Bronwyn podcast: Witnesses shed light on missing mother’s last known weekend alive
Bronwyn Winfield, 31, had little money upon the break-up of her marriage. As winter approached she complained that the flat she lived in with her two little girls was freezing. So she took action.
Bronwyn Winfield had had enough. For seven weeks since the break-up of her marriage to Jon in March 1993, she’d been living with her daughters – Chrystal, 10, and Lauren, 5 – in a tight cluster of brick-and-tile townhouses on the road out of Lennox Head, a seaside village on the NSW far north coast.
Bronwyn, 31, had little money. As winter approached she complained that the flat was freezing.
She had her job at Eden’s Takeaway, but she found it hard to make ends meet.
Still, the advice of local solicitors gave her hope. She had some legal claim to the former marital home in Sandstone Crescent, and a right to be occupying it.
So in mid-May, while Jon was working on a construction job in Sydney, Bronwyn seized her opportunity. She packed up bits and pieces from the flat and returned to Sandstone Crescent.
It was Friday, May 14, two days before she would disappear without trace. Witness accounts to police and fresh interviews on the Bronwyn podcast now reveal her last known movements.
Later that afternoon, Bronwyn saw townhouse landlord Shirley Taylor and said she was moving out of Flat 5 because Jon had moved back to Sydney.
Taylor later told police: “She was extremely happy about moving back. She moved some of her things out that day and left other things, such as clothing, crockery and kitchen items, in the townhouse.” That night, Debbie Hall, Bronwyn’s friend and immediate neighbour in Sandstone Crescent, heard a ruckus next door.
Seeing a trailer and a car, Hall thought Jon might have rented the house. “Then, lo and behold, about 9 o’clock that night, a knock on the front door. And it was Bronwyn,” she said.
“I went, ‘Oh. What’s he going to do when he finds out you’re in the house?’ Because I just thought Jon’s going to blow a gasket. She said, ‘No, no, no … I’ve got people I can call’.”
Jon, it transpired, had changed the locks. So Bronwyn phoned her brother, Andy, in Sydney.
He recalled saying to her: “Well, you know, get a locksmith.” So she did.
Bronwyn was so excited to be moving back that she phoned her half-sister Kim Marshall in Tasmania, telling her it was the right moment to “get things back to normal”. Bronwyn added: “We’re safe. We’re safe.”
Kim was “totally taken aback”. Bronwyn “had actioned this repossession of the house so quickly”, she told the podcast.
Jodie Winfield, Jon’s daughter to a previous marriage, was 18 years old and living in Sydney at the time. She was close to her dad.
Jodie would later tell police she phoned the Lennox Heads house that Friday afternoon.
“Bronwyn answered. She told me that she had moved back into the house with the kids and that she was staying there,” she said.
“She also told me that Dad was not welcome there and that he can stay in Sydney with me. She told me that she was going to get a restraining order so that he couldn’t come near the house.
“She also told me that the house belonged to her and I really noticed that she had changed from the person who wanted us all to stay close. We both started to argue because I told her that it was not her house, and that it belonged to Dad, Chrystal, Lauren and me as well.
“It developed into a very heated argument and we were yelling at each other and she hung up on me. I immediately rang her back and the phone was engaged. I kept trying, but she must have left the phone off the hook.”
Bronwyn gave her friend Virginia Beves a different account. “Jodie rang her when she moved back in and said, ‘How dare you move back into Dad’s house?’ (Bronwyn) told me that,” Beves said. “Jon had said something to Jodie, and Jodie rang Bronwyn and abused her.”
Jodie phoned again early the next day and Chrystal answered. The girl said her Mum would be out until 4pm. Chrystal was looking after her Lauren, according to Jodie. “When I terminated the phone call and told Dad he appeared to be very stressed out about it because they had never been left alone before and he was so far away,” Jodie said.
It was Saturday, May 15, and Jon decided to book a flight back to Ballina the next day.
His brother Peter Winfield remembered that Jon was concerned that if he didn’t get back to Sandstone Crescent straight away he might find “he would be locked out and it wouldn’t be his home anymore”.
Peter’s wife, Louise, had a more accurate recollection.
“Jon was very upset and was very emotional at that time,” Louise told police. “He considered that it was very unfair that someone could take the children away from him so easily.
“Jon also said that he was worried that if Bronwyn moved back into the house and he wasn’t living there, that he would be unable then to return to the house himself. As far as I recall, he told us that he was going back to Lennox Head to prevent this happening.”
The next morning, Sunday, May 16, Bronwyn phoned a friend and said she was back in the family home. The friend spoke to the podcast using the pseudonym Joan. “I said, ‘How does Jon feel about that?’ She said he wasn’t happy to start with, but he’s all right now,” Joan said.
“She had no plans to move away. She said, ‘You’ll have to teach me how to mow the grass’.”
That afternoon in Sydney, Jodie drove her father Jon to the airport for his flight to Ballina. He was on his way to sort out the house issue. In Lennox Head, Bronwyn’s neighbour Debbie and her daughter Melanie had been minding the children while she worked a shift at Eden’s.
Jon’s plane landed in Ballina at 6.30pm. He’d phoned a friend, John Watson, who was there to pick him up. “He asked me if I could take him to the Ballina police station prior to taking him home,” Watson later said in a police statement.
Jon was inside the station for about five minutes, checking with authorities to see if Bronwyn had secured an apprehended violence order against him. She hadn’t.
Watson drove Jon to Sandstone Crescent. Along the way they picked up one of Jodie’s friends – Becky McGuire – as a “witness” to Jon’s arrival at the house and what might transpire.
“We walked up to the front of the house and Jon knocked on the door,” Becky told police years later. “The door opened and Bronwyn and the children were standing at the door. Bronwyn walked back into the house towards the kitchen and Jon gave the girls a cuddle and I saw that Lauren was crying. I saw two suitcases inside the doorway and Jon picked them up and put them in the (family’s) car.”
Bronwyn had packed Jon’s things, intending for him to take the suitcases away. But that night, according to Jon, Bronwyn said she needed a break and left the house, never to be seen again.
Do you know something about this case? Contact Hedley Thomas confidentially at bronwyn@theaustralian.com.au
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