What Bronwyn’s neighbour saw

NSW Police have acted swiftly on retired nurse Judy Singh’s account of seeing what she fears was Bronwyn Winfield’s body wrapped in sheets in the back of a car driven by Bronwyn’s estranged husband Jon Winfield in May 1993. Ms Singh, 69, who lived close to the Winfields’ home in Lennox Head at the time, came forward on Episode 7 of Hedley Thomas’s Bronwyn podcast.

She tried to report the sighting to local police 31 years ago and again several years later, accompanied by a doctor from New Zealand who has confirmed she visited Byron Bay police station with Ms Singh.

Police were in touch with The Australian within about two hours of the episode being posted on Thursday evening. That response contrasted sharply with the apparent indifference of police to the disappearance of women in 1993. Bronwyn Winfield was 31 when she vanished, leaving behind two daughters she dearly loved, then aged 10 and five. Jon Winfield, the last known person to see her alive, has always denied any involvement in her disappearance.

A little more than a decade earlier, on Sydney’s northern beaches in 1982, police also were reluctant to react to the disappearance of Lynette Simms, who was murdered by her husband, rugby league player and phys-ed teacher Chris Dawson. Lynette also left two daughters behind. Dawson was tried and convicted of Lynette’s murder as a result of Thomas’s The Teacher’s Pet podcast. Last week, Dawson lost an appeal against his conviction.

Another notorious cold case put under the blowtorch by Thomas in a podcast, Shandee’s Story, resulted in two major overhauls of Queensland’s failed forensics laboratory. Shandee Blackburn, 23, was stabbed near her home in Mackay when returning from work in 2013.

After Thomas uncovered the laboratory’s weaknesses, they were examined in a commission of inquiry into forensic DNA testing in Queensland by Walter Sofronoff KC. As a result, thousands of DNA samples from rape and murder cases are being retested after it was revealed scientists from the laboratory had made unreliable statements to courts, prosecutors and victims of crime since 2010.

To bring Ms Singh’s memory to life, The Australian’s team used computer-generated images and video animation, and featured a 1987 Ford Falcon sedan – an identical model to the Winfield family car.

Thomas’s podcasts have achieved 100 million downloads in Australia and abroad. Such painstaking investigative journalism is time-consuming and costly. But without it audiences would be in the dark about vital matters of justice and public interest.