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The Murders of Bruce Burrell

In September 2007, at his trial for a second murder, the jury got it right with the conviction of Bruce Allan Burrell. For the first time in our history, Burrell had now been found guilty of not one, but two murders, where the bodies of his victims have still not been found to this day.

Burrell had been a suspect for 10 years in both the women’s disappearances. Outside of the fact that his victims were both wealthy women, they may well have lived on different planets. The only thing they had in common in life was that they both knew Bruce Burrell. But in death it is highly likely that they could be very much closer, their bodies perhaps buried in the same grave or secreted together forever in any of the many bottomless mineshafts on Burrell’s southern New South Wales highlands farm.

The beginning of the end for Burrell began on 6 May 1997, when 39-year-old Mrs Kerry Whelan, the mother of three and wife of Bernard Whelan, a successful Sydney businessman and CEO of Crown Forklifts, went to a hairdressing appointment in Parramatta and vanished. A surveillance video from where Mrs Whelan had left her car revealed a distinctive two-tone Mitsubishi Pajero with a bullbar leaving the scene a few seconds after she left the car park.

Soon after, a ransom note arrived at Mr Whelan’s work, demanding $1 million in US dollars or his wife would die. The ransom note instructed that when the money was ready, sometime in the next seven days, an advertisement was to be placed in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. The ad was to read: ‘Anyone who witnessed a white Volkswagen Beetle parked beside the eastern gates of the Sydney Olympic site at 10.30pm on Tuesday 8.4.97 please call…then put your home telephone number at the end of the advertisement.’

The Whelan family nanny came forward and told police of an unusual circumstance that had occurred just a month earlier when a former sales employee of Mr Whelan, a Bruce Burrell, had arrived unannounced at the Whelans’ rural home during the day and had secretive discussions with Mrs Whelan over a cup of tea. What Mrs Whelan would be doing associating with Burrell was a mystery. Burrell was a 44-year-old balding, portly braggart who was always broke, swigging on a can of VB and smoking a cigarette.

When Burrell had left, Mrs Whelan said to the nanny, ‘Can you do me a favour? You never saw him here. Don’t tell anybody. Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll tell you why. Don’t worry. I’m not having an affair.’ It has since been proved as close to conclusively as possible by police and author Candace Sutton that this was definitely the case and that Kerry Whelan had never been unfaithful to her husband, least of all with a lowlife like Bruce Burrell, who had been sacked by her husband years earlier because he couldn’t be trusted.

Police raided Burrell’s farm on the southern highlands and found a Mitsubishi Pajero identical in every way to the one in the surveillance video, a typewriter that could have typed the ransom note, two handwritten cryptic lists that could have been the outline of a kidnap plan, empty bottles that contained traces of chloroform and a map book in which the car park where Mrs Whelan parked her car was highlighted.

Hundreds of police converged on Burrell’s farm looking for Mrs Whelan, but apart from some stolen cars and rifles they found nothing. On further investigation they discovered that Burrell was unemployed and desperately broke and couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments on his farm.

It wasn’t until police began investigating Mrs Whelan’s disappearance that they considered Burrell a suspect in a similar case that had happened two years earlier. Between 1pm and 1.30pm on 30 May 1995, 74-year-old grandmother Dorothy Davis left her house in Sydney’s exclusive Lurline Bay and told a builder she was on her way to visit a cancer-stricken friend down the street. She has not been seen since.

The sick friend was Bruce Burrell’s wife, who was a nearby neighbour and had been a friend of Mrs Davis for many years. Police believe that when Mrs Davis arrived at the flat, her sick friend was not there. Instead, Bruce Burrell was waiting alone to murder her.

That same afternoon Burrell made a ‘sudden and unexpected trip’ to his farm near Goulburn and returned the same night, before making the same five-hour round trip again the following day. It would later be concluded that Burrell had murdered Mrs Davis in his apartment and on the first trip he left Mrs Davis’ body at the farm; the second trip was to conceal it. But why did Burrell murder the elderly lady? What was his motive?

It seemed that in 1994 Bruce Burrell secretly approached Mrs Davis, a very wealthy widow who had been left a lot of money by her late husband, and borrowed $100,000, which he said was to purchase a unit in the street. He repaid Mrs Davis $10,000 and when she kept asking for the balance, Burrell confided in a friend that ‘she had gone as far as saying that she would take legal action to get the money back’. Burrell had allegedly gone to comfort her to get her to back off from her threats. Soon after, Mrs Davis disappeared. Burrell had never come under suspicion. Until Mrs Whelan’s disappearance.

But despite the mountain of circumstantial evidence against Burrell, police desperately needed him to make a mistake in order to charge him with the murder of Kerry Whelan. It happened early on 23 May 1997. As police turned his home upside down with the media camped outside his property, Burrell drove to Goulburn, where, seemingly under the belief that calls from public phone boxes weren’t traceable, he made a call from the phone box outside the Empire Hotel.

At 9.21am – the exact same time as Burrell was in the phone box – a call was received at Crown Equipment. A man spoke to a receptionist and asked her to write this message down and give it to Mr Whelan. He said: ‘Mrs Whelan is okay. Mr Whelan must call off the police and media today. Tell him, the man with the white Volkswagen,’ and hung up.

Only the kidnapper, the police and the Whelan family knew about the white Volkswagen reference. Phone traces showed the call came from a phone box outside the Empire Hotel at exactly 9.21am. Burrell told police he had made a call from that phone box but said it was to his lawyers. That was soon disproved. They had their man, but the absence of a victim was going to make proving the case almost impossible.

In the meantime, Burrell was charged with six counts of stealing cars found on his property, including the Pajero. On 22 October in the Parramatta District Court he pleaded guilty and was sent to prison for two and a half years. Police now had him where they could keep an eye on him and have the run of his property.

On 31 March 1999, Bruce Burrell was charged with the abduction and murder of Kerry Whelan, but the charges were later withdrawn through lack of evidence. In 2002 a coronial inquest found a ‘known’ person was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Kerry Whelan and referred the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

In August 2005 Burrell went on trial in the NSW Supreme Court for kidnap and murder, but after nearly two weeks of deliberation the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. On March 2006 Burrell was re-tried and on 6 June 2006, after nine days of deliberations, he was found guilty in a unanimous verdict and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Charged with the abduction and murder of Mrs Dorothy Davis, under the laws of subjudice, mention of Burrell’s previous conviction for an almost identical crime was not permitted at the trial or in the press during the trial. But it seems it wasn’t necessary. All the evidence pointed to a clear case of murder of an old lady in the pursuit of personal greed. In September 2007, Burrell was also found guilty of the abduction and murder of Mrs Dorothy Davis and received a further 28 years.

We can only wonder if the details of the Kerry Whelan murder, which was one of Australia’s most sensational and publicised trials, had any sway on the jury’s decision in finding Bruce Burrell guilty of murdering and concealing the body of Dorothy Davis.

But then again, who really cares? Do you? The chances of the same set of circumstances ever happening to an innocent man would surely run into the trillions.