Blood On The Tracks 04 | Whitewash

This is an ABC podcast.

If you're an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person, we want you to know that this series contains the name of someone who has died.

Today's a big day for me.

I'm on my way to meet one of the few eyewitnesses that actually saw Mark's body on the tracks the morning he was found.

And at the inquest into Mark Haynes' death in 1988, this man's evidence was crucial

we've heard about him in previous episodes his name is Glenn Bryant and back then he was the assistant station master at West Tamworth

hi Glenn how are you hi Alan how are you good I found you you did find me yes nice to meet you it's one way out

yes come on and take my shoes I'm Alan Clark and this is Unravel

our season one story is Blood on the Tracks, an investigation into the death of Aboriginal teen Mark Haynes.

And if this is your first time listening, I recommend going back and starting at episode 1.

Nine months after Mark died, a public hearing was held to explore the cause and circumstances of his death.

In this episode, we'll unpack that inquest through the eyes of an unlikely ally that Mark's family found at the local Tamworth courthouse.

I want to speak to Glenn about what he saw that morning and what he said in court.

It's taken him years to agree to speak publicly.

Glenn Bryant is 67 years old, clean-shaven with the voice of a Packaday smoker.

But he doesn't smoke.

He actually quit close to 30 years ago.

He's a no-nonsense bloke with calloused hands from decades of handling metal and steel.

The view from Glenn's lounge room is of endless green pastures full of dairy cows.

And after a lifetime on the railways, he's built his dream home.

Started working the railway in 1966 as a toilet cleaner and finished up in 2006 down in Sydney as a senior manager in Railcorp.

Back in 1988, Glenn Bryant just happened to be on duty the morning Mark's body was found on tracks 7ks out of town.

What Glenn saw has never really sat well with him.

Not then, not now.

I just

wondered how he died.

And I sort of fell for his family because the family's got no closure on it.

And that's probably one of the reasons why I'm doing an interview now is for the family to try and get some closure.

At the inquest into Mark's death, Glenn was determined to make sure his observations were on the record.

He was the only person to give evidence twice that suggested Mark wasn't alone out there on the tracks.

It was just never right.

This didn't appear to be right and it's been something that has stuck in my head for many years.

It's day one of the inquest, October 19, 1988.

With the witnesses assembled and the courtroom full, the coroner takes the bench.

All right.

Mark's parents and uncles are packed inside.

This inquest may never have happened if the family hadn't pushed for it.

I was hopeful

that it would

enlighten us, give us some plausible explanation or someone may give some evidence there that would give us a better understanding

of the events that either led up to Mark's death or what happened to him.

There was no recording made of the inquest so we're going to reconstruct some of the important moments in that courtroom.

There are three major things that point to something sinister happening on the tracks that night.

The towel under Mark's head, the injuries to his head, and the lack of blood at the scene.

But even before the inquest gets to these three things, the family start having doubts about the behaviour of police.

The first police officer to answer questions under oath is the one responsible for gathering evidence and protecting the scene from contamination.

You say that you found a black comb and a pink cigarette lighter on the deceased.

That's correct.

All the items were found in his pockets, in his front pockets.

Duck can't believe what he's hearing.

I leaned over to our solicitor and I said to him,

I gave them that cigarette lighter.

I came into the police station.

The family solicitor asks the constable again.

And he admits that he never took the evidence found on Mark's body into the station in the first place.

Obviously from what's happened is we've taken the property from the body or from or from the railway line across to the car, the police car.

Now it's possible that that dropped out and that's how they found the cigarette lighter.

But Duck's outraged.

After all, he was the one who found that evidence at the scene and handed it in.

And now a cop under oath is saying he found it and possibly lost it.

But if you hadn't spoken up.

It would have been whitewashed again.

That's what we call whitewash.

Not just in Mark's case, but in all mysterious Aboriginal deaths.

This is the first shock of many for the family at the inquest.

When the coroner turns his attention to the crashed Tirana found one and a half K's from Mark's body, the police admit they didn't fingerprint it.

They didn't even bother to open the boot.

I am shocked by that because if it was a non-Aboriginal person, every attempt to secure

that area and the evidence surrounding it would have been paramount.

But it was not, as I would suspect, because the boy was Aboriginal.

There was no attempt by him to even look in there.

There might have been another dead body in there.

They didn't even bother looking.

Duck suspicious about why police investigating Mark's death came to such a quick conclusion.

They found the boy, an Aboriginal boy, dead about one and a half kilometers thereabouts from that motor vehicle, and there were stolen goods strewn around his body.

So they added it up: Aboriginal boy, stolen goods.

That's the end of the matter.

As the inquest rolls on, it becomes clear to the family that police are still pushing forward the possibility that Mark was out there on the tracks alone.

So, the theory is that Mark was drunk, stole a car, went for a joyride, crashed it.

