Paul Peters is escorted from the courthouse in Louisville, Kentucky, after police tracked him down and charged him with the collar-bomb crime. Source: Supplied
WHEN the FBI raided Paul Douglas Peters' Kentucky home in August last year, they weren't surprised to find a copy of Tai-Pan lying on his desk.
Although he did not initially admit this to police, Peters loved James Clavell's story of colonial Hong Kong, reading and re-reading it, covering the novel in his own handwritten notes.
Within hours of the raid, still wearing a lilac shirt and shorts, Peters sat inside a cramped interview room, facing NSW Police Detective Sergeant Andrew Marks.
Did Peters know, Marks asked, that a man wearing a rainbow-striped balaclava and carrying a baseball bat had broken into the bedroom of 18-year-old Sydney schoolgirl, Madeleine Pulver?
That a hoax collar-bomb had been locked around her neck? That an extortion note left with the device contained an email address which matched the name of Tai-Pan's central character, Dirk Struan?
"Absolutely. I have a feeling I know now why you may be here," Peters replied.
"Why are we here, Mr Peters?" asked the detective.
To answer that you must go back many years; to when Peters, like Dirk Struan, was a powerful Asian trader, the head of his own company, with a fortune at his command.
After his arrest, a number of tantalising coincidences seemed to connect Peters to his teenage victim's family.
In court documents filed in the US, police said "Peters was formerly employed by a company with which the victim's family has links".
Almost the same age, Peters and Madeleine's father Bill Pulver went to two of Sydney's most exclusive private schools - Scots College and Shore Grammar, respectively. Keen athletes, they may have played sport together.
Both men subsequently worked in New York, where Pulver's office was less than a kilometre from an apartment rented by a Paul Douglas Peters - though it may not have been the same man. Their fathers both reportedly now live in the same NSW country town of Tamworth.
A NSW central coast property Peters rented in the months before breaking into the Pulvers' Sydney home was only a few kilometres from the million-dollar beach house the Pulver family owned at nearby Avoca Beach.
The Pulvers deny knowing the former banker, and no evidence of any connection between them was heard in court. What is known is this: an Australian, Peters graduated from the University of Sydney before leaving for a career in Hong Kong and then Malaysia, describing himself as an "international investment banker".
During this time, he "worked very hard and slept very little but we had lots of money", Peters's wife Debra told his sentencing hearing in a Sydney court.
He played polo. She lived with their three daughters in their mansion in New Jersey. Peters gave his wife $15,000 in "living expenses" each month, plus an extra $5000 to $15,000 she spent on her credit card.
But, after 2000, her husband "started to disconnect", Debra told the court. His drinking increased to two large gin and tonics and two bottles of wine a night.
Around the same time, Peters began writing a a novel about Hong Kong, telling his wife it was "about a man who found a key and was looking for some treasure".
Over the years, his mood swings worsened, but he refused medical treatment. "I didn't really know who was going to walk in the door," Debra told the court.
Peters's last paid employment was with the Allco Finance Group in Malaysia. The company foundered in 2008, he told police, and he bought it out, naming the corporation after himself.
The venture fizzled out. Peters lost a lot of money. His marriage failed. Psychiatrists who interviewed him told the court he was a narcissist who "lamented the loss of that lifestyle".
Like a character in his book, the court heard, he went looking for lost treasure, tracking down the beneficiaries of a multi-million dollar trust fund, one of whom lived in the exclusive Sydney suburb of Mosman, near the Pulvers' home.
A few days after Madeleine was attacked, on August 8, Peters flew to the US from Australia, where Debra met him at the airport.
He seemed happy, "a lot more at ease than he was when I saw him last", she told the court. One week later, the FBI arrived outside their home.
Peters finally understood his extortion plot had caught up with him about 7.20pm, inside that tiny interview room in Louisville, Kentucky.
At first, he seemed relaxed, leaning back in his chair and happy to talk, particularly when talking about his wealth.
"I could write you a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars," Peters said.
Another $12 million was sitting in a trust, although access to this fortune had become complicated and he was currently "tracking down the trustee".
"It's called the James M. Cox trust," Peters said, after a US politician from whom he was descended.
Sitting across the desk, Marks handed Peters a two-page letter, addressed to the "trustee of the James M. Cox trust estate" and demanding money, with a threat to kill.
That extortion note, Marks said, was reconstructed from a deleted file on a USB stick the attacker had hung around Madeleine's neck.
