Bronwyn podcast: police missed witness’s evidence for 16 years

Police failed to interview one of the last known people to see Bronwyn Winfield alive until 2009 - more than a decade after her disappearance.

Bronwyn Winfield, left, with husband Jon, vanished in 1993. Friend Virginia Beves, top right, was one of the last people to speak to her.

Police overlooked for 16 years a witness in Bronwyn Winfield’s disappearance who says the missing mother of two spoke of being scared of her “abusive” husband.

Virginia Beves lived down the road from Bronwyn in Sandstone Crescent at Lennox Head on the NSW far north coast and is one of the last known people to see her alive before she vanished in 1993.

Police took a witness statement from Ms Beves only in 2009, so her evidence was not considered by a coroner or when the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions was first considering whether to charge Bronwyn’s husband, bricklayer Jon Winfield, with her alleged murder.

Her statement is detailed in The Australian’s new investigative podcast series, Bronwyn.

“Bronwyn told me about Jonathon being abusive towards her,” it reads. Ms Beves added that Bronwyn said “words to the effect of ‘You don’t know him, he’s been abusive before and he scares me’ ”.

The statement came seven years after the coroner, Carl ­Milovanovich, recommended in 2002 that Mr Winfield be prosecuted over his wife’s alleged murder. The then-DPP, Nicholas Cowdery KC, refused, citing insufficient evidence.

Mr Winfield has always denied any involvement and has never been charged with any offence in connection to the disappearance.

Ms Beves told the Bronwyn podcast that police knocked on her door for the first time in 2009.

By then, she had moved around the corner from Sandstone Crescent but had the same phone number.

Police said her name and contact details were in Bronwyn’s diary in the days immediately before she vanished. Her name was there because her eldest daughter helped Bronwyn with babysitting.

“I said ‘Why didn’t you ever come and see me? I saw her the night before she went missing, my phone number’s written there. It actually says Saturday night, Virginia, phone number, etc, and you never contacted me,’ ” Ms Beves said. “The police need to pick their game up, the detectives. I wasn’t hard to find.”

She is haunted by advice she gave Bronwyn, who had moved out of the family home at Sandstone Crescent with her children and into a townhouse after separating from her husband in March 1993. Mr Winfield had then gone to Sydney to work.

“I said ‘Just move back in the house, he’s in Sydney’. It was my bloody idea. She said ‘Oh, he won’t like it’.”

Bronwyn’s solicitor and her brother, Andy Read, had given her the same advice, and she moved back into the home on Friday, May 14. Two days later, she dis­appeared.

Bronwyn and Jon Winfield and their daughter Lauren.

Ms Beves and her husband, Lee, talked to Bronwyn regularly, and one of their daughters would babysit Bronwyn’s two girls, Chrystal and Lauren, who were 10 and 5 when she went missing.

The children would worry about making a mess in the house and upsetting Jon, she said.

“Well, he locked the kids in the garage while he was going surfing,”Ms Beves said. “That’s what happened when my daughter and her friend went to visit Chrystal.

“They walked down, Tia (the friend) wanted a drink of water, and Chrystal said ‘Oh, we’re not allowed in the house while he’s not here’.

“And she says ‘Well, I’m getting a drink of water’ and walked in. Next thing I heard screaming, and I’ve looked out the window upstairs and they’re running back.

“He’d come home and caught them. Kicked them out.

“I just thought it was strange locking the kids in the garage and not letting them in the house, to go surfing. And I thought they were too young.”

If Bronwyn disappeared today, “it would be over social media instantly” and police “would have better investigating skills”, Ms Beves said.

Bronwyn and her two daughters had struggled to stay warm in the rented townhouse. “I remember her telling me how cold it was down there,” Ms Beves said.

“She was struggling. There was just certain things she said – something about that’s all they could afford and they were freezing.

“And he was abusive and she was scared of him.”

Bronwyn was outside Eden’s Takeaway, where she did casual shifts while caring for her daughters, when she discussed being afraid of her husband, Ms Beves said.

“We were sitting down talking. I think I even told her to get a locksmith, which she did.

“She couldn’t get in because he’d changed the locks. I can remember even seeing the locksmith parked out the front of their place.

I’d walk from Sandstone around the corner to Granite Street (where she was building a home) every day because I was owner-builder. So I’d see a lot.””

Many questions remain after 31 years, she said. “How could she have an accident and not be reported? And if she left him, why didn’t she take the kids, at the very least Chrystal (her daughter from a previous relationship)? Or get her clothes?”

Mr Beves said there was “not a chance” Bronwyn would deliberately abandon her daughters.

“She was a lovely lady. She loved the kids,” he said.

NSW police have said they again sought advice on the case from the DPP in 2008, and made further submissions in 2012.

In 2013, the DPP indicated in advice to police that “no proceedings to a charge would be taken without consideration of significant new material”.

The DPP confirmed that decision in 2014. Police have not gone back to the DPP since.