hands and big legs.Was this where he planted one of his knees as he subdued his wife? His knee on her collarbone, one hand pinning her left hand to the floor above her head and the other wrapped around her throat.The man Rob Moodie and Ian Dicker shed tears over was not a good man.‘Bruising and haemorrhaging on the side of the head above the ears.’ How many times did he hit her with roundarm punches once she’d hit the ground? Leckie never asked the doctor to try to quantify the number of punches. In particular, the left side of Julie’s head had taken a powerful beating. Philip Dunn had two major issues to confront. The defence had to cast serious doubt on the use of a rope and leave open the 160
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possibility that it was a quick death without too much pain and physical damage. Before he addressed that question he wanted the jury to know a secret.‘You did find, did you not, that there was a developing carcinoma in the thyroid,’ he said, catching everyone by surprise.Although the doctor said it ‘may or may not have presented itself later in Mrs Ramage’s life’, Jane was stunned. Did that mean she might have a potential problem of the same kind? That aside, what relevance did information like this have to the killing of her sister? She might have died young. Is that what Dunn was implying? And if that was possible, did it mean the crime was less serious? There was no doubt about Dunny Boy. That matter resolved he went on to the really serious stuff.‘If there is a ligature around the neck and somebody is wearing a jumper around their neck…you are going to find an imprint?’ asked Dunn, keen to exclude the rope from the killing and impress the court with the depth of his vocabulary. Ligature was legal speak for a tie or a rope.The word ‘rope’ was never used by the defence barrister. ‘You might or you might not,’ said the doctor. ‘You don’t have a ligature mark?’ said Dunn. ‘No,’ said Lynch. In an attempt to press the matter, Dunn added a more specific question. When he suggested that if a ‘ligature’ was used there’d be ‘discolouration above and below the ligature’, the doctor answered ‘disagree’. Dunn decided against further questions on that issue. There was no specific rope mark but rope hadn’t been eliminated. No one was any the wiser. And as the police hadn’t asked Ramage about the rope, Leckie couldn’t really drive home the allegation. And unless Ramage took the stand he could not be cross-examined by the prosecution. ‘In relation to Mrs Ramage there were no broken bones or fractures of the bones to the face or the jaw or teeth or anything HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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like that?’ asked Dunn. It was really a statement rather than a question. ‘No, there were not.’ ‘So, looking at the injuries there, would you say the amount of force was moderate?’ ‘At least moderate.’ At least moderate? Was Lynch serious? Smashing a person in the face and strangling her doesn’t involve moderate force. It’s a violent, forceful act. For Jane and the Garrett clan it was a question that brought grief and anger. Dunn wanted the jury to conclude that despite Ramage bashing and strangling his wife and burying her in a bush grave, he had killed her gently. Jane Ashton put it this way: ‘Mr Dunn’s trivialisation of my sister’s injuries during the trial was even more repulsive to me than the injuries themselves. To sanitise what was done to my beautiful, happy, radiant Julie was to portray her as some animal humanely put down.’ Towards the end of the cross-examination of Dr Lynch, Dunn asked the question that seemed to encapsulate everything that had transpired:‘Now, just one or two other things. Did you find, incidentally, a tampon in situ? Was she menstruating when you carried out your post mortem?’ ‘I believe so.’ Did this explain why James Ramage had killed his wife? If she was getting over premenstrual tension or experiencing period pain Julie was in no biological or emotional state to be talking with her husband about the marriage.This is what Dunn wanted to have the jury believe. In an irrational state she’d been abusive and provoked him into losing control. Dunn was drawing on a rich and primitive history to deliver another strike at Julie Ramage and all women who cried ‘murder’. Defence lawyers don’t have to believe the arguments they 162
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summon in a courtroom.Yet sometimes the lines sound so primitive. The idea that menstruation had a role in Julie’s alleged murder was staggering.Then again, I remembered how Roman historian Pliny the Elder had written: ‘Menstrual blood turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off…even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.’ Was it any wonder Germaine Greer said women needed to taste their own menstrual blood in order to free themselves from the myths? Was it any wonder Julie’s friends cringed? Would the women of Foley’s List have been raising their glasses to Dunny Boy? Justice Osborn should have reprimanded Dunn or at least asked him why the question was put. Jane Ashton saw it this way in a letter to me: Justice is portrayed as a blindfolded woman.Women are fair, kind and nonjudgmental. My sister possessed all of these qualities yet evidence about her character was deemed inadmissible as hearsay. My vision of Justice now wears industrial size earmuffs. I saw in my head an image of the blindfolded Justice holding scales of very different size. One tiny delicate dish contained an empty multicoloured Tampax box.The other dish of these scales is much larger and contains a blue rope (which may or may not have been used to murder her). These scales are of course in perfect balance. Then this rope becomes a snake wrapping itself around the scales and prevents them from moving at all. Our legal system still supports the ancient biblical belief that women are to blame for mankind’s original sin. HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
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Time and again pictures of Eve tempting Adam to taste the forbidden apple were painted for the court: the ordinary man, so weak and so easily manipulated by cunning, wanton women. While the farce of R v Ramage trudged on, the Law Reform Commission report Defences to Homicide was rolling off the printing presses. The report’s findings make a mockery of Dunn’s misogynistic narrative. If only Leckie had been able to draw the jury’s attention to page 22 of the 360-page report. In explaining the origins of the law of provocation the report cited the 1707 case R v Mawgridge. In that case Chief Justice Holt ruled that one of the circumstances in which a manslaughter verdict would be open to a defendant was if the killing involved ‘a man caught in the act of adultery with one’s wife’. So civilised was the typical English gentleman, it was assumed that an aggrieved man such as Ramage would have killed the lover not the wife. In Justice Holt’s parable the wife held less status than the man caught in the act of adultery and would have been regarded as collateral damage had she been on the end of a dagger or musket. Every imputation in Defence Counsel Philip Dunn’s tale could be traced back to the premise that women were property. And as much as Justice Osborn would emerge as a critic of the ‘scourge of family violence’, his protection of the killer’s rights infuriated me. Fuck the appeal court, I’d have said. If more judges had protected the rights of women and denied provocation to possessive men instead of worrying about a possible overrule in the appeal court, the law of provocation and the kind of arguments run by Dunn would have disappeared a lot sooner.
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IF YOUR HONOUR PLEASES
It wasn’t until Thursday 14 October 2004 that Crown Prosecutor Julian Leckie grasped the nettle and challenged His Honour to rethink the way he’d conducted the trial. It came after Dunn had cross-examined Julie’s lovers Laurence Webb and Davey.‘I would askYour Honour to consider whether it’s appropriate to advise the jury as to the fact that this is not a moral judgement…I am concerned, Your Honour…the focus has largely become… using your words ‘‘blackening the character of the deceased’’...The jury I think should be cautioned about having their minds coloured because there is a huge prejudice…my learned friend…said ‘‘here she was having an affair’’. I say a jury ought to be cautioned about that, lest their minds be not focused on the true issue,’ said Leckie. Justice Osborn had opened a Pandora’s box when he accepted Dunn’s argument that the jury should hear about the affairs. His decision, as Leckie reminded him, was based on the premise that the affairs impacted on ‘the probability as to 165
whether or not she would say something provocative and vindictive to her husband on the fatal day’. The more she knew about sex the better able to insult his sexual inadequacies. The capacity of the ruling to discriminate against Julie was highlighted in Justice Osborn’s response: Mr Leckie, the fact that I have ruled the evidence admissible on a particular basis…doesn’t mean that it may not also potentially be relevant to the evidence of the relationship as a whole, because it would be artificial in one sense, particularly Mr Webb’s case, to have no regard to Mrs Ramage’s relationship with Mr Webb, as it has been described, in understanding what she was saying, or likely to say, to her husband, not just immediately prior to the fatal assault, but in the last few preceding days…I don’t know how the case as to provocation is going to be put by the defence, but the circumstances in which the ultimate confrontation occurred were clearly those of the breakdown of the marriage and I am not going to presume at this stage to direct the jury precisely as to how they can use particular parts of the evidence…
How could the judge possibly argue that he shouldn’t ‘direct the jury’ on how they should view Julie’s affairs? If the evidence of affairs had relevance beyond the fact that it threw light on the possibility that Julie might have ridiculed her estranged husband’s sexual prowess, then surely he had a responsibility to explain why? In my view the decision was wrong and contributed to Ramage being turned into the victim. Julie hadn’t flaunted her affair with Davey and she’d agonised over what to say about Webb. Not once in his evidence did Ramage say she’d used the affair with Davey to deride him in the kitchen on the 166
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day of the killing. Hearing about the affairs did no more than enhance the possibility that prejudice would triumph. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only decision that troubled the Garrett clan. Every time Justice Osborn used the words ‘Mrs Ramage’ her family cringed.‘Mrs’ bestowed ownership on the killer. It was not the way Julie defined herself after the separation, and the judge had no right to ordain her with it. If, in the minds of the some members of the community, ‘adultery was the highest form of invasion’ then the words ‘Mrs Ramage’ did the dead woman grave harm.This isn’t a semantic game. It’s the heart and soul of a provocation murder. Julie wasn’t his chattel. In R vYasso, Judge Elizabeth Hollingworth never once referred to Eman Hermiz as Mrs Yasso. Osborn’s language when it came to the act of murder was equally troubling. After initially describing the event as a ‘fatal assault’ he effortlessly slid into the use of terms such as ‘ultimate confrontation…in the context of a breakdown of the marriage’. At no stage did Ramage ever say his wife had confronted him or that he hadn’t bashed and strangled her. Nor did anyone ever suggest she had gone to the house to reprimand him or deliver an ultimatum. There was no evidence led by the defence that Julie had attacked or confronted her husband. The use of the words ‘ultimate confrontation’ implied there were two warring parties.These weren’t two gentlemen, pistols drawn at ten paces. It was a big man attacking a much smaller and defenceless woman with no history of ever insulting him. Given the freedom to exploit the affairs, Dunn sounded like a moral crusader on Christian television. What followed was a sequence of outrageous and demeaning questions to Webb. ‘You wrote her poems?’ he asked. ‘You told her you bought her lingerie and sent her poems to build up a relationship?’ IF YOUR HONOUR PLEASES
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‘You told her on the Friday night, after you’d known her, what, been with her five or six times, she was the love of your life?’ ‘You knew she was a recently separated woman?’ An unemployed, would-be poet intent on luring a wife and mother from a distraught and dutiful husband was hardly likely to win the sympathy of the jury.The real story was nothing like that. On their first night out, they’d gone to the stage production of the Beauty Queen of Leenane at the Athenaeum Theatre. As the similarities between Julie’s life and that of the principal character, Maureen Folan, unfolded, the couple found themselves holding hands.The same age as Julie, Maureen lived in an isolated village in County Galway, Ireland. Although it was a manipulative and self-pitying mother not a bullying husband who stood between her and love, the moral of the story was the same. Only love could free them. Over French champagne at the five-star Sofitel Hotel it suddenly dawned on Julie that Laurence might be the man to free her. On Wednesday 16 July, only six days after their night at the theatre,Webb adorned his little cottage with candles in preparation for her arrival. Just call me ‘Sven’ he said with a cheeky grin when she arrived at the door. It would turn out to be a prophetic comment, for Ramage’s lawyer would label Julie’s Svengali a bounder and a conman who literally did try to lure a woman with grand promises. Julie didn’t see it that way. After a massage they were, to use a term favoured by Webb, intimate. She told her girlfriends it was nothing like the way her husband touched her. The day before the killing they’d gone riding, and to enhance the seduction, Webb had read Reedy River, a somewhat serious piece of verse from the Australian bush bard, Henry Lawson. He was particularly taken by the lines ‘All thro’ that moonlit ride, 168
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Until our weary horses, Drew closer side by side’. The eternal love of Lawson’s bushman for the ethereal Mary Campbell perfectly captured his final day with Julie,Webb would tell me. Barrel-chested, with a square jaw and the compressed neck of a rugby player, Webb didn’t look like the sort of man who’d carry a nom de plume like ‘bush poet’. A man with a penchant for chivalrous love, he’d later recall the prophetic nature of the last four lines of Lawson’s poem: And my bright days are olden, For the twisted branches wave And the wattle blossoms golden On the hill by Mary’s grave.
