Australia's Strangest Mysteries Read online

  *BIZARRE ENCOUNTERS *BAFFLING MURDERS *STRANGE VANISHINGS

  Australia is a continent of fathomless mystery. In this compelling book John Pinkney presents a new selection of the most tantalising true cases he has investigated during a lifetime’s research.

  UNEXPLAINED DISAPPEARANCES From the enigma of the vanishing heiress to the saga of the ‘jinxed’ ship which disappeared with 102 travelers aboard

  OUTBACK ENIGMAS The desert Aboriginals whose astonishing ‘song’ saved the life of a dying woman 3,000 miles away. The eerie invasion of remote Lake Eyre. The mysterious monster that guarded an abandoned potato farm. Startling UFO phenomena in Queensland’s Isla Gorge.

  MYSTERIOUS DEATHS Including the fate of John Friedrich, ‘the man who never was’ — and the horror in Sydney’s dunes.

  INEXPLICABLE EVENTS The baffling case of the burning man. The uncanny images floating outside suburban windows.

  Investigative journalist John Pinkney — author of A Paranormal File — invites you on another intriguing exploration of the unknown and unexplained.

  Australia’s

  STRANGEST

  MYSTERIES

  for

  Ian Jones

  Australia’s Strangest Mysteries

  Copyright John Pinkney 2011

  All rights reserved

  Cover picture: The Pinnacles at Dawn,

  Western Australia.

  Shutterstock ® Images

  Inkypen Editions

  UNSOLVED • UNEXPLAINED • UNKNOWN

  Australia’s

  STRANGEST

  MYSTERIES

  John Pinkney

  Inkypen Editions

  Contents

  Preface

  The Disappearing Divers – and Their ‘Diaries of Death’

  Baffling Case of the Burning Man: Australians Ablaze

  What Lit Up Lake Eyre?: Strange Encounters

  Mystery of the Man Who Never Was

  The Monster that Shocked a Senator: The Strangest Australians

  Mysterious Murders in Sydney’s Dunes: The Atrocity on Wanda Beach

  The Pilot, the Submarine and the Fluke of Fate: Great Australian Coincidences

  The Expedition that Vanished

  Strange Case of the Shining Crosses: Extraordinary Phenomena

  Mishap – or Murder? Mystery of the Missing Tiger Moth

  Phantoms on a Moonlit Road: Australians and the Uncanny

  The Day that Evil Stalked Adelaide Oval: A Nation Numbed

  The Jinxed Ship – and Its Journey to Nowhere: Maritime Mysteries

  How Nostradamus – and a TV Quiz Hero – Foretold a President’s Death: Great Australian Premonitions

  Enigma of the Vanishing Heiress

  Nightmares on the Nullarbor

  The Dying Woman Who Was Cured by a Song: Astonishing Powers

  The Murders that Nobody Noticed: Horror on Easey Street

  Riddle of the Tiger that Rose From Its Tomb: The Thylacine Puzzle

  Lost, on a Road Without Shadows: Inexplicable Events

  Preface

  STRANGE THINGS CAN HAPPEN in the Australian bush. Consider the case of remote Isla Gorge, west of Bundaberg, Queensland. Here, two campers witnessed a spectacle so frighteningly bizarre that their nightmares have mirrored it ever since. Or contemplate the series of disturbing occurrences in almost impenetrable scrub around Henry Creek, New South Wales. In this forbidding environment shooters happened upon the ruins of an abandoned 19th century potato farm. They were discomfited to find that an angry something – towering and with hate in its eyes – had discovered the stunted crop long before them, and annexed it as a private pantry. The men considered themselves fortunate to escape alive.

  Then there was the pilot who, flying at night above South Australia’s Lake Eyre, saw and photographed an immense circular pattern of lights in the water. The provenance of this display has never been satisfactorily explained.

  Australia has challenged us with such fathomless perplexities since the earliest days of European settlement. In my book A Paranormal File I describe many of these cases. In this volume I take the process further.

