05 Blood On The Tracks | The Driver

Speaker 1 When the police raided the Stonewall Inn back in 1969, they had no idea that it would eventually lead to the birth of gay pride.

Speaker 2 We started standing up for ourselves. We stood tall and said, This is who we are, and you're going to accept us.

Speaker 1 I'm Mark Finnell, and I am the host of the ABC Radio National podcast, No One Saw It Coming.

Speaker 1 Each week, we unravel a moment in history that changed the course of the world, but well, no one saw it coming. To hear it, search for No One Saw It Coming on the ABC Listen app.

Speaker 4 This is an ABC podcast.

Speaker 5 Just a note before we start, this case is currently being looked at by the New South Wales Coroner. After this podcast was first released in 2017, the coroner agreed to launch a fresh inquest.

Speaker 5 Keep listening to the end of this series to find out about the new information that's recently been revealed in the inquest hearings.

Speaker 5 This season of Unravel is intended to be listened to as a whole.

Speaker 5 If you haven't heard all the episodes, you shouldn't draw any conclusions because you haven't heard all the sides of the story.

Speaker 5 And a warning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This series contains the names of people who have died.

Speaker 5 Now back to our story where we're currently exploring what happened at the first inquest way back in 1989.

Speaker 5 The inquest into Mark Haynes' death unearthed a lot of suspicious evidence, but it didn't answer the central questions in this case.

Speaker 5 What happened to Mark Haynes after he left the nightclub with his mates? And how did he end up dead on the railway tracks in the early hours of the morning?

Speaker 5 The case went cold for over two decades and those questions were left hanging.

Speaker 5 Then I met Faye.

Speaker 6 He couldn't even kill a rat, but I think he was involved.

Speaker 5 I'm Alan Clark, and this is Unravel Blood on the Tracks: an investigation into the death of Aboriginal teenager Mark Haynes.

Speaker 5 In this episode, fresh evidence that Mark wasn't alone at the tracks that night.

Speaker 5 After Mark's inquest returned an open finding, his family were pretty much forgotten about. The police stopped calling and all the unanswered questions ate away at his family.

Speaker 7 We couldn't pick ourselves up from this, so I was just blaming myself.

Speaker 5 The DIY investigating by the uncles had failed to find any solid answers. They'd stepped on a lot of toes.
Uncle Jack remembers fearing for his family.

Speaker 8 People used to drive around, coming down our street, you know, park there.

Speaker 9 They was looking for duck.

Speaker 8 We had to sit in the dark while duck was sitting out the front with a gun.

Speaker 5 It became too much for Jack and his family, and they moved away from Tamworth. Yeah, that's it.

Speaker 8 I don't know if I'm paranoid or not, but

Speaker 8 you make your family get your family close to you. What's happened to Mark might happen to us.

Speaker 5 The two people who who felt the loss of Mark's life the most were Mark's parents, Josie and Ron Haynes Sr.

Speaker 5 You haven't heard from them because they passed away years ago.

Speaker 8 His mother died of a broken heart. She died young, I think, age of 47.

Speaker 8 She took it to her grave. Ron, he was quiet all that time, a broken heart too.

Speaker 10 I know they'll try to, you know, to be there for me and Ron, but they just weren't the same after Mark passed away. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Lorna and Ron Haynes Jr. are Mark's younger brother and sister.
He just drank and drank and drank, Dandy. Yeah.

Speaker 12 After Mark passed away, he used to drink before that, but he just drank more and more.

Speaker 12 I tried to save him.

Speaker 5 But you could have never known any of that would have happened, you know. It's not your fault.

Speaker 5 You're a co-care. bird.

Speaker 5 The family never gave up. Five, ten, twenty years after Mark died, they were still searching for answers.

Speaker 5 On the 25th anniversary of his death, Duck was still appealing to the public to come forward with information. And that's when I covered the story for the first time.

Speaker 13 The unsolved death of 17-year-old Mark Haynes in Tamworth in 1988 left a devastated family seeking answers. Alan Clark investigates.

Speaker 5 Tamworth police have told Living Black that Mark's case has been suspended with no action. After that first visit to see Mark's family, the story never let me go.

