Wentworth

Those following the inquest into Joedan Andrews’ death have been left asking one plaintive question: why were so many alarm bells ignored?
HE LOVED being naked – he would strip off his clothes and take off on his scooter wearing only his gumboots. He adored showing off his Spiderman moves. He had long black ringlets but when he heard grown-ups saying he needed a haircut, he found the scissors and gave himself a trim so ragged that his mother had to shear away most of what remained.
The people who loved him are full of funny stories about Joedan Andrews.
He would walk across balance bars in playgrounds with utter fearlessness. He wandered off occasionally but only short distances – maybe to the neighbour’s veranda, where he would employ his chubby-cheeked charms to bludge some biscuits.
Mostly, he liked staying close to his mum. Hers was the lap he preferred. It’s an instinct, the child’s longing to stay close to mother. They say it evolved to help the survival of the species. In one of the many dangerous kinks in the natural order of the world in which Joedan lived his two years and nine months, it did not work that way for him. In December 2002, Joedan chose to stay with his mother rather than go back to Mildura with his grandmother, Veronica Andrews, who had raised him for much of his life. His mother, Sarah Andrews, had just moved in with a new boyfriend, Colin Moore jnr, who lived at a former Aboriginal mission just over the Murray River from Mildura at Dareton, NSW.
He didn’t much like Moore, his mother would later tell police. The little boy was jealous of the new man in his mother’s life. If the three of them were lying in bed together, Joedan would hit him and say: “That’s my mum!”
Joedan was too young to realise that Moore had a long history of violence. Joedan would have had no idea that the mission was an isolated and troubled community in which many drank too much and got stoned too often, in which illiteracy and unemployment ran through three generations, in which angry, boozed-up young men drove like demons in beat-up cars on dark bush tracks.
Nor could he have understood that he had placed himself out of the reach of his grandmother, the woman who had watched out for him during all his mother’s troubles. Veronica Andrews had had a hard life herself – a former partner once beat her so badly she had 56 stitches put in her head – but she took over for her daughter whenever Sarah’s drug problems got out of control. She would take Joedan in and feed him. She claims her last, desperate effort to do that was just two days before he died.
Joedan Andrews disappeared on December 15, 2002. An inquest began last week and was suspended on Wednesday. In her statement to the inquest, Veronica Andrews said she had phoned a local Aboriginal welfare agency and the Department of Human Services many times in 2002 asking for her daughter to be helped, or for her grandson to be given to her (the department says it has only one record of contact from her).
Just a couple of days before Joedan’s death, Veronica claims, she had begged the Aboriginal agency to drive her to Dareton so she could fetch the boy. The family had heard that Joedan had fallen out of a moving car at the mission and was badly bruised: “We were worried about him and we did not have a car.”
An agency worker refused, she said, telling her “they could not go over the border and that (they) did not (transport people) any more. I didn’t ring DHS this time because I had totally lost faith that they were ever going to help me. I would have just lost my temper with them again.”
Veronica would never see her grandson again. Two days later, his mother reported him missing from Colin Moore’s house.
A few weeks later, fragments of Joedan’s bones were found at the mission’s tip. They had fractures that suggested he was subjected to trauma around the time of death. Police believe his body was disposed of in pieces, with part of it stored in the seat cavity of an old armchair, his inquest in the NSW town of Wentworth was told. Forensic evidence showed that dogs had interfered with his remains. The inquest would also hear allegations of the kind of human interference with his remains that is the stuff of horror.
Aborigines call the rituals of mourning “sorry business”. White culture, too, could call what happened to Joedan Andrews a sorry business. Joedan had it hard from the start. According to his grandmother’s statement, Sarah had continued to use drugs while she was pregnant, which contributed to Joedan’s lungs collapsing at birth.
Veronica cared for mother and baby for months while also holding down a full-time job in a Mildura art gallery. She had a breakdown and was hospitalised for two weeks: “They said I had a deep depression because I was overworked, and I had not enough food and not enough sleep.”
Over the next couple of years, Sarah repeatedly moved to Sydney and then back to Mildura, and on and off drugs. Veronica said her daughter took “snow cones” – marijuana mixed with speed. When Sarah moved back to Mildura, Veronica developed a steady relationship with the Aboriginal welfare agency.
At one point, the workers there told her Sarah was now under the supervision of the Department of Human Services, which runs child protection, so her case was out of their hands. Said Veronica: “I never had an interview with anyone from DHS even after I made a formal notification in 2002.”
She got sick of running down to Sarah’s house, but if she didn’t, Sarah’s sister would bring Joedan to her “with nothing, not even a bottle or nappies. This would happen three to four days out of a week. Sarah would be asleep, off her face on drugs, or not home. (Joedan) would be left with strangers. On one occasion, I found someone I knew to be a pedophile in the house. I told him to piss off and he said he was living there with Sarah as a boarder and a babysitter. He was off his face on drugs. I got locked up for punching him through the glass trying to get back in to see (Joedan) after he locked me out.”
