THE man who found the bodies is 70 now, the oldest drinker in the public bar of the Plaza Hotel in Townsville. He’s seen and done a lot of things since he left South Otago, New Zealand, back in 1952. But nothing sticks in his memory like the day he played a walk-on part, in a cruel story that haunts the town where two little sisters lived and died.
He tells it his way. A knockabout carpenter, he’d been building houses for the nickel mines out past Kalgoorlie, then got a bankroll and itchy feet and headed east across the Nullarbor in his new Falcon, camping on the way.
He’d meant to go home to New Zealand to see his family, but good intentions slipped away as easily as last week’s wages. After a little work at Woomera Rocket Range building a ‘secret’ satellite-spotting post, he turned north.
First to Coober Pedy, then further into the desert to the Three Ways’, where a traveller has to make a lonely choice. The Adelaide road was behind, narrowing the choice ahead to Darwin and Townsville. He tossed a coin. Townsville it was, via Mount Isa. He arrived late on 27 August, a Thursday, to find the sleepy coastal city in a frenzy, shocked out of its tropical torpor by the worst tragedy since the war. Two sisters had vanished on their way to school the previous morning. Their mother was under sedation, their father half-mad with unspeakable fear.
The old man puts his glass on the bar, fishes in his coat pocket for two pieces of paper – worn, grimy, folded small – that he’s kept almost half his life.
It’s the carbon copy of a statement he made to police the day it happened. This is what it says: I am a married man, 40 years of age, at the present time of no fixed place of abode in Townsville, having only arrived from Boulder, Western Australia, on the night of 27th August, 1970.
About 8.45am on Friday 28th August 1970 I joined a number of other persons in a taxi cab … In company with two other men I was engaged in a search party for two missing girls who had disappeared whilst on their way to school.
We travelled along the Townsville to Charters Towers Highway and made a search in various places along this road prior to going to a spot near Antill Creek. We parked the car and set off in various directions. I traversed the creek bank and dry creek bed.
Whilst searching in the creek I saw what appeared to be child’s footprints in the sand. I continued to walk along the creek bed and, about ten yards further on, I then saw the body of a child … in a small hollow and the child was in a more or less sitting, reclining position. I saw that the child was wearing a pair of panties. At this stage I was a distance of approximately 10 feet from the body. The child appeared to be dead. I now know that the body which I located was the body of Susan Debra Mackay.’
SUSAN was five, the baby of the family. Judith was seven. They were ‘late lambs’, as they say in the bush, born well after two boys and two older girls. They were dark-eyed, olive-skinned and pretty, like many children of the far north, where indigenous, islander and Italian influences have tempered the anglo-celtic majority.
Bill Mackay kissed his babies goodbye as they slept, when he left for the meatworks before dawn. He never saw them again.
The Mackays lived in Albert Street, Aitkenvale, a suburb sprawled along the Ross River road, a highway that leads inland from Townsville to Charters Towers and beyond.
Susan and Judith left home about 8.10am, after their mother, Thelma, got them ready for school. They walked to the corner, turned left into Alice Street, and vanished.
The girls would have crossed the road to wait at their usual bus stop. But when their brother, Alan, rode past on his bike about ten minutes later, they weren’t there. They weren’t at school, either, but it wasn’t until they didn’t come home that afternoon that the alarm was raised.
When Bill Mackay got home from work his wife was distraught. He grabbed photographs of the girls and went to the police. By nightfall, police and friends gathered to search backyards in the district.
Next day hundreds more joined in. The meatworks offered its entire workforce, and police doorknocked every house in the area. By Friday, the search had spread, which is how a wandering Kiwi carpenter, called Richard Tough, and two men he didn’t know, were sent to Antill Creek, a sluggish watercourse meandering across an ugly plain, 25 kilometres south-west of Townsville. It is an empty place where scrawny cattle poke through stunted scrub and feral pigs tear up the barren ground.
Tough waited by the little girl’s body for an hour until the police arrived. They followed foot prints in a sandbank running along the creek bed, which was almost dry. About 70 metres away, near the opposite bank, they found Judith’s naked body.
The only mercy was that the pigs hadn’t got to them first. Both girls had been raped and stabbed in the chest. Susan had been strangled, Judith choked from having her face rammed into the sand. It looked as if she had fled while her little sister was being killed, and was then run down.
Beside the bodies, their school uniforms: folded inside out and placed with an awful neatness. Their shoes, socks, hats and school bags were nearby.
A senior sergeant cried when he saw it. Another policeman said he wouldn’t go home until they caught the killer. He was as good as his word, staying at Townsville police station day and night, with his worried wife bringing in food and clean clothes. Until he died of a heart attack two weeks later.
Had he lived, he could hardly have guessed that the case would see his generation out of the force.
IN the days before drugs multiplied crime, homicides were mostly simple domestic murders, or brawls gone wrong, as easily solved as the average burglary.
But the motiveless and random killing of two innocent children produced a huge outcry and no obvious culprit. There was intense pressure from the top for a quick arrest, when a slow, painstaking investigation was the best chance of cracking the case.
From the start, the police’s problem was not that there were too few leads, but too many.
