The mystery of the Hayward Street baby
The mystery of a mutilated baby dumped in a Cairns driveway has been solved 20 years later with a confession. Or has it?
The Cairns cemetery groundsman runs his right forefinger down a list of the dead, searching for the Hayward Street baby. “It’s funny,” he says. “Sometimes when you get everything organised, that’s exactly when you can’t find anything.” I’ve been thinking something just like that. Sometimes when you have all the answers lined up in your head that’s exactly when you can’t find all the questions.
The groundsman is sun-bronzed and fit with a salt-and-pepper crew cut. He’s happy to help. He’s always helping strangers who drop in to the cemetery to pay their respects to the Hayward Street baby. He runs his finger down the names of another 100 or so dead locals. “Here we go,” he says. “Fifty-five.” The forefinger moves across instead of down now, finds a collection of biographical notes. “Male,” he says. “Infant remains. No name.” He shakes his head. “Mmmmmm,” he says, grimly. He closes the folder. “Follow me.” He exits his office, closing the door behind him. He wants to keep the airconditioned room cool inside because it’s hot in Cairns, even in May.
It was early May 1996 when Pat Callaghan opened the roller door on his garage in Hayward Street, Mooroobool, west Cairns, to see what he thought was a dog lying in his driveway. Saturday morning, around 8.45am. Pat was taking his children to the local shops and they were already in the back of his car waiting for their dad to lift the garage door. He walked closer to what he now thought looked more like a doll. Then he saw what it really was, a sight that would fix inside his mind for the next 22 years of his normally uncomplicated working-class Cairns life. He rushed back inside the garage, pulled the door down again and ordered his children to go inside.
The groundsman passes a tractor parked beside the maintenance shed. A young colleague is having afternoon smoko on a seat behind the shed. “He’s over this way,” the groundsman says, pacing over tidy grassed rows of infant graves without headstones. He looks down along a concrete strip of numbered plots. “Forty-nine,” he says. “51, 53 …” He stops at a respectful one-metre distance from the grave, points at it with his right forefinger. “Fifty-five.”
Pat Callaghan tried his best to convey the sight in his driveway to police over the phone. A naked baby, but not whole. An unclamped and roughly torn umbilical cord but only the top half of the baby, lying face down. Police told Pat to cover the baby with a blanket, which he did, but when he returned to the phone he saw a neighbourhood dog grip the baby’s arm with its teeth and attempt to drag the body away. Pat dropped the phone once more, chased the dog from his yard.
The groundsman left a coloured pot at plot 55. “So I’d know where to find it.” The pot’s still there, covered in pink, yellow, red artificial flowers. There’s a blue teddy bear figurine and a white crucifix candle holder with a message: “Always loved.”
A team of 20 police officers doorknocked the streets of Mooroobool in search of the baby’s mother. Some 70 locals submitted blood and saliva tests to police. Police consulted the hospital to find women who’d recently been pregnant. Local mothers were interviewed and sampled for DNA. Dr Michael McAuliffe, a government medical officer, examined the body in the driveway. He noted sideways cuts to the baby’s wrists, a wound above his collar bone. An autopsy revealed the baby was likely cut in half by a knife or scissors just below the navel. He was possibly born into a toilet, a bath or Moody Creek, which regularly flooded the neighbourhood’s wide sleepy streets in the 1980s and 1990s.
Months passed and police doubled and tripled their efforts and called for the public to help. A $250,000 reward was posted for anyone with information on the growing mystery of the butchered baby boy with no name.
In the Cairns cemetery, the groundsman stands a bunch of fallen artificial flowers back upright. “The bloke who had my job before me told me that he used to see someone coming to this plot on the same day every year,” he says. “They’d leave flowers here for the baby.”
Two and a half years passed and the Hayward Street baby case went cold.
“Today is our last day to solve this case,” said lead investigator Detective Sergeant Paul Priest, as the people of Mooroobool prepared for the baby’s funeral service. “It still remains a very bizarre and macabre discovery and at this stage we have progressed no further.”
The baby was buried in August 1998. About 30 locals from Hayward Street and surrounds helped bury a boy they never knew. The funeral service was led by a particularly thoughtful man named Fr John Flynn who was known for two things: his devotion to God and his devotion to the people of Cairns. “We know nothing whatever about his father and mother,” he told mourners surrounding a small white coffin. “This little child only knew the light of life maybe for a day. We don’t know exactly how long, that’s the tragic mystery.”
