The Tapp tragedy revisited: Part 2

of them became her lovers. It was known the police discovered that there might have been half a dozen who worked at the William Anglis Hospital that at some point either had been her lovers or were suspected of same. And this of course led to a lot of complications for the police in trying to navigate their way around such tricky social areas where you've got married professionals who are very well lawyered up and who don't want to be caught out. And so the police had their hands

full checking out those leads. But the man that she really loved, the one she really wanted, was doctor John Bradkey. Now John Bradkey was a doer. He was a South Australian of you know, the sort of German extraction over in South Australia. There's a lot of those Lutheran German people that are farmers by origin. We see the names crop up always, you know, out of the Clare Valley and all that. And he was a successful, hard working doctor.

He was married, he had I think three children, and he and his wife had a lovely property with trees and all sorts of beautiful stuff and it was a showpised property.

she told friends. And we know this because a you know, he actually bought her the house that she lived in at Calvin Drive, the one she later was able to purchase. She had to pay out half of it by paying out Bracky's widow. We know it because we know that before Brakey's death, at one point Margaret, who was quite excitable, she went up to break his house in the Dandy Knocks, to break his home and she stripped off her clothes and lay down in their garden and created a terrible

scene to embarrass him. At another time, she damaged his much loved DA's and sportscar, the one in which he was killed. Actually, she has to scratch the paintwork or keyed it or whatever, the usual sort of stuff that angry lovers get involved in, and all of which tells us that this love affair between the doer doctor and

the dashing, beautiful nurse was mercurial and dangerous. It was years of living dangerously and after breakis death on the first of March nineteen eighty three in his car driving down the hill too fast to deliver a baby. He was heading off to the hospital to deliver a baby. After his death, it would appear that Margaret in some respects settled down in that she paid out the house and she got her son to move in with her parents, and she and Shauna lived in the house while she

took up studying law and these other things. But she also I suspect, having missed out on John Brake and grief stricken over John Key, she started to knock around with whichever blog her eye fell on, and one of them was one of the fellow law students from one as UNI. One of them was the allegedly the guy that was teaching her to drive trucks, one of them was somebody else, and one of them was somebody else. So there were a whole heap of people that had

come into her orbit. One of the things that was obvious to me was that there were just so many candidates for the police to check. Now, in the nineties, DNA came to be a thing. In the eighties, DNA had been science fiction. In the nineties, suddenly it was a police tool. Not as good a tool as it is today, but it became a very useful tool for the police. And what they had was a semen sample

that had been deposited on Shawna's night dress. Now this would suggest that the killer, of course, is a sexual deviate. That this murder is not a burglary gone wrong. This murder is not a case of a rapist looking to attack Margaret, the thirty five year old mother. It is a sexual deviate who has an interest in a nine year old girl. There's no way around that. That's what it is. And it certainly doesn't look like a hit, a paid hit. They were both strangled and there is

seamen found on the little girl's night dress. This is unlike any other hit in history. If it's a hit, so I'm tipping it's not. That didn't stop the homicide squad at one stage floating a fairly bizarre theory that Dr Bradkey's widow had paid a person a man to kill Margaret Tap out of spite and anger and revenge and all the rest of it, to kill her dead husband's ex lover. This would appear to be highly unlikely.

The doctor's widow was outraged by this suggestion, and in fact got a press counsel ruling that stories making that suggestion overstep the mark. And I think she made her case very well and very strongly that it was a fairly bizarre thing for the police to suggest. And one of the problems of that theory was they said she

paid this man a large amount of money. Well, the fact was, she says she and her husband brad Key, when he was alive, had lent this particular man money, and by the time Margaret was murdered in nineteen eighty four, that man had paid back most of that money. So the police's information was sort of out of kilter, deliberately or what. I don't know, but it just didn't really stack up. But what stacked up more to a neutral observer such as ourselves, is this Margaret knew a lot

of men. A lot of men knew Margaret. So there's the ones we've already been through, the ones that were cleared, you know, the brother in law, the ex neighbor, the ex husband. Then we've got her own brother, Lindsay Nelson, who recently he died two years ago. Lindsay told me that for years and years and years he was not tested for DNA. And he said to me in two thousand and four he said this, And then later he said, if they didn't test me him, who else didn't they test?

