Networked Knowledge - Media Report

[This edited version of the report has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles]

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On 25 October 2008 Victoria Laurie of The Australian reported: Lloyd Rayney - “A man in limbo”.

More than a year after Corryn Rayney's murder, WA police are yet to charge anyone. Her husband, Lloyd Rayney, a former prosecutor, remains under suspicion. Victoria Laurie reveals how the story is unfolding. The birthday party was in full swing at Lloyd Rayney’s house. It was a happy, carefree scene – a bunch of kids dressed up as their favourite Disney characters, playing on a bouncy castle in the family backyard. “Soon after the party started, I heard someone yelling from the front of the house and went outside to see what was happening,” recalls Rayney. “At the front was someone who lives in the neighbourhood. When this person saw me they called out: ‘You’re celebrating her death!’ I thought I had misunderstood. As I tried to process what I thought was said, (they) shouted even louder. ‘You’re celebrating her death, aren’t you? You’re celebrating her death, aren’t you?’”

So many ironies permeate the life of Lloyd Rayney that it’s hard to know where to begin. He’s a criminal lawyer and former Crown prosecutor who is suspected of murdering his own wife. He’s not been charged with any such crime, yet in a letter to The Weekend Australian Magazine he outlines numerous cases – including the birthday party – of hurled abuse from perfect strangers. And, irony of ironies, the first legal case he’s taken on since police named him as a suspect in his wife’s murder – almost destroying his career – is of a man alleged to have murdered a female partner. Grim anniversaries have slipped by. In August, it was the first anniversary of the death of his wife, Corryn Rayney; in September, the anniversary of the day a West Australian police officer named him as the “prime” and “only” suspect, an accusation that horrified Rayney. Then came a third crucial date; last month Rayney decided to sue the state over the police’s alleged defamation of him. With two days to go before his year-long option expired, his lawyer, Martin Bennett – celebrity legal defender of Alan Bond and Lang Hancock – issued a writ on Rayney’s behalf.

Now the stakes are higher than ever, not least for Rayney himself. He’s a slender, unremarkable figure but when he walks down the street, TV-watching adults identify him as “the man police think did it”. Not a single piece of evidence has been made public to link Rayney with the murder of his 44-year-old wife, but his claim of innocence is invariably a single line added to the bottom of each news story. Rayney lives the ultimate existential nightmare – until someone is charged with Corryn’s murder, the presumption of innocence is daily denied him. Equally, until they charge him or someone else, the WA Police – who have never found the killer of three women who disappeared from Claremont a decade ago – must live with the embarrassment of another high-profile, unsolved murder.

Dark-haired and olive-skinned, Corryn Rayney was an attractive, vivacious lawyer whose day job as Supreme Court registrar was a serious one. But she had a frivolous side – bootscooting was her after-hours passion, a fun ritual that involved dressing up in a shirt with tassels, blue jeans and boots with silver trim. On August 7 last year, she’d turned up at Bentley Community Centre to the bootscooting session she had attended, once or twice a week, for five years. “She was in fine spirits, she was happy and sat down and talked to most people in the class like she normally does,” dance instructor Glenn Dale, of Urban Cowboy’s Line Dance Company, would later tell reporters. Outwardly cheerful, Corryn was also headed for divorce. Her 17-year marriage to the quieter, reserved Lloyd Rayney was on the rocks; they still shared a house but they argued about property and custody of the children, Sarah, 10, and Caitlyn, 13. Each had hired lawyers and exchanged bitter emails amid the usual hostilities that erupt in a dying marriage. Rayney was being urged to move out.

About 9.30pm, Corryn’s dance session was drawing to a close. “She did the dances she liked to do and then, as the class finished, she left,” said Dale. “There was nothing out of the ordinary.” Except that it was the last time they would see Corryn alive. Thirty bootscooters were later interviewed; she’d left the centre but nobody had seen her get into her car or drive away into the night. Back at the family house in Monash Avenue, Como, Rayney was at home with Sarah while Caitlyn was at a Gwen Stefani concert. He said he was home all night; a parent who dropped Caitlyn home about 10.45pm confirmed his presence at that time. The next morning, Rayney was up early, asking a neighbour whether Corryn had gone there for a cup of tea. He would later tell police his wife had either come home late and left early, or not come home at all.

