Australia 1999 Cold Case Solved – The Clue Sat in Evidence for 14 Years

Tonight, Francis John Work was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter of teenager Hayley Dodd, but not guilty of her murder.  A 17-year-old girl disappeared two decades ago while walking along a remote road in our wheat belt.  Her family from South Australia desperately begged the killer to finally reveal the location of Hayley’s body.

On the morning of July 29, 1999, a 17-year-old girl was walking east on the North West Road near Bajingarra, about 200 km north of Perth. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder, silver sunglasses, and a pair of earrings she had bought two days earlier at a shop in Dongara. Several people driving along that road saw her between 11:00 and 11:35 that morning.

The last of them passed her at 11:35 , she was still heading east.  No one has seen Hayley Dodd since then.  Her body was never found.  Over the course of several days, police removed a seat cover from a bus on this road, examined it, and found nothing.  Her mother had walked this road for years , looking for something the police had missed.

  Then, 14 years and 38 days later, the scientist placed the cover face up on a bench and saw the earring.  That was the first thing she noticed.  The Northwest Road runs east of the Brand Highway through the wheat belt, and there is almost nothing on it .  Cleared pastures, wire fences, scattered trees, and that’s not much.

  The view stretches for hundreds of meters in all directions, and it was the detail that was most important to the investigation, because it meant she couldn’t just walk away from it.  This is not a country where people just randomly hide.  There is no ravine here where you can fall.  There is no thick enough brush here to lose a person, and there is no water to cross.

Haley Dodd walked off that road without leaving any scratch marks or any signs of a struggle anywhere on it. Whatever happened, it happened quickly and next to a moving vehicle .  Such a landscape admits only one explanation.  Someone in the vehicle stopped.  This became clear to the detectives within the first week, and it influenced everything they did next.

  They weren’t looking for a girl who got lost.  They were looking for the driver.  Hayley Dodd was 17 years old and from Mandurah, south of Perth. She worked as a part-time worker for a shearing crew from Dongara on the coast, about 350km northwest of the city.  It’s hard physical work in the barns, and she took it on because she wanted to move.

  That’s pretty much all there is.  At her age, there are no long records of adults to look through in search of a cause.  There was no reason. There was a road and a stranger in a car.  On July 29, she was heading to a friend’s farm near Mura. She was hitchhiking, which was common in this part of Western Australia in 1999 .

  The distances are huge.  The towns are tiny, and without a car, anyone could only get somewhere by lift. She called from a roadside eatery in Badgingarry at about half past ten that morning.  Ahead of schedule, she said, and she wasn’t worried about anything .  Maybe her friends hadn’t even returned home yet, because she made it faster than she expected .

  Then some woman gave her a ride to Northwest Road, dropped her off there, and she started walking.  That was the last time anyone was responsible for Hayley Dodd.  From then on, she walked alone along a road with pastures on both sides, doing the usual thing that thousands of people in this part of the state did every week.

  Several people saw her on that road over the next 40 minutes.    It ‘s worth remembering this, because it’s unusual. Most people who go missing do so without witnesses.  Hayley Dodd was seen repeatedly by various drivers during the day on a public road .  This also means that the window is very tight. Investigators did not attempt to explain the disappearance at night.

  They tried to explain the few minutes on the road where she had just been seen by strangers who all remembered her. At 11:35 a.m., the driver passed her for the last time.  By then she was almost all the way to the farm, and everything that happened to Hayley Dodd happened within minutes of that car driving by. She never arrived.

She never called.  Her family reported her disappearance to the police the next day, July 30, 1999.    There was no quarrel at home and no reason to run away.  She told people where she was going and almost got there. Police searched the road and the countryside on either side of it for the first week and found nothing.

  No backpack, no jacket, no sunglasses, nothing fell.  Nothing that caught on the fence. Nothing to indicate where along those miles of open road she had stopped.  What happened next took place in the early weeks, while the case was still in its infancy, as investigators worked to identify every vehicle that had been on Northwest Road that morning.

One of them was a Holden, borrowed that day by a man who lived on a lot in the neighborhood right next to the road where Haley was last seen walking.  He was already a person of interest, and he had been from the beginning.  Not because of anything he did that the police knew about, but because of who he lived with.

