Justice is Personal

By R.J. Boyd

Forty years ago, a young female veterinary student was abducted and taken against her will to an isolated bush location, where around a campfire party of drugs and booze, was tortured and gang raped prior to being bludgeoned to death.

Five years ago there had been a Coronial Inquest into her death. A brief of evidence had exposed a gang with eight prime suspects as being responsible. Five of those suspects had since died, but three were still alive to take the stand and answer questions surrounding the allegations brought against them.

Unfortunately too much time had gone by. Memories were short, witnesses had died, golden opportunities had been missed by the authorities, and no DNA evidence was available to charge anyone with anything. The three surviving suspects seemed to have gotten away with murder.

The community and the media were outraged. Voicing their opinions, they proclaimed that once again in the face of overwhelming evidence, the judicial system had failed the victim and her family. Where was the justice? If something wasn’t done to reform the system, then there was a real concern that the victim’s families or vigilantes would take the law into their own hands to get that justice.

Not long after the Inquest, the three gang survivors packed up and left Victoria, to relocate in the suburbs of Sydney in NSW. They thought they were safe. But in a freakish turn of events, a chance encounter between one of the suspects and Jamie Wells were about to see events turn full circle.

He was the brother of the slain girl, and with the passage of time, he had surrendered to the call from the community and media to do something about the scum of society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Aug 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925814736

Book preview

Part 1

Chapter 1

Fog drifted from the valley below, climbing the vertical rock face with a gracious ease. It brought with it an updraught of coolness to encapsulate the body, which, like the mist itself, had a calming effect upon his emotions.

It had been an agonising downhill journey to get to this point. Stumbling blindly through the bush in the darkness he had fallen many times, but the fear of pain had kept him moving. Fear pumped adrenalin into his body. Adrenalin gave him the strength to keep going. To crawl on his knees when he fell down, to struggle back up again, to regain his balance so he could travel a few more metres. At the time it seemed as if the suffering would never end. But now, tired and defeated at his final destination, his entire life’s journey was as good as over, and strangely with the acceptance of that fact, came an immense relief.

His physical appearance, with blood stained clothes in tatters, portrayed the features of a sad and dishevelled individual. Contusions, lacerations and large welts disfigured his face, limbs and upper torso. It was excruciatingly painful and laborious to breath, and his whole body ached from the physical punishment. He suspected a couple of ribs were broken, as no doubt was his jaw, and probably the right eye socket which was so swollen he couldn’t see out of it. But these punishing physical afflictions were the least of his problems. He had confessed his sins over the last supper. Spiritually he was an empty shell of a man who needed to atone for those past sins. But there would be no forgiveness forthcoming, only retribution of an eye for an eye. Any form of further resistance was futile.

Standing precariously on the edge of a sheer drop, Bill Hunter braced himself for what was about to happen. He took comfort in the vast ocean of whiteness before him, a shadowy landscape of mountain mist illuminated by a mystical waning moon and a billion stars. His mind strangely reliving much happier times, when as a child he would spend endless hours on the beach, digging in the sand and frolicking about in the frothing sea. He closed his eyes, allowing his mind to conjure up an image to perceive this alternate reality. He could clearly see the beach and feel the onshore breeze with the dampness of the sea spray. There was a cool crispness in the air that tickled goose flesh over his body and stimulated hairs to stand on end.

Suppressing the rasping pain in his chest, he breathed in deeply through his swollen and bloodied nose. It was invigorating. It made him feel refreshed and alive. He strained his ears to listen, directing his focus away from the idealistic white noise of the ocean, with its distant roar and rhythmic crashing waves, to tune into the cry of seagulls. Their tortured calls pleased him immensely. It projected feminine pain and heightened his primal sexual instinct. Their sounds acted as an urgent catalyst. They dug deeply into the gutters of his subconscious, resurfacing distant sadistic memories, transforming the previously perceived salty ocean spray upon his lips, into the saltiness of hysterical red hot blood.

