Bronwyn and Lennox Head: a seaside village divided
The disappearance of a young mum has roared once again into the local consciousness of Lennox Head, polarising the town as talk gathers pace.
It’s just after 7.30am on a bright and freezing weekday in front of the Lennox Head Alstonville Surf Life Saving Club – here, in the NSW Northern Rivers, the seasons tick over with an eye on the calendar and as precisely as a Swiss watch – and three men are discussing murder.
It’s not a subject raised often in these parts.
Lennox Head is a seaside town that for decades somehow escaped the tourism lunacy of big sister Byron Bay to the north, with its Hollywood clientele and Mother Earth mantras, and the stolid functionality and retirement haven vibe of Ballina to the south.
Gone are the days of students taking a gap year and spending their time surfing and carousing at Lennox – demographic forces have been at play. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic a few years ago the place was invaded by city slickers from Sydney and Melbourne, and while many have returned to metropolitan life their lasting legacy was to drive property and rental prices through the stratosphere. (An older three-bedroom house a street back from the waterfront sold recently for $2.55m.)
Against all odds, though, Lennox Head still clings, ever so slightly, to its village roots. For how long is anybody’s guess.
Down on the main thoroughfare – Ballina Street – fish and chip shops such as The Bream Hole, a half-century institution, are competing with health clinics such as Skin & Clay, which offer your standard body scrubs and massages along with Dermapen microneedling and epi-blading.
As one of the men in front of the Lennox surf club says, gesturing towards the splendid rocky promontory jutting into the Pacific Ocean that gives the town its name: “They call this place Gentrification Head these days.”
But serious crime? Here?
There was the matter of local Kevin Malcolm Purtill who, back in the summer of 2010, slit the throat of a man in a unit up on Blue Seas Parade after a so-called drug deal gone bad.
Now, though, an old case has come back to haunt Ballina Street and Pacific Parade, and the whispers are riffling through the cafes and butcher shops and real estate agencies and surf outlets and wholefood stores.
The disappearance of former Lennox mother of two Bronwyn Joy Winfield – the subject of Bronwyn, The Australian’s new investigative podcast by award-winning journalist Hedley Thomas – has roared once again into the local consciousness and it has divided the village.
Since Bronwyn was released late last month, the vanishing of Winfield, 31, from her home in Sandstone Crescent (by coincidence a few streets across from the gruesome doings in Blue Seas Parade) on May 16, 1993, has been discretely debated throughout Lennox Head and its small satellite suburbs such as Skennars Head, to the south of town. And the talk is gathering pace.
Winfield, in the lead-up to her disappearance, was entangled in a messy break-up and impending divorce from her husband, Jon Winfield. Bronwyn had moved out of Sandstone Crescent with her two daughters – Chrystal and Lauren – in March 1993 but two months later, while Jon, a well-regarded builder, was in Sydney on a job, she and the kids moved back into the family home.
On hearing of this development, Jon flew back from Sydney to sort out the issue. He alleged his wife said she needed some time out, and that a person unknown came and picked her up at the Sandstone Crescent house on the evening of May 16.
Jon then took the girls and drove through the night back to Sydney, where he had relatives. Since then there has been no trace of Bronwyn.
Jon, meanwhile, lives at Skennars Head and surfs daily at his favourite local beach, Sharpes. Now in his late 60s, he is one of a handful of older long-time surfers who still regularly haunt this part of the northern NSW coastline – a “clique” of dudes, one local says, who never stop reminding you how good Lennox used to be.
On this brisk Tuesday, some of those oldies are watching the waves from the surf club.
“I was here when it happened, I recall it,” says one. (Everyone, without exception, refuses to be quoted by name in this story. Lennox is still a small town.) “It has faded away over the years. And a whole generation of new people have moved in.
“Bronwyn’s case does come up now and again. There’s talk. But people come up here (to Lennox) to turn off and tune out.”
The men gaze towards the water, deep in thought and checking the swell.
“But everyone knows everyone’s secrets, that’s for sure,” another says, smiling. “I think you’ll find that most people in town are split on Bronwyn and what happened to her. It’s terribly sad for the (Winfield) family.
“It does happen up here. People go off the grid. The hippies. The communes are still up this way.”
Another of the men says some people are saying the podcast and the reinvestigation into Bronwyn is “a great thing”. Others are wary of reheating the past.
“Something like this polarises a small town,” he says. “You’re either for Bronwyn or Jon. “There should be a presumption of innocence until it’s proved otherwise.”
Back in the heart of town, there is ample evidence that Lennox’s physical past – certainly from the time Bronwyn walked these streets – is slowly but steadily being erased.
For example Edens Takeaway, the fast food shop where Bronwyn worked part time in 1993 as her marriage fell apart, has been transformed into Seed & Husk, a thoroughly contemporary wholefoods hub, foodery, cafe and naturopathy centre where you can buy boxes of seasonal vegetables and buckwheat cakes, and the adjacent Seascape body and massage salon.
Jack, behind the counter of Seed & Husk, the place rich with the aroma of organic coffee, vaguely recalls the Bronwyn case as a young man. He has asked some of the younger staff whether they know of it. They don’t.
Other locals, though, are highly invested in the podcast’s reinvestigation of this extremely cold case.
One business operator, a former NSW police officer (“There are a lot of us up here, escaping the Sydney rat race”) is following the reinvigorated case with a passion.
As a former cop, she says, she is intrigued by the details of the story – the timeline of Bronwyn’s disappearance, neighbours and friends of Bronwyn being reinterviewed, and what she figures was a “pretty poor” investigation by local police.
“I’d like to know more about how the police initially handled it,” she says.
(One retired detective familiar with the case at the time said the early investigation was not as thorough as it could have been, and that police first thought Bronwyn had been the victim of “the old sand dune trick” – that her body had been secreted in the dunes at the southern end of Seven Mile Beach, not far from the surf club.)
The business operator’s work colleague says he vaguely knew Jon “from the surf” and that he was living in Lennox when Bronwyn vanished.
“There’s a lot of small-town speculation flying around at the moment,” he says. “The talk about the case has been reinvigorated. Back then the public didn’t have as much information as they have now.
“So many people have moved here in the last 10 years. Stories get left behind. But with this case everyone has an opinion. Everyone has got an assumption.”
A long-term local and business owner who doesn’t remember Bronwyn or the case does recall, almost swooning, Edens Takeaway’s famous “Dapto wraps” – salad and chicken with a poppy-seed dressing.
One young woman who works locally says the town is “cleanly divided” in opinions on what happened to Bronwyn Joy Winfield: missing on her own volition, perhaps because of some mental health crisis at the time; or murdered.
“People are taking sides,” she says. “People are listening to the podcast hoping that the truth will be found. I think the whole thing is going to blow up.”
Do you know something about this case? Contact Hedley Thomas confidentially at bronwyn@theaustralian.com.au
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