Mandatory Murder by Steven Schubert

Author:Steven Schubert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2019-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

22

DURING A BREAK IN her interview, Bronwyn scolded Detective Sergeant Bedwell – Andy, as she called him – for wearing crumpled jeans. His wife should have ironed them for him, she said. Bedwell laughed and agreed they looked a bit ordinary.

Bronwyn continued with her story. The day after Ray got bail, Chris was having a cigarette out the back of the laundromat with his mother, where they’d often catch up at the end of the day. Bronwyn told the police Chris started up a conversation. ‘Nipper tells me that you may want to put a contract out on Ray,’ he said. (Nipper later denied any prior knowledge of a ‘contract’.)

Bronwyn looked at her son. ‘Yeah,’ she said, shrugging off the prospect of having her former fiancé killed, not thinking Chris was serious.

The police had heard this part of the story, but the next chapter changed. A few days later, Bronwyn told them, in the same place and over a different cigarette, Chris had once again approached her and said, ‘I know three people that can do it. It will cost $15,000, Mum.’ When Bronwyn had replied, ‘Fifteen thousand dollars?’ Chris had said to her, ‘And it will have Ray out of your life forever, Mum. He’ll never be able to hurt you again.’

‘And because of what happened with the breaching of the DVO,’ Bronwyn said to the detectives, ‘I thought, Yep, why not?’

She began to cry as she told the police that she’d felt she had no other choice – Ray would track her down and kill her if she ever left Katherine. She’d have to change her name and go into hiding. So she told her son that she’d get him the money, and Chris said he needed $10,000 in cash up-front to get the murder plot under way.

Bronwyn already had most of that payment sorted. According to her, Ray had recently demanded $7000 in cash to buy a Chrysler Charger, but when she went to give it to him in July 2011, he yelled at her, telling her he didn’t want the money right then and would let her know when he did. Rather than return it to the bank, Bronwyn for some reason put it in a container in a storage unit she’d leased in Katherine’s industrial area.

She had another $2500 ‘ferreted away’, made up of some winnings from the casino in Darwin, and a bit of money out of the till every now and then. When she went down to buy milk and cigarettes from Woolies, she got another $500 cash out for the murder contract.

Bronwyn took the money to Chris and Nipper’s flat for counting, first by her, then Nipper, then Chris. (Nipper said later he thought the money was to pay some bills.) Once that was done, Chris went into his room to divvy it up and put it in plain white envelopes from the laundromat, while Bronwyn had a coffee.

In her police interview, she claimed to have had no idea how much money each person involved in the plan would receive.

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