Missing mum’s family just wants closure … and justice

Was Bronwyn Winfield’s body disposed of at a Sydney building site less than 24 hours after she disappeared 31 years ago? | NEW EPISODE OUT NOW

Bronwyn Winfield, Jon Winfield and their daughter Lauren.

Sometimes in life you get to meet these special men and, if you’re lucky, know and befriend them. These are the sorts of men, in this mad, breakneck world, you know deep down you’d want beside you – heaven forbid – in the trenches. Blokes who are solid, reliable, ­unflinching in the face of great ­adversity.

One of these men is Andy Read, 60, of the Cronulla Shire, south of Sydney.

They don’t make them like Andy anymore. He harks back to another Australia, where men rolled up their sleeves and did their duty to family and country. Who prized loyalty. Who spent a lot of their spare time giving back to the community. Who would back you when you were down but be ­careful not to open the blinds too much on their own troubles and emotions.

As it happens, Andy is the brother of missing Lennox Head mother Bronwyn Winfield. His beloved sister vanished on Sunday, May 16, 1993, from the family home in Sandstone Crescent in Lennox, just south of Byron Bay on the NSW far north coast.

And Andy’s life, 31 years after Bronwyn disappeared, leaving behind as she did not just two young daughters but a devoted brother, has now been exposed to the nation through the gripping hit podcast Bronwyn, created by award-winning journalist and The Australian’s national chief correspondent Hedley Thomas.

Bronwyn’s brother Andy Read and his wife Michelle at South Cronulla Beach. Picture: John Feder

The final episode of the second season of Bronwyn – The Shire – was released on Friday night, featuring revelations about the possibility that Bronwyn’s body may have been disposed of at a Sydney building site less than 24 hours after she disappeared.

And it features an emotional journey into the past for Andy. He and Hedley take a tour of significant historical touchstones throughout the Cronulla shire – the flat where Bronwyn first lived with her husband Jon Winfield ­before they relocated to Lennox Head. The hairdressing salon where Winfield’s daughter Jodie worked at the time Bronwyn disappeared. The salon where, according to Jon, Bronwyn purportedly telephoned with a message to her stepdaughter that she was leaving Lennox Head and not coming back.

After two seasons and 20 episodes of this gripping and addictive drama, we have grown to know, and in many cases love and admire, a rich cast of characters. There’s salt of the earth Andy and his wife Michelle. Bronwyn’s half-sister, Kim Marshall. Bronwyn’s daughter Chrystal, struggling to keep her own life on an even keel. There’s Madi Walsh, the young forensic science graduate and cousin to a victim she never met, applying her laser focus to tricky corners of the investigation. There’s the tenacious ex-cop Glenn Taylor. And the Winfield’s former neighbours at Sandstone Crescent – Murray Nolan and his wife Deb – still in the same house, still wondering what happened to the vivacious blonde next door. There one minute, gone the next.

And of course there’s Jon Winfield himself, who has consistently denied he had anything to do with the disappearance of his wife and has never been charged with anything in relation to her case.

He too has emerged as a ghost in this story, a fleeting figure in a wetsuit slipping into the waves off Boulders Beach not far from his home south of Lennox. A man constantly negotiating the spotlight of the Bronwyn podcast, trying to restore a life before his wife’s story became a national obsession.

This drama has touched us because we see elements of our own families, their dynamics, our own natures, and our own lives reflected in it. It touches us because it is us. But for the vast majority, we have not had a beloved relative vanish off the face of the earth.

Bronwyn’s husband Jon Winfield surfing at Sharpes Beach, Skennars Head. Picture: Liam Mendes

They suffer for us, the families in this story. They force us to ask ourselves – what would I do? How would I react? How would I feel about a member of my clan suspected of foul play? Would I be furious or sad, or both? And where, after three decades, do you begin to find the truth?

The thing too that adds almost unbearable poignancy is the inescapable reality this young mother, sister, wife, daughter, friend, has not been here for 31 years. That she’s been gone longer than she was alive. That her children will soon face their 31st Christmas without their mother.

She would now be in her early 60s, if that brief moment hadn’t pulled her under. She’d be greying. She’d have a few aches and pains and smile lines creasing her face.

But she’s not. She’s nowhere.

Death has its little protocols. We’re all heading for a grave of some sort. If we’re lucky we’ll have a loving family with us when we cross over. Our passing may be marked by a tombstone, a brass plaque, a wooden cross. But Bronwyn Winfield is nowhere. She remains suspended. Somewhere. And this status, for her family and people who knew and loved her, is almost impossible to fathom.

