In 1995, the small community of fortunate landowners included Dorothy Davis, a 74-year-old widow who lived at number 9 Undine Street, next door to the Strictly Ballroom star, dancer Paul Mercurio, and his wife, Andrea. Dottie, as her friends called her, often chatted over the back fence and doled out lollies and small gifts to the Mercurio children. On the other side, at number 7, Dominic Ianna lived with his family. Margaret Keg and her husband Brian resided with their sons, Durwin and Damian, at number 8, down the hill from Dottie. The neighbours looked out for one another, exchanged pleasantries and enjoyed the occasional get-together.
Dottie had arthritis in her legs and, given the slope of her street, she tended to drive her Mercedes almost everywhere. Very occasionally, she would go two houses down to visit Norma Peacock, another widow, but it was unusual for her to walk far. Everybody knew that Dottie drove. Norma, seventy-seven, had lived at number 5 for almost forty years; her late husband had known Dottie’s late husband, Jack. From her kitchen window Norma could see Dot coming and going from the garage.
Two hundred metres away, on Marine Parade, lived Dallas Burrell, who was recovering from cancer. Dallas was married to Bruce Burrell, and she was the daughter of Dottie’s friends, Les and Shirley Bromley. In her generous way, Dottie treated the Bromleys’ daughter like a niece.
On the morning of Monday 29 May 1995, Dottie woke early to let in Kenneth Hulse, a 48-year-old Liverpudlian-born builder who was installing a roof on Dottie’s back verandah. Dottie would bring him coffee and biscuits and tell him whenever she was popping out for some reason. Around 5 p.m., Margaret Keg paid Dottie a visit and they discussed Dottie’s plans for a party to celebrate the completion of her balcony in a few weeks. The old woman had a lively social life and a big circle of friends. As Mrs Keg took off for home, a freezing wind was blowing up Undine Street from the sea.
Dottie continued cleaning her house and turning out items for a garage sale to aid the Randwick Lantern Club for Deaf and Blind Children. She had been a founding member of the club for thirty-three years. Already she had found some old photographs and given them to her son, Lessel. The pictures were of her and Jack, who had died from cancer more than ten years earlier.
The next morning, Tuesday 30 May, Paul Mercurio saw Dottie moving her car to give the builder access. She drove to her doctor to have a skin cancer removed at 10.45 a.m. and returned around 1 p.m. with a red, puffy blotch on her face. She took some steak from the freezer to thaw and, gesturing towards the ocean, told the builder she was going to visit a friend who had been suffering from cancer, and had ‘lost all her hair’.
Around 2 p.m., Margaret Keg had struck up a conversation in the street with Sandra Walker from number 2 and she could see no sign of Dottie at her house or in the street.
The builder left at 4 p.m., puzzled that Dottie had not returned to see him out.
In the late afternoon, Paul Mercurio noticed Dot’s car was still in the street, but he did not see her.
Inside number 9 Undine Street, the steak on the sink had defrosted when the phone rang. It was Dottie’s daughter, Maree, who was trying to contact her mother for the second time that day. Maree felt a tiny wave of anxiety as the phone rang out. She lived on Sydney’s North Shore, and called her brother, Lessel, who agreed to call in to see Dottie on his way home to Coogee.
The house was silent when Lessel let himself in that evening. As he searched for a sign of his mother, he noticed her diary which was lying open on a desk. In it was an entry for a doctor’s appointment and, for the evening, the Dining Dollies—a group of women who met each month at a different restaurant in Sydney. Lessel assumed she was out with them and left .
The next morning, Maree tried again, and in the evening also. No answer. She rang Lessel whose son, Andrew, answered and said that his parents were at a school function.
‘Is Grandma with them?’ Maree enquired.
‘Probably,’ the teenager said.
But the next morning when Maree called Lessel she learned her mother had not been with him the previous night. Maree knew something was terribly wrong. ‘We’re in trouble,’ she told her brother.
They met at Undine Street and they began searching for clues inside the house. Dottie’s car was parked in the street, which was unusual. Phone calls to friends revealed that she had not turned up at her regular Dining Dollies outing, and had not called to cancel. This was not like Dottie.
