DESPITE THE DISINTEREST - AND, IN some cases, outright hostility - displayed by some of the Bulldogs towards her, the woman eventually shared a cab back to the Pacific Bay Resort about 5.30am, accompanied by the player with whom she had had sex earlier in the night.
She later told police she wanted to go to the resort only to return a wallet to her friend Kylie Hubbard, who had gone back there with a player. But her credibility was thrown into doubt when police later established she had not taken the missing wallet to Pacific Bay; it was left all night at the Planto.
It is here that the timeline - and the evidence of two key independent witnesses - becomes critical. One witness, a maintenance worker at the Pacific Bay Resort, told police he ran into the woman and man shortly after he started work about 5.50am, when she asked him for directions to a semi-private beach adjoining the resort.
About 25 minutes later, he encountered the couple again. By then, they were near the resort's Charlesworth Pool, talking to two young men he had just seen put two other girls into a cab. The girls were "very young, say 16 to 18", the worker recalled. "I thought it was a bit late for them to be out at that time." If nothing else, this evidence suggests at least two other Bulldogs players that night openly flouted the club's unwritten code outlawing women being brought back to the hotel.
A second witness, a pool technician, spotted the couple "actually in the act of sex" in the pool about that time. The man told police it was about 6.30am and broad daylight when he arrived to take water samples from the Charlesworth Pool, one of three pools at the resort. "There was a girl in the water with her back towards me and there was a fellow sitting on the edge of the pool taking his weight on his hands and I presumed they were having oral sex," the man said in his statement to police. He added he deliberately shut the gate loudly to warn them he was there.
"When that happened the girl sort of rose up out of the water and pivoted around beside the bloke and just sat there alongside him ... I wasn't really interested in what they were doing; to me it was just a couple of people having an early morning romp. The girl was just sitting there and I just minded my own business."
Some time after 6.30am, the maintenance worker also entered the pool area to empty bins. He saw the young woman "swimming in the pool breaststroke, virtually in the one spot. She looked like she was enjoying everything. There was nothing unusual about her." The young man with whom she had arrived was nowhere in sight. But the pair he had seen farewelling two younger women in a cab were lying by the pool on banana lounges.
At least one golfer is believed to have been on the course that hugs the pool - a putting green sits just five metres from its perimeter fence - at that time. By 7am, the golf shop and snack bar that overlooks the area had opened; by 7.15am, when the pool technician returned to do more work on the Charlesworth Pool, it was deserted.
The young woman originally told police the assault happened some time between 6am and 7am, although she later broadened that window to between 5.30am and 7.30am. If the independent witnesses are to be believed, and physical evidence of time, weather and locale taken into account, there seems almost no opportunity left in that period for six to eight young men to assault a woman undetected in a pool area overlooked by two large hotel blocks.
Nevertheless, at 8.30am, an ambulance was called to the resort. An hour or so later, Bulldogs CEO Steve Mortimer walked out of his hotel room and immediately spotted football manager Garry Hughes speaking to a player who was gesticulating wildly. Mortimer's first thought was: "Oh God, not again."
:-({|= Poor us.
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