July 5, 2025 • 55 mins
When 24-year-old Belgian backpacker Davine Arckens reached out to a man on Gumtree about working on his farm, she was excited. The 88 days of labour would mean she could stay in Australia on a tourist visa for an extra year. She couldn’t wait to spend more time in a country she thought was safe and full of nice people.
When Davine met the man, it didn’t take long for her to realise she’d made a terrible mistake. What followed was two harrowing days where she was held against her will and an escape that made national headlines.
Walkley award-winning journalist Richard Guilliatt reported on the story, and he joins Jessie Stephens to walk us through it.
This episode first aired in 2019 and marked one of the earliest major cases on True Crime Conversations. We're re-releasing it today for listeners old and new.
CREDITS
Guest: Richard Guilliatt
Host: Jessie Stephens
Senior Producer/Editor: Elise Cooper
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. Oh hi there,
True Crime Conversations listeners, whether your brand new here or
have been with us from the very beginning, welcome. I'm
your host, Claire Murphy, and like so many of you,
I have always had a very deep interest in true crime.
(00:26):
I don't know about you, but I read it, I
watch it, I listen to it. And True Crime Conversations
is about giving victims a voice and speaking with people
who really know the cases, journalists, authors and experts who
spent time researching what really happened. We are not here
to sensationalize. Our goal is to create a space for respectful,
important conversations that go deeper than the headlines. Many of
(00:49):
the stories that we cover do focus on women, and
that's because sadly, women make up the majority of victims
in violent crimes. In fact, one in four women in
Australia has experienced violence by an intimate partner since the
age of fifteen. But we do cover a wide range
of cases from this appearances and scams to shocking assaults
and murders. Cases from here in Australia and all over
(01:11):
the world. I mean, even though we're an Aussie made podcast,
you will hear voices from just about everywhere, survivors, experts
and storytellers who bring these cases to life. And if
there's every case that you'd like us to cover, or
a survivor you think we should really speak to, we
would love to hear from you. You can send us
an email or a voice note, and there are links
for both of those in the show notes. Now, over
(01:33):
the next few weeks, we're going to be doing true
crime conversations a little bit differently. We are re releasing
a few episodes from the very early days of this podcast,
and we're talking way back in twenty nineteen when the
excellent Jesse Stevens was hosting. Now, usually we don't go
back and redo episodes because a lot of the cases
we cover are what we call evergreen, so that means
(01:54):
you can scroll back and listen to them at any time.
But these early episodes came out so long ago that
we're thinking some of you might have missed them, so
we're bringing a few of them back and we hope
you'll find something new or hear a story that you
hadn't come across before. Today we're revisiting the story of
Belgian backpacker Devien Arkins. This is a truly chilling case.
(02:15):
In twenty seventeen, Devine was lured to a remote South
Australian property by a man named Jean Charles Bristow. He
kidnapped her, assaulted her and held her captive, but she
managed to escape and it's a story of both trauma
and incredible strength. There haven't been any major public updates
on this case since twenty nineteen, but it remains one
(02:38):
of Australia's most disturbing and memorable. Award winning journalist Richard Gilliot,
who covered the case, joins Jesse Stevens in this episode
to walk us through what happened. After you've listened, we
would love to know your thoughts, especially if this is
a case that you haven't heard of before and don't forget.
We're also on TikTok at True Crime Conversations, where you
can find quick explainers and clips from our interviews. You
(03:00):
can dm us there too if you want to get
in touch.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
A quick warning this episode contains discussions of sexual assault
and the recounting of traumatic events. Listener discretion is advised.
Sweat was trickling down Lucy Arnaud's back as she stepped
off the bus in murray Bridge, an hour or so
from Adelaide in South Australia. It was February nine, the
(03:30):
thick of the Australian summer. Back in Belgium, her friends
would be freezing, but here she was about to embark
on a lone backpacking trip around Australia. Petite and quiet,
Lucy was excited about her big adventure in a country
that she thought was safe and full of people who
(03:51):
were friendly and nice. As she stood at the bus stop,
she spotted the man she was waiting for, Max, but
as she would later find out, his name wasn't actually
Max at all. I'm Jesse Stevens and this is True
Crime Conversations a Muma mea podcast exploring the world's most
(04:15):
notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the
most about them. In this episode, I'm joined by Walkley
Award winning journalist, author and staff writer for The Australian
Richard Gilliot. In March of this year, Gillat wrote a
story for the Weekend Australian magazine titled I've Been Kidnapped
(04:36):
No joke. It was about a twenty four year old
woman who until this week had her name kept private
for legal reasons. She's recently come out into the public
eye and revealed that her real name is Devien Arkins.
But for this story, we're going to call her Lucy Rnaud,
the name given to her by Richard in his reporting.
(05:03):
It was February ninth, twenty seventeen, when a woman who
will call Lucy meets a man who we're going to
call Max at a place called murray Bridge in South Australia.
Why is she there? What's brought her to that point?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Well, she's a backpacker and she's on an adventure that
many Europeans go on in Australia. She was quite an
experienced traveler in some ways. She'd been to a number
of other countries. She'd been to China, and she'd worked
in wildlife parks in South Africa. She'd also trekked a
bit in South America.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
And she was studying in Europe. I think she wanted
to be a vet.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
This was her next adventure and it was one of
those classic adventure travel backpacker trips where she arrived in
Sydney she'd been to Tasmania to see the wilderness down there,
She'd hiked in the Blue Mountains and her plan was,
like a lot of backpackers, she wanted to try and
extend her trip. And the way you do that you
(06:07):
get an extra year if you work eighty eight days
in the rural area of Australia and you then become
eligible for an extra year on your visa. So she
had traveled, i think on a package tour from Victoria
across to Adelaide and she was staying in a backpacker place,
(06:27):
and she had been to Kangaroo Island and she was
now planning the rest of her trip, which involved going
up to the Northern Territory.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
But she wanted to get some farm work under her.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Belt before she did that, because she had to clock
up these days. And so she was in a backpacker
place in Adelaide and she started looking on gumtree for
farm work.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
Nearly a quarter of a million backpackers come to Australia
every year. They follow a well worn backpacker tourist path
and they work in bars, on building sites and on farms.