Her lover’s rundown cottage in bucolic Kangaroo Ground paled into insignificance compared to the beach house, the $900 000 home and the sporty silver Mini Julie enjoyed as a result of her husband’s success in business. Her friends said she loved the riches and the occasional business class trips overseas with her husband. And even though a lawyer had told her she would not leave the marriage poor, it wasn’t the money that mattered. All the money in the world couldn’t make Julie love her husband. A former Royal Air Force flying officer,Webb had offered to sort Ramage out if need be. ‘You don’t know the details of my military life, but I’m in a position to help if you have a nasty husband,’ he’d told her. She said it was her problem. He remembered those words and her battered face in the morgue as he passed Ramage in the dock. Why didn’t Osborn stop Dunn from interpreting Webb’s relationship with Julie as tawdry and immoral? Did the judge really think the law gave him no option? If that’s what he thought, I IF YOUR HONOUR PLEASES
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don’t agree.The blaming of women might be the culture of the criminal justice system, but it’s neither pretty nor legal. Dunn’s questions were based on the premise that it was ‘illegal’ for Julie to have a relationship outside the marriage. It’s always ‘illegal’ for women who have been murdered to have a life after they separate. Even the act of telling her husband in her letter that the relationship was over didn’t give Julie the right to what Dunn disparagingly called a ‘new beau’. Surely Justice Osborn could have done something about that? Dunn’s questions to Webb threw not one shred of light on the vexed issue of whether Julie might have belittled her husband in the kitchen.They were clearly designed to ‘blacken’ her character. The endless questions about her relationship with her ‘new beau’ landed like rocks at the public stoning of a female adulterer in some primitive village. It was no wonder many people in the court cringed.While the damning of Julie took centre stage, at the rear of the court the sad, devoted James Ramage looked on. Prostitutes in Singapore and mandatory sex from his wife in Balwyn; the world was his oyster until his slave ran away. As with almost every provocation murder, the killer had become the victim. Before the trial, Dunn told Matthew Ramage that his father had only a thirty per cent chance of escaping with a manslaughter verdict. Murder could mean twenty years with a minimum of eighteen, if he was lucky. Manslaughter could be anywhere between six and ten years.To win over his son Ramage told him he’d commit suicide if he was found guilty of murder. Brave man indeed! As the trial entered its last days Ramage’s mood improved. He’d paid his money and his mouthpiece hadn’t let him down. Airing the affairs before and after the killing had boosted his spirits. As much as it hurt his pride to know that his wife genuinely didn’t like sex with him and had been sexually excited beyond expectation outside the marriage, he felt vindicated. 170
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‘Were the rumours of other lovers right?’ he wondered as Davey and Webb told their stories. It was a topic of conversation when Ramage discussed the letters and his prospects with his son. He’d never met Davey or Webb. Sean Mays, on the other hand, had been in his house and partaken of his hospitality and even offered some free investment advice. He just never picked that the polished, confident banker was treating his wife to intimate rendezvous at five-star hotels. Even then he didn’t know that Julie had wanted to run away with Mays once he’d separated from his wife. He did leave his wife, but not for Julie. As Ramage had chosen not to take the stand, all the jury had before it was the evidence of the witnesses and his videotaped police interview. Recent changes to the law have made it mandatory for a defendant giving evidence to submit to crossexamination. Ramage was not prepared to risk being asked about the rope in any cross-examination.The only time the jury heard him speak was in the police interview. Despite looking tired, Ramage didn’t cry or break down. How could he get anything but murder? It was impossible. After two weeks of bluster in which Philip Dunn had interrupted and bullied almost every crown witness, it had come to the final summaries. Exhausted and confused, on 1 December 2004 Jane and her family took up their seats yet again to listen to the learned gentlemen one last time. ‘He was bigger and stronger and could have stopped. He didn’t apply CPR or show any remorse.The killer was a self-absorbed and controlling man and he treated the body with contempt.’ Slowly and carefully Julian Leckie painted a picture of a callous man who after brutally killing his wife spent three hours with his solicitor preparing a case. And hadn’t he dumped a piece of rope in the hole with the bloodied clothes? IF YOUR HONOUR PLEASES
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Throughout the address the jury listened intently and scribbled notes here and there. No one knows what they wrote when Leckie explained that Ramage could only be found guilty of manslaughter if they believed he’d done what any ordinary man might have done. ‘Surely they won’t conclude that Julie did enough to provoke him,’ thought Jane.‘I never heard Julie speak back to Jamie once,’ babysitter Naomi Brick had told me. The jury surely knew Julie wouldn’t have challenged him in the house that day? And what if she did? But who was the Julie Ramage about whom they were preparing to make judgment? After her death, one photo would become synonymous with Julie’s life. Exhibit one was the first of one hundred and ninety-seven photos that stepped the jury through her life and grizzly death.With her black, sequinned dress slit up the middle and her white shawl drawn to expose her bare arms, Julie looked nothing like the five women on the jury.Was she a loving mother and devoted wife or a promiscuous adulterer? That was the question they must surely have asked as they studied her glistening face and alluring body. If they’d looked closely they’d have noticed the ambiguity of her smile and realised that behind the pretty blonde façade and the clinking of champagne glasses, all had never been well.The dead woman in the bush grave was proof of that. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to understand. Julian Leckie didn’t ever tell the jury that human rights were at the heart of Ramage’s guilt or that if what Ramage offered as provocation was acceptable then no woman was safe. Nor did he ask them to imagine what they might have thought if Julie been their daughter or sister. Such questions had no place in this bourgeois soap opera. Was Julie a saint? That’s all that mattered. Only a saint could have escaped the noose around Julie’s neck. Conscious that Julie’s predilection for adulterous sex made it hard to portray her as a saint, Leckie walked another path. 172
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Dragging the rope from its plastic cover he gripped it at both ends and paraded it in front of the jury. It was all about premeditation. He wasn’t out of control and acting on the spur of the moment. No, he wrapped it around Julie’s neck to finish off the job.That’s what Leckie wanted them to believe. Unfortunately it mattered little. The jury had other things on its mind. Julie had a new boyfriend when she was killed. She was guilty.They knew the killer had strangled his wife – hands or rope, it didn’t seem to matter. But it should have mattered, and maybe it would have if she hadn’t been an adulterer. To that extent Detective Jeff Maher was right about the rope. It shouldn’t have mattered whether Ramage finished Julie off with the rope. It was murder anyway. Is that what the jury thought? For the women of the jury it was a question that went to the heart of their identity. Blame Julie for provoking her own murder and they could walk from the courtroom chaste and pure: the epitome of the ideal woman who is immune from murder. Julie was killed because she was neither as wise nor as moral as her peers on the jury. Is that what they thought? By contrast, a guilty verdict would have pardoned Julie’s lustful and immoral behaviour and her abandonment of her husband. A guilty verdict was an affirmation that all women were like the adulterous and damaged Julie Ramage. Had they fallen for the provocation myth? How could they not when the judge said not a word about Dunn’s assault on Julie? The five women of the jury didn’t look like the kind of women to tempt a man to write pages of sexually explicit words or engage in illicit sex. Jane thought they looked like Labor supporters and that after hearing Dunn’s story about Ramage expecting his family to be servile like his employees they’d dislike him. In my mind’s eye I could see Prime Minister John Howard extending a hand and wishing James Ramage well.The IF YOUR HONOUR PLEASES
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businessman stood for the Prime Minster’s version of the family. The jury looked like John Howard’s kind of people, I thought. The son of a rural bank manager, Philip Dunn has been known to skite about having grown up in Buckley Street, Essendon. A Liberal voting suburb with well-established housing, Essendon is synonymous with the local AFL team and the famous Windy Hill football ground. Dunn’s courtroom voice was not in keeping with the local dialect and had clearly been cultivated over his legal journey. His first wife was the daughter of a judge and had been educated at an elite Catholic school. Some say he’s arrogant. Others say he is a funny man with a passion for advocacy. Often during a tense moment in court he would shuffle his papers when Leckie was trying to make a telling point. As he’d done from day one, Dunn treated the court to a fable about an unfolding, yet entirely predictable tragedy. It wasn’t a murder and Ramage wasn’t a vile, bullying man. He was a sad and lonely husband cruelly misled by Gilda Pekin and Jane.While his wife painted the town red he desperately struggled to hold a family together. He’d tried counselling and mediation and up until the fateful meeting in the kitchen still held out hope that the marriage might survive. ‘The accused was living in hope and she destroyed that hope.’Yes, his actions were irrational, but he simply lost it when she ‘referred to matters which affected him deeply’. Julie wanted to make ‘a U-turn’ and poor James Ramage couldn’t adjust.‘We all have the capability for losing it in real life and are all fragile,’ said Dunn. Is this what author Helen Garner meant when she wrote: You don’t think she might have goaded him until he snapped? I once did it myself to a bloke, when I was a student. I treated him so cruelly and hurtfully that he hit me 174
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across the face. It was only an open hand but it knocked me to the ground. I never felt badly towards him for it, though. I was ashamed. Because I knew he wasn’t that sort of guy. I knew I’d driven him to it. I pushed him past the limit.
Were Ramage’s actions no more than what Garner calls ‘a spontaneous stroke of revenge for cruelty or betrayal or abuse’ and therefore not murder? Philip Dunn believed so. After recounting the tale of Julie belittling her husband’s sexual prowess and his renovations, Dunn had one little gem up his sleeve. He asked the jury to remember that, as Dr Lynch had explained, Julie Ramage had a ‘tampon in situ’ when she met her husband for lunch. No one, especially women, describe a tampon as being ‘in situ’. As with every other part of Julie’s private life the act of menstruating had been appropriated by the male narrative that filled the court. It was very important for the jury, in particular the female members, to reflect on how this might have affected Julie’s behaviour that day, he said. Without caution from Justice Osborn, the defence barrister had been allowed to ask the jury to conclude that the very act of being a woman might have been the reason for the murder. Profound indeed! Dunn’s defence of Ramage was based on a myth that men kill out of love. It’s a myth that camouflages one terrible truth. It’s bad men, not ordinary men, who ‘lose it’ and kill like Ramage did. The businessman from Balwyn hadn’t lost it because he wanted the marriage to survive and was hurt by insulting comments. It was his final act of power. It was an honour killing and everyone knew it.While walking to court the whistling Dunny Boy had bumped into a colleague at the traffic lights.‘Whom are you defending today?’ she asked. ‘Just another dirty rotten scoundrel,’ he replied. IF YOUR HONOUR PLEASES
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Despite what lawyers say, provocation murders are not founded on the innate weakness of humans and a sudden loss of control. When the feigned compassion for our alleged frailty is stripped away, what’s left is one awful truth. Provocation has always been about ownership. It’s about a man having an inalienable right to a woman. When a woman kills her spouse, it invariably follows years of violence and abuse and is done in such a way that provocation is rarely an available defence.That’s why its use had been dominated by men and why Victorian woman Heather Osland was sentenced to fifteen years’ gaol after being found guilty of the murder of her violent husband. A woman can’t strangle or bash her husband to death in a moment of alleged loss of control. By jealously protecting the provocation law, successions of governments, always male, and generations of male judges have enshrined a man’s right to kill his wife. As much as Dunn and Leckie knew this, the only time it was declared was when, in the absence of the jury, the crown prosecutor accused the defence of blackening Julie’s name in order to diminish the gravity of the crime. From start to finish the trial was an insult to the dead woman. Obsessed with portraying Julie as a wilful adulterer, Dunn had been like a dog at a bone over the erotic letters from Davey. Knowing the letters would be damning, Gilda Pekin had persuaded Matthew to leave them at the flat, where they could find their way into safe hands. The last thing Julie’s friends wanted was for Matt, who was genuinely angry about the letters, to pass them on to his father. Desperate to locate them or, failing that, have their existence aired at the trial, Dunn had fired a barrage of questions at the committal.‘It wasn’t that you were being protective of your friend’s reputation?’ he’d asked. Gilda said she had ‘no idea what was in the letters and if they were love letters or not’. It’s no wonder the barrister was incredulous. Equally it’s no 176
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surprise that one of Julie’s girlfriends secreted the letters and burnt them so Dunn couldn’t get his hands on them. The letters were never going to be seen as symptomatic of Julie’s search for love. As tawdry as they were, they were little more than a fantasy.With relationship evidence skewed in favour of the killer, the jury would never hear why she needed another man in her life. Dunn’s question to Gilda about the effect of the letters on Julie’s reputation was no Freudian slip. Ramage was glad his son had seen them.They were further evidence of Julie’s abandonment of him and of her capriciousness. These were not the saccharine, romantic letters of Robert Browning or the earthy utterances of Lady Chatterley’s lover.They were the words of a man who couldn’t get enough of Matthew Ramage’s mother and loved nothing better than writing about it. If Julie Ramage hadn’t already been damned, the letters would have sealed her fate. Yet one major question remains. If Ramage didn’t know about the raunchy letters or the affair with Davey until after he killed his wife, what relevance did they have to the murder and how did they assist his defence? Ask Davey about his penchant for writing love letters and you hear the hackles rise. ‘No, I didn’t treat her as just a sex object.’ When pressed he says she was beautiful and intelligent. Because of the suppression order, Davey was never allowed to publicly lay claim to Julie. Had the trial passed without fanfare it would have mattered nought to Davey. However, by the time the verdict was handed down Laurence Webb had been decreed the ‘love of Julie’s life’. It was not something that her former lover appreciated. In his eyes there was only one man in Julie’s life, and that was him. The astute Philip Dunn milked the rivalry for all it was worth. So who was the real ‘love of Julie’s life’? ‘We’d have been together. We were still seeing each other, even after Laurence IF YOUR HONOUR PLEASES
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appeared on the scene,’ says Davey. It’s not quite accurate. Under cross-examination in the Supreme Court Davey said they’d been intimate for about five weeks after the separation.This coincides with the arrival of Laurence on the scene. It’s crystal clear that he replaced Davey as Julie’s lover. As much as he wanted to be the love of Julie’s life, Davey’s marriage barred him from taking that role. She wanted more than an affair with a married man. And while it’s true that Davey suffered from having to stay away from the funeral and not being able to take his rightful public place in the tragedy, there is no evidence that Julie wanted to be with him. As brutal as it sounds, she dropped him for Laurence. The expression ‘dead women tell no tales’ has never been more apt. Appropriated in marriage and pursued after she’d left Ramage behind, Julie was in a whirlpool.When she desperately needed space and time to think, all she had were men hovering about. Keen to defend and protect Julie, in his trial evidence Davey told Leckie how scared she was of her husband and how she’d tried to placate him.Yet one curious answer during cross-examination troubled me. When Dunn asked whether Julie had told Ramage of Laurence’s existence during the Geelong trip, his answer beggared belief.‘I don’t recollect her saying she had told James.’ It’s hardly plausible that during their forty-minute conversation on Monday morning nothing was said about this crucial fact. Julie had told her twin sister that James ‘took the news well’. So why didn’t Julie tell Davey? And why, for that matter, didn’t he ask? The truth is that he did ask and she did tell. In his statement a month after the killing Davey told Detective Wiseman Julie had advised her husband she ‘did not intend returning to the marital home’ and had met a man at the riding club and was ‘interested in pursuing a relationship with him’. When he took the witness stand did Davey simply forget 178
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what Julie had told him? Or was he too jealous to admit that Laurence, who by the time of the trial was portrayed as the unrivalled ‘love of her life’, had usurped his position? It was an astounding oversight by the lover. Equally, it is mystifying that Crown Prosecutor Julian Leckie chose not to cross-examine him about this crucial fact. There was one more curious revelation in the lover’s story. In his police statement he said ‘she told me James had broken her nose once. She didn’t go into details of when or why…I didn’t take it any further.’ Men everywhere, wanting to get into her pants, but not one of them angry enough to tell Ramage to ‘fuck off ’. Maurice ‘Mole’ Saggars, the swaggering Londoner, would have known what to do with his bovver boots! Dunn’s final soliloquy lasted close on two days and cost Ramage somewhere in the vicinity of $10 000. Brimming with textbook clichés and metaphors it was memorable for all the wrong reasons. ‘Julie had “decided to throw caution to the wind”. She was going to deliver “the final blow”.’‘Mrs Ramage had gone there to end the lies’ and put things straight. Menstruating and ‘tetchy’, she was a shrew-like figure when she burst into the marital home and confronted a depressed James Ramage. In the weeks before he’d been making appointments with counsellors while a gaggle of women kept him in the dark and laughed at his pain. His wife ‘caught up in lies’ and her son pressing her to ‘tell the truth’, Ramage simply lost it as any ordinary man might do in the same situation. ‘What a windbag,’ someone quipped when he finally sat down. What a prick of a job, I thought. No mention of Julie’s father reinforcing the security at her flat for fear that Ramage might break in and do her harm. Nothing about the Valium Jane found in the flat when she went to retrieve her sister’s underwear and clothes. And never a mention about IF YOUR HONOUR PLEASES
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Julie’s threat to sue her husband years earlier after he’d grabbed her so hard he’d broken a bone in her arm. Such were the rules of relationship evidence in R v Ramage, no one would hear the real story.And while the jury imagined a woman running around town fucking at will, her sister knew she’d been cautioned by her boss Felicity Holding for appearing distracted and not attending to her work. On the very day she was accused of provoking her husband to strangle her, Julie was scheduled to meet Felicity to discuss Eco-d’s accounts. The men in her life and the jury appeared oblivious to the pressures she faced. After Justice Osborn retold the sequence of events as offered by the defence and the prosecution, and outlined the principles of the law of provocation, the jury retired. For all the talk of a ‘jury of one’s peers’ the seven men and five women who filed off to the private room where their deliberations would begin were not genuinely representative of the community. Professional people were usually too busy or were challenged by the accused’s legal team. Young women were a rarity and anyone who looked vaguely radical didn’t have a chance. Jury members are invariably conservative and cautious.And with old-fashioned judges guiding them it’s not surprising they so often rule in favour of men when provocation is raised.
