Mandatory Murder: The compelling true story of an outback murder from an award winning journalist, for readers of THE TALL MAN and SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO

By Steven Schubert

A compelling true story of homicide and injustice in an outback town

At first it looked like a swag, said the grader driver. He'd found the body just off the road outside the outback town of Katherine in the Northern Territory. Police quickly identified the dead man as Ray Nicefero, who'd recently appeared in court for aggravated assault and breaching a domestic violence order.

Three days later, three young local suspects were arrested, including nineteen-year-old Indigenous man Zak Grieve. A month later, Ray's former partner was also arrested. But when the accused faced court in the rough justice system of the Territory, it quickly became apparent that there were few provable facts to be had. Depending on who was talking, a loving friend could be an abusive monster, a battered wife a conniving temptress. And a joke between mates about the best way to dispose of a body could be a conspiracy to murder.

The outcome of the case was no less murky, thanks to the Territory's mandatory sentencing laws, which, the judge said, 'brings about injustice'.

Mandatory Murder is the compelling true story of murder in an outback town and the extraordinary aftermath. It raises several important questions, including how an Indigenous man who didn't attend a murder can be sentenced to jail for twenty years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781460710036

Steven Schubert

Steven Schubert is an award-winning journalist based in Alice Springs. He has spent most of his career as a reporter working in remote northern Australia, including in Mount Isa and Katherine. Author of the book Mandatory Murder about the case of Zak Grieve, Steven won the NT Journalist of the Year Award in 2018 for his reporting of that case and a series of features looking at police investigations into Indigenous murders in the Northern Territory. His book Kumanjayi, about the murder of Kumanjayi Walker during an arrest at Yuendumu in remote NT, will be published later in 2023.

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Prologue

BY ANY ACCOUNT, ZAK GRIEVE was an unlikely accomplice for a murder. He spent most of his time smoking weed and playing video games, and he’d never been in a fight. He was close to his mother and gentle with his many male and female friends.

But there he was, in the dock of a courtroom in Darwin, waiting for a jury to decide if he was guilty. On the witness stand he’d consistently said that he pulled out of the plot before the crime took place. But he had a legal problem. The prosecutor hadn’t accepted any of Zak’s evidence that he wasn’t there for the murder.

‘The law says that a person who aids and abets a killing – in other words, provides assistance in the killing – is guilty of murder,’ the prosecutor told the jury on the first day of the trial. ‘Such persons are just as guilty of murder as the person who physically causes the unlawful death.’

‘Zak was never supposed to be born,’ his mother Glenice told me later.

Before him she’d had two children, but then had several miscarriages. When she became pregnant again, ‘I decided to go home and just put my feet up and just say to whoever, the universe, whatever, God, you’re not taking him, he’s staying. So I stayed in bed. And he’s still here.’

Twenty-one years later, in January 2013, Glenice was once again praying to God, the universe, whatever was listening, that her son wouldn’t be taken from her.

An Indigenous woman who grew up on Newcastle Waters Station, a remote cattle property seven hundred kilometres south of Darwin that was once the jewel of Kerry Packer’s cattle empire, Glenice is distantly related to the late Vincent Lingiari, a Gurindji leader. In 1966, he became the face of Indigenous land rights activism when he led the walk-off from Wave Hill Station, just a few hundred kilometres to the west of Newcastle Waters.

For most of her life Glenice had lived in Northern Territory towns, and she’d worked hard to establish a small retail business. Her world view was a mix of new-age mysticism and traditional Indigenous beliefs.

Zak’s father, Wal, is a tough-looking white man, well built, with a shaved head and a goatee. When Zak was born, the family were living in Tennant Creek while Wal worked at a nearby manganese mine. He was still working there but had taken a few weeks off to be in court as his son was tried for murder.

Zak has told me he’s proud of his Indigenous heritage. He’s never been through initiation, the process where a boy becomes a man, but can speak some language. He has described himself as a naive kid who was a bit ‘wet behind the ears’. When he was a teenager, his family moved up the highway to Katherine, three hours’ drive south of Darwin. Zak went to high school until he was sixteen, then left to work full-time at his parents’ sunglasses shop.

During the trial, Zak’s friends described him as ‘happy-go-lucky’ and ‘a good bloke’. His small business as a marijuana dealer also boosted his popularity.

The first time I met Zak, I was with Glenice and his sister Teaua. As we walked in, he hugged his mother and sister, and I offered an awkward handshake. I sat there uncomfortably while the family shared some time together. The intimacy between Zak and his mother was noticeable; he called her ‘beautiful’, and they held hands as they talked.

At the end of our meeting, I again stuck out my hand. He asked me how I’d feel about a hug, and before I could really reply I was being embraced by a sweaty, stocky, shaved-headed man. After we walked out, Glenice asked me what I thought of him, and I told her I was surprised by the hug. ‘He’s very affectionate,’ she said with a laugh. ‘But he’s no pussy.’