Townsville was, and is, an army town, and the meatworks had its own blood-spattered corps of itinerant slaughtermen, butchers and boners, not all model citizens. Add meatworkers to a barracks full of soldiers and there were thousands of potential suspects. It was inevitable that the sheer weight of numbers – and of public expectation – would affect the investigation. Local knowledge, sometimes a police officer’s best tool, didn’t help the tedious elimination of hundreds of suspects. Ironically, it might have been a handicap, because it would encourage assumptions about who should be put on – or left off – the long list of people to check. The temptation was to take shortcuts. The risk was that they would miss their man.
Meanwhile, there was the mammoth job of piecing together witnesses’ accounts – often contradictory, or apparently so.
A teacher, Judith Drysdale, saw a man driving slowly near the Mackay sisters and staring intently at them. Much later she was able to pick a photograph of the man she saw from a series of pictures.
Nola Archie, in the grounds of the Aboriginal hostel behind the bus stop, saw two small girls talking to a man in a car. She wasn’t sure of make or model, but agreed it might have been a Holden.
Bill Hankin was driving a road-roller on Ross River Road that morning. About 8.15 he pulled over near the Aitkenvale school for a smoke and a cup of tea. He noticed a man in a car with two girls in school uniforms; while everyone else was driving children towards the school ‘like ants to a nest’, this man was taking children away from it.
Hankin had been a driving instructor in the army, and he noted automatically that the driver was thin-featured, swarthy, not tall, and drove badly. He looked middle-aged, with a tanned complexion and dark, wavy hair, cut short. A face like the character ‘Beau’ in the television series Days Of Our Lives, but older, he was to tell police later.
Around the same time, Neil Lunney was running late for work at the army barracks. Just back from Vietnam, he had a short fuse, and was incensed when a car in front of him sped up and veered to block him when he tried to overtake.
‘He tried to put me over the embankment,’ Lunney was to recall. ‘I did my cool. I was going to bumper roll him but, when I got up level with him, I saw the kids in the car.’
The older girl, on the passenger side, had shoulder-length hair, as Judith Mackay did. The younger one, sitting in the middle, had shorter hair, like Susan Mackay. Both wore green Aitkenvale school uniforms.
Lunney yelled at the driver, and looked at him hard in case he saw him in the street. He’d been taught recognition in the army; it could mean life and death in jungle warfare. This enemy had high cheekbones, short hair, and ‘Mickey Mouse’ ears stuck out from a narrow skull. Lunney wasn’t so observant about the car, except that it was blue-grey ‘like a battleship’; it wasn’t a Ford but might have been a Holden, and had an odd-colored driver’s door. He did notice two ‘STP’ oil stickers on the rear mudguards, and Venetian blinds in the back window.
JEAN Thwaite was cleaning a car in the Shell service station she and her husband ran at Ayr, more than an hour’s drive south-west of Townsville, when a car pulled up. It was covered in dust and her memory is that it was ‘dirty white’ or beige color, and arrived between 11.30 and noon.
The driver was thin, dark-haired, looked to be in his 40s, and wore a faded, fawn or off-white shirt. He seemed preoccupied, and ignored her request to cut the motor while she pumped the $3 worth of petrol he ordered.
The petrol inlet was on the left side, and she had to open a flap to get at the screw-on cap, similar to her own 1965 EH Holden. This ruled out the car being a 1950s Holden but, unknown to her, was a design feature shared with the Vauxhall Victor, uncommon in country Queensland.
Thwaite, mother of a five-year-old, took notice of two children in the car. In the back seat, a small girl who looked as if she had been crying asked: ‘Are we there yet?’ In the front seat was an older girl, who said to the driver: ‘When are you taking us to mummy? You promised to take us to mummy.’ Both wore green school uniforms.
The driver silently handed Thwaite exact change. By the time she looked up from the till, the car had gone. When she heard next day about the abduction in Townsville, Jean Thwaite was sure she had seen the Mackay sisters, but found it hard to get the local police to take her seriously.
There was so much information – some obviously contradictory and some apparently so – that the police felt pressured to make choices: to play hunches that one lead was better than another. Unfortunately, they got it wrong about the car.
Although the descriptions of the car given by Hankin, Lunney and Thwaite varied in details, between them they had enough key information about it to find a driver whom they all described the same way.
But the police, punting on a description of a car seen near where the bodies were found, concentrated on looking for an early model Holden. Their enthusiasm to find the ‘right’ car rather than to build a picture of the driver caused confusion. As one legal insider was to remark dryly 30 years later, witnesses who first thought they’d seen a Vauxhall ended up signing statements they’d seen a Holden – and an FJ Holden, at that.
Worse, despite the matching descriptions of the driver – apart from his age – there was no sketch or photofit picture of him published. Instead, the newspapers and television ran pictures of FJ Holdens.
It put the investigation so far off course it never recovered. For the wanted man, it was an unbelievably lucky break. For others, it was a tragedy, because sex killers almost always kill again.
JOHN White was only 19, but he’d worked alongside men for years, and knew his way around. He’d been a carpenter, bridge builder and meatworker. Now he was a trainee psychiatric nurse, working shifts at the mental hospital in Charters Towers. Which is why, late on a weekday afternoon – probably the first Tuesday of September, 1970, he was to say later – he was sitting in the deserted bar of the White Horse Tavern in the main street, when a stranger walked in.
