Chapter 15
Find My Family
The quest to find out who loved Perth’s Mystery Man
‘The seventh of March doesn’t go by without me thinking of him. It’s like Remembrance Day for me.’
Senior Constable Jen Robinson had just got back from maternity leave when a file landed on her desk.
A man had gone under a train near Perth’s Burswood Casino and it was her job to find out who he was.
Jen thought that identifying the body would be easy. She also thought – after years of identifying bodies in the worst of circumstances – that she could remain detached.
She was wrong on both counts.
•••
Jen Robinson has seen it all but you’d never guess to look at her. The attractive mum has been on duty for twenty-two years – but not at the tuckshop.
Her toughest gigs have been in the Forensics Division, where she spent six years, and the Coronial Investigation Unit, where she spent seven. ‘So I’ve dealt with lots of suicide,’ she says.
Jen was also part of the Disaster Victim Identification team that helped give names to the victims of the Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand in 2004. It’s the kind of work you need a strong stomach for because by the time Jen and her colleagues examined the bodies, they’d been in the water for long enough to make the job extremely arduous and unpleasant.
Prior to that, however, it had been Jen’s job to identify ‘Perth’s Mystery Man’, and from day one she felt like he was pleading with her from beyond the grave.
•••
The man had died at 11.20pm on the night of Saturday 7 March 1998, struck at 90 kilometres an hour by a city-bound train between Burswood and Victoria Park railway stations, where he’d been walking along the tracks.
He hadn’t stood a chance.
When forensic investigators answered the call, they examined every inch of the scene, photographed the body and the blood-spattered train, then bagged and tagged the man’s battered remains.
The fact that he’d left nothing behind to say who he was – and that no-one had reported him missing – meant this investigation was going to be harder than Jen first thought. ‘It was definitely a challenge,’ she says. ‘He didn’t have any identification on him at all.’
She thought the people of Perth might recognise the man by the clothes he was wearing, so she made that her starting point. ‘He was wearing olive green Bogart brand trousers,’ Jen says. ‘They were popular in the late seventies and early eighties but stayed current. They were a brand you’d get from Kmart.
‘We also determined by his trouser length that he was between 168 and 175 centimetres tall.’
The man had also been wearing black size seven Rivers brand shoes, a light green shirt and a brown belt. ‘It was business attire but cheap business attire,’ Jen says. ‘So he obviously cared about what he was wearing but we’re not talking about a wealthy person.’
Jen’s next step was to go to Kmart to purchase the same type of clothes. ‘As luck would have it one of our own blokes in Coronials was the same height so we dressed him in the clothes and released a picture of him walking down the railway tracks at Burswood on the Crime Stoppers TV show.’ They didn’t show his head though, because Jen’s colleague had different-coloured hair from the Mystery Man, whose hair was a blondy, reddish colour. He was also slightly balding.
Unfortunately, no-one came forward after the show to say they’d seen him.
Curious as to whether the man had spent the evening at the nearby Burswood Casino, Jen’s next job was to speak to casino staff. ‘At the time, the Burswood Casino kept their surveillance footage for seven days before it was overridden. I believe at the time we were very close to the seven-day mark so there was no footage available to us.
‘We did, however, make extensive inquiries into any possible disturbances or altercations that occurred on the night at the Burswood Casino with a negative result.
‘We also checked all police-attended jobs within the Perth CBD and South East Metropolitan District for any matters that could be related. Again, nothing of interest surfaced.’
With no-one coming forward locally to say they recognised him, Jen contacted her counterparts interstate. ‘We sent his DNA to every state but got negative results there.’ She also ran his fingerprints through the system but it appeared he’d never been in trouble with the law in Australia or New Zealand. A report on the national crime show Australia’s Most Wanted couldn’t flush out his family either.
‘Then we turned to police in the UK because he had a ruddy complexion so we thought he might have been from Scotland or England, maybe somewhere like that. But we got no results there either.
‘Then we thought, “Maybe he’s a visiting sailor,” because blokes from the United States were in [port] at the time but we found out that they didn’t have any AWOL sailors in that period.’
Next Jen came up with another way to pursue the avenue that he might be a local. ‘We contacted Homes West [the public housing department] and all the real estate agents in the area. We wanted to find out if someone had stopped paying their rent or their utilities bills or if it had come to their attention that someone had vanished and left their possessions behind.
‘But no-one had – in the entire city – so that came to a dead end too.’
