FOUR years ago, Paul James Wilkinson was making headlines with wild allegations of corruption at a parliamentary inquiry into policing in Redfern.

An Aboriginal liaison officer with NSW Police since the late 1990s, he claimed his house had been burnt down and police had threatened to kill him because of his whistleblowing.

Wilkinson was hiding his own deadly secret. Five months earlier he had strangled his young, pregnant girlfriend and would later try to pin his crimes on an innocent police officer.

Although he pleaded guilty to murder on November 12, he has led police on a $250,000 wild goose chase as they try to find the body of his victim, 23-year-old student nurse Kylie Labouchardiere.

After more than four years of playing cat-and-mouse with Gosford detectives, the 33-year-old has finally admitted to killing Ms Labouchardiere.

She was training at Sutherland Hospital as a nurse and lived in The Shire with her husband, a naval officer, until shortly before her murder.

They separated amicably and she moved into her grandmother's house in Erina. By then she had already become romantically involved with Wilkinson.

Neither friends nor family knew of Wilkinson's existence.

Their relationship began in December 2003, and he soon began bombarding her with texts and phone calls.

The pair exchanged more than 20,000 in the five months leading up to her death on April 28, 2004.

The month before she died, Wilkinson abruptly stopped turning up to work. That coincided with Ms Labouchardiere's news - doctors had confirmed she was pregnant.

It was believed to be Wilkinson's child. But he was living in Picnic Point with his wife and their newborn son.

Ms Labouchardiere made plans to move to Dubbo. She booked a removalist to meet her there on April 29 but she failed to show up. The night before she left her grandmother's home in Erina saying she was going away with friends but would be back to join her family at an engagement party the following week. She caught a train south.

Days passed as he worried family could not reach her by phone. When her family went through the phone records, they found the startling amount of calls from the same number and rang it.

Wilkinson told the family he was helping with a complaint she had made to police about being sexually assaulted. He said she had been having an affair and had gone to South Australia.

In early May, her family reported her missing to Gosford police. Later that month, Wilkinson set fire to his rented home in Picnic Point, causing substantial damage. He recently pleaded guilty to the arson but shortly after Ms Labouchardiere's disappearance he told police she and a man had assaulted him, tied him up and set fire to the house.

The following year, Wilkinson approached the Police Integrity Commission and accused a serving NSW police officer of Ms Labouchardiere's murder.

Wilkinson claimed to have been present when the officer murdered her in the Royal National Park at Sutherland and buried her near a firetrail.

The officer, sources say, remains mystified as to why Wilkinson nominated someone he did not know well to undergo a gruelling investigation, only to be exonerated.

When police arrested Wilkinson in April last year, he was cocky as he told The Daily Telegraph the "real story" was yet to emerge.

Detective Senior-Constable Glenn Smith told Wilkinson's sentencing hearing on Friday police could no longer rely on him to assist with finding the remains. The court heard Wilkinson had nominated two places in the Royal National Park and three at Mooney Mooney.

The closest they have come is finding a doona in a quarry at Mooney Mooney.

Ms Labouchardiere's family have told police they can no longer deal with the cruelty of false hope of finding her remains - then being dashed again.

WHEN Kylie Labouchardiere arrived in Sydney with two packed suitcases, the pregnant 23-year-old thought she was starting a new life with her married lover.

The student nurse had already arranged for her furniture to be sent to Dubbo, where she and Paul James Wilkinson were to set up house together.

But instead of leaving his wife, Wilkinson murdered his girlfriend in April 2004 and weeks later tried to cover his tracks by burning down the rental house he shared with his spouse.

In the ensuing years, he told lie after lie, including blaming a policeman for her murder and indicating fake spots where her body was buried.

Yesterday in the NSW Supreme Court, the 33-year-old former NSW Police Aboriginal liaison officer faced a sentencing hearing after finally admitting to her murder last November.

At one stage, he agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter, and said he had been provoked into strangling his pregnant girlfriend.

He also pleaded guilty to arson and will be sentenced next month.

 

Cold killer leaves Kylie Labouchardiere's family broken

PAUL Wilkinson boasted in a text message to his wife that he would never reveal where his lover's body was. "F**K THEM", he said of the Labouchardiere family.

 

 

A Fatal Attraction - Part 1

CAROLINE JONES, PRESENTER: Hello I'm Caroline Jones. When a young nurse disappeared in 2004, the lives of the people she left behind fell apart. Unbeknownst to them, the man behind the death of Kylie Labouchardiere was plotting to hide his crime through a series of bizarre actions, which made no sense to anyone at the time. In a story where truth is stranger than fiction, the lives of innocent bystanders were turned upside down. This is their story.