White guessed the man was old enough to be his father, perhaps in his 50s, but wiry and fit. He put his height at ‘five seven or five eight’ (about 172 centimetres) and his weight at no more than ‘11 stone’ (about 70 kilograms). He was wearing clean work clothes – a checked flannelette shirt, long brown trousers, brown hat.
The man sat at the bar a couple of metres away, produced a tin of tobacco and rolled a cigarette. He was out of matches, and he asked the younger man for a light. White didn’t smoke, so the stranger bought matches from the barmaid and started talking.
He asked White if he’d been following the murder of the Mackay sisters a few days before. White nodded, and the man stated that the police, were ‘looking for the wrong sort of car’.
Before White could ask how he knew that, the man kept talking quickly. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I killed those two girls.’ White wanted to think it was a tasteless joke, but it didn’t quite sound like it. So he kept talking, trying to draw out more information. The stranger said he was staying at the Crown Hotel down the street, that he was a carpenter who did a bit of maintenance work for the publican, and that he sometimes did some prospecting in local creeks.
It was as if the older man had ‘a monkey on his back, and happened to choose me to get it off,’ White was to muse later.
The stranger got up to leave, and White tentatively arranged to meet him next day for another drink. And, as casually as he could, he asked him his name.
As soon as the carpenter left, White borrowed a pencil from the barmaid and wrote the name on the back of the empty matchbox the man had left on the bar. Then went looking for police.
He found two, locking the station to do their afternoon patrol. He knew one of them, a Constable John Cooper, and told him what the carpenter had said and where he was. He gave them the matchbox with the name on it.
The policemen went to the Crown Hotel. Next day, the carpenter turned up at the tavern, as arranged. He told White the police had spoken to him, but didn’t seem worried. If anything, he was a little cocky. He showed White a photograph of his house, which was small and low to the ground, with sawn timber stacked neatly in the yard. Then he had a beer, and left.
White never saw him again. He ran into Constable Cooper a few days later. ‘He just said he’d been to see him (the carpenter) and there was nothing in it.’
And that, as far as John White was concerned, was that. He rarely thought about the strange encounter again, though he never forgot the name he wrote on the matchbox.
Arty Brown.
IN late March, 1972, two children in north Queensland disappeared, feared murdered. One was a two-year-old, Shay Maree Kitchen, at Mount Isa. The other was a cane farmer’s teenage daughter, Marilyn Joy Wallman, at Eimeo on the coast near Mackay.
It was before the state’s homicide squad was formed, and local police investigated murders. Charles Bopf, prominent Townsville detective and future homicide chief, did the Kitchen case. He quickly arrested the de facto husband of the child’s mother – another sordid domestic tragedy to add to his big tally of cases solved. The Wallman mystery, outside Townsville’s police district, wasn’t so easy. It was as brazen as Judith and Susan Mackay’s abduction 20 months before, but with no clues. No cars. No suspects. No leads. Not even a body.
On Tuesday, 21 March, the three oldest Wallman children were going to school. Marilyn, 14, had to catch the high school bus on the main road, a few hundred metres away along the small road that led to the farm. She left, riding her bike, a few minutes before her brothers – David, 10, and Rex, 8 – who went to the local primary school.
Wallman’s road went over a hill that hid most of its length from the house. When David and Rex rode over the crest they found their sister’s bike lying on its side.
The puzzled boys looked around, thinking Marilyn had fallen, bumped her head and wandered off in a daze. David went home for his mother while Rex stayed, sitting near the bike. He heard voices on the other side of the canefield next to him, but couldn’t tell if one was his sister’s.
Their mother came with the car. They drove around the blocks of cane, searching and calling, fear rising as the minutes passed.
The boys’ father was out fishing, and someone went to get him. Friends and neighbors gathered and began a search that has never really ended for the Wallmans.
As the days became weeks, hopes of a miracle ebbed. It seemed clear Marilyn was almost certainly dead and her body well-hidden. If buried, it was deep. If put in water, it had not floated or washed ashore.
At least the Mackays had bodies to grieve over. The Wallmans prayed for even that bitter-sweet mercy. Thirty years on, they still do.
EVERY day is a private hell for the broken hearted, but anniversaries torment most. The Mackays had moved from Townsville to Toowoomba to get away from the stares and whispers, the crank calls and the well-meaning solicitudes of their hometown, but they took their grief with them. And nothing could ease that, only mask it.
On the morning of 26 August, 1973, third anniversary of their girls’ murder, they woke to nightmare news. Lightning had struck someone else. In Adelaide, where the Beaumont children had disappeared seven years before, two girls had been abducted from a football game. In a public place, in daylight, like the Beaumonts and their own girls and Marilyn Wallman.
Joanne Ratcliffe was 11; Kirste Gordon was four. At three-quarter time in the preliminary final between Norwood and North Adelaide at Adelaide Oval, Joanne had taken Kirste to the women’s lavatory, about 300 metres from the stand where her parents were sitting with Kirste’s grandmother. Neither was seen again.
A teenager selling lollies, Anthony Kilmartin, saw a man watching the girls in the stand and, later, hurry after them near the southern gate. He lifted the young girl under his right arm and started walking fast. The older girl, whom he later identified from photographs as Joanne Ratcliffe, had looked frightened and tried to stop the man.