‘One slice Bill’ they used to call him, way back then, in another lifetime when it had been his full time job on the boning line of the local abattoirs to strip meat off carcases. But his nickname had nothing to do with that process. It had come about because of his surgical technique, using his well-honed boning knife, to deliver a quick and deliberate two inches long slice to the skin on the forearm of fellow employees. That’s all it would take to get a trip to the medical centre, for five or six stiches and a workers comp holiday on full pay for a week or so. His fellow workers would thank him with a carton of beer or a bottle of whisky for his surgical craftsmanship, and it didn’t take long before he became a legend in the work place. Fellow workers not only feared him but also treated him with respect, and along with a select few others from the abattoir, he had soon been initiated into a gang to become a blood brother. From that point on, he had a reputation to uphold.

Bill Hunter chuckled to himself, struggling to retain his balance while twisting and contorting his upper body to cough up coagulated blood. The one slice technique had become his Modus Operandi for pleasuring women. As a means of foreplay, to heighten sexual tension, it was the ultimate starting point, and in his mind’s eye he could see and feel it all so clearly. The hysterical semi-naked girl thrashing about on the ground, the knife in his hand, the sensual slicing of her breast skin to make it bleed, the rivulets of blood trickling from the open wound, the white eyed panic of his victim and the hopeless sobbing. The sounds and smell of their fear sexually excited him, and as the victim’s tears and panic built, so did his arousal and the urgency of his participation in the rough foreplay.

Nudging the breast, gouging his tongue into the soft tissue, lapping up the blood to gargle, drizzle and smear it back over her trembling body. Then with the mouthing of vile obscenities, and the ritualistic howling of a demonic werewolf drowning out the muted screams and futile resistance of his victim, the foreplay would be over and he would punish the female beneath him. Forcing her thighs apart, he’d ram into her with an animalistic vengeance, all to the goading revelry of his associates bantering for their turn. What a turn on. The sluts deserved everything they got. That feeling of domination and power, to do whatever he wanted to them while they begged for their miserable lives, was all so conquering and supreme.

The feather in his cap though, was the fact that he left his victims with a legacy they could never forget, his signature, his calling card scarred on their breast for life. It also acted as a reminder to them, that if they reported him, then he would be back with his knife to finish the job. They had all been too scared, too intimidated to do anything about it, or perhaps they didn’t go to the cops because they’d simply been grateful for a bloody good root. Bill Hunter smiled with an all knowing satisfaction. He felt those blood lust cravings now. They began to boil deep within the arteries of his groin. He felt his genitals tighten and his cock stir as the engorgement began. How he’d love to have been able to experience that real life scenario one more time, but that was not meant to be. An electric shock, from a savage jab of a two pronged instrument to the middle of his back, prompted him his time was up.

Bill Hunter cried out in bewildered agony, his eyes flung open with reactive shock. His body quivered, held briefly in suspended animation by muscular contractions. At that particular moment though, the bodily mechanics he was most aware of was the relaxation of the sphincter muscle of his urinary bladder, followed by the sensation of warm urine flowing down his inner thighs. His life force was slipping away. Scenes from various movies flashed before his eyes. He was the condemned man strapped in the electric chair and unable to move. The switch had been thrown and the huge current of electricity had been delivered. His body was slumped and unmoving. He was dead and pissing his pants.

This was the end, he could take no more. But he wouldn’t beg for his life, not like that young veterinary student had. What had happened to her shouldn’t have happened. It was none of his doing, but he had been there on that fateful night, pleasuring her before she’d been killed, and in the eyes of the law he was as guilty as the rest of the gang. They had all gotten away with it for all these years. Who would ever have thought that events would turn full circle?