Sarah was asked by DHS and the Aboriginal agency to do a program for young mothers with drug and alcohol problems. She refused. She didn’t want them knowing her business, Veronica said.
Veronica was alarmed to find needles lying around Sarah’s house and a little plastic bag of white powder in a child’s jacket. She said she took them both to the Aboriginal agency and showed two staff, including a drug and alcohol worker. “They didn’t say much and they did not seem to do anything. I expected them to make sure DHS knew the extent of Sarah’s drug problem and to take action.”
She said she began ringing the Mildura office of DHS directly: “I was so frustrated about them not doing their job that I became abusive towards them . . . They said Sarah was no longer their client as she was doing fine. I tried to tell them that she was a junkie partying in front of the boys but they would not listen.”
In a statement tendered to the inquest, the child protection worker assigned to the Andrews family told why she had decided that two notifications saying Joedan was at risk – one from a person other than Veronica – could not be substantiated. At the first home visit, the worker did not see any items connected with drug or alcohol use and saw no track marks on Sarah’s arms. The children were playing and seemed well.
The worker decided Sarah needed general welfare support and referred her to the Aboriginal agency for help with her marijuana use and parenting skills. But Sarah refused to work with the agency because she said someone there had breached her confidentiality. Despite this, on August 23 the worker decided the case should be closed: “No significant protective concerns were evident.”
Counsel assisting the coroner at Joedan’s inquest, Stephen Rushton, SC, said: “Someone in the department seems to have formed the view that it was a malicious complaint (by Veronica), which was a very odd conclusion to draw.”
There was another call to child protection in September 2002, alleging Joedan had witnessed a violent incident between a relative of Sarah’s and the relative’s male partner. The worker concluded that Sarah had acted protectively by telling the warring couple to leave the home. The Andrews file was closed on October 15.
A departmental inquiry later concluded that management of Joedan’s case had failed in several ways: there was too long a delay before the first visit to the family, case notes were missing or inadequate, no proper risk assessment was made, and differences between the Aboriginal agency and DHS over the level of risk were never resolved. The inquiry’s report said that the Mildura child protection team was understaffed and overloaded in 2002.
Two weeks after the child’s death, Veronica Andrews met the DHS worker for the first time. In her statement, the worker says Veronica called her a murderer.
Looking back, there are several points at which Joedan’s fate could have unfolded in a different way. Three weeks before his dis appearance, Veronica took Joedan to live with her in Mildura. A week later, Sarah crossed the state border and moved into the mission with Colin Moore. A week after that, Veronica went out to the mission to get money from Sarah for the child’s needs. It was then that Joedan saw his mother and wanted to stay with her.
Said Veronica: “I thought Joedan would be all right for a night or two because he had aunties and a grandfather out there and I thought they would look after him. I asked a few relatives to make sure that they kept an eye on them, and they said that they would.”
Local Aborigines of Veronica’s generation and older – Veronica is now 44 – remember the mission as a good place for the Barkindji or “river people” to live. “People looked after each other then,” recalls a former resident. There are still families there that do. But there are other families whose names provoke sidelong glances and mutterings about thieving, standover tactics, squatting and houses being burnt down. To many local whites, the mission is a no-go area. “Brick through your car window,” warns one. Both races call it “Nama”, after the long and winding Namatjira Avenue that snakes down its centre.
For both the desert artist Albert Namatjira and this rural mission named after him, dreams ended in the dust. “Nama” is on the outskirts of Dareton, reported in 1999 to be one of the most disadvantaged places in NSW. Many of the mission’s 150 or so people have become fringe-dwellers, an estimated 85% of them unemployed, living in a world without time other than that set by the sun. There are unlettered parents whose idea of discipline is to threaten naughty children with having to go to school. Witness after witness from the mission told Joedan’s inquest they could not read.
A favourite pastime is stealing cars and driving them in clouds of red dust along the dirt tracks that criss-cross the grey mallee scrub behind the houses. A vast dirt arena cleared of scrub is used for rallying – the chariot races of the dispossessed. A scant half-hour from Dareton is Mildura, with its suburban-dream houseboats, flash hotels and gourmet restaurants.
There are families at Nama who won’t touch alcohol because of the damage it can wreak. Those socialising with Sarah and Colin on the last weekend of Joedan’s life were not among them. Everyone agrees there was heavy drinking and smoking of “yandi” – marijuana – at two parties on December 14, 2002 – one of them at Colin Moore jnr’s house at 16 Namatjira Avenue.
