THERE’S a Raymond Chandler feel to Maroubra. Its sunbaked streets of ageing stucco and tile houses, sprawled next to Coogee on Sydney’s eastern beaches, suggest Chandler’s between-the-wars Los Angeles. So do some of the goings-on there.
It was here, in a street with a million-dollar view of the Pacific, that a little old lady with a big bank balance went for a walk and never came back.
Chandler himself couldn’t have plotted the last-known movements of Mrs Dottie Davis more bleakly, or have left fewer clues.
Late on a Tuesday morning in May 1995, the 74-year-old widow came home to her ugly double-storey brick house at 9 Undine Street, after an appointment with her doctor.
About an hour later, according to a builder working on an awning at the back of the house, the old woman said she was going to visit a sick friend. The builder wasn’t wearing a watch, and could later offer only vague estimates of crucial times, a fact that was to earn him the undivided attention of detectives who considered him, briefly, the best suspect they had.
What the unfortunate tradesman could tell police was that Mrs Davis did not drive her Mercedes. The signs were that she didn’t intend to go far, or to stay long. Though she suffered badly from arthritis, she walked. She left meat out to defrost, and the prescription her doctor had just written was on the kitchen table.
The old lady walked down the drive, past the fake antique gaslight and the rickety letterbox, and was never seen again.
UNDINE Street is only a dozen houses long and slopes down towards the bay. At the bottom of the street, probably 60 metres from Mrs Davis’s house, a walker can turn right into a footpath that skirts the shore in front of a few houses.
The last of these buildings, on the next corner, is a stylish duplex pair. One of the pair, 34 Marine Parade, was in 1995 the home of a close family friend of Mrs Davis. This was Dallas Burrell, who’d known Mrs Davis all her life, and called her ‘Auntie Dot’.
In May 1995, Mrs Burrell had just been diagnosed with cancer. Police now consider it highly likely she was the sick friend Mrs Davis intended to visit. As far as they can tell, no one else fitting that description lived within walking distance. In 1995, the Burrell connection was only one of many possibilities for puzzled police. That has changed.
When Mrs Davis vanished, police spoke to Dallas Burrell, and to her husband Bruce. It was a routine inquiry. The Burrells, after all, were a respectable professional couple. Dallas Burrell was an advertising art director, and her husband worked for a Sydney advertising agency, Peter Grace and Associates.
Not only was there nothing to link either of the Burrells with the disappearance of a dear family friend, but both seemed understandably distressed.
What police didn’t know, nor would they have cared then, was that Bruce Burrell had been retrenched five years before by the Australian arm of the international forklift firm, Crown Equipment, which has its national headquarters in Smithfield in Sydney.
Business had been tough for Crown in 1990. The company liked to think of itself as a big family, but when the crunch came, heads had to roll to cut costs. One of them belonged to Bruce Burrell, the advertising manager, until then one of the close-knit management team. He was called into the executive offices on the top floor of the Smithfield address. There, he faced the man who had been chief executive of the company since 1974, and had become its Asia-Pacific vice-president. A man who had known Burrell through work, tennis days and shooting trips for more than ten years, and who thought it his duty to wield the axe personally. His name was Bernie Whelan.
BRUCE Burrell was good at keeping up appearances. He always had cash to spend, according to workmates, but privately he was doing it hard. Friends later told police they suspected he was largely supported by his wife, and that his ‘advertising’ job was as a contract salesman, a hand-to-mouth existence compared with his days as a high-flying marketing executive.
Coincidentally, after Dorothy Davis’s disappearance, the Burrells’ marriage broke up. Dallas Burrell moved from the smart duplex at 34 Marine Parade just up the road to number 44, a big block of flats – luxurious by 1960s standards – sitting on a headland overlooking the ocean. Her estranged husband, meanwhile, moved to the 192-hectare property he had bought some years before at Bungonia, near Goulburn, in the southern tablelands.
Burrell’s property is the last on a quiet track beyond Bungonia township, which comprises only a dozen houses and no shops. There, according to locals, he lived alone after his marriage breakdown and mostly kept out of people’s way. One neighbor says he ‘enjoys a beer and a talk’, but not many have had the chance to find out even that much about the bloke from Sydney.