Speaker 5 I became convinced, like Duck, that this was a major injustice. The paperwork piled up in my living room.
I took the case with me from job to job, convincing editors to let me tell Mark's story.

Speaker 5 And then I got my first big lead.

Speaker 5 Remember back in episode one, I found out that Mark was seen with a guy called Terry Souter on the night he died.

Speaker 5 When you saw him on the steps, who was he with?

Speaker 3 Terry Souter, yeah.

Speaker 5 And you're pretty sure he was with Terry Souter.

Speaker 3 Terry was sitting to the right of Mark, I still remember that.

Speaker 5 The big lead was this. Terry Souter's mum called me.
She'd seen my reporting and she said she had something to tell me about her son.

Speaker 5 We're going to meet Faye Suda. I met with her last night and she was like, she just said, I want to talk.
She wants to help Duck and his family get justice. So this is...
a big lead.

Speaker 5 So I'm very keen to get Faye, Terry's mum, and talk to her about what she knows.

Speaker 5 I sit down with Faye at her house in West Tamworth.

Speaker 5 I can tell she's nervous about speaking to me. She's got short brown hair and a round welcoming face.

Speaker 5 She speaks about her son with a raw kind of warmth.

Speaker 6 Gentle,

Speaker 6 fun-loving, do anything for anybody.

Speaker 5 But after a while she steals herself. as if she's about to tell me something important.

Speaker 6 Well, I think Terry was with all these

Speaker 5 people

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 5 he

Speaker 6 was the driver of the car

Speaker 6 that maneuvered everybody to and from the dumping of Mark Haines's body. From what we gather and what we've heard is that Terry did not know Mark Haines was in the boot of a car

Speaker 6 and taken out to the World silos, put on the railway track.

Speaker 5 It's a surprise to hear Faye say that her own son was involved. She slowly cobbled together this story from what other people have told her.

Speaker 5 But this isn't just rumour, she says, because some of this information comes from someone close to her. Someone she trusts.
a relative.

Speaker 5 This relative told Faye that he wants to remain anonymous. He didn't see how Mark died and he didn't see Mark in the boot of Terry's car, but he did see Mark's body.

Speaker 5 Early on the morning of Mark's death, this relative, who was just a 14-year-old boy at the time, says he was woken up by Terry.

Speaker 5 The boy notices that Terry seems scared or agitated, like something terrible has happened. But Terry's not saying much.
He just tells his relative to get up and takes him out to the tracks.

Speaker 5 Despite the humid night, Terry has his favorite red jacket with him.

Speaker 5 There's a bit of drizzle around as they get to the tracks.

Speaker 5 Terry tells the relative to keep his distance.

Speaker 6 Terry wouldn't allow him to go

Speaker 6 close, and he was so worried about his safety.

Speaker 5 The young relative hangs back and watches Terry walk up the gravel incline.

Speaker 5 Terry's shadow is moving around a figure lying on the tracks.

Speaker 5 Terry takes his favourite red jacket and does something strange.

Speaker 6 Terry had

Speaker 6 folded it and put it under Mark's head on the railway track.

Speaker 5 And that's all the relative saw.

Speaker 5 The boy was just left with this haunting memory of watching from a distance as Terry moved around a body on the tracks.

Speaker 5 I think I'm standing around about where... that boy was standing and

Speaker 5 if you're out here at night and they would have been out here at night night right now it is really really dark but you can still make out the train tracks and next to me is a highway so lots of cars coming through and that's lighting up bits of track so so yeah this boy looked down and saw Terry

Speaker 5 sort of crouched over doing something to this body's head and I think that body was Mark Haynes and he says that Terry put a red jacket on Mark's head and the police never found a red jacket at all.

Speaker 5 So I'm just wondering whether or not what he saw was actually a towel.

Speaker 5 But if Mark and Terry were friends, it just makes me wonder

Speaker 5 what was going through Terry's mind.

Speaker 5 Why come back out here?

Speaker 5 I mean, and certainly when you...

