Drugs, bikies, a serial killer: How did six men vanish from the outback without a trace?
Wes Lockyer is one of six young Aboriginal men from WA’s remote north to have disappeared in recent years. Is enough being done to find them?
By Tim Elliott
Jo Taylor, Wes Lockyer’s mother, found her son’s wallet and phone in his empty house. “I knew something bad had happened,” she says. Credit: Rhett Wyman
Not long before Wes Lockyer disappeared without trace from his home, in October 2022, he booked a tree-lopper to trim the eucalypt in his front yard. Wes, who was 29, lived in the tiny Aboriginal community of Jinparinya, about 20 minutes’ drive south of Port Hedland, in the Pilbara, in Western Australia’s remote north. In the vast, sandy expanse of the Pilbara, Jinparinya is a blip of green, an oasis of well-kept lawns and gardens, with a communal cubby house and potted succulents, and shady verandahs strung with wind chimes and paper lanterns.
There are only nine houses here, clustered together, most of them belonging to Wes’s family, including his mother Jo Taylor and her partner Pete, his stepbrother Camis, his uncle Barry and 93-year-old grandmother Winnie. At the time he went missing, Wes had been sharing his house for four months with his cousin Ray Dhu and Ray’s girlfriend, Darian Whitehurst. It wasn’t ideal: Ray often brought people back to the home, which only had two bedrooms. But Wes couldn’t say no: he and Ray were not just cousins but yalbu, blood brothers by Aboriginal law, obliged to share everything in common, always and forever, without question or complaint.
Wes, the oldest of Jo’s three sons, was an imposing figure: six feet tall (182 centimetres) and 130 kilograms, but disarmingly shy, with plump lips and chubby cheeks. He had done three years of an apprenticeship as a mechanical fitter with Rio Tinto, and planned to join his mother’s freight company, which runs supplies from Port Hedland to the mines. He enjoyed fishing and hunting, but his first love was culture. “He was very knowledgeable about traditional laws, especially Dreamtime songlines,” Barry, himself a respected law man, tells me. “He was an absolute master.” As Jo tells me when I visit her in October, “Wes had a certain power.”
On the night of Friday, October 21, Wes was in South Hedland, where he attended a meeting of the Gumala Aboriginal Corporation (GAC), of which he was a member. After that he went drinking with Ray and others, before being dropped back in Jinparinya by a friend.
Pete, Jo’s partner, spoke to him briefly on Saturday morning: Wes was on the couch in his house, hungover, and planned to take it easy for the rest of the weekend. Pete and Jo then left to attend a funeral in Broome, about five hours’ drive north. A few days later, Jo got a call from her niece, back in Jinparinya: there was a snake on Jo’s deck. Perhaps Wes could shoo it off? “And so I called Wes,” Jo says. “But he didn’t answer.” Jo called again. Still no answer. “Sometimes Wes would take off for a week or two, for cultural reasons or for work. But he would always respond to me.”
Appeals for help, including bumper stickers, have led nowhere.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Jo began calling Wes’s friends and cousins and posted messages on Facebook, but nobody knew anything. She and Pete then returned to Jinparinya. She walked into Wes’s house, dialling his number as she did so. There, sitting by the TV in his bedroom, was his phone. There were multiple missed calls. Jo went to open the phone but didn’t know the PIN. She then found Wes’s wallet under his bed. “It was eerie,” she says. “Wes never went anywhere without his phone and wallet.” She walked out the front of Wes’s house. The air felt woolly with heat. Her heart started pounding. “I felt something bad had happened.” She called the police in Port Hedland and reported Wes as missing.
The Aboriginal community in WA’s north-west is small and tight-knit, and news of Wes’s disappearance travelled fast. But, as it turned out, his case was far from unique.
A year before, a 27-year-old Aboriginal man from the East Kimberley, named Jeremiah Rivers, went missing in remote south-west Queensland while travelling with friends. A week after Wes disappeared, Clinton Lockyer – a relative of Wes’s – went missing from Roebourne, two hours’ south-west of Port Hedland. Four days after that, 22-year-old Indigenous stockman Wylie Oscar vanished near Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley. Young Aboriginal men were being “swallowed by the outback”, as a story on the ABC put it.
