Adrian Bayley: An evil past revealed

Barely eighteen and working her third shift as a street prostitute, 'Rebecca' thought life couldn't get any more grim.

Then she met Adrian Ernest Bayley.

It was late in the year 2000. Rebecca had turned to prostitution to fund her heroin addiction.

One night, she found herself at the Prostitutes Collective in St Kilda. Pinned to the notice board were pamphlets warning street workers about violent clients. Ugly Mugs, they were dubbed.

She walked out of the building, and was reading the pamphlet when a red Mini pulled up along side her. The driver had blond, spiky hair.

"Want to make some money?" he asked. She did. She needed drugs.

As the man drove off, he glanced at the pamphlet in her hand.

"I can't believe how many bad people are out there," he commented.

Then, seemingly from nowhere, a fist flew at her face. He punched her, and snarled:
"Do you know that I am one of those bad guys?"

Just how bad, Rebecca could never have imagined. Adrian Bayley was on his way to becoming one of the worst sex offenders in the nation's history.

Bayley drove the terrified teenager to a laneway not far from the traditional prostitutes' haunt of Grey Street, St Kilda. He parked close to a fence so his victim couldn't open the car door.

Rebecca was trapped. She froze in fear.

Bayley began to attack her, physically and verbally.

"You little junkie sl*t. You're sick. You like this."

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He degraded her for what seemed like hours.

"He treated her... a bit like a rag doll," the prosecutor told the jury in his opening address. "She'd never felt such fear in her life. She felt she had no control."

There was a pause as a car drove into the narrow laneway. Rebecca bashed on the window, pleading for help.

Bayley fumed. "Shut up. I'll kill you now," and thrust his fingers down her throat.

He scoffed as she pleaded for her life, telling him she had a family that loved her.

"He said she was a junkie sl*t and no one would miss her," the jury was told.

When the attack finally ended, Bayley drove off. But the threat of death lingered.

The young woman bravely managed to escape. Battered and bleeding, she went home.

She later pinned an Ugly Mug note to the Prostitute Collective's noticeboard, about a blond man with red, 'ranga' hair on his arms, but she took the matter no further.

Rebecca felt there'd been a hint of truth to what Bayley had said to her; she was a prostitute and a drug addict, so perhaps she deserved it.

She was also keen to prevent her father learning his eighteen-year-old daughter had been a sex worker. He would inevitably learn the painful truth if she went to police.

Rebecca moved interstate, leaving her old self behind. She started a new life.

But a decade later, her awful secret caught up with her.

In September 2012, Rebecca read an article online about Jill Meagher, an Irishwoman who had been plucked from a Brunswick street and viciously raped and murdered.

Alongside the words was a photograph of a man with blond, spiky hair. She recognised that face, and some of the details sounded familiar.

Said the prosecutor: "To her, it all added up."

Rebecca recalled her rapist drove a red Mini Minor. VicRoads records confirmed Bayley owned a 1974 Mini, a fact confirmed by his then-wife. He was working shift work in a bakery and would have had ample opportunity to crawl the streets at night.

This time, Rebecca felt brave enough to go to the police. She told them her story, and looked at a photo board to see if she could identify her attacker. Number four stood out. "It definitely looks like the offender," she told detectives. It was a photo of Adrian Bayley from 2001.

A year after Bayley was jailed for his crimes against Jill Meagher, Rebecca had her day in court. She told the jury her story, in her own words, in person, rather than via video link.

Bayley's defence barrister told the jurors he didn't dispute the fact Rebecca had been raped. He told them the fact she was on drugs and was a sex worker made her no less believable.

But what couldn't be believed, he said, was her identification of Bayley as her attacker. How could she be sure her memory of the man who raped her hadn't been clouded by the images of Bayley that had been splashed across the media after Jill Meagher's murder?

"She has made a mistake. An understandable one, but a mistake nonetheless," he said. He said the case had to be decided with 'ruthless logic.' Thinking with their heads, not hearts.

The jurors' heads told them Bayley was guilty.

Eight months later, a second jury was empaneled in another rape trial.

