Australia 1973 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

On Friday the 12th of October, 1973, a 17-year-old girl finished her shift at Coles in Albury and walked a block to wait for a lift near St. Patrick’s Church on Smollett Street. It was a main street, lit with a hotel doing Friday trade a few doors down. People saw her standing there between 6:00 and 7:00. At about a quarter past 7:00, a man walked past and saw her at the driver’s door of a car talking to the two men sitting inside it.

 Nobody ever saw her again. Her body was found two days later in a lagoon 6 km out of town. Her watch had stopped at 7:26, 11 minutes after that man walked past. 16 years later, somebody rang a police station in another state and named the men who killed her. This is how they finally nicked her killer.

 Smollett Street isn’t a back lane. It runs through the middle of Albury, a regional city on the New South Wales side of the Murray. In 1973, it had shops, a church, and a hotel busy on a Friday night. Bronwyn Richardson was standing on that footpath waiting for a lift home. Numerous people place her at Coles that afternoon and numerous people saw her waiting nearby for the best part of an hour. She wasn’t hidden.

Whatever happened to her happened in front of a working street on a Friday evening. One of them stopped being a bystander and became the most important witness in the case. Stanley Thompson saw her leaning in at a car window at a quarter past 7:00, and he gave his statement to police a week later on the 19th of October, 1973.

It is the closest thing this case has to a contemporaneous account. Thompson was able to fix the time precisely because of what was on television when he passed. A man doesn’t misremember what was on the television. That’s the last reliable sighting of Bronwyn Richardson alive, and there is a detail in it that matters more than anything else in this case.

She was standing at the driver’s door talking. And she wasn’t being dragged or shouting or running. Her watch is the only witness in this case that couldn’t be got at. It was a wristwatch, and it stopped at 7:26. Not because it had run down, because when it was examined it was found to be half wound.

 Something abrasive had gone inside the works and jammed them. The watch mechanism was recovered on the bank of Horseshoe Lagoon off the Murray River. It was lying loose on the ground. The band it belonged to was still fastened around Bronwyn’s wrist. The whole evening collapses into a number. At about a quarter past 7:00 she was standing on a lit street in the middle of a city talking to somebody through a car window.

By 7:26 she was at a lagoon 6 km away with enough force being applied to her that her watch came off its band and ground to a halt in the dirt. 11 minutes. That is the whole of it. The coroner used that watch to establish that the assault had already begun and that she and the men who killed her were at the water by then.

She didn’t die then. The autopsy was consistent with an assault that went on for a prolonged period, and the coroner found she died later, possibly in the early hours of the following morning. So, the 11 minutes are not how long she had left. They are how long it took to get her somewhere nobody would hear her.

That isn’t a chase. And it isn’t a struggle that spilled out of somewhere. It is a car that was already there, a driver who knew exactly which road to and a girl who had no idea she should be running. Bronwyn Ann Richardson was 17 years old and she was from Corowa on the Murray about an hour west of Albury.

 She had been crowned Corowa Showgirl. She was working at Coles. Her father was named Stan and she had a mother, Noel, and five brothers and sisters. That’s close to all of it. There was no adult life to summarize, no career, no marriage, no long history for anybody to sift through for a motive. She had finished a shift and she was waiting for a lift.

 Everything anybody knows about her now comes from the fact that she didn’t get home. On Sunday, the 14th of October 1973, 2 days after she was taken, searchers found her body in the water at Horseshoe Lagoon. It’s off the Murray River out past the edge of Albury on a road running through farmland and scrub. Nobody’s out there at night without a reason to be.

Bronwyn had been physically assaulted and she had been sexually assaulted. The post-mortem found two causes of death rather than one. Her neck [music] and the water. In the coldest possible terms, that means whatever was done to her neck didn’t finish her and the water did. The first inquest was held on the 18th of March 1975.

It found she had died from strangulation and drowning. It didn’t identify anybody. No charges followed. Police already had a great deal by 1975. A girl taken off a main street in the early evening, a body 6 km away, injuries pointing to more than one attacker, a witness and a watch that fixed the time. None of it produced an arrest.