Then, in April this year, two more Aboriginal men, Zane Stevens, aged 21, and Brenton Shar, 37, disappeared within the space of a week. The disappearances have been the subject of much speculation about the involvement, perhaps, of drugs and bikies, or even a serial killer. All six men remain missing.
Clinton Lockyer, a relative of Wes’s, went missing a week after Wes disappeared; Wylie Oscar followed four days later.
The circumstances around Wes’s disappearance were certainly unusual. The last person to see him, it turned out, was Ray’s girlfriend, Darian. Darian told Jo and the family that she was in Ray’s bedroom at Wes’s house, in Jinparinya, on Monday morning, when Wes knocked on the door. He wanted to see Ray. Darian told him that Ray was away hunting.
According to Darian, Wes then went out into the yard, where she heard him talking anxiously. “Where’s yalbu Ray, I need to see him,” he said. “He understands what I’m talking about. These mob keep blaming me.” Darian said he was holding his phone. He then appeared to get a text message. He looked down and read it. “What the f---!” he said. “I didn’t do anything!” Darian asked Wes if he was OK, to which he replied, “Yes,” before walking off. It seemed clear to Jo that her son had been caught in the middle of something, and that someone was coming after him.
The search for Wes started several days later. The land around the community is flat, dry, rocky, and hot – when I was there in mid-spring it was 40 degrees every day – and patched here and there with low, stunted scrub. Police and SES workers set out on foot, scouring the terrain within a three-kilometre radius around Jinparinya. They deployed six vehicles and surveyed the area from above, using a drone, a helicopter recruited from a neighbouring station and an aeroplane equipped with infra-red sensors, but all they found were two dead cattle. On the fourth day, with nothing else to go on, they suspended the ground search. The family was dismayed. “We felt like we’d been abandoned,” Jo tells me.
‘Where’s yalbu Ray, I need to see him. He understands what I’m talking about. These mob keep blaming me.’
A year before, a four-year-old white girl, Cleo Smith, had disappeared from her tent near Carnarvon, 800 kilometres south-west. The police had searched for 18 days, and the state government had offered a $1 million reward. Jo asked if there would be a similar reward for Wes, but was told that offering such incentives required signs of criminality. Jo got the impression that as far as the police were concerned, Wes had simply wandered off, drunk or on drugs, and perished in the bush.
The family printed hundreds of banners appealing for information about Wes’s disappearance and posted them around Port Hedland.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Undeterred, the family kept searching. They bought dune buggies, a drone, and a metal detector. (Wes had a golden eyebrow ring, and sometimes wore steel-capped boots.) Wes’s aunties, uncles and cousins came to Jinparinya to help, camping out on lawns and verandahs. The Nyamal Rangers, an Indigenous landcare group that Wes belonged to, also volunteered. Portable toilets and tents went up. People cooked kangaroo tail on open fires. When Fortescue Mining heard about the search, it donated camp beds and night lights. Every morning, people set off beneath a blistering sun to search for Wes, peering under bushes, looking for tracks. At dusk, Jo would walk into the bush and stand staring into the immensity, calling out her “big son’s” name.
About a month and a half into the search, odd things began happening. At night, lights could be seen dancing in the distance. “Like car lights,” says Jo. The men would jump in their vehicles and drive out to investigate, but by the time they got close, the lights would disappear. Around the same time, an unfamiliar car started showing up in the community. It would stop, at night, not far from the tents, headlights on, engine idling. As soon as anyone approached, it would speed off into the darkness.
The nine houses in Jinparinya, south of Port Hedland, where Wes lived with his extended family.Credit: Rhett Wyman
It was about then that the family brought in the mabarn. In Aboriginal culture, mabarn, also known as “clevermen”, are spiritual guides, thought to have special powers of insight and healing. In some cases, they can conjure the dead or locate missing people. Some came from as far away as Wiluna, 900 kilometres to the south. (Mabarn don’t accept cash but will take payment in kind, with food or fuel.) Within no time, there were five mabarn and their families in Jinparinya. At night, they would disappear to a nearby creek bed, practising secret rituals, summoning Wes’s spirit. Much of their advice was contradictory, but after a time they came to a rough consensus. Wes, they believed, had been taken from the back of the block in a blue car driven by a man with dreadlocks.
