Melbourne 1977 Cold Case – Arrest Shocks Community 

The family of murdered beauty queen Brahman Richardson is hoping a new million-dollar reward will help find her killer almost half a century on. The 17-year-old was abducted near the Victoria border, raped and dumped in the Murray River. Police believe they know who did it, but desperately need witnesses to come forward.

 On Friday the 12th of October 1973, a 17-year-old girl finished her shift at Kohl’s in Alb and started walking towards St. Patrick’s Church on Smalllet Street where she was due to catch a lift home. It wasn’t a lonely walk. Smalllet Street ran through the middle of a working regional city, shopfronts, a church, a hotel doing steady Friday night trade a few doors down.

 Between 6:00 and 7 that evening, several people walked past her and noticed nothing at all. A girl waiting for a ride home was the most ordinary thing happening on that street. At around a quart 7, that changed. A passer by saw her standing at the driver’s door of a car, leaning in, talking easily to the two men inside.

 It didn’t look like trouble. It looked like a conversation with someone she knew. Minutes later, a second man driving past saw a car pull away from the curb hard enough that he thought for a second it had gone out of control. He would say a young woman was forced inside it and that in the instant before the door shut, she looked at the person behind the wheel and said four words that would sit at the center of this case for the next 50 years. Oh, it’s you.

 She wasn’t afraid of a stranger. She knew him. Nobody would see Brunwin Richardson alive again. Her body was found 2 days later in a lagoon 6 km outside town. on her wrist. Investigators found the one piece of evidence in this case that could never be intimidated, coached, or worn down by the decades that followed. A stopped watch.

 It read 7:26, 11 minutes after that car pulled away from Smalllet Street. Whatever happened to Bronwin Richardson, it happened fast, and it happened somewhere that would keep its secrets for almost 50 years. The first man to see her that evening, the one who watched her talking calmly at the car door, gave a statement to police a week later on the 19th of October, 1973.

His name was Stanley Thompson, and he was able to fix the time with unusual precision. He remembered exactly what had been on television when he walked past. It’s the closest thing this case has to a contemporaneous account, and there’s a detail in it that matters more than almost anything else that follows.

Whatever was happening at that car window at quarter 7, Bronwin wasn’t struggling. She wasn’t calling out. She was talking. 11 minutes later, she was gone. That watch was more than a time stamp. When it was examined, investigators found it hadn’t simply run down. It was still half wound. Something abrasive had jammed the mechanism from the inside.

 The watch itself was recovered loose on the bank of Horseshoe Lagoon. The band it was fastened to was still around Bronwin’s wrist. Between a lit street in the middle of a city and a riverbank 6 km away, 11 minutes had passed, and by 7:26, there was already enough force being used against her that a watch had been torn from its band and ground into the dirt.

 She didn’t die then. The autopsy was consistent with an assault that continued for a long time afterward, and a coroner would eventually find that Bronwin likely died later, possibly in the early hours of the following morning. Which means those 11 minutes weren’t how long she had left. They were 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 into the open. It’s a car that was already waiting. a driver who knew exactly which road to take and a 17-year-old girl who until the last possible second had no idea she needed to run. Brunwin Anne Richardson was from Coroa about an hour west of Albry on the Murray River.

 She’d been crowned Cora’s showgirl. She had a job at Kohl’s, a father named Stan, a mother named Noel, and five brothers and sisters. That’s close to all there is. No career to describe, no marriage, no decades of a life for anyone to comb through looking for a motive. She had finished a shift and was waiting for a lift home.

 Almost everything the world would ever know about Brunwin Richardson comes from the fact that she never made it there. She was found on Sunday the 14th of October in the water at Horseshoe Lagoon, a stretch of the Murray out past the edge of Aubry through farmland. Nobody has a reason to be driving at night. She had been physically and sexually assaulted.

 The post-mortem gave two causes of death, not one. Pressure to her neck and drowning. In the coldest possible terms, that means whatever was done to her neck didn’t finish her. The water did. The first inquest was held on the 18th of March, 1975. It found that Bronwin had died from strangulation and drowning.

 It didn’t name anyone. No charges followed. And that’s despite police already having a great deal to work with, a girl taken off a main street in the early evening, a body 6 km away, injuries suggesting more than one attacker, a witness who watched her talking, and a watch that fixed the exact minute everything changed. None of it produced an arrest.

