In brief, therefore, unless the Crown had failed to persuade the jury that the applicant's story as to drug stupor was untrue, the inevitable alternative inference was that the offenders had agreed to terminate the lives of their victims and to get away from the scene as soon as practicable, and that at that scene of the crime, understood widely but properly, Camilleri both was present and had reached an agreement or understanding with Beckett as to both the killings and their own escape. The ground therefore is not made out.

An overwhelming Crown case

92 The defence was conducted on the basis that, although Camilleri was in the car with Beckett when the girls got into it and remained in the car until some hours after they had been killed, he did no more than perhaps say hello to them, being for the whole of the time grossly affected by heroin and for most of the time insensible. On his case, he was conscious or awake only for a short time and on a few occasions - when the girls were encountered and Beckett, driving the car, talked to them and made room for them by removing the television set; when the girls were with Beckett at the beach and he, Camilleri, absented himself; when Beckett was away from the car murdering the girls; when Beckett used petrol to burn something; when the shoes were bought at Tuggeranong; and when Beckett threw a knife or two from the bridge in Canberra. The Crown was able to suggest to the jury with much force that Camilleri's version was intended to have him emerge from his stupor at convenient points at which he could describe events tending to incriminate his companion before lapsing into a stupor again. We do not think a reasonable jury would have regarded that account, put forward in the police interview of 12 November, as sufficiently credible to leave them in doubt about his guilt. It was an extraordinary and most implausible story, told with hesitancy and suffering badly from inconsistencies and improbabilities. It could not account for the damning seminal stain on Lauren's shirt: that stark and intractable fact could not be explained away. The idea that Camilleri was sunk in a stupor for most of the ten hours, becoming briefly alert only in time to observe certain notable events inculpating his companion, will not bear critical examination. Quite apart from the semen-stained shirt, how did Beckett single-handedly keep two girls prisoner during a ten hour journey punctuated by so many stops and so many sexual assaults? How, for instance, was it that one girl did not make her escape from the car while the other was being sexually assaulted by the only conscious male some distance from it at Ben Boyd National Park? What of the incidents at Wingan Point? Did one girl wait obediently in the car with the stupified Camilleri while Beckett raped the other in the forest? How can the beer carton marker on the log be explained on the defence case? If Camilleri was fast asleep at Fiddler's Creek, how did Beckett manage to get the two girls all the way down to the creek and kill them one by one? The improbability, indeed, the practical impossibility, of this is manifest from the independent descriptions of the country and the photographs. The defence case was that no rope was used to tie the girls' hands or lead them. How did one man control them? Each girl must have been in the most desperate fear for her life at that stage and have thought that nothing could be lost by trying to escape. One should read again Camilleri's extraordinary account to the police of what he saw and heard at Fiddler's Creek; and the whole of what he told them, both in the two formal interviews and otherwise; and the psychologist's evidence of what he told her at Goulburn Gaol; and what he said on two separate occasions about the burning of female clothing and a towel supposedly found behind a laundromat. It is all unconvincing and redolent of guilt.

93 The defence faced altogether too many questions. For example, why did Camilleri and Beckett stay together and act together after the killings? What of the admitted burning at the lookout? What of the admitted throwing away of the knives? What of the admitted cleaning of the car? What of the concerted false denials of any knowledge of the girls? What of the admitted return to the lookout for the second burning? What of the earlier abduction of Ms G.?

94 In his false alibi, at a time when he had no reason to conceal his supposed use of heroin, Camilleri claimed to have been injected not with heroin but with amphetamine. This would not, on the evidence, have made him sleepy: quite the reverse. The Crown said that he changed to heroin in his account once he thought it necessary to confess and avoid his having been in the girls' company.

95 Beckett's admitted role in the rapes and killings, and his character as otherwise shown, made him a man whose evidence had to be approached with great caution. Yet there is much force in the Crown's contention that his evidence, although he was an accomplice and the actual killer of both girls, was uncommonly persuasive. His terrible description of the rapes, and indeed the whole journey, and his account of what took place at Fiddler's Green Creek, both before and during the killings, have a sickening ring of truth about them. They are notable, as the Crown pointed out time and again in its address, for the absence of any attempt to suppress or explain away facts showing himself in the worst possible light. Even to a reader of the transcript, they suggest a man without pity, without conscience, giving a matter of fact account of horrible events as if they were commonplace.

96 No reasonable jury, properly instructed in every way, would have entertained the defence hypothesis of an inert and inoffensive man, stupified by drugs, waking only occasionally and playing no role in a prolonged series of rapes.

97 It was, however, said at the trial, and it is said now, on his behalf, that for the jury to go beyond a finding of rape to one of murder was too great a leap. But there is no gulf between the findings. On the contrary, the allegations of rape and murder, while of course separate and distinct, were very closely related. The Crown case was that the one set of crimes led naturally, indeed, in the particular circumstances of this case, almost inevitably, to the other. The Crown case was that the men hunted together, caught their prey together, sated themselves together and at the end of it all, in order to escape many years' imprisonment, killed together. Once the girls were dead Camilleri, who must on any reasonable view have known that Beckett had murdered them, continued to associate closely with him and to act together with him in ways which tended to conceal their connection with the girls. Camilleri's assertions and denials can only be described as inconsistent, improbable and unconvincing. Once the jury rejected the ten hour stupor hypothesis and found him to be a rapist, they could not, if properly instructed, in the light of all the evidence reasonably have failed to convict him of the murders.

Sentence