Arthur Stanley Brown (May 20, 1912 - July 6, 2002) was charged in 1998 for the August 26, 1970 rape and murder of Judith and Susan Mackay in Townsville, Queensland. The jury failed to reach a verdict and a new trial was blocked on the grounds that Brown was too senile to be tried again.

Brown's arrest attracted wide publicity leading to a witness to the abduction of two children from Adelaide oval in 1973 identifying Brown as the man she had seen. Brown is considered a suspect for the Beaumont children disappearance based on the connections that have been made between him and the Adelaide oval abduction.

Life

Arthur Brown was born in Merinda, Queensland, on 20 May 1912 and moved to Townsville with his parents when he was four. Following the separation of his parents he moved to Melbourne, Victoria with his mother where he remained until he got a drivers licence when he moved back to Townsville and obtained work as a meatpacker. He was exempted from military service in World War II as his job was listed as a Reserved occupation and in 1946 became a maintenance carpenter with the Queensland Department of Public Works where he was known to his workmates as a polite, immaculately dressed man, who ironed knife-edge creases in his work uniforms. He was nicknamed The Scarlet Pimpernel based on the verse from the play as he could be anywhere at any time due to flexible work hours and self supervision.

In 1944 Brown married Hester Porter (Née Anderson) following her divorce and became a stepfather to her three children. On May 15, 1978 Hester, by now bedridden with arthritis, died after hitting her head in a fall and Brown married Hester’s younger sister Charlotte, who had five children, later that year. Some members of Hester’s family believed Brown had killed her and investigating police believe the family doctor wrote out a death certificate without examining the body, which Brown had had cremated.

In 1982 another of Hester's sisters told her parents that Brown had molested her while a small girl after which many more of the Anderson extended family came forward to say they also had been molested. Following legal advice that taking the matter to court could be traumatic for the victims, the incidents became a family secret. It was not entirely secret as an entry in Christine Millier's diary dated January 23, 1991 and produced at his trial in 1999 reads: "Kids and I went for walk to Strand. Arthur Brown drove by and the kids called him "rock spider", shouting it out. Eventually they told me what a rock spider was".

Mackay sisters

Five year old Susan and seven year old Judith MacKay disappeared on the morning of Wednesday, August 26, 1970 from a school bus stop near their home in the Townsville suburb of Aitkenvale.

A search for the missing girls was mounted after they failed to return home after school and continued until the girls bodies were found on Friday in the dry bed of Antill Creek, 25 km (16 mi) south-west of Townsville. A post-mortem revealed that Susan had been raped, strangled and stabbed three times in the chest, possibly after death. Judith had also been raped and stabbed three times in the chest but cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation by sand. Their school uniforms were folded neatly beside them.

One witness saw the girls talking to a man in a car at the bus stop at 8:10am. Just after 11am a car pulled into a service station at Ayr, 85 km (53 mi) south of Townsville and the driver bought $3 (around 25 litre/ 5 gll) of petrol. The two girls were in the car and the station attendant recalled the younger girl saying "Are we there yet?" followed by the older girl asking the driver, "When are you taking us to mummy? You promised to take us to mummy." Several other witnesses reported the girls being driven around in a car and two later reported seeing a man walking towards a car from the direction the murder scene about 1pm that day. Most of the witnesses claimed the car was an FJ Holden but several said it was a blue Vauxhall Victor with an odd coloured drivers door. One of these was to eventually be a key witness at the trial as he identified Brown as the driver with two young passengers that he had argued with over erratic driving that day. Police were unable to locate either car at the time and the murders remained unsolved. The Mackay family eventually moved to Toowoomba.

Brown was never a suspect in the original police investigation.

Suspect for Mackay murders

In 1998, a cousin of Brown’s wife who was now living in Perth, Western Australia had been one of Brown’s victims and also had suspicions about his involvement with the MacKay sisters, she decided to phone Crimestoppers after they aired a program on the case.

