Helen |13

You are about to receive a film call from the correctional facility. The conversation will be.

Recorded after the inquest into William Tirel's disappearance finishes hearing evidence in public.

If you do not wish to receive this call, please hang up now.

A lawyer for the New South Wales State Coroner sends me an email.

This call is originating from the Shortland Correctional Center.

With a link to dozens and dozens of exhibits that were tendered at the inquest, including witness statements, photographs, things we've never seen before and these recordings of Frank Abbott inside prison in November twenty nineteen, where Frank is serving time for sexually abusing children and here he's talking on the phone to a Christian pastor, Martin Parrish and his wife Jeannette.

I'm really good, thank you.

How are you.

Days? It's not funny really, it's the.

First time we've heard these recordings, which have never previously been made public, and listening to them, the first thing that strikes me, why yesterday, is that Frank who and I'll stress this, Frank's in prison for sexually and indecently assaulting children. Frank is winging.

We had four full days and two days locking in the last couple of weeks.

Ah, that's very good.

Frank says, he's been locked up for too long. Inside his prison cell.

Breakfast and they brought at luncher it.

Frank complains the prison breakfast was late coming and lunch was too early. I mean Didham's.

A few days ago now.

But then Frank says he's spoken to his two surviving brothers, Les and David. He says the police investigating William's disappearance have been up to see them.

They're in the place.

Frank says the cops asked his brothers about a murder murder, a murder Frank was charged with and where he was found not guilty.

And the second to half the fall half during the twelve months later, at another four and a half weeks.

In, the cops are still bringing it up. Frank, sis have done this one, saying oh, he's done this, and he's done that. We think he might have done this one. The priest answers, well, that's that's that's fair thinking, and Jeanette Parish chips in not fair.

I'm not guilty.

You should be able to say I'm not guilty.

But what exactly do the police mean by saying we think he might have done this one? Were they talking about William? If so, Frank denies it. That beat means the conversation has to end soon. You only get a few minutes on a prison phone call. In the rush to end the call, nobody seems to ask Frank who was it? He was found not guilty of murdering. I'm Dan box and from news dot com dot Au. This

Well, being older than us, she was working, had more of her own life than her cellphone, my brother.

And.

What kind of person was she? Looking back? How do you think of her?

Well, she enjoyed. She actually had to cycle to work at Pittown, which is quite a distance, four or five kilometers to Pittown. But apparently she used to sing on the bike other people who told us, and just worked in the general store.

So she used to sing on the bike she cycled to and from work.

Yes, and more of a social life than my brother and I.

How would you describe her physically as you remember her?

Oh? Maybe quite good looking and more matures than than us. That's about how as much I.

Can can I and I'm sorry to do this, can I ask what you remember of what happened to her?

Oh, certainly remember it all on the day where there was a big storm in Pittown, fairly hot weekend, when a hot day turns into a storm. And we believe this is maybe part of the reason she accepted a lift because of the rain.

And what came next.

Oh, we're waiting and waiting on the afternoon, but she didn't come out. Excuse me.

Peter takes a moment looking out the window as his memory reaches back across the decades.

But it was later in the day, I think four or five, and my father, he was driving around looking all through the night. Really we didn't know.

What had happened, and the police became involved. And can you remember much of their investigation at the time.

The police, I think only for in the beginning. They didn't think anything had happened to her. They thought she may have run off, left home, shot through somewhere, but she was happy to her no reason to do that. And they didn't try and look at all for the first early days.

And how did that feel?

Well, it was a bit hopeless for everyone. We didn't just kept on just driving around and talking to people and asking if they and local people told us that's any blue utility and three people in it. I think it was three or Helen in the middle. Some of had seen a bike in the back of a blue utility. That was the rumor.

But this was your family doing the looking at this point. The police weren't looking.

I don't think they were until the basket was discovered.

That was Helen's basket.

I think it was about a week later, and that was the first clue of where wish you might have been.

And then they started to look.

Yes, and then they found in the bush land there the shallow grove off the side of the road there.

Can I ask how that was for you as a child and for your parents.

Well, very traumatic of course then, but it was worse for mother anybody. There was a big loss in a lot of.

Ways, and that loss is something you've lived with. Imagine your parents lived with for the whold of their lives without ever maybe being given an answer as to exactly what happened by the police and the courts.

Yes, that is true. There's been no firm result about habbit, although it's been We've had two trials and a lot of do you say evidence and some stronger evidence, which is all amounted to nothing in the end as far as finding out the truth.

And watching all of that over the years, and it was decades, what do you think looking back at that now.

It seemed to be that this type of murder case as it was, was unknown well there anyone had heard of before in Maria district, town district, and it was.

It was just.

More hard to deal with, I suppose. And yes, even with a lot of evidence of some degree and opinions from other people and a missing watch which Habit had boasted about. He's told other people that he's got they've seen watching the club box of the car.

Did Helen wear a watch? Oh yes, We'll come back to that watch later.

And we thought the police would have been taking more action and were dividing more people that type of thing.

And later when Abbott was eventually charged and taken to court, when we met, you said you had doubts about the jury system based on what you've been through.

The whole thing is just hanging on a jury, and it only takes one person not to agree with it, because and then the whole jury can file. And some people possibly weren't happy with the decision and just said I.

And you would have seen Frank in the courtroom.

Yes, I saw him in the court and going him, but I never saw him coming out.

Could you describe him now?

