Bruce Allan Burrell was convicted of murdering two Sydney women he knew well. Dorothy Davis, a 74-year-old widow and a friend of his wife, vanished on a short walk near her Lurline Bay home in May 1995. Kerry Whelan, a 39-year-old mother of three and the wife of his former employer, vanished from a hotel car park in Parramatta in May 1997, and the next day her husband received a typed ransom demand for $1 million. Prosecutors said that in each case Burrell acted for money, and that he hid both women's bodies on or near his farm in rugged country near Bungonia, in the Goulburn district.
No remains were found in either case, there were no eyewitnesses to either killing, and Burrell never confessed. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence after a process that ran for more than a decade: a joint coronial inquest, a trial that ended with a hung jury, a second trial, a separate trial for the 1995 killing, and appeals that reached the High Court of Australia. He died in custody in August 2016, and the families' hope that he would say where the women were died with him.
Burrell was born about 1953; court reports gave his age as 54 in September 2007 and 55 in February 2008, and he was 63 when he died in 2016. He worked in advertising, and he later worked for Crown Equipment, whose Australian arm was run by Bernie Whelan. He was also a family friend of the Whelans and visited their home at Kurrajong, northwest of Sydney. In 1990 Bernie Whelan retrenched him. Woman's Day, drawing on interviews with the Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, reported in 2022 that he was let go for being inept, that his money troubles were long-running, and that he leaned on his wife, Dallas, and on his father for support.
By the mid-1990s he had no regular income. In Sydney's eastern suburbs he and his wife lived near Dorothy Davis in Lurline Bay. He also had a farm called Hillydale, about 200 hectares on Inverary Road at Bungonia, where he later lived. It lies beside the Bungonia State Recreation Area, and Peter Dein, described by the ABC as the lead investigator, later said the large property had many old mine shafts and dense bushland.
Dorothy Davis was a widow who lived in Lurline Bay, in Sydney's eastern suburbs. She had a daughter, Maree Dawes, and a son, Lessel Davis, and she was a grandmother. She was well off, and she was fond of Dallas Burrell, who had cancer. The Crown later said Burrell used that affection to get money from her.
In 1994 she lent Burrell $100,000, money the ABC later reported he used for a home loan. He did not repay it. He lied about the loan to his wife, to Mrs Davis's daughter and later to police, according to a State Library of New South Wales summary of the case. By May 1995 he was unemployed and had no means of repaying, and Mrs Davis had begun pressing for the money and threatening legal action.
On the afternoon of May 30, 1995, Mrs Davis told a builder working at her house that she was walking to visit a friend who had cancer and lived nearby. She never came home. At the 2007 trial the Crown argued that the only person who fit that description was Dallas Burrell, and that Burrell had drawn Mrs Davis to his house, where she expected to see his wife, and killed her there.
According to the State Library summary of the evidence, later that afternoon Burrell drove to his country property and spent several hours there, and he went back the next day. Phone records placed him in the Mittagong area, in the Southern Highlands, at 4:30 pm. The Crown said her body was disposed of on or near the property. A police search there found no trace of her.
Kerry Whelan was 39 in 1997. She had been married to Bernie Whelan for 17 years, and they had three children: Sarah, 15, Matthew, 13, and James, 11. Bernie Whelan, who raised six children in all, ran the Australian operation of Crown Equipment and was a wealthy man. The family lived at Kurrajong, on the rural fringe northwest of Sydney. Mark Tedeschi described her years later as a beautiful woman with a loving family and three children.
In mid-April 1997, according to evidence later kept from the juries and published after a suppression order was lifted, Burrell visited Kerry at home intending to abduct her, and abandoned the plan when he found James home from school. Afterward Kerry asked the children's nanny and riding instructor, Amanda Minton-Taylor, to keep the visit to herself.
On the morning of Tuesday, May 6, 1997, Kerry Whelan told her husband she had a 9 am beautician's appointment. She parked in the underground car park of the Parkroyal Hotel in Parramatta, and a security camera recorded her walking up the car park ramp. That was the last confirmed sighting of her. The Crown case at trial was that Burrell picked her up outside the hotel and took her away.
The next day, May 7, a typed letter arrived at the Whelan home in Kurrajong. It began "Follow all instructions or your wife will die" and demanded $1 million. Bernie Whelan followed every instruction but one: he went to the police.
