Bronwyn Winfield podcast: The truth will come out; it’s just a matter of time

With the unearthing of critical new evidence, the truth behind Lennox mother Bronwyn Winfield’s presumed murder may come down to a timeline of events that police have held for more than thirty years.

Bronwyn Winfield has been missing for 31 years.

Back in the 1990s two things were vividly remembered about Ballina airport.

Firstly, it appeared to have the cheapest parking of any airport in Australia. (As recently as a few years ago it set you back about $2 an hour). Secondly, it was always a mere lily pad to the true object of desire for most of the travellers who passed through its gates – Byron Bay – a 30-minute drive along the old coast road.

Times have changed. The airport has had a facelift, and just to stress the new pecking order, it is now officially known as the Ballina Byron Gateway Airport, not the Closest-Airport-You- Have-to Use-to-Get-to-Byron.

Ballina has beautiful beaches, some great restaurants, excellent facilities, a close-knit community and has established its own identity, separate from the glitz and gloss of Byron. Amid the change Ballina has managed to retain its small-town charm. But one thing doesn’t change, here or anywhere. That’s time itself. The march of it. The measure of it. Its immutable nature.

In the mystery of Bronwyn Joy Winfield’s disappearance and presumed murder, her then estranged husband Jon told police about that final day his wife was seen alive. It was Sunday, May 16, 1993, and days earlier Bronwyn had moved back into the family home in Sandstone Crescent, Lennox Head, having lived with her daughters for weeks in a flat in the main village. On discovering Bronwyn had returned to the house, Jon made a beeline back to Ballina on a flight that arrived from Sydney that evening. The time here is slippery. He said he got in after dark. John Watson, the mate who picked him up from the airport, says he was there by 6.30pm to pick him up.

His timeline between landing in Ballina and confronting Bronwyn is also not in dispute – from the airport he travelled to Ballina police station, onward north to pick up daughter Jodie’s friend Becky McGuire from downtown Lennox, back to Sandstone Crescent, back to drop off Becky, and then the final leg to the final destination of his journey – Sandstone Crescent.

Winfield told police the trips from the airport to his home, folding in all the detours, took an hour or so. When the Bronwyn podcast team timed Winfield’s movements, conservatively taking into account stoppages and contemporary traffic, the test trip took 56 minutes and 35 seconds, albeit 31 years removed from the journey. His estimate to police of about an hour was pretty much on the money.

Matthew Condon retraces Jon Winfield's route

But because you cannot alter time – a minute is a minute, an hour an hour, whether you’re in Ballina or Baltimore – the length of Winfield’s journey, measured by the clock, only has to be placed on top of his airport arrival time and it would show, give or take a cluster of seconds, when Winfield arrived at his home that Sunday night and was face-to-face with his estranged wife.

Now, an old Ansett timetable uncovered by Bronwyn host and creator, Hedley Thomas, with help from one of an army of podcast listeners, has pinpointed Winfield’s flight as landing at 7.25pm. At issue here is Winfield’s insistence to police that he made two phone calls – one to Jodie, another to his brother Peter, both in Sydney – from the house in Sandstone Crescent.

Phone records show those calls were made at 6.53pm and 7.06pm. This is where the truth of time comes in. If you add 56 minutes to the arrival time of 7.25pm you come to an estimated arrival at Sandstone Crescent of 8.21pm. Even if the plane landed at 6.30pm, the timeline puts Winfield back at the house at 7.26pm. In both instances, time says Winfield could not have made those calls. Time says he couldn’t have been in the house to make them.

You might ask what’s so important about who made those calls in the lead up to Bronwyn’s vanishing. If it was Winfield, assuring his daughter and brother he had arrived safely in Ballina, then it reveals a man whose safety must have been of keen concern to his relatives. That he was beloved. If it was Bronwyn, then her reaching out to two people closest to her estranged husband, that being his daughter and brother, may be seen as the act of a woman in a heightened state, fearful of Winfield’s imminent arrival at the house. Did she make those two calls to call off the dog? We can only speculate. But not about time. People lie. Time doesn’t.