THE DOUBLE MURDER CASE THAT SHOCKED AUSTRALIA

Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan came from different parts of Sydney, mixed in quite different circles, and led completely different lives. They had never met each other and, if they had, they would have had little in common. In fact, Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan had just one thing in common – they both knew Bruce Allan Burrell. The disappearance without trace of these two women caused massive police investigations and resulted in sensational trials that gripped the nation of Australia. Mark Tedeschi led the prosecution in the conviction of Bruce Burrell for the brutal murders of Kerry Whelan and Dorothy Davis. In his book Missing Presumed Dead, he explores the intricacies of those investigations and the tortuous processes of the legal proceedings, while exploring the dark recesses of Bruce Burrell’s mind. On Wednesday 12 October 2022, Mark Tedeschi addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss the Bruce Burrell murders and prosecution.

THE DOUBLE MURDER CASE THAT SHOCKED AUSTRALIA

MARK TEDESCHI

My book, Missing, Presumed Dead, is about the disappearance without trace of two women who were victims of a man by the name of Bruce Burrell. Those two women were Dorothy Davis, who disappeared in 1995, and Kerry Whelan, who disappeared in 1997. Those two women were both happy, healthy, mature-age, middle-class women – the sort of people who rarely go missing for more than a few days and are hardly ever amongst the ranks of those who are never found. Those two victims, Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan, were not hitchhikers or associates of drug dealers, or unhappy with their lives, or suffering from mental health issues. In fact, they fell well outside any of the conventional categories of people who go missing permanently without any trace. They came from completely different parts of Sydney, they mixed in quite different circles, they’d never met each other and if they had, they wouldn’t have had much in common. In fact, they only had one thing in common, and that was that they both knew Bruce Burrell.

Dorothy Davis was a 74-year-old widow who lived in Lurline Bay, in her own home. She was a very happy, healthy woman with children, grandchildren and a very extensive social life. One day, in May 1995, she left her home on foot. Thankfully, at the time that she left her home, there was a carpenter that was doing some work on her house, and she said some things to this carpenter that were to prove of crucial importance in the later prosecution of Bruce Burrell. I’ll come back to what it was that she said to this carpenter. She left her home on foot, never to be seen again. Within a few days, her family realised that she was missing. They made extensive inquiries, they notified the police, and the police initially thought “This is just a woman who’s decided to go off on a holiday on her own and not tell her kids and grandkids where she’s going.” But eventually, they realised she was truly missing. The initial investigation of Dorothy Davis’s disappearance by the police was cursory, to say the least. In fact, in many respects, it was deficient.

The police were told by Dorothy Davis’s daughter that Dorothy had lent $100,000 to Bruce Burrell, who was married to a woman called Dallas and who was a very close friend of Dorothy. It turned out that Dorothy had made the mistake of demanding back the $100,000 that she’d lent to Bruce Burrell. Now, Bruce Burrell had borrowed money from a number of middle aged and elderly women and whenever they asked for the money back, he would threaten them, become intimidatory and use his big physical bulk to intimidate them.

But Dorothy Davis was made of sterner stuff. She announced to Bruce Burrell that if he didn’t pay the money back, she’d hand the matter over to her solicitor and, more importantly, she would tell Dallas, Bruce Burrell’s wife, about this loan. Because she had been induced by Bruce Burrell not to tell Dallas about it. So, the police went and investigated Bruce Burrell in a very cursory way. He told them that he’d been at work on the day of her disappearance. He told them that he’d been at a lunch that day with his work mates for somebody’s birthday. They went and spoke to one of his workmates who said, “Yeah, I think it was that day that we had the lunch, and I think Bruce was at work that day.” And that was the end of the investigation. Nothing further happened.

Two years later, the second disappearance was that of Kerry Whelan. Kerry was the wife of Bernie Whelan, who was the CEO of the Australian branch of a large multinational company called Crown Equipment, a company that made forklift trucks. He was quite wealthy and the family lived on a large property at Kurrajong, where they ran horses. They had three children together. They were a very loving couple. They had a fabulous family life. They had loads of friends. They had lots of social activities.

