Australia’s most chilling cold case murders, from a missing heiress to an executed suburban mum
FROM mysterious disappearances to heartbreaking cases of mistaken identity, these are the homicides that rocked Australia.
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URBAN legend has it Juanita Nielsen’s body is entombed in the concrete foundations of one of the Sydney high-rise developments she fought to stop.
But exactly what happened to the glamorous and formidable 38-year-old heritage preservation campaigner is still unknown.
It’s just one of Australia’s most chilling cold case murders.
Nielsen’s disappearance and presumed murder in 1975 remains one of the era’s most prominent criminal mysteries, due to the entanglement of the criminal underworld with high society.
She was the heiress to the Mark Foys department store fortune who spent her 20s travelling the world, before returning home to work for the family company. But Nielsen soon shunned comfort and privilege to start an alternative newspaper, named NOW, in the seedy suburb of Kings Cross, where she wrote about the fascinating urban landscape.
That is, until Frank Theeman entered the picture and her modest publication’s focus shifted.
The real estate tycoon planned to evict dozens of residents to build a $40 million apartment complex in the Cross.
One of the historic Victoria Street terrace homes in his sights belonged to Nielsen, who then began using her local rag to campaign against unrestrained development.
Through her advocacy, Nielsen and a small army of local campaigners secured a green ban on the site and managed to hold off the bulldozers.
COLD CASE: Man arrested over the abduction and murder of Cheryl Grimmer in 1970
For a while, it seemed people power had succeeded at a time when corruption and money trumped all else.
But Theeman had spent some $6 million — in excess of $40 million in today’s money — acquiring property, costing him a fortune in interest.
When fellow anti-development activist Arthur King was kidnapped in 1973, the high stakes of the situation became shockingly clear.
King was grabbed by two men, who shoved him in the boot of a car and drove him to a motel on New South Wales’ south coast, where he was held for three days. After his release, he quit the action group and left the Cross.
Other Victoria Street residents were harassed and Nielsen began receiving threats, telling close friends she feared for her safety.
“She had received a threat but she wasn’t sure where from,” her partner of several years David Farrell told The Daily Telegraph in 2015.
“She’d also had a number of people trying to contact her, luring her away, which she was highly suspicious of.”
But on July 4, 1975 she went to a suspect meeting at the notorious Carousel Club to discuss an advertising query she’d received from barman Eddie Trigg.
The bar was owned by infamous organised crime figure Abe Saffron and managed by James Anderson. It later emerged Anderson received a cheque for $25,000 from Theeman’s company weeks before the fateful meeting with Nielsen.
She wasn’t seen again and her body has never been found. Days after she vanished, her purse was discovered discarded beside a highway in Sydney’s west.
In 1977, Trigg and two other Carousel Club employees were charged with conspiring to kidnap Nielsen at the instruction of others.
There are multiple suspects who’ve been named in the decades since, from corrupt former cops to Theeman and his associates.
And while various theories have emerged over the years — including a claim from the club’s receptionist that she saw Nielsen’s body, with a bullet hole in her head, in the venue’s basement — her exact fate is unknown.
There was even a suggestion that her successful anti-development campaign was only part of the motive for her murder, and that she was also preparing to publish an article exposing high-level corruption.
Before his death, it was rumoured Trigg wrote a manuscript revealing the key players in Nielsen’s death as well as her final resting place. The document never surfaced.
A 1983 coronial inquest noted that police corruption probably hampered the original investigation.
Theeman died in 1989 and many of the homes he hoped to raze still stand today, recognised for their enormous historic value.
Nielsen’s home is among them, heritage listed and with a memorial plaque in the pavement outside.
MISTAKEN IDENTITY MURDER
It was a crime that sent shockwaves across the country — a mother returning from the afternoon school run, gunned down in her driveway in full view of her children.
The shocking murder of Jane Thurgood-Dove puzzled police, who were initially unable to find a suspect or motive for her brutal execution on November 6, 1997.
The 34-year-old had just pulled into her drive in Niddrie in Melbourne’s northwest, her children aged three, six and 11 in their seats, when a man described as being “short and pot-bellied” confronted her.
She was shot repeatedly in the head. A getaway car was dumped and torched a few blocks from the scene, a second vehicle then collecting the gunman.
The investigation quickly turned to a serving policeman who was said to be obsessed with Thurgood-Dove, and whose romantic advances she’d rejected.
The man’s odd behaviour following her death included building a quasi-shrine to her in his house and trying to buy a cemetery plot near hers. He even failed a lie-detector test.
But he wasn’t their man, police determined after years of probing. Instead, the answer looked to be much closer to home.
On the other end of the family’s street lived Peter Kyprianou, a career criminal who a few years earlier had been the subject of a kidnap and torture plot by a disgruntled crime contact, Philip Peters.
Peters was charged with conspiracy to murder and jailed over the failed plan. In prison, he made contacts with other inmates — including a drug dealer linked to a bikie gang.
He was still set on revenge but if he tried to go after Kyprianou again, police would know it was him, the theory goes.
So instead he used his new contacts to arrange for some bikies to knock off his enemy’s wife Carmel, in order to send a message, it was alleged.
Police believe the instructions were given — target the blonde mum who lived three houses up from the corner of Muriel Street.
Trouble was, Thurgood-Dove also lived three houses from the other corner of the street. Her death is strongly suspected to have been a case of mistaken identity.
Peters has never been charged in relation to Thurgood-Dove’s death.
In his book The Good Cop, ex-detective Ron Iddles revealed he was on the cusp of making an arrest in the case and could’ve nabbed one of the three men involved.