He's a stand over me. Yeah, literally, that's what people used to say. That's a word of her. It's written them from what other people say. But he did look a bit fearsome. I suppose.

Frank looked fearsome enough that even his own lawyer described him in court as someone who stands over people to get his way. But that doesn't make him a murderer, the lawyer argued. And as the jury found, looking back at what happened, what are your regrets?

Oh, the time factor well landor in sixty eight, natrial wasn't until ninety one or two. That's ridicuous, twenty three or four years and literally that's that's terrible.

And what have you heard from the police since that trial?

Very little, if any that I can remember.

It's now fifty years or more since Helen went missing, and we've heard Frank's name in the years since. In relation to the William Tyrell investigation. You said the police haven't contacted you since the trial. Do you still have any hopes that what happened to your so that can be resolved? What do you hope for now?

I would like to see a resolution, But there's because there has been a lot of evidence over the years, a lot of people interviewed and provided their thoughts and some facts, and it's all come to nothing in spite of two court cases after all this time, and we know Abbott is a bad person, and the sheer amount of stories, really, it's got to be there's got to be more interest put in Abbot.

You'd like to see the police pay more attention to Frank Abbott.

Certainly. Yes, it's a very old case, but is not of unsold answers questions.

After walking outside, Peter's bicycle is standing up against his garage wall. He says he cycles like his sister Helen, and I think of her cycling home from work on that day singing. It's an image that I can't shake, and nor can Nina, the producer.

On this series, All right, thank you both.

Nina has spent months now trying to find out more about Helen's death and what happened after.

So what I want to do today is take you through what I've found out about this afternoon.

She's asked me and Gary Jubilin to join her in the studio.

And this information is based on court documents that I've been able to find and newspaper articles that were written at the time.

Gary is one of the detectives who led the investigation into William Tyrrel's disappearance. He's got a checkered history with the case, which we've talked about a lot earlier in this series. But nobody disputes Gary knows police work. He spent thirty four years in the New South Wales Police Force, most of them investigating homicides.

And what I'm going to try and do is present it to you in a way that's not my opinion. You know, I'm trying to color it. So if you think I am doing that, speak up let me know.

Okay, just affects me.

Just the facts, all right. Shall we get started, Okay, So it's nineteen sixty eight. Let's start with Frank Abbott and what he was doing in nineteen sixty eight. So Frank's in his twenties and he's living with his parents in Kingswood, which is a suburb in the west of Sydney. It's not too far from Penrith.

Okay, so it's far west of Sydney.

Yeah. Frank's from a big family, has got lots of brothers and sisters. And he's also I guess what you'd call like a petty criminal, so car theft, burglary, break and enter, that kind of level of criminal.

Right.

How old is he?

Roughly in his sort of mid to late late twenties. Yeah, yeah, so that's Frank at that point. About half an hour from Kingswood is pitt Town and that is where Helen Harrison, who's seventeen at the time, is working.

I do Pittown then, what are we talking? Sixty eight? That would a ban A very small place, small place.

It's right on the fringe of Sydney bush than.

Yeah, acres and farmland and all that. Pit Town.

Yeah.

Helen at the time, she was really reliable, go to work, come home. On the sixteenth of March nineteen sixty eight, she left work about twelve forty five pm and she hopped on her bike to ride home, as she always did. People saw her leave, but she never made it home. She was not the kind of teenager who would just go off without telling her parents, so they raised the alarm pretty quickly, there's a search and they just can't find her.

How good would a search have been from the police at that time, Gary sixty eight.

It would literally be driving around on the roads and they wouldn't have the communication seventeen year old girl leaving the store riding on a country road. I dare say that the search would be that she hasn't been involved in an accident or whatever. So I think it'd be a cursory drive along the roadways on the most likely path that she would have taken.

So it's not flooding the area like we saw were William.

I wouldn't imagine seventeen year girl on the bike sixty eight, So I think that's what the search would have been.

So it's about a week later they find Helen's body. She's in a shallow grave in East Courageong, which is around the area she was murdered, and she was found naked from the waist down. I don't think that they have a cause of death.

Do you know anything about You said it was a shallow grave, but where it was it.

Was in the Carrageng Yeah, you've got pitt Town in the plains windsor planes Richmond East Carriageong is as you're starting to go up into the Blue Mountains, so that would have been Yeah, it's a bit wild, so that would be a place you'd take someone.

It's even further out of Sydney, it's more remote. You've gone through this kind of idylic country edge and now you're getting into the mountains. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay.

They found the body and she had been paid at her job about twenty dollars that was missing, her watch was missing, her underwear was missing, and her bike was missing at that time. But they did find that a few months later.

Gary, can I ask a question which isn't a pleasant question, or none of this is pleasant. If you find a teenager's body roughly a week after she's died in sixty eight, how do you tell she's been sexually assaulted?

Could be damage around the round, the vagina or the anus that might have been because of the flesh. Potentially that the flesh is still there.

So, because there's not going to be modern day forensics, there's no DNA.

Maybe they'd swab for blood back then, but it's not DNA.

So she was naked from the waist down.

Okay, So that yeah, Okay, there's that.

So there's no immediate obvious suspect for the police. So I wanted to ask you, Gary, I imagine this kind of seemingly random attack where you don't have that obvious suspect. That's got to be one of the hardest kind of crimes to solve, the most.

Stranger murders are what we consider most difficult ones.

But would you assume it was a stranger murder?

