The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper Read Free Book Online Page B

said; they had “tussled” on the way to the door and tripped and fallen through it side by side. But now he adds a new element.
    The video shows him standing near the filing cabinets, as Roy Bramwell said he had been. But where Bramwell said he saw a punching motion, Hurley demonstrates a “picking up” motion. He leans down to the floor and bends his elbows up and down. When he straightens, his head nearly touches the ceiling. He explains to the inspectors that he was trying to lift Doomadgee by his shirt. Rather than saying, “Do you want more, Mr Doomadgee? Do you want more?” as Bramwell claimed, he was calling on Doomadgee to get up: “Get up, Mr Doomadgee! Get up!”
    This interview is striking for its camaraderie. Webber refers to Hurley as “mate” or “buddy”; Hurley calls him “boss.” When he demonstrates trying to lift Cameron by the shirt, Hurley laughs with the investigating officers—they joke about not tearing Inspector Webber’s shirt the way Hurley had torn Cameron’s faded Hawaiian one. Neither inspector asks Hurley why Doomadgee was taken into custody in the first place. They don’t ask why he had objected to his arrest. They don’t ask whether Hurley hit Cameron back. They don’t ask how the dead man got a black eye.
    After conducting the re-enactment, Inspectors Webber and Williams sat down to watch the cell-surveillance tape. “Senior Sergeant Hurley actually had to operate it for us,” Webber told the inquest. They could not remember if Hurley watched it with them, just as Robinson and Kitching could not remember if he had watched it with them the day before.
    Next morning, Sunday, November 21, two days after Cameron’s death, Detective Senior Sergeant Kitching tracked down Penny Sibley, the Aboriginal woman who had been standing outside the police station when Hurley struggled with Cameron. She had left Palm Island and was staying in the sugarcane town of Ingham, an hour’s drive from Townsville. She had not yet heard Cameron was dead: “I got the biggest fright.” Penny, who’d known Cameron all his life, described him in traditional terms as her nephew. She told Kitching she had seen him strike Hurley’s face, then Hurley “got wild” and punched Cameron back. She said that when she saw this she started to cry. Kitching asked her if she was on any medication. Penny admitted she was on “a helluva lot of drugs” for “heart, high blood pressure, sugar, yeah, diabetes.” Penny’s daughter wondered if her mother should be talking out against Hurley: “All this things that Mum doing,” she asked Kitching, “this can put in danger?”
    Darren Robinson, meanwhile, had heard a rumour that Cameron had been drinking bleach, and was researching alternative causes of death. On Monday morning, November 22, Kitching suggested he stop by the hospital to get the dead man’s medical records. This was what Robinson found: Doomadgee had been admitted in 1991 with hepatitis; in 1993 with a head injury; in 1994 with an alcohol-related seizure and also renal trauma; in 1999 with multiple stab wounds to his chest and stomach. In 2000 he was admitted with stab wounds in his right thigh and a fractured arm; in 2003 it was lacerations to his hand and lip from fighting; and later that year he was admitted with broken ribs. This was life for a young man on Palm Island. From around the time of Robinson’s visit to the hospital, the rumour emerged—popular with the police—that Doomadgee had been in a car accident just before Hurley arrested him.
    Kitching, of the onyx Christian ring, signed the police report on Cameron Doomadgee and sent it to the pathologist. He did not include Roy Bramwell’s allegation of assault: the cause of death was a fall.
    But by Monday afternoon, Bramwell’s story of seeing and hearing Hurley beating Doomadgee had made its way around the island. Mayor Erykah Kyle had been calling on any witnesses to come forward and speak on a PA system she’d had set up