That same day, Rayney was due to appear before the Corruption and Crime Commission, representing a police officer in a case of wrongful imprisonment of a man jailed for murder. Rayney was a former Crown prosecutor whose outward reserve belied a steely ambition to rise through the ranks of the state Public Prosecutions office; later he headed out on his own as a barrister. He could be forceful in defending his reputation, attracting international headlines in 2002 when he sued expatriate art critic Robert Hughes for describing the Indian-born lawyer as a “curry-muncher”. Hughes denied making the slur against Rayney, who had prosecuted Hughes over a dangerous driving charge, but he settled the matter out of court.

The morning after his estranged wife’s last bootscooting class, Rayney turned up for work as usual. TV cameras were parked outside the CCC hearing to film accused police officers and their lawyers. Channel Seven reporter Alison Fan remembers seeing Rayney, whom she had known for years: “He walked in, looking completely normal, completely composed, as Lloyd Rayney always looks. He’s a very reserved guy.” Barrister Philip Urquhart, who had known the Rayneys for 15 years, also remembers the morning well. “I was sitting next to Lloyd at the hearing when he left abruptly at about 11am and said, ‘Something urgent’s come up, I have to go.’ He was very concerned – I learnt later that Corryn had gone missing.” The Supreme Court had rung him saying she had not turned up for work; that afternoon, Rayney went to Kensington police station to register her as missing.

Wednesday evening was bridge night for Rayney and some law friends, including barrister Linda Black. “I spoke with Lloyd at about 6pm by phone to see what time he was coming,” says Black. “He said, ‘I can’t talk, the police are here. Corryn’s gone missing.’ “Over the next couple of days we had very short conversations,” says Black, who had dined with both Rayneys at home six weeks earlier. “I didn’t think there was any foul play involved; I thought Corryn just wanted some time out.” But days passed, and the Major Crime Squad launched Operation Dargan to find the missing lawyer. Black decided to go to the police with small scraps of information about Corryn’s recent movements. She says Rayney encouraged her to go. “I said, ‘Lloyd, do you want me to talk to the police…’ He stopped me and said ‘Linda, don’t sit there and tell me anything. Go straight to the police and tell them everything you can think of. I just want them to find her.” And still Corryn and her missing car, a silver 2005 Ford Fairmont, didn’t materialise. Her bank accounts were not touched, and she rarely carried a mobile phone. On Sunday, August 12, a haggard, unshaven Rayney addressed a press conference with Corryn’s sister, Sharon Coutinho. “(We) are appealing to the public to come forward with any information they may have,” he said. “As far as we know, Corryn was last seen at bootscooting … all of us are deeply distressed and extremely concerned for her welfare.”

Two days later, Corryn’s locked car was located after a resident in a leafy street in Subiaco called police. Why was it parked several suburbs away from where she had been dancing? Coincidentally, it was the street where two lawyers known to the Rayneys lived. Then came an extraordinary discovery. A police officer noticed a trail of oil that led from under the car back along the street. Nearly 40mm of rain had fallen in Perth between Corryn’s disappearance and the discovery of her car. Yet rain had not washed away the black line of treacly oil, which police traced for nearly a kilometre along the bushy thoroughfare of Thomas Street and into the scrubland of King’s Park. As surely as if someone had led them there, police found themselves standing beside a freshly dug grave in the bush. Digging began on Thursday August 16 and, later that day, a body was located in the deep grave. Rayney was told DNA analysis showed it was his wife.

