John Douglas Bowie,72,has pleaded not guilty to the murder of his wife and mother of two Roxlyn Bowie who vanished from Walgett on June 5,1982. The Crown alleges Bowie killed the 31-year-old to pursue an unfettered relationship with another woman,Gail Clarke.
Brenda Boyd outside court on Thursday after giving evidence at her father’s trial.Rhett Wyman
The accused’s daughter Brenda Boyd gave evidence in the NSW Supreme Court on Thursday about the last night she saw her mother,when she was six years old. She said the family of four,including her late brother who was in a high chair at the time,had dinner together in their fibro home.
“My parents were arguing a little,I don’t remember what about,” the now 47-year-old said.
“I said goodnight to my father,then my mother put me to bed ... I usually went to bed around 7pm.”
Boyd said that when she woke up the next morning,“she wasn’t there”.
“My father was there,and I asked where my mum was,and he read me a note that he said he found,” she said. “He said that she was sorry and that she had to leave,and he didn’t know where she was.”
She said she remembered crying and some of her breakfast coming out of her mouth. Boyd said it was quite a short conversation and “he didn’t seem upset”.
Asked by Crown prosecutor Alex Morris whether anything further was said,Boyd said her father had said “she won’t be back”. “He said he wished he knew where she was,but he didn’t know.”
She recalled one argument between her parents in the hallway “maybe a couple of nights before” her mother disappeared.
“My Dad was angry and he threw his dinner plate and was shoving the food down her top,” she said. “He was choking her and they were yelling. She was yelling at him to stop and I remember holding on to her leg and yelling at my Dad to stop.”
Roxlyn and John Bowie.NSW Police Media
Speaking about the day after her mother vanished,Boyd said her father drove them to a property within Walgett “to see if people knew where she[Roxlyn] was”,and then to the police station.
Boyd said a family friend later drove them to their grandparents’ house in Killara,Sydney,and her father said they would be staying there until he packed up the house.
She said her father visited and once took them to a dance school to meet a woman named Gail Clarke and her children.
“He said that we were going to have a new family,and I’d have a brother and a sister,” she said. “I was happy and I remember going back to my grandparents and telling my grandmother.”
Boyd said her father and Gail dropped them off and she did not see Gail again. She spent about four or five weeks at her grandparents’ house before their father picked them up and they “met a lady called Anne”. She said they moved into a unit with Anne in August 1982.
The court heard Anne and the accused were later married. Boyd said the relationship was “quite violent”,marked by screaming and drinking,and her father had once kicked Anne in the knee leaving her “in a cast for quite a while”.
Boyd said that in a conversation with her father,when she was eight or nine,he said her mother had “left with her boyfriend the bank manager”.
Under cross-examination from Bowie’s barrister Winston Terracini,SC,Boyd was asked whether she had “substituted” her memories of the weekend her mother disappeared and her father’s comments as the result of speaking to others “over the last couple of decades”.
“No,” she replied.
The prosecutor read notes from a police interview with Gail Clarke in April 1988 regarding “her relationship with the missing person’s husband,John Douglas Bowie”. He said Clarke was deceased.
Clarke said she had met Bowie,then an ambulance officer,in the May 1982 school holidays while she stayed in a caravan along a river with friends. She had been separated from her husband.
According to the notes,Clarke “went out with Bowie on a number of occasions” including to the Walgett RSL club,where she said he had pointed out a woman as Roxlyn “with her male friend”.
“She had previously been informed by Bowie that he and Roxlyn led different lives and that she had a boyfriend,” the prosecutor read.
Clarke said she continued seeing Bowie over the two-week holiday and “some weeks later,Bowie phoned her and told her he was coming to Sydney”.
“Towards the end of June 1982,Bowie arrived at her home and told her that his wife had left him,and suggested that he move in with her,” the prosecutor read.
“She refused this request,and although she went out with him on a number of occasions,she terminated the relationship after two to three weeks,and has not seen him since.”
In the notes,Clarke said Bowie had been “extremely keen to form a serious relationship with her”.
She said she had met his children and also accompanied him to his in-laws,where the children appeared well cared for.
“Although she was surprised that the older child,Brenda,made no mention at all of her mother,” the interview notes state. “She[Clarke] also stated that Bowie did not discuss his wife or her disappearance other than to say she had left him.”
The defence argues that while Bowie was not a “perfect fellow” he did not kill his wife. The trial before Justice Dina Yehia continues.
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