Jon Winfield’s first wife claimed he choked and threatened to kill her in the 1970s

The first wife of Jon Winfield – former husband to missing Lennox Head mother Bronwyn Winfield – has claimed he choked and threatened to kill her during their fleeting marriage in the 1970s | NEW EPISODE

Jon Winfield. Picture: Liam Mendes

The first wife of Jon Winfield – former husband of missing Lennox Head mother Bronwyn Winfield – has claimed he choked and threatened to kill her during their fleeting marriage in the 1970s.

Jennifer Mason, from southern Sydney, was just 16 when she fell pregnant to Mr Winfield in early 1974 and the couple married. But within a few years she said she became “scared” of her husband and his “angry” outbursts.

“He never allowed me to argue back with him or question what he had to say,” she told police during a 1998 reinvestigation into Bronwyn’s disappearance, and as revealed in the latest episode of The Australian’s investigative podcast, Bronwyn. “If I did question him over some issue, he’d get aggressive and angry with me.

“He’d yell at me and he made me scared of him. I recall on one occasion when he pushed me back on to the bed because I’d answered back to him. On that time, he scared me a great deal.

“He said to me, ‘I’ll kill you if you say that again’. And at the time he had his hands around my throat and was squeezing.”

Ms Mason said in her statement that while she was allegedly being choked she told Mr Winfield – “go ahead”.

“And to my surprise he kept squeezing me around the throat,” she said. “I managed to kick him in the groin and I got away from him and hid in the outside laundry.”

Bronwyn Joy Winfield disappeared from the family home in Sandstone Crescent, Lennox Head on Sunday, May 16, 1993. Mr Winfield told police at the time that Bronwyn – his third wife – said she needed a break from the children and was picked up at the house by a stranger. She has not been seen since.

In 1998 Ballina police Detective Sergeant Glenn Taylor began reinvestigating Bronwyn’s vanishing and took more than 70 statements from family, friends and witnesses. He interviewed Ms Mason in Caloundra, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, late that year.

Ms Mason and Mr Winfield had grown up in the Sutherland Shire, south of the Sydney CBD. She met him in December 1973.

“We had only been going out for about three months when I fell pregnant,” she said. “Jon Winfield and I married when I was about three months pregnant. At the time Jon was working at an oyster farm at Kurnell (in the Shire). My relationship with Jon at that time was very happy. My father got Jon a job as a bricklayer and Jon earned fairly good money.”

(Incredibly, while Ms Mason was pregnant, Mr Winfield’s future third wife, Bronwyn Read, was in her first year at Gymea High School, also in the Sutherland Shire. They would not meet until the mid-1980s and would ultimately marry in late 1987).

In November 1974 Ms Mason gave birth to daughter Jodie. A year later the marriage to Mr Winfield started to sour.

“I tried to have the marriage work out and I stayed with Jon for four years,” Ms Mason told police. “After the fourth year I decided to leave. I couldn’t communicate with Jon anymore. I had to be quiet and be a wife the way that he wanted a wife to be. I couldn’t have opinions of my own and if I tried he would build up this anger. I would then become scared and would back off.”

As the marriage disintegrated Ms Mason took off to Coffs Harbour with Jodie and stayed with relatives, contemplating her future. She returned to the Shire and told police she was confronted by Jon’s mother, Mary Carberry Winfield, who supposedly said: “No woman walks out on my son.”

Bronwyn and Jon Winfield with their daughter Lauren.

After the marriage finally fell apart Ms Mason moved into a flat in Cronulla with Jodie. Depressed and lonely, she said Jon’s parents were critical of how she, as a single parent, was raising the child.

“I recall Jon’s parents turned up one day with Jon and they picked up Jodie and walked out the door, and Grandma Winfield said, ‘When you get your act together you can have her back’,” Ms Mason recalled. “At that time I decided not to try and get Jodie back from Jon.”

She said she later regretted the decision to relinquish custody. “Jon wouldn’t allow me to visit Jodie at school and they (the Winfields) constantly pushed me away from her. I used to sit outside the school watching Jodie play at lunchtime in the school grounds.”

Years later, Ms Mason and Bronwyn Winfield – who both had Jodie’s best interests at heart as her mother and stepmother respectively – became good friends. Ms Mason at one point confided in Bronwyn that Mr Winfield had choked her during their brief marriage in the 1970s.

Bronwyn’s brother, Andy Read, and his wife, Michelle, have speculated for more than 30 years over whether Bronwyn herself was the victim of domestic violence at the hands of Mr Winfield.

They were aware she had confided in friends that he allegedly put his hands around her throat.

Bronwyn and Mr Winfield separated in March 1993. She rented a flat in downtown Lennox Head, on the NSW far north coast, where she lived with daughters Chrystal, then 10, and Lauren, 5, but moved back into the family home in Sandstone Crescent in mid-May while Mr Winfield was working on a building project in Sydney.

On hearing that Bronwyn had taken possession of the house, he flew back to Lennox Head on Sunday, May 16, and confronted his wife. She had been consulting with solicitors and was preparing for a custodial and property assets dispute with Mr Winfield.

In her own statement to police, Chrystal said she remembered her parents arguing that night and that her mother was crying.

Late that evening, with the children in bed asleep, Mr Winfield claimed Bronwyn suddenly left the house and went off with a stranger. He then decided to take Chrystal and Lauren to Sydney, driving through the night in the family’s Ford Falcon.

On the morning of Monday, May 17, Mr Winfield unexpectedly arrived at Ms Mason’s home in the Shire.

Ms Mason’s mother, Joan, answered the door. He asked if she would mind the children as he had “a big job” to attend to.

Jennifer Mason later asked Mr Winfield what was going on.

“I said, ‘Where’s Bronwyn?’,” Ms Mason told police. “Jon said, ‘She’s gone off with a boyfriend’.”

Donna Sialepis, a close friend of Ms Mason’s, told journalist Hedley Thomas, creator of the Bronwyn podcast: “She (Ms Mason) was like a beautiful Hawaiian princess. She was the most beautiful, gorgeous girl.

“She could never do anything right (in the marriage with Mr Winfield). She was never good enough. And she could not live up to his expectations of what a wife should be.

“She was very vulnerable and very young. And that didn’t work out. And she said that she was terrified of his mother. And that no woman was ever good enough for Jon.

“I mainly recall her telling me about the bullying tactics to take Jodie. And that they tricked her. And they pretty much stole Jodie from her. This is what she has told me.”

In her 1998 police statement, Ms Mason expressed grave fears for Bronwyn.

“I don’t think Jon would have purposely done anything with Bronwyn but I feel something has happened that night between them,” she said.

“I think Jon is a type who could lose his cool, he was under a great deal of stress at the time.

“I feel that Bronwyn may be dead and somehow met with foul play.

“I believe that Bronwyn would have contacted me if she needed help, I was very close to her.

“The fact that she has never rang or contacted any of her family or her children makes me think that something has definitely happened to her.”

Jon Winfield has always strenuously denied any involvement in the disappearance of Bronwyn. He has never been charged in relation to the case of his missing wife.

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.