Again, the victim was a young sex worker, with a drug habit. Also in St Kilda. But this time the date was April 2012.

'Kelly' had an unstable family life and difficult upbringing. Substance abuse followed. Between July 2011 and April 2012, she walked the streets a few times a week to support her addiction.

On the night in question, she was standing on a well-known prostitutes' corner when a car pulled up.

"Are you working?"

As she chatted casually to the driver, she noted his characteristics. Fair skin. Light hair. A checked shirt. Jeans. Unpolished shoes she described as 'wog tappers.' He was muscular. Staring at her were his 'cold, blue eyes.'

He drove to a secluded, dead end laneway, with overgrown vines covering a fence.

It was soon apparent she was in trouble.

The man pinned her down, pressed hard on her chest near her throat, then began to rape her.

The jury, in the prosecutor's opening address, was told: "She was shaking and stuttering in fear." Whenever he wound down the windows, she would scream, and he would wind them back up. No one heard her.

She pushed hard with her foot against the corner of the windscreen and cracked it. "You shouldn't have done that," he said. "I was only going to rape you." As if that were OK.

While she was scared, she was also confused, when the man grabbed her cheek and told her she was beautiful.

Girls love hearing that, he said.

Quick-thinking Kelly tried to engage him in conversation. She noted he had a tribal tattoo on his arm, emblazoned with a woman's name. "Are you going to ID me from me tatts?" he asked. She quickly promised she wouldn't.

He started offering personal information. He told her he took steroids and had weighed 110kg. He said he trained at a gym in Bell St, Preston. He even offered her safety advice, suggesting she get a pimp. "This is stupid, not to have someone to look out for where you're going."

She managed to convince him to take her to a Balaclava hotel so she could go to the toilet. She was finally safe, but had been left physically and emotionally scarred.

Kelly had been due to enter rehab that week, but, according to her housemate, went 'really strange' and binged instead.

A fortnight after the attack, she stumbled, drunk, into a police station, demanding police give her the name of the man who'd raped her. She carried a box cutter she wanted to use to kill him. She told them he had a tattoo. But in her emotional state, there was little police could do for her.

She went to police again in December, after Jill Meagher's death. This time she was able to take detectives to the overgrown laneway in which she was attacked.

She provided a better description of the man's appearance and clothing.

For police, all signs pointed to Bayley.

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Bayley's girlfriend confirmed their car's windscreen had been damaged while she was away in Fiji, at the time of the rape. Repair shop records showed it had been fixed.

Bayley was a member of the gym Kelly reported as being mentioned. Bank records showed withdrawals from his account at the Kittens strip, not far from St Kilda, around the time of the attack.

A search of his shed located a bag containing a shirt, jeans, and distinctive, unpolished shoes.

Bayley's face may have been circulated widely in the media. But there was no publicly available photo revealing the name entwined in his tattoo.

In his defence, his barrister had used the same argument as in the first trial; that Kelly had been raped, but by someone else, not Bayley, and she'd only identified him after seeing his picture in the media.

"She has jumped on the Adrian Bayley bandwagon."

But the jury believed her. It took only an hour of deliberations to find Bayley guilty.

The prosecution case in the third trial was notably weaker. There was less circumstantial evidence tying Bayley to this crime.

The victim was not a prostitute, but a 27-year-old Dutch backpacker, who'd been living in Melbourne with 17 other travellers.

On the night of July 14, 2012, 'Sam' had partied with housemates at the Elephant and Wheelbarrow pub in St Kilda.

When she left for home at 2.30am, she was, in her words, 'a little drunk.' But by no means wasted.

As she trotted towards St Kilda Rd, she saw two cars stopped by the side of the road.

The driver of one motioned to her. He told her the other vehicle had been following her. He offered her a lift. She believed him, and got in.

The man started to drive her home. But as he pulled into her street, there was a sharp deviation. He steered the car into a laneway behind a row of shops. And climbed on top of her.

Fear was immediate.

"Oh, f***!" she cried. "S**t."

The man forced a kiss on her. He told her he'd seen her wobbling along the street, even though she was adamant she was not that drunk.