>> [music] >> And there is one failure from that period that the coroner singled out nearly 50 years later. A second man, Wayne Leech, said he had also seen something on Smollett Street that night and that he approached investigating police in 1973 to tell them. He said they told him they didn’t feel the need to take a statement from him.

 The coroner wrote that there is no satisfactory explanation as to why police wouldn’t have made further inquiries with an apparent eyewitness. Then, the case sat. Not for a year or two. From the night she was taken, 16 years went by without an arrest while Bronwyn’s family stayed in the same district and got older. Her father, Stan, battled cancer in the years that followed and died without ever knowing who had killed his daughter.

Subscribe so you don’t miss how a television program 16 years later finally broke the silence. On the evening of the 9th of October, 1989, a television program presented by the journalist Derryn Hinch went to air in both South Australia and New South Wales. It dealt with Bronwyn Richardson’s unsolved killing and it raised a possibility that had nothing to do with Aubrey.

The program suggested Raymond Edmonds might have had some part in it. Edmonds was known publicly as Mr. Stinky. He was a serial rapist eventually convicted of the murders of two teenagers at Shepparton in 1966 and he wasn’t caught until 1985. For almost 20 years, his was a name attached to unsolved crimes all over the state’s north.

 Putting his name next to Bronwyn’s on television in 1989 was a reasonable thing for a program to do. It was also the single most consequential event in this case between 1973 and 2021 because somebody was watching it in a house in South Australia a long way from anybody who was looking for him. At about 12:23 in the afternoon of the 10th of October 1989, the day after the program aired, Constable Paul Friend answered the phone at Murray Bridge Police Station in South Australia.

The man on the line didn’t give his name. He said he had seen the Hinch program. He said the police had been telling Bronwyn’s family a heap of [ __ ] and he just wanted them to know what happened. And he said he knew what happened because he had been there. He said he was one of a group of four men in a green and white FB Holden station wagon.

 He said the vehicle came from Red Bluff, and he told the constable who owned it. Then he named the others, a man he called Puppy Newman, a man he called Brownie, and a man he called Max or Reg Martin. He said he had been 14 at the time and that he and Newman had watched but taken no part. About 15 minutes later he rang back. He wanted to correct one thing.

The wagon wasn’t registered to the man he had named. It was registered to that man’s wife. The calls were traced to a public phone box on Kintore Avenue, Murray Bridge. Nobody was waiting there by the time anybody thought to look. Police in 1989 treated that call exactly as anybody would.

 It was the first real break anybody had had. The caller had put himself at the scene. He had named names. He had described a vehicle in a level of detail that only somebody who had been in it could give. Within months the investigation had a shape it had never had before. Jeffrey Brown, the man the caller called Brownie, had been Bronwyn’s boyfriend.

The relationship had ended before she died, and he had not taken it well. He had harassed her afterwards. According to a family statement, he had said the words Bronny, you’re going to die. To detectives in 1990, that was the case. An obsessive ex named by a witness who had been in the car. Brown was charged with murder.

And then it came apart. The committal proceedings ran in 1990, and the witnesses who were supposed to support the account wouldn’t support it. The charge against Brown was withdrawn. In 1993, police charged Ross Eames and Kevin Newman with concealing knowledge of a serious offense. That case reached trial, and the judge directed the jury to acquit.

Three prosecutions, nothing. There is a reason police were so certain for so long that the caller was Ross Eames. It comes down to the second call, and the name he went back to correct. Les and Janice Murphy were Ross Eames’s foster carers. Nobody hands police that trail unless they’re the person at the end of it.

And there was more. Because the caller had said he was 14 years old at the time. And Eames was 14. But the coincidences in this case are almost hard to credit because of when the Murphys first took Eames in. They collected him from the Albury Courthouse on the 12th of October, 1973. The day Bronwyn Richardson was abducted.

The coroner examined all of it, and found he couldn’t have done it. Les Murphy took Eames straight out to the property at Red Bluff, 32 km from Albury. They fed stock from about half past four, which took about two hours. Eames had tea with the Murphys that evening. And Murphy told a committal hearing that Eames couldn’t drive at all, describing him as completely useless, to be blunt.