Accepting his fate Bill Hunter wriggled closer to the edge, positioning his feet carefully, rocking on his toes and only just keeping his balance. He likened himself to an Olympic diver on the springboard, mentally preparing himself for the exact right moment to propel himself off the board and into the water below. He closed his eyes and took a nervous short breath, but in that instant he knew that he was toppling. His eyes sprung alive, lit up with terror and his jaw dropped open to scream but no noise came out, his throat parallelised by fear. He was freefalling, plummeted head first to his pending death with an awkward swan dive into the abyss.

Chapter 2

The sight was metamorphic, hypnotic and therapeutic. Hot water pounding down onto a cold tile surface, turning liquid to steam that then rose mystically with the convectional currents. It soon filled the shower cubical, becoming more cloud-like as it rolled over the top of the glass, spilling out into the body of the bathroom with warmth and humidity, to fog up the mirrors and dampen tissues and towels alike. It wasn’t anywhere near as intense, grandiose or as beautiful as the mountainous valley fog, but nonetheless, it reminded him of where he had just been and of what he had just done. Now he just needed the mist to swallow him up and allow him to become anonymous.

Jamie Wells stripped down, carefully discarding his clothing and placing them into a garbage bag. They were torn, bush bashed and impregnated with blood stained DNA evidence. He then stepped into the shower recess, closing the glass door quickly behind him to become encapsulated within its opaque matrix. Straight away he felt protected and insulated from the world. He welcomed the heat relieving and massaging properties of hot water on his weary body, physically relaxing his muscles to feel his physique go putty and weak with complicity, before then going about the process of consciously calming his mind. He needed to emotionally detach himself from the events of the night, before then being able to view those events logically to justify his actions. He needed to have a clear conscience, devoid of any doubt or guilt, and was prepared to stay in the shower for as long as it took to get his head right. He needed to nourish his soul, and to do that he needed to metamorphose into a new being.

Tilting his head back, he willingly accepted the impact of full hot water pressure belting on his face. Opening his mouth he flushed the oral cavity with a river of water, attempting to wash away the sour taste of what he’d done, whilst he thought about the night. Technically, he hadn’t murdered the man, the man had committed suicide. Yes he was guilty of drugging, abducting, torturing, inflicting grievous bodily harm, holding the man against his will, coercing a confession out the man and in supplying a location for him to commit suicide. But in the end he hadn’t executed Bill Hunter by physically pushing or throwing him over the cliff, Bill Hunter had done that to himself. And in all fairness, he had been compassionate with his involvement in the whole process of Bill Hunter’s death.

He had supplied the condemned man a predawn breakfast, with his choice of either a date or pumpkin scone from a well know franchised bakery, along with a strong cup of milk coffee to wash it down with. Admittedly, this humane consideration was also to help detoxify or neutralise the effects of the sedative drug in his victim’s body, as had been the forced one hour march through the rugged terrain in the black of night to reach the location a few hours before dawn. As the end approached, he needed the man to be consciously aware of what was going on, and to know why these events were taking place. He needed Hunter to feel all the fearful emotions, which his sister would have also no doubt experienced, prior to confronting her own horrendous death. Bill Hunter could get angry, cry, grovel for his life, beg for forgiveness, repent or plead for some sort of divine intervention from the Lord, but in the end there was never going to be any mercy shown. In the court of public opinion, this man was a serial rapist and murderer. He had needed this man to confess, and in return for his honest confession, he had granted Bill Hunter one last reasonable dying wish, which was to be carried out after his death.

The final Coronal Inquest, into the murder of his sister a few years ago, had presented witnesses and evidence overwhelmingly suggesting that Bill Hunter had been involved. Unfortunately time had worn away at the truth and its edges had been eroded and blurred. There had not been enough hard evidence to commit him, or other members of his gang to trial, even though they were all prime suspects in the ongoing investigation into her murder forty years earlier. Quite simply, these grubs had gotten away with murder. Once again, the legal and judicial system had failed and society was outraged. After the findings of the Inquest were released to the public, the media had gone into meltdown, prophesising, that if a much tougher stance wasn’t taken against the rising violence and leniency in the sentences given to criminals, someone would take the law into their own hands. Now it was too late to argue the semantics of that point. It was no longer an academic argument.