  Analysed here are such puzzles as: the fate of two men who (as police confirm) disappeared separately but in mystifyingly similar circumstances in a Western Australian desert; the unsolved murders in Sydney’s dunes; the extraordinary images that floated outside the windows of two Melbourne suburban houses; the ‘jinxed’ ship that vanished with its 102 Australian passengers (and not even a lifebelt found), and the saga of the conservationists who disappeared aboard their Tiger Moth.

  Also documented are the extraordinary experiences of Australian author Dame Mary Durack, whose Aboriginal schoolfriends ‘sang’ her back to life after a devastating road smash – and the Perth radio executive whose beliefs about the universe were abruptly changed on a moonlit road.

  My gratitude goes to the numerous readers who have written to me describing their own experiences – and suggesting additional mysteries which (as one correspondent put it) ‘demand to be explored’. You’ll find a number of these requested explorations in the following pages, along with a broad array of questions concerning other seemingly inexplicable Australian events.

  At the time of writing, not one of those questions has been answered.

  John Pinkney

  Melbourne

  The Disappearing Divers – and Their ‘Diaries of Death’

  In January 1998 an American couple vanished, after diving from a charter boat off the North Queensland coast. For two days, the pair’s absence went unnoticed. Police, convinced they were dead, alleged that the boat’s skipper had been negligent. But their case was complicated by a mass of bizarrely contradictory evidence. Entries in both divers’ diaries suggested that the husband had been depressed and longing for death. A bookseller conflictingly testified that the pair was still alive – and had bought maps of Australia’s remote north. Despite official attempts to lay the case to rest, the divers’ fate remains one of Australia’s deepest mysteries...

  IMAGINE THIS. YOU AND YOUR SPOUSE are passengers aboard a scuba boat bobbing dreamily in calm tropical waters. The sky is sun-scrubbed, brilliantly blue.

  You’ve enjoyed two dives already today, but it’s time, you decide, to seek relief again from the fierce heat. Masked, wetsuited, you step up to the bow and plunge together into the green ocean: spearing down, ever-deeper into cool realms far beneath the hull, until you are swimming, at sinuous leisure, amid crags of jagged coral and darting reef fish.

  In the primal silence 40 minutes pass. Perhaps 50.

  And then, even though you are still breathing comfortably, you feel within yourself a familiar tug, a restlessness. A well-understood signal, one to the other, and you are ascending again, back toward the sea’s sunspangled surface.

  In the deep, receding swiftly beneath your feet, you were in an altered state. Now, as you soar ever-closer to the familiar world, the nature of your thoughts is changing. Dinner tonight with wine and candles on a moonsilvered beach. The folding, the packing, the checking of tickets for tomorrow’s departure.

  Abruptly, however, you forget these petty considerations. Fear stirs suddenly within you. You are in your final few moments underwater and you sense that something is terribly wrong. But what?

  Not until you explode from the surface into the golden fury of the afternoon do you learn the answer.

  The charter boat is gone.

  The sea’s boundless surface is unoccupied, desolate. You remove your breathing mask and cry out, irrationally, for help. The ocean, devoid of echoes, flattens your words.

  The charter boat is gone.

  Buoyed by your wetsuit you are floating in a w
ilderness of water. But surely someone will remember that you went for a long dive. Surely the passenger logs will attest to that fact. The boat, even at this moment, must be speeding back here, to the rescue.

  The hope sustains you until the horizon swallows the sun’s last embers, and the sky darkens, and the first pale stars appear.

  This was the story – almost too terrifying to contemplate – outlined by prosecutors and police to Queensland courts in 1998–1999. According to some legal arguments it was not necessarily the real story.

  THE DISAPPEARANCE that would create persistent controversy throughout Australia and the United States occurred on Sunday, 25 January 1998 at St Crispin’s Reef, a dive site off the Queensland coast. Sailing aboard the Port Douglas-based scuba boat Outer Edge were the two Americans who would become principal players in the mystery: Tom Lonergan, 34, and his wife Eileen, 29. As volunteers in the Peace Corps they had recently completed a tour of teaching duty in Tuvalu and Fiji. They told Australian acquaintances that they were planning a world tour before returning to the USA.

  The Lonergans were a practical-natured and academically accomplished couple. Eileen, a geologist, had enrolled to train as a military pilot. Tom, also a graduate, had already served in the US Air Force. Both loved sports and were experienced scuba divers.

