Speaker 1: Last week on Life and Crimes. He goes into Margaret's
Speaker 1: bedroom and sees Margaret's body in bed, and he went
Speaker 1: close enough to realize that she was dead. And he
Speaker 1: goes into Shawna's bedroom and he sees Shanna dead on
Speaker 1: the bed, and it really affects him because he had
Speaker 1: a little girl the same age. One thing they did
Speaker 1: find that probably is the only strong clue to the
Speaker 1: killer's identity worth some unidentified footprints left by a Dunlop
Speaker 1: Volley Sanchu. I'm Andrew Rule. This is Life and Crimes.
Speaker 2: Last week we looked at the first half of the
Speaker 2: story of the Tap murders, the murder of Margaret Tap
Speaker 2: and her little daughter Shawna back in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: It's forty years ago. This week, we're going to pick
Speaker 1: up that story and expand it and look at all
Speaker 1: the potential leads that were or were not followed. The
Speaker 1: thing about Margaret Tap is that she knew so many people,
Speaker 1: and so many people liked her. She got along well
Speaker 1: with people. She knew a lot of blokes, a lot
Speaker 1: of them became her lovers. It was known the police
Speaker 1: discovered that there might have been half a dozen who
Speaker 1: worked at the William Anglis Hospital that at some point
Speaker 1: either had been her lovers or were suspected of same.
Speaker 1: And this of course led to a lot of complications
Speaker 1: for the police in trying to navigate their way around
Speaker 1: such tricky social areas where you've got married professionals who
Speaker 1: are very well lawyered up and who don't want to
Speaker 1: be caught out. And so the police had their hands
Speaker 1: full checking out those leads. But the man that she
Speaker 1: really loved, the one she really wanted, was doctor John Bradkey.
Speaker 1: Now John Bradkey was a doer. He was a South
Speaker 1: Australian of you know, the sort of German extraction over
Speaker 1: in South Australia. There's a lot of those Lutheran German
Speaker 1: people that are farmers by origin. We see the names
Speaker 1: crop up always, you know, out of the Clare Valley
Speaker 1: and all that. And he was a successful, hard working doctor.
Speaker 1: He was married, he had I think three children, and
Speaker 1: he and his wife had a lovely property with trees
Speaker 1: and all sorts of beautiful stuff and it was a
Speaker 1: showpised property.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: He clearly was a man of wealth and taste. But
Speaker 1: his weak point in this case was Margaret Tap. Margaret
Speaker 1: Tap was a striking woman. She had red hair, she
Speaker 1: had high cheek bones, she had sort of green eyes
Speaker 1: like a cat, and she had a bright and bubbly personality.
Speaker 1: She was intelligent, she was vivacious, and she liked men.
Speaker 1: Men liked her, and clearly she had a bit of
Speaker 1: a hypnotic effect on people because so many people fell
Speaker 1: for her. But John Brakie was the love of her life,
Speaker 1: she told friends. And we know this because a you know,
Speaker 1: he actually bought her the house that she lived in
Speaker 1: at Calvin Drive, the one she later was able to purchase.
Speaker 1: She had to pay out half of it by paying
Speaker 1: out Bracky's widow. We know it because we know that
Speaker 1: before Brakey's death, at one point Margaret, who was quite excitable,
Speaker 1: she went up to break his house in the Dandy Knocks,
Speaker 1: to break his home and she stripped off her clothes
Speaker 1: and lay down in their garden and created a terrible
Speaker 1: scene to embarrass him. At another time, she damaged his
Speaker 1: much loved DA's and sportscar, the one in which he
Speaker 1: was killed. Actually, she has to scratch the paintwork or
Speaker 1: keyed it or whatever, the usual sort of stuff that
Speaker 1: angry lovers get involved in, and all of which tells
Speaker 1: us that this love affair between the doer doctor and
Speaker 1: the dashing, beautiful nurse was mercurial and dangerous. It was
Speaker 1: years of living dangerously and after breakis death on the
Speaker 1: first of March nineteen eighty three in his car driving
Speaker 1: down the hill too fast to deliver a baby. He
Speaker 1: was heading off to the hospital to deliver a baby.
