Bernie remembered receiving a phone call from Burrell a month before Kerry disappeared. It was four years since the two had spoken and Bernie described the call as ‘bizarre’, with Burrell talking about his separation from his wife, Dallas, and rambling incoherently from topic to topic.
Despite the lack of firm evidence, Burrell was now a person of interest, and the strike force began building a profile. He was born in 1953. At the age of 32 he married Dallas Bromley and in 1988, together with Dallas’s parents, Bruce and Dallas bought the Bungonia property. In January 1994 Dallas was diagnosed with cancer and began treatment, including chemotherapy. The Burrells separated and divorced in 1996.
The strike force and Bernie prepared for the ransom exchange. Bernie had raised the cash through Crown Equipment. A few days before the exchange was due, the heavily armed State Protection Group, trained in hostage negotiation and high-risk operations, took up positions both inside and outside the house. On 13 May, Bernie did as he was told and placed a notice to the kidnapper in The Daily Telegraph, but there was no response.
Three days later, by arrangement with the strike force, Burrell was pulled up in Goulburn by the highway patrol. The number plates on the Pajero he was driving did not match the car, and the car itself was found to be unregistered. Burrell was arrested and taken to the local police station, where he was charged with stealing the Pajero and related offences. The charges created an opportunity for the strike force to search his property, which it did. In the house police found (but did not confiscate) an empty chloroform bottle, a number of guns and various types of ammunition, as well as a typewriter, from which they took a sample of typing. Burrell was charged with receiving a stolen car, driving an unregistered and uninsured vehicle, and using number plates calculated to deceive. He was released on bail.
Another three days went by and there was still no contact from the kidnappers. By this time the media had begun to hear stories of a kidnapping and were asking questions. A media release was prepared and the media were asked to broadcast a plea to the community for help. On 19 May the strike force began a major search of Burrell’s property, organised and led by Detective Inspector Bruce Couch, who had played a major role in the search for bodies in the Belanglo State Forest. It was the first Burrell knew that the police regarded him as a suspect.
This time investigators seized a crossbow, Bernie Whelan’s .223 Ruger rifle, the typewriter, the empty chloroform bottle and a dozen other items, including two notes with ‘numbered points’, which were later identified as having been written by Burrell and interpreted by police as an early outline of the planned kidnapping. The first note consisted of six points (the words in brackets represent the strike force’s interpretation of each point):
1. Collection [a reference to the ‘collection’ of Kerry Whelan]
2. Advisement [a reference to ‘advisement’ of kidnapping in a ransom note to her family]
3. Waiting [a reference to ‘waiting’ until further instructions on how to proceed]
4. How to proceed [a reference to ‘how to proceed’ in delivery of the ransom]
5. Pick up [a reference to ‘pick-up’ of the ransom], and
6. Cover all [a reference to cover-up of the crime].
The second note consisted of five points and has been interpreted as being the outline of the ransom note (again, the words in brackets represent interpretations by the police):
Has been K[idnapped]
No P[olice to be involved]
Letter within 2 days [to be received with further instructions]
Nothing until received [do nothing until second letter received]
Stress 2 [no police]
Police also seized a Yamaha quad bike that had been stolen from Burrell’s neighbour’s property about seven weeks earlier, and a 1995 silver Jaguar Sovereign, which had been stolen from a car sales dealer in November 1995. Under the front seat of the Jaguar they found a UBD street directory marked with the location of the Parkroyal Hotel in Parramatta, with the hotel’s address written in highlighter pen. The route from the Parkroyal Hotel to the headquarters of Crown Equipment in Smithfield was also highlighted.
A guard was placed on the house overnight and the search continued for several more days, with divers searching the property’s six dams. Burrell admitted to police that he had visited Kerry at the Whelans’ property about a month earlier. It had been a social visit, he said, and he had intended to ask Bernie if he had any work for him. Burrell denied meeting Kerry three weeks later at Parramatta. As the search continued, the receptionist at Crown Equipment received a phone call: ‘Mrs Whelan is okay. Whelan must call off the police and media today. Tell him it’s the man with the white Volkswagen . . . He must call off the police and media today . . . will be in touch in two weeks.’
