Mum’s Malaysia murder an unending agony for family

The final insult came last Monday for Greg Jenkins, the Adelaide man who has spent almost five years trying to resolve his mother’s disappearance and presumed murder in Penang in 2017.

Annapuranee ‘Anna’ Jenkins with her son Greg, who is still searching for answers.

The final insult came last Monday for Greg Jenkins, the Adelaide man who has spent almost five years honouring his mother’s memory and trying to resolve her disappearance and presumed murder in Penang in 2017.

Yes, his mother’s physical ­remains had been found at a ­George Town construction site in June 2020. No, they were not handed to the police.

Instead, the site manager ­ordered workers to have them reburied amid fears the project would stall and prospective buyers would be reluctant to live at a murder scene.

This was the evidence of Terrence William Theseira, 56, a project manager with Berjaya Land Development, the company ­behind the 3000-dwelling apartment complex which would ­become the final resting place of Adelaide grandmother Annapuranee “Anna” Jenkins.

This place should have been treated as a crime scene. It should also have been a place of reverence for a dignified woman who died an undignified death. But work continued regardless, the builders under orders to complete a feature pond and landscaped waterfall at the very spot where bone remains of Mrs Jenkins had been found.

For a long time now, Greg ­Jenkins has been devastated and enraged by what he regards as the lack of respect shown to his ­mother since her disappearance.

But nothing prepared for him for last Monday as he sat inside a Penang Court, where Sessions Judge Norsalha Hamzah has been presiding over an on-again, off-again coronial hearing that was scheduled to conclude on Friday.

“We were clearing the area for a feature pond when we stumbled upon the bones,” the site manager, Mr Theseira, told the court.

“We asked the landscaping workers to rebury them since they belonged there. A few days later, there were rumours that they ­belonged to a missing person.”

As harrowing as the evidence has been for the Jenkins family, the one upside of the inquest is that, for the first time, Greg Jenkins was able to put their side directly and outline what they and others see as major deficiencies in the Malaysian police investigation.

His trip to Penang this month is the 25th he has made since his mother disappeared, every one of his visits self-funded at a cost to date of more than $200,000.

The trigger for all these visits was the sluggish and evasive ­nature of the local police response to Mrs Jenkins’s disappearance, with last Monday’s testimony only deepening Mr Jenkins’s suspicions that authorities wanted his mother’s death hushed up for fear of scaring buyers away from the property development.

Mrs Jenkins was a happily married mother-of-two who was 65 when she vanished during a 2017 visit to her 101-year-old mother in Penang.

She disappeared in George Town on December 13 after catching an Uber after a visit to a dentist en route to her mother’s aged care home, and was never seen alive again after falling prey to what looks like a bungled robbery.

Since then, Mrs Jenkins’ husband, Frank, and children Greg and Jen have faced an ongoing ordeal, with Greg leading the investigative effort.

He has travelled more than 73,000km across Malaysia, distributing 12,000 posters and stickers seeking information about his mother and interviewing more than 1000 people.

All along, the level of support he has received from local police has been questionable, starting with their failure to declare Mrs Jenkins a missing person despite her husband reporting her as such, and then failing to interview the Uber driver who was the last person to see her alive.

With the coroner’s inquest under way, the conduct of the local police shifted more from ambivalence towards hostility, with the good name of Mrs Jenkins and her family being questioned to rationalise the level of police interest in the case.

With no evidence to support either accusation, one of the key police investigators, Detective Zali Hanapi, claimed at the inquest earlier this year that the ­devoutly Christian Mrs Jenkins may have been involved with drugs, and has also suggested she may have been fleeing domestic violence. It was also suggested by police when she vanished that she had probably just wandered into the jungle but would hopefully survive by eating bananas.

The baselessness and flippancy of the claims have caused great distress to the Jenkins family, with Mrs Jenkins being such a devout Christian that a carved wooden crucifix she carried at all times was found with her remains.

The inquest descended into chaos on Tuesday, when Mr Jenkins stormed out in anger after the DPP casually announced that two key prosecutors scheduled to give evidence had been sent to another trial elsewhere, and that a local pharmacist due to give evidence was unavailable as he was now working in another part of the country. Outside court, Mr Jenkins erupted.

“My Mum is the victim of all of this,” he said. “Treated as nothing. I’m disgusted by the Malaysian authorities’ treatment of her. I’m disappointed they can only refer to Mum as the deceased. She has a name. She is a person caught up in a country that doesn’t care for her. She was lost, found, reburied and they tried to forget about her.”

Mr Jenkins told The Weekend Australian he was heartened by the coroner’s refusal to vacate the hearing to a later date and ­believed she was sincerely trying to resolve the mystery.

But he said he was less than impressed with the tactics of the prosecutors and police.

“It is starting to feel like a ploy to stonewall the investigation and to make it all go away,” he said.

“I suspect they are trying to drag it out to the point where I eventually just run out of money and abandon it but we are going to keep going for Mum’s sake.”

The family has set up a GoFundMe page in the name of Anna Jenkins but Mr Jenkins, who has spent 25 years as an officer in the air force, said he was unsure whether he would be able to return to Penang again if the inquest was delayed again.

The case received limited ­attention this week from Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who said Mr Jenkins was receiving consular assistance. “I know the time since has been very difficult for her family. My thoughts go out to Mrs Jenkins’ family and friends,” Senator Wong said.

It was of little comfort to the Jenkins family, who want a formal protest to the Malaysian government over the handling of the case.

The Malaysian High Commission has ­offered no comment.