To get a two year visa, backpackers must spend at
least three months working somewhere rural. Many farmers rely on
working holidaymakers.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Backpackers dominate our workforce. Now.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
It's obviously hard work. We're outside all.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
The time, we work in varying weather conditions, you're bent over.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
It's just the type of work that ossies don't want
to do anymore.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
What sort of farm work is it? What kind of
things do backpackers go and do on farms?
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Well, there's fruit picking, it's manual labor, it's helping out
with mustering. But I think a lot of it is
very simple farm labor work, digging, fencing.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
Whatever help is available.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Gum trees the sort of locus of all that and
where a lot of backpackers go to find work and
where a lot of farmers advertise. It's a thriving business
in a sense. And you know, a lot of farmers
will tell you that with how backpackers, they could barely
operate their properties because a lot of Australians don't want
(08:02):
to do that work. Whereas for a lot of tourists
it's kind of part of the adventure is working in
the bush in Australia, and.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
The accommodation and everything is included that's the idea too,
that you stay there, correct And so what do we
know about this man Max who's met her to pick
her up, Well.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
We know plenty about him now. At that time Lucy
knew nothing. So she goes on to gum Tree and
he contacts her and says, yes, I work for this
company called Genesis, and we have these farms a few
hours outside of Adelaide, and we hire a lot of backpackers.
We've had French backpackers. And he spends this whole story
(08:42):
to her about how he prefers female backpackers because they're
much more gentle with the animals, and she will be
sort of helping milk cows and look after calves.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
You know.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
He makes it very enticing for her, and she's got
an interest in animal welfare.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I think that for a lot of people like her,
Australia is seen as this very safe destination where there
haven't been major terrorist attacks, crime is quite low compared
to a lot of overseas destinations, and there's a feeling
that you're very safe here. In fact, she did say
later on that her image of Australia was of an
(09:22):
incredibly friendly, safe place and so like a lot of
young women who are traveling here.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
I think there's a kind of false sense.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Of security there, which led to her putting herself in
quite a dicey situation because she actually didn't know who
Max was and she just took on faith value what
he was saying. And so he said, look, you know,
get on the bus, and I gave her the details
and I'll meet you in murray.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Bridge and I'll take you to the farm. And that's
what she did.
Speaker 6 (09:52):
I did ask questions to get more information. He spoke
about another French girl who was recently going to another farm.
So that makes me feel a bit more reassure, like, okay,
other people doing this job.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
And can I ask you about that sense of safety
because in Australian criminal history, like if you look at
Ivan Malatt, I mean, that's one of our most infamous crimes.
Why is it that that hasn't sort of rattled that
tourist economy in terms of Australia still feeling like a
safe destination.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
I was really puzzled by this too, because I'd seen
one survey where a lot of overseas travelers weren't even
aware of the Bilanglo murders or the Bradley Murdoch kidnapping
in Central Australia, and so I got to say that
really surprised me because I had thought those crimes got
(10:56):
saturation coverage. I think they got saturation coverage in England,
but I think in Europe there's still this image. And
in fact, when I interviewed Backpacker Company new people, they
said that safety is one of the least important issues
that people raise with them before they're coming out here,
apart from the possibility of being attacked by a wild animal.
(11:20):
I mean, one of them joked that Steve Irwin being
killed in the ocean has given Australia a much greater
image for danger than any serial killer or sex crimes
guy out there.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
So she then gets in a car with this man
who she obviously believes is taking her to do some
farm work, and they're in the car for two hours
or so. Where does he take her?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
So Max is this guy in his fifties, and he's
got a bushy sort of go tee and curly hair,
and we know that his real name is Jeane Bristow
and he operates a hobby farm in Meningi.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
Which is a sort of a touristy.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Town on a lake, about an hour and a half
out of Adelaide. But he spins this whole story that
his name's Max, and he takes her on this.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Very security strive to his farm.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
So he heads southeast from murray Bridge, but he goes
down into the lake district and as you head into
this area, it gets kind of more swampy and there's
estuaries and it starts to look a lot more sort
of barren the landscape, and you have to cross a
(12:36):
couple of rivers on ferries, and so it takes two
to and a half hours to get to Minningi that way,
and along the way you pass some pretty dry and
empty landscape, and so Lucy would have had a sense
that she was I think heading out to quite a
remote spot, and that was obviously Bristow's intention to make
(13:00):
her feel that she was a long way from Adelaide.
Along the way, he's chatting to her about the work
they'll be doing, and he's sort of talking it up
that she'll be interacting with the animals and that this
company Genesis that he supposedly works for. And so it
takes them about two and a half hours to reach
(13:21):
his place, and he also drives into his property through
a back road, so she never sees the town of Meningi.
And I'm sure that to her it seemed like she
had been taken to quite a remote spot, and she
would have had no idea that she was really only
(13:41):
a little over ninety minutes from Adelaide and just really
like a five minute walk from the town of Minindi,
just down the street.
Speaker 6 (13:51):
We told me I could take a bus to murray Bridge,
so I looked it up and it seemed fine to me.
It was not that far and it was easy to
go there. They told me that he would pick me
up at a bus station, so I just had to
look for the bus, get there and there will be it.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
So he takes her to a almost like a farmhouse.
Can you describe the facility that she's sort of walked into.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Well, it's a pig shed, and it's essentially an abandoned
pig shed. Because Bristow was not really a farmer. I mean,
he had been a farmer and worked on dairy farms,
but he was really a laborer who'd been in and
out of employment in Mininghi and was had a terrible
reputation as an employee. He'd been sacked from a number
(14:44):
of jobs, and when I spoke to people in the town,
they described him as just an argumentative, sort of trouble
maker sort of a guy. And he worked at the
council dump and had taken them to court for unfair dismissal.
So his farm was really just a hobby farm with
a few head of cattle on it, and his house
and this pig shed. He didn't have any p So
(15:07):
this thing was cinderblock building, corrugated iron ruth sort of
open to the elements, straw on the floor, stalls for animals,
and a fridge that wasn't plugged in, a huge hive
of bees in one corner, and this filthy sofa which
(15:27):
was all cut up and clearly worse for wear and tear,
which was actually positioned over a grate where you were
designed to sweep animal droppings into. And so Lucynau walks
into this place with Max as she thinks he's called,
and looks around and realizes that this is where he's
(15:50):
proposing that she's going to stay. And at this point
she's obviously completely confused, and he's still talking and talking
to her, and then he says that he needs to
make sure she's not a druggie, and he needs to
check her feet for needle marks, and so he needs
(16:11):
her to lie face down on the sofa, which she does.
