CONSPIRACY? | THE FACE OF EVIL

By Monday the media coverage of the massacre had raised mob-consciousness in Port Arthur to such a level that a special contingent of police and security guards had to be stationed at the entrances to Royal Hobart Hospital, ostensibly to guard against the possibility of the injured assassin being lynched. International press and camera crews were being ferried on ghoulish sightseeing tours to photograph bullet holes, burnt cars, buildings, and blood . . . lots and lots of blood. The still-smouldering ruins of the guest house, the victims' BMW, the 4-wheel drive with the ominous dark stains seeping from under the driver's door, and the blood-stained seat covers of the Corolla at the service station, became the focus of every photographer and media hopeful trying to achieve some claim to fame -- however brief. Emotive statements squeezed from shocked survivors and the relatives of those killed were cut, edited and embellished to fill the pages of the international tabloids and provide impact for TV anchormen around the world.

This was news!

And it had to be told . . . even if it weren't all true.

Slowly the stories began to unveil more and more of the killer's background in the lead up to the crime. As with Dunblane, Bryant was portrayed as a 'loner' with a 'history of mental illness' who had always had problems with society. He 'loved guns' and was accused of 'bestiality' and an 'unnatural interest in sex'. He was considered to be 'spooky' and 'strange'.

The scripting had begun.

All that remained now was to destroy the 'evil one' and get rid of the main cause of the problem . . . Guns!

In England the Queen and the Prime Minister were pushing for tougher gun laws, while in Australia, Prime Minister John Howard was campaigning vigorously for legislation to ban the sale and use of all semi-automatic weapons in that country.

American commentators were predicting that the issue of gun control would figure prominently in the up-and-coming Presidential elections later that year -- with the Democrats saying that the Republicans would be 'very vulnerable' when this issue came before the public.

It was all happening exactly to plan.

This time they had got the formula right!

Sal pulled up a chair and sat alongside Donna. "I've been following up on those earlier massacres in Australia," she began, "and I've come across something interesting."

"Like what?"

"It seems that Bob Hawke, the Prime Minister of Australia at the time of the Hoddle Street massacre in '87, used the incident to try and stop the gun lobby, but the then Premier of NSW, Barry Unsworth, said that it would, and I quote, 'take a massacre in Tasmania' to make it happen."

"Where'd you get this from?" Donna asked with renewed interest.

"From an Australian TV documentary called 'Four Corners'," Sal replied. "But even more interesting is that the leader of the gun lobby in Brisbane, on the same program, commented on just how easy it would be to 'programme somebody to do just that' . . ."

"But why Tasmania?"

"Well that's not so hard to understand when you see that the rest of Australia already had some sort of gun control and Tasmania was the only state where the gun lobby had been strong enough to resist any such action against them. Up until recently you could still buy any assault weapon you liked, over the counter, no questions asked. Hell, these guys had no gun laws whatsoever before 1993, and even then it was still possible to buy automatic and semi-automatic weapons with the minimum of fuss. . . . It seems pretty obvious to me why they chose a place like that."

Donna's brow puckered. "Yeah, I take your point. Anything else?"

"Yeah, more backgrounding on the gun thing. The Australian government introduced something called the 'Guns Act', after the Sydney massacre in '91 -- the Wade Frankum one -- but it turned out to be a toothless tiger. It was fairly obvious that what they really needed to make this anti-gun-lobby thing work was a huge public outcry against the use of guns in private hands. The combination of Dunblane and Port Arthur only a few years later, provided the perfect catalyst for them to push for a more drastic set of laws. The government got its public outcry and could move with impunity to remove private weapons from the public arena."

Donna raised an approving eyebrow. "Hey, Sal, I'm impressed. We'll make an investigative journalist out of you yet."

Sal squirmed with delight. "Say, but that's not all! There's more!" she continued excitedly, bubbling with girlish enthusiasm. "Searching through the Oklahoma file this morning I came across a couple of other things."

"Yeah . . ."

"McVeigh's commanding officer described him as 'a good soldier, a fine Christian young man and a credit to his family and his town'. It just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense for a guy like that to do what he's supposed to have done . . . that is, until you see the President trying to push his Counter Terrorism Legislation through Congress, authorising the government to spend a billion of our hard-earned bucks to fight what's said to have happened in Oklahoma. Oh, and the other thing that got me, is that he said, 'accept the fact that things will happen we can never understand or justify.' . . . What in hell do you think he meant by that?"

"Exactly what he said, Sal! And you for one are trying to understand some of those things right now."

Sal's jaw dropped. "Shit, but if you can't trust your own President, who can you trust?"

"Precisely! That's why I haven't told you everything," Donna replied. "Not because I don't trust you, but because I can't trust anyone else and it'd be dangerous for you to know too much at this stage."

"Gee thanks, chief, but I'm a big girl now," Sal said, pulling a face. "I'm sure I could handle it."

Donna shook her head. "Not just yet. But you'll know soon enough. I promise."

Sal's disappointment was obvious. "You're the boss," she began slowly. "But you know -"

"I know," Donna replied. "Thanks for your help. You're doing a great job and I'd be lost without you. That's why I don't want you killed. OK?"