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THE JURY’S BACK
Jane Ashton’s mind was awash with doubts as the hours ticked by. She still thought Ramage would go down for murder, but the jury had been out for two days. The longer they’re out, the greater the likelihood of a manslaughter conviction.That’s what the experts say. Then at 2 pm on Thursday 28 October, she answered her mobile phone and heard the words, ‘They’ve reached a decision.You need to be in the court within twenty minutes. They don’t wait for anyone.’ Jordana Millman didn’t offer an opinion as to which way the jury might go. A quick burst of phone calls from Jane and everyone was ready. Osborn’s assistant, a young woman with dark brown hair corralled in a ponytail, would have the opportunity to ask the question on everyone’s lips. Judges aren’t required to ask such mundane questions as to the outcome of a trial. From her little designated spot under the bench she paused and in a slow, audible tone delivered the question that inspires fear like no other. ‘Do you find the accused guilty or not guilty of murder?’ 181
Ramage waited. ‘Not guilty,’ said the foreman. ‘Do you find the accused guilty or not guilty of manslaughter?’ ‘Guilty,Your Honour.’ Jane Ashton didn’t wait for any more formalities. She couldn’t stand to be in the court another moment. She felt sick in the stomach and in a state of disbelief.‘What about my sister’s basic human rights? What provocation was there? He had prior knowledge of her relationship with Laurence. It was a cold and calculated killing,’ she thought. Ramage felt her presence as she marched past him. That’ll show them. Is this what Ramage thought as he counted the years ahead one more time? In February 1989 I had taken a deep breath as I studied the faces of those twelve men and women who’d blamed my sister for being murdered. Manslaughter! It was such an act of treachery.What if it was your sister or daughter who’d been bashed or stabbed to death? You couldn’t possibly burden your own daughter or sister with the accusation that she’d caused Keogh to pull that knife from his scabbard. When a man deliberately takes your sister’s or daughter’s life and the society turns on you and says ‘she asked for it’, it’s impossible to escape the humiliation. For the Garretts it was worse than a knife in the heart. A knife kills you. Not guilty of murder due to provocation stays with you forever. In the family’s eyes they’d been set adrift by a legal system that was supposed to protect the innocent. Feeling abandoned, they tried to make sense of all that had happened. Ray couldn’t even bear to say Ramage’s name and the idea that his daughter had died a Ramage and been talked about as Mrs Ramage throughout the trial was almost as humiliating as the murder itself. Months earlier I’d accepted an invitation from the registrar of the Magistrate’s Court in Shepparton to address a local meeting 182
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on the question of provocation. How bizarre that I should be there on the day of the verdict. Already the Herald Sun was on the phone. Did I have a piece prepared in the event of a manslaughter verdict? Never had the Herald Sun run anything on the law of provocation. Always it was the Age that ran the stuff I wrote. Now Rupert’s tabloid had entered the debate. Ramage was in trouble. He mightn’t have grasped it yet, but he was going to get his comeuppance. Thursday 28 October was about to be etched in the public consciousness in a way Ramage had never imagined. When he arrived back at Port Phillip the boys were all over him. ‘Well done, mate,’ they said, slapping him on the back and generally gloating about the victory. John Soldo was among them. Ramage had taken him under his wing and heard about his troubles. As part of his rehabilitation Ramage had become what’s called a ‘prison listener’. It meant he spent time talking with young offenders about their attitude to all manner of things, including the crime for which they’d been imprisoned. Soldo had become so friendly with Ramage that he agreed to write a reference to be tendered as part of Ramage’s sentence plea. On 27 August 2004, Justice Robertson had sentenced Soldo to nine years’ gaol with a minimum of six for the false imprisonment and rape of a sex worker.The 24-year-old victim had engaged in sex on a professional basis with Soldo on a previous occasion and told the court she attended Soldo’s house on the day of the rape, aware that it would include a bondage session. She would later claim it went ‘much further than I had intended’ and that Soldo raped her eight times. It’s not hard to imagine what might have happened once the woman was bound. If it’s not prophetic that the only person prepared to speak for him was a man convicted of a savage rape, it’s at least surprising THE JURY’S BACK
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that the wily Philip Dunn would have thought a wife killer receiving a reference from a rapist made good sense. Most people writing a reference are expected to be of reasonable character. Whatever the deeper origins of Ramage’s friendship with Soldo, one fact was indisputable. Ramage didn’t have a friend in the world outside his immediate family which, since the death of his father nearly twenty years earlier, comprised only his mother Joyce and brothers Clive and Linsday, who were all living in Melbourne. ‘How could he do it?’ Linsday had said to Jane Ashton at the funeral, before bursting into tears. The youngest child, Linsday Ramage had little time for his brother, whom friends said had bullied him all his life. So while his son loved him, as all sons would in the circumstances, and his mother would be there until she died, Ramage was truly on his own.And in the coming days it would only get worse. Soon his manslaughter verdict would have all the hallmarks of a pyrrhic victory. While he counted his lucky stars, Jane Ashton counted her friends.Within days she’d posted a petition calling for reform of the provocation defence on the internet. Soon it was everywhere. Beneath the photo of the couple that had become their signature tune in the media, Jane had penned sardonic captions that brought the court’s decision into stark relief. Alongside the smiling James Ramage were the words ‘I’m pleased women in Australia don’t have any basic human rights, or I might have had to spend as long in jail as she did in our marriage’. Nothing resembling Julie’s response was ever heard in the court. ‘I spent 23 years in a violent marriage. Finally I tried to leave in a safe and civilised manner. He’s won again! And the legal system says I deserved to be punished for defying my husband.’ Within two months of the verdict more than 4000 people had signed the petition. Many of the middle class women who signed the anti-provocation petition after Ramage’s trial had 184
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never dreamed someone from their class would be murdered, let alone blamed for it. As long as the victims of the law of provocation were working class women, the well-to-do had little interest in attacking patriarchal judges. Now they did. Neither Clive Schlee nor Jock McKay – businessmen friends Ramage had picked up in the late eighties at the Melbourne office of the worldwide finance company Jardines – were prepared to come to court to give character evidence. Neither were Nick Farley, Rob Moodie and Ian Dicker, who all stayed well clear of the cameras and the guilt by association that came from endorsing the killer’s character. Even his brother Clive went to ground.A rapist,Archdeacon Newman and a Catholic nun were the only people prepared to write a good word about the killer. Why? Because he was a killer and he was no good. Jock McKay, one-time marketing manager with Jardines, had bankrolled Ramage’s initial legal fees to the tune of $40 000 while he was organising a cash flow to pay the massive bill he’d soon be facing. In early February 2005, less than four months after the verdict, he died from a heart attack.And although Clive Schlee had been touting the truth of his mate’s legal argument after receiving Dunn’s summation and the news of the manslaughter verdict, he soon disappeared from the radar. After making his name as the CEO of Pizza Hut, in 2003 Schlee had taken over as CEO of Pret a Manger, a British-based sandwich chain with a French name. In early 2004, with Pret a Manger retreating, tail between its legs, from the Japanese market, Schlee had to face the music.‘It’s possible for foreign companies to survive in Japan if you go in with care and you learn as you go carefully,’ he said. Schlee didn’t say how much money the company lost under his command in Japan. Still unrepentant, Ramage quickly put pen to paper in an attempt to win back those friends who’d disowned him. If he THE JURY’S BACK
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was to make it again in the world of business, he needed some of them on his side. The first letter was sent to an agent in the thermoglazing business. What happened should not have happened. I should be punished. I do want you to know the truth. I was naïve to think that going to trial the truth would come out. Only those who went to court heard the truth. Those who’ve listened to the media haven’t.
What truth could this killer possibly have been talking about? No one heard about him head-butting his wife, demanding sex or giving his daughter a black eye. No one heard about him visiting prostitutes or having an affair, or how after head-butting Julie in 1991, he told a therapist sex with her was boring. He satisfied his fantasies in the beds of prostitutes because he wasn’t happy. Ramage wasn’t sorry. Nor did he believe he’d done anything wrong. ‘What happened should not have happened’ is not an admission of guilt. If Julie had not belittled him and provoked him, all would have been well. If Julie had given him the right sex it would have been different. If only he’d understood that she’d stopped loving him ten years ago. Within twenty-four hours of the verdict, Dunn’s 27-page account of how he avoided a murder conviction had been photocopied and was on its way to Clive Schlee in England. Soon Schlee was in contact with Ramage’s best man, Peter Ronchetti. ‘The lawyer was all part of a cunning plan to get off with manslaughter if you ask me’, Ronchetti would tell Jane in an email. Schlee didn’t agree. I’ve corresponded with Clive Schlee’s wife, Eileen. She’s implacably opposed to the defence of provocation. I’ve never met or spoken with her husband. It’s hard to believe that he or 186
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the now deceased Jock McKay could seriously think the verdict in R v Ramage was just. By now, though, it didn’t matter what Ramage’s mates thought about provocation. Nor did it matter that another defence barrister tried to tell a woman in the witness assistance program that the killer had been provoked and it was definitely a manslaughter killing.The public had turned on Ramage and provocation. Although the Herald Sun reverted to type when it grabbed a photo of Jane outside the court and plastered it with the misnomer ‘Anger turns to Grief ’, the emerging coverage in the media was groundbreaking. One after the other, a procession of journalists looked for comment on a case that was about to make Ramage a pariah. On Friday 29 October the Herald Sun devoted several pages to the Ramage story.Alongside the regular column of its resident right wing provocateur,Andrew Bolt, it ran my piece. I have no idea what Bolt would have made of Julie Ramage. Although he’d famously lost a defamation case after ridiculing a magistrate for allegedly being soft on a convicted drug dealer, Bolt has never shown the same contempt for the excesses of judicial patriarchy. He’d taken an interest in the Law Reform Commission report, but unfortunately it was for all the wrong reasons. He believed it would ‘sneak through changes to benefit lesbians and single mothers’ and was stacked with ‘mates’ of the chairperson, Marcia Neave. Barrister Felicity Hampel, wife of George Hampel and three months away from being sworn in as a judge, was one such mate, he said. Bolt seemed unconcerned that judges would be entrusted with the power to determine the level of provocation in sentencing in cases such as R v Ramage. The final paragraph of my piece for the Herald Sun refected the concerns of many people. As long as we offer juries the chance to blame a woman for her murder, as this jury has effectively done in handing THE JURY’S BACK
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down a manslaughter verdict, we’re a party to the violence. I’m sick of writing about men, who, protected by the law of provocation, turn dead women into provocateurs in the name of ‘doing their job’. It’s time we changed the law, affirmed a woman’s right to leave a relationship and told these men the days of blaming women for the violence of men are over.
Everywhere people were outraged by the manslaughter verdict and the notion that Ramage had been provoked. And as always the emails flowed: What does it take, when will sanity, let alone justice, prevail. ‘Provocation’ reduces it to man – well woman-slaughter, then a minimum of eight, not the possible twenty. Slaughter is still slaughter. He was fortified, being stronger physically, but not justified. She was defenceless, helpless, innocent, and the law which we trust to avenge us, failed her, just as he did. The law is just another enemy of the victim, defender of the offender. She did not provoke him. Was anyone there to hear her provoke him? The legal system will not allow ‘hearsay’ relative to a history of domestic violence, and yet allows this hearsay.
And as always there were the women who’d lived with the violence: Provocation as attested by the perpetrator. I have lived 25 years of domestic violence, been ‘protected’ by an intervention order, and would never be so reckless to my own safety, knowing my ex-husband as I do, to say anything that would anger him, regardless of what I thought. Even Julie Ramage’s 188
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daughter knew her mother feared him.The so-called ‘provocation’ is an unproveable – yet successful – escape from murder. The Eternal Judge will not be so easily persuaded. He will, however, have a huge case list, hence the need for eternity. Dear Phil, I was glad to read your voice of reason in the Herald Sun today as yet another violent man got away with murder quite literally. I also read your book, Another Little Murder and find it astonishing that the defence of provocation still exists in the 21st century. As a logical proposition the defence of provocation doesn’t make much sense.
And from a friend of Julie’s: Dear Phil I am a friend of Julie Ramage. I used to ride with Julie at my property which is on the road where her husband dumped her. I am outraged – I know so many things that could have helped that arsehole go down, but none of it would have been allowed. I know she was so scared of him that there is NO WAY that she would have said what she has been accused of. She would have been absolutely terrified. I have read the papers for the last few weeks and had to read all this crap, and what a lost soul this man is presented as.The lies and portrayal of Julie have been nothing short of amazing. Nothing will bring Julie or your sister back, but I will personally be maintaining my rage till the day I die. Thank you for your article – it has been uplifting.Thank you for confronting the QC. THE JURY’S BACK
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Back in his cell at Port Phillip James Stuart Ramage could sense the gathering storm. Already Matthew had been told to remind people that a verdict of manslaughter meant that he had been out of control when he killed his wife. ‘I hope it stops the Ramage haters from telling lies,’ his son told a family friend.And whilst the massive media coverage drove Ramage mad, he had no idea of the contempt that would flow from the Law Reform Commission’s recommendation that provocation be abolished. Although some concluded that the Law Reform Commission’s condemnation of provocation had been based on the Ramage case, it actually wasn’t true. The report was already printed before Ramage stood up to hear the jury’s verdict and, as the preface stated, it reflected the law ‘as at 1 August 2004’. It didn’t really matter, for history had conspired to ensure that this middle class murder would forever be seen as the case that changed the law and turned the businessman James Ramage into a pariah and the man who escaped a murder conviction. On 18 November the attorney general summoned the media to parliament for the release of the commission’s report. None of the recommendations had been made public yet, but everyone in the room knew provocation was about to be scuttled. In the three weeks between the verdict on 28 October and the press conference, the Ramage story was rarely out of the news. A Melbourne Grammar boy and, since his elevation to the position of attorney general, outspoken on the issue of gender balance on the bench, Rob Hulls is subject to the usual contradictions that beset mainstream politicians. Between 1990 and 1996 he held the Queensland federal parliamentary seat of Kennedy. After the maverick Bob Katter won it back for the Nationals, he was shunted into Victoria. Once elected to the state parliament, Hulls acquired the tag ‘head kicker’. Former premier Jeff Kennett had been his principal target. On 26 July 190
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2000 I’d sent him a detailed letter criticising the law of provocation and calling for reform. When we subsequently met to discuss the law it was obvious it was destined for the scrap heap of history.The only question was whether the real culprits, those judges who’d either allowed it at trial or ruled in its favour on appeal, would stand condemned. At the 18 November press conference the attorney general left nothing open to misunderstanding. The law of provocation had, he said, ‘reduced women to chattels’. I’d first used the term ‘chattels’ in an article for the Age in 1992.The difference was that I blamed judges. Hulls didn’t attack the judiciary for their complicity in eroding women’s rights. The only time judges were condemned by politicians was when they made rulings in the High Court or in a Royal Commission that contradicted the interests of a major political party.And as much as politicians will tell you it’s not their right to attack or influence the judiciary, it’s never stopped them appointing their mates or calling for a tougher attitude to crime when there’s been a vote to be won. As well as damning the law of provocation the attorney general should have been asking why so many women have been killed and the courts have been so forgiving. Despite the pathetic provocation defences accepted in the trials of Dincer, Keogh and Crowe in the eighties and the revelations that these murders could be traced to a deeper vein of family violence, the 1991 Victorian Law Reform Commission refused to condemn the law of provocation. The law was in no way discriminatory, said chairman David Neal. Although he would repeat this absurd claim in 2004, Neal’s was a voice in the wilderness. The law of provocation was crumbling in the face of community outrage. The launch of the Law Reform Commission report in 2004 would have been the perfect time to make a universal apology to the families of victims who preceded R v Ramage. If, as the attorTHE JURY’S BACK
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ney general believed, the law had always discriminated against women, then why not sympathise with its victims? If reconciliation with indigenous Australians is an aim of the Labor Party, then so too should be reconciliation with the victims of this legal terror. It would prove to be yet another lost opportunity to bring some peace to the mothers and fathers who’d been told their daughters were responsible for their own murders. Pat Garrett is so traumatised she’s a shell of the person she once was. Like my own mother, Lorna, hardly a day passes when she’d doesn’t think about her daughter.A consoling word from an attorney general would make a profound difference to their lives. The only ‘victim’ named at the launch was convicted husband ‘killer’ Heather Osland. In 1996 she was sentenced to fifteen years for the murder of her husband, Frank, even though her son admitted killing him and was found not guilty. In July 2005, after nearly ten years in gaol, she was finally released. For those who’ve followed the evolution of the defence of provocation, the Osland case became the cause célèbre of activists fighting discrimination against women. Wife killers had been offered the defence of provocation for trivial reasons yet there was nothing in the law that could save Osland. Less than four years for Keogh and Crowe, fifteen for Osland. The misogyny that underpinned the decision should have been enough to make the Office of Public Prosecutions blush with embarrassment. Osland’s conviction was legally unsafe and the verdict an insult to all women who’ve suffered at the hands of violent, bullying men.There was no doubt about that. However, if Heather’s name was worth mentioning, why wasn’t it appropriate to name Julie Garrett and every other victim of this arcane law? There’d be no judges or specific cases named, nor any ‘law and order’ catchcries that day. It was a civilised gathering. In the room were a collection of women who’d waved the ‘women’s 192
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rights’ flag in its various colours. The most prominent of these was former Labor premier Joan Kirner. Joan had championed Heather Osland’s innocence. Well known Homicide Squad detective Ron Iddles, who’d joined various round table meetings in the preparation of the report and been an articulate critic of provocation, was there too. Also in the room were Professor Jenny Morgan, member of the advisory committee and long time critic of the law, and Felicity Hampel, in her capacity as part-time law reform commissioner. Nearly ten years had passed since Felicity Hampel told me her husband George had no alternative but to offer Peter Keogh a defence of provocation. Evidence had been tendered that Keogh was a ‘depressed alcoholic’ and was therefore more prone to a loss of control than other men. Hampel ruled that Keogh was essentially in the same boat as Kemalettin Dincer, a Turkish Muslim who’d stabbed his sixteen-year-old daughter Zerrin to death in 1981. They were, said Hampel, victims of permanent character defects, one induced by Islam, the other by years of alcohol consumption. All George Hampel had done was imbue Keogh with the same vicious misogyny that drove Dincer. And Felicity should have been feminist enough to say it. As much as she had been a defender of human rights in her capacity as president of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties (VCCL), her public offerings on provocation have been rare. When she did belatedly write about provocation in 2001, she went no further than saying it was ‘largely a male defined proposition’. Not terribly profound, I thought. And while the Law Reform Commission’s report called for the abolition of provocation, its chairperson, Professor Marcia Neave, has not always been of that view. When the 1991 Law Reform Commission concluded that provocation did not discriminate against women, Marcia agreed.What had changed? Between July THE JURY’S BACK
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1997 and June 2001, nearly two-thirds of the twenty-two men granted a defence of provocation for killing their wife or girlfriend were found guilty only of manslaughter.And while it’s astounding that so many of them escaped a murder conviction, the statistics show that the likelihood of a jury finding the accused guilty of murder has been increasing. Contrary to what the commission says, the jury isn’t the only player in these trials. As Judges Charles and Batt showed when they overturned the murder verdict in R vYasso, provocation lies in the eye of the beholder, or specifically in the eyes of elderly male judges. What if Justices Batt or Charles were charged with the responsibility of sentencing someone like Ramage or Yasso? ‘To the extent that provocation may reduce a defendant’s moral culpability, it should simply be taken into account with other mitigating factors at sentence,’ says the Law Reform Commission. The implications of this proposition are unavoidable. If a judge genuinely believes in the old common law myth that women provoke men, they will sentence accordingly. Does this mean wife killers will get a sentence way below what’s given to ‘stranger murder’ or rape? And even more importantly the law will remain silent on a woman’s right to leave a relationship. The decision to abolish the law of provocation came about because judges were increasingly subjected to scrutiny. The scrutiny and the momentum for change didn’t come from the Law Reform Commission, civil libertarian lawyers or the judiciary. It came from the families of victims and from pioneer activists such as barrister Dr Jocelynne Scutt. And as much as the attorney general chose to ignore it, I’d led the charge. Years of campaigning were reflected in an email in May 2005 from Melissa Smith, a young American woman completing an internship with the Deputy Leader of the State Opposition in the Legislative Council: 194
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According to David Neal and Marcia Neave, your campaigning is the main reason Rob Hulls decided to launch an enquiry into defences to homicide. In order to have provocation re-examined, did you appeal more to the public or to politicians, or to both?
