The most valuable thing one person can steal from another is their life.

Every year in Australia there are around three hundred murders which the public can help police to solve – yet many homicides rarely rate a mention in the daily news.

It  is the  same with  missing people. Thirty-eight  thousand Australians vanish every year and, while most turn up, what about the others? As time goes by, their families feel as though their loved ones have been forgotten.

If Unsolved  Australia  has anything to  do  with  it, Australia’s murdered and missing will never be forgotten.

Unsolved Australia asks you to help solve some of this country’s most mysterious murders; track down missing people; and identify a John Doe.

The book is made possible because of the victims’ families who have graciously opened their hearts and homes to offer realistic and moving insights into the lives of their murdered or missing loved ones.

Then there are the heroes of the book: the incredible homicide detectives and cold case investigators, who reveal important clues for the first time. It has been a great privilege to interview these men and women, who are among the best major crime investiga- tors in Australia. They have generously entrusted me with crucial and sensitive information and, with their blessing, I can now pass this on to you.

As you read about these enthralling cases, you might find that you have the missing piece of the puzzle police need to solve a case. Then again, you might be a true crime reader who’s com- pelled by a baffling ‘whodunit’.

So come, let Unsolved Australia  take you  behind  the  scenes at homicide squads and cold case units where top investigators reveal chilling information and vital clues, and the families of the victims – who would do anything for answers – tell us what made their loved ones tick.

Unsolved  Australia  also features a few complex  cases which detectives have skilfully cracked so you can see the process up close. You will be amazed at the lengths they have gone to!

And to give you further insight into what goes on behind the scenes, I’ve compiled some fascinating profiles in which forensic scientists, a victims’ advocate, a defence lawyer, and a missing persons counsellor give us first-hand accounts of their remarkable work.

Like most takers-of-life, he doesn’t wear  a  horror  mask or a fright wig or carry a sign around  his  neck which  says ‘murderer’. He’s  probably just an ordinary-looking bloke, going about his business in an ordinary way.

‘She was a very trusting girl. Just a country girl. A bit naïve and not worldly. From all accounts she got on with everyone.’

What makes him different from other ordinary people, however, is this: he bashed a young woman senseless and dumped her – unconscious and gasping for air – by the side of the road on a freezing winter’s day.

His victim was a twenty-year-old country nanny called Penny Hill, who spent two weeks in hospital clinging to life but never woke up.

Penny was the epitome of innocence – a country girl who adored children, wore liberty print dresses, and would order a lemon squash if you bought her a drink.

She had been in the town of Coolah in central western New South Wales for only three days – not long enough to make any real enemies – when she was brutally attacked and left for dead.

The  likelihood is that whoever killed her was someone she knew, and chances are, he’s still out there.

Penny Hill was born to care for kids. Even as a six-year-old, the little daddy’s girl fussed over her newborn baby brother, Andrew, and claimed him as  her own. ‘She always used to  say  he was hers  and her father’s baby, “not  yours, Mum!”’ Penny’s  mother, Jeanette, laughs.

Growing up, Penny babysat children in the neighbourhood, and volunteered at occasional day care before studying to be a nanny at Tamworth TAFE. She was over the moon when she landed her first full-time job taking care of three young children in Coolah, two and a half hours drive from her hometown of Narrabri. It was to start as a one-week trial, but Penny was confident her love of children would impress her new bosses.

Penny’s  new employers  were Col and Barbara Baigent, who needed someone to look after their children while they ran the busy Black Stump Motel in Campbell Street, Coolah. Jeanette Hill remembers how it all began so uneventfully. ‘Penny went to Coolah on Friday, 5 July 1991. My husband had a flexiday from work, so we took her by car.We had a counter lunch at a hotel and met the people [Penny’s employers].Then we left to come home.’ Among the precious few belongings Penny took to her new

post was a distinctive 1953 penny, which her dad Felix had found in the garden and lovingly crafted into a brooch. She wore it everywhere, as it kept her much- loved dad close to her heart.