Sarah told police that Joedan had earlier fallen out of a moving car when he opened the door himself and grazed his hands and upper lip, which bled a little, but was otherwise well that day. He sat on her lap while she was drinking at another house. Later, she took him back to Colin’s and put him to bed, joining him, she would say later, a little before dawn.
According to Sarah, Joedan was in bed at Colin’s house all night from 11pm. But another witness who stayed at Colin’s that night, Darren Williams, told the inquest he heard the car leaving, possibly about 4am. He got up and found the house empty.
According to Sarah’s statement, she and Colin drank and had a few “cones” when they got home that night and then went to bed. She went to sleep curled around her son but woke at 11am and he was gone. A door that should have been locked wasn’t, and a flyscreen had been removed from a window, she said. When a quick search of Colin’s house and his mother’s house next door failed to find Joedan, she rang police.
INVESTIGATORS have felt frustrated by a wall of silence at Nama. One of the goals of the inquest that began two weeks ago was to shake the tree and see what fell from it. Lawyer Rushton warned unspecified witnesses that it was more serious to lie to a coroner than to tell fibs to police: “This is not a matter where it would be appropriate for the local Aboriginal community to look at what occurred as an ‘our mob versus their mob’ issue.”
Throughout the proceedings, Colin Moore sat still and silent in a high, throne-like wooden dock in the centre of the 1880 building that is the Wentworth courthouse. He was on remand over other criminal charges. He had previously been sent a 1200-page brief of evidence and a letter informing him he was “a person of interest” to the inquest. It was of little use to him – he is one of those who cannot read.
Two main scenarios were put to the court.
Thomas Hines, a former resident of the mission, said “Collieboy” (Colin Moore) had told him he punched Joedan in the chest and that the child stopped breathing.
“I said, ‘Why did you do it?’ He said the little fella was crying, he wouldn’t shut up . . . They tried to revive him but couldn’t. And he turned to me and said if I said anything, he would kill me.”
Rushton asked: “Were you scared?”
Hines replied: “For my life.”
Kathleen Brown told the inquest she had been at the mission that Saturday with her then boyfriend, Tim Mitchell. That night, when they got back to where they were staying in Mildura, she noticed a spot of blood on his face and more on his shirt.
She asked about it. “He said: ‘Remember that little boy that belonged to Sarah? Well, you won’t be seeing him no more.’ He said . . . he died. I asked him what happened. He said driving around in the car, there was no brakes and they hit a tree and Joedan was standing up between the two front seats and . . . he hit the windscreen when they hit a tree and he wasn’t moving so they thought he was dead.
“He said they cut his head off and buried his body separately, and that if I told anyone, they were going to kill me.”
Questioned by Rushton, she agreed that the knife Mitchell claimed was used was like a machete: “He said (it was) the one I seen before. It was supposed to belong to Collieboy. He used it to cut the heads off chickens at the mission. I had seen that a couple of weeks before . . . It’s about a foot long. It had a green handle and it was old, because the blade was sort of rusted.”
Mitchell denied it all. He told the inquest he had not been at the mission that day. In his statement to police, he did say he had heard rumours that the child got caught up in a game of chicken Moore was playing with another car: “He’s just mad when he’s drunk.”
A teenage witness who cannot be named for legal reasons said he saw Colin Moore and his younger brother, John, carrying a bundle wrapped in a shower curtain a couple of days after Joedan disappeared. John Moore denied this, and also denied suggestions that he and his brother had been moving Joedan’s body around to evade the police hunt for the child.
On Wednesday, the inquest was suddenly suspended by coroner Malcolm Macpherson, who declared that there was now enough evidence for a jury to be able to convict “a known person” of an indictable offence. This followed evidence by Colin Moore’s mother, Jennifer, that her son had made a confession to her at the weekend: “He was telling me that they were in a car, driving a car, with Sarah and Joedan. They were going a bit too fast and turned a corner and Joedan went out the window. He wasn’t breathing and they panicked.”
She said her son told her that he and Sarah had put the body “in the couch”.
None of the scenarios involving a car explain why police found Joedan’s blood in four rooms of Moore’s house, including a splotch on the floor at the foot of the family’s mattress. But one of the police exhibits is a photograph of a tree at the side of a dirt track that appears to have had bark scraped off its lower trunk.
For Joedan’s family, there is still no sense of finality. Rushton said the bone fragments might be all that is ever found of him: “More likely than not, other parts remain strewn around Dareton mission and beyond. It’s unlikely that those remains will ever be recovered.”
It is not known whether anyone will be charged, whether the inquest will resume or whether Joedan’s relatives will get another chance to wear the T-shirts they donned every day of their vigil at court. The shirts boldly demand “Justice for Joedan” and carry a picture of him taken after that famous haircut. This was not the cocky child of the balance bars – the camera caught him in a moment of uncertainty, looking small and lost. As he will forever be.
Karen Kissane is law and justice editor.