Kilmartin was vague about the man’s age – ‘about 40’ – but gave a detailed description of his clothes and appearance. He was thin, narrow-shouldered, wearing a brown broad-brimmed hat, grey checked jacket and dark trousers.
And there was one other thing, Kilmartin was to tell police in 1973, and an inquest six years later. The older girl had kicked the man in the knee, causing him to bend down. As he did, a pair of black, horn-rimmed glasses fell from his pocket, which he snatched up. A small thing, but it signified a man too vain to wear glasses all the time, or who needed them only for reading.
Kilmartin wasn’t the only witness. An assistant curator at the oval had earlier seen a man and two girls apparently attempting to entice some kittens from under a car near a shed. The man was thin, about 172 centimetres tall, and dressed in a grey-checked sports coat, brown trousers and brown, wide-brimmed hat.
Sue Lawrie, her father and little sister heard the football siren as they left the zoo, about a kilometre from the oval on the other side of the Torrens. Sue’s father guessed it was the start of the final quarter of the big game. They followed the river bank towards the new Festival Theatre, opposite the oval. Minutes later Sue, then 14, saw a middle-aged man hurrying towards them, carrying a small girl. Behind him was a girl about 11, running to keep up, punching him in the back and yelling at him, ‘We want to go back!’.
Sue was surprised the man would let his ‘grand daughter’ hit him without chastising her. She stared long enough to be able to describe details years later that tallied with other witnesses, but the hat and the man’s face caught her eye most.
In 1970s Adelaide, the most English of Australian cities, if a middle-aged man wore a hat at all in winter it was usually a tweed, peaked cap or a natty, narrow-brimmed felt. Wide-brimmed hats were not yet a fashion affected by city people – big hats were for practical protection, and worn in summer in the country. And there were regional differences even then. The only time Sue had seen a wide-brimmed hat with a low, flat crown like this one, was when visiting relatives in Queensland, where a lot of men wore them. It was, as she was to say later, ‘very Queensland country’.
Next day, Sue went for a country trip for a week, and missed most of the furore over the missing girls. When she returned, police were concentrating on events around the oval, so she dismissed what she had seen near the zoo. It wasn’t until some time later, while discussing lack of discipline in some families, that Sue commented on the young girl she’d noticed thumping her ‘grandfather’ in public.
‘When was that?’ her father asked.
‘The day we went to the zoo,’ she replied. As she spoke she remembered it was the day the girls had been abducted, and she realised the sinister significance of what she’d seen. But she was young, her father thought she had the timing wrong, and he didn’t take it further.
For years, it played on her mind. In late 1980, married with a baby of her own, she told her husband about it. He urged her to go to the police. She told detectives about a man in his 50s with a wide hat and a thin, hollow-cheeked face she couldn’t forget.
IT was the darkest secret she knew, and she’d spent half her life wanting to tell it. But it took a move to the other side of Australia and a crisis of conscience for Merle Martin Moss to make the call she’d rehearsed so many times in her head.
She was sitting alone in a flat in suburban Perth in October, 1998, looking through her family ‘birthday book’ when a wave of revulsion hardened her resolve. On the page under May was the name of an old man who, she knew, had molested at least five female relatives among her extended family. She despised him.
It was a family secret, shared between cousins, aunts and husbands. But an inner circle – Merle Moss, her sister Christine Millier and two of their cousins’ wives – suspected something more sinister was linked to the old man’s predatory ways.
Moss had bowed to family pressure not to embarrass or distress the victims by forcing them to reveal things they’d learned to live with. The problem was, if such delicacy masked the fact that the old man was a deviate, it would be hard to accuse him of murder. She had no hard evidence he was a killer. Her suspicions relied on a web of circumstance, detail and intuition spun around the knowledge that he had covered up decades of sexual offences against children. Without knowing that background, she feared, any police officer bothering to check out a telephone tip would find nothing but a couple of harmless, old-age pensioners in a neat house in a sleepy Townsville street.
But, this night, Moss decided she had to act. The Crime-stoppers number flashed on her television. She reached for the telephone. It took three days for the message to filter through to the Queensland homicide squad in Brisbane. Sergeant David Hickey, who had just finished investigating a baby’s death, was about to open an old file allocated for a routine review when he got a note to call the woman in Perth.
As he spoke to her, the coincidence hit him … the old file on his desk was the Mackay sisters’ murder in Townsville. Hickey, a methodical investigator, isn’t superstitious – but when he told the woman on the line which file he was reviewing, she took it as a sign. She poured out her heart about an old man in Townsville called Arthur Brown.
For Hickey and another detective, Brendan Rook, it was the beginning of an exhaustive investigation. Starting with a circle of the woman’s relatives in north Queensland, their inquiries rippled outwards, interstate and, in one case, to New Zealand. Some people they spoke to were shocked at the allegations of sexual abuse, others guardedly confirmed them. But Merle Moss’s younger sister Christine Millier and two cousins-by-marriage filled the gaps in a Gothic horror story, played out among three generations of slow-talking, hard-working, apparently respectable folk.
