David Cunningham’s sister was murdered while hitchhiking in Queensland. Over 50 years on, he wants a commission of inquiry into the case.<\/p>\n
He gave evidence that he returned to Mount Isa on October 11, 1978 after a motorcycle trip from Alice Springs.<\/p>\n
But counsel assisting the coroner John Aberdeen claimed this did not line up with multiple witness statements that placed Mr Preston back in Mount Isa around October 4 or 5.<\/p>\n
Mr Aberdeen asked Mr Preston if he deliberately tried to move the date of his arrival in Mount Isa to be after the deaths \u2014 which Mr Preston denied.<\/p>\n
He told the court he he could not recall the exact dates of his travel.<\/p>\n
“I spent 11 months incarcerated in an isolation cell, and I’ve spent the last few years doing nothing else but think about this case,” Mr Preston told the inquest.<\/p>\n
“Trying to recollect, recall things that have happened. I’ve done nothing but spend my time thinking \u2013 it’s been the only thing on my mind.”<\/p>\n
Coroner David O’Connell granted Mr Preston indemnity, meaning anything that he said during the inquest would not be used against him in another court.<\/p>\n
But he warned Mr Preston he could be charged with perjury if he was found to be lying.<\/p>\n
“I think you need to have a very good think about your evidence overnight, come back in the morning and answer things with a lot more conviction as to what is truthful,” Coroner O’Connell told the court.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A 1977 BMW motorcycle belonging to Tim Thomson who was found shot dead north of Mount Isa in 1978. (Supplied: Queensland Police)<\/p>\n
Others give evidence<\/p>\n
Earlier on Tuesday, the court heard evidence that Mr Preston’s now-deceased father, Arthur Preston, confided in a friend in 1978 about the murders.<\/p>\n
During a line of questioning to Bruce Preston’s older brother, Ian Preston, Mr Aberdeen put it to him that his father Arthur had said (in reference to Bruce): “The little bastard done it. But he’s a tough little bastard. They can’t break him.”<\/p>\n
Mr Aberdeen also asked Ian Preston if his father instructed him to tell police that his brother Bruce called him from Adelaide to say that he bought a red BMW bike that he was having transported to Mount Isa in 1978.<\/p>\n
“The sequence of events is very cloudy to me. I did go to police \u2026 I don’t recall having a conversation with my father with him directing me to.”<\/p>\n
Merril Anderson, a neighbour of the Preston family in 1978, told the court she recalled seeing the red BMW motorbike in the Preston’s shed during the police investigation into the suspicious deaths.<\/p>\n
She recalled Arthur Preston offering to help authorities search a nearby lake for evidence and said she had thought he could have been running “interference” in the investigation.<\/p>\n
“I thought it was strange that a man who knew motorbikes didn’t say he had one in his shed,” she told the court.<\/p>\n
The inquest continues on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man once accused of being behind a triple homicide cold case in rural Queensland has been urged…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":284179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[153651,4740,10934,5624,42127,146487,4221,37165,17365,146485,146482,50,4797,4798,146486,5268],"class_list":{"0":"post-302490","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-153651","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-brisbane","11":"tag-cold-case","12":"tag-dead","13":"tag-gordon-twaddle","14":"tag-homicide","15":"tag-inquest","16":"tag-inquiry","17":"tag-karen-edwards","18":"tag-mount-isa","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-qld","21":"tag-queensland","22":"tag-timothy-thomson","23":"tag-tourists"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115372281744199709","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}