The distress was etched on Roger Cutler’s face as he stood outside the court building where the inquest into the suspected death of his daughter, Julie, had just wrapped up.
Now in his 80s, the white-haired man had just heard deputy state coroner Sarah Linton tell the court his daughter was dead, and she was unlikely to be able to draw any conclusions about what had happened to her.
“It’s not really finished at the moment. I don’t think something like this is ever finished,” a clearly pained Mr Cutler told journalists.
"I probably just need to digest [the inquest's outcome] a little bit."
A family's search for answers
The Cutler family — many of whom packed into the limited seats available at court 85 of the Central Law Courts this week for the inquest — have now endured more than 34 years of not knowing what happened to their beloved daughter, sister, cousin and niece, who was just 22 when she abruptly vanished on June 20, 1988.
And now it appears they’re unlikely to ever know.
If anything, the inquest has raised more questions than it has answered, including how the police could have let key pieces of evidence — and suspects — slip through their fingers.
Mr Cutler testified that he had very quickly drawn the conclusion that Julie had been murdered after her car was found floating off Cottesloe Beach, two days after she disappeared.
To his knowledge, she was not depressed, and It was out of character for her to have not let someone know where she was.
Police, at the time, conducted an intensive investigation, including a sea, land and air search of the beach and surrounds, as well as interviewing people who were with Ms Cutler at the work function she attended on the night she disappeared.
However, by December 2 of that same year – less than six months after she vanished – they were ready to draw a line under their inquiries.
No suspects after five months
Former detective sergeant Ronald Carey — who was part of the Major Crime Squad looking into the case — wrote a report on that date. It concluded that police had done all they could.
They had no suspects, and the inquiry could no longer be considered an active one.
Yet the case was far from over, as events over the following years were to reveal.
Just months after Mr Carey wrote that report, the proprietor of a CBD kebab shop handed police a blouse he’d discovered in a plastic bag under a chair at his shop.
Found around the same time Ms Cutler vanished, the bag had also contained a pair of black panty hose, which he discarded, along with the bag itself.
The blouse was of the type manufactured in very small numbers, especially for staff at the Parmelia Hilton hotel, where Julie worked as a room attendant, and was in her size.
Police believe that blouse was almost certainly Julie’s, although no forensic testing was ever undertaken.
The tantalising clues
There were a number of other intriguing clues as well.
Inside Julie’s car, a note in her handwriting was found, with the name “Mike” on it and an address on Albany Highway — but police ruled out any link to Ms Cutler’s disappearance.
Then there were the two Polish hotel workers that Ms Cutler was seen talking and dancing with at the Parmelia Hilton hotel work function she had attended shortly before she vanished.
Tadeusz Maciejewski and Gregory Swiatek had invited Ms Cutler and her colleague, Consuela Harper, back to their place after the staff party, to have a drink and watch a movie together.
Evidence tendered to the inquest suggested Ms Cutler was tempted to accept, but Ms Harper was not keen and so the 22-year-old told them she would not join them after all.
However, walking with Ms Harper to the staff car park later, Ms Cutler told her she was meeting up with a friend, and when Ms Harper pressed her on the person’s identity, Ms Cutler was not forthcoming.
“It’s a secret. I can’t tell,” she told Ms Harper.
Police were quick to interview Mr Maciejewski and Mr Swiatek after Ms Cutler’s car was found, but seemed to equally quickly rule them out as suspects.
Yet, some years later, the extended Cutler family received a total of six phone calls, all apparently from a man with a European accent that police believe could have been Mr Maciejewski.
The caller said he “was the person they were looking for”, and that he was leaving Western Australia.
Mr Maciejewski emigrated back to Poland in mid-January, 1994, around the same time the phone calls stopped, without police re-interviewing him.
They have not been able to trace him since.
The items police destroyed
Then, in 1996, a number of items were found in a sand dune, about one kilometre south of where Ms Cutler’s Fiat was found at Cottesloe.
Those items included a 1988 diary — and Ms Cutler was known to be an avid diary writer — as well as a Westpac cheque book holder, the same bank Ms Cutler used.
However, police ruled out the items as being relevant to the case and they were subsequently destroyed.
So too was much of the other physical evidence linked to the case, including Ms Cutler’s car and the items it contained.
Other items were also missing by the time police reopened the case in 2017, including all of the original witness statements taken by police in 1988, meaning Detective Inspector Gailene Hamilton — who spearheaded the new inquiry — was forced to rely largely on photos of exhibits, rather than the physical items themselves.
Bradley Edwards and the importance of DNA
The benefit of 34 years’ of hindsight notwithstanding, it is hard to understand how police could let such evidence slip away.
The trial of Claremont killer Bradley Edwards in 2020 showed only too clearly the value of keeping even the tiniest scraps of potential evidence.
In the late 1980s, the science of DNA was only beginning to be understood in relation to evidence in criminal matters, but some detectives were ahead of the curve.
If investigators hadn’t carefully stored a silk kimono obtained from a crime scene in 1988, from which Edwards’s DNA would ultimately be extracted almost three decades later, it is likely that he would still be a free man.
If Pathwest scientists hadn’t held onto miniscule scrapings taken from underneath the fingernails of 27-year-old Ciara Glennon — whom Edwards brutally murdered — scrapings that were so tiny as to be practically invisible to the human eye, it is almost certain Edwards would not have been found guilty of her killing.
Yet these seemingly random or useless items proved to be absolutely crucial to a case that had laid dormant for decades, until a 2016 cold case review finally connected some of the dots.
Holding on to hope
Edwards is among the 44 suspects police have been unable to conclusively rule out of involvement in the case, although police testified it was not a likely possibility.
Sadly, the 2017-2018 review of Ms Cutler’s case appeared to come too late.
Too late to use modern forensic techniques to examine old evidence, too late to use advanced DNA testing to see if any biological material could be extracted from the few physical items that were, or might have been, connected to the case, because such items no longer existed.
Police made clear at the inquest that murder was just one of the two probable scenarios to explain Ms Cutler’s baffling disappearance, the other being suicide.
It seems Ms Cutler’s grieving family are not destined to know for sure, either way, what happened to their beloved Julie.
However, outside the court, Mr Cutler expressed hope that someone would come forward some day with new information, a sentiment also expressed at the inquest by retired detective Ronald Carey, who described the case as one of the most distressing and emotional he had worked on.
“We live in hope that some day that someone does come good … and tell us what did actually happen,” he said.