  His roommate was a convicted pedophile , and that was enough to put the household on the list.  So, the police did the obvious thing and did it thoroughly .  They conducted a forensic examination of the car he was driving on July 29 and searched his property.  They found nothing.  In 1999, when the case was receiving more attention than ever before, the police seized this very car.

  They took him apart, inspected the property where he lived, and closed the case on both of them.  The seat cover from that car was removed, packaged, registered, and placed in storage.  It was inspected, cleaned, and it was no longer a subject of investigation.  No one else opened the package until Hayley Dodd was 31 years old.

  Subscribe so you don’t miss what a scientist saw the moment she put down that seat cover. The investigation didn’t just hit a dead end.  Someone decided.  After about 2 months without any significant new information, senior police officers downgraded the case. The team that had been working on it full-time in the Wheatbelt was brought back to Perth and the case was moved to what police call the inactive murders list.

Margaret Dodd, Haley’s mother, publicly criticized the decision at the time.  She was effectively told that her daughter’s disappearance was now a case, not an investigation.  It didn’t matter.  There were no more police on the road in Bajangarra , and the case was shelved. Over the following years, the investigation involved about 130 people of interest .

  None of them led to charges being filed, and none of them put Haley in her place.  130. Each of them had to be found, interviewed, and chronologically checked by detectives who were told that this was no longer a real-time investigation.  On August 2, 1999, four days after Haley’s disappearance, her friend Lisa Frederiksson sat down with police and drew the earrings from memory.

  She could have done this because she was standing next to Hayley in the shop in Dongar when she bought them two days before she disappeared.  It was an Egyptian cross, an ankh, with a small blue stone in the middle. Frederiksson told investigators that Haley was wearing them on July 29, and she was sure of it.  This drawing was included in the case during the first week of the investigation and remained there.

  This is what makes the next 14 years difficult to read.  Since August 1999, Western Australian police have kept a photo of exactly what they were looking for.  They also kept the thing itself.  These two items had been lying around in the same organization, in the same city, for 14 years, and no one had put them in the same room.

  The 1990s are over, but things have n’t moved forward. Margaret Dodd gave interview after interview. She put up posters all over Western Australia. She went to Bajingarra herself and followed the path her daughter had taken, looking at the ground.  The family spent their own money on private searches and on clues that the police did not have the resources to follow.

  None of this worked. And the reason is not what anyone might assume.  Margaret Dodd did not fail in her search for evidence.  The evidence has already been found.  It was collected in 1999, catalogued and put in a locker in Perth, and it lay there the whole time she was looking for it on the road .  By 2013, the case had been referred to a judicial inquiry, which occurs when a disappearance has lasted so long that the court is asked to officially determine whether a person is dead.

This is exactly the situation the Dodd family found themselves in.  By 2013, with no arrests and no remains after 14 years, the state had no choice but to declare it out loud.  Before the investigation could be completed, the unsolved cases team reviewed physical evidence from 1999. Among them were items that had already been examined and removed from evidence.

One of them was a seat cover from a Holden ute .  On September 5, 2013, a PathWest forensic expert named Tracy Horner removed it from its sealed paper bag and placed it face up on the examination bench.  She saw a small piece of metal stuck in the woven fabric.  It was an earring, and it matched Lisa Fredrickson’s drawing exactly.

The hook on it was damaged, which happens with an earring that falls out of the ear the wrong way.  Horner later testified about this moment in the Supreme Court, and her description is the part that remains.  She did not describe how she searched for it .  She did not describe how she tore the weave or worked with the fabric under magnification.

  She described taking the case out of her bag, putting it down, and noticing that it was there. That’s how long the earring was in police custody before anyone saw it.  The difference between 1999 and 2013 was not a car that had not yet been invented.  And it wasn’t a database that did n’t exist.  It was a pair of eyes, a judge’s bench, and someone who was willing to look twice.

  Everything else in this case stemmed from that one day in the lab.  Arrest, extradition, two trials, an appeal, an “A” sentence and a change in Western Australian law – all related to a woman who put away an old seat cover correctly. Forensic analysts also re-examined the car itself and found a single strand of hair from the passenger side footwell.

