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.

Illustration: Emilia Tortorella

Over two seasons, 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.

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.

Who is Jon Winfield’s ‘secret’ daughter?

Sonia Lee was born in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire in 1972, to a teenage mother known by the pseudonym Sybil Green.

The 51-year-old woman claims Jon Winfield is her biological father, but it’s never been confirmed by a paternity test – though he can be legally compelled to take a DNA test, lawyers say.

“The first time I saw his face was on the front page of The Australian,” Sonia Lee told Hedley Thomas in episode 13 of Bronwyn.

She came forward in hopes it would help to unravel what happened to Bronwyn Winfield.

“It might give [Jodie, Chrystal, and Lauren] a different light to see their father in,” she said.

“If you can’t be honest and open about it now that ‘Yes, I got a girl pregnant on the beach in Cronulla in 1972, I own it, I did it and I lied about it’.”

Sonia Lee. Photo: Supplied.

When did Jon Winfield arrive back at Sandstone Crescent?

Jon Winfield said he couldn’t be certain what time he returned to the home on Sandstone Crescent on May 16, 1993.

“All I know is it was dark,” he said in his 1998 police interview. “You know, it was probably at least an hour or may an hour and a half after the plane landed – whatever time that was.”

According to Ansett Airlines flight schedules found by listener Karina Berger, two flights from Sydney were scheduled to land at Ballina Airport on May 16, 1993: one at around 3pm and another at 7:25pm.

Jon Winfield’s recollection that it was dark when he got off the plane suggests he departed Sydney on the later flight.

His friend John Watson recalled in his 1998 police statement that he collected Mr Winfield from Ballina Airport slightly earlier – around 6:30pm.

Mel Taylor, the daughter of Jon and Bronwyn’s neighbours – Deb Hall and Murray Nolan – said she was playing at a nearby park with Chrystal and Lauren around 5:30pm, when there was likely still some sunlight around.

“Bronwyn came to our door and she’s like, ‘Hey, is Lauren and Chrystal here?’ and I said, ‘No, they’re at the park’,” Mel said in episode 15 of Bronwyn.

“And she said to me, ‘Can you go get them? Because their father’s coming home’.”

Who made the phone calls on Sunday evening?

Two phone calls were made from the Winfields’ Sanstone Crescent home on the evening of May 16, 1993: one at 6:53pm – to Jodie Winfield, in Sydney – and another shortly after, at 7:06pm, to Jon Winfield’s brother, Peter, also in Sydney.

At first, Jon Winfield claimed in his 1998 police interview that he didn’t make any calls after returning to Sandstone Crescent. Then, he backtracked.

“Yeah, I rang Jodie and said, ‘Okay, I’m back home now,’… I rang my brother too, yes. That’s my brother’s number,” he said.

Jodie Winfield's police statement confirms she received a call from her father that night.

“I can recall that my father rang me at that time from the home at Lennox Head to tell me that he had arrived there safely,” she said.

Because of the necessary travel time from Ballina Airport to Sandstone Crescent in Lennox Head, via the Ballina police station and the home of Becky Maguire, it’s not physically possible for Jon Winfield to have placed the calls.

We believe Bronwyn almost certainly made those calls.

Mr Winfield also claimed in his 1998 police interview that Bronwyn made a third phone call from the bedroom shortly before he says she walked out of the house and got into a car with an unknown driver.

In 1993, only long-distance calls were individually itemised on phone bills – that’s how we know the 6:53pm and 7:06pm phone calls were to the homes of Jodie and Peter Winfield in Sydney.

So, if the bedroom phone call was indeed made to a local phone number, as Mr Winfield claimed, it wouldn’t appear on the phone bill.

Why did Jon Winfield collect Becky Maguire before returning to Sandstone Crescent?

Jon Winfield told police in 1998 he collected Becky Maguire – a school friend of Jodie Winfield’s – from her home before returning to the house on Sandstone Crescent on the advice of an officer at Ballina police station.

“Because I remember the sergeant downstairs said, you know, ‘You’re better off to have someone with you’,” he said.

Essentially, Mr Winfield suggested Becky attended the home as a witness to any interaction he might have with Bronwyn.

Becky said in her 1998 police statement it was a brief visit and that Jon Winfield – not John Watson – drove her home.

"John Watson drove home," she said.

"Jon [Winfield] must have had a set of keys to the car because we then got into the car and he drove me home… While we were driving back to my house, Jon thanked me for coming with him and told me he was sorry for getting me involved."

But Jon Winfield told Detective Sergeant Glenn Taylor it was his friend who drove Becky back to her house on either Gibson or Stewart Streets in Lennox Head.

“Once I was right in the door, I said, ‘Oh, thanks Beck. See you later,’ and she just… off she went,” Mr Winfield said.

Who owned the suitcases and where did they go?

In her 1998 statement to police, Becky Maguire said she saw two suitcases inside the door of the Sandstone Crescent house.

“Jon picked them up and put them in the car,” she said, referring to the family’s Ford Falcon.

In his interview with Detective Sergeant Glenn Taylor, also given that year, Jon didn’t mention the suitcases.

“Becky came to the door with me,” he said. “And we knocked on the door, and then the door opened, so once the door was open, I walked in,” he said.  

If the suitcases existed, it’s not known what, if anything, was in them – or where they ended up.

Michelle Read – Bronwyn’s sister-in-law – says some of Lauren and Chrystal’s belongings had been packed in pillowcases and transported in the boot of the Ford Falcon. She doesn’t mention seeing any suitcases in the car when Mr Winfield arrived at her home in Cronulla on Monday, May 17, 1993.

Where are the kids’ bedsheets?

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.”

 

Megan Read

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.

Jon Winfield at Sharpes Beach. Picture: Liam Mendes

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.

Andy and Michelle Read at South Cronulla Beach in Sydney. Picture: John Feder

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