Penny  spent  her  first night  in  the Baigents’ house  before  transferring to otel Room  14 the next day. She was ot only excited to have a new job, but a ew place to live too.‘She was twenty and guess when you get to that age, it’s new,

A penny  for Penny:  Penny Hill’s dad crafted this coin into a brooch for his daughter.  How did it end up as part of a murder inquiry?

it’s exciting,’ Jeanette says. ‘I spoke to her on the phone on the Sunday night. She said she was happy and liked being there.’

That  Sunday, 7  July,  Penny  spent  time  with  the  Baigents’ children before playing darts and drinking lemon squash at the Coolah Valley Hotel, also known as the ‘top pub’. It was the same pub Penny had gone to with her parents two days earlier, and she felt comfortable there because her parents knew the owners. Even though Penny was neither a drinker nor a smoker, the top pub seemed like a good place to make new friends in town.

Between 9.00 and 9.30 that night, Penny’s  boyfriend, Shane Williams, a university employee who lived in Armidale, phoned the motel and asked to speak to her. The pair had been dating for about a month, after meeting at Joe Maguire’s Pub in Tamworth.

When Barbara Baigent went to Room  14 to tell Penny she was wanted on the phone, she noticed the door was ajar about three inches (seven and a half centimetres). Barbara thought  it was unwise but it was typical of Penny, who was so trusting she wouldn’t have perceived a risk.

Penny, who’d  been alone in her room, went to the motel’s office to take the call. A while later, another employee, Debbie Carley, overheard her saying, ‘Tell them where I am,’ and ‘Don’t be long.’ By that time Penny had been on the phone for some time so Debbie assumed she must have been speaking to someone else. The  telephone exchange would later be unable to  trace the call.

Penny then returned to her room. At the time, her hair was wet and she was wearing pink ugg boots, grey tracksuit pants and a red sloppy joe.

By ten o’clock, motel employees saw that the door to Penny’s room was closed and that the lights were off, so it’s most likely she’d turned in. But Penny Hill wouldn’t be having sweet dreams that night – someone would see to that.

At eight o’clock the next morning – Monday, 8 July – a local schoolteacher, Sue Brown, was driving along Cassilis Road, out of town. About two hundred metres from the Coolaburragundy River she saw a young woman slumped against a paddock gate, about twelve metres from the road. She urgently called for help on her UHF radio and waited with the gravely injured woman until it arrived.

Sue was  horrified to  see blood  smeared over the  woman’s enormous, swollen  face and blood clotted at her ears. She was foaming at the mouth and her breath was ragged. Unconscious, the woman was unable to tell Sue her name, let alone what had happened to her.

Sue also noticed that the comatose woman – who was wearing grey tracksuit pants, a red t-shirt, and a blue jumper –

was wearing ugg boots,  the   soles  of which were perfectly clean. She thought this was odd given that her  own  shoes were aked  in   mud   from he  short  walk  from er car. Had the young woman been dumped?  Sue also noticed the woman’s hands were clean and that there were fresh grass stains on her knees. There was also a small amount of blood at the scene and, grimly, the woman was clutching a plug from an electric jug cord in her left hand.

Ambulance officers rushed the battered woman to Coolah Hospital, where doctors examined the horrific injuries to her face: a broken nose and jaw, along with a fist-sized area of skin missing from her left cheek. They believed it was possible that there was cerebrospinal fluid leaking from her ears, which is not uncommon after massive head trauma. The only saving grace – if it could be called that – was that there was no sign of sexual assault.

The medical staff observed that the young woman’s  skin was not mottled and blue, as they would have expected had she spent the entire winter’s  night by the roadside. Her clothes were not damp either, which also suggested she hadn’t been outside as the frost had set in, but rather, that she had been dumped there at the last minute.