SEAN LABOUCHARDIERE, KYLIE'S FORMER HUSBAND: Kylie and I were very much in love, and it all changed once we moved to Sydney. She started becoming very secretive. She became very paranoid that someone was following her, people were after her. She cut her hair, she started smoking, and Kylie was very against smoking all the way through our courtship and then the marriage. And all of a sudden within a period of weeks she was literally chain smoking. Her whole personality changed. She told me things like, 'I'm involved in something, Sean, and I can't get out of it. I can't tell you what it is because I don't want you to be involved in it as well.' So I said, 'Let me know, I'll help you get out of it.' I was willing to at this stage, do anything to get our marriage back on track. And she wouldn't. Kylie and I separated in March 2004, and then a month later I got a call from a detective saying she was missing. She got a train here to Central Station. From there she caught a train to Sutherland Station, before she disappeared. I work for the Royal Australian Navy and have done so for the last 11 years. It was around about Christmas time 2001, I was in a restaurant in Melbourne and Kylie was there. It felt really comfortable, right from the start. She was a very understanding sort of person. She always liked to help people. That's why when I found out she was in the nursing industry, working as a nurse, I thought that was a perfect job for her.

(Excerpt of home video footage)

SEAN LABOUCHARDIERE: To you Kylie I thank you for being such a wonderful person and making this last eight months have been the best eight months of my life.

(End of Excerpt)

SEAN LABOUCHARDIERE, KYLIE'S FORMER HUSBAND: I did take it upon myself to try to steer her away from any sort of bad influences and things like that. I wanted to give her us a life that is stable, I've got a good job, regular income - we could, we could have had a really good life together. Kylie and myself moved back to Sydney first two weeks of December 2003. Our plan was to live a normal life, have kids and all that sort of stuff. It was when she met a man called Paul Wilkinson, that life got strange. She mentioned to me that this guy, Paul Wilkinson, was an undercover policeman, working for a specialist unit of the New South Wales police. She said, 'I can't tell you anymore but he is working on special operations type things that may require my assistance from time to time.' And I just thought initially, this can't be right. Surely the police aren't going to use civilians to do their operations for them. So I thought, is he telling her stories? Is he trying to win her over, so to speak, by telling her something and she's getting caught up in it?

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: Paul Wilkinson was my husband. I knew on my wedding day that I should never have married him. Paul, when I first met him, was an Aboriginal Liaison Officer with the New South Wales Police. He came to lecture at the Police Academy where I was studying to be a police officer. I was 21. I was struck by how witty and charming he was. He was definitely a ladies' man. He had a great sense of humour. In the beginning our relationship was great. We'd go out, we'd have fun. But I think once he reeled me in, that's when his claws came out and things started to change and he became controlling and abusive. He'd say things to put me down and to make me feel worthless, and then gradually it escalated into physical abuse.

(Excerpt of footage from home video - Paul Wilkinson at a zoo)

PAUL WILKINSON: Julie says she's never seen a deer like this before. (Pointing to a goat)

(End of Excerpt)

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: He would control what I wore, down to, I couldn't wear any dresses above the knees, I couldn't wear low-cut tops. He wouldn't like me going out in them because he'd think other men would look at me. He would turn up at my police placement which was at Bankstown, and constantly badger me about leaving. Finally, in the end I agreed because he made me choose between him or the Academy, and he told me that all male police officers are sleaze bags. Paul was particularly obsessed with one ex of mine, a policeman called Geoff Lowe. It was ridiculous of Paul to become jealous of Geoff because I hadn't had any contact with Geoff for about eight months prior to meeting Paul, and the relationship that Geoff Lowe and I had was so insignificant and short that, yeah, it didn't really mean a great deal anyway.

