My brother's keeper: the true story of a vicious killing and a powerful surf brotherhood

245 Pages·2006·1.99 MB·English

by  Kamper, Angela;Miranda, Charles

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THE TRUE STORY OF A VICIOUS KILLING
AND A POWERFUL SURF BROTHERHOOD
ANGELA KAMPER & CHARLES MIRANDA
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First published in Australia in 2006
Copyright © Angela Kamper and Charles Miranda 2006
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 and 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 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied
by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the
educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration
notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Miranda, Charles, 1969- .
My brother’s keeper : the true story of a vicious killing
and a powerful surf brotherhood.
ISBN 978 1 74114 603 5.
ISBN 1 74114 603 8.
1. Hines, Anthony Gerard. 2. Abberton, Jai.
3. Abberton, Koby. 4. Murder victims - New South Wales.
5. Trials (Murder) - New South Wales. I. Kamper, Angela. II. Title.
364.152309944
Set in 11/14 pt Sabon by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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CONTENTS
Prologue vii
PART 1
1 Brothers 3
2 Tony Hines 11
3 The Bra Boys 26
4 Path of destruction 40
5 Turning on friends 56
6 Bra vs Cops 69
7 The long night 82
8 Him or me 96
PART 2
9 The day after 115
10 Closing in 128
11 The swoop 143
12 Facing court 154
13 Jai’s trial 169
14 Jai’s case 189
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15 The verdict 210
16 His brother’s keeper 214
17 Sentencing 219
Acknowledgments 225
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PROLOGUE
‘Come on, mate, we’re going for a walk,’ the surfer says
wryly as he hoists his dead friend out of the car. He drags
him across the sodden grass but the bloody corpse slips
from his grasp in the dark.
‘I can’t do this by myself,’ he yells to the woman sob-
bing uncontrollably next to him.
She reluctantly takes one arm and together they drag
the body to the cliff’s edge.
◆
Marian Romeo and Tracy Watts have their Wednesday
morning routine. There are the science projects to find,
the homework to pack and lunches to make before the
two Maroubra mothers walk their three respective
children to St Mary & St Joseph Primary School on
Fitzgerald Avenue. There they usually chat briefly outside
the school gates before they each return home to put on
a load of their family’s washing, meeting again about
9.30 am to walk their dogs on the beach. It is a routine
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MY BROTHER’S KEEPER
the mothers have grown comfortable with over the
past three years, but on Wednesday morning, 6 August
2003, their pattern is broken.
After an overnight shower, Maroubra wakes to a
gentle breeze and hazy winter sun. A large swell pounds
the shore, giving some brave surfers the perfect condi-
tions for an early morning challenge, while business men
and women line up passively on the beachfront, drinking
takeaway coffees and reading the morning’s tabloid.
They are waiting for the stream of buses that will whisk
them away to their office jobs in the city thirty minutes
away.
On the quieter northern end of Marine Parade, salty
dew on the windscreens of parked cars is drying as
quickly as the pools of blood on the road side. Marian’s
poodle Chloe is the first to notice the large red puddle on
the walking track by the Jack Vanny Memorial Park.
Then Tracy’s fox terrier Barney begins tugging at his lead
to get closer to the mess.
Marian yanks Chloe’s nose away from the chunks of
red. Tracy steps closer and the two women notice a trail
extending east across the park. The pair curiously follow
the trail—40 metres of bloody drag marks painting the
grass red—to the rocky cliff edge.
‘Something’s happened here. It’s either a dog that’s
been hit and limped away or someone’s been murdered,’
Marian says.
‘A husband who’s killed his wife,’ Tracy chimes in,
recalling that she had heard a man had been found hang-
ing from a tree in southern Maroubra the day before.
Perhaps the two events are connected, she thinks.
‘Look over and see what’s there,’ orders Tracy excit-
edly as they reach Mistral Point.
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PROLOGUE
‘No way, I’m not looking over—you do it.’
‘No, there’s going to be a body, I just know it. I’m not
doing it.’
The pair debate looking over the cliff for several min-
utes before Marian works up the courage, hands Chloe’s
leash to her friend and inches forward to the edge.
‘Oh my God, something has happened here, some-
thing terrible,’ she says as she stares down towards the
raging surf.
There is a small pool of blood on a jagged ledge
below their feet, and a larger stain in the shape of a torso
15 metres below that. The women both have mobile
phones but continue their walk for another half an hour,
trying to decide whether or not to call the police with
their ‘Cagney and Lacy theory’ of what they have found.
They watch all the police shows on television and this is
how plots start, but they were never meant to be charac-
ters in one. If it really is anything, then surely someone
else has already reported it. Tracy was witness to a car
accident the previous month and does not want the
inconvenience of having to complete another lengthy
police statement and be interviewed over and over about
what she saw, who she was with and what she thought
had happened. She is a mother of four, including a high
schooler, and has enough on her plate. Marian also
decides against calling police; she is on a pre-paid mobile
phone plan and knows the time-consuming call will chew
credits. Anyway, she has lived in Maroubra for eleven
years and nothing ‘real’ ever happens in the usually quiet
village streets.
As they walk back to their homes, the women speak
only of their find. They even peer into the windows of
rusty cars parked along Marine Parade, bordering the
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MY BROTHER’S KEEPER
park, hoping to find a clue to back their morning walk’s
murder theory.
One of the cars belongs to twenty-nine-year-old
Bridie Spratt, who later emerges from her unit across the
road. Unlocking her rusted 1987 Mitsubishi Colt hatch
she notices she is standing in a pool of red. She initially
thinks it could be blood, but sees it is ‘everywhere’ along
the road and dismisses it as brake fluid from another car
or animal blood. She curses and hopes it will clean off
her new Pumas as she gets in her car and drives to study
group. Three or four other commuters, joggers and dog-
walkers have similar thoughts that morning as they
inadvertently trample through the mess.
Five minutes away at Maroubra police station,
Detective Senior Constable Graham Sims trudges up the
well-worn stairs to his first-floor office with his first cof-
fee for the morning in hand. It is about 10.30 am and, at
the downstairs counter of the Maroubra Road police sta-
tion, Constable Rachael Adams has told him of a call she
has just received—made from a home telephone—from a
woman named Marian who reckons she’s found a ‘heap’
of blood at the northern end of the beach.
‘She said it was everywhere and on the road,’ Adams
had said over the noisy din of telephones and conversa-
tions in the busy suburban station.
‘Righto, I’ll check it out,’ thirty-six-year-old Sims
promised, adding with a snort, ‘Probably some idiot fish-
erman has cut his finger or something.’
Sims walks into the office of thirty-four-year-old Paul
Simpkins, the station’s case file manager and a part-time
first-grade rugby league referee.
‘C’mon, Paul, you’re always whingeing about work-
ing in an office with no windows, how about coming
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