Unfortunately, Jen had little else to go on to make an ID.
‘It was estimated he was aged between twenty-five and thirty-five,’ she says. ‘And he had very good teeth with no fillings so he was probably brought up in a good family.
‘He was circumcised so that immediately eliminates him coming from some religious groups. He also had very soft hands so we don’t think he did manual labour.’
Besides the lack of clues as to his identity, the other thing that has bugged Jen about this case was the widespread, instantaneous belief that he wanted to end his life. It was a clear night and the train’s headlights were on full beam, so the man should have realised he was in harm’s way.
But did he?
The way Jen sees it, just because someone is walking into the path of an oncoming train, doesn’t necessarily mean they want to kill themselves. ‘My gut feeling is that it was an accident,’ she says. ‘He might have been down in the dumps after a bad night at the casino; he might have had a head full of thoughts and got hit because he wasn’t paying attention.’
Unfortunately, Jen never got to interview the train driver to find out firsthand what they saw in that instant before the man was crushed beneath the wheels. ‘We don’t have a legal right to speak to the drivers,’ she says. ‘The railways use their own investigators. So even though the train driver was of the view that the man intended to commit suicide, I’ve only read that on a piece of paper. I’m not satisfied with a written report like that. I don’t know what questions the driver was asked or how the questions were asked.
‘What I do know is that the driver saw his face.’
Jen may never know exactly what the driver read in the man’s expression the moment before he died, but she acknowledges the deep trauma any driver must go through when a train and a person collide. ‘It would be a terrible thing. I feel very sorry for them.’
As the case grew cold, Jen’s forensic investigation ground to a halt until the appointment of the new Sergeant in Charge of the Missing Persons Investigation Unit, Bert van der Woude.
‘When I first came to the unit in 1998 my predecessor informed me that we had an unidentified person who’d been hit by a train at Burswood. He said that they’d thought they could put a name to him but they hadn’t been able to. “Be mindful of anything you come across along the way,” he’d said to me. “Just keep an eye out for anything that will help you give this man a name.”
‘And that’s what I did so the case was always in the back of my mind.
‘Jen had done a lot of work on it and had been very proactive. You’d think with all that she did that she would have received some response from the public about who he was, but she didn’t.
‘Then about twelve months later I was down at the mortuary and one of the attendants asked me, “What are you doing about your body?”’ Jen says, picking up the story. ‘I didn’t realise he was still there but bodies aren’t allowed to be buried unless they’ve been identified.
‘So I petitioned the coroner. I asked if we could bury him and he agreed.’
What Jen did next was above and beyond the call of duty. ‘I said to Bert, “One day we will find his family, so let’s do something for them.”’ With that, Jen arranged a proper funeral for the man, officiated over by the police chaplain. It was held on 12 April 1999, and was attended by half a dozen people, including a former ABC journalist whom Jen had asked to film the ceremony. ‘We just wanted to be able to say to his family, “We did give your son a farewell.”’
That day, in the stillness of the cemetery, Jen let go of her professional detachment. ‘I actually got teary because I was thinking of the family…you can’t help but relate to them.
‘I thought, “What if this was my child?” I’ve got three children and three grandchildren and I thought, “What if it was one of them?”’
Bert too was moved, not just by the ceremony itself, but also by the fact that Jen had seen fit to arrange a formal service for a John Doe who, under normal circumstances, would be buried on top of others in a pauper’s grave with neither a eulogy nor a final blessing. ‘I had never heard of anyone doing anything like that,’ Bert says. ‘Credit’s due there, it was a great effort.’
And even if the Perth Mystery Man had intended to commit suicide, Jen says that makes his passing no less important and that it’s time we lose the stigma surrounding mental illness. ‘To me, suicide is no different a death to being hit by a car or having diabetes…it’s something that happens because of an unhealthy mind.
‘I haven’t spoken to many survivors of attempted suicide, but those who I have all said how relieved they were that they weren’t successful.
‘With a healthy mind people would never take that step.’
Jen’s best friend is a psychiatric nurse and given their lines of work, the women talk about suicide all the time. ‘It’s rarely just one thing that makes someone want to take their own life,’ Jen says. ‘It’s usually a combination of three of four things that all build up.’
Bert doesn’t share Jen’s opinion that it was an accident; he was pretty sure Perth’s Mystery Man had known full well what he was doing. ‘From my experience at the Missing Persons Unit, we had a very high rate of suicides, especially amongst males.
