The Ricochet of Echoes: The Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans Murders

PROLOGUE

My two sisters, brother and I grew up ‘on the land’. Our backyard was a two thousand acre sheep and wheat property. Looking back, it is so easy to see how fortunate we were to have a lifestyle where it was possible to enjoy the fruits of our labour. We were practically self-sufficient back in the fifties and sixties. Fresh eggs from free-range chooks, vegetables from the garden, honey direct from the beehive and fresh milk straight from the udder of our milking cows. We separated the cream and churned butter to bake cakes and biscuits in the oven of our wood fired stove. All our cooking, heating and hot water came from this stove. The kitchen was the heart of the home. We plucked fruit off the trees, picked mushrooms from the paddock, caught ‘yabbies’ from the dams and grew our own meat.

Life was wonderful, idyllic, uncomplicated and as the years went by we took it all for granted. We lived with the illusion that nothing could ever shatter our family’s way of life, or destroy the way that we perceived the world. But then, one day it did. One day we got the news that my youngest sister, Lorraine, was missing. And from that point on, nothing would ever make sense again.

In those early days, I can still remember the despair and feel the hopelessness of watching my mother bake and ice a cake, weeks in advance, to celebrate her youngest daughter’s upcoming twenty-first birthday. My mother was so proud of her. Lorraine had followed in our mother’s footsteps to become a nurse. But in reality, after being a missing person for ten months, Lorraine was never coming home to share that special day with us, or any other day for that matter. Unbeknown to us at the time, Lorraine was already dead. Lorraine’s travelling companion and best friend, Wendy, was also dead.

In what was surely a night of unimaginable terror, they had both been abducted, brutalised, gang raped, hogtied and bludgeoned to death. Their bodies lay rotting in a paddock, exposed to the elements, scavenging birds and feral animals. Disrespectfully and obviously with no remorse, no attempt had been made to hide or bury their bodies. The realisation that Lorraine was never coming home to celebrate her twenty-first birthday was probably the lowest point in my mother’s life. What happened to the cake, I do not know.

For nearly forty years this double homicide would become one of the most baffling and infamous unsolved crimes in Australian history. Two female trainee nurses, hitchhiking from Brisbane to the inland township of Goondiwindi, on the Queensland–New South Wales border to retrieve their repaired vehicle, were to disappear forever. Twenty-one months later their skeletal remains would be discovered in the bush at Murphys Creek, situated at the foothills of the Toowoomba ranges.

I remember to this day, the day that my father came across the paddock to inform my wife and myself that the girls’ bodies had been found. He was a broken man. He was finding it difficult to verbalise. With the horror of what his daughter must have endured fresh in his mind, the colour drained from his face and his eyes faded away to a distant memory. His dazed blank look was synonymous to ‘the thousand-yard stare’, the affliction infamous amongst battle weary soldiers who had been on the front line for far too long. I was to recognise this soul destroying look for many months. That look, from a father, with the pain and torment of feeling responsible that he had in some way let his daughter down, is burnt into my brain forever.

My first daughter was born only two days before my sister was murdered. The joy of her birth and every subsequent birthday, would be overshadowed by the tragic disappearance and death of my sister. My sister and her friend’s murder was always the white elephant in the room. However, although deeply affected, we as a family did not talk about it. We did not know how to talk about it. So we kept our thoughts to ourselves, bottled it all up and suppressed our feelings. The whole situation was awkward and as time went by, cracks appeared in the family dynamics and relationships suffered.

Like any other young parent at family gatherings, I wanted to be able to joyously celebrate special occasions like Christmas, Easter and birthdays every year with my wife and three young children. But I could not. Emotions were subdued or suppressed and I felt cheated. At the same time, on these occasions, I felt horrible and sad for how my parents must be feeling about the loss of their own daughter and what she had suffered on that night. Overriding all those emotions was the anger and rage that I was feeling towards the killers who had done this to our family unit. Little did I know at the time how profound these suppressed negative emotions would impact upon me, nor did I realise that they would last for a lifetime.

I personally felt the need for retribution and revenge. These murderers needed to be hunted down and hung by the neck until dead, their corpses left to rot on the rope, to serve as a barbaric reminder of the atrocities they had committed. For years dark thoughts and forces would possess me. I called upon the spirit world for help and all I can say is: be careful what you wish for. Unwittingly, I had drawn disturbing spiritual entities into my physical world that I could not get rid of, and for a very long time, I was afraid to close my eyes and succumb to sleep for the fear of facing the demons of the night. An internal battle raged. The only thing that could restore some sort of normality was justice and that was not forthcoming. Something had to give.