Then John Flynn asked mourners to do something profound. “We have got no idea if a name had been chosen for him,” he said. “So we ask each of you in your hearts to give this little one a name.” Each mourner bowed their head and silently named the unknown child in the coffin. And in that moment, the residents of Hayward Street, Mooroobool, became the baby’s stand-in carers.
The groundsman turns back around from Plot 55, motions to return to his shed with his thick identification folder filled with the details of the dead. Male. Infant remains. No name.
“Well,” the groundsman says. “We know who he is now, don’t we.”
Anne Storer emerges from her bedroom in a pink nightie emblazoned with the words “Do Not Disturb”. She takes my hand and leads me to a shrine she’s constructed against the wall of her wood-panelled living room beneath a framed portrait of Pope John Paul II. “I always say this before I start the day,” she says, making a sign of the cross. “Good morning good Lord, good morning world, good morning people.”
A quick smoke, a cup of tea and she’s ready to return to May 4, 1996. “I remember it like it happened this morning,” she says. She’s 70 and has lived in Hayward Street since 1971, back when a block of vacant land here cost $1000. Her husband Fred, a retired truck driver, sits in a blue shirt in an armchair that matches Anne’s. “It was a Saturday morning,” Fred says. “I was having bacon and eggs. Coppers came around next door by the droves.”
He went out the front and saw the baby in the driveway. “It was horrible. I came back upstairs and I said to Anne, ‘There’s a bloody awful sight next door’.” His wife rushed down to the scene and knelt beside the body. All she felt was compassion. “I immediately wanted to baptise the baby,” she says. “But the police said I couldn’t touch it. I just wanted to put a little water on it and at least make a sign of the cross on the forehead. I wasn’t allowed for the simple reason that it might interfere with forensics.”
Tears well in Anne’s eyes. “It was the soul I was thinking about,” she says. “It was the eternal soul.”
“Then the detectives turned up,” Fred says. “They wanted to borrow a tarpaulin from me. They said they had some material coming up in an aeroplane, forensics stuff, and they were gonna put it all over the grass and then they were gonna hope it didn’t rain and it would show up all the blood stains around the place. All that showed up was dog turd. Everywhere, dog shit.”
Fred and Anne recall the surreal scenes of mums, dads, sons and daughters along Hayward Street being swabbed for DNA. “Every dog in the street was taken to the vet,” says Anne. “The dogs had their stomachs pumped out. X-rays were taken. They were searching for the other half of the body but not one dog in the street had anything.”
“The chief inspector said to us, ‘This is gonna drag on and on and on’,” Fred says. “It sure did.”
Thelma Spelta owned the house that Pat Callaghan was renting when he found the baby. For two decades she has watched the Hayward Street community try and fail to process the impossible scene that morning. “We still can’t believe something as shocking as that could be done to a baby,” she says today. “It gets to you and it’s difficult to move on.”
The colder the case got, the more the residents felt connected to the baby. A shorthand developed between neighbours: “You heard anything about the baby?”
“I started feeling for the child,” Anne Storer says. “The poor thing spends two years in the morgue before it gets its burial.” She was deeply touched by the way Fr John Flynn led that cemetery farewell. “After it was all over we were at the cemetery lawn there beside the grave and I said to the head police investigator, Paul Priest, ‘So, what did you call him’?” says Anne. Priest named the boy after all the kind people in Hayward Street who had been so earnestly assisting the investigation. “I called him Hayward,” he said.
Anne called the boy Augustine because he was buried on August 28, the day marking the feast of St Augustine. “And that name stuck with a few of us in the street,” she says. “Augustine Hayward.”
Every year on the May 4 anniversary of Augustine Hayward’s death, Anne Storer would place flowers on the anonymous grave at Plot 55, Row CP3, in the Cairns cemetery. “Yeah, that was me,” she says. She would pray for the boy’s soul and silently vow to him that somehow justice would be served for what she was certain was his murder.
Fred Storer shakes his head in his armchair. “It was like something you see on TV,” he says. “A murder mystery came to our own bloody street. The police eventually went away but all them questions kept going through your mind.” He sips his tea, shrugs his shoulders. “Who done it?”
