For detectives investigating the murders of two women who vanished without a trace, their main suspect, Bruce Allan Burrell, was something of a conundrum.
Burrell was a flashy advertising executive who liked to boast about his property portfolio, including a country estate called ‘Hillydale’ near Goulburn in the NSW Southern Highlands.
He portrayed himself as being a wealthy former private schoolboy from the bush, and the scion of a rural estate.
He drove a Jaguar and boasted about owning a townhouse with ocean views.
But behind the facade, the reality was vastly different.
Burrell was flat broke and had been living off his wife, but that support dried up when his marriage came to an end.
Dennis Bray, the detective who eventually brought down Burrell after a painstaking and brilliant investigation, said this week that Burrell was far from being a typical killer.
Bray told a new documentary, part of Australian Crime Stories: The Investigators, that the cocky, media loving killer thought he would get away with murder.
Kerry Whelan, 39, was kidnapped and murdered in 1997 by advertising executive Bruce Burrell, who had once worked for her husband
Flash ad man Bruce Burrell liked to portray himself as a wealthy gentleman with property and luxury vehicles, but in reality he lived off his wife, stole cars and was almost bankrupt
Burrell murdered wealthy widow and 74-year-old grandmother Dottie Davis after she pursued the $100,000 she had lent him out of kindness, being a friend of his wife Dallas
But a meticulous search of Burrell’s property had revealed evidence so damning the police could hardly believe it: actual plans for the Whelan kidnap and murder, typed on the same machine as the ransom note.
As Bray and his team looked into Burrell, they realised that his motivation for murder was financial.
Contrary to his image, he was bordering on bankruptcy, drove stolen cars, and sold off anything he could fleece from friends.
The detectives would discover that before becoming a killer, Burrell was a lazy schemer who was known to be a bully, a liar and a thief.
He was from a working class family which had been forced to leave town abruptly for undisclosed reasons when Burrell was in his teens, uprooting from Goulburn and moving to the city.
Burrell was sacked for stealing from his first job at a bank, but had avoided a criminal charge because his father paid the money back.
Burrell then got a job in advertising, then another job, and another, as employers realised he actually didn’t do much work, preferring to go on long lunches and drink beer.
Entering his 40s, the increasingly portly Burrell kept on stealing, showing amazing audacity and flair, and a smooth ability to come across as a confident wealthy businessman.
In the mid-1990s, he persuaded two car salesmen into letting him take a Mitsubishi Pajero and then a $170,000 Mercedes Benz for test drives, and the cars were never returned.
Bernie Whelan with his wife and children and Bruce Burrell who was a guest of Bernie’s before stealing his property and then kidnapping and murdering Kerry Whelan
Bernie and Kerry, above with two of their children, had been planning to celebrate joint birthdays at a party when Burrell tricked her into meeting him and killed her, hiding her body in a secret place
However as he became deeper in debt and more desperate, his offending moved from theft to murder.
But it was partly that swollen-headed self assuredness which brought Burrell down, as police investigated the disappearance of the wife of his wealthy industrialist friend and former boss Bernie Whelan.
Kerry Whelan, 39, had last been seen on May 6, 1997 wearing $50,000 worth of jewellery and a smart pantsuit while getting into a Mitsubishi Pajero at the Parkroyal Hotel at Parramatta.
The conceited Burrell couldn’t help himself when her disappearance became the centre of media attention, and gave interview after interview.
In the days after Kerry’s disappearance, her distraught husband Bernie – the boss of global company Crown Equipment – stayed with their three children at the family’s Kurrajong property in western Sydney.
After collecting the mail one evening from the letter box at the end of the drive, he noticed a long yellow envelope addressed to him among the pile of bills.
Inside was a ransom note demanding $US1 million to be delivered by Bernie, alone, without contacting police ‘or your wife will die’.
Putting aside the threat, Bernie did contact police, who began orchestrating the drop of the the ransom money, delivered in an armoured van from the Commonwealth Bank to the Whelan home.
Police scoured the Bungonia State Forest but never found any trace of the two missing and murdered women that Bruce Burrell killed for money
As they awaited the money drop, police questioned a wide array of people connected to the Whelans, including the children’s nanny and horse trainer, Amanda Minton-Taylor.
She revealed an unexpected visit Mrs Whelan had received in mid-April, three weeks before she vanished, from a male visitor who had promised her something.
Mrs Whelan had asked Ms Minton-Taylor not to mention the visit to anyone, as it was connected to a surprise she was planning for the couple’s approaching birthdays.
Ms Minton-Taylor remembered that the man’s name was ‘Bruce’ and that Mrs Whelan had described him as an ‘old family friend’.
Police got Ms Minton-Taylor to look through Whelan family photo albums in the hope the ‘old family friend’ would be inside.
She paused at a photo of six people at a social function, and pointed to a man holding a beer while standing next to advertising guru John Singleton with his then wife, TV reporter Liz Hayes.
