Missing, Presumed Dead

The double murder case that shocked Australia

Mark Tedeschi

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781761104459
• eBook ISBN: 9781761104473

It was the double murder case that gripped Australia, and former Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi KC is finally able to share all the astonishing details.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Danger Awards

Dorothy Davis and Kerry Whelan were both happy, healthy, affluent, middle-class women from conservative, loving families.

Such women are hardly ever among the ranks of the missing. They were not hitchhikers, or associates of drug dealers, or unhappy with their family relationships, or suffering from mental health issues. 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. But Dorothy and Kerry did have one thing in common – they both knew Bruce Allan Burrell.

The disappearance of these two women without trace led to massive police investigations and resulted in sensational trials that gripped the nation. This book explores the intricacies of those investigations and delves into the twisted, tortuous processes of legal proceedings, while exploring the dark recesses of the mind of Bruce Burrell.

'Gripping writing, from an expert on the inside of some of the state's worst murders and disappearances.' Peter FitzSimons

1 LIFE OF BRUCE

Bruce Burrell

Bruce Burrell was born in 1953 into a conservative Australian family in the Goulburn district of rural New South Wales. His father worked as a wool classer which, in the days when that product was in great worldwide demand, was a highly regarded and well-paid occupation. As an adolescent, Bruce left school and got his first job with a bank, however within a few months he was caught stealing cheques. His father came to the rescue and paid for any shortfall, and in return the bank agreed to dismiss Bruce without involving the police, so that he suffered no long term consequences of his actions. He then trained as a salesman and copywriter in the advertising industry. By this time, Bruce’s personality had developed some alarming trends. He could be very charming and personable, particularly if he wanted something from you. Because of this ability to impress and connect with people, Bruce was easily able to obtain employment, however it would soon become apparent to his managers that he was almost totally lacking in any initiative, commitment or work ethic.

In 1984, at the age of 31, Bruce met his wife, Dallas, at an advertising company in Sydney where they were both working. Dallas was a highly enterprising, resourceful and successful advertising and copywriting manager. It is hard to know what she saw in Bruce, but the simple fact was that she had been single for many years and relished the opportunity to share her life with a partner. Bruce seemed charming and affable, and initially he doted on her. They were married in 1985.

Prior to their marriage, Bruce and Dallas joined a company called The Advertising Works: Bruce as an advertising salesman and Dallas as an advertising executive. One of the accounts for which Bruce had responsibility was the Australian division of Crown Equipment, a large multinational company based in the USA, engaged in the manufacture and sale of forklift vehicles. It was in this capacity that Bruce came into contact with Bernard (‘Bernie’) Whelan, who was the managing director and CEO of Crown Equipment in Australia. These two men were in many ways complete opposites. Bernie Whelan was a middle-aged, highly successful corporate executive, a solid family man, and financially prosperous. When they met, Bruce Burrell was a 31-year-old failed advertising salesman who found it hard to maintain long-term relationships and was constantly short of money to fund his day-to-day living expenses. Despite their differences, Bruce Burrell and Bernie Whelan became friends. The main reason for their connection was that they shared interests in farming and shooting, and from time to time they went away together on shooting trips to the country.

Bernie Whelan’s first wife, with whom he’d had two sons, had suffered severe mental illness and eventually, years after a divorce from Bernie, had taken her own life. After a long time on his own, Bernie married Kerry Ryan, who was 20 years his junior. Together, they had three children – Sarah, Matthew and James – and by all accounts were devoted to each other and their children. Bernie’s two sons from his first marriage had drifted away from their father and only had occasional, superficial contact with him. As the CEO of Crown Equipment, Bernie had a huge income and maintained a very affluent and varied lifestyle. Bernie, Kerry and their three children lived on an expansive rural property called Willow Park in the magnificent, lush, undulating country of the Kurrajong Hills in the foothills of the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney. It was sufficiently close to Sydney that Bernie could drive each day to Crown’s headquarters in Smithfield, not far from Sydney’s second largest CBD at Parramatta, and yet far enough away that they were able to enjoy the benefits of life in a rural setting.

When Bruce and Dallas were married in 1985, Bernie and Kerry Whelan were among those who attended their wedding. Soon after, Bruce and Dallas moved into a unit in Marine Parade, Lurline Bay – an attractive and semi-affluent seaside suburb in the eastern part of Sydney.