Season Two of Bronwyn made some great gains. It enriched our understanding of Bronwyn’s predicament in the last months, weeks, days and indeed hours of her life. It defied the accepted and, in some instances, calcified truths of this tale. And in forensically examining Jon Winfield’s only version of events in his statement to police in 1998, it opened the door to numerous inconsistencies in the narrative and posed fresh questions that investigating police have still not resolved.

Andy said on Friday he was pleased with the progress of the podcast, but one thing stuck in his craw. “I’m frustrated with the police,” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be any movement in the case. That’s what is so frustrating.”

Thomas said: “With the help of listeners and a really careful analysis of the evidence we’ve been able to establish a very different timeline and demonstrate how some things accepted by police as true could not have been true.

“This case appears, to experienced lawyers and retired police detectives, as very strong and the evidence as a whole against the husband is as strong, if not even stronger, than the evidence in the case of wife killer Chris Dawson (exposed so brilliantly in Thomas’s podcast The Teacher’s Pet).”

While the continued revelations have progressively filled in the gaps of this drama, just as important is what has remained unsaid. Forming beneath this narrative, taking shape with each episode, with each voice, is the unavoidable vacuum left by Bronwyn Winfield.

It sits beneath everything like a vast cavern, a dark, subterranean truth that just seems to grow as the podcast, gathering and garnering it seems with its own momentum, moves forward.

How does any family carry on with this cold catchment sitting under it? You get on with it, like Andy Read. You make do. You take a step at a time. But that void is still down there.

And how does the passage of time impact on human hope?

In the immediate wake of a major event like the disappearance and presumed murder of a loved one, anything seems possible. You come up with plausible story endings. She’s been murdered. Perhaps she genuinely chose to walk away and start a new life. Maybe she was kidnapped. Perhaps she fell under the influence of a cult. She could be living out an anonymous life overseas. Maybe she quietly ended her life where she would never be found.

Then as time moves forward, the rational mind takes over. It eliminates the fanciful endings to Bronwyn’s story. Logic swings in like a sledgehammer and scatters suppositions. Until you’re left with one conclusion. Bronwyn Winfield did not simply vanish. She was murdered. But by whom?

After decades of weary pondering and the elimination of theories, as her family watches itself grow older, only Bronwyn stays permanently youthful. And it’s not hard to imagine her calling out – don’t stop. Come back. Find out what happened to me. Fill the vacuum. I’m begging you.

This is the voice that Andy Read must hear. His sister. A voice he knew since he was a boy. A voice with a tone and timbre that he could distinguish from any other human voice in the entire world.

And with the voice, that age-old brotherly protective intuition must kick in, that invisible antennae constantly seeking any crumb, skerrick, morsel of information that might help understand what happened to his sister. That might finally retrieve her from nowhere.

Andy Read carries his burden with great courage. It takes a certain type of man to keep himself together in the unique situation that he’s found himself in. The sort of bloke you’d share a trench with.

Throughout the podcast, Andy has talked and remembered and helped and researched and stepped into the glare of media attention, alongside his loving wife Michelle, without flinching.

In this season’s final episode, he talks matter-of-factly about the theory that his sister’s remains may have been concealed beneath concrete in the footings of a house in Illawong, south of Sydney, the day after she disappeared from the family home in Lennox Head.

That her body was allegedly stashed in the boot of the family Falcon that Jon drove through to Sydney late on the night Bronwyn disappeared, then taken to a building site he was working on in the southern suburb of Illawong.

It’s a macabre theory – because in the back seat of the car for the rushed road-trip were Bronwyn’s two daughters, Chrystal, just 10 at the time, and Lauren, 5.

The podcast revealed that slabs were poured at the site just days after Bronwyn vanished.

Andy clinically discussed the theory with Hedley.

“If she was going to be put under a slab … then that sounds like the place,” Andy rationalised.

Madi Walsh added: “It comes down to logic. What you can do (and) the smartest way to do it.

“He would have known if there was a big enough space to put her. But I’m also thinking…by that stage of the day, by the time he would have got there, she would have full well been in rigor mortis.

“Depending on how he put her into the car, I’m quite confident she would be stuck in that position”

Andy said on the podcast that if “rigour mortis set in, then you roll the person on their back, you’re picking them up like you carry a small child, your arms tucked under the legs. You’ve got your hand under their back and under their armpit type thing and you lift them up and away you go.”

That’s Andy. A man from a different era of Australia. A realist. A proud Shireman. Tough as boots. (“It’d take a bucket full of brown snakes to get rid of me, mate,” he says at the end of the podcast).

And above all, a brother who wants to retrieve his sister from nowhere, and finally deliver her somewhere.