  The last time anyone remembered seeing the two Americans was when Outer Edge, with 26 passengers aboard, stood at the northwest tip of St Crispin’s Reef, above a subsurface coral outcrop the crew had nicknamed Fish City. The boat’s owner and skipper Geoffrey (Jack) Nairn gave the Lonergans and their fellow tourists a briefing before they plunged into the serene, peaceful ocean at about 2.20 pm.

  For everyone it was an idyllic experience. The tide was slack, with 15 metres’ visibility; the multi-hued arrays of tropical fish and corals dazzling to the eye. Instructor Karl Jesienowski escorted a party of tenderfoot tourists to the most beguiling of the reef’s displays – but Tom and Eileen, a skilled buddy pair, needed no such guidance. After plunging in they dived swiftly away into less populous waters.

  At about 3.20 pm Jack Nairn gave a passenger, Brendan Vidian, permission to jump from the bow for one last swim. A restaurant manager, Simon Townsend, joined him. Nairn told the pair to make it quick – an order they cheerfully obeyed. At 3.30, with everything seemingly normal, the Outer Edge quit Fish City and headed back to Port Douglas.

  Nobody noticed that Tom and Eileen Lonergan were absent.

  It was not until Tuesday evening – more than two days later – that Jack Nairn discovered the couple’s personal belongings in his boat’s lost property bin. Among the casual shoes and roughly folded clothes were the shortsighted Tom Lonergan’s spectacles and wallet. Nairn was shocked. He immediately rang the owner-manager of the Americans’ holiday address: the Gone Walkabout hostel in Cairns. No, the manager said, they weren’t here. He hadn’t seen them for a while.

  Jack Nairn alerted the police, then summoned staff members to his office. Soon afterward, Senior Constable Steve Burgess arrived, armed with a tape-recorder. The captured conversation, which would later be played to a coroner’s inquest, comprises a conflicting mass of recollections about events aboard the charter boat on 25 January. The policeman is particularly annoyed when nobody can recall who conducted the final head-count.

  The following morning, 60 hours after the Lonergans had gone missing, a massive air and sea search began. While navy divers scoured the sea floor around St Crispin’s Reef, the Australian Search and Rescue Service conducted an intensive aerial sweep covering 8000 nautical miles. There was no trace of the couple.

  Karl Jesienowski was unimpressed by the would-be rescuers’ efforts. The search, he complained, had concentrated on the south and west of St Crispin’s Reef, while the prevailing currents were running northwest. The Lonergans, he said, had an excellent chance of having survived in the present mild conditions – and might even now be huddled on a reef somewhere. Overnight squalls would be providing enough drinking water for the couple to save in their face masks.

  To prove his point about current and tide flows, Jesienowski donned a buoyancy vest and allowed the ocean to carry him, unresisting, away from St Crispin’s Reef. As he had predicted he was borne toward the coast, drifting more than three nautical miles in slightly more than 50 minutes.

  Emboldened by this experiment, other critics embraced Jesienowski’s argument – asserting that the official searchers had been looking in the wrong places. These criticisms were, seemingly, strengthened when two buoyancy vests, a fin, wetsuit hood and diving tank were washed up on a remote beach 10 kilometres from Cooktown.

  However, the vests only intensified the mystery. Undamaged and unbuckled, they bore the Lonergans’ names. The accompanying fin was inscribed ‘Eileen L’. The discovery engendered numberless theories – the commonest being that the couple had either suicided or been murdered. Many observers found it hard to believe that two divers – if of sound mind – would voluntarily remove buoyancy gear that had been designed to keep them afloat indefinitely.

  Further questions were posed by a researcher with the Australian Institute of Marine Science. How was it possible, he asked, that the two vests (blown along by winds) had landed on precisely the same beach as the hood, diving tank and flipper (all of which would have been driven by the northwest current)?

  Nothing made sense. Much of the informed scepticism of that time focused on the buoyancy vests’ almost flawless condition. The waters between St Crispin’s Reef and the beach on which the vests were found are a morass of jagged coral, shoals and atolls, many protruding like saw-teeth at low tide. But the vests seemed to have negotiated these obstacles without the slightest nick or tear.