Fronting the media, Detective Senior Sergeant Jack Lee described a macabre scenario – whoever had dumped Corryn’s body had accidentally driven over a bollard to reach the bush gravesite, damaging the underside of the car’s gear box. Oil may have begun pouring out while the grave was being dug and continued to leak as the driver left. “Had the oil run out sooner than it did, we may have never linked the two scenes,” Lee told the media. Blood had been found inside the vehicle: “She may have been alive but bleeding in the car.” Then state attorney-general Jim McGinty summed up the communal disbelief. “To have a senior officer from the state’s superior court murdered is absolutely shocking and I am sure it will send shockwaves through the whole of the court system.” Death-notice tributes poured in, from the Chief Justice Wayne Martin down. “A beautiful life tragically cut short. Corryn and family are in our prayers.”

Corryn’s sister, Sharon, appeared alone before the media, on behalf of her father, Ernest da Silva, and her two nieces. “Girls of their age need their mother most. How will they cope? Now she is my murdered sister. My family and I want to know why.” On August 22, police combed the Rayney home for clues. Lee told reporters Rayney had “fully co-operated with police” and any speculation that he was a suspect could be “detrimental” to the investigation. Yet everyone speculated about how a bright, uncontroversial woman could have become a victim. The Rayneys had both dealt with criminals in their careers – was it too far-fetched to think one perverted person could have held a grudge?

On September 1, Corryn’s funeral was held in the church where she and Rayney had married in 1990. Lloyd and Corryn’s union had blended two migrant families with Indian links – he was of mixed Irish-Indian descent but born in the Yemen city of Aden, she was the daughter of a Goan father who fled violence in his adopted home of Uganda, where tyrant Idi Amin ruled in the 1970s, to make a safer home in Perth for Corryn and her sister. In his eulogy, Rayney wiped a tear as he recalled how it had been “love at first sight” when he spotted Corryn at the Australian Government Solicitor’s office in the late 1980s. Lawyer friend Beth Smith knew the couple well. “The minute you met Corryn, you felt connected. And Lloyd was an excellent lawyer, obviously very intelligent.” Smith had been at their wedding, but never expected to attend Corryn’s funeral. “Seeing the little girls walking alongside the coffin was heartbreaking. And Lloyd looked shattered.”

But three weeks later, the cordial relationship between the police and bereaved widower was over. Half a dozen officers forced entry on the Rayney home in Como, breaking down the back door after their knocking failed to rouse a response. The media had been tipped off and recorded Lloyd Rayney emerging in a double-breasted grey suit and walking calmly to a police car. Five hours later, at police headquarters at Curtin House, he was charged under the Surveillance Devices Act with illegally using a listening device to monitor his wife’s telephone calls. That afternoon, Jack Lee presided over a packed police conference. Yes, Rayney had been charged with the phone-tapping offence, but there was other news. Police believed Corryn may have been killed at home, although Lee wouldn’t say why or how. “What we are saying is we believe the offence occurred at Monash Avenue,” Lee said. “That makes Mr Rayney a significant person of interest or a suspect in this matter.” He added, “He is our only suspect at this time,” although there were “a number of persons of interest”.

Lee faced a barrage of rapid-fire interrogation that all amounted to the same incredulous query – was Lee saying Rayney was suspected of killing his own wife? “He is our prime suspect because our evidence at this time leads us to believe the offence occurred in that house and he is the occupant of the house,” Lee reiterated. He regretted that Rayney had refused permission for his daughters – who had been interviewed once, before their mother’s body was found – to be re-interviewed. Yet it was possible they had been at home when their mother was murdered. The news led the evening TV bulletins that night. “I was watching the news and I remember my heart stopped,” Black recalls. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe Lloyd could have done it.’ But I thought, ‘What the hell have they found? Why would (they) announce it before charging Lloyd? They must have uncovered something really big.’”

The next day, September 21, Rayney’s lawyers issued a terse, one-page statement. “Mr Rayney wishes it to be clear that he had no involvement in the tragic death of his wife. He is enormously distressed that the police, in focusing their attention on him, may never catch the person who robbed his and Corryn’s children of their beloved mother. Contrary to the police claim, there is nothing that Mr Rayney said to the police in any interview that could possibly lead to him being declared a suspect.” As for failing to cooperate with police, “he has done everything he can to assist them from the very start when Corryn went missing. It was Mr Rayney who arranged for police to have access to all of Corryn’s emails.” And the children had already been interviewed for several hours “with Mr Rayney’s express consent” just after their mother went missing. And then, nothing happened. Rayney sat at home surveying the ruins of his life while police carried on with Operation Dargan. He had been charged with the phone-tapping offence (as, later, was another person in relation to the same charge). But Lee himself had said publicly, “I’m not suggesting the phone tap links him to the murder.”