But it was during the time when Victoria Police were fixated on Melbourne’s high-profile gang war and resources were deferred elsewhere.
“The justice system should be there to protect average citizens rather than gangsters and drug dealers,” Thurgood-Dove’s father John told Fairfax in 2013.
“I’ve lost count of the number of times homicide investigators were told to shelve the case because it was wasting resources. It’s now clear this was a case of mistaken identity. To think of a mum returning home to be killed in front of her kids is abhorrent in the extreme.”
Some six years on from her shocking death, a $1 million reward was put on offer and tips came rolling in.
The homicide squad determined the pot-bellied man was likely to be Rebels bikie Steven John Mordy, who died in 2001.
The man who organised the getaway car was his mate James Reynolds, who died before he could be questioned.
The third man involved hasn’t been identified. The case is still open and police in 2013 offered a pardon if that person came forward to explain what happened.
EPITOME OF EVIL
He allegedly murdered his pregnant wife and their three children, in part with a crude electrocution device he made, then pushed a car containing their bodies off a cliff.
And Elmer Crawford, who vanished after the murders, could still be alive somewhere, 46 years after his grisly crime shook Victoria.
It was July 1, 1970 when he’s believed to have electrocuted Theresa, 25, who was carrying his unborn child, and children Katherine, 12, James, eight and Karen, six.
Crawford had rigged a bizarre device using an extension cord with five small leads and alligator clips attached. Not content, he also used a hammer to bash the youngsters.
Police believe he intended to make it look like Theresa had killed the children and then herself.
He drove his dead family to Loch Ard Gorge in the state’s southwest and pushed the car over, but it didn’t sink into the ocean as planned — instead coming to rest on a ledge 15 metres below.
It was discovered the next day, sooner than Crawford had anticipated, and he was interrupted before he could completely clean the crime scene.
A foaming bottle of carpet cleaner was found on the table inside the house.
Greg Fogarty grew up near the scene of the horrific crime and wrote a book about it, Almost Perfect, and believes Crawford’s motive was his wife’s unplanned pregnancy and a desire to avoid a costly divorce.
“If the car had gone in the water, I believe he would’ve said ‘My wife had a breakdown, she’s run off with the kids’,” Fogarty told Fairfax in 2005.
“Theresa didn’t actually have a fractured skull. He hit her with an iron bar wrapped with a garden hose. So if they found skeletal remains, the only ones with physical injuries would be the children.”
In 2008, a reward was offered for information about the whereabouts of Crawford and tips began flooding in.
Police also released a digitally altered and aged image of how he might look.
Information from the public saw investigators travel to Perth and Tom Price in Western Australia but the trail went cold.
It followed an apparent sighting in 1994 by a woman who’d known the family and saw someone who looked like Crawford in a pub in Bunbury, WA.
The search then went to Texas in the United States in 2010, where the unidentified body of an elderly man was thought to be Crawford’s. DNA later ruled out the possibility.
“We would dearly love to solve this one,” detective Damian Jackson told the Herald Sun.
INNOCENCE LOST
The morning of March 21, 1972 saw young Marilyn Wallman in an excited rush to get to the school sports carnival in her regional Queensland town of Mackay.
She jumped on her bike and raced off. Her two brothers Rex and David were only about 10 minutes behind but soon came upon her deserted bicycle.
It was lying on the side of the sugar cane-lined road, next to her discarded school bag. The 14-year-old was never seen again.
There was intense media interest in the case and locals assisted with search parties for the child.
Police examined a number of leads and probed various theories about her disappearance but later concluded she had probably been murdered.
Then in 1974, part of a small skull was discovered in a creek about an hour from town, but years of inconclusive testing left Wallman’s devastated family wondering.
It wasn’t until two years ago that authorities used advanced DNA testing to determine the skull belonged to the missing girl.
She was able to be finally farewelled and mourned by her family, however questions still linger about what happened to her that morning.
A $250,000 reward is on offer for anyone with information leading to her killer being found.
A COLOURFUL ICON TAKEN
Her illustrations, textiles, designs and wallpapers are famed around the world, occupying the homes of the uber-stylish, rich and famous.
But decades before Florence Broadhurst became an international household name, her brutal death had Sydney gripped in fear.
It marked a sudden end to a remarkable life that saw her travel the world as a singer and dancer, work as a tutor in journalism and culture, marry an English stockbroker and then an engineer, and entertain troops in World War II.
When she eventually returned to Australia in 1949, she told people she was British — despite being born in Queensland — and regularly went by the name Madame Pellier.
A gifted painter, her landscape works were shown widely and she was well regarded in art circles. But most prominently, she was a successful printmaker and interior designer and developed significant technical advancements including printing wallpaper onto metal.
In 1977 when Broadhurst was 78, she was bludgeoned to death with a large piece of timber inside her studio in the Sydney suburb of Paddington.
Her killer was never found and there remain a number of theories about who took her life in such a brutal fashion.
There was speculation she was an early victim of the serial killer John Glover, who murdered six elderly women in the late 1980s. Police long believed he had killed others but couldn’t pin her death on him.
Broadhurst’s friends believed the assailant might’ve been known to her, given two cups of tea were found near her body, and that the motive was financial.
Investigators also suspected the killer knew their way around her factory and studio.
But the shocking case was never solved and Broadhurst eventually became better known for her enduring contribution to design than her awful end.
Following her death, there were several hundred designs in a library collection that changed hands a few times. Wallpaper fell out of fashion, then in the late 1990s a Sydney designer sparked renewed interest in Broadhurst’s work.
A printmaker began promoting parts of the collection in the UK and US with great success.
If you have any information about these or any other crimes contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
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