Gayle Woodford’s husband Keith reveals the pain and torment he endured after her abduction and murder
IT was the sight of his wife’s blue nursing bag that made Keith Woodford’s blood run cold. He reveals the torment he endured after Gayle’s abduction and murder.
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IT was the sight of his wife’s blue nursing bag that made Keith Woodford’s blood run cold.
There was no reason to worry when Mr Woodford woke to an empty bed in their Fregon home and nurses quarters on the morning of Thursday, March 24, 2016.
His wife Gayle, who was in her fifth year as an Outback nurse working in some of the most troubled and remote parts of the state, was likely in her ambulance attending to a call-out in the vast APY Lands.
It was 9am when he rang Gayle’s nursing colleagues, only to be told she hadn’t shown up for work and that she might be at the Fregon airstrip.
Keith rushed the several kilometres to the empty airstrip, before he went to the nursing clinic, and police were alerted and the ambulance’s GPS tracked.
But his anxiety rose alarmingly on his return home midmorning.
“When I got home I knew something was wrong, because her bag, or pouch that she wears was there, and she wouldn’t have gone out without that,” Mr Woodford told The Advertiser.
The shocking discovery sparked an intense and ultimately tragic search for the 56-year old nurse across hundreds of kilometres of the APY Lands and south through Marla and Coober Pedy.
Nobody at that stage — except her remorseless killer Dudley Davey — knew that it was already too late.
Keith Woodford describes as “a blur” the 53 hours between the initial alarm and the discovery of Gayle’s body in a shallow grave on the outskirts of Fregon, where they had lived for 3 ½ years.
The key to unravelling the mysterious disappearance came through the GPS device fitted to the Nganampa Health Service ambulance, and within an hour the vehicle had been tracked to Coober Pedy, 365km to the south. Police there quickly found the ambulance with three people inside, including the man who drove it — Dudley Davey.
Davey said nothing, while his two accomplices were picked up along the way and had no idea their driver had hours earlier committed one of the state’s most heinous crimes.
Now serving a life sentence with 32 years non-parole, Davey had somehow lured Gayle from the caged home at night, as her husband slept inside, before driving her to bushland where he raped and murdered her.
But Keith Woodford — at that stage — firmly believed his wife was alive. “We still had a lot of hope that we would find Gayle and she would be all right,” he said this week.
“I was hoping she had jumped out and got away or something like that ... but she didn’t.”
As swarms of police and detectives converged by plane to the APY Lands, their investigation was dealt a cruel curveball.
“This Anangu woman flagged me down in Fregon, and said that she saw Gayle and spoke to her in Marla,” Mr Woodford recalled.
“She said that Gayle was filling up the ambulance and she was going to Coober Pedy. I don’t know if she believed it in her head or just wanted to be part of what was going on, but it was just fake.”
Mr Woodford and his son Gary shook their heads as they talk of the false report, which threw police off the trail, briefly at least.
“So the police concentrated in the wrong places, because they believed that Marla was the last place she’d been seen,” he said.
In the following days, planes and helicopters hovered over the endless desert scrub looking for disturbed earth, as STAR Group officers and local Anangu people traversed the vast landscape.
As he waited for his son and daughter Alison to arrive by road with Gayle’s sisters, Mr Woodford was approached by two boys from the Fregon community school, where he worked as a groundsman.
“Two little kids came up, and they told me ‘don’t worry Woody we’ll find her, because we’re tracking,” he said.
AS ANANGU men and boys used dirtbikes and ancient tracking techniques to search, a group of women began a touching yet eerie vigil outside the Woodfords’ home in the centre of Fregon.
“They camped outside the gate and sat there for two days and they were singing and talking in Pitjantjatjara,” he said.
Unable to accept their request to come inside, Mr Woodford said the local women got their way when one asked to use their toilet and ushered the rest of the group in.
“I was sitting in the chair and they all just had a hand on me and they were saying a prayer in Pitjantjatjara, and then they left. And that’s all they wanted, to show that they supported me and loved Gayle,” he recalled through welling tears.
As grave worry evolved into foreboding panic, Mr Woodford said a semblance of calm was restored when Major Crime detectives, and particularly victim contact officer Cris Poppy, arrived in Fregon.
“As soon as Cris walked in, she had an aura about her and everyone just sort of calmed down and they listened, she just sort of got in our heads — I don’t know how, but she did,” he said.
“She just kept contact, every move that was made, she made sure we knew what was going on, each step she would come and tell us.”
Describing the Major Crime team’s tireless efforts as “just remarkable”, Mr Woodford said Ms Poppy became the family’s rock of support and source of information.
In the early afternoon of Saturday, March 26, police used the ambulance’s GPS to search a small area of scrub 70m from the edge of the road out of Fregon, where data showed the vehicle had stopped for more than half an hour just after the violent abduction.
SOON after, Gayle’s body was found in a crude grave which police admit would have almost certainly remained hidden if not for the GPS technology.
Keith Woodford recalls the moment that police confirmed his family’s darkest fear.
“Nothing in my life can describe the feeling that I had and everyone in the room had after I heard the words that they’d found Gayle and she was dead,” he said.
Amid the devastation enveloping the room, Mr Woodford said one of his last endearing memories was playfully chastising his wife for ruining his housework just days earlier.
“I can remember telling her off on the Monday, because she had pairs and pairs of shoes and she was always out in the garden. I had just cleaned the floors and there’s mud all the way across the floor — she just laughed,” he said.
As Davey was charged with murder, for which he would eventually plead guilty, the APY Lands community poured out their united sense of despair and vengeful anger at Davey — who they did not consider as one of them.
“It brought shame on them as well, even though they didn’t do anything — it was the Anangu name, every community took part in the tracking and helped out,” he said.
“They were devastated, really, and they still are. And they want him out of jail, they want him up there to be dealt with.”
Mr Woodford, who has never returned to Fregon, said he continued to feel for the Anangu people, who described Gayle as their “angel”.
“The people out there didn’t want him — they were scared of him. He was just such a violent person, to his own people as well,” he said. “Put it this way, if they had found him before the police did, they would never have found him.”
On Easter Sunday, Gary and Alison Woodford heroically fought their way through torrents of tears to read a statement for television cameras and media who had converged on Fregon.
It would not be the last time the Woodfords found themselves in the unwelcome gaze of the media, as a series of court hearings went by without Davey uttering the word “guilty”.
In the Sunday Mail, Mr Woodford speaks of his anger at a justice system that allowed Davey to roam free in the community despite his escalating and violent history of attacking women.
“The justice system stinks. It is as though the defendant has more rights than the victim and their family,” he said.
“He (Davey) had that many chances, he got let out that many times and just seemed to be getting slapped on the wrist. And look what happened.”
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