True crime: a mother’s quest to find her daughter’s killer
A murdered teenager, a bungled investigation, a suspect never charged ... Debi Marshall visits the scene of the brutal killing of Michelle Bright and meets a family who won’t rest until justice is done.
It was not just the violence and violation of Michelle Bright’s murder and rape, but the callous indifference with which her killer discarded her body when his terrible night’s work was done. Michelle, once a vivacious young woman, was discovered half-naked and face down in the earth, tossed aside, hidden by long grass, just steps away from a railway line, outside the tiny town of Gulgong in rural NSW.
It was an ignominious end for a woman with so much vitality and life. In the emotionless language of the coronial inquest, heard 10 years after Michelle’s murder, the details sound clinical, almost detached, despite the Coroner’s expressed sympathy for the family. “Michelle Loraine Bright died on 27 February, 1999, at Gulgong from homicidal violence, but the actual cause of death the evidence adduced does not enable me to say.”
In the cold light of day, the case remains another long-standing unsolved murder on the NSW Police’s cold case division’s books. Yet, as autumn sun strains through the windows of Michelle’s mother, Loraine’s, modest kitchen in Wyong, on the NSW Central Coast, there’s nothing clinical about the bittersweet memories that pepper her conversation about the daughter and best friend she lost to a savage, senseless death.
“Michelle was just perfect from the day she was born,” Loraine says, wistfully. “She was so lovely, a tomboy who loved older people and animals. She wanted to be a veterinary nurse.”
On the night Michelle went missing, she’d attended a 15th birthday party and planned to stay at her best friend, Lauren’s, house. Loraine was at work at the local RSL.
“Michelle often bounced in the door there and I expected to see her, but she didn’t come,” she recalls. It was Loraine’s habit to do a lap around town after work to check on her kids if they were out, but as fate would have it, that night she didn’t, a decision which haunts her. When Michelle didn’t return home the next day, Loraine and her family drove around in drizzling rain anxiously looking for her. The nightmare had begun.
Loraine’s hazel eyes glisten with anger as she recalls how, on day one, a police officer searching Michelle’s bedroom for clues to her disappearance found over-the-counter medication that didn’t belong to Michelle, and announced she was a runaway with an amphetamine habit.
“I kept telling them she wasn’t a runaway and didn’t take drugs,” Loraine recalls. “We were so close, I knew she never would have left me. They just wouldn’t listen.”
Yet, on Tuesday, two days after Michelle disappeared – the same day the missing person’s report was filed – police finally had to listen. That afternoon, the teenager’s body was found when a man’s dog reacted to the foul stench of rapid decomposition. Michelle’s bra had been both cut and torn from her body, and she had been either strangled or suffocated.
Just seconds from home
There’s a sense time has bypassed the small gold rush town of Gulgong, which today boasts a population of just 2500. It’s so small that when I began searching for Loraine, my first call was to the local pub to see if anyone knew her. “Yes, I know her,” the barmaid answered with no hint of surprise. “She’s my mother-in-law.” In this quintessentially Australian community, where the nearest town is Mudgee, about 30 kilometres south, old timers still tip an Akubra as they pass. In a place the size of Gulgong, a murder is always going to fuel gossip, what the Coroner described as a “black cloud hanging over the township”. Yet all suspicions were put aside when 2000 people turned out to say goodbye to the popular girl who died four months shy of her 18th birthday.
Michelle’s older brother, Les, a thoughtful, decent man, drives me around town, pointing out sad landmarks. Here, where Michelle was last seen getting out of a vehicle in the centre of town. Here, where she likely walked around the corner and found no one home at her friend’s house. From that point, Les says there’s a void of not knowing what happened until we reach here, the godforsaken location Michelle was murdered.
“I kept telling them she wasn’t a runaway. ”
She was just off the main road, just 20 seconds by car from her home. Her family passed this spot hundreds of times in their frantic search for her. Today, it hosts a homemade memorial under the gum tree that townsfolk planted in her honour. Our last, forlorn stop is the cemetery, just out of town, where a locked box holds letters from friends and Michelle’s small treasures. “It never occurred to us Michelle may have been murdered by a local person, so we searched out of town,” Loraine says. “Little did we know we passed her every day.”
An unbearable grief
Unable to stay in the family home or drive past the site his daughter was found at, Michelle’s father, Greg, persuaded Loraine to leave Gulgong. Happily married for more than two decades, 12 months to the day after Michelle’s murder, they packed up and left the town that had been their home and their children’s.
Michelle’s older brothers, Les and Philip, chose to stay, but their lives were fractured, overlaid with the guilt they’d failed to protect their sister.
Yet Greg and Loraine’s attempt to start a new life was a failure. Broken with grief, Greg could find no solace and Loraine repeatedly returned to Mudgee, where detectives on the case were based, to seek new information on an investigation which was getting colder with each passing year. Six years after Michelle’s murder, the once happy couple separated.