The jury came back into the courtroom. Zak Grieve made eye contact with a female juror as the twelve of them walked in, and she burst into tears. The foreman read out the verdicts of Zak’s co-accused. Then the judge’s associate asked if the jury had reached a unanimous verdict for Zak Grieve on the charge of murder. The foreman replied they had.

Part One

The Investigation

1

THE BODY LOOKED LIKE a swag or a bundle of sheets to the grader driver who found it. This was an understandable assumption: the cleared area of bush off the road where he’d parked his machine was often used by tourists looking for a free spot to camp near Katherine Gorge. But it was getting a little late in the year and too hot and humid for campers.

As Darryl Hill approached, he saw flies buzzing around the sheets. He thought perhaps someone had shot a feral pig and left it there. But when he lifted up the corner of a sheet he saw a human foot protruding. He grabbed his phone and tried to find enough reception to call triple zero.

Hill: I’m out on the Gorge Road … I’ve just found a human body.

Police operator: Oh okay –

Hill: Yeah.

Police operator: And how long does that appear to have been deceased for, can you tell, like, is it just bones or –

Hill: It’s, ah, it’s, about probably twenty-four hours by the look of the (inaudible), and the swelling – I don’t know, I just –

Police operator: Sorry, it’s a really, really bad line, I can hardly hear you –

The operator eventually overcame the patchy mobile service to work out Hill was about fifteen kilometres east of Katherine. The road he mentioned goes to Katherine Gorge, also known as Nitmiluk National Park. It’s a beautiful, windy sandstone gorge that runs for kilometres and is the region’s premier tourist attraction. Hundreds of thousands of people visit every year to take a boat along the natural wonder or hike far above the river to one of the beautiful swimming holes supposedly safe from saltwater crocodiles.

Gorge Road was a terrible place to hide a body.

Police operator: Okay – all right – and it appears to be – and you can pretty much tell that it’s a – definitely a human body?

Hill: Ah – yes, it’s a human male, European male.

Darryl Hill’s call came in at 10.15 am on 25 October 2011, in the middle of the season known as the build-up, where temperatures in Katherine can nudge forty degrees and it’s so humid that salt left on the table turns to brine. Sheets, leather, clothes, walls and ceilings go mouldy. Often storm clouds build up, promising sweet relief from the heat, before dissipating without offering a drop. Mango madness, some call it. During the build-up, there’s a rise in assaults and domestic violence most years.

First to the scene were general duties police officers and a paramedic. Then a sergeant from Katherine arrived to confirm it was indeed a dead man in the bundle of bedding. The sergeant sent the paramedic away and ran the gruesome discovery up his chain of command. Soon detectives from the Major Crime Unit in Darwin were on their way.

Detective Sergeant Sally Ellis arrived at the crime scene after midday. Pulling back the sheet she saw the corpse hadn’t fared well in the twenty-four hours or so since it had been dumped. During that time the temperature had hit 38.1 degrees Celsius, and decomposition had set in. Blowflies were swarming.

Now clouds were on the horizon. They offered some hope of rain – relief from the heat, but also the possible destruction of forensic evidence. It started spitting. The police quickly erected a tent over the body.

Forensics guys arrived. They took photos of the crime scene and a thumbprint from the corpse. A surveyor was called in to draw a map, detailing where everything was at the crime scene. They noted drag marks from the roadside to where the body was found, along a creek that ran into the Katherine River. They also included the white cross on the edge of the clearing that marked a fatal road crash from years earlier.

A bit after seven in the evening, local undertakers arrived to take away the body.

Later that evening, a middle-aged woman called Brenda Heal went to visit her friend Ray Niceforo at his unit on the corner of Quinn Street and the Victoria Highway in Katherine.

Ray hadn’t been around to see Brenda for a few days, which was unusual for him. He would often pop over for a chat and to help her feed the injured native animals she cared for at her caravan on the outskirts of town. Ray had been sick – nothing serious, but enough to keep him off his feet for a few days, so Brenda hadn’t been too worried about his absence. But now she’d decided to check on him. With her that evening was a friend, accompanied by her young son.

Ray’s unit was one of four in the building, all single storey and built from breeze blocks. It was nothing flash – just two bedrooms and a living room with a bench separating it from the kitchen. The four units each had a front door facing the highway, where road trains would rattle past as they turned west towards the Kimberley in Western Australia, but no one used those doors. The back door was next to the outside laundry, on the other side of the building away from the highway.

When Brenda arrived, the first thing she noticed was Ray’s dog, Bear, outside on his own and appearing anxious and uncared for. That was unusual, because ‘Ray almost carried that dog around on a silk pillow,’ Brenda said later.