First published in The Age.

REVEALED How state failed Joedan Andrews
Karen Kissane, Law and Justice Editor, Wentworth

NSW   CHILD protection workers failed toddler Joedan Andrews in several instances before his death in late 2002, waiting too long to investigate his family, according to a review by their own department.
An inquiry into Joedan’s care by the Victorian Department of Human Services also criticised its own workers for failing to talk to his maternal grandmother, Veronica Andrews, who had notified them she feared he was not safe with his mother, who was using drugs. The department closed its file on the family two months before Joedan’s death.
The report said the Aboriginal support agency believed, following their contacts with the grandmother, that Joedan was at high risk.
Yesterday the inquest into his death was halted when coroner Malcolm Macpherson declared that he now believed there was enough evidence to satisfy a jury that a known person had committed an indictable offence.
This followed evidence by the mother of Colin Moore, the de facto husband of Joedan’s mother, Sarah Andrews. Mrs Moore told the inquest that Colin, a remand prisoner, had made a confession to her on Sunday when she visited him in jail.
She said, “(Colin) was telling me that they were in a car, driving a car, with Sarah and Joedan. They were going a bit too fast and turned a corner and Joedan went out the window. He wasn’t breathing and they panicked.”
She said Colin told her they wrapped the body and then he and Sarah “put him in the couch”. She said she had not asked her son about Joedan’s blood having been in his house.
Joedan, a Mildura two-year-old, disappeared while staying with his mother and Colin Moore on an Aboriginal mission at Dareton, NSW, on the weekend of December 14-15, 2002. His partial remains were found at a local tip a few weeks later.
The report said the office managing Joedan’s case was short-staffed and had a high workload in 2002. The document was released under freedom of information and is a heavily edited version of a Child Death Inquiry Report on Joedan’s case. It does not name staff and uses pseudonyms for family members including “Jeremy Apple” for Joedan.
The inquiry into the department’s handling of the case also found:
· It was 28 days before the family was visited after the first notification (14 days is supposed to be the maximum delay in non-urgent cases).
· There was no evidence that a comprehensive risk assessment was made.
· Case notes about visits to the family were missing, and existing notes “contain minimal detail and little analysis”.
· Child protection workers and the Aboriginal support agency held different views over the risk to Joedan and failed to communicate with each other.
“This lack of co-ordinated response was never resolved,” the report said.
“Given the young (age of Joedan) and the nature of the concerns identified in the notification (including exposure to drug use and domestic violence, lack of supervision and parenting issues) a detailed discussion with (his mother), to develop a comprehensive assessment, was essential.
“There is no evidence this occurred. The case notes are limited and do not provide a strong sense of the assessment process. Ultimately, questions are raised as to how and why Child Protection formulated the assessment that it did.
“It is not known how the conclusion was reached that (Veronica Andrews) was not genuine in her concerns and that (Joedan was) not at risk in (his) mother’s care . . . No contact was initiated directly with (Veronica) to discuss the protective concerns, and this was despite (Veronica’s) ongoing insistence that the (boy was) at risk.”
Serge Petrovich, lawyer for the DHS, opposed the release of the full report, arguing that the review was skewed to a management viewpoint, contained inaccuracies, and had not been conducted with the kind of rigour and fairness required for findings to be published.
Child Protection was first notified about Joedan on April 12, 2002. Joedan’s mother agreed to work with a family program and the file was closed on August 23. It was reopened after a second notification, but was closed on October 15, 2002.
The review found no evidence the issues in the notification were canvassed with Sarah Andrews and she was not asked whether she had a partner.
“The acting team leader . . . was supervising almost 90 cases (or about 40 families) . . . There was the same number of clients on the Long Term Team List, and the team manager also had responsibility for an additional 20 cases.” It concluded: “The reviewers found there to be fundamental case practice issues that resulted in key practice standards not being met in this matter.”
THE CASE OF ‘JEREMY APPLE’
DHS file name for Mildura toddler Joedan Andrews
– 28 days before the family was visited (maximum is 14 days)
– No evidence risk assessment was made
– Case notes about family visits missing
– Communication breakdown between child protection workers and the Aboriginal Support Agency
From Child Death Inquiry Report into Joedan’s case.

First published in The Age.