The police response was on a large scale. Officers of the State Protection Group surrounded the Kurrajong property. Six hostage negotiators sat with Bernie Whelan in his lounge room, snipers and a police helicopter were on standby, and tracking devices were fitted to his Mercedes. The ransom, $1 million in $100 notes, sat in a bedroom safe under guard around the clock. The kidnapper never called. Police had Bernie Whelan make a public appeal, in which he told his wife that the family loved her and would do anything to get her back.
Burrell soon came to the attention of the task force led by Detective Dennis Bray. Police raided his house and found weapons, a chloroform bottle and two notes that suggested a plan to kidnap someone. Over the following months police searched the Bungonia State Recreation Area beside his farm, and a fortnight after Kerry vanished dozens of officers combed the rough ground of Hillydale itself. They found nothing of her.
Bray came to believe that Burrell had also killed Dorothy Davis, after she demanded repayment of her loan. Bray kept working on the two cases for about a decade. Peter Dein said police made several attempts over the years to persuade Burrell to reveal where the women were.
Burrell was charged in 1999, but the charges were dropped. In 2002 a joint coronial inquest into the disappearances of Kerry Whelan and Dorothy Davis was held. In May 2002 the State Coroner, John Abernethy, visited Hillydale, and police walked him over the property for about two hours before the inquest resumed at the Coroner's Court in Glebe. After the inquest the charges over Kerry Whelan were reinstated, and Burrell was later charged with murdering Dorothy Davis as well. A podcast summary of Tedeschi's later book notes that the Director of Public Prosecutions had at one early stage decided to abandon the prosecution.
Burrell was tried first for the kidnapping and murder of Kerry Whelan, in the New South Wales Supreme Court, with Mark Tedeschi QC, the Senior Crown Prosecutor, leading for the Crown. The case was wholly circumstantial. Much of the evidence police had gathered was ruled more prejudicial than useful and kept from the jury. That included the chloroform bottle, the weapons, a remark Burrell was said to have made boasting that he could hide a body where no one would ever find it, a street directory showing a route from the Parkroyal Hotel to Bernie Whelan's Smithfield factory, a call he made to a Canon help desk about a typewriter that police believed was used for the ransom letter, James Whelan's evidence, and part of Amanda Minton-Taylor's account. A remark attributed to Kerry, "That bastard, why did he do this to me?", was excluded because its meaning was unclear.
In early November 2005 the jury could not agree, and the trial ended. At the time New South Wales required unanimous jury verdicts. Within a week the Attorney General, Bob Debus, announced that the state would allow majority verdicts of 11 to one, citing the collapse of the Burrell trial. The Jury Amendment (Verdicts) Act 2006 followed, but the State Library notes that it came too late to apply to Burrell's retrial.
The second trial took place in 2006 before Justice Barr. On June 6, 2006, the jury found Burrell guilty of kidnapping and murdering Kerry Whelan. On August 9, 2006, Justice Barr sentenced him to life imprisonment for the murder, with no prospect of release, and 16 years for the kidnapping.
Burrell's trial for the murder of Dorothy Davis opened in 2007 before Justice David Kirby and a jury. Tedeschi again prosecuted. In his closing address at the end of August he said Burrell had lied about the loan five times and that his credibility had been "shot to pieces," and he said the money gave Burrell a strong motive.
The defense, led by Philip Young SC, said the case rested on flawed circumstantial evidence and that Burrell had an alibi: he had been at a lunch for a friend's 40th birthday when Mrs Davis disappeared. A colleague, Peter Grace, testified that Burrell came back to the office after the lunch and left between 4:30 and 5 pm. Tedeschi answered that the witness must have been mistaken about the day, because phone records put Burrell near Mittagong at 4:30 pm.
The jury of ten men and two women deliberated for about a week and a half. During that time the trial was reopened so the jurors could hear further evidence. On September 17, 2007, they found Burrell guilty of murder. Burrell appeared shocked, and Mrs Davis's daughter wept. "No verdict can ever give us the peace that we so desperately crave," Maree Dawes said, adding that there would be no closure until her mother's body was found.
