You're listening to a Mother Mea podcast. Mama Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waterers. This podcast was recorded on It's Sunday, the sixteenth of May nineteen ninety three in Lennox Head in New South Wales, a laid back coastal town full of families and people in search of the quiet life away from the hustle and bustle. Ron Win Winfield is getting her daughter's ten year old Crystal and five year old Lauren ready for bed. It's
been a big weekend. Her Rex's husband has been in Sydney on a construction job, so she has moved her girls back into the family home. They've been staying in a townhouse on the road out of town for seven weeks since she filed for divorce, but as winter approaches, it's been getting cold within their new walls. So here she is taking a stand and reclaiming the Sandstone Crescent property she once shared with John while he's away on business. Tonight, John is on his way back to Lennox. His flight
touches down at six thirty pm. Bronwin has his belongings packed. She has every intention of staying in their marital home of fighting for the home she's raised her girls in. But after John returns home, it's Bronwyn who leaves alone. According to him, she needed a break and left into an unknown person's car that very same night. That Sunday is the last time the thirty one year old mother
of two is ever seen again. I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime Conversations a Mama mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. The disappearance of Bronwyn Winfield was barely covered by the media in nineteen ninety three. It took eleven days for John to actually report her as missing after that Sunday night. Very little was done in the way of a police investigation in those early days.
In fact, it would be years until her case was actually taken seriously. A coronial inquest nearly a decade later determined that Bronwin had likely been murdered. It went as far as recommending John be prosecuted, but that never happened. Bronwin's case is the focus of Headley Thomas's new podcast investigation. You'll remember him from The Teacher's Pet. The investigation into missing mother of two Lynette Simms, formerly known as Lynett
Dawson in Sydney. She vanished from her Bayview home in nineteen eighty two, and her former husband, Chris Dawson, was convicted of murder in twenty twenty two after Headley went digging and brought the case back into the light. Now in twenty twenty four, he's hopeful of getting some answers for Bromwin's family. He's speaking to her friend, her family, the police, and the last people who saw Bromwin before
she disappeared. He's currently in the midst of his investigation, but Hedley joins us now to tell us about what he's uncovered so far. So, you've spoken to lots of people who know Bronwin Winfield by now, how would you describe her? Who was she?
Bromwin was a young woman who was seeking from a very early age the stability of family. She had grown up in a family that became very dislocated. Her own mother had serious mental health challenges when Bromwin was very very young. She had postatal depression and she also had what was described at the time as a schizo effective disorder.
It wasn't well understood in the nineteen sixties, and Barbara, who is Bromlin's mum, ended up really just trying to find her own way, no longer being the mother of Bromwin and Andrew, so she went overseas and stayed overseas with her own mother for some years while Bromlin was being raised with her brother by their father and their
father's second wife, Jennifer. As a result, when Barbara came back into their lives, Bromin was already about eleven years old, Andy Andrew was nine, and Andy didn't know that he had a biological mother who had been away all those years.
It's unclear whether Bromwin knew, but the recollection of other people is that Bromwin did know in any event, when Barbara returned from overseas and really wanted to play a significant and important role in the lives of her children, you know, she had been replaced by another woman who had effectively been their mother, and we must have been incredibly destabilizing for both children, and on the one hand, natural surprise at realizing that they had not known of
their own mother for so long and then wanting to understand how that happens, and their natural mother becoming part of their lives, and their stepmother, who they had called mother, perhaps feeling herself somewhat replaced. So I think these must have contributed to Bromin's desires when she reached adulthood to forego career, to forego travel, to really just focus on trying to have the perfect family. She just wanted the white picket fence, the perfect little home, happy marriage, and
healthy children. And she loved children. She adored kids. She was by all accounts, a wonderful young mum and certainly showed no evidence of having any mental health challenges, apart from it has to be said she did have some depression postnatal depression after the birth of her own first child.
That really sets the scene of her being a real family woman mother. And she did have a bit of an unusual setup there because she had two children. But then she also brought in John, her husband's third daughter. Didn't she can you help us understand the family unit?
In the nineties, so Bromwin had her first child, Crystal, with her long term boyfriend, guy called Mark, and she didn't marry Mark. She married a guy called Gary Bear and that marriage was short lived. Then when she met John. She had a child with John, Lauren, who was Bromin's second child, but John also had a child from his first marriage. John had been married twice before he met Bromin, and he had Jody from his first wife, and John
and John's parents had been looking after Jody. Jody didn't grow up with her own natural mother, and that was a source of great regret for that woman, and we will deal with that in the podcast. But Bromlin was of the view when she and John got together that Jody should become part of their family unit, that she should no longer be living with her grandparents and being
raised with them. So she brought Jody into the family home that she and John were trying to create in the Shire in south of Sydney.