And it's at that point that the whole thing turns
very nasty.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
And you can understand why she would, because she's a
woman completely alone in what she thinks is a very
isolated country town with a man that she doesn't know.
You sort of don't have an option to stand there
and say no, why would I do that?
Speaker 3 (16:33):
Well, I think she must have realized at that point
that she'd made a very big error because she actually
didn't know where she was. He had told her they
were near a town which was actually about an hour away,
and she didn't know who he was. She didn't know
where she was, and he's quite a big guy. And Lucy,
I know, is quite a small girl and even a
(16:55):
young woman.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
She was twenty four, and even though she had traveled
a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
I saw her in court when she presented her victim
impact statement, and she did have an air of sort
of innocence about her, and I could imagine that she
would have been sort of panicking at this point and
wondering what to do, and so she complied with his
instructions to lie down, and at that point he suddenly
(17:23):
grabs her arms and ties them behind her and jabs
her in the shoulder with something and she looks back
and it appears to be a gun. She then realizes
that this guy has ill intentions.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
And what did he then proceed to do to her
over the course of this sort of afternoon.
Speaker 4 (17:44):
Well, he he.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Took her clothes off apart from I think her bra
and he sexually assaulted her a number of times over
the next twenty four hours, and he kept her tied
up for most of that time. I didn't mention this
in my story, but Bristow was actually impotent, So it
(18:11):
was just this weird aspect of the case where he,
you know, he was incapable of committing full rape, but
he sexually assaulted her and sort of groped her, and
he seemed to at one point he even kissed her.
There was something kind of pathetic, even though what he
(18:33):
did was incredibly malevolent, at the same time, there was
something quite kind of pathetic about his behavior as well.
To me, I don't know if a woman would agree
with that. But so for the first I don't know,
several hours, he sexually assaulted her, and then he told
(18:57):
her this whole story in order to frighten her into compliance,
which was that he was working for this organization that
essentially kidnapped young women, and that there were other women
who were being held on other farms, and that if
she tried to escape, he would shoot her because the
(19:19):
operation could not be exposed, and that the people he
worked for were paying off the local police, and so
there was no point trying to escape because if the
police picked her up, they would simply bring her back
here and she would end up on one of the
other farms, where the people who were running them were
far more cruel than he was, and she would be
(19:41):
drugged and even more appalling things would happen to her,
whereas he was one of the nice guys.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Didn't he say something too about snakes or something about
the wildlife around it?
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Yeah, he also it intimated that it was incredibly dangerous
in the surrounding areas, And I think he was trying
to give her the impression that they were virtually in
the desert and that she would be lucky to sort
of get far without being bitten or somehow attacked by something,
(20:15):
and of course she had no reason to disbelieve that,
because all she had seen was acres and in fact
miles and miles of empty paddocks on the drive there,
and you couldn't see the farmhouse from where she was,
so she wasn't even aware, for instance, that Bristow's wife
and son and daughter in law were living just two
(20:38):
hundred meters up the hill in the farmhouse, and nor
were Bristow's family aware that he had carried out this
bizarre kidnapping which he somehow seemed to think that he
could get away with.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
So they didn't hear anything, because she wouldn't have even
thought that if she yelled that people would hear, right,
because she's imagining that she's completely isolated.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
That's right, And so she, I think, decided for self
preservation to just comply with him, and he would leave
her in the shed for hours and then come back
with food or water, but then sexually assauld her again,
(21:20):
and eventually he rigged up this chain arrangement, so she
was chained with one foot and one arm to the
wall using a kind of g bolt, and from memory,
she had one arm and one leg free. As it
grew dark, he left her there, and at some point
(21:44):
I think he suggested to her that she might be
let free the next day, and then he went back
to his wife and son in the house and presumably
had dinner and watch TV with them.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
Bizarrely enough, in.
Speaker 6 (22:01):
The beginning is very commanding. When I walk in here,
we'll be always undressed. You don't put on anything anymore
that I'll have to be kind. Don't run away or
he would find me and shoot me with the gun.
I was just stuck there, and I thought it would
(22:22):
take a while for someone to notice I was gone
or even to find me. So I was like, I'm
not getting out of here. I thought, this is this
is it. This is where I'm gonna die.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
And so while he's inside and he's sort of left
her for a few hours, and at this point I
think he's taken her phone and stuff. Doesn't she have
access to a backpack?
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Yeah, he had taken her phone and her main bag,
but he had left her backpack in the shed with
her and failed to look at its contents. This was
the thing that struck me about this whole bizarre case
was Bristow's complete and competence. You just couldn't fathom how
(23:13):
he thought he was going to get away with this,
and you couldn't fathom his complete lack of thinking through.
He certainly was no criminal mastermind. So he leaves her
there in the shed with this backpack. Darkness is falling,
and she has a laptop in there, and she's got
a dongle, an Internet dongle, and so she reaches across
(23:39):
to this fridge because he had opened it and she'd
seen that there were some implements in there, and she
managed to get something out of the fridge which she
managed to loosen this g bolt with over a period
of some time, and so she was able to free
herself after I think about half an hour of working
away at this g bolt on the chains, and she
(24:01):
scurried over to her backpack and pulled out her laptop.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
And USB dongle.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
And by this stage it's dark, and she of course
has no idea when he's going to come back, and
she gets an Internet connection on the dongle and she
contacts a number of people. First of all, she sends
a message to Belgium, where her family live, and then
(24:28):
she manages to I think that was a Facebook message
to a member of her family, and then she managed
to contact a friend in Queensland on an audio connection
and had a conversation with her and basically told her
that she mean kidnapped and she was in the shed
somewhere outside Adelaide and she had no idea where she was.
(24:52):
And the friend contacted the police while she was on
the phone, and so she knew the police had been
alerted at that point. But then that connection dropped out,
and while she was still had the Internet connection, she
sent these frantic messages to She thought it was the police,
(25:14):
but it was actually the Police Association, the Police Union.