On February 8, 2008, Justice Kirby sentenced Burrell to 28 years' imprisonment with a non-parole period of 21 years. He accepted that the motive was purely financial, that Burrell had lured Mrs Davis from her home to avoid repaying the loan, and that the killing was cold-blooded. The Crown had asked for a second life sentence. The judge declined, finding that the killing had involved less planning than the Whelan murder. Burrell listened closely and showed no emotion.
Maree Dawes said the family was disappointed, and that she did not understand why the sentences differed when the intent was equal in both murders. Still, she said, he would not walk the streets again or do this to another family, and the loss of her mother's remains lived with the family every day. Lessel Davis called the proceedings extremely stressful and said the good news was that Burrell would die in jail.
Burrell appealed against the Whelan conviction. In March 2007 the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal against conviction and his application for leave to appeal against the sentence. After those orders were formally entered, the court found that its written reasons contained substantial factual errors about the evidence, errors that had not been made at the trial. It reopened the appeal, rejected Burrell's argument that it had no power to do so and his request for a fresh bench on the ground of apprehended bias, and confirmed the dismissal.
Burrell took that to the High Court of Australia. On July 31, 2008, in Burrell v The Queen, six justices (Gummow ACJ, Kirby, Hayne, Heydon, Crennan and Kiefel JJ) unanimously held that once the Court of Criminal Appeal's orders had been formally recorded, it could not reopen the appeal. The High Court set aside both the original and the reopened orders and sent the conviction appeal and the sentence application back to the Court of Criminal Appeal to be heard again. The decision concerned the appeal court's procedure, not the jury's verdict, and it did not order a new trial.
On June 17, 2009, the Court of Criminal Appeal reheard the appeal and dismissed it. On July 31, 2009, a separate bench dismissed his appeal against the Davis conviction, which had been argued partly on the trial judge's directions to the jury. Both convictions stood.
Burrell spent his last decade in prison. He never admitted guilt and never said where either woman was. In 2016 he was diagnosed with cancer, and early on Thursday, August 4, 2016, he died in the Corrective Services wing of Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, aged 63. Police were called at about 1:10 am. Corrective Services said he had died of natural causes and that, as with any death in custody, a report would go to the coroner, but that the death was not being treated as suspicious.
Mark Tedeschi called it a great shame that Burrell had not revealed where the bodies were, since knowing would have let the families give the women a decent burial. Peter Dein said the chances of finding them had diminished significantly with Burrell's death. He said the farm's size, its old mine shafts and its dense bush made it the likeliest place and also the hardest to search, that Burrell had shown no remorse, and that he felt "so sorry for both families."
Bernie Whelan did not live to see his wife found. He retired from Crown Equipment in 2003 after 42 years with the company. In 2004 his son Matthew was left quadriplegic by a rugby accident. About six years before his death he was diagnosed with dementia. He later married Debra, a former family friend who had reconnected with the family after Kerry disappeared. He died in November 2015, aged 77.
In 2009, when the suppressed evidence was published, Bernie Whelan called kidnapping "the cruellest of crimes" and said, "Bruce Burrell was once my friend." He said that he and the children would without doubt choose to bring Kerry home, if the choice were between that and keeping Burrell in jail. After his death Matthew Whelan, by then a counselor, said the uncertainty would always be a burden, and repeated that the family would choose finding her body over keeping Burrell locked up. James Whelan described his father as a fighter who had taught the family resilience.
The case is often mentioned in discussion of laws that deny parole to killers who will not reveal where their victims are. Such laws would have made no practical difference to Burrell: the Whelan sentence already meant he would never be released. New South Wales passed its own law, the Crimes (Administration of Sentences) Amendment (No Body, No Parole) Act 2022, after the conviction of Chris Dawson in August 2022 for the 1982 murder of his wife, Lynette, whose body has never been found. The bill was introduced on September 21, 2022, passed both houses by October 13 and received assent on October 18, 2022. It bars the State Parole Authority from releasing a person convicted of murder or another homicide unless it is satisfied that the person has cooperated satisfactorily in identifying where the victim's body or remains are, taking into account a report from the Commissioner of Police. Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory already had similar provisions.
