Colin's Little Black Book

I'm an ex-cop. For those of you who know people like me you'll know that this means that we have stories to tell. Some will be funny, the weird and wonderful situations that people get themselves into. Some are gruesome, I really have to pick my audience carefully for those ones. And some are just sad and they're the ones I have the hardest time sharing with others.

The story of Colin's little black book is a mixture of all of the above. For a variety of reasons it's one of the strangest situations I ever encountered. And it's one that leaves me with more questions than answers.

One of my first postings was to the city of Cairns. Those of you who know Australia well, will know that Cairns is situated in the far north of Queensland, adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef. Tropical rainforests and crocodile infested beaches are some of the hallmarks of this tourist city. It's hot in winter and hotter in summer. You'll see soon why that's relevant.

While Cairns is a tourist town, it has local residents who can trace their heritage back six or seven generations to the first convicts to be shipped out from Great Britain. It was one of these locals who my partner and I received a call about one hot summers day.

The job we were given was a scenario we both knew well. An elderly woman hadn't been seen for a few days and when a neighbour had knocked on her door he'd noticed a bad smell and a lot of flies around the doors and windows. Not wanting to trespass he'd called our station and as luck would have it Karen and I got the job.

We arrived and spoke to the bloke from next door. He was a nice old guy and seemed a bit upset about what we all suspected we'd find inside. Karen and I asked him for a bit of background information and he was happy to supply it. June was the name of the lady who lived there, she was in her late eighties, quite frail and generally kept to herself. She had a son named Colin, who according to the neighbour, "was not quite right in the head" and who he believed still lived with her but he couldn't say for sure as he hadn't seen him around for a few years.

We had a look around the house and it was as described. An old Queenslander style house and despite the heat, had every window closed. This wasn't unusual as for reasons I guess I'll understand when I'm older myself, a lot of the oldies kept their windows shut, even in the heat of summer. We couldn't find any signs of forced entry or damage to the house apart from the gently decaying facade which was again normal in the wet tropics. What we did notice was the smell. We really noticed that.

We knocked on the front door a few times and when no-one answered it, I tried the handle. It was unlocked and so, prompted by a gentle nudge from my senior partner, I opened it and stepped inside.

If the smell from outside was bad, inside it was ten times worse. The front door opened into a long hallway which ran from the front door through to the back door, typical of old Queenslander houses and designed to cool the house down if you left the doors open so the breezes could blow. All of the rooms opened off the hallway.

We hit the jackpot almost immediately as the doorway to the right opened up into the lounge room. One look inside there told us where the smell was coming from. In the centre of the room, sat in a faded old recliner was a very dead person.

Normally, when we found a body we would approach it and check for signs of life as both of us had been caught out before by drug overdoses who were still hanging on with faint heartbeats etc. In this case, we could tell from a distance that this one was definitely a dead body and one which had been in that chair for at least a week. A combination of the heat, humidity and insects had corrupted the body to the point where it had bloated and split open in parts.

I've dealt with a few nasty situations and so had Karen but this one was past both of our thresholds so gagging, we both bolted out the front door.

Once outside, we both took a few deep breaths and managed to stop ourselves from tossing our cookies onto the front lawn. After a moment I said, "I thought that we were looking for a frail, little old lady."

Karen answered, "That was definitely not little."

I paused and said "I didn't get a good look at it in that light, but that looked like a bloke to me."

Karen agreed "Uh huh, and we've got to look through the house and see if there are any suspicious circumstances."

We didn't really have any other options and a few other neighbours had come out to watch the show, so we had to square our shoulders, hold our breaths and march back in. While it's not a smell you ever get used to. We knew what to expect now and so we both managed to keep the gagging to a minimum. And of course professional curiousity had set in.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark room I started to take in more details. The body in the lounge room was big, I estimated that even before the gasses bloated them, at probably over one hundred kilograms. And it was definitely male. A big bloated man wearing a dressing gown.

Walking around the chair I couldn't see any signs of trauma apart from the insect infestations. What was strange was the amount of foreign matter down the chin and over the front of the gown. Like vomit but not quite.

