GORDON WOOD'S conviction for the murder of Caroline Byrne has taken 13 years, a coronial inquiry, three troubled police investigations and a manhunt throughout Europe - and The Sydney Morning Herald has been at the forefront throughout it all.
The trial, one of Sydney's longest, most expensive and certainly most controversial, has provided the final chapter of a sensational whodunit that began on a moonless night in June 1995 when a beautiful young woman was found dead at the foot of a cliff notorious for suicide.
But the trial of Wood for Byrne's murder is much more than a tale of mystery. It was a case in which justice had to be seen to be done.
It has forged important precedents for policing techniques, it exposed mistakes that will, hopefully, never be repeated, and it provided new chapters in the training manuals for homicide detectives. It is seen by senior officers as a case that, with hindsight, could have been solved immediately had it been handled correctly at the time. An unsupported assumption of suicide is an error that will never be repeated.
Equally, the case set new challenges for the media, not only in chasing the story but in making longer-term judgments about what and when to publish to ensure no interference with the justice system. We felt this especially keenly at the Herald .
In April 2004, while researching a story about the relationship between Wood and Byrne, I found and interviewed a man, Angelo Georgiou, who had a story to tell but had not done so because of fears his family held about the consequences of doing so.
This man, who would become a key witness in the case, had managed the gym where the couple met in 1992. He claimed to have become a confidant to the young woman and she had told him of her concern about the way her boyfriend was managing his affairs. Byrne told him she had concerns for her safety because of his increasing fits of anger.
As he would tell the court, Georgiou had not told these stories before. He had not been approached by police in the nine years since Byrne's death.
And yet it was clear he was troubled by what she had told him. After a series of meetings with the Herald , Georgiou agreed to talk to Byrne's father, Tony, who convinced him to go to police. The Herald agreed to conceal his identity when publishing its story.
Two years later, I found another witness who appeared to have information that might fill in more pieces of the puzzle. Michael Jaggard owned the Alife restaurant in East Sydney where the stockbroker Rene Rivkin lunched the day of Caroline Byrne's death.
Jaggard claimed to have witnessed a conversation between Wood and Rivkin about 3pm that day, and he would tell the court that Wood had confronted him three times about what he saw.
The Herald had approached Jaggard, who was reticent to talk but confirmed what we had been told and agreed to meet. On this occasion, however, we decided against publishing a story. Instead, we passed on his details to police. There was more at stake by now than being first with a story. This was confirmed when Jaggard decided to co-operate with the police.
There was a third involvement. On March 1, 2006, while still following the story meticulously behind the scenes, the Herald became aware that the Director of Public Prosecutions had decided it now had enough evidence to charge Wood. The Herald decided against publishing the story, aware there could be a risk it could interfere with the police investigation. Instead, we would wait until he was arrested in London, which happened more than a month later, and ensured we were there to report it.
In doing so, we stumbled across information that Wood was about to travel to New York on a one-way ticket. We told police and they then secured a warrant for his arrest, which took place on April 5, just before 1am Sydney time, and forced a rare stoppage of the presses to drop in the scoop as well as details about Wood's life in London, which had been compiled covertly during the previous month. The Herald's role in his arrest was acknowledged by senior officers the next day.
A month later, after a cat-and-mouse game in London with police determined to evade the spotlight, the Herald managed to board the Qantas jet that was to bring Wood home in handcuffs. We sent our photograph from a toilet on the jet in the minutes before all communication equipment had to be turned off for take-off. As the plane left the tarmac at Heathrow, the pictures of Wood, head bowed in a window seat, with the two detectives who had brought him to justice, Paul Jacob and Paul Quigg, were already being readied for publication on the front page.
The Herald's Philip Cornford had already revealed, in December 2003, that experiments by Sydney University physicists had found that Byrne could not have jumped to her death. Police and scientists had conducted the tests by throwing mannequins of the same height and weight - and dressed in similar clothes - over The Gap. They showed that it was possible for two men and in some tests, one man, standing inside the metre-high security fence, to have thrown her body with sufficient velocity for her to land 11.8 metres from the base of the cliff, as she was found.
A father's thanks CAROLINE BYRNE'S father, Tony, gave thanks yesterday to police, prosecutors and journalists. "My thoughts are with the investigative journalists at The Sydney Morning Herald who never gave up, and I mention them by name - there was Philip Cornford, Robert Wainwright … and they're very much in my thoughts. They did a marvellous job with their investigation. There was also Neil Chenoweth and Andrew Main from the Fin Review who got the Gold Walkley for their investigation into the mystery shareholders in [Rene Rivkin's] Offset Alpine."
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