It seemed that, until 1982, most family members had not suspected Arthur Brown of anything except being a ‘big noter’ who fancied himself as ‘a ladies’ man’. But, that year, a tearful teenager told her parents he had molested her as a small girl, and Brown’s carefully constructed cover was blown. Four other girls – sisters and cousins – had quickly admitted similar secrets. To all but a few who refused to believe the girls, he was a pariah. And some suspected worse.
ARTHUR Stanley Brown was born at Merinda, near Bowen, on 20 May, 1912, one of three children whose parents separated when he was young. His mother went to Melbourne and Arthur was to spend several years there. He told people later he had been a paperboy and had got a Victorian driver’s licence before returning to Queensland.
He attached himself to the Anderson family, who also came from Bowen and had six daughters and two sons, most of them younger than Brown. Their mother and some of the girls ran ‘the galley’, cooking for workers at the Ross River meatworks, where Brown worked during and after the war, apart from a spell doing wartime construction work.
A beach photograph of Brown in the 1940s, bare chested, shows a wiry man with the lean muscles and dapper toughness of a lightweight boxer or a heavyweight jockey. The high cheekbones, long jaw, and prominent ears below a short-back-and-sides haircut were distinguishing features that age was not to soften.
Active, fit, and a light drinker, Brown didn’t gain weight or lose his hair as he got older. He was delighted when a shop assistant once mistook his first wife as his mother; a stranger could easily have mistaken him for 15 years younger than his real age. Even in his 50s, he would show off by gripping a table edge and balancing his body in the air above the table, lifting himself up and down. If this showed a dash of the exhibitionist, there was also an obsessive neatness. He would line up his perfectly shone shoes, fold a piece of paper before putting it in the bin, and iron knife-edge creases into work clothes when others wore rumpled shorts and singlets.
Brown was to marry two of the six Anderson sisters, and was close to two others. He was first married in June, 1944 – to Hester, then freshly divorced, with three small children, but whom he’d known before her first marriage. They were to live an outwardly normal life for 34 years, but Hester’s oldest sister Milly, now dead, was convinced she made the best of a dreadful mistake.
Milly disliked Brown, said he couldn’t be trusted. She told relations that Hester feared him, and had once confided to her about his well-known womanising: ‘He doesn’t just like big girls – he likes little girls too.’ Hester had caught him interfering with a child and tried to prevent him from being alone with them. But she was stricken with crippling arthritis in early middle age, and was no match for the man she increasingly relied on to care for her.
Hester’s younger sister, Charlotte, had also been married before and also had three children. One son bore a strong resemblance to Brown, as did another sister’s boy. As Hester grew more infirm, Charlotte visited the Browns often and even went on interstate holidays with them.
Hester kept up appearances but, once, called aside a young female relative and gave her prized lace work she’d inherited from her mother, saying bitterly: ‘I don’t want his next lady love to get it.’ Asked who she meant, she blurted: ‘Charlotte, of course.’ Hester, in constant pain, became confined between a walking frame and bed, a virtual prisoner in the fibro and timber house Brown had built long before in Lowth Street, Rosslea, an old suburb of Townsville. Her torment ended late at night on 15 May, 1978, when Brown told the family doctor by telephone she had fallen while trying to get on the commode next to her bed, hitting her head and killing herself.
As far as the police could ascertain 20 years later, the doctor had written out a death certificate at home without viewing the body, which Brown took to an undertaker’s himself. Hester Brown was cremated, which meant the injuries to her skull could never be examined.
At the time Brown pointedly told family members he’d paid for a post mortem to be done. Detectives told them years later it wasn’t true, although at least one insisted she’d been there when police spoke of an ‘autopsy’. Hester’s big sister, Milly, didn’t believe the death was an accident.
‘The day Hester was found dead,’ another relative was to recall, ‘Arthur was shaking with fright. He wasn’t grieving, because he never showed emotion. He was worried.’
Suspicion didn’t appear to worry Charlotte who, family gossip had it, had been sent packing by Hester not long before her death. She moved in with Brown and married him the following year.
She was a small woman and, even in her 60s, had the odd custom of wearing little girl’s pyjamas, much to the bemusement of her female relatives. When one of her cousin’s grandchildren asked her once why she wore such childish clothes to bed, Arthur Brown interrupted, saying: ‘Because she’s my little girl.’
MERLE and Christine’s mother was a cousin of Hester and Charlotte, and the girls often visited the Browns while they were growing up.
As youngsters, they accepted Brown as a jovial, talkative man who liked to be the centre of attention. But as they matured and he aged, they tired of his boasts that he knew everybody of importance in Townsville. And they didn’t like his fascination with sex crimes. He kept a collection of lurid ‘true crime’ magazines and showed the graphic photographs to children. He went on about how dangerous it was for young girls to be alone, and told them to ‘trust nobody’. He spoke of ‘silly mothers’ dropping their children too early at school.
There was another side to his ‘concern’. He would say he felt sorry for male teachers because girl students were ‘prick teasers’ and that it was too easy for girls to ‘scream rape’ on a whim. ‘The kids of today will set you up,’ he would say. ‘They’ll get you hung.’
It seemed to the sisters, even then, that Brown protested too much. They recalled that their grandfather had detested Brown, and refused to be in the same house with him. ‘Pop always said Arthur was a bad man,’ Merle was to recall. ‘He would say to me “See after yourself, love, and don’t be on your own with him.” I often wonder what he knew.’
