Is there a good way to bowl up to a perfect stranger’s family home or workplace without appointment or forewarning?
And then explain at the front door that you’ve come as a journalist because you’ve been investigating their past life and you know about the homeowner’s uncomfortably close tie to the unsolved murder of a woman who was once a close friend?
Those were two of the questions my colleague, Karina Berger, asked last month as we drove a hire car from the airport we’d just flown into, a short drive from the home of a woman who was at the centre of a harrowing murder four decades ago.
Karina – a former coronial investigations lawyer who began working with me and The Australian on unsolved murders two years ago – and I had convinced ourselves we knew so much already of the mystery witness we were going to try to see, Donna.
But Donna didn’t know, of course. She was oblivious to the fact that in the months before our travel to her quiet neck of the woods far from our respective homes, we had read hundreds of pages of documents from a police brief of evidence in which Donna was almost as prominent as a man twice her age, Ray McQueen.
A man who used a trusted connection with her parents to groom the then vulnerable 16-year-old girl, become her confidante, kiss and tickle her in private moments, pay close attention to her at a funeral service after the sudden and unexpected death of his healthy pregnant 30-year-old wife Rosslyn and then, two days later, according to the evidence, tell the teenager he loved her.
A man who would ask this girl to move into his family home to be his de facto wife in a physical relationship; and be the carer of the two-year-old daughter he had with Rosslyn. Three weeks before toxicology tests showed his wife died from strychnine poisoning in the presence of her toddler, triggering a rush by homicide detectives to a rural community outside Victoria’s fourth-largest city, Bendigo.
We knew about these events because we had been fully immersed in all the statements and files from a murder investigation run by then Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Blackshaw of Melbourne’s Homicide Squad, who had already been interviewed by me. And we had further evidence gleaned by then coroner Geoffrey Hoare during the cross-examination of witnesses during an inquest in the old Eaglehawk Courthouse near the historic gold rush city.
What we knew came from the words on many pages generated 40 years ago. Those pages held insights, observations, allegations and agreed facts from a time close to when a murder occurred. But they can also be abstruse. Incomplete.
The silent words typed up for the case files and transcripts of evidence are a stepping stone to the reflections today of people such as Donna and the other witnesses we’ve been to see in this murder probe for our podcast series, The Poisoned Wife.
Karina and I stopped at a greasy spoon cafe off the highway for coffee, crumbed sausage and a pep talk.
“Many people, including those who have lived quiet lives for years, want to talk to journalists, even about cases like this,” I told her.
“It isn’t like what you see on A Current Affair with a reporter and camera guy chasing a dodgy neighbour or scamming tradie down the street.
“We’ll turn up, calmly introduce ourselves, and explain what we’re doing and why we’ve come.
“We won’t be recording or filming. We’ll speak quietly. We won’t push for anything. If Donna is home, if that address is even still hers, she’ll know soon enough if she wants to talk to us.”
As a lawyer for the Australian Government Solicitor and the Canberra Coroner’s office, Karina knew the modus operandi of official investigations. A subpoena was one mechanism. We didn’t have that luxury. She must have doubted my assurance that many people from unresolved cases like this really want to talk.
After a navigation fail (we’ll blame the car’s GPS), we drew up near a house in the suburbs. It was a cold winter’s afternoon. We knocked on the door. Softly, then firmly when nobody appeared.
A curtain shifted but nobody came. Later, we learned that one of Donna’s children had decided we were Bible sellers and best ignored. A third attempt got the attention of her husband, Kevin, and we told him what was going on.
Kevin asked us inside and we kept talking. He appeared to trust that our intentions were good. We wrote our contact mobile numbers down in the hope Donna might telephone when she got home. Kevin told us he was protective of his wife.
He knew something about the case, of course; they had been together many years. His protective demeanour seemed to me an indication that he would not be in favour of us returning to interview his wife, but we learned later that this was not true. Kevin believed it could be cathartic.
We drove away 15 minutes later. Not knowing how things might go, we hadn’t booked a return flight. Nor anywhere to stay. On a quiet road near Donna’s home, we speculated on the possibilities.
“He obviously knows a lot about the case and he told us that their children also know about this case. Whether Donna will talk to us, though. I don’t know. What do you think?” I asked Karina.