One day, in May 1997, Kerry Whelan drove her car to Parramatta and parked in the underground carpark of the Park Royal Hotel. Parramatta was the closest large shopping centre to where the Whelans lived at Kurrajong. That hotel had cameras everywhere, including down in the car park. On the security camera from the hotel, you could see Kerry walking up the ramp from the underground carpark to the street, turning right towards the entrance of the hotel and disappearing. She was never seen again. Her body has never been found. Kerry and Bernie were due to go on a holiday for a few days that afternoon. When Kerry didn’t turn up, Bernie realised something dreadful had happened, because there was no way that she would have missed out on this holiday.

Bernie reported Kerry missing to the police very quickly. He got a private inquiry agent to start ringing hospitals and going to police stations and making every inquiry of every friend and relative they ever had, to no avail. The next day, the whole family was at their home at Kurrajong and the mail was delivered. In the mail was a ransom note, demanding $1.25 million for Kerry’s safe return. It was at that stage that an employed nanny and housekeeper, who worked for the Whelans, told the police and the family that about three weeks earlier, Kerry had a very strange visit from a man she didn’t know. The man had turned up at Kurrajong without any warning. Kerry seemed considerably uneasy with this man. The housekeeper had seen them sitting outside on the patio having a cup of tea and talking, and Kerry was upset afterwards. So, the police gave the housekeeper family photo albums to look through. She looked through album after album, and eventually she came upon a photograph from a picnic day at Kurrajong for Crown Equipment employees and she said, “That’s the man who came to visit Kerry.” That man was Bruce Burrell.

Bernie then said, “That’s surprising because, about a week earlier, out of the blue, my former employee, Bruce Burrell, rang me and I couldn’t see what the purpose of the conversation was. It was about nothing. I couldn’t work out why he’d rung me after years of having no contact with him. But I did mention that every second Wednesday, I go overnight to Crown Equipment’s premises in Adelaide.” That very next Wednesday was the day that Bruce Burrell turned up at their property and had the conversation with Kerry.

Immediately, Bruce Burrell became the prime suspect for the disappearance of Kerry Whelan. The police went and got the security video from the hotel, and they looked at it very closely. Not the officer in charge, but his underlings, looked at it very closely. All they could see was Kerry walking up the car park to the street and disappearing. There was another camera that was inside the lobby of the hotel, looking out through the main entrance to the street. You could see that Kerry didn’t walk past that main entrance, and she didn’t go into the hotel. So, the police concluded that she must have got into a car between the car park ramp and the main entrance.

It was about a week later that the officer in charge of the investigation – who really is the hero of this story, Detective Chief Inspector Dennis Bray – decided to have another look at the video himself. What he saw was that there was a camera on the outside of the hotel, pointed in towards a glass door that led to a night club of the hotel. Being daytime, the night club was in darkness. It was an overcast day, so the glass door acted like a mirror, so that you could see in the glass door what was happening out on the street. What he saw was that 38 seconds after Kerry Whelan had exited that car park ramp, a very distinctive car had taken off from outside the hotel. You could very vaguely see the outline of a passenger in the front passenger seat. You couldn’t see who it was, you couldn’t even tell if it was male or female, but there was somebody seated in that seat. That vehicle was a 2-door, 2-tone, 4-wheel-drive Pajero, with no roof rack, a running board, and a very dirty rear windscreen which had been partially wiped by the rear windscreen wiper. The police immediately went and investigated if Bruce Burrell had a vehicle like that. No, he didn’t. There was nothing registered to his name like that. But he was still the one and only suspect.

So, police decided to conduct surveillance of Bruce Burrell who, by this stage, was separated from his wife Dallas. He was living at a very remote property called Hillydale near Bungonia, which is in the Southern Highlands, and his ex-wife, Dallas, was still living in their house at Lurline Bay in Sydney. The police started conducting surveillance of Bungonia. I don’t know if any of you have been to Bungonia, but it’s a very small village, and you can’t have a police presence in Bungonia without everybody knowing about it. So, immediately, everybody thought “The police are looking for a marijuana plantation”, or something like that. But what the police did see was that Bruce Burrell was driving a 2-tone, 2-door Pajero, with a running board, no roof rack and a dirty rear wind screen that had been partially wiped. So, they knew they were onto something. After about a week of conducting surveillance of Bruce Burrell, the police decided to conduct a raid of his property at Bungonia. This raid was very extensive. By this stage, the officer in charge had been informed that two years earlier, Bruce Burrell had been the one and only suspect in the disappearance of another woman, Dorothy Davis. So, immediately, this became an investigation of two disappearances.

