New South Wales 2003 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

Teresa Binge was aged 43 at the time of her murder. She was last seen on midday Friday the 18th of July at the O’Shea Royal Hotel. On the afternoon of Tuesday, the 29th of July 2003, a road crew working along the Mungindi Goondiwindi Bridge Road in northern New South Wales found a body in a drainage culvert beneath the road.

 The culvert was a concrete pipe set into the earth under the bitumen, about 12 km south of the Queensland border. The road ran through flat farmland with no houses in any direction. The body belonged to a woman who had been severely beaten. Her name was Teresa Binge and she was 43 years old.

 She had been missing for 11 days. Queensland police had been searching one side of the state line. Her body turned up on the other. The homicide went to a regional New South Wales station 115 km south. People in the community already know the name of the man last seen walking with her. They’ve known for 22 years. Nobody has been charged until now.

Teresa Binge was a Gomeroi woman from Boggabilla, a small town of about 530 people on the McIntyre River just across the border from Queensland. She was a mother of three and a grandmother. Her sister Lilly was also from the town. People in Boggabilla knew her as gentle, someone who got along with everyone in town.

 Her daughter Daylene called her real loved, happy-go-lucky. On Friday the 18th of July 2003, Teresa was seen at the O’Shea’s Royal Hotel in Goondiwindi, Queensland around midday. Goondiwindi sits just over the river from Boggabilla. The two towns are about 9 km apart connected by the Newell Highway. For the Aboriginal community on the New South Wales side, Goondiwindi is where you go to shop, drink, and visit friends.

Crossing the state line is part of daily life. Teresa was wearing a black and yellow horizontal striped football jersey, silver track pants, and white running shoes. She left the hotel with a local man. They were seen walking together, the man carrying alcohol heading toward his home. That was the last anyone could say where Teresa was.

After she walked away from that hotel with him, nobody in Boggabilla or Goondiwindi saw her over the weekend. 3 days later, on Monday the 21st of July, her family reported her missing to Queensland police. They hadn’t heard from her since Friday. In a community that small where people run into each other at the shops and along the main road, 3 days of silence from a woman everyone knew was enough to raise alarm.

 Her family picked up the phone. Queensland police opened a missing person file and began asking around Goondiwindi. Officers spoke with people who had been at the hotel on Friday. They interviewed the man she had left with. He told them Teresa had walked out of his home and gone on her way. None of those early inquiries led anywhere.

 The family searched, too, asking everyone who might have seen her. For the next 8 days, officers kept searching but turned up nothing. There were no sightings in any of the surrounding communities, no bank activity, no phone contact. Teresa hadn’t shown up at any family member’s home or at the Aboriginal Medical Service in town.

 Then on the 29th of July, 11 days after she was last seen, the road crew found her. The road there had once been called Boomi Road. There were no businesses along it, no destinations at the end, no reason for anyone to walk that stretch. Forensic evidence confirmed she had been killed somewhere else. There were signs of a sustained beat.

Her clothes weren’t as they had been when she walked out of the hotel. The track pants were bunched at her ankle and one shoe was still on her foot. The culvert was a dumping ground, not a crime scene. Whoever killed her had done it somewhere closer in, in Goondiwindi or Boggabilla or nearby, and driven her body out to a place where nobody would see it from the road.

Finding a body in one state when the missing person report sits in another creates immediate problems. Queensland had been handling the search. Now that the location fell inside New South Wales, the murder investigation moved to New South Wales police. The nearest station with major crime resources sat in Moree, 115 km south of Boggabilla.

Moree covered a vast stretch of northern New South Wales, including all the border towns. Officers there were used to driving long distances. The Barwon local area command out of Moree set up Strike Force Flare to handle the murder. A detective inspector named Greg Lamey took charge. The witnesses were in Queensland.

The body was in New South Wales. The forensic labs were further south again. From Moree, Lamey began the long process of piecing together what had happened to Teresa between the Friday afternoon she was last seen and the Tuesday her body turned up. One regional strike force, two state jurisdictions, no specialists on the way from Sydney.

Lamey walked into a situation that was already tangled. Witnesses, possible suspects, and Teresa’s relatives were spread across both sides of the state line. For the people living there, the border was invisible. For the detective trying to build a prosecution, it created barriers at every step. The community where she had lived and done presented its own difficulties.