Lessel’s wife Tanna rang hospitals and taxi companies, to no avail. That afternoon, Lessel filed a missing person statement but was told that police procedure meant they had to wait three days. ‘She’ll show up,’ the constable assured him.
Back at the house, that wasn’t good enough for Maree, who pressed Lessel to call in some favours from a friend who knew detectives at Maroubra. By evening a major search was underway for their mother. As Maree sat on the front steps of her mother’s house, she heard a helicopter buzzing overhead and the sirens of three police cars pulling into Undine Street. A searchlight blazed down from Polair. ‘Oh my God, this is real,’ Maree said in a half-cry.
A doorknock of the neighbourhood began and the police rescue and dog squads embarked on a search of the cliff ledges and shoreline around Lurline Bay. The search would take them to the northern end of Maroubra Beach, but they could see nothing in the torchlight on the sea. Friends of Maree and Lessel’s from Coogee Surf Club launched out in a rubber duckie onto the black waves. Maree stood for a while with Paul and Andrea Mercurio, watching the Polair searchlight beaming down over the ocean.
‘All I hope,’ Maree said, ‘is that she didn’t suffer.’
Andrea Mercurio sucked in a breath and Paul put his arm around Maree. ‘Don’t say that,’ he said gently.
Maree could not sleep that night as her mind somersaulted over the possibilities. Perhaps her mother had suffered a stroke and was disoriented? Or had she fallen? Dottie never walked down near the cliffs so how could she have come to grief?
The next morning was cool and rain drizzled as police resumed their search. Lessel and Maree made ‘Missing’ posters with a photograph of Dottie, which they plastered up around Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Lessel had it posted out to hotels and motels up and down the coast and, later, Maree drove to the New South Wales central coast to meet up with her cousin, a truck driver, so he could distribute it to other truckies driving around Australia. Maree thought that if her mother was disoriented, she might try to return to where she grew up, in Grafton on the New South Wales north coast.
Police made their own check of institutions: hospitals, the morgue, trains, buses and airlines, all without result. Dottie’s GP, Dr Andre Haski, told detectives Dottie suffered from a condition called claudication, which caused severe cramping in Dottie’s calves and hamstrings as a result of her chronic vascular disease.
‘If Mrs Davis were to walk down a steep hill of some two to three hundred metres, would she be able to walk back up that hill?’ the detective asked.
‘Very unlikely,’ Dr Haski said, ‘but perhaps Dottie was expecting a lift home.’ He listed Dottie’s other health problems: arthritis, high cholesterol and mature-onset diabetes. He said Mrs Davis was her usual self, ‘composed, happy, very straightforward’ when he saw her on the morning before she went missing. Only twice had she been depressed, the first time after her husband died in 1984, and then again in 1993, when she attempted to stop smoking.
However, he made an intriguing statement. Dottie once told him that she was sick of her children and went off on her own to Lismore in the New South Wales Northern Rivers district. ‘Mrs Davis . . . was cranky and said “those kids of mine won’t leave me alone. If I want to go somewhere I will. I don’t have to be beholden to my children”,’ Dr Haski recounted. ‘She told me where she had been . . . however, her family found her within twenty-four hours . . .’
Listening intently, the detective sniffed a lead.
On Saturday 3 June, police held a press conference at Maroubra station. They had advised Maree and Lessel
not to attend; there would be no benefit. It was poor advice. With no one to push the story along in the media, it soon fell from sight.
The following day the Sun-Herald published a story buried in the back of the news section headlined ‘WEALTHY WIDOW MURDER FEARS’, which generated no follow-up interest from other media, nor the public. Maree shuddered at the glib typecasting of her mother as a ‘wealthy widow’; it was a tag that would stick.
On 5 June, Detectives Andrew Ford, a crime scene investigator, and Frank Giordano from Maroubra drove to Dottie’s house to take photographs. They found nothing unusual. An empty coffee cup and a plate of biscuits lay on a table in the sunroom, the old lady’s dresser was neatly arranged and a few boxes lay around the house.