When my first daughter approached twenty years old, the same age as my sister was when she disappeared and was murdered, I fell apart. I guess I had a breakdown. I was to suffer episodes of uncontrollable sobbing and panic attacks, and would remain emotional for months. This downhill spiral lead into bouts of undiagnosed clinical depression which lasted for years until all my children had passed that significant twenty year milestone. I had held it all together until then, suffering in silence with my inner torment. But suddenly it seemed, with the realisation of what had happened, of what could happen again and of how fragile life was, my outpouring of grief had begun and there was no suppressing those buried emotions. I was plagued by the question: how would I have coped if this had happened to one of my daughters? A real fear gripped me.

I felt my world was caving in and there seemed nothing I could do about it. I carried the constant guilt and regret from having bought that Volkswagen sedan for my youngest sister. My insistence that she have that particular car proved fatal. The engine seized on a motoring holiday whilst heading north to Queensland and it would cost a lot of money to repair. As a consequence, to save money for their holiday outings, the girls hitchhiked to their Brisbane destination. All went well on the way up and they were lulled into a false sense of security, but on their return journey to retrieve the repaired vehicle, they were picked up by persons unknown and ultimately met their demise. The ‘what if’ syndrome tore me apart. Could I have done something different to have changed history? Should I have bought another vehicle, gone to a different dealership, paid for a roadworthy certificate, let my sister have a greater say in the choice of vehicle, or maybe not have gotten involved at all and allowed her to buy her own vehicle? The questions for self-persecution were endless and I explored them all.

The primary torment for us all however, was the ‘not knowing’ element of what had happened. There were so many unanswered questions. Who had done this? How many men were involved? Why were the girls killed? What could have gone so tragically wrong to justify bludgeoning two innocent girls to death in the one night? Why were they tied up? Had they tried to escape? Had they been beaten? How many times had they been raped? Did their captors torment, humiliate and laugh at them? Did the girls scream until they could scream no more? How much did they suffer? Did they beg for their lives? Did they comfort one another? Forgive one another? Who was killed first? Why were their bodies left to rot in the paddock? Why had no attempt been made to hide or bury their bodies? The questions and torment went on and on.

As a father myself, I was constantly haunted by the imagery of what the girls must have endured on that long, horrible night. I assumed we all were. From that day on, when the skeletal remains were discovered, we really had no reason to complain about anything ever again. Nothing by comparison could ever be that bad. We had no reason to feel ungrateful, hard done by, or sorry for ourselves and if hard times fell upon us and we had to go without for some reason or other, then so be it! We were alive weren’t we? Work became our distraction, our best friend and ally, our reason to be off on our own, alone with our thoughts.

It is such a truism that silent waters run deep. What you see on the outside is not necessarily a reflection of what is happening on the inside of a person. We all wear a mask or a disguise. I was no different. Cumulative years of locked up silence, of guilt, regret, self-persecution and anger, of unanswered questions, of not knowing what happened, of waiting and waiting and waiting for justice that was not forthcoming gnaws away at the soul. It just about destroyed me. This period of time was undoubtedly the lowest point in my life. In hindsight I would refer to it as my bottomless pit of emotional despair.

For my own sanity and salvation, I felt compelled in 2003 to publish my first book, The Echo of Silent Screams. It was my belief that with enough publicity about the book, we could resurrect this cold case and force the Queensland Police Service into conducting another investigation. I hoped that in the process, we could solve this double Homicide of my sister and her friend, which at that time was practically thirty years old. In this book I provided background information on the case, my hypothesis of what I believed happened and emotionally exposed myself as to how the injustice of this tragedy had affected myself and my family.

The echo of the girls’ silent screams which had haunted me so profoundly, would also be heard subconsciously by thousands of other individuals. The community was frustrated and outraged. Concerned citizens over a thirty year period who had already given information came forward again, as did a lot of other first time witnesses offering new evidence. Everyone wanted this solved. The book and the ninety minute true crime television documentary film that followed two years later had the desired effect and the information flooded in.

In reality, this battle was always going to be a crusade for justice, not only for my sister and her friend, but also for the community at large. The public needed to be reassured that there was no statute of limitations on murder. No matter how long ago a murder was committed, and regardless of the cost, the killers would be hunted down and brought to justice. It was equally as important for me that my mother and father were still alive, were physically well enough and had their mental faculties in order to endure this to the very end and to see the girls get justice. Time was running out for them. I believed that surely this was not too much to ask.

