Blood Vows: A Haunting Memoir of Marriage and Murder

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PART ONE

YOU’LL KNOW WHO I AM BY THE SONGS THAT I SING

1

A PREMONITION

It started out as an ordinary Newcastle day, one weekend early in March 1984. Something was creating a strange sense of sadness and unease in me. I was crying and couldn’t explain why. There was no obvious reason. My children were settled and happy. My parents were living just around the corner in Cooks Hill, an inner-city Newcastle suburb close to the harbour and the Pacific Ocean. My brother and two sisters were happily married and raising their families. Not long before, I’d left my job at the radio station 2KO, because it had become difficult to juggle working full-time with raising two young children as a single parent. I was determined that they wouldn’t become latchkey children, waiting for me to finish work in the afternoon. It wasn’t an easy decision to leave full-time work in a job that I loved, but I’d quickly found a part-time position in a local solar business.

Kathy, my younger sister, was concerned enough to call by. Over endless cups of tea, we tried to figure out a reason for the tears, for these thoughts roiling around in my mind. It was good to have my sister doing her best to cheer me up.

But still the tears flowed. After a restless night’s sleep, on Monday I felt even more exhausted. I’d never experienced anything like this. I worried about dehydration, not knowing where and why the tears were coming. Kathy decided to call our doctor, who dropped by after work; he confirmed that all my vital organs were working, but he couldn’t shed any light on my fragile state of mind. At times I’d be laughing at the absurdity of crying for no known reason.

By Tuesday, although the tears had eased a little, a heavy sadness lingered over me. I decided to stay inside for the day, still puzzled about the source of my unexplained melancholy.

Meanwhile, in a doctor’s surgery in the Victorian town of Heathcote, the patients were getting restless. It was the Tuesday morning after a long weekend. Many had waited for surgery hours to consult their local GP, Dr Stuart Wynter, but there was no sign of him. Something must be wrong.

The receptionist phoned his home, but there was no answer.

She did her best to reassure his patients. Maybe he’d been delayed by an urgent house call or an emergency at the hospital. She made a call to the hospital, hoping it would solve the problem. But no, the hospital staff hadn’t heard from Dr Wynter or seen him all weekend.

His lateness was out of character. He’d always been there. He’d never let his patients down like this.

Dr Wynter’s partner, Dr Jim Casey, was worried when he heard that Stuart hadn’t turned up for work. The two doctors had known each other for about five years, having met in March 1979 on the Micronesian island of Banaba. They’d worked together in the Heathcote practice since February 1982, and their daily routines were well established.

Six months earlier, Stuart Wynter and his wife Raken had purchased a one-acre block of land with a view to erecting a family home. Stuart had mentioned to Jim Casey that they might do some work on the land over the long weekend. The Wynters and their four-year-old daughter, Binatia, had waved to Dr Casey from the driveway of their flat as they prepared to head off for church on Sunday morning. ‘They appeared to be the way they normally were seen by people – to be a happy family,’ Dr Casey said.

Two hours later, at about 11.30 am, Dr Casey had received a phone call from Stuart pleading for a talk. From the distress in Stuart’s voice, Dr Casey knew that something was wrong, and he went straight over to the Wynters’ flat. It immediately became obvious that the Wynters weren’t a happy family at all. Stuart said he and Raken had had a serious argument, and he was worried that the situation could prove ‘irrevocable’.

Over the rest of that day, Stuart repeatedly tried to persuade Raken to speak to Dr Casey, but she refused. Jim became convinced that she was angry with him and didn’t want him to be involved. By the evening he was ‘extremely concerned, and also frightened’. The next day, he heard nothing from either of the Wynters, and his state of unease increased.

Stuart was due to work at the local hospital at 8.30 on Tuesday morning, but he didn’t turn up. Dr Casey phoned him three times without receiving a response. At 9.45 am, he drove past the flat and noticed that both cars were parked outside, all the blinds were drawn and the lounge-room light was on. Dr Casey proceeded to the medical centre, which was directly across the road, and spoke with his receptionist, who told him Dr Wynter hadn’t yet arrived. She also remarked that she’d expected a visit from the Wynters at her place on Saturday evening, but they hadn’t come.

The waiting room was getting very crowded. Anxious looks replaced boredom.

By now, the receptionist had phoned the flat several times, and so had Dr Casey. The receptionist had also established that Binatia wasn’t at her pre-school. Dr Casey’s concern grew by the hour.

He cancelled Stuart’s morning appointments and decided to drive past the flat once more. Nothing had changed, and both cars were still parked in the driveway.

Dr Casey drove to the police station, where he reported his concerns to Senior Constable George Entwistle. He drove back to the flat with Entwistle, who entered the flat through the unlocked back door while Dr Casey waited outside.

A few moments later, Constable Entwistle came back and beckoned Dr Casey into the flat. In the bedroom were the bodies of Raken, Stuart and Binatia.

