New South Wales 1993 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

For more than 30 years, a family has been searching for answers. Today, finally a breakthrough in the disappearance of Illawarra mother of three, Pauline Sauri. A man in his 60s tonight behind bars.  In early 2023, New South Wales police detectives followed a witness into thick bushland off O’Brien’s Road in Figtree on the Illawarra escarpment.

 A woman had been killed there decades earlier, the witness said, and they led detectives to the spot. From the soil, they pulled a cream-colored blouse and long black trousers, both bloodstained. The blouse was hand-stitched with a colorful design the wearer had added herself. Both items fit a woman of Pauline Sauri’s build, and they had been in the ground since 1994.

No lab could extract DNA from any of it. Almost three decades in the soil had broken down anything biological that had once been on the fabric. The blouse alone proved nothing. But the witness who led police to that hillside said they had been present when she died. Whoever had put her there had been free for almost  30 years.

That was about to change. Pauline Sauri was 49 when she vanished from the northern suburbs of Wollongong in December 1993. She was a mother of three sons. Paul was 27. Jason was 24. And Adam had just turned  18. Pauline had recently divorced and was using both her maiden name, Sauri, and her married name, Lawrence.

 She played Diana Ross and the Eurythmics on vinyl, kept cats,  and made her boys finish their vegetables before leaving the table. In late 1993, Pauline had been living with Jason and his new wife in the Illawarra. Around Christmas time, he met her for lunch at a pub in Warrawong, a few minutes south of Wollongong.

 They talked about the divorce and the chapter she was about to start. She told him she was thinking about where she might live and how she wanted to fill her time. The last movie they had watched together was Beaches, a film about an unbreakable  friendship that ends in goodbye. That afternoon turned out to be the final time they spoke.

After that day, Pauline stopped making contact. She didn’t ring any of her sons or show up at their doors, and nothing arrived from her through any other channel, either. There was also no sign she had left the country, checked into a hospital, or done anything that left a paper trail. Her bank account stayed quiet, and she was simply gone.

For a while, Jason and his brothers tried to believe Pauline had walked away on purpose. It was a painful thought, but it was easier to carry than the alternative. “That’s in the back of your mind that you think that mom may have disappeared, or she walked off, or she met someone, or had gone overseas,” Jason later told reporters.

He sometimes wondered whether she had simply stopped loving them. But Pauline never surfaced. The weeks turned into months, and the months stretched into years, and nobody heard a word from her. In 1994, a single unconfirmed sighting came through. Someone reported seeing Pauline south of Wollongong, traveling in a white 1968 Holden HK Kingswood sedan in pristine condition.

Police looked into it, but could not verify the report. The driver was never identified. No other tips came through, and the trail went cold. In 2008, a coronial inquest in New South Wales examined the full circumstances of the case, 15 years after Pauline disappeared. By that point, the original missing person’s investigation had run out of leads, and a coroner’s review was the next step in the legal process.

The coroner heard evidence from police and reviewed everything that had been gathered up to that point. The finding was that Pauline Sory had died, most likely sometime after the unconfirmed sighting in 1994. The ruling formally changed her classification from missing person to suspected homicide victim.

 The family had a formal finding they could point to when they talked about her publicly. But the inquest went no further than that determination. It produced no suspect. Cause of death, crime scene, motive, none of it had been established. What it gave the family was official confirmation of the thing they had already known in their bones.

After all that time, nobody in the system had been able to tell them how she had ended up that way, where it happened, or who was responsible. The verdict closed the question of whether Pauline was still alive, and left every other question open. The case went quiet after the inquest findings were handed down.

Pauline’s parents grew older in the Illawarra without ever learning what happened to their daughter, and went to their graves not  knowing. The file sat in a police station somewhere in the region, and between 2008 and 2022, there were no public developments at all. The family heard nothing back from investigators, just silence.

 The grief did not stay still. Paul Lawrence, the oldest of the three sons, took his own life, and Adam, the youngest, did the same. Both deaths were connected to the weight of their mother’s disappearance and the decades of uncertainty that came with it. Jason watched his older brother die, and then he watched his younger brother die.

Both lost to the same wound and the same unanswered. When the case finally moved again, 14 years after the inquest, Jason was the only son left to hear the news. His father was still in the Illawarra, aging alone. In 2022, almost three decades after Pauline vanished, New South Wales police formed Strike Force ANTHEA.

A new team led by Detective Senior Constable Scott Nichols of the Homicide Squad was assigned to re-examine every piece of evidence in the case from the beginning. The original investigation had ended without charges and without a body. ANTHEA’s job was to go through all of it with fresh eyes in a region full of long-term missing people whose families were still waiting.

Many of the case files had not been touched in years. The task force had the standing authority to follow leads wherever they pointed. What brought them to the Illawarra escarpment was a new witness. That person had come forward with a detailed account of where Pauline had been killed and gave detectives a location in the bushland at Figtree.