Rob Hulls was a backbencher in the Keating Federal Labor Government when, as the independent member for the federal seat of Wills, I put the following question to the federal Attorney General Michael Lavarch on 8 June 1994: Despite the offerings of former broadcaster Terry Lane and filmmaker Don Parham on the issue of violence against women, feminists continue to argue that the criminal justice system is biased against women. Contrary to the Victorian Law Reform Commission’s 1989 finding that there was no gender bias in the law of provocation, critics, including myself, believe, as Dr Adrian Howe of La Trobe University said: The commission suffered from its singular failure to address the key issues raised by feminist analysts as well as from a faulty empirical study. Given your government’s expressed concern for the rights of women, will you guarantee to put the issue of the defence of provocation, including its gender biased interpretation by some judges, on the agenda at the next meeting of state and federal attorneys general?
Although Lavarch offered the following comforting words, it would turn out to be a long haul: I acknowledge the longstanding commitment of the honourable member in this area. He has on other occasions THE JURY’S BACK
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spoken about this issue in the House. Clearly, the criminal system and the defence of provocation are matters for Australian states, given that the criminal law is a matter for state jurisdictions. There is an attempt to achieve some national uniformity in our criminal laws.There is a project which does report to the Standing Committee of Attorneys General on the process of achieving uniformity in criminal matters. This committee responded to the Gibbs committee, which did a very detailed investigation into the criminal laws of this country. I certainly can give an undertaking to the honourable member that state Attorneys and the Commonwealth, at each of their meetings, discuss questions of the development of the criminal law. I will make sure that the particular issues, which the honourable member raises, are raised at the next meeting, which I understand is in the latter half of July.
As much I welcomed the Victorian attorney general’s condemnation of provocation, the reform legislation could well be a smokescreen. With provocation removed from the court’s deliberations and left to the trial judge to assess in sentencing, it’ll be impossible to properly examine the assumptions that drive a presiding judge. Chairperson Marcia Neave did receive submissions from groups who believed that provocation could and should be reformed, rather than abolished.They argued that separation, threatened separation and infidelity or suspected infidelity should be excluded from the provocation defence. If the law had been reformed in this way there’d be no need to rely on the wisdom of judges. Such a strategy would have sent a clear message to violent men that a woman is not a chattel and, just as women have managed male infidelity and separation without resorting to violence, so too can they. 196
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If a woman’s right to leave a relationship had been enshrined in the law thirty years ago, the acts of revenge carried out by the likes of Dincer, Crowe, Keogh and Ramage would never have resulted in a provocation defence and manslaughter verdicts. It might not have saved every murdered woman. But it certainly would have sent a message to potentially violent men and stopped judges from enlisting the legal lie that women cause men to commit murder. In the end, that’s all you can cling to when James Ramage or Peter Keogh murders your sister or daughter. There is nothing in the proposed change of the law to suggest that defence barristers will be prohibited from blackening the name of a murdered woman. Even with the ‘provocation’ word eliminated from proceedings defence barristers will blame a woman for her murder. Instead of prattling on about the woman’s alleged words, the likes of Philip Dunn will paint a picture of domestic chaos brought about by infidelity or separation unhinging the male defendant. What sticks in the craw of anyone who’s lived through a provocation defence is that in one fell swoop the Law Reform Commission has cleansed all those judges and lawyers who’ve swept aside the rights of murdered women. Instead of pointing the finger at a legal fraternity and its support for provocation, the Law Reform Commission chose to blame ordinary people who sit on juries. ‘Those consulted, suggested the ordinary person test was particularly confusing for juries – requiring them to ‘perform a form of mental gymnastics…in reality it’s unlikely that jurors are capable of making these fine distinctions,’ says the report. Of course there’s a problem for a jury when a judge says you ‘must consider whether an ordinary man with the characteristics of James Ramage might lose control’ and kill Julie Garrett. The decision in R v Ramage wasn’t singularly the jury’s fault. Nor was it singularly the law’s fault. Generations of judges hidden from THE JURY’S BACK
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criticism have allowed some of the most barbaric provocation defences and in doing so have been complicit in sustaining this discriminatory law. Instead of blaming juries for the evolution of provocation, the Law Reform Commission should have turned the spotlight on some of those rulings. The murder of Lisa Richardson in 2000 and the trial that followed was so characteristic of everything that was wrong with the criminal justice system. None of Julie’s friends were in court for the retrial of her killer, Midas Conway, in April 2005. Conway had stabbed Lisa to death in a jeans shop and been sentenced to a nonparole period of fourteen years for murder. On 7 October 2004, two days after Ramage’s trial began, an appeal court overturned the decision on the grounds that Conway should have been allowed a provocation defence. One major issue troubled the judges: ‘The question is whether the provocation, measured in gravity by reference to the personal situation of the accused, could have caused an ordinary person to form an intention to kill or do grievous bodily harm and to act upon that intention, as the accused did’. On 18 October 2000, while on bail for a drug offence, Conway arrived at the shop where his former fiancée worked. He claimed that after Lisa told him there was no hope of reconciliation he pulled a knife from his pants and threatened to kill himself and that when she laughed at him he ‘lost it’ and stabbed her many times.At the retrial her sister fell apart as a female witness described how Conway had broken one knife then grabbed another and plunged it into Lisa’s back. As this same witness left the court she looked at Conway who, believing her evidence captured his fragile mental state at the time of the murder, mimicked the word ‘thanks’ with his lips. Midas Conway still believed he was a victim. And why wouldn’t he? This is the moral of all provocation murders. On 13 April 2005, he was found guilty of murder a second time. It hardly raised a bleep in the media. 198
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LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
By the time Attorney General Rob Hulls presented the Law Reform Commission report in October 2004, Julie Ramage had become one of the most well-known murdered spouses on record. If the media or Julie’s friends had cared to look they’d have seen that there were little ‘wife murders’ everywhere. Six weeks after Julie Ramage was buried, Mark Verdins, another ‘abandoned man’, turned his fury on a former lover. On 17 September 2003 he kidnapped his former girlfriend at gunpoint and drove off at high speed down the Monash Freeway. Before his car reached speeds of 190 km/h he shot dead his passenger, a terrified 25-year-old, Leanne Elliott. The murder accomplished,Verdins shot himself in the mouth and ploughed into the back of a car driven by 39-year-old Kevin Bertram. It was 8.50 pm whenVerdins’ fury was brought to a halt. A newspaper article reported him as being ‘consumed with pain over the failed relationship’. It was the standard defence. Mr Bertram, who was described in one report as ‘an innocent victim’, 199
died when his car exploded. ‘Wasn’t the girl innocent?’ I wanted to ask.Verdins survived. Women so rarely kill out of revenge for infidelity or to assert control over a man.‘Husband killing’ usually follows years of violence or ritualistic drunken rape, and when women pursue a provocation defence it is more often a case of self-preservation or self-defence. For a range of cultural and biological reasons women are either unable or disinclined to kill like spurned men.And what infuriates so many families is that too often judges summon almost unimaginable depths of compassion for wife killers. During his time on the bench George Hampel was among the most compassionate of Victoria’s judges. After Noel Meyers was found guilty on 4 March 1992 of bashing his ex-girlfriend Tracey McNamara to death, Hampel sentenced him to a minimum of ten years gaol. It was much less than the sentences normally given for murder, even those deemed to be ‘only a domestic’. So angry was her father, Noel McNamara, he founded the Crimes Victims Support Association. Mark Bottriell was another killer who fell into Hampel’s path. Bottriell treated 22-year-old Debbie Smart like a punching bag before bashing her to death in 1998. Poorly educated, unemployed, drug dependent and a single mother, Debbie Smart was the classic, working class victim of family violence. She’d attended the Peninsula Hospital four times during December 1997 and January 1998, and been described as anorexic, wasted and covered in bruises. A suspicious doctor recorded that ‘her boyfriend was always present’. On 11 January 1998 a social worker said Debbie appeared to be the victim of domestic violence.Two days later her partner Mark Bottriell killed her. The judge sentenced him to a minimum three years in gaol, after his charge was reduced to manslaughter in a plea bargain. It was a very lenient sentence, given the ruthlessness of the 200
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killing. Bottriell would have done worse if he’d run someone over while drunk. In his five-minute summation the judge focused on the killer’s violent upbringing. He said nothing about the suffering of the Smart family or of their daughter. Hampel isn’t the only judge to have shown unusual compassion for a woman killer. He wasn’t responsible for the provocation defence offered to Kemalettin Dincer after he dragged a knife from his sock and murdered his daughter for having a relationship with a boy. Nor was Judge Hampel responsible for Kevin Crowe getting away with murder. He was, however, a stepping stone on the legal path that led to the appeal court decisions in R v Conway and R v Yasso in 2004 and the manslaughter verdict in R v Ramage. On 20 May 2005 Justice Simon Whelan brought George Hampel’s judgments and those of many other so-called ‘compassionate’ judges into stark relief. In the dock was Robert Clifford Barrett, who over many hours on Saturday 7 June 2003 had virtually tortured his partner of twelve years, Jennifer Lorraine Brodhurst. The judge described how, by ‘the early hours of Wednesday 11 June 2003 when an ambulance attended, the deceased was suffering from bruising and abrasions to her entire body. She also had two broken ribs and a broken finger. She had numerous lacerations to her head. Most of her injuries were the result of blunt force trauma.’ Whelan proceeded to sentence Barrett to 25 years in gaol with a non-parole period of 20 years for the murder of Brodhurst. The judge’s 15-page, 5,000-word statement clearly illustrated how some judges were beginning to view family violence: It seems to me that there is a pressing need to protect the community from you. You have five prior convictions for LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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matters involving violence or threats of violence, three of which were most serious.The evidence in your trial revealed a long and violent history towards the woman who you eventually murdered.That murder was characterised by both violence and cruelty. There is no present indication of any amelioration of your violent tendencies.A long-term psychiatric prediction of your future conduct cannot be provided. Whilst, as I have indicated, some sensible moderation of the aims of general deterrence needs to be made in your case given your longstanding psychiatric condition, there remains a very important issue of general deterrence. You were in a relationship with a woman considerably weaker than yourself.You have murdered her in the most shocking circumstances, motivated by, and giving effect to, your morbid jealousy. The resort to violence in domestic circumstances, and in response to issues in a relationship such as jealousy, is a matter which this society cannot tolerate.