Tell me about the first time you heard about Bromwyn and her story.
I was sitting in the living room of a former deputy state corner called Karl Milavanovitch, and Karl was someone I was meeting for the first time a week before Christmas twenty seventeen, and I had just been doing some really exhausting, emotionally but also very affecting interviews with people who knew Lynn. Lynn Dawson, who we now refer to as LYNL. Sims. And we were rushing around because I was doing these interviews for The Teacher's Pet in December
twenty seventeen. We were still six months out from releasing the first episode of that series, but I was trying to do as many interviews as possible in a shorter time as possible, And so we drove out there and Carl welcomed us very warmly, and he was happy to talk to us about the that he had run back in two thousand and three into Lynette's presumed death, and as a result of that inquest, Carl recommended that Chris
Awso be prosecuted for murder. He also made a ruling that Lynnette was dead and had been dead since nineteen eighty two, when she supposedly, according to Chris, went off to start a new life or do whatever Chris said it she was doing. He was peddling all sorts of lies at that time. And Carl, in the course of talking about Lynnette, he talked to me about his concerns about a number of other missing women cases. And this was in the context of Carl explaining that the police
investigation in Lynn's case was so poor. She was treated just quite appallingly as a mother who didn't care about her children, who didn't care about her home, her friend, family, a job, and just took off run away mum. And it was stupid. It was a reckless response by police, possibly even corrupt at that time. But Karl made the point that it wasn't that case alone that concerned him. He had dealt with other missing mother, missing women cases
where the police response had been very, very shabby. And he mentioned this case that he had done in lenox Head, his mother from Sandstone Crescent, lenox Head, and he said her name bronwin Winfield. He gave me a little summary of it, and you know, I just made a mental note then, and I think I googled it soon afterwards and realized it was very little on the public record about her. I was intrigued. I opened a folder on my laptop wanting to revisit this case because I had
so much respect for Carl and his judgment. I thought there must be so much much more to this. And I couldn't do much at that time because I was so busy trying to do more interviews and investigate leads and so on for the Teacher's Pet. But as the episodes from the Teacher's Pet began coming out, people who were following Lynn's story and all the evidence of Crisp having groom schoolgirls and having then murdered his wife in
cold blood. A number of people who knew Bronwin contacted me out of the blue, just emailing me and saying, you know, this is one that you may have time to investigate one day as well. This story was very concerning. This case was very concerning, and one of those people was Matt Fordham, who was the senior police officer with the legal degree who handled the inquest when Karl ran the inquest in two thousand and two. So you know
that's the history of this. A year before Karl had run Lin's in quest, had done Bromlin's and it was one of a number of cases that concerned him because there was no rational explanation for the disappearance of both these women, these dedicated mothers.
All these years later, you've been able to actually dedicate time to this case, to Bronwin's story. I think, knowing so much about Linn's story and the Teacher's Pet, it is very eerie how similar these cases are. Have you found that while investigating them?
Yeah? I really have, And it's almost like parts of them are a mirror image. One key difference is that Bromlin had separated from her husband John. She wanted to go her own way. She could no longer tolerate aspects of his behavior. She felt like she was living almost in a prison. The things that she would describe, which we now know as very extreme coercive control, are set
out in her own writings. She was in longhand penning so many points and recollections and aspects of her relationship, a failing relationship with her husband that when we go back now and read those and think about those, you know it is a very powerful demonstration of a marriage that is doomed because of the possessiveness and control of one partner. That's how it's represented. Of course, there's always two sides of the story, but we've not heard John's.
He's preferred to keep that to himself. But the similarities in other ways are very clear. Let's think about the
fundamental similarities. The most obvious ones a young mother with no addictions, with no other potential catastrophe in her life, The sorts of things that could cause a young mother to just lose her bearings suddenly disappears on the eve of her going to see her lawyer about property settlement matters relating to the fact that she separated from her husband and she wants to get a divorce as soon as lawfully possible, so she's got an appointment on a
Monday morning to see her lawyer. She's already had several appointments with lawyers about the marriage that she wants to end, and on a Sunday evening, the night before she sees her husband for the first time in several weeks, he comes up to the family home from Sydney, where he's
been working building a house. He goes to the house that Bromwin has been living in with her children, the house that John himself literally built with his bare hands, and he agrees that they have an altercation that evening, and he's the last person to ever see her, and she doesn't touch her bank account. Ever, she doesn't have
any further contact with anybody. She certainly doesn't catch up with any of the milestones or significant events in her children's lives, their age ten and five at that time.