Sergeant David Hickey of the Queensland homicide squad, who was conducting the cold case review of the MacKay murders, returned the call three days later. After interviewing other family members police had 45 cases against Brown relating to pedophilia and circumstantial evidence linking him to the MacKay murders. Investigations continued and evidence accumulated. Brown had been obsessed by the case, falsely claiming he knew the girls' father and two weeks after the murders he had offered to take two of his wife’s cousins to view the murder site. He had replaced the odd-coloured door from his blue Vauxhall Victor, buried it, then later dug it up and took it to the rubbish tip explaining to his family he did it because he didn't want anyone interviewing or annoying him. Many of his victims were taken to Antill Creek to be molested and one instance was only 20 metres (66 ft) from where the girls bodies were found. He twice confessed to the murders, once to a stranger in a pub and once to his apprentice in 1975 who said he never came forward before because it seemed totally out of character and he though Brown was joking. Brown was arrested on 28 charges of sexual assault and rape and for the murders of Susan and Judith MacKay.

Trial and aftermath

The trial of Arthur Stanley Brown for the murders of Judith and Susan Mackay, began on October 18, 1999.

Although evidence regarding Brown’s pedophilia had been given at the committal hearing it had been ruled prejudicial at trial and therefore could not be put before the Supreme Court jury, the jury were unable to reach a decision on the strong but circumstantial evidence.

A new trial was set for July 31, 2000 but before it could start newspapers reported “the case did not proceed for legal reasons which cannot be published”. The court suppressed release of the legal reasons until July 2001.

In 2001 it was revealed that Brown's lawyer had applied for a section 613 verdict (unfit to be tried) from the jury. The jury had rejected the application, but in the meantime Brown's wife Charlotte had referred the case to the Queensland Mental Health Tribunal who ruled that Brown had progressive dementia and was also suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and was thus unfit to stand trial. The Attorney-General lodged an appeal and the court concluded that the Mental Health Tribunal did not have the jurisdiction to make the ruling and commissioned an independent psychiatric report. In July 2001 the report concluded that Brown was unfit to stand trial because he was suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's disease and all charges against him were dropped.

Death

Charlotte Brown died in April 2002. Ostracized by his family he moved into a nursing home in Malanda, north Queensland where he died three months later on July 6, officially an innocent man. Everybody involved with the MacKay case is satisfied that Brown committed the murders and police have closed the file.

The Beaumont children

Along with Bevan Spencer von Einem, he is considered to be the best suspect for the Beaumont children disappearance as he bore a similarity to an identikit picture of the suspect for both the Beaumont children and Adelaide Oval cases. A search for a connection to the Beaumonts was unsuccessful as no employment records existed that could shed light on his work history such as showing holidays when he may have travelled interstate. Some of the records were believed lost in the 1974 Brisbane flood and it is also possible that Brown, who had unrestricted access to government buildings may have deleted his own employment files. Brown is considered a suspect for the Beaumont children disappearance, based on the connections that have been made between him and the Adelaide Oval Abduction.

Although there is no proof that he had ever visited Adelaide, a witness recalled having a conversation with Brown in which he mentioned having seen the Adelaide Festival Centre nearing completion which places him in Adelaide after June 1973. The oval abduction occurred on August 25, 1973.

Another witness who earlier had reported seeing a man near the oval carrying a young girl while another older girl (the two victims?) in obvious distress followed, identified Brown as the man she had seen after seeing his picture on television in December 1998 in relation to his arrest for the MacKay murders. This identification though is based on that of a woman who was aged 14 when she saw him, only for one minute, and who then saw a picture of Brown, now aged 86, 25 years later.

Wikipedia.org

Arthur Stanley Brown first came to media attention in relation to the Beaumont children case in December 1998. Then aged 86, he was charged with the murders of Judith and Susan Mackay, aged 5 and 7, in Townsville, Queensland, on 26 August 1970.

The arrest for the long-unsolved murders attracted wide publicity and it was quickly noted that Brown matched the descriptions for the suspects in the Beaumont children and Oval Abduction cases. As well as his similarity to the identikit images, Brown was also conceivably the right age to have committed the other crimes. South Australian police announced that they would investigate, but also said that in the absence of any concrete evidence Brown was not a suspect. The similarity between pictures of Brown and identikit pictures could not be considered evidence.