Back at Maroubra, Giordano and Detective Senior Constable Sue Whitfield were focusing their attention on the builder. They had taken Kenneth Hulse’s statement on 1 June, then hauled him back in to the station on 6 June and fired more than two hundred questions at him. Police again interviewed him on 8 June, as well as his wife, Rita, and put them under surveillance.
Lessel was also a suspect, particularly after police learned that Dottie had lent her son a million dollars. The police had asked both Maree and Lessel strange questions about whether their mother was ‘trying to get away from her children’. When police finally told Maree Dr Haski’s claims, she was furious. ‘It’s ridiculous that I am a suspect,’ she told Frank Giordano and Sue Whitfield, informing them that the doctor’s story could not be true. Maree phoned Auntie Heather, who lived up in northern New South Wales. She described the story as ‘rubbish’. Maree was extremely frustrated and felt the police’s focus was misdirected. She assured Whitfield that members of the Davis family had a normal, healthy relationship which included conflict and harmony, dispute and resolution—and, overall, much love.
Almost a month after Dottie’s disappearance, detectives got their first possible lead. On 20 June, a 33-year-old sales director named Wayne Reuben arrived at Maroubra police station. Dorothy Davis was Mr Reuben’s godmother. His parents, Ron and Norma, had been friends with Dottie and Jack since just after the war. Through Dottie, the Reubens had met Les and Shirley Bromley. Wayne Reuben explained to police that Dottie had recently lent a large amount of money to a friend, Bruce Burrell.
Bruce was married to Dallas Bromley and they were almost neighbours of Mrs Davis. Dallas occasionally walked over from their Marine Parade duplex to visit ‘Auntie Dot’. Reuben had found Dottie a sensible and practical woman who was in charge of every aspect of her life, particularly her finances. But Reuben disliked and mistrusted Burrell. In fact, police were not surprised to hear about the loan. Maree Dawes had rattled off a list of people she knew had borrowed money from her mother. However, Wayne Reuben’s story cast the revelation in a more sinister light, and the police decided to schedule a visit to the Burrells the following week.
Bruce and Dallas lived in a house with stunning ocean views. Detective Sue Whitfield remembers pale-coloured walls and a white shag-pile carpet she feared messing up with her work shoes. The officer felt as if she ‘was inside a seashell’.
Dallas blinked through an enormous pair of spectacles ‘seeming to know very little about her husband or his affairs . . . she didn’t appear to know where Bruce got his money’.
Whitfield asked them to come into Maroubra police station to make a statement the next day, 29 June. They arrived around 9 a.m. Whitfield remembers, ‘Bruce was all charm, and Dallas dressed up to the nines with long nails and her hair immaculate.’ Bruce made a point of mentioning his car, the grey Jaguar parked outside, saying with a broad grin, ‘I hope I don’t get booked.’
‘He came across as a big guy, a company director with a big house in Maroubra and a country property,’ Whitfield says, ‘and Dallas was keeping up with the Joneses.’
The husband and wife were interviewed separately, and each had an alibi—they were at work on the day Auntie Dot vanished. Burrell was at his office on Sydney’s North Shore and had attended a lunch with colleagues at Crows Nest.
Whitfield and Giordano quizzed Dallas about their lives, their finances and their friendship with Dottie. Dallas seemed vaguely aware of a cheque Mrs Davis had asked Bruce to process. In the other interview room, Malabar’s Detective Jim Bignell asked Burrell just thirteen questions about the financial transaction with Dorothy Davis. He said Dottie had not lent him money. He said she had simply asked him to process a cheque for her which he had done. Bignell remembers Burrell ‘was as slick as a fresh dog turd’. Burrell’s interview lasted four minutes longer than his wife’s, and when the couple left , they seemed relaxed and amiable.
By that evening, Bruce Burrell was in a rage. He paced the white carpet in his house as he spoke in terse sound bites down the telephone to Maree Dawes, who was at her own home on Sydney’s lower North Shore, alone. She could sense his anger through the receiver.
Burrell told Maree he had been interviewed by the police about her mother’s disappearance. He wanted to come over and explain the arrangement he had with Dottie.
Maree was feeling drained and sad, as she often did these days, and Burrell’s fury alarmed her. ‘Don’t worry about it, Bruce,’ she said, trying to placate him, ‘we’ve all been interviewed.’