She doesn't turn up for work, doesn't reach out to her mother, her brother, her other loved ones, and she's just again written off as the mum who decided to take off, leaving behind her children, not to mention leaving behind the means by which she could support herself equity in a house that was going to be sold, she would have been entitled to perhaps half, maybe even more because of her care for the children of this house. It was worth a quarter of a million dollars in
nineteen ninety three. And I think that such a proposition that a woman would just up and leave all of that without warning, without anyone knowing of any such plan to do so, is just so ridiculous. Anyone who thinks that it should be taken seriously deserves to be checked into an embarrassment clinic. I mean, it's just so stupid.
And yet that was the theory that the police adopted, and they made some absolutely appalling errors early on when they were being asked to investigatein as a missing person, some errors that you could not fathom would be capable of detectives with some seniority, And yet they did, and they persuaded themselves that she'd just gone off.
Let's delve into some of those details. I want to start with the marriage because Lennox is a small coastal town. People talk, and by all accounts, it seems that Bronwin was quite open with a lot of people about her unhappiness in her marriage and what was going on and sharing details. You mentioned a bit of coercive control, but what else was happening in that marriage.
People who visited Bromwin at the house in Sandstone Crescent were aware that she walked around as if on eggshells while they were there, and that was because, in their opinion, John didn't really want visitors at the house. Ever, He didn't like seeing other people in his house, and he was incredibly particular about any mess, so literally crumbs that were spilled on the floor would have the potential of
setting him off. According to some of these people, Bromwin used to cover the taps at the sink with a tee tar when she was peeling potatoes so that the starch and water and so on from the peeled potatoes wouldn't actually jump onto the taps and potentially show up as a little blemish. Now, that sounds like a personality tray or disorder that you know lots of people have. It doesn't make you a violent person. It doesn't make you some unlikely or possibly capable of murdering your wife
and concealing for body for thirty one years. However, it did produce a huge amount of tension in the relationship. It meant that Bromwin couldn't actually have people over without being very stressed. Her friend Deb Hall, who lived next door, said that Bromwin would have friends who she would ask
Deb to host at her house. Dev didn't actually have the same bonds with these people, and Deb was only too happy to help, but Bromwin was terrified that she'd upset John that could trigger him if he saw these friends. Another good friend of Bromwin's was a woman called Bridgeta in the Shire, and she described Vibed in the early years of the relationship. When Bromin first started seeing John.
She described the sort of the light and the happiness that she used to see in Bromen just diminishing and being replaced by a sense of unease in Bromman and Bromwin once told Brigida that she was reluctant to go out driving and visiting Bridgeta, even though they had been friends for so many years since high school, because John would check how much fuel she'd used and try to
work out where she had gone. John's second wife, who we referred to as d in the podcast, She told me that John was not violent towards her, but their marriage lasted just eighteen months, and she told me that was because he was just extraordinarily possessive. They'd be walking down the street together and she would be feeling the same unshine and thinking how nice is this. They're probably walking hand in hand, and she said that he would then ask her why she was looking at a guy
a certain way, Why are you looking him? Why are you staring at him? Do you like him? This kind of obviously very jealous insecurity that would lead to disagreements because she wasn't looking at anybody.
The early nineties was a very different time in terms of what we thought domestic violence. Look like, we've come a long way in the last twenty thirty years in terms of knowing that it's not just physical, it's emotional, it's financial, it's coercive, it's isolation. Do you think that that contributed to everything going on that perhaps Bronwin and her community didn't have a word for it. They didn't understand what was going on or think it was as bad as it was.
Yeah, it's a really interesting question because it's very hard to put yourself in that place at that time. You know, we're talking about the early nineteen nineties, and I think we did have a lot of awareness about domestic violence. Certainly, things like apprehended violence orders were part of the legal system's response to concerns of women. So we should have
been becoming much better educated about these things. You know, John emphatically denies wrongdoing, and no doubt he denies that he ever lifted a finger against Bromlin, but she also did confide to friends like Denise Barnard that he really scared her. Bromman told Denise, and Denise told police, and has told me that Bromwin said one day he had put his hands around her throat and was acting in
a really threatening way. She was worried about choking, and I think we know from the literature that this is a very serious precursor to much worse events.
You're listening to true crime conversations with me, Jemma Bath. I'm speaking with Hedley Thomas about the disappearance of Bronwyn Winfield. Up next, we find out why the DPP declined a recommendation to charge the missing mother's ex husband with murder. When Bronwyn decided to divorce John, she was starting to try and create a new life for herself, wasn't she.