She found the Police Association website and she managed to
type out this frantic message which I could read, being
kidnapped murray Bridge to Lamarue. I think a cow farm
crossed two ferries, got chains loose, afraid to run away,
(25:36):
he might chase and shoot me. Please help look for me,
please please, I'm so afraid. Please, I'm on a farm somewhere.
He drives a red pickup. So she loses the internet
connection short out to sending that, and she's fearful in fact,
that the light from the laptop screen will alert him,
(25:56):
or that he'll come back, And so she shuts the
laptop down and puts it back and then rechains.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
Herself up to the war and just waits.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
And she's naked on this sofa with just I think
he gave her a coat to throw over herself. And
so she spends this sleepless night in this peak shed
with these bees buzzing in the corner, waiting to see
what's going to happen the next morning and whether the
police are going to respond.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
What are the police thinking at this point, because that
would be very bizarre getting a message like that in
terms of even understanding whether it was real or not.
Do the police take this seriously straight away?
Speaker 3 (26:40):
My sense of it is that the police did take
this very seriously straight away, because they immediately held a
press conference and released photos of her early the next morning.
Her photo was on the front page of the Adelaide
Advertiser in fact as a missing person, and they sent
a large number of cars from various different squads down
(27:03):
to the Meningi area. And because they had such specific information,
you know that they were looking for a red pickup
and it was around the Lamaroue sort of area. They
seem to have narrowed it down to Meningi quite quickly,
so by I think mid next morning, there were police
(27:26):
planes circling over Meningi and there were certainly a lot
of police presence in murray Bridge, for instance, and so
it did seem like the police responded very.
Speaker 7 (27:37):
Quickly, good evening major crime police so leading the search
for a Belgian tourist they fear has been abducted while
on the holiday in South Australia. There are tonight grave
fears for her safety.
Speaker 8 (27:51):
We believe she was potentially picked up by a person
in a red pickup top vehicle. We have grave concerns
that she's been held against her will.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Did Bristow have any idea that this was happening.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
He came in the next morning and he gave her
some breakfast and.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Sexually assaulted her again.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
You know, this weird sort of combination of giving her
food and expressing this idea that he was going to
set her free and he was one of the good guys,
while at the same time, you know, sexually assaulting her.
And then he went into Meningi and he picked up
the fact that there were a lot of cops.
Speaker 4 (28:34):
In the area, and.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
I think in fact that her photo would have been
in the Adelaide Advertiser perhaps that morning. I just can't
remember that entirely myself, but he certainly by ten o'clock
knew that something was up, and he himself was pulled
(28:59):
over driving his red pickup by two cops outside Meningi,
and they photographed him and took down some details, but
didn't really press him all that much. And because the
police plane had spotted his pickup and reported it in
(29:19):
and so he got back to the farm and he
was of course in a total panic at this point
because he realized that somehow word had got out, and
so he said.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
To her that they had to leave immediately.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
He got her to throw on some clothes, and she
grabbed her backpack and he told her to run across
the farm to this cluster of trees a few hundred
meters away, and he came around in his wife's car
because he didn't want to be driving the red pickup
to collect her.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Was he a suspect at this point? So the police
have taken a photo of him and seen the car,
Are they thinking of investigating any further?
Speaker 3 (30:03):
I'm sure he was a suspect at this point because
he'd already been pulled over and photographed. Look, I don't
know how many people had red pickups in that area,
but my sense of it was that they had narrowed
it down to Meningi and had him in their sights.
He seems to have had this bizarre idea that he
(30:23):
could drive her back to murray Bridge, and that she
would be so freaked out that she would just book
a flight back to Belgium and go straight to Adelaide
and get on the plane and leave, and he would
somehow be able to kind of wash his hands of
the whole thing. But in fact he left behind a
(30:45):
trail of evidence that was a mile wide, which later
came out in court. But that is in fact what
he did. He drove her to murray Bridge. He actually
went into the motel reception area with her. She of course,
is looking terrible at this point. She's had a sleepless night,
she's been sexually assaulted, she hasn't showered for a couple
(31:08):
of days, and she's fearful and traumatized by her experience.
And the woman at the motel immediately registered this, and
Bristow tried to sort of make out that he was
I don't know, some friend of hers or some farmer
who was just dropping her off and tried to organize
for her to book a ticket back to Belgium while
(31:31):
she was at the motel, and then he basically skid addled.
This is where the impact of this on her became
really evident, because you would think that at this point
he's left, she's in this motel, she would just pick
up the phone or say to the woman in the reception,
can you please call the police, But in fact, she
(31:54):
goes to her room, she has a shower, she walks
to McDonald's and gets herself some food, and she's walking
back from McDonald's off Judy cop spots her and checks
her appearance against the bulletin that's going around and realizes
(32:14):
that it's her, the missing girl from Belgium, and so
he gets out of his car and approaches her, and
she starts to hurry away from him. And so it's
clear that this story that Bristow had told her about
the cops being corrupt and being in on this whole
(32:35):
kidnapping scam was real to her, very very real to her,
and she was absolutely petrified of the police, and in
fact she really wouldn't let this guy approach her, even
when he pulled out his badge and she said to him,
how do I know you know that's a genuine police ID.
Eventually a police female police officer was brought to talk
(32:57):
to her and she described Lucy I know, as being
just shaking with fear even talking to the police. They
eventually convinced her that their intentions were good, and they
showed her a photo of Bristow and she id'd him,
so that's when they definitively knew it was him.
Speaker 9 (33:19):
Good Evening nine News has filmed the moment police arrested
a fifty two year old man who's accused of abducting
a tourist at murray Bridge. Police alleged the man from
Meningi rape the young woman while holding a hostage for
more than twenty four hours.
Speaker 8 (33:32):
What I'd like to say is thank all the members
of the public who provided an information, because some of
the information was crucial. She is still with police and
she is well, unharmed, and obviously her family are very
grateful for everything that's occurred in the fact that she
is safe.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
And when you say there was a mile of evidence,
what sort of evidence had he left behind.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Well, when the police got his computer from home, they
discovered that he had been for two months trawling through
Gumtree spinning all sorts of lies to various different backpackers,
trying to lure them to his farm. And he'd had
conversations with a number of young women in that time
(34:15):
where he'd spun all the same lies about being from
this company and that they ran this chain of farms,
and that they preferred female workers, and he was even
asking them how old they were, did they have a
boyfriend with them? Very leading questions, which in fact made
many of them suspicious, And in fact, it had taken
(34:38):
him more than two months to actually get his first
victim because of his suspicious sort of behavior online. On
top of that, he had purchased online a replica pistol
and a set of novelty handcuffs.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
So when you say a replica pistol, not a real.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
One, no, right, essentially a kind of a talk but
a realistic looking toy.