With the passage of time, he had answered that call. However the drastic action he had taken tonight to set things right, hadn’t been so much about revenge any more, as all that raw anger and troubled emotion had softened over the years. This course of action was about societal justice, and as such, a very important moral question plagued him. In dispensing justice his way, had he set himself above the law? Had he become the judge, jury and executioner? Logically, there was always going to be an executioner who had to do the dirty work. Someone had to give the lethal injection, release the gallows trapdoor, throw the electrocution switch or fire the bullet from a rifle. As far as a jury was concerned, he felt as if he didn’t need one. In a court of law there was only twelve jurors to make a finding, but in the court of public opinion there were tens of thousands of individual jurors on his side, all screaming for blood. And as for being the judge, it could be argued, that along with the overwhelming brief of evidence and witness statements implicating the gang members involvement, he also had an intimate knowledge of the psychological and emotional effects that murder had upon a family, which was absolutely necessary to find the guy guilty.

In his eyes, it wasn’t enough that an illusion of justice seemed to be done. Holding a Coronial Inquest, and documenting eight gang members names on the public records as being prime suspects in the murder of his sister, wasn’t justice. Justice was tangible, it wasn’t words on a piece of paper. Until tonight, justice hadn’t been done. And only time would tell how he would be judged for his actions, and that’s assuming if he ever got caught. But by the same token, there was also no sense denying that his name would never come up as a person of interest. Due to his sister’s historic case, there was an indirect link to Bill Hunter and the other gang members, and there was always the possibility that he may have slipped up somewhere during the nights activity to have implicated himself. But that was the future and it was pointless worrying needlessly about something that may or may not happen, until that moment arrived.

By the time Jamie stepped out of the shower, he had justified his actions and emerged with a renewed determination to finish what he had just started. Nothing had changed and he would continue to explore his options of how to execute the last two surviving gang members. As of yet though, he didn’t know how he would go about it, but he would be opportunistic and wait for a golden moment to present itself before striking again, just as he had with Bill Hunter. But first thing was first, the body had to be found and an investigation had to be launched. Then there needed to be time for the dust to settle, time for Hunter’s comrades to drop their guard and time for the media and the public to lose interest and curiosity in the case, before he could strike again.

At this stage, there was no need to be paranoid about anything. He was not under any current investigation, he was not a known associate of the Bill Hunter, or involved in any criminal activities. There was no direct connection to the victim, or his associates, and no one had witnessed or challenged him throughout the entire ordeal last night, from abduction to the death of his victim. Quite simply, the Homicide Detectives may ask him a few general questions, but they weren’t about to come knocking on the door with search warrants and forensic equipment looking for evidence.

He would have a guilt free breakfast and go about his normal house cleaning and maintenance duties, which today would require extra attention to the bathroom and back seat of his vehicle, where forensic evidence, if searched for, could be found. Tonight was also garbage collecting night, so he would also be disposing of all items which may have come in contact with his victim during the abduction, including clothing, boots, backpack, car seat covers, a few other assorted nick knacks and cleaning items. Then he would head off to the shops to renew these items, and tomorrow he would go to work as usual, as if nothing had happened.

Chapter 3

They had travelled for hours to get to this tourist location, and it was everything the brochure said it would be. Autumn in the Blue Mountains, in a world heritage listed national park. The changing of the colours they called it. Varieties of deciduous trees and shrubs sliding into winter hibernation with all their breathtaking magnificence. It was an event not to be missed. Liquid Ambers, Tallowwoods, Chinese Pistachio’s, Ornamental Pears and the unbelievably stunning beauty of the Maples, most noticeable of all the Japanese Maples with their rich claret hues, were sure to take your breath away and lift the most depressed of spirits.