At the announcement of the sentence, Barrett’s mother Florence delivered a torrent of abuse at the judge. Justice Whelan merely took his leave. Simon Whelan has another life beyond the supreme court. Educated at the elite Catholic school, Xavier College, he has been a member of the ABC radio team, the Coodabeen Champions, for more than twenty years. It was in this context that we first met. As coincidence would have it, I bumped into Simon outside the restaurant where the Garrett family and their friends had gathered on the day James Ramage was sentenced.We discussed the case and the law of provocation. I wasn’t surprised with the sentence he handed down to Robert Barrett. Whelan is no George Hampel. Ironically, Julian Leckie prosecuted the Barrett case, and as always Dr Lester Walton provided a psychiatric report. 202
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Whelan’s remarks upon sentencing Barrett capture the changing attitude among some judges to violence within the family. And whilst it’s surely a step forward, it raises so many questions about the conduct of judges in provocation cases in Victoria. Twenty years for Barrett and less than four for Keogh and Crowe.Try telling me that’s justice. Two weeks after Rob Hulls said it was his intention to support the abolition of provocation, Jane and her family were back in the Supreme Court for the final pleas. His best work behind him, Philip Dunn now had the task of leaning on Justice Osborn in the hope he might deliver a piddling sentence. The Garretts were buoyed when they learned that Dyson Hore-Lacy thought Ramage could get in the order of ten years with a minimum of eight. It seemed a light sentence for such a callous and brutal murder, but when compared with Keogh’s three years and eleven months, it was an eternity. It was now 1 December 2004 and Julie had been dead for a year and a half. After some preliminary discussions during which it was established that Ramage had been in custody for 499 days, Dunn took to the stage. His client continued to find his actions ‘inexplicable’, he said. It was ‘like watching a movie or looking at somebody else’s life’. He found it ‘incomprehensible that he behaved the way that he did’. ‘As you have seen in a bundle of reports which I will refer to and have been handed to you, he did contemplate suicide as the easiest way out to spare everybody the embarrassment, but it was the thought of his children that obviously kept him going,’ said Dunn, as he struggled to win over the judge. The sympathy card played, Dunn quickly reverted to his old self.‘May I suggest, by some widespread publicity and a number of persons who presented victim impact statements have [sic] volunteered to speak not only to the press but various radio LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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programs and to go on television. In doing so, they have made public comments about the verdict, the likely sentence and the character of Mr Ramage.With the greatest respect to those people who are going through the grieving process, this is a particularly unhelpful way and doesn’t help the courts and administration of justice when one-sided comments are being made and a public atmosphere is created which may lead those who are not familiar with the case to form an opinion which is not one which is fully supported by all the material before the court.’ If Dunn thought the claim that Ramage had three hours to fabricate a case against his wife was crap, then his opening address was nothing short of bullshit. It was disingenuous, insulting and plain ignorant for Dunn to argue that the public campaign was anything other than proper and considered. To suggest a ‘grieving’ sister should not have been able to express her contempt for the verdict and the provocation defence presented to Ramage was laughable. If my article in the Herald Sun was wrong he had every opportunity to respond.There was nothing one-sided at all about the article or the public commentary. Everything Ramage offered in his defence was aired in the media. He just never dreamed that in hiding behind a provocation defence ordinary people in pubs and clubs and the family home would discover what a vicious person he really was. He’d won the battle but lost the war. Like so many men at law, Dunn couldn’t resist the obligatory ‘it was a tragedy of some sort of Shakespearean proportions’.The art of defending a wife killer is to never say or imply that a woman has been murdered. Murder’s all about fate and otherwise good people being trapped by their own demons or devious gods. If we fall for the myth then wife murder is never understood for what it really is, an act of clinical revenge or power. It’s a tragedy ‘written in the stars’ said one judge, quoting 204
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Shakespeare, when two blokes on their way home from the football had a ‘rush of blood’ and bashed a homosexual man to death on Anzac Day 1999. Shakespeare dispensed with, it was back to cleansing the court of the brutal consequences of Ramage’s act. The impact statements ‘fall outside the ambit, in my submission to you, of Section 95(b) and that’s not surprising because apart from the two last victim impact statements, which I haven’t seen yet, they are all made by persons who have made their views known both in the press, the television and radio and in doing so have commented more than once on their own view of the verdict and the sentencing process, even expressing opinions as to the likely sentence and their views about it. Now, it is unusual…’ Before Dunn could go a step further Justice Osborn interceded.‘I have done a three week trial in Shepparton and I can tell you that I am not familiar with this press coverage. I am familiar with some of the newspaper coverage but I am not familiar with radio discussions or matters going as far as those you have referred to. I’m not familiar with radio reports,’ said the judge. Osborn did not appreciate being accused of listening to populist, talkback radio. Jane’s victim impact statement wasn’t textbook, but it was so true it made a mockery of Dunn’s defence. No wonder he didn’t like it: I am angry that despite his reassurances he has not contacted Sam’s school once. I am angry that he has paid his legal fees, but has not paid Sam’s school fees…I am angry that the children moved back into the house where their mother was killed…I am angry that Matthew was not left alone to get on with his VCE but was called on constantly by his father to finish the renovations and run his errands for him. I am angry that Dunn suggested my sister was a LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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bad mother to leave in the middle of Matthew’s VCE, but failed to mention that despite the horrific murder of his mother he still managed to get top marks and a place at Melbourne University. I was disgusted to learn that Jamie checked Matthew’s funeral speech, and included a bit on happy family life, just in case his friends were listening I was disgusted to learn that Jamie got Matthew to put a red rose on Julie’s coffin and wish her hand could have come out and pushed it off. I am sick of his hypocrisy, how dare he claim any part of that day… Witnessing the suffering of my parents was the most awful thing I have had to do in my whole life, and my father’s voice still sounds in my head. I would have done anything to protect Mum and Dad, but thanks to Jamie, I had no choice…Despite Ramage’s often cruel behaviour towards Julie over the years, she was kind and wanted to help him move on. Many of the women he contacted over the five weeks before he killed Julie feel used. People that he had insulted and shunned on previous occasions were approached for help and advice. I wish we had all given him the same advice that my father had. ‘It’s over; just get on with your life.’ I wish I had been braver and told him how much I hated him…She stopped loving him. Not because I or anyone else told her to. But because Julie realised he never really loved her in a selfless pure way. He could only ever love himself.The more she gave the more he took.And she had no more to give…I can’t describe my grief. It is too painful.You can never break the unique bond of twins…I am not surprised he has shown no remorse to me, my parents or Julie’s friends.To show remorse he would have had 206
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to understand how other people felt and he has never been able to do this. I have seen Ramage’s eyes when they are full of hate a number of times over the years. Even during the trial he managed to look at Felicity Holding and myself, in the courtyard, and I wished the judge and jury had been there to see the pure evil in his gaze… I have not attacked his sexual prowess, his business acumen, his manhood, but I have criticised his bullying, violent, controlling and manipulative behaviour, unfortunately as these things do not matter to him… If he had shown some remorse I may have been less ‘petty and grumpy’ towards him. He could have included one line expressing his sorrow for what he had done in his one and only letter to me, but he did not. He blames her for making him have to do what he did. He blames her for putting him in the situation he now finds himself. He blames me and her parents and her friends for encouraging her to leave. He blames everyone except himself for what has happened.
The impact statements dispensed with, it was time to step inside Ramage’s head.To prove that Ramage was a victim of his own character and upbringing there was the mandatory report from Dr Lester Walton. A psychiatric gun for hire, he’d appeared on behalf of Peter Keogh in 1989. He said he found Keogh ‘depressed and remorseful’ when he visited him in remand just after the killing. More significantly, his evidence that Keogh ‘was prone to impulsive behaviour in a situation of a deteriorating relationship’ saved him from a murder conviction. Walton never offered a view as to whether Keogh might harm other women or burn their house down – as Keogh later did – if they crossed him. LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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Dr Walton’s modus operandi was predictable then and nothing had changed fifteen years later. Invariably, he visits a wife killer in gaol and compiles a report based on what the man tells him. Ramage, whom he’d met a month after the murder, was suffering from ‘a rigid way of thinking and had trouble with change’. As with his assessment of Keogh, he didn’t say whether Ramage might pose a chronic threat to women. That task was left to the judge. ‘I must record some underlying concern as to your capacity to function in a non-violent manner within a marital relationship,’ said Justice Osborn. So why was he allowed a defence of provocation? ‘Were you serious with that Ramage evidence, Lester?’ I said when he answered the phone at his office. ‘I didn’t appear at the trial. They mustn’t have thought what I said was that helpful,’ he replied.These days I can laugh. There was a time when I wanted to wring Walton’s neck for offering such trivial explanations for why men murdered women. Ramage did have a rigid way of thinking. But was it enough to explain why he bashed and strangled his wife? Walton knew the answer to that question. Aware that there was nothing about Ramage’s behaviour that indicated remorse, Dunn drew on the opinions of Sister O’Shannessy to further his cause. She’d come across him in remand. ‘I don’t want my children to think badly of me. I wish it would be different. It’s a huge mistake. I can’t believe this has happened.’ The sister’s reference documenting Ramage’s words only confirmed what everyone in the court knew. He was a deadset prick. Not a single word about the beautiful, if desperate, woman he’d killed. A woman so unhappy she put her life at risk to find a man who might just love her. Someone to cuddle her and tell her she was beautiful. There was not a word of remorse, only considered opportunism and self-interest. Yes, it 208
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was a huge mistake.The world knew he was a bully and a coward. And now he had to live with it and cop what came his way. Leckie, as always, trod a careful path.The 42-year-old woman was, he said, the true victim. If only this had been the tone of the trial. For the first time the court heard about the broken nose and the real bullying. Only after the trial was over and the jury had gone was the true story allowed to be told. It was all so predictable until Justice Osborn leaned forward slightly and said, ‘this epitomises one of those cases which Mr Dunn said with respect to the victim impact statements cause tragedy to extended family and friends of the victim and in a sense are a particular scourge upon society because of that broader suffering, apart from the tragedy of the untimely loss of life of the principal victim. I don’t know if you want to say something about that, as to whether you say there is a question of general deterrence or not.’ Even the prosecutor seemed surprised by the judge’s words. Osborn had effectively offered him the chance to say in words what had been the dominant narrative in the media over the previous two weeks. As much as the law is supposed to reflect community standards, judges must be guided by what the law says, not what people or newspaper editors or media magnates think. Although judges stress that they are immune from the prejudices of public opinion and are never victims of their own foibles, was Osborn a man whistling the public’s tune here? That being the case, it was a gleeful crown prosecutor who devoured what Osborn had put on his plate.‘Your Honour, generally speaking, what the courts should be indicating under the Sentencing Act is that this is not the sort of conduct which will be tolerated despite the fact that people say: “Well, I lost my temper, I lost my self-control” because it is endemic generally of an indication of men generally using violence to resolve their LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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differences with their female partners as a general rule and it has been a general situation occurring in the community. One only has to look at the intervention orders that go through the magistrates’ courts, the myriad of them, that reflect that kind of thing. Many of those don’t result in death, but many of them do lead to death.’ They were strong words. Unfortunately Julie’s friends thought it too little too late. With Julian Leckie and Philip Dunn’s words cemented in ink in his folder, Justice Osborn retired to consider the appropriate sentence for James Ramage. I decided it was time to take a look at the crime scene. From the middle of Marock Place I ran my eye over the Ramage house and tried to plot a course through the events of 21 July 2003. In the front garden was a large ‘For Sale’ sign with the word ‘Sold’ stamped on it. It was hard to believe that anyone could be killed in a court so small without the neighbours hearing something. As the house was vacant the opportunity to take a look was irresistible. Inside the gate to the left of the house the path leads to a landing at the western end of the family room, where Julie had met her fate. It wasn’t the first time I’d peered through a kitchen window and tried to make sense of wife murder. Four years earlier I’d stood at the kitchen window of a cottage in Ballyvadlea in County Tipperary, Ireland. Here in 1894 a relatively prosperous cooper had knocked his wife Bridget to the floor, stripped her, doused her with paraffin oil and set her alight.The murder completed, he dragged her across a field to woodland and dumped her in a shallow grave. Bridget had been sick with a fever, probably tuberculosis, for a week.A local man well versed in the spirit world said a changeling had snared her. Bridget, he said, was ‘away with the fairies’. Her frustrated husband was told that the 210
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only way he could retrieve her was to expunge the witch with a brew of milk and herbs. In the kitchen of their comfortable cottage, 26-year-old Bridget was in the final stages of the cleansing ritual when everything went awry.‘I’ll not be taking it,’ she told her husband as he forced a piece of bread into her mouth.This act of defiance and an allegedly insulting remark about his family opened the floodgates. Like Julie Ramage in Balwyn, she was knocked to the ground and killed.The more imaginative locals said an affair with a man down the road was the underlying source of the tension in the household. Others believed the absence of children had given Bridget a level of independence unknown to other women in the village. They said this independence had destroyed her husband’s pride. Whatever the truth of the rumours, their seven-year marriage had certainly been afflicted by violence. On 6 April 1895 the killer, Michael Cleary, was found guilty of manslaughter. In court and during his ten years in gaol he refused to admit his guilt. In her book The Burning of Bridget Cleary, written more than one hundred years after the murder, Angela Bourke couldn’t hide her sympathy for the killer. The cooper, she said, was a victim of local superstition and what he’d done did not amount to murder. Walking down the sideway towards the garage of 5 Marock Place, I thought about the murder of Bridget Cleary and how another Irish writer had described the killing as a product of the ‘ultimately unknowable nature, to the outsider, of intimate relationships between a man and a woman’. On the night of the killing, Ramage mimicked this explanation for the cooper’s fatal attack on his wife. ‘You don’t know what’s been happening,’ he told Felicity Holding. Like the Tipperary cooper, the Balwyn businessman would seek refuge in the myth that he was a victim of powerful forces within his marriage. LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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Rickety and stiff, the back tilt door of the garage at Marock Place was reluctant to give way.When it finally did, I was dumbstruck. There, as serene as the casket of an ancient princess, was Ramage’s silver green Jaguar. Clean and shiny with its bonnet almost pressing against the back door, the sight of it made my skin tingle. A $96 000 hearse, returned to its rightful home as if nothing had ever happened in that garage. Had Ramage told his son to look after it while the matter of the boy’s mother’s was ‘sorted out’? If Julie had been raped and murdered by a stranger in the Jaguar, would the family have cared for it? When Vicki was murdered we quickly sold her two-year-old Ford sedan. Flushing her blood from the seats and upholstery wasn’t going to free the car from the taint of murder. Closing the garage door I thought about the sequence of events. I wanted to understand how Ramage felt as he climbed into the luxurious cabin and took off for Kinglake. And how could you not think about the Ramage children? ‘They were so beautiful and kind,’ said Naomi Brick, who babysat them in their primary school days. She’d never forgotten how Matthew had given her a birthday card with lovely little pictures drawn on it and how they’d insisted on going to bed at exactly 7.30 pm. Nor could she ever forget Julie’s generosity. ‘She really cared about other people. I still can’t believe that I won’t run into her down the street ever again.’ Julie’s friends couldn’t believe Ramage would let his children sleep in the house where he’d killed their mother.Yet for nearly two months Matt and Sam traversed the spot where their mum had been brutally killed. On occasions they even took phone calls from Port Phillip Prison. ‘Hey, Rambo, your dad’s on the phone,’ a young bloke had yelled across the family room to Matthew during a social gathering. Two years on, Matthew’s mobile phone still carries the greeting ‘You’ve rung Rambo, 212
