The Australian launches a new Hedley Thomas investigation
Hedley Thomas has trained his focus on the case of missing mother-of-two Bronwyn Winfield, interviewing family, friends and neighbours and analysing vital documents.
The Hedley Thomas podcast is back.
Thomas is one of Australia’s leading journalists and The Australian’s national chief correspondent, who created The Teacher’s Pet in 2018.
Today The Australian launches Thomas’ new investigation, Bronwyn.
The podcast examines the disappearance of a young mother who vanished from her home in idyllic Lennox Head, near Byron Bay on the NSW far north coast, in May 1993.
While a coroner recommended that a “known person” be charged with her murder, the office of the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions refused to proceed with a prosecution.
In 2008 the NSW government posted a $100,000 reward to help solve the case.
Then police minister Michael Daley said: “Her estranged husband reported her missing to police on the 27 May 1993.
“She left behind two young children, aged five and 10 at the time, making the attack all the more heinous. Ms Winfield’s family, particularly her children, deserve to know what happened – and her murderer deserves to be behind bars.”
Now Thomas has trained his focus on the case, interviewing family, friends and neighbours and analysing vital documents.
“In cases where a devoted mother of sound mind suddenly vanishes from her children, as a general rule in my view it is hard to believe that those women just take off to start new lives, somehow avoiding all identity checks, all proof of life checks, never contacting children or loved ones, siblings, friends and colleagues again,” Thomas said.
“We know that through the decades, until recent years, police and the criminal justice system did not prioritise these cases involving missing women.
“They treated them as just runaway mum cases and flicked them to the bottom drawer.
“Journalists have a role to play in launching serious follow-up investigations all these years later.
“I believe many of these cases could still be solved.
“Bringing fresh eyes to these cases also holds the potential of clearing male partners of missing women if they have done nothing wrong but been regarded for years as prime suspects.”
Thomas made world headlines with his award-winning podcast The Teacher’s Pet – an examination into the disappearance of Lyn Simms, a young mother of two children who vanished from Sydney’s Northern Beaches in January 1982.
Her husband, Chris Dawson, a former high-profile rugby league star and school physical education teacher, had at the time been having an exploitative sexual relationship with one of his teenage pupils, and moved her into the family home in Bayview two days after Lyn vanished.
Shoddy early police work and a refusal to treat Lyn’s disappearance as anything more than a missing person case saw the matter disappear into police archives for the first 16 years after she went missing.
Dawson was ultimately charged with Lyn’s murder in December 2018 and found guilty in August 2022. He was subsequently also convicted of the unlawful carnal knowledge of the teenage pupil.
Dawson has launches an appeal against the murder conviction.
The Teacher’s Pet podcast became a global juggernaut. It has been downloaded more than 80 million times. Combined with sequel podcasts, as well as Thomas’ investigations The Night Driver and Shandee’s Story, have recorded more than 100 million downloads.
The Australian’s editor-in-chief Michelle Gunn said the masthead was now thrilled to release Thomas’s newest investigation. .
“The Australian has developed a reputation for world-class podcasts and Hedley is a trailblazer in this form of storytelling, using the power of audio to shed light on cold case suspected murders,” she said.
“The story of Bronwyn is an absolutely compelling quest for truth and justice.”
Thomas, an eight-time Walkley Award for Journalism winner, became aware of the Lennox Head case during his research for The Teacher’s Pet, and it nagged at him for years.
Bronwyn had left a deeply unhappy marriage and disappeared the night before a scheduled meeting with her solicitor to discuss divorce proceedings and steps to divide the assets of the marriage, including a mortgage-free house then worth $250,000.
The new podcast returns Thomas to one of the most powerful and recurring themes in his work – going back in time and giving a voice to women who for decades have remained voiceless.
“I think what we hope for with all of these kinds of cases is overdue and diligent scrutiny of the facts,” Thomas said. “It’s not too late for some of these cases to be reviewed properly and thoroughly again.
“We know that people who listen to the podcasts come forward for the first time with information they have not disclosed before.
“The other thing that I hope comes out of this and comes out of all these kinds of podcast investigations that we’re doing is a greater awareness for the public at large of the fallibility of systems that perhaps we’ve often blindly trusted but not sufficiently challenged.
“I’m talking about the police. I’m talking about agencies like the Director of Public Prosecutions. As we go through these cases, we realise that these agencies are prone to error like all of us.
“And we also highlight for other people, particularly women listeners, the dangers in certain relationships with some men. Controlling men. Men who are prone to being coercive. Men who may pose a real threat to the safety of women.”
Do you know more? Email us at bronwyn@theaustralian.com.au
To hear directly from the Bronwyn podcast team each week, click here.