Yeah, In late March, Bromwin wanted to make that break and she had very little in the way of money, so it was always going to be difficult for her to do this. She didn't have much in the way of her own savings. She has told friends and she has written down that she never believed that John would
allow her to take this house. I know from other people who spoke to John at the time of the separation between John and Broman that John told these people, including a guy called Ian Lewis or Scruffy the concrete He worked with johnn He employed John on a number of jobs, and he told me that John had said to Scruffy, I'm not going to lose another house. Scruffy. I've had two previous marriages and I've lost out both times, and I'm not going to lose this house. I'm not
going to lose this one. He loved Lennox Head. He was a very committed surfer. Bromwin was prepared to make the break, and she understood her rights, particularly after she'd been to Sea lawyers in Ballina and in nearby Lisbon. She knew that as the care for their children, and Crystal was calling John dad, even though he was at legally her stepfather, but John had wanted to have a
relationship with Crystal whereby she called him dad. Broman understood that when the property settlement occurred, she would have certain rights to the assets of the marriage, as she should, remembering that Broman had Crystal before she met John, then she had Lauren with John, and of course she effectively moved Jody into the family home. So Bromin had been a carer for those three girls. So she moved into
a rented flat in Lennox Head. It was not far away from the family home, and you have to wonder why did she have to move out? Usually in situations where you know there's a family home and a marriage breakdown and the mother is clearly going to be looking after the children. Bearing in mind, Jody had moved to Sydney and was working in a hair salon. By then she was eighteen years old. The mother would usually stay
in the family home as the primary carer. It's almost always the case that the father who unless he is going to be the care of the children, would move about. That didn't happen in this case, and it's unclear to me why. Andy, who is Broman's brother, is adamant that Bromlin was effectively forced out when she said she wanted to separate. His view is that she was effectively kicked out, and certainly the locks were changed soon afterwards by John.
So while Bromin was living in rented accommodation, no doubt she was getting good legal advice weighing her options. She was working part time in a little takeaway place down near the beach front, trying to stay out of John's way. He had moved to Sydney after some weeks and was working on the house building it in the Shire, and that's when Bromin decided that rather than paying all this money in rent, she should move back into the family home because it was vacant and.
It's hers as well.
And it's hers yeah, so nobody was living in it. She had been paying rent downtown. She could not afford to pay that rent, so we'll save that money and move back in, and her brother was urging her to do that. She got legal advice from her solicitor who said that would be fine. You're entitled to it, and so she did. On a Friday evening, a trailer came up and she brought many of her belongings from the townhouse back to her own house. She hadn't finished the
move and I think that's really interesting too. She had a plan, a plan to empty the townhouse, to give it back to little land Lady Shirley Taylor, and have all of her things back in the family house, settle her children and get them off to school on the Monday. When she disappeared, the townhouse still had many boxes of her contents, of her belongings, her personal goods. They were just left there. She didn't go back for those after she disappeared. She didn't ever go back to her own house.
It's just another, I think, powerful indicator that something else happened to Bromwain that she didn't, as her husband has said, leave of her own volition.
What does he say happened that evening when he arrived back at Sandstone Crescent.
He says that he went from the airport at Ballina to the police station, and at the police station on the Sunday evening, he wanted to check whether there were any orders that would have prevented him from approaching the house. And we believe that's because Roman had had a conversation with John's daughter Jody a couple of nights earlier, and Jody has said in a police statement that Bromin said, look, you know, your dad needs to be careful about coming
near me. I'm getting an order so that he can't and they must have been related to John. I mean, I'm speculating a little bit here and paraphrasing, but that gives you the gist of it. So John certainly has gone to the police station and they've said no, there's no order here, and there was, and we don't know whether it was in the process, whether it had been
held up. We're still trying to work that out. But he went then from the police station to the home of one of his daughter's friends and picked her up. He wanted her to go with him to the house when he knocked on the door. He knocked on the door and this woman called Becky Maguire, she witnessed that and Broman opened the front door and then John went in.
Broman had his two suitcases at the front door. Becky Maguire then was driven home by John, and she says that he apologized for disrupting her Sunday evening and then he went back to the house. He then says that the children were having their dinner and they were put to bed. Crystal says that they usually went to bed at about eight thirty pm. John says to some people that they had a bit of a disagreement, but not
too heated. To someone else, he described it as an altercation. Crystal, in her statement when she was sixteen years old, says that she could hear them arguing when she was in bed, and that her mother was crying, and that her mother said that she would see her girls in the morning, and according to John, Bromlin decided that she needed to have a bit of a break and that she told him she wanted to go away for a few days just to have some time because according to John, she'd
been with the kids all this time and so on. So he says that she went into the bedroom and she made a phone call or two, and that at about nine to thirty pm, a car drew up and Bromlin went outside and got into the car, and the car drove away, and he didn't see the car, so he doesn't know what kind of car it was, and he certainly doesn't know who was driving it or who she called. And that's the last time John says he saw his wife.