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please leave a message’. His daddy didn’t see fit to tell the boy the Hollywood Rambo was a growling, macho killer. What Matthew’s mother would have made of her children living in the house where she experienced such a terrifying death is almost too painful to contemplate.What was Ramage’s brother Clive thinking as he picked the children up after the cremation and drove them back to the house only a day after the funeral? In January 2004, with the house about to be occupied by the new owners, the children held a garage sale at Marock Place. The Age newspaper caustically described it as a ‘bad taste sale’. Overseeing the garage sale where Ramage had concluded the act of murder was his mother, Joyce. Julie had always said she was one woman who knew what her son was really like. Little did she know that Joyce had told builder Graeme McIntosh her daughter-in-law was a gold-digger. My heart was racing when I emerged from the side gate of the Ramage house and spotted Debbie Webb in her open garage across the road. She invited me inside and over coffee told me about life in number 5. Debbie had lived with her husband and two children at number 3 for ten years. Engaging and, when prompted, forthcoming about the excesses of the local milieu, Debbie was battling cancer. A fifty-something, stay-at-home mum, she considered Ramage a social climber and would-be snob.When I asked whether his wife had been forced to ape her husband’s manners or had fallen in love with the riches, she offered an ambiguous smile. On one occasion Julie had rushed across the court in search of a ladies’ ticket to the Melbourne Cricket Club section of the MCG. Until the nouveau riche began taking out membership of the MCC, it had been a bastion of old money and influence. Ramage learnt this early on in his climb up the ladder. Julie was genuinely surprised when her neighbour said she’d never been a LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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member. With a stockbroker husband, a son at Scotch and her daughter at Ruyton Girls’ School, Debbie Webb had all the accoutrements of an MCC member.The trappings didn’t do her justice. ‘My husband’s pretty laidback and we’re not into crawling. And unlike most people around here I vote Labor,’ she would tell me with some pride. Eight days later, on Thursday 9 December 2004, Justice Osborn returned to the Supreme Court to hand down his sentence. Today the latest wife killer was about to learn his fate in Court 2, the same court where Matthew Wales had been sentenced. It was a full house.The lover, Laurence Webb, had taken a place in the middle of the court in the company of Julie’s friends.The Garretts were alongside the wall, opposite where the jury would normally sit, and a bevy of journalists had grabbed the remaining seats.Also there was Noel McNamara, and alongside him George Halvagis, whose 25-year-old daughter had been murdered in the Fawkner cemetery in 1997. For some it might have seemed macabre that they were in the court but to those who’ve experienced murder, it made perfect sense. I’d grabbed a spot at the rear of the court alongside the convicted man. The tension was remarkable. Justice Osborn’s comments during the plea, coming as they did only days after the attorney general had savaged the law of provocation, had left the killer palpably nervous. When the judge arrived Ramage stood to attention and didn’t move for the next thirty minutes. For someone so obsessed with image and status it must have been shattering to have to stand while a man in a wig dissected his life and prepared to send him to gaol. Christened ‘Jamie’, today he was James Stuart Ramage. He’d always thought Jamie effeminate and had begun the transformation by using the name ‘Jim’. Eventually the very formal ‘James’ had become his moniker. At the 214
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Boroondara police station after the killing of his wife, and now in court, his name would be James. ‘I accept that the breakdown of your marriage in this way was from your point of view sudden, unexpected and emotionally destabilising in a way which you did not easily accept.’ It was the first of a number of lines from Osborn that offered the killer hope. Bullshit, thought Jane. In her eyes he remained a selfish and cold-hearted man whose only emotion was revenge. On and on went Osborn’s speech. The meetings with counsellors and the dinners with his wife were all documented. The trip to Geelong where it became apparent Julie ‘was seeing someone else’. The mixed messages Ramage received from Jane. After three pages had been read out there was nothing to suggest Ramage had killed with murderous intent. Then came the moment everyone was waiting for. ‘There is no direct evidence of what occurred save for the account given by you in your record of interview. I am prepared to accept this account sets out the essential sequence of events. It is circumstantial and detailed and describes a spiralling confrontation in a manner which would not easily be invented.’ One after the other, the sequence of events as outlined by Ramage was given credence by the judge. Did Osborn seriously believe that Julie had ‘screwed up her face’ and said how much better her new friend was in bed? Did he really believe the ‘Crown was correct to adopt the position’ of allowing provocation to be put to the jury? It didn’t matter that Osborn qualified his explanation by way of ‘I must apply the current law whatever view I may hold as to the desirability to change it’. This was rubbish. The common law hasn’t just emerged from the mist. Nor is it immutable. Ask any thinking lawyer and they’ll tell you provocation is much easier to get up if the dead woman is having an affair.This was a key finding LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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in Professor Jenny Morgan’s submission to the Law Reform Commission. And it was the real reason why Julie Ramage was said to have provoked her husband to lose control. From George Hampel’s emphasis on Vicki’s alleged words when Keogh accosted her and grabbed her car keys before stabbing her in 1987, to Justice Robert Osborn’s ‘I accept that it is likely you were provoked to rage and anger by the confrontation with your wife’ in 2004, judges have been active players in fashioning the provocation defence. For the Garrett family, Osborn’s words obscured the truth. The poor woman had left her computer on and raced to Marock Place to placate a bullying husband. Even the judge accepted that it was to be a short visit. Julie hadn’t gone there to hurt him.The only reason she was at the house was because she wanted to please him. She was a victim of her own compassion. Despite weeks of community outrage and impassioned debate in the media the barbaric tenet, that women were to blame when men killed, had been reinforced. Ramage had been provoked to rage because his wife said she wasn’t coming back.That was the real story. Despite a wealth of evidence that Julie had never challenged her husband and had been nothing but civilised in meetings with counsellors, Osborn said he accepted that ‘a series of hurtful things’ had been said before the fatal assault. And the ‘most feared’ of those, as the judge put it? ‘That the marriage was over and that your wife had found a new lover.’Was this all there was to provocation? How could a democratic society that had gone to war against ‘Muslim fundamentalism’, including its alleged brutality towards women, accept this as provocation? The answer, again, was simple. The application of the ordinary man test was ‘pre-eminently a jury matter’, said Justice Osborn. He cited the appeal court decision in Yasso, which meant the ordinary man was now a 216
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Chaldean Iraqi who’d contravened an intervention order to chase down and stab his estranged wife to death.Three months after Osborn drew on Yasso to defend the court’s decision to allow provocation to Ramage, the insignificant Iraqi, Mazin Yasso, was retried and found guilty of murder.What did this say about the two judges who argued thatYasso’s circumstances warranted a defence of provocation? In the context of the verdict against Yasso the irony of Osborn’s statement was breathtaking. The more he read, the worse Justice Osborn’s judgment sounded. Ramage, he said, had ‘contacted a friend and handed himself in to police’. No mention that the friend was a top QC or that his name was Dyson Hore-Lacy.Three weeks of evidence and not a single mention of Hore-Lacy’s name in any transcript. No mention by the judge that Ramage had spent the evening in the Harp Hotel with a lawyer. After Mazin Yasso killed his wife he was found in a park smoking his last cigarette. A poor, parttime cleaner, Yasso had no lawyer to help him manufacture a provocation defence. So much for the claim that everyone is equal before the law! It was ‘an emotional confrontation’ and Ramage had ‘effectively destroyed the life he’d built for himself ’, said Osborn. Julie Garrett’s family and friends flinched at these words, her mother chronically depressed, her father disillusioned and Julie’s friends emotionally devastated. If he was a pauper would the judge have said these things? There is a precedent for the proposition that wife killers suffer untold pain from their actions.As the Australian newspaper reported on 1 March 1990, so compassionate was one English judge he let a wife killer go free. Graham Sherman was a 21-year-old Royal Marine who shot dead his wife and one-month-old son. The judge, Lord Dunpark, told him: ‘I’m going to do something I’ve never done in culpable homicide and I don’t anticipate I’ll ever do it again. LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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I’m going to admonish you on both charges. In my opinion you have punished yourself enough, more than enough by what you did.You will have to live with this for the rest of your life.You don’t know why you did it. No one in their right mind would have killed without reason these two people who were dearest to them in the world. You have no previous convictions. You have to live with this for the rest of your life.The sooner you try to forget it the better.You have my deep sympathy.’ Although Justice Osborn showed nowhere near the same sympathy to Ramage, the identical logic informed the sentence and fashioned the language used to describe what had happened. It’s a logic that only applies when a man kills his wife. The Marine was the classic victim. James Ramage was a ‘bit of a victim’.The damage he’d done in taking his wife’s life had become an injury to the killer and a mitigating factor in sentencing.Was it any wonder the criminal justice system was accused of deepseated patriarchy? Osborn’s statement was studded with euphemisms which, if deconstructed, are simply code for patriarchy.They can’t obscure the fact that a civilised society and a criminal court failed Julie Garrett.As much as he tried to meet the standards to which critics of provocation aspired, Osborn failed. Julie was a dead woman walking the minute she left her bullying husband. That was the truth of the verdict and the judge’s explanation. It wasn’t an obscure ‘personality disorder’ that caused Ramage to kill his wife. Like Yasso and Conway with their knives, James Stuart Ramage believed his wife had no right to leave him. To blame this on ‘core aspects of his personality’ as if he had no free will and no capacity to free himself from proprietorship was so trite as to be an insult to thinking people. Would the same standards apply to someone afflicted by fascist or Nazi beliefs, or imbued with ethnic or racial hatred? 218
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Why didn’t Justice Osborn apply the same standards to Ramage as were applied to Robert Parsons when he killed his wife in front of the Family Court in December 1997? ‘To hold that provocation arose in this case would be to encourage savagery at the expense of civilised behaviour.’ This was the appeal court’s assessment of the judge’s decision to deny Parsons provocation.The killer went down for twenty-five years. Parsons was enraged that his wife had sought financial redress in the Family Court. In the street that day he went mental when he saw Angela Parsons walking along the footpath.Things were going badly for him in the court when she allegedly smiled at him and said, ‘We’ve got you now, you bastard.’ With that, he jumped from his car and stabbed her to death. The legal reason offered for denying Parsons a provocation defence was that the alternative would have contravened any proper reading of the law. Critics of the law wonder whether the real point of difference was that the forty-eight knife wounds Parsons inflicted were delivered on the steps of the Family Court and not the family home. Had he invaded the sacred property of the judiciary? Whatever the real reasons for the judgment, the same principles should have applied to Ramage. Parsons was a lot like James Ramage. He had money. He’d been violent to his wife in the past and she was scared of him. He killed her because she challenged his authority and allegedly made a derogatory comment to him. Unlike Ramage, Robert Parsons didn’t go to a solicitor after stabbing his wife. ‘I’ve finished with her now. You can call the police. It’s over now, bitch. She stole my kids.That’s the fucking Family Court.You can blame the Family Court.’ So incensed was Parsons all he could do was shout a series of curses. Ramage’s feelings towards his estranged wife in the moments before he killed her in the family home in Balwyn were the same as those LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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of Parsons as he charged towards the Dandenong Family Court. The only difference was that immediately afterwards, Parsons publicly admitted that his actions were driven by a desire for revenge. To conclude that Julie Garrett did anything more provocative than Angela Parsons is plain muddle-headed. Parsons killed in the context of an ongoing and bitter Family Court struggle. Julie had gone out of her way to let ‘her husband down gently’. Her fatal error was that she had sex outside the marriage and wasn’t the classic victim. Not surprisingly, Robert Parsons alleged that his wife was having an affair with a family court solicitor. If only it had been true he might have been saved. It wasn’t until close to the end of his 56-paragraph statement that Osborn waded into the political quagmire. ‘Domestic killings involve the cruel and brutal subjugation of one party to the emotional inadequacy and violence of the other…and carries consequential emotional trauma to all those who knew and loved that victim,’ he said.‘So why was Dunn allowed to blacken my sister’s name and blame her and why was the real violence hidden?’ asked Jane. ‘Such killings strike at the foundations of society…and the provocation was not objectively extreme,’ he added. Women shook their heads in disbelief. Others struggled to hold back their tears. Some wept. Then, as if he was oblivious to how the trial mocked the morality of his words, Osborn turned to five factors which he said mitigated Ramage’s crime. The killer was a man of good character and high achievement.The killing had occurred in circumstances of emotional stress and provocation. He’d assisted police, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and destroyed his previous way of life. Short of canonising him a saint, there wasn’t much more praise that could have been sent the killer’s way.That done, Osborn sentenced Ramage to a minimum of eight years’ 220
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gaol. Seventeen years less than the minimum twenty-five years given to Robert Parsons. Although Osborn said such killings must be the ‘subject of general deterrence’, there was not a single reference to Julie’s rights or how she might have avoided provoking her own death. If this was ‘not a case of extreme provocation’ then what was it? I had waited for Osborn to offer some guidance, but the wait was in vain. Yet for all its failings and lost opportunities, R v Ramage had been a watershed in the evolution of the law of provocation.There had never been so much interest in the words of a judge in a ‘domestic murder’ as those uttered by Justice Osborn on 9 December 2004.The media hung on every single one of the four thousand words he spoke. Walking through the foyer towards the Lonsdale Street exit, all my memories of February 1989 flashed before me. How my mum cried out when she walked into that line of jurors who’d handed down a verdict of manslaughter. How the Director of Public Prosecutions, John Coldrey, now Justice Coldrey, saw nothing wrong with the sentence of three years and eleven months. How Hampel banished us to the gallery due to Mum’s words and my audible description of Keogh as a ‘fucking murderer’.To see my proud mother, a woman so compassionate and sophisticated in matters of life and justice, treated like this was a grave insult. I’ve never forgiven Hampel. A young woman murdered while parking her car outside the kindergarten where she worked and all Hampel could offer were six hundred words and not one word of condolence to the girl’s family. Was the life of a working class girl worth only one-seventh that of a middle class woman? Osborn’s fourteen-page summary made Hampel’s two pages look obscene. Didn’t Hampel’s absence of words only confirm that elitism and snobbery were rife in the criminal justice system? As much as I’ve tried, I find LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
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it impossible to forgive Hampel. Every time I’ve seen his name in the newspaper over the past fifteen years I’ve thought of my sister.Why shouldn’t I be unforgiving? His refusal to respond to any of my emails. And more than anything, his inability since retiring from the bench to write to my parents and express some regret about the verdict.And there I was in the same foyer where it had all gone awry in 1989.There, with Osborn’s statement in my hand. Another woman dead. The working class thug Keogh had cried at Hampel’s feet, whereas Ramage had used his money to find a route by which to escape the full force of the law. Outraged by Ramage’s ruthless killing of their friend and the law’s rough handling of her life, the Canterbury mothers and the women from the riding club had dug their spurs into his hide. Some genuinely thought their connection to men of influence would make a difference. By the time they walked from the court most had lost all faith in the criminal justice system. In Lonsdale Street, friends and supporters of Julie gathered to discuss what had happened. As always, men in wigs, their hunched shoulders draped with the customary black cape, crisscrossed the streets. Hidden away in a bundle of notes carried under the arm or on a trolley wheeled by some underling was the infinite wisdom they used to seek forgiveness for killers like Ramage. ‘Defending any wife killers today?’ I wanted to ask. ‘Mr Cleary, what do you think of the sentence?’ asked one of the journalists as the cameras turned towards me.‘Yes, Osborn is to be congratulated for devoting so much time to explaining the reasons for the eight-year sentence. But what about a woman’s life? Have we forgotten about human rights? And why didn’t the Office of Public Prosecutions oppose provocation? Does anyone seriously believe she provoked him?’ I seemed to talk forever. When I finished, the women clapped. Simultaneously, Philip 222
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Dunn and Steve Pica scurried past. His fifteen minutes of fame over, Dunn didn’t respond when I asked, ‘Happy with the decision, Mr Dunn?’ His fable of ‘love gone wrong’ now embedded in precedent for some other wife killer to draw on, and the law’s compassion for the frailty of violent men upheld, Dunn could return to his chambers a victor. A few minutes later I bumped into Pica at the traffic lights. ‘Your wife must be proud of you,’ I wanted to say. Pica’s married to Magistrate Lisa Hannan. Educated at the Star of the Sea Convent, Germaine Greer’s old school, she was said to have been less than impressed by the verdict and the scrutiny given to her husband’s three hours with the killer in the Harp Hotel. Her office didn’t respond to my request for an opinion on provocation.