There’s a second failure from that same period, and it’s one a coroner would single out nearly 50 years later, one that gets harder to excuse once you already know what that second witness saw. The man who watched Bronwin forced into a car. The man who heard her say, “Oh, it’s you.” Tried to give police a statement in 1973. He was turned away.

Officers told him they didn’t feel the need to take it. His name was Wayne Leech, and it would be 36 years before anyone in an official capacity wrote down what he’d seen that night. A coroner would later find there was no satisfactory explanation for why police faced with an apparent eyewitness to an abduction chose not to ask him a single follow-up question.

 From the night she disappeared, 16 years passed without a single arrest. Brunwin’s family stayed in the same district and got older around a question nobody could answer. Her father, Stan, developed cancer in the years that followed and died without ever learning 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 program hosted by the journalist Darren Hinch aired in both South Australia and New South Wales. It covered Brunwin’s unsolved killing and raised an entirely different name. Raymond Edmunds, a serial rapist known publicly as Mr. Stinky, who would go on to be convicted of murdering two teenagers in Sheperton.

but hadn’t yet been caught when this program went to air. Putting his name next to Bronwin’s case was a reasonable thing for a current affairs program to do in 1989. It also turned out to be the single most consequential broadcast in the entire history of this case because somebody was watching it in a house in South Australia, a long way from anyone still looking for him.

 At around 12:23 the following afternoon, the 10th of October 1989, Constable Paul Friend answered the phone at Murray Bridge Police Station. The caller wouldn’t give his name. He said he’d seen the Hinch program the night before, that police had been telling Brunwin’s family a heap of lies and that he wanted them to know what actually happened because he’d been there.

 He said he was one of four men in a green and white FB Holden station wagon that had come from Red Bluff. and he named the man he said owned it. Then he gave up three more names. A man he called Puppy Newman, Kevin Newman. A man he called Brownie, Jeffrey Brown, and a man he called Max or Rege Martin, Maxwell Martin. He’d been 14 at the time, he said, and he and Newman had watched but taken no part in what happened.

 About 15 minutes later, he called back. He had one correction to make. The wagon wasn’t registered to the man he’d named. It was registered to that man’s wife. The call was traced to a public phone box on Kinto Avenue, Murray Bridge. By the time anyone thought to check it, there was no one there. But police in 1989 treated the call exactly as anyone would have.

 It was the first real break this investigation had ever had. The caller had put himself inside the vehicle. He’d named four people. He described a car with a level of detail that only someone who’d actually been in it seemed likely to know. Within months, this case had a shape it had never had before. Jeffrey Brownie had been Bronwin’s boyfriend before the relationship ended, and he hadn’t taken it well. He’d harassed her afterward.

According to a family statement, he’d told her, “Brawny, you’re going to die.” To detectives working the case in 1990, that was enough to build a theory around an obsessive ex-boyfriend named by a witness who claimed to have been in the car with him. Brown was charged with murder. Then it came apart. The committal proceedings ran through 1990 and the witnesses expected to support the account wouldn’t support it.

 The charge against Brown was withdrawn. In 1993, police tried again, charging Ross Emmes 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 to show for any of them. There’s a reason police were so certain for so long that the anonymous caller was Ross Emmes and it comes down to that second call and the name he went back to correct.

 Les and Janice Murphy were Emmes’s foster carers. Nobody hands police that kind of detail unless they’re the person who’d know it. And there was more. The caller said he’d been 14 at the time. Emmes was 14. But the coincidences in this case go further than that to the point where they’re almost hard to credit. The Murphy’s had taken Emmes in on exactly one day, the 12th of October, 1973.

 The same day Bronwin was abducted. They’d collected him that afternoon from the Aubry courthouse. It should have been the strongest lead police ever had. It fell apart almost as completely as it had come together. Less Murphy drove E straight out to the family’s property at Red Bluff, 32 km from Aubry, in his work truck, not a car, according to multiple accounts of that day.

 From around 4, the two of them fed stock, a job that took roughly two hours. Emmes had tea with the Murphy’s that evening. And when the case eventually reached a committal hearing, Murphy testified that Emmes couldn’t drive at all, describing him bluntly as completely useless. Murphy had no reason left to protect him by then.

 He’d thrashed the boy over a shoplifting incident and asked him to leave within 4 months of taking him in. He called him, in his own words, a bad bugger. That isn’t how a man talks about someone he’s covering for 17 years later. A 14-year-old who couldn’t drive didn’t steal a car from a property he’d never set foot on before, navigate 32 km of unfamiliar country road in the dark, commit a murder, and return the car without anyone at the house noticing that he and the vehicle were both missing.