Detective Chief Inspector Bray immediately set in train inquiries about Dorothy Davis that should have been conducted two years earlier but hadn’t been. For a start, he got the telephone records of Bruce Burrell and discovered that he hadn’t been at work that day, but that about an hour after Dorothy Davis had left her home on foot, Bruce Burrell had driven from his home at Lurline Bay, which was literally around the block from where Dorothy Davis lived, down to the Bungonia property, which is about a 2-hour trip. He spent an hour there, and then drove back all in the same day. The very next day, he’d done exactly the same; two hours down, about two hours there and then two hours back. That immediately raised a lot of suspicions.

What did the police find during their search at the Bungonia property? They were primarily looking for bodies. That property and the surrounding national parks were dotted with old shale mines and ventilation shafts from decades past that hadn’t been used for a long time and were in shocking condition. They lowered police down some of them that were safer, but some of them they had to lower cameras down because it was too unsafe to lower somebody down. They didn’t find any bodies.

But what they did find, at Bruce Burrell’s home, was absolutely fascinating. On a desk in his loungeroom, there was a pile of papers. They took possession of those papers, took them back to the police station and, in due course, two police officers had the task of going through those papers. What they found were a number of dot point notes. There was one dot point note that was an early version of the kidnapping plan. There was another dot point note that was an early version of the ransom note. There was another dot point note about cleaning a vehicle, and in particular it said, “Front passenger side, half an hour”. Now, I’m sure all of you at some stage of your lives have washed a car. But have you focussed for half an hour on the front passenger side? I haven’t. But I can think of a good reason why somebody might want to focus on the front passenger side of the vehicle, if they wanted to get rid of anything like fingerprints or DNA in relation to a person for whom they would have no explanation for their presence in the car. They also found a note in which Burrell had written down $68,000 worth of improvements that he wanted to do to his property at Hillydale.

The motive for Bruce Burrell’s actions in kidnapping Kerry Whelan was that he was in such dire financial straits that he couldn’t even pay the interest that was due on the bank mortgage over Hillydale, and he was at risk of losing Hillydale. The obvious motive for Dorothy Davis’ disappearance was that he had spent the $100,000 that she’d lent him, that she was demanding back and threatening him with action. Even more significant was the shame of having to tell his wife that he had prevailed on this elderly woman to lend him money and that he had no way of paying it back – he’d already spent that $100,000. So, it was purely a financial motive – purely greed. He was certainly in no position to spend $68,000 improving Hillydale.

The police also found an almost empty bottle of Chloroform. When Burrell was asked why he had chloroform, he said he bought it to use as a cleaning agent. Again, I don’t know about you, I’ve done occasional cleaning from time to time, but I’ve never had any need for chloroform.

They also found a street directory where the location of the Park Royal Hotel in Parramatta was highlighted in pink highlighter, and the address of the hotel was written in the margin. Then, in the directory and highlighted, leading away from that location, was a route along various roads towards the premises of Crown Equipment, but stopping a couple of kilometres before it at a place where, at that time, there was a straight stretch of road where you could see about a kilometre in either direction, and where there were no houses, no shops, no factories, and nobody to see what was happening. It was an ideal location to convert a voluntary lift – because Kerry Whelan, undoubtedly, voluntary got into that car – into a forced abduction.

Bruce Burrell was so overwhelmed by the presence of a large contingent of police at his property and, perhaps more significantly, a large contingent of media people camped at the front gate of this property, that in desperation he managed to find his way without being followed to Goulbourn. He went to a public phone box, thinking that you can’t trace calls from public phone boxes, made a call to the reception desk at Crown Equipment, and gave a code that had been in the ransom note, so that Bernie would know it was the real kidnapper. He said, “Tell Bernie that if he ever wants to see Kerry alive again, call off the police”. When he was asked questions about that call by the police a few days later, he thought maybe he had been followed and thought, “If I lie about this, that’s going to be evidence against me”. So, he admitted being in that phone box at that time, but claimed that he was ringing his solicitor, not Crown Equipment. We could prove from phone records that did exist, that the call at that time was to Crown Equipment, and not to his solicitor.

Following the search, a decision was made, in relation to the Kerry Whelan murder, for Bruce Burrell to be charged. It went to a pretrial hearing. The trial judge that was allocated the case excluded quite a bit of the evidence that I’ve told you about, including the chloroform, parts of the street directory other than the location of the Park Royal Hotel, the dot point note about car cleaning, the list of improvements to Hillydale – but allowed in the other two dot point notes. The Director of Public Prosecutions then announced that the prosecution of Bruce Burrell would be discontinued for lack of sufficient evidence.

