The remarkable and treasured family photos of missing mum Bronwyn Joy Winfield
These images are testimony to the adamant belief of Bronwyn Joy Winfield’s family and friends that she would never have walked away from her own children on that distant Sunday night at Lennox Head.
They are showing their age now, the family photographs of Bronwyn Joy Winfield.
Those pictures stopped when Bronwyn disappeared on May 16, 1993 – still a world away from digitisation or mobile phone cameras – so they carry the ravages of time.
Many of them bear the classic trait of prints from the 1970s or ’80s, when the ink used was rich ion chromophores or a light-attracting molecule that breaks down through the years, leaving behind images rendered flat with sepia hues, human skin a rich orange or bleached-out white, the shots muddied and fading.
Bronwyn’s pictures – beach picnics, family celebrations, birthday parties, nights out with friends or weddings – remain remarkable for another reason. There is hardly a photograph of Bronwyn, treasured by her family, that doesn’t include a child.
There’s Bronwyn pregnant, side on in the picture, hands on hips and proudly displaying her baby bump. Bronwyn helping toddlers cut birthday cakes or blow out candles. Bronwyn hugging children, kissing them, feeding them and laughing with them.
The images are testimony to the adamant belief of her family and friends that Bronwyn would never have walked away from her own children – Chrystal and Lauren – on that distant Sunday night at Lennox Head on the NSW far north coast. Estranged husband Jon Winfield told police at the time that Bronwyn left the home in Sandstone Court of her own volition, saying she needed a break for a few days.
She has never been seen since.
At an inquest in 2002 Carl Milovanovich, the NSW deputy state coroner at the time, found that Bronwyn had been a loving mother who would not have left the family home without her kids.
Jon Winfield has always denied any involvement in Bronwyn’s disappearance. He made a sworn statement in 1998 and confirmed that version to police again in 2010. He told The Australian this week that he stands by these answers he gave.
While Bronwyn leaving without her children remains one of the biggest red flags in this mystery, family and friends said there were warning signs leading up to her vanishing.
Bronwyn’s sister-in-law Michelle Read knew there were cracks in Bronwyn and Jon’s marriage. “What you see on the outside isn’t always what’s happening on the inside, is it? What happens behind closed doors in someone’s house,” she tells award-winning investigative journalist Hedley Thomas, author of The Australian’s new podcast Bronwyn, which was launched on Thursday. “The only people who can really tell you about that is Bronwyn, and she can’t and Jon won’t.”
Sydney-based Read said Bronwyn often called her from Lennox Head expressing her unhappiness and desire to leave Jon.
“I said to her, ‘Well, do you want to move back to Sydney? Like I can help you try and find somewhere to live,’ ” Read recalls. Bronwyn said she couldn’t afford to move. She had no money.
“And then she’d say, you know, ‘If anything ever happens to me, will you promise me you’ll look after (her daughter) Chrystal.’ Particularly Chrystal, because Chrystal was not Jon’s genetic child, whereas Lauren was. She kind of felt that Jon would look after his own more than he would look after Chrystal, which rang true in the end.”
On another occasion, an unhappy Bronwyn rang Read and said something startling.
“She rang up and she was unhappy,” Read remembers. “And was talking about leaving him again. And said again the next time about looking after the kids ‘if anything ever happened to me’. She never, ever said straight out, ‘Oh, I think Jon’s going to do something to me.’ That never got said. It just got implied.”
In Read’s mind, one thing was certain. Bronwyn was scared.
“Oh, definitely fearful,” Read says. “We knew she wasn’t unwell. She would never leave her kids. She loved those kids. Wholeheartedly. It was fear. It was fear of Jon. I just knew that.”
Bronwyn’s cousin, Megan Read, has similar memories. She was “as close as close” with Bronwyn. “Her relationship with Jon, I knew what it was like,” Megan Read tells the podcast. “I knew. I’d seen the bruises. To me, it’s just so shocking. Because I used to speak to her when she was on that phone. And I could hear him, yelling and screaming and banging on the door. I mean, surely other people heard it. Now she was terrified of Jon. Absolutely terrified of him.”