Apart from one minor incident, Merle was old enough to be out of Brown’s reach. And he didn’t try to molest Christine ‘probably because I had a mouth and would have fought to the death’. But, looking back on it, she thinks she was lucky. Twice.
The week that John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963 Christine, then thirteen, was staying at Brown’s. One day, when Hester was out, Brown proposed taking her ‘for a swim’. She refused because she couldn’t swim, and there were no other children to play with.
Three years later, on another visit, Brown came home early from work while Hester was at bingo and Christine was home alone. He suggested driving her to a mountain outside Townsville, to take some pictures with her new camera. She refused because she didn’t like the steep, winding road. Much later, she realised it was such a slow trip, it would have been too dark to take photographs by the time they arrived.
At sixteen, she was too articulate to be molested and scared into keeping quiet, as younger girls had been. So what was his plan? If she had disappeared, no-one would have known where she’d gone. Brown was supposedly at work, and she would have been just another teenage runaway. But that thought didn’t strike her until after 1970.
THE day the Mackay sisters were murdered, Christine was staying at Brown’s. She was 20, with a year-old baby, on her way north to rejoin her husband at Weipa after visiting family in Bowen.
That morning, Brown got up about 7am, cut his lunch, and went to work. Christine remembers nothing unusual about his return that afternoon, except that the radio that was usually on was switched off that night and next morning – which meant she didn’t hear news of the abduction until she got to Cairns the following evening.
Another relative, who trusted Brown with her children until 1982, when his sexual abuse was exposed, was puzzled at something he said a few weeks after the Mackay girls’ murder.
‘I could’ve done that,’ he told her. The woman didn’t go to the police, she was to explain years later, ‘because I didn’t think he’d be the type’. She was to change her mind in 1982, but stayed silent rather than involve his sex abuse victims.
When police were looking for a car with an odd-colored driver’s door after the murders, Brown took the dark-blue door off his Vauxhall and buried it, according to another relative. He told her at the time ‘he didn’t want anyone interviewing him or annoying him’. Because they thought police were looking for an FJ Holden, they accepted his explanation. Later still, he told Christine he knew the Mackay sisters’ father, and that he had worked at the girls’ school. He offered to drive Christine and Merle to look at the spot where the bodies had been found. They refused, and wondered at his weird tastes.
THE detectives came for Arthur Brown after breakfast on 3 December, 1998. Car after car pulled up outside the neat fibrocement house in the neat street. There were fourteen detectives – and photographers, forensic experts and army sappers with metal detectors used for mine sweeping.
While the soldiers swept the big backyard for any remnant of a buried car door, the detectives painstakingly searched the house. They were especially keen on a spare room they’d been told about, which had a door fitted with a bolt on the inside. It was where Brown kept, among other things, his personal papers. Yet there was no record of registration or insurance or mechanical work to indicate he’d ever owned a blue-grey Vauxhall Victor sedan – a car he tried to deny having owned, until they produced a photograph supplied by a relative.
There was no warning of the raid, but even when the officer in charge read the warrants, detailing allegations of murder and sexual abuse, the old man did not seem shocked. ‘Didn’t raise an eyebrow,’ one detective was to recall. When the officer reading the warrant used the married name of one of the sex abuse victims, Brown instantly queried it, nodding when the officer corrected the surname to one he knew.
Before they left to go to the police station for questioning, Brown said to an increasingly agitated Charlotte that he’d done some terrible things she didn’t know about, and it was time to pay for them. It seemed an odd comment, given that she must have known about the sex abuse allegations. At the watchhouse, Brown reportedly said another strange thing, later denied. ‘Those Mackay sisters have me stumped,’ he declared. ‘I’ve lived in Townsville for 30 years and I haven’t heard of the Mackay sisters.’
This, a prosecutor was to tell a hushed court months later, was a clumsy lie that pointed to guilt of a crime the judge himself called ‘one of the most notable events in the city’s post-war history’, of which ‘no-one in Townsville at the time would not be aware’.
At the start, detectives thought they were talking to ‘a silly old bloke,’ as one was to put it. But when questions swung from the general to the particular, Brown’s attitude hardened.
Asked if he would go to Antill Creek with police, he retorted ‘No way I am going out there with you,’ then demanded to see a lawyer. Arthur Brown had never had a conviction in his life, but he’d worked at the meatworks and around courts and police stations, and he knew the drill. He got a telephone book and looked up a law clerk, who called a solicitor who made another call. Mark Donnelly, a policeman’s son and one of north Queensland’s toughest criminal barristers, soon turned up to represent his new client.
From then on, Brown was silent. And his wife refused to repeat in a formal interview what she had already told police informally.
The police were left pondering what had come from the arrest. One thing they’d found in the bolted room was a bottle of port, which tallied with claims by some of Brown’s alleged victims that he’d given them liquor before molesting them.
And something else had been locked away for years – a set of worn work clothes, musty and yellowed with age. It included a singlet with a large, faint stain that washing had not removed.
‘Arthur would never wear a stained singlet,’ one relative was to say. ‘I reckon it was the clothes he wore the day the girls were killed in 1970. He’s kept them like a trophy.’
