M all right, Okay, we've just pulled up.
We have Okay, Nina and I have spent too long together.
Well, I was going to say, what's on the sign?
Certainly helps you?
Yeah, we are for the recording audience.
We've started to bicker at each other. I'm waiting for you to say, so, Dan, where are we?
I was gonna, you know, for once, I was going to say.
Where we were, but we hadn't pulled up with Should we not bicker anymore?
All right?
But in fairness, we're two years in to working on this podcast, months past where we expected to finish, and we're both tired. Can we do a piece of microphone? Just talk? I'll talk, you record what talk. We're also still driving right now. We're near the small town of Old Bar on the mid north coast of New South Wales, which is a out three quarters of an hour south of Kendall, the town where William Tirell was reported missing. Driving this dirt road, we passed between two walls of forest,
the trees seeming to crowd closer in upon us. Then suddenly the country opens to our right. There are long empty beaches, the blue sky, the sun's sparkling in the water. Oh fuck, it's gorgeous, or it would be gorgeous if this wasn't the likely sight of another unsolved murder and getting out of the car the wind wasn't whipping in as sharp as knives across the ocean. This is a place called mud Bishop's Point Reserve. You can hear the trees and just over there's the water coming down from
the Manning River, and it's a beautiful place. Out to our right there's just these golden beaches. But back in December nineteen ninety six, a thirty eight year old mum called Margaret Cox. She had three kids. She was last in on a Thursday night in Taree, which is about twenty kilometers away from here, and a couple of days later her body was found in the water near here. Margaret's underwear, carrying the DNA of four other people, was found at the picnic reserve near where Nina and I
are standing. Like Helen Harrison whose death we looked at in the last episode, Margaret's killing is still unsolved, meaning her family don't have any answers, except that a coroner found she had been raped, was killed by blunt force injuries to her head, and that it wasn't possible to say if Margaret was still alive when her body was
put in the water. And the other thing the coroner found was that it was most likely a local who was involved in whatever happened to Margaret, because this area's a long way out of town, at the end of a long dirt road. There's no street lights, so you come here at nights and it would be pitch dark. The only light would be your car headlights, and you'd have to be a local to even know this place existed. I'm Dan Box and from news dot com dot Au.
This is Witness William Tyrrell, Episode fourteen, Margaret.
Thank you, gentlemen. Stop recording.
To get a sense of why Margaret's case is still unsolved. Almost thirty years later, Nina and I sit down again with Gary Jubilin, the former detective who once led the investigation into William Tyrrel's disappearance. All right, hey, listen, what we're going to do is talk you through these two unrelated cases. So we talked to you through Helen Harrison before, and we're just trying to get your sense on anything that comes to mind, particularly about the investigation.
So It's December of nineteen ninety six. It's the nineteenth of December. It's a Thursday before Christmas. Margaret Cox was a thirty eight year old single mom. She had three children, and on that Thursday, Margaret had spent the day with family and friends that had been consuming some alcohol from marijuana. Then the group went out in the evening and they decided to walk from Kendletown to Tarre in order to go to a nightclub.
It's about five kilometers straight down the road. Tarree itself is the big city on this stretch of the mid North Coast, but it's not that big. With just over twenty thousand people living there, it shouldn't be that easy for someone to get lost.
Around midnight, they stopped at a service station, which was where the Big Oyster was at the time.
Yep, the Big Oyster is just that, a big sculpture of an oyster. It's meant, I think, to celebrate the local oyster farming industry, and it's kind of why. It's enormous and kind of goofy and kind of impressive and also so kind of ugly.
Big ways to steal. Their service station has moved and somehow during this point, Margaret gets separated from the group, and no one's really sure what happened at that point. The theory is that she either gets into someone's car or a lift, or is taken in someone's car.
Essentially, she's not seen after this point at that service station.
And that's twelve midnight service station. Yeah, okay, how many people wash you with?
We don't know the number. Two people who worked at the service station told police they saw Margaret with either another man or two men who bought a cigarette lighter and then left. But someone else told the police that he saw Margaret at the service station surrounded by a group of men and screaming. So it's all confusing.
I mean, I'll say up front that we did apply for the coronial inquest files for this case, and even though I applied in October, I haven't received them. Dan, you've also applied.
Yep, my got sent the findings, which is a single page.