While Bronwyn’s marriage to Jon had its ups and downs, one issue loomed large when they separated – the marital home that Jon built at 60 Sandstone Crescent, Lennox Head.
Bronwyn and the kids had moved out in March 1993 and rented a cramped flat down in Byron Street, on the road out of Lennox Head village. Then in mid-May, while Jon was working in Sydney, Bronwyn moved back into the house on legal and family advice. He had changed the locks but she had used a locksmith to gain access to the property.
When Jon found out, he flew straight back to Lennox. It was Sunday, May 16, 1993. Bronwyn had an appointment with her local solicitor set for the next morning.
“He (Jon) had made it incredibly clear that she would never get that house,” Megan Read says. “The last thing she said to me was that the best thing she ever did was to move out and get away from him. She had asked my parents for money. She needed to retain a solicitor. I just can’t believe the timing. I don’t understand to this day how Jonathon’s walking around the streets. It just astounds me, the incompetence of the police.
“They’ve lost a lot of the evidence. They can’t even find it. Can you believe that? They’ve bungled this so badly. They really have. I’ve lived with it for 30 years.”
Bronwyn had few close friends during her time in Lennox but she did meet Denise Barnard in a mothers group and they became close.
In the early months of 1993 Bronwyn moved into the flat out of town and decided to get the girls a puppy – Muffy. Jon had never wanted a dog. Bronwyn, however, confided in Barnard about her relationship troubles, telling her friend she was growing fearful of Jon’s alleged violence towards her.
“I still recollect when she told me that he had had her by the throat, up against the wall, and that she was frightened … I remember the conversation,” Barnard says. Was Bronwyn being dramatic and exaggerating these stories? “I don’t know that she would need to,” Barnard says, adding that Bronwyn had never made any mention of needing to go away for a long time or taking a break from the whole situation.
“I think she was committed to leaving him and taking the girls and starting a new life for herself. Probably the bottom line – she would never have left those children. Ever. They were her life. And knowing that Chrystal wasn’t Jon’s, she wouldn’t have gone anywhere without them. She just wouldn’t have done it.”
Barnard says that after Bronwyn disappeared Jon Winfield contacted her. He didn’t want the dog. “So my parents ended up with that lovely little dog for, like, 18 years,” Barnard says.
She says she is excited about Thomas’s podcast.
“We need to do it,” Barnard says. “It’s been too long. I think anybody that had anything to impart, any more information to try and get this resolved one way or the other, would be interested in talking to (Hedley). Whatever happened that night – on that Sunday night – that was the last of Bronwyn. That’s the night those girls lost their mum.”
Deb Hall will never forget the first time she met Bronwyn.
She was next-door neighbour to Bronwyn and Jon in Sandstone Crescent, up on the ridge with a view of the ocean.
“She came down to introduce herself,” Hall tells the podcast. “We were chatting, we had things in common, we had kids. And about the same age. She was about the same age as me. But while I was talking to her she kind of broke down. And I hadn’t met her before. And she started to cry. She said, ‘Oh, I’ve just got some things going on with my husband.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t even know you.’ And that struck me. And I went, ‘Oh, if there’s anything I can do? Let me know.’ ”
Despite this unusual emotional outburst, Hall says, Bronwyn came to her house a lot.
“The reason she would be at my house was because Jon would not allow anyone to come to their house,” Hall recalls. “Jon was an absolute neat freak. I mean, you could eat off the floor. Nothing was out of place. And Bronwyn was neat, but she wanted her house to be lived in. They had kids. I had four kids. But they were never allowed in the house.”
A peculiar arrangement ensued. “If they (her kids) went up there to play, they had to play in the garage,” Hall says.
“But quite often she (Bronwyn) would offload to me a lot about him. How, you know, he wouldn’t let her have this, he wouldn’t let her do that. But when I ever spoke to him, it would always just be polite conversation.”
Then everything changed.
“To my astonishment one day she, and I can’t remember exactly when it was, but she told me she was going to leave him (Jon),” Hall says. “And I said, ‘Oh, OK, well where are you going to go?’ And she said, ‘I’ve organised a place down in Lennox.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s good … what does Jon think?’ She said, ‘Oh well, he’s agreeable to it and I’m going to move down there.’