In Goulburn, 30 kilometres away, few remember that Bruce Burrell was once a local. In fact, according to a local optometrist, on at least one occasion Burrell wasn’t keen to remember it himself.
It happened some time in 1996, when Mr Burrell stepped into the optometrist’s shop. He wears glasses, and might have wanted to look at a new pair or have his eyes tested, the proprietor can’t remember which. What he does recall is Burrell’s reaction when the optometrist remarked that he’d known him as a child because his father, Alan Burrell, had once worked for the family as a wool classer.
To his surprise, Burrell bluntly contradicted him. ‘He said, ‘Oh, no. That’s not right’,’ the optometrist was to recall. Several other people in Goulburn remember Alan ‘Splinter’ Burrell, who lived at West Goulburn with his family, including a son called Bruce, before moving to Sydney in the 1960s. They have no doubt it is the same Bruce Burrell.
The optometrist had no reason to dwell on this trifling exchange until May this year. That was when the wife of the man who had sacked Bruce Burrell seven years before, vanished without trace.
THE facts of Kerry Whelan’s last-known movements are few and worn with retelling. But when the 39-year-old mother of three went missing on Tuesday, 6 May, 1997, only her family, close friends and police knew. It was kept secret for the next ten days. Then the media were told, but police negotiated a news blackout for another six days.
So it wasn’t until 21 May that the rest of Australia heard the news that had crushed Bernie Whelan and his children, Sarah, 15, Mathew, 13, and James, 11.
After breakfast on 6 May, Kerry Whelan drove her new silver Land Rover Discovery from the family’s lush property at Kurrajong, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, to Parramatta, where it was due for its first service. And where, she had told her family, she was to have beauty treatment before accompanying her husband to Adelaide on a business trip that afternoon.
The secretary who’d married her much-older boss after an office romance 16 years before, retained a business-like habit of keeping a meticulous daily appointment diary. But for that Tuesday she had made only one cryptic entry: ‘Parramatta 9.30.’
She had been running late. The security film recovered from the car park underneath the Parkroyal Hotel in Parramatta shows that she drove in at 9.36 am.
After speaking to attendants at the boom gate, she parked near the entrance. Leaving the keys in the ignition so an attendant could later move it to another spot, she took her bag and walked quickly out to the street, as if late for something. She hasn’t been seen since.
When she didn’t meet her husband at 3.45 pm, ready for the Adelaide flight, he went searching. When he found the Land Rover in the car park with the keys still in it, he called the police.
From the start, it was a frustrating and delicate investigation. At first, as in most missing persons cases, police were sceptical. The odds were that the young wife of the wealthy, busy executive would turn up within hours or days, as 95 per cent of missing people do.
Next day, the ransom note turned up, and all bets that it was just an embarrassing domestic drama were off. This was life or death.
The note was typed, and postmarked in central Sydney. It demanded a $1 million ransom, which happened to be the exact amount of kidnap insurance Crown offers its executives and their families. This raised speculation that the kidnapper had inside information.
The note made conditions that baffled police. Contact would be made in ten days, through newspaper advertisements. And, it demanded that police not be told. Here, the kidnapper had miscalculated badly, because the note hadn’t arrived until after the rattled husband raised the alarm.
Meanwhile, detectives combed through the Whelans’ social and business contacts, looking for the classic suspect: someone with an opportunity and a motive. The common motives are greed, revenge or lust, sometimes all three.
Bruce Burrell’s name came up quickly. Two reasons for this have been made public; if there are more links, the police aren’t saying.
One is that Burrell telephoned Bernie Whelan out of the blue, the month before the abduction. If a coincidence, it was lousy timing. The other was the discovery that Burrell had visited the Whelans’ place while Bernie Whelan was away, only days before the abduction. He had no good reason to go there.
There was no clue in Kerry Whelan’s behavior that anything was amiss in her life as a wealthy wife and devoted mother.
