National Chief Correspondent Hedley Thomas and Visual Design Manager Sean Callinan sat with Judy at her home in northern NSW last Thursday and forensically re-examined her recall of seeing Jon Winfield’s white Falcon XF cruise slowly past her house late on Sunday, May 16, 1993, and what she viewed that night from her seat on the front deck of her home.

The Winfields’ house in Sandstone Crescent, Lennox Head, a seaside village on the far north coast of NSW, was just metres from Granite Street, a short cross-thoroughfare where Judy lived.

Judy told Thomas in the Bronwyn podcast that, sitting on the deck late at night, she witnessed Jon Winfield drive past her house with the car’s interior light on. Looking down into the cabin of the car, Judy and Jon momentarily locked eyes. And, Judy said, “I saw this, you know, what looked to be like a mummy in the back of the car”.

Judy told Thomas the “mummy” appeared to be wrapped in a sheet.

“This was a light green or or sort of creamy coloured sheet,” she told the Bronwyn podcast. “I don’t know what colour sheets Jon had, but, it was like a shroud. You know, like a body. I’ve dealt with a lot of dead bodies in my life as a nurse And I can’t be mistaken because the light was on in the car.”

This is a major development in the podcast investigation. The sighting was the first indication that Bronwyn may have been deceased on that Sunday night. With the Winfield marriage effectively over, husband Jon would tell police that Bronwyn- mother to Chrystal, then 10, and Lauren, 5 - said she needed a break for a “few days” from the children, and that a person unknown picked her up from the Sandstone Crescent house.

He then drove Chrystal and Lauren to Sydney in the white Falcon.

However, Judy’s sighting could suggest that Bronwyn died in the family home and was disposed of prior to her husband’s journey to Sydney. Jon had taken the kids late on that Sunday night and driven throughout the night, arriving in Sydney on the morning of Monday, May 17.

As part of the recreation, Callinan took physical sketches of Judy’s descriptions and then, using Google Earth, pulled up a view of Granite Street from the angle of her seated position that night, then transposed a 3D vehicle onto the map until Judy was satisfied with the representation.

“She supervised that and confirmed along the way that basically that was the angle she was looking at,” Callinan said. “We then pieced together everything with a 3D model of the Falcon XF and Google Earth.

“We were able to spin that model into position, like vertically, horizontally, where we could manoeuvre it to the exact sort of angle that she was looking at.”

The object Judy described as a “mummy” had its head and shoulders positioned in the left corner of the rear seat with the feet placed diagonally and resting on the console between the two front seats.Judy additionally remembered a surfboard in the back of the car that night, also resting across the console but originating in the right rear of the back seat, behind the driver’s seat. The surfboard and the ”mummy” formed an “X” configuration from the rear seat. Both were added to the graphic.

Callinan and Digital Designer Steven Grice additionally created an animated video reconstruction of the vehicle’s movement down Granite Street as per Judy’s recollection.

The team then searched for an actual 1987 Falcon XF – one of the last of the “boxy” Falcon models - to conduct literal tests to see if it was possible, or otherwise, to fit a human body and a surfboard into the back seat, as Judy had observed.

Judy Singh’s memories are brought to life in a digital animation by 3D artist Steven Grice.

National Crime Correspondent Dave Murray went on the hunt.

“In Jon Winfield’s statement to police in the late 1990s, he describes the family car, he says it’s a 1987 Ford Falcon XF sedan,” Murray said. “We started looking for that model of vehicle online, on Facebook. We contacted car clubs and they put out messages to their members.

“In the meantime we were looking for cars for sale. Then last Sunday a man called Ash and his wife Kate, from Ipswich, replied. They had the exact same car that Jon described in his police statement. The only difference being that it was a different colour.”

On Monday, Thomas, Murray, Callinan and Video Editor Bianca Farmakis headed to a field behind the Ipswich racecourse west of Brisbane and conducted a series of tests.

Firstly, they positioned a number of surfboards in the rear seat, finding that a large 6’2” board, or 1.87m, fitted more than comfortably. The team said it would have been possible to easily accommodate larger surfboards. Thomas said the cabin of the Falcon simply “swallowed them up”, such was the available space.

Then Farmakis – sharing Bronwyn’s physical dimensions at 172cms tall and weighing 59 kgs – was wrapped in a bed sheet and placed in the car’s left rear seat as “the mummy”.

Thomas said: “This exercise is really just to see if we can fit a six foot-plus surfboard into the car. To see if we can fit a woman the same height and with a very similar build to Bronwyn, in the car at the same time. And that’s Bianca. We’ve done that.

“We reproduced both those things, and now we’re working out what would have been visible from the upstairs part of the house (in Granite Crescent, Lennox Head) where you’re sitting on a night where Judy says she saw a vehicle, Jon’s vehicle, and Jon driving it, and what she describes as a ‘mummy’ that looked like a wrapped body in the back seat.”

Farmakis was unnerved by the reconstruction.

“It was a very intense experience,” she said. “I guess you would call it scary, but what scares me most was how easy it was. I was expecting this to take hours, you know, of repositioning, of moving around, but it just slotted right in.”

Murray said the exercise revealed what was “possible”.

“Judy described seeing what she called a ‘mummy’ in the back seat that she thought might be a body,” he said. “We knew Bronwyn’s height and we used someone who was the same height, and it showed that you could fit someone of Bronwyn’s height in the back seat, the legs outstretched in that position, with a board across them in an X-type shape. The reconstruction just showed that it was possible - that that could have been Bronwyn in the back seat. The board and Bianca went in easily, with room to spare.”

Drone footage captures a car and its contents in a recreation of what Judy Singh witnessed.

Jon Winfield has always strenuously denied any involvement in the disappearance of Bronwyn. He has also never been charged in relation to the case of his missing wife.

Back in Ipswich, Falcon owner Ash and his wife Kate, had an unexpected afternoon to remember.

“We’re right into the true crime sort of stuff and all the unsolved stuff,” he said. “And I guess it’s cool seeing it first-hand, how you gather all the evidence and stuff. It’s interesting.”

If you have any information about Bronwyn Winfield’s disappearance, email Hedley Thomas confidentially at this address: bronwyn@theaustralian.com.au

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