Murphy had no reason to protect him. He had thrashed the boy over a shoplifting incident and asked him to leave within four months. He called him a bad bugger. That isn’t how a man talks about somebody he’s covering for 17 years later. A 14-year-old who couldn’t drive didn’t steal a car from a property he had never been to, navigate 32 km of country road in the dark, commit a murder, and get it back without anybody noticing.

He was named in that phone call in 1989, charged in 1993, and he stayed on the suspect list until a coroner cleared him in 2021. He was in his 60s by then. The call did something else, and it is the thing that damaged this investigation most. It put that wagon into the middle of the case, and it stayed there for three decades.

The two witnesses who were actually on Smollett Street that night said something different. Stanley Thompson, whose statement was taken seven days after the murder, described an FB Holden that was Tuscan yellow with a Grecian white flash. He said the base color took on a greenish tint under the streetlights, and he thought it was a sedan.

Leach, the man police turned away in 1973, described a yellow four-door Holden sedan. Two witnesses, both said yellow, both preferred sedan. That description came from one place only, which was the anonymous call. The coroner’s finding on this is blunt. She found the stronger view is that a green wagon may not have been used in the abduction at all.

And that this part of the call is to be regarded as false. She noted that a regrettable consequence of the misinformation was that the investigation went looking for a green station wagon when the best objective evidence indicates that wasn’t the color or the type. For 32 years, police were hunting a car that may never have been on Small at Street.

 Subscribe so you don’t miss what a prisoner’s notes finally revealed about that night. In June 2008, the Southern Region Unsolved Homicide Team reopened the case. Detective Sergeant Stephen Morgan took it on. Witnesses along the New South Wales and Victorian border were found and re-interviewed through 2009. In 2010, the reward went from $50,000 to $200,000.

A second inquest ran in November and December 2011. It heard from Ross Eames, who denied in emphatic terms that he had made the call. It heard from the detective who had recorded Eames apparently admitting it. And it heard for the first time from a witness who said Colin Newey had bragged about ringing police to set Eames up and had put a handkerchief over the receiver while he did it.

The 2011 inquest returned an open finding. That’s two inquests 36 years apart and neither one could say who killed her. But something in the 2011 evidence had shifted the investigation’s center of gravity and it had moved off the four names from the phone call entirely. From 1976 onward, one man had given police the same alibi.

 He said that on the weekend Bronwyn died, he had been away on an army bivouac with the 8th/13th Victorian Mounted Rifles out at the Chiltern State Forest. He said he’d worn his army uniform all that day. He was so confident about it that in a later interview he invited investigators to go and find the regimental records. Every part of it fell over.

He had been at a house at 512 George Street, Albury on the evening of the 12th of October and he admitted leaving there at about 7:00. Bronwyn was abducted about a quarter past. He was in Albury the next day, too. His sister Rosemary had a birthday party on the Saturday and his brother Peter remembered it because he rode his brother’s motorbike around the backyard with his plastered broken leg propped up over the handlebars.

Nobody gets weekend leave from a bivouac for a teenage sister’s birthday. Then, the uniform. A witness who was there was absolutely certain he wasn’t wearing one and said he’d never seen him in one at all. And this man had been at court that morning on firearms charges. The officer in charge pointed out that turning up to court in military uniform would have been a serious breach of army regulations.

There’s one more thing and it’s the pattern that gives it away. In 1976 he told police he hadn’t seen Bronwyn for a week before she vanished. In every single account he gave from 1990 onward, he admitted he had seen her and spoken to her on the day she was taken. Over four decades, his story moved him steadily closer to her.

Colin Newey, Bronwyn Richardson’s second cousin. He had grown up in the same small communities, on the same stretch of the Murray and he had known her since she was born. On the afternoon of the 12th of October 1973, he was at Coles, where he asked her to have dinner with him that evening.

 That made him one of the last people to see her alive, and he didn’t tell anybody in 1973 or in 1976 when police first spoke to him. In 2014, Colin Newey was arrested in South Australia, extradited, and charged with Bronwyn’s abduction, sexual assault, and murder. He was held on remand at Parklea Correctional Centre. While he was there, he talked to another inmate.

