π Australian Crime Stories: The Investigators (2023) - Season 3 Episode 3
Behind every headline is a story of courage, investigation, and the relentless pursuit of justice. In Episode 3, [brief hook: see episode-specific hooks below]. Follow detectives, forensic experts, and survivors as they piece together the truth in some of Australia's most compelling cases.
πΉ Episode Highlights:
β’ [E01 Hook: "A cold case reopens: new evidence brings hope to a grieving family"]
β’ [E05 Hook: "The final piece falls into place: how investigators cracked the code"]
β’ Exclusive access: interviews with detectives, forensic analysts & key witnesses
β’ Investigative process: from crime scene to courtroom, the journey to justice
β’ Human impact: stories of resilience, loss, and the power of truth
πΉ Series Info:
β’ Format: True Crime Documentary / Investigative Series / Crime Journalism
β’ Original Network: 7plus / Seven Network (Australia) / International Streaming
β’ Series Launch: 2023 | Season: 3 | Episodes: 1 & 5
β’ Focus: Real Australian Cases, Police Investigations, Forensic Breakthroughs
β’ Setting: Across Australia β Urban & Regional Crime Scenes
β’ Language: English (Original Audio) + Subtitles Available
β’ Runtime: ~45-60 minutes (full) | Clip/Highlight version: ~10-15 min
π§ Prefer audio? Listen to true crime recaps & investigative podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
π Enjoying the series? Hit LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, and comment: "What case would YOU like to see investigated next? ππ" Turn on notifications π so you never miss the next breakthrough!
#AustralianCrimeStories #TheInvestigators #TrueCrime #CrimeDocumentary #SevenNetwork #S3E[X] #ColdCase #Forensics #BingeWatch #JusticeServed #AustralianTV #CrimeJunkie
β οΈ Copyright Disclaimer: This video is shared for promotional, review, and informational purposes only. All rights to "Australian Crime Stories: The Investigators" belong to Seven Network and the original production company. This upload complies with Fair Use guidelines (Section 107, U.S. Copyright Act). No copyright infringement intended.
Behind every headline is a story of courage, investigation, and the relentless pursuit of justice. In Episode 3, [brief hook: see episode-specific hooks below]. Follow detectives, forensic experts, and survivors as they piece together the truth in some of Australia's most compelling cases.
πΉ Episode Highlights:
β’ [E01 Hook: "A cold case reopens: new evidence brings hope to a grieving family"]
β’ [E05 Hook: "The final piece falls into place: how investigators cracked the code"]
β’ Exclusive access: interviews with detectives, forensic analysts & key witnesses
β’ Investigative process: from crime scene to courtroom, the journey to justice
β’ Human impact: stories of resilience, loss, and the power of truth
πΉ Series Info:
β’ Format: True Crime Documentary / Investigative Series / Crime Journalism
β’ Original Network: 7plus / Seven Network (Australia) / International Streaming
β’ Series Launch: 2023 | Season: 3 | Episodes: 1 & 5
β’ Focus: Real Australian Cases, Police Investigations, Forensic Breakthroughs
β’ Setting: Across Australia β Urban & Regional Crime Scenes
β’ Language: English (Original Audio) + Subtitles Available
β’ Runtime: ~45-60 minutes (full) | Clip/Highlight version: ~10-15 min
π§ Prefer audio? Listen to true crime recaps & investigative podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
π Enjoying the series? Hit LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, and comment: "What case would YOU like to see investigated next? ππ" Turn on notifications π so you never miss the next breakthrough!
#AustralianCrimeStories #TheInvestigators #TrueCrime #CrimeDocumentary #SevenNetwork #S3E[X] #ColdCase #Forensics #BingeWatch #JusticeServed #AustralianTV #CrimeJunkie
β οΈ Copyright Disclaimer: This video is shared for promotional, review, and informational purposes only. All rights to "Australian Crime Stories: The Investigators" belong to Seven Network and the original production company. This upload complies with Fair Use guidelines (Section 107, U.S. Copyright Act). No copyright infringement intended.
Category
πΉ
FunTranscript
00:24It is difficult to have been a person
00:27living in the 70s and 80s and not have heard of the Mackay sister murders.
00:31Seven-year-old Judith and five-year-old Susan Mackay were taken while waiting for the bus
00:36to Aikenvale School.
00:38We're dealing with an 86-year-old suspect.
00:41He could no longer hide from these crimes.
00:46Brisbane Homicide Squad detectives raided the man's house this morning.
00:50It was like standing in front of your grandfather.