Because there he is, he's the uncle of the little girl Shauna. He should have been eliminated because he had access to the house. He would have known how to go through the back door. What if he was a fiend, what if he was a raving pedophile killer, whatever? Whatever he said, He wasn't clear. And he pointed out that he worked for a particular counsel out there, and that he'd borrowed it truck with a driver from the council.

Well borrowed a loose word, that'd actually commandeered the truck and took it more or less illegally a council truck to move some gear into Margaret's house, tables and stuff. So he said, the guy that drove the truck is called you know, Bill Blogs. And I went and knocked on Bill Blogs's door one day. But Bill Blogs was a shifty character. Bill Blogs had form for doing dishonest things.

In fact, he was sacked from the council for breaking fire hydrants with crowbars so that he would be called out after ours to fix the hydrants so he woud get overtime. So he was a bit of a crook. He used to receive stolen goods, pinch stuff, you know,

he was one of those sort of guys. And also Bill Blogs, not his real name, used to drive a hot red falcon Ute and it was a really good hot falcon Ut with what they called twelve slaughter mag wheel These were the very expensive mag wheels, twelve slaughters. And one of the clues that neighbors gave police they said they'd noticed such a vehicle in Calvin Drive around the week of that murder. Now this is not a positive sighting. It doesn't actually put Bill Blogs in the frame,

but it's interesting. Lindsay Nelson, Margaret's brother, Shawana's uncle says to me, how come that bug, Bill Blogs hasn't been cleared. Why wasn't he clear? How come all these other guys he thinks haven't been cleared. There was a young guy teaching Margaret how to drive a semi trailer. Margaret was an enthusiast. Margaret had a lot of energy. Margaret was mercurial.

Margaret was up for new experiences. And one of Margaret's ideas was she would get a semi trailer license a truck lasnon so she could help friends in South Australia bring in their grain crop over summer. Go over there, work in summertime, driving a truck back and forth to the wheat silos. She was that sort of person. She'd give anything a go. She was getting her truck license with instructions from a young man who was happy to give her free lessons because he really enjoyed her company.

That guy should have had his DNA tested because who knows what might have happened there. That guy's circle of friends should have been tested, you know. Did he know someone else that knew Margaret through the truck driving thing. We don't know. In the same street, there was a house at the end of the street on the corner of Ferntry Gully Road and Calvin Drive I think it was, and that family were regarded as sort of the black sheep of Calvin Drive. Dad was an interstate trucky. They

are pretty rough and ready. There was a lot of them. There was a lot of boys in the family grown up. When I say boys ranging from a teenage kid of about fourteen up to twenty eight years old or whatever. I tracked down a couple of those young fellows and they said to me, we weren't cleared. And one of them had the common sense to say that they.

for rape. So there we've got a whole family of rough young bugs from fourteen to twenty something. And the sister's boyfriend who's a convicted rapist or was later convicted of rape and did time. None of them were tested at that time. This means that the police managed to miss for some time, maybe forever, but certainly for many years, they didn't eliminate a whole group of people, any one of whom could have been the murderer. But wait, there's more.

A few years ago, not that long ago. Let's stay just before COVID. Back in there. I was approached by a young man with a story to tell you. He's a guy with a good job, proper person, not a lunatic, not an armchair detective. Wasn't full of theories. He just had one story to tell me. He said. Look, I'm a close friend of a particular young fellow and his father, whom he hates, was a doctor in the Dandy Knongs back in the eighties and nineties. And his father was

very popular, very well known. He was sporty, he was good looking, he was king of the kids. He drove good cars, and he played tennis, and he had a holiday house down the coast, and he was big house

on the hill. The whole shebang very high in the list of socially desirable people living in the Dandy Knongs, you know, the top of the social tree among his friends would be I think the former Senator Don Chip and his wife, among others up in the hills, and there was a pretty big group of those sort of people, and he said, what I want to tell you is that that man was a monster. He looked great and he was popular, but people became aware that he was

a sexual predator. And he wasn't just a sexual predator. He was a really aggressive pedophile, among other things, to young girls, bigger girls, teenage girls, and women of all ages, just the full Monty. And it got that way that even though he was sort of a popular GP, some people didn't want to go to him. Some women didn't want to go to his surgery, certainly, not unless they had a friend with them or whatever. And he got