Boggabilla and the nearby Aboriginal settlement of Toomelah had dealt with decades of neglect from government agencies. A 1988 report on Toomelah had found no household water supply, no sewerage, and 80% unemployment. Conditions had improved since then, but the relationship between Aboriginal residents and authorities in the region remained strained.

Asking people to come forward and cooperate with a murder probe took trust between the community and the police, and that trust wasn’t there. Lamey also had to deal with the practical reality of working out of a station hours from the crime scene. The nearest forensic labs were further still.

 For a murder investigation with a limited window for gathering witness accounts, the distance slowed everything down. Lamey pushed forward anyway. Rumors about who was responsible had been moving through Boggabilla and Goondiwindi since the day her body was discovered. The man she had walked away from the hotel with had a name, and her daughter Dayleen Barlow later told reporters his name was mentioned from day dot.

Theresa had been a 43-year-old grandmother. The rumors moving through town were about her. Rumor and evidence are not the same thing. Lamey needed forensic analysis linking a suspect to the crime, witness statements solid enough to survive cross-examination, and backing from the New South Wales Homicide Branch in Sydney.

Lamey later told NIT he had received little to no support from the Homicide Branch. He said the investigation had been complex from day one and that he’d been left to run it on his own. One detective was trying to build a murder prosecution in a remote border town across two state jurisdictions in a community with deep reasons to distrust law enforcement.

The strike force identified persons of interest and tips kept coming in with names attached. But without the resources to build it, the investigation stalled before they could charge anyone. The file stayed open, but nobody was arrested or prosecuted. Months became years. The man people in town named stayed where he was.

 People in Boggabilla and Goondiwindi saw him around. That was as far as anything went. In July 2006, 3 years after Teresa’s death, more than 100 members of her family and friends gathered in Boggabilla for a rally. Heavy rain that morning forced the cancellation of a planned march and a change of venue, but the numbers didn’t drop. Photographs of Teresa were on t-shirts and posters carried through the crowd of family, friends, and supporters.

Whether it rained or snowed, Teresa’s sister Lilly Bing told reporters they would keep coming until they knew the truth. Some at the rally asked why police hadn’t done a DNA screen of local men, and others spoke openly of their anger at what they saw as a lack of communication from police. The investigator handling the case said DNA wasn’t going to be the answer here.

“There’s a lot of gossip, Lily said, but gossip’s no good. What the family was asking for was an inquest. By the time the coronial inquest was finally held, 4 years had passed since Teresa’s death. The proceedings began in 2007, and the hearings ran in Moree through 2008. Deputy State Coroner Jacqueline Milledge heard testimony from the officers who had worked the investigation, examined the forensic material, and reviewed the available evidence.

On February 4th, 2009, she handed down her formal finding at the New South Wales Coroner’s Court at Glebe in Sydney. Teresa’s manner of death was homicide by an unknown person or persons. Milledge referred the file to the New South Wales Police Cold Case Squad, and asked them to report back on their progress twice a year.

She noted that the inquest could be reopened if new evidence emerged. Beyond the finding itself, Milledge made two formal recommendations. The first was that the New South Wales government urgently work on legislation, and negotiate with other states to let the New South Wales Police Force operate effectively in border towns regardless of the state line.

Her reason was sitting in the file in front of her. A border town crime had crossed jurisdictions, and the investigation had failed at the seams. The second recommendation was that Aboriginal communities, particularly remote communities in New South Wales, should get prompt professional counseling and victim support after a death like Teresa’s.

Boggabilla wasn’t a town with those services on standby. The family had been left to carry the loss largely on their own. The New South Wales Attorney General agreed to the first recommendation. New South Wales signed on to the national model laws on cross-border investigative powers through the Standing Committee of Attorneys General.

The legislation moved forward. The framework changed. But for the file that had prompted the recommendation in the first place, nothing changed. Nobody had been prosecuted for Teresa’s murder, and her family didn’t hear a word from the cold case squad about the twice-yearly reports the coroner had asked for.

Those reports were supposed to keep the file moving. The family never saw one. That same year, the New South Wales and Queensland governments jointly announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. The reward was publicized through the usual channels, with a page posted on the New South Wales Police website listing the details of the crime.

After the inquest, the file was transferred to the State Crime Command’s Unsolved Homicide Team, which took it on with a new name, Strike Force Flares 2. For the family, the transfer brought little comfort. The operation moved from a regional command that at least knew the town to a cold case unit headquartered in Sydney, more than 600 km south.