It didn’t stop Rayney from being convicted in the minds of gossips and crime fans. One hypothesis went thus: 70 per cent of murders are carried out by people known to the victim, often their domestic partners. A woman demanding a divorce and child custody might have been killed late at night in a fit of passion in the home, bundled into a car and driven to her grave. If this scenario was favoured by police, where was the evidence? No one saw Rayney near the car, nor walking home, nor taking a taxi. No one had stepped forward to challenge Rayney’s claim that he’d been at home the whole night. And supposing an accomplice had helped shift a lifeless body, where was he or she? “I went into absolute shock when I realised they didn’t have anything to back it up,” says Black. Then anger set in. “I kept thinking, ‘The police commissioner is going to come on TV and apologise for (Lee) making the comment. Or else they’ll charge him.’ “This is the police releasing a comment that effectively says, ‘We have no one else we’re looking at; we know it’s him, we just need to prove it,’” says Black. “In all my time as a criminal barrister, I have never, ever heard the police do that in any other context.”

She kept thinking back to Rayney’s behaviour after his wife went missing. “He had no apprehension about me speaking to the police. If I’d been responsible for the death of someone, and I had a friend whom I’d been talking with or seen at the relevant times, I’d want to suss out what they remembered first. He made no inquiries of me at all.” From that point on, the murder case turned into a high-stakes poker game. The police had revealed their hand too early, and Rayney was an accomplished card player. As a former prosecutor and an expert in forensic evidence, he knew every trick in the book; how evidence could be collected and used against a person, how even an innocuous statement might help convict someone. “From that time on,” Black continues, “the police ensured that everyone was concerned about the openness and fairness of their inquiry. If I had a client in those circumstances, I’d be telling my client not to speak to the police.”

It was Rayney’s turn to make a tactical move. On November 19, with three of his lawyer colleagues sitting in the studio, he went on commercial TV to plead his innocence in an interview with Channel Seven reporter Alison Fan on Today Tonight. He made carefully worded answers to a few questions: “I had nothing to do with (Corryn’s) death or disappearance.” Life had become unbearable after the “prime suspect” comment, he said. “I know the way people view me when I walk down the street.” That same day, Rayney’s nemesis, Lee, denied that his police transfer to the remote Pilbara town of Karratha, 1500km north, was in any way related to the Rayney case. It had been planned for months, he said.

As for his “prime suspect” comment, Lee remained unrepentant. “There may have been criticism from some areas in relation to the stance I took in naming Mr Rayney as a suspect but I don’t move away from that. It wasn’t a mistake and it wasn’t a misunderstanding – I went to that conference with the intention of saying what I said.” But Lee was contradicted by Acting Police Commissioner Chris Dawson in a letter sent to Rayney’s lawyers two months later. Dawson wrote “the naming of Mr Rayney as the ‘prime suspect’ was not planned”. “Unfortunately, in fielding questions from the media, Lee agreed with a number of propositions that ultimately led to the media reporting that Mr Rayney was the ‘prime suspect’.” Black doesn’t care who was right. “I think it was a stuff-up, or a deliberate tactic by the police to put pressure on Lloyd to make him talk,” she says tersely. “Whichever it was, it was just cruel.”

The new year brought no peace to either Lloyd Rayney or his wife’s family, and no charges against Corryn’s killer. Rayney’s reputation was in freefall, his career at rock bottom and family income nil. “Within a day or so of Lee making those comments, all of the solicitors who briefed Lloyd wanted their files back,” says Philip Urquhart. In his letter to The Weekend Australian Magazine, Rayney describes it thus: “It took more than 20 years to build my career and reputation and less than 20 minutes to destroy it.” He had private school fees and mortgages to pay, but the mere act of showing his face in public was risky. “One afternoon I was sitting in the reception of an office in the city, not long after I was publicly named by police as the only ‘suspect’,” Rayney recalls. “Two men in their 20s saw me and came to the entrance shouting, ‘You’re the guy who killed his wife! We know that you f...ing killed your wife!’ I was trapped with these men who were aggressive and loud. They only stopped when staff from the office came to help me.”