Up each side of the road, on council strips and front yards of residential properties, these trees and many others displayed a guard of honour, presenting a huge welcome to tourists and an imagery which would surely burn into their memory forever. Colin and Cheryl Cruikshank were no exception. They were here, not just for the sight-seeing, but also here to share one another’s company with an inspirational bushwalk on their first wedding anniversary. They had planned this trip for ages and took it all in. Surely nothing could spoil this special day.

And what a spectacular picture perfect day it was. An ocean of rich blue skies as far as the eye could see, majestic green peaks, a splattering of feathery white clouds and the slightest of breeze that carried a hint of winter on its wing. Branches gently swayed and leaves delicately vibrated with the fresh breeze, some falling to dance acrobatically in front of the windshield, while others swirled with a perpetual motion around the tyres of the moving vehicles. It was natures’ waltz and today they were part of the performance.

Eventually the pair reached their destination, a small car park at the end of a dead-end road. With spirits high, they stepped out from their vehicle, snatched up their backpacks and headed off along a narrow, undulating bush track clearly identified with markers as being of a moderate grade. Thirty odd minutes later, at the bottom of a section of steep earth eroded steps, they reached an intersection where they could either go left, right or straight ahead. They chose to go straight ahead, and after following a winding narrow gutted track for a hundred or so metre, came to a scenic outlook that left them both temporarily speechless.

The view was absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. The outlook was located on a rocky outcrop protruding over a shear sandstone cliff dropping hundreds of metres to the valley floor below. Constructed in the shape of a horseshoe, a metre wide and waist high sandstone rock wall secured the perimeter of the lookout and acted as a physical safety barrier to prevent anyone from falling. The structure looked very secure. The individual rocks had been screened for size and shape and were strategically placed and bound together by concrete. Its creation was a credit to the craftsmen or craftswomen who had put it all together in such a precarious location.

The temptation for Colin and Cheryl to sit on the wall, and then lean out to peer over the ledge to look straight down, was overwhelming. Throwing caution to the wind, they both decided to take a risk to do exactly that, and with her husband going first, they took turns to share the jaw dropping and heart racing experience. As an added safety precaution, they held onto each other’s legs as they took turns, just in case something went horribly wrong and the ledge began to crumble and fall away with one of them on top of it.

Oh dear Lord, exclaimed Cheryl wriggling back from the ledge to drop securely into her husband’s arms. How scary was that? My insides are still shaking. It’s so far down!

Yer it is, particularly without a parachute. It does makes you wonder how anyone could possibly find the courage to take their own life by throwing themselves off a cliff …

Ohhh, she shuddered holding him tightly to cut him off mid-sentence. It’s too nice a day, let’s not think about such horrible things.

Returning to the intersection, they decided it really did not matter which way they hiked. The map indicated that both tracks would take them on a journey along the cliff face and down into the valley two hundred metres below, to then return in a loop to this very starting point. Their bush walk would take approximately four hours to complete. They had timed this well. It was now ten in the morning, which meant that they would be back by about two in the afternoon. They would stop for their prepared anniversary snack somewhere down on the valley floor, maybe beside the creek near the bottom of the waterfall, where the hiking guide said there was a little sandy beach. That way they could rest up before they were forced to do the return journey, with its hard yards, back up the mountain wall.

They took the left track, and soon after crossed a watercourse with stepping stones at the top of the waterfall. From here on it was a steep decline, hugging the shear sandstone wall with its rough steps gouged out of the escarpment and with the safety of their decent being aided by holding onto a continuous stainless steel cable. The gradient didn’t begin to ease until they neared the valley floor and had descended into the dark, very cool southern side of the mountain with its moist lush canopy above. A soft mist was ever present, giving an eerie feel to the bush surrounds. It had the effect of drawing the couple closer together, heightening the experience of their anniversary adventure. Down here in the valley, mobile phones didn’t work, and