00:53It's one of Queensland's most notorious crimes.
00:56Is your husband innocent little girl?
00:58Yes, he is.
00:59He would have committed sex offences for 50 years.
01:03These kids knew what he was, a pedophile.
01:07What granddad wants, granddad gets.
01:10Was he a serial killer?
01:12He said, those little girls are just prick teasers.
01:16Prick teasers?
01:16Who makes that comment?
01:18He was just an evil, evil man.
01:20I just don't know how he got away with it for that long.
01:26God.
01:27It's just terrible.
01:37My name is Brendan Rook.
01:38I'm a former detective sergeant of the Queensland Police.
01:42Over the years, the one thing that I have spent a lot of time doing is working on cold
01:48case homicides.
01:50And the Mackay sisters would be the very first I actually worked on in 1998.
02:03Susan was five years of age.
02:06Judith was seven years of age.
02:07The youngest of six children of Bill and Thelma Mackay.
02:12They both attended the Aitken Vale Primary School.
02:15Every morning, their mother would watch them walk to the bus stop, which was some 200 metres
02:21away from home.
02:24And the children would catch the bus on the same road to the school, which wasn't far
02:28away.
02:29The father, Bill Mackay, had left early before the girls went to school, had kissed them
02:35goodbye.
02:36And that was actually the last that Bill would ever see of his two young girls.
02:43This sort of thing just doesn't happen in Townsville.
02:46The children just go missing.
02:53By dawn the next morning, the police had organised a search of the area.
02:59The coordinated effort pretty much had Townsville in a shutdown.
03:04There were literally thousands of people that participated.
03:13And the two days after the girls had gone missing, they were found.
03:26The first body to be located was that of Susan's.
03:30She had two stab wounds to the upper part of her chest.
03:37Judith's body was found an hour later, away from the road and further into the scrub,
03:43sort of potentially indicating that Judith may have been running away and there was signs
03:48of struggle.
03:49She was located face down naked and her head was pushed into the sand.
03:55She too had also been stabbed twice, but the cause of her death was the sand in the lungs.
04:04Both girls had been raped.
04:09The father, Bill, was taken out to the scene and the detectives had to restrain him from
04:16trying to view the bodies.
04:22Yeah, this is one of the crime scene photos.
04:27These are the girls' bags, school bags.
04:31This property was located very close to the body of Susan.
04:36As far as the crime scene was concerned, the investigators at the time had very little to go on.
04:43What they did find, which was strange at a scene like this, is the girls' clothes uniforms were neatly folded
04:50next to the bodies.
04:54I think it was very difficult for the investigators as well at the time that just the crime scene photos
05:00alone, it was a very emotional time for everybody.
05:07Obviously, it's a cold case for a reason.
05:10The case went cold and by 1971, all inquiries have been exhausted.
05:20I'm very careful not to criticise the investigators in Townsville at the time.
05:25They were working through the night, through their holidays.
05:31There was one investigator that vowed not to go home until the killer was located.
05:37And in fact, a couple of weeks later, he had a heart attack and actually died at work.
05:50In our reinvestigation in 1998, we relied on local knowledge from a veteran Townsville detective, Ray Charles Smith,
05:57who'd been working in the city since the mid-60s.
06:01And local knowledge from that era was crucial to the investigation.
06:06In those days, you didn't really care about locking your front door or leaving the keys in your car.
06:12When they went missing there, it seemed that half the town didn't go to work.
06:17The next day and then, it was all on the radios and all that.
06:21From the start, investigators were trying to find a particular type of car thought to have been involved in the
06:27abduction,
06:27that had been mentioned by witnesses.
06:32Well, everyone had their hopes pinned on a FJ Holden with a blue door.
06:38And that was the centre of attention.
06:41But there was a problem when I took a look at the original statements.
06:46One thing that hit me straight away, all the statements were saying something like an FJ Holden.
06:53Taking yourself back in time, FJ Holdens were a fairly popular vehicle and everyone knew what an FJ Holden looked
07:00like.
07:02So I didn't quite understand why most of the statements would read something like an FJ Holden.
07:09My view is, you either know an FJ Holden or you don't.
07:12So that was probably the first red flag for me.
07:16To some witnesses, the car looked like an FJ Holden, possibly even an EH Holden.
07:22Similar, but not definitely either of these models.
07:27Regrettably, the investigators and Ray Superiors ran with the belief that the killer drove an FJ Holden.
07:35The investigators had rounded up every person in Townsville that had an FJ Holden with an off-driver side blue
07:42door in Townsville.
