Arthur Stanley Brown

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.

Early life and criminal history 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 as he could be anywhere at any time due to flexible work hours and self-supervision.

Suspected murder of first wife 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.

Sexual assaults

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 with 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.

Suspect for Mackay sisters murders Murders and sightings On the morning of 26 August 1970, Susan Debra Mackay, 5, and Judith Elizabeth Mackay, 7, disappeared from a school bus stop 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 Anthill Creek, south-west of Townsville. Susan was found first, and a trail of footprints from her body led searchers 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.

The Townsville community was outraged by the murders.

One witness reported seeing the girls talking to a man in a car at the bus stop at 8:10a.m.

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. The Mackay family moved to Toowoomba several months after the murders.

Suspect identification and arrest 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 from where the girls' bodies were found. Brown was arrested on all charges of sexual assault and the rape of six children and for the murders of Susan and Judith Mackay.

Potential links to other cases 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: Brown is considered to be a suspect for the Beaumont children disappearance as he bore a similarity to a identikit picture of the suspect. A woman reported seeing two girls and a boy come up from the sea after a swim and that a tall, blond-haired man had started talking to the children. They were never seen again. A search for a connection to the Beaumonts was unsuccessful as no employment records existed that could shed light on Brown's 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 destroyed his own employment files. 14-year-old Marilyn Joy Wallman disappeared while on the way to school at Eimeo, Queensland, on 21 March 1972. Witnesses saw a blue Vauxhall in the area around the time of the disappearance. Brown and his wife Hester had visited relatives in Mackay, which was 13km from Eimeo, but his car, a blue Vauxhall, had broken down and the couple returned home by train. Brown returned to Mackay alone to pick up the car and police speculate that if the couple had taken an early train, Brown could have been passing Eimeo at the time that Wallman disappeared. In 1974, a fragment of skull was discovered 40 km away from where Wallman went missing and was positively identified as being Wallman's through DNA analysis in January 2015. Joanne Ratcliffe, 11, and Kirste Jane Gordon, 4, were two Australian girls who went missing while attending an Australian rules football match at the Adelaide Oval on 25 August 1973. The presumed murders are thought by South Australia Police and the media to be related to the disappearance of the Beaumont children in 1966. The case is sometimes referred to as the Adelaide Oval abductions. Although there is no proof that Brown 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 placed him in Adelaide after June 1973. Another witness who earlier had reported seeing a man near the oval carrying a young girl while another older girl 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. She had reported that the man was wearing a pair of horn rimmed glasses which had fallen to the ground, been picked up and placed in a pocket. Brown is known to have worn horn rimmed reading glasses which police consider a significant point in the identification.

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.