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Back at the Owen Dixon Chambers the backslappers were out in full force. ‘Dunny Boy, what a performance,’ they shouted as the beer flowed in the Essoign Club. Known irreverently as the Swine Club, it’s a licensed cafeteria, pretty basic and blokey, where barristers debrief after victories such as these. Dyson Hore-Lacy says he wasn’t there.What a shame he didn’t make an appearance and tell Dunny Boy what he told me – that the excuse offered by Ramage was pitiful. What a shame he didn’t take the stage and say ‘Julie was my friend. She has as much right to leave her husband as I have to separate from my wife. It’s everyone’s inalienable right to leave a marriage.’That would have been enough for Julie’s friends. Former secretary of the Nurses’ Union, Irene Bolger, another Foley’s List barrister, wasn’t there. When we crossed paths outside the Supreme Court during the trial she found some choice words to describe the provocation defence offered in R v Ramage. I don’t know whether other Foley’s List leading lights 224
such as Bruce Walmsley, crown prosecutor in my sister’s case, were among them or whether Colin Lovitt was there. Lovitt had successfully won a provocation defence for Kemalettin Dincer after he stabbed his daughter to death in 1981. He’d also rather famously secured an acquittal for Greg Domaszewicz, who was charged with murdering toddler Jaiden Leskie. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial and a presumption of innocence. And Dunn was entitled to be satisfied professionally. But how do you congratulate someone when a woman has been murdered and a court is up to its neck in her blood? When a murdered woman’s your kith and kin, it reads like betrayal.Three months later New South Wales Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen accused some defence barristers of ‘a kind of misplaced altruism that it is somehow a noble thing to assist a criminal to evade conviction’. It was a brave call. It was exactly what I’d told Robert Digala, the lawyer who’d been at Keogh’s side after he murdered my sister. By the time I’d tracked him down, ten years after the murder, some of my anger had subsided. Nevertheless, for years the anger had simmered. Julie wasn’t my sister, but the thought of Dunn celebrating the manslaughter verdict was hardly endearing. Quite frankly it was nauseating. While a group of wealthy men celebrated another victory over a female provocateur, Julian Leckie was telling the Garretts it was a pleasing sentence. ‘It’s not much for my daughter’s life,’ Ray Garrett remarked forlornly. Ray Garrett is a strong and hardy 71-year-old with thick grey hair. Born during the Great Depression he’d served with the Royal Scots Greys after the war. The Greys date back to 1681 and take their name from the grey horses used by their regiment. ‘I always voted Labor and I’m a socialist. Ramage was a conservative and just had no soul.’ In a restaurant around the corner from the court he tried to make PROVOCATION CRUMBLES
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sense of what had befallen him. His old-fashioned use of the term socialist was totally in keeping with everything he valued. The idea that a craven, soulless capitalist had outsmarted him had broken his heart. Ray Garrett felt betrayed and humiliated. He lamented not being there when his daughter needed him.All he could do was imagine what might have been. In his younger days he was more than a match for the killer. As Ray Garrett talked, my mind went back to the words of the surgeon who had attended my sister:‘I’m sorry.We couldn’t stop the bleeding, Mrs Cleary’. Only two days before the doctor told Mum her daughter was dead, Ray had visited his own daughter in St Vincent’s Hospital. On Monday 24 August 1987, she’d given birth to a daughter, Samantha.While he was admiring his granddaughter,Vicki Cleary was telling Peter Keogh she wanted no part of marriage or a child with him. If Julie had read the Herald Sun the following Thursday, she’d have come across a tiny article about the murder of a young woman in Coburg. ‘A year younger than me, poor girl,’ she might have said. Born on 9 October 1961, my sister was thirteen months younger than Julie Ramage. A working class girl from Coburg, Vicki had never tasted the material pleasures of the Canterbury set.Yet, as coincidence would have it, their paths could so easily have crossed.When Julie was living in Preston with her relatives the Kelletts in 1978, Vicki was studying down the road at Newlands High School, alongside Pentridge Prison. On many an afternoon she could be found laughing with customers at Dad’s butcher shop, around the corner from the Kellett house. And in yet another remarkable coincidence, in the mid nineties my sister Donna had spent eighteen months at 15A Dunstan Street, next door to what had been the Kellett home for decades. Long before my sister moved into 15A, Julie Garrett had fled the Kelletts’ working class neighbourhood under orders from her 226
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fiancé. And as much as Vicki’s murder could be traced back to her living in Preston and meeting Keogh’s mob in a pub in High Street, living in a middle class suburb didn’t save Julie. Family violence didn’t stop at theYarra River where the children of the wealthy rowed their fancy boats. By the time Vicki had been murdered in Coburg, Julie Ramage had been knocked to the ground enough times for her to know the milieu she inhabited had no monopoly on goodness. Like so many women she stayed for the sake of the family, or was wooed back by false promises. The evening before he murdered her, Keogh had demanded my sister visit him at his house in Preston. ‘Don’t go near him,’ my mother told her. She did as her mother said. In the morning he struck.Vicki Cleary and Julie Ramage told people they were scared.Vicki stayed away. Julie did as he wanted and visited her husband. Both were murdered and no one was there when they were needed. If Vicki had been Julie’s guardian angel that fateful day Julie stepped out of Eco-d, she’d have put her hand on the door of the Mini Cooper and said, ‘No, don’t do it, don’t go alone, look what happened to me.’ If only. In the early evening the skies opened up and it poured rain. Under a broad umbrella I stared down the lens of a camera for the Channel Ten News and lifted my voice to offset the pounding of the rain. A few minutes later a bloke rang my mobile to tell me how bad some women can be. I’d heard it all before and delivered the usual script. No, it’s not all men.Yes, some women kill their children. It didn’t matter anymore. Provocation was now truly on the radar. Unfortunately, a phone call from Cheryl Freake later that evening would remind me that it had come at a terrible cost. Cheryl had once been married to Brian Freake, Keogh’s housemate and confidant. In another strange coincidence, she was living in Balwyn at the time of my sister’s murder. PROVOCATION CRUMBLES
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The evening of my sister’s murder, Freake had decamped from Preston to escape any possible grilling from the police. He knew too much for his own liking. Although Cheryl lovedVicki it wasn’t enough to persuade her at the time of the murder to tell me what she knew.The Channel Ten report on the Ramage sentence changed all that.When she said,‘Keogh told Brian he was going to killVicki,’ I had only one question: why hadn’t she come forward in 1987? Too scared, she said. It wasn’t all she knew. One night she’d driven to Preston after a plea for help from Vicki. She found her cowering outside the Preston house hiding from Keogh. It only hardened my feelings towards those of Ramage’s friends who visited him in gaol. Only a fool would think the average wife killer is a good bloke. Within days of the Ramage trial ending, a female acquaintance rang seeking advice. Her estranged husband was whispering terrifying words down the phone line and there was no man to deal with him. I felt angry and embarrassed that a bloke could do this with impunity. Just as Julie Ramage needed some men to stand between her and her husband, so it was with this woman. Filing into court after a woman’s been murdered and railing against the likes of Philip Dunn only brings guilt, regret and more pain.As Eman Herziz and her family had learnt, throwing yourself at the feet of the police or trekking to the Magistrate’s Court doesn’t stop a wife killer’s march. Julie Garrett could have been saved from the murder that befell her. It was a job for ‘the boys’.Where were ‘the boys’ when a woman needed them? Telling a man they were sorry his wife was such a bitch. A week after the sentence, Jane Ashton received a phone call from Rob Hulls’ office.The attorney general was holding a press conference to announce that the Bracks Labor government would soon be enacting legislation to bring about an end to the law of provocation. His office thought it a good idea she be there.When 228
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they rolled the cameras Jane was asked to stand between Hulls and Deputy Premier John Thwaites. Neither politician publicly criticised the verdict in R v Ramage or privately expressed a comforting word about the death of her sister.‘They didn’t know Julie. She didn’t affect them or their lives, so they do not grieve for her or acknowledge that she was a victim of a biased legal system,’ said Jane. These were not the kind of words a couple of majorparty politicians were likely to utter. So stage-managed was the press conference, not even the chairperson of the Law Reform Commission, Marcia Neave, was invited. Although she wouldn’t make any public comment, she was said to be genuinely hurt and offended by the snub. Not one of the people or groups who’d fought for reform of this barbaric law had been invited. Sharing the limelight didn’t appeal to the attorney general. It was the first time in his political career that Thwaites had spoken publicly about provocation. He said the law ‘no longer had a place in a civilised society and harks back to an era when it was acceptable, especially for men, to have a violent response to an alleged breach of a person’s honour’. Did it have a place when Justice George Lush granted Zerrin Dincer’s father a provocation defence in 1982 on the grounds that he was a Muslim? Was it an anachronism when George Hampel stunned the court and offered it to Keogh in 1989? Why did the appeal court grant ‘wife killers’ Yasso and Conway a retrial in 2004? Thwaites’ comments were well meaning, but they offered little comfort to those families who’d been on the unjust end of the law in recent times. The law as it has applied to the killing of women has always been fundamentally bad. Worse still, it had only survived because middle class judges had allowed it to. As was discovered when Mazin Yasso successfully appealed against his murder conviction on the grounds that Justice Coldrey should have allowed him a provocation defence, there PROVOCATION CRUMBLES
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was any number of judges prepared to effectively trammel on a woman’s right to leave a man. Although Justice Frank Vincent dissented, on the grounds that Yasso was capable of controlling himself, he had always been very much a judge in the minority. That two appeal court judges believed an ordinary man might do what Yasso did with his knife should have been an affront to a civilised society.Yet it passed with hardly a comment in the media. Under theVictorian Labor Party’s reforms the jury will have no say in determining whether provocation exists. Instead, the same ‘men’ in wigs that history shows have been an abject failure on provocation will be the sole judges as to the level of provocation. Under Hulls’ legislation the presiding judge will sentence according to what he considers is the amount of provocation. Provocation hasn’t been abolished – it’s been shifted to the judge’s chamber. The legislation is a victory for those men who beat the drums at Scotch College military tattoos, attend elite private schools and grow up believing in their superiority over the ordinary punter. They’ll still be the blokes, not the ordinary jurors who foundYasso and Conway guilty of murder, who’ll be deciding whether a man was provoked to murder his wife. It’s a responsibility far too many judges have failed. In an email to Rob Hulls in June 2005 I asked whether his legislation would ‘ensure that a woman’s name won’t be blackened and that some judges won’t sentence according to their deeply held views about the right of a man to treat a woman as a chattel?’ It was my view that he should have enacted legislation to affirm that a man murdering his wife would be treated identically with a man killing a stranger. A few days earlier he’d written to me to reiterate his government’s decision to abolish provocation and to point out that he was still receiving petitions calling for the reform of the law of 230
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provocation. These petitions, he said, were being downloaded from my website. He asked that his letter, explaining that provocation would be abolished, be published on my website. The same men who’d backslapped Ramage as a hero after he’d beaten a murder conviction didn’t quite share my point of view about the shortcomings of Hulls’ reforms. They thought it meant annihilation in court for them. Paul Margach and Brendan Whelan were among the ‘wife killers’ in remand awaiting trial. On 15 October 2004, two days after Jane Ashton gave evidence in the Supreme Court, Margach, an engineer by profession, confronted his wife Tina, in the kitchen of their Ascot Vale home. After an exchange of words he stabbed her to death in front of her two young daughters. She had told him the marriage was over and that she’d met another man. At the committal hearing he would claim his wife had said ‘I fucked him and it was better than with you.’ Her brother denied that she was intimate with the man. At the committal, where Margach’s lawyer, Christopher Dane flagged a provocation defence,Tina’s brother described the killer as a controlling and jealous man. It was as if Margach was reading from Ramage’s script. Coincidentally, Dane had assisted Bob Kent QC when he won a provocation defence for Kevin Crowe in 1989. As Margach had done, Crowe killed his wife in front of her two daughters. Dane went on to represent alleged gangster, Lewis Moran, before he was shot dead in Brunswick in 2004. In a further coincidence a couple of good friends of mine live in the same street in Ascot Vale where Tina Margach was murdered. I’d visited them the night before the stabbing. Margach and Whelan knew that the mood outside was now against them. Ramage suddenly wasn’t so popular. Mazin Yasso only spoke broken English and had little interest in changes to the law or the Ramage case. He knew the cards were stacked against him anyway. PROVOCATION CRUMBLES
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At his retrial in February 2005 the case went as expected.The moment the jury asked whether they had to consider provocation once they’d decided that his wife hadn’t spat at him, he knew it was over. It begged one profound question. If they believed his estranged wife had spat at him, might they have accepted that he was provoked? In Julie’s or Vicki’s case, the answer was yes. Their killers were ordinary Aussie blokes. The attack on New York on 11 September 2001 and the ‘war on terror’ had effectively spelt the end of any killer with a taint of ethnicity winning a provocation defence.Yasso was going down for the count. On Friday 18 March 2005, Mazin Yasso was the image of defiance as he sat emotionless at the rear of Court 2 and listened to his lawyer.The third of seven children, whose whereabouts in Iraq were unknown, he was a man without a friend. Dark eyed, with a pronounced nose and black hair parted on the left, he was unmistakably Iraqi. Educated at Baghdad University, he obviously could have been someone. As is the case for most non-English speaking immigrants in Australia,Yasso’s degree in economics had done him no good here. He had no family, no money, no real work, no support and no QC. At his retrial there was no suspense, nor crowds of people craning to hear every word. The murdered woman’s brother-in-law, Jamal Kalandos, was the only person in court who knew him. Unlike the Canterbury set and the women from the riding club, his friends were not people who enjoyed the luxury of free time to campaign against life’s injustices. As his legal aid lawyer struggled through a jumbled and forlorn plea, an interpreter pressed his lips to the prisoner’s left ear and delivered what could only be described as a litany of bad news. For the occasion, Justice Hollingworth had dispensed with her wig. Solidly built with red hair and a clear, middle class voice that 232
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exuded a touch of Englishness, the judge could find little to ameliorate Yasso’s crime. In the face of a female judge whose view of the world was the antithesis of his, and a female prosecutor who described the killer as a stalker who refused to allow his estranged wife a life of her own,Yasso had no hope.That his lawyer couldn’t even properly pronounce the names of the various characters in this tale of murder was symbolic of his powerlessness. Three days later, on Monday 21 March 2005, Justice Hollingworth sentencedYasso to fifteen years’ gaol.The moment she began her summary of the crime, at 2.15 pm, the killer cast his gaze towards the now empty spot where the jury would normally have been.When his translator attempted to tell him what the female judge was saying, Yasso told him to be quiet. Not once during the delivery of her 35-minute statement did he look at her. He looked like he’d kill her if he could. Educated at a string of elite schools, including Geelong Grammar, Hollingworth’s life was a cultural eternity from Yasso’s. The 48-year-old Iraqi clearly knew the judge didn’t like him. He also knew that the fifteen-year sentence that awaited him virtually meant the end of his life. That wasn’t enough for Hollingworth to take pity on him. Unlike Justice Osborn’s account of James Ramage’s life and prospects, there was not a single word of sympathy for Yasso. There was no description of the killing of his wife occurring in the context of an ‘emotional confrontation’ or the ‘breakdown of a relationship’, and no recognition that he’d ‘effectively destroyed the life he’d built’ as had been Justice Osborn’s description of what lay ahead for Ramage. And although Osborn had stressed the importance of ‘strong judicial responses’ to domestic killings, Hollingworth’s words were decidedly more feminist. ‘Eman Hermiz, like any other person in Australian society, had the right to pursue her career and meet friends and relatives PROVOCATION CRUMBLES
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and most importantly, to terminate her marital relationship with you, without suffering fatal consequences.’ If only George Hampel had said that aboutVicki fleeing Keogh. If only Osborn had spoken about Julie’s right to leave her bullying husband. ‘I wish to say something about Eman Hermiz and her family.’ Hollingworth could have been the dead woman’s sister such was the passion in her words. To see a judge actually name their daughter, describe how old she was, what she did for a living and how much she wanted to live, was everything Mum and Dad and the Garretts had wanted. Such words of recognition were much more important than how many years the killer was to spend in gaol. To hear in detail the effect of the loss of Eman Hermiz on her sister and her family and that it is ‘something from which they will never fully recover’ was as inspiring as it was sad. If only a man in a wig had said the same of Zerrin Dincer and Christine Boyce. Three months earlier, James Stuart Ramage had stood in the very same spot as Yasso. Day after day, a wealthy, middle class Australian had been described as a troubled man suffering from a personality disorder that made him vulnerable. Although he was a killer, it wasn’t his fault. By contrast, evidence was tendered that Yasso killed because in Iraqi culture ‘the honour of a husband requires that he kill his wife’ if she associates with another man. As much as it was untrue and in his police interview the killer made no such claim, it did him no good.Terrorist! Is that what some of the jury thought? The real difference between the two killers was that Ramage had powerful friends and the capacity to resume his life. Yasso had no worldly goods and no friends and was facing deportation because his wife had withdrawn her sponsorship of him. His life was in tatters. No such fate awaited the Aussie businessman. Before the murder he told his business partner a new life and a 234