07:43Every one of those people were interrogated and eventually identified as not being responsible.
07:53They never looked for any other blue cars other than Holden's.
07:57That was despite the fact that several witnesses had identified another vehicle.
08:02An imported British car called a Vauxhall Victor.
08:08Thank you, Gerry.
08:13So these three pictures, we have an FJ Holden, an EH Holden, and we have the Vauxhall Victor.
08:24We have two witnesses and later a third that said it was a Vauxhall Victor.
08:30The witnesses were very clear that they said it was a Vauxhall vehicle.
08:35It wasn't something like a Vauxhall. They were saying it was a Vauxhall.
08:39Unfortunately, the information about the Vauxhall was disregarded.
08:44They've chosen to follow a wrong path.
08:46Some witnesses' statements had been influenced by investigators into suggesting the vehicle was an FJ Holden.
08:53Investigators also thought the killer was already sitting in a jail cell.
08:58There was a Western Australian inmate who would make admissions to killing the girls.
09:06The reason for that was he apparently was feared being killed in prison in Western Australia and wanted to do
09:11time in Queensland.
09:14He also had an FJ Holden.
09:15So he actually fitted in with the narrative.
09:19So he was flown to Townsville where it quickly became clear he'd been lying all along.
09:26Unfortunately, I think the police have spent too much time on the vehicle and disregarded the description of the offender.
09:42I can't say that it would have changed the course of the investigation for them.
09:48However, I think maybe now they would have done things a little bit differently.
10:01Seven-year-old Judith and five-year-old Susan Mackay were taken from Ross River Road while waiting for the
10:07bus to Aikenvale School.
10:31In 1974, Cyclone Wanda hit Queensland and flooded Brisbane, destroying many of the police records in storage.
10:39Unfortunately, that included evidence in the MacKay sisters case.
10:43The crime scene photos survived.
10:45However, some evidence crucial to the investigation, in particular the girls' clothing and swabs taken from the bodies, were lost.
11:04Without all the evidence, we were struggling.
11:08So we needed a bit of luck.
11:10And we got it.
11:13A woman who'd been bottling up a long-held secret rang Crime Stoppers and asked to speak with someone regarding
11:20a murder in Queensland 30 years ago.
11:23She was referred to me and Detective Hickey.
11:28I said to them, look, I think Arthur Brown has killed these two children.
11:35He had murdered the two little girls.
11:42Arthur Stanley Brown, patriarch of Mim's family.
11:46We'd never heard of him before.
11:48His name didn't appear anywhere in the files from 1970s.
11:53He'd never been spoken to, didn't appear on any running sheets.
11:57So the Townsville detectives weren't even aware of Arthur Stanley Brown.
12:01And this is the problem with the investigation in 1970, that Brown had not been charged with any offences.
12:07Brown was not a suspect at any stage.
12:10They just said, we're coming up.
12:12I've never been so glad to see two people as I was to meet them.
12:18Mim told us Brown was a maintenance man for the Queensland Government.
12:22A carpenter who worked in official buildings, police stations, courthouses and schools.
12:31Including Aitkenvale School, where the Mackay sisters went.
12:35And most importantly, Mim told us about a dark family secret.
12:41Mim provided information in relation to child sexual abuses and rapes committed on family members of Arthur Stanley Brown.
12:51We're not talking about child abusing.
12:54We're actually talking about full-on vaginal rape of young children.
13:00And he would commit a lot of these offences whilst Hester, his then wife, was in the house.
13:08I was 12. I reckon I was about 12 when I first met him.
13:12My Aunty Hester was Arthur Brown's first wife that I know of.
13:17They met when she was out west somewhere.
13:21Her husband was working on the railway.
13:25And Mr Brown got her to leave her husband.
13:29She had three children too.
13:31And he took the children.
13:34And her.
13:37He never changed over the years.
13:39He always had that slab-sided face.
13:42Not a whole lot of hair.
13:44Big ears.
13:45Yeah.
13:46And that was just him.
13:49Mim didn't live with Arthur and Hester Brown.
13:53But she knew exactly what happened in their house.
13:57Thanks, Mim.
13:59Louth Street, huh?
14:03The House of Horrors.
14:05That's what it is.
14:08In this house, he had a little shrine which had been one of the bedrooms.
14:14And the room was always locked.
14:17Mim told us the door to this room had two locks, so it could be bolted from the inside.
14:24This is where we would later discover Arthur Brown often took his victims.
14:27He had the girls sitting there drinking and playing strip jack naked.
14:34So they were all in different parts of being naked.
