David Eastman inquiry opens fresh can of worms as murder mystery deepens

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/06/david-eastman-inquiry-opens-fresh-can-of-worms

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David Harold Eastman is a convicted murderer.

He is also, according to one of the lawyers closest to his case, “the perfect patsy”.

Eastman is undoubtedly (again in the words of one who has spent too much time with him) “a very difficult bastard”. Indeed, he has a razor-like capacity for assessing, in a split second, a person’s character traits and flaws – then firing an Exocet of profanity directly into their emotional bunker.

Yes he’s acutely antisocial. But he’s also a highly driven genius – an idiosyncratic former Treasury official with an enormous appetite for mind-boggling detail and an almost superhuman capacity for rational analysis. Those who know him well will invariably confirm his profound intelligence – not least because he’s told all of them that himself.

His name is still painted on the honour board at Canberra Grammar School. I’ve sat in the War Memorial Hall at that school many times and cast an eye up and down that list of school duxes.

And it always stops here, about halfway through, at 1961, on DH Eastman.

For almost two decades now that honour board has been the basis of one of the lowest scoring questions at school quiz nights across Canberra: Who is the 1961 dux of Canberra Grammar who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1989 murder of the Australian Capital Territory’s police chief, assistant commissioner Colin Winchester?

Everyone knows the answer to that question about an intriguing case that has earned a place in the cultural pantheon of Australian mystery alongside baby Azaria and the Beaumont children.

As millions of words of evidence from a Kafkaesque myriad of coronial inquests, the murder trial itself, appeals and inquiries, attest, Eastman – who is now 68 – barely coped on the outside before he was convicted of shooting Winchester twice in the head after a long, convoluted dispute with the ACT police service that began with a fight with neighbours, an assault charge and his loss of employment.

Now, after almost 7,000 days inside, Eastman may soon be freed. Late last month an inquiry by acting Justice Brian Martin found that his 1995 conviction should be quashed because a “substantial miscarriage of justice” happened during the trial.

Martin, who has made his recommendations to the ACT supreme court, found that Eastman was convicted on the basis of “deeply flawed” forensic evidence and that he was disadvantaged during the trial because the prosecution failed to disclose all relevant information to his legal representatives.

Martin found that a critical prosecution witness, forensic expert Robert Barnes, who matched gunshot residue from the murder scene to Eastman’s car, “lacked independence and objectivity”. Martin found there were also “inadequacies and flaws” in Barnes’s methodology.

A strong alternative possibility, put forward by Eastman’s defenders and many in the ACT legal community, asserts that Italian organised crime figures killed Winchester because he was threatening the illegal drug trade.

I watched part of Eastman’s trial in 1995, during which Eastman repeatedly sacked his legal team and often represented himself.

Eastman would oscillate between impassive, though intent, observer of the legal process as it played out in the court, to an abusive provocateur. I saw him throw a glass of water in the courtroom and swear, profanely, at the magistrate.

This was de rigueur courtroom behaviour for a man whose mental clarity appeared highly questionable at times but who was, nonetheless, deemed fit to stand trial.

Upon his conviction there were sighs of relief from police and from within the ACT’s legal fraternity which was divided, though never quite evenly, over the question of his guilt.

It is instructive that Justice Martin, while recommending that Eastman ought now be freed, said he remained “fairly certain” that Eastman killed Winchester, who was shot while parking his car in his driveway in Deakin, a prosperous, politically conservative and rather anodyne suburb in Canberra’s inner-south on 10 January, 1989.

He said: “I am fairly certain that the applicant is guilty of the murder of the deceased, but a nagging doubt remains. There is also material pointing to an alternative hypothesis consistent with innocence, the strength of which is unknown. Allowing such a miscarriage of justice to stand uncorrected would severely undermine public confidence in the administration of justice.’’

It was while Eastman represented himself that significant elements of the prosecution case (not least into the forensic evidence) went unchallenged. Ultimately Eastman was convicted largely on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

A constant refrain from lawyers – and some police – after Eastman’s conviction, was that while Eastman may not have been the murderer he was certainly capable of such violence and that the ACT would be safer with him inside.

Jeremy Thompson, a retired journalist who covered the first inquest into Winchester’s murder and has followed the case closely since, says he has always doubted Eastman’s capacity to kill.

“I never thought Eastman had it in him to kill anyone. In his quest to get his public service job back he harassed many journalists, mostly women, and his temper and threats were legendary. As far as I'm aware, though, he never followed through – he was known as an unpleasant, loud, aggressive blowhard,” Thompson says.

“Significant circumstantial evidence does implicate the volatile Eastman: he had a grudge against Winchester because he would not drop an assault charge against Eastman which may have hindered his bid to re-enter the public service; various witnesses heard Eastman make threats against Winchester; Eastman bought two guns in 1988 – because he feared a neighbour he was in dispute with, he said, and, interviewed the day after the murder, he could not account for his movements the night before.

“But the Calabrian mafia had an even stronger motive – they assumed Winchester was a corrupt cop who was protecting them from prosecution for growing marijuana at Bungendore and Guyra. In fact Winchester was overseeing a sting operation against the criminals. When 11 Calabrians were arrested they must have felt betrayed. They were due for trial in early February 1989 – but Winchester, who was to testify against them, was killed in January. The trial was abandoned when the state's prime witness refused to testify.”

Chris Staniforth, a former director of ACT Legal Aid who had extensive dealings with Eastman after the Winchester murder, gave evidence to Martin’s inquiry.

“Seen from a decent seat as the funder of Mr Eastman’s defence, the man simply didn't have a chance to put to the jury any hypothesis consistent with his innocence, including the bodgy ballistic evidence, knowledge of which was around during the trial. Unfortunately the systemic inability to deal with his erratic, offensive behaviour stopped him getting a fair trial,” Staniforth says.

Staniforth was a regular target of vituperative attack from Eastman who, he says, had a profound “talent for assessing character, spotting the weakness and attacking, mercilessly, that vulnerability”.

“I mean Eastman was certainly the Jonathan Swift of Canberra, circa 1990. The thing is he would attack, incisively, but without any humour. He had no capacity for humour at all which made him detestable to so many people. Of course, this made him the perfect patsy for a crime that he may or may not have committed. He was just so noncompliant with everybody.”

So, how would Eastman’s release be greeted throughout Canberra?

“I was told last night that intense interest is developing in the ‘upper circles’ of Canberra,” Staniforth says.

Why?

“Because so very many people have crossed swords with him over the years. Simple.”

Eastman has served 19 years for murder when the veracity of his conviction is clearly questionable. Many convicted murderers in Australia serve significantly less time.

So the postscript to 20 years of ongoing speculation, despite the conviction, about whether Eastman did or didn’t murder, begins. Precisely because of what Martin has determined.

“He's clearly disordered – if anyone thinks 19 years in jail has cured that, in my view they too are disordered,” says Staniforth.

“His negative self-perception of his ability to cope will dominate him, and his unlikeability, his noncompliance, will stop the bourgeois social workers from assisting his return to the community. I fear that we will soon see him back in criminal custody, all because we do not resource anywhere near adequately public provision of mental health services.”

So, the intrigue about David Harold Eastman intensifies while the mystery of the murder of Colin Winchester deepens.