Then he's taken an armful of presents from the boot and walked a K and a half down the railway tracks.

Next, he's supposed to have laid down and put a towel under his own head so that it's high enough to be smashed by the front of an oncoming freight train.

As the police take the stand one by one, Glenn Bryant, the assistant stationmaster, is listening and growing increasingly agitated.

Well the inquest was again, I felt it was they just wanted to get it over and done with and appease the family and say thank you very much.

The train killed him.

As the first man on the scene, Glenn didn't like the police attitude right from the start.

I don't think the police did a very good investigation back in 1988 into it.

I feel that they just wanted to get home and I think they just wanted to put it down to suicide and that was fine.

He was convinced they were ignoring things they couldn't explain, like the scrunched-up white towel that was mysteriously tucked under Mark's head.

The towel was just a white towel.

It was probably just the size of a normal bath towel, as in a beach towel, and placed under his head, which sort of jacked his head up.

At the inquest, Glenn told the court what he'd seen.

To him, there was no way Mark could have put that towel there himself.

I thought it was just very unusual, very strange that the person would then be on the track with a towel under his head.

Glenn wasn't the only one who had a problem with the towel.

When Constable Gaia was on the stand, the coroner himself pushed for an explanation.

When you arrived at the scene and saw the body, you gave evidence there was a towel under the deceased's head?

That's correct.

Did you take any particular note how the towel was folded or, you know, placed?

As far as I can recall, it was just sort of jumbled and under his head.

It wasn't folded

to any extent.

Were you able to form any opinion as to how or where did another person place it there or was it placed or or just happened to fall that way?

Sir, I'm unable to say because it was one thing that stumped me, if not other people that were there, how the towel did get under his head.

Did you assume that another person had been at the scene prior to yourself?

Would it give the appearance that some person had placed the towel under the head of an injured person?

It would give that appearance, yes.

There are very few believable explanations for how that towel got under Mark's head.

Either he'd placed it there himself as a kind of pillow, or he landed on it when his body was hit by the train, or someone else put it there.

Whatever the case, any chance to test it for blood, DNA, or any other clues is gone.

Because guess what?

The police actually lost the towel.

I've read this part of the inquest transcript more times than I can count.

Here's the exchange between the coroner and lawyer for the police, Sergeant Garland.

Sergeant, do we have knowledge of what happened to the towel?

No, unfortunately.

I think I'm not sure whether it came out in evidence on the last occasion, but I think it may have been with the ambulance officer.

I understand it was conveyed on the stretcher with him to the morgue.

That's as far as we've tracked it.

Unfortunately, the significance of it wasn't, it was not apparent at the particular time, and one can only assume what has happened to it, Your Worship.

So now you can add the towel, along with the comb and the lighter, to the list of evidence lost by the Tamworth police.

Anyway you look at it, it was a gruesome scene out there on the tracks.

The top of Mark's head was smashed in.

A piece of his skull had been partially sliced off.

He had deep cuts on his left shoulder, his elbow, his hand, his wrists and his thigh.

Mark's cousin Leah couldn't stomach looking at the photographs of Mark's body that were shown at the inquest.

You remember seeing

crime scene photographs of Mark?

Yeah, I just, when they passed them around, I just had to turn away because I didn't see the whole photographs.

All I could just see was red.

And that was, I just had to look away.

The autopsy report says Mark had an extensive laceration due to the shearing off of the front of his skull.

So the red Lear is referring to was Mark's exposed brain.

It was a massive head injury probably from the temple across to the other side temple and it was fairly just on the hairline and it was like a crushed eggshell, the way of putting it.

But for Glenn Bryant there was something missing.

Normally most injuries I've been to where people have been killed by trains.

There's always hair and blood samples and flesh,

bits of skull that'll be stretched over the track from when the train hit it.

That wasn't the only problem.

The injuries on Mark's head didn't match up with the direction the train was traveling.

But there was a complicated scenario offered up at the inquest to explain all of this.

I'm going to go through this scenario in detail.

But before I do, I've got to tell you something important.

There wasn't just one train involved that morning.

there were two.

Around 35 minutes before the train that ran over Mark's body, another train passed over the same rails heading in the opposite direction.

The driver saw a white box on the rails ahead of him.

When the train hit it, it made a really solid sound.

A train worker later compared it to the sound it makes when a train runs into a sheep on the tracks.

The driver didn't think much of it until later, when he switched trains, headed back out of Tamworth and in the same place saw a body lying on the tracks in front of him.

At the inquest, forensic pathologist Dr.

Thomas Oatley said Mark was killed by the first train, not the second one.

This explains why the injury didn't match the direction of the second train, and it also means that the white box was either on top of Mark's body or he was behind it.

Dr.

Oatley believes that Mark's body was shifted by the impact of the train.