Karen Kissane, Law and Justice Editor, Wentworth, NSW

THE mother of toddler Joedan Andrews and her boyfriend had said the boy died when he went out of a car window in an accident, an inquest heard yesterday.
John “Johnnyboy” Moore, younger brother of the boyfriend, Colin Moore, told the court: “Colin said to me, him and Sarah were driving the vehicle when they came to a corner in the mission. I believe they were driving pretty fast.
“As a result of turning the corner – the kid was on Sarah’s lap – the kid went out the window of the car. They said they went back. He said the kid wasn’t breathing and as a result of that they panicked.
“They went to the tip area where they hid the kid in a lounge chair.”
Lawyer Stephen Rushton, SC, asked whether Moore realised that Joedan was then aged two years and nine months: “Did Colin or Sarah communicate to you how they managed to fit his body into the lounge chair?”
“No,” said Moore.
Moore said he had been told this between Christmas 2002 and New Year, shortly after Joedan disappeared at an Aboriginal mission in Dareton, NSW. The child’s partial remains were found at a tip in January 2003 and police believe he was disposed of in pieces.
Moore told the court: “I said to both of them that they should have reported it.” Sarah Andrews told him repeatedly it had been an accident.
John Moore has previously been named at the inquest as someone who was seen helping Colin Moore carry a bundle wrapped in a shower curtain.
Yesterday he denied he had helped Colin Moore get rid of the child’s body. He denied claims by other witnesses that:
· He had found the child’s body, chewed by dogs, on a walk with his father near the tip.
· He had ever said: “We will go to the tip and move the little kid.”
· He had ever said that he had been in a car with Sarah Andrews, Joedan and Colin Moore when “Colin crashed his car into a tree and the kid was screaming”.
Mr Rushton asked him whether he thought it strange that police were not able to find any of Joedan’s remains in the tip for 21/2 weeks. “Is that because you and your brother were moving his body around?”
“No,” Moore said.
“Was your brother doing that with someone else?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Moore said he had not reported the conversation about Joedan’s death even to his father because he was frightened of his brother. Nor did he report to police: “If charges had been laid and nothing had come of it, something would have come back to me, and I was in fear.”
Moore is serving 15 months jail over a driving offence.
The inquest continues.

First published in The Age.

The inquest into the death of toddler Joedan Andrews was suspended today after the coroner said there was enough evidence to lay charges.

NSW deputy state coroner Malcolm MacPherson stopped the inquest in Wentworth this morning after hearing that Colin Moore, the boyfriend of Joedan’s mother, allegedly made a confession to his mother, Jennifer Moore.

Ms Moore told the inquest she had visited her son at the Broken Hill Correctional Centre on Sunday and he told her the child’s death had been an accident.

Ms Moore told the inquest Colin said it was a weight off his shoulders that his brother, John, had publicly aired that the boy allegedly died in a car accident.

She said: “I said ‘How do you feel?’ and he said, ‘I feel a lot better’.

“He said it was a weight lifted off him … that it came out with John.”

Under questioning, Ms Moore agreed that Colin had told her there had been a terrible accident.

She said Colin told her he was driving in a car with Sarah and Joedan when the accident occurred.

“They were going a bit too fast and turned a corner and Joedan went out the window,” Ms Moore said.

“He wasn’t breathing and they panicked.”

She told the court Colin said they wrapped the child’s body and that Sarah and Colin then put the body in a couch.

Yesterday the inquest heard Joedan’s mother and Colin Moore had said the boy died when he went out of a car window in an accident.

John “Johnnyboy” Moore, younger brother of Colin Moore, told the court: “Colin said to me, him and Sarah were driving the vehicle when they came to a corner in the mission. I believe they were driving pretty fast.

“As a result of turning the corner – the kid was on Sarah’s lap – the kid went out the window of the car. They said they went back. He said the kid wasn’t breathing and as a result of that they panicked.

“They went to the tip area where they hid the kid in a lounge chair.”

Lawyer Stephen Rushton, SC, asked whether Moore realised that Joedan was then aged two years and nine months: “Did Colin or Sarah communicate to you how they managed to fit his body into the lounge chair?”

“No,” said Moore.

Moore said he had been told this between Christmas 2002 and New Year, shortly after Joedan disappeared at an Aboriginal mission in Dareton, NSW. The child’s partial remains were found at a tip in January 2003 and police believe he was disposed of in pieces.

He told the court: “I said to both of them that they should have reported it.” Sarah Andrews told him repeatedly it had been an accident.

John Moore has previously been named at the inquest as someone who was seen helping Colin Moore carry a bundle wrapped in a shower curtain.

Yesterday he denied he had helped Colin Moore get rid of the child’s body.

He had ever said that he had been in a car with Sarah Andrews, Joedan and Colin Moore when “Colin crashed his car into a tree and the kid was screaming”.

Moore is serving 15 months’ jail over a driving offence.

First published in The Age.