Desperate for a breakthrough, the family seized on this theory. “Dreadlocks are more common [with Aborigines] in the Central Desert,” Jo says. “We thought maybe a man had come from there to get Wes’s cultural knowledge. To tap into it somehow, because they were jealous of Wes’s power.” But there was another possibility. Shortly before he disappeared, Wes had posted a TikTok clip of himself handling what some said were sacred objects – mostly boomerangs. Perhaps someone had come to punish him? “We didn’t know,” Jo says. “It was all so confusing.”
The family explored the Central Desert theory, but nothing came of it. The mabarn eventually departed. By the Christmas of 2022, everyone was exhausted, and the search was put on hold.
Wes Lockyer’s house in Jinparinya.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Before she began her freight business, Jo worked as a nurse at Port Hedland Regional Hospital. She was perfect for the job: tall and strong, with deep reserves of compassion and stamina – both qualities she drew on now like never before. She wrote to everyone she could think of – the state Indigenous Affairs minister, her local member, the police minister, the premier – begging for help. “No one bothered replying, except for the AG [attorney-general] on behalf of the premier,” she says. “It was disgusting.”
The family set up a Facebook page to solicit tips, and printed hundreds of banners of Wes which they posted around town. Psychics got in touch, from as far away as Melbourne, with suggestions on where to search. “We listened to them, to find out what they had to say,” Jo says. There were supposed sightings of Wes in James St in Perth and in a park at Scarborough. All of them proved false.
At one stage, Barry learnt that the road trains that rumble past the turn-off from the Great Northern Highway to Jinparinya every 15 minutes have cameras along their sides. Maybe they’d captured Wes being taken? He went to the trucking companies and asked to see the footage. “They were really helpful, but the footage had been erased,” he says. He also travelled to Pardoo Roadhouse, 150 kilometres north, to get their CCTV vision, but that too had been wiped.
Barry, Wes’s uncle, alerted police to possible evidence.Credit: Rhett Wyman
By mid-2023, the search had become less hopeful. The family purchased a sifting tray, in case they found any bone fragments. They also carried tongs and snaplock bags, so they could collect anything they found as evidence for the police. At a friend’s suggestion, Jo hired four cadaver dogs from a company in Perth. (The police didn’t provide any.) The dogs identified three areas of interest, but none turned out to be Wes.
November marks the onset of the wet season in the north-west of Australia, when the curdling heat starts cooking up storms, and the sky crackles and growls with blue-black clouds. In Broome, tourists shop for pearls in white linen shirts and Panama hats. Most of the drug dealing happens at night, up near the Japanese cemetery, with kids on scooters swapping meth and cash in the blink of an eye. Broome has become one of the areas worst affected by drugs, especially injectables, which are known here as “nyarbies”. (“Nyarbie Barbies” are Indigenous girls who sell themselves for meth.) Despite the drugs and the crime and needles discarded by the beaches, the police presence appears minimal. It’s worse in Port Hedland, where I never once saw a patrol car on the street. “We are totally ungoverned,” a friend of Jo’s tells me.
Daylesford Park in South Hedland is used by families but is also well known for illegal drug activity.Credit: Rhett Wyman
It is, to say the least, a suggestible environment. Some of the stories I hear about Wes and the missing men include: that they had been shot and fed to crocodiles; that they had been strangled and fed to pigs: that one had been taken by a featherfoot (a sorcerer who lives in the desert); that another had been taken by a mudman (a sorcerer who lives in the mangroves); that they were being held in a sea container in the bush, being fed dog food and beaten with sticks. At one stage I find myself sitting in a room with a psychic in a back street in Broome, a small woman in a dark singlet, who explains how she is visited regularly by the missing men’s spirits. She channels the meetings into pages of scribbled notes, columns of numbers and random letters. She shows them to me, but they’re impossible to understand.
‘There is an underworld at play that joins all the boys together, directly or indirectly.’
Robyn Cottman, private investigator
And all the while, the families suffer. Jo cries often and has frequent panic attacks. She is held together by Valium and antidepressants. “I used to have a loving nature,” she tells me. Now she is full of rage: at the police, at the politicians, at whoever stole Wes, at the FIFO workers who post racist rants on Facebook, calling the Indigenous people “untouchables”. One day we’re sitting in her car, parked at a spot in South Hedland where Wes was reportedly sighted. “I hate this f---ing place,” she says. She wants to move, but not until she finds out what happened to her son.