Yeah, not much help.
The inquest into Margaret's death was held in twenty ten, fourteen years after she was murdered, and the coroner's findings say the cause of her death was blunt force injuries to her head inflicted on her by person or persons unknown and the evidence available does not enable me to make a finding as to the place of death.
So it's that was a Thursday night. The following Saturday morning, Margaret's body was found floating in the Manning River.
So, if you don't know Tarre, Tarre's on the Manning River and then that flows down to the coast, and it kind of it splits in two and goes around this big island and then hits the.
Coast yep, and some of her clothing was found in a picnic area called mud Bishop's Reserve, where the police and later the coroner theorized that she was sexually assaulted multiple times. The police pretty quickly formed the opinion that they thought the killer was local, mainly because it's not an area that you'd likely find and access late at night if you weren't already aware of that area. Dan and I actually went to this area. Yeah, I would agree. It's pretty hard.
There's no way you'd know about it unless you knew the area.
And that assumption is a reasonable assumption if we're looking at an area that if you're from out of the town, you don't even know about it. So I think that's a reasonable assumption.
And the other point is it's not in Tire, so she's last seen in Tire and then mud Bishop's Reserve where her clothes are found and the coroner and the police think that she was assaulted. That's a decent drive, maybe ten to fifteen minutes, but it's out a tarre down following the river, you hit another little town called Old Bar and then from there it's not easy to find your way up to this reserve. People fish there, people might go there for I don't know, teenagers might
drink there. It's not an obvious place to go at all. So the police first they looked at the ex boyfriend. He was a truck driver and he'd actually driven from Grafton I think to Taree and he'd signed in at a nearby sailing club on the Thursday night that Margaret went missing, so he's an obvious person to talk to. They spoke to him. He said the relationship ended weeks before and he had an alibi, so they kind of scratched him. Police interviewed everyone they could find who'd been
on the highway that day, so thousands of inquiries. They spoke to fishermen who'd been near where the clothing was recovered, and they treated some of those as potential suspects. At first, police learned that upstream at a bridge, some people had heard screaming on the night that Margaret went missing, But the investigation started to feel like it was getting bogged down. Three homicide detectives from Newcastle came up, spent several months
in Tare. Another couple of detectives came up and took the lead from the local cops. So at this point, does that sound like a comprehensive police response.
Well, they're treating seriously if they know the fight homicide, So you'd send a team of three. That seems normal with the family who was with her? Was anyone from the family with her at the time of her disappearance?
Yeah, so that day and that night she was with family and friends.
Yeah, Okay, my instinct from a homicide detective, the answer lies in at the service station, which pretty much stayed in the obvious, saying it was the last place she was seen alive. But yeah, how she wandered off from a group with no one in the group knowing.
The answer to how Margaret got separated from the group might be in old newspaper reports, which Nina found in the State library. These say that Margaret was one of four people drinking together that night. They say the group drank two bottles of Jim Beam and a four liter cask of wine. One other group later described Margaret saying she could stand up, but if you asked her to walk in a straight line, it would have never happened.
So pretty drunk. About eleven or eleven thirty that night, the group somehow drove from Tai to nearby Condletown to keep drinking. Only they ran out of drink in Condletown, so three of them, including Margaret, walked back. Then that group split. Margaret wanted to get a cigarette lighter, so she went to the service station and the other two walked onto a caravan park to call on a friend.
My focus, if I was looking at an investigation being called out the bet would be focusing very much on everyone's movements. Was anyone showing the particular interest in that night? A group going for a drink, kicking on a nightclub. Invariably people are starting the pair up or someone that's shown an interest in her that night, thinking that he might be their man.
Up until at least we get to, like the ten year anniversary of the crime. The police are still saying in the media, you know, this can be solved. They don't seem like they've given up.
They also don't seem to have had much success for different reasons. Different police officers were put in charge of the case over the years, and none of them was able to be certain where exactly Margaret died. There was no blood or sign of a struggle, meaning they didn't have a lot of evidence.
There's at least three or four persons of interests that were named the inquest. So early on the police released a photo fit of a man that they believed had been camping in the mud Bishop's Reserve area, and they released an image of him and the description of his car, which was a white four wheel drive Land Rover, and as a result of that, a number of people identified the same man as being the man from that photo.