Wentworth

THE man who is said to have talked about Joedan Andrews dying in a car accident and being beheaded denied he had even been at the Dareton Aboriginal mission the day the toddler disappeared.
Tim Mitchell yesterday told an inquest that his former girlfriend’s claims that he had told her of a rusty chicken knife being used on Joedan after he died in a car accident were “a load of lies – I wasn’t there”. Mitchell said his girlfriend could not have seen him at the wheel of a car that night, with Joedan in the back seat, because he did not have a licence and could not drive.
He said he was drinking in Mildura with friends and family on the day in question and knew nothing of Joedan’s disappearance until he was told the following day. As for the rusty chicken knife, “I didn’t even know they had chooks out there”.
Mitchell is in jail on remand and was handcuffed while he gave evidence at Wentworth Local Court.
A day earlier, his former girlfriend, Kathleen Brown, told the court she had seen him drive off into scrub at the mission with Joedan and the toddler’s stepfather at the time, Colin Moore.
She said Mitchell had returned angry and with blood on his eyebrow and shirt. Ms Brown said he had told her that Joedan had died when the car in which he was travelling hit a tree – because its brakes were faulty – and that the child’s body had been buried in pieces.
Joedan was two when he was reported missing by his mother, Sarah Andrews, on December 15, 2002. They had only recently moved in with Colin Moore in Dareton, NSW, having previously lived in Mildura, where notifications had been made to Victorian child-protection services by people concerned about Joedan’s safety.
Another man told the court how he helped find the place where police now believe some of Joedan’s remains were stored. Clinton Rose, a former resident of the mission, said that just before New Year’s Eve in 2002, he had run into Colin Moore’s brother, John “Johnnyboy” Moore. “He told me to come out back ‘cos he wanted to tell me something,” he said.
Mr Rose agreed under questioning by lawyer Stephen Rushton, SC, that he had told police that “Johnnyboy” claimed he had found Joedan’s body while walking near the mission’s tip. Mr Rose said “Johnnyboy” had pointed towards the tip and said: “We put him underneath a couch. The dogs had been chewing at him.”
John Moore also allegedly said: “Every time I look at my son, I think of the little feller.”
Mr Rose said he told a local Aboriginal liaison officer, Buddy Parsons. They went to the tip and found a bone-coloured lounge chair that had a rotten smell and a red blanket on it.
The inquest continues before deputy state coroner Malcolm Macpherson.

First published in The Age.

Wentworth

THE coroner said the witness was fragile and wanted to testify without feeling threatened. So he allowed her to give evidence to the inquest on Joedan Andrews by video link from a separate room in the courthouse.
She was the first witness to tell of how the two-year-old Mildura boy might have died in a car accident and been disposed of in pieces the night he disappeared from a house on an Aboriginal mission in Dareton, NSW, in December 2002.
Kathleen Brown, who looked to be in her 20s, said she came from Queensland but had been living at that time in Mildura, and had a boyfriend, Tim Mitchell. Around Christmas 2002, they took a taxi to the Dareton mission. She stayed in one house watching TV while Mr Mitchell went out. He returned angry, yelling and swearing.
“I asked him where he had been. He just hit me, backhanded me across the face, punched me and lifted me out of the chair and headbutted me.
“I said I wanted to go home but he said he had to do something first. He picked up some keys off the table and went out the front door.”
She saw him walking towards the house of Colin “Collyboy” Moore, who was living with Joedan and the child’s mother, Sarah Andrews. She saw him get into the driver’s side of the car, with Moore in the passenger seat and Joedan in the back. Two men in another car also drove off with them – “fast, because the wheels were spinning”. They headed to the scrub behind Moore’s house, she said.
When Mr Mitchell returned a couple of hours later he was again “wild about something” and had a spot of blood above his left eyebrow. “He hit me again and then he got up and said that we were leaving.”
Someone she did not know gave them a lift back to Mildura, where she realised that Mr Mitchell also had spots of blood on his shirt.
She asked about it. “He said it had nothing to do with me. He said, ‘Remember that little boy that belonged to Sarah? Well, you won’t be seeing him no more.’ He said . . . he died.
“I asked him what happened. He said driving around in the car, there was no brakes and they hit a tree and Joedan was standing up between the two front seats and he went through the front seats and he hit the windscreen when they hit a tree and he wasn’t moving so they thought he was dead.
“He said they cut his head off and buried his body separately, and that if I told anyone, they were going to kill me.”
Questioned by lawyer Stephen Rushton, SC, she agreed that the knife Mr Mitchell said was used was like a machete. “He said (it was) the one I seen before. It was supposed to belong to Collyboy. He used it to cut the heads off chickens at the mission. I had seen that a couple of weeks before.”
Ms Brown said she had told Mr Mitchell to “stop talking shit”. “He said, ‘Fine, don’t believe me’, and then we went to bed.”
Ms Brown said that when she heard from her family that Joedan was missing she was too frightened to speak up. Later, she and Mr Mitchell had a row in which he told her to pack her bags. She said she rang police who took her to a women’s refuge. That was the end of their relationship: “I never saw him again after that.”
She made a statement to police about Joedan’s disappearance in 2004.
A lawyer for Joedan’s mother, Sarah Andrews, was granted leave yesterday to appear at the inquest, as was a lawyer for Colin Moore senior, who “may be charged with accessory after the fact”, said his solicitor, Bruce Caulfield.
The inquest continues before NSW Deputy State Coroner Malcolm Macpherson.

First published in The Age.