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new woman could be his if he wanted it. By any objective criteria Mazin Yasso was more worthy of sympathy than Ramage. Whether Yasso thought about the cocktail of social forces that had conspired against him and saved Ramage is impossible to know. Not once did he flinch or feign sorrow as the judge damned him. Proud, maybe even arrogant, and certainly fatalistic, he looked resigned to his destiny. If ever it was possible to feel sorry for a killer it was in Court 2 on 21 March 2005. Fifteen years for a poor Iraqi. Eight years for a rich Australian. Class and prejudice had triumphed again. Two years earlier, on 15 May 2003, Ray Garrett had celebrated his seventieth birthday party with friends and family. Before the cake was cut, his two daughters stood beside him and spoke of the father they knew.The home video provided a telling picture of the Garrett girls. If the jury had seen this film, rather than formed an opinion of Julie’s life based on the affairs and her frantic last days, how different it might have been. Julie was anything but a free spirit.Tense and nervous, she took a minor role as her twin sister held the floor. In the background Julie’s husband could be heard ribbing the girls about their teenage years. As had been the story of their life together, Ramage was blind to his wife’s secrets. He literally had no idea that his wife had been to a solicitor to determine how much of the estate she could take when she left Marock Place. It was this secret that was the reason for Julie’s tense and anxious exterior. Unable to stand her husband’s touch any longer and sick of living a lie, she’d become a nervous wreck. Her face drawn from worry and her demeanour so fragile it was hard to believe she could entertain an illicit sexual relationship, she was palpably neurotic. ‘I’ve left him. It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever made,’ she would tell a group of Scotch College mothers after the final separation. In 1995 during her first ever girls’ weekend away, she’d reprimanded PROVOCATION CRUMBLES
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her friends for talking capriciously about infidelity and marriage break-ups. She told them marriage was for life. It was how she wanted to live her life. Julie only told a handful of friends about her affairs with Mays and Davey.Telling had nothing to do with bragging or titillation. She very much wanted her friends to understand that her unhappiness was the reason for the illicit encounters. She didn’t want random sex. She needed love. She married as a teenager because she genuinely wanted to love and be loved. As old-fashioned as it seems, she truly was a fairy princess at heart. Once her husband laid an aggressive hand on her in Percy Street in the early eighties the marriage was in deep trouble. Like so many women, at first she believed it was her fault. When she came to realise her husband’s aggression wasn’t her fault, he told her he’d change. Then there was the head-butt in 1991. From that moment she knew the marriage was effectively over. Thereafter she stayed for the sake of the children. It was so typical of marriages where aggression and violence are the norm. The fairy princess could so easily have been his. She enjoyed sex and in the early days had told friends that her husband was good at it. Obsessed with climbing the social ladder and cravenly exploitative of relationships, her husband had become a victim of his own materialism. Only a man who’d lost his soul could kill the mother of his children in the way Ramage did that day in Balwyn.The use of his hands, rather than a knife or a blunt instrument, to kill her told a story.This wasn’t murder by ‘blunt trauma’ as it had been described during the trial. He’d used his hands in the most truly intimate way. Invariably, when a man faces trial for the murder of his wife, explanations are sought in the man’s childhood. Peter Keogh’s defence produced psychological reports that said ‘an over possessive mother’ had been the source of his angst. No one in his 236
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family agreed. Maybe they were wrong and Keogh’s assault on women was symbolic matricide. It was the same argument doctors used to explain the murders by the American GI Eddie Leonski sixty years earlier.While stationed near Royal Park during the Second World War, Leonski had used his massive hands to strangle three Melbourne women. For his crime he went to the gallows in Pentridge. As it was a time of blackouts, he became known as ‘the brownout strangler’. In local parlance Ramage would inherit the nickname ‘the Balwyn strangler’. Psychiatrists said Leonski was a ‘mama’s boy’ and that the murders were symbolic matricide. He could only be free if he killed women who had become emblematic of his mother. James Ramage might not have been a psychopath but he’d stamped himself a dangerous man. Matthew Wales didn’t bother with the symbolism. He bashed his mother to death then blamed her for everything. Was James Ramage’s relationship with his mother problematic? It’s not idle speculation to say that his mother was possessive of her son and highly critical of his wife. From the moment Ramage began mixing with the business connections of the Canterbury set he lamented not having a formal education.This he blamed on his parents. ‘If they’d sent me to a better school in England I wouldn’t have had to go to night school and try to catch up,’ he told friends. His insecurities about a lack of formal education were brought into stark relief when his wife left him in June 2003. ‘I’m bored with my work. All I do is coat baths. It’s not very challenging. Then I go home and annoy my wife,’ he told a counsellor. In a social world of merchant bankers and barristers, AFL presidents and prominent CEOs, Ramage was not the great success story some in the media would label him after the killing. Without his wife, he suddenly felt very ordinary. Julie’s happiness mocked his unhappiness and insecurity. Maybe killing her was PROVOCATION CRUMBLES
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the only way he believed he could be free of the insecurities. After the trial one of his friends in England reflected on the trajectory of Jamie’s life. ‘Looking through the old school pictures, I see, Mike’s gay, Simon’s been banned for insider dealing and Frank’s in a mental home. And of course Craig’s in and out of prison. It seems that Peter and I are the only straight ones left.’ And there was Jamie Ramage, locked in Barwon Prison with some of the most violent criminals inVictoria.Among them was Paul Denyer, whom Dyson Hore-Lacy had represented a decade earlier. Ramage was no match for the standover men who coveted his wealth.The massive coverage of the trial and the endless descriptions of the killer as a wealthy businessman destroyed any chance he had of pursuing anonymity in gaol. A high security gaol in a desolate stretch of paddocks near Geelong, Barwon is no cosy Port Phillip. Within a few weeks of his relocation from Port Phillip, rumours were circulating that Ramage had been assaulted. If he wanted to be protected the killer was told he would need to deposit $200 a week in the bank account of the wife of an inmate. It was a far cry from the naïve ‘the violence etc I think is a little exaggerated’ he’d written in his letter to the Farleys eighteen months earlier.The former businessman didn’t ask any questions. He did what he was told and organised the money. Bashing your wife is nothing like confronting a man born and bred on violence. It’ll be a long six years. In Philip Dunn’s pantomime the defenceless woman Ramage killed had been portrayed as silly and desperately in need of being rescued by her husband. Like the ‘witch’ in Ballyvadlea more than one hundred years before, she was away with the fairies. When the courtroom theatre is stripped away and the minutiae of the trial are laid bare, it isn’t a story of unrequited love or failed romance, as painted by Dunn. The killing of Julie 238
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Ramage is a carnal tale. Ramage didn’t love his wife. In fact he no longer found sex with her satisfying. The pursuit of prostitutes, his fantasies about threesomes and the kinky, ‘scary’ sex were proof of that. Julie tried to satisfy his fantasies and for a fleeting moment considered breaking some taboos to keep him happy. Ultimately it made no difference. Ramage knew as well as anyone that the spark was gone and the marriage was over. He just couldn’t countenance the idea that his wife had ended it. The pitiful explanation offered by Dunn for his client’s actions was emblematic of the failure of the marriage. If only the court had heard about Ramage’s private life. If only the court had heard why Julie loved coffee and conversation with Davey. It was a prelude to the kind of sex and erotism her husband could never create. Sure, Ramage had accumulated enough wealth for his wife to enjoy a good life.Then again, what was the value of a cliff top beach house if your husband wanted to exercise on a rowing machine instead of watching the waves roll over the shore? Instead of wrapping his arms around her on a desolate beautiful beach and saying what a great mother and lover she was, he pecked her cheek in front of business acquaintances. Like the story told in court, their marriage was sheer fiction. In the latter part of the marriage Julie had told her twin sister she’d dreamed of her husband dying in a plane crash. It was the only way she could see herself escaping a loveless marriage.There was one major problem. She couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else dying with Ramage. The fantasy dispensed with, she took the sole course of action available to her. She left her husband’s bed. As taxing as the separation was, she still experienced fleeting moments of black humour.‘I should write a book about surviving a bad marriage,’ she’d laughed with a friend. Find a lover, wait until your husband’s overseas, write a letter and withdraw $100 000 from the bank account. It was all very simple PROVOCATION CRUMBLES
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really, she said. Sadly, she overlooked the one golden rule. Don’t let him kill you. That would have been step number five. In all the excitement of a new life with Laurence Webb and the sheer pleasure of escaping a man whose touch she found repulsive, she forgot how bad he could be. ‘I don’t mind you talking to me about your problems, but if you’re unhappy do something about it. I don’t want you to regret anything. Life is sooo too short.You said you should have left dad years ago, but if you’re still saying that now you’ll be saying it in years to come.’ Julie’s daughter could never have thought the words in this letter to her mum eight months before her murder would be her epitaph. A gorgeous young woman, her life was profoundly too short. ‘She was such a baby, with so much life ahead,’ the irrepressible Felicity Holding had said of her bookkeeper. Married so young, she had just begun to grow up when a weak man stole her life. As with so many of the women who’ve revelled in the freedom that comes from escaping a violent man, Julie Garrett’s happiness was short lived. The first act of punishment came when her husband beat her to the floor and brutally ended her life. The next came in the form of an old-fashioned barrister whom defence lawyer Julian Leckie accused of blackening Julie’s name. Her family will never really overcome her death. Nor will they ever forget what Philip Dunn did. Dunn’s explanation, as he told me after I questioned his tactics on the first day of evidence, was that he was only doing his job. So be it. Nevertheless, I look for the day when the language of the courtroom is stripped of its implied misogyny and killers like Keogh, Crowe, Conway, Yasso and Ramage can’t blame women for their violence. The events of Monday 21 July 2003 and their finale in the Supreme Court epitomise the life of James Stuart Ramage.The same character traits that had ruined his marriage saved him 240
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from murder. Most wife killers ring the police and give themselves up. Not so James Ramage. Methodical and obsessive in life, clinical and dispassionate in murder, he didn’t miss a beat after he smashed his wife to the floor.The moment Julie Garrett entered Marock Place her fate was sealed. ‘Dyson, I’ve got some bad news. I’ve killed Julie.’ If only it had been that simple. Unfortunately for James Ramage, Julie Garrett became a martyr to the feminist cause he despised. And for the rest of his life the man who killed her will never be allowed to forget it. It was no consolation for Pat and Ray Garrett.They just wanted their daughter back. For Jane, creating a spiritual shrine – in angry defiance of Philip Dunn, a quisling jury and a vicious killer – was all she could do for her sister. It’s all anyone can do when their sister has been murdered then crucified in court. Mummy was more than good looking. She was kind and sexy, intelligent and a great mother and lover. Daddy might have been rich but all the money in the world couldn’t make him a good bloke. On 21 July 2003 he was a coward and so he always will be. Almost two years after the murder there would be a prophetic twist in the story of Julie Ramage. A friend of Matthew Ramage had been among a group of drunken students, all from elite private schools, who’d damaged a clothes drier at Rob Moodie’s house during a party.As Moodie sent them on their way one of the boys screamed ‘You’re nothing but a slut’ to a young woman. So angry was Moodie, he confronted the boy. It was the identical insult Ramage had yelled at his wife in the weeks before she left him. Here in a well-to-do Balwyn street the same chauvinism that drove Ramage to kill his wife was on show yet again. If Julie’s female friends had reason to be furious with Dunn’s portrayal of their mate as a ‘slut’, then they had reason to be mighty angry with the boy.After all, one day he might be a businessman or a judge. PROVOCATION CRUMBLES
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While this drama was unfolding, Matthew and Samantha Ramage’s world was going through a remarkable transformation. Free of his father, Matthew wasn’t the same boy friends had seen at the funeral and in the witness box.As his aunty had done twenty years earlier, he’d fallen in love with university. With a girlfriend by his side and a love of art firing his passions, he was acquiring a real understanding of what his father had done. By now, those of Julie’s friends who’d questioned the boy’s words at the funeral and in the court had grasped the truth. Malleable and innocent, Matt was so much like his mum. And while this had been the boy’s Achilles heel, alone in his prison cell and rejected by the society to which he aspired, James Ramage could no longer control him. As much as it hurt them to think of their mother, Matt and Sam learnt to laugh again. Although life will never be the same for Jane, she too has moved on.As a tribute to her sister, she’s thrown herself into the battle against ‘Ramage style’ violence in the home. Whenever she wants to have a moment with her sister Jane opens an old chest and runs her hands across some of Julie’s little treasures.The riding hat, a few ribbons, and the gloves and boots that she wore in those special moments when she was free of her husband. These personal belongings, the bereavement cards and letters from all over Australia that speak of a woman searching for uncomplicated love, remind Jane how lucky she was to be Julie’s twin sister. Julie is dead, but her face will live on in the woman who shared the same pram back in working class Tottenham. Annette Luckman says that on certain autumn days when Julie’s horse, Harley, is snorting and stamping her feet, she sees that face in the horse’s eye. Then in the trees she hears the soft words, ‘Go, girl – go, girl’.That was Julie’s anthem.The Garretts
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and their friends will remember those words. And in time to come they’ll remember Julie as the woman whose life – along with those of Zerrin, Christine and Vicki – spelt the end of the legal lie of provocation.
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ENDNOTES The events recreated in this book are taken from statements provided to the police by the individuals involved and, where possible, from conversations with the people involved.The court transcripts referred to below are held at the Office of Public Prosecutions for the State of Victoria. Transcript of the Committal Hearing, May 2004 Transcript of the trial, R v Ramage, October – December 2004 Transcript of Justice Osborn’s sentencing remarks Transcripts of letters written by Julie Ramage (nee Garrett) provided by the family Conversations with Dyson Hore-Lacy Conversations with employees at Eco-D Conversations with neighbours in Marock Place Conversations with Rob Moodie Conversations with Laurence Webb Conversations with Julie’s close friends Gilda Pekin, Christine Howgate, Dallas Price and Dr Kate Clark and members of the Kellett family Conversations with Julie’s friends from the Hurstbridge Adult Riding Club Conversations with Tony Brady Conversations with the Office of Public Prosecutions Conversations with family of Eman Hermiz Conversations with families of other victims cited 245
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Getting Away With Murder – the true story of Julie Ramage’s death – is yet another sad tale. Like Just Another Little Murder, the book I devoted to my murdered sister in 2002, this book makes no apologies for its assault on the criminal justice system. The killing of women by estranged partners and the way these cases have been dealt with at trial is, I believe, a national disgrace. In the acknowledgements of Just Another Little Murder I said of my sister, ‘So many people loved her. Maybe this book will sweep away the injustice perpetrated on her in 1989.’The murder of Julie Garrett by her estranged husband James Ramage and the provocation defence offered to him at trial fired the same passion for justice. By the time this book was finished Julie had become like a sister. As Vicki Cleary had done, Julie Garrett brought joy and love to so many people. I genuinely hope this book counters the untruths and the blackening of Julie’s name that occurred during that trial. Despite the emotional devastation of losing her twin sister, Jane Ashton (nee Garrett) never once flinched as she fought to uphold her sister’s name and memory. From the first day I saw her give evidence I grasped the depth of her love and devotion to her sister. Courageous and fair-minded she wanted nothing of the victimhood that so often afflicts grieving relatives. Never did she let her contempt for her sister’s killer cloud her love for her niece Samantha and nephew Matthew. Torn between her commitment to Julie’s memory in the face of a ruthless attack in 247
court and the need to protect her sister’s children, she refused to allow her pursuit of justice to compromise the children. I thank Jane and the Garret family for sharing their memories of Julie. However, it was not their idea that this book be written. The picture of the killer is mine alone, gleaned from talking to almost everyone who knew him well. The court’s decision to offer Ramage a defence of provocation, I believe was wrong.That’s why I decided to write this book. Just as the court had done in 1989 when it said Peter Keogh was provoked into killing my sister, its decision to offer Ramage a defence of provocation betrayed all women. This book attempts to expose the betrayal. It’s also an attempt to tell the truth about how Julie really died and what kind of person she was. Unconstrained by the laws of evidence, Getting Away With Murder literally does tell the true story. To that extent the fictitious story of how Julie Garrett died is shown for the legal lie it is. As always, I want to thank my in-house editor Andrea McNamara. Andrea’s passion for the story of Julie Ramage and her guidance in the construction of that story was indispensable. To publisher Sue Hines who listened when I first raised the idea of the book, I say thanks again. I especially wish to thank copyeditor Jo Jarrah whose incisive comments and suggestions were immeasurably helpful.And thanks to Bruce Gardner at the OPP for always answering my questions.
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PICTURE CREDITS Illustrated section: Page 1 Childhood pictures of Julie and Jane Garrett, private collection Page 2 Horse riding pictures, private collection Page 3 Teenage years pictures, private collection Page 4 The Garrett family, private collection Julie Ramage with Scotch mothers, private collection Page 5 Julie Ramage, private collection Page 6 5 Marock Place, Balwyn, courtesy of the author Inside 5 Marock Place, Balwyn, courtesy of the Freedom of Information Unit,Victoria Police Page 7 Ramage’s Jaguar, courtesy of the author The burial site, courtesy of the Freedom of Information Unit, Victoria Police Page 8 Julie horse riding, courtesy of Morrie Matthews, Equestrian Photography Cover: Front cover wedding photo, private collection Back cover, Julie and James Ramage in Japan, private collection 249
Praise for Just Another Little Murder ‘It’s a passionate book, because [Cleary] knows no other way.’ Garry Linnell, Good Weekend ‘Cleary is no longer asking questions. He is demanding change …his book has effectively retried Keogh…it also calls for the criminal justice system to be put on trial, especially in the way it handles violent crimes against women.’ David Gilchrist, Canberra Times ‘I am glad I have read Phil’s book Just Another Little Murder because it shocked and enraged me...This tale of one man’s search for truth and justice is a raw story, wrought in anguish and hammered out with passion…The book deserves to be widely read but, more importantly, it should be read by every judge and civil libertarian who has ever wondered why so many Australians believe they have to fight to find justice in the courts.’ Piers Akerman, Sunday Telegraph ‘Phil Cleary was a courageous footballer. As the independent member for the federal seat of Wills he was a courageous politician. [In this book] he is courageous in his search for justice.’ Victoria Police Association Journal ‘I was under the impression that the worm had turned, that the law was bending over backwards to assume male culpability and female innocence…here is a book to change your mind. If you have a daughter, read it and then give it to her to read.’ Frank O’Shea, The Irish Echo