By now Kerry’s disappearance was front-page news. Burrell was arrested and charged at Goulburn with stealing the Jaguar and firearms offences and bailed. A photograph of a Suzuki vehicle was found in Burrell’s house. The vehicle was traced and found to have been stolen and sold. Burrell was later charged with receiving the vehicle.
After five days the search of Burrell’s property was called off. The searchers had found no trace of Kerry. The next night, Monday 26 May, the strike force received some extraordinary news. News reports of Kerry Whelan’s disappearance had reminded Maroubra Detective Sue Whitfield of her own investigation, two years earlier, into the disappearance of 74-year-old Dorothy Davis from Lurline Bay in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Just after 1 p.m. on 30 May 1995 Dorothy Davis had left her home to visit a friend. She was never seen again. Bruce Burrell had been questioned over the disappearance and remained a person of interest.
Whitfield was seconded to the Whelan strike force and the Davis case was reopened. There were striking parallels between the cases. Around 1 p.m. on 30 May 1995 Dorothy told a builder who was attaching an awning to her home that she was going to walk to the home of a friend who had cancer. The friend was Dallas Burrell but she was not at home; she was at work that day. The only other person who lived in the house was Burrell.
Twelve months later the marriage failed and Dallas left Burrell. Their financial settlement required each of them to borrow $125,000 in order to buy out Dallas’s parents’ interest in the Bungonia property. While Burrell ended up as the sole owner, he was unable to meet the mortgage payments.
When police first interviewed him over the disappearance of Davis, Burrell had an alibi: he was at lunch at Crows Nest on Sydney’s north shore with two business colleagues. After the Davis case was reopened, the strike force interviewed the colleagues. One remembered the lunch being on his birthday, 30 May, the day Davis disappeared. But credit card and restaurant records established that the lunch had in fact taken place two days earlier. Burrell’s mobile phone records confirmed that he had been in Sydney on the morning Davis disappeared and in Moss Vale a few hours after she was last seen, and that he had returned to Sydney later that afternoon.
While the strike force continued investigating the Whelan and Davis disappearances, Burrell was making his way through the courts on motor vehicle theft, firearms and related charges. On 3 August 1998 he pleaded guilty in the District Court to larceny as a bailee, three charges of receiving stolen motor vehicles (a Suzuki, a Pajero and a Jaguar), disposing of a stolen motor vehicle (the Suzuki), and possessing a prohibited weapon. Burrell was convicted of four more offences: having registration plates calculated to deceive, driving an unregistered motor vehicle, driving an uninsured motor vehicle and using a firearm without a licence or permit. All offences were committed between 1992 and 1997. He was gaoled for a total of three and a half years.
By now the strike force had checked the security cameras in Parramatta where Kerry had parked her car. These recorded her entering the hotel car park at 9.35 a.m., talking with the parking attendant and walking up the ramp leading from the car park onto Phillip Street. Forty-four seconds later Kerry was seen on the parking station security camera. Another securi
ty camera recorded a reflected image of a two-tone, two-door Mitsubishi Pajero pulling away from the kerbside in Phillip Street outside the hotel. It was the same model of Pajero that Burrell was driving at the time. Other features—a bull-bar, a running board and heavy dirt stains on the rear window—matched Burrell’s Pajero. Kerry was believed to have entered the vehicle, although it was not known why. In the following months police tracked down most of the people who owned similar Pajeros and excluded them from their inquiries.
On 1 April 1999, as he neared the end of his gaol sentence, Burrell was charged with kidnapping and murdering Kerry Whelan. Three years later, following legal argument at trial, the charges were dropped, but the police were not finished with Burrell.
Dallas and her parents had been close friends of Dorothy ‘Dottie’ Davis since Dallas was a child. Dallas and Burrell lived in a unit in Lurline Bay about ten minutes from Davis’s house. In November 1993 Burrell left a note for the owner of an ocean-facing house in their street, expressing an interest in buying the house. The owner, however, did not want to sell. Three months later Dallas was diagnosed with cancer. In mid-1994 Burrell again wrote to the owner of the ocean-facing house and this time a deal was reached to buy the house for $600,000.
