By Karen Fredericks
Douglas Bruce Scott died in Berrimah jail in Darwin early in the morning of July 5, 1985. A police inquest and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody both ruled it was suicide. But Doug's widow, Lettie Scott, says she has evidence that her husband was murdered by prison officers, and that the murder has been systematically covered up by prison officials, police, the royal commission and the Northern Territory government.
Lettie Scott has filed a claim in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory which, she told Green Left Weekly, she believes will prove the multimillion-dollar inquiry, with its many "suicide" verdicts, was "nothing but a whitewash".
Lettie Scott has seen photographs of her dead husband hanging from a knotted sheet tied to a grate in the ceiling of his cell. She and her two daughters were shown the photographs by Mick Dodson and Geoffrey Barbaro — the lawyers assisting the commission in the NT — in April 1989. It is an image they will never forget.
"When we saw the photographs we started to scream, 'No, no, this is murder'", she said.
The photographs showed Scott suspended inches from the nine-foot-high ceiling, his feet dangling two to three feet from the floor. Around his neck was a plain sheet, tightly twisted and neatly tied in multiple knots, one underneath the other. The noose, she says, was tight around his neck and the knots were tight and close together. Lettie believes her husband did not make the noose.
Ever since her husband's death, Lettie has been fighting to prove that he did not kill himself. In April 1993 funds were made available through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission for her to obtain legal assistance. The Aboriginal and Islander Legal Service in Brisbane wrote to the police forensic department in Darwin for copies of the photographs tendered during the royal commission. Among the 22 photos the department sent were two of Doug Scott hanging in his cell.
Lettie told Green Left that these were not the same photographs she was shown in 1989. In this second set of pictures, the sheet around Doug Scott's neck was orange and patterned with trains, boats and planes. Instead of a tightly twisted noose, the sheet was arranged as what Lettie describes as "a real bulky, loose, rubbishy looking affair, with one great big bulky slip knot". Also, she says, in the second set of photos her dead husband's feet were only about two inches off the floor.
Geoffrey Barbaro agreed to speak to Green Left about the case. He said he believes Lettie Scott has an "incredibly strong case" against the NT government and that he is prepared to testify in a hearing should he be requested to do so.
Barbaro confirmed that he and Mick Dodson, now the Human Rights Commission social justice commissioner, privately showed Lettie Scott and her daughters original polaroids taken by a prison officer named Birbeck immediately after Doug Scott was found hanged. But his explanation for the discrepancy between these polaroids and police forensic photographs is different from Lettie's.
Barbaro said that Birbeck's polaroids were black and white shots taken with a flash in the early hours of the morning. The police shots were in colour and taken by natural light. In these circumstances, he said, the patterns on the sheet could have been washed out by the flash in the polaroids, though visible in the forensic photographs. But, he acknowledges, in the later photographs the police (or somebody) had "stupidly" retied the noose.
Even without the photographs, the report of the commission inquiry into Doug Scott's death raises some troubling questions.
For example, while the commissioner found that Scott was in "lawful custody", the body of the report notes several points which throw that finding into serious doubt.
According to the report, Scott was being held on remand for breach of a reporting condition imposed while he was on bail for a charge relating to an assault on his wife outside a Darwin hotel on February 22, 1985. Lettie Scott agrees that Doug "slapped" her while they were arguing outside the hotel, but says she did not call the police, and when the police were called by the publican, she asked them not to arrest her husband and told them she did not wish to lay charges.
When Doug was arrested, and given bail on strict, daily, reporting conditions, and on an undertaking not to go near his wife, she says she approached the police prosecutor on many occasions and begged him not to proceed with the charges and to let Doug have contact with her. Her requests were denied.
Lettie Scott says Doug reported to the police, daily, from late February until May 25 when, suffering severe stress from the fear of being found still to be seeing his wife, he failed to report. For this three-month period the Scotts had been begging the prosecutor and the magistrate to finalise the matter, but the case was continually adjourned, despite the fact that Doug pleaded guilty at each hearing.
Just after midnight on May 26 the police arrested Doug Scott at the Bagot Reserve, for breach of his reporting conditions. They took him immediately into custody, leaving Lettie with their infant son, Nathan, to make a three-hour trip home, by foot.
The remand warrant dated May 31, which ostensibly provided the legal authority for Doug Scott's incarceration at the time of his death, describes the charges against him as "use obscene/indecent language and other offences". Lettie told Green Left that this formulation was necessary because of her refusal to press any charge. (The police claim that during the incident outside the hotel, Scott swore at Lettie and at another woman.)
By the authority of the warrant, Scott was remanded in custody in Berrimah prison from May 31 to July 29, a total of 60 days — for allegedly swearing at his wife outside a pub.
Under NT law at that time, the longest lawful remand period was 15 days unless a defendant consented to longer. There is no evidence that Scott did so, but the commissioner's report nevertheless found that he was "lawfully" in custody when he died on July 5, 20 days before his case was due to be heard.
The report also found that the police investigation of Scott's death was "satisfactory" and even "superior to most", despite the fact that the police report was inconsistent with the inquiry's own findings in many important respects. One example is the police finding that Scott had climbed up on a plastic stool and kicked the stool away as he hung himself. The commission report makes no reference to such a stool, finding that all furniture in the cell was fixed to the floor and that it would have been "possible" for Scott to have stood upon the table and then "stepped off".
The report notes that on May 31, 1985, Scott was treated by the prison nurse for a "closed, badly swollen and bruised" left eye. It refers to the injury as "puzzling" but concludes that he did it to himself, possibly during an earlier attempt at suicide.
Lettie visited her husband on Wednesdays. On each visit, she says, he had black eyes. On her last visit the left side of his face was "all smashed up very bad, it was just dark purple and blue". She asked him who did it to him, and he pointed surreptitiously at the prison officer standing guard. "He was trembling with fear. He said, 'I'll never get out of here alive'. Two days later he was dead."
The commissioner found that, in the death of Douglas Bruce Scott, "there was no foul play on the part of any prison officer, any inmate or any other person. There is no evidence to suggest that the deceased was subject while in custody to any harassment or discriminatory behaviour by any person which contributed to his decision to take his life."
Lettie Scott says she has been obliged to leave her home in the NT to escape police harassment and anonymous violence against herself and her family. She is now living in hiding while she proceeds with her case against the NT government.
"We are living in another world here in Australia", she says of her family, "a world that the majority of Australians know nothing of".
(Green Left attempted to contact Mick Dodson at the Human Rights Commission and Marshall Perron, chief minister of the NT, for their comments regarding the Scott case. Neither was available for comment. Michael Deegan, senior adviser to special minister of state Frank Walker, assured us that he was "investigating" the matter following Lettie Scott's representations to the prime minister.)