That man can only be identified as Witness M, and in February 2018, he walked into State Crime Command and told them what Newey had said. He said Newey told him Bronwyn had got into the car willingly, that she’d changed her clothes first, that they went to a place near the water, and were there for an hour, maybe two, and that she was skipping stones, that he walked off to have a leak, that when they came back to the car, he grabbed her, that she screamed, that he pulled at her clothes, took her by the neck, and hit her backhanded

across the face. He described it as giving her a couple of clips. He said she was already dead when he put her in the water. Witness M had taken notes. He had also asked Newey what color the car was, and Newey had pointed at a towel to show him. Witness M cut a piece out of that towel and handed it to police. The coroner called this the most compelling new evidence in the inquest.

She also said plainly what was wrong with it. Witness M was a serving prisoner who might be after a sentence reduction or a share of a million-dollar reward or both. The coroner named a second man. Maxwell Martin was released from Goulburn Gaol on the morning of the 12th of October 1973. He always said he’d gone straight home to his parents at Wagga Wagga and was never in Albury that day.

The evidence against that is substantial. Multiple people put him at the George Street house that evening with Newey. Newey himself put Martin with him at Coles that afternoon and several accounts put him at the birthday party the next day. Then there’s what he said in 1990. Interviewed by police, Martin denied any association with the Newey brothers.

Peter Newey had been the best man at Martin’s wedding. The coroner treated that denial as what it looks like, which is consciousness of guilt. Maxwell Martin was never charged with anything to do with Bronwyn Richardson. He died in 1995, 26 years before anybody in authority said out loud that he had been there.

A television series called Murder, Lies and Alibis broadcast an episode on the case in July 2019. By then the reward stood at a million dollars and a third inquest had been set down. And that inquest ran into a problem the coroner returns to again and again in her findings. The witness who described Newey bragging about the phone call gave a fuller and more dramatic account after appearing on the program, including details she’d never mentioned in 2011.

 Another witness identified a suspect from images shown to him off a laptop, which had come from the program. Witness M’s later accounts diverged from his first one. The coroner found the 2019 program had a contaminating effect on the recollection of important witnesses and she said so repeatedly. There are two television programs in this story.

 The first in 1989 put a name on screen and the killer picked up a telephone the next day and gave police four names. Three of those men had nothing to do [music] with it. The fourth was the man who had been with him. The second program, 30 years later, degraded the memories of the people who might have helped sort one from the other.

Deputy State Coroner Carmel Forbes delivered her findings in Albury Local Court on the 25th of October 2021. They ran to 86 pages. She found that Bronwyn Richardson died on the 12th or 13th of October 1973 after being abducted and then physically and sexually assaulted by a group of men.

 The cause was a combination of pressure to the neck and drowning. She found, on the balance of probabilities, that Colin Newey made the anonymous calls to Murray Bridge Police Station in 1989. She found that Colin Newey had some involvement in the abduction, assault, and death and that Maxwell Martin did too, though the evidence didn’t allow her to say what either man’s precise role was.

 She found that Ross Eames wasn’t involved at all. She found it extremely unlikely that Jeffrey Brown was involved and set out the timings that made it so. He was at a farm until 6:00 at the Walla Walla Hotel until half past and at the Barooga Hotel by 10 past 8:00. He also had no way of knowing where Bronwyn was that evening. On Kevin Newman, she found the evidence didn’t permit a finding either way.

Colin Newey died in 2019, 4 years after the charges against him were dropped without explanation. Maxwell Martin died in 1995. Kevin Newman is also dead. Nobody has ever been convicted of anything. Four men were charged across three decades and every single case fell over before a jury could hear it. A coronial finding is not a verdict.

It’s made on the balance of probabilities, not beyond reasonable doubt, and it can’t send anybody anywhere. It’s a public record and that’s all it is. For the Richardson family, it’s also the only answer they’re ever going to get. Noel said they could never put rest and peace on the headstone until somebody was held responsible for what happened.

Nobody ever was. What’s left is a wristwatch. It stopped at 7:26 on a Friday evening in October 1973 with grit in its works on a riverbank 6 km from a lit footpath where a 17-year-old had been standing at a car window talking to somebody she knew. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments.

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