Speaker 1: After his death, it would appear that Margaret in some
Speaker 1: respects settled down in that she paid out the house
Speaker 1: and she got her son to move in with her parents,
Speaker 1: and she and Shauna lived in the house while she
Speaker 1: took up studying law and these other things. But she
Speaker 1: also I suspect, having missed out on John Brake and
Speaker 1: grief stricken over John Key, she started to knock around
Speaker 1: with whichever blog her eye fell on, and one of
Speaker 1: them was one of the fellow law students from one
Speaker 1: as UNI. One of them was the allegedly the guy
Speaker 1: that was teaching her to drive trucks, one of them
Speaker 1: was somebody else, and one of them was somebody else.
Speaker 1: So there were a whole heap of people that had
Speaker 1: come into her orbit. One of the things that was
Speaker 1: obvious to me was that there were just so many
Speaker 1: candidates for the police to check. Now, in the nineties,
Speaker 1: DNA came to be a thing. In the eighties, DNA
Speaker 1: had been science fiction. In the nineties, suddenly it was
Speaker 1: a police tool. Not as good a tool as it
Speaker 1: is today, but it became a very useful tool for
Speaker 1: the police. And what they had was a semen sample
Speaker 1: that had been deposited on Shawna's night dress. Now this
Speaker 1: would suggest that the killer, of course, is a sexual deviate.
Speaker 1: That this murder is not a burglary gone wrong. This
Speaker 1: murder is not a case of a rapist looking to
Speaker 1: attack Margaret, the thirty five year old mother. It is
Speaker 1: a sexual deviate who has an interest in a nine
Speaker 1: year old girl. There's no way around that. That's what
Speaker 1: it is. And it certainly doesn't look like a hit,
Speaker 1: a paid hit. They were both strangled and there is
Speaker 1: seamen found on the little girl's night dress. This is
Speaker 1: unlike any other hit in history. If it's a hit,
Speaker 1: so I'm tipping it's not. That didn't stop the homicide
Speaker 1: squad at one stage floating a fairly bizarre theory that
Speaker 1: Dr Bradkey's widow had paid a person a man to
Speaker 1: kill Margaret Tap out of spite and anger and revenge
Speaker 1: and all the rest of it, to kill her dead
Speaker 1: husband's ex lover. This would appear to be highly unlikely.
Speaker 1: The doctor's widow was outraged by this suggestion, and in
Speaker 1: fact got a press counsel ruling that stories making that
Speaker 1: suggestion overstep the mark. And I think she made her
Speaker 1: case very well and very strongly that it was a
Speaker 1: fairly bizarre thing for the police to suggest. And one
Speaker 1: of the problems of that theory was they said she
Speaker 1: paid this man a large amount of money. Well, the
Speaker 1: fact was, she says she and her husband brad Key,
Speaker 1: when he was alive, had lent this particular man money,
Speaker 1: and by the time Margaret was murdered in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: that man had paid back most of that money. So
Speaker 1: the police's information was sort of out of kilter, deliberately
Speaker 1: or what. I don't know, but it just didn't really
Speaker 1: stack up. But what stacked up more to a neutral
Speaker 1: observer such as ourselves, is this Margaret knew a lot
Speaker 1: of men. A lot of men knew Margaret. So there's
Speaker 1: the ones we've already been through, the ones that were cleared,
Speaker 1: you know, the brother in law, the ex neighbor, the
Speaker 1: ex husband. Then we've got her own brother, Lindsay Nelson,
Speaker 1: who recently he died two years ago. Lindsay told me
Speaker 1: that for years and years and years he was not
Speaker 1: tested for DNA. And he said to me in two
Speaker 1: thousand and four he said this, And then later he said,
Speaker 1: if they didn't test me him, who else didn't they test?
Speaker 1: Because there he is, he's the uncle of the little
Speaker 1: girl Shauna. He should have been eliminated because he had
Speaker 1: access to the house. He would have known how to
Speaker 1: go through the back door. What if he was a fiend,
Speaker 1: what if he was a raving pedophile killer, whatever? Whatever
Speaker 1: he said, He wasn't clear. And he pointed out that
Speaker 1: he worked for a particular counsel out there, and that
Speaker 1: he'd borrowed it truck with a driver from the council.
Speaker 1: Well borrowed a loose word, that'd actually commandeered the truck
Speaker 1: and took it more or less illegally a council truck
Speaker 1: to move some gear into Margaret's house, tables and stuff.