 Rosses was named in a phone call in 1989, charged in 1993, and stayed on a suspect list for another three decades until a coroner finally cleared him in 2021. He was in his 60s by then. That anonymous call did one more thing, and it’s the thing that damaged this investigation the most. It put a specific vehicle at the center of the case and kept it there for 30 years.

Both of the men who were actually on Smlet Street that Friday night described something different. Stanley Thompson in his statement a week after the murder described an FB Holden. He thought a sedan painted Tuscan yellow with a Grecian white flash, though he noted the base color took on a greenish tint under the street lights.

 Wayne Leech, the man police turned away in 1973. The man who watched Brunwin forced into that car, described a yellow four-door Holden sedan. two witnesses, two independent accounts, both yellow, both a sedan. That description of a green station wagon came from exactly one place, the anonymous caller. A coroner would eventually find that the stronger view was that a green station wagon may never have been used in the abduction at all, and that this specific part of the 1989 call should be treated as false.

 For 32 years, police searched for a car that likely never existed on Smalllet Street. while the two men who’d actually stood on that footpath had been describing something else from the very beginning. 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 investigation. Detective Sergeant Steven Morgan took it on. Witnesses on both sides of the New South Wales Victoria border were tracked down and reintered through 2009. In 2010, the reward jumped from $50,000 to $200,000. A second inquest ran in November and December of 2011.

 Ross Emmes took the stand and denied in the strongest possible terms ever making that call. The detective who’d originally recorded him apparently admitting to it, gave evidence, too. And for the first time, a new witness came forward to say she’d heard Colin Nui brag about ringing police to set Emmes up and that he’d used a handkerchief over the receiver while he did it.

 The 2011 inquest returned an open finding. Two inquests, 36 years apart, and neither one could say who had killed Brunwin Richardson. But something in the 2011 evidence had shifted the entire investigation center of gravity, and it had moved finally off the four names from that 1989 phone call.

 Since 1976, one man had given police the same alibi every time he was asked. He said that on the weekend Bronwin died, he’d been away with the 8th 13th Victorianmounted rifles on an army bivwak at the Chilton State Forest. He said he’d worn his uniform all that day. He was confident enough about it that in a later interview, he told investigators to go and check the regimental records themselves.

 Every part of it started to fall over. He’d actually been at a house on George Street in Aubry that evening and admitted to leaving there at around 7:00 p.m. Writers Brun was being taken a few streets away. He was still in Aubry the next day, too. His sister Rosemary had a birthday party on the Saturday, and his own brother, Peter, remembered it in vivid detail because he’d ridden his brother’s motorbike around the backyard with his freshly broken, plastered leg propped up over the handlebars.

 Nobody gets granted weekend leave from an army bivowwak to attend a teenage sister’s birthday party. Then there was the uniform. A witness who was there that afternoon was absolutely certain he hadn’t been wearing one and said he’d never seen him in one at all. That same morning, before any of this, he’d been in court on firearms charges.

 Turning up to a courtroom in military dress would have been a serious breach of army regulations at the time. There’s one more detail, and it’s the one that gives the whole story away. In 1976, he told police he hadn’t seen Brunwin for a full week before she disappeared. In every account he gave from 1990 onward, he admitted he had seen her and spoken to her on the very day she was taken.

 Over four decades, his own story kept moving him closer and closer to her. His name was Colin Nui, Brunwin Richardson’s second cousin. He’d grown up in the same small communities along the same stretch of the Murray and had known her since she was born. On the afternoon of the 12th of October 1973, he was at Kohl’s 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 never told a single investigator. Not in 1973, not when police first spoke to him in 1976. In 2014, Colin Nui was arrested in South Australia, extradited to New South Wales and charged with Brunwin’s abduction, sexual assault, and murder. He was held on remand at Parkle Correctional Center, and while he was there, he talked to another inmate, a man who can only be identified today as Witness M.

 In February 2018, witness M walked into state crime command and told investigators what Newui had said to him. He said Newi told him Bronwin had gotten into the car willingly, that she’d changed her clothes first, and that they’d driven to a place near the water where they stayed for an hour, maybe two.

 He said Newi described her skipping stones at the water’s edge. He said Newi walked off for a moment, and when he came back to the car, he grabbed her. She screamed. He tore at her clothes, took her by the neck, and struck her. What Newi himself apparently called a couple of clips. By the time he put her in the water, Nui told him, she was already dead.

