Missing Pieces, page 6
Cass savoured the beauty all around and the damp pungent smells of the rainforest as she climbed out. Apart from two other vehicles parked there and a couple of backpackers crossing the road, the place was deserted on this late Wednesday afternoon.
‘The car park wasn’t here in 1992,’ she said. ‘At least, not like this, according to Drew.’
‘No,’ agreed Zak, ‘I remember what it was like. Just dirt and some grass. And picnic tables. When I was at school we often came here in the holidays.’
In front of them water rushed down towards the bridge. To their right around the lowest pool were thick clusters of palms and giant ferns jostling for space. Behind these, tall rainforest trees, figs and eucalypts, tamarinds and lillipillies, blocked out the afternoon light. Lawyer and wait-a-while vines clambered over every tree.
Leading Denzel, Cass began the climb with Zak to the top of the path beside the series of waterfalls that formed the Cascades. Across the creek to their right were rocky walls rising to form cliffs as they proceeded higher up the stream; ferns and creepers grew from every cranny in the rocks. On their left side was dense rainforest, pierced every hundred metres or so where a stream flowed into a culvert under the path and onwards to spill into the Cascades. As they climbed Cass outlined what she knew of the story. Zak stopped for a moment and looked back down the creek and into the forest .‘A little kid could easily disappear here,’ he said sombrely. ‘Into the water or into that bush.’
‘Yeah,’ Cass replied. ‘That’s what all the generals thought at the time.’
The sun was now well over in the west, almost hidden by the mountains in front of them. A cool breeze had sprung up and there was a chill off the water. They climbed steadily up to the top of the path where a gate barred the way to the water catchment land beyond. A platform had been built, jutting over the topmost cascade with a view back down to the creek near the car park. When they walked out onto the platform, Denzel stepped nervously onto its metal grid. The scene below them was now partly hidden in shadow, mist was rising off the water.
‘Quite a lot of people have died here,’ Zak observed. ‘Mostly backpackers. From Europe. Ignoring the signs about not diving in. Locals don’t die here.’
Cass nodded. But, she wondered, was little Yasmin Munoz an exception to this rule?
In broad daylight, sparkling in the sunshine, with family groups picnicking and splashing in the swimming holes, Crystal Cascades was idyllic. Right now as the evening lengthened and shadows fell across the water, it had a haunted feel.
15
Cairns
Thursday 2nd August 2012
Cass, Drew and Troy met with Detective Inspector Leslie Fernando in his office. This was a regular event, though today there was little to discuss except the Andrew Todd story and the possible involvement of the possibly still-living Yasmin Munoz.
‘It’s all over the media,’ Troy said. ‘And she’s trending on Twitter. People are reporting they’d seen babies years ago, who looked just like her. Here. In Sydney. In Byron Bay. And drawings of what she might look like now on Facebook.’ Troy was a big fan of Facebook.
Drew snorted. ‘No one can know what she’d look like now. Even Comfit—with only the photos from before she was two and no one who’s genuinely seen her recently to give a description, they’d have no idea. And with the mixed-race background. Her hair could be straight or curly, her skin dark or light, nose any shape at all.’
‘Yeah,’ said Cass. ‘Just look at you and me, Drew. Both with one white parent and one not. Both of us with brown skin. You with hair orange as carrot cake. And me with dark nearly straight hair that was blonde until I was three.’
Troy looked interested. ‘Really? You used to be a blonde?’
‘Yeah. Calm down, though. It was completely dark by the time I was seven. It happens quite a bit in our mob.’
‘Yasmin Munoz had dark hair as a child,’ said Leslie. ‘But given what women do to their hair these days it could be any colour now. If she’s alive. And for your information, I was never blonde.’ The team laughed at this. The inspector had been born in Sri Lanka; his hair, although edged with silver, was still jet black. He looked across at Cass.
