‘She should be alive but she’s not’: judgment looms in Amber Haigh trial decades in the making
“Amber Haigh should be alive … but she’s not,” crown prosecutor Paul Kerr told a silent and still courtroom.
“And she’s not alive because Robert Geeves and Anne Geeves wanted her child. So, they murdered her.”
Kerr told the court when Haigh went missing in June of 2002, she was just 19 years old. She was a new mother to a five-month-old son “whom she loved dearly, whom she cherished”. Haigh should have spent her 20s and the years beyond, the prosecutor said, as a mother to her child, building a career, a community, a home and a life.
“But Amber Haigh was denied these things. She should be alive but she’s not.”
This fiercely contested trial has been a reckoning decades in the making, sought for so long by so many who knew and loved Haigh.
On trial are Robert Geeves, 64, the father of Haigh’s child, and his wife, Anne Geeves, 64. Each faces one count of murder over her 2002 death. Each has pleaded not guilty, and has consistently denied any involvement in her disappearance: they have spent more than two years in prison awaiting trial. Their lawyers told the court this trial has seen no evidence that they murdered the teenager – that the only “rational verdict” is not guilty.
That Haigh met an untimely and premature death is accepted by both sides in this trial. But there is agreement on almost nothing else.
A girl who belonged nowhere
Haigh was 19 when she vanished without trace in June of 2002. Her body has never been found. No trace of her has been uncovered in the two decades since.
Her short life was marked by dislocation and drift.
She was shifted between family members as a child, seeking refuge from a violent father. She toiled to manage her epilepsy amid a chaotic, unstable home life. She was diagnosed with an intellectual disability and struggled at school.
Related: Notebook Amber Haigh left behind reveals loneliness and hurt in final days before disappearance
This trial has heard she was “easily led” and “vulnerable”. Friends described her as “bubbly” and loving, but also needy, that she was naive and quick to place trust in those undeserving of it.
Haigh was a young woman without a secure place in the world, prosecutors said, a child without a voice.
She had moved from Sydney as a teenager to live with her great-aunt in the town of Kingsvale in the Riverina. The court heard she found abuse there too: she was impregnated by a cousin – that pregnancy was terminated – and life in that home was volatile.
Haigh started a friendship with a teenager the same age who lived at the property next door. This was Robbie Geeves – the son of Robert and Anne Geeves. But, her murder trial was told, she soon began a sexual relationship with his father, Robert Geeves.
When Haigh fell pregnant to Robert Geeves, it caused an irreparable schism in the Geeves family: in this trial Robbie gave evidence as a prosecution witness, against his own parents as they stood trial for murder. Over days in the dock and the courtroom, he refused to acknowledge them.
Haigh’s child to Robert Geeves was born in January 2002. For the first few months of his life, the pair shifted between her great-aunt’s in Kingsvale; the Geeveses’ property next door; and a small bedsit flat she kept in the nearby town of Young.
But friends, police and government social workers were all concerned about her unsettled, itinerant existence. Documents tendered to court show a new mother ringed by chaos and confusion, pushed and pulled between three houses, but safe at none, and feeling she belonged nowhere.
The trial heard Haigh was devoted to her son, and loved him deeply, but struggled with the occasionally ceaseless demands of motherhood, that she lacked many of the “basic mothering skills”.
The last independent sighting of Haigh was on 3 June 2002, when a neighbour saw her, in the company of Robert Geeves, at the Young flat.
The Geeveses told police, in interviews played to the court, the last time they saw her was two days later, the evening of 5 June, when they drove her from their home in Kingsvale to Campbelltown railway station on Sydney’s southern outskirts, from where she was to visit her dying father in hospital.
At 8.49pm that day $500 was withdrawn from her bank account at an ATM in Campbelltown – the identity of the transactor has been contested – after which, on the Geeveses’ account, they dropped her at the front entrance to the station.
Haigh, the Geeveses said, gave her infant son a kiss and a cuddle, told him she would not be away long, and walked off towards the station. She wore thongs and a green jumper, and carried a blue and red striped bag.
It was 14 days – a full fortnight of no contact at all – before the Geeveses reported her to police as a missing person.
Haigh has never been seen since. No CCTV footage has ever been located to corroborate the Geeveses’ version of events, or her presence at Campbelltown. No trace of her has been found.
The prosecution case
The crown case theory, expounded at this trial, has been that Haigh’s death at the hands of the Geeveses was deliberate and was planned: that the intellectually disabled teenager was used as a surrogate by the couple to provide them with a baby they could not bear themselves.
The court heard that after having their son, Robbie, the Geeveses had endured three miscarriages and a tragic stillbirth. The prosecution alleged the Geeveses desperately wanted another baby, and Haigh was the way that dream could be realised.
“The crown case theory is that it was always the intention of the Geeves to assume the custody and care of [the child] from Amber,” the crown prosecutor Paul Kerr told the court in his opening address.
“But they knew that to do that, Amber had to be removed from the equation, because the Geeves knew that Amber would never voluntarily relinquish custody of [her child] and certainly not to them.