‘Singo’ was the ad man who’s coined the memorable jingle for Crown forklifts, ‘there is nothing like a Crown, for picking it up, and putting it down’.
Mr Whelan grabbed the album and said, ‘That’s Bruce Burrell. Come on Amanda. He’s like a big teddy bear. It couldn’t be Bruce Burrell. We call him the “gentle bear”.’
Despite his surprise, Bernie then remembered getting a ‘perplexing and pointless’ phone call ‘out of the blue’ from Burrell, who had been an ad executive for Crown before being retrenched in 1990.
Bruce Burrell was convicted of both the murders of Dottie Davis and Kerry Whelan and died in prison in 2016 without revealing where he’d put the bodies
During their conversation, Burrell had elicited from Bernie the fact the Crown boss flew interstate every second week. He had been due to fly out on the day Mrs Whelan vanished.
Dennis Bray, the commander of Task Force Bellaire formed to investigate Mrs Whelan’s disappearance, knew this was their best lead.
Bray assigned six detectives to monitor Burrell and investigate his background.
Bernie said that he and his wife had continued to socialise with Burrell and his wife Dallas even after the retrenchment.
The men would go on shooting trips together. On one such trip, Burrell boasted that he had a place where you could ‘hide a body that nobody would ever find’.
But their friendship had soured after two events.
Burrell had offered to agist Bernie’s cattle at Hillydale, but that the cattle had mysteriously disappeared, with Burrell claiming they had simply wandered off into the vast Bungonia National Park which adjoined his property.
Burrell also asked to borrow Bernie’s Ruger .223 semiautomatic rifle to shoot feral pigs, but then reported the weapon had been stolen out of his car ‘at Redfern’.
After that, Bernie wanted nothing more to do with Burrell, and it was four years since they had last spoken when Burrell called him.
As the days leading up to the ransom money drop rolled past and Bernie’s hopes of his wife still being alive waned, police infiltrated the town of Bungonia and began to watch Burrell’s comings and goings from Hillydale into town.
Kerry Whelan was murdered and her body dumped probably in the Bungonia State Forest, a vast area of 4000 hectares where police have searched and come up with nothing
Eighteen days after Mrs Whelan’s kidnap, on May 24, 1997, a newspaper crew acting on a tip arrived at Inverary Road, Bungonia to find Inspector Bruce Couch standing near the entrance to Hillydale.
Three days earlier, Operation Bellaire had lifted the blackout on the Whelan kidnap and gone public at press conference in police headquarters.
The media had been camped outside the Whelan’s Kurrajong home ever since, but this was their first appearance at Bungonia.
Inspector Couch told the news crew he was there on a training exercise, but one of the reporters recognised him from an investigation five years earlier into the backpacker serial killings at the Belanglo Forest, one hour north of Bungonia.
The news that a police operation at Bungonia was connected with Mrs Whelan’s kidnapping broke that night and at daylight the next morning the skies over Bungonia were buzzing with TV helicopters.
Watching the news on Sunday at a friend’s house in Sydney, Maree Dawes was drinking a cup of tea and chatting.
When the broadcast revealed that the search for Mrs Whelan had descended upon a property owned by a Burrell, Maree felt her legs turn to jelly and she dropped her tea cup.
Police searched Burrell’s Hillydale property and took away 22 garbage bags of items which they sifted through to eventually find his notes of preparation for the kidnap and murder
Maree’s mother Dorothy ‘Dottie’ Davis, a wealthy 74-year-old widow, had vanished two years earlier.
Dottie had lived in Lurline Bay in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and was friends with Burrell and his then wife Dallas Bromley who lived down the road in an oceanfront apartment.
Dottie went to visit Dallas, who had been ill, on May 30, 1995 and was never seen again.
Initially, police did not suspect any foul play, clocking her disappearance up to an old lady’s wanderings near cliffs overlooking the ocean, despite Maree Dawes’ insistance her mother was neither senile nor did she wander.
It would later emerge that Dottie had lent a persuasive and cash-strapped Burrell $100,000, and at the time she vanished had been insisting he pay her back and was threatening legal action.
The case mirrored that of the disappearance of Charlie Speirs, another elderly neighbour who lived in the next street over from Burrell at Lurline Bay.
Mr Speirs had suffered a stroke and was left with depression and a shuffling walk, but was still cognisant.
In 1994, Burrell approached him with an offer to buy the home with seaviews, which Mr Speirs refused ‘point blank’.
Dottie Davis was a much loved grandmother (pictured, right, with a relative) before she inexplicably vanished and police only realised two years later that she had been murdered for money by Burrell
Several weeks later, Mr Speirs’ wife returned from Sunday morning mass to discover he had vanished. There was no note, a police search found no trace of him and he was listed as a missing person.
It was not until three years later when police were investigating the disappearance of Mrs Davis, and realised Burrell was connected to both her and Mr Speirs, that they knew they were onto something.
