by Justine Ford
No matter what kind of person he was or what he’d done with his life, it was a wretched way for it to end.
‘Everyone deserves a proper burial,’ David Butler says. ‘And we’d like to make sure he gets one.’
Chapter 23
Fix It if You Can
Danny Walker, the man who wanted to come home
‘I loved him and he loved me. There was no rift between us. But I don’t know what’s happened. I’ve got no idea.’
Beverley Walker, Danny Walker’s mother
This is a story about a mother’s love…and loss.
Danny Walker’s family loved him, even more than they can say. Yet despite their frequent attempts to help the troubled thirty-nine-year-old, his mum says he ‘went off the rails’.
But as the saying goes, where there is life there is hope, and eighty-year-old Beverley Walker hasn’t given up hope that her son is still living and breathing…and that he might just turn up out of the blue.
•••
Tragedy had hit Danny Walker hard.
‘He lost his father from a heart attack in 1980 when he was eleven. His dad was buried on Danny’s birthday,’ Danny’s mum, Bev, reveals. ‘Then he went through the loss of six of my husband’s brothers within three years. There weren’t many men in the family after that.’
As if losing his dad and his uncles wasn’t enough, Danny soon copped two more premature blows. ‘His brother-in-law was killed in a car accident,’ Bev says. ‘Danny had been doing well at school until then but everything went downhill from there.
‘He also lost a mate who drowned in a boating accident. It was just awful.’
Danny, the youngest boy in a family of six children, never recovered from all the loss and as an adult, he hit the bottle. Like an estimated 6 per cent of Australian men, he found it hard to stop once he’d started. ‘He got addicted,’ Bev says. ‘And when people get addicted to alcohol, their personality changes.’
Danny was never a violent, angry drunk, but he sure liked a tipple. Yet despite his battle with the demon drink, he never failed to tell his family that he loved them, and spoke to his mum every week on the phone.
‘He’d ring up and for a while he seemed happy enough,’ Bev says, ‘but I knew he wasn’t.
‘He’d been to AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] and he’d done rehab for eight months. The doctor told him he had an addictive nature and said that every time he came out of rehab but had to go back again, his condition was getting worse.’
Danny grew up in Tasmania, but like many Australians, he was attracted to Queensland’s warmer climate, and moved to Brisbane for a while where he ran a car detailing business. ‘I set him up in it,’ Bev says. ‘It was a mobile type thing that meant he could clean cars in car parks and outside offices.’
Business was all right for a while, but during a period of water restrictions, Danny was forced to clean the vehicles with just a bucket. ‘That meant he could no longer provide the same level of service,’ Bev explains.
But it wasn’t just Danny’s work life that was growing shaky; his personal life was in more strife than ever. ‘He’d had a relationship with a woman,’ Bev says, ‘but it went pear-shaped and things got even worse for him after that.
‘Mind you, I can’t blame her [for the relationship breakdown] ’cos you can’t live with someone when they’re drinking all the time.’
Eventually, Danny quit town and went back to Tasmania for a spell, returning to Brisbane in March 2008 to catch up with his sister, Julie, to whom he was very close. He was driving his maroon-coloured 1985 Subaru wagon and had his dog with him, a kelpie named Coffee. ‘He loved that dog,’ Bev says. ‘They went everywhere together.’
Danny also took his expensive cream-coloured bicycle with him, as well as some camping equipment. When he reached his sister’s place, he told her he was heading up to Mackay. ‘After the flood [in February 2008], he seemed to have the idea that there was work to be found up there,’ Bev recalls. ‘His sister begged him to stay but he was determined to go. She said he could leave his bike behind but he insisted on taking everything.’
Upon his arrival in Mackay, Danny set himself up close to the beach. But he wasn’t staying in a grand apartment overlooking the ocean; he was living rough. ‘He met a couple of people and for about two months he was camping with one of the fellows,’ Senior Constable Claire Gillespie from the Queensland Missing Persons Unit later found out. ‘They spent their time fishing and looking after their dogs.’
