Retired detective sergeant Mark Winterflood talks about the investigation into the 1997 abduction and murder of Bega teenagers Lauren Barry and Nichole Collins that shook the nation.
A pink television set was the crucial factor in solving the mystery of what happened to Bega teens Lauren Barry and Nichole Collins.
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On the night of October 5, 1997, the two teens were camping with friends just minutes from home.
Nichole had recently broken things off with her boyfriend but, that night, she decided to try and patch things up.
Deciding to visit the ex-boyfriend, she and Lauren walked away from the campsite. And into the clutches of a two-man crime wave in the form of Leslie Camilleri and Lindsay Beckett, who were in the area visiting Camilleri’s de facto.
The duo were career criminals who had racked up more than 200 criminal charges between them and were well-known to police in Yass, where they lived.
The pair put the girls into the back seat of their car – where the doors could not be opened from the inside – then raped and tortured them on a road trip to Victoria, where the teenage friends were murdered.
Mark Winterflood had been the detective sergeant at Bega for only a few years when the girls disappeared.
A taskforce was set up to investigate the case but was wound down after almost all the leads written on a whiteboard at the police station were exhausted.
One of those leads included Graham Potter – who murdered Kim Barry in 1981. He had been living in Bega since being released from jail in 1996.
The only lead left on the whiteboard was a police tip that Beckett and Camilleri were quite capable of abducting the pair – and it fell to Bega police to check out that lead.
And it was a large pink TV left by the roadside that let the detectives know they were on the right track.
Beckett was arrested in Canberra on October 27 over a stolen car so Winterflood and a fellow detective headed to the nation’s capital to interview him.
“It was during the trip to Canberra that my offsider Stewart Gray, who had taken a statement from an earlier witness who had seen a pink television on the side of the roadway where the girls were last seen on an early morning trip for a surf,” Winterford said,
“My offsider said to me it would make sense if you were trying to get two girls into a car and you had a TV in it you’d have to take it out to fit them in.”
Winterflood didn’t think much of the theory at the time but broached the subject of the pink TV at the end of the interview with Beckett.
At the mention of the TV, the relaxed Beckett swiftly became quite uncomfortable.
Convinced the TV set was the key that would unlock the case, the detectives started tracking it down.
They found an informant who told them he’d given Camilleri a pink TV set as payment for drugs – and the secondhand dealer the informant bought it from still had its serial number.
The TV had been through several sets of hands, before the police found it in a hotel in the nearby town of Bemboka. While it had since been painted black, the serial numbers matched.
“So at that point we could demonstrate that Camilleri and Beckett had been in Bega on the night that the girls disappeared and we could also show they put out a television at the very location where the girls were picked up.
“Beyond that, we had nothing.”
They decided that Beckett was their best bet. He was the one more likely to break as he seemed the weaker of the pair – there were reports he would sleep on Camilleri’s verandah waiting to be told what to do.
“I think he looked up to Camilleri as a tough-guy hero figure,” he said.
“He was also his supply of drugs. The two were just a walking crime wave, stealing cars and other crazy stuff – they were doing that two or three times a week.”
In a second police interview with Beckett, Winterflood laid out their evidence and showed him they could place the pair on the road where the girls went missing.
He also said Camilleri was being interviewed by police at the same time.
If Beckett didn’t tell them what happened, Camilleri might spill the beans himself in hope of a lighter sentence.
“Beckett wanted time to think about it and went outside to have a cigarette,” Winterflood said.
“He was outside with some prison security guards. While he was out there he started to make admissions to them and came back in in tears.
“We quickly asked him what had happened and he told us he’d killed them both, which caught us by surprise. Normally criminals will try and distance themselves from things or say ‘he killed one and I killed the other’.”
Then he took police to the girls’ bodies, in bushland just over the Victorian border – nearly 200 kilometres from Bega.
The pair were charged with multiple counts of abduction, rape and murder – Beckett pled guilty and was sentenced to life with a non-parole period of 35 years.
In a trial in Melbourne – which had jurisdiction because the murders occurred in Victoria – Camilleri claimed he’d had nothing to do with the murders. He said he was shooting up heroin in the car and slept for most of the trip.
The court didn’t buy it – in part because of the testimony of another victim of the pair, who was abducted and raped just a month earlier but managed to escape – and Camilleri was sentenced to life with no possibility of release.
In 2013 Camilleri would be sentenced to a further 28 years for the 1992 murder of Melbourne 13-year-old Prudence Bird.
Winterflood, who had planned to move on from Bega police station after about five years, ended up staying there even after retiring in 2014.
He also investigated the 1993 murder of six-year-old John Ashfield, who was beaten to death with a hammer and a phone book by his mother Gunn-Britt Ashfield (who later changed her name to Angelic Karstrom) and her de facto Austin Allan Hughes (now known as Blain Lopez Smith).
However, Winterflood said the murders of Nichole Collins and Lauren Barry was the “cruelest and most tragic” case he had worked on.
“It stays with you and whenever you drive on those roads you remember what took place there,” he said.
He also said he formed close friendships with the teens’ parents Graeme and Delma Collins and Garret and Cheryl Barry.
“We became very good friends with all the parents and particularly Lauren’s parents, I see quite regularly,” Winterford said.
“They’re really lovely people and anyone that’s got any level of empathy, you put yourself in their shoes and think ‘I wouldn’t cope with that’.
“It touches you because you can see that nothing repairs the damage, there’s absolutely no positives out of this except that those blokes are locked up and can’t walk among us again.”
Crimes That Shook Australia airs an episode on the Bega schoolgirl murders at 7.30pm Sunday on the Crime and Investigation channel.