Two Sydney journalists, Candace Sutton and Ellen Connolly, wrote Ladykiller, published in 2009 after the suppression order on evidence kept from the juries was lifted. In 2022 Mark Tedeschi, the former Senior Crown Prosecutor, published Missing, Presumed Dead, the first book he had written about a case he prosecuted himself; it was shortlisted for the 2023 Danger Awards, and he said the proceeds would go to charities for victims of crime, families of murder victims and relatives of missing people. He told interviewers he wanted to show that a strong case can be built on circumstantial evidence, since many people wrongly believe a murder cannot be tried without a body. He described Burrell as an extreme narcissist driven by entitlement and a need to avoid the shame of admitting he was a failure, a man unmoved by what he did to the women and their families. After the kidnapping became public, Tedeschi said, Burrell overnight "became the most hated man in Australia." He believes the bodies will probably never be found.
Proven by jury verdicts, upheld on appeal and final: the murder of Dorothy Davis in 1995 and the kidnapping and murder of Kerry Whelan in 1997.
Unknown: where and how either woman died, and where their remains are. The Crown said both were taken to Hillydale or the bush around it; police searches there found nothing. One 2016 wire report placed his property "near Belanglo State Forest"; every other source puts it at Bungonia, which is a different area.
Never tested before a jury: much of the evidence police collected in the Whelan case, including the chloroform bottle, the weapons, the notes, the reported boast about hiding a body, the street directory route, the typewriter call, and the account of the April 1997 visit to the Whelan home. The trial judges ruled it inadmissible, and it became public only in 2009.
Allegation, never charged: in a deposition taken in September 1997, when she was dying, a wealthy widow named Jennette Harvey said Burrell had pressured her to invest in a sham diamond scheme, and said she believed she would have disappeared if she had gone along with it. No charge resulted.
Details that vary between sources: Dorothy Davis's age is given as 74 in most reports and as 71 in one 2008 ABC report; one 2009 newspaper account dates her disappearance to May 29, 1995, while the State Library summary gives May 30. An ABC report of the 2009 appeal says she was killed "in 2005," an evident error for 1995. One 2008 ABC report says Burrell was sentenced for the Whelan murder in June 2006; the verdict was in June and the sentence in August 2006.
About 1953: Bruce Allan Burrell is born.
1990: Bernie Whelan retrenches him from Crown Equipment.
1994: Dorothy Davis lends him $100,000, which he does not repay.
May 30, 1995: Dorothy Davis, 74, walks from her Lurline Bay home to visit a friend nearby and is never seen again; that afternoon Burrell drives to his country property.
Mid-April 1997: Burrell visits Kerry Whelan at Kurrajong, by later-published police accounts intending to abduct her, and leaves when he finds her son at home.
May 6, 1997: Kerry Whelan, 39, is last seen in the Parkroyal Hotel car park in Parramatta.
May 7, 1997: a typed ransom letter demanding $1 million arrives at the Whelan home; a large police operation begins, but no call comes.
1997: police raid Burrell's home and search his Bungonia farm and the neighboring recreation area.
September 1997: Jennette Harvey gives a deposition about Burrell's diamond scheme.
1999: Burrell is charged; the charges are later dropped.
May 2002: State Coroner John Abernethy visits Hillydale during a joint inquest into both disappearances.
2002: charges are reinstated; Burrell faces murder charges over both women.
Early November 2005: the first Whelan trial ends with a hung jury.
November 9, 2005: NSW announces majority jury verdicts, citing the collapsed trial.
June 6, 2006: Burrell is found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Kerry Whelan.
August 9, 2006: Justice Barr sentences him to life for murder and 16 years for kidnapping.
March 2007: the Court of Criminal Appeal dismisses his appeal, then reopens it to correct factual errors and confirms the dismissal.
September 17, 2007: a jury finds him guilty of murdering Dorothy Davis.
February 8, 2008: Justice David Kirby sentences him to 28 years with a 21-year non-parole period.
July 31, 2008: the High Court rules the reopening invalid and sends the Whelan appeal back to be heard again.
February 2009: suppressed evidence is published; Ladykiller appears that year.
June 17, 2009: the Court of Criminal Appeal rehears and dismisses the Whelan appeal.
July 31, 2009: the Davis appeal is dismissed.
November 2015: Bernie Whelan dies, aged 77.
August 4, 2016: Burrell dies of cancer in custody at Prince of Wales Hospital, aged 63, without revealing where either body is.
March 30, 2022: Mark Tedeschi publishes Missing, Presumed Dead.
October 18, 2022: NSW's "no body, no parole" law receives assent.