Speaker 4 (35:08):
And the day before he picked Lucy.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Arnaut up in murray Bridge, he had gone to the
hardware store in Meninghi and bought a whole lot of
cable ties and so all of the things that she
described to the police, the pistol that was jabbed into
her back, and the cable ties that we used to
tie her up he didn't actually use. The handcuffs were
(35:32):
found on the farm. The pistol was found discarded in
a paddock, the cable ties were there, and he had
thrown her phone into the bottom of a water tank,
and the phone was discovered some weeks later when his
own son was repairing the tank and drained it and
found her phone at the bottom of the water tank.
(35:52):
And of course the police had Lucy Arnau's direct testimony
of who he was and how the circumstances of how
she ended up there, and she had injuries consistent with
being tied up and consistent with being sexually assaulted, and
so there was, you know, a massive evidence implicating him.
Plus which he had completely lied to his family about
(36:16):
his whereabouts over that forty eight hour period. So he
told them he'd gone to murray Bridge for a job interview, which.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
Was a lie.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
He didn't tell anyone in the family that he had
a willing worker backpacker down in the shed. He didn't
even concoct a story about why she might be there.
He just of course, hid that from his son and
his wife, and when the police arrested him the next day,
he had shaved all his hair off and his beard
off to alter his appearance, and had thrown a whole
(36:49):
lot of objects over the sofa and tried to discuss,
you know, tried to hide the existence of the sofa
in the pig shed. So there was a massive incriminating
evidence and direct testimony from her that pinned the crime
on him, And to my mind, it was just inexplicable
that he chose to plead not guilty and try to
(37:16):
throw this line out in court that she was this
sort of fantasist who didn't like farm work and found
it too grinding, and had concocted this whole story in
order to cover the fact that she didn't have the
umph to be a farm.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Worker, even though none of his family knew there was
a woman just like meet us away in a picture.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Well, when it got to so he was arrested immediately,
of course, and it got to court, and over the
course of the investigation the police found all this evidence
that I've just mentioned. Then he agrees to testify in
the trial, and you know, I didn't observe him giving
evidence in court. But the transcript just he argued with
(37:59):
the prosecutor. He seemed to think that he could sort
of argue his way out of this case. And so
his whole demeanor in the court was quite sort of
strange and just completely out of touch with the reality
of the situation he was in, because there was just
such an overwhelming amount of evidence and his story was
(38:20):
so implausible, and his own family had agreed to give
evidence against him because his son. Once his son found
the phone in the water tank and learned that his
father had lied to him about a number of things,
clearly was so disgusted that he agreed to testify as
a prosecution witness against his own father. His wife was
(38:41):
going to be called, but in the end wasn't for
reasons that I don't think I'm allowed to talk about
because they were sort of subject of a suppression order.
But certainly there's no doubt that his family knew that
he lied to them about it, and that his son
felt he was guilty, and so the son's testimony was
(39:02):
pretty damning, I think.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
So they have all of that evidence in court, what
is the conviction? What do they decide to do with Bristow.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Well, he's charged with rape and kidnapping and he's put
on trial in the district Court in South Australia.
Speaker 4 (39:21):
Because he's pleaded not guilty.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Lucy Arnau is forced to testify and his lawyer, you know,
grills her and pursues this story that he Bristow is telling,
which is that she's a fantasist and you know, she's
made all this stuff up.
Speaker 4 (39:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (39:39):
The trauma of everything she'd been through is then compounded
by having to be presented in court as a liar
who's invented this whole story. She gave testimony over a
number of hours. She's a very quiet, sort of demure
sort of person, and she had a sort of basic English,
you know, so her expressions of what had happened to
(40:02):
her were quite kind of simple and straightforward.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
The testimony is.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Extremely convincing because it's so plainly expressed and her story
just so plainly coheres with all of the rest of
the evidence in the case. Bristow then spends hours and
hours in the dock, arguing with the prosecutor and engaging
in these rambling monologues about his prowess as a welder
(40:30):
and various other aspects of farming, and just seems completely
lacking in any self awareness, seemingly unaware of the fact
that by pleading not guilty, by subjecting Lucy Arnaut to
this ordeal, he runs the risk of having a much
heavier sentence than he would normally because his sexual assaults
(40:53):
were to use the legal jargon at the lower end
of the scale, and he didn't use extreme violence, for instance,
and so I think there was a possibility that he
not have got that heavier sentence, But because he did
this chose to plead not guilty, he.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Ended up getting a heavier sentence than you know, he
got eighteen years.
Speaker 10 (41:16):
Wow nine News can reveal for the first time the
identity of the man accused of holding a backpack of
hostage near murray Bridge and repeatedly raping her. Jean Bristow
today pleaded not guilty to three counts of rape and
one count of detaining the woman against her will.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
What was her victim impact statement when she sort of
delivered that to the court. What was the contents of it?
Speaker 3 (41:43):
It was very simple, simply expressed she came to court,
but she didn't actually deliver the statement herself and she
got the prosecutor to read it, but there were a
number of things in it that she said. She said
she felt foolish for the situation that she'd put herself in,
(42:04):
her naivety at putting herself in this situation, and she
described the terror that she felt when she was being
held in this shared by this guy, that she would
never see her parents again. I think there was a
very real fear for her that the only option form
would be to kill her once he'd done whatever he
(42:25):
wanted to do with her. And in fact, it's difficult
to understand what Bristow's exit plan for this crime was.
And that was one thing that really struck me about it,
is he just didn't seem to have thought through anything
of what he was doing. And so was he planning
to just, I don't know, drive her back to murray
(42:47):
Bridge and or drive her to Adelaide and put her
on a plane back to Belgium. I mean, he had
apparently no history of violent crime, he didn't have a
mental illness. It's not like he had bipolar disorder and
so was in the throes of a mania attack when
he did this, and so you wonder, really what was
(43:09):
he planning to do. And I'm sure that question must
have been haunting her the entire time she was in
that pig shed. You know, how is this going to end?
