Free Call Me Cruel by Michael Duffy Page A

harm would come to Julie, my wife, and Bradley my little boy.’
    The detectives asked if he’d ever spoken to Hollingsworth about TJ’s death. He said he’d bumped into him at Redfern Police Station on the afternoon after Hickey died, and Hollingsworth began to tell him how he’d ‘put his hand through the wound in TJ’s neck and placed it down towards his heart to stop the flow of blood’. But the conversation had been stopped by a senior officer, who Wilkinson said had come into the room and said to Hollingsworth, ‘Don’t fuckin’ say anything in front of him.’ (There is no evidence anything Wilkinson said about Michael Hollingsworth is true.)
    Several times Houlahan and Craig pushed Wilkinson about the nature of his relationship with Kylie. He continued to deny having an affair with her and persisted with the story that she had pursued him and he had resisted but been too scared by her threats to just walk away. He said they’d exchanged maybe eight or ten SMS messages a day, and their content had been ‘like a stage play, really, like, I was told what, you know, like, the messages she sent to me, in some of them were very sexual, like, I was told on what, you know, how to reply to it and I didn’t dare go against what she said.’ Asked for an example, he said, ‘ “I want to suck your black cock”, you know, you know, I had to reply like, “I want to pound your”, like, I don’t know if this is spot-on or not, but like, “I want to pound your white C-U-N-T”.’
    â€˜And that’s what you sent back?’ said Craig.
    â€˜I was like a fuckin’ dog cornered, like, you know . . . I was frightened of what would happen, not to me, so much to me, but my boy and my wife, you know, I was frightened and I’m frightened, I’m still frightened now.’
    â€˜And how many do you think of those sexual—’
    Wilkinson said, ‘Oh, you’re talking thousands there.’
    â€˜A lot.’
    â€˜A hell of a lot.’ Craig asked how he’d felt when Kylie threatened to lie to his wife and say they were having an affair. He said he didn’t want her to do this: ‘My wife, she’s jealous of any woman in the world, I know what it’s like when I drive the car down the street, I’ve got to put horse blinkers on if I look to the right or look to the left, I’m supposed to be, you know, possibly looking at someone’s arse or someone’s breasts. That’s the reason I don’t go down the academy any more and do any of the Aboriginal lecturing to the probies . . . it was in her head that I’d go down there and I’d sniff around the Eagles’ Nest for a sheila . . . That’s why I stopped going down there, anyone would think you’re the world’s fuckin’ prettiest man, you know, the way she goes on.’ (Probies are probationary constables; the Eagles’ Nest referred to the academy bar—the eagle is the symbol of the NSW Police Force.)
    Returning to Kylie, the detectives asked if she’d ever wanted him to leave his wife for her. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that was mentioned, she actually um, mentioned that, she would have Julie knocked off . . . have her killed, you know.’
    Houlahan and Craig knew a bit about Kylie by now, from speaking to her family, her husband and some of her colleagues. They’d received no hint she was the sort of monster Wilkinson was describing. They wondered what it all meant, unaware that this particular fantasy—Kylie as a threat to Julie’s life—would emerge years later as Wilkinson’s justification for the murder he had committed less than a fortnight before this interview. But for now, they could only sit back and ask themselves what the hell he was raving about. They knew he was lying, but his lies were not mere denials,