14:42When the girls used to come over and stay, he went into the bathroom and bathed the girls.
14:49And they'd say, Grandad, you know, I'm however age.
14:53No, no, no, you've got to be bathed properly.
14:56That's the sort of thing he used to do.
14:59And also, he molested his little step-granddaughters down the back of the house.
15:08Brown abused girls in the family aged between three and 13.
15:12At least six young girls.
15:18Hester actually caught him raping one of the children.
15:23There was one day, he had one of the girls, his pants were round his ankle.
15:29And he had one of the little girls doing oral sex on him in the kitchen.
15:34And Aunty Hester walked out.
15:37She was terrified of him.
15:41And Aunty Hester wasn't going to say anything because she couldn't get away anywhere.
15:46Couldn't get away from him.
15:49He was just an evil, evil man.
15:53There was question about whether or not Arthur was responsible for Hester's death in 1978.
16:00Aunty Hester, she was crippled with arthritis.
16:04When she died, he said that she'd fallen and killed herself.
16:11The certificate of death had been issued over the phone by the doctor who never saw the body.
16:17Arthur then took the body and had it cremated straight away.
16:23So whilst we're not able to prove that Arthur was responsible for murdering his wife,
16:27we were certainly looking at that as a possibility because the sister Charlotte moved in very shortly after,
16:34who he was having an affair with.
16:37So Brown married Charlotte and she moved in, bringing her granddaughters into Brown's reach.
16:46The reality back in 1970 is that a lot of those crimes just went unreported.
16:51And a lot of those sexual offendings were actually swept under the carpet, even within their own family.
16:58It's not talked about.
17:00I was sitting on the back steps and he just walked up behind me and I thought he was just
17:04putting his hands on my shoulders, you know.
17:06But then he just moved in and cupped my breasts and I just, oh, jeez.
17:12And I told my husband about it, that he said, oh, he wouldn't do that.
17:16Your imagination, you're imagining it.
17:20Mum and Dad just said, God, he wouldn't do that.
17:24He's a grandfather, for goodness sakes.
17:27Nobody wanted to know.
17:31A few days after the murders, Arthur Brown made a disturbing suggestion.
17:37I was staying at Brown's at the time of the murder.
17:40And he wanted to take Aunty Hester and my sister and I out to Ant Hill Creek
17:45to show us where the girls were found.
17:51That was odd, very odd.
17:55I mean, who would want to do that?
17:57Over the time, it was just like he was feeding people little bits of information to see what they would
18:04do with it.
18:04You know, just to see if someone would say anything.
18:08He'd tell the girls he abused that he could have murdered the Mackay sisters.
18:14By Brown saying that he could have killed those girls, I think, personally, he's also sending a clear message to
18:21them.
18:22If you talk about this, you could also be a victim.
18:29Thanks to Mim, we had hopes that the crimes that shocked the nation could finally be solved.
18:34We had strong new leads the original investigators didn't have.
18:39One of them was knowing what car Arthur Brown was driving back then.
18:48Ah, the Vauxhall.
18:52I wonder how many people that he took and molested in that car.
18:57That's what he used to do with the girls.
18:59He'd take them out somewhere and he always made the eldest girl sit in the front with him.
19:05And he'd say, what granddad wants, granddad gets.
19:10Mim had told us that Arthur had a Vauxhall with an off-driver side blue door.
19:16Mim had told us that he'd taken the door off the vehicle and buried it in the backyard.
19:22He said to his daughter-in-law, because she said to him,
19:25what are you taking your door off your car for, granddad?
19:28He said, I don't want them coming around here accusing me.
19:34Another thing that Mim talked about with Brown was that he was meticulous.
19:37Particularly when he was folding clothing.
19:40He was a very tidy person, almost obsessive compulsive.
19:45One thing that we identified at the scene was the clothing of the children
19:51was actually very neatly folded next to the bodies.
19:55The socks were neatly folded inside the shoes.
19:58But a lot of the information she provided was starting to stack up.
20:03It was helping us develop a disturbing profile of a man we believe had been in the presence of investigating
20:10police.
20:11The two little Mackay girls, they went to the Aikenvale State School and Brown was there.
20:18He used to work there.
20:20I can remember when he came home one day and he said,
20:25he said, those little girls are just prick teasers, you know.
20:28He said, they're going to get some man in trouble one day.
20:33And I, I just thought they, they're primary school children.
20:38What he termed as prick teasers.
20:40I mean, who makes that comment?
20:43That's not the comment of a normal person.
20:53During the reinvestigation in 1998, I went out to the crime scene to get a feel for the crime scene.