JOHN White, late of Charters Towers, was in Brisbane when he heard a man had been charged for the Mackay sisters’ murder.
‘I bet his name is Arty Brown,’ White blurted to his astonished partner, then told the story of his conversation with a thin stranger in his hometown 28 years earlier. He couldn’t sleep for several nights, and wrote down details as they came back to him: Brown’s name, the name of the tavern, the time he spoke to the police, and the policeman’s name, John Cooper. Then he called Brisbane CIB.
Sue Lawrie was living in Melbourne when she saw fleeting footage of an old man in Townsville on the television news. Something about him pricked her memory. ‘Where do I know you?’ she said to herself uneasily. Next morning she took a call from an old friend in Adelaide, who asked her reaction to the news. Before the friend could explain that there was media speculation in Adelaide about a connection between the old man arrested in Queensland and unsolved Adelaide abductions, Sue interrupted.
‘My God! It’s him,’ she screamed into the telephone. The man she’d seen on television was older, more gaunt, but – in her mind – the same one she’d seen on the banks of the Torrens, 25 years before.
John Hill had been apprenticed to the Public Works Department in Townsville as a teenager in 1974, and worked with Brown intermittently for eighteen months. The first radio bulletins about the arrest brought back a memory of a ‘capable tradesman’ who’d once said something so strange the younger man remembered it, word for word.
They’d been driving past Townsville police station in 1975 in Brown’s Vauxhall when Hill, then 16, had remarked that the police hadn’t solved the Mackay sisters’ murder. Brown, a ‘big-noter’ whose habit in conversation was one-upmanship, had said immediately: ‘I know all about that – I did it.’
This had troubled Hill. ‘It chilled me because of the way his face looked when he said it. But I didn’t believe it because it was so out of character for the person I had worked with.’
Hill had a restless night, but Brown seemed at ease next day and the boy didn’t ask questions. ‘Being a kid, when it wasn’t reinforced, I put it to the back of my mind.’ But he didn’t forget it, either. When Brown was arrested 23 years later, his former apprentice called the police.
He told them about an obsessively neat tradesman who sometimes wore black, horn-rimmed glasses and who had been right under their noses for years. So close, in fact, that no-one had seen him.
FROM the day Brown was arrested, he was described as a roving school maintenance carpenter. This was correct as far as it went, and it was understandable that it was emphasised: the fact Brown had worked at schools, supplies one of the planks of a copybook prosecution case – opportunity and, perhaps, motive.
Brown, after all, had worked at Aitkenvale State School, which the Mackay sisters attended. He was known to eat lunch with the children, who called him ‘uncle’. None of which, unfortunately, seemed to strike anyone in 1970, despite the seemingly obvious need to interview any men who had contact with the victims, such as teachers, cleaners, or gardeners.
Such an apparently glaring oversight isn’t the only reason several retired or veteran Queensland police might have been secretly embarrassed when Brown was arrested. Schools, in fact, had been a minor part of Brown’s rounds. As a Public Works employee, he regularly did jobs in every state public building around Townsville … he was a familiar face at the police station, the prison, the courthouse and the orphanage.
Brown carried some tools in his car boot, but stored other gear in an outbuilding of the old courthouse to which he had the key. He regularly parked in spots reserved for police next to the police station, and was friendly with the court registrar, the bailiff, the matron at the orphanage and many local police.
Hill recalls that when working at the old police station Brown usually had ‘smoko’ with ex-police who worked in the police garage. Hill, in fact, bought his first car from one of them. If working at the courthouse, Brown would have coffee with the bailiff and discuss seized goods due to be auctioned. He was on first name terms with court staff and police, who called him ‘Arty’ or ‘Browny’.
When police houses needed work, Brown did it. When one policeman needed dining chairs mended, Brown arranged for Hill to do it. Brown was a notoriously bad driver and parked wherever he liked, but he boasted that he never got a ticket. He also boasted he knew the most senior police in town, notably Charles Bopf, the man whose brilliant career had only one blot – not finding the Mackay girls’ killer.
In a state that had rewarded some senior police with knighthoods, an Order of Australia was the least a grateful Queensland could do for Bopf. Townsville’s best-known detective for years, and head of the state’s new homicide squad in the 1970s, in retirement he is still a noted citizen in what is an overgrown country town.
Unlike Arthur Brown, whose mind has ostensibly been eroded by age, Bopf is still alert. He lectures in law at a local tertiary college, follows current and legal affairs, and easily summons details of his career after joining the force from the railways in 1946. But no-one’s perfect: the sleuth who made a living for almost 40 years with his memory for names and faces has trouble recalling a man who claims to know him well, and he swiftly ends conversations that raise the question.
As a youngster in the 1960s, Christine Millier was walking in the street with Brown when he stopped to chat to Bopf, and made a great show of introducing her to him. Afterwards, he claimed ‘Bopfy’ as ‘a mate’ and boasted that he was chief of police in all of Townsville. This overstated Bopf’s rank, and probably the relationship, if indeed there was anything more to it than Brown scraping acquaintance with an authority figure.
But the fact remains that in 1970s Townsville, Brown knew the police well enough that he blended into the scenery, and police knew his car so well nobody even noticed that it once had an odd-colored door. They were looking for a Holden driven by a crazed killer, not a Vauxhall driven by someone they knew.
