Gayle Woodford’s brutal murder brings remote nurses safer lives

Gayle Woodford died the most brutal of deaths. But her life was given lasting meaning following recommendations to make life safer for remote nurses.

Gayle Woodford, who was murdered in 2016.

Outback nurse Gayle Woodford died the most brutal of deaths — abducted, raped and murdered by a recently released lifelong sex ­offender in the hellish township of Fregon in South Australia’s ­remote APY Lands.

But her life was given lasting meaning yesterday as the South Australian coroner brought down 12 recommendations to make life safer for remote nurses and provide better protection for people working and living in outback ­Indigenous townships.

Woodford, a happily married mother of two who was 56 when she died, already has the legacy of what’s known in South Australia as Gayle’s Law, a set of work arrangements enshrined in state law ensuring outback nurses can no longer attend emergencies without a partner.

Gayle Woodford's husband Keith Woodford pictured with his daughter Alison Woodford and other supporters outside of the Coroners Court. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

But SA Coroner Anthony Schapel went further on Thursday, delivering a raft of recommendations for further change in the management of health ser­vices in troubled Indigenous communities. In his harrowing 103-page report, he paints a ­picture of a township almost ­completely dysfunctional and ravaged by violence and abuse.

He also asks a compelling question: how was it that a man as depraved and beyond rehabilitation as Dudley Davey, who lured Woodford to her death in 2016, could have been released into as remote and unpoliced a community as Fregon, with no supervision?

Known in the Pitjantjatjara language as Kaltjiti, Fregon is almost 1300km north of Adelaide in northwestern SA in the Western Desert, just southeast of Uluru. It has a floating population of 200 to 300, and it is where Woodford came to live with her husband, Keith, taking up a nursing role with the Nganampa Health Council.

Their life in Fregon required constant vigilance, with the coroner’s report describing a town that was highly unsafe and barely functional. “The violence in Fregon was described by a medical practitioner of several years’ standing in remote communities such as these as ‘ongoing’ and ‘continual’,” the report states.

“If there was no violence in the Fregon community on a given day, it was a ‘good day’, circumstances not helped in her opinion by the lack of a police presence in the community.

“The practitioner described Fregon as ‘completely lawless’ and the most violent place in which she had resided and worked while employed by the NHC in the APY Lands, to the point where she believed serious consideration needed to be given to the withdrawal of services from this community so as to bring it to its closure.”

The coroner documents the staggering criminal history of Davey, who was 34 at the time of Woodford’s murder and is serving life imprisonment with a 32-year non-parole period for her death.

Litany of offences

Born in the APY Lands, Davey started offending when he was a juvenile, his first recorded sexual offence committed at 14 when he knocked on the door of a nurse and exposed himself in an aroused state.

He was only reported for that offence, setting in tow a train of increasingly serious encounters with the law where he was given repeated second chances.

In 1997, he was charged with ­attempted rape and indecent assault after grabbing a 16-year-old girl at random in metropolitan Adelaide, dragging her into a bush and covering her mouth. The charges were downgraded.

Between December 1997 and October 1998, Davey was charged with a series of offences perpetrated against women and convicted and detained.

In the first offence in that series occurred in 1997, he ran towards a female, punched her to the head and knocked her to the ground.

The second victim was a nurse in Fregon, whom he raped while choking her.

Of that attack, the coroner said: “The circumstances of this event are strikingly similar to what I have found happened to Mrs Woodford at Davey’s hands, except of course that the victim of this earlier offence at Fregon survived the experience.”

In 1998, he tackled and sexually assaulted another woman at a city park in Adelaide; two years later, in Darwin, he was convicted of ­aggravated assault after grabbing a female stranger

In 2001, Davey was charged for the first time as an adult after ­masturbating in front of a nurse at the Fregon airstrip.

He committed a further six ­violent and or sexual offences before he murdered Woodford on March 23, 2016 — just six months after he had been released from prison for previous offences on September 17, 2015.

Dudley Davey. Picture: Channel 7

General lawlessness

Mr Schapel has this to say about Dudley’s return to Fregon after leaving prison: “He was not on parole or under any supervision at the time he abducted and murdered Mrs Woodford.

“He ultimately made his way to Fregon after his release from ­custody.

“Mrs Woodford’s murder is in keeping with the general lawlessness within the Fregon community and the fact that this atmosphere of dysfunction and ­violence largely remained unchecked. Davey’s propensities in this regard were so entrenched, even before his rape and murder of Mrs Woodford, that the notion that he could have been rehabilitated or that his behaviour could have been altered by educational programs designed to correct those criminal tendencies has its manifest difficulty.”

Violent history

The coroner also said a warrant should have been issued for Davey at the time he killed Woodford if not for a breakdown in procedure by SA Police. However, he said there was no guarantee he would have necessarily been imprisoned for those offences of being unlawfully on premises and providing false information while in the remote SA town of Coober Pedy in November 2015.

He notes that a warrant had been issued for those ­offences after Davey failed to attend court.

“It was not executed,” he wrote. “Davey remained at large until 24 March, 2016, when he was found at Coober Pedy in possession of the Fregon ambulance, having murdered Mrs Woodford.”

Mr Schapel also notes the failure of authorities to place Davey on the Australian National Child Offender Register, which would have allowed police to better monitor his movements.

Much of the report examines the manner in which Davey was able to lure and then remove Woodford from the secure area outside her home known as “the cage”, which had been designed to provide nurses with some protection from violent patients.

The coroner draws on comments from judge Anne Vanstone at Davey’s murder trial in determining how he managed to attack Woodford, who had left the house to help him while her husband was asleep.

“Justice Vanstone inferred that Davey had tricked Mrs Woodford into opening the security cage, perhaps on the false claim about the need for medical assistance related to his grandmother.

“Her Honour was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Davey immediately overpowered Mrs Woodford when she opened the cage door. Her Honour was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Davey had enticed Mrs Woodford from the security of her cage on some false pretext.”

Mr Schapel said if Woodford had been aware of Davey’s violent history, there is no way she would have tended to him alone. “I have little doubt if Mrs Woodford had known of the background and propensities of Dudley Davey, she would never have engaged with him without the walls of the cage at all times intervening between the two of them.”

Deterrent effect

Among Mr Schapel’s recommendations, the most powerful was to advocate for an expansion of Gayle’s Law to ensure that outback nurses are accompanied by second responders at all times.

“The obvious solution for the NHC would have been to make provision for nurses to be accompanied by another person when working on-call at night and to have called for the necessary funding, a measure that took Mrs Woodford’s murder to come to ­realisation,” he said.

Mr Schapel also called for a permanent police presence in Fregon, saying it “would have a deterrent effect on criminality and other misbehaviour”. He said the closest police station was at least 40 minutes away at Mimili, but it sometimes took hours for police to respond to incidents in the remote community. He also said high-risk offenders such as Davey should be precluded from living in the APY Lands.

Outside court, Keith Woodford thanked Mr Schapel for holding the inquest. “The coroner found Gayle was doing exactly what she was employed to do: provide care for people on the APY Lands,” he said.

“He also found she should not have been required by Nganampa Health to treat men alone at night and if she hadn’t been required to do that, her death might have been prevented. It’s important (his) recommendations are acted on so no other family has to endure what we have.”