I'm just answering them. Stranger murders are the most difficult ones. But you'd be thinking, okay, a strange murder if someone was just driving along the road, but you'd be looking at all the local people around there who knew who knew she rode that route. You're looking at people that victimology is the early part of the murder investigation, finding

So it's a cop you'd actually on the basis, so that'll almost be walking into town and looking at potentially anybody there.

And then line of a questioning. You'd speak to a family and friends, anyone that's been paying particular attention to her, anyone that stands out in the community that's a little bit strange in the behavior, So that would be the way you work the community.

Yeah, and that's exactly what the police did. So they cast a pretty wide net, the following up every possible lead. By the time the case goes to trial decades later, the court hears that the police have spoken two thousands of people in relations.

Thousands, thousands in sixty eight. The cops said that much work into.

It, you'd be astounded. Like some of the old school investigations, they were fascinating the amount of detail. We didn't have computers. It wasn't electronic, but there was a card system in place, and you'd have boxes of cards and a bit of information be stored alphabetically in the system.

Like cross reference between cards.

Yeah, there was a lot of collating to be done. But yeah, they were thorough because they didn't have the benefits that we've got currently, like we've CCTV for the phone records all that. So it was just that legwork. You had to go out and speak to people and that was the thing that solved cases.

Well, that's definitely what they were doing. And as far as I can tell from the court records that I have access to, Frank Abbott first comes onto their radar when a sixteen year old boy goes to the police in the weeks after Helen's murder and he tells them that about two weeks before Helen's disappearance, he'd spoken to a passenger in an old white Courtina sedan who expressed an interest in Helen and her whereabouts.

And so that's all from court records.

Yeap.

So a teenager goes to the police and said, hey, saw this guy in this car and he asked me about Helen.

When he asked him about Helen. That was prior to helen disappearance. Okay, yeah, okay, Well that's definitely a line of inquiry that you'd be wanting to follow up.

So they do, and they go to Frank and they ask him about it in April of nineteen sixty eight, so it's about a month after the murder, and he confirms that, yes, he was a passenger in that white Courtina and he says his friend Trevor was driving, but he says he doesn't remember asking about Helen, he tells the police that he had met Helen a few months earlier at a dance and he'd seen her around since then.

So that's again court records.

That's all in break that down at ten thirty am to twelve thirty pm at the pub, at the pub and then his brother dropped him home.

Yeah, so he's at the pub with his brother John. John drove him back to Kingswood and then another brother came and picked him up.

She disappeared. What time she's sat at twelve forty five she's riding the bike came, so he's given basically he's with his brother John at the critical stage.

So what time was she last seen?

Twelve forty five?

Twelve forty five, so he's left the pub just before then with his brother so the only alibi witness at the crucial time would be his brother.

Yeah, so that's my next question. Gary, you get that alibi given to you from a person of interest, who do you speak to?

Go to the pub see if they were together. That would be the first thing. And then I would be grabbing the brother as quickly as I could and lock him in and then speaking to other people, say, say with the brother and associated with Frank, to see if they corroborate it.

So the police don't speak to John, which is Frank's brother, don't speak to John. In fact, no one speaks to John until decades later when it goes to trial, and at that point John has no memory of any of it.

So again it's court records saying absolutely the cops do not speak to the person Frank nominates as his alibi witness.

Yes, and just as Slattery will later say in court, such an interview might have been expected after the applicant told police here and his brother John had visited a hotel in Paris for several hours up to twelve thirty pm.

An understatement is it definitely should have been spoken to and you'd be checking his hourbie like that.

Does that make any sense to you. If the cops are working this hard enough that they speak to thousands of people, but they don't speak to the brother who Frank says he was with at the time, why are you with that?

It comes down to I think leadership sometimes directions and sheer volume of information comes in and like, we're looking at it now, knowing what we know about Frank and the type of person he is at that point in time. He was in his mid twenties, might have the criminal history. Okay, well, two blokes they go for a drink at the pub that might have had that urgency.

Yeah, okay, so he's a potentially just someone who's come up just okay, we've checked what he says he was doing. We ticked that box. Move on, because they might have been looking at someone they might have had.

So I'm always cautious when we're looking at old investigations at what the information did they have at the time.

We're not done with the allibis. So the police do speak to Trevor, who was the driver of the Courtena hang on, So this is the guy who was in the car with Frank when they spoke to that teenager who.

Said Frank was asking about Helen.

So Trevor said that he did remember Frank asking the teenager about a girl who lived nearby.

Okay, so you're ramping Frank up a little.

Bit there, a little bit.

And then they speak to another of Frank's brothers, So not John, who said he said he was at the pub with but Ted. Ted is the brother that Frank's said came by in the afternoon and picked him up. So Ted says that he was at work from six thirty am until four pm in Penrith, and then he went to his mum's place in Kingswood, which is where Frank was living at four point fifteen pm, and he said Frank was there with his parents and a friend

Well that might be why they don't speak to the brother who Frank actually says he was with.

But you'll notice that Ted has said that Frank was at home with a friend named Rodney. Yeah, Frank didn't mention that in his first alibi.

So the problem is if they've not spoken to John, but they've spoken the ted so that they have got interest in him. Yeah, and then so that they've missed John.

John's the crucial And you're right, you've spotted a contradiction in Frank's own account of what he was doing.

Yep.

So at this point the alibi is a little bit muddy.

Well it's not it's not confirmed. That's non alibi all over the place.

