Bronwyn Winfield mystery takes a new twist
The saga of what happened to Bronwyn Winfield, the devoted mother of two little girls aged 10 and five, who vanished from her Lennox Head home in northern NSW 31 years ago, has taken an unexpected turn. In a new episode of his investigative podcast series released to The Australian’s subscribers this week, Hedley Thomas interviews Sonia Lee, the secret daughter fathered by murder suspect Jon Winfield, Bronwyn’s husband. Jon had always lied about being Sonia Lee’s father. Now a middle-aged woman, she saw his face for the first time on the front page of this newspaper at the start of the series earlier this year.
Compelling as it is, the mystery is more than a great human interest story. The Bronwyn podcast is a quest for justice; an attempt to right a decades-old wrong. It has already prompted NSW police to investigate new evidence uncovered by our reporting.
Thomas’s first investigative podcast, The Teacher’s Pet, which began in 2018, contributed to the arrest, trial and conviction of former teacher and rugby league player Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife, Lynette Simms, in 1982. He is serving 25 years in jail. The Teacher’s Pet podcast has had more than 80 million downloads. The fallout from Shandee’s Story, Thomas’s investigation of the frenzied fatal stabbing of Shandee Blackburn, 23, near her mother’s home in Mackay in central Queensland in 2013, is continuing. That podcast led to the review and overhaul of Queensland’s moribund DNA laboratory. Such podcasts demand thorough, painstaking journalism, including hundreds of hours of interviews and the scrutiny of thousands of documents.
In Bronwyn, one turning point has been the memory of retired nurse Judy Singh, who came forward to reveal that late one night in mid-May 1993 she saw Mr Winfield driving a 1987 Ford Falcon XF sedan, the model of the Winfield family car, with a figure in the shape of a body, wrapped in a sheet, in the back seat. Ms Singh who lived about 50m from the Winfields, tried to report what she saw to local and Byron Bay police but says they were “hardly interested” and never got back to her.
Bronwyn Winfield’s family has been highly critical of the police handling of the matter. And in the absence of a body, former NSW director of public prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery declined to prosecute Jon Winfield, despite a coroner finding there was a reasonable prospect a jury would convict “a known person” for murder. Mr Winfield denies any involvement in Bronwyn’s disappearance.