And then later that evening he says he drove the girls to Sydney.
Yes, so he says that he decided that he should go to Sydney, but he'd flown from Sydney to Balana, so at that time of night there were no flights. He packed up the car, but he didn't put much in the car because when they got to Sydney, Bromwin's brother and sister in law on the Monday afternoon saw John. He came to their house and the kid's clothes were
sort of thrown into pillowcases. But the clothes that were packed were not really clothes you would pack for the onset of winter burying in mind the kids would you to be in school on the Monday, not in Sydney.
He says that he got fueled at eleven oh six pm and he kept the receipt for that fuel for years and years in his wallet, and when people would ask him about what happened to Bromwin, he would often flourish this receipt, as he did when he got to Sydney, as he did five years later when he met the detective Sergeant Glenn Taylor, who i'd take this case very seriously in nineteen ninety eight when he heard about it.
And you know, it's always been puzzling for people why John has been so wedded to this receipt showing his purchase of fuel at eleven oh six pm in Ballina on the Sunday night. But he says he drove through the night and arrived the next morning in Sydney. And he was in Sydney for about eleven days until Roman's brother very strongly insisted to him that he had to go back up to Lennex, put the kids back into
school and report Bromwn missing. And he was becoming very concerned about what had happened to his sister.
Hearing that story, it sounds very bizarre, But the police didn't really question it in nineteen ninety three, did they not.
In the way that you would have expected, given the fact that, as Glenn Taylor said, there were red flags flapping everywhere. I mean, broman had even telephone her solicitor on a Sunday at home because she was concerned that her husband was returning to the family home that day. She had told people she was very scared of him. One of her friends in lewis the man we referred
to as Scruffy because everybody else does in Lennox. He spoke to Bromlin about Bromin's decision to move back into the family home and he said to her, Bromlin, I don't think that's such a good idea. John's going to lose it. He's not going to like that. They knew his temperament. Scruffy describes him in this way. He says, still waters run deep. John doesn't show much, but there's
a lot going on beneath the surface. And Scruffy was concerned for Bromin when she told him days before that she was going to move back into the family home because John was away. So you're right, Why would such a case have been treated with such naive disdain as a woman just taking off to do her own thing for a while, when it was very obvious to police over the ensuing weeks that she wasn't touching her bank accounts, she hadn't been in contact with anybody, she hadn't been
back to the house. But then they then misled themselves, the police. They determined on the most ridiculous piece of evidence imaginable, that she had actually gone back into the house after John had left the house with the children. And once they'd satisfied themselves of this, notwithstanding that it was completely ludicrous, they i think believed that Brombin was alive and was just playing cat and mouse.
So what was that piece of evidence which cemented that belief for police?
The police got the phone bills, the phone account and back then it was Telecom and we used to get these printed bills and they would print out STD calls and it's a weird name, I know, stands for subscriber trunk dialing, and that's the long distance telephone call that you could make from your landline. Back in the day. Most people wouldn't have had mobile phones in ninety three. They were probably just darting to come out, but it wouldn't have been very widely used. On the phone bill.
There was also evidence of a number of calls being made to a number that started with zero zero five five, and back in the day those zero zero five five numbers were information related telephone calls. They were services, so if you wanted to check football results, for example, you could bring that number. People weren't just going to the
internet just to check stuff out there. The zero zero five to five number appeared on the telephone bill as having been called at two thirteen pm on Sunday, sixteen January, and that makes sense because Bromwin was in the house on that day. John was still in Sydney, he would soon be boarding a flight to Ballona and the zero zero five to five corps, this particular one was checking
a lot of results. Bromwin didn't have much money, she was trying to make ends meet and no doubt had taken a lot of ticket and was checking to see
whether she'd got lucky. However, when the police got that bill all the details from it from Telecom now Telstra, for some bizarre reason, they mixed up PM and AM and determined that Bromwin was checking a lot of results at two thirteen am on Monday morning, and the police had evidence from John that he was on the road to Sydney and had a received for fuel having been
purchased at eleven oh six pm that night before. So the conclusion that the police drew from this, which they put in writing in their own internal reports and running sheets and so on, was that the MP or missing person Bromwin Winfield, had become aware that her husband had left the house with the children, and so had returned to the house at two thirteen in the morning to ring a number to check her a lot of results, and then left again.