We both stood back and started to look around the room. There were two recliners and an old TV set. Lots of photos in a variety of frames rested on every flat surface of furniture in the room, all were black and white.

I'm not proud of what happened next. I'm not the bravest guy in the world but I've stood my ground in some hard situations, but when you're in a room like that, looking at a corpse like that and a high pitched voice asks "What are you doing in my house?" then I comfort myself by thinking that most people would react.

Karen and I reacted in a way which wasn't exactly in accordance with our training or experience. We bolted, again, for the front door.

It was an instinctive reaction and once we'd reach the safety of the front porch we both turned to face our fears.

Out of the house came a very indignant, frail, white haired old lady. Wearing a worn and threadbare house dress and slippers, she charged out to confront us.

"Why were you in my house?" She demanded.

We were trying to adjust to this turn of events and so I looked to Karen for her experience to take the lead. She said "We were just checking to see if you were alright. The neighbours were concerned about you."

"Of course I'm alright, what gives you the right to just barge into my house without even knocking?"

"We tried knocking, but no-one answered." I jumped in.

"I was having a nap. I didn't hear any knocking." She was still indignant.

"Um, who is the person in the lounge room?" asked Karen.

"That's Colin, I hope you didn't disturb him."

Karen and I looked at each other. We were both starting to fill in the gaps. This was obviously June and the body in the lounge room must be her son.

Karen asked "Is Colin ok, he didn't look very well?"

June replied "He's been sick for a couple of weeks, he needs his rest."

I couldn't help myself "Don't you think Colin smells a bit?" Karen shot me a look which I think had daggers in it.

"He's a big boy, big boys sweat in the heat."

"Who's been looking after Colin?" To give Karen her credit, she was showing genuine concern. She didn't show any sign of how weird she must have thought this situation was. Maybe it was my inexperience but I was struggling to hold it together as well as she was.

"I've been looking after him, I've been feeding him chicken soup. He hasn't had much of an appetite though these last few days."

I felt my stomach heave as I realised that the foreign matter over Colin's chin and dressing gown was from a weeks worth of food that his mum had been spooning into his mouth after he had died.

From there, Karen stepped up and was the consummate professional. She kept chatting to June while I went back in and checked the house for any other surprises. There was nothing else obviously wrong and so I called for the coroners wagon and also for an ambulance. We had a duty of care to get June to the hospital for both a physical and mental welfare checkup.

The ambulance arrived first and so Karen helped June get changed and taken away, despite her protests. We had to promise to look after Colin in her absence and so that was our next priority.

With June gone we went back in and examined Colin more thoroughly. There were no signs of this having been a suspicious death and so our next course of action was to get him to the morgue for a post-mortem.

While we waited for the coroners van we looked around the house and spoke further with the neighbours to find out a bit more about Colin. We found that he was around fifty five years of age, was very reclusive and had severe learning disabilities. He had dropped out of school at around eight years of age and had apparently endured some pretty nasty tormenting from other kids when he was young. As a result the neighbours said that they only ever saw him outside of the house at night time and had often seen or heard of him being seen roaming through the local hills and rainforest. It seemed like it had been a sad, lonely life for Colin.

Eventually the van arrived and the two morgue attendants came in with us to examine the situation.

Normally, these guys did all of the hands on work but both Karen and I had dealt with some other situations with the larger bodies and knew that we would have to lend a hand.

They got the stretcher set-up beside the recliner and then we all gloved up and started trying to prise Colin up and onto the stretcher. In situations like that bodily fluids sink to the lower parts of the body, and with the heat and corruption Colin's calves and thighs had "melted" into the fabric of the recliner. We had to literally tear him off the seat. With his weight it took the four of us to move him and I can't begin to describe the smell as we were that close to him.

Finally though, he was on the stretcher and the guys put a sheet over him. They took the handles at either end and Karen and I went on either side to help support them.

We were fine going down the straight hallway and out of the front door, but the front steps turned at an abrupt right angle down from the porch and so we had to twist the stretcher to get it around this corner. We were puffing and cursing as we had to tilt the stretcher to get it around this bend. Having around a dozen onlookers from nearby houses didn't make the job any easier.