Yet, through bureaucratic inaction, the case stalled. For another ten long years we were forced to chip away at the bureaucratic system trying to get an ending, a resolution. This third major investigation, which uncovered new information regarding previously unknown witnesses and persons of interest, needed a conclusion and it was not forthcoming. After all we had gone through, my mother and I were not going to allow this latest investigation to be swept under the carpet and be forgotten. In total frustration, after thirty-eight years of being a cold case, we decided to write a letter to the State Coroner requesting a Coronial Inquest and see what transpired from that request.

The following chapters in this sequel book are the end to a very long and tragic journey, of a previously unsolved mystery, which has controlled and consumed the majority of my adult life. There is a ten year gap between the two books, from where an investigation was launched in 2003, to where an Inquest took place in 2013.

I titled this book The Ricochet of Echoes, because I perceived the echo of those silent screams to have physically impacted upon certain individuals. It would be the impact of those ricochets upon the conscience of a cross-section of individuals that would prompt witnesses to want to give evidence in a court of law, prompt journalists to want to write about the injustice and prompt Detectives to pursue these killers to get justice. Collectively, it is these individuals who have turned the girls’ echoes into a voice.

PART 1

BATTLING BUREAUCRACY

Chapter 1

Cold Hard Reality

Mum’s dead!

The statement from the other end of the telephone stunned me. It was my brother. He was ringing from my parent’s house, on the farm where they had lived for the entire sixty-five years of their married life.

For a few long seconds, the words, Mum’s dead, echoed through the deep recesses of my brain.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to happen!

The words deftly fell out of my mouth.

We all assumed that Dad would be the first to go. He was the one who had a deteriorating condition, not Mum. At the age of eighty-six, she was mentally alert and physically unstoppable.

My brother’s harsh words portrayed the cold hard reality of the situation. Our mother lay dead on the front verandah. She had died alone, just as my sister and her friend had died thirty-eight years ago, with nobody holding their hands to comfort their passing. The big difference was that my mother had the free will and determination to trudge the ninety-odd metres back from the paddock with her injury, heading to where she knew her body could easily be found—the front verandah. This was tragically unlike the situation which my sister, Lorraine, and her friend, Wendy, had found themselves in.

They were abducted and forcibly taken against their will to an undisclosed location, where they were subjected to terrible atrocities by a gang of thugs before being hogtied and bludgeoned to death. Horrendously, one of the girls had been forced to watch the other die knowing that she was next. Their bodies were callously discarded, cast aside like garbage and left to rot in the open, to be scavenged over by birds and feral animals. Their skeletal remains would be found unexpectedly by bush-walkers approximately twenty-one months later. To this day, their killers have not been brought to justice.

My mother died on the twenty-sixth of April, 2012. It was the day after Anzac day, at around five in the afternoon. At the time she was in the house paddock, cleaning up around a grove of young Wilga trees. The trees had reached an appropriate size where the sheep would now leave them alone, so she was removing the protective wire mesh from around their trunks in order to prune them into shape. She was doing something she loved. Both my older sister and my mother had planted and maintained literally thousands of similar trees over the years, as their attempt to give back to the land.

At the time it was still daylight and Dad was up the paddock walking around checking his sheep. Due to having Alzheimer’s for some time, his dementia was quite advanced and this was a ritual he engaged in every morning and afternoon. He was, and still is, living in another world which is unfamiliar to us all. It is a world of forgetfulness, where time, logic or reason has no meaning. It is a cruel disease. Mum would have been patiently waiting for him to find his way home and then she would have come in from the paddock to prepare dinner for them both. But at the time my mother was tormented and the activity in which she was engaged, was therapeutic. Three days earlier she had written a letter to the Queensland State Coroner requesting a Coronial Inquest. The rehashed events of what had happened to her daughter Lorraine, and her friend Wendy lay heavily on her mind.

My mother was concerned that Lorraine and Wendy would be forgotten. She worried that their case would once again be bundled up, to be buried in a cardboard box and doomed to sit on a shelf in the cold case archives, never to see the light of day ever again. That thought was breaking her heart.

Before her death both my mother and I were at our wits’ end. We had done everything humanly possible to reach the stage where there was practically no other avenue left in which to pursue justice. A decade-long investigation by Kerry Johnson, a senior Detective, previously assigned to Homicide, was concluded. It had been the third major investigation in thirty-eight years and had gone as far as it could possibly go. Detective Johnson’s brief of evidence had been submitted and there was nothing more he could do. Although he still retained carriage of the case, he had long since been promoted and reassigned to another division of law enforcement.