By May, however, Danny decided he’d had enough of the drifter’s life and thought he might like to go home to Tasmania, phoning his mum to tell her so. ‘He was on the verge of crying,’ Bev says, recounting what turned out to be the most memorable conversation of her life. ‘His best mate in Tasmania had asked him if he wanted to come home to Tasmania and said Danny could have a room under his house. But his friend was married with a little boy so I had to point out some home truths. Knowing that Danny was drinking, it wouldn’t have been suitable.
‘It would have been all right for a few weeks…but Danny wasn’t well so it was a different story.
‘He thought we didn’t want him home but it wasn’t like that.’
Bev was also concerned that Danny’s car was unreliable and that he didn’t have enough money to make the long journey. She wishes now she’d insisted he come home right away but felt that she was doing the right thing at the time.
Immediately after phoning his mum, Danny called his good friend, Sue, also in Tasmania. Sue had helped him through tough times before. ‘When he rang his friend he said, “I want to come back”,’ Claire Gillespie reveals. ‘He said, “I want to go into rehab again.” She said, “That’s fine. Ring the institution [the rehab clinic] and I’ll help you from there.”’
She then texted him the number of the institution but he never called them and Sue never heard from him again.
‘That was the 30th of May 2008 and that’s the last we know of him,’ Claire says.
Unfortunately, Danny wasn’t reported missing for more than two months, so Claire’s investigation was behind the eight ball from the start. ‘He wasn’t reported missing until mid-August 2008, because his sister in Brisbane believed he was probably on his way to Tasmania. But when the family didn’t get any phone calls from Danny at all, they became concerned.’
They were right to be concerned because no-one has seen Danny Walker since – as far as Claire knows. ‘Doorknocks were conducted, flyers were distributed, and we spoke to anyone who remembered Danny,’ she says. ‘We visited the previous addresses where he lived and went to where he’d worked. We issued media releases several times and contacted all the likely institutions where he might have turned up across Australia.
‘As a result of the media releases there were some sightings but none of those panned out as we would have hoped.
‘There was one lady who didn’t recall his name but recalled meeting him. It was towards the end of May and he was walking his dog on the beach. Danny is very distinctive – a very imposing-looking fellow, 195 centimetres tall, quite good-looking, with black hair and brown eyes – and she remembered seeing him on a poster.’
During their conversation, Danny mentioned that he was going back to Tasmania. What was haunting about the exchange, however, was that the woman described the striking thirty-nine-year-old as ‘forlorn and fragile’.
‘My take on it is that he was spiralling out of control,’ Claire says. ‘Perhaps his physical and emotional health was declining because of his lifestyle and substance abuse.’
Police managed to track down the man Danny had been camping with, a harmless ‘old bushie’, who confirmed that Danny had been drinking before he disappeared but said ‘he didn’t create havoc or anything like that’. He also described Danny as someone who ‘would chat to anybody’.
Unfortunately, Danny’s fellow camper had no idea where his mate went, let alone what happened to Danny’s car or his beloved dog, Coffee.
There
were suggestions from other itinerants in the area that Danny had given Coffee away, but police have been unable to confirm those rumours. There was also talk that he’d gone camping in Sarina, 30 kilometres south of Mackay, but police found no evidence of that either.
The only thing that Danny’s homeless mates all agreed on was that he was in bad shape. ‘There seemed to be a general consensus among the itinerants that he was declining,’ Claire says, ‘although there was no evidence that he’d been hospitalised or treated by ambulance officers.
‘Naturally, we looked for potential signs of foul play but there was no sign of it. We had no evidence that he had committed suicide either, and no evidence that he’d had an accident.’
Six months after Danny’s disappearance, a family friend came forward, stating that he thought he’d seen him. ‘But then he said that truthfully, he couldn’t be certain if it was him,’ Claire says.
The fact that Danny had stopped calling his family was what concerned Claire the most. It was certainly peculiar given that Danny used to maintain such regular contact and it prompted his brothers and sisters to mount ongoing searches of their own. ‘One of Danny’s older brothers has been distributing brochures far and wide,’ Claire says. ‘The family have also driven up north to look for him themselves but they haven’t had any luck either.
