Murder case family told: ‘I know who did it’

The sister of Deborah Smykalla, brutally murdered in her Brisbane home 38 years ago, is urging police to reopen the case.

Rosemary Bidgood and daughter Tara in front of the flats where they used to live in Windsor, Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

The sister of a Queensland woman brutally murdered in her home 38 years ago has called on police to reopen investigations, after a witness came forward claiming he was told who killed her.

Deborah Smykalla was found lying with her head in an oven and a dog leash around her neck at Capalaba, on Brisbane’s bayside, on Father’s Day, September 6, 1981. Two fires had been lit on the floor in an apparent attempt to burn down the house and make it look like a suicide, but burned out.

The Australian reported in March that Smykalla’s sister, Elke Hall, was generating new leads on the unsolved case via a Facebook group. Ms Hall was inspired to launch the group by the podcast series The Teacher’s Pet, which examined Sydney mother Lyn Dawson’s 1982 alleged murder.

A man has since contacted the newspaper to pass on the name of a red-haired man he had been told years earlier was the killer.

He said he had previously dismisse­d the information, but came forward because the article referred to a man police were unable to identify, known only as “Bluey”, a common moniker for someone with red hair.

Deborah Smykalla with boyfriend Robert Cavallo and a young Tara Bidgood.

Details of the call have been passed to detectives in the Queensland Police Service’s homicide squad. Ms Hall wants police to delve back into her 22-year-old sister’s murder.

“The whole point of me starting all of this in the first place was to get them to start checking on things,” she said.

“It shows there are people out there that know things that are reading about the case, even though it was so long ago.”

Smykalla’s close friend Rosemary Bidgood has also spoken publicly for the first time about events leading up to the murder.

Ms Bidgood rejected sugges­t­ions made at an inquest that ­Smykalla may have been heavily involved in selling marijuana.

She also dismissed as “rubbish” claims made online that Smykalla was connected to outlaw motorcycle gangs. “She was just a young woman going about her business, enjoying her life,” she said. “We went out, we listened to music, we had a few drinks, a few smokes — it was like that in the 70s.

“Never, ever would I have seen her having connections to bikie gangs. She was harmless, friendly, bubbly, happy with life most of the time.”

The friends lived in the same street in Windsor, in Brisbane’s inner north, when Ms Bidgood was a single mother with a young daughter. Their paths diverged when Smykalla moved to Capalaba and Ms Bidgood to Byron Bay.

“I got the knock on the door from detectives telling me she had been murdered,” she said. “I rememb­er sitting in the police car crying and crying and crying.”

Smykalla had visited Byron a week before the murder, letting herself in to Ms Bidgood’s home when she was out.

“We came home in the middle of the night and there she was in the flat … I was a bit annoyed about that,” she said.

“I got up in the morning and she’d left this strange note for me. She said something about that she understood, and that ‘I’ll always love you’. It was like she knew something was going to happen. She’d never said anything like that to me before.”

The exception to Smykalla’s happy outlook was the souring of a long-term relationship, Ms Bidgood said. There is no suggestion her former boyfriend Robert ­Cav­allo was involved in her murder.

A police spokeswoman said any new information on the murder­ would be “welcomed and will be thoroughly investigated”.

“The QPS remains committed to solving this crime and bringing answers to the family,” she said.

A homicide detective recently assured Ms Hall her sister’s murder had not been forgotten. “But she said ‘I’ve got about a thousand cases on my desk’,” Ms Hall said.