Christopher Hudson: Hells Angels bikie said Ive decided you need to go before shooting
THEY are three survivors, locked in a decade-long nightmare, the memories still raw of the day they came way too close to an armed man hellbent on murder.
Kaera Douglas, Paul de Waard and Natalie Gullace were three strangers, now forever tied by a tragedy that cost a good samaritan father, husband and lawyer Brendan Keilar his life when he walked into the line of fire to save another.
Ten years on, the three have reunited for the first time to reveal the terrible cost of that Monday morning in June, 2007, when Hells Angels bikie Christopher Wayne Hudson unleashed his rage in the CBD, leaving Brendan dead, Kaera and Paul injured, a city reeling and lives shattered.
In an interview aired on 60 Minutes, the three paid tribute to Brendan for his courage and heroism.
Kaera Douglas will always be grateful to Brendan: as Hudson’s ex-girlfriend she knows she is the one the bullet was meant for in his drug-fuelled, jealous rampage.
Hudson had been drinking heavily and had already beaten another woman unconscious and left her on the street before finding Kaera, showing her he had a handgun, and forcing to walk with him up a CBD street.
In a carpark, he threatened her with the gun, and she managed to escape up some stairs and into Flinders Lane.
She tried desperately to get into a waiting cab.
When Hudson began dragging the distraught Kaera away from the taxi by her hair, Brendan Keilar made the good samaritan make a move that would cost him his life.
He approached and asked Hudson what was going on, with Paul de Waard not far behind.
“I thought that together we could stop the man hurting her,” Paul would later tell police.
In reply, Hudson pulled the gun. Shot Kaera in the chest area, then turned it towards the two men, and gunned them down.
As they lay on the ground, he fired another shot into each of them.
Brendan died at the scene. Paul remembers shots, and pain in his chest. He was critically injured.
Kaera was in a coma for days, and lost a kidney.
She suffers survivor guilt, and has battled alcohol, anorexia, and depression since the shooting, she recently told The Herald Sun.
“He was going to execute me, 100 per cent,” Kaera, tells 60 Minutes.
As Hudson made her walk up busy Flinders Lane, he told her: “I’ve decided you need to go.”
“Today you’re going to die,” he continued. “Today’s the last day of your life.”
Natalie Gullace can’t stop thinking about what might have been. She’d noticed something amiss as she observed Hudson and a clearly terrified Kaera, and had followed them up the street, only to bear witness to the full horror as he opened fire.
“I just saw him (Hudson) reach into his jacket and extend his arm and just went ‘bang, bang, bang’,” she says.
“All I remember is locking eyes with him and just staring at the end of the gun.”
“You know ... it was all the what ifs. If I had have maybe started walking a bit sooner, maybe it would’ve been me, not Brendan.”
Hudson was sentenced to a minimum of 35 years imprisonment for the crime.
60 Minutes airs on Sundays on Channel 9 at 8.30pm
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