Everyone who knew Teresa, who heard the rumors and the names, was in Boggabilla, not in Sydney. The rewards page directed anyone with information to contact the Barwon Local Area Command. Between 2017 and 2018, New South Wales Police phased out local area commands entirely and restructured into Police Area Commands.

The Barwon Command was gone. For years after the restructure, the link on the rewards page for Teresa’s murder led to a restricted login screen the public couldn’t access. Anyone following the official instructions for reporting a tip hit a dead end before they could start. The file itself sat in the unsolved homicide team’s queue in Sydney.

Reviews happened periodically. New detectives inherited the case from old ones and reread the names from the original strike force material. But no review led to charges. No review brought a detective back to Boggabilla to walk the town. And no review picked up the phone to tell the family what was being done.

Inside the family, more than a decade went by. Then more than two. The grandchildren grew older and Teresa would have been 65 in 2025. Nothing happened to him. Teresa’s daughter, Daylene Barlow, lives in Moree, about 90 minutes south of Goondiwindi. She had children of her own now and a life she was trying to live in the gap her mother had left.

 Daylene said her mother was harmless and quiet, well-known in Boggabilla. “She didn’t do anything to anyone,” she told NITV. “People in town checked in on her and when she stopped appearing, it was noticed inside a day.” More than 43% of Boggabilla identifies as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal families there go back generations.

 An unresolved death in a place that’s small doesn’t get forgotten. Information moved through the community at family gatherings, at the shops, after funerals. People pulled Daylene aside with what they had heard. Each time the family took it to investigators. What the family got back was silence. Daylene began to feel like the information was going into a drawer and staying there.

By 2023, her family hadn’t heard from the investigating team in nearly 7 years. That July, on the 20th anniversary of Teresa’s death, Daylene and her relatives traveled to Sydney and staged a protest at the Law Courts Building. Calling on police to reopen the investigation, they pressed ochre handprints onto the glass facade and held up a banner that read “Justice for Teresa B”.

Teresa’s grandchildren stood alongside the adults with their fists raised. Daylene told reporters the family wanted answers and that 20 years on the case was shattering them because they couldn’t get any. “It keeps getting swept under the carpet”, she said. “They’re not listening.

” New South Wales Police said in a statement that the family’s recent information would be assessed as part of the ongoing investigation. The protest produced news coverage and statements of concern. It didn’t produce a phone call from the unsolved homicide team. Greg Lamey left the force because of post-traumatic stress. The investigation into Teresa’s murder played a significant role in his decision to walk away.

 He still keeps in touch with the family. In 2023, he spoke publicly about the original case. Lamey told NITV, “If Teresa was a 43-year-old white housewife who lived in Balmain”, he asked, “what would be different?” He didn’t frame it as a hypothetical. He framed it as something he’d watched happen. Boggabilla was a long way from headquarters.

 A Gamilaraay woman found dead in a culvert on a border road didn’t generate the same urgency as a death in a suburb the media could drive to by lunchtime. What Lamey was describing was bigger than a single death. Aboriginal women across Australia have gone missing and turned up dead with responses often slow, under-resourced, or abandoned outright.

Gomeroi woman Gwenda Stanley, an Aboriginal Embassy representative who attended the 2023 protest at the courts, called the police effort in this murder very poor. Missing and murdered Indigenous women have become a national issue in recent years where the 2022 Four Corners report drawing fresh attention. But in 2003, when Teresa died, there was almost no public conversation about the pattern.

In 2018, NITV’s Cold Justice series ran two episodes of its second season on the case. Journalist Allan Clarke retraced Teresa’s final movements, spoke with her family, and examined the failures in how the original investigation had been run. Viewers across Australia heard her name for the first time. The series brought national attention to a file that had been sitting in the unsolved homicide cabinet for 15 years.

The coverage put pressure on the system and gave Daylene a platform to speak on national television about her mother and the failures that followed. But the episodes didn’t lead to charges and the file stayed where it had been. In 2025, a woman approached Daylene with a story she said she had been sitting on for nearly a decade.

Back in 2016, the woman had been traveling from Moree down to Melbourne and she had spent the night at a gathering with locals while waiting for a train. A man at the gathering had been drinking and he had started talking about Teresa’s killing. He mentioned names. The host of the gathering walked over and told the man to shut his mouth.

