Suspect's brother saw sex at murder creek

Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans who were murdered in 1974 near Toowoomba. Source: The Sunday Telegraph

FOLLOW our rolling coverage of day two of inquest into murders of Sydney nurses Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans.

3.32pm: The brother of one of the men police suspected of murdering Sydney nurses Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans has told an inquest he watched his brother's friends having sex with two women at Murphy's Creek when he was 10.

But the evidence from Allan John "Shorty" Laurie's younger brother Walter Laurie was disjointed and at times difficult to follow due to a brain injury he had suffered in a car crash in 1991.

Mr Laurie, who had a speech impediment, said his brother Shorty, step-uncle Allan Neil "Ungie" Laurie, Wayne "Boogie" Hilton and a host of associates including Larry Charles, Terrance "Jimmy" O'Neill, Donnie Laurie and a man he referred to as "Kingsley" Hunt came to his parents' house in Toowoomba with two women.

He said Kingsley had brought the girls up from Goondiwindi for a party and they later went down to Murphy's Creek in two cars about sunset.

Mr Laurie said his father drove him, his mother and his brother down to the party in an old black station wagon.

His mother waited in the car while his father took him through a barbed wire fence to a clearing at Murphy's Creek, he said.

He said there was a bonfire going and the men - including his brother Shorty - were "making love" to two women, one of whom was naked.

"It was like a gang-bang," he said.

Mr Laurie said one of the women, the taller of the two, at one point yelled out "that's enough".

He said another girl stood up and was "knocked or pushed" back down onto the ground by "Ungie" Laurie.

Counsel assisting the Coroner Craig Chowdhury said Mr Laurie told police in a statement taken in 2000 that he heard the women begging them to stop.

Mr Laurie: "Yes."

He said he asked his older brother Shorty what was going on and why was this happening.

He said his brother told him to mind his business before he was knocked off the log where he had been sitting.

Mr Laurie said he got a concussion but remembered the shove starting an argument between Shorty and his father.

Mr Chowdhury said, in his statement to police, Mr Laurie indicated that he was picked up by his mother and taken back to the car after being knocked out.

He said in the car on the way home his father was going on to his mother "about the boys and the way they had acted".

Mr Laurie said he remembered the date was in the early 1970s because he was watching a show about the Vietnam War on television at the time.

12.58pm: The fifth witness to take the witness stand was Norma Sterling.

Ms Sterling was standing in her kitchen cooking tea when a woman came to the back door asking if anyone was home in October, 1974.

In a statement she gave to police in 1989, Mrs Sterling said she remembered the date because her son was home at the time watching football on television.

She said the woman looked like Lorraine Wilson.

"I heard this voice at the back door asking if anyone was here and I said 'Yes, come in,' thinking it was a neighbour," she said.

She said the woman was standing in the laundry and asked if she could stay for a little while.

"I asked her why and she said she just wanted to get away from some people," Mrs Sterling said.

She told the court the girl had been at a party at Picnic Point but had been in an argument with someone who wanted to go and visit their mother.

She didn't want to call police, Mrs Sterling said.

"She said they'd probably find her anyway. We just stood there for quite a while looking at one another because I didn't know what to say," she said.

"Then she said 'Right, I'd better go then' and left."

Mrs Sterling returned to the kitchen and heard a scream.

She went to the window where she could see the woman who had been in the laundry struggling with a man who was trying to get her into the backseat of a car, which had been parked on the street.

"He was really struggling with her and he hit her across the face," Mrs Sterling said.

She said another man was wrestling with a second woman in the backseat of the car.

Her husband came home shorty afterwards and asked her what as going on.

Mrs Sterling explained what had happened to him and he said "it was probably just a domestic".

She never called police because her husband told her "don't get involved".

Mrs Sterling said the women she had seen looked exactly like the photos of Ms Wildon and Wendy Evans which appeared in The Toowoomba Chronicle a fortnight after she saw them.

She thought of them again when the bodies were found in 1976 but did not contact police.

Finally, in 1989, she gave a statement. Mrs Sterling said she spoke to her parents and a friend who encouraged her to come forward.

"(Before then) we didn't want to go against my husband's wishes," she told the court.

12.23pm: The fourth witness to give evidence at the inquest on was Jeffrey Nuttall who lived with his family on a farm at Blanche View in the 1970s.

He said he was in a car being driven by his wife up the Toowoomba Range around 6pm to 7pm sometime after August in 1974 to a Chinese restaurant for dinner when they came across "all these people on the road running around".

He said two cars had pulled over on the roadside, about 40m apart. He said one was a green and white EJ or EH Holden while the other was an older-model car with faded paintwork.