Fr Hilary Flynn of the Catholic Diocese of Cairns learnt long ago not to question the mysterious ways of God, so he didn’t question it for a second when he was asked to visit Violet Flora Evans before her death. “One of her best friends rang me up and said, ‘Violet is in Cairns Base Hospital and she’d love a visit from you and a prayer’,” Fr Flynn says. “I said a prayer for her and she said a prayer for me. She died four or five months later. She wasn’t bitter. I don’t think she ever became bitter. She was an amazingly forgiving person, really. I think she died at peace. I suspect she was closer to God than people realised.”
Some 20 years before this moment by the Cairns hospital bed, Fr Flynn’s older brother, John — who died in 2008 — had buried the boy Violet Evans was charged with murdering.
In 1997, Violet Evans was evicted from her Housing Commission duplex, four houses up from Pat Callaghan’s driveway. Detective Sergeant Paul Priest had visited the duplex on May 4, 1996, when he was doorknocking the street, searching for clues. He saw a wall inside Evans’ home that he thought at first was painted black, only to realise it was, in fact, crawling with cockroaches. He took DNA samples from the dwelling but found no matches to the Hayward Street baby.
In 2008, Violet Flora Evans, then aged 52, was charged with the baby’s murder after a woman who had been contracted by the Housing Commission to clean the vacant dwelling in 1997 told police she recalled finding in the bathroom crusted-over blood and mucus that she believed was afterbirth. The cleaner came forward after reading an article in the Cairns Sun in which a retiring police officer lamented the case’s lack of closure.
Evans allegedly confessed to police that she cut her newborn baby in half to “hide any evidence”. In a committal hearing, Priest gave evidence that Evans had been a strong early suspect for the murder but initial DNA tests from 1996 failed to connect the devoted churchgoer to the baby. “Forensics was in its infancy then,” Priest said. “We were kind of just winging it.”
But, said defence barrister Tony Kimmins, more up-to-date DNA tests failed to show Evans was the baby’s mother. Kimmins accused police of badgering Evans and asking her leading questions during an eight-hour interrogation. In her confession she allegedly described giving birth to the baby — the alleged product of an affair with a member of her church — outside her unit. Then, seeing the baby was not breathing, she decided to cut the baby in half and “put him on the water’s edge” of Moody Creek. Evans was described in court as being an “unsophisticated person” prone to speaking of “visions” and “revelations”. The Director of Public Prosecutions later dropped the charges due to lack of evidence.
Today, a personable and gentle 76-year-old racing steward named Lester Miles lives in the duplex Violet Evans occupied. He says he moved here in 1998, not long after she moved out. “All the locals here talked about it,” he says. “What I did notice was when I walked around the back, the back of the toilet and shower area it just sort of … the vibes were a bit funny. I never ever walked close to that side of the house. Just a bad feeling.”
In 2008, he heard a knock on his door. “It’s the police and they’ve got a bloody search warrant: ‘We wanna dig up ya bathroom’. They checked the pipes and everything in there and I thought to myself, ‘You’re not gonna find out a lot there’, because the sink, the hand basin, the water had been slow going out and I pulled the S-bend off and cleaned it all out and there was all this black gooey stuff in there and I thought that was blood. I cleaned all that out.”
Lester Miles may well have unwittingly discarded the evidence that police were hoping might link Violet Evans unquestionably to the Hayward Street baby. “I don’t know what they were thinking, maybe that the baby was killed in there, dissected or something. The word around the street was that this was all a waste of time.”
“Violet?” says Anne Storer, shaking her head. “I never thought she did it. If she was guilty of anything it was that she knew something about it and she was covering up for someone.”
“I don’t know why they said she killed her baby or why she couldn’t defend herself better,” Fr Hilary Flynn says. The Violet Evans he knew was deeply pious. “She lived in poverty. She was one of those off-the-radar ladies. She had a flair for making friends and she had a flair for putting people off. She was a bit of a mixture.” He reflects on this for a moment. “She considered me a friend,” he says. “I can say it’s one of the things in my life I’m ashamed of. I could have been a better friend to her. Affirmed her more. Resourced her more. Encouraged her more. Turned up more.”