And just to stress, everything that you're saying is coming from court records that you've got, that you've been through. So this is evidence the court has heard. Because yeah, it does sound like if I was a cop working that one, I'd want to go back to Frank again and.

Say, yeah, I was looking at that, going gee, if I was a cop, I think maybe I would have confirmed this. They didn't. At this point, what.

Do you reckon to that?

Again? Who knows what was operating on their minds. But if you're looking at the gold class, Yeah, let's do it right. Obviously you speak to John. And the moment if Frank was a suspect, the moment Frank nominated John, I would be prioritizing getting someone to speak to John before Frank has an opportunity.

And the moment you notice the contradiction between what his other brother says and what Frank said.

You want to go back, Yeah, but you'd be getting to that person straight away, and don't let them be able to I wonder.

If you're speaking to thousands of people, if you just have this running list of these are things we have to get to, you've got to confirm that person's well.

Literally up until the electronic systems come in. We'd have a job book and a book and task number one, go speak to Dan, box number two, go speak to Nana. And you just have to keep that the whole time.

And if all of these little contradictions or missing persons that you haven't spoken to, we're all in a card index, and there's going to be shelves of those cards, isn't there quickly? If you're speaking to a thousand people, you're going to have boxes of cards and cross references. Stuff is going to get lost.

It's not fool proof, but you can't justify not speaking to John if Frank was a suspect and said he was driving.

So the investigation continues. They haven't given up. They're still casting this really wide net. They're still speaking to people all around the area. They find Helen's bike in September of nineteen sixty eight in Berkshire, which is not where her body was found.

Berkshire Parks half an hour's drive from East Korea. It's a fair way away and you'd have to have a car to move a bike that distance.

They keep doing interviews. One of the people that they interview is a man named Gary Grimson, who will come relevant later on. Gary gives a statement to the police and I can tell you, according to court records, that in nineteen sixty eight, when Gary Grimson spoke to the police, he did not say anything to implicate Frank. They're thinking at that point is that the offender is a local person.

This is a quote Nina reads from Frank's own evidence read out and court by the judge.

I made a mistake. What I'd done on that day, sixteenth of March is as follows. On that morning, I got up about eight or eight thirty am, went out and helped my friends Brian and Rodney and my father in the backyard. We were pulling Brian's car to pieces. He said. He stayed in the backyard attending to the vehicle until about eleven thirty am. And then this is another quote, the four of us went up to the

Yeah, and he's nominated how many people that he was hanging out.

With his father, his mother, his brother, Rodney and Brian he said were there. They left about two pm.

Okay, the crucial time twelve forty five to one forty five, however long. So that's yeah, whether whoever he's claiming he was with, that's a crucial time of the alibi.

What do you make of the fact that he's changed his version of events completely? So within weeks of her disappearance he gives one version of events, but months later he changes his version of events completely. Do you read anything into that.

For anyone that changes an alibi? But to come out strongly and say I was at this pub ten thirty to twelve thirty and then driving with my brother.

Because that's the thing is precise that the first.

By that to me, something jumps out. I'm not sure if it's just the way it's been recorded, because at the pub ten thirty to twelve thirty, and then with my brother.

So this correction of Frank's alibi is in nineteen sixty.

Nine, the year after how goes messing.

So going back to Ted's statement, he doesn't mention Frank visiting him that day. In the statement that Frank gave in nineteen sixty nine, he said that about eleven thirty am, the four of us went to the shell station at Penrith and got some parts. On the way back we went to Woodruff Street to see my brother Ted, and I stayed there until about twelve thirty. So Ted had said he went to work at six thirty am and worked all day till four pm, didn't mention Frank coming to visit him.

So Frank gives one version of events, which is essentially contra addicted by his brother Ted. Then Frank gives a different version of events, which also contradicts what his brother has previously said.

Yep, yep. So again you would think you checked the alibi.

Yeah.

One.

The only way you can prove or disprove it is other people's accounts that can support it.

Do they do that?

Frank's father, Frank's brother John that we mentioned, Rodney Plackett, who was the man that he said he was with, Brian Stockman, who I think was another person who was at the house.

Yep.

They were never interviewed by the police.

Kidding. So the again, that's all from the court.

Yep, this is all court.

Right, So those are people that Frank said he was with, They're never interviewed by police.

I'm not speculating or offering opinions here this, No.

I'm offering opinion. That's really bad. I don't know, I not got anything to say about Frank, but in terms of the police investigation, that's really bad.

And this was criticized in court, and this was used as to form part of the defense in court. So decades later in court, Frank's lawyer will assert that at that point in the investigation, so say nineteen sixty nine, on the available material, there was no forensic evidence linking the applicant to the crime. There was no identification evidence and no eyewitness evidence. So at this point the police he didn't have anything solid.

Well, that's fair enough. There is actually no evidence linking Frank to the murder at this point at all. Yeah, okay.

At this point Frank seems to be out of the investigation. Over the next few years, he gets married to a woman named Katrina. He's also in and out of jail for various crimes, none of them violent crimes, minor crimes. Yeah, so again break and enter, stealing cars. So he and Katrina, they seem to have a bit of a tumultuous marriage in that various reports from that time seemed to say

Ahead here almost ten years now.

Yeah, okay, two women related to Katrina Abbott go to the police.

So two women related to Frank's wife. Yeah, okay, go to the place.

So one is Katrina's cousin. And what she tells the police, and this is from court records, is that Frank took her and Katrina, his wife, to the bush site where Helen Harrison was found. And she said along that drive, Frank was beating his wife, Katrina as they drove.