To make matters more frustrating, other Detectives, who knew precious little about this complex cold case, were now tinkering around the peripheral edges when any new leads came in. With a mountain of paperwork to sift through, in an effort to understand all the connections, it seemed as if they were rehashing old territory and the cycle was repeating itself. It was all beyond my comprehension.

It appeared to me as though our case was in the ‘too hard basket’. I was quite sure the bureaucratic system was stalling, shifting responsibility for our case from one department to another. If the faceless men within the system did this for long enough, then sooner or later my parents would die, or, the last person of interest in the murder investigation who remained alive would die. Perhaps then we would be expected to give up the chase and the case could slip away and disappear into history forever. My mother and I were determined to not let that happen.

As far as we were concerned, the investigation was complete. We knew there was a large group of men who were under suspicion and possibly responsible. All we needed was an outcome, a conclusion, an official ending to this last investigation. Surely this was not too much to ask. We needed an adjudicator to review all the police evidence and present it in the public arena for all to see and hear. This was a job for a Coroner. We had to do something and as a last resort, with a little push from an equally frustrated friend, we decided to write a letter to the State Coroner requesting a Coronial Inquest. His response would determine where we would go from there.

Emotionally, this was never going to be an easy letter to write. This plea for an Inquest had to come from a mother’s heart, not from a brother’s. Mum agreed to write the letter but, after a week, she was burdened by the responsibility and was emotionally distraught by reliving the events of what Lorraine and Wendy must have gone through on that fateful night. My mother had tried many times to begin the letter, but had very little to show.

At home, isolated on the farm with her torment, she was all alone. Her husband of sixty-odd years was incapable of understanding, let alone sharing her pain. My father struggles to remember the most basic things, let alone comprehend the fact that he once had a beautiful daughter who was so brutally taken from this world. I told Mum not to worry. I assured her that I would compose a rough draft of what we needed to cover within the letter, and she would then have the freedom to alter or embellish the context to suit her own emotional needs.

When I rang my mother the following morning, which was a Sunday, she was terribly distressed. As I read out my rough draft of this very important letter, she copied it down and sobbed continuously. I had never experienced such an outpouring of grief from my mother ever before. It crippled my heart with pain and flooded my eyes with tears. I had an overwhelming urge to reach through the phone to hug and comfort her.

I had to stop our conversation on two occasions, to ring back fifteen or twenty minutes later. My mother needed time out to settle down and compose herself, and I needed time out to question myself as to whether or not this was all worth the pain. We eventually completed the drafted letter and once again, after a reasonable break, my mother rang back to assure me that the letter would be hand written and dispatched in Monday’s mail. Sadly, this was to be the last time I would ever speak to my mother. I miss her more than words can express. There was now nobody left to support me in championing this cause. Now, I felt truly alone.

Chapter 2

Letter to the Coroner

Shown below is the letter my mother wrote to the Coroner requesting an Inquest. Due to the forced circumstances brought on by my mother’s death and of personal frustration towards the legal and judicial system, as well as bureaucratic inaction, I shared this letter with others. The letter went on to receive immense positive publicity. The ramifications which resulted from that letter were to finally catapult the outcome of that decade-long investigation into the fast lane towards justice being done. I am so proud of my mother’s final achievement. I am sure you will agree with me that she did a wonderful job.

To the State Coroner

Michael Barnes

Dear Sir

My name is Betty Wilson, mother of Lorraine Ruth Wilson who lost her life when only 20 in terrifying circumstances along with her friend Wendy Joy Evans, 18, on the 6th October 1974.

Two girls who stood on the threshold of life, having everything to look forward to, a wonderful fulfilling life as nurses and giving to the community. Their lives cut short far too soon by unknown hands at Murphys Creek QLD.

After almost 38 years I am still tormented by that night, what they must have endured and the way they died and by whom were responsible leaving their bodies in the open to be reduced to bones by wildlife ... yes picked over by birds ... not a very nice thought, but we had to accept it.

This last investigation headed by Kerry Johnson has been an intensive one. It has lasted 9 years and has now run its course. It was precipitated by the release of my son’s book with his quest to seek answers to all the questions that have haunted us. With extensive publicity and the subsequent film that followed the release of the book, an avalanche of previously unknown information flooded in.

We have never given up hope that one day that the girl’s killers would be brought to justice. I am under the belief that there are a number of deceased suspects, who if they were alive today, could be