“I’ve got a feeling that she will,” she replied. “I’ve just got this sense that maybe she’s ready to tell her story. ‘She’ll want to at least hear us out and find out why we’re here and what this is all about. I’m hoping we might hear something by about five today.”
At that point, we agreed we would bide our time for several hours, then decide where to go and what to do next in this reinvestigation of Rosslyn McQueen’s murder.
“Yep. And also whether we go and knock on Ray McQueen’s door,” said Karina.
We recounted our meeting with Kevin. What he said and what we observed.
“They had How to Host a Murder, the game, sitting on their table, but then they had these other crime packs where you try to solve a crime,” Karina recalled.
We had made friendly small talk with Kevin about the family’s hobby interest, and I’d asked whether he could solve Ros McQueen’s murder. Kevin had said something like, “well, it seems pretty evident what happened”.
A cosy pub with a fireplace and mulled wine became a welcome pit stop to debrief further and ponder next steps. At two minutes before 5pm, Donna called. I recall her saying she was “pretty anxious, having heard that you’ve come here to talk to me about this”.
A phone call would be too impersonal. Could we drive over right away to talk to her off the record, answer all of her questions and hopefully allay her concerns?
“Yes, that would be good,” she answered.
On the drive, Karina and I recorded an impromptu back-and-forth.
“Out of the blue, two people turn up and ask to question her about a 40-year-old murder. Would you want to talk to us,” I asked the lawyer-turned-podcast producer and journalist.
“Yeah, I would. I wouldn’t commit to an interview at this stage … I would want to know what it was all about. And how my story might be told.”
We spent the next three hours at Donna and Kevin’s kitchen table, talking about the case, her teenage experiences, the grooming, Rosslyn and Ray McQueen, and a searching murder investigation in which Donna was for a while suspected as an accomplice.
By the end of it, Donna did want to break her silence. But not then. It had been emotional. We were all very tired.
We left the house about 8.30pm and checked into rooms in a nearby motel just before it had closed.
A little after 9am the next day, Donna started to talk. Her on-the-record disclosures over four hours were remarkable and poignant. She was sad and angry and resentful and filled with remorse.
Painfully and regrettably, she blamed herself for having believed as a vulnerable girl that she was “in love” with McQueen, a man twice her age.
“Why have you decided to talk to us?” I asked her.
Donna said she wanted to try to put things right. “You feel guilt, embarrassment, shame. But it’s not about us. It’s about her.
“I made a promise to Ros on her grave some years after that If I ever found out that he was in some way responsible, that I would try my hardest to make sure that he was brought to justice.”
There was a lot. We checked the equipment. Every megabyte recorded. Saved to the cloud.
As we drove away around 2pm, Karina observed we had obtained much more than just Donna’s words.
“She relaxed into it and turned a corner and then she just started to speak a lot more freely and her body language relaxed,” Karina said on the way to the airport for our hastily booked flight.
“She was a child. She’s really reflecting on her own actions and involvement, and she’s carried this terrible guilt; I mean, can you imagine?
Kevin was a rock for his wife.
“That’s the sort of husband you want, don’t you? Him saying, ‘I would support her no matter her decision’,’’ Karina said.
“And it’s quite emotional because she’s so emotional. He was very caring towards her. After all they’ve been through, they look like they have a really solid marriage.”
We have talked to Donna again since that interview. She doesn’t want to be filmed or photographed. We won’t use her current surname nor disclose where in Australia she lives. She told Karina that she’d done it a bit tough after the interview. But she had also got a lot off her chest. She had learned a lot more about the case. And she’d deal with the consequences. The Band-Aid was off now.
Do you know more? Contact the team at thepoisonedwife@theaustralian.com.au
Subscribers hear new episodes of The Poisoned Wife first. Listen at thepoisonedwife.com, in The Australian’s app or search for The Poisoned Wife on Apple Podcasts to connect your subscription.
Join the conversation and hear more from Hedley Thomas in The Poisoned Wife Podcast Official Discussion Group on Facebook
Read related topics:The Poisoned Wife Podcast
Hedley ThomasNational Chief Correspondent