‘You’ve started looking through the Munoz files, I think?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ she answered. ‘Started yesterday.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘At the moment, what I hear is that the Todd family lawyers are dealing with all the inquiries. They’ve advertised in all today’s papers. But unless there’s a major breakthrough quickly, I imagine they’ll come to us. Even if they hire private investigators they’d need to know what we had back in ’92.’
Leslie was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘One thing that occurred to me ... the Todd family. They know very well what it’s like to look for a missing person and never find them.’
Cass looked up. What was this? There’d been nothing in the files she’d seen so far.
‘Yes,’ Leslie continued. ‘The young woman who went missing in Brisbane. Around 1990, I recall. Chloe, Chloe ... yes that’s it, Chloe Campion. Before the time of any of you. She was Clarkson Todd’s fiancée. She went missing from a party in Brisbane. No trace of her was ever found.’
‘I don’t know anything about that case, sir,’ said Cass, ‘but are you thinking it might have something to do with the little girl disappearing as well?’
‘No, not at all,’ said Leslie. ‘Any such links would have emerged long ago. No, what I’m thinking is that Andrew Todd was very involved in the search for Chloe Campion. His future daughter-in-law. The whole family got a lot of unwelcome publicity. He knew what that’s like. He might have thought that he didn’t want that all over again if for some reason he believed that Yasmin was still alive. So he decided to leave it until he was dead.’
‘I see,’ said Cass. ‘Well, I’ll have a look at the Campion disappearance while I’m checking out Yasmin Munoz. Might as well.’
***
Cass went back to her desk. She considered the possibility of another coffee but decided to wait for half an hour, and instead use the time to see what she could find about Clarkson Todd. And the missing Chloe Campion.
She started by simply googling Clarkson, and found a great deal. He was born in Brisbane in 1963. Educated in elite private schools in Charters Towers and Brisbane. Worked in Daddy’s firm after he left school; graduated from Bond University in 1992 with a degree in business and accounting. No doubt, thought Cass, it was also Daddy who had paid the tuition fees and probably provided a snappy sports car for his son to get to classes.
Also in 1992, Clarkson appeared to have left the family firm and set himself up as a financial planner and accountant in Brisbane. And in May of 1992 he married Jennifer Cowles. Cass could see that they were still married and that they had a son and daughter.
Clarkson became involved in the financing and management of Todd enterprises again in 1996. There were various testimonials to his business expertise. He was a member of the Brisbane Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council of Queensland, various Brisbane city clubs, Rotary.
Cass scrolled further down. This stuff was boring, boring ... She turned to newspaper records.
And there on page 3 of the Brisbane Mail was a headline: ‘Clarkson Todd cleared of involvement in fiancée’s disappearance’.
On the next page another: ‘Police question Clarkson Todd’.
And then: ‘No clues in Chloe Campion’s disappearance’.
All items were dated August or September 1990. So, more than eighteen months before he married Jennifer Cowles, Cass noted.
She settled down to read what had happened to Chloe according to the media reports. ‘Engagement party by the edge of the river’. ‘No trace of stunning blonde in powder blue evening dress.’ ‘Police talk to ex-boyfriend.’ ‘Police talk to Valley doctor.’
On the night she went missing, Saturday 14th July 1990, Chloe Campion, a university student in the final year of a commerce degree, whose family lived in New South Wales, had been engaged to Clarkson for about six weeks. Cass looked closely at a photo of the beaming couple, with Chloe displaying a large diamond on her ring finger. And wearing the low-cut powder blue Empire-line silk dress.
The party was held at the Lauriston Reception Rooms in Brisbane’s New Farm. Cass knew the place close to the Brisbane River, although she had never been there. The party seemed to have been mostly for friends of Clarkson and Chloe. There was a band, a buffet, lots to drink. It appeared to Cass that neither Andrew Todd and his wife, nor Chloe’s parents, were present; possibly there had been a separate, more formal family gathering at some other time.
A couple of articles mentioned an argument between Clarkson and Chloe. Witnesses described seeing them through the large windows on the river side of the dance floor. No one interviewed later by Brisbane police admitted to being close enough to actually hear what was said, and Clarkson had said it was a ‘serious discussion not an argument’. Initially, he’d declined to say what it was about.