I shouldn't laugh, but it just feels a bit ridiculous.
Like you said earlier, it's preposterous, just unbelievable that you could screw up something so fundamental so badly, and that leads the police down the wrong path because in their minds, Bromwin is returning to her home when her husband's not there, so she must be alive.
I want to skip through a bit of the police investigation side of things, because we know the nineteen ninety three investigation didn't really go anywhere, but it was picked up again in nineteen ninety eight, and it did go somewhere into an inquest in two thousand and two that determined that Bronwin died at the time of her disappearance. But the DPP never picked that up. They never decided
to prosecute anyone after hearing those inquest findings. And then you pick up the case in twenty twenty four, and we still don't have answers. When you did come into this story at that point, what did you surmise that the case had been forgotten all these years, that it was just put into a too hard basket? Why are we in this position?
Well, as a result of me hearing about it from Carl in twenty seventeen and then over the last seven years making progress getting to know Bronwin's brother and others involved, including the detective Glenn Taylor, who was on the case from nineteen ninety eight and helped prepare a brief of
evidence that went to the coroner. I became aware that after the appalling nineteen ninety three investigation, a febit of work was done and Glenn Taylor ran a comprehensive investigation and then detectives from the Unsold Homicide Unit of the New South Wales Police had another look in two thousand and nine twenty ten, they picked it up again and they made a further submission to the office of the New South Wales DPP seeking to have John Winfield prosecuted
for murder because there's no point police charging anybody if the DPP is not prepared to run a case. So you had in two thousand and three, after Karl Milavanovitch's finding, the DPP in New South Wales saying no, there's no evidence of any crime and we're not going to prosecute.
And when Roman's brother followed up with the DPP's office, he received a less the written by Nicholas Cowdery the DPP, and mister Cawtery said that innuendo rumor can't be a substitute for hard evidence and he was unable to authorize the prosecution of this case because of the lack of evidence. So that was the two thousand and three ruling by
the office of the DPP. We know that the police made a further submission as a result of the Unsolved Homicide Humans efforts, and that was also declined by the DPP, But I don't believe that we should see that as the final word. The same office of the DPP, indeed the same DPP himself, Nicholas Cowdery, repeatedly refused to prosecute
wife killer Chris Dawson. Now, the first time that Chris Dawson was prosecuted after the podcast and a renewed investigation by New South Wales Police, a judge, acting alone said, I have no doubt about his guilt. So I think there's a lesson here for journalists, for citizens, for society. DPPs don't get everything right, and we shouldn't just accept the view. Given that the view is reached often in secrecy, we don't understand what thought process, what reasoning has gone
into the consideration of a brief of evidence. We only know that we get a very brief explanation, such as there was insufficient evidence, there's no body, And I think it's incumbent on journalists, particularly in cases that are as deeply suspicious as this one, to challenge and see if there's more that can be gathered that could lead to a sensible review of the evidence.
Well, that leads us into your investigation, because that's what you've been doing, uncovering more evidence. And I guess the biggest bombshell in your investigation was dropped only recently. A few days ago. You had an incredible person come forward and give you quite mind blowing evidence. Can you talk us through what the former Lenox resident and former nurse told you that she saw on the night Bronwyn disappeared.