In May this year, the family retained a private investigator named Robyn Cottman. Cottman, who is a former WA police officer, is based in Perth, but has travelled to the Pilbara and become close to the family. She has since become consumed by the case and has worked dozens of hours for free, including producing a five-part podcast about Wes’s disappearance, which has served as a handy way of testing theories and flushing out leads. It’s her belief that Wes’s case is linked to the disappearances of the other Aboriginal men. “There is an underworld at play that joins all the boys together, directly or indirectly,” she explains. “And it all comes back to drugs.”
Back roads like these are used by drug traffickers to transport meth around the Pilbara and the Kimberley.Credit: Rhett Wyman
The drug trade in the north-west is booming, with meth consumption in the Kimberley and Pilbara now at critical levels. Remote and sparsely policed, it’s a market shaped by race and geography, and supercharged by mining money.
Since the early 1990s, mining companies have had to pay Indigenous people for the right to mine their land. This money, in the form of royalties, goes to the local Aboriginal corporation, which then distributes it, often as cash handouts, to its members. According to Business News, $370 million in royalties were handed to Aboriginal groups in WA in the 2023 financial year – $50 million more than in 2022. Some corporations receive more money than others, depending on the amount of mining on their land. Members of the Gumala Aboriginal Corporation, for instance, receive tens of thousands of dollars a year, financed by Rio Tinto’s Yandi iron ore mine, together with a $1800 “sitting fee” for attending the corporation’s AGM in South Hedland. (Wes still receives his money, which hasn’t been touched since he disappeared.) The schedule of disbursements, which usually occur quarterly, now governs much of the drug trade. Dealers drive up and down the Great North Highway and ply the backroads, hitting towns and communities in time for the payments, when tens of thousands of dollars land in people’s bank accounts, literally overnight.
According to Keith Lethbridge, an Aboriginal elder and former drug addict, the trade is run mostly by bikies, including the Rebels, the Coffin Cheaters and an Indigenous gang called Naala Moort. (Naala Moort’s leader, a former policeman named Donald Collard, is currently serving 10 years in jail on money laundering and drug charges.) “Some of these people also hold good jobs in mining, and high-profile Aboriginal companies are also involved.”
Lethbridge lives in Tom Price, a mining town 400 kilometres south of Port Hedland. When he was younger, he spent years in jail before finding God and turning his life around. He went on to become a broadcaster, successful native title applicant and a director, in 2012, of the Gumala Aboriginal Corporation. He is also close to the Lockyers: “I consider him family,” Jo tells me.
He says most of the meth is cooked in Perth. “They high-ups don’t trust people in Broome to bake it. Also, they want to control the quality.” It is then driven north by couriers, usually young Aboriginal men who are recruited by the bikies in jail. “These young fellas will accumulate debts by getting ice on credit, or they will get given tobacco, which is like money in jail, and if they can’t pay it back, that’s when they start to get owned. And when people own them, they can get them to do things, like running drugs.”
Injecting meth has become a chronic health problem in remote WA.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Lethbridge says the couriers and the dealers become affiliate members of the bikie gangs. “There’s a big difference between a full member and an affiliate. The full members are the heavy ones. If you f--- up as an affiliate runner – if you steal money or drugs – [the full members] will come and see you and sort it out.” Tamper with or steal a $100 bag of meth and you’ll get a “hiding”, says Lethbridge. Tamper with or steal a $50,000 bag of meth “and people go missing”.
Lethbridge believes this is what happened to Wes. “Knowing what I know, Wes got caught in the middle of a drug deal.” He thinks it unlikely Wes was at fault: if Wes had stolen drugs, he would have gone into hiding, not spent his last weekend on his couch at home. “Someone he knew, someone he trusted, stole drugs and blamed him for it. That would have been the message he got on his phone in Jinparinya that morning, someone saying, ‘There’s a problem. The package is missing, and we need to find it.’ “
Lethbridge believes Wes was probably picked up in Jinparinya shortly after he got the text message. “He was panicking, saying ‘They’re coming for me.’ ” When I ask him where Wes might be, he says: “I think he’s dead and buried.”
When a person goes missing, their loved ones often suffer what is called “ambiguous grief” – a sense of mourning without closure. As Jo tells me: “I don’t want to know what they’ve done to him or who done it. All we want is to find him and bring him home.”
