The Advertiser: TENSE ENCOUNTER AT COMMISSION AS McGEE FACES VICTIM’S WIFE [10jun05] by Nigel Hunt
IT took a ton of courage and even more self-control. Face to face with the man who killed her husband, Di Gilchrist had many questions she wanted him to answer. But yesterday, a dignified Ms Gilchrist chose to remain silent as she shared a lift with lawyer Eugene McGee, preferring to let the answers be revealed through the Kapunda Road Royal Commission.

There were no words spoken in the brief encounter between the two as they rode the lift to the first-floor hearing room in Flinders St. The stony-faced McGee avoided eye contact with Ms Gilchrist, who gave him only a resolute glare. In his much-awaited appearance at the commission yesterday, McGee conceded to commissioner Greg James, QC, that his actions after the accident that claimed the life of cyclist Ian Humphrey were consistent with avoiding police.

He also said his first thought after killing Mr Humphrey was to seek legal advice, rather than call an ambulance. Such was his urgency to get legal advice, he rang his friend, barrister David Edwardson, at 5.11pm – just six minutes after the accident. Under cross-examination by counsel assisting the commissioner, Grant Niemann, McGee gave a graphic account of hitting Mr Humphrey on the Kapunda-to-Gawler road and his actions immediately afterwards.

He said there was a “flash of colour” on his left and, when he looked at the front of his Pajero, it “was striking the cyclist”. His first focus was then on correcting the Pajero, which was “dipped down” on the left and then he continued driving south. He said he did not have a clear “recall of driving from that point on”. Asked by Mr Niemann if he recalled not stopping, McGee said he did recall that and that he remembered thinking: “I can’t stop, I can’t go back”.

“I just continued to drive,” he said. “My next clear recollection is just a tumble of thoughts about the fact I’d been involved in a very serious accident; somebody had been killed; I hadn’t stopped; I was in very serious trouble; I was obviously going to be charged; I was going to have to deal with police and I needed legal help.”

Asked by Mr James why he thought he was in serious legal trouble, McGee replied: “Because there had been a very serious accident, somebody had been killed and I’d failed to stop.” McGee said although he remembered little of his driving after the accident, he still “vividly” remembered seeing an ambulance, which he associated with the accident, driving with its lights on along the Sturt Hwy. He also remembered seeing the gates to the Mantina quarry while he was stationary on the side of the road “shaking violently”.

McGee said his brother Craig had later told him “that apparently I said something about being at a quarry . . . so that’s where obviously I must have waited.” This prompted Mr James to ask him: “Waited for what?”

McGee said that while he had no memory of this, his brother had told him later that he had asked him to go to their mother’s house and check to see if there were any police waiting for him there. He said he wanted to tell his mother about the accident “personally” and then travel to Adelaide to get assistance from Mr Edwardson and a solicitor “to deal with police”.

“. . . I don’t know what my state of mind was, but my brother certainly has conveyed to me that I was obsessed with telling my mother directly, personally, what had happened and that I was concerned that, if I attended there and police were in attendance, I would be arrested, which would prevent me from doing that and would also have the situation where my 83-year-old mother would be witnessing her son being arrested by the police,” McGee said.

Mr James put to McGee that he had waited until the “coast was clear” to go to his mother’s house, to which he replied: “Apparently.”

During his evidence McGee also contradicted evidence given on Wednesday by his wife, Barbara, in which she testified they had not discussed the accident at all.

He said the pair had discussed the accident in the days after it occurred.”I have, to some extent when we were down on the South Coast, but not really since we got . . . when we came back because she was not handling the whole situation well at all,” he said. In his testimony, following McGee’s, Mr Edwardson said all conversations he had with McGee on the night of the accident were related to McGee “seeking legal advice”. While McGee has claimed legal professional privilege in relation to the content of those calls, Mr Edwardson did answer questions. He denied being asked by McGee how he could avoid police, and denied smelling alcohol on McGee’s breath.

Mr Edwardson also denied a suggestion by accident investigator Sergeant Dan Hassell that wine bottles and glasses had been placed on a kitchen bench to create the impression the drink had been consumed before Sergeant Hassell arrived to arrest McGee.