21:04The original road remained intact, but completely unused behind a padlock gate.
21:10As luck would have it, that abandoned bit of road was exactly where the crime scene was.
21:24So essentially, that crime scene has been preserved for 27 years.
21:42We were able to go to the exact location of where the bodies were.
21:50It was like every hair on your body is standing to attention that you've just entered this preserved, incredibly preserved
21:59crime scene.
22:02It was an incredible experience, something I'd never been through up to that point, something I'll probably never experience again.
22:11The significance of this old crime scene is that Mim would tell us that a number of the step grandchildren
22:20had been taken out to that same creek and they'd been abused sexually.
22:26So this is a location that's known to Brown.
22:31And we have six sightings of Arthur's car at this scene.
22:36We're now able to confirm that, yes, you would be able to actually see the vehicle from this particular location.
22:45We were tracking down witnesses who still had good recollections of Brown.
22:50A man who in just weeks had gone from being a retired elderly carpenter, unknown to police, to our main
22:56suspect.
22:5950% of our witnesses had already passed away.
23:02One thing we were fighting against was time.
23:06The witnesses were maybe in their 70s, maybe in their 80s, and their memory may start to fade.
23:15A witness with a good memory was an army veteran called Neil Lani, who was running late for work that
23:21day.
23:22The driver of the vehicle in front of him was cutting him off and wouldn't let him pass.
23:27So he pulled up along the vehicle, looked at the driver and saw the girls.
23:32He got a good look at the girls.
23:35Neither of them were distressed, neither of them were upset, they weren't crying, they weren't yelling for help, or they
23:42obviously, you know, in some form or other knew the person that was driving the car.
23:51Luckily, after all this time, Neil Lani still had a crystal clear recollection of the man behind the wheel.
23:58The driver of that vehicle had Mickey Mouse ears.
24:02And that description is fitting of Arthur Brown, he has what appears to be Mickey Mouse ears.
24:11Two hours after Neil Lani's sighting of the girls in the blue car, 90 kilometres away in the coastal town
24:17of Eyre, a blue car was spotted refuelling at a service station.
24:25Now, the woman at the service station, she saw the man behind the wheel of a blue car with two
24:34little girls in the car who seemed quite upset.
24:37And when she got off the seat and said, are we there yet?
24:40The big girl turned to the driver and said, you promised to take us to mummy, when are you taking
24:45us to mummy?
24:47She said, the man behind the wheel was thin faced, he had a lantern jaw, short hair, and his ears
24:55stuck out a bit.
24:56Quite a distinctive looking head.
24:59This was by far the best clue, regardless of the actual make of the car.
25:05The investigators didn't put out identity kits.
25:08They didn't put out artists' impressions.
25:10The police of that era, I have to say, did not distinguish themselves.
25:15They jumped to conclusions.
25:16They played a hunch that the bad man they're looking for was driving a Holder.
25:20And they ignored evidence that it might have been another sort of car.
25:27That buggered the whole investigation for close to 30 years.
25:41After a year or two of the murders, two young men both heard strange confessions from Arthur Brown that implicate
25:50him in these murders.
25:52The first one is a young fellow, 19 years old.
25:55He's got a job in Charters Towers.
25:57He's having a drink after work in a pub there.
25:59And in comes this thin, neat looking older man.
26:04And this fellow sits down and rolls a smoke and starts talking.
26:09Arthur Brown brings up the subject of the murdered girls.
26:14And he said, the police are looking for the wrong car.
26:19That young fellow, on the ball, he went and saw a local policeman and said,
26:22guess what, I've been having a drink with this bloke.
26:24And he said he, that he was involved in the murder.
26:28Two days later, he sees Arthur Brown in the same pub.
26:31And Brown's quite cocky.
26:33And he said, oh, the police came and saw me about, you know, the Mackay thing, but nothing to do
26:38with me.
26:38No problem.
26:39And the police had been to see Arthur Brown and accepted whatever he told them at face value.
26:45And they did not go on with it.
26:56Arthur was a maintenance carpenter with the Queensland government.
27:02There was another young man.
27:04He had worked with Arthur Brown as assistant.
27:07And he used to talk to him and ate lunch together.
27:10And at some point, Brown said, police have got it wrong.
27:15They're looking for the wrong car.
27:18And he said, I killed those girls, which shocked the young bloke.
27:22But he thought, you know, it can't be right.
27:25But he never forgot it.
27:27He never forgot it.
27:43So after conducting the cold case investigation, after talking to relatives, after talking to other new witnesses, a picture started
27:52to develop around Brown.