In 1987, in a decision that he was soon to regret, Bernie Whelan offered Bruce Burrell a job as advertising manager at Crown Equipment. Bruce immediately accepted the offer and left his position at The Advertising Works. As an employee at Crown and a friend of the CEO, Bruce was invited to the Whelans’ home on several occasions, including a tennis day for Crown employees. It was in 1988, while Bruce had the security of his employment at Crown, that he and Dallas purchased a 192-hectare rural hideaway called Hillydale in partnership with Dallas’s parents, Les and Shirley. Hillydale was in the Bungonia district, a remote, quiet and heavily forested area on the edge of the Southern Highlands and about half an hour’s drive from the nearest large town of Goulburn, where Bruce had been raised as a child. Accessible only by a long dirt road, Hillydale was covered in extensive areas of thick, natural bushland and bordered on two sides by the Bungonia State Recreation Area. The property and park were peppered with numerous deep mine shafts that had been dug decades earlier for shale mining. Hillydale was nominally a sheep farm, but the soil quality was so poor that its usefulness for agriculture was marginal. Coming from the area, Bruce was very attached to Hillydale, and he would spend time there whenever he could. Every spare dollar that he earned went into buying equipment and stock in a futile attempt to make Hillydale financially viable as a farming venture.

Within a short time, it became apparent that Bruce Burrell’s performance as advertising manager at Crown Equipment was woefully inadequate. He was viewed as a lazy and ineffectual employee who would take no direction from his superiors and made no effort to get along with his workmates. In 1990, when there was a recession-induced downturn in Crown’s business and some 30 jobs were shed, Burrell was one of those who were retrenched, and it was Bernie Whelan who had the task of telling Bruce that he was forced to let him go. At the time, Bruce seemed to take the news well, but deep down he had a profound sense of having been stabbed in the back by his so-called friend. He had no appreciation of the fact that he had let himself and his employer down.

After his dismissal from Crown Equipment, Bruce Burrell’s life spiralled out of control. He effectively had no long-term full-time job, and his financial situation quickly deteriorated to the point that he was forced to rely on the generosity of others – principally his wife, Dallas, and his elderly father, Allan. He had no qualms accepting money from them. He drifted from position to position as a casual advertising salesman, with long periods of no work, while Dallas continued to be a valued and well-paid employee. During this time, he became subject to severe mood swings that plagued his relationship with Dallas. He was frequently volatile, abusive and controlling towards her, and particularly resented her questioning him about what he was doing at any particular time.

It was at this stage that Bruce began manifesting a disturbing belief that the world owed him a living and that he was entitled to take from others what he himself lacked. He felt perfectly entitled to live off the generosity and naivety of others. He began befriending lonely, middle-aged or elderly women and attempting to convince them to lend him money. He could be very charming and flirtatious with them, but when he needed to, he could also be extremely intimidating with sudden flashes of intense anger. This came in handy when women who had lent him money began asking for it to be returned. Bruce also had an unfortunate habit that if he liked a certain item that was for sale or that belonged to someone else, he would devise some sneaky way of getting hold of objects that he coveted. This was particularly so with cars. In 1992, Bruce decided that he needed a four-wheel drive for use at Hillydale. He decided that a Suzuki Vitara fitted the bill perfectly, so on 30 September 1992 he visited Daytona Car Rentals in Ashfield, took one for a test drive, and never returned it.

Bruce viewed car dealerships as fair game, believing that their arrangements for test drives were so slack that they deserved to be ripped off by someone like him, who was smarter and more cunning. One day in October 1993, Burrell decided that he needed another, larger four-wheel drive for Hillydale. He went to a car dealership at Broadway and took a dark green, two-tone, two-door Mitsubishi Pajero GLS worth $43,000 for a test drive with the salesman seated next to him. He drove it to the Queen Victoria Building in the city and asked the salesman to go upstairs to ask one of Burrell’s friends to come and have a look at the car while he double-parked. The gullible salesman went into the building but was unable to find the friend, and by the time he re-emerged neither Burrell nor the Pajero was anywhere to be found. Burrell gleefully took the Pajero to Hillydale, amazed at how easily he had been able to dupe the salesman. Once again, he felt that this exercise demonstrated how superior he was compared to the ordinary man, who would never have had the guile or guts to carry out such a bold yet simple plan. He changed the car’s appearance slightly, replaced the registration plates and kept it for his own use. When Dallas enquired about the new vehicle, Bruce told her that he had bought it from a friend in the car trade at a very good price. Dallas was often mystified that Bruce had money when he hadn’t had a full-time job since 1990, but she meekly accepted this explanation rather than having an argument with him.

In November 1995, Bruce arrived home with a smart new Jaguar Sovereign – a $140,000 model. He had again driven off with it after taking it for a test drive, this time from New Rowley Motors at Artarmon. With an air of self-satisfaction and arrogance, he gave Dallas the explanation that he had been given a good deal from someone he knew at a car auction house. Again, Dallas had no idea how he could afford to buy any car when he was sponging off her for his daily living expenses, but she knew better than to question him.