That man was not Frank Cabot.
Mud Bishop Reserve was where her clothing was found. There I see the primary crime scene, I would suggest as a service station. I didn't get overly excited about the secondary crime scene. Someone in the area and again, this is just what's going through her mind in that why did she get to that location? She didn't have a car. How did she get to the picnic area where a clothing.
Was found, because she's got to get there.
Yeah, so it's who meets the service station and takes her there.
That's where I'd be looking. I wouldn't be overly concerned who was around where her clothes were dumped.
But the coroner ultimately ruled there was not enough evidence to point to a likely killer or to charge anyone. They also mentioned DNA, so the coroner mentioned that there was a DNA of four people on Margaret's underwear. Ye, three of those people have been identified and one hasn't.
Right, Okay, Certainly, if her clothes have been dumped, her body has been dumped in the river, and it looks like she's being sexually assaulted, the DNA on the underwear would be of vital interest.
Yeah.
But presumably if they've identified three of those people, they aren't suspects. They must have been ruled out.
Again, the media reports are confusing, but it looks like three of those DNA profiles were identified and two of them ruled out as suspects at the inquest, leaving one other identified person and a fourth DNA profile that's never been identified. But one thing does stand out from the media reports, and that is that Margaret had a bandage on her left arm. The newspaper report says she suffered a very extensive laceration on her left arm shortly before
her death. Another report is different, that one says that she'd had what it called certain surgery earlier that December.
So I keep coming back to if you're looking at the person of interest, you're looking at someone that was in the.
Group or who met the group at that service.
Station, potentially met the group at the service station. But the game then you've got that random meeting of a predator and the victim at a location where you wouldn't expect to find the victim.
Yeah. OK, So that's all that was known at the time and since then essentially nothing until the William Tyrrell inquest as we go, hang you, This is Iris Northam. She's a kind face and slightly plump and smiling, older woman. She looks like a grandma out of Central Casting. And this is Nina. Iris and her husband Dooley live in a little single story brick house surrounded by bright flowers in old bar, the tiny town just down the dirt
road from where Margaret's clothing was discovered. Nina and I have come to visit them because of a witness statement which we found among dozens of other exhibits released to us by the coroner from the inquest into William Tyrrel's disappearance. That witness statement is from Iris, and it sets out the evidence that she'd be prepared to give as a
witness in court. That statement is also the first time the story of Margaret Cox's disappearance and her murder intersects with our story about Frank Abbot, and its full contents have never been made public before.
Now, so you're doing a follow up on this.
In her witness statement to the William Tyrrell Inquest, Iris explains how she first met Frank Abbott.
His father.
Was a customer of it US. We hit the script medically out and his father used to bring a bit of script medal in Andy and one day just come in he stole.
My son.
Frank's looking for a job. He can do anything that he's been in jail done.
He just got out of something.
That noise you can hear in the background is me talking to Iris's husband, Dooley. Dooley's getting on these days. He stooped over. He struggles to walk and it's hard to break away from the conversation.
And my husband said, bring him in if you can do the work whatever I want done.
And then when he came in, he just talk like a normal person. He didn't put yeah yeah.
And then when he started work, you know, you just ask him to do something, you go, I'll do no back chattle anything. He didn't talk that much, but if you talk to him, it's sort of pretty insurance whatever. But well, he only worked for us fur Book months.
I suppose it might have been that.
One the reason Frank stopped working for them was that he got arrested in nineteen ninety one over the murder of Helen Harrison, which we talked about in the last episode.
One day, one of the policemen come to wear a place and he said, oh, Frank Abbott's not going to be working for you anymore. He said, we just arrested him for murder.
And I said, what, Frank was found not guilty.
He just said that everything was cleared. I said that he was not guildy by now.
Dooley and I are both sitting at the kitchen table listening to Iris. I asked her, did it ever worry you that Frank was put on trial for murder?
It's sort of sort of did, but yeah, he sort of didn't.
Didn't sport the press on it too much.
Instead, they stayed friend. Iris says, Frank and Dooley used to gamble together on the horses.
They are planters, of course, they bring up the sounds has writing today And anyway, Frank moved to John's River and hittering happens. What do you fancy for race number six or something? And they'd be talking away there for half an hour, think oh, yeah.
This one's a good one. That wrong, And you know they just chatter on, just mates, just.