In January, Rayney took Sarah and Caitlyn overseas on holiday. Prior to their departure, his lawyers sent a pointed letter to the police. “We seek your undertaking that the details of the Rayney family’s travel will not be disclosed by police to any person who is not a serving police officer and certainly not to the media.” The subtext was clear: We know you’re leaking information to the media. There was no reply. On January 4, with media massed in the street outside, police arrived at the family home with a botanist, two scientists from a university chemistry laboratory and a pollen expert flown in from New Zealand. At Rayney’s request, Urquhart went to the house to observe the raid. He was still there 12 hours later. “Paving bricks, sand, red paint, moss – they took every possible sample from every possible tree, plant and the ground to be sent off to be analysed,” Urquhart recalls. Word leaked that plant matter on Corryn’s body might connect the murder to the house.

Police upped the ante, publicly repeating the question, “Why won’t Rayney allow his daughters to be re-interviewed?” Rayney’s response was swift and headline-grabbing. “Caitlyn and Sarah do not want to be interviewed yet again,” read an April media release from the Rayney camp. “Their feelings have been reinforced by police conduct, which has been intimidating. For example, on a recent overseas holiday, police followed the children, photographed them and bugged their room.” The police didn’t rise to the bait, refusing to comment on Rayney’s sensational claim. Meanwhile, Rayney stated that the children could be interviewed if it were conducted “fairly and by a qualified and independent person”. But lawyer parlance left it wide open to interpretation; who exactly was “qualified” and “independent”?

Rayney’s media release revealed something else; a central pillar in his personal life had crumbled. A mere eight months before, he had stood in solidarity with Corryn’s sister, Sharon, before the media; now they were no longer on speaking terms. Corryn’s father Ernest had claimed in a newspaper article that he could no longer see his grandkids, or only in Rayney’s presence. Such claims were “wrong and hurtful”, Rayney countered in his media release. “On the contrary, Mr da Silva has declined invitations to spend time with Caitlyn and Sarah. Since Corryn’s death, he has never visited, phoned or contacted Caitlyn and Sarah, including for their birthdays, Christmas and Easter.”

On July 9, the family rift was in full view when Rayney was due to make his first court appearance on the phone-tapping charge. When Corryn’s family arrived, they were flanked by police officers investigating her murder; Rayney eventually turned up with his lawyer after initially requesting to remain absent to avoid the media scrum. The two family factions didn’t exchange a word before or after Rayney’s case was postponed. “It’s terrible … it’s a very emotional day for us,” a distressed Sharon told reporters. “It’s my sister’s birthday and we just wanted the truth and yet again we’re left with nothing. It’s unbearable.”

On July 30, Rayney pleaded not guilty to the charge and was again released on bail. Outside court, Sharon declared the family’s relief that things were moving. “It’s good to get some progress. Every week is difficult until we get real answers.”

Fourteen months on from Corryn Rayney’s murder, any real answers are still elusive. Her family, who have endured endless speculation about her personal life, declined to comment for this article. Rayney’s writ has also silenced the police. “We do not want to get into public debate with Mr Rayney and the agency can’t come out and defend itself any more,” a senior officer confides. Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan will publicly say only that “there are many DNA samples to be examined so we can’t comment (on the case) at this time”.

When The Weekend Australian Magazine asks to interview Rayney, he agrees to meet at a conference room in his law chambers but warns that he is unlikely to make any comments on the record. He says he has never been told exactly how his wife died. He’s thinner than a year ago, his face seems drained of emotion and he admits he’s wary of the media. “Could I have your mobile phone?” he asks, which I hand over before realising that he wants it left at the reception desk while we talk. I explain that people want to hear the obvious things from him – where was he on the night, how would he describe his relationship with his wife, who does he think killed her. It’s no sin to be separated or on the point of divorce, I argue, and it’s not any kind of evidence that a person has killed his wife. If he’s not guilty and not charged, then why condemn himself to silence?