Violet Evans was buried in the Cairns cemetery on May 15, 2017, not far from the resting place of the Hayward Street baby and mere months after Cairns police arrested the real biological mother of the mystery boy with multiple names.
“There’s something coming from that place.” Local mum Lisa* leans on her porch railing, looking over a high timber fence to the vacant house adjacent to hers in Cochrane Street, a one-minute walk from Violet Evans’ former home. Lisa says her dog always barks at one particular corner in the neighbour’s house, a low-set white concrete block home. The dog barks and barks, she says, like it knows something we all don’t. “It’s like there’s this big dark cloud hanging over that house,” Lisa says. “Spirits. Culturally, for us indigenous people, it’s like the little one is looking for someone. The spirit is unsettled.”
In December 2016, Cairns police made public appeals for information on the cold case of the Hayward Street baby, saying advances in DNA technology, or a flat-out confession from someone in the community carrying a heavy secret, could solve the now 20-year mystery. Days later, they received a tip-off that led them to this concrete block house in Cochrane Street.
On January 8, 2017, detectives arrested 43-year-old Cairns resident Maria Raymond, an indigenous woman with strong family ties to the community. They charged her with manslaughter and the improper disposal of the remains of her deceased baby between May 1 and May 5, 1996.
In April this year, a jury in the Cairns Supreme Court heard witness Naomi Blanche recall the pre-dawn morning on March 5, 2012 when she came across Maria Raymond in a distressed state on the corner of Chester Street and Cochrane Street, one block from Hayward Street. “She was muttering that she needed to be arrested, that she’d killed her baby, he was blue and she didn’t know what to do,” Naomi said. “She said that she had left him on the side of the street. She said that this had happened 15 years earlier.”
Justice James Henry summarised Maria Raymond’s side of a 21-year story for the jury. “The accused’s uncontradicted account is that she did not know she was pregnant, or giving birth, until the baby proceeded from her on the toilet at her home, where no one else was present. She claims that soon afterwards she wrapped her dead baby and walked to a house in her neighbourhood where there lived a woman she had seen about locally wearing a cross. She left it outside a door of the house and left.
“The following day the upper torso of the baby was found on the front driveway of another house in the neighbourhood in circumstances suggesting dogs had been moving it about the local area. Whether she left it outside a house, as she describes, the circumstances suggest she did leave her dead baby’s body somewhere out in the open, in a residential neighbourhood, where members of the public or animals, such as dogs, may encounter it. These events occurred in 1996. The accused told no one of her role in them for many years.”
On her Cochrane Street porch, Lisa has only one brief question about the Hayward Street baby mystery. “Why?” she says. “I feel so sad for her. I keep thinking about the family unit. Culturally, it’s a norm for indigenous people to have kids at a young age. We help each other through it.” She believes the whole sorry saga didn’t have to happen. “The weight on her shoulders, mentally, for her to carry that for that long. Did no one in the family unit click that she might need help?”
Justice Henry directed the jury to “not use the fact that the body was likely cut in half as in any way tending to prove the accused is guilty of either charge against her”. The jury took little more than an hour to reach a decision. “Whatever guilt you may have felt associated with the death of your child, the jury has concluded you are guilty of no criminal offence in connection with it,” Justice Henry said. “You are discharged and free to go.”
The late Fr John Flynn would have called that jury decision an act of human compassion and understanding. A 22-year-old woman endures great personal tragedy and that tragedy is compounded for 21 more years by actions made in deep distress. Fr Flynn would have said that was punishment enough.
On May 3 this year, Maria Raymond posted a quote on her Facebook page: “It’s never too late for a new beginning in your life.”
In her house in Hayward Street, Anne Storer stubs out a cigarette. She shrugs her shoulders. “So that’s supposed to be it?” she asks. “Does that all add up to you?” Most of it does. “But you got questions, don’t ya?” Anne asks. “What happened to the other half of the body?”
Anne rests back in her armchair. “I’ll think about that boy for as long I live,” she says. “Every time I see a baby I think of him. Every time I hear a child is gone I think of him.”
She’s going to keep visiting his grave. In time, she hopes the cemetery will allow her to place a plaque on Plot 55, Row CP3. She’ll pay for it all herself. “I know what it will say on the plaque,” Anne says. “‘Baby Augustine. God’s angel.’”
* Name has been changed.