Bronwyn Winfield podcast: Witness says husband’s strange move ‘blew me away’

Missing mother Bronwyn Winfield’s husband surprised her family when he turned up in Sydney with her daughters the day after she vanished – but what he did earlier in the morning really shocked them | LISTEN

Michelle and Andy Read, the brother of the missing Bronwyn Winfield. Picture: John Feder

Missing NSW mother of two Bronwyn Winfield’s family has recalled the strange events of the day after she vanished, when her “jittery” husband Jon said she’d gone away for a break.

Michelle Read, married to Bronwyn’s brother, Andy Read, said Mr Winfield arrived unexpectedly at her Sydney home on the afternoon of Monday, May 17, 1993, with Bronwyn’s two young daughters.

“I was in the kitchen and there was a knock on the door. I was ­really shocked to see Jon and the two girls,” Ms Read told The Australian’s investigative podcast, Bronwyn.

Ms Read thought the girls, Chrystal and Lauren, then 10 and 5, were home with their mother at Lennox Head on the NSW far north coast.

She also thought Jon had been far away from Bronwyn and the girls, working in Sydney after separating from his wife seven weeks earlier. “At that point, we didn’t know that Jon had taken himself up there. Then Jon was all of a sudden with the kids,” she said.

“So I said ‘What are you doing here?’ Jon was nervous. He was mumbly. He actually ushered the kids inside because he didn’t want to talk in front of them. And we were standing on our little front veranda, just he and I.

“He said ‘Oh, Bronwyn’s left me’. And I went ‘Oh, OK’. He was, like, jittery and all of that. And then he said, ‘Well, actually, she needed a break. She’s going on a holiday.’ ”

Ms Read said it was her nature to be suspicious, and Mr Winfield’s changing story set off alarm bells. “I said to him ‘Where are you staying?’ And they decided to stay with us. We went up to the back of the car, he was parked in our cul-de-sac on the road. He opened the boot. He was picking up pillowcases. And inside pillow cases were just kids’ clothes.”

“There might have been a smallish bag of some sort. I kind of thought ‘Oh, why are you so dishevelled? Why isn’t anything organised?’ ”

Mr Winfield told her he had driven through the night because the kids slept better.

Unloading some of the items from the boot, he said several significant things about Bronwyn, his third wife. Ms Read recalls him telling her: “She’s got the kids. She’s got the car. And she’s not having the house too.”

The comments seemed out of place to her at the time, as he had said Bronwyn was going away for only a short time.

Things got stranger when she asked him why he was in such a hurry. “He gets out his wallet and he’s got, like, a little receipt that you get from the cashier,” she said.

It showed he bought petrol from a service station near Lennox at 11.06pm Sunday. “(He’s) just proving to me that he left at 11.06 and got petrol. And I kind of thought to myself ‘Why are you showing me that? Like, I don’t care if you’ve got petrol.’ ”

When Mr Read returned to the house in Caringbah in southern Sydney to find his sister Bronwyn’s white Ford Falcon in the street, he thought she must have been visiting with the girls.

“Then I saw Jon sitting on the front veranda talking to Michelle,” he said. “Walked down to the front veranda and said ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Bronwyn had a chance to go away and clear her head for a few days’.”

Mr Winfield didn’t mention to the Reads that prior to going to their house, he’d visited the home of his first wife, Jenny Mason, in the same Sydney suburb that morning.

Ms Mason wasn’t related to the two little girls – Chrystal was Bronwyn’s daughter from a previous marriage, and Lauren was Bronwyn and Jon’s daughter. Jenny Mason wasn’t home but Joan Mason, was visiting. She was the mother of Jenny’s husband, Brad, and she’d never met Jon Winfield or the two girls.

“I answered the door and I saw a man who introduced himself as Winfield,” she recalled.

“I don’t remember his first name but I recall he told me he had been Jenny’s first husband. I saw he had two young girls with him. I remember these young girls were dressed in pyjamas. I remember this man Winfield asked me could he leave the two girls as he was in Sydney to do a big job.

“He said something about being in the building game and he had to go and see someone about a job. He said he had been driving all night (and) he needed to leave the children with someone.”

Mr Winfield left the girls there, and Ms Mason looked after them until her daughter-in-law returned. Mr Winfield came back in the afternoon. “They spoke for some time,” she said. “After that, he took the children and left.

“I spoke to Jenny after he left and she told me that he had asked her if she could mind the two young girls for a couple of weeks due to the job he was doing in ­Sydney.”

It wasn’t until years later when a detective, Glenn Taylor, was investigating that the Reads found out about Mr Winfield’s visit to Jenny with the girls.

“That blew me away. These kids, they would never have met Jenny, let alone Jenny’s mother-in-law,” Ms Read said.

Mr Winfield denies any involvement in his wife’s disappearance and has not been charged with any offence in connection to it.

On the Monday morning before visiting his former wife’s house, Mr Winfield had also been to the hair salon where his 18-year-old daughter Jodie worked.

She later told police: “He told me that Bronwyn had had enough and she had gone away for a holiday for two weeks.

“He said that she went to the bedroom and made a telephone call and that she took a small amount of clothes. He then told me that he heard a car pull up and leave and he was sitting on the lounge and didn’t get up to see who picked her up.”

Do you know something about this case? Contact Hedley Thomas confidentially at [e-mail]

To subscribe to our weekly Bronwyn podcast newsletter, click here.

To join in the discussion in our Bronwyn podcast Facebook group, click here.