SGT GEOFF LOWE, NSW POLICE: I'm a Sergeant of Police in the New South Wales Police Force. I first met Julie Thurecht many years ago, and for a short time, we had a very brief casual relationship. In 2002, I received a number of phone calls from a drunken male. At the time I had no idea who it was. Originally they were happening a week apart, where the phone calls would come late at night, drunken male, and they were very abusive, calling me a dog, wanting to cut my throat, all these type of things. He called me a rapist on every occasion that he rang up. And then on one of the phone calls, he mentioned the name Julie Thurecht, and that's when it twigged on who the person could be. Paul Wilkinson was, at that time, giving the local police a bit of a hard time, getting kicked out of a lot of pubs and clubs for drunken and unruly behaviour. We knew he was an Aboriginal Community Liaison Officer. I think basically he wanted to be a cop. When that didn't transpire he turned the other way. He basically went anti-cop. I can only assume that Paul Wilkinson resented the fact that I knew Julie before he married her. At the time, of course, the calls were distressing but I'm a police officer so I'm used to people not liking me or having a negative attitude towards my profession, but I had absolutely no idea about what sort of trouble it was going to cause me in the future.

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: A couple of months after Paul and I got married, I found out I was pregnant, and then our son was born on the 18th of November, 2003. I was very excited about being a mother. It's something that I'd wanted for years. After my son and I were discharged from hospital, Paul brought us to my parent's house, and told me that he wanted me to stay there for a couple of weeks to get used to being a mother, which I disagreed with because I wanted to be a family unit.

KEVIN THURECHT, JULIE THURECHT'S FATHER: I had concerns with the way she was being treated, times when he would say "jump" and she would say "How far?"

JENENE THURECHT, JULIE THURECHT'S MOTHER: He more or less had her in a cocoon, didn't he?

KEVIN THURECHT, JULIE THURECHT'S FATHER: Yeah.

JENENE THURECHT, JULIE THURECHT'S MOTHER: She wasn't allowed to do anything unless he told her to do it.

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: Paul became a lot more needy and desperate for money just after our son was born. The threats he made towards me, it was just easier to give him the money and have peace rather than, yeah, not give it to him, and him explode. Paul would never tell me why he needed the money. I later found out that he had a gambling habit. He would go to the club and gamble constantly on the poker machines.

SEAN LABOUCHARDIERE, KYLIE'S FORMER HUSBAND: In the months before our marriage broke down, Kylie was getting more and more involved with Paul Wilkinson. Kylie and Paul would constantly text each other on the phone. At night she'd have the phone next to her, she'd even have it on the bed, between us, and the phone would be going off non-stop. S he'd be lucky to get two hours sleep doing that. I said, "Look, are you having an affair with this bloke?" She went off, yelling and screaming, "How dare you check up on me." Kylie got a phone call at about 2:30 in the morning. She picked it up and her, the only words she said was, "I'll meet you in five minutes." I jumped up and said, "Look, you're not running out at two o'clock in the morning to meet someone that I don't know about," or, you know, "how safe, it's not safe for you to be running around the streets at two o'clock in the morning." She said, "Oh no, it's all right, he's coming to pick me up." I said, "So how do you think I'm going to feel as a husband to let you jump into a car with some bloke who I don't know about at two o'clock in the morning?" So anyway, she went outside and she got into the car and she was in there for at least an hour, if not more, close to two hours. I rang her up and said, "Kylie, are you all right?" She freaked out on the phone, she said, "Look don't, don't ever call me on this phone again," and then, and she hung up. And I'm thinking, what am I involved in here? Anyway, five minutes later she came through the door yelling and screaming, throwing the phone around. She said, "Oh, by you ringing me you nearly got me shot." Those were her exact words, "You nearly got me shot." I said, "Nearly got you shot, what do you mean by that?" She said, "Well as soon as the phone rang," and she didn't mention names, she said, "As soon as the phone rang, he jumped and he went for his gun." That's all she said. During this time Kylie developed a need for money at short notice and once again without explanation. So I'd be at work, she'd rock up to the wharf, she'd say, "Look I need $4,000," and I said, "Look, I don't have $4,000, I can wait till pay or something like that, I'll give it to you in the next few weeks," and her response was, "No, I need it by four o'clock today or I can't guarantee your safety." You know, what am I supposed to think, I'm thinking, I'm sitting here thinking, what are you involved in that you need $4,000 by four o'clock? Even to this day I don't know fully what she was involved in. In the final weeks of our marriage, it was constant bickering, stress, anger, yelling, slamming doors, storming out of the room. There was many incidents like that where the relationship was, was definitely gone by that stage.