Whatever had kept them silent for 28  years had loosened. The team prepared to dig. Police conducted three separate digs at the site over the next 2 years. The first was in March  2023, the second in May 2023, and the third in October 2024. Each search pushed deeper into the densely vegetated escarpment with officers and cadaver dogs working through steep terrain that dropped away toward the suburbs below.

Bones, weapons, anything that could anchor the case to the physical world, that was what they were looking for. Across those three digs, the missing clothing was finally located. It had taken nearly 18 months of searches across the slope before the right ground was found. Detectives brought the find back to people who had known Pauline.

They recognized the blouse as something she had owned and the stitching on the front as her work. The forensic labs went to work on the blood stains. They tried to extract a DNA profile from the fabric and tried to pull anything else usable from the rest of the garments. “Unfortunately, due to the age of this matter, there is no DNA available,” Sergeant Catherine Gray later told the court.

Police were back where they had started, with a witness and a hillside. By early 2024, detectives had taken the case as far as physical evidence could carry it. They had a location and an allegation, but no body and not enough to charge anyone. In March 2024, the New South Wales government and New South Wales police announced a $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone responsible for Pauline’s disappearance or death.

Jason flew in from Perth for the appeal. He stood beside detectives at a press conference outside police headquarters. “Mum has missed the birth of her five grandchildren and my niece,” he told reporters. “There is a lot of happy memories from the last 30 years that she will never have.

 And we want to bring her home or know what happened to her.” Acting Assistant Commissioner Darren Brown said  publicly what police had long suspected. Pauline had been caught up with the wrong crowd shortly before she disappeared. Investigators believed those  people either knew what had happened to her or were responsible for it.

Bran specifically called on anyone in that circle who had carried the information for 30 years to come forward now and tell police what they knew. The reward was meant to shake them loose. Behind the scenes, the reward had set something else in motion. After the figure hit the news, detectives obtained judicial warrants for covert surveillance.

 The target was a 64-year-old man living in Gwynneville, an inner Wollongong suburb a few kilometers from where Pauline had lived. He had been on the police radar around this case for a long time. He lived in public housing he had held since 1999 on a quiet street with a criminal history stretching back years. Police planted listening devices inside both his home and his car.

 Detectives were prepared to run the warrants for as long as it took. The reward had been the move in public microphones with a move behind it. If nobody in the community was going to come forward for the money, police would listen for what the suspect said when he thought he was alone. A team began monitoring the audio as it came back.

They expected at most a phone call or a slip in conversation with a visitor. What they got was something different. What the microphones picked up over the following weeks and months was unusual. The audio was largely empty with stretches where nothing came through at all. Then a voice would start coming through.

The man was alone in his unit talking to  himself out loud. He spoke in his living room and behind the wheel of his car about what he had seen  decades earlier and what he had been carrying since. In those recordings, he was allegedly  captured saying things only someone at the scene could have known.

“I can’t even tell anyone what I’ve seen,” he can be heard saying on one tape. “We could have done it in a better way,” he says on another. And it was the worst thing he had ever seen in his life. For weeks, detectives sat with headsets on, taking down every relevant sentence the operation produced. Police prosecutor Sergeant Catherine Gray later told  the court the recordings placed the man at a Gray Street address when Pauline was taken by two men.

He mentioned a third person of interest now living in South Australia. “He knows who murdered her, and he’s known that for many years,” she said. The tapes captured something else, too. At one point, the man said, “I’ve got a mental illness.” His defense later argued that statement was central to understanding everything else on the recordings.

At 8:30 in the morning on the 29th of May, 2025, Strike Force Anzac detectives executed a search warrant at a unit on Murphys Avenue in Gwynneville. The operation had been planned for weeks once the recordings produced enough material for charges. They arrested the resident and took him to Wollongong Police Station for questioning.

His name was Leon Andries Antonius Bowden. Later that afternoon, he was formally charged with accessory after the fact to murder and concealing a serious indictable offense. The Crown alleged he had assisted two men who murdered Pauline in June 1994 following an argument about money and helped cover it up afterwards.

He was also alleged to have contacted Jason in August 1994. He told him his mother had left and he didn’t know where she had gone. Then arranged for Jason to come and collect some of her belongings. At the Murphys Avenue address, police seized a white Holden  HK Kingswood sedan that matched the vehicle from the 1994  sighting.

 They also recovered a rusted machete that fit an eyewitness sketch of a weapon seen at the alleged murder scene 30 years earlier. Both the vehicle and the blade were taken into evidence on the day of the arrest. Nobody was charged with the murder itself. Boyan appeared in Wollongong local court by video link the next morning in a striped polo shirt and applied for bail.