Speaker 5 When you hear what the boy said, which is it looked like Terry was comforting Mark, you can't help but think that he came back out here to either see if Mark was still alive and maybe help him or put a towel under his head to make people realise that Mark didn't come out here alone.

Speaker 5 And we'll never really know what happened out here that night. We can't ask Terry because six months after Mark died, Terry was found dead in his bedroom.

Speaker 6 This is my son's box, I call it. I made it myself out out of a shoebox.
It's got just little bits and pieces and

Speaker 6 information and things like that in there.

Speaker 5 Terry took his own life at home in July 1988. He was alone.

Speaker 5 The rest of the family was out celebrating his cricket team's grand final win. Terry had left the celebrations early, telling his mum that he was going home to cook dinner.

Speaker 6 That's Terry's final message.

Speaker 5 So this is his suicide note.

Speaker 6 His suicide note.

Speaker 5 It's just a little yellow note. Do you want to read that for me? I will.

Speaker 6 Love you all, but can't handle life.

Speaker 6 Love Terry.

Speaker 5 For Faye, Terry's suicide came out of the blue. And she's spent the last few decades asking why.

Speaker 6 You never know with suicide. What's on a person's mind.

Speaker 5 Why?

Speaker 6 I think I'm coming close to my answer.

Speaker 5 Faye shows me some photos of Terry. He's young with a blonde mullet.
He looks a bit like David Bowie. I notice that his hair has a slight curl to it.

Speaker 3 The passenger in the front seat had blonde hair, curly.

Speaker 3 They all look to be young fellows to me.

Speaker 5 So maybe, just maybe, Terry was in that car that was hooning around the time and the place where Mark was last seen.

Speaker 5 Faye thinks Terry wouldn't have hurt Mark, but she seems sure that he was involved somehow or was there.

Speaker 5 She believes that there was a group of teenagers there that night and that one or more of them have been holding onto a dark secret for decades.

Speaker 6 I mean these kids of Terry's age, you know, they were all teenagers

Speaker 6 and to think

Speaker 6 someone's done this

Speaker 6 and left me

Speaker 6 in pain

Speaker 6 for 30 years and the Craigie family,

Speaker 6 30 years we've had to live with it. Doesn't go away.

Speaker 5 Faye heard heard that before Terry's death, he wrote three letters to people close to him. These letters are rumoured to detail exactly what happened to Mark.

Speaker 5 Since hearing this, I've tried hard to track down those letters, with no luck.

Speaker 6 He couldn't do anything. He couldn't even kill a rat.
But I think

Speaker 6 he was involved. And to me, that's what he would have meant on his letter by life is too hard to live.

Speaker 6 He could not have handled anything like that.

Speaker 5 When Faye first told me about all of this, I was wondering why she hadn't come forward with this information years ago.

Speaker 5 I was surprised to hear Faye say that she had gone to the cops over a decade ago. A detective wanted to follow up with her in Tamworth, so Faye arranged to travel up from Sydney.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it was a weekend.

Speaker 6 My daughter and I hired a car, which he knew that we were doing,

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 we had to ring him up outside of town so that we could meet him somewhere, have a cup of coffee and have a chat.

Speaker 5 But the meeting never happened.

Speaker 6 He never answered his phone and I've never spoken to him or seen him ever since.

Speaker 5 Did you go into the police station in Tamworth and ask if he was there? Yeah.

Speaker 6 When I went in and asked a uniform officer behind the counter if I could speak to detective and he said oh hang on a minute and

Speaker 6 he went away which naturally I thought oh he's gone to get him or something.

Speaker 6 He came back and he said no there's no such detective here

Speaker 6 so I just took him at his word.

Speaker 5 We did speak to this detective. He does exist and he denies that this happened.
He says he never would have avoided people wanting to make a statement.

Speaker 5 The history of Mark's case seems to be full of moments like these when people come forward with crucial information and maybe behind the scenes the police were doing all sorts of work trying to make use of the new leads.

Speaker 5 But to the people on the outside it just looked like they didn't care. Duck was annoyed to find out that there was a new lead that hadn't been followed up, but he wasn't surprised.