 Witness M had taken notes during these conversations. He’d also asked Nui what color the car had been, and Nui, unable or unwilling to say it out loud, pointed at a towel to show him. Witness M cut a swatch from that towel and handed it to investigators. A coroner would go on to call this the most compelling new evidence in the entire inquest.

 She’d also say just as plainly, “What was wrong with it?” Witness M was a serving prisoner, and there was now a reward worth a great deal more than $200,000, plus the possibility of a shorter sentence, riding on how useful his information turned out to be. His earliest account, the one he gave before his own case was tied to anything more than a quiet conversation with police, would hold up well under scrutiny.

 It was what came later after everything changed that investigators would come to trust far less. There was a second name the coroner examined just as closely. Maxwell Martin had been released from Goldale on the very morning of the 12th of October, 1973. He always maintained he’d gone straight home to his parents in Waga Waga and was never in Aubry that day.

 The evidence against that account is substantial. Multiple people placed him at that same George Street house that evening alongside Colin Nui. Nui himself put Martin with him at Coohl’s that same afternoon. Several accounts placed him at the birthday party the next day, too. Then there was what Martin said in 1990. Interviewed by police, he denied any association with the NewI brothers whatsoever, despite the fact that Peter Nui had been the best man at Martin’s wedding.

 A coroner would later treat that denial for exactly what it looked like, consciousness of guilt. Maxwell Martin was never charged with anything connected to Brunwin Richardson’s death. He died in 1995, 26 years before anyone in a position of authority said out loud and on the record that he’d been there that night.

 By July 2019, the story had a new complication. A two-part television series called Murder, Lies, and Alib on the case, by which time the reward had climbed to a full million dollars, and a third inquest had already been set down. That inquest ran directly into a problem the coroner would return to again and again in her findings. The witness who described Nui bragging about the phone call gave a fuller, more dramatic account after the program aired, one that included details she’d never mentioned back in 2011.

 Another witness identified a suspect from photographs shown to him on a laptop taken directly from the broadcast. And just as it had with that witness, witness M’s own later accounts of what Newui had told him in prison began to diverge from what he’d first said in 2018, growing more detailed and more certain in ways that lined up a little too neatly with what had since aired on television.

 There are two broadcasts at the heart of this story. The first in 1989 put a name on a screen and the next day someone who knew exactly what had happened to Brunwin Richardson picked up a phone and gave police four names. Three of them turned out to have nothing to do with it. Only one was the man who’d actually been there.

 The second broadcast 30 years later did the opposite. It didn’t produce new truth. It contaminated the memories of the very people who might have been able to help sort one from the other. and a coroner would say so in her findings more than once. Deputy state coroner Carmel Forbes delivered those findings at Albury local court on the 25th of October 2021.

 They ran to 86 pages. She found that Brunwin 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 of death was a combination of pressure to her neck and drowning. On the balance of probabilities, she found that Colin Nui had made the anonymous calls to Murray Bridge Police Station in 1989.

 She found that Nui had some involvement in Brunwin’s abduction, assault, and death, and that Maxwell Martin did too, though the evidence didn’t allow her to say precisely what either man’s role had been. She found that Ross Emmes had no involvement at all. She found it extremely unlikely that Jeffrey Brown was involved and laid out the exact timings that made it so.

 He’d been at a farm until 6:00, at the Walawala Hotel until at the Burham Butk 8 with no way of knowing that evening where Bronwin even was on Kevin Newman. She found the evidence simply didn’t permit a finding either way. Colin Nui died in 2019, four years after the charges against him were dropped without any explanation ever given.

 Maxwell Martin had died in 1995. Kevin Newman is also dead. Nobody has ever been convicted of anything. Four men were charged across three separate decades, and every single case collapsed before a jury ever had the chance to hear it. A coronial finding isn’t a verdict. It’s reached on the balance of probabilities, not beyond reasonable doubt, and it can’t send anyone anywhere.

 It’s a public record, and for the Richardson family, it’s also the only answer they will ever officially receive. Brunwin’s mother, Noel, said once that they could never put rest and peace on her daughter’s headstone until somebody was held responsible for what happened to her. Nobody ever was. What’s left in the end is a wristwatch.

 It stopped at 7:26 on a Friday evening in October 1973 with grit ground into its works on a riverbank 6 km from a lit footpath where a 17-year-old girl had been standing at a car window talking to somebody she knew. If this case has stayed with you, say so in the comments. There are more cases like it in the