“And so she did. I did visit her there. She got a dog. The kids always wanted a puppy. And I used to think, ‘Oh well, she’s really branching out’ … she had a job at the cafe down there and she was sort of getting on with it. And you’d go down there and the house was lived in, the kids had their stuff and my kids would go and play and, you know, it was just a normal environment, albeit a little bit difficult for her.”
Bronwyn had responded to an advertisement in the Northern Star newspaper for the townhouse down in Byron Street. The property’s owner and landlady, Shirley Taylor, cut the single mum some slack.
Taylor told the police in 1998: “She informed me that she had separated from her husband and was looking for a place to rent. At the time she had two young girls with her. After inspecting the flat she informed me that she wished to rent it but told me that she would have trouble paying the $150 a week rent.
“I told her that she could move in and we would see how things go.” Taylor also asked for a bond of $700. A cheque for the amount was signed by Jon Winfield. Bronwyn handed it over the same day.
Taylor told police Jon later arrived asking for the bond money back.
“I told him that Bronwyn had given me the money for the bond and he was very angry and demanded the money,” she said in a formal statement. “Because of the way he was acting and his aggressive manner, I gave him back the cheque and he left. A couple of days later, Bronwyn came over to my place and gave me another cheque for $700. I think it was the same cheque that her husband had taken from me.”
Taylor formed an attachment with Bronwyn.
“I came to know Bronwyn fairly well and I would mind her children if she had to go down the street. I found her to be a most devoted mother who was very attached to her children,” she said.
“I didn’t really have any conversations with her about her private life. I do recall, though, that she told me that she hated her husband.”
Another of Bronwyn’s Lennox friends – interviewed on the podcast under the pseudonym of “Joan” – says Bronwyn had told her that husband Jon had offered a marriage settlement worth a fraction of the value of their house in Sandstone Crescent.
Joan said Jon Winfield didn’t want to lose the house.
“He said he would give her – and I can’t remember the exact amount, $5000 or $10,000, something like that,” Joan says. “There’s no mortgage on the house. And she said, ‘I’ll get a real estate to value it.’ ” The house was worth about $250,000 at the time.
“He didn’t want to lose that house. Like she said, she overheard him talking to his father … it’d be better if he had the kids. More chance of having the house.”
Joan recalls Bronwyn saying things that made her concerned for her safety. “She had told me that Jon had said to her if ever she badmouthed him around town he would kill her. I got the impression she felt like he would. I had no doubt about believing anything she told me.”
Police statements down the years pointed towards signs of domestic violence in the Winfield household before Bronwyn disappearing.
Bronwyn’s uncle, John Read, told police in 1998: “While Bronwyn was at our house, she informed me that Jon had been assaulting her and she showed me a significant bruise on her forearm. I cannot remember which arm it was.”
Robyn Shanahan owned Eden’s Takeaway, the fast food place where Bronwyn worked in the final weeks of her life.
She remembers that Bronwyn was nervous with Jon.
She recalls seeing a tea towel draped over the taps at the back of the sink in Bronwyn’s kitchen at the Lennox Head home.
Shanahan asked about the unusual placement of the tea towel.
Bronwyn replied that when peeling potatoes starch sometimes sprayed on to the taps and the messiness “set Jon off”. Placing the tea towel there mitigated an argument.
“In my opinion, she lived in fear,” Shanahan says.
In the early stages of Bronwyn’s disappearance, the matter was reported sporadically in the local newspaper, the Northern Star, out of nearby Lismore. Bronwyn’s case never got traction in the national media and was forgotten over time.
The photographs of Bronwyn Joy Winfield faded away.
But a handful of family and friends never forgot.
And now, more than 31 years to the day that she disappeared, and was presumed murdered, a modern podcast is throwing its powerful arc lights on her case.
Anyone with information can send it to Hedley Thomas at bronwyn@theaustralian.com.au
To hear directly from the Bronwyn podcast team each week, click here.
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