Mates for years. An Iris doesn't seem to bear Frank any malice today. Did you ever hear any other stories about him? People saying things about that?
Since? Yes, since quite a lot.
Then we start talking about Margaret and what Iris says in her statement to the William Tyrell inquest.
When Margaret Cox went miss she went missing on a Thursday night. On the Saturday morning they found a body in the river, and on the Sunday we went to an auction.
It was a film I had yet to have an auction every month, and the yaid, there's Frank, we've got a few minutes before you know, we've got to be there. So when out and we're talking Frank and anyway, Burley said to him, Frank, what did you do to you arm? Because he had all these gaut marks on his arm, and Frank just said, oysters. That was it.
Oysters from the local oyster beds around Tyree, the ones that inspired the big Oyster in the wild. Oysters have really sharp shells. They scratch. In her statement, Iris says Frank had about seven or eight gouge marks between in his left wrist and his elbow.
Always just don't do that. I fell on the oysters once and they don't do that. They just slash.
So what was the difference with these?
They were gouge marks, like someone had gouged skin it with the actual flesh out with.
Their fingernails, and so these weren't Did you think anything of.
That at the time, Well, I did and I didn't.
Speaking to Gary Jubilin, Nina reads out this section from Iris's statement to the Inquest.
The gouge marks were long and straight, and they looked to be a couple of days old, as they had that kind of festy look that wounds get before they start to heal.
Yep.
I remember thinking that the marks on his arm really didn't match what he was telling us.
As a former homicide detective, I asked, Gary, do you read into that it.
Is concerning There's been a lot of murders solved by someone carrying injuries that obviously what appear to be wounds with someone struggling if they're being attacked, oyster marks as distinct from straight scratches. Yeah, I offer a concern there. I worry with contamination of Frank Abbott because his reputation is so well known that people what we know about Frank Abbott is a grub. You're testing memories from what ninety six, if it was at the inquest, We're looking
at thirty years down the track. I don't know. I'm trying to think thirty years back. Can I recall specific injury or how it looks? Memory can do some funny things, so I wouldn't get overly excited, but I'd be curious where Frank is. Certainly opportunity motive capability, as I always talk about he would have the motivation, because he seems to be, in my understanding, the sexual predator capability, the opportunity. Let's set missing ingredient.
Meaning can you prove Frank had the opportunity to do anything to Margaret? So far, the answer is no. We can't even say Frank ever met her. Although there is a line in Iris's witness statement about.
Ken Ben bowling.
She says Frank used to bowl in Tarree on a Thursday night. It was a Thursday night that Margaret was last seen in Tiree.
And so the bowling alley and I've confirmed it is the same bowlier alien hasn't moved, is five minutes away from that service station. We went to the bowling alley and I said, can you tell me who was bowling here thirty years ago? No, they can't, but they gave me the name of someone who did bowl there thirty years ago, and I tracked that guy down. Unfortunately, he is a Tuesday Wednesday bowler, not a Thursday.
Which at least corroborates that there was bowling on a Thursday. And the other thing we heard is that bowling was big then and people would bowl late into the night, which proves nothing. We don't know if Frank was bowling on that Thursday, or what time the bowling finished, or if that was the same time Margaret was last seen at the service station.
I tried to be a detective, Gary, I'd.
Tried to be a detective too.
That didn't work out.
But there is one other thing. In Iris's statement to the William Tyrrell inquest, she says Frank had another mate.
Yes, no, no, Santa, Yeah, could you tell us a bit more about what Noel told you about faith.
In her witness statement, Iris says she and her husband told Noel about seeing Frank with oyster scratches after Margaret was murdered.
Duley sort of mentioned it to him, and Narl said, he said, I'm sure that's the woman that I saw at Frank's with Frank.
He said she had a bandage or something on her arm, and.
I said, I don't know whether she had any bandages or anything.
So when Noel told you this that he'd seen Margaret at Frank's place with the bandage on her arm, did he say when that.
Was a few days before?
A few days before?
Ye might have been a week, but it was only a few days.
So Frank's mate Noel says he saw Margaret at Frank's house sometime before she was murdered, and Noel recognized her from the bandage, which we know she did have on her left arm. As far as we can tell, this claim that Nol saw Margaret at Frank's house has never been made public, not at the inquest into Margaret's death in twenty ten, nor at the inquest into William's disappearance that ended last year.