27:54And we believed Brown was responsible.
27:57However, in this case, there was no smoking gun.
28:10The cold case investigation had been running for months.
28:14But all the evidence we had against Arthur Brown was circumstantial.
28:19There's nothing in the information that Min provided that directly told us that Arthur was the killer, except for bits
28:28and pieces of information in relation to Arthur bragging about he could have killed those girls.
28:35We knew almost everything there was to know about Brown.
28:38We knew almost everything there was to know about Brown and what had occurred at Low Street Townsville.
28:42His pure evil activities and the possibility he may have killed his first wife, Hester, to marry her sister Charlotte.
28:53Charlotte was a little tiny woman.
28:56Her relatives noticed that she used to wear a young girl's pyjamas to bed, like shorty pyjamas, like a ten
29:04-year-old might wear.
29:06And she was a middle-aged woman.
29:10And they said, why do you, Aunty Charlotte, you know, why do you wear those kids pyjamas to bed?
29:16And Arthur jumped in and said, because she's my little girl.
29:21My little girl.
29:23Creepy old bastard.
29:33Well, he was a carpenter and he used to go to schools, the prisons, any government buildings.
29:41He worked at the Aikenvale School and he said they all called him Uncle Art.
29:47And I thought, well, that sounds like it.
29:50That was another piece of information that Min provided that made sense to us.
29:55That term is significant because Uncle suggests a familiarity, a trust.
30:02The fact that the driver was able to entice the girls into the car without dragging them,
30:09we're not talking about a snatch and grab abduction, is suggestive that the girls know him.
30:16It corroborates how the girls may have been in that vehicle in the first place.
30:23Because of the job he had, a unique job really, he kept his tools and his paint brushes and all
30:30the rest of it
30:30in an annex to the local courthouse in Townsville.
30:33He knew the JPs, he knew the local magistrate.
30:39He'd be fixing up their desk or the window or whatever it was, they all knew him.
30:44Hello Brownie, g'day boss.
30:46He knew the local police, same thing, he'd do maintenance at the police station.
30:50And he knew the police from the bottom to the top to the inspector.
30:55He had the run of the place.
30:57He was invisible because he was there all the time, because he was part of the furniture.
31:02I didn't know him personally, but he used to work for the Public Works Department
31:07at the old police station in town there, and being old it was always getting repaired.
31:11And he used to come there and, you know, just say g'day, how are you going?
31:17But the children at the Cutharinga Children's Home, my sister was working there at the time.
31:25And he drove past and the kids said, oh, look at that old rock spider.
31:32Oh, there goes that old rock spider, the rock spider.
31:35And she said, what do you mean?
31:36And they explained to her what a rock spider is.
31:40A pedophile.
31:41These kids knew what he was, and they knew all about rock spiders.
31:46And he must have done stuff there that alerted them to his proclivities.
31:52Something that no one else had picked up.
31:54The kids had.
31:57He was old now, as were the memories of our witnesses, which we knew would be an issue in court.
32:04When you're dealing with a 30 year, a cold case investigation, it's an easy thing to criticise memory.
32:12We believe now we've exhausted all inquiries, and we believe we have as good a brief as we're going to
32:18have against Arthur Stanley Brown.
32:24By the 3rd of December 1998, we were actually ready to move on executing a search warrant on Arthur Stanley
32:30Brown at his home address.
32:32Brisbane Homicide Squad detectives raided the man's house in the Townsville suburb of Ross Lee this morning.
32:37The army was called in to search the yard and house.
32:41We were dealing with an 86 year old suspect.
32:45So when Arthur answered the door, it was almost like standing in front of your grandfather.
32:52He didn't seem surprised at all when we said we were investigating the Mackay sister murders and that we were
32:58from the homicide unit.
33:00And he just acknowledged and nodded and invited us in.
33:10We didn't blink an eyelid. It was almost like he he's acknowledged that it's caught up with him.
33:17And Charlotte said something like, what's going on? You know, what have you done?
33:23And he said, don't worry, love. He said, I've done some awful things and now I've got to pay for
33:29it.
33:31He did not want to talk to police at all about any of Mackay sister related matters.
33:38But when we asked what cars he'd owned, he quickly reeled off a long list.
33:44Except he missed one vehicle. He missed the Vauxhall Victor.
33:49And it wasn't until his wife, Charlotte, corrected him and said, hold on, you had the Vauxhall Victor.
33:55And he says, oh, right.
33:58Brown completely avoided talking to us about that vehicle.
34:03We went looking for the secret room where Brown took his victims.