Speaker 2 (43:20):
And what would have happened if she hadn't disrupted that
plan by having, you know, access to the internet.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yeah, And so she spoke about the impact of that
on her and how it had really profoundly affected her
now because she had been this adventurous person who traveled
and she was now it had taken her nearly a
year to be able to sort of just drive on
her own in her hometown. She was did not feel
(43:49):
safe walking around the streets on her own at all,
and that it had this profound impact on her, which
she had been taking sleeping pills to sleep. She had
been undergoing counseling fairly constantly to get over it. There
was one I think she said at the end where
she said, sometimes I think it's a curse to be
(44:10):
born a woman. I think we're not safe at all.
And this was kind of an expression of how profoundly
shaken she had.
Speaker 4 (44:18):
Been by this whole experience.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
So the prosecutor read this out in court while she
sat behind him, and she was flanked by a couple
of support people. That court hearing actually only took perhaps
about fifteen minutes. She walked in, she sat down in
the front bench of the courtroom. The prosecutor got up
and read her statement, and then the hearing ended and
(44:43):
she left. And it was then a couple of months
later that the sentence was actually brought down by the
judge in fact quite recently, and Bristou was sentenced to
eighteen years in prison with a minimum of twelve and
a half.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Was that sentence of surprise or do you think that
because he didn't plead guilty that was sort of expected.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
I thought that he might get something like that. I
never know how people react to sentences. I think eighteen
years is a pretty long stretch for a guy who's,
you know, fifty four or fifty five. In many ways,
it's a really shocking crime to kidnap an innocent young woman,
(45:27):
tire up in a filthy shared, take off her clothes,
sexually assault her with no plan apparently of how to
how you're going to kind of extricate yourself from this,
at the same time threatening her with all sorts of violence.
But there was one thing about the case that I
didn't really put this in the story because I didn't
want it to be misinterpreted. But when police searched Bristow's computer,
(45:55):
they found that one of his Google searchers was fed
up with life, and you know, he was sexually impotent.
And I got these of him as rather a pathetic
kind of individual, even though what he did was so malevolent.
There was an aspect of the crime that was out
(46:18):
of him that I thought was sort of pathetic. And
he seemingly had no history of this, unlike a lot
of the other people men who've been convicted recently of
crimes against backpackers, who do have a history of sexually
offending and you do seem to have misogynistic impulses. Bristow
(46:42):
didn't seem to be like that, and I found that
a curious part of the story. And when I went
to Meninghi and interviewed people who knew him, they all
sort of told the same story, which was that he
was this sort of slightly hapless character who worked as
a laborer. He worked, bounced from job to job, was
sort of argumentative but sort of a bit hapless, and
(47:04):
they were just that he would attempt to carry off
such a ghastly.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
Crime because this wasn't an isolated incident in that it
had happened before the Gum Tree ad and having someone
come to property for farm work, had that inspired what
he had done?
Speaker 3 (47:25):
I think there's evidence of that. So a year before
he committed this crime, a man called Roman Heinz, who
was also based in Adelaide and was in fact a
very predatory, misogynistic man.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
Had.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
He had been involved in a series of sexual assaults
of backpackers who he met up with through Gumtree ads.
In fact, over the period of I think it was
two thousand and fourteen to twenty sixteen, Hines had arranged
to meet a number.
Speaker 4 (48:01):
Of backpackers, two of them in Adelaide.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
He had sexually assaulted, and he'd attacked his own partner,
And he'd in fact taken a Japanese backpacker to Salt Creek,
which is a fishing beach about two hours outside of
Adelaide and it's not far from Meninghi and the only
reason that she didn't get attacked by him, apparently is
that she had posted a photo up on Facebook saying
(48:27):
where she was.
Speaker 4 (48:28):
But shortly after that, some.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Months after that incident, he picked up these two young backpackers,
a Brazilian woman and a German woman, on a pretext
of taking them to Victoria, and he took them to
Salt Creek, the beach where he previously visited, and he
perpetrated an absolutely atrocious attack in which he tied up
(48:51):
the Brazilian woman and sexually assaulted her, and then when
the German woman tried to intervene, he attacked her with
a hammer and beat her with a hammer and then
chased her around the beach in his four wheel drive.
Just this nightmarish scenario of her trying to evade this
(49:11):
guy while the Brazilian girl was running in the opposite
direction to escape him. And those two girls miraculously managed
to survive that attack, and so Heines had been arrested
a year before the Bristow incident happened, and the modus
operandi of Hines had been revealed in the Adelaide Advertiser
(49:35):
that he'd placed these gumtree ads, And when police went
to Bristow's computer, they found that he had done searches
and looked up information about the Salt Creek incident. He
followed the modus operandi he'd sort of researched the crime
on the Internet, and he lived in Meningi, which was
(49:58):
I think half an hour up the coast from Salt Creek,
so that crime was in fact investigated by the Meningi police.
Have been the talk of the town at the time.
I don't think there's any doubt that Bristow got some ideas.
Speaker 6 (50:13):
Yeah, I thought he would kill me. I would die there.
I feel kind of a bit ashamed in the beginning,
because you let someone trick you, let someone fool you.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
Do you think that this has changed Australia's reputation. Have
these stories been reported internationally?
Speaker 3 (50:37):
My sense of it is not. And I contacted a
number of travel companies who do backpack of packages and
they all expressed quite a dismissive attitude about this. Heinz
and Bristow are just too of a whole range of incidents.
I mean you mentioned, of course, my lad is the
(50:58):
kind of legendary. I mean he killed five foreign backpackers
and two Australian travelers over a three year period. There
was a more recent case. In fact, it was happening
around the same time as Bristow was kidnapping Lucy Arnaut.
