The murder of three children in Bowraville is a crime that has gone unsolved for more than 20 years, Caroline Overington investigates why.
Three Australian children go missing from the same small town and nobody is ever held responsible for their deaths. Reading that, you’re probably thinking, "Yes, I remember – that was the Beaumont children."
Yet, no, this story isn’t about the Beaumont children. It’s about three quite different children, who went missing from the town of Bowraville on the NSW North Coast in the early 1990s.
Unlike the Beaumont children, these three children – Colleen Walker, 16, Clinton Speedy-Duroux, also 16, and Evelyn Greenup, four – did not disappear without a trace. The bodies of two of them –Clinton and Evelyn – have been found, as have Colleen’s clothes, bagged and weighed down with rocks and the bones of a dog in the Nambucca River, so there is little doubt that she, too, is dead.
The families – and some police – believe the children were victims of the same serial killer. That’s something that would normally fire the public’s imagination, but despite the media’s best efforts to whip up interest, it hasn’t happened in this case. It’s worth asking why. It could be because we’ve all watched a few too many crime shows. We expect the victims of serial killers to have some features in common (Ivan Milat liked to kill backpackers, Jack the Ripper went after prostitutes and so on). The three victims from Bowraville don’t fit into a neat box: one was a 16-year-old girl; one was a 16-year-old boy who looks in some photographs more like a man, with his stocky good looks, his moustache and his job in the local tannery; and one was a four-year-old child.
What holds them together? All went missing from the same town of just 900 people, in the same five-month period between September 1990 and February 1991. All were known to each other. The two bodies and Colleen’s clothes were all found in roughly the same area, either along a dirt road that leads down to the Nambucca River, or in that part of the river itself.
Also, all three victims were Aboriginal.
As a nation, we want to believe that race plays no role in matters of justice, but the data suggests otherwise. Aboriginal people are more likely to be arrested, less likely to get parole, more likely to be sent to prison and more likely to die there. No doubt, there are people who think that’s because of the way they behave, drinking and fighting all the time, but there’s a flipside. This crime, in which Aboriginal children are the victims, has gone unsolved for more than 20 years and there has been nothing like the effort, or the resources, that has gone into trying to find the Beaumont children, or indeed into tracking other serial killers.
Could it be that we don’t really care – or don’t care as much – about this case because the kids were black? Or that we feel more comfortable about turning a blind eye because of the way the families lived? Or, as Colleen Walker’s devastated mother, Muriel Craig, puts it, "
I ask myself, would we still be sitting here if this were three white kids? And I know what the answer is."
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Colleen Walker was just 16 years old when she arrived in Bowraville from her home in nearby Sawtell in September 1990. Bowraville was then a relatively small community of 150 Aboriginal people and about 750 white people, and the two groups didn’t really mix.
On one of her first days in town, Colleen attended a party under a big, old tree. There was plenty of alcohol and Colleen got very drunk. She didn’t leave the gathering until after midnight. She was supposed to meet two friends at the local railway station so they could catch the 3am train out of town. When she didn’t turn up, they left without her.
This was before mobile telephones. There was a bit of a culture in Bowraville of letting teenagers do their own thing. Drugs and alcohol were part of the mix. Colleen’s mum didn’t find out for two days that Colleen hadn’t caught the train. When she went to tell police that her daughter was missing, they asked her whether it was possible that Colleen had just "gone walkabout". They didn’t really search for her at all.
On October 3, there was another party in Bowraville, not under the big tree this time, but in a house. One of the guests was Rebecca Stadhams. She was a young mum, with three children under the age of five. She got very drunk at that party. Halfway through the night, she dragged her kids, including four-year-old Evelyn, down to their father’s house to see if he could take care of them, but Billy Greenup was dead drunk, too, so she took them back to her mother’s house, where the party had been raging. Now it was dying down. Rebecca’s mum, Patricia, had shooed everyone way, saying it was time for the kids and everyone else to get to bed.
Rebecca took the kids inside and all piled into one bedroom to sleep. When Rebecca woke up the next day, Evelyn was gone. Rebecca didn’t immediately raise the alarm, telling police that she assumed that Evelyn had simply toddled off down the road to visit her dad, but when she caught up with him at the RSL later that day, Evelyn wasn’t with him.
Again, it was at least two days before a police search was mounted and it was somewhat cursory. The feeling among some police was that Rebecca had been drunk, so how could she know what had happened to the child? Child protection officers were sent in, to see whether anyone in the family could explain what had gone on.
Four months later, Clinton disappeared.
Like Colleen, he was only 16, yet he was partying pretty hard on the night of January 31, 1991, which was the last time anyone saw him alive. The difference this time was that Clinton’s body was found, not by police, who weren’t really looking, but by two men out searching for firewood in scrubby woods off the dirt track that ran down to the Nambucca River.
Clinton had a head wound and a pillowslip was found stuffed into his pants.
This was clearly a homicide. Police began to trace Clinton’s last movements. They knew that he’d been at a party with his Aboriginal girlfriend, Kelly Jarrett, the night before he’d disappeared. One of the other guests at that party was a 25-year-old white man, Jay Hart, who lived in a caravan on Bowraville’s outskirts. Hart is now middle-aged, married, with a couple of kids and a beer gut.
He uses a different name. In those days, he was a fat, young bloke with a job at the local tannery, skinning hides. Unlike other white folk, he didn’t mind hanging around the "Aboriginal" part of town, also called "the Mish" after the old Aboriginal mission. He often supplied the alcohol. He got drunk that night and invited Clinton and Kelly back to his caravan to continue drinking. Kelly told police that when she woke up the next day – still in the caravan – she felt groggy, like she’d been drugged. Her underpants had been removed. She couldn’t find Clinton, only his shoes.
Jay Hart wasn’t there, either. He had been seen driving around town at around 5am. He would later tell police that he had decided to drive to work, despite having organised to get a lift with another tannery worker. Then he came home to have a cup of tea, which is why he’d been spotted returning to the caravan, just before his lift arrived.
Police heard him out, but didn’t believe him: the pillowslip found stuffed into Clinton’s pants was from Jay Hart’s caravan. They decided to charge him with Clinton’s murder. Their theory was that he’d drugged Kelly so he could rape her. When Clinton woke up and tried to stop him, he’d hit him on the head, taken his body out in his car, dumped it and driven back to his caravan, all before dawn.
Jay Hart protested his innocence. He was awaiting trial when a fisherman snagged his line on Colleen Walker’s jeans in the Nambucca River. A search team went into the water and turned up two more bags of clothes. Eight days later, the remains of Evelyn’s body were also found. She had a head wound, too.
It was around this time that the theory that Jay Hart might be involved in all three murders began to form. Witnesses came forward to say that he’d been at the party with Rebecca on the night that she had become drunk and dragged her kids around to their dad’s. Rebecca’s mother, Patricia, remembered seeing Jay Hart hanging around, peeking in the windows after she’d tried to shoo everyone away. One of Evelyn’s "aunties" (not a real aunt, but a close female relative) said she had seen Jay Hart coming out of the bedroom where Rebecca and the kids eventually lay down to sleep. Patricia remembered hearing Evelyn crying and then a thump, then Evelyn falling silent. Rebecca told police she had felt groggy, like she’d been drugged, when she woke up – and her underpants had been removed.
Then people remembered that Jay Hart had been at the party with Colleen Walker on the night she disappeared as well. Witnesses said he had pestered her and maybe even followed her when she left.
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