Rayney reluctantly agrees to an interview at a later date. “Lloyd wants you to talk to the others first, and then he says he can respond to what they have said,” his solicitor, Amanda Blackburn, says. The interview never eventuates; Rayney sends his three-page letter instead, describing “the humiliating and embarrassing attacks” and how he has urged the police “with a deep and passionate intensity to pursue their investigation thoroughly and competently so that Corryn’s murderer is brought to justice as soon as possible … I have stated publicly before, and I reiterate now, that I had no involvement in my wife’s death whatsoever. I did not kill Corryn.” In an accompanying letter, Rayney’s defamation lawyer Martin Bennett writes that “one of the many hideous consequences of the (police) defamation has been Mr Rayney being left with the impossible task of proving a negative, namely that he did not kill his wife.”

That Rayney is due to face court again this week on the phone-tapping charge adds yet another layer of caution. I ask, via Blackburn, for confirmation of facts as seemingly simple as his movements on the night Corryn went missing. “He won’t be saying.” Why not? “You don’t go around talking to anyone in public about things you may discuss in court.” It’s left to half a dozen colleagues, whose names he has supplied, to articulate Rayney’s side of the argument. “What’s happened is the police have ‘shaken the tree’,” says Richard Lawson, a lawyer friend who has started to give Rayney some legal work. “The police are thinking ‘he’s estranged from his wife, he wants to know her movements, he’s knocked her off’. They named him to rattle him – it’s an FBI trick. It’s what you do if you’ve only got a hunch.”

Lawson sees no irony in hiring Rayney to help him on his current case, that of a man accused of murdering a female partner. “I brief Lloyd. If I thought anything was amiss, I wouldn’t. I’ve had clients say, ‘I want him.’ He’s a fantastic barrister.” So what about the souring relationship between the Rayneys? Is it relevant that in 2003, after he’d been beaten to a senior DPP job in Perth by a female rival, Rayney left the family behind and took a job in the Caribbean? Corryn, who had her own career to consider, stayed behind with the children, although they made a visit to Bermuda. Friends point out the family was reunited 18 months later, and it would be several more years before the marital rift. “To my mind, it doesn’t matter where he and Corryn were in their relationship,” says Black. “I saw Lloyd quite often in the period leading up to the time Corryn went missing, and he had not become some altered personality. “What makes the allegations so improbable is that Lloyd loves his kids. After the police announcement he said to me over coffee, really emotional, ‘How can anyone ever believe I could do that to my children?’ That’s the part that devastates Lloyd.”

Rayney’s camp would argue that, with every passing day, the WA police reputation is as besmirched as that of their “prime” suspect. No killer caught, no crime solved. They compare Rayney’s situation to the suspect in the Claremont serial killer case; a public servant named by the media as the man police believe may have killed three young woman but whom – a decade later – they have never charged. “Lloyd may continue to live the same sort of life as that chap – the police car outside his door for 10 years, and not a shred of evidence against him,” says prominent Perth barrister Tom Percy QC, who uncomfortably levers his stiff lawyer’s collar away from his neck as we talk. “If there was a skerrick of evidence against Lloyd Rayney, he’d be sitting at Hakea Prison on remand now awaiting his trial … I’ve yet to see anything that would indicate to me that he’s a suspect, other than the fact that he’s an estranged husband. That doesn’t equal suspect, in my view.” So what would Percy do in Rayney’s position? “Defamation does not really solve the problem,” he says. “I seriously wouldn’t know what to do.” After a moment’s thought, Percy adds: “I think as a community we should be pushing for the police to apologise and make public affirmation that he’s no longer a suspect.”

Is Rayney – whether innocent or guilty – living the ultimate nightmare? Percy fidgets again with his tight collar. “He is the definition of ‘in limbo’.”

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