At about four o’clock that afternoon in Newcastle, I received a phone call from a sergeant at Mayfield police station. He told me that Eve Wynter, Stuart’s mother, had asked him to phone. He had some bad news. ‘Stuart Wynter is deceased,’ he told me. I immediately asked if Raken and Binatia were OK. I held my breath as I waited for his reply, silently saying ‘Please, please God – no, please.’ After a few seconds, he said quietly, ‘No – they are all deceased.’

At that instant, my mind began spinning like the wheels of an overturned truck after a crash. I was facing my own past.

Later that afternoon, my sister Margaret drove me to visit Eve, Stuart’s mum, who lived alone in the family home. We were all still trying to comprehend the news. Two police officers spoke with my sister while I comforted Eve. The officers were puzzled about how I knew the deaths weren’t accidental. No-one had given me any details. Margaret smiled grimly and said, ‘She knows.’

2

IN THE SHADOW OF THE STEELWORKS

I spent my childhood in Mayfield, a suburb of Newcastle, in the shadow of the BHP steelworks. From the end of our street, you could see, hear and smell the steam trains hauling coal from the mines to the furnaces. The constant clanking and hissing of an industrial city and the terrifying noise of steam hitting the molten steel in the blast furnace were part of our daily lives. We woke each morning to the sound of the BHP whistle alerting steelworkers to the change of shift. The local radio station notified workers of their rosters by broadcasting puzzling announcements like ‘Last man chartered pin boss.’

My father was a fireman. He was a handsome, quiet, loving father. One of my earliest memories is of wintertime in our draughty home at Mayfield. All of us huddled around the kerosene fireside heater – Dad in his fire-brigade uniform, resting his head in Mum’s lap as she stroked his hair, waiting till it was time to put on his metal garters and ride his bike to the fire station at Tighes Hill.

Dad didn’t seek other male friends or go to pubs or clubs. He was basically a shy man, not the blokey type. He didn’t play sport or follow any particular football team. His idea of a family picnic was to go picking field mushrooms or blackberries in the Hunter Valley, and then visit the cemeteries in little towns like Kearsley or Kurri looking for his ancestors. Mum was his best friend, and his four children, the fire brigade and the Labor Party were his life.

Poppa Plumbe, our mother’s father, had also been a fireman in Newcastle, retiring as station officer at inner-suburban Hamilton in 1962. Poppa’s brother Wally and his son Billy served in the brigade as well. We still have a photo from the Newcastle Herald of Poppa Plumbe sipping a cup of tea after a big fire, his brass chinstrap gleaming under his beautiful smile. Mum became a member of the Women’s Fire Auxiliary in 1941. They called us Newcastle’s first family of firefighters.

When I was little, I’d run along Newcastle beach behind Poppa, picking up pennies in the sand. He told us the pennies had been left for us by Jimmy Nimmy Snipper Whoppa. The mythical Jimmy Nimmy has been part of our family ever since.

After Poppa retired from the fire brigade, he and Grandma Plumbe moved to Belmont South on Lake Macquarie. The two of them led a blissful life there until Grandma died of bowel cancer in the mid-1960s. She was only 64.

When he wasn’t fishing or smoking fish in his shed, Poppa Plumbe would sing to us while Grandma knitted. The first song I can recall was ‘In the Good Ol’ Summertime’, which I learnt from Poppa. I sang it every day, at every event, usually two or three times in succession, until someone gently removed me from the spotlight. ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ was another favourite. Original Australian pop music was thin on the ground in the early 1950s.

Poppa Plumbe taught me ‘Botany Bay’ and ‘The Road to Gundagai’ and sang a song called ‘Umpty Doodle’, which I suspect he made up. He’d cross his legs so I could swing on his weathered brown feet – feet covered in scales from the day’s fishing on Belmont Bay with my uncle Bill. Both had lovely deep voices and knew every song in the world, or so I believed.

Grandma Plumbe had waist-long hair, which she plaited and coiled around her ears. She used to sing her own special sad song about Nellie, the best little girl in the whole wide world, who was ill and would die when the last leaf fell from the tree. A little boy who loved Nellie tied all the leaves to the tree so they wouldn’t fall and the wind wouldn’t blow them away. We loved the last verse where the little boy’s actions saved Nellie’s life.

Poppa patiently made fishing lines for all his grandchildren with a cork and small hooks. He spent hours untangling our lines on the big wooden wharves that lined Newcastle harbour. While he fished with his rod and reel, we dangled our lines in the water through the cracks between the giant sleepers. For years, Poppa would tell the story of how I caught a small eel when I was about five years old. I yelled at the top of my voice, ‘I’ve caught a bloody snake!’ Poppa carefully unhooked the eel from my line, and the whole family laughed at my outburst for years. I swore a lot as a kid, though my father and mother never did.

When I was very young, Grandma Plumbe told me that my great-great-grandmother had encountered a leprechaun back in Ireland. She understood that she had to outstare him to win his pot of gold, but the leprechaun tricked her. ‘What’s that behind you?’ he said. She foolishly looked around and the leprechaun vanished.