‘There’s still a chance, however, that someone at least knows where his property is,’ Claire continues. ‘There have been other people who have disappeared in their cars in Queensland and sometimes their cars have turned up. Other times the missing people themselves have been found, though not always in positive circumstances.’
Claire cites similar (but unrelated) cases such as the disappearance in August 1995 of pretty twenty-two-year-old Sunshine Coast woman Tabbatha Hodge, who went missing along with her grey Ford Laser and her belongings. She was expected to celebrate her birthday at a party in Currimundi but never turned up. Her body was eventually found in a Twin Waters canal in 1998 and her death was ruled an accident.
In February 2003, thirty-nine-year-old Kerry Mackay, from Australia’s ‘melon capital’ of Chinchilla in the Darling Downs, left a note for her family saying she was driving down to Dalby then on to Brisbane. It’s understood that she set off with her stumpy-tailed black dog, Grizzly, and her four pet birds.
In 2007, Kerry’s car turned up in the Durikai State Forest near Warwick, south-west of Brisbane. The car had a flat tyre but there was no apparent mechanical trouble. Inside, there was no sign of Kerry or her dog, just the skeletons of her pet birds.
A search of the forest failed to turn up the missing woman.
Another Queenslander who drove off, never to be seen alive again, was thirty-seven-year-old Brisbane man Robert Nivison. After a falling-out with his housemates, Robert drove to Lismore in northern New South Wales, where he asked a good mate to look after his pet dog, Basil.
Police later traced Robert to Alice Springs, and in June 2010, his body was found in the scrub near Uluru. There were no suspicious circumstances but it was a devastating blow for yet another loving, close-knit family.
Beverley Walker dreads receiving similar news, and while she still hopes her son will turn up safe and well at her front door, she has given police a DNA sample just in case a body is found. And it is a possibility – after closely examining the evidence at hand, Queensland State Coroner Michael Barnes found in 2011 that Danny was deceased, although the cause and location of his death were unknown. The coroner noted that several factors pointed to the unfortunate finding, including Danny’s alcoholism, stress, the bad experiences in his life, the way in which he’d been upset and had wanted to go home, and the fact that there had been no sign of him, despite extensive police checks.
‘But we hope he’ll surprise us,’ says Claire, who has grown close to Danny’s mum, Bev, and would like nothing more than to give her some good news. ‘We have had people in the past who have been declared dead and have turned up. It can happen.’
And while Danny’s mum hasn’t given up hope, she has placed a memorial plaque for him – along with an image of a dog just like Coffee – on his father’s grave. ‘I’ve got nothing to say he ever lived otherwise,’ Bev says. ‘There are a few photos…a few memories…but nothing else.’
Bev Walker has been a private person all her life so it’s been a challenge to deal with the attention she’s received since her son went missing. But she has bravely spoken out – and would do so again – if it meant she’d receive news of her lost son. ‘Someone must know something, I’m sure of it,’ Bev says. ‘I just hope they come forward and say something.
‘It’s not easy, but what else can you do, honestly? One of my daughters has always said, “Fix it if you can fix it”…but this might be something I can’t fix.’
Chapter 24
The Sharp-dressed man of Rotten Row
A fifty-year-old mystery solved
‘I was working on a case from 1958. That’s ten years before I was born!’
Detective Senior Constable Mark Rippon, Victoria Police
Back in the fifties, Port Melbourne wasn’t the posh end of town like it is now. Like many historical dock areas (think Fremantle in Perth or Darling Harbour in Sydney), it has morphed from its working-class roots into one of the city’s most affluent suburbs.
Ask an old ‘Port’ resident what they think of all the change and they’ll probably tell you they liked it just the way it was – a place for families, workers, and knockabout characters who enjoyed a beer and a laugh. So idiosyncratic was Port Melbourne, it even had its own language. If you were suffering from Port Melbourne goitre, you had a beer gut; a Webb Dock honeymoon was what couples got up to in parked cars late at night; and the Port Melbourne Meals-on-Wheels was another name for the garbage truck.