“When it became apparent that choosing their desired outcome would be more difficult than they first thought, the Geeves realised that a more fundamental action was needed. So, the crown asserts, they killed her.”
Weeks of this trial were dedicated to two incidents in Robert Geeves’s history.
The retired detective Gaetano Crea, the police officer who led the original taskforce investigating Haigh’s disappearance, told the court that Geeves had been charged with murder in 1993 after his then girlfriend Janelle Goodwin had been killed during an alleged drunken fight, “shot through the nose and killed in a struggle with a gun”.
Crea alleged to the court Geeves put a plastic bag over Goodwin’s head, covered her body in a sheet and tied it up.
“The crime scene was washed down … he put the body in a shed … in a wheelbarrow and left it there for two days and then decided to report it to police as an accident.”
Geeves was discharged at committal, then re-charged with murder – by Crea himself – before, ultimately, being acquitted at trial.
Crea told the court Geeves was also charged with sexual offences over two 13-year-old schoolgirls who had disappeared in 1986 and were discovered weeks later at Geeves’s property.
Geeves was acquitted on those charges, but convicted of hindering a police investigation.
But, the crown argued, despite these acquittals, the “true character” of Robert Geeves had been revealed during the trial.
“The crown says he is a violent and manipulative man,” Kerr told the court. “He is a man who expects to get what he wants, irrespective of what is right, legally or morally, he is a man who was prepared to manipulate and exploit a young, vulnerable, intellectually disabled girl who had already suffered sexual abuse and who was easily led.”
He said he was prepared to kill the teenager, to give his wife “the child that she so desperately wanted”.
On the police account, Anne Geeves was the driving force behind the crime.
“The whole basis of Mr Geeves having a sexual relationship with Amber was to extract a child from her, and keep the child,” Crea alleged to the court.
“Anne Geeves was the mastermind.”
The Geeveses were suspects – prime and then sole – almost immediately. They had motive, the crown argued, opportunity and capacity. They were, on their own account, the last people to see Haigh alive.
In closing, Kerr told the court Haigh’s was a life cut cruelly short.
“Amber Haigh should be alive but she’s not. And she’s not alive because Robert Geeves and Anne Geeves wanted her child.
“So, they murdered her.”
The defence
But the fixation on the Geeveses as the prime – and ultimately sole – suspects was a catastrophic flaw in the initial police investigation, and the subsequent crown case, the Geeveses’ defence barristers have argued.
The case against the couple, now two decades old, was blinded by a “presumption of guilt”, Michael King, acting for Anne Geeves, told the court in his closing address. Police were so certain they had their suspects, they closed their minds, and their investigation, to other potential leads.
An investigation already deferred – the two-week delay in Haigh being reported missing meant CCTV caches were wiped, and forensic evidence lost – was further compromised by an unwillingness to consider that Haigh may have actually been at Campbelltown the evening of 5 June, and may have encountered another person there.
“If Amber Haigh was not killed by the Geeveses – and there is no direct evidence that she was – this is the greatest tragedy in this case,” King argued. “That she met someone at the station, or on a train, who lured her and her money away, and then caused her death, and that that person or persons have escaped justice for their actions, escaped even any investigative scrutiny.”
Instead, King argued, the Geeveses suffered from an unjustified “presumption of guilt”.
“Everything that the Geeveses did was viewed through a haze of mistrust, suspicion and of community distaste,” he told the court.
“Anything that got in the way of … the case theory that the Geeveses killed Amber Haigh had to be swept aside.”
Phone intercepts placed by police in the home and car of the Geeveses were police “waging psychological investigative warfare” in the hope they would react and incriminate themselves.
“They didn’t,” King said.
Even intercepts presented as evidence of a consciousness of guilt, such as Robert Geeves telling his wife “don’t you roll on me” – cast as him imploring his wife not to give evidence against him – were viewed in the worst possible light, when benign explanations were obvious.
“Given that this conversation occurs at 2.58am and when they are in bed, without any other context, it can be assumed that the words have their normal meaning and are not a plea for protection.”
The evidence of fresh witnesses, averred to the Geeveses as holding vital new information against them, collapsed under cross-examination in court, a confusion of dates and times, of memories eroded and elided over decades.
King said the court heard no evidence on the murder of Haigh, “including any evidence at all of when it occurred, how it occurred, or where it occurred. Of these critical matters the evidence is completely silent.”
And nothing in this trial, he said, linked the Geeveses to the death of the teenager, arguing the prosecution case was inconsistent, confused and unsupported by any evidence.
“The only rational verdict, your honour, is not guilty,” he said.
“It is a shame it took 20 years for this to be brought to a head. It’s a shame that the family haven’t been able to put any of this behind them. It’s a shame that the Geeveses have had this hanging over their heads for 20 years. It is time to draw the line for once and for all.”
The judgment
This trial, held in the supreme court in Wagga Wagga, has been judge-alone at the application of the defendants: there has been no jury.
Justice Julia Lonergan is due to deliver her judgment at Darlinghurst on Monday morning.