Magistrate Les Mabbutt refused. The magistrate said some of what Boyan had said in the recordings could only have come from someone with knowledge of the offenses. He acknowledged the accessory charge was not strong, but he called the concealment charge solid and the flight risk a real concern. Mabbutt set the matter for a further appearance and Boyan was returned to custody.

Jason received the call from police at his home in Perth that same morning. Goosebumps, shock, excitement was how he described the moment the phone rang. “We have waited more than 30 years to hear today’s news,” he said. He told reporters it felt like the world had been lifted off his shoulders and the family was a step nearer to finally getting answers.

Boyan’s lawyer, Matt Ward, pushed back hard from the start. He told the court  there were real issues with the context and accuracy of the recorded statements. His client had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and the defense framed the recordings not as a confession, but as the symptoms of an illness.

 The Crown case, he said, was a puzzle with many missing pieces. Devastatingly, we don’t know how, when, where, or by whom the deceased has disappeared, he told the magistrate. Eight months later, on the 22nd  of December, 2025, the case came back to court for a second bail application. Bowen now had a new defense lawyer, Christina Vassilia.

She argued the 8-month delay was an issue and pointed to her client’s deep roots in the local area. Jason had flown over from Perth and sat in the public gallery. Magistrate David Williams heard the application this time, and his read of the prosecution case was different from his colleagues. He pressed the Crown on what positive act Bowen had allegedly  committed that would constitute an accessory offense under the law.

The court  heard the Crown case was built on information Bowen allegedly held, but had not given to police. “That is not how accessory after cases are generally framed,” Mr. Williams said. He called it problematic with very significant issues with the prosecution. The magistrate said there might be a case for the concealment charge, but the accessory charge was on thin ground.

 He found Bowen had shown why his continued detention was not justified based on factors including the diagnosis and the weakness of the case against him. But Williams still refused bail. The same recordings that held the alleged admissions had captured something else as well. Bowen had been recorded saying he was going to get the coppers and take them out one by one and talking about getting rid of someone.

The magistrate said those statements could be reflective of a person with mental illness or they could be real. The court had to act as if they were the latter. He found the risks of release were unacceptable and the application was denied. The case was set down to return in late January.

 Five weeks later, Boyan appeared in Wollongong Local Court again by audio-visual link. He was dressed in prison greens and his hair had grown long and gray during his time behind bars. The hearing had been listed as a procedural appearance with nothing in the daily court list indicating the move that was about to be made.  The Crown Prosecutor stood and formally withdrew every charge.

 Accessory after the fact to murder was dropped and so was concealing a serious indictable offense. The entire case against the only person ever charged over Pauline Sary’s death was gone. “He should be released sooner rather than later.” the prosecutor told the court. “There is nothing else for him to remain in custody for.

” Magistrate Williams ordered the immediate release and Boyan choked back tears on the video screen. The withdrawal came without a public explanation. The Director of Public Prosecutions did not issue a statement. There was no press conference and the Lawrence family received no briefing on the reason.

 The Crown walked away from the case that had built around those covert recordings. Neither the public nor Jason received any reason for the decision they could share or push back against. The men the recordings allegedly placed at the scene with Pauline had never been named in court at all. “I’m in hell.” Jason Lawrence told reporters after the dismissal.

“I feel like I’m the one that’s in the prison. Like I’m the one that’s done the crime.” The whole experience had felt like a roller coaster ride, he said, and he didn’t think anyone in the world deserved to be on the ride he was now on. Jason has four children of his own now, and none of them ever met their grandmother.

His daughter Jacinta often reminds him of Pauline. He has spent the years since his brother’s deaths fighting to keep his mother’s name in front of the public interview after interview. Press appeals, returning to Wollongong every time the case moved. He praised Detective Senior Constable Scott Nichols and the Strike  Force Anthea team by name, saying they had worked tirelessly on the investigation.

Their work, he said, had given the family something they had not had for years, a sense that someone in the system was fighting for an answer. The decision to drop the charges, he said, had come from elsewhere. Then he made the same plea he had made a hundred times across 32 years. Someone knows something, he said.

 If they had it in them to come forward now, after everything his family had been through, an answer could finally be put on the table. A cream button-down blouse with colorful hand stitching the wearer had added herself. Pulled from the dirt on the Illawarra Escarpment after three decades in the ground, it fit a woman of Pauline Sauri’s build, and the labs returned nothing usable from it.

The witness who led police to the burial spot is the same person who said they had watched her die there. A man was charged based on the words he had spoken to himself in an empty room. He sat in custody for eight months. He walked out of a courtroom without anyone offering an explanation to the family left behind.

 Nobody has been charged with Pauline’s murder. Strike Force Anthea continues to investigate, and the $500,000 reward still stands. Pauline Sauri has been missing since December 1993. Her son Jason is the only one still waiting for an answer. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.