Shortly after Narl had told us it was only probably four or five days.
Iris says her husband Dooley and Nol did try to tell police about seeing Margaret at Frank's place.
Narl had been doing something for us. I'm not sure what it was now, but anyway, Dearly was taking him home because he lived at John's River near pretty near over the Eye, and there was a police block.
Idea there'd been some kind of traffic incident, and.
They said, oh, we're just stopping peguin Dulian.
Nill tried to tell him about Margaret been.
There, but the cop didn't seem interested.
No, No, we've got someone for there.
I see, as in the cops already had a suspect.
They had three or four different people, and all sort of, you know, sort of gone through what could have been, what might have.
Happened, meaning what might have happened if the cop that day had listened when they tried to tell him about Margaret. So what did happen? To answer that, Nina tracks down the detective who first led the investigation into Margaret's death.
His name is Dave Wilno, and we drive out to meet him and sit with Dave and his wife at the table in their cozy kitchen, reading out Iris Northam's witness statement while Dave sits there without moving, his eyes closed, chin on his hands because he's never heard any of this before. Now, and Dave, I think, is a good man who did his best with the investigation and who deeply regrets not being able to give Margaret's family an
answer as to who killed her. We keep talking. After more than two hours together, Nina and I finally stand, shake hands and leave. So that I wasn't expecting.
Yeah, so.
We've just been talking to a cop, Dave Wilno, and he led the investigation into Margaret Cox's murder back in nineteen ninety six. In tire and at the moment he doesn't want to be recorded, but I think we can say what we said to each other. And well, the first thing I didn't expect is that, as well as Dave, we met his wife, June. And while Dave was the cop who led the investigation into Margaret's murder, June was the nurse who treated Margaret in the week before she went missing.
Yes, which is non information that I had from media reports.
I didn't know either. And this is the bit that got me was we talked about the investigation, and we talked about different things, and we were there for a good long time, a couple of hours. But then un said that Margaret was in the hospital right up until just before she went missing. In fact, June said she was working the night shift and she worked the Thursday night. Margaret went missing on the Thursday night, and June said
she came into the hospital and Margaret was gone. But she also said something that got your attention, didn't it.
Yeah, So she said that Margaret was being treated for an infection, yeah, and that she had left hospital. She had just had she had a pick line in treating this infectation.
Yes, an intravenous line going into her arm.
Yeah, And that caught my attention because of Irish Northam's statement. And in that statement she said that Noel Sunter, who was a friend of hers and a friend of Frank's, said that he had seen Margaret Cox at Frank's house shortly before the murder and that she had a bandage on her arm.
And this this is the thing that when I read that in Iris Northham statement, I thought, it kind of doesn't mean anything. You've got a secondhand account that somebody saw Margaret at Frank's house kind of so what until June told us that Margaret was in hospital until the day she went missing and she was discharged with a bandage on her arm.
Yep.
And Iris then says, a couple of days after Margaret goes missing, she sees Frank with those scratch marks down his arm. Suddenly, all of that seems much much more important than it did before.
And it gives a frame of reference as well, because her statement says shortly before the murder, yeah, which could mean days, weeks, hours, but the fact that she had the bentage on her arm, and we've got the nurse that discharged her saying she was discharged that day with.
The bet, Yeah, so that puts it at Frank's house the day she went missing. Have the police followed this up when they got Iris's statement. Well, we know they haven't spoken to June who was the treating nurse, but maybe they wouldn't. And we know they haven't spoken to the cop we just met Dave who led the investigation, but maybe they wouldn't. But have the police followed up with anyone about that statement that Frank might actually have
been with Margaret on the day she went missing. Before she disappeared, Everyone around the table in that kitchen today was a little bit shocked by that.
You've got me more interested in the effect if Frank Ebbertt knew her, that sort of changes the dynamics a bit.
We go back and ask Gary Jubilin as a four, if this evidence about Margaret being at Frank's house changes anything.
I'd be looking if I was looking at this investigation fresh, like in the actual time period you got Frank if he knows the victim. To me, it feels like a local type crime. If I was looking at it, I'd be looking for someone in the area.
It might also mean that Frank knew she was going out that night, if she was the woman with a bandage on her arm seen at Frank's house.