Her anxiety became panic. The sun had set but no lights were on inside, and when she banged on the door there was no answer.

Brenda rang the police to try to raise the alarm, but they seemed unmoved.

Her next call was to try to get a key from Ray’s estranged former fiancée Bronwyn Buttery. But to Brenda, Bronwyn sounded flat, disinterested. ‘I don’t have any keys to the unit,’ she said. ‘Ray and I have a DVO. I don’t see him. We have no contact.’

Brenda was becoming more and more frantic. She tried the police again, giving them one more piece of information about her friend Ray: ‘The police know him. There’s been a bad domestic thing going on.’

But still they didn’t show. As the dusk slipped into darkness, Brenda took a desperate measure. She smashed a small window to the toilet and tried to get up on the external laundry trough to climb through. Brenda is short and stout, not in the best of health; she couldn’t make it, so she asked her friend to go inside instead. After lowering her friend into the dark unit, Brenda asked her to walk the six or so paces from the toilet to the back door.

When her friend opened the door, Brenda saw a pool of blood just inside. She pulled her friend out and told her to take her son away from the door. Then Brenda entered the unit. She tried to turn on the lights, but there was no power. She could see Ray’s bed stripped down to the mattress. It didn’t make any sense. A red hand mark was smeared down a cupboard.

She stepped back outside, just as the police finally turned up. A couple of general duties officers had been sent around to see what all the fuss was about. A young constable pushed open the door with his torch, saw the pool of blood and noticed blood spattered up the walls. He checked that the unit was empty before radioing his superiors.

A crime scene was established, and the forensics guys arrived. They had plenty to work with.

Although the science of blood-spatter analysis is controversial, experts say they can extract information from the size and shape of a stain. NT Police forensic analyst Denise Grover was assigned to look at the blood patterns in the unit, and she concluded that whatever had happened there was particularly violent. ‘Those elongated stains take an awful amount of force to produce,’ she later reported. There were some small bloodstains on the ceiling, probably flung off the murder weapon on a back swing – another sign of the force and ferocity of the attack. Grover’s report said most of the blood came from a source very low to the ground, spattering almost a metre up the wall, but some stains showed a higher source, about the height of a human head. And there were smears of blood up and down the wall, where someone had brushed against it. Blood was also found on a stick outside the unit, between where a car might be parked and the back door at the laundry.

Whatever had occurred in the kitchen of this nondescript unit had been brutal.

The cops knocked on the neighbours’ doors to ask if they’d noticed anything. Someone thought maybe they’d seen a white van, but Ray often drove one for his job at a local laundromat. No one had heard or seen anything they thought was odd.

The autopsy determined the cause of death to be blunt-force trauma to the head. The forensic pathologist found seven separate lacerations on the scalp; the skull wasn’t broken, but there were imprints on the outer layer for each blow. There was also evidence of a cord or rope having been used on the neck, although the evidence wasn’t conclusive as to whether the rope had been placed around the neck before or after death. The body was found wrapped up in a donna cover and a sheet, with a string of beads that looked like it might be from a style of door curtains more at home in the ’70s. There was what appeared to be a house painter’s canvas, sometimes called a drop sheet, around the body along with some bed sheets.

The doctor who performed the autopsy said the wounds were consistent with a spanner or similar tool being used to hit the victim, but he couldn’t say this definitively.

That evening, the body found out on Gorge Road was formally identified as local man Ray Niceforo.

2

RAFFAELI NICEFORO’S BODY WAS identified by a fingerprint match. Ray, as he was known, had a long history with the law – in fact, he had a well-earned bad reputation with the local cops. As far back as 1992, Ray had been fined $2000 for an assault.

In 1996, while drunk, he’d tried to shoot a man in the main street of Katherine. He’d been out drinking with the victim when they got into an argument. Apparently Ray pointed a gun at the man’s head, but then changed his mind and aimed at the man’s thigh. He pulled the trigger. The gun misfired due to problems with the ammunition; the bloke was still hit in the thigh, but the wound wasn’t as serious as it could have been.

Ray later claimed the man had hit his girlfriend at the time, so it was self-defence. Somehow a string of charges against Ray were withdrawn, and he got done instead for possessing an unregistered gun, being armed in public and causing danger while intoxicated. For this most brazen act, stopped only by a mechanical failure of the gun, Ray avoided jail time.

There were other violent offences on Ray’s rap sheet. In 2005 he’d been convicted for an assault in Brisbane and received ‘an intensive corrections order’. It’s not entirely clear what, if anything, he had to do for that – probably a bit of community service.

Ray was also well known around town for having run-ins with people. He had regular disagreements with the owners of the pet shop next to the laundromat he co-owned and helped to run. On one occasion, a random police patrol came across Ray in the middle of a fight with his apparent nemesis, Richard, the pet-shop owner.