Mr Nuttall said his wife pulled over midway between the two cars.

"Everyone got off the road except for one girl," he said.

"She was reasonably tall, with dark hair... and she was standing on the left-hand side of the older vehicle and was conversing with people in it."

Mr Nuttall said the woman, whose description was similar to that of Lorraine Wilson, walked back down the range towards them with her arms folded, looking as though she had been crying.

"I said to her 'are you all right?'," he said.

"She mumbled something that was inaudible.

"She didn't stop for a second."

He said the woman walked towards a second, shorter woman who was standing by a passenger car door of the Holden.

He wrote down the Holden's number plate because he'd had an uneasy feeling about the incident, before driving off with his family.

Mr Nuttall said he told a police officer about the encounter and gave a formal statement in October last year after reading a newspaper article about the women's murders.

11.10am: The second and third witnesses giving evidence at the inquest into the murders of two Sydney nurses, husband and wife Vivian and Rose Murphy, said they were driving down the Toowoomba Range with three young children in the back of the car on their way to Redcliffe in Brisbane when they came across a frightening scene.

Mrs Murphy said a woman whose description matched that of Lorraine Wilson ran out from where a car was parked on the side of the range "trying to get our attention".

She said a man was chasing her.

She said the woman was waving her arms and calling "help, help" while another woman was being "cuddled" by a second man in front of the parked car.

"I looked at them and there was fear," Mrs Murphy told the inquest.

"I said (to my husband): 'Keep going, don't stop'."

She said the woman who ran to their car looked frightened but she thought if she had stopped "we may have made it worse".

The couple drove to the Helidon Police Station at the bottom of the Toowoomba Range and Mr Murphy reported the incident to a lone police officer.

"He said he would send a car to have a look," he said.

"We were concerned this girl was running and there was a bloke chasing her."

He said the officer did not appear to take any notes.

Mrs Murphy said she was watching a cold case television program about the women's disappearances many years later when she heard the presenter make reference to her husband's police report at Helidon.

"It was an instant in our lives and it was very small but it was ultimately very important," she said.

She contacted police and eventually gave a formal statement in 2005.

Mrs Murphy said she was left feeling "upset and scared".

10.33am: A witness has told an inquest into the murders of two Sydney nurses that he saw the two women tied up on the side of the road but thought it was a prank.

Melvin Oliver was the first  witness to take the stand at Toowoomba Magistrates Court on day two of the inquest into the double murders of Sydney nurses Lorraine Wilson, 20, and Wendy Evans, 18 in 1974.

Mr Oliver told State Coroner Michael Barnes he gave a statement to police on November 26, 1999 after watching an episode of Australia's Most Wanted about the murdered women on television.

He was a travelling salesman for a Toowoomba-based company in the early 1970s and was driving down the range for a 2pm appointment with a farmer in the Lockyer Valley when he came across two women being tied up on the side of the road.

He said it was around the time of the winter-crop harvest and placed the date around late September or early October, 1974.

Mr Oliver described a woman who was sitting on the ground with her hands tied behind her back. He described her as plump with wavy collar-length hair.

He told the court a second woman, who was taller with dark, long hair, was being tied up by another man nearby.

He said a black Holden was parked on the left-hand side of the road but he thought it was a group of Darling Downs Institute students who were playing pranks.

"I just assumed that when I saw this, this was another one of those real-life performances where they wanted to extract some money," he said.

He said he noticed the man tying up the hands of the taller girl was shorter than her, wearing black clothes and had a tattoo on his right-upper arm.

He described the man's shoulder-length scraggy and unkempt hair.

But when he was pulled up next to the black Holden he noticed a movement and, in a panic, said he quickly reached over to lock his car door in case he became a target.

He said he didn't think of calling out to the women to see if they were okay.

"I thought if they were in trouble they would look at me or nod or call for help," Mr Oliver said.

He said he then noticed a second car, which he described as a grey-coloured 1963 EJ Holden, parked further down the range with "a couple of blokes looking back" inside.

Mr Oliver said he drove to the bottom of the Toowoomba Range after deciding the women were okay but found himself being pursued by the EJ Holden which was "going flat-out".

"I thought 'uh oh, I'm in trouble here, these larrikins are going to try and get me'," he said.

"I dropped the clutch and out it into gear and I took off like a shot in front of them."

He said he was being followed and was almost "run off the road" at around 70mph when the EJ Holden suddenly pulled off near the Withcott Hotel.

He never went to a police station until a few days later, when he came across the same EJ Holden in Toowoomba.

He said the car tried to run him off the road again and he quickly parked and ran into the Toowoomba Police Station on Neal St to report it.

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