Bronwyn podcast: Your burning questions answered on the missing mum mystery
The Australian’s investigative podcast series Bronwyn has generated new leads, reinvigorated the police investigation, and prompted big questions.
In 10 episodes, the podcast investigation into the unsolved disappearance of Lennox Head mother Bronwyn Winfield by The Australian’s national chief correspondent Hedley Thomas has generated new leads, reinvigorated the police investigation, and prompted big questions.
They’re the subject of two new special episodes, available exclusively for subscribers at bronwynpodcast.com. Here, we have unpacked some of the most-asked questions about this investigation, from queries about bedsheets to a cousin’s staunch denial of a damning phone call more than three decades ago.
Where are the kids’ bedsheets?
This is the question asked most often. In episode 7 of Bronwyn, former Sandstone Crescent resident Judy Singh made an extraordinary revelation: she claims she saw husband Jon Winfield driving the family’s Ford Falcon down the street with what appeared to be a “mummy” in the back seat.
In an earlier conversation, Mel Taylor – daughter of Bronwyn and Jon’s neighbours Deb Hall and Murray Nolan – recalled she’d visited the Winfield home in the days after Bronwyn vanished and noticed it was unusually dishevelled. “There was the washing in the laundry, the dishes … There were no sheets on the beds. They were gone,” she says.
That confluence of factors has led many listeners to question whether Jon Winfield wrapped Bronwyn in the sheets taken from the children’s beds before allegedly disposing of her body in an unknown location.
The house was never formally declared a crime scene so the purported absence of the sheets wasn’t noted in the initial police brief of evidence.
So the short answer is: we may never know what happened to the bed sheets, or what – if anything – they were used for.
Did Megan Read talk to police in 1993?
A memo by Detective Graham Diskin in 1993 details a conversation he had with someone claiming to be Bronwyn’s cousin Megan Read. It’s not a signed police statement.
“Megan stated that she has no fears about Jon Winfield being involved in anything untoward so far as his wife’s disappearance is concerned,” the document reads.
“Megan also believes that in the past, Bronwyn was a user of cannabis and described her as a ‘flower child’, believing she may well be living on a commune somewhere. Megan reiterated the fact her mother did exactly the same thing some years ago, and believes that one day she will walk back into the family home as if nothing happened, due to her state of mind at the time of the disappearance.”
Bronwyn’s cousin vehemently denies speaking with Detective Diskin in 1993 and maintains someone close to Jon Winfield was impersonating her to divert suspicion from him. “Absolute bullshit. I never, ever would say that,” she insists. “Jon told me that she was at the Age of Aquarius Commune. This is Jon’s words.”
The police running sheet kept by Detective Diskin during his investigation shows he recorded Megan’s name and number.
In a post in the podcast’s official discussion group on Facebook, Megan says her phone records from September of 1993 – when she’s alleged to have spoken with the detective – were handed to Deputy State Coroner Carl Milovanovich at an inquest into Bronwyn’s unsolved disappearance in 2002. She says Graham Diskin’s phone number isn’t among the long-distance phone calls captured in the records.
“The statement tendered by Sergeant Diskin is a work of fiction not given by me,” Megan wrote. “He had the spelling of my name wrong – Reid instead of Read – and in Sept (sic) ’93 I only ever went by my married name of Megan Levitas. It was five years later that I started using my maiden name, after my divorce in 1997.”
This purported phone call is a point of contention within the Read family. Because Megan was in regular contact with Jon Winfield after Bronwyn’s disappearance, Bronwyn’s brother, Andy Read, became concerned at the information he might have access to – and so he had her effectively sidelined from the investigation.
Megan’s niece and Bronwyn’s second cousin Madi Walsh says she believes it was Megan Read on the other end of the phone but Detective Diskin might have misunderstood her comments or taken them of context.
Who called the Shire hair salon?
When Bronwyn Winfield went missing in May of 1993, her step-daughter, Jodie Winfield, was working as a hairdresser at a salon in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire.
In the missing person’s report filed on May 27 of that year, Jon Winfield said someone claiming to be his estranged wife called the salon and asked to speak with Jodie on May 18 – a day Jodie wasn’t working.
The salon employee who answered the phone later told Andy Read she didn’t know if Bronwyn was the caller, but said they relayed a message for Jodie: “Tell Jodie I’m okay. I’m in Queensland and I’m not coming back”.
That lead was never followed up by police in 1993 and any records showing the source of the call to the salon have likely been lost or destroyed. That means the identity of the caller will probably remain a mystery.
When was Jon Winfield coming and going?
Neighbour Murray Nolan says he observed the Winfields’ Ford Falcon backing silently down the driveway around 10:40pm on May 16, 1993.
When he arrived at the home of Andy and Michelle Read the next day, Jon produced a tax receipt showing he’d purchased fuel at a petrol station near Ballina at 11:07pm.
And Judy Singh says she saw the Winfields’ car creeping along Sandstone Crescent sometime after that – she believes it must have been in the early hours of the next morning because it was a challenging time in her life and she recalls being unable to sleep.
Murray Nolan and Judy Singh never gave formal statements to police during the initial investigation into Bronwyn’s disappearance, and Murray didn’t tell them about this observation when he was interviewed by Detective Sergeant Glenn Taylor in 1998, so there’s no documentary evidence that indicates if these were the same or separate outings.
Is the Read family cursed?
In episode 11 of Bronwyn, it was revealed Chrystal Winfield-Neale – Bronwyn’s oldest daughter – had been scammed out of her life savings by self-described “soul doctors”. The true extent of the financial damage has yet to be determined, but members of her family believe the total sum to be in excess of $300,000.
“Chrystal has been searching for a way to bring permanent positivity into her thinking and into her daily life,” said Bronwyn’s half-sister and Chrystal’s aunt, Kim Marshall. “And she thought meeting these people … would help her on a spiritual path to no longer having this weighted burden.”
Chrystal’s search for peace was motivated by a belief that her mother’s side of the family – the Reads – is cursed. She believed the acts of financial kindness she performed at the urging of the soul doctors would break the hoodoo.
“The deepness or the darkness that’s always over her whole life, a belief that something always seems to go wrong … Something always seems to pull her down. Something always seems to stop her having success,” Kim Marshall said. “I think that’s really what the curse is about.
Madi Walsh says no one really knows where this bit of family lore came from, but some believe it affects Read men more than the women. “It’s just a funny thing we like to bring up every now and then as a joke, but other family members take it more seriously.”
Bronwyn’s brother, Andy Read, is emphatic: he doesn’t believe his family is cursed.
“I reject any suggestion that there has been or is currently any curse on the good name of the Read family,” he says.
Was the clairvoyant involved?
Before she vanished, Bronwyn attended two sessions with clairvoyant David Addenbrooke, who went by the name Pendragon.
A missing-person report by Jon Winfield on May 27, 1993, cast suspicion on the clairvoyant. He claimed Bronwyn had spoken with Pendragon after the date she was last seen – on May 16.
Pendragon was placed under surveillance by police during the initial police investigation into her disappearance, but he was ultimately cleared of involvement.
His son, Andy says his late father was a flamboyant character who cared deeply for his clients. He believes Bronwyn ultimately engaged Lismore solicitor Chris McDevitt on Pendragon’s recommendation.
There’s no other evidence to suggest Pendragon was involved in or had knowledge of Bronwyn’s disappearance.
LISTEN TO ALL THE EPISODES HERE
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