Free Call Me Cruel by Michael Duffy Page B

they were well-developed fantasies.
    And the more he spoke, the more the fantasies grew. It was hard to keep on top of them all. ‘I was frightened of her,’ he said, ‘I was frightened of Mick [Hollingsworth], you know. She said that she had, whilst living in Melbourne she, you know, she had associations there with, you know, with the underground down there. She said she had association with the Bankstown boys . . . Said [a relative] was a major drug dealer in the Bankstown area and he’s, he had some rough and ready associates, you know, that could have things done, you know, no wonder I didn’t fuckin’ say anything about anything, you know.’
    Houlahan asked if Kylie had ever said she was pregnant, and Wilkinson said she’d told him five weeks ago she was pregnant to Gary. ‘That’s when I started to get frightened too,’ he said, ‘cause she was going to tell, she was going, this was what was thrown at me, she was going to spread the obsession, runs wild, she was going to tell my wife that [we were] having an affair, second to that, like, the child was mine and, like, you know, fuckin’, it definitely would have been fuckin’ divorce, without even the chance of DNA, the wife would have just packed my little boy up and just taken off.’ The last time he saw Kylie, he said, was at the Sydney Football Stadium on Monday 26 April 2004, when Souths played Canterbury. Wilkinson had insisted she tell the police her rape allegation was false, they had argued about this, and later she had agreed and arranged to meet him at Sutherland Railway Station on 28 April, to go to the local police station so she could retract her story about the rape. Wilkinson turned up on that evening, at about 9.00 p.m., but there was no sign of Kylie.
    After this interview, Craig was convinced that Wilkinson had killed Kylie. The case was circumstantial, but strongly so. Wilkinson’s behaviour and stories suggested someone who was trying to cover up a crime. He had sought to minimise his relationship with Kylie but the records showed otherwise. The detectives had now obtained details of all her phone use in the months before her disappearance, and the volume was staggering. There had been 23,836 phone calls and text messages between Wilkinson and her from 21 December 2003 to 28 April 2004—an astonishing average of 184 per day. His claim that there had been only eight or ten calls a day was nonsense. It was self-defeating nonsense, though, because he must have known this was something that could and would be easily checked. But then, as Craig now knew, Paul Wilkinson was a peculiar man. He wasn’t stupid but he was lazy; probably, he just hadn’t thought things through.

    A police analyst set to work on the telephone data, and patiently pieced together all the calls for 28 April, showing Kylie and Wilkinson had been in frequent contact. The analyst noted the mobile phone towers used by the phones for each call, as these indicate the general location of a mobile at the time a call is made or received. They suggested that for most of the day, Wilkinson had been at home in Picnic Point and Kylie at her grandmother’s place in Erina. Then Kylie left Erina and caught the train, and by 8.00 p.m. her calls were using a city tower as she approached Central Station. At 9.10 p.m. she made a call using the Sutherland tower, and Wilkinson’s phone received it using the tower at Bonnet Bay, in between Picnic Point and Sutherland. This suggests she had changed trains at Central and was on her way to Sutherland, and that he was driving to the station to collect her. Soon after, Kylie called him again and both their phones used the Sutherland tower, indicating they were very close. And yet, according to Wilkinson, he arrived at the station and she wasn’t there.
    If this is really what had happened, you’d expect one of them would have rung the other to find out what