And if she was seen at Frank's house, if we're linking the bandage on the arm to being discharged from hospital. So it's contemporary, it's not I saw in the house ten years before. So it was Frank Abbott's reputation out and about at that stage.
No, So it's interesting we asked about this because Frank was arrested in ninety ninety one in tire and then he goes through both of his trials whereas found not guilty over the murder of Helen Harrison. That all wraps up in ninety four, ninety five. So I did ask the investigator who was leading the investigation to Margaret's death, were you aware of Frank in the community and that he'd been charged with a crime like that, and would
that make you more likely to look at him? And he kind of said no, that they weren't really aware.
So they didn't know that Frank was living in the area and had just been acquitted of abducting, sexually assaulting and murdering a teenage girl.
It shouldn't happen. I'm not saying that that couldn't happen that police would miss that. I'm thinking back to ninety six. I was in homicide and they operate. A person's name comes up in the investigation and you'd be looking at their past history, and it certainly flagged that if he was charged then acquitted of a murder.
Well, Frank's name didn't come up in an investigation.
So this information about knowing the victim, Margaret has come up.
Basically, it's come up as there was up with the William Towell inquest.
Right it has.
But yeah, there's a lot of a lot of missing pieces.
That's one question I wanted to ask you is if you were in unsolved handling this so it'd come to the police as a result of IRIS giving this statement in the William towol inquest, would you be getting in touch with Margaret Cox's family to say we've got some information.
If I was in the unsolved homicide, which I have been in the unsolved homicides, I'd want to have a look at what's gone on, speak to the family, maybe get access to the brief and answer all the questions that I'm asking.
How would you go.
Back to IRIS after that statement.
Was made, Iris been the.
Woman who made this statement for the inquest.
Oh yeah, yeah, that would be an obvious, obvious one.
And would you go back to Nils onto the guy who apparently said he saw Margaret at Franks Out.
I'd be going back to them, armed with all the information that you've provided now, to sit down and potentially get additional information based on the information that you've forecoming.
So what if I told you that IRIS gave that statement in twenty nineteen, So we're five years on and they've not heard anything from the police.
I'd be disappointed that I'm used to being disappointed.
Gary isn't the only one who's disappointed that the police haven't followed up with IRIS about Margaret Cox's murder.
Well, that's it, it is.
This is Iris.
When the coroner come here and he was asking questions and things, and I'll mentioned.
That IRIS says someone from the coronial team investigating William Toole's disappearance came to her house to take her statement and sat where Nina and I are now sitting.
One of these was with him said, we'll mention that the cold case Detectives, the.
Cold Case Detectives is the unsolved homicide team David Laidlaw, who's running the police investigation into William's disappearance, is one of that team's commanders.
But whether she did or not, I don't know.
So you've never heard that.
That was two thousand.
Cons lawyers came here and you obviously told them. They said they'd tell, and you've never heard.
Anything, never heard, so I don't know whether they said anything or just completely forgot about it all.
And did you hear back from the police since the inquest. Iris did give evidence in person at William's inquest, but that in quest wasn't looking at Margaret's murder, and Iris was only asked about part of what's in her statement and the rest hasn't been made public before now talking to US, Iris says it was one of who she calls the girls who interviewed her at home to get her statement, who said they passed the information on to
the cold case unit. We don't know who that person was, though Iris's statement is signed by a female police detective who was on the strikeforce investigating William's disappearance, so we know at least that she was in the room, and we know no one has gone back since to talk to Iris.
Well, I could probably Seisafi good?
But yeah, I just think I want to fly. I'm an idiot.
Do you think they should talk to you?
WHOA?
At times I think, oh, I've got you know, I've got to say something, even if if it's just to ring Nicole case mob up on Friday out with the other said anything about it?
They got your information. Yeah, I do want to say. I think you're holding you're feeling a lot of responsibility. Oh yes, yes.
You have told someone and you have done your part.
You should know that. Well, yes, but I didn't follow it up. I haven't followed it up.
That's not really but I would like to know whether she did see someone down there or mentioned it to someone.
That's a good question. We asked New South Wales Police if this evidence about Frank and Margaret was passed on to the Unsolved Homicide Team in twenty nineteen, and if they had done anything to investigate it. The police declined to answer.
