by John Pinkney
Possibly the most controversial evidence at the inquest concerned Tom Lonergan’s state of mind when he made the fateful decision to travel with his wife aboard the Outer Edge. Coroner Noel Nunan heard claims that the Peace Corps volunteer was depressed and anxious about the work prospects awaiting him in the United States. On 3 August 1997 Tom wrote in his diary that his life was complete and that he was ready to die.
And in her own diary, on 9 January 1998, Eileen noted: ‘He is ready to die. He hopes to die a quick and fairly painly [sic] death and he hopes it happens soon.’ Another passage, discussed at the subsequent trial, reads, ‘Our lives are so entwined now and we are hardly individuals. I am still Eileen but I am mostly Eileen and Tom. He is mostly Tom and Eileen. Where we are now goes beyond dependence, beyond love.’
But even this statement is not conclusive. Elsewhere Eileen writes that she does not want to participate in Tom’s death-wish – and fears that she might be ‘caught up’ in it. She says she ‘corrected’ Tom when he told her he wished they could die together soon – but fears that ‘it’s a risk I take’.
Graham Houston, counsel for skipper Jack Nairn and the Outer Edge company, created uproar in the court when his questioning of a witness suggested that the case had been a murder-suicide. John Bailey, counsel to the coroner, leapt to his feet protesting that the theory was ‘wild, unsubstantiated speculation’. (The couple’s parents and friends would have concurred. Their general view was that while all young people can suffer depressive episodes, Tom and Eileen had been too optimistic and life-affirming to act on such fleeting feelings. As Eileen’s father, John Haines, observed to a reporter, They were happy young people travelling the world’.)
Seldom in Australia’s legal history had there been so little common ground between opposing lawyers. Although counsel generally agreed on particular facts, their interpretations of the data usually tended to be radically diverse.
Coroner Nunan weighed the evidence. On 9 October 1998 he ordered Jack Nairn to stand trial for manslaughter. When the coroner asked whether he had anything to say, Nairn replied, in a clear, controlled voice, ‘Yes your worship – I’m not guilty of this charge.’
In November 1999, after hearing 13 days of evidence, a jury agreed with him. The verdict surprised few people. The deaths – or was it the continuing lives? – of Tom and Eileen Lonergan were too enmeshed in contradiction to be ruled on with any authority by 12 jurors.
In May 2000, however, Rye Holdings, the company of which Jack Nairn was a director, was fined $27,000 for having failed to keep an accurate logbook of the number of people who had dived and returned to the boat. The fine was additional to the $350,000 he had paid in costs associated with the manslaughter trial. ‘My company took the responsible avenue of pleading guilty to the logbook charge,’ Jack Nairn said.
The court decisions did nothing to dispel the rumours that had swirled around the case since the start. Some observers went so far as to suggest that the Lonergans might have been intelligence agents employed by the US government – their Peace Corps activities providing perfect cover for their work. Unexpectedly found out – and frightened – they faked their own deaths before a political enemy could murder them first. Today (or so the story goes) they live in hiding in Australia’s far north. This theory is as feasible as any other. It might even resolve the puzzle. But first you’d have to rule out the other 1,000 possibilities.
Baffling Case of the Burning Man
Australians Ablaze
Frank Clewer, a 59-year-old forklift driver, is a gentle and reserved person. But in September 2005 he unwittingly created panic in the city of Warrnambool, Victoria – when he left a trail of flame and scorch marks wherever he walked. Experts who tested Mr Clewer’s clothes found they were generating 30,000 volts of static electricity: a charge powerful enough to melt synthetic carpets. The incident echoed a comparable event seven years earlier, when a Wollongong woman, Mrs Agnes Phillips, inexplicably exploded into flames. Both these Australians are thought to have experienced forms of SHC (Spontaneous Human Combustion). The syndrome has been chronicled for millennia. But its cause remains a profound mystery...
FRANK CLEWER WAS ONE of numerous workers made redundant by a Warrnambool manufacturing plant. He took immediate steps to find another job.
