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Is Arthur Brown Australia’s Worst Child Killer?

It was one of Australia’s most controversial murder trials. In December 1998, 86-year-old Arthur Stanley Brown was tried for the murders of Judith and Susan Mackay, aged five and seven, in Townsville, Queensland, on 26 August 1970. Brown’s arrest came about when his name hit the headlines in 1998, after a woman broke a 30-year silence to tell police Brown had molested five children related to his first wife. Brown took the children and molested them where the Mackay sisters’ bodies had been found.

At the time of the murders, Brown had owned a car with one odd-coloured door, matching the description of a car driven by a man seen near the abduction site on the day the girls went missing, which had never turned up in the investigation. Arthur Brown’s relatives now came forth and told police that Brown had removed the odd-coloured door shortly after the murders and buried it. They thought nothing of its relevance at the time.

These revelations opened the floodgates of Brown’s paedophilic activities over the years. Somehow he had managed to fly under the radar and had got away with molesting family and local children all of his life. Now Brown’s unchallenged activities asked another far-reaching and much more sinister question: had Brown abducted and killed other children over the years – not just in Queensland, where numerous cases remained open, but also in other parts of Australia?

A thin-faced man answering to Arthur Brown’s description was seen in the vicinity of Adelaide’s Glenelg Beach on 26 January 1966, the day that the Beaumont children, Jane, nine, Arnna, seven, and Grant, four, disappeared; they have never been seen again. And was it just a remarkable coincidence that the middle-aged man with a thin face and gaunt features, who abducted four-year-old Kirste Gordon and 11-year-old Joanne Ratcliffe from Adelaide Oval during a football game in August 1973, had an uncanny resemblance to Arthur Brown?

A thin man with the build of a runner, Arthur Stanley Brown was born in Queensland in 1912 and worked mainly as a carpenter in Townsville until he retired in 1977, aged 65. He married into a family of six sisters and it was believed that over the years he had affairs with at least three of them apart from his wife. When Hester, Brown’s wife of 34 years, died in mysterious circumstances after falling in the bathroom and hitting her head, Brown encouraged the family doctor to write out a death certificate without examining the body, which was cremated immediately. Brown married his wife’s younger sister, Charlotte, soon after.

Convinced that Brown had murdered their sister Hester, family members began talking among themselves about matters that the family solicitor had advised them many years ago were best left unsaid. It turned out that Brown was also a paedophile who had molested at least five young girls in his wife’s extended family over the years. No one said anything until 1982, when one victim told her parents that Brown had molested her when she was a little girl.

Other victims in the family came forward and as the truth came out it seemed likely that there wasn’t a female member of the family, adult or child, who hadn’t been molested or confronted by Brown at one time or another. The oldest sister, Milly, also told the family that Brown’s wife Hester had confided in her that ‘it wasn’t just big girls that Arthur liked – it was little girls too’.

Under family pressure and following legal advice, Brown’s victims did not declare publicly what had happened. It was reasoned that it would be too traumatic for the victims to recall the incidents in court. The allegations remained a dark, unspoken family secret and Arthur Brown became the family pariah.

But while it was a family secret, Brown’s adolescent philanderings in the local neighbourhood hadn’t gone unnoticed by his intended victims. A family relative recorded in her diary that she was once walking a group of State Ward children to nearby Strand when Arthur Brown drove by. The children shouted ‘rock spider, rock spider’ at him. The children then explained that ‘rock spider’ was a very serious slang term used in prison for a child molester. Such was Arthur Brown’s reputation among the children of the district.

The murder of the Mackay sisters was one of the most terrible crimes in Queensland’s history. On the morning of 26 August 1970, seven-year-old Judith Mackay and five-year-old Susan left their home in Aitkenvale, Townsville, and walked to the nearby bus stop to catch the bus to school. From there they vanished. Two days later their bodies were found in a creek bed 25 kilometres south-west of Townsville. Both girls had been assaulted and murdered.

A huge investigation was launched, but all the police had to go on was the makes of two cars seen in the abduction area or near where their bodies were found. One was an FJ Holden and the other a blue Vauxhall Victor with an odd-coloured driver’s side door. They were unable to locate either car. Outside of that, police had nothing. The local paedophile, Arthur Brown, though unknown to police, had a Vauxhall Victor sedan with an odd-coloured driver’s door. No one ever bothered to tell police and he was never a suspect in the case. Eventually the case went cold.

In 1998, a woman who had been molested by Brown at around the time the Mackay sisters were murdered came across an old photo of Brown in a family album. She was one of the many who were persuaded at the time to say nothing about him, but she had always suspected that he was capable of murdering the two little girls. The woman rang police, who by coincidence were conducting a cold case investigation into the Mackay sisters’ murders at the time. The police were very interested in what she had to say and frustrated that none of this had come out sooner.

Police interviewed the entire family and charged Brown with 45 sexual offences, going back years. The odd-coloured door from his Vauxhall, which he had removed and buried soon after the murders, Brown’s fixation for neatness, the fact that the little girls’ clothes were neatly folded and placed beside their bodies, and Brown’s alleged confession to two associates that he had murdered the girls, were just some of the mountain of circumstantial evidence against him. The police charged him with murder in 1998 and he was sent to trial.

At Brown’s trial for the murders of Judith and Susan Mackay, which began on 18 October 1999, things did not go well for the Crown. Much of their evidence was considered as hearsay and inadmissible. The jury couldn’t arrive at a decision and another trial was ordered. Before his second trial in July 2000 was due to start, Brown was declared unfit to stand due to advanced dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and the trial was abandoned.

In July 2002, Arthur Stanley Brown, an innocent man in the eyes of the law, died alone, aged 90, in a local nursing home. He left strict instructions that there were to be no funeral notices placed in the paper and that he was to be buried in secret, ensuring that he would take his grim secrets with him to the grave.