What time in the evening did ‘the discussion’ take place, Cass wondered. Reading on she found it had been some time close to nine o’clock. There had been a main course served and then speeches and toasts, followed by dessert and dancing. People then broke away from the tables where they were sitting, most had had a lot to drink, many were dancing, and quite a few had moved into the courtyard at the front of Lauriston and were smoking. Probably some dope there, Cass thought. Tobacco smoking inside restaurants was still perfectly acceptable in 1990.
Clarkson told police that following the discussion he went back alone to the table where he had been sitting with Chloe and others. A bit later, while he was talking to someone else, Chloe came back to the table, collected her handbag and said she was going to the Ladies. He didn’t recall seeing her after that.
Questioned by police the following day, he said he had assumed she was ‘sulking’ somewhere. She had many friends at the party and he thought she was with some of them.
Why would she be sulking, the police asked. Clarkson claimed that they’d been trying to agree on a wedding date but he didn’t think there was anything seriously wrong.
In the next hour he’d danced with two old friends of Chloe’s and one of her cousins. He also talked to a number of people at other tables. Police established that he was definitely present in the Lauriston ballroom for at least two hours after he came back inside following the scene on the riverbank. A friend who’d stood beside him in the Gents during this time stated that he appeared his normal self and they talked about the footy as they both sprayed the urinals.
The reports indicated that at about 11 o’clock, Clarkson began to look for Chloe but it took a while before he realised that she wasn’t there. They had driven to the party in her car which was still where she had parked it some distance from the reception centre entrance.
‘Pissed, pissed-off and embarrassed’, as witnesses later described him to the Sun, Clarkson began to ask other guests if they had seen her. Quite a few people had already left, some to go on to clubs in the Valley. One friend he spoke to told him she’d looked out the front door of Lauriston sometime just after nine and seen Chloe walking down the side drive on her own. There was a side exit from the reception centre just beside the Ladies that led onto the drive. The witness hadn’t thought much of it, thinking Chloe was maybe going to clear her head a little as she had seen her earlier and thought she was quite drunk then.
There was a lot of repetition in all these accounts, Cass found. She scrolled more rapidly through them, looking for the answer to her next question. What did Clarkson Todd do after the party?
She found a long story on the case from a Sunday supplement. While this was not sworn police evidence it was very helpful. It seemed that Clarkson, having no car himself and no Chloe, had to get a cab, and the cab driver testified that he had dropped him directly to his own apartment soon after midnight. He was not living with Chloe so he had decided to leave her alone that night and talk to her in the morning. He admitted to having drunk a lot, and to feeling very angry with Chloe for leaving the party.
There was no answer when he rang her the following morning so he went to the flat which she shared with a friend. The flatmate had been at the party herself and told Clarkson that Chloe was not there, and she was sure she had not come home at all. Chloe’s bed looked unslept in. The friend had assumed Chloe had made up with Clarkson and stayed at his place. At this point, they both decided that she must have gone off to stay with someone else, and would turn up at some stage in the afternoon or evening.
In the course of the afternoon Clarkson called every friend he could think of, getting more and more steamed up, but also starting to worry a bit at the edges. Could something have happened to her? Nobody had seen her leaving with another man. Nobody had given her a lift anywhere.
So it was ten o’clock Sunday night when there’d been nothing heard at all that Clarkson finally called Chloe’s parents in Sydney to say he was worried; and it was midnight before they alerted police.
There was no sign in the flat that she had been home since the party. The dress and shoes she had worn were not there. Her briefcase and university books were in her car which was parked where Clarkson said they had left it in a side street about three hundred metres from Lauriston. There was no sign of any forced entry or damage to the car and there was nothing in the car to indicate that she had changed out of her party clothes. There were fingerprints belonging to Clarkson, various friends, her mother and the garage attendant who’d filled her car with petrol that day, and lots that police concluded were Chloe’s own. No others.
