Citizen sleuth’s aviation rabbit hole casts doubts on Jon Winfield’s story

Karina Berger says she hopes her strong research background will advance the podcast investigation by The Australian’s national chief correspondent.

Karina Berger is an experienced lawyer from Canberra who helped Hedley Thomas with some research for the most-recent podcast episode of Bronwyn.

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A dogged podcast listener tracked down 30-year-old flight schedules from a now-defunct Australian airline to better understand what happened to missing Lennox Head woman Bronwyn Winfield.

Karina Berger spent hours speaking with aviation enthusiasts and trawling several different ­archives in search of records of flights into Ballina on the evening of May 16, 1993 – the night Bronwyn vanished from her home on Sandstone Crescent in Lennox Head.

Her disappearance and suspected murder is the subject of an investigative podcast series by The Australian’s national chief correspondent, Hedley Thomas.

“It was right up my alley in terms of my interests and experience and skill set,” Ms Berger – a litigation lawyer experienced in coronial investigations and inquests – told The Australian.

This is the first time Ms Berger has lent her skills to a podcast investigation, and she said it had been a unique learning curve.

“I’ve always had a strong desire to do work that’s in the public interest, and my background … means I have a skill set and experience that might be of benefit to [Thomas] and, through him, Bronwyn’s family,” she says.

The movements of Bronwyn’s husband, Jon Winfield, on the evening of May 16, 1993, are being scrutinised in new episodes of the series. Mr Winfield told police in a formal interview he flew into Ballina Airport from Sydney in the afternoon of May 16, 1993, and later arrived at the family home after dark.

Ms Berger turned to Google in the early stages of her search for flight records that could verify or refute Mr Winfield’s claim.

“It made me realise that time­tables for planes and other modes of transport are actually really collectable items,” she said. “And there are quite a lot of private collectors who tend to catalogue them … and pop them online.”

She spoke with collectors based in North America but couldn’t locate a specific timetable for arrivals into Ballina Airport on that day in their collections.

Next, she sought information from Air Services Australia, and searched National Library of Australia catalogues, as well as the Nat­ional and NSW State archives for flight records.

“Those searches also weren’t very fruitful,” she said.

“And so then I just went back to Google and started to work my way through all of the hits, and I came across the Sir Reginald Ansett Transport Museum.”

The aviator is best known as the founder of Ansett Airlines, a domestic airline that operated across Australia for decades until its collapse in 2002.

It was through the museum in Hamilton, Victoria, that another listener to the podcast located an Ansett Airlines flight schedule for Sunday, May 16, 1993.

It showed two flights arriving at Ballina on that day, the second of which was scheduled to land at 7:25pm.

At the same time as the anonymous volunteer was making inquiries at the Sir Reginald Ansett Transport Museum, Ms Berger was talking to high-ranking members of The Australian Timetable Association, who verified the schedule and confirmed Ballina wasn’t part of the Qantas network at that time.

“The only other explanation that I can think of is that he travelled with a different airline carrier,” Ms Berger said.

“And we haven’t been able to identify such a carrier at this point in time.”

She, along with another listener to the podcast who wishes to remain anonymous, volunteered to help Thomas in his inquiries at the conclusion of the first season of the Bronwyn podcast series.

Ms Berger said in her experience, the weight given to these kinds of details changes from case to case.

“It’s probably dependent upon the nature of the case and the police lines of inquiry at the time,” she said.

“It would be prudent for an investigating officer to seek facts to support things like an airport arrival time if a suspect or someone who may very well become a suspect is claiming they arrived in a location at a particular time.

“Doing something like that at the time would be much easier than doing it many years later.

Jon Winfield. Picture: Liam Mendes / The Australian

Having emerged from her aviation rabbit hole, Ms Berger is eager to see where the dual podcast and police investigations lead.

“What will be really interesting [is] to see what the NSW police might do next in their ongoing investigation, whether [that’s] as a result of the podcast or because of other lines of inquiry they’re pursuing,” she said.

Mr Winfield maintains he had no involvement in Bronwyn’s disappearance and he has never been charged in connection to it.

Do you know something about this case? Contact Hedley Thomas confidentially at [e-mail]