Detective Sergeant Andrea Turner saw two men in the middle of the road fighting, both without shirts on. One was holding a stick, and she later found out this was Mr Niceforo. She said that both Ray and Richard were injured by the time she and her partner, Constable Gary Houseman, got in there to break them up. Constable Houseman said they were both ‘bloodied’. The officers allowed Ray and Richard to go on their way, with no charges laid against them. ‘The evidence was conflicting,’ Turner said. ‘It was pretty much word against word. And there was no way of establishing who was at fault.’

Ray had an ongoing feud with several other Katherine residents. He was given a trespass notice after apparently threatening the owner of a convenience shop just around the corner from the laundromat. As one cop put it, ‘He certainly had negative dealings with a number of people, including police.’

Just a week before he was found dead on the side of the road, Ray exploded while buying smokes from the manager of the tobacconist in Katherine, Allan Steele. Allan was in his shop talking to a customer, Mick Besic. Mick was a regular, an old bloke who had lost his wife a while back and would come in for a yarn with Allan every day. Mick would step aside whenever a customer came to the counter, letting them be served, then step back to continue his conversation with Allan.

Allan was serving Ray a packet of Winfield Red when Mick turned to him and said g’day.

‘Mr Niceforo went off his tits,’ Allan said later. ‘Mick, you fucking wog cunt, if you don’t shut your mouth around town, I’m going to put you in a pine box and bury you. Mick was a bit hard of hearing so he just shuffled around the shop and wasn’t really taking notice of it. Mr Niceforo just grabbed his cigarettes and stormed out.’

Ray was known for his explosive temper, which had led him to make poor choices in the past. He’d skated close to serious police charges but always slipped through. The police knew Ray had accrued a number of enemies, but would any of them want to see him dead?

Ray might have been infamous in his home town, but the rest of the Niceforo family were well known for different reasons. Niceforo was a big name in the small community.

Ray’s Italian father, Bruno, had moved to Katherine with Ray’s Dutch mother, Anna, in 1959. In those post-war days, the town was little more than a dot on the map. Back then there was some talk that the whole place should be abandoned, but the local population of a couple of hundred people banded together to keep it going. Bruno got a job on the railways, and the couple had a son, then another. Then Ray’s older brother Nino was born.

Bruno and Anna worked hard establishing a small business empire. Bruno left his job on the railways to open a takeaway food shop on the main street. Then he decided to split that in half and start an Italian restaurant. For some arcane bureaucratic reason, Bruno couldn’t get a liquor licence without being married. So after having three children together, Bruno and Anna were married by their family solicitor in Darwin in 1968. Ray, their last child, was born three years later.

A few years on and the family owned half a dozen businesses in Katherine, including a pizza place, a second-hand furniture shop, a caravan park and a trucking business. They’d pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

Four years younger than his closest sibling, Ray was the black sheep. Even his mother said he was different from her other children. All the boys were sent to boarding school, but Ray was brought home because he kept getting sick; he had to repeat his first year of high school. He went to the local school in Katherine, but left after just three years. He was known for getting into fights.

When he was seventeen he left his home town and went to drive trucks in Queensland. He met a woman, but something went wrong with the relationship. His mother thought perhaps another man was involved. Ray came home; the girlfriend stayed in Queensland. He lived in Katherine for a while driving trucks to and from Darwin for his family’s business. He was quiet and reserved, and his family never saw any sign of another girlfriend. Soon after he left again to drive trucks in South Australia.

Ray had gotten into trouble with the law, but would snap at anyone who tried to tell him how to live his life. His father had expectations for his children, expectations that Ray never seemed to live up to.

In contrast, Ray’s brother Nino had inherited their father’s knack for business, establishing a pizza joint and taking over a laundromat in Katherine. Nino built up a trucking company for the family, and eventually used this to his advantage when he took over a profitable mango operation. He turned his business success into winning an election to sit on the Katherine Town Council, helping to make decisions that affected the whole community. Nino also had three sons – an important measure of success in the Italian family, and yet another contrast to the childless Ray who couldn’t keep a relationship together.

According to his friend Brenda, Ray was unappreciated by his family, who couldn’t seem to work him out. When his father died, Ray didn’t go to the funeral.

When Ray’s body was found, the police went to Nino’s place on a big block out of town to deliver the grim news. They drove through the grand set of gates and past the concrete animals lining the driveway. They climbed the steps, guarded by two giant concrete peacocks, to knock on the door, but Nino wasn’t home.

So the police went to Ray’s other known next of kin, his ex-fiancée Bronwyn Buttery.

Bronwyn was living in a caravan in an abandoned van park owned by the Niceforo family. The park had been shut down for years, and now only a handful of