Published: 24 March 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IMAGINE, JUST FOR A MOMENT, that your child goes missing. Vanishes. Without a trace. You race to the police, begging for help, wailing for your nightmare to end. But instead of scrambling choppers, deploying search parties and issuing rewards for information, they dismiss your pleas.
Sounds impossible, unconscionable, immoral, right?
Wrong. This is precisely what happened in Bowraville, a small, disadvantaged town in northern NSW, just over an hour’s drive from the sun-kissed beaches of Crescent Head.
Not once. Not twice. But three times, to three families, more than 25 years ago. On each occasion, the families say the police initially told them they’re kids had “gone walkabout”.
Then the bodies began to turn up…Yes, they were Aboriginal kids – 16-year-old Colleen Walker was the first to go missing after a party in September 1990 on The Mission, a string of ramshackle houses conspicuously located down in the valley and out of sight of High Street, on top of the hill, where whites resided
Just under three weeks later, in October 1990, four-year-old Evelyn Greenup disappeared from a bedroom, after another party on The Mission. And three months later, in January 1991, 16-year-old Clinton Speedy-Duroux went missing, once again after a party on ‘The Mish’
The central point is that Bowraville in the 1990s had not progressed much from Bowraville in the 1960s, when community leader Charles Perkins rode through town on the Freedom Rides: in the early ’90s, Bowraville still had two pubs – one for whites, one for blacks – and seating at the local cinema was segregated.
Perkins and his Freedom Riders may have broken the segregation barricades at the swimming pool in Moree in NSW, but segregation was still alive and well in Bowraville three decades later, despite the efforts of former NSW Chief Justice Jim Spigelman and a clutch of Jewish students who surprised Perkins with their involvement back in 1965.
“I thought, well, they wouldn’t be interested in our affairs and yet there was about six Jewish students who were on the bus,” Perkins was quoted as saying in 1998. “And they were the ringleaders. They were really right up front.”
“If it was three white kids, we know what the answer and the result would be. Why is it different just because there’s three black kids. Why?”
But racism was still rife in Bowraville when the three kids disappeared. At face value, the signs of an alleged serial killer appeared to be self-evident: Each of the three kids went missing late at night after parties on The Mission; their remains were found off the same dirt road running out of town, although Colleen’s body was never found (her clothes were recovered, weighed down by rocks in the river); all three were seen in the company of the same person – a white man – on the night they disappeared; and autopsies on the two corpses revealed that Clinton and Evelyn had both suffered blows to the head.
And yet, the police never joined the dots. Instead, they botched the initial investigation, for which they later officially apologised.
The suspect – who cannot be named for legal reasons – was charged separately for the murder of Evelyn and Clinton. He was acquitted both times, by all-white juries – first in 1994 and then in 2006. But the families never gave up fighting for justice. They still haven’t, 27 years on.
Is this an horrific cold case - or racism writ large? Tragically, it’s both, and it has happened on our watch with barely a blink from contemporary Australia, the Jewish community included.
Despite three murdered Aboriginal children, one white suspect, two trials, one coronial inquest, a landmark change to the centuries-old double jeopardy law, two appeals to attorneys-general and a Parliamentary inquiry, the Bowraville murders haven’t been headline news. And it’s hard to avoid the inescapable and inconvenient truth – it’s because the victims and their families are Aboriginal.
But all that began to change in 2016 following a podcast series by The Australian and late last year a landmark hearing was held at the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, where three judges – including Chief Justice Tom Bathurst – weighed whether there was enough “fresh and compelling” evidence to send the alleged serial killer back to court for all three murders for the first time.
I’ve been filming this unfolding story for over a year in a bid to ensure that this horrific chapter in our history is told on screen. As a father of three, it’s spine-chilling to interview the parents of murdered kids, knowing that the injustice they’ve suffered is, literally, black and white.
The judges’ verdict is due any day now, and what they decree will be monumental: either an alleged serial killer will be retried and may be found guilty of these three murders, or a murder suspect – who has changed his name and long left Bowraville – will be free for the third time, after being hounded by the criminal justice system for almost 27 years.
Either way, much more is at stake than the innocence or guilt of the alleged serial killer. On trial is the entire criminal justice system that has thus far failed the Aboriginal community. For the Bowraville murders stand grimly alongside Aboriginal deaths in custody, the NT Intervention, the apparent torture of kids at Don Dale….
Though the three murders still linger like tropical clouds on the lush green hilltops surrounding Bowraville, the suspect is, of course, entitled to the presumption of innocence.
But the system is surely not entitled to dispense justice for whitefellas and injustice for blackfellas. As Ronella Jerome, Clinton’s aunt, fumed on camera outside of court late last year: “If it was three white kids, we know what the answer and the result would be. Why is it different just because there’s three black kids. Why?”
Photo: Murdered four-year-old Evelyn Greenup’s sister Marji Stadhams, aunt Michelle Jarrett and mother Rebecca Stadhams in Bowraville (Lindsay Moller/The Australian)
