Murdered nurse Gayle Woodford’s family ‘totally betrayed’

Murdered nurse’s family shocked by decision not to prosecute the APY Lands health service whose unsafe work practices contributed to her death.

Gayle Woodford with a young patient in the APY Lands in outback South Australia before her shocking death in 2016.

The devastated family of murdered outback nurse Gayle Woodford say they have been ­“totally betrayed” by a shock decision not to prosecute the APY Lands health service whose unsafe work practices contributed to her death.

The decision by SafeWork SA not to prosecute was made despite a damning coroner’s report finding major deficiencies with staffing and safety leading up to the murder of Woodford while working alone as a nurse in the violent town of Fregon in 2016.

It raises fresh questions about the capacity of SafeWork SA to prosecute such cases after it was slammed in a 2018 ICAC report for bungling investigations into a construction worker crushed by a scissor lift, a young girl thrown from a fairground ride, and two women seriously injured when a steel gate collapsed on them.

SafeWork SA is standing by its decision on Woodford’s murder, saying it conducted a thorough investigation and sees no likelihood of securing a conviction.

But the Woodford family and their lawyer are perplexed by the failure to prosecute, with such strong evidence of workplace safety problems, saying the case has grave ramifications for nurses working in dysfunctional Indigenous communities.

The 56-year-old mother of two was living with her husband, Keith, in the remote town of Fregon, 1275km north of Adelaide, when she was abducted, raped and murdered while tending to serial sex offender Dudley Davey.

Gayle Woodford with husband Keith … SafeWork SA is refusing to take action over her brutal rape and murder. Picture: Facebook

Woodford was working alone and at night when the attack occurred in or outside the reinforced steel cage outside her home, which was meant to protect her from ­violent patients.

SafeWork SA had been investigating the role of the Nganampa Health Service following last year’s coroner’s report but has now told Mr Woodford it will not proceed with a prosecution, leaving the family stunned.

“We have not been kept in the loop,” Mr Woodford told The Australian. “Then four days before the time limit was up to mount a prosecution I got a phone call from SafeWork saying their decision was not to proceed.

“I told them that they had the coroner’s report, all the work had been done for them. It has left our family devastated.”

Andrea Hannemann, Woodford’s sister, said the family and their lawyer believed the mountain of damning evidence uncovered by the coroner meant a prosecution was “guaranteed”.

“They were the last line of defence and they let her down,” Ms Hannemann told The Australian.

“We feel totally betrayed. We cannot understand why all of the findings of the coroner can’t form the basis for a case to be mounted.”

In a major 103-page report, SA Coroner Anthony Schapel declared in April last year Woodford would still be alive if the NHC had heeded calls from nurses not to work alone.

The inquest heard from Fregon-based nurses Belinda Schultz and Phibion Takawira, who said they had raised concerns that the NHC’s occupational health and safety policies were confusing and not being followed. This included the use of the security cages at the nurses’ homes and if they should open the cages to care for patients.

The inquest also heard evidence from the former head of the APY Lands SAPOL unit Sergeant Anne Yeomans who said she had warned the NHC that not even police attended jobs in the APY Lands without a partner, and that the NHC should follow suit.

Mr Schapel said that advice was made “specifically” to NHC manager David Busuttil after a 2012 incident when another nurse was indecently assaulted while working alone.

Under cross-examination, NHC managers disputed and denied these conversations, so much so that the coroner recalled them to give evidence again so they could be quizzed a second time over their version of events.

Gayle Woodford, right, in the trauma room at the Minlaton Medical Surgery in 2003. Picture: Lindsay Moller

In his conclusions, Mr Schapel was emphatic about the role the NHC’s safety and security policies played in Woodford’s death, and said he believed the testimony of Mr Woodford and the nurses.

“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 Woodford’s murder to come to ­realisation,” he wrote.

“Mrs Woodford’s death could thereby have been prevented.”

The family’s lawyer is one of Adelaide’s most senior legal figures, former District Court judge Peter McCusker, who has been working pro bono.

Mr McCusker said SafeWork SA had failed to ­explain why it did not believe it could obtain a conviction. He said the fact Woodford’s death led to Gayle’s Law – national legis­lation requiring remote nurses to work in pairs – confirmed that the previous practices were unacceptable.

“The thinking by SafeWork SA is wrong,” Mr McCusker said.

“All they had to prove was that the system and set-up of the work involved a risk to the safety of any of the nurses, which could be avoided by reasonably practical means. That was straightforward. Obviously those reasonably practical means existed as they instituted the needed changes imm­ediately after she was murdered.

“They had been warned by Sergeant Yeomans more than once and did nothing. The nurses told them numerous times it was a sit­u­a­tion fraught with serious danger. Still ignored. It was obvious to anyone it was no good.”

The Australian has seen correspondence between Mr McCusker and SafeWork SA in which SafeWork SA refuses to provide the Woodford family with the legal advice it claims underpins its decision not to prosecute.

The correspondence also shows that in the first instance after the murder, SafeWork SA did not even record Woodford’s death as a workplace incident, and as such was confused as to whether it could investigate. “That was a wrong decision and one I would not have made,” SafeWork SA executive director Martin Campbell admits in the correspondence.

Gayle Woodford was working alone and at night when the attack occurred in or outside the reinforced steel cage outside her home, which was meant to protect her from ­violent patients. . Picture: Facebook

SafeWork SA was sent a series of questions by The Australian on Wednesday and provided a statement saying it had “dedicated a team of WHS investigators and inspectors to undertake a comprehensive 12-month investigation to identify whether Nganampa Health Council should be pursued for any breaches of the WHS Act”.

“The complexity of the investigation required the full 12-month period to thoroughly complete inquiries, which included seizing over 1200 documents, obtaining statements from numerous witnesses and interviewing NHCI and Mr Dudley Davey, who was convicted of the rape and murder of Mrs Woodford,” it said.

“Having thoroughly investigated the matter and assessed the evidence, SafeWork SA determined that there was no reasonable prospect of conviction against NHCI for committing a breach of its work health and safety duty pursuant to Part 2 Division 2 of the WHS Act. Offences against the WHS Act are criminal offences and require evidence to the criminal standard of proof (i.e. proof beyond reasonable doubt). There is a distinct difference between the standards of proof applied in the Criminal Court and the Coroner’s Court (i.e. balance of probabilities) which can affect the admissibility and use of ­evidence.”

The handling of the Woodford case by SafeWork SA will reopen fresh questions about its capacity to investigate and prosecute cases involving worker and public safety. In 2018, ICAC brought down a damning report documenting its failures in three high-profile cases including the 2014 death of construction worker Jorge Castillo-Riffo on a scissor lift at the new Royal Adelaide Hospital.

SafeWork inspectors were unavailable the day Mr Castillo-Riffo died and did not attend until the next day, by which time the scissor lift had been removed.

In his report, ICAC Commissioner Bruce Lander slated SafeWork SA as a toxic workplace which failed to meet its charter of protecting workers and the public.

“SafeWork SA is lost in a sea of overly convoluted, unnecessary and ineffective policies,” he said.

“Staff are largely left to their own devices and oversight is poor. Very serious workplace safety risks might be identified but affirmative action may not be taken. This could lead to catastrophic consequences for workers.”