Wentworth

A NINE-YEAR-OLD boy saw two men putting a bundle wrapped in a shower curtain into the boot of a car two days after Mildura toddler Joedan Andrews disappeared, an inquest has been told.
The men had taken the bundle from under a black couch at a tip close to the house from which Joedan had disappeared, the witness, now in his teens, said yesterday.
The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the court the two men were Colin “Collyboy” Moore, the boyfriend of Joedan’s mother, and his younger brother John “Johnnyboy” Moore.
“Johnnyboy opened the boot and Collyboy put the bag in?” asked lawyer Stephen Rushton, SC.
“Yeah,” replied the witness.
But the witness said he could not recall having told police in a statement at the time that he had earlier overheard one of the men say to the other: “We’ll go over here to the tip and move the little kid.”
He agreed with Mr Rushton that he was frightened about giving evidence in case he got into trouble in some way.
Joedan Andrews, who was also known as Joedan Morgan, was 2 1/2 years old when he was reported missing by his mother, Sarah Andrews, on December 15, 2002.
She said she woke and found he was gone from the house she was sharing with Colin Moore in Dareton, NSW. A month later partial remains found close to the tip were identified as his.
The inquest was earlier told that when Joedan was living in Mildura in 2002, several notifications to Victoria’s child protection services were made by people worried about his safety, including his maternal grandmother.
Police suspected that Joedan might have been run over by a car, a forensic investigator told the inquest yesterday. Detective Senior Constable Ian West said he found a crusted bloodstain and swerving tyre marks on a dirt track near the tip. The stain was “straddled by tyre marks”, he said.
Senior Constable West said he also examined a beige armchair at the tip, which had been soaked with biological fluids and had a foul odour. Near it he found part of the shoulder blade of a small child.
Dareton resident Darren Williams had been drinking and smoking marijuana at Colin Moore’s house the night Joedan disappeared. He told the court that Ms Andrews and Colin Moore had asked him to babysit Joedan. He told them he was going to sleep and to wake him when they left.
He heard a car leave in the early hours, possibly 4am, and checked every room but Joedan was not there. He assumed Joedan was with his mother and went back to bed, he said.
He knew nothing of the child’s disappearance until Colin Moore woke him the next morning and asked him where Joedan was. But Mr Williams said: “They never left him here with me. I know that for a fact. And he know it too.”
The inquest continues.

First published in The Age.

Wentworth

REPEATED warnings that Mildura toddler Joedan Andrews was in danger were made to Victoria’s child protection services, but the family’s file was closed two months before Joedan’s death, an inquest was told yesterday.
Joedan’s grandmother, Veronica Andrews, had reported that her daughter, Sarah Andrews, often went “walkabout” and left two-year-old Joedan with her.
She told authorities that Sarah frequently screamed at Joedan, punched him and left him unattended in order to buy drugs, the inquest heard yesterday.
Joedan was reported missing by his mother on December 15, 2002, shortly after they moved to the troubled Namatjira Avenue Aboriginal “mission” on the outskirts of the small NSW town of Dareton. A month later, police discovered partial remains later identified as Joedan’s. No one has been charged over his death.
In his opening address to the inquest yesterday, counsel assisting the coroner, Stephen Rushton, SC, said Victoria’s Department of Human Services initially assessed the notifications about Joedan as serious and considered that if the complaints were true, it was highly likely Joedan would be harmed.
There was “an investigation of sorts” between April and August 2002, Mr Rushton said. But the department closed the file on the basis that no significant risk could be identified.
“Someone in the department seems to have formed the view that it was a malicious complaint . . . and evidence suggests (this view) was inconsistent with reports being received from others at the time which corroborated what Veronica Andrews had said,” Mr Rushton told Wentworth Court.
The file also showed only one notification from Veronica Andrews when in fact she had made several, including one only two months before Joedan’s death, Mr Rushton said. On December 6, 2002, another person contacted the department, expressing concern that Joedan might be exposed to life-threatening physical harm, Mr Rushton said.
Shortly before Joedan’s death, Sarah Andrews and her son had moved in with her new boyfriend, Colin Moore jnr. She told police Joedan was asleep when she went to bed but was missing when she woke up.
Mr Rushton described Moore as a man with a long history of violent criminal offences, including domestic violence. He said the couple had an unstable relationship marred by drug and alcohol abuse and that Moore – who sat in the court’s dock at the inquest yesterday – was now on remand for soliciting an undercover police officer to murder Sarah Andrews in 2007.
Mr Rushton yesterday pleaded for Aborigines in Namatjira Avenue to tell the truth about the events of that night.
“This is not a case where any decent human being could conceal what they know. We are dealing with the death and disposal of a beautiful baby boy . . . This is not a matter where it would be appropriate for the local Aboriginal community to look at what occurred as an ‘our mob versus their mob’ issue,” he said.
“The local community needs closure on this tragedy . . . Joedan demands it.”
Mr Rushton told the court that police had found bloodstains in four rooms of the Namatjira Avenue house where Joedan had been on the night he died. They had also found a lounge chair at a nearby tip that was soaked with fluids believed to be from a body.
The few bones that had been identified as Joedan’s had fractures in them, suggesting he had been subjected to trauma at or around the time of his death, Mr Rushton said.
Forensic evidence suggested that his body had been cut into several parts before it was disposed of. Mr Rushton said it was unlikely Joedan’s remains would ever be fully recovered. Mr Rushton said that the night before Joedan was reported missing, Moore and Sarah Andrews had attended different parties at which alcohol and cannabis were consumed, and that Moore had later been seen driving aggressively with Joedan seated unrestrained on his mother’s lap in the front passenger seat of the car.
The last independent sighting of Joedan was about 11 o’clock that night, when Sarah took him from one party to another at Namatjira Avenue.
Mr Rushton said two scenarios were under consideration. First, that there had been a collision in the car that injured the unrestrained Joedan so badly that he died; second, that at some stage that night, he was killed inside the Namatjira Avenue house.
NSW state deputy coroner Malcolm MacPherson yesterday travelled to Dareton and viewed the two houses at which parties had been held, and the nearby tip area. The inquest continues.