So as he's driving out to the site where Helen Harrison's body is found, with at least two women in the car with him, he is beating his wife.

That's what she said in her statement.

Which was hurt in court.

Yeah.

This evidence was heard in court during an part of the legal process called a committal hearing, and it was heard again during the trial where Frank was found not guilty.

And she said he bragged about the killing, talked about it as if it was a big joke, and said that he'd scruffed the girl and he'd raped her. And she also says he showed them a watch in his glove compartment that he said was Helen's watch. She says that Abbot told her that he tried to date Helen Harrison at the shop where she worked in Pitttown and

That's what that's what I caught, would lay her hair, yes, yeah.

Where he grabbed her by the throat and strangled her. So all of this was what Katrina's cousin told the police. She also said that Abbot had told her he had sex with the girl before killing her, and again when she was dead, and she said, I thought he must be sick in the head.

You said there were two women, Yeah.

So that's the first woman. So the other woman that went to the police in January of nineteen seventy seven was Katrina's sister, and she told the police that Abbot had lured her into his car where he made a move on her, and she'd refused his advances and was crying and she was pleading him to let her go.

Again. This evidence was heard in Frank's committal hearing and his trial.

But he took her out into the bush and he said, you're like that other stupid bitch. I took her out to the bush and I soon shut her up. So she pleaded to be allowed to go home to attend to her young baby. But Abbot took her out into the bush, and she says in her statement to play at knife point. It was a night long ordeal where she was savagely rapped four times.

Okay, okay, bragging about crimes, I carry a little bit of weight to it, but not It's not a deal clincher for me. Someone bragging about a crime, he gets off on terrorizing people. It might be part of his fantasy. What interests me that he does know her and newer in the area, it would have been a very small community. Knowing that he knows her disappeared, he's alibi. And then if we accept we're seeing the type of person he is. He's a predator. He's a rapist.

And again, look he's not convicted of that, but that as a detective, if you were looking at that, that would be what this is.

How I'd be talking as a briefing. Okay, So whether we got we've got a blake that newer. His names come up early in the investigation. His alibi hasn't been fully tested. We're now getting information that hasn't been improved to care. But we've got the statement from the victim. He is saying she was raped at knife point.

He'd be someone you would want to pursue.

She also said in a statement that he showed her.

The watch, that's the thing, and that we said that the watch, the clothing was watch was money taking. Ye.

That suggests he has got physical evidence that would link him, because that would be a clincher.

Yeah, on that information, you could execute a search.

Warrant and if you got the watch, you'd almost be looking.

At your watch. I'd say you've got circumstantial, but the strong circumstantial brief.

So you'd be potentially charging.

At that point, you've got him linked to the crime.

Did they find the watch?

So this is a quote from one of the court records I found after the women came forward. It seems that the police did not initiate any further investigation into the matter.

I can't pinpoint who I would criticize over that.

Now you might say you don't want to criticize, but there's a witness saying there might be physical evidence that would directly link him to the crime, which you said just on her account, you could get a search warrant.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the cops would be able to within honestly hours maybe day, get a search warrant. Yeah, get his car and see if that watch is there.

And where I think potentially you're failing just knowing the organization. Everyone's operating in silos. That might be information passed on to a local detective. You then got homicide squad station somewhere else and information like that because of the manner in which it was stored, like it's not you can't access a computer. It would have been the old card system. So to be me picking up speaking to pitt Town Police station is a detective on can you get him to check that?

Yeah, I will flag that the two women that came forward to the police were Aboriginal women.

Yeah.

Well that's the make you think, Well, you'd like to think it doesn't count, but victims get judged, whether we say or not. And I don't want to tarnish the police that they dismissed him. I'd like to think it wouldn't happen but I've got to say, in my experience, I've seen things like that happen.

You've worked cases well, witnesses have been dismissed or not listened to who happened to be Aboriginal. And I've reported on cases murders, serial killings where Indigenous women have come forward, and in fact, there was a government inquiry two years ago into the murders of Indigenous women and children in this country.

It gave evidence that the inquiry, well, I can tell you that they don't really know why it wasn't followed up.

By the time the case did go to trial in the mid nineties, one of the two officers involved had died and the other officer said that the one who was now dead was the one that had been left to handle everything post interview, and he didn't.

Know what happened, so we can't ask him.

We do know Frank wasn't interviewed or even informed about those allegations.

So that's again the court records records.

Yeah, he wasn't charged. We know at the time everybody of those allegations. Frank's wife also wasn't interviewed at that time.

Because she was a witness. According to her cousin. She was in the car when Frank being beat up. When Frank, So the cops have an interviewed Frank or the other witness. Okay, so we can't say that those two witnesses have come forward were telling the truth because Frank hasn't been convicted of those offenses or charged.

Gary.

Oh, look, if you're asking you plain and simple, shouldn't have been followed up? The clear answer is yes, should have been followed up.

Yeah.

Years later in court, Frank's lawyer would argue the women had an axe to grind due to an ongoing family dispute, though the women themselves denied this. Either way, nothing happened.

So again things go quiet at this point, and that next decade is pretty similar to the decade before for Frank. He's in and out of for minor crimes. He's on and off with his wife.

So that's twenty years when Helen's family are just waiting no answers.