Familiarity breeds contempt. Like the postman who appears at the same time every day, Arthur Brown had become invisible.
John Hill marvels at how trusted Brown was around the police station. Brown worked any hours he liked, and Hill thinks that if he’d wanted to he could have got access to records and files. Speculation, perhaps. And yet …
When police spoke to Neil Lunney in 1998 he said he’d made a statement in 1970, but was told it was missing. They had found his name with others on an old file note, and had a record of him taking part in an identification parade in 1971, but nothing else.
It wasn’t the only evidence to disappear. Samples taken from the murder scene were, apparently, lost when the police forensic section in Brisbane was flooded in 1974.
The floods of 1974 – which struck vast areas of Queensland – might also explain why there are no Public Works records of Brown’s work history. There is no record of when he joined the department, no pay records and, crucially, no record of when he took leave, when he was absent, or for what periods he was not sighted by a supervisor.
With Brown, at almost 90, unwilling or unable to answer detailed questions, his working life is a mystery. He didn’t have to report to work except to draw his pay and pick up maintenance requests. He was trusted to work unsupervised. The state couldn’t have employed a more careful man.
JUST as southerners go north in winter, seeking the sun, northerners head south in summer to avoid it. One of the perks of working for the Queensland Government north of Rockhampton is getting five weeks annual leave instead of four – a legacy of when it took a week to travel to and from Brisbane by train or steamer.
But, by the 1960s and 1970s, with better roads and cars, a traveller could go a long way in a week – and five weeks was enough time to visit Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide. Relatives know that the Browns visited the youngest of his wife’s sisters and her husband in Victoria more than once. No-one willing to talk about it now knows if Brown ever went on to South Australia.
But Christine Millier has her suspicions. She believes the man she’s known all her life killed the Mackay sisters, and that the fact a jury did not reach a verdict in a murder trial proves only that its members could not be told everything the family and the police know. There are coincidences that intrigue investigators, though they would never be put before a jury. Judith and Susan Mackay’s bodies were found at Antill Creek at the spot where Brown had taken little girls to molest them. That place was only 500 metres from where the body of a murdered teenager was found in 1975.
Her name was Catherine Graham, and she was last seen selling encyclopaedia door to door, near Brown’s house. The last night of her life she had made a call to her mother in Brisbane from a public telephone box. The last thing Graham told her mother was that a man was standing near the telephone box, staring at her, and that she didn’t like the look of him.
Other things unsettle Millier and her sister, Merle Moss. They believe that around the time of Marilyn Wallman’s disappearance in 1972, the Browns were visiting Hester’s relatives nearby, in Mackay. His car broke down, causing them to come home by train. Brown returned alone to get the car, the story goes, and didn’t come back to Townsville for some time. All the police can confirm is that a ‘chalky blue’ Vauxhall was seen in the district around the time of Marilyn Wallman’s disappearance.
In early 1991, Christine was working as a carer with teenage wards of the state, at what had been the local orphanage, where Brown had once been a regular visitor as maintenance man. On Wednesday, 23 January, she wrote in her diary: ‘Kids (state wards) and I went for walk to Strand. Arthur Brown drove by and the kids called him “rock spider”, shouting it out. Eventually they told me what a rock spider was.’
‘Rock spider’ is prison slang, never used jokingly, for a child molester. Somehow, at 79, Brown had a reputation outside the family as a sex offender.
Some instincts die hard. In Brown, the reflex to boast about what he’d seen and done was stronger, at times, than his sense of self-preservation.
Buildings were a favorite topic. He had a carpenter’s eye for the way they were made and where they were, and once he saw a building he didn’t forget it. Talk about other cities, and he’d talk about something he’d seen there. Mention Sydney and it was Martin Place. Brisbane and it was The Valley. Melbourne he knew backwards, of course, having lived there. Perth he’d never seen.
And Adelaide? It seemed to Christine that he’d been there, too. When the city’s name came up one day, he mentioned seeing the Festival Theatre when it was almost finished. He agreed when she said what a beautiful building it was, with the steps down to it, looking over the river to the oval. Work on the Adelaide Festival Theatre, commissioned in the 1960s, started in 1970, and the first stage was completed in June 1973, when a symphony orchestra performed in it for the first time.
Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon were abducted from the Adelaide Oval on 25 August, 1973. It was Australia’s worst child abduction case since Grant, Arnna and Jane Beaumont were abducted from Glenelg Beach on Australia Day, 1966. Their bodies were never found.
In a corner of the prosecutor’s office in Townsville is a board with half-a-dozen photographs on it of Arthur Stanley Brown at different stages of his life, in different clothes, bareheaded and wearing hats. In the middle of the collection is a computer-generated sketch of a man’s face, based on the recollection of the schoolteacher who saw a driver staring at the Mackay girls before they were abducted. The similarity between the sketch and the photographs is striking. So is the resemblance to the police sketch of the man seen taking two girls from the Adelaide Oval in 1973.
In July 2001, 28 years after Kirste Gordon and Joanne Ratcliffe disappeared, South Australian Police had still not taken a signed statement from Sue Lawrie about the thin-faced man she saw.