When a Ballina woman called Kerry McLean sent me a brief email in January 2023, there were no explanatory notes. Just these words and the date: “Bronwyn Winfield, Lennox Head, May 16, 1993.”
The disappearance of this dedicated mother of two girls on that date has been known to me since late December 2017. Her case was raised with me during interviews for The Teacher’s Pet about wife-killer Chris Dawson and the murder of his wife, Lyn, in 1982.
Kerry and I exchanged emails and she told me that she once had a good friend who lived near Bronwyn and her estranged husband Jon’s house.
Kerry said her friend had seen something deeply troubling. But Kerry added that this woman had a lot going on in her life with serious health and family challenges. Kerry wasn’t sure if she had been to police to report what she saw.
In February this year, 13 months after those brief emails, I got back in touch with Kerry and told her that I was investigating Bronwyn’s disappearance for a new podcast series.
Police and the former deputy state coroner who had investigated the case closely in the 1990s and early 2000s had wanted her husband Jon Winfield charged with murder, but the then DPP Nicholas Cowdery KC refused. He had also repeatedly refused to prosecute Chris Dawson.
There was no body, he said, and “no evidence” that Bronwyn’s husband Jon, who has always emphatically denied wrongdoing, had committed any crime.
In a recorded interview, Kerry told me her friend’s name was Judy Singh and that she was a very reliable, honest woman.
She told me what Judy had told Kerry on a number of occasions over the years. It had so alarmed Kerry that she made her own disclosure about it to police in Ballina.
“And I made phone calls and told the detectives what I knew about the friend living in the street, and I thought that they should speak to her,” Kerry told me. But nobody contacted her about it.
“She saw him (Jon) driving down the street. And she could see down into the car. And it looked like he had something on the back seat. She said it looked like a white sheet, something wrapped in a white sheet, which I thought was … ‘Jeez!’.”
I asked Kerry: “What sort of relevance do you know or think that she attached to it?”
She said: “Well, I think she thought that Bronwyn was deceased in the back seat, wrapped in a sheet.”
Kerry and Judy have not been in touch for years.
About 12.30pm on Sunday June 9, a few days after the release of episode 4 of the Bronwyn podcast series, I opened an email from Judy Singh. We had been trying to find her without success but she had seen advertising for the Bronwyn podcast. Until I read Judy’s email, I couldn’t understand how, in darkness, a neighbour would have been able to see inside an unlit car as it passed by her house at night. But in her email, Judy explained that the interior light of the Winfield family sedan, a white Ford Falcon, was on.
She agreed to be interviewed by me. Judy is adamant that Jon Winfield was driving. She is also adamant about the timing – about two weeks after her birthday, May 1. Bronwyn disappeared on the evening of May 16. Nobody heard from her again.
Her husband Jon was the last known person to see her in their Lennox Head house, the major asset of a six-year marriage which had come to a bitter end.
Judy told me she was up late at night and sitting out on an upstairs balcony, worried about her pregnancy and the loss of her job as a nurse and making ends meet in her home in Granite Street near the Winfield house. From the balcony you can see inside passing cars.
“And this night I was sitting up and I saw the car pull out the end of the street and the light was on in the car. He drove very slowly, along the street, but he had left the car light on. I could see directly into the car, and, I had a small lantern on the on the balcony rail, and he kind of looked up this night, and I saw this what looked to be like a mummy in the back of the car? And I thought, well, even if he was taking out, belongings, you wouldn’t make it look like a body.”
Me: “When you say a mummy, it was wrapped in something?”
“Yes. It was either very pale green or cream. Not white, but maybe like a bedsheet or something like that. And I wanted the police to know that.
“I know that he had something in that car that resembled a body. A body shape in the back seat.
“The head of the mummy was in the corner. Pressing up against the door. She was quite upright. The roundness of the head was very visible. This was a light green or sort of creamy coloured sheet. I don’t know what colour sheets Jon had, but, it was like a shroud.
“I’ve dealt with a lot of dead bodies in my life as a nurse. I can’t be mistaken because the light was on in the car. And I hate saying mummy because it is somebody’s mummy, but it was a long white with a rounded head right in the very corner of the back of the car as it went past.”
I asked: “Was it possible for you to actually identify him as Jon Winfield when you looked in?”
“Oh, yeah. It was him. Definitely him. Without a doubt in my mind, it was him.”
Judy said Ballina police were scarcely interested when she went into the station in 1993 shortly after Bronwyn’s disappearance. Police official running sheets show that the local cops believed at the time that Bronwyn was a runaway wife and mum. They took her details and gave her a card which she kept for a long time but nobody got back in touch.
Judy said they were “hardly interested – (I) almost had to beg them to let me say something”.
The image has haunted her over the years. She said she has confided to others, including a medical doctor from New Zealand who was working as a locum in northern NSW.
She told me the doctor implored her to go to police again – as a result they went together to Byron Bay police station where she said she explained what she saw. An officer took her details down, but nobody took a statement or followed up.
Last week, when I found the doctor, a GP on the south island of New Zealand, she told me she remembered Judy Singh and her disclosures about having witnessed something to do with a murder. She said she recalled that the husband was a concreter or block layer, or something like that. Jon Winfield, now 69, was a bricklayer.
The doctor recalled going to Byron Bay police with Judy to report what she saw. And she said she regarded Judy as highly credible; she believed her account of what she saw.
Towards the end of my first recorded interview with Judy Singh on June 11, I asked if she felt better for having made her disclosures in the podcast. She was yet to listen to any of the Bronwyn episodes which had been released by then. Her phone had prevented her from downloading the podcast.
Judy fought back tears as she considered the question. She had almost died recently with heart problems.
She had feared that she would be “taking this to the grave”.
And she welcomes a visit from detectives to finally take a statement from her, 31 years later.
If you have any information about Bronwyn Winfield’s disappearance, email Hedley Thomas at this address: bronwyn@theaustralian.com.au
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