By nineteen ninety, Frank's definitely separated from his wife and is living in Tari with his teenage daughter, and he's doing odd jobs for work. And that's when the next thing happens that pushes Frank back into the spotlight of the investigation. So that thing is a man named Gary Grimson, and you may remember I told you earlier to remember that name. Gary is in jail. I think he's in jail for break and enter. And he makes a confession.

FJ holden ute, as in they stop.

Well, he doesn't say that the statement they picked one up before they.

Went to So this is the day when Helen goes missing.

No, this is prior to it, prior.

To Helen goes missing. He says that he and Frank picked up a pale blue potentially holding.

Blue green FJ holding ute which Frank and he drove into the bush and covered with a tar poland then they went to a dance and Frank apparently went, according to this statement, went outside with a blonde woman age at eighteen to twenty. Gary says five minutes later he heard a commotion outside and he went outside and saw Frank with this woman on the ground near a wall, pulling at her clothes.

And this is all heard in court.

This is all heard in court and in Gary Grimson's statement, so that's prior to the murder. He says that in the days after Helen was murdered, Frank's brother Les came to Gary and told him that police would be coming to talk to him about a girl that had been killed, and if he mentioned the Holdute he said he would fire bomb his parents' home. So, according to Gary, Lairs is saying this to him, not Frank.

Again, it's worth knowing that all this evidence from Gary Grimson and his statement is what he said in court during Frank's committal, and it's right there in the transcript of the hearing which was released to Nina by the New South Wales Supreme Court.

Gary then says in his statement that he was taken by Frank and Lairs at gunpoint and it had a twenty two caliber rifle held against him and he was taken into the bush in East Curajeong where he was forced to push the Holden Newt the same hold and ut that they had taken and put in the bush into the Hawksbury River, and Frank told Gary, according to a statement, that he was now involved in a murder, and when Gary says which murder, Frank apparently replied, the

We've tried to speak to Frank and to Les about this. We've written to Frank and driven hours to reach an empty property registered in Les's name. He wasn't there, and we've passed messages to both men through their sister and been told they don't want to talk.

What year was this that Gary provided this information?

Nineteen ninety and he claims that he had waited so long to tell the truth because he was afraid of Frank. So again he's talking about things that happened in nineteen sixty eight. It's nineteen ninety at this point, So that's a big accusation right.

There.

Are some issues with that statement, and all of those issues will be later raised in court.

So all of this evidence is heard in court and it's interrogated.

I mean the first issue that comes up again and again Gary I mentioned, is in jail when he makes that statement. Yeah, he's an informant and he's.

About what they're not looked at very reliable, and there's some professional ones in.

The professional informant.

Don't trust anything they say because.

They're trying to get something in return for informant. Yeah.

Yeah, And at this point when he makes this statement, he's about to be moved to another prison. He doesn't want to be transferred because he says he has enemies at the other prison, and a court heard that as a result of him giving this information, he avoids that transfer.

Okay, so he does get something that does get.

So this all becomes a bit of an issue in court. The other thing that gets brought up was that Gary was interviewed by police in nineteen sixty eight. Didn't say any of this at the time.

But he's of explained that before being asked the question, because he said, Frank said, if you say anything on fire bomb your and.

What his response to that in court was that he's been afraid of Frank for twenty years. The other issues that's brought up is that the other friends that Gary mentioned as potentially knowing about the crime, they'd also been interviewed by police back in nineteen sixty eight, sixty nine and they hadn't mentioned any of this. And then number four was kind of the most damning one for the prosecution, which was his statement said that he went to Frank's

And if they are looking at and I'm not sure if it came out in the court, are they independent of each other? So they're not.

No, two of two of them aren't because they're related to Frank's right wife and.

They went to the police at the same time place at the same times.

But Gary is potentially independent.

You'd look at that.

So they had three witnesses claiming that Frank had confessed. They reinterviewed the relatives and the police were pretty confident, and they made the arrest of Frank in nineteen ninety.

So they do arrest Frank, and they do charge him.

It gets delayed because Frank's lawyers immediately apply for a permanent stay. You can probably explain what that is better than me.

That's just where they stop charging him with murder.

Yeah, please don't do the trial, right, Okay, Well, on the basis that there'd been an extreme delay on the part of the prosecuting authorities in taking proceedings against Frank.

That's interesting. The reason the defense are saying don't charge Frank with murder is they're saying the prosecution took so long to do its job and there.

Was an incurable prejudice which would make a fair trial impossible.

So that's their argument, is that it's impossible for Frank to mount a defense because so much time has gone past that he might not be able to find the witnesses.

They might have died, and those allegations there weren't put to him in nineteen seventies.

And all of that.

I can hear that argument.

Yeah, I can hear that. But if they had interviewed Frank's brother, who Frank said was in the car with him at the time, in the weeks after the murder happened, then you might not end up in nineteen ninety one saying this thing has been delayed for so long it can't go ahead.

And there's also mention of records and evidence being lost or destroyed. I don't know what that is precisely. So in nineteen ninety three the case did go ahead. So Frank's mother had.

Died, so that's his alibi witness.

Yeah, Frank's wife died in November of nineteen ninety one, so she couldn't testify at the trial. Are the witnesses who hadn't been interviewed at the time of Helen's murder now didn't have any recollection of things others like Frank's.

Less Garry is frowning, and your frown is getting deeper and deeper as this goes on.