Suddenly, Peters stopped answering questions.
The interview ended at 7.39pm. A moment later, Marks looked straight at Peters. "I think that last document shows that you're in this up to your eyeballs. You know that," the policeman said.
Yet, Peters nearly got away with it. His mistake was failing to realise that Madeleine Pulver might telephone her father, Bill, before reading the full extortion note.
Typed out on two A4-pages, this reads: "The case is booby-trapped ... DO NOT under any circumstance try to open it."
Any attempt to contact the police "will trigger an immediate BRIAN DOUGLAS WELLS event."
Wells, a US pizza delivery man, was killed in 2003 by a bomb fastened round his neck. But Bill Pulver knew none of this when his daughter called, and he immediately telephoned the police.
"If I had known there was an extortion letter, I ask myself the question many times - would I have actually rung the police?" Pulver said. "I'm really not sure what I would have done. He was unlucky not to get away with this."
There were also other mistakes. Peters used his credit card, not cash, to buy a bike lock used to make the mock-explosive device, as well as the baseball bat and balaclava he carried during the attack.
The same, traceable, credit card was used to buy the USB stick left hanging around Madeleine's neck, which also contained an electronic version of the extortion note. That file was created on a computer registered to a 'Paul P'.
The "dirkstruan-1840@gmail.com" address given in the note as a means by which the victim's family could obtain further instructions, was also easily traced. The account was accessed three times in the hours after the attack, at a library and video store on the NSW central coast. CCTV footage recorded Peters at each.
In March, Peters pleaded guilty to the attack on Madeleine. For the police, the question that remained was, why?
For almost two full days the court trawled back and forth over the issue of Peters's mental health. Three psychiatrists gave evidence in person, while others provided written reports.
Among their diagnoses were that the former investment banker suffered from alcohol abuse, depression, or a bipolar disorder and that either of these, or something else, could have caused him to become psychotic.
In court, the defence rejected all talk of Peters having concrete "targets" for his crime.
"You are talking about a person who ... could not be thinking clearly, was liable to be influenced by delusional thoughts," Tim Game SC said.
Central to these was the book he spent a decade obsessively writing, and which he claimed to have finished either the day before or on the day of his attack. After his arrest, Peters claimed he had begun to confuse himself with the book's central character, John Chan.
"We (himself and Chan) can't be in this situation, we are humiliated," Peters told one psychiatrist.
No longer an international investment banker, and mourning the high-rolling lifestyle he used to enjoy, he told another: "I started to think of a dual revenge. One for Chan, one for me."
Among three boxes of documents seized by police from the Peters home were several containing the names of James M. Cox's children, and other beneficiaries of his estate.
"The plan was to hunt down the beneficiary of the James M. Cox trust," Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC told the court. "The first target," she said, was a woman who had inherited a fortune from her mother, herself a beneficiary of the trust, and who lived less than 2km from the Pulvers' Sydney home.
Peters admitted to police that he visited Mosman several times before Madeleine was attacked. Doing so, he bumped into a businessman he knew from his successful past in Hong Kong, who "gave Mr Peters the brush-off", Cunneen said.
As a result, the court heard, he suddenly "changed target".
The first extortion note, recovered from the deleted file on the USB stick, was meant for the first woman, Cunneen said.
The second, which uses the same brutal language, was meant for the family of this businessman.
This man - who cannot be named - was a neighbour of the Pulver family. "He makes a mistake. The offender got the wrong house, having changed target somewhere between the two extortion notes," Cunneen said.
As a result, Madeleine sat for 10 hours with what she thought was a bomb fixed round her neck.
In photos tendered to the court, "the anguish on that young lady's face is palpable", Cunneen said.
Ultimately, in sentencing him to prison yesterday, judge Peter Zahra said Peters had not given evidence himself in court.
As such, his claims to be suffering psychoses, and to have no memory of entering the Pulvers' home, had not been tested, and could not be taken as fact.
For the same reason, a number of other unanswered questions remain. For Bill Pulver, these include why it was his family, particularly, that was targeted.
The man who could answer this, Paul Peters, has sat silently throughout the court hearings, thin lips turned down, often staring straight ahead.
"The one person in the room who knows exactly what happened and he's chosen not to give evidence," Bill Pulver said outside the court. "He should be ashamed. But it's not clear looking at him in court."
Paul Douglas Peters was yesterday jailed for at least 10 years, with a maximum of 13 and a half years.
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