While sitting in the local employment centre’s reception area Frank was startled by a loud cracking noise. Like everyone around him he jumped, then joined a vigorous argument about what might have happened. The consensus among the jobseekers was that someone must have exploded a firecracker in Koroit Street, outside. This theory effortlessly pipped a second supposition: that a truck had backfired. The eardrum-jarring bang had sounded nothing like a truck, said the doubters.
A young female assistant called Frank’s name and ushered him into the interview room. The personnel people smiled and directed him to a chair. He was surprised to find that he was suddenly hot. Almost unbearably so, with sweat rolling from his forehead and stinging his eyes.
Surely the weather couldn’t have changed so abruptly. It was only two weeks into spring – 16 September – and it had been positively cool when he left home this morning.
One of the interviewers began to discuss a contract that had become available. Then he stopped and sniffed the air. Everyone, Frank included, did the same. The smell of burning was overwhelming. The building must be alight. Someone called the fire brigade.
Within 10 minutes, firefighters had evacuated not only the building housing the job agency, but the business premises on either side. There was no sign of flames, anywhere. But they did find a blackened trail of what seemed to have been tiny spot fires (each the size of a 10 cent piece) burned into carpets in the reception area and interview room.
Aided by two electricians the brigade members immediately began cutting into the floor coverings. They were convinced that wires underneath must be aflame. Puzzlingly, however, they could find no wires at all. And neither were there any scorch marks on the carpet’s underside. The only burns were on the surface.
Tony Cleverley, chief firefighter with Warrnambool Country Fire Authority, was mystified: ‘From the moment we arrived we could hear cracking and electrical popping noises. I’ve never known anything like it. Imagine a room with five firefighters, two electricians and an electrical inspector all standing around scratching their heads.’
When I [the author of this book] spoke to Frank Clewer in February 2006 he recalled: ‘I couldn’t see any way I could help, so I walked back to my car. But the moment I climbed behind the wheel I realised the problem had followed me – or that’s what I thought at the time. There was another loud bang, like a clap of thunder – followed by a strong burning smell and so much smoke I had to open all the windows.
‘I finally realised that the source of the smoke was a charred plastic bag I regularly used to protect the seat from water after I’d been surfing. The bag had fallen to the floor – and was disintegrating under my shoes. Even then it didn’t occur to me that it could be my feet, or my whole body, that were melting the bag in the first place.
‘It was all seriously weird and I was pretty scared and bewildered. I decided to walk back to the employment office to see if the fire officers or electricians had found out what was going on. All along the way people were staring because I was being followed by noises – sharp poppings and electrical zapping sounds...’
Until Frank stepped back into the Koroit Street building he was under the impression that everyone there would be experiencing the same bizarre events. But when what he described as ‘almighty cracks’ began to resonate around the employment office, the fire crew quickly advised him that he was the epicentre. The noises, they said, had stopped when Frank left and dramatically resumed at the moment he returned.
They ordered him to don overalls while they scanned his clothes for static electricity. To their astonishment the measuring device recorded 30,000 volts.
There were no lesions on Frank Clewer’s skin. The only visi
ble effect of the colossal voltage he was carrying was a charred hole in a knee of his jeans.
At the University of NSW scientists of several disciplines checked Frank’s clothing, along with samples of the carpet that had flamed beneath his feet. They could find no explanation for the lightning surge that had exploded inside his body.
‘The symptoms haven’t recurred – and I’m hoping they never will,’ Frank told me. ‘Perhaps one day someone will be able to explain what happened to me – but no one has yet. My wife was best at keeping my spirits up. When the volts were still crackling she said I’d better give up surfing – or I’d stun all the sharks and we’d have fried flake floating in the bay.’
‘It’s Too Hot...Too Hot’
SEVEN YEARS EARLIER, on 24 August 1998, an 82-year-old woman had died after mysteriously bursting into flames in Wollongong, NSW.
At the inquest, coroner Bill Wheeler said he could find no known cause for the fire that had caused Mrs Agnes Phillips’s death a week later. He delivered an open verdict.