Local police immediately set about trying to identify the injured woman, as  neither they nor the hospital staff recognised her as being from the tiny town. By the time they canvassed the Black Stump Motel, Col Baigent told them the unidentified woman could be their nanny, as she was missing from her room and hadn’t turned up for work. At around 10.30, Col accompanied a police officer to the hospital, where he identified the almost lifeless figure as his nanny of just three days, Penny Hill. He returned to the motel, shaking.

When the police examined Penny’s motel room they dis- covered that the cord from the electric kettle was missing. They also discovered blood in the sink, but tests did not reveal whose. There was no sign of a struggle, however, and Penny’s single bed was unmade, as though she had been sleeping in it prior to all hell breaking loose.

Interestingly, Barbara Baigent told police that  on  the  night Penny was bashed she’d seen a dark-coloured sedan, possibly a Holden Commodore, driving slowly through the motel car park after midnight. At the time police were unable to identify the car or its driver. Was it someone scanning the numbers on the doors? Someone trying to find Penny Hill?

Just as mysterious  was that the distinctive brooch that Penny so loved turned up on the counter in the motel’s reception area after she was attacked.Who put it there? And was it a clue?

*

When Jeanette Hill found out her daughter was at death’s door, the normally stoic countrywoman fell to pieces.

‘I was at work as a cleaner about five miles out of town,’ she begins, with  trepidation. ‘A policeman came out  and my son, Andrew, was with him. He [the policeman] told me Penny had been found by the roadside and that she was unconscious. He said they’d taken her to the hospital and had tried to stabilise her. At one stage they didn’t know if she’d been hit by a car.’

Jeanette’s employer drove her to the village of Bellata, about fifty kilometres from Narrabri, so she could tell her husband, Felix.

‘My husband was driving a loader for the RTA [Roads and Traffic Authority],’  she says. ‘We  then  went  to  the  police station and seemed to be there forever. Then at about two o’clock we found out they’d taken her to John Hunter Hospital.’

Sick with worry, the Hill family packed their bags and drove to

John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, arriving at about ten that night.

‘It was horrific when we got there,’ Jeanette remembers. ‘She had what looked like carpet burn on the side of her face because all the skin was off one cheek. I don’t know if it was done with a punch . . .’ The Hills desperately hoped Penny would recover, but she was

a mess. ‘As hard as it is to say this, when I first saw her, in the back of my mind I thought, We’re  not going to be lucky,’ Jeanette  says. She was right.‘She never regained consciousness . . . she was never able to say anything.’

Penny Hill passed away on Sunday, 21 July 1991, almost two weeks after she was found unconscious by the roadside. She died from septicaemia (blood poisoning) as a result of bilateral pneu- monia following a massive brain injury.

It was no accident – someone had done this to her, and now it was a murder investigation.

At the start of a homicide investigation, detectives set up a time- line of the victim’s  movements and find out who crossed that timeline in the lead-up to the murder. In Penny’s case, they quickly established that she had been speaking on the telephone to her boyfriend before returning to her room, and there had been no suggestion she had plans to go anywhere other than bed that night.

‘She was effectively in her pyjamas and ugg boots, ready to settle in for the night,’ says Detective Chief Inspector John Lehmann from the New South Wales Police Unsolved Homicide Team.

Police spoke to almost everyone who was in town that night, but there were no witnesses to the attack. However one local who lived next door to the motel, Leeola Davis, told police she awoke to hear a woman begging, ‘Help me, please help me,’ in the early hours of Monday, 8 July, but was unable to locate the source of the chilling pleas. Only after news broke of Penny’s bashing was she sure she hadn’t been dreaming and figured she’d heard the young nanny’s cries for help.

Police suspected early on that whoever murdered Penny was most likely someone she knew, as there were no signs of forced entry to her motel room.‘So was the person responsible somebody she’d invited in or someone who had access to the room?’ John Lehmann asks. ‘Was it somebody that had some sort of grudge, or some reason to harm her? Was it a jealous boyfriend? Was it a person from the town?’ Police had to explore all these possibilities.