After the initial contact with the body, the body moved, as one would expect with an impact with such weight at such speed.

In fact, Dr.

Oatley said that Mark's body tumbled under the the train and turned a full 180 degrees.

But what he struggled to explain was how Mark's head ended up perfectly positioned on top of a towel after his body had tumbled.

And there was still the issue of why there was no blood around.

The family's lawyer was unimpressed.

If a body tumbled, as you say it may well have done, you would expect it to be bleeding profusely from the head, would you not?

Yes.

Indeed, you'd expect that there would be blood all around the railway track.

Yes.

And if you were to understand that the only blood discerned by anybody was a small amount of blood on one of the nearby sleepers in a diameter of a 50 cent coin, does that give you cause to question your theory that he may well have tumbled?

No.

Can you explain that, Doctor?

Because of the rain, that was said to be very heavy at the time.

Would not the rain, doctor, have washed away any blood?

Why?

It could have washed away some of the blood, but not all of the blood.

So, Mark supposedly steals a car, lies down on the tracks.

He gets hit by a train and tumbles, but his head lands perfectly on a towel.

The rain washes away some of the blood, but not all of the blood.

And then a second train goes over him without moving his body.

If you're confused, you're not alone.

It's a pretty complicated way of trying to explain a very mysterious set of circumstances.

I head out to the tracks and try to make sense of it all.

So I'm standing on the exact spot where Mark's body was found and I've come back out here because I'm trying to work out, figure out this strange scenario that was presented at Mark's inquest.

At the inquest the forensic pathologist said that Mark was supposed to have been lying right here between the train tracks with his feet facing away from Tamworth.

Then when the train hits him and the carriages are still passing over him, somehow Mark is meant to have flipped or turned 180 degrees under the moving train.

His body is then meant to have stretched back out with his feet facing in the opposite direction.

And somehow his head is meant to have magically landed on a towel.

It's completely, it's such a strange strange scenario.

It's one I've struggled with for a very long time.

I mean, it just sounds ridiculous to me.

And it sounded just as ridiculous to Glenn Bryant.

So much so that he asked to come back to the coroner's court a second time and set the record straight.

Keep in mind, in 1988, he's a country railway worker.

up against a medical expert from Sydney.

He tells the court that Dr.

Oatley's version of events doesn't make sense, that there's no way Mark's body could have tumbled under the train.

This doctor said that the body did turn under the train and I just maintained that it couldn't without severing arms and legs and crushing the body.

And he says the rain couldn't have washed away the blood from those serious injuries.

And it had not been raining heavy enough to wash it away.

But instead of pursuing what Glenn was saying, the police lawyer grills Glenn on why he took so much notice of things at the scene.

They did say to me that I took more notice of the scene than what the police did.

And they wanted to know why I took so much notice of the scene.

And I just said that I was just observant.

In the 40 years Glenn Bryant spent working on the tracks, he's seen dozens of bodies hit by trains.

This grim experience has only reinforced his original conclusion that someone put Mark's body on the tracks.

Well I don't think that Mark got there the tracks were anyway, so I feel that he was put there by someone

whilst

he was dead to try and make it look like he had committed suicide.

For the family, hearing Glenn Bryant's rejection of the police theory was a sweet vindication.

So, if it wasn't suicide by train, how did Mark get out there and get these injuries?

And are there any more clues in the autopsy that could explain what happened to him?

We decided to bring in our own expert, Professor Johan DeFlew.

I must say it was an interesting case.

There were discordant aspects, for example, where was the blood?

What was the rolled-up towel doing there, etc., etc.

Professor DeFlew actually worked under Dr.

Oatley, who has since passed away.

Now DeFlew is a highly respected forensic pathologist in his own right.

He's done hundreds of post-mortems during his career and he agreed to look over Dr.

Oatley's autopsy to see if anything might have been missed.

The injuries were described and they were described in a fair amount of detail but I don't think the significance of some of the aspects was fully understood.

There was one injury in the autopsy report that really piqued DeFlew's interest, something called a subdural hematoma.

And if you're hit and killed by a train, it's very unlikely you'd get this injury.

Now, they don't develop within seconds.

They take time to develop.

They can take many hours to develop.

And when you look at it from that perspective, you realise, well, could that subdural hematoma have developed as a result of some other event?

A subdural hematoma is a type of head injury where blood pools or builds up on the brain.

The longer it's left untreated, the bigger it gets, before it kills you.

Mark had a big hematoma, and Professor DeFlew says it can take hours for a hematoma of this size to develop.

But this injury is never spoken about at the inquest, not by the police, and not by Dr.

Oatley.

I think that I am as confident as I can be that the subdural hemorrhage predated

the

railway events.

And if that's the case, it must have happened somewhere else.

That also explains the lack of blood at the scene if Mark had bled out somewhere else as a result of some other injury.