 He said the man was drunk and was letting too much out. According to the woman, the host physically put his hands around the man’s face to stop him from talking. She held onto that information for 9 years before bringing it to Daylene. 9 years of knowing something and saying nothing until she finally picked up the phone. What the woman described mattered beyond the names themselves.

 She had no connection to Boggabilla. The woman had only passed through Moree once on her way to somewhere else. And what she had heard at that gathering came from outside the local rumor circuit that Daylene’s family had been navigating for years. A drunk stranger naming names in front of an outsider who then got physically silenced for it was a different kind of evidence than what had been moving through the community since 2003.

It was independent. Daylene called the officers handling the file to report the tip. It took 3 days for someone to call her back. The delay matched a pattern the family had been living with for more than two decades. As Daylene put it, because she’s black, who cares? Since day one, she told reporters, a couple of people’s names had got mentioned and they were still out there today.

 Daylene was 45 in 2025. She had been carrying her mother’s case for more than half her life. Detectives changed over the years. Daylene did not. She told NITV the years of silence and uncertainty had taken a toll. “I’ve been going through a lot,” she said. “My depression is back, my anxiety. I’ve been traumatized.” The toll on her mental health, on her ability to move forward with her own life, had been enormous.

All she wanted was closure for her mother, not a public apology, not a press conference, just an answer to the question that had been sitting in her chest since 2003. On November 4th, 2025, detectives from the homicide squad flew to Marie and announced that the reward for information about Teresa’s murder had been raised from $100,000 to $1 million.

 The The tenfold increase put it at the maximum New South Wales typically offers for cold case homicides. Detective Superintendent Joseph Dwayhi, the homicide squad commander, stood next to Daylene outside Moree Police Station. “This is a solvable crime,” Dwayhi said. “We just need someone in the community to come forward.

Step forward. Be brave. Take that step and give us the information that we require.” The team would spend the week in town, he said, going over old lines of inquiry that might need another look. The New South Wales Police Minister Yasmin Catley said in a statement that the renewed appeal was about keeping Teresa Bingley’s memory alive and supporting her family’s long fight for answers.

“For more than 20 years,” Catley said, “Teresa’s loved ones had lived with the pain of not knowing what happened to her.” The family stood beside the investigators that morning. Detectives spent the rest of the week in Moree, Goondiwindi, and the surrounding communities, knocking on doors and handing out flyers in cafes and community centers.

Crime Stoppers deployed a mobile billboard and drove it through the border region between Moree and Goondiwindi, parking it in town centers along the way. The billboard carried Teresa’s name and photo and the Crime Stoppers number, 1-800-333-000. Thousands of people followed a social media page that posted updates on the investigation.

And the announcement traveled there, too. Daylene was the next to speak at the press conference. “We just need answers,” she said. It had been 22 years too long, and she wanted justice for her mother, a sister, an auntie, and grandmother. “Everyone had loved her,” Daylene told reporters.

 “Why did she deserve this?” It had been a roller coaster of emotions for the family. “Her grandkids had grown up by now,” she said, “and they asked her what their grandmother had been like.” The renewed appeal had left her anxious, but she had received a lot of support. The announcement came with something else, too.

 For 22 years, the official New South Wales Police notice about Teresa’s murder had carried the wrong details. It had said she was last seen leaving the Victoria Hotel at Goondiwindi around midnight on June 17th, 2003. The actual hotel was O’Shea’s Royal. The actual time was midday, and the actual date was July 18th.

 A different hotel, a different day, a different time of day, NITV noted in its coverage of the new reward. That the announcement also came with a clarification of earlier details. For more than two decades, the document the public had been reading to help police solve Teresa’s murder had been describing a sighting that had never happened.

The Unsolved Homicide Team doesn’t formally close its files. Strike Force Flares 2 remains active. Detectives look at the material whenever new leads come in. But the gap between the crime and any potential prosecution grows wider every year. Witnesses forget details or move away. Evidence degrades.

 Every year that passes without charges makes the next year harder. As of today, more than 22 years after Teresa was found beaten and left in a drainage culvert beneath a country road, nobody has been charged with her death. The people in Boggabilla and Goondiwindi still talk about what happened. They still say the same names.

Dalyne Barlow is still waiting for someone to pick up the phone. A concrete pipe under a stretch of road between two small towns on the border. Flat country in every direction. Somebody drove Teresa Binge out there on a winter afternoon, left her in that drain, and drove home. Somebody out there knows who. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments.

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