The melancholy chain of events began when Mrs Jackie Park picked her mother up from the Chesalon nursing home, intending to take her on a day-trip. En route the daughter parked her Toyota Camry station wagon at Balgownie’s Four Square grocery store, leaving Mrs Phillips asleep in the passenger seat. Emerging from the shop minutes later, she noticed black smoke pouring from the car, followed by an explosion of flames.
A passerby, 29-year-old Bradley Silva, also saw the sudden inferno. With what police would later describe as ‘extraordinary heroism’ he ran to the station wagon, forced open the door and tried to undo Mrs Phillips’s seatbelt. When the metal proved too hot for his bare hands he ‘just somehow pulled her out’. Bradley then sustained further, permanent burns by patting out the flames on the victim’s body.
Mrs Phillips remained conscious through the ordeal. As daughter Jackie cradled her at the roadside she calmly confided, ‘It’s too hot...it’s too hot.’ She had suffered extreme burns to her neck, arms, chest, abdomen and legs: injuries that she would not survive.
At the inquest in April 1999 Fire Brigade Inspector Donald Walshe said he could not determine where the fire had originated.
The car’s engine was switched off.
The wiring was in perfect condition.
There was no mechanical fault.
There were no traces of liquid accelerant or any other fire-starter.
Police found no matches or remnants of cigarettes – unsurprising as both Mrs Phillips and her daughter were non-smokers.
Agnes Phillips had nothing in the pockets of her tracksuit pants and was not wearing her battery-charged hearing aid.
The temperature on that winter day was a cool 16 degrees Celsius.
None of the usual signs police used to determine a fire’s ‘source’ were present in the car.
Rescuer Bradley Silva told the court, ‘The first I noticed was heat rising from a parked car. Mrs Phillips was sitting there very calm and very peaceful. When I actually opened the door it was very hot in the car – and flames seemed to be coming from the right side of her.’
Inspector Walshe said, ‘It’s my opinion that this fire originated in the passenger’s right hip/thigh area, close to the seatbelt anchor point. From the fire damage to the passenger seat I believe the burning was on the outer side of the inner thigh.
Mrs Agnes Phillips: was she Australia’s first known victim of SHC?
‘This case was so baffling that we initially considered Spontaneous Human Combustion as a possibility. But we’ve ruled that out because this fire took place over a very short period – and it takes a lot longer for Spontaneous Human Combustion to occur.’
As several critics asserted after the inquest, Inspector Walshe was sorely mistaken. SHC has been known to cause the swiftest of deaths. Only 16 years earlier (August 1982) a woman had died within an estimated two minutes when she burst suddenly into flames while walking down a busy Chicago street.
A fiery event whose speed and circumstances closely matched the Wollongong case occurred in Jacksonsville, Florida, 18 years before Agnes Phillips’s death. On 9 October 1980 naval pilot Jeanne Winchester was being driven by a friend, Leslie Scott, when flames suddenly ‘sprang’ from her. Agonised she screamed, ‘Help me!’ Scott tried to beat out the flames with her hands – and crashed the car into a pole. Bystanders wrapped their coats and shirts around the burning woman, saving her life. Forensic police announced findings similar to evidence given at the Australian inquest. The mechanically sound car contained no spilled petrol, accelerants, cigarettes or matches. Its windows were closed, ruling out the possibility that someone had thrown a burning object at Jeanne Winchester. And the flames had localised themselves to her body alone: leaving the car’s seats and side panels untouched.
The tragic case of Agnes Phillips – and to a lesser degree the ordeal of Frank Clewer – made Spontaneous Human Combustion a talking point for the first time among Australians. People who had dismissed the syndrome as little more than an overheated myth began to learn that it was a recognised phenomenon that had puzzled the world for millennia.
* * *
SHC: A Burning Question in 52 BC
References to Spontaneous Human Combustion can be found in the literature of most ancient civilisations. In 52 BC the Roman poet Titus Lucretius fully expected his readers to understand when he wrote of a man ‘trapped and entangled without warning in the flame from heaven’.