Chief Inspector Bray then took the matter to the coroner, and the coroner held a joint coronial inquest into both deaths. Bruce Burrell was required to appear because he was served with a subpoena, but he exercised his right not to answer questions on the grounds that the answers might tend to incriminate him. The counsel assisting the coroner asked him some great questions; “Are you responsible for the death of Kerry Whelan?”, “I decline to answer that question”. “Are you responsible for the death of Dorothy Davis?”, “I decline to answer that question”. “Are you a predator of women?”, “I decline to answer that question”. There were 84 questions that he declined to answer. But there was a small piece of evidence that came out that hadn’t been available previously. Armed with that, the coroner said he was satisfied that a known person – guess who – was responsible for both deaths, and he wrote a letter to the DPP. By that stage, I had become available – I was unavailable previously because I was doing another trial – and the matter came to me.

Subsequently, the DPP announced that Bruce Burrell would go to trial on both matters, the Kerry Whelan murder and the Dorothy Davis murder. I then made an application to a new trial judge to have both matters heard together. I drew the trial judge’s attention to the similarity between the two matters. I also called a police officer from the missing persons section of the NSW Police and asked her how many people had been reported missing in the three years that these two women went missing. The answer was about 21,000. I then asked how many of them were still missing, bodies never found, who were women of mature age, who were not hitchhikers, not suffering from mental health issues, not dealing in drugs, not wanting to change their lives because they were desperately unhappy, not any of those categories of people who sometimes go missing. How many, excluding those categories, were still missing six years later which was when I was on the case. How many do you think there were? Two! What were their names? Kerry Whelan and Dorothy Davis! I had to show some significant probative value to make the two matters interchangeable at the same trial. Unfortunately, the trial judge didn’t agree with me and ruled that I had to go to trial on each matter individually.

So, we made a decision to go to trial first in relation to the disappearance of Kerry Whelan, because it was a stronger case. We went to trial, the trial took about three months, and at the end of the 3-month trial, the jury were unable to agree. The judge discharged them. A day later, many of the jurors went to The Sydney Morning Herald to complain about one juror who had refused to engage in proper discussions with them. So, the NSW Government, because of this case, passed new legislation to allow for majority verdicts of 11:1. You can have one person holding out and you can still get a verdict either way, for guilty or not guilty. We went to trial again; three months of the same evidence and this time, the jury were able to agree and deliver a verdict. Bruce Burrell was convicted of the murder of Kerry Whelan and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

We then went to trial in relation to the Dorothy Davis matter. In this trial, there was crucial evidence from the carpenter at Dorothy’s home on the day of her disappearance whom she spoke to as she left her home that day.. The carpenter said that as Dorothy Davis was leaving her home on foot, she pointed in the direction of where the sea was, which was only a block away, and said “I’m going to visit a friend who’s had cancer. She had chemotherapy, she lost all of her hair, but she’s well now. She’s got her hair back and she’s recovered and is really well.” We could prove that the only person that she knew in that whole suburb who fitted that description was Dallas Burrell, Bruce Burrell’s wife. So, Dorothy was clearly leaving her home, thinking that she was going to meet up with Dallas. But, in fact, Dallas was at work that day, and the only one who was at home was Bruce Burrell. An hour later, he left his home and drove to Bungonia, giving him an opportunity to temporarily dispose of the body, and then went back the next day to dispose of it permanently.

After another 3-month trial, Bruce Burrell was convicted of the murder of Dorothy Davis and was sentenced, surprisingly, to 28 years gaol, which, of course, was purely academic, because he’d already received a life sentence.

Just two short further facts. The first one is: the police conducted two extensive searches of Bruce Burrell’s property and the neighbouring national park looking for bodies and never managed to find them. The other is: after his conviction and after all of his appeals had been exhausted, the police approached Bruce Burrell in jail trying to convince him to disclose the whereabouts of the bodies. He always refused to admit responsibility for the deaths, and never disclosed anything about the location of the bodies. In my book, I advance some reasons why people in his situation maintain their innocence. There are some very strong reasons why, particularly for somebody like Bruce Burrell, who had very severe narcissistic traits. Serving a life sentence, his life was almost totally outside his control. This was the one area where he still had control.