I often dreamed about the lost pot of gold and all that we could never have because she looked away. ‘Bloody Grandma,’ I’d mutter under my breath. Grandma Plumbe said I had the devil on my shoulder. Each time she said it, I’d defiantly knock him off both shoulders, not sure which one he was sitting on.

There were seven of us in our home in Nelson Street, Mayfield: Mum and Dad, my big sister Margaret, little brother Ray, baby sister Kathy, Dad’s mother Nanna and me. For a while there was also Toby, the neighbourhood dog, who belonged to everyone. One day, a young boy riding past on a bicycle stopped, cuddled Toby and told us the dog used to live at his place. Toby would adopt a family for a while, then move on when the children grew up. Like most dogs of the time, he was a mongrel breed – a bit like us.

Sunlight flooded through the purple glass in our front door onto the mustard carpet in the hallway. On Saturday mornings we’d often polish the doorknobs with Brasso, supervised by Nanna. A rickety table in the hallway balanced a heavy black phone with a ring that would wake the dead. My brother Ray spent hours in his room, a tiny converted pantry we called the ‘boxometer’, with his arms behind his head and legs up the wall.

When Nanna played bowls, she powdered her nose in the tiny bathroom mirror and put on a white uniform. We helped her polish her bowls with old nylon stockings. I remember Margaret frantically trying to clear steam from the bathroom so the gossamer would stick to her beehive hair.

When we were kids, we often visited Dad at his work. A big red fire engine with the word ‘Dennis’ on the front took up all the space at the station. We climbed onto the running board and up into the driver’s seat, our imaginations running wild. There were long bench seats on either side where the firefighters sat, no doubt clinging for their lives as the siren screamed out along the winding streets through the suburbs of Newcastle. Standing in line on the cement floor were the brigade’s highly polished black leather knee-high boots. Brass-button uniforms and leather-pouched axes hung neatly along the walls, and polished brass helmets shone on their hooks, all waiting patiently for the next call-out.

Kathy, my younger sister, accidentally set fire to the family garage one day. Many years later, she confessed that she and a friend had been pretending to smoke cigarettes with straw from a broom. Poor Dad was deeply embarrassed when he was called in as part of the fire brigade to put out a fire in his own back yard. Fortunately, the asbestos-clad garage was saved, and fire didn’t get to the kerosene and petrol stored there.

Dad grew beautiful flowers and vegetables. At Nelson Street, there were frangipanis and camellias surrounding the front lawn, and in the back the fragrance of sweet peas camouflaged the smell of the neighbours’ chook pen. We’d often find Dad on his knees in the garden wearing his old dark-blue Greek beret, cultivating his poppies and stocks.

In later years, the water authorities investigated Dad because they couldn’t fathom why his water bill was so low. The reason was that he never wasted water – or anything else, for that matter. He recycled the rinsing water from the washing machine for the garden, which meant the laundry was always crowded with buckets of water. He wore the same pair of fire-brigade-issued trousers and cardigan for decades. He melted scraps of soap into a larger cake for bathing. I asked him one day what he planned to do with an old square of cheese in the fridge. ‘Tile the bathroom,’ he replied with a quick smile over the top of his reading glasses. Everything was recycled and nothing was wasted, which I guess was symptomatic of Dad having lived through the Great Depression.

Our good friends and next-door neighbours were Polish, and one year they painted their house navy blue with purple trimmings. It wasn’t unusual to see the local bus slow down to look at this amazing colour scheme. Our playmate Mary – or Maryolika as I like to call her – lived there. Each day Agnes, her mum, would yell at her kids in Polish, ordering them to come home from our place for dinner. I knew exactly what she was saying. Maryolika is still part of our extended family.

We kids would while away hours on the grass, listening for Tiger Moths and other little biplanes that spluttered in the sky above our back yard. On washing day, I’d lie on the lawn waiting for crickets to poke through. Soapy water was supposed to kill them, but I suspect they lapped it up. I’d watch them go back down their holes to wait for the next soaping.

Our bread was delivered by horse and cart, and we paid for it with tokens; likewise the ice for the ice chest. The laundry was always piled high with dirty clothes, the copper boiling sheets with starch to stiffen them and a tub of Reckitt’s Blue to make them white. My clothes were hand-me-downs from Margaret, who’d inherited them from our older cousin Jan. I admired the way Mum could distinguish the dirty clothes from those that were simply old, even when they shared the same cupboard.

Material possessions were sparse, but love was in abundance. On Sundays, Mum and Dad’s double bed held all six of us and the newspapers as well.

Mum was more interested in James Joyce and Dylan Thomas than in matching our school socks. She sang and smiled her way through our childhood, never speaking a harsh word to anyone. Tunes such as ‘Stranger in Paradise’, ‘Whispering Hope’ and ‘On Moonlight Bay’ still transport me back to Nelson Street. Mum was always singing – everything from musicals to opera. One minute it was Nellie Forbush from the musical South Pacific, the next Joan Sutherland. Mum would sometimes drive us crazy by turning every sentence we uttered into a song. I embarrass myself doing the same thing today.

Before