Charles Dickens was so fascinated by the SHC syndrome that in 1853 he described it in chapter 32 of his novel Bleak House. Two visitors, calling on their dealer friend Krook, are appalled to find that little remains of him but a strange burning smell, a ‘smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark greasy coating on the walls’.
The chapter infuriated the philosopher G.H. Leves, who described it as ‘a fault in literature, overstepping the limits of fiction and giving currency to a vulgar error’. But Dickens was devastatingly well-armed against the sceptic’s lazy attack. He wrote a densely referenced counter-essay describing 30 cases of SHC that he (unlike his critic) had actually studied. All the cases were documented in 19th century medical and scientific literature.
Today, despite the police reports and the photographs, sceptics overall remain scornful about SHC. But some remain open-minded. The Australian science writer and wit Karl S. Kruszelnicki – known for his deftness as a debunker – said in an ABC broadcast, ‘I will remain vaguely dubious until a really well-documented case turns up.’ But earlier: ‘I didn’t believe in Spontaneous Human Combustion, until I read a report in New Scientist by a retired scenes-of-crime police officer in Gwent, UK. He described a case which seemed to be a classic Spontaneous Human Combustion...’
The police officer was John Heymer. In New Scientist, 15 May 1986, he chillingly described a visit to a house in which a man had combusted:
I opened the door and stepped into a cooling oven. There was a steamy sauna-like heat...the walls were radiating heat...condensation was running down the windows. The lightbulb was bare because the plastic lampshade had melted, oozed down the bulb and fallen to the floor. The walls, ceiling and all surfaces were coated with a greasy black soot.
On the floor about one metre from the hearth was a pile of ashes...emerging from the ashes was a pair of human feet clothed in socks. The feet were attached to short lengths of lower leg encased in trouser leg bottoms.
In the ashes were the incinerated remains of a man. Of the torso and arms nothing remained but ash. Opposite the feet was a blackened skull. Less than a metre away a settee, fitted with loose covers, was not even scorched. Plastic tiles which covered the floor beneath the ashes were undamaged.
As Australia’s population continues to grow, it becomes theoretically possible that new SHC cases will occur – giving scientists a chance to analyse the phenomenon. But – statistics notwithstanding – we must hope that that opportunity never arises.
* * *
What Lit Up Lake Eyre?
Strange Encounters
Pilot Lewis Brice was thunderstruck by the scene spread out below him. On the dark surface of South Australia’s Lake Eyre an image shaped like an immense circular clockface lay glittering in the water. Neither Brice nor the tourists aboard his aircraft could remotely guess what the majestic phenomenon might be. Not until 22 years later did events at a farm, on the other side of the earth, yield an enigmatic clue...
LAKE EYRE WAS discovered in 1840 by the English explorer Edward John Eyre. He had been searching for a fabled inland sea – but instead stumbled upon the largest saltpan in the world: a brutally bleak environment assailed by a ferocious sun.
For most of the year the lake does not exist, but is instead a deadly wasteland of salt and mud: the immemorial burial place of billions of animals and birds. Stark white salt has entombed and encrusted the most recent of the region’s dead, twisting them into abstract forms.
Only when seasonal rains thunder into its feeder rivers does the lake come to life again, providing a temporary haven for rainbowed flocks of pelicans. Annually these birds race a cosmic clock, attempting to rear their young before the waters shrivel again in the implacable heat.
Like the pelicans, tourists enjoy Lake Eyre best when it is a seemingly boundless solar mirror whose waters, at night, gleam under the moon.
Lewis Brice loved the lake also – and earned part of his living by flying foreign visitors around it. In 1979 he saw and captured on film the astonishing spectacle that would haunt him long afterward [see photograph]. He wrote: ‘I was taking some passengers on a scenic tour. While we were passing over the lake’s southeastern corner I noticed a huge clockface-shaped pattern in the water. The whole thing was breathtaking in its size and configuration.
‘It consisted of a central mound and a series of smaller mounds in a circle around it. It looked for all the world like little heaps of sand in pink water. I didn’t have the faintest clue what it was – and neither did anyone on board. I was so intrigued by the thing that I subsequently flew back to the area – but I wasn’t able to find the clockface again.’