Speaker 1: So he said, the guy that drove the truck is
Speaker 1: called you know, Bill Blogs. And I went and knocked
Speaker 1: on Bill Blogs's door one day. But Bill Blogs was
Speaker 1: a shifty character. Bill Blogs had form for doing dishonest things.
Speaker 1: In fact, he was sacked from the council for breaking
Speaker 1: fire hydrants with crowbars so that he would be called
Speaker 1: out after ours to fix the hydrants so he woud
Speaker 1: get overtime. So he was a bit of a crook.
Speaker 1: He used to receive stolen goods, pinch stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: he was one of those sort of guys. And also
Speaker 1: Bill Blogs, not his real name, used to drive a
Speaker 1: hot red falcon Ute and it was a really good
Speaker 1: hot falcon Ut with what they called twelve slaughter mag
Speaker 1: wheel These were the very expensive mag wheels, twelve slaughters.
Speaker 1: And one of the clues that neighbors gave police they
Speaker 1: said they'd noticed such a vehicle in Calvin Drive around
Speaker 1: the week of that murder. Now this is not a
Speaker 1: positive sighting. It doesn't actually put Bill Blogs in the frame,
Speaker 1: but it's interesting. Lindsay Nelson, Margaret's brother, Shawana's uncle says
Speaker 1: to me, how come that bug, Bill Blogs hasn't been cleared.
Speaker 1: Why wasn't he clear? How come all these other guys
Speaker 1: he thinks haven't been cleared. There was a young guy
Speaker 1: teaching Margaret how to drive a semi trailer. Margaret was
Speaker 1: an enthusiast. Margaret had a lot of energy. Margaret was mercurial.
Speaker 1: Margaret was up for new experiences. And one of Margaret's
Speaker 1: ideas was she would get a semi trailer license a
Speaker 1: truck lasnon so she could help friends in South Australia
Speaker 1: bring in their grain crop over summer. Go over there,
Speaker 1: work in summertime, driving a truck back and forth to
Speaker 1: the wheat silos. She was that sort of person. She'd
Speaker 1: give anything a go. She was getting her truck license
Speaker 1: with instructions from a young man who was happy to
Speaker 1: give her free lessons because he really enjoyed her company.
Speaker 1: That guy should have had his DNA tested because who
Speaker 1: knows what might have happened there. That guy's circle of
Speaker 1: friends should have been tested, you know. Did he know
Speaker 1: someone else that knew Margaret through the truck driving thing.
Speaker 1: We don't know. In the same street, there was a
Speaker 1: house at the end of the street on the corner
Speaker 1: of Ferntry Gully Road and Calvin Drive I think it was,
Speaker 1: and that family were regarded as sort of the black
Speaker 1: sheep of Calvin Drive. Dad was an interstate trucky. They
Speaker 1: are pretty rough and ready. There was a lot of them.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of boys in the family grown up.
Speaker 1: When I say boys ranging from a teenage kid of
Speaker 1: about fourteen up to twenty eight years old or whatever.
Speaker 1: I tracked down a couple of those young fellows and
Speaker 1: they said to me, we weren't cleared. And one of
Speaker 1: them had the common sense to say that they.
Speaker 2: Should have been cleared.
Speaker 1: He said we should have been cleared because he said,
Speaker 1: I worked at Bowater scott or one of the big
Speaker 1: factories out there. I used to come home at midnight
Speaker 1: from shift work. He said, I was a perfect candidate,
Speaker 1: but the police didn't come and test me or question me.
Speaker 1: He said, I should have been tested and eliminated, and
Speaker 1: so should my brothers, and so should my sister's boyfriend.
Speaker 1: Sister's boyfriend lived in the caravan beside these people's house.