This is addicted young guy in Queensland befriended a backpacker
(51:20):
from Liverpool and ended up kidnapping her and terrorizing her
so much that she ended up on this wild sort
of car journey with him through northern Queensland in which
he was beating her and sexually assaulting her in a
sort of meth frenzy. And he was eventually caught. Now
(51:42):
he was recently jailed for ten years. He pleaded guilty
to those crimes. There's been a whole series of them,
and the Salt Creek crimes were on sixty minutes. The
one I just mentioned was aired on Sunday night. I
wrote my feature about the Bristow case, and so these
things have had a lot of attention here. But when
(52:05):
I spoke to backpacker companies, they expressed sort of puzzlement
that anyone would talk about.
Speaker 4 (52:11):
Safety issues or be afraid of that, or be conscious
of that.
Speaker 3 (52:15):
And as I say, one of the main backpacker companies,
the head of that company joke that, you know, people
were more afraid of our wild animals than the possibility
of being attacked or.
Speaker 4 (52:28):
Molested by someone.
Speaker 3 (52:29):
And look, you know, hundreds of thousands of people come
to Australia every year, and so it's true that these
cases are anomalous in some way. But when we published
our story, we got a number of letters from people
who described, if not similar, but certainly threatening situations that
they'd been in. You know, one person had been forced
(52:52):
to milk cows dressed in a bikini, you know, because
of this perverse sort of attraction that the farmer had
for her. And there've been a number of cases of
farmers being convicted for more minor kind of sexual assault,
if you want to put it that way. But it
does seem like you're in a vulnerable situation. If you're
(53:12):
a traveler, you don't know the country, you're in an
isolated rural area, you are in quite a kind of
vulnerable situation. You're far from home, and it does seem
that there are people out there who are certainly prepared
to take advantage of that.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
Thank you so much for speaking to us today. I
really appreciate it, and I think your story is really
important for sort of shedding a light on that. And potentially,
I mean, it might need regulation. If this is a
requirement that they have to go and do eighty eight days,
then there's got to be some sort of regulating that
you don't just go and find someone on gum tree
like that can't be safe.
Speaker 4 (53:53):
Well, one would.
Speaker 3 (53:54):
Think that there must be some way of at least
compiling some information about which farms have been the subject
of complaints, or some sort of central body that would
take complaints, because I think one of the things with
backpackers is they perhaps don't know how to lodge complaints
(54:15):
or what to do, and you know, maybe they've suffered
some sort of harassment or molestation which they're just they
just think, well, I'll just get away from it and
carry on with my holiday. And you know, when you're
on holiday, do you want to spend a whole lot
of time, you know, talking to the police, getting the
police to take a statement and going through that whole
(54:37):
process if you feel like you haven't suffered a major trauma,
Well perhaps not. But I think it probably would be
good if there was some sort of central place that
you could at least report incidents too, because it seems
that there are quite a number of people who are
taking advantage of the of these young people.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
That's so true, so true. Thank you again for making
time for us today.
Speaker 4 (55:03):
Thanks very much.
Speaker 2 (55:06):
You can read Richard Gilliat's feature about the story of
Lucy r nord or Devine Arkins online at the Australian
website via the link in our show notes. True Crime
Conversations is a mum and maya podcast hosted by me
Jesse Stevens. Our. Senior producer and editor is Elise Cooper.
(55:28):
If you liked this episode, you can join the True
Crime Conversations Facebook group. Just search true Crime Conversations or
click the link in the notes of this episode. True
Crime Conversations will be back next week, looking at crimes
through the eyes of those that know the most about them.
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. Oh hi there,
True Crime Conversations listeners, whether your brand new here or
have been with us from the very beginning, welcome. I'm
your host, Claire Murphy, and like so many of you,
I have always had a very deep interest in true crime.
(00:26):
I don't know about you, but I read it, I
watch it, I listen to it. And True Crime Conversations
is about giving victims a voice and speaking with people
who really know the cases, journalists, authors and experts who
spent time researching what really happened. We are not here
to sensationalize. Our goal is to create a space for respectful,
important conversations that go deeper than the headlines. Many of
(00:49):
the stories that we cover do focus on women, and
that's because sadly, women make up the majority of victims
in violent crimes. In fact, one in four women in
Australia has experienced violence by an intimate partner since the
age of fifteen. But we do cover a wide range
of cases from this appearances and scams to shocking assaults
and murders. Cases from here in Australia and all over
(01:11):
the world. I mean, even though we're an Aussie made podcast,
you will hear voices from just about everywhere, survivors, experts
and storytellers who bring these cases to life. And if
there's every case that you'd like us to cover, or
a survivor you think we should really speak to, we
would love to hear from you. You can send us
an email or a voice note, and there are links
for both of those in the show notes. Now, over
(01:33):
the next few weeks, we're going to be doing true
crime conversations a little bit differently. We are re releasing
a few episodes from the very early days of this podcast,
and we're talking way back in twenty nineteen when the
excellent Jesse Stevens was hosting. Now, usually we don't go
back and redo episodes because a lot of the cases
we cover are what we call evergreen, so that means
(01:54):
you can scroll back and listen to them at any time.
But these early episodes came out so long ago that
we're thinking some of you might have missed them, so
we're bringing a few of them back and we hope
you'll find something new or hear a story that you
hadn't come across before. Today we're revisiting the story of
Belgian backpacker Devien Arkins. This is a truly chilling case.
(02:15):
In twenty seventeen, Devine was lured to a remote South
Australian property by a man named Jean Charles Bristow. He
kidnapped her, assaulted her and held her captive, but she
managed to escape and it's a story of both trauma
and incredible strength. There haven't been any major public updates
on this case since twenty nineteen, but it remains one
(02:38):
of Australia's most disturbing and memorable. Award winning journalist Richard Gilliot,
who covered the case, joins Jesse Stevens in this episode
to walk us through what happened. After you've listened, we
would love to know your thoughts, especially if this is
a case that you haven't heard of before and don't forget.
We're also on TikTok at True Crime Conversations, where you
can find quick explainers and clips from our interviews. You
(03:00):
can dm us there too if you want to get
in touch.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
A quick warning this episode contains discussions of sexual assault
and the recounting of traumatic events. Listener discretion is advised.