And I've got to finish this sentence because you're going to found more evidence was missing. And the two women who went to the police, the relatives of Katrina, what I got from the records, and this is a bit of interpretation, was that they had some trouble on the stand. There was a reference in the court records to them having memory issues and the defense having issues with cross examination and being able to do it properly because of

No, and I've got to be fair, it's a weak case at the start of it. And then if those issues that you're saying arose at court, I could see it going against the frustrating parties that the police investigation is the thing that used against the prosecution.

Yeah, Frank's lawyer said that the two women who went to the police were potentially out to get Frank. So that trial ends the jury can't come to a verdict. A second trial is held in nineteen ninety five and Frank was eventually found not guilty of Helen's murder. Right so to date, Helen's murder remains.

Unsolved, meaning nobody has been brought to justice decades later, and Helen's parents died without getting any answers except that Frank Abbott, as you heard in the prison calls at the start of this episode, he denies any involvement Helen's brother Peter, who I visited at his house and who stood beside his bicycle waving sadly when I left him.

If you had fresh and compelling evidence, now under the double jeopardy legislation, you could have him really tried.

But could you, even though it's gone through two trials. Yeah, that's interesting.

It's interesting partly because Gary knows what he's talking about. As a detective, Gary tried to take a man who'd previously been found not guilty back to court for murder, arguing there was now new evidence against him. That story is a whole other podcast. What matters is that it proved it could happen. That could be done. Though Gary is the only cop to date who's tried.

It, it's going to be fresh and compelling evidence.

What would count is that DNA.

If let's say Frank was arrested for something and found the watch in DNA, which wasn't the viiable at the time, DNA approves that was Helen's property, that would be compelling and they'll be fresh.

Gary speaking hypothetically, at this point, there is no new DNA evidence, But if there was, then hypothetically that could be fresh and compelling. So someone's been found not guilty murder, they can be charged again. You need fresh and compelling evidence, so fresh is something that hasn't been heard in court before and compelling speak spelling. Yeah, how much do you need do you think as a homicide cop to and

I think my instinct of pushing this and really taking it to the next level. If you got Frank confessing to someone and you captured that on tape, I think that would warrant an application.

At the very last we don't have Frank confessing on tape, but there is something.

M h m hm.

Hi is that Brian? Yeah, Brian Collier is one of the first people I speak to in John's River, the little town where Frank once lived and where we were in the last episode. Brian, my name is Dan Box.

Frank.

Yeah, exactly that.

Yes, Frank, I knew it well, Frank. It was very very handy A doing things he could.

He could like electrician, plumber, anything and the favorite of work at my face. But he was a blake you couldn't trust if there was kids around.

What makes you say that?

Well, me granddaughter when Vowel living here. According it was just getting starting to get dark, and she was walking up straight coming out.

He was coming the other way and he'd go behind my car. Yeah, what do you do? I said, I just kind of scare her. I thought, yeah, it'd been more than that.

What makes you said it would have been more than that?

Well?

He virtually admitted to me that he did kill that girl that after Windsor.

Helen Harrison was last seen about a ten minute drive from Windsor.

I fink she's at fourteen.

She was seventeen, not fourteen.

He went to court for that, but the Jerry on three occasions, I think it was.

And there were only two trials, not three of them.

They couldn't reach a verdict.

But I've spoken to Brian on a couple of occasions now about this, and I'm sure it's Helen he's talking about. I think it was Helen Harrison.

Yeah, I can't remember the name, but I know he because frankly used he was an alcoholic apparently, but he stopped drinking and he was he was, Mamie Lords, actually is a stinking hot day. And I told him in the having a couple of beers, and he started loosen up a bit and he and he mostly admitted to me that he did kill her.

The shadow up.

What did he what did he say?

Well, he did have sex with her, and then he was she was going to tell on him, so he there.

And so what did he say he did, Well.

He was around about way the way had come out, and then he just cleaned up then because I think he realized he said.

A fair bit.

Can you remember what words he used?

I'm but I think he did say that he had he had sex with her a few times, okay, and he was she was riding a pushbike I think it was, I think she said at the time, and and he picked her up and through I think he said he had a ute.

And what did he say he did with the pushbike?

I think he did damp it.

So he picked her up with her bike maybe put the bike in the back of the ute apparently, And then did you tell you what happened next?

That now he cleaned up, okay.

And what did you think when you heard him say that?

Well, nothing he could do because he had three trials and they well, they couldn't try him again. So yeah, that's why I was. I was very careful with Frank. He was He often used to wander around John's River. I heard early ails of the morning and he wasn't very well liked over.

And did the police ever talk to you about what he said about this young girl?

Nah?

Well, I didn't say think about it because he had free trials, so that was it. They couldn't roy arrestling after that.

Brian is right about that point. At the time Frank was found not guilty of Helen's murder, the law said you couldn't be put on trial again for the same crime. So at that time the police could not rearrest Frank, even if Brian had come forward. But the law has been changed since. That's what Gary Jubilin was talking about. If you have fresh and compelling evidence, they can do if they have new evidence, so something they hadn't heard before.

Now thought I didn't think they could roy arrest.

How would you describe Frank?

Yeah, well, don't know.

I got on good with him in one way.

But I was careful of him also because see, look he was a bit of a day with kids, So I.

Know that you'd heard that from other people or no.

My grandson was another girl here she was for then Frank try to grab her.

Did he ever talk about any other you know, any other crimes he might have committed anything like that.

Nah, No, there was just luck. I think that the things he said to me about the girl at winter and then he shut up pretty quick.

