| Arthur Stanley Brown | |
| Birth Date: | 20 May 1912 |
| Birth Place: | Merinda, Queensland, Australia |
| Death Place: | Malanda, Queensland, Australia |
| Charge: | Murder two counts Sexual assault and rape 28 counts |
| Conviction: | Hung jury (2000) Deemed mentally unfit to stand trial a second time. |
| Conviction Status: | Deceased |
| Victims: | 2–10+ |
| Motive: | Pedophilia |
| Country: | Australia |
| Apprehended: | December 1998 |
| States: | Various |
| Occupation: | Retired carpenter |
| Spouse: | Hester Porter (1944 – 1978) Charlotte Anderson (1978 – 2002) |
| Children: | Eight stepchildren |
Arthur Stanley Brown (20 May 1912 – 6 July 2002) was an Australian man charged for the 26 August 1970 rape and murders of Judith and Susan Mackay in Townsville, Queensland. In his 2000 trial, 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 1973 Adelaide Oval abductions identifying Brown as the suspect she had seen. Brown is thus considered a prime suspect for both these abductions and the Beaumont children disappearance in 1966 as well as for several other murders.
Arthur Stanley 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, Brown moved to Melbourne with his mother. He remained there until he got his drivers licence, moved back to Townsville and obtained work as a meatpacker. Brown was exempted from military service in World War II as his job was listed as a reserved occupation. In 1946 he 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. Brown was nicknamed the "Scarlet Pimpernel" based on the verse from the play[1] as he could be anywhere at any time due to flexible work hours and self-supervision.
Brown married Hester Porter (née Andersen; 24 May 1910 – 15 May 1978) in 1944 following her divorce, and became a stepfather to her three children. On 15 May 1978 Hester, by now bedridden with arthritis, died from injuries Brown claimed she had suffered in a fall while trying to get on a commode, had hit her head and been killed, after which Hester's younger sister, Charlotte Andersen, who had five children, moved in with Brown. The couple married later that year. Some members of Hester's family believed Brown had killed her. One relative recalled that Brown was not grieving the day Hester died but was "shaking with fright" and appeared worried. Brown told family members that he had paid for a post-mortem that found the death to be an accident, but investigating police found this to be untrue and believed the family doctor had written out a death certificate without examining the body, which Brown had cremated.[2]
According to Hester's older sister Milly, Hester had confided in her that she was afraid of Brown, reporting that she had caught him molesting a child and had tried to prevent him from being alone with other children. Milly, once said that Hester had told her: "He doesn't just like big girls – he likes little girls too". Hester once gave a female relative the "prized" lacework she had inherited from her mother, saying that she did not want "[Brown's] next lady love to get it". When asked whom she meant, Hester identified her sister, Charlotte.
In 1982, another of Hester's sisters told her parents that Brown had molested her while a small girl. After this, many more of the Andersen extended family came forward to say they also had been molested and shown pictures of dead women in a secret room at his home. Following legal advice that taking the matter to court could be traumatic for the victims, the incidents were kept a family secret. However, as an entry in relative Christine Millier's diary, dated 23 January 1991, and produced at Brown's 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". "Rock Spider" is a slang prison term for a child molester.
On the morning of 26 August 1970 Susan Debra Mackay, 5, and Judith Elizabeth Mackay, 7, disappeared from a school bus stop 200m (700feet) from their house in the Townsville suburb of Aitkenvale, less than 10 minutes after leaving home. 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 28 August in the dry bed of Antill Creek, 25km (16miles) south-west of Townsville. Susan was found first, and a trail of footprints from her body led searchers 70m (230feet) to Judith's body.
It was speculated that Judith had fled while Susan was being murdered and had then been run down. 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 the cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation by sand. Their school uniforms, straw hats, and shoes were beside them, with each shoe containing a neatly folded sock while their uniforms were folded neatly inside their schoolbags.[3]
The Townsville community was outraged by the murders. Police initially declined to post a reward, but after interviewing more than 6,000 men who lived in the area and having no progress in the investigation, posted a reward of $10,000 with an offer of a pardon for any accomplice who came forward.[4]
One witness reported seeing the girls talking to a man in a car at the bus stop at 8:10a.m. Just after 11a.m., a car pulled into a service station at Ayr, 85km (53miles) south of Townsville, and the driver bought $3 (around 25-litre/ 5 gll) of petrol. The station attendant, Jean Thwaite, reported seeing two girls in the car, recalling the younger girl asking, "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." Not long after, Neil Lunney, a soldier recently returned from Vietnam, spoke to a driver who had cut him off.
Lunney stated that he saw two girls in Aitkenvale school uniforms in the vehicle and that the driver appeared to be trying to avoid being seen. The evidence given by Thwaite and Lunney were both rejected as unreliable as, in contrast to all the other witnesses who identified the car as "looking like a Holden", they had both identified the car as a Vauxhall and neither were questioned "in depth". Several witnesses reported the girls being driven around in a car. Two witnesses later reported seeing a man walking towards a car from the direction of the murder scene around 1p.m. that day.