Speaker 1: He did time for rape, did time in Pentridge prison
Speaker 1: for rape. So there we've got a whole family of
Speaker 1: rough young bugs from fourteen to twenty something. And the
Speaker 1: sister's boyfriend who's a convicted rapist or was later convicted
Speaker 1: of rape and did time. None of them were tested
Speaker 1: at that time. This means that the police managed to
Speaker 1: miss for some time, maybe forever, but certainly for many years,
Speaker 1: they didn't eliminate a whole group of people, any one
Speaker 1: of whom could have been the murderer. But wait, there's more.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, not that long ago. Let's stay
Speaker 1: just before COVID. Back in there. I was approached by
Speaker 1: a young man with a story to tell you. He's
Speaker 1: a guy with a good job, proper person, not a lunatic,
Speaker 1: not an armchair detective. Wasn't full of theories. He just
Speaker 1: had one story to tell me. He said. Look, I'm
Speaker 1: a close friend of a particular young fellow and his father,
Speaker 1: whom he hates, was a doctor in the Dandy Knongs
Speaker 1: back in the eighties and nineties. And his father was
Speaker 1: very popular, very well known. He was sporty, he was
Speaker 1: good looking, he was king of the kids. He drove
Speaker 1: good cars, and he played tennis, and he had a
Speaker 1: holiday house down the coast, and he was big house
Speaker 1: on the hill. The whole shebang very high in the
Speaker 1: list of socially desirable people living in the Dandy Knongs,
Speaker 1: you know, the top of the social tree among his
Speaker 1: friends would be I think the former Senator Don Chip
Speaker 1: and his wife, among others up in the hills, and
Speaker 1: there was a pretty big group of those sort of people,
Speaker 1: and he said, what I want to tell you is
Speaker 1: that that man was a monster. He looked great and
Speaker 1: he was popular, but people became aware that he was
Speaker 1: a sexual predator. And he wasn't just a sexual predator.
Speaker 1: He was a really aggressive pedophile, among other things, to
Speaker 1: young girls, bigger girls, teenage girls, and women of all ages,
Speaker 1: just the full Monty. And it got that way that
Speaker 1: even though he was sort of a popular GP, some
Speaker 1: people didn't want to go to him. Some women didn't
Speaker 1: want to go to his surgery, certainly, not unless they
Speaker 1: had a friend with them or whatever. And he got
Speaker 1: known as sort of the dirty doctor. And eventually it
Speaker 1: transpired that several witnesses got together and compared notes, and
Speaker 1: they realized that this bloke was a serial predator. And
Speaker 1: it turned out sexually molested females between the age of
Speaker 1: four and twenty nine at six different locations, four places
Speaker 1: up there on the Dandy Knongs and his own house
Speaker 1: and his own holiday house which is down the coast.
Speaker 1: And although he was convicted, I think only of one
Speaker 1: of those The allegations were made by a series of
Speaker 1: witnesses the similar fact behavior covering many people. The conviction
Speaker 1: he got was enough that he was struck off the
Speaker 1: medical register he could no longer practice as a doctor.
Speaker 1: This is in the late nineties when he was around
Speaker 1: fifty years of age, and that doctor having moved from
Speaker 1: the Danny Knongs when in disgrace to Saint Kilda, where
Speaker 1: he was able to work for a while as a
Speaker 1: doctor before he was actually convicted. He then moved into state.
Speaker 1: He went to a border town. Let's say he went
Speaker 1: to a border town. And some time ago I went
Speaker 1: to that border town. It might have been I think
Speaker 1: since the COVID pandemic. I went to the border town
Speaker 1: and I watched that man, and I watched him Walky's dog,
Speaker 1: and I made sure that locals knew exactly who he was,
Speaker 1: which they did. They knew very well who he was,
Speaker 1: and they knew his reputation. And they keep a very
Speaker 1: close eye on that man because he lives between a
Speaker 1: scape park and a primary school, and everybody in that district,
Speaker 1: the parents and the grandparents, they keep an eye on
Speaker 1: that guy. So he's probably not going to get up
Speaker 1: to much, although some people worry about the little kids
Speaker 1: next door. That man, as we've said, was a doctor
Speaker 1: in the Dandy Knongs. It turns out, as we've just discovered,
Speaker 1: that if you look at the birth notices published in
Speaker 1: the newspapers from early nineteen eighty three, there is a
Speaker 1: birth notice that says that doctor Bradkey, that is Margaret's