But Bruce insisted, and he would not let it stand undefended. He was coming over.
Maree hung up the phone and dialled Maroubra police station. She was frightened, she told one of the officers, because her husband was at work and she was about to be confronted by a big ball of fury.
Maree had managed to calm down by the time Dallas and Bruce arrived on her doorstep. She opened a bottle of wine, gave Bruce a beer, and put out a plate of cheese and biscuits.
Burrell was sweating. ‘Bloody Wayne Reuben,’ he cursed. He went on to explain Dottie had asked him to keep the cheque transaction a secret and Wayne Reuben had spilled it to the police without knowing the truth of it. Bruce explained to Maree that Dottie had asked him to process a cheque for $100 000. He had done as she asked and Dottie gave him $10 000 for his trouble.
Bruce’s story did not make sense, and Maree challenged him. Dottie would have to have been dead drunk to hatch that plan. Was she worried about something else?
Burrell was sitting bolt upright, chain-smoking and babbling, his face puce with emotion. He continued to blame Wayne Reuben.
Maree sat there thinking two things: poor Wayne, and thank God Burrell did not know she had also told police about Dottie and the loan arrangement. Maree kept on feeding him possible scenarios. At one point she said, ‘I’ll bet that money was meant for me.’ Perhaps Dottie had wanted to appease her daughter because she had propped up Lessel’s company with the one million?
Burrell raved on while Dallas reclined languidly in a chair, sipping her wine with the wifely indifference of someone who had seen this tirade many times before. They left and Maree was confused and bewildered.
Burrell’s version of events was very different to what Dottie had told Maree in the months before she disappeared. Dottie had mentioned to Maree over the phone that Burrell had asked her for a loan as bridging finance to purchase a house on the water for Dallas. Dottie had mentioned a large amount, around $300 000, Maree thought. She remembered saying to her mother, ‘Dallas probably deserves that after all she’s been through, given the cancers. It’s your money, Mum, do what you like with it.’
Dottie had later told Maree that she had lent Burrell the money but it was a lesser amount, which would be ‘easier’. Now, with her mother gone and Burrell giving her a different version of the transaction, Maree did not know what to believe. She had a feeling, which amplified with time, that if she could work out the true story of the $100 000 she would have the key to her mother’s disappearance.
Days later, Detective Bignell and a constable arrived at Burrell’s office on the Pacific Highway at Crows Nest, an advertising company called Peter Grace & Associates. The police wanted Bruce Burrell to accompany them back to the police sta
tion. Burrell’s boss, Peter Grace, noticed the extreme agitation on his employee’s face.
The next day, a sheepish Burrell told him, ‘One of our neighbours has gone missing. Dallas and I have already been interviewed by the police and we told them everything we know. I don’t know why they keep wanting to interview me.’
A few weeks later, the police returned to the office to verify his alibi. Burrell was flustered by their second visit, but relieved when his boss, Peter Grace, confirmed to police that on 30 May Burrell had been at work. Burrell later told Peter Grace that police were interviewing him about a loan Dottie had given him. ‘They’re treating me as if I am a suspect,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet the old girl’s gone walkabout without telling her family. She did it once before when there was a dispute over money, by packing up her bags and catching a train north to go and stay with a friend.’
The Maroubra detectives accepted Burrell’s alibi and lost interest in him as a suspect. They had obtained bank reports of the transaction and a copy of a Westpac cheque made out to Burrell by Dottie. But they took it no further. Eventually the builder was ruled out as a suspect too, and the case fell fallow. Everyone—except for Dottie’s family—forgot about the old lady.
After their mother disappeared, the bitter pill of her vanishing would rise up in Maree and Lessel’s throats for many years to come. They had no body to bury and so no grave for them and Dottie’s grandchildren to visit. Maree and Lessel kept the house at Undine Street going, but cleaning away the cobwebs and dust every few weeks was an emotional task that only got harder. They could not sell her house, or even Dottie’s car, because according to the law, the family was not allowed to declare probate on her possessions. Maree still had to file tax returns for Dottie because, officially, her mother was not dead.
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