Using a sample taken from a lipstick belonging to Hayley and a control sample from Margaret, analysts concluded that the hair most likely belonged to Hayley Dodd. These are two pieces of evidence, both from the same vehicle, and both were collected in 1999 during the initial investigation, which failed to make anything out of them .

  By 2013, the man driving this car was no longer in Western Australia. He moved to Queensland and by the time detectives arrived to investigate, he was serving a 12-year prison sentence there. Western Australian detectives flew to Townsville to question him about Hayley Dodd.  He denied any involvement.  He told the officers that they were wasting their time.

  And they flew back across the country with only that.  In 2015, while he was still serving his sentence in Queensland, he was charged with the death of Hayley Dodd and extradited back to Western Australia.  Margaret Dodd wrote him a letter.  She asked him to tell her where her daughter was so she could bring her home.

  He never answered her.  And he never answered to anyone else in the family.  Every year since then, it has remained the same.  Not a single letter, not a single message through the lawyer, not a single word.  Subscribe so you don’t miss the two trials it took to finally imprison him.  Francis John Work.  In 1999, in his 40s, he lived on an estate off Northwest Road, borrowing his flatmate’s car for fortnightly shopping trips.

  He was on the original list of questionable individuals in 1999. The police searched his car and property that year, then moved on .  He continued to live in the area for many years after that, on the same road.  The sentence he was serving in Queensland was related to something he did in 2007. And that’s why the prosecution stated that this incident was not accidental.

  In 2007, 8 years after Hayley’s disappearance, Walk picked up a 31-year-old woman who was hitchhiking on a remote road in north Queensland.  He took her to his home, where she was physically and sexually abused. The next morning, she escaped and reached a neighbor, who called for help.  He was convicted and given 12 years.

  Compare this to 1999.  A woman alone on a remote road and a man in a vehicle that has stopped. Eight years, hundreds of kilometers have passed between these two events, and the pattern is the same.  At trial in Western Australia, prosecutors presented this conviction to the court as evidence of predisposition, and the trial judge accepted what it showed.

  She found that Walk had a tendency to pick up a lone female hitchhiker and violently and severely assault her so that she could not resist sexual assault.  A woman on this road in Queensland survived because she climbed out the window at dawn.  There is no convenient way to make such a comparison.  She survived.

  She was able to go to the police station and describe the man who did it, which is the only reason there is a record of who he was.  Hayley Dodd was 17 years old, walking down a road with nothing on either side, but she did n’t realize it. The trial lasted 7 weeks in late 2017 before Judge Lindy Jenkins sat alone without a jury.

  This format matters.    There weren’t 12 members of the public who needed convincing.  One judge heard every witness, read every piece of evidence, and then wrote down her arguments, which meant the case had to withstand detailed investigation, not argument.  Prosecutor Amanda Burrows openly told the court that the case was circumstantial.

  She described it as built on four strands, or planks: opportunity, earring, inclination, and DNA in the hair. Taken together, she told the court, there was not a shadow of a doubt that this man killed Hayley Dodd.  None of these four threads was a confession, a witness, or a body.  That is what the circumstances of the case are, and the state has stated it openly, not pretending it is not so.

The defense attacked every thread. Wok’s attorney, Darryl Ryan, raised the issue of storage and handling of the seat cover for 14 years, between 1999 and 2013 .  This is an obvious question that the state should have answered.  He argued that the timeframe was unrealistic, if not impossible, and on the face of it, he had plenty to work with.

The prosecution had time from 11:35 a.m., when the last driver saw Haley, to approximately 1:36 p.m., when it was confirmed that Walk had left the county. Less than 2 hours to stop, kill her, dispose of the body in a country that never gave it back, and get out of the county. The defense called it impossible.

  The state said he knew the area.  And the defense was actually right about the earring. The owner of a shop in Dongar gave evidence that the earrings were mass- produced and very popular.  They were not the only ones of their kind.  Someone else could own the pair.  Volk did not testify at that trial.  He was not obliged to do so, and the court had no right to hold it against him.

  Judge Jenkins found that there was no reasonable possibility that the earring had been in that seat cover before July 29, 1999, or that it belonged to anyone other than Hayley Dodd.  She said she was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Volk picked her up and killed her that day by some unknown means. This phrase has great significance.