She struggled, but he hit her across the face and grabbed her throat.

Said the prosecutor: "He told her she couldn't get out and no one could hear her."

The attack intensified. Sam assessed the situation as one of 'kill or be killed.' She decided her best chance of survival was to play along.

Amid her terror, she kept a level head. She convinced him a car was far from an ideal location for such an encounter, and suggested they go to her place, down the street. Of course no one would be home, she promised.

The man allowed Sam to put her jeans back on and he followed her to the door. He held on to her as she opened the front door. But once she was inside, she bolted, to the back of the house where she knew her housemates would be.

"Hey, hey, come back!" he cried in surprise.

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Sam ran, screaming, to the bathroom. A housemate ran to the door and saw a well-built man with spiky, blond hair, jeans and a blazer disappearing down the street.

Again, the finger was pointed at Bayley.

Police examined his phone records and found he was in St Kilda in the early hours of July 15.

A friend of Bayley's said he'd been to the football with Bayley and his girlfriend the night before and they'd argued. His girlfriend had kicked him out of bed. He told her he'd slept in his car, but his phone records showed he'd made 14 calls to her as he travelled from Fitzroy to St Kilda.

The calls stopped at 2.57am, roughly the time Sam was assaulted. Between 2.55am and 3.41am, his girlfriend sent him 25 text messages. He sent none.

However, an expert shed doubt on the accuracy of the phone tracking data, saying he could still have been at home.

Defence counsel seized upon the most glaring hole in the victim's testimony. The car. Her description of the vehicle in which she was raped did not match the vehicle Bayley was driving. She got the colour of the car and its interior wrong.

"The car she was raped in was not Adrian Bayley's car," he told the jury. "It wasn't his car, because it wasn't him."

He accused police of deciding Bayley was the culprit, then letting the evidence fit around him.

It was clearly a difficult decision for the jury. It twice told the judge it couldn't reach a unanimous verdict. It was only after it was given the option of a majority verdict - 11 to 1 - that a guilty verdict was delivered.

Finding Victorians to serve as jurors in each of Bayley's trials was a massive undertaking. Central to the justice system is an accused person's right to a fair trial. It generally requires anonymity. Even if a person on trial has prior convictions, the jury is not allowed to know.

But keeping Bayley's past a secret would have been all but impossible. Few criminals are more notorious.

Even if his appearance was not familiar - with his strawberry blond hair now slicked back in a ponytail - his name would ring bells.

Huge pools of prospective jurors were assembled, and they were required to fill out questionnaires to gauge their ability to be impartial. Anyone who believed they would be unable to put aside their prejudices would be excused from the process.

But there were surprisingly few, and juries were selected with relative ease.

They were given strict instructions about how to conduct themselves. No doubt their friends and families would be curious to know about the case they were deciding. But they were banned from divulging details.

"You are here to be impartial and objective," they were told. The murder and rape of Jill Meagher was irrelevant. "It is absolutely essential you put it out of your minds completely.

"You have to put aside all biases. Don't let them interfere with your verdicts."

When the 36 men and women read media reports of Bayley's trials in coming days, they will no doubt be shocked to learn the case they sat in on was part of a bigger picture.

Suppression orders prevented details of the rape allegations being reported. Even when Bayley was sentenced for Jill Meagher's murder, parts of his brutal background could not be published, so as not to prejudice future trials.

For more than a year, Adrian Bayley's name has been banned from publication.

Several media outlets have breached the orders, either deliberately or inadvertently, and they now face the prospect of prosecution.

Broadcaster Derryn Hinch was jailed after breaching an order and being found in contempt of court.

Journalists sat through the rape trials to take notes for stories they could not publish until now.

Adrian Bayley is currently serving a life sentence, with a 35-year non-parole period, for Jill Meagher's rape and murder.

His latest convictions will earn him extra time behind bars. But sentencing conventions mean it may not be much. Perhaps a few years more.

Whatever his revised sentenced, Adrian Bayley will still be eligible for release as an old man. Even then, it's a frightening prospect.