Around the time of Penny’s  bashing, the motel was  full, so police interviewed everyone who’d rented rooms there. ‘The local golf club was holding a tournament and PGA touring profession- als were staying there,’ John says, ‘and there was a report of a very violent incident in one of the rooms involving one of the golfers and his partner.’

The  alleged domestic dispute had taken place in Room  3. When the original police looked closely, however, they could see no reason why the golfer would attack Penny Hill – a stranger – whose room was at the other end of the motel. The investigators also spoke to all the other golfers who’d stayed at the motel, but there had been nothing suspicious about their movements.

An RTA road-marking crew had also been staying at the hotel, but on the night Penny was attacked, they were in the neighbour- ing township of Mendooran, leading police to conclude it was unlikely any of them would have had time to return to Coolah to commit the crime.

On the night of Penny’s bashing there had also been a party at the Coolah caravan park, about three hundred metres from the motel. Police interviewed everyone who’d attended, as well as all the guests at a twenty-first birthday party at the nearby top pub. All of their stories were corroborated.

Worryingly, at the time of the bashing, an inmate was on the loose from Goulburn’s maximum security jail. But after the police arrested him they ascertained that, while on the run, he’d driven up the Pacific Highway and not inland towards Coolah. So he couldn’t have killed Penny either.

Police spoke to all the staff at the Black Stump Motel, paying particular attention to the cook, Bob Lee, who, they found out, was wanted over an attempted armed robbery at Castle Hill in north-western Sydney. But three months later, in October, Bob Lee died in  a car accident, sparking rumours  that  he’d  killed himself over Penny’s  murder. The  second investigation by the Unsolved Homicide Team would dig deeper and two  coronial inquests would exculpate him.

The  original investigators  discovered that the motel’s  owner, Col Baigent, was something of a rock and roll legend, having been the original drummer with Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs in the mid-1960s and having worked on air for Sydney radio station 2KY. That Sunday night Bob had been spotlighting – using powerful lights to hunt  nocturnal animals – with his son and Bob Lee. They returned to the motel at about 10 pm, around which time Barbara Baigent asked her husband to settle down the disturbance in Room 3. ‘The evidence of his wife was that, after that, he came home, got into bed and went to sleep,’ John Lehmann says.

Detectives also spoke to those closest to Penny, including her boyfriend, Shane Williams (who, incidentally, is now a Salvation Army officer and married to  another  woman  named Penny). Shane told police that during his last phone call with Penny Hill, the pair chatted for about forty-five minutes and she said she was going back to bed. He said he attended a church group that night and had never been to Coolah, three and a half hours drive from Armidale. (Whilst Shane maintains he was in the Armidale area, he has more recently said he cannot remember his precise location or what he was doing that long ago.)

It was a challenging investigation and at the time there was no evidence to charge anyone who’d been in Coolah that night, or anyone Penny knew, with murder.

At an inquest in October 1992, Deputy State Coroner Derek Hand returned an open finding, unable to say who had inflicted the fatal blows. He did remark, however, that since Penny had been dressed in her usual cold weather bedclothes and was dumped only a short distance from the motel, ‘it leads to the inference that someone associated with the motel was involved in the assault and the subsequent death’.

Coroner Hand stated that, in his opinion, it had not been Bob Lee. He also stated, ‘. . . there are serious inconsistencies in what Mr Baigent has said occurred and various other matters  which does lead to suspicion that Mr Baigent knows more about this than he’s told us, but that’s as far as it goes.’

In 2008, seventeen years after Penny Hill’s murder, John Lehmann judged that the case was still highly solvable. He tasked Detective Sergeant Jason Darcy and his Western Region Unsolved Homicide Team with conducting further inquiries. And now, as  Unsolved Australia  goes to print, Jason  is closer than ever to cracking it.

‘We’ve  been working on Penny’s  case for six years nonstop,’ he says. ‘There have been constant leads and constant new lines of inquiries to follow up.’