Davis’s husband had died in 1984, leaving her a wealthy woman. In July 1994 Davis wrote a cheque for $500,000 in favour of Burrell. Three days later the bank manager phoned Davis and drew her attention to the fact that she had only $114,000 in her account. Davis explained that the cheque was ‘a short term loan to a friend’ and gave instructions to stop the cheque. A month later Davis wrote another cheque in favour of Burrell, this time for $100,000. When depositing the cheque in Burrell’s account, Davis told the bank manager the funds were to be used as a deposit on a property. A week later Burrell withdrew $90,000 in cash from his account.
Davis explained to her daughter, Maree, that Burrell had told her Dallas was desperate to buy the Lurline Bay house, but that the owner had demanded a larger than usual deposit. Davis had agreed to help by writing Burrell a cheque for $500,000. When the cheque was stopped, Burrell told her the owner was prepared to accept a smaller deposit; Davis had then written the second cheque.
Burrell said nothing to Dallas about the ‘loan’ from Davis until several months later, when he gave a very different story to Davis’s. In Burrell’s version Davis wanted to conceal certain things from her children and had asked for his help. Davis had written him a cheque for $100,000, which was deposited into his account. A few days later he withdrew the cash and gave Davis $90,000. At her suggestion, Burrell said, he kept $10,000 for his trouble.
In August Burrell bought the ocean-facing house. The purchase price was covered by a bank loan; there was no need to use Davis’s money.
According to Burrell’s former business associate, Peter Grace, Burrell claimed that Davis had lent him money and asked for it back, threatening legal action, but Burrell had been unable to repay the loan. In fact, Burrell was broke and had been for some years. He had been only sporadically employed since at least 1992 and had been sacked several times, he received no social security benefits, had no source of income, was dependent upon the earnings of his wife until they separated, could not meet the repayments on either the Lurline Bay house or his Bungonia property, and had been living on money borrowed from his parents. Burrell had also been living off the proceeds of cars he stole and then sold, property he had stolen from Bernie and any other money he could ‘con’. The money Davis lent him in July 1994 was spent before the house in Lurline Bay was even bought.
A month-long inquest into the disappearances of Whelan and Davis began in May 2002. After the inquest, the coroner referred the papers to the director of public prosecutions, and ex officio indictments were subsequently filed against Burrell over the disappearance of Kerry Whelan and Dorothy Davis. Burrell’s trial for the murder of Whelan had been due to start in January 2003, but Burrell’s poor health caused delays. The trial eventually got underway two and a half years later, on 10 August 2005, and continued for ten weeks. On 2 November, after ten days of deliberations, the jury failed to reach a verdict and was discharged. The retrial began four months later and lasted ten weeks. This time, after nine days of deliberation, the jury found Burrell guilty. He was gaoled for life for the murder of Kerry Whelan and for sixteen years for her kidnapping, both sentences to be served concurrently. An appeal against the severity of those sentences was dismissed in 2007.
On 30 July 2007, thirteen months after being convicted of murdering Kerry Whelan, Burrell faced trial for Davis’s murder. He pleaded not guilty, but was convicted and gaoled for 28 years.
The strike force investigation revealed Burrell to be a man with few redeeming features. Casual acquaintances often mistook him as affable, outgoing, well connected and independently wealthy. Those who knew him better regarded him as an inveterate name-dropper; an idle, untalented bully who stood over women to do work that he would take credit for; a bullshit artist with an evil temper who could become violent when things did not go his way; a liar and a sleazebag who was always conning money from others.
Burrell also had an obsession with a notorious criminal: Ivan Milat. When hosting parties at Bungonia he would often talk at length about the backpacker murders and the stash of weapons seized by police when they arrested Milat. Pointing to the forested national park that bordered his property, Burrell would tell his guests, ‘You could hide a body so easily out there and no one would ever find it,’ adding that he knew the area ‘like the back of my hand’.
Perhaps there was more to Burrell’s comments than just an obsession. Neither Dorothy Davis’s nor Kerry Whelan’s body has ever been found; Burrell is believed to have buried both in a forest somewhere near his property.
