This article had to come and I've been dreading writing it. It needs to be written, though, as the influence of the event over my characters is something that they will not mention, however haunted by it they might be. It's a story of two sisters and the faceless monster that devoured them and then spat them out into a ditch, defiled and murdered. It is a story that I'll provide links to rather than source by those links because while the facts of the case are important it is the emotional impact that lingers. I'm telling most of it from memory.
They were blow-ins, probably the kids of an industrial specialist working a finite contract that would either end with him buying local or moving on. The girls were called Judith and Susan and were close in age. One was in my class but I can't remember which. They kept each other company at lunchtime but that's because they were new, not disliked. One or both had puddling bowl haircuts.
Mum took some of us on a holiday outside of the school schedule. We went to her side of the family in Bundaberg but I can't remember why. I do remember having a sip of stout and pretending to be roaring drunk. I rolled around on a bed, singing obnoxiously, trying to get that cawing sound of drunks in the street. I also remember talking to a cop about the Mackay girls. He wanted to know if I knew anything about them. At all. Anything. I was frightened of him and his seriousness. He also looked sad which also frightened me.
After he left I was told that the Mackay girls had gone missing on their way to school and then found, days later in a ditch, stabbed to death. The killer was still out in the dark.
Bundaberg is a small town but it has delights for children. There's a big bronze head of the famous aviator Bert Hinkler, a native of the town, rising from the earth with a smile. He's still in his leather helmet and goggles. Probably wouldn't know it was him without them. We go to a cinema and see a Flintstones movie. Everything is bright during the day. There are paths cutting through the sugar cane. One of them leads to a milk bar that sells peanut shaped chewy caramels coated in chocolate. It's like a tropical version of an enchanted forest. Once you're on the path you can see nothing but ahead and behind and the sky is framed by two rows of wavering cane. It smells of plant. A green smell. I feel no danger. I'm a kid.
I feel no danger on the way to school either. If my bike needs repair or I just feel like walking I leave home, stroll along Patrick Street, turn right at Elizabeth, cross Ross River Road and there I am at school. I'm about as far away from home as Judith and Susan Mackay were. Supposedly they took the bus there. Maybe they were just too small and vulnerable or just protected. But if they missed the bus they'd probably just walk because even for a kid the school is not far away by shoe. When I got back from holidays, mum drove me to school. All the mums did. Two blocks in maternal custody for about three minutes which is about how long it takes to walk and I was safe at school.
In 1998 Arthur Stanley Brown was arrested for a number of murders including the Mackay sisters. I saw this on the news and everything around me disappeared for a few seconds. There was no sound. Over the next few months I followed the story as completely as I could, even reading the sensationalist nonsense in the tabloids because the disgust in them was like scratching eczema. He was dobbed in by a female relative whom he'd abused. It wasn't just her. Every younger female relative in his extended sway fell prey to him. And then he moved out of the circle and started picking it fresh from the tree. He boasted about it. He had been questioned and released by the police several times. Now, finally, after decades of being the scariest land monster in the north, he was, a quavering old man with the big wide stare of dementia.
He was a carpenter whose trouser creases were pressed to a knife edge. He was referred to as the Scarlet Pimpernel as he was quick to respond to work requests. Any time. Anywhere. He supervised himself. He was working as a carpenter at the school at the time. I always used to wonder what he'd said, how he'd got them into the car. Neither sister had reached ten years old. All adults have authority. They'd seen him working.
I don't remember him from school. As a male, I wasn't in danger from him. But I and everyone else who wasn't one of his victims lived under the night sky of his influence. There are no stars in that sky. The jungle of the ground beneath sits in silence. No curlews whistle there. No mossies sing. Not even cane toads call and belch. The mould and slime of the tropical night huddle to its surfaces, clinging in stillness lest they should be noticed and consumed by something. The word doesn't meet the air but it wants release, even as a whisper: murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder....
But there's only silence and mould.
No one talked much about the sisters and their murder. The conversation lifted without thought and was allowed to fall back to the floor, unengaged, like a ripple at low tide. It's unsolved. There's no solution. There's no one there when we go looking. The door is still open and he's still there. He's out there, walks among us, gets his milk and bread from our shops and his meat from the butcher, feeds his car with the same petrol we do, shakes our hands and waves as we meet him, looks at us, our sisters and daughters, with a gaze both hungry and careful. We don't talk about him. We think about him. He's always there. There is a breath we drew that we are still holding. We will hold it all our lives.
The evidence against him in court was applied with a shovel. It was him. But something happened in the jury room and something happened on the bench. He was judged unfit for trial because of his dementia. It's possible that by this stage he was unaware of what he had done. The accidental obsolesence of his organs and reason kicked in and set him free even from his memory. He died soon after, ostracised by his own family and hated by the people he moved among, but in a quietude of sorts, fed porridge in the morning and ice cream at night in a nursing home in the shade of mango leaves, as vulnerable as each of his victims had been when he invaded them, and if his death was witnessed someone, a nurse perhaps, held him warmly while his mouth stretched, wide and dry over the gums, until his life softly extinguished and he was free.
Read about the case.
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