Missing mother Bronwyn Winfield’s neighbour regrets not telling police everything he knew

Murray Nolan is an all-round good bloke, and a small pocket of misjudgment three decades ago doesn’t in any way blemish that goodness. But it gnaws away at him | Episode 9 out now.

Deborah Hall and Murray Nolan at their home in Sandstone Crescent, Lennox Head. The couple were next door neighbours and friends with Bronwyn Winfield. Picture: Liam Mendes / The Australian

In the rich, funny and at times ludicrous annals of Australian suburbia, you’d have to go a long way before you found a better neighbour than Murray Nolan of Sandstone Crescent, Lennox Head.

Murray is open, friendly, trusting, a bit of a wag and the definition of a straight shooter.

Like all lifelong surfers, he’s comfortable with routines. In Lennox, a board rider’s paradise on the NSW far north coast, time, for many like Murray, is measured by the tides and the swell.

But Murray has a singular regret. Something that has sat uncomfortably with him through the years. That regret is that he was once next-door neighbour and good mate to bricklayer Jon Winfield and his wife Bronwyn.

Bronwyn, 31, inexplicably vanished on Sunday May 16, 1993. Then in the weeks that followed, Murray didn’t share with police all he knew, and suspected, about what had happened to Bronwyn, devoted young mother and good friends with Murray’s wife, Deb.

Murray is an all-round good bloke, and this small pocket of misjudgment three decades ago doesn’t in any way blemish that goodness. But it gnaws away at him. “Look, when she went missing I never … told the police anything … because he’s my friend,” he told The Australian’s podcast, Bronwyn. “I never told the police nothing. I was staying out of it. It was that obvious to me …

“The guy’s arrived at 8 o’clock at night and she’s gone missing at 20 to 11. And I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to stay out of this because they’ll arrest him in three or four days’.”

Bronwyn was there one minute then vanished off the face of the earth the next. By March 1993, Bronwyn and her husband were separated. She was living just near the outskirts of town in a rented flat with her two daughters – Chrystal, 10, and Lauren, 5 – when she decided, while Jon was in Sydney for work, that she and the kids would move back into the family home in Sandstone Crescent. The locks had been changed but Bronwyn got hold of a locksmith and gained entry to the property.

Bronwyn Winfield.

Bronwyn and Deb hooked up and enjoyed a glass of wine. Welcome back. But Deb was worried about Jon’s reaction to Bronwyn’s return to the house next door.

Bronwyn was still moving goods and chattels into the house on that fateful Sunday when Jon flew back from Sydney to confront his estranged wife.

The Nolans had, of course, become aware of bits and pieces of this tragic narrative as it unfolded. How could they have not? Neighbours inevitably share peripheral aspects of each other’s lives, picked up like images on a television with scatty reception.

But what was happening at the Winfields’ place was infinitely more than peripheral.

Late that Sunday night Murray heard the distinctive squeaky brakes of his neighbour’s white Ford Falcon, and heard the vehicle’s undercarriage scrape the bitumen as it left the driveway, and strangely saw the car cruise downhill without the motor or lights engaged. The next morning, Bronwyn was gone.

When police finally came to the Nolans’ door a couple of weeks later, Murray didn’t mention the car, the scrape on the road, or much else.

“I just thought I’m staying out of this,” Murray told the podcast. “He’s (Jon’s) a mate. He’s my friend. I’ve got to live next door to him. And I’m going to surf with him. And I just thought I’m staying out of this … I just thought it was just too obvious. I was probably mistaken at the time.”

Ballina police detective Graeme Diskin and his officer sidekick Wayne Temby had come to Murray’s door with a few questions. The conversation was short and sweet. No formal interview was requested.

“And they asked me a couple of questions, very little actually,” Murray said.

“I remember saying to them – ‘Can’t you forensic the car? Can’t you go in and forensic the house?’

“And they go ‘No, no, no, no it doesn’t work like that. We can’t just go in guns a-blazing and accuse him of anything’.

“Diskin actually said: ‘This is a missing person inquiry, not a murder inquiry’.”

Murray said the police officers seemed “blase” about the matter.

“That’s why I kept saying to him – ‘But there’s something wrong here. You need to investigate.”

He also said that he knew ­Diskin and Jon Winfield were on friendly terms. He saw the pair on Jon’s veranda, yarning away “for ages” around the time of the initial investigation into Bronwyn’s disappearance.

In 1998, Detective Glenn Taylor, freshly transferred from the Homicide Squad in Newcastle, north of Sydney, saw the Bronwyn Winfield file and reinvigorated the investigation, taking more than 70 formal statements from family, friends and other witnesses.

Murray revealed to Taylor everything he knew.

Why did Murray finally talk?

“I could see that it was going nowhere,” he said. “There’s an ­injustice being done here. I wasn’t staying silent to protect him. I was just staying silent because I didn’t want to get involved.”