"OK," Sal acknowledged grudgingly. "But you will let me know what you want me to do, won't you?"

Donna nodded again. "You're already doing it. Now what?"

Sal consulted her notes.

"I've got some backgrounding on Bryant that others don't seem to have connected as yet. There's the usual run of stuff about him being a loner and a nutcase who went around frightening young girls and children and if you were to believe some of the reports all he did all day was sit in a dark room watching pornographic videos and wanking off. But there are some interesting connections here."

"Like?"

"Well the story goes something like this -- while hitch-hiking in Tasmania in '91 he met an heiress called Helen Harvey. This Harvey woman was middle-aged and single and she invited him to move in with her as a companion. Now I'm all for middle-aged women having young male companions, for whatever reason, but a year later she ended up being killed in a freak car accident a few miles from where they lived, and Bryant inherited the property together with a half a million bucks. The next year his father, a retired Waterside Worker from the mainland, visited Bryant in Tasmania. His body was later dragged from one of the farm dams. It had a bullet wound in it and a diver's weight-belt strapped around his waist and yet the coroner found no evidence of foul play, even though no firearm was ever located in the vicinity."

"Uh huh. So this guy went to visit his wealthy son, shot himself, put on a weight belt, and threw himself into the farm dam, huh?"

Sal grinned. "Sure seems that way according to the locals," she replied. "Anyway, the story gets even more tricky. Bryant's inheritance was part of a famous lottery fortune, 'Tattersalls', which was apparently shared by two others, an academic called Dr. John Flynn and his Catholic priest brother, Father Jeremy Flynn. Just shortly before the massacre Dr. Flynn was arrested in India and held without trial -- apparently on a trumped-up charge of smuggling valuable artefacts out of the country. This prevented him from returning to Australia for several months. These artefacts by the way, turned out to be some old coins which Flynn, as a registered collector, was actually entitled to collect. Anyhow Dr. Flynn was released after the massacre, without an apology, and the Australian government took a media pasting for not having intervened sooner."

Sal waved another piece of paper under Donna's nose.

"But there's more!" she said with a large grin, revelling in her new-found role of investigator. "The second brother -- Father Jeremy Flynn -- turned out to be something of an aviator. He set out to fly a twin-engined 'Beech Baron' from the mainland down to Tasmania on the 21st. of April -- just one week before the massacre -- and both he and his plane disappeared without trace somewhere in Bass Straight. To date there's been no sign of him, his passenger, or any wreckage."

"And your point is . . .?" Donna queried.

"Well if I wanted to set up something like Port Arthur, would I want the remaining members of the dead-woman's family turning up at the place, especially during that week? I don't think so! . . . I think that they were both removed. One temporarily, and the other for keeps. It's too much of a coincidence."

Donna reflected for a moment. "You could be right, but I think it's drawing a pretty long bow. Still, anything's possible in this game. And it does seem a helluva coincidence that both the remaining heirs to a large fortune were put out of action at the same time that Port Arthur was going down. . . . Let's keep going down there and see where it leads."

"But that's not the only thing that strikes me as peculiar in all of this. The only two cops on the peninsular were lured from the scene by an anonymous phone caller purporting to know the whereabouts of a large heroin cache in some remote location -- which of course never existed -- and the massacre took place four minutes after they radioed their arrival there. Meanwhile the Tasmanian police were somehow stopped from attending the site for nearly six hours while the Australian Intelligence Security Organisation, A.S.I.O., took charge in a State jurisdiction, supposedly because the shootout had been classified as a 'terrorist attack' and not some crazed gunman on a rampage. . . . It just doesn't stack up!"

"I don't know what you've turned up here, Sal, but it sure doesn't sound kosher to me either. One doesn't involve the nation's top security organisation in something like this unless there's a damned good reason. . . . Let me know what else you find out."

Sal made as if to leave, but Donna caught her by the arm. "I know it's early days yet, but how did you go with those comparisons of Dunblane and Port Arthur?"

"I took a quick look at 'em and you were right," Sal replied. "It's pretty much like reading the same stuff all over again, only with local references thrown in to make the whole thing look more convincing. Phrases like: 'oddball', 'a dysfunctional man nursing a grudge', 'pervert', 'weird', 'the face of evil', 'morose', 'seeking revenge', 'loner', 'creepy', and of course the usual common thread of 'calls for tighter gun laws and increased security', abound in all of the reports both here and overseas. It's as though they've been copied to all concerned."

"And from what I've seen of how the system works, I believe they probably were."

"You're serious aren't you?"

"Deadly!" Donna replied. "And I mean in the real sense of the word. It's still too early to call, but I expect this to happen again and again until the bastards get their way."

"You mean more massacres . . .?"

"Yeah, I don't think we've seen the last of this type of activity just yet. It'll probably happen again in some other country to reinforce the need for civilian disarmament. And you can bet your buns that the U.S. will figure prominently somewhere in the near future. This time it'll be the death of our own women and children that'll be used to bring the gun lobby to its knees."

"You know something, don't you?" Sal asked quietly.

"More than you could imagine," Donna replied in a voice that was barely audible.