Bruce would also steal objects from his friends and associates. In 1992, he rang Bernie Whelan and asked him whether he was interested in selling his Ruger .44 magnum carbine to a neighbour of Burrell’s. Bernie was quite interested in selling the weapon, so he gave it to Bruce to show the neighbour. A few days later, Bruce rang Bernie and told him the bad news that the firearm had been stolen from his car when it was parked at Redfern. Of course, this was a lie and Bruce had merely kept the rifle for himself. Several months later, when a drought was making it difficult for Bernie to look after his cattle, Burrell offered to agist them on Hillydale. Grateful for the offer of help, Bernie took twelve pedigree Poll Hereford steers, a few calves and a bull to Hillydale. Some weeks later, he was informed by Burrell that the cattle had all escaped into the neighbouring national park, and that despite extensive searching by Burrell, they could not be found.

After these two bad experiences with Bruce Burrell, Bernie became deeply suspicious of his former friend, but he was not the sort of man to make accusations without hard evidence, so he decided to put his losses behind him and sever all contact with Bruce.

Bernie Whelan was not the only friend of Bruce Burrell to lose a firearm in this way. In June 1996, Bruce and Dallas’s friend Adam Pantle, who was the president of the Harbour City Pistol Club in Sydney, came to Hillydale for several days to join Bruce on a shooting trip. He brought with him his Browning Buck Mark .22 calibre target pistol. After a late-night shooting spree on Bruce’s quadbike, they returned to the homestead, leaving the pistol in the vehicle. Pantle later went to retrieve it from the bike but could not find it. Burrell insisted that it must have fallen out of the vehicle on their return trip to the house. They searched the area they had travelled over, but without success. Pantle suspected that Bruce had taken it, but he had no proof. Pantle wanted to report the loss of his pistol to the police, but Burrell insisted that he tell the police that it had been stolen from the boot of his car.

---

Bruce Burrell believed that his financial woes were entirely due to the malevolent actions of others – particularly Bernie Whelan. The humiliation he’d felt when Bernie had told him that he had to ‘let him go’ still smarted, and he knew that one day Bernie would have to pay for his disloyalty. Of course, bad luck had also plagued Bruce, but bad luck, he felt, was something that could be reversed with decisive action. Burrell believed – no, he knew – that he was a person of superior ability, with a wealth of knowledge and insight that other people lacked. While it troubled him that his qualities were not appreciated by others, he also thought it gave him an advantage over them, because he could so easily manipulate them. Only later, after he had achieved his aims, would they realise just how brilliant he had been, and then he would get the recognition and respect he deserved. Only after he had relieved them of their ill-gotten gains would they appreciate how easily he had been able to outsmart them and take advantage of them. This delayed recognition was the price he had to pay for having special qualities that others were unaware of. He was prepared to break the law and felt no moral qualms or sympathy for his victims. Quite the contrary – he believed that it was grossly unfair that they possessed wealth and security that he didn’t, so he was entitled to relieve them of their disproportionate share of good fortune. His determination to set things right was so firmly held that he would brook no resistance. Dallas’s complaints that he was a lazy good-for-nothing who drained money from her was like water off a duck’s back.

Bruce Burrell considered that because of Bernie Whelan’s overwhelming wealth, he could justifiably be fleeced of a few assets, like his gun or a few of his cattle, to help alleviate Burrell’s financial difficulties. He got a thrill from the conversations with Bernie in which he had so easily convinced the older and wealthier man to hand over his property. He believed that because Bernie would hardly notice the losses, it was all a bit of a harmless game. In any case, Bernie ‘owed him’ because of the retrenchment from Crown, so he was only taking what was rightly his. Burrell viewed the episodes with the Ruger and the steers as a kind of challenge or test, which of course he had passed with flying colours. It proved that although Bernie had the upper hand in the work environment, Burrell was the smarter one. Bernie had just been too dumb to realise what was happening.

---

By 1994, Bruce and Dallas’s relationship had severely deteriorated and they were spending less and less time together. Bruce was spending increasingly more time at Hillydale on his own while Dallas was almost always at work or at their home in Lurline Bay. Bruce seemed to have an insatiable appetite for spending money – especially on Hillydale – which meant that he was perpetually on the edge of financial disaster. He seemed quite unperturbed about his excessive spending, as though he knew that it would not matter in the end. Bruce would flare up whenever Dallas asked him questions about what he was doing when he was away. He was deeply resentful of her success at work and the fact that he had to continually ask her for money.

