Ladykiller by Candace Sutton

Author:Candace Sutton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRU002000, TRU002010
ISBN: 9781741761740
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2009-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

23 THE GREAT

PRETENDER

On Remembrance Day 1973 Linda Burrell, forty-five years old, collapsed in her Beacon Hill kitchen from a cerebral haemorrhage. She died on 14 November in hospital and was interred in the Church of England cemetery at Frenchs Forest.

Bruce had never seen his father cry in the way he did that November, but it was the ensuing months of dry-eyed stony grief which tore at the family. In the absence of his wife, Allan Burrell was incapable of doing much it seemed, except sit in the kitchen and watch a meal grow cold. Bruce’s sisters— Debbie, thirteen, and Tonia, six—were separated; Tonia went to live with an aunt because their father was so abject with sorrow he could not care for two children.

Bruce, then twenty-one, was sharing a flat with two young men in the beachside suburb of Manly. He was devastated at his mother’s sudden departure from his life, and struggled to come to terms with it. Burrell’s parents and his sisters were among the few people he would truly bond with in his life. In his family home, Bruce had grown up idolised and—for the most part—uncriticised. With his mother’s death, that sanctuary, in which there was no judgment of his actions, disappeared. His vibrant mother had simply dropped to the floor and thereupon remained unconscious until she died; there was no time to say goodbye to her.

Bruce thought it was not fair and from then on he began to fill the gap in his life with an increasingly fantastic world. With no mother around to adore him, and a father who had retreated into himself, Burrell would invent a life in which he was a king—rich, successful, adored and feted by all who met him. Between 1971 and 1973 Bruce worked for the Sydney radio station 2GB as a junior copywriter, earning a small wage. On his curriculum vitae, however, Bruce said he was a trainee marketing executive with Cumberland Newspapers, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited. The company has no record of his employment there.

The Bruce Burrell described on his resumés—he wrote numerous versions—became increasingly important. Over the next two years, on paper at least, life was very busy for the high-flying Burrell, who promoted himself to an advertising account executive with Sydney agency Jacque McAskill in Willoughby. According to Burrell, he had big-name clients, including Volvo Australia, Mercedes Benz, Malaysian Airlines, food company Kellogg’s, Fabergé cosmetics and McWilliams Wines. Another CV had him employed as the New South Wales representative for the KG Murray Publishing company, representing Australian House and Garden, and Wheels magazines.

Bruce’s teenage crushes with private schoolgirls had whetted his appetite for rich girls and his first adult romance was with Vanessa Jones, whose father was the managing director of the billion-dollar jam company, IXL. Bruce bowled Vanessa over with his charm and she accepted his marriage proposal. But her father saw straight through Bruce and while his vehement opposition to the union only served to fan Vanessa’s infatuation with Bruce, she accepted it when her father sent her away to England.

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