Several witnesses claimed the suspect's car looked like a Holden EH. Two witnesses, Thwaite and Lunney, said the car was a blue Vauxhall Victor, a very uncommon car at the time. A car seen parked near the murder scene was described as an earlier model Holden, possibly a Holden FJ. Despite the various descriptions of the vehicle, the two witnesses who saw the children inside the car gave matching descriptions of the driver, with him having high cheekbones, narrow skull, short dark hair and, as one put it, "Mickey Mouse ears", and both were in agreement that the vehicle had a driver's door that was a different colour from the rest of the vehicle.
Lunney would eventually be a key witness at Brown's trial, as he identified Brown as the driver with two young passengers that he had argued with over erratic driving that day. Although twenty-eight years had passed, Brown's appearance had barely changed and he was still very much recognisable as the same person when compared to photographs of him taken in the 1970s. This would be an important factor in identifying him as matching the sketch of the suspect in the Beaumont and Adelaide Oval abductions.
Inexplicably, Thwaite and Lunney later changed their minds and signed statements that the vehicle may have been a Holden FJ. The police, believing the car seen parked near the murder scene was the offender's, concentrated on finding the vehicle rather than the driver, thus no sketch or photofit picture of the suspect was ever released. Despite evidence from Thwaite that the suspect's car's petrol cap was on the left side which ruled out the vehicle being a Holden, the media only ran pictures of FJs.[5]
Police were unable to locate the suspect's car at the time, and the murders remained unsolved. Brown, who matched the suspect's description and owned a blue Vauxhall Victor with an odd coloured drivers door, was never a suspect in the original police investigation. The evidence given by Thwaite and Lunney, who identified the car as a Vauxhall, was rejected as unreliable solely due to the belief held by police that the car was a Holden. The two witnesses were never questioned in depth, which police later admitted hindered investigations as they both were the only witnesses to speak to the suspect while the girls were in the car.[6] The Mackay family moved to Toowoomba several months after the murders.
In 1998, a cousin of Brown's wife, who was now living in Perth, and had been one of Brown's molestation victims, decided to phone Crimestoppers after they aired a program on the Mackay murders and expressed her suspicion of Brown in the murders. 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. The ensuing months of investigations by Hickey and Detective Brendan Rook, including interviewing other family members, resulted in forty-five cases against Brown relating to paedophilia and circumstantial evidence linking him to the Mackay murders.
Investigations continued and evidence accumulated. Brown, who had been working as a carpenter at the Mackay sisters' school at the time, had been obsessed by the case, falsely claiming he knew the girls' father and had offered to take two of his wife's cousins to view the crime scene two weeks after the murders. Brown had replaced the odd-coloured door from his 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 Brown's victims were taken to Antill Creek to be molested, and in one instance was only 20m (70feet) from where the girls' bodies were found.[2]
Brown had twice previously confessed to the murders. In September 1970, Brown was drinking with 19-year-old John White in the White Horse Tavern in Charters Towers. White, who did not know Brown, claimed that Brown had asked if he had been following the murder of the Mackay sisters a few days earlier and had then stated that police were looking for the wrong car and that he had committed the murders. White reported the conversation to the local police who had dismissed the claim after speaking to "Arty Brown". In 1975, Brown confessed to the murders to his apprentice John Hill who said he never came forward before because it seemed totally out of character and he thought Brown was joking.[7] Brown was arrested on all charges of sexual assault and the rape of six children and for the murders of Susan and Judith Mackay.
After his arrest for the double-murder of Susan and Judith Mackay, Australian authorities investigated Brown for links to other additional crimes of a similar nature. As a result, Brown was identified as the prime suspect in a number of unsolved murders:
The trial of Brown for the murders of the Mackay sisters began on 18 October 1999. Although evidence regarding Brown's paedophilia 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. Trial was set for 25 July 2000, when the defence argued Brown was unfit to plead and a new trial was set for 31 July, but before it could start newspapers reported that "the case did not proceed for legal reasons which cannot be published". The court suppressed release of the legal reasons until July 2001.[24] In 2001, it was revealed that Brown's lawyer had applied for a section 613 verdict from the jury which meant that Brown would have been considered unfit to be tried. 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 tribunal did not have the jurisdiction to overrule the jury 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. Although the psychiatric report could not overrule the courts finding that the trial could proceed, Queensland's Director of Public Prosecutions, Leanne Clare, announced on 3 July that her office had decided not to proceed with the retrial and all charges against Brown were dropped.[24]
His wife, Charlotte, died in April 2002. Ostracised by his family, Brown moved into a nursing home in Malanda, where he died three months later on 6 July, officially an innocent man. Brown left instructions that no funeral notices be placed and only one stepdaughter had knowledge of the funeral details. His death was not reported until several weeks after the funeral.[25]
