Star rugby league player Brian Battese’s reaction when Bronwyn Winfield went missing: ‘She’s dead’

When former premiership-winning footballer Brian Battese heard family friend Bronwyn Winfield was missing, he told his wife ‘you’ll never see your friend again’ | LISTEN

Bronwyn Winfield’s good friends Terrie Battese, main, and Brian Battese, top right playing for the Bulldogs; Bronwyn’s husband Jon, last month

When former dual NRL premiership-winning footballer Brian Battese first heard family friend and Lennox Head mother Bronwyn Winfield was missing, he was convinced she was dead.

Brian Battese, a star for the Canterbury Bulldogs in the mid-1980s, and his wife Terrie were friends with Bronwyn before she inexplicably vanished from the far northern NSW seaside town in May 1993.

In fact, Terrie Battese was on the committee of a local Lennox children’s playgroup with Bronwyn, and the pair revelled in motherhood and their young children. But when Brian learned that Bronwyn had vanished, he was immediately convinced that she was deceased.

“Terrie told me the story and I said ‘she’s dead – I guarantee you’ll never see your friend again’,” he recalled for The Australian’s podcast Bronwyn.

“Terrie was a bit shocked when I said it, I remember.”

Terrie also believed Bronwyn – mother to Chrystal, then 10, and Lauren, 5 – “died that night” she went missing from the family home in Sandstone Crescent.

At the time, Bronwyn had separated from her husband Jon Winfield and was on the brink of a major child custody and matrimonial assets dispute.

Brian “Bruiser” Battese was only five years into his retirement as a professional rugby league player when Bronwyn vanished. He had returned to the Byron Shire after hanging up his boots and became a successful school football coach.

His professional career was garlanded with honours. Playing his junior league years for South Lismore – just a 40-minute drive from Lennox Head – he was part of the Wynnum-Manly squad that won its first Brisbane premiership in 1982.

Battese was a tough but versatile second-rower, and he soon headed south to Sydney and the more glamorous, and lucrative, NSW rugby league competition, joining the Western Suburbs Magpies in 1983. He switched to the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs under legendary coach Warren Ryan the next year.

It was a fortuitous move.

Battese started off the bench at the start of the 1984 season but soon replaced second-rower Phil Gould, who broke an ankle.

Battese thrived and was part of the team’s narrow 6-4 grand final win over Parramatta. His teammates – Steve Mortimer, Terry Lamb, Paul Langmack, Steve Folkes, Darryl Brohman and others – have since been recognised as legends of the game.

The Bulldogs, with Battese on board, also won the premiership in 1985, defeating St George 7-6.

The Batteses still live in the Byron Shire. Both continue to wonder why, for more than three decades, nothing has officially progressed with the Bronwyn Winfield police investigation.

Terrie was only 30 in the early 1990s when she befriended Bronwyn at the children’s play group.

She remembered her friend as a kind person with strong maternalistic instincts. Terrie recalled an incident in a shopping plaza in Ballina, south of Lennox. “Once my daughter was born … I was in Ballina Fair and she saw me and she came up and she was just – ‘Oh, what a beautiful baby’,” Terrie said. “She was so overwhelming. And, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky’. Genuine. Heartwarming. She was just so kind with my new baby.”

When husband Brian theorised that “she was dead”, Terrie found it hard to disagree.

“Probably because I said she would never leave those girls. Never, ever would leave,” Terrie told the podcast.

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

Terrie said many of the locals were nonplussed at perceived police inaction. “There was this psychic called Pendragon hanging around Lennox at the time,” Terrie recalled. “She’d (Bronwyn) been to (see) him. And the talk was ‘did he tell her something that made her want to go and hide for a little while?’ That was the talk that was going around.

“(But) my friend was always onto it. She kept ringing the detective every week. ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’

“And I think people in town may have been scared, perhaps. And no one really came to any sort of decision.”

Do you know something about this case? Email Hedley Thomas 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.