  Might someone have planted the diving gear on the beach? When police were asked that question at the inquest, they replied that they didn’t think so.

  The Lonergans’ disappearance came at a bad time for the Queensland government. The day before the air-sea search began, detectives had charged an Australian youth with the murder of a 22-year-old tourist, Michiko Okuyama. Japanese media were quick to point out that he, too, had come to Australia to go scuba-diving. The probable deaths of two additional divers inspired prominent reports in the Japanese and American media.

  Nervous tourists began to cancel their bookings. Queensland’s then-Premier Rob Borbidge ordered his tourism minister to fly to Port Douglas to reassure intending visitors that Queensland was still one of the world’s ‘safest destinations’.

  But anyone who read a transcript of the inquest would have been forgiven for believing otherwise. Perhaps the most chilling testimony was offered by the undersea filmmaker Ben Cropp, who thought it likely that the Lonergans had been killed by tiger sharks. Cropp told the hushed court that the sharks flocked to the edge of the Barrier Reef at about 3.30 every afternoon. They would have circled the couple for several minutes, waiting for a member of the pack to take the first bite. Then, as blood gushed into the water, the predators would have exploded into a feeding frenzy.

  Old hands in Queensland’s threatened dive industry dismissed Cropp’s contention as headline-hunting. It was unlikely, they insisted, that tiger-sharks would have devoured the Lonergans whole, leaving no evidence behind.

  Curious Conversations

  Another witness – who considered his evidence so important that he lodged it in writing with his solicitors – was Tom Colrain, the Outer Edge company’s operations manager. He recalled that on 24 January (eve of the disappearance) Tom Lonergan had telephoned him at the office to ask a seemingly pointless question. Lonergan wanted to check that the Outer Edge would be visiting Agincourt Reef as part of its itinerary next day. When Colrain said yes, the American seemed dissatisfied – and found a way of posing the query again. ‘He asked me that question about where we were going at least three times,’ Colrain wrote. ‘I remember thinking to myself, “What a pest! How many times do I have to tell this guy?’”

  Intriguingly, Gail McLean, an employee of the Cairns Vi
sitors Information Centre, reported a similar conversation. She said that about 48 hours before the disappearance Tom Lonergan had enquired about the itinerary of the large charter-vessel Quicksilver V– asking in particular whether it would be visiting Agincourt Reef. Lonergan seemed unwilling to accept her affirmative answer, suggesting that Quicksilver was more likely to be visiting Ten Ribbon Reefs, nearby. ‘He kept insisting,’ Gail McLean said. ‘Finally I got my back up and said I didn’t care what anyone else had told him, it was Agincourt Reef that Quicksilver visited – end of story.’

  Had the Lonergans clandestinely boarded Quicksilver V as part of a plan – whatever its motive might be – to disappear? Aboard the boat were large numbers of Italian scuba tourists. Conceivably the Americans might have blended among them as the ship returned to Port Douglas. However there was no hard evidence that such a deception had occurred. Police investigated, but ultimately neither they nor the coroner took the suggestion seriously.

  Yet another puzzling recollection was offered by Jeanette Brentnall, owner of the Port Douglas bookstore. She claimed that on 27 January, two days after the Lonergans were allegedly lost at sea, they visited her shop. She later recognised the couple from their newspaper photographs. Cautiously and meticulously she described the visit.

  ‘They bought maps of the Territory and the Top End from me. They also bought six postcards. I keep records of everything I sell. I remember the couple well, because Tuesday, January 27 was a slow day. I only made three sales. We chatted for a while. I asked them where they’d been and they told me they’d come from Fiji. The man dominated the conversation...his wife looked pretty subdued...’

  On 28 June, five months after the Lonergans vanished, a fisherman discovered a dive slate wedged in mangroves south of Cooktown. On it was a faint handwritten message, dated 26 January, pleading for help. Police announced that the writing was ‘more than likely Mr Lonergan’s’, but that the evidence was inconclusive.

  ‘Death Omens’ in Two Diaries