Speaker 7 It's what I would expect from this local command of investigators.

Speaker 5 It made him angry to hear that Faye had first gone to the police about this over a decade ago.

Speaker 7 She, quite a few years previously, contacted the police.

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 told them that her son was driving that motor vehicle and possibly Mark was in the boot.

Speaker 5 When Faye came forward a second time after seeing my reporting, one of Duck's goals was finally realised. The police reopened the case.

Speaker 5 But that optimism quickly turned into frustration. Months went by and the police still hadn't taken a formal statement from Faye.

Speaker 5 We'd been told the case was active again. but there didn't seem to be much investigating going on.

Speaker 5 I was starting to get a taste of the frustration that Duck had felt all these years and it was really getting to me.

Speaker 5 I had to do something about it. I called New South Wales Greens MP David Shoebridge.

Speaker 11 And the call was there's been years of work regarding the death of a young Aboriginal boy just south of Tamworth and there was a request for help.

Speaker 5 I knew that he was a criminal barrister who'd handled cases like this in the past. And I was interested in how he'd respond to this story.
I asked him if he'd come and meet Mark's family.

Speaker 10 Could Could I get up to Tamworth?

Speaker 11 Could I meet with this character called Duck and see what, if anything, I could do? So I said, yes. Next thing I know, I'm meeting this extraordinary bloke.

Speaker 11 And once you meet him, once you start hearing the story, how could you not keep campaigning for him?

Speaker 7 He was genuinely interested. He was genuinely concerned about how this investigation, if you call it that, has taken so long.

Speaker 7 Dave even said that, look, this matter would have been, you know, if they were professional, he said that this would have been resolved in a matter of weeks.

Speaker 5 I gave David a copy of the inquest transcript. Like me, he was stunned by the behaviour of the police.

Speaker 11 The explanation from the police about this young man's death never held water. Even the most cursory scrutiny would have said that it was a farcical explanation.

Speaker 11 It was almost as though the police shrugged their shoulders and said, nah, you know how it is.

Speaker 11 Young Aboriginal men, they just walk away, lie down on railway tracks and wait to get hit by a freight train. That's actually their answer.

Speaker 11 Not looking at it as a family that deserves answers for their grief and their loss.

Speaker 5 Just,

Speaker 11 young black kids, they lying down in front of railway trains.

Speaker 5 The first thing David Shoebridge did was try to go and see police in Tamworth.

Speaker 11 Well, as an MP, if you're going into an area and you're going to start

Speaker 11 questioning how a particular government agency has worked.

Speaker 11 I take it as part of what I should do is I give them the courtesy of telling them I'll be in the patch and saying, I'd like to pop in and get your side of the story, find out what's been happening.

Speaker 11 And I did exactly that with the police here. I said I'd be up there with the family and we wanted to attend with the family to get some direct answers.

Speaker 5 The police declined to meet with them.

Speaker 11 That wasn't 1988.

Speaker 11 That was just two years ago.

Speaker 5 I was there at the time watching it all. David and Duck are peas in a pod.
They're both fighters. I wasn't surprised when they staged a protest right out the front of the station.

Speaker 15 Justice Walmart, and we want the truth of what really happened to him to be unearthed.

Speaker 15 This isn't right, that families have to go out of their own way to investigate what they believe is very serious crime. Put your finger out, Attorney General, State Government!

Speaker 11 When we had a press conference out the front and basically shamed them into meeting with me and Duck.

Speaker 5 They got the meeting, but things quickly turned sour. Duck and David demanded to know why the explosive information from Faye Souder hadn't been followed up.

Speaker 11 Duck is saying, well, did you contact this witness whose name and details and numbers I gave you?

Speaker 11 And non-answers coming back from the police.

Speaker 7 Yeah, well, Dave asked about her statement and

Speaker 7 why it wasn't acted upon earlier.

Speaker 11 And then I said, well, it's a very simple question. You know, you've had these contact numbers, you've had these details.

Speaker 11 Have you actually arranged and had a face-to-face meeting and actually interviewed them?

Speaker 7 The police reacted by saying, don't tell us how to do our job.