  The cause of death was never determined because there was never a body to investigate. Guilty of murder. Life imprisonment with a minimum term of 21 years.  For 2 years, this was the answer, and the Dodd family was told that the case was closed.  In February 2020, the Western Australian Court of Appeal overturned the conviction.

The three judges found that the trial judge erred in law in considering Volk’s alibi by rejecting it for lack of evidence rather than properly weighing it against the state’s case.  The verdict was overturned, and a retrial was ordered .  For the Dodd family, it meant starting all over again, from the beginning. Same hearing, same hair, same 2 hours and same argument that mass- produced jewelry proves nothing.

  Margaret Dodd sat through it all for the second time, 22 years after the morning her daughter walked down that road.    The retrial lasted 7 weeks in early 2021, this time before a jury.  Walk did something he didn’t do in 2017.  He testified and denied under oath that he had anything to do with the disappearance of Haley Dodd.

He said he was shopping in Muri about 50km away when she was last seen.  The jury rejected his version, even though they heard him say it himself .  It was 22 years after Hayley Dodd was last seen on Northwest Road.  With her earring and hair as evidence, he took the witness stand and swore to 12 strangers that he had never met her.

  They deliberated for 11 and a half hours before reaching a verdict. Not guilty of murder, guilty of a lesser crime–unlawful homicide.  The 12-person jury was not convinced that he intended to kill Haley Dodd.  They were convinced that he had killed her.  On April 13, 2021, Judge Stephen Hall sentenced him. Since the crime was committed in 1999, the maximum sentence for manslaughter was 20 years.

  Hall recognized that this murder belonged to the worst category of crimes and imposed 18 such sentences.  This is the longest sentence for manslaughter in Western Australian history.  Six years longer than the previous record .  Hall discovered that Walker lured Haley into a car with the intent to sexually assault her, and attacked her when she resisted.

That is why the verdict is what it is .  He failed to understand the fight, but the goal, which had already been formed before he stopped the vehicle. Margaret Dodd and her daughter Toni read statements to the court about the consequences of the crime while he watched from the dock. Margaret told them that it was impossible to describe the true hell, despair, helplessness, and destruction of the past two decades.

Walker appealed again .  On May 2, 2023, three judges of the Court of Appeal unanimously dismissed all grounds, including his argument that the recognition of the Queensland conviction was a miscarriage of justice. Walker is eligible for parole after 16 years.  Whether he ever gets out of there depends on one thing.

In March 2018, Western Australia passed a law that prohibits parole for a convicted murderer unless he cooperates with police in searching for the victim’s remains. Margaret Dodd fought for this law .  The woman whose daughter was kidnapped in 1999 lobbied parliament for years.  And other states have since adopted their own versions of what she achieved.

  The law was passed in Western Australia because a mother from Mandurah kept asking for it.  And now it extends to every murderer in the state who hides his whereabouts. If Vokl never tells where Haley is, he will serve all 18 years and be released from prison in 2037, at the age of 81.  Since then, he has said nothing through two trials, two appeals, and ten years in prison, with the answer in his head.

  That same month, before the verdict was handed down, the police returned to Bajingarra and spent several days there.  They broke through the concrete under the old water tank, acting on comments Walker made during his own trial about what might be under parts of the property.  They dug up the ground, pulled out concrete slabs, and searched the outbuildings one by one.

  They didn’t find it, but the man himself showed them where to dig.  Whatever he did to Haley Dodd on July 29, 1999, he did it so well that 27 years of searching haven’t ruined it.  This was not the first search in this country, and it will not be the last. Police have repeatedly searched bushland , farmland, and properties associated with Wok for over two decades, and none of them have turned up any remains or anything belonging to him.

  On Tuesday, Hayley Dodd bought a pair of earrings at a shop in Dongar. Her friend drew them from memory four days after her disappearance, and this drawing ended up in the file.  One of the pair ended up in the fabric of a seat cover in a borrowed car, then in a paper bag, then on a shelf in Perth.  She lay there for 14 years and 38 days while her mother traveled to Bajangarra and walked that road in search of something.

  This is the only part of Hayley Dodd’s life that has ever been found.  If this case remains in your memory, leave your thoughts in the comments.  More solved cases in the playlist.