Frank did not completely shut up. In fact, he's allegedly been telling other people similar stories. At the inquest into will Tull's disappearance, there was another witness who can't be identified, who was asked if Frank Abbott ever told him about a murder back in nineteen sixty eight, the year Helen Harrison went missing and died. This witness gave evidence saying Frank told him quote borrowed his car, raped a girl

And he told me he was charged with the murder over that.

This witness has since died, so we can't ask him any questions. But here's the key thing. Listening back to what he says and what Brian Collier told me, I realized neither of them is actually saying Frank told them he murdered Helen. Brian claims Frank virtually admitted that he killed.

Her, and he mostly matter to me that he did kill and the shadow up.

But that's Brian's opinion, and actually Frank doesn't say that. In Brian's version, Frank says only that he had sex with Helen.

Well, he did have sex, brother.

Frank doesn't say anything else.

He just claimed that then because I think he realized he said a fair bit.

And the unidentified witness at the inquest his evidence is not that Frank killed Helen, just that Frank told him a couple of blokes borrowed his car, raped a girl and she had an epileptic fit and died. So this new evidence is only that at most Frank did have sex with Helen. Not sure what to make of this. Nina and I keep on talking to people, speaking to people who know Frank Abbot.

Hello, Dora speaking Hide.

My name is Dan Box. I'm sorry to call you about the Blue his friends and family. I'm a reporter and I'm trying to get in touch with the daughter of a man called David Abbott. That is you, oh fucking hell, including this woman who is Frank's niece, the daughter of one of Frank's few surviving brothers. It was specifically to do with with his brother.

Ah, where do you start anyway?

What would your love to?

Now?

What can you tell me about Frank?

Creepy?

But he never touched me, He never did anything to me that I know of. Bo can remember he was in Windsor. This is another thing. My father told me he's a kid, which I was waiting for the police to do more interviews, and I've tried to tell Queensland Police. But years ago, down in Penrith, Windsor area, there was a young girl.

This is going back years and years.

There was a young girl. They found her dead and she had a pushbike ye and she wrote out and they found her in the scrub years ago when I was a kid. My father, now, I don't know why he would tell me this, but he told me that his brothers took her out into the scrub and they all had sex with her and that she ended up dead. But no one knows how And I've been trying to get that looked into because if he dies, no one's ever going to know the full story, Like why would you tell your kid that?

And you've told police this.

Well, I've tried to Yeah, yes.

Police in New South Wales or queen.

No police in Queensland. When I've said, oh, yeah, there's some girl on a bike years ago, and.

You know.

It was back in the nineteen sixties. I think I think she was only sixteen or seventeen.

Frank was tried, Yes, he was, that's the one.

Yes, they tried to get him for it.

It was the murder of a girl called Helen Harrison.

That's it.

That's her name.

That's the name.

And I think it might be quite important that we look at that because.

Yeah, because my father, I can just see where I am right now in the shed within there telling me this story of this young girl that they picked up who was on a push bike. They put the bike in the back of the you and they his brothers took her out the bush and yeah, all had sex with her.

Day's memory is that her father, David told her that his brothers picked up a young girl with a pushbike and had sex with her and that she ended up dead, but no one knows how. I've seen a version of that same allegation included in a witness statement Day gave to the police in November twenty twenty two. That statement describes Frank's brother David, showing off Playboy magazines and talking about the girl that went missing, but again not talking

Apparently she had an eteleptic fit and died.

Nina, who's the producer on this podcast, spends weeks going back and forth with the New South Wales Supreme Court trying to get access to the thirty year old court records of Frank's prosecution over Helen's murder. Nina then spends two days reading through these yellowing pages and finds a page of transcript from Frank's committal hearing where Helen's old boss at the store says in court that she was taking epilepsy tablets.

Well, I remember being surprised when I first heard about it.

I call Helen's brother Peter and ask him if Helen was epileptic.

Waiting just a child. I wasn't aware she had anything like that.

He says he was only fourteen or fifteen when his sister first went missing, and he didn't know anything about epilepsy until after Helen's body was recovered and.

During the police investigations. Okay, later on, I think I just heard mark parents discussing it. Yeah, brought color because my personal reaction was I just thought, in a shock situation, maybe that's how she died.

Yeah, it was just.

My went through my mind. If she had a sickness.

Yeah, Helen being epileptic could explain why no one at Frank's trial knew how she died. I call a forensic pathologist, someone who's done thousands of different autopsies, and who tells me that if someone died with epilepsy and their body was not discovered for a week like Helen's, that fact wouldn't be something you could see during an autopsy conducted in nineteen sixty eight, and maybe not something you could see even with today's technology. Meaning I don't think you

I've just been just last night thinking a lot but the stage in my life and trying to recall the rest of where a laws were up to, you know, to jog my memory about things. Yeah, it's still just unsolved and should be got nowhere with the whole thing.

And I guess you'd like that to change, yes, hm, hm, to change things. Peter knows that the police and the courts can only act on evidence, but he also expects

They were gouge Max like that someone had gouged.

Skin it.

That's next time on Witness William Tyrol. A lot of different people have been involved in making this series. Among them, the executive producer is Nina Young. The sound design was by Tiffany Dimack. The producers have been Emily Pigeon, Nicholas Adams, Jazzbar, phoebe Zakowski Wallace and Tabby Wilson. Research by Adan Patrick, original music by Rory O'Connor. Our lawyer is Stephen Coombs. The editor at news dot com dot Au is Kerry Warren. I'm Dan Box