However, lacking anything but a circumstantial connection, police were unable to take it any further.
Years later, Burrell was still a free man and enjoying the media attention at Bungonia as police fruitlessly searched his property.
He said he was ‘good friends’ with Bernie. He declared to Channel 9’s A Current Affair he knew nothing about Mrs Whelan’s disappearance and that ‘I just want it to be resolved like everyone else’.
Maree Dawes was alarmed by seeing Burrell’s name back in the news, and phoned the police to remind them of his connection to her mother’s disappearance.
So too did Detective Sue Whitfield after she also saw Burrell’s interviews.
Fat flashy Bruce Burrell was cocky and loved the limelight, but his overconfidence led to him making mistakes and in the end police nailed him
Detective Whitfield had investigated Dottie’s disappearance and had interviewed one of her neighbours: Bruce Allan Burrell.
Burrell was now the key suspect in a number of disappearances, but police pulled out of Bungonia as the search had come up with no trace of Mrs Whelan.
There was still no concrete evidence with which to charge Burrell, but officers were sifting through the 22 garbage bags of items removed from Hillydale; ‘every document, notebook and scrap of paper’ bar the toilet paper.
On June 18, 1997, officer Allan Duncan, known for being a perfectionist, returned to the task force basement for one last sift through the bags of evidence.
He took out a writing pad which had appeared to be blank, until he noticed the last page.
On it was a strange note, in capitals like the ransom letter, which read: ‘1. HAS BEEN K. 2. NO P. 3. LETTER WITHIN 2 DAYS. 4. NOTHING UNTIL RECEIVED, 5. STRESS 2.’
He raced to the head detective Bray, who read out the note, adding his interpretations. K meant kidnapped. P meant police. Letter within two days – further instructions. Stress 2 – no police involvement.
Police scoured vast tracts of thw Bungonia forest, a caver’s paradise of almost 4000 hectares, was littered with multiple abandoned mine shafts, but found no trace of Kerry or Dottie
That night another officer found a second note in the back of another pad, again all in capitals saying: 1. COLLECTION. 2. ADVISEMENT. 3. WAITING. 4. HOW TO PROCEED. 5. PICK UP. 6. COVER ALL.
Bray took this to mean the collection of Mrs Whelan, the advertisement Bernie had been instructed to put in a newspaper acknowledging receipt of the ransom note, then how to pick up the delivered ransom, then cover up the crime.
In a UBD street directory found in Burrell’s car, a pink highlighter marked a route from Phillip Street, Parramatta to Smithfield, the location of Bernie’s company.
Scribbled in pink was ‘A 30 Phillip A’. The Parkroyal hotel where Mrs Whelan was last seen was at 30 Phillip Street.
Over the ensuing days, police found notes about a two hour clean-up of a car, and references to items and their ‘hidey holes’, which reminded Bray of Burrell’s boast to Bernie about where he could hide a body.
Officers returned to Bungonia adjacent to the local forest which is a caver’s paradise of almost 4000 hectares, littered with multiple abandoned mine shafts.
Police scoured vast tracts of it, with police abseiling down deep ravines, and diving in chilly dams.
No trace of Mrs Whelan was found and Bernie had the heartbreaking task of telling his three children that their mother was probably dead.
Inside prison, the cocksure Burrell worked tedious jobs, making funeral shrouds and as a process worker, stripping electrical cables
After several more exhausting and fruitless months, the police teams and their dogs and vehicles packed up and left.
Despite not having found the body of Mrs Whelan, having no direct proof she had been killed, no DNA, and no witnesses, Task Force Bellaire still felt they had enough evidence against Burrell.
On April 1 1999, he was charged with Mrs Whelan’s murder and also that of Dottie Davis.
Burrell went to trial for Mrs Whelan’s murder in 2005. The case resulted in a hung jury. He was tried again in 2006, when he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Burrell then went on trial for Dorothy Davis’s murder in 2008, and was found guilty and sentenced to 28 years in prison.
Burrell appealed both convictions and sentences, and was rejected.
The events took a heavy mental and physical toll on Bernie, who died in November 2015 without ever knowing the whereabouts of his wife’s body.
‘Bruce Burrell was once my friend,’ Bernie said.
‘He was welcomed into my home. He cuddled my children, then he betrayed me in the worst way imaginable.
‘He’s not an insane person – he’s just a cold-blooded killer who would do anything for money.’
Incarcerated at Lithgow prison west of the Blue Mountains, Burrell’s health deteriorated with symptoms of serious heart disease.
He worked tedious jobs, making funeral shrouds and as a process worker, stripping electrical cables, which were probably more laborious than any job in his life on the outside.
In August 2016, Burrell died in Lithgow prison aged 63, from lung and liver cancer.
Police returned to search Bungonia several more times for the remains of Mrs Davis and Mrs Whelan, but without success.
Despite that, the women’s families erected a memorial there to honour them.