As the stretcher tilted on it's side I could see the body starting to shift to the left. Without thinking I grabbed Colin's right arm to hold him in place.

Gravity was not my friend on that day. Gravity took hold of Colin while the stretcher was tilted and pulled him towards the ground on the left hand side of the stretcher. I held on as hard as I could to his right arm but I couldn't arrest his fall and so off he toppled to the ground.

This happened in front of all of the neighbours. Colin's bloated corpse hit the ground with a wet thud and our shoes were all splattered with bodily fluids. Strangely enough, this wasn't the worst part for me.

I hadn't let go of his right arm. I can't begin to describe my horror when I realised that I had literally torn it off his shoulder joint when he fell.

I'm not going to go into further detail about that part. It's gross, it was undignified for Colin and it was horrible for us. I'm so glad that his mum wasn't there for that part. I know that her grip on reality was strained but I think that the horror of this moment would have even penetrated the fog she was experiencing.

For anyone who has been through this type of traumatic situation, you will probably realise that we all react differently. Sometimes there are tears, sometimes laughter. Laughter in this situation is slightly hysterical and more from nerves than humour. That's where our reactions went. I know for a fact that the neighbours couldn't see how this was impacting us as I heard about it at length from our duty Sergeant back at the station later after several of the neighbours called and complained.

Eventually we got Colin (all of him) into the van and on his way. He had lost his robe during his fall and so I went back and picked it up. Lying beside the robe was a little black notebook. I picked it up and started reading through it.

The writing was childlike and barely legible. It was hard to read as Colin had obviously never really learned how to spell and so each word was his version of how he thought it should be spelt.

The pages were filled with trivia that was obviously important to him, like how many bottles he had collected for recycling, or a drawing of what looked like a dog chasing a cat. I was about to take it inside when I read the last page. I won't try to replicate Colin's spelling but my interpretation of it was "I've hidden the money for my new bike under the wheelbarrow. Don't let the bad man get it."

I showed the book to Karen and I said "It looks like that was important to him. I don't know how long it'll be, if ever, before June comes home - she's likely to end up in a nursing home. I'll check under the wheelbarrow and we can drop whatever it is in to her, or leave it in the house." From our conversations with the neighbours it didn't look like these two had any living relatives, or any that cared enough to visit them. No one had any idea who or where Colin's father was.

I walked around to the back of the house and looked around through the overgrown grass. By the back shed there was a an old rusted wheelbarrow lying upside down. I flipped it over to see what was underneath.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it sure wasn't several dozen stacks of plastic wrapped piles of $100 notes. I'm not sure what kind of bike Colin was thinking of buying, but with this stash it looked like he could buy the whole bike shop.

We piled the bags up and took them down to the station. It turned out that there was twenty thousand dollars in that pile of cash.

Our fraud squad went through it all and tried to track down the serial numbers of the cash. None of it was flagged as stolen and we had no reports of any large quantities of cash, or at least that large, having been stolen. There were no other references to the money in Colin's notebook.

As the money was clean we had a responsibility to take it and the notebook to June in the hospice where she was staying. She had been moved into permanent care by that time as it turned out that she was suffering from dementia.

June was delighted to get the notebook. She didn't really seem to care about the money, she was just more excited to have the contact from Colin. She spoke about him in the present tense and seemed to think of the notebook as a letter from him. I think she was quite liberal in her interpretations of his writings and as she read some of the pages out to Karen and I, we were both quite moved by how she translated his scrawlings into questions about her health and how well he was looking after the house.

We arranged to have the money deposited into her bank account and hopefully that helped her to life out the rest of her time with the care that she needed.

The origins of that money remain a mystery. June had no idea of where it had come from. Colin had never worked a day in his life and didn't appear to even have a bank account. I've thought about it often and wonder if in his wanderings through the rainforest he had come across one of the many drug labs or plantations hidden in the jungle around Cairns and whether he had stumbled across some criminals stash of drug money. I guess that's a secret Colin will take with him to his grave.