The cowboy called Tex: Dark secrets of deadly serial killer

FOR the past 17 years this little-known serial killer’s backdrop has been a NSW prison cell but even behind bars he has been at the centre of another murder investigation.

He wore a cowboy hat, called himself Tex and haunted outback rodeos, although he never rode a horse.

Or he was called Robert, the drifter working as a chef at a hotel on a long and lonely highway. Or under the alias Hank or Buck, he was photographed at a barbecue at a police station somewhere in the bush.

Reginald Kenneth Arthurell was a chameleon. Two metres tall and powerfully built, he nevertheless had the ability to blend into any background and talk himself into, and often out of, all sorts of situations.

For the past 17 years this little-known serial killer’s backdrop has been a NSW prison cell but even behind bars he has been at the centre of another murder investigation.

Police named him as the major suspect in the murder of Catherine Mary Page, an 82-year-old woman bashed to death in her Coonamble home at the height of the 1971 floods when the central west NSW town was isolated and full of itinerant visitors stranded by the waters.

Among them was Arthurell, then 25 and visiting a friend around the corner from Ms Page, a churchgoing spinster.

The missing 1981 red Nissan Patrol belonging to Venet Raylee Mulhall, who was bludgeoned to death in her home at Coonabarabran in the State's north-west.

Arthurell was already known to police with a list of convictions for dishonesty, vagrancy and possessing an unlicensed pistol. He also had a liking for women’s clothes, having once tricked police by cross-dressing.

Cold case detectives thought they had a breakthrough when a crucifix and scapular, with some head hairs caught in them, believed to belong to Ms Page, were handed to police.

Two rounds of DNA testing in Sydney and Melbourne laboratories failed to reach any conclusions so the objects were sent to experts in America but no DNA was found.

“But the case is not closed. It is open to any further evidence,” Detective Chief Inspector John Lehmann of the Unsolved Homicide Team said.

Reginald Arthurell in a wanted photo from 1995.

Ms Page may well have been Arthurell’s first victim.

The next was his stepfather.

When he left Coonamble, Arthurell drifted to the towns of the north of Western Australia, working in a hotel and hospital in Derby, a roadhouse in Fitzroy Crossing and on cattle stations in Derby.

In May, 1974, he was in Sydney visiting his mother when he bumped into his ex-stepfather Thomas Thornton. They ended up back at Thornton’s home in Guildford, where the stepfather was later found stabbed to death.

Arthurell drifted north, where he hung around rodeos impersonating American cowboys and took odd jobs on outback stations.

In November, 1981, the partly decomposed body of a young sailor, Ross Browning, 19, was found with massive head wounds off the Barkly Highway near Tennant Creek.

As the Northern Territory police hunted Arthurell, who they discovered had been given a lift by Browning, Queensland police announced they wanted to question him over the “Wolf Creek-style” shooting deaths of two men and a woman near Mt Isa in 1978. The trio had been last seen at a local rodeo.

The bludgeoned young sailor

In late November, 1981, Arthurell was arrested at the Corncob Hotel, Mareeba. He pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Browning and a murder charge was dropped. In May, 1988, he was released from jail, having served six and a half years of a 12-year sentence.

NSW detectives immediately extradited him to Sydney where he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, this time on the grounds of provocation, for killing his stepfather.

In July, 1989, he was jailed for a minimum of four and a half years with a maximum period of 11 years as Justice Peter McInerney remarked on Arthurell’s “remarkable transformation” after he had been baptised in a Darwin jail.

As early as April, 1991, he was released on parole after he was befriended by a naive but loving Christian prison visitor, Venet Raylee Mulhall, 54, who had started writing to him while he was in jail in Darwin.

One of the conditions of his release was that he live with Mulhall and the couple were briefly engaged. In February, 1995, she was found bashed to death at her home in Coonabarabran. Arthurell killed her because she wouldn’t give him her car.

He was convicted of murder but still not jailed for life. Finding the killing was not in the “worst-case” category, Justice David Hunt jailed him for 24 years with a minimum of 18.

Arthurell can apply for parole in May next year. He will be 69. The Mt Isa killings remain unsolved and a $250,000 reward still stands. There is a $100,000 reward for information relating to Catherine Page’s murder.