She had not phoned any family members or friends since the middle of the previous day. No one had made any arrangements to meet her at a club or have her stay over after the party. One university friend had a loose arrangement to meet her for a drink around four o’clock on Sunday afternoon. When she didn’t show up, the friend had tried to phone, but couldn’t reach her. At the time she’d thought no more about it.
By early Monday morning, Chloe was officially a missing person, and police ‘held grave fears for her safety’. By Monday afternoon, dozens of people, many of them university students like Chloe, had turned out to help police search parks, the riverbanks and deserted buildings in the vicinity of the reception centre. The river itself was trawled, but revealed nothing of interest.
Cass came to another article, more about Clarkson and his relationship with Chloe. Had this broken down in the previous weeks? What had the argument on the riverbank been about? Clearly, he’d been extensively questioned by Brisbane detectives, and his flat and car were completely pulled apart as police searched for any evidence of a struggle between himself and Chloe. None was found.
At some stage friends of Chloe’s had told police that she was pregnant and was planning to have an abortion. Clarkson then admitted they were ‘discussing’ this. He had not wanted the abortion, he said. They were getting married, they hadn’t planned the pregnancy but he thought it should continue. Yes, it would mean Chloe postponing her master’s degree, but she could come back to that later. And he’d wanted to bring the wedding date forward because of the pregnancy.
Pressed by police, he insisted that he’d asked her to marry him before either of them had known about the pregnancy. She had agreed, but when she found she was pregnant she’d said she wanted an abortion; she wasn’t going to make having a baby at this point in her life part of the deal. On the morning of the party, the Saturday, she’d told him that she’d been to an abortion clinic that Friday and arranged to go back the following week for the procedure. According to the reports, this was what they had been arguing about on the riverbank.
In the next tranche of newspaper articles that Cass came to she found much speculation: had Chloe gone for an abortion and died at the hands of the abortionist who’d then disposed of her body? Police inquiries, reported by the press, showed that she’d had an appointment for the abortion at eleven the following Tuesday morning with Dr Freddy Rawlinson whose clinic received quite a lot of media attention at this point, Cass could see. The clinic staff, including the doctor, all had alibis for the Saturday night, and the security service monitoring the building reported that while Dr Rawlinson had spent an hour there on Sunday morning, no one else had been there at all over the weekend.
In an interview, the doctor pointed out that, ‘The clinic doesn’t open at the weekend. And anyway, why would any of us be there performing a procedure at the weekend when this woman had a perfectly acceptable plan for a visit on Tuesday?’ Freddy Rawlinson also said he would not stoop to answering the absurd allegation that he might have killed Chloe Campion in the course of an abortion procedure and somehow disposed of her body. He claimed that after her clinic visit on Friday he never saw her again. No fingerprints matching those in Chloe’s car and flat were found in any of the rooms of the clinic except on the chair in the consulting room where she’d sat talking to the doctor.
According to Rawlinson it was even less likely that Chloe would have gone off to some other, possibly illegal, backstreet abortionist somewhere in Brisbane on the Sunday, having passed Saturday night in an unknown location, and then met an untimely end. The days of backstreet abortion in Brisbane, he told the media, were over.
Still looking at newspaper reports, and now on page 15 of the Google search, Cass could see that Clarkson was completely distraught following Chloe’s disappearance. The police also noted this, although they had spent many hours grilling him. He was involved in the search for Chloe almost continuously and seemed to have hardly slept for days. Both of his parents appeared in photos beside him.
Andrew Todd offered a substantial reward for anyone providing any information that could lead to the discovery of the whereabouts of Chloe Campion, alive or dead. Cass was not surprised that following this announcement there were numerous supposed sightings of Chloe—in Rockhampton and Toowoomba, on Hayman Island and as far away as Wollongong. None of them had any substance. The ‘willowy blonde’ in the powder blue evening dress and silver sandals had completely vanished.