Jason travelled to New Zealand to ask more questions of the pro-golfer who’d allegedly fought with his girlfriend at the motel, and further interrogated the life of Bob Lee.‘Lee was into guns and had done robberies in Sydney,’  Jason  says. ‘We  really delved into him and spoke to lots of associates. From all of the available infor- mation we’ve obtained, we’ve eliminated him. His four-wheel drive was seen parked at the caravan park where he was staying. He put himself on national television and talked about the death and assisted police with their inquiries from the outset. Significantly, two inquests failed to generate any incriminating evidence against him.

‘Had murder been on Bob Lee’s  mind,’ Jason  continues, ‘he would have had plenty of time and many secluded places in which to dump his victim, not just on the side of the road on the way out of town, in plain sight to all travelling on this road. There are forests all around Coolah. It’s obvious that, whoever did it, it was rushed.The cook, on the other hand, had plenty of time.’

Jason also ruled out rumours that Bob Lee had meant to kill himself in the fatal car accident.‘We looked into the motor vehicle accident and there was no connection.’

The Unsolved Homicide Team determined that the dark- coloured car that Barbara Baigent had seen crawling through the motel car park on the night Penny was bashed could be a signifi- cant lead. Barbara had thought the car was similar to a Commodore, but as experience told Jason, ‘a lot of people get their cars mixed up’. Particularly when it’s dark and so many of them look alike.

‘Often,’ Jason  says, ‘people just notice a car’s colour, and whether or not it is a sedan.’ He’s hoping someone reading this book will know more about the car and its mystery occupant.

In early 2012, as Jason’s investigation continued turning up fresh leads, new owners  at the Black Stump decided to renovate, and what they found in Penny’s old room – which had been turned into a storeroom – made everyone gasp.

They found a wooden compartment underneath Penny’s  old bed and, in it, a bizarre cache. ‘A used condom, a blue hacksaw blade, the butt of a shotgun, a toilet roll, some plastic gauze, and an insurance card for a company in the United Kingdom,’ Jason reveals.

As a result of the unanticipated find, police conducted a full forensic analysis of the room and its contents.

‘We dated the condom wrapper back to the period of Penny’s murder,’ Jason  says. ‘I spoke to the CEO  of that company and that sort of condom was mainly dispensed at community centres. We have canvassed a lot of the guests, but the DNA inside the condom has still not been identified.’

John Lehmann elab- orates, ‘We basically checked the DNA of all of the menfolk of the town  and  that  DNA remains unmatched to this day. The question now is, do any of the items  found  in  the room relate at all to  Penny’s  murder? It’s   interesting  that they’ve been hidden in this hidey hole.’

Naturally, Jason Darcy asked Col Baigent about the weird hoard, but he knew nothing about it.

‘The condom and the gun could have nothing to do with Penny’s murder, but it raised a doubt,’ Jason says. ‘We also got hair fibres from the gun which we sent to Texas for mitochondrial DNA testing. And at the time of Penny’s murder, there was also blood in the basin, which was unidentified. So, there’s  forensics there but at this stage it hasn’t progressed the investigation further.’

Police have other DNA as well, which might require advances in technology before it’s useful. ‘There were profiles on the ugg boots and on her clothes, but the samples are so weak,’ Jason says.

‘There’s trace DNA, and there’s nothing to say it’s not from people rendering Penny assistance. It’s the same in the motel room – you don’t know if it’s from a previous guest.’

‘A swab  test was done on the centre of the bedhead for a luminol reaction for blood,’ John Lehmann continues, ‘and there was blood. It tested positive.’The only problem is, there’s no indi- cation yet who the blood belonged to. ‘A luminol test might indicate blood but it mightn’t be good enough to identify whose blood it is.’

Not  satisfied with their extraordinary trawl of the room, the forensic investigators kept looking. ‘We removed the carpet,’ John says, ‘but it didn’t identify any [blood] stains from the underlay. We went under the building, but didn’t identify anything under there.We spent a couple of days there doing that.’