Yeah, I can. Her name is Judy and she lived very close to Bromwin and John Winfield in Lenox Head at the time of Bromwin's disappearance. And as you say, she's a nurse. She's living in a house with her two teenage children. She was also pregnant and she was worrying about a miscarriage. And because of her concerns, she says, she was up late at night sitting on a balcony
that overlooked the street. This is Granite Street that runs at right angles to Sandstone Crescent where John Bromwin lived, and from her vantage points she could see down onto the road and she could see in daylight hours into the passing cars. She could actually see inside the cars. And her friend Kerry McClain, who would visit her, confirmed this. Told me that they would often sit out there and would be able to see inside as they're having a cup of tea and a catch up. They would just
be looking down. The cars would get past and you can see inside them. So that bit we know. But at night around midnight. Judy says that the Windfield family sedan the Ford Falcon, grow very slowly along Grounde Street and she saw the headlights approaching, and unusually, the car interior was bathed in light because the interior light had been left on for some reason. It was on, and Judy says that the driver was John Winfield, and that in the back seat there was what looked like a
body wrapped in a sheet. She's described it as looking like a mummy, like an ancient Egyptian mummy, because was wrapped tightly. The body, if that's what it was, was in a seated position with the head which she couldn't see because it was wrapped. And again I'm surmising that it's a head based on her description, kind of pushed into the corner of the back seat where it meets the back door behind the front passenger seat, and the
feet are going through to the center console. And Judy has been haunted by this image that she says she saw about two weeks after her birthday. Her birthday is May one, and John Winfield returned to Lenox Head on May sixteen. He hadn't been living in Lenox Head for several weeks. Prior to May sixteen, and his evidence is that he left Lennox Head on the evening of May sixteen, so it has to be May sixteen if she's positively
identified that she has seen this. And Judy had a lantern on the balustrade thing that was on the balcony there, and she said that this light must have attracted John's attention because she says he looked up, and whether or not he saw her up there, it's unclear, but he looked up, and she says he was driving so slowly, and she was so sure of what she saw, so concerned that what she saw, and she's very adamant about it, and she gets quite teary talking about it, because it's
clear she didn't want to see this. So this image from thirty one years ago, you know, is edged in her mind. She had a lot on she'd recently had to give up her job, she was worried about how she was going to support her children, she didn't know whether she was going to miscarry the one on the way, she was going through breakdown of her marriage, and had her own health challenges in her life at that time.
She says that when she was told by neighbors in the street that Bromwin had been reported missing because it was obviously there was a bit of a police presence. A couple of weeks later, detectives turning up at the neighbor's house, Devin Murray Nolan, and also at John's house to chat to him. She asked the neighbor what's going on and they said, oh, Bromin's been reted missing and that's when she thought, oh my god, and she went
to baal on a police to report it. She says she was taken behind the counter of the police station and they didn't take a statement from her. She says, they couldn't have been less interested. And you know, this is just speculation, Jemmy, but I wonder whether it's because the police thought, yeah, you know, as she's pregnant and
she got all her marbles. We already know that Bromwin's come back to the house because we've got evidence of her making a phone call and checking her lot owe numbers, and John has shown us evidence that he's on the road. So yeah, it can't be right, I mean, is that possible that they've just discounted her version because they preferred his. We don't know it's probably going to be impossible to
find out. I do know, though, that Judy confided what she saw to some friends, some people who were close to her. She confided it to a woman called Kerry McLain, and that's how I knew about Judy and her account before Judy contacted me. Kerry McClain her friend from Ballina who hadn't seen Judy for years, they'd lost touch. Judy had contacted me eighteen months ago to tell me about her friend who had witnessed this and had been really
concerned about it. And when I telephoned Kerry earlier this year, when I started properly investigating Bromin's case for the first time and trying to do interviews and following up all the emails and leads that I've been keeping over the previous six and a half years, Kerry agreed to do an interview with me, and she talked in the interview about what Judy had told Carry over the years about this, and Carry said I was so concerned about it that
I Kerrie also contacted the police and said, you need to talk to my friend Judy Willer brands. Her name now is Judy Singing. She had a lot going on in her life. I think she reported it to police, but I wasn't there. I don't know. Please follow up with her because this case is unsolved, and Carrie says she never heard back from the police herself, and it seems Judy wasn't contacted either by police. Judy probably didn't
know Kerry had even done that. But when Judy contacted me on June nine by email, as soon as her email arrived in my inbox, I had an understanding about what it would be about, even though she didn't say in the email. She just said I saw him leaving on the night prob and disappeared the interior light was on.
But I, because of the background I had from having talked to Carrie's six months earlier, you know, I appreciated the significance of this, and I had been trying to find Judy, but because of the moves and changing her name, she was living with her doeler, she was a bit hard to track down, and I didn't tell her for some time that I already knew all about her from Kerrie. She was quite surprised, but then she wasn't because she said she confided this to a number of people, and
I spoke to Kerry about her veracity, her credibility. Kerrie told me that Judy was a very reliable person. She would not tell tall stories. She was highly credible. She was a career nurse, a very dedicated mother herself. And I found that too when I spoke to her at length, initially over the telephone in recorded interviews and then I met her in northern New South Wales. She's, I believe, a woman who's sincerely sure of what she says she saw.
What's the reaction been so far to the podcast? Police taking your evidence seriously?
I believe that they are. They wasted no time in wanting to reach Judy sing So within a couple of hours of the episode seven dropping, I got an email from an Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mick Fitzgerald, seeking duty's contact details. I handed those over immediately. I'm sure that they're going to get a very detailed statement from her.
Obviously, with the Teacher's pet with Lynette Simms's case, there was an ending, there was justice. We've got someone behind bars. Are you putting pressure on yourself this time to see a similar outcome?