1. The murder of the Mackay sisters

Judith, aged 7, and Susan, aged 5, were the youngest of six children of Bill and Thelma Mackay. The Mackay family lived in Aitkenvale, an outer suburb of Townsville. On the morning of Wednesday, 26 August 1970, Bill Mackay left for work, before his youngest two children were awake, so he kissed them both while they slept. He was to never see them alive again.

The sisters left the house at 8:10am and walked to the nearby bus stop around the corner, where they were to catch the bus to school. Witnesses later confirmed that the girls did reach the bus stop, but by the time the bus arrived 10 minutes later they had gone. Their absence was not noticed until they did not arrive home after school.

A search was mounted that night and was extended the next day. On Friday, with the girls still not located, the search was extended again. A New Zealand carpenter named Richard Tough was sent with two other men to search near Antill Creek, 25 kilometres south-west of Townsville. Tough's statement to police later read:

In company with two other men I was engaged in a search party for two missing girls who had disappeared whilst on their way to school.

We traveled along the Townsville to Charter Towers Highway and made a search in various places along this road prior to going to a spot near Antill Creek. We parked the car and set off in various directions. I traversed the creek bank and dry creek bed.

Whilst searching in the creek I saw what appeared to be child's footprints in the sand. I continued to walk along the creek bed and, about ten yards further on, I then saw the body of a child...

The child was Susan Mackay. Tough figured that she was dead and returned to the highway, yelling for help. The taxi radio was used to summon police and Tough stood guard over the body for an hour, waiting for police to arrive. When police arrived an hour later they found Judith Mackay's body about 70 metres away, near the opposite bank of the creek.

The murders of two young girls caused massive horror in Townsville and a huge police investigation was launched. However, the investigation faltered and police focused on the makes of several cars that had been seen either in the area from which the sisters had been abducted, or the area where their bodies were found. One was an FJ Holden, which police decided might have been the murderer's car. The other was a blue Vauxhall Victor Sedan, with an odd-coloured driver's side door. They were unable to locate either car.

The murders of Judith and Susan seemed likely to remain unsolved. The Mackay family, unable to bear living in the area, eventually moved to Toowoomba.

2. About Brown

Brown had been born in Merinda, Queensland, on 20 May 1912. His early life was unremarkable, but his parents split and he moved to Melbourne with his mother, where he may have remained until old enough to get his driver's license. He then returned to Queensland, where he'd remained. During the Second World War he was working as a meatpacker, which was a reserved occupation, and then he became a carpenter until he retired in 1977, aged 65.

Brown had become close to an extended family, the Andersons. There were six daughters and two sons in the family, one of the daughters being named Hester. She married and become Hester Porter and had three children, but her marriage ended in divorce. She then married Brown, with whom she lived for 34 until she died on 15 May 1978. By Brown's account she had fallen while trying to get on a commode, had hit her head and been killed. Some members of her family, however, were convinced that Brown had killed her.

Brown had become well known in the Anderson family for his womanising, and as well as Hester he had probably conducted relationships with three of her sisters. However, the oldest sister, Milly, once said that Hester had confided to her: "He doesn't just like big girls -- he likes little girls too".

In fact, Brown was a paedophile and had molested at least five of the girls in the extended Andersen family. The incidents were kept secret by the individual victims until 1982, when one told her parents that she had been molested by Brown while a small girl. Other victims in the family came forward until it was realised, by most members of the extended family, that Brown was a paedophile.

Under family pressure and following legal advice, Brown's victims did not declare publicly what had happened. It was reasoned that it would be too traumatic for the victims to recall the incidents in court. They therefore remained a family secret.

It wasn't entirely a family secret, however. Christine Millier, a relative, recorded in her diary on 23 January 1991:

Kids (state wards) and I went for walk to Strand. Arthur Brown drove by and the kids called him "rock spider", shouting it out. Eventually they told me what a rock spider was.