Jason says there have been theories that Penny was attacked at another location or in a vehicle, but without evidence he can’t be sure. The missing electrical cord does tell him one thing, though.

‘It means someone was in the room, obviously. Someone knew where Penny was and that cord had been taken out of the room.’ Whether the cord – which has never been found – was used

as a weapon in Penny’s  murder is something police are investi- gating, all these years later. ‘There were marks on her neck,’ Jason reveals. ‘Professor Jo Duflou [the chief forensic pathologist] from the Glebe Coroner’s  Court  has been doing some reanalysis and looking at possible strangulation.’

Not  surprisingly, Jason is leaning heavily towards the theory that whoever murdered Penny was someone she knew, a person she was comfortable letting in the door.‘She was still in her night- clothes so she wasn’t out to impress that person,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t like she was on the first date.’

There’s another possibility, too, given Penny’s relaxed, country girl’s  attitude  towards security. ‘The  door  mightn’t have been locked, so someone might have walked straight in,’ John explains.

But who?

In 2012, the second inquest into the murder of Penny Hill was like a whodunit with allegations about who murdered her and the goings-on in Coolah flying around the courtroom. ‘You’ve got no idea what was going on in the town that night,’ Jason says.

‘There were professional golfers, there was a tennis competition, there was a football match, there were RTA  workers. The town was swollen.’

The woman who was allegedly attacked by her pro-golfer boy- friend told the inquest that she’d called out for help that night, which might explain the distressing cries Leeola Davis had heard. But not necessarily, as Leeola heard the cries for help in the early hours  of the  morning, yet the  golfer’s  girlfriend was  allegedly attacked earlier, around 10 pm. Could there have been two separate incidents in which women were calling for help? It must have been a bad moon that night.

In  court,  Barbara Baigent said she’d  always thought  what happened to Penny was an accident.‘I always thought it was a single blow to the head, something done in anger,’ she told the court.

With her (now ex) husband one of those in the spotlight in court, Barbara gave evidence that she’d never known him to be

‘violent outside a marriage’. She said, however, that she’d experi- enced ‘a certain amount of abuse’ during her twenty-three-year marriage to Col Baigent and that on one occasion he had punched her in the head and burst an eardrum. She blamed herself, however, saying  she had ‘triggered’ his outbursts. ‘There’s  no  excuse for violence in a marriage,’ Deputy State Coroner Sharon Freund told her from the bench.

The coroner also said to Barbara Baigent:, ‘The evidence you have given so far can only lead to one conclusion . . . Mr Baigent’s propensity of violence to individuals, known individuals, young adults, is highly relevant to this inquest.’

How  Penny Hill sustained the  horrendous injuries that led to her early death, however, the coroner was unable to say, and she handed down an open finding, referring the matter back to the Unsolved Homicide Team for further investigation.

Even though several ‘persons of interest’ had been identified in the Penny Hill murder case, Jason Darcy’s investigation  has found another. Recently, he has been putting the man’s past under the spotlight, and he doesn’t like what he sees.

Jason is confident that the law will eventually catch up with whoever murdered Penny Hill, and it won’t be a moment too soon for her still grieving family. ‘They’ve been waiting so long for answers  and there’s  a person out there who can give them those answers,’ Jason says.‘They’re out there walking this earth and you just think, have a conscience, give this family closure.’

Jeanette Hill also remains acutely aware that whoever stole her daughter’s life is still out there, and wants to know who it is before she gets any older.‘You just take each day at a time and always hope that, somewhere, someone will spill their guts and we find out.’

Jason Darcy, meanwhile, has these words of warning for the killer: ‘We  are not  going away. You hear people say  every day, “Just ignore them they will go away.” But we won’t.

‘Suspects are always going to get a knock on the door and will have a reason to look over their shoulder.’

There  is a $100,000 reward for information  leading to the conviction of those responsible for the murder of Penny  Hill.