Speaker 1: dead lover, well known popular doctor doctor John Bradkey and
Speaker 1: doctor X. We're not going to name him here, Doctor
Speaker 1: bradkn Doctor X brought our beautiful daughter into the world,
Speaker 1: you know, last week, baby girl born December the twenty
Speaker 1: ninth of two or around that date, and the birth
Speaker 1: notice names those two doctors together. Now this is proof
Speaker 1: positive that doctor Bradkey, who is Margaret's lover, the one
Speaker 1: that she really wanted, the lover that she really loved,
Speaker 1: and she was broken hearted when he wouldn't leave his
Speaker 1: wife and marry her and all that stuff. He was
Speaker 1: a lover that bought her a house at Frontrick Gully,
Speaker 1: So they were pretty well connected. Doctor Bradkey used to
Speaker 1: deliver babies side by side with doctor X, the charming,
Speaker 1: dashing sexual predator, and so it is clear listeners that
Speaker 1: doctor X the sexual predator must have known, must surely
Speaker 1: have known Margaret Tap because they delivered babies in the
Speaker 1: William Anglis Hospital, in the Dandy Kongs at wherever it is,
Speaker 1: fern Trick Gally or up whatever it is. And Doctor
Speaker 1: X used to play tennis, as we've heard, he not
Speaker 1: only had a court at home, he used to play
Speaker 1: at the local courts. Very keen on it. Social tennis player,
Speaker 1: pretty good one. And he used to play tennis with
Speaker 1: a group of other alpha males, one of whom was
Speaker 1: a builder well known to me, a bloke who played
Speaker 1: one game of VFL football interestingly. And they played in
Speaker 1: a sort of a social comp at Fernie Creek Tennis
Speaker 1: Club and Fernie Creek Tennis Club in those days, i'm told,
Speaker 1: had onto car courts, that is the red sort of
Speaker 1: brick dust stuff onto garrett as opposed to tarmac or
Speaker 1: as opposed to lawn. This is onto cart and easily
Speaker 1: maintained and all the rest of it. And in those
Speaker 1: days most of us used to wear things called dunlop
Speaker 1: folly tennis shoes. If we didn't use them to play tennis,
Speaker 1: we used to wear them around with our jeans. They
Speaker 1: were a cheap and popular item of footwear, and they
Speaker 1: had a very distinctive ripple soul which was like a
Speaker 1: zig zag pattern on the soul. I think these days
Speaker 1: they be regarded as prehistoric and ridiculous, but in those
Speaker 1: days they were sort of good snakers to wear, and
Speaker 1: tennis players is to wear them. And here's the bit
Speaker 1: that matters. The one clue found at the murder house
Speaker 1: at thirteen Calvin Drive, Ferntry Gully was a perfect footprint
Speaker 1: or footprints plural in Margaret's bedroom and in the bathroom
Speaker 1: Dunlop volley tennis shoe and it would appear to have
Speaker 1: left the marks on the floor because the Dunlop volley
Speaker 1: was impregnated with red onto car brick dust and it
Speaker 1: had left these excellent foot in the murder house. Now,
Speaker 1: that does not prove by itself that Doctor X was
Speaker 1: the unknown visitor, but there is no doubt in the
Speaker 1: minds of the police, and you have to agree with
Speaker 1: them that if you find the person that was wearing
Speaker 1: the volley Sanchez in that house that night that left
Speaker 1: those footprints, you have probably found the killer. Doctor X.
Speaker 1: Keen tennis player size eleven feet which would seem to
Speaker 1: tell you with the man sized prince left in the house,
Speaker 1: and he was a aggressive, opportunist, sexual predator. He played
Speaker 1: tennis on Tuesday nights at Fernie Creek, which is a
Speaker 1: quick drive fifteen minutes or whatever from Ferntry Gully Easy.
Speaker 1: He plays tennis between you know, nine and ten whatever
Speaker 1: evening stuff after work, then whips down to see Margaret,
Speaker 1: whom he knew as the extremely friendly nurse ex lover
Speaker 1: of his dead colleague Dr Bradke. And one thing might
Speaker 1: have led to another. And so while we cannot say
Speaker 1: with any certainty who killed Margaret Tappan her daughter Shawna,
Speaker 1: he could only hope that doctor X has been eliminated
Speaker 1: through the use of DNA and any other means at
Speaker 1: the police's disposal, because if he hasn't, it would seem
Speaker 1: to be a glaring oversight. Thanks for listening. Life and
Speaker 1: Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True crime Australia.
Speaker 1: Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more,
Speaker 1: go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew
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