18
GRIEF
Rita and Peter O’Malley had a good life together in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Rita ran a bridal and dressmaking shop at Double Bay, and the two of them performed as the ‘Singing O’Malleys’, often turning up to entertain the residents at local nursing homes. Nothing connected them to the horrors of the Belanglo State Forest. But this changed in April 1991 when Rita, who was born in Germany and spoke fluent German, received a phone call from a friend. The friend asked Rita to act as interpreter for Manfred and Anke Neugebauer, who were flying to Sydney to search for their missing son, Gabor, and his girlfriend, Anja Habschied. Anja’s brother, Norbert, would accompany them to help with the search. While the Neugebauers’ search for Gabor and Anja proved fruitless, their meeting with Rita at Sydney Airport marked the beginning of a deep friendship.
Manfred and Anke flew home disappointed, but they stayed in contact with Rita by phone and letters. After hearing that Gabor’s and Anja’s bodies had been found in the Belanglo State Forest, Anke and her elder son, Tibor, returned to Australia. Rita met them at the airport, spent time with them in Sydney, and went with them to the forest to visit the site where Gabor and Anja had lost their lives, before Anke and Tibor flew back to Germany with the bodies of Gabor and Anja.
In February 1994 the premier, John Fahey, unveiled a plaque in memory of the murdered backpackers in the Belanglo State Forest, close to the former site of the police command post. Pat Everist, Ray and Peggy Gibson, and Ray and Gill Walters attended the memorial service, together with the police commissioner, Tony Lauer, local police and members of Task Force Air, including me. The Clarke family was unable to attend but sent a letter of support and encouragement that was read out at the service. Rita represented the families of Gabor and Anja and of Simone Schmidl.
The memorial and service had been organised by the Reverend Steven Davis. ‘I felt it was a good opportunity for the parents, for the local community in which I live and for the police to tie a whole lot of things together,’ he said. ‘In the midst of death—even such violent and tragic deaths as these—I want to stand up and hold out a word of hope and light.’
After the memorial we all returned to Bowral Police Station. Recalling her meeting wi
th Pat Everist and Peggy Gibson, Rita told Steve Meacham of The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘That first day we met, we all formed this special friendship. It was the oddest thing. Here we were, a group of strangers drinking tea and eating sandwiches in a police station. We all felt we had known each other for years. We shared this common horror.’ Pat told Meacham, ‘Rita made it bearable for us, in unbearable circumstances . . . It has become a wonderful friendship. Not just with Rita, and the other parents, but with the police. They were so compassionate. They became friends, like family. I never knew you could have a relationship with the police.’
Most of the victims’ families were in Sydney for the committal hearing and the trial. It was while Rita was attending Ivan’s committal at Campbelltown Court that she became friends with the Schmidls. ‘I helped him [Simone’s father, Herbert] get through every day as he has no knowledge of English. He spent a good portion of time with myself and my husband at our home . . . he was so glad to have someone he could talk to in German and of course to relate many stories about his beloved daughter Simone.’ Rita also spent a lot of time with Herbert during Ivan’s trial: ‘It must have taken all his strength to walk into that courtroom and face the man who had destroyed such a part of his life.’
Norbert Habschied also returned to Australia for the committal proceedings, together with his and Anja’s mother, Olga. Speaking no English, Olga relied on the Neugebauers and on Rita to explain the trial to her.
The O’Malleys again caught up with the families of the victims at the trial but, not expecting it to continue for as long as it did, had booked a trip to Germany and were overseas during its final weeks. During the trip the couple spent several days at the Neugebauer home with Anke while Manfred was at the trial in Sydney. Gabor was never far from Anke’s thoughts, Rita said. ‘Every night she [Anke] takes the dog for a walk and then visits Gabor’s grave . . . Gabor’s room is practically as he left it and I have no doubt it will stay this way forever.’ They also stayed with Herbert Schmidl, who had had to return home for personal reasons, and his second wife, Helene, and with Olga and Guenther Habschied. While Guenther remained very withdrawn, Olga seemed to be coming to terms with the loss of Anja, believing her daughter was ‘in another place, a rose garden . . . very close to her’.
Milat Page 18