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: After a month at my parents' house, Paul finally agreed that my son and I could come home. We weren't home long when we received a death threat, which was handwritten, and over the months to come, we received several more death threats and threatening letters. I remember reading it and saying to Paul that it was written in female handwriting. He seemed shocked that I, I knew that, and he asked how, how I'd worked that out. And I pointed out to him that the i's weren't just dots, they were like big circles, like, yeah, like a teenage girl's handwriting. Paul told me the death threats were from corrupt police who were trying to get him, and I believed him. He kept moving us back to my parents' house. Moving back and forth all the time was very hard, trying to get used to motherhood, wanting support from my husband, but not getting it. Then quite suddenly in April, the death threats stopped. Paul let our son and I back home. Paul was a different person. It was the nicest he'd been to me for a long time. Then, a few weeks after our son and I moved back home, Paul received a phone call one morning. I could hear him in the other room saying, "Is everything okay, is everything okay?" After he got off the phone, I asked who it was. He told me it was a police officer investigating a girl called Kylie's disappearance, and he had helped on one of her cases, or something like that, and they were just ringing to check if he'd heard from her at all.

CAROL EDWARDS, KYLIE LABOUCHARDIERE'S MOTHER: After Kylie and Sean's marriage broke up, I was very shocked at that news. Sean is an absolutely fantastic gentleman. The family absolutely adore him. They had only been married for just over a year. Kylie went to live with her grandmother on the Central Coast, north of Sydney. Kylie and her grandmother were inseparable. Kylie was the youngest of three children. Unfortunately her father and I divorced when Kylie was only five. After that I remarried into a very violent relationship, and Kylie went to live with her grandmother. She was very fun loving. Her nickname actually was "Smiley Kylie". I was concerned that Kylie wasn't her normal self when she moved back with her grandmother. At this stage Kylie had left her job as a nurse. She took up smoking and alcohol which she absolutely detested. She'd lost a lot of weight. She was very thin and gaunt. She was bordering on a drug addict look. We don't know whether she was involved in anything like that. She was very, very jumpy around that period of time. I had put it down to maybe it was the breakdown of her marriage. A week before Kylie went missing, she organised a family dinner for the Thursday night, where she was going to announce what she had decided that she was going to do for the rest of her life. She also said that there was someone special coming to the dinner but did not elaborate on who it was. We were all there ready to sit down for dinner. Kylie's phone rang. The person who was supposed to be coming could not attend. And then Kylie announced that the dinner was off. We were all astounded at what was happening, why the dinner couldn't continue. But she was very adamant that the dinner be cancelled. The next day Kylie informed her grandmother that she was pregnant and the person that was supposed to come to dinner the night before was the father of her unborn child. Kylie and this person were going to have a life together, but Kylie did not inform her grandmother of the name of the person. On the 28th of April 2004 Kylie left her grandmother's place at approximately 6pm in the evening and travelled by train to Central railway station in Sydney. Kylie had packed two duffel bags and had told her grandmother that she would be away for a week. Her grandmother told me that Kylie was very excited, very eager to go. Kylie rang her grandmother at half past eight and told her that she'd arrived safely at Central Railway Station in Sydney. She told her grandmother that she would be back the following Tuesday or Wednesday, and that was the last time any of us spoke to her. The next morning, her grandmother received a phone call from a transport company in Dubbo saying that they had a meeting with Kylie at 11 o'clock to receive furniture that she had sent to Dubbo and she didn't turn up. Alarm bells rang pretty well straight away for me. I tried to ring Kylie repeatedly on her mobile phone, and when she didn't answer, I just knew that there was something wrong. We started searching Kylie's room for anything that might tell us, where she was or what was happening in her life. The most telling thing that we found was her phone bill. There was one number there that appeared, more than any other numbers that she had dialled, with both phone calls and text records. Kylie's sister Leanne and brother Michael both phoned the number and found out that it belonged to Paul Wilkinson.

LEANNE EDWARDS, KYLIE LABOUCHARDIERE'S SISTER: Basically he informed me that he was a policeman and that he hadn't seen her for quite a while. Till my brother and I had made those phone calls to Paul Wilkinson we had actually never heard of him, before. On the phone I actually found him quite cocky, quite um - he seemed very confident and just, very sure of himself.

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: Paul had been asked to go for an interview with the police on 17 May in regards to the disappearance of a woman, Kylie Labouchardiere. The night before, Paul and I were meant to be going to my parents' house for dinner. Just as we were about to leave, Paul told me he couldn't come, but was insistent that I take baby photo albums with me. He stated that he wanted me to show my parents, which I said to him they'd already seen the photos, so why bother? Then halfway through dinner, we received a call from the police to say that the fire brigade were at our house and that Paul was in hospital. I later found out that there were four separate fires lit in the house. Paul had told the police that a woman by the name of Kylie had lit the house fire, along with another male, and that Paul had been tied up and had to jump out the bedroom window.