First published in The Age.

TWELVE Melbourne men accused of terrorism will be housed at a lower-security prison after a judge said they were being kept in intolerable conditions.
The trial of Abdul Nacer Benbrika and 11 other Melbourne Muslims will continue now that Justice Bernard Bongiorno received two affidavits by his deadline of noon yesterday confirming that the changes would be made immediately.
Justice Bongiorno said Penelope Armytage, the secretary of the Justice Department, and Kelvin Anderson, the correctional services commissioner, had confirmed the changes in affidavits that regrettably contained “lengthy . . . and irrelevant detail”.
On March 20, Justice Bongiorno had said he would stop the trial and consider bailing the accused if the department did not improve their “intolerable” jail and transport conditions.
The men were living in the high-security Acacia Unit at Barwon Prison near Geelong and being transported in shackles in an armoured van to Melbourne twice a day to make court appearances.
Two of the men were recently removed from Barwon and were diagnosed with psychiatric problems.
Justice Bongiorno had said that the men should be housed at the Metropolitan Assessment Prison in the city for the rest of the trial; they should not be shackled or subjected to any restraints other than normal handcuffs; and they should not be strip-searched in any situation where they had been under constant supervision in secure areas.
He wanted them to be allowed out of their cells for at least 10 hours on non-court days and said they should not be subjected to conditions any more onerous than those imposed on ordinary remand prisoners.
The men have all pleaded not guilty to charges involving fostering a terrorist act in the pursuit of violent jihad.
A lawyer for one of the accused yesterday told the judge that his client, who was grateful for the changes that have taken place, was nevertheless “carrying a scar today from banging his head against the door on Saturday night because of the lack of air in the new cells”.
“There might be some . . . teething problems that need to be worked through,” the lawyer said.
Justice Bongiorno said he hoped such issues could be ironed out through continuing talks with the lawyer for Corrections Victoria.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr Alexandra Welborn told the court that the two accused who had previously been moved out of Barwon because of psychiatric problems were examined yesterday morning and found fit to continue with the trial, which resumes today.

First published in The Age.

ROBERT Farquharson has appealed against his convictions for murdering his three sons and against his sentence of three terms of life imprisonment without parole.
There was not enough evidence to sustain the verdicts and the sentence was “manifestly excessive”, according to documents filed by his lawyers to the Court of Appeal.
Farquharson was sentenced to life in jail last November for having driven into a dam near Winchelsea on Father’s Day 2005 with his children Jai, 10, Tyler, seven, and Bailey, two.
The Supreme Court was told he planned the killings to punish his former wife, Cindy Gambino, for leaving him.
Farquharson pleaded not guilty, claiming he blacked out in a fit of coughing and woke to find the car in the dam. He said he dived in to try to save the children but could not reach them in the dark, icy water.
The documents list 31 grounds for appeal against conviction, including alleged failures by trial judge Justice Philip Cummins in rulings about medical evidence and about reconstructions of the path of the vehicle.
It is also claimed the prosecution failed to disclose before the verdict that key witness Gregory King had charges pending against him (police later provided a letter of support at his plea and sentence).
Mr King testified that Farquharson had spoken to him of revenge against his estranged wife that would involve an accident at a dam.
The appeal claims the judge’s charge to the jury distorted issues, ignored or underplayed important parts of the defence case and “was marred by evident displays of emotion”. The appeal against the sentence claims the judge erred in failing to fix a minimum term and in placing insufficient weight on Farquharson’s mental condition. Other errors included the judge treating Farquharson’s behaviour after the death of the children as evidence of self-centredness, the appeal claims.
Justice Cummins said at sentencing: “Your conduct beside the dam demonstrated your self-centredness. Two young men came across the scene. They offered to dive into the dark and still water to try and save the children. You said it was too late.”
Ms Gambino told a women’s magazine she refused to believe Farquharson deliberately killed their three sons. She said he was a kind, loving father whose conviction for murder was a travesty of justice.

First published in The Age.