"Rock Spider" is a slang prison term for a child molester. It is never used in jest.

3. Suspect for Mackay sisters murders

In 1998, Merle Martin Moss, sister of Christine Millier, was living in Perth, Western Australia. One evening she was looking through a family "birthday book" when she came across a picture of Brown. She had been one of his victims and like the others had agreed not to say anything publicly about him. However, she suspected that he might have been involved in the murder of the Mackay sisters and decided to take action. She phoned Crimestoppers and told them what she knew.

The murder of the Mackay sisters was being subject to a cold-case review by Sergeant David Hickey, of the Queensland homicide squad. Three days after Moss's call to Crimestoppers, a message to call her was passed to him. He telephoned her and listened as she told him why she thought Brown might have been the culprit.

Interviews with other family members followed, and police eventually built up a list of 45 charges against Brown relating to his own family. In addition to this, of course, the reopened investigation into the murders continued. Evidence which had been previously ignored led police to believe that Brown was indeed the murderer.

Among other things, the family told police, Brown had been obsessed by the case. A couple of weeks after the murders he told one family member, who did not know about his paedophile activities: "I could've done that."

He also removed the odd-coloured door from his Vauxhall and buried it, because he said he didn't want anyone interviewing or annoying him, and he offered to take Millier and Moss to see the place where the bodies had been found. They refused. On another occasion, he molested one of his other victims and made her look at pornographic magazines only 20 metres from where the bodies of the Mackay sisters had been found.

4. Other cases for which Brown became a suspect

It was not just the Mackay sisters case in which police saw a possible connection, however. There were a series of other cases for which Brown appeared to be a good suspect:

• The disappearance of Marilyn Joy Wallman, at Eimeo, Queensland, on 21 March 1972. Fourteen year old Marilyn Wallman had disappeared while on the way to school. Her family's home was over a hill from the main road, from which she was to catch a bus to school. Having cycled ahead of her brothers, over the hill and out of sight, Marilyn vanished. Her brothers, having crested the hill, saw her bicycle lying on its side. The younger of her two brothers could hear voices from the other side of a canefield, but couldn't tell if one was that of his sister. She has never been found.

  Brown is considered to be a suspect for this disappearance. At around the same time as Marilyn Wallman's disappearance, the Browns had gone to visit Hester's relatives who lived in nearby Mackay. Brown's car broke down so they returned home by train. Brown then went back alone to retrieve the car but did not return for some time. Police confirm that a chalky blue Vauxhall was seen in the area at around the time of the disappearance. Brown could not have committed the crime on this day because he would have been returning with his car long after Marilyn Wallman disappeared, but it is entirely possible for him to have been in the same area on a different day.

   

• The murder of Catherine Graham near Townsville, Queensland, on 28 July 1975. Graham, a teenager, had phoned her mother from a phone box that evening. Her last words to her mother were: "There is someone peering at me mum -- and I don't like the look of him". Having left the phone box, she bought a hamburger at the nearby Rising Sun fish shop at 8:10pm and then visited a friend at Townsville General Hospital. She then went to the Townsville Post Office where she was seen at 9pm, before visiting a family friend in The Avenue in the suburb of Hyde Park. That was her last known movement. Her savagely-battered body was found the next day in long grass off the Flinders Highway, 24 kilometres west of Townsville.

  Catherine Graham had been selling books door-to-door, and the day she was murdered had been seen doing this close to Brown's house. Her body, when it was discovered, was only 500 metres from where the bodies of the Mackay sisters had been found, five years previously. While police believed that the murder had been committed by more than one person, they admitted that there were similarities with the Mackay sisters murders. The disposal of the bodies was very similar and there were other similarities which have not been specified.

  Interestingly, however, Detective Sergeant Phil Notaro said of the case in 2001: "We believe at least one of the culprits is still in or near Townsville. We are pretty confident of that." There were also semen swabs taken from the scene, but these were of poor quality.