DeFlew says a subdural hematoma is basically caused by a blunt object hitting your head.

So it could be caused by an assault or it could be caused by hitting your head in a car accident.

And reasonably, I think a car crash is a typical example of where you can get that constellation of injuries to the head.

Professor DeFlew says it looks like his former boss, Dr.

Oatley, overlooked crucial medical evidence.

I think one of the major problems is that, again, it's a human failing that I have as well.

You become fixated on a theory.

And before you know it, you stick to that theory despite the evidence.

I'm sure it's happened to me.

I know it's happened to me.

It happens to everybody, to all expert witnesses, and that's a danger.

So, if you accept DeFlex's analysis, factoring in the big bleed on Mark's brain that most likely began well before he was found dead, all of a sudden we're a long way from the police theory about misadventure on the tracks.

The night Mark died, a white Tirana is hooning around the back streets of Tamworth.

It's just after 3am and an Aboriginal woman called Julie Munro is on her way home in a cab after a night out.

There was a white Tirana sedan.

coming up the street on our left.

It was going pretty fast.

Given the white Tirana found near Mark's body, these revelations at the inquest about a speeding Tirana full of teens should ring alarm bells.

In a statement tended to the court, Julie Munro describes what she saw.

As it was in the headlights of our cab, I could see there were two males in the front seat and a few males in the back seat.

I think the driver of the car had black straight hair, with a slight moustache.

And the passenger in the front seat had blonde hair, curly.

They all looked to be young fellows to me.

And the street where Julie sees all this is the very same street where Mark's girlfriend Tanya says goodbye to him that night.

Tanya tells the inquest that all is quiet on the street when she says goodbye to Mark around 20 minutes later at 3.30 a.m.

And she says she was home by 3.37 a.m.

Just before 3.40am, Julie Monroe tells the police she hears something else.

I then heard voices and I heard a voice sing out Mark.

The car then drove off and I didn't hear any more voices.

The voices I heard were male and female, but the one that yelled out Mark was a female.

I got out of bed straight after that and had a drink of milk.

It was 3.40am.

Now, we have no way of knowing who this female voice belonged to.

And it's worth noting that Julie Munro knew Mark's family.

So her evidence about hearing his name was strongly questioned at the inquest.

But Julie wasn't the only person to hear yelling on the street that night or a car zooming off around 3.40am.

Remember Marie, who we heard from in episode one?

Next minute I heard this car come flat out up Churchill Street and I didn't think it would make the corner.

It almost hit the house.

Marie also told the inquest that she heard a car race up that street around the same time.

We don't know if Mark was in this car or if it's the same Tirana that ends up wrecked near Mark's body, but the timeline matches up.

What we do know is that Mark couldn't drive.

So, if he was in that car, he was there with at least one other person.

And that connection was never explored in the inquest.

The inquest wrapped up and the coroner delivered an open finding the following year, which means there was still a question mark over what or who killed Mark.

Mark's family left feeling some satisfaction that the police theory that Mark did this to himself was publicly discredited.

But it was a small victory.

At the end of it all, they were no closer to solving the mystery of Mark's death.

I wouldn't call it an inquest.

It never came across the answers we wanted.

You know, we wanted the truth and we wanted the right answers.

It just never came across the way I

heard and seen.

Yeah, it just was an inquest to me.

Mark's family had come with high hopes, but left feeling like they were locked out of a system that was meant to help them.

Ah,

it was a sham.

It was only there for show, you know, to show that they went through the

procedures or whatever.

Like every other Aboriginal deaths and all that, there just all gets swept under the carpet.

So many things have gone missing in this case.

After a lot of digging, I eventually discovered that even the transcript of the inquest is incomplete.

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of pages that have just disappeared.

and the New South Wales Attorney General's Department says it has no record of them.

After months of speaking with the department, they did find one extra page, and it's a crucial part of the transcript.

It's the page where the coroner delivers his findings, the conclusion to the whole inquest.

And it's a page the family have never seen.

So we put in a request duck for

those findings and have been very difficult to get.

Although they did send us a very small section of it.

It just had about one sentence on it.

So

I'll read to you what it says.

This is from the coroner.

It says that Mark may have placed himself on the tracks or, and this is directly from it, was placed there by...

another unknown person or persons.

So he's saying that I never heard that.

Before.

So basically the coroner says that Mark may have placed himself on there or was placed there by another unknown person or persons.

Well that now

gives us something

to say that something untoward has happened to Mark.

So if the coroner was willing to accept the possibility that there were other people involved, who were they?

In the next episode of Unravel, we start to find out when a woman comes forward with crucial new information.

He couldn't even kill a rat, but I think he was involved.

I met with her last night and she just said, I want to talk.

Mark Haynes was in the boot of a car.

I said, I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job.

I'm just trying to find out if you've done anything.

Put your finger around, Attorney General, State Government.