Sweat was trickling down Lucy Arnaud's back as she stepped
off the bus in murray Bridge, an hour or so
from Adelaide in South Australia. It was February nine, the
(03:30):
thick of the Australian summer. Back in Belgium, her friends
would be freezing, but here she was about to embark
on a lone backpacking trip around Australia. Petite and quiet,
Lucy was excited about her big adventure in a country
that she thought was safe and full of people who
(03:51):
were friendly and nice. As she stood at the bus stop,
she spotted the man she was waiting for, Max, but
as she would later find out, his name wasn't actually
Max at all. I'm Jesse Stevens and this is True
Crime Conversations a Muma mea podcast exploring the world's most
(04:15):
notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the
most about them. In this episode, I'm joined by Walkley
Award winning journalist, author and staff writer for The Australian
Richard Gilliot. In March of this year, Gillat wrote a
story for the Weekend Australian magazine titled I've Been Kidnapped
(04:36):
No joke. It was about a twenty four year old
woman who until this week had her name kept private
for legal reasons. She's recently come out into the public
eye and revealed that her real name is Devien Arkins.
But for this story, we're going to call her Lucy Rnaud,
the name given to her by Richard in his reporting.
(05:03):
It was February ninth, twenty seventeen, when a woman who
will call Lucy meets a man who we're going to
call Max at a place called murray Bridge in South Australia.
Why is she there? What's brought her to that point?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Well, she's a backpacker and she's on an adventure that
many Europeans go on in Australia. She was quite an
experienced traveler in some ways. She'd been to a number
of other countries. She'd been to China, and she'd worked
in wildlife parks in South Africa. She'd also trekked a
bit in South America.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
And she was studying in Europe. I think she wanted
to be a vet.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
This was her next adventure and it was one of
those classic adventure travel backpacker trips where she arrived in
Sydney she'd been to Tasmania to see the wilderness down there,
She'd hiked in the Blue Mountains and her plan was,
like a lot of backpackers, she wanted to try and
extend her trip. And the way you do that you
(06:07):
get an extra year if you work eighty eight days
in the rural area of Australia and you then become
eligible for an extra year on your visa. So she
had traveled, i think on a package tour from Victoria
across to Adelaide and she was staying in a backpacker place,
(06:27):
and she had been to Kangaroo Island and she was
now planning the rest of her trip, which involved going
up to the Northern Territory.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
But she wanted to get some farm work under her.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Belt before she did that, because she had to clock
up these days. And so she was in a backpacker
place in Adelaide and she started looking on gumtree for
farm work.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
Nearly a quarter of a million backpackers come to Australia
every year. They follow a well worn backpacker tourist path
and they work in bars, on building sites and on farms.
To get a two year visa, backpackers must spend at
least three months working somewhere rural. Many farmers rely on
working holidaymakers.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Backpackers dominate our workforce. Now.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
It's obviously hard work. We're outside all.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
The time, we work in varying weather conditions, you're bent over.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
It's just the type of work that ossies don't want
to do anymore.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
What sort of farm work is it? What kind of
things do backpackers go and do on farms?
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Well, there's fruit picking, it's manual labor, it's helping out
with mustering. But I think a lot of it is
very simple farm labor work, digging, fencing.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
Whatever help is available.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Gum trees the sort of locus of all that and
where a lot of backpackers go to find work and
where a lot of farmers advertise. It's a thriving business
in a sense. And you know, a lot of farmers
will tell you that with how backpackers, they could barely
operate their properties because a lot of Australians don't want
(08:02):
to do that work. Whereas for a lot of tourists
it's kind of part of the adventure is working in
the bush in Australia, and.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
The accommodation and everything is included that's the idea too,
that you stay there, correct And so what do we
know about this man Max who's met her to pick
her up, Well.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
We know plenty about him now. At that time Lucy
knew nothing. So she goes on to gum Tree and
he contacts her and says, yes, I work for this
company called Genesis, and we have these farms a few
hours outside of Adelaide, and we hire a lot of backpackers.
We've had French backpackers. And he spends this whole story
(08:42):
to her about how he prefers female backpackers because they're
much more gentle with the animals, and she will be
sort of helping milk cows and look after calves.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
You know.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
He makes it very enticing for her, and she's got
an interest in animal welfare.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I think that for a lot of people like her,
Australia is seen as this very safe destination where there
haven't been major terrorist attacks, crime is quite low compared
to a lot of overseas destinations, and there's a feeling
that you're very safe here. In fact, she did say
later on that her image of Australia was of an
(09:22):
incredibly friendly, safe place and so like a lot of
young women who are traveling here.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
I think there's a kind of false sense.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Of security there, which led to her putting herself in
quite a dicey situation because she actually didn't know who
Max was and she just took on faith value what
he was saying. And so he said, look, you know,
get on the bus, and I gave her the details
and I'll meet you in murray.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Bridge and I'll take you to the farm. And that's
what she did.
Speaker 6 (09:52):
I did ask questions to get more information. He spoke
about another French girl who was recently going to another farm.
So that makes me feel a bit more reassure, like, okay,
other people doing this job.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
And can I ask you about that sense of safety
because in Australian criminal history, like if you look at
Ivan Malatt, I mean, that's one of our most infamous crimes.
Why is it that that hasn't sort of rattled that
tourist economy in terms of Australia still feeling like a
safe destination.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
I was really puzzled by this too, because I'd seen
one survey where a lot of overseas travelers weren't even
aware of the Bilanglo murders or the Bradley Murdoch kidnapping
in Central Australia, and so I got to say that
really surprised me because I had thought those crimes got
(10:56):
saturation coverage. I think they got saturation coverage in England,
but I think in Europe there's still this image. And
in fact, when I interviewed Backpacker Company new people, they
said that safety is one of the least important issues
that people raise with them before they're coming out here,
apart from the possibility of being attacked by a wild animal.
(11:20):
I mean, one of them joked that Steve Irwin being
killed in the ocean has given Australia a much greater
image for danger than any serial killer or sex crimes
guy out there.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
So she then gets in a car with this man
who she obviously believes is taking her to do some
farm work, and they're in the car for two hours
or so. Where does he take her?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
So Max is this guy in his fifties, and he's
got a bushy sort of go tee and curly hair,
and we know that his real name is Jeane Bristow
and he operates a hobby farm in Meningi.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
Which is a sort of a touristy.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Town on a lake, about an hour and a half
out of Adelaide. But he spins this whole story that
his name's Max, and he takes her on this.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Very security strive to his farm.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
So he heads southeast from murray