5. Connection with the Beaumont children

Brown's arrest for the murder of the Mackay sisters attracted Australia-wide publicity, particularly in South Australia, which had its own share of unsolved child murders with the Beaumont children and Oval Abduction cases. There was a definite similarity between published pictures of Brown and the identikits of the suspects in both the South Australian cases, and Superintendent Paul Schramm, the officer in charge of the South Australian Major Crime Investigation section, said that investigations were being made to determine whether Brown had ever visited South Australia.

The South Australian police approached Queensland homicide and ran a joint inquiry involving the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, based in Canberra. They had forwarded information to the Violent Crime Linkage Assessment unit. Schramm said: "We are taking it seriously and we are seeing if there is any connection. We have analysts working very closely together to try and piece together the last 30 years."

The search was utterly unsuccessful. Every piece of information that might have detailed when or where Brown had been working, had been lost. There was no way of determining when he had taken holidays. Some of the information might have been lost in the 1974 floods which affected central Brisbane, but Brown had also had unrestricted access to many government buildings and could have easily have removed files and paperwork himself.

Without records, police were unable to establish where Brown had been at any time, nor when he had taken holidays. There was no proof that he had ever visited Adelaide. However, Christine Millier recalls having a conversation with Brown in which Brown mentioned having seen Adelaide's Festival Theatre when it was almost finished. The first stage of construction of the theatre was finished in June 1973, when a concert was performed there. It looks across the river to Adelaide Oval, from where the Oval Abduction took place on 25 August 1973.

The Oval Abduction is the key link between Brown and the Beaumont children case. Apart from the similarity of identikit pictures to his photograph, direct connections between Brown and the Beaumont children disappearance remain elusive. Direction connections have, however, been drawn with the Oval Abduction. While it is by no means certain that the Oval Abduction and the Beaumont disappearance are the acts of the same perpetrator, many people believe that they are. If this is the case then Brown may be considered a suspect for the Beaumont children disappearance, based on the connections that have been made between him and the Oval Abduction.

Most critically, an eyewitness has placed him at the scene of the Oval Abduction. Sue Lawrie, then aged 14, was walking with her father along the banks of the Torrens River, about one kilometre from Adelaide Oval. Speaking years later, she said:

We walked out from the zoo and were about midway between Popeye and the University Bridge. I looked across the river and saw a very young girl being carried by a man who I thought was her grandfather. He had a hat and a checked jacket on. She was crying and the older girl, I think she was a few years younger than me, was running after him. She was thumping him and punching into him and crying out at him. I saw all that for about 60 seconds. The thing seemed wrong because I would have thought if he was a relative he would have shooed her… It was after I married, I was about 18 or 20, I kept on and on at my husband about my memories -- and I read another article on the abduction. My husband said "go and do something about it". I went to the chief investigator in about 1979-80 and made a full statement. I was sure of many things, including the time, because the siren went for the beginning or end of the third-quarter. Dad remarked on the game, but I don't think he saw what I was watching on the other side of the river. I believe on the day of the abduction the police were looking in an opposite direction to where we were walking. The only other thing I need to say is the parents of Joanne should take heart that little girl did everything she could to protect her little friend.

Lawrie said that the man's hat was wide-brimmed, with a low, flat crown, which was unusual in Adelaide in 1973. In more recent years wide-brimmed hats have become a fashion accessory, but in 1973 they were usually worn in the more northern parts of Australia, for protection against the sun. Lawrie, who had travelled to visit relatives in Queensland, described the hat as "very Queensland country"

Lawrie had a good look at the man's face. In December 1998, when Brown was arrested for the murder of the Mackay sisters, Lawrie caught a glimpse of Brown's face on television. She thought she recognised him from somewhere but couldn't think where. The next morning a friend from Adelaide phoned and asked her what she thought of the news. Before her friend could explain that there was speculation about Brown being linked with the Beaumont children disappearance and the Oval abduction, Lawrie exclaimed "My God! It's him". She believed that Brown was the man she'd seen 25 years earlier.

6. The Mackay sisters murder trial