The days leading to her disappearance were filled with family engagements and meeting friends. Sunday 4 May was the 11th birthday of her youngest child, James. Her husband had arrived home the day before from one of his frequent overseas business trips.
On Monday, after dropping the children at school, Kerry went to a hairdresser and had a color rinse put through her hair. That night the Whelans entertained neighbors.
Next morning she set off for Parramatta. On the way she dropped in on a friend, Marj Taylor, for coffee. She seemed normal and happy. BY 11 May, just five days after the abduction and more than a week before the story broke publicly, there were strange sights in the tiny hamlet of Bungonia, 200 kilometres and more than two hours’ drive from Parramatta.
At first the tightlipped strangers were coy about what they were doing, or as coy as you can be when hitting a township of a dozen houses in a fleet of shiny new cars with tinted glass and bristling with aerials, taking over two churches as temporary headquarters.
They could hardly deny being police, but they told curious locals that they were doing ‘an exercise’. It didn’t take people long to realise that they were watching Bruce Burrell’s property, although no-one could have imagined why until after the kidnap became headlines on 21 May.
By then Bernie Whelan was begging for his wife’s life. He was prepared to pay the ransom, but there were no takers.
In a videotaped appeal released on 23 May, the stricken man urged the ‘kidnappers’ to contact him, to let him know his wife was all right. ‘For ten days we have tried to comply … with their ransom demands. For reasons unknown to us, the kidnappers have stopped contact. I would do whatever they asked, and I would go anywhere to get the safety of my wife.’
Detective Inspector Mick Howe, head of the kidnap taskforce, codenamed Operation Bellaire, said police supported Mr Whelan and his company paying the ransom if it would ensure her safety.
There was no reply.
Asked on 25 May what had led police to Bungonia, Detective Sergeant Dennis Bray played the regulation straight bat, talking about following all leads and searching other properties. Asked if the man police were looking at had once worked for Crown, he intoned dutifully: ‘I don’t believe this has any consequence to this inquiry.’
But, in murder inquiries, the rule of thumb is that no confession and no body means no case. After days of searching, surveillance and interviews had produced neither, police were not so keen to protect the identity or feelings of the man they rather quaintly termed ‘a person of interest’. They pitched tents near his house, and for five days in late May combed the property, dragged dams and went through every inch of his home and sheds.
They found two suspected stolen cars, a Jaguar reportedly worth $150,000 and a Mitsubishi Pajero. Police also allegedly found weapons, including a .44 calibre Ruger semi-automatic rifle, allegedly stolen from Mr Whelan, as well as a pistol and a prohibited crossbow.
It seemed that the jowly 44-year-old with glasses and a walrus moustache might look like a country bank manager, but he had some interesting hobbies. He became front-page news, the mystery man at the centre of the hunt for the millionaire’s missing wife.
The publicity gave the task force what looked like its biggest break. That was when Sue Whitfield, a police officer at Maroubra, recognised Mr Burrell as someone local detectives had interviewed about the disappearance of Mrs Dorothy Davis almost exactly two years earlier. The odds seemed long against one man knowing two wealthy women who’d vanished.
The police turned the screw, sending dozens more searchers to comb hundreds of mineshafts and caves in rough country next to the Burrell farm. One reason was to try to find usable evidence. Another was to apply pressure.
More than three months after Kerry Whelan disappeared, little had changed. Except, perhaps, that Bruce Burrell voluntarily crossed the line that separates ‘a person of interest’ from a ‘suspect’ when he appeared on Channel Nine’s tabloid current affairs show, Sixty Minutes.
While it’s likely Mr Burrell had many thousands of good reasons to submit himself to the theatrical inquisition by Richard Carleton, it didn’t look as if he was enjoying the chance to clear his name.
He confirmed that he had borrowed or ‘minded’ $100,000 for Dorothy Davis – but said he had paid her back in cash some time before her disappearance. There were, sadly, no witnesses to this transaction, which he admitted was ‘bizarre’.
He said he was amazed about the chances of him knowing both Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan. ‘It’s freakish, he said, shrugging. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it.