34:08That room still existed with a lock on the outside and the inside of the door, as the girls had
34:15said.
34:22What was in the room at that particular time were, was Vaseline, was pictures of the grandchildren.
34:30Everything consistent with the stories of those girls being raped and sexually abused.
34:37As we were leaving, we said, well, Arthur, obviously you're under arrest and you're coming with us.
34:43And Charlotte asked his wife, she said, will you be coming home?
34:47And he said, I don't think so.
34:50After all this time, an 86 year old Townsville man has been charged with their murders.
34:55The former school worker will celebrate his 87th birthday on Thursday, defending the charges.
35:04Arthur Brown was charged with two counts of murder and 43 child sex charges.
35:10We knew we had a strong case, albeit circumstantial.
35:15But ultimately, it was up to a jury to convict him.
35:29The Mackay family have waited almost 30 years to find out what happened to the two schoolgirls.
35:34It's expected that by the end of the week, they'll at least know whether the accused will stand trial for
35:38the girls murder.
36:00It was determined too prejudicial to run in the trial.
36:05So by the time we got to the Supreme Court, the jury are looking at an absolute clean skin of
36:13a person.
36:14Being accused of murdering two children.
36:18Nobody knew that Arthur Stanley Brown was a child abuser capable of rape.
36:29So the trial for Arthur Stanley Brown occurred on the 18th of October, 1999.
36:43Is your husband innocent, Mr Brown?
36:46Yes, he is.
36:48So you clearly believe your husband is innocent?
36:49Yes, I do.
36:51Are you confident the jury will find that way?
36:52Oh, shut up.
36:54We're left with half of the witnesses from the investigation.
36:59We're really against the clock at this point in time.
37:04So what the defence had to play with was discrediting our investigation, discrediting the memory of our witnesses.
37:11Justice hadn't been served according to them because the killer had never been found.
37:17The witnesses were all very staunch.
37:20The memories of those occurrences for each one of the witnesses had remained with them quite strongly because it was
37:27a traumatic event.
37:29They live with the fact that they were the last person potentially to see the Mackay sisters alive.
37:34You sit back later and you criticise yourself and say, you know, how come I didn't help them girls?
37:40And for me, over the years, it becomes very hard because...
37:49There was a lot of confrontation during the course of this trial by the defence and the witnesses.
37:56And at one stage, one of our witnesses, Neil Lunny, ended up standing up screaming at the defence lawyer.
38:03And the defence lawyer was screaming back, this is how it all started.
38:06He accused myself and Dave of fabricating evidence.
38:12During the trial, Brown did not take the stand.
38:17And what we saw in court was this old man.
38:20He was making a bit of a show of not following the proceeding.
38:23What, you know, what's going on?
38:35During the trial, we sort of got the feeling that the jury were actually taking all the information in
38:40and they were connecting the dots themselves.
38:44Are you deaf?
38:45You wouldn't like to say anything before you go.
38:47No, he wasn't.
38:48So we were quite confident that Brown was going to be convicted of the murder of the girls.
39:00Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.
39:04We had a hung jury.
39:10There was only one person in the jury that was reluctant to find Brown guilty.
39:16And the information we were told was that this person believed that Arthur looked too much like his grandfather.
39:31We're shattered. We're shattered. We, uh, fight it hard to believe.
39:37They would have been devastated.
39:40They lose two kids.
39:43Oh, it broke my heart.
39:45Just broke my heart.
39:47I suppose they're past now.
39:50The Mackay's.
39:53But, yeah.
39:55Oh.
39:58Is there anything you'd like to say to the Mackay family, Mr Brown?
40:03Mrs Brown, is there anything you'd like to say to the Mackay family?
40:08Has this made it harder or easier for you, Mr Brown?
40:14Are you sure there's nothing you'd like to tell us?
40:19Get along.
40:21I'm sorry, what was that, Mrs Brown?
40:24Absolutely.
40:31The defence played an effective stay-out-of-jail card for Brown.
40:36They claimed he was suffering from dementia.
40:40Hello, Arthur.
40:42Arthur?
40:46The Queensland Director of Public Prosecutions eventually agreed.
40:50It wasn't in the public interest to put Brown through another trial.
40:57It's my view that he played the game,
40:59that he realised that dementia would be his friend
41:04and might prevent him standing trial
41:06and that he cultivated, perhaps,
41:09the vaguenesses that you get in your 80s.
41:14That was BS.
41:16He didn't have Alzheimer's.
41:18He was still switched on.
41:22Unfortunately for us, that's the system.