Speaker 5 I said, I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job.

Speaker 11 I'm just trying to find out if you've done anything.

Speaker 5 That meeting failed to ease 28 years of tension between the family and police. The cops didn't concede any wrongdoing.

Speaker 5 After that, David Shoebridge grew frustrated with police in the Oxley Local Area Command.

Speaker 11 This required the attention of broader media, it required the attention of the state government. I saw how we weren't going to get anywhere.

Speaker 11 Just banging our heads against the wall of the Oxley Local Area Command.

Speaker 16 Mr David Shoebridge.

Speaker 16 Mr President, on the 16th of January 1988, in the early hours of the morning, a 17-year-old Aboriginal boy, Mark Anthony Haynes, was found dead on the train tracks outside Tamworth.

Speaker 11 So I came back and I raised it squarely in Parliament.

Speaker 11 I put on record what we knew to that point about Mark's death and demanded a separate state crime command investigation, the homicide squad effectively, because I knew if we just left it there at Oxley, nothing would happen.

Speaker 16 The case remains open, but for the family and community to have faith in the police investigation, there needs to be a break with the past.

Speaker 16 For this reason, I am today writing to the New South Wales Police Commissioner seeking to have the investigation.

Speaker 5 Two months later, on the 29th anniversary of Mark's death,

Speaker 5 New South Wales Police announced the state homicide squad would review the investigation. There's movement on the coal case of Tamworth teenager Mark Haynes.

Speaker 17 The family has been calling for the case to be moved from the Oxley Local Area Command to the state's homicide squad, and today they got what they've been asking for.

Speaker 5 And I understand that the State Crime Commander willing to conduct a review of the investigation.

Speaker 5 With the case active again, the next step was getting the police to commit to a reward.

Speaker 5 But as was becoming standard with this case, if the police didn't act, the family wouldn't wait.

Speaker 5 Last year, Uncle Jack stumped up $20,000 of his own money as a reward in the hope it would encourage someone to come forward.

Speaker 8 I love to put $20,000 of my own money

Speaker 5 to

Speaker 8 any information to lead up to arrest, you know, just

Speaker 8 try and solve this mystery.

Speaker 5 No one came forward to claim the $20,000, but the police had been spurred into action and they were finally making plans to announce a reward of their own.

Speaker 5 The 16th of January this year was the 30th anniversary of Mark's death. It was always going to be a big day for Mark's family, but none of us were really prepared for just how big a day it would be.

Speaker 5 The police had called a press conference to make an announcement about the case.

Speaker 5 We're outside the Tamworth police station. Just across the road, people are gathering a small group of mostly Aboriginal community members.
They have posters.

Speaker 5 that they've written up with the words, what happened to our boy Mark?

Speaker 5 Gone but not forgotten.

Speaker 5 And they're pinning a small black and white photograph of Mark

Speaker 5 with the colours of the Aboriginal flag

Speaker 5 in ribbons onto each other's shirts. And they're going to head across to the police station where the police will give a statement.

Speaker 5 Look, welcome everyone this morning to Tamworth Police Station and today is a significant day. It commemorates the death of young Tamworth man Mark Haynes in 1988, 30 years ago today.

Speaker 5 Significantly,

Speaker 5 we can announce today a major reward has been offered of half a million dollars to assist police and the family in getting some resolution on Mark's death.

Speaker 5 While it was three decades overdue, the family were happy there was finally a reward on the table.

Speaker 9 And we very much appreciate

Speaker 9 this substantial reward being offered today,

Speaker 9 which is a day of very significance to us. And as I've said, this is a community issue.
This boy belonged to the community of Tamworth.

Speaker 9 And no family should have to go through the anguish of not knowing what has happened to their loved ones.

Speaker 5 It was a roller coaster day for the family. The police reward announcement that morning was a high point, but the afternoon would be more somber.

Speaker 5 They had to head over to the cemetery to finally lay Mark to rest.

Speaker 5 Just a few weeks before all of this, I'd found out that 13 tissue samples taken from Mark's organs were still being housed at the coroner's court in Sydney.