LEANNE EDWARDS, KYLIE LABOUCHARDIERE'S SISTER: On the night of the fire at Paul Wilkinson's house, we had policemen turn up at my grandmother's house, looking for Kylie. This disturbed my grandmother greatly and confused our family a lot because, you know, we sort of, didn't expect them to be knocking on the door looking for her when we had reported her missing only not long before that.

JENENE THURECHT, JULIE THURECHT'S MOTHER: Later that night, Paul had been discharged from hospital, and when he walked in, I was surprised because somebody who'd been tied up, bashed up, jumped through a glass window, he didn't have a mark on him, and he just stood over, opposite where we were and then the tears started to roll, saying, "Oh, if my son had have been in the house, he would have been killed." And, that was it, and I thought, gee, you've been through a lot and you don't show anything for it. And I thought, got suspicious then.

KEVIN THURECHT, JULIE THURECHT'S FATHER: I don't think there were too many tears when he...

JENENE THURECHT, JULIE THURECHT'S MOTHER: That was, was fake.

KEVIN THURECHT, JULIE THURECHT'S FATHER: Yeah.

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: At that point, I totally believed Paul. I was petrified that people were after us. I honestly believed that at least Paul would end up dead, if not my son and I as well.

SGT GEOFF LOWE, NSW POLICE: After the abusive phone calls in 2002 from Paul Wilkinson, I changed my mobile phone number and that seemed to solve the problem. I didn't hear from him again. I'd never heard of Kylie Labouchardiere. I knew nothing about a murder or a missing person. However, in October 2004 I was called to a job outside Engadine RSL Club where police had restrained a male - this male was shirtless, obviously very intoxicated, and very abusive. And I walked up, and one of the other police officers mentioned my name. And he instantly went calm and said, "Are you Geoff Lowe?" And I said, "Yes, who are you?" He got aggressive straight away again and said, "You raped my wife, you dog" and started coming at me. I had no idea who this person was, I'd never seen him before in my life. But then I looked over at the doors of the RSL club and I saw Julie Thurecht, and remembering the abusive phone calls in 2002, I knew straightaway that it was Paul Wilkinson.

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: At that point I became overwhelmed and ran back inside the club, and yeah, I was too scared to come back out - the fear what, yeah what was going on out there. Paul's hatred for Geoff Lowe really escalated after that night.

SGT GEOFF LOWE, NSW POLICE: He was wrestled to the ground, handcuffed, and later taken to Sutherland Police Station where he was charged with assault police and resist arrest. And it just seems incredible now that that one, five-minute job turned my life upside down in ways that I just did not see coming.

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: Paul had told me that he just had to get out of Sydney because there was too much danger, and him and I didn't see a great deal of each other at all.

JENENE THURECHT, JULIE THURECHT'S MOTHER: Early 2005, Julie decided that this was it. She was going to separate from Paul. She told Paul this and, well he wasn't very happy about it and he told her there that if she divorced him, he would kill her. And, she was in a state of shock.

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: A few months after Paul and I separated, the police came to talk to me about Kylie Labouchardiere's disappearance. They informed me that Kylie and Paul had sent in excess of 18,000 SMS's to each other in about a five-month time period, and also that Kylie was pregnant with Paul's child when she disappeared. They also told me that it was more than likely that Kylie had been murdered. I just went into shock. I was 100 per cent certain that Paul was involved in it.

NEXT WEEK:

CAROL EDWARDS, KYLIE LABOUCHARDIERE'S MOTHER: Kylie's body had not been found, and that's why I was still clinging onto hope.

JOHN EDWARDS, KYLIE LABOUCHARDIERE'S FATHER: The police didn't seem to be too interested to start off with, so I started to do my own investigation.

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: Whilst I held animosity towards her for what she'd done, she also didn't deserve to die because of it. He already hated Geoff because of our past, and he started a campaign of false complaints about him.

SGT GEOFF LOWE, NSW POLICE: He alleged I had committed a particularly gruesome murder upon Kylie Labouchardiere. What do you do when someone makes an allegation like that against you?

JULIE THURECHT, PAUL WILKINSON'S FORMER WIFE: By the time we came down to the National Park I was certain that Paul was involved with her murder.

SGT GEOFF LOWE, NSW POLICE: He'd been stalking my wife. Sue was absolutely terrified.

SUE LOWE, GEOFF LOWE'S WIFE: One girl probably is dead and, you know, I certainly don't want to be the next one.