Underbelly 5 Page 10

  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 daught
er’ 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.’