In early 1994, Dallas was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of cancer and she underwent an extended period of chemotherapy, although she managed somehow to keep working through the period of the treatment. In 1995, having successfully completed chemotherapy and feeling a renewed level of energy, Dallas opened her own advertising business, Burrell Advertising and Design, which prospered. Although Bruce was officially a director of the firm, he had in fact nothing to do with its operations. As Dallas powered ahead, Bruce languished in a haze of inactivity, financial desperation and social isolation at Hillydale. He became even more resentful of Dallas’s success and his moods became even more deeply morose. Although they were technically still living together at the unit in Lurline Bay, Bruce spent much of his time on his own at Hillydale.

---

It was at this time that Burrell’s greed and sense of entitlement extended beyond any previous bounds. He was so resentful of his precarious financial situation and so envious of those with an abundance of wealth whom he knew were less enterprising and bold than himself, that he began to feel he had a right to take whatever he could. He felt no guilt or sense of wrongdoing about this. He felt like Robin Hood – redistributing the excess assets of the rich to the deserving poor, namely himself. Like a renegade outlaw, he began to feel that if his ‘targets’ resisted the transfer of their wealth, the use of force, even lethal force, was perfectly acceptable.

2 QUICK FIXES

Two years previously, in early 1993, Bruce Burrell had decided that he and Dallas should upgrade their Lurline Bay unit to a house or townhouse in the same neighbourhood with a view of the sea and a yard where they could keep their dog. Initially Burrell put an ad in the paper seeking expressions of interest for swapping houses with people who wanted to downsize, but nothing suitable emerged. Then Burrell spied the ideal house in Banks Street, just around the corner from where they lived and a block from the ocean. It was a detached cottage owned by an elderly couple, 72-year old Charlie Spiers and his wife, Helen. Burrell approached them to see if they were interested in selling. Helen Spiers was quite keen, because their home was becoming a liability as they aged, but Charlie, who had been immobilised by a series of strokes and could only slowly shuffle around his house and the immediate neighbourhood with the aid of a stick, was adamant that he would see out his days in the house he had lived in for most of his life. He found it difficult to speak and had a special machine to assist him in communicating. Due to the physical limitations that had afflicted him since his last stroke, he had been depressed for some considerable time.

On the morning of Tuesday 20 April 1993, Helen Spiers went to her local church for a game of bingo, as she had done on numerous occasions before, leaving Charlie at home on his own. When Helen got home about two hours later, Charlie was nowhere to be seen. A small table in the lounge room was upturned and the machine that helped him speak was on the floor. Charlie’s slippers, which he always wore, were strewn across the room. Nothing had been taken from the house. Helen frantically searched for him and eventually contacted the police. After making preliminary enquiries, the police initially thought that Charlie might have committed suicide from the nearby rock platforms overlooking the sea. A friend who had known Charlie for 14 years told police that prior to his disappearance Charlie had said to him: ‘When I’m ready to die, they’ll never find me’. However, the police were mystified how, in his frail condition, Charlie could have ventured onto the rocks without being seen and flung himself so far across the terraced rock platforms into the waves below that he was washed out to sea. Helen was adamant that Charlie would never have left the area near to their home without her and that although he was frail and depressed, he would never have attempted to kill himself.

Charlie Sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Note
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Life of Bruce
• Chapter 2: Quick Fixes
• Chapter 3: Dorothy Davis Disappears
• Chapter 4: Kerry Whelan
• Chapter 5: Preparations for an Abduction
• Chapter 6: Kerry Disappears
• Chapter 7: Ransom
• Chapter 8: Action at Bungonia
• Chapter 9: Police Swoop on Hillydale
• Chapter 10: Fatal Mistake
• Chapter 11: Sifting Through the Papers
• Chapter 12: Trial Abandoned
• Chapter 13: Trial Resurrected
• Chapter 14: Crown Case
• Chapter 15: Pajero, Ransom Note, Dot-Point Notes and Street Directory
• Chapter 16: Phonecall from Goulburn
• Chapter 17: Burrell’s Financial Straits, His Credibility and a Final Analysis
• Chapter 18: Defence Case
• Chapter 19: Allegations Against Bernie and Trevor Whelan
• Chapter 20: Alibis
• Chapter 21: False Sighting Witnesses
• Chapter 22: Defence Witnesses, Jury Disagreement and a Retrial
• Chapter 23: Dorothy Davis Trial
• Chapter 24: Appeals
• Chapter 25: Enduring Mysteries
• Chapter 26: Reflections
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Endnotes
• Copyright