41:26Arthur died a year later.
41:30Arthur wasn't convicted of anything.
41:34Arthur died a free man.
41:38He was a terrible person.
41:42I just don't know how he got away with it for that long.
41:52Oh, God.
41:54It's just terrible.
42:00It was a better pill to swallow for the Mackays, for all of the victims of Arthur,
42:10all the family who had managed to tell their story.
42:18Something Bill said, it's not about vengeance.
42:22It's about justice.
42:25And, unfortunately, we just didn't quite get to that level of justice.
42:34One thing the trial did determine, and one thing that we are convinced of,
42:39is that Arthur Stanley Brown is responsible for the murders of the Mackay sisters.
42:45Arthur Stanley Brown is responsible for heinous acts of rape and sexual abuse against his own family.
42:56We had our man, Arthur Stanley Brown was our killer.
43:01But other questions remained.
43:04Had Arthur Brown murdered other children?
43:08Was he a serial killer?
43:18This is the great mystery of Arthur Brown.
43:22Is he the best suspect for one of the biggest unsolved disappearances in Australian history?
43:34Adelaide, city of churches, city of bizarre crimes.
43:45There's a football game at the Adelaide Oval.
43:50Two girls, one older one, Joanne Ratcliffe, and one little one, Kirsty Gordon.
43:56Joanne was taking little Kirsty to the lavatory at three-quarter time during this big game.
44:03They disappear.
44:04The disappearance of 11-year-old Joanne Ratcliffe and four-year-old Kirsty Gordon shocked Australia.
44:12Various people saw something.
44:16There was a woman, Sue Laurie.
44:18In 1973, she was 14.
44:21And she saw a middle-aged man, thin man, thin-faced man, high cheekbones, broad-brimmed hat.
44:30And she assumed it was a grandfather with a recalcitrant grandchild because he's carrying one little girl who's struggling and
44:39he's gripping her.
44:40And the other little one was running along beside him, punching him and saying, put her down, put her down.
44:46On the back, hitting him and saying, let her go, let her go.
45:02Everything about the person she saw, tellies with Arthur Brown.
45:07Arthur used to travel interstate for his holidays.
45:10And somebody remembered that he said to them that he'd seen the Festival Theatre almost finished when he'd been in
45:18Adelaide.
45:18This tellies perfectly with the timing of the disappearance of Joanne and Kirsty, who have never been found.
45:37To be continued...
46:00Sex killers are driven by a compulsion. Some of them are very neat and tidy, sort of psychopathically
46:08tidy and careful. Arthur Brown was one of those. He didn't just come out of the blue
46:15as a middle-aged man and start offending. He built up to murder as a way to probably
46:22the ultimate thriller. And that once he got the taste for it, that he would have continued
46:28to do it. So he would have committed sex offences for probably 50 years. He was born in 1912.
46:35So he was in his 20s during the Great Depression, pre-World War II. So he could have been offending
46:43from the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, right up until he was too feeble to do anything.
46:52There were other cases in northern Queensland, which do roughly fit the Arthur Brown mould.
47:02The case of Marilyn Wallman, March 1972, which is less than two years after the Mackay sisters.
47:13She gets on a bike and rides through cane fields towards school. Her brother's coming along.
47:20Within minutes, he finds her bike with the wheels still spinning. And she's gone.
47:27Clearly abducted.
47:30Arthur had extended family out in Mackay. We know he was in the area of Imeo around about this time.
47:37In fact, the last known vehicle sighting near when Marilyn went missing was a voxel.
47:45Described as a blue voxel.
47:47It's a possibility. When that was investigated, nobody had heard of Arthur Stanley Brown.
47:54Marilyn Wallman's body was never found.
47:57And at the time, I thought that her murder was certainly one Brown could have been responsible for.
48:08Brendan Rook and Dave Hickey and their team, they were just absolutely marvellous.
48:15If you gave them a bit of info, they were onto it like a seagull onto a sick prawn.
48:20They were fierce.
48:22They were just like bull terriers.
48:24They did a magic job.
48:27And the good thing about it was they still had time to talk to us.
48:33When you start getting a bit nervy about stuff, they were just brilliant.
48:49MUSIC PLAYS
49:06Whilst we didn't get a conviction, the parents of Judith and Susan Mackay got the opportunity
49:15to look their daughter's killer in the eye.
49:18And I think that's important.
49:24We're not looking at anyone else in connection with these murders.
49:28This case is closed.
49:54We're not looking at anyone else in connection with these murders.
49:58We're not looking at anyone else in connection with these murders.
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