Alone in the depths of sorrow, Loraine contemplated suicide. Diminutive, her slender fingers worry a rubber band as she recalls those desperate months and years. “It’s a heart-wrenching pain,” she says, wiping tears from her cheeks. “People told me enough time had passed and I should get over it, but how can we? It’s constantly in your thoughts.” The only thing that prevented Loraine from taking that walk into the abyss was the thought of leaving her sons and adored grandchildren. Yet time, for her, is no healer. “I see Michelle’s friends getting married and having babies, and think, ‘It should be my daughter’. Her killer has stolen all my joy.”
While Michelle’s last movements are not known, Loraine believes she didn’t attempt to walk the dark, lonely road to her home, 1.7 kilometres from town, on her own. “She was petrified of the dark,” she says. “I think she knew her killer and he offered her a lift or to walk her home. She was a strong girl who knew self-defence, but she was overpowered and murdered that same night. She fought hard, though; they found hairs in her hand.”
Insufficient evidence
Police initially identified five persons of interest related to Michelle’s death. Two were cleared, but three remained. One of these is Mark Hawkins – a former bricklayer, then 23, who’d gone to school with Les and knew Michelle “in passing”. Named at the inquest, Hawkins, a married man with a then two-year-old son, had no criminal history when Michelle was murdered. That changed when he was convicted of stalking and telecommunications offences over an eight-month period from August 1999. The victim gave evidence he’d followed her and made obscene gestures, left messages saying he loved her and wanted sex with her, and that he had underpants belonging to her. He also described the colour of her toothbrush, indicating he’d been in her house. In one police interview, he admitted masturbating while speaking to her.
Hawkins was also a suspect for an indecent assault in Mudgee in February 2000, when a male jogged up behind the victim and grabbed her breast. When she tried to escape, he followed her and grabbed her breast again. The victim identified Hawkins as her attacker, but there was insufficient evidence to charge him.
The coronial inquest heard statements from Detective Inspector David Payne
that placed Hawkins in the vicinity of where Michelle was walking the night she went missing. Hawkins told police he arrived at his wife’s parent’s house around 1.15am, a time his wife repeatedly queried. Of the 67 men who provided voluntary DNA samples during the investigation, he was the only one who declined. In one statement he said, “I haven’t really got a reason, but I just feel funny about giving one.”
The Detective Inspector also told the inquest that listening devices installed in Hawkins’ home by police showed rising tension between Hawkins and his wife (since divorced), Kym, as to why he refused the DNA tests and his agitated demands to know what she told police in her interviews with them. Increasingly suspicious, she asked, “Have you got something to hide? … You worry me.” To appease her, he lied and said he’d tried to contact police to volunteer a sample. After pressure from Kym, he reluctantly agreed to provide samples.
The day before he was due at the police station, Hawkins’ car collided with a tree on a straight road. He told police he’d swung to avoid a kangaroo. Taken to hospital, he was unable to meet the police deadline. When he did eventually provide DNA, he denied any knowledge of Michelle’s murder and police couldn’t find sufficient evidence to charge anyone.
Wasted time
Les says police have had enough time to solve the murder and wonders why they waited more than three years to ask him who he thought may be responsible. He named a person he knew. “We haven’t heard from police for more than 12 months,” he says, frustrated. “This investigation needs a fresh set of eyes.” He has a message for his sister’s killer. “It’s been 18 years. I hope you’re living with the pain of what you’ve done every day. Make no mistake© – this will catch up with you.”
Former Gulgong police sergeant Bruce Pearce is critical of the initial investigation’s lack of structure, which, he claims, led to wasted time and false leads. When Michelle was found, Bruce told her family. Greg broke down, but Loraine knew without him telling her. “She was driving past the site and saw the road closed off after Michelle’s body was discovered. We had to escort her away; she wanted to go to her daughter.”
After 27 years in the service and wracked with guilt that he was unable to find answers for her family, Bruce says he was “drowning in despair”. A nervous breakdown forced him to retire soon afterwards. He still frets that the murder remains unsolved and says had it been treated properly from the start, Michelle’s body would have been found earlier and more DNA preserved. Her body was in the open for days before its discovery and was in a state of advanced decomposition. To date, any DNA profile is inconclusive as to the offender’s identity.
While Loraine appreciates the police’s efforts over the years, she is critical of aspects of the investigation. “A family member found a piece of Michelle’s jewellery where she was murdered, after police had searched,” she says. “Because initial investigators thought her disappearance suspicious, the case should have been sent to Homicide, rather than the superior officer treating Michelle as a missing person.”
She has no idea what, if anything, is happening with the investigation today. “I’ve always been told to be careful so as not to hinder a possible prosecution,” she says. “But what are they doing? I want to see justice while I’m alive. They won’t tell me what her injuries were or if they have DNA.”
At the inquest, the Coroner praised Loraine’s quiet dignity and strength of character. While her partner, Ray, and her family are a support, she won’t rest until her daughter’s killer is behind bars. “I’m Michelle’s spokesperson, her last hope,” she says. “If anyone knows anything – please help me.”
I hope you’re living with the pain every day.
If you know anything that might help solve Michelle Bright’s murder, please phone Crimestoppers on 1800 333 000. If you or someone you know needs emotional support, phone Lifeline, 13 11 14.