Jo Taylor: “If six whitefellas had disappeared from the same area in the space of two years, there would have been a royal commission by now.”Credit: Rhett Wyman
The family’s trauma has been compounded by a sense that they have been sidelined and ignored, and that the authorities – the police, the politicians, the government – have treated them differently because of their race. “If six whitefellas had disappeared from the same area in the space of two years, there would have been a royal commission by now,” Jo says.
The family was frustrated with the investigation almost from the beginning. The police, Jo says, implied that Wes was mentally ill or on drugs at the time he disappeared. She says there was no evidence to support this. It was also suggested that he may have gone “walkabout”, but she believes there was no reason for him to wander off.
‘I don’t want to know what they’ve done to him or who done it. All we want is to find him and bring him home.’
Jo Taylor
According to the family, the police regularly dismissed their concerns. When Jo told them about the strange lights at night and the car that appeared in their camp, the police said it wasn’t relevant. In April 2023, Barry was stopped in a truck bay just north of Port Hedland when he spotted some bloody tissues, a handful of Winchester rifle shells, and a can of Wild Turkey. “Wes, when it’s hot, he’s a notorious nosebleeder,” Barry tells me. “And he drank Wild Turkey.”
Barry told the police, who agreed to come and collect the items. Eighteen months later, he returned to find it all still there, so he bagged it all up himself and sent it to Cottman. (A spokesperson for WA Police was reluctant to comment on the specifics of Wes’s case, but assured me that “all missing persons are treated as a priority”.)
The police also seemed reluctant to accept help. Early in 2023, well before Cottman came on board, Jo engaged two private investigators named Mick Buckley and John Hindriksen. The men, both retired WA police officers, travelled to Port Hedland. One of the first things they did, as a professional courtesy, was introduce themselves to the police at South Hedland. “It was a fairly negative response,” Hindriksen says. “They wouldn’t come to the counter and see us.” Buckley tells me: “They couldn’t be bothered seeing if we had any information that could have been of assistance. It didn’t make much sense to me.”
Missing posters for Wesley Lockyer around Port Hedland.Credit: Rhett Wyman
One of the things that most concerned the family was Wes’s phone. Jo wanted the police to open it, but they claimed they didn’t have the technology to do so. (Hindriksen describes this as “bullshit”.) The family also asked the police to get Wes’s phone data from his telco – the call history might show who he had been speaking to at the time he disappeared. But five months after Wes’s disappearance, the police maintained that there were no grounds to do so. Hindriksen is baffled by this. “They should have got the call logs in the first couple of weeks.” When I put this to the police they tell me that they have, in fact, examined the phone data, contradicting their earlier advice to the family.
In order to gain some clarity, Cottman recently asked to view the police incident report, which catalogues the steps taken in the investigation. But police refused to release the document, claiming they needed Wes’s consent to do so. The family then lodged a freedom of information request but that too was knocked back on the grounds that the investigation was ongoing.
Cottman understands the pressures of policing: there are 336 long-term missing people in WA, and resources are limited. But she is infuriated by their lack of transparency and adversarial stance. “The police do not want me involved in this case in any capacity,” she tells me in an email. “There is no way they want any attention drawn to the areas of their incompetency.”
Faced with the government’s inertia, the families of the missing men are starting to band together. In September, they led more than 1000 people in a rally outside WA parliament, demanding urgent action. They presented a petition, backed by the Australian Greens, calling for a federal taskforce. After the rally, relatives of the missing men met with senior officers and discussed their concerns. Two weeks later, Jo and Robyn Cottman had a private meeting with the deputy commissioner of police, Allan Adams. Jo gave Adams the bag with the items that Barry had found at the truck stop – the bloody tissues, the empty can and the bullet shells. At the time of going to print, she and Cottman hadn’t heard anything back.
In the meantime, Jo goes on, caught in an agonising stasis. She rarely goes back to Jinparinya. Seeing Wes’s house only makes her cry. Instead, she and her husband Pete now live in South Hedland, at the freight company’s depot, where there is a little caravan. It’s cosy and air-conditioned. On the steps of the caravan, just by the door, are some small pots full of succulents. “I love plants,” Jo says. “Palm trees, succulents, hardy plants. They make me feel good. They’re still surviving out here. I don’t know how they do it.”
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.