I don't feel like I'm putting pressure on myself. But I hope that if the evidence puts pressure on those who should be reviewing a case that was always deeply suspicious. But that's a good thing. I can't force an outcome. I can only be the messenger in showing things that have happened, evidence that perhaps was not properly considered, facts and d guitars that make no sense. I don't believe that mothers just willfully, without any extreme events in their lives,
walk out without any warning on their young children. I don't believe that that happens unless there's some intervening event. Of course, there will be cases of women with very serious personal issues, perhaps addictions or other external events that have distorted their judgment and cause them to do something extreme, but they're very, very rare, and they're different to what we're talking about here. Bromwin didn't have any of those issues.
She had appointments and plans, and I just think we have to go back to our common sense and our understanding of the incredible bond that young mothers have with their children and ask ourselves, does this past the smell test? Does this seemed plausible?
I'm talking to you in the midst of this investigation, You're still uncoveringly, You're still talking to people, You're still putting out episodes. I spoke to you after the Teacher's Pet, after everything had died down, and you, in retrospect, spoke about how hard it was, the strains on your marriage, the strains on your time, the lack of sleep. Do you feel like that's happening again or are you able to put a bit more boundary around your investigation this time?
Well, where's my wife? You're still here, you know, you know the marriage is solid. Other strains certainly are always present, and you can't do this without making very heavy commitment. But you know there's an end point and if you just put your head down and sold your on, you know, you reach it and then you can step back and
leave it to others. I think that this is a really important case, and these cases, as they become better understood by the general public and as listeners delve into the details and appreciate what's gone on and the dynamics of relationships and also how the criminal justice system works and sometimes sadly doesn't work. There's an impact on many other cases that are potentially just waiting to be properly understood.
There's an awareness that leads to those cases hopefully being renewed, hopefully getting the attention of people other than myself, people who will look at those cases with fresh eyes and maybe give some justice to the victims and their families.
Well, you're only one man, one journalist, one team. You're obviously looking into Bronwin's story. You've looked into Lynn's story and quite a few other women's stories. But I can't help but think how many other cases there are out there that are similar, where it's women that have gone missing and something potentially more has happened and it hasn't been investigated. Do you think about that a lot?
Yeah, I do, Jemma, And what I hope is that many many more media organizations and journalists will dedicate resources to investigating those I get now dozens of emails a week from people asking me to address a range of terrible crimes. They're not all missing women, but a number of them are. But I can't find enough time to dedicate to Romlin's investigation, let alone picking up so many others. You can only really do one, maybe one and a
half a year, and do them well. So it would be good if many more journalists were doing these, because I'm sure we would see more outcomes that have been denied the families.
And lastly, I just wanted to check. Obviously, you're getting to know Bromwyn's family, You've gotten to know them very well, and what are they hoping to see from this investigation.
Well, it depends on which part of Bromin's family you're from. Bromwin's eldest daughter, Crystal, is I think in a very difficult place where she wants to maintain a relationship with her sister, and her sister has a very strong belief in the innocence of her father. And then you have Bromlin's brother Andy and his wife Michelle, and Bromlin's cousins who have been very very sure for a long time that the coroner, Karl Millavanovitch got it right and that
John should have been prosecuted for murder. And of course John's eldest daughter, Jodie, who wasn't related to Bromin, she believes emphatically and her father too, so you know, there is quite a bit of division there. I don't have direct contact with John's youngest daughter, nor with his oldest daughter but I have had contact with Crystal and I've completely respected her wish to remain detached from the podcast. There's been no pressure at all from me on her
to be part of it. Her family, her uncle Andy is keeping her briefed, and her Auntie Kim, who is Bromin's half sister, is also keeping her up to speed with everything. I hope. I don't know exactly what they're briefing her on, but these podcasts and the very rawness of the detail that comes out, it must be incredibly disruptive for families, you know, and I feel for those who are affected by it from all sides of the family.
But sometimes it seems you need a disruption like this to be able to push for just us.
Yeah. Well, you know, I think that if Bromwin did meet with foul play, then it is a terrible thing, and it's made worse by the characterization of Bromwin as a reckless, uncaring mother. She was anything but everybody. Everybody who I've talked to tells me how committed she was. She was, like Lynn, lived for her kids, would do anything for them.
Now we've just got to find out what happened to her. Thanks to Headley Thomas for assisting us to tell this story. You can find the Bronwin podcast linked in our show notes. True Crime Conversations is a Muma Meer podcast hosted and produced by me Jemma Bass, with audio design by Scott Stronik. Our executive producer is Lift Proud