Speaker 5 The family knew nothing of their existence until I told them. Now they were about to cremate those last remains.

Speaker 5 For Mark's brother and sister, Ron and Lorna, it was a bittersweet moment.

Speaker 14 a bit emotional, you know. So

Speaker 14 I think, you know, because me and Lorna, you know,

Speaker 14 we can't, I can't explain it in words, but you know, but I, it just like hurts too much.

Speaker 14 I suppose it's a journey that you'd never have to make, right?

Speaker 18 Yep.

Speaker 12 And 30 years, it's a long time, it's too long.

Speaker 5 Not knowing.

Speaker 5 That afternoon at the cemetery, a smoking ceremony was held and speeches were made.

Speaker 9 We hope one day

Speaker 9 we may be able to replace the plaque that's on here right now

Speaker 9 where it is stated, mysteriously died 16-1,

Speaker 9 1988.

Speaker 9 Hopefully that day will come while I am still

Speaker 7 upon this earth

Speaker 9 and I would like to see that change which means to say we will truly be at the end of our journey.

Speaker 5 For Aboriginal people including the Gomorrah it's important to be buried whole on country. For 30 years Mark's body remained incomplete, which means his spirit couldn't rest.

Speaker 5 Now he was finally at peace.

Speaker 18 Do you feel things like might happen this year?

Speaker 5 I mean hopefully, you know, got a good feeling.

Speaker 14 They all got a good feeling too, yeah, about it, you know. Something's, you know,

Speaker 14 has gotta come, you know, so...

Speaker 5 From the reward announcement in the morning to the burial in the afternoon, it was a pretty huge day for Mark's family.

Speaker 5 And by the time the sun was setting, I also felt completely overwhelmed by everything that had happened.

Speaker 5 It's around 7.30 p.m.

Speaker 5 and I'm lying on my hotel bed in Tamworth. I'm absolutely shattered.
I didn't count on how

Speaker 5 emotional I would feel and I don't like talking about

Speaker 5 the emotional toll that

Speaker 5 it takes on me sometimes because

Speaker 5 it's not my pain to have.

Speaker 5 You know, I'm here for the family to give them a platform and sometimes I become part of the family. And then sometimes I am the journalist.

Speaker 5 It's very hard to go between the two sometimes, but I'm incredibly privileged and honoured to be able to share their story. Having been with the family for the past five years,

Speaker 5 when I first spoke with them, nobody listened to them. Not the police, not a politician, no one.

Speaker 5 And to

Speaker 5 be here and seeing the police announce a $500,000 reward is It's kind of surreal actually.

Speaker 5 And then when we went to the cemetery to see the family, I think it was like popping a cork off a bottle. Like the emotion just flowed.
It was almost as if they had to do a second funeral.

Speaker 5 It was a very, very

Speaker 5 special moment. because

Speaker 5 black followers look after each other. We have to.

Speaker 5 There is so much inequity between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people that it's so important that we continue to maintain our tradition and look after our mob.

Speaker 5 The 30th anniversary of Mark's death felt like a moment when everything crystallized, when everyone felt like they had hope again.

Speaker 5 Since then, things have started to shift pretty dramatically in my investigation, and people are coming forward to speak with me who've never spoken before.

Speaker 5 In the next episode of Unravel,

Speaker 8 she said that

Speaker 8 she had gotten drunk, had become very emotional, and had told her that he was there the night that Mark was dead and that he'd placed Mark's body on the tracks.

Speaker 5 Head to abc.net.au slash truecrime to see a video that looks at the forensic evidence and explores the clues suggesting that Mark wasn't alone on the tracks.

Speaker 5 If you know anything about those letters written by Terry Souter or anything else about this case, please get in touch. We're already following up on some of the leads you've sent in.

Speaker 5 Our email address is unraveltruecrime at abc.net.au.

Speaker 5 If this story has raised concerns for you or someone you know anywhere in Australia, you can contact Lifeline on 131114.

Speaker 3 Inside the most extraordinary criminal trials in Australia, the K-SOP podcast is your eyes and ears in the courtroom. First, we followed the case of the mushroom murders.

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