On getting older, Narl's getting older, whether it's sulam to give any sort.
Of evidence, Iris is right to say she's getting older. Her husband Dooley, who knew Frank well, is no longer really up to being interviewed or giving evidence. And what about Frank's other mate, Noel Sunter, the man who apparently saw Margaret at Frank's house with a bandage on her left arm shortly before she was murdered. Hello, Hi, is that Utah?
Yes it is.
Eventually we track Noel down. This is his wife. I tell her what we're doing. I'm a reporter and for the past couple of years I've been working on a podcast series about the investigation into the disappearance of that little lad, William Tyrell, who went missing ten years ago. Now, Utter explains Nol is also getting older and also no longer really up for being interviewed, but he is with her in the room as she and I are talking.
Reason to speak to yourself is that in one of the exhibits that came out of the inquest, there was a witness statement given by a woman called Iris Northam whose yes yes. In her statement, Iris is talking about this woman who went missing in Tiree and was subsequently found dead, a woman called Margaret Cox. She was the mum of three who was found the old Yes.
Yes.
My personal opinion is I don't think they've investigated Frank Abbott enough.
But that's just my opinion.
Iris gave this statement to the inquest which mentions Nol seeing my Margaret and Frank together. She gave this statement four or five years ago, roughly have you heard from the police in that time.
I'm trying to think, we're already in this house, and we've been in this house now for when it were moving six just over six years. It mustn't be about five years ago, I'd say. When we got the message from the police. Never heard from them again. It was a woman and she said she'd call back, and that's the.
Last I heard.
So you've never heard from the police about Margaret Corks. Has he ever mentioned Margaret to you?
I remember Noel saying that he saw a woman in Frank's house. She had an arm in a sling or something. Noel, you said, Nol doesn't talk so well anymore, wrapped up in a bandage in Frank's house.
And did he say who he thought that woman was?
No, you don't remember who that was to you?
No? No, okay, So Noel today, five years on from when Iris gave her statement about Margaret, Nol doesn't remember or can't say if he remembers who the woman was that he saw in Frank's house, just that she was wearing a bandage, And as it stands, that's not evidence of anything, and maybe Noel was mistaken about who was with Frank. Too many years have passed since Margaret died
and since Iris gave her evidence to the inquest. But you do think the police could have been asking these questions back in twenty nineteen when Iris first up, and they haven't.
We've all said all along that the police never investigated Frank enough.
What makes you say that he was just there was.
Just something about Frank.
I didn't like him, and I never liked him, but it was, you know, Noah's friend and whatnot.
I think it was just creepy. That's the way I didn't describe it. Really.
Did he do anything in particular made you think he was creepy?
Just he'd brush up against you, just yeah, yeah, yeah, he was just.
Oh.
I tried to stay away from him, and because we lived so close, he used to call in quite readily.
So it's a bit.
Just.
I think anybody who you talk to about Frank would probably tell you the same thing. You know, he had a beautiful door atmember's daughter's names.
She was gorgeous. She was really lovely.
You know, do you have any idea what happened to her?
I have no idea.
We haven't been able to contact Frank's daughter either, and if you're out there and you want to talk, there's an email address in the show notes. We've written to Frank Abbott in prison where he's serving time for child sex offenses, about Margaret Cox and whether he ever met her. He hasn't responded to our questions. So this is what
we do know. We know the police and the inquest team investigating William's disappearance were told back in twenty nineteen about one of their persons of interest and his alleged links to a young woman who was murdered. We know the woman who gave that evidence was told it would be passed on to the Unsolved Homicide team, but no one from the police has contacted her since, nor have the police contacted the other alleged witness she mentioned, nol Santer.
And as we learn more about Margaret's death, that begins to seem completely inexplicable, because we learned there was once a dedicated police task force called Task Force METS, who reportedly looked for any links between Margaret's killing and three other unsolved murders. So Nina and I start looking at those three killings and we find there are others other unsolved murders here on the New South Wales North Coast
and the Irish Northam. Statement to the inquest into William's disappearance links Frank to yet another of those cold cases, but that has never been made public until now. That's Next Time on Witness William Tyrrell. 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 Aden Patrick, original music by Rory O'Connor. Our lawyer is Stephen Coombs. The editor at news dot com dot Au is Kerry Warren and Box