‘It was very sad because it was not uncommon for them to end their lives in this fashion.’
Compounding his belief is Bert’s local knowledge of the Burswood area. ‘One of my former colleagues regularly attended that stretch of line,’ Bert says solemnly. ‘It did have a bad reputation …’
While Bert worked closely with Jen during the early days of the investigation, it wasn’t until 2000, when his unit was better resourced, that he was able to delve more deeply into the baffling case of the unidentified man. ‘We gave it a bit more publicity at the Missing Persons Unit but nothing came from it.
‘I also went through a lot of old cases to see if anyone met the description of the man but there was no-one there. I tried to find out who he was through Interpol but that was a bit of a dead end too. So it became very difficult to know where to cast a net.’
Every year when Bert attended missing persons conferences in Canberra, he hoped his mates from interstate could provide him with some fresh information. ‘During wind-down drinks I’d say, “If somebody comes across someone like this on their books can they please let me know,” because there was not a national missing persons database.
‘But even with the extra help and attention from my interstate counterparts I had no joy.’
After Bert had thoroughly reviewed the case, he reluctantly accepted that Perth’s Mystery Man might not be identified during his tenure. He was right because when he retired two and a half years ago, the man’s identity was as much a mystery as ever.
Nowadays, Bert wiles away the hours relaxing at home, spending time with the family, and taking trips up north – exactly what he should be doing after thirty-six years of service. Having said that, the job is still in Bert’s blood and he still hopes someone will find out the name of Perth’s Mystery Man. ‘That’s the problem with being a policeman…it’s something you can’t get out of your system.
‘Finding out who the mystery man is would be like fast-forwarding something on TV and finding out what the ending is,’ he says. ‘I’d think, “Why didn’t I solve that?”
‘For all we know he could come from ten thousand miles away. Or he could be from just around the corner. But I still think about it and it would be tremendous if someone could solve it.’
Senior Constable Karen Clarkson, another missing persons specialist, has been hoping for two years to be that person.
When Karen began looking over the case with a fresh set of eyes in September 2010, she noticed something interesting about the dead man’s teeth. ‘Two of his teeth were described as distally inclined, and I thought, “This is it!” as it appeared to match a photograph of a missing person from England.’
Karen, who lives and breathes long-term cases, had a hunch that the Perth Mystery Man was a twenty-year-old man from England who’d gone missing while backpacking in Australia in 1997 but hadn’t been reported until 2004. ‘We contacted his mother through Interpol and DNA was obtained; however, the result was negative,’ Karen says. ‘I was very disappointed.’
But now, for the first time, Karen is able to nationally release a likeness of the man, put together by the Forensic Imaging Unit. Using brand-new technology, they were able to enhance a photo of the deceased man’s face to give an idea of what he may have looked like prior to sustaining severe head and facial injuries. As eye colour can change after death, Karen has chosen to release an image of the man with his eyes closed.
Even though it’s fourteen years on, she’s hoping someone will recognise him and come forward.
The only trouble is, Karen too is leaning toward the likelihood that he doesn’t come from Australia. ‘It’s very likely in my opinion that this fella’s from overseas because why isn’t someone missing him locally?
‘We are currently revisiting the DNA and fingerprints that were obtained at the time of the missing person’s death and sending them to as many countries overseas as possible to try to locate any link.’
The torch has been passed, and now Karen is the one doggedly determined to work out who the man is and why he ended life the way he did. ‘It’s one of those cases that you really get your teeth into and to solve cases like this is very satisfying.
‘Unfortunately, it’s too late for him but it would be very satisfying to be able to tell his family where their loved one is.’
It’s a sentiment echoed by Jen, who keeps in regular contact with Karen to find out if there are any new leads. ‘In this job you try not to get too attached but sometimes a case gets through the cracks.
‘And this one has meant so much to us personally.
‘We’ve put so much of our souls into it.’
Despite her theory that he had accidentally walked headlong into the path of the oncoming train, Jen has certainly stopped to wonder: what if the man from the train tracks had wanted to die that night – what had been on his mind? What had made him so unhappy, so desperate, that he saw no other way out?
No-one will ever know.
The irony is that if he did feel unwanted the night he met his sudden and dramatic end, now he is remembered with love every year on the anniversary of his passing. And by people who never even met him.
‘The seventh of March doesn’t go by without me thinking of him,’ Jen says. ‘It’s like Remembrance Day for me.’