It’s no surprise then that a place as colourful as the old Port Melbourne would have found its way into the newspapers now and again.
‘River Body Puzzle – Murder?’ read the headline in the Sun on 28 July 1958, after the body of a ‘well-dressed, middle-aged man’ was found floating in the Yarra River near Lorimer Street.
The Herald’s caption had a different take on the story, posing the question ‘River Death Suicide?’
They were reasonable questions because how a well turned-out gentleman came to be floating in the river at Port Melbourne wasn’t known. Not only that, but it would be more than fifty years before anyone even knew who he was.
•••
It all began – or ended, depending on how you look at it – in July 1958.
It was around that time that the family of a sixty-year-old man, to be known as Elmore Robinson* for the purpose of this account, believed he disappeared.
Five decades later, in 2009, Elmore’s grandson Shaun* heard that Victoria Police were reinvestigating cold missing persons cases and figured he might have a chance of finding out what happened to the granddad he never knew. ‘Shaun Robinson had made his own inquiries and had found out that there were a number of unidentified remains in existence from the 1950s,’ Detective Senior Constable Mark Rippon says. ‘He then wrote to the Chief Commissioner requesting our assistance.
‘Elmore hadn’t been reported missing, however, so we had no idea who he was,’ he adds.
When Detective Sergeant David Butler handed Mark the job, he asked him to find out if any of the old unidentified remains on their books belonged to Mr Robinson. Older jobs are often the hardest to investigate, but Mark planned to give it a red-hot go. ‘We’d been doing the Belier work in which we investigated cases between 1960 and 2005,’ Mark says. ‘This case wasn’t within our scope but given the nature of what we were doing [matching unidentified remains with missing people], we were probably the best placed to do it.’
Mark’s first step was to meet with Shaun, a clergyman from South Australia, to find out everything he could about his grandfather. Shaun told Mark that Elmore, of good Irish stock, was born in Collingwood and was one of nine children. When Elmore was six
teen, he took a job alongside his dad at a brewery in the city. When he first started Elmore wasn’t an alcoholic, but as Mark says, ‘he became one’.
In 1923, Elmore got married and his wife, Alice*, bore four children: Donald*, Jane*, Elmore Robinson Junior* and Bessy*. Elmore and Alice’s relationship didn’t last, though, and Elmore eventually left Alice to look after the family by herself. ‘He had been a family man but his alcoholism led to him becoming estranged from them,’ Mark says. Donald, who has since passed away, told his son Shaun that the last time he saw his father was in 1951 at a family wedding, where Elmore gave a speech.
Shaun would have loved to know what became of his granddad but no-one really knew. He was captivated, though, by a story his dad told him back in 1958. As the story goes, Elmore’s alcohol dependence had become such a problem that he eventually ended up living like a vagrant. ‘By the time he was sixty, it’s believed Elmore was living in a men’s refuge in Fitzroy,’ Mark says.
On the night of 13 July 1958, one of Elmore’s brothers, Mitch*, a soldier who was not known for his kindly nature, was drinking with Elmore and possibly others on the banks of the Yarra River in Port Melbourne. According to the story, Mitch and Elmore got into a heated argument during which Mitch punched Elmore and pushed him into the river.
Elmore never resurfaced and not surprisingly, Mitch, (who has since died), never breathed a word to the police.
•••
Two weeks after the apparently fatal stoush, a man’s body was found floating in the Yarra.
At about ten o’clock on the morning of 27 July 1958, a man was enjoying a walk along the south bank of the Yarra River at Port Melbourne when he made the unsettling discovery. He didn’t know what it was at first but on closer inspection he realised it was the body of a dead man, floating face down. He hotfooted it to the Port Melbourne police station, where he reported his ghastly find.
Shortly afterwards, Port Melbourne police went to investigate, by which time the body had floated even closer to the riverbank, near where the Maribyrnong River flowed into the Yarra. It was an area north of the boat harbour known, aptly in this context, as Rotten Row. As he bobbed idly in the water, it was as though the dead man – bloated from being submerged in the river – was taunting the police officers, daring them to work out who he was – and how he ended up in such a sorry state.