Death in the sand the unsolved disappearance of James Annetts and Simon Amos

301 Pages·2015·2.37 MB·English

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Death in the Sand
The Unsolved Disappearance of James Annetts and Simon Amos
Norm Barber
Editor: Helen Eagle-Lomas
Smashwords Edition
Copyright Norm Barber 2014
The moral right of Norm Barber to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted. All rights reserved. The author welcomes requests for reproduction rights and may
be contacted at [email protected]
Photographic Copyrights
Sturt Creek station massacre site: Berkeley Fitzhardinge
Water bottles: Western Australia Coroner’s Court
Stan and Clare Tremlett: Robyn Long
Old Caranya homestead and store: Reg and Heather Snelling
All other photographs copyright Norm Barber
"We totally believe they were murdered.”
Sandra Annetts, 2009
Table of Contents
Prologue
1. Out on the Nicholson
2. Inside the fog
3. Instant jackeroos
4. Life at Flora Valley
5. Twice daily radio reporting
6. The case of the missing alibi
7. The reluctant search
8. Crowded skies
9. The Air Wing extravaganza
10. The circus comes to town
11. Cold welcome
12. Tales of violence
13. Meanwhile, back at Binya
14. The public relations search
15. The hundred years war
16. Rough and tumble in Halls Creek
17. True lies
18. Les Annetts’ second Kimberley search
19. Clan country
20. Finding the Datsun ute
21. Action men
22. Locating the remains
23. The recovery
24. Forensic identification and ‘end of story’
25. Memorial service
26. Meanwhile, back at the ranch
27. The reluctant Coroner
28. A bad case of amnesia
29. That other case of acute memory loss
30. The man who didn't need an alibi
31. “A cuff behind the ear”
32. Torn between two loyalties
33. The future search and rescue chief
34. That curious death ute
35. All is forgiven
36. Accidents happen
Part 2
2009
37. At home with the Annetts
38. Poems and letters from people they didn’t even know
39. The bisexual angle
Part 3
2010
40. Chris Rumpf
41. On the Tanami
42. The Pallottines
43. The Byzantine republic of Balgo
44. Yagga Yagga
45. The Balgo/Yagga Yagga struggle
46. A weekend in paradise
47. Machiavelli
48. Retreat from Balgo
49. Halls Creek
50. The bottle tree bore hanging
51. The Tanami Track disappearance
52. Billiluna
53. Back at Halls Creek
54. In the footsteps of James Annetts
55. Birrindudu oasis
56. Ghosts from the past
57. Voices from the ether
58. Feather man
59. Peter Sherwin: hard man on a hard land
60. The fall and rise of Peter Sherwin
61. The Wyndham liaison
62. Giles Munro Loder at home
63. Shane and Julie Kendall’s Anger
64. Strange Broome
65. The enigmatic courier
66. Harry Mason, Heather Snelling and Colin Main
67. Shadows behind shadows
68. Jock Mosquito
69. Tapping on doors
70. Marten Ynema
71. The status quo 1
72. The status quo 2
73. The private massacre
74. Ghost prisoners
75. Sex prisoners
76. Last Chapter
Whatever happened to…?
Photographs
End Notes
Acknowledgements
Prologue
April 1987
Clan Contractors’ bulldozer driver Johnny Brown was confused when he found the
police team boiling the billy next to the scattered trail of Simon Amos’ bleached bones. A
precise hole in Simon’s forehead marked the entry of a small calibre bullet, while the
mushrooming ball of lead had left a messier triangular exit wound from the top of the skull.
The boy’s eyeless sockets stared up to the sky from the sun-bleached skull as if in reproach at
the indignity.
They were in a unique area of the Great Sandy Desert where the last of the invisible
nomads carried metal tipped spears, and left their barefoot tracks around the bulldozers and
swags of sleeping drivers. No one saw them, but in the mornings the dozer operators found
the barefoot tracks of those who had crept around their beds during the night.
What bothered Johnny Brown in the glint of day was how a body could be reduced to
bleached bones in less than five months? Back on the farm down south, that level of
decomposition took 18 months. Perhaps the ravenous hunger of the creatures of the desert
accounted for it, but what really bothered him was the next corpse.
Back on the moving search vehicles, Johnny took a standing view on the tray of the
second. About a kilometre up the sand dune track, he jumped and rolled over the ground.
He carefully paced himself, until he found the old-style Dunlop shoe sticking out from a
trouser leg. He kicked it, checking its substance, and like a cluttered RAM drive, his brain
took a few seconds to realise what his eyes saw. The shoe was on an actual leg connected to a
hip bone piercing the fabric.
Further across the dune he picked up then dropped a shirt, still filled with a backbone
and intact ribs, brown and sinewy. The guts were gone: dried or hollowed out. The head lay
twenty feet away, jaw still attached, some flesh and the hair, strangely red.
How could the remains of two boys be in such disparate condition when they died at
similar times in similar terrain?
Why had those ancestors of Alsatian dogs, that had strayed from tourist convoys, ripped
Simon to pieces while leaving James relatively intact? What had stopped the rapid
decomposition of the remains of James? Insects didn’t prefer one human corpse to another.
Johnny knew that much.
Chapter 1. Out on the Nicholson
Station manager Giles Loder had caught the doomed sixteen-year-old, James Annetts,
skinning a duck, when he arrived unexpectedly at Nicholson homestead on Monday, 1
December 1986, about lunchtime. The weekly rations wouldn’t keep a fat-assed office worker
satisfied, let alone a station ‘bore runner’, so James shot wild ducks with his Baikal shotgun,
in the creek bed behind the ghost town. His Dad had taught him to hunt and skin ducks, not
pluck them.
Nicholson Station had twenty years earlier employed 120 jackeroos, stockmen and
cooks, who supported a mob of dependants in the creek bed. There were hundreds of horses
and working dogs, electric street lights, a cool room compressor, hot water, and dozens of
accommodation rooms, offices, workshops, kitchens, and machines. But by 1986 the
profitability of the cattle industry had collapsed. The garden sprinklers were turned off, and
the once bustling station was reduced to two streets of empty decaying buildings. And one
inexperienced city boy, who hadn’t been paid for two months.
Loder was born in 1951 at Murwillimbah on the east coast, before it became a surfing
Mecca. He left school at 15 and by 18 was thriving in the bullying atmosphere of Northern
Territory stations. Within 17 years he'd outpaced and replaced half a dozen of Lord Vesteys’
managers who couldn't adapt to the fists and steel-capped boots regime of the new owner,
Peter Sherwin. He was a Sherwin man at heart and produced beasts for the live trade on
budget, whatever it took.