known as sort of the dirty doctor. And eventually it transpired that several witnesses got together and compared notes, and they realized that this bloke was a serial predator. And it turned out sexually molested females between the age of four and twenty nine at six different locations, four places up there on the Dandy Knongs and his own house and his own holiday house which is down the coast. And although he was convicted, I think only of one of those The allegations were made by a series of

witnesses the similar fact behavior covering many people. The conviction he got was enough that he was struck off the medical register he could no longer practice as a doctor. This is in the late nineties when he was around fifty years of age, and that doctor having moved from the Danny Knongs when in disgrace to Saint Kilda, where he was able to work for a while as a doctor before he was actually convicted. He then moved into state. He went to a border town. Let's say he went

to a border town. And some time ago I went to that border town. It might have been I think since the COVID pandemic. I went to the border town and I watched that man, and I watched him Walky's dog, and I made sure that locals knew exactly who he was, which they did. They knew very well who he was,

and they knew his reputation. And they keep a very close eye on that man because he lives between a scape park and a primary school, and everybody in that district, the parents and the grandparents, they keep an eye on that guy. So he's probably not going to get up to much, although some people worry about the little kids next door. That man, as we've said, was a doctor

in the Dandy Knongs. It turns out, as we've just discovered, that if you look at the birth notices published in the newspapers from early nineteen eighty three, there is a birth notice that says that doctor Bradkey, that is Margaret's dead lover, well known popular doctor doctor John Bradkey and doctor X. We're not going to name him here, Doctor bradkn Doctor X brought our beautiful daughter into the world, you know, last week, baby girl born December the twenty

ninth of two or around that date, and the birth notice names those two doctors together. Now this is proof positive that doctor Bradkey, who is Margaret's lover, the one that she really wanted, the lover that she really loved, and she was broken hearted when he wouldn't leave his wife and marry her and all that stuff. He was a lover that bought her a house at Frontrick Gully,

So they were pretty well connected. Doctor Bradkey used to deliver babies side by side with doctor X, the charming, dashing sexual predator, and so it is clear listeners that doctor X the sexual predator must have known, must surely have known Margaret Tap because they delivered babies in the William Anglis Hospital, in the Dandy Kongs at wherever it is, fern Trick Gally or up whatever it is. And Doctor X used to play tennis, as we've heard, he not only had a court at home, he used to play

at the local courts. Very keen on it. Social tennis player, pretty good one. And he used to play tennis with a group of other alpha males, one of whom was a builder well known to me, a bloke who played one game of VFL football interestingly. And they played in a sort of a social comp at Fernie Creek Tennis Club and Fernie Creek Tennis Club in those days, i'm told, had onto car courts, that is the red sort of brick dust stuff onto garrett as opposed to tarmac or

as opposed to lawn. This is onto cart and easily maintained and all the rest of it. And in those days most of us used to wear things called dunlop folly tennis shoes. If we didn't use them to play tennis, we used to wear them around with our jeans. They were a cheap and popular item of footwear, and they had a very distinctive ripple soul which was like a

zig zag pattern on the soul. I think these days they be regarded as prehistoric and ridiculous, but in those days they were sort of good snakers to wear, and tennis players is to wear them. And here's the bit

that matters. The one clue found at the murder house at thirteen Calvin Drive, Ferntry Gully was a perfect footprint or footprints plural in Margaret's bedroom and in the bathroom Dunlop volley tennis shoe and it would appear to have left the marks on the floor because the Dunlop volley was impregnated with red onto car brick dust and it

had left these excellent foot in the murder house. Now, that does not prove by itself that Doctor X was the unknown visitor, but there is no doubt in the minds of the police, and you have to agree with them that if you find the person that was wearing the volley Sanchez in that house that night that left those footprints, you have probably found the killer. Doctor X. Keen tennis player size eleven feet which would seem to tell you with the man sized prince left in the house,

and he was a aggressive, opportunist, sexual predator. He played tennis on Tuesday nights at Fernie Creek, which is a quick drive fifteen minutes or whatever from Ferntry Gully Easy. He plays tennis between you know, nine and ten whatever evening stuff after work, then whips down to see Margaret, whom he knew as the extremely friendly nurse ex lover of his dead colleague Dr Bradke. And one thing might

have led to another. And so while we cannot say with any certainty who killed Margaret Tappan her daughter Shawna, he could only hope that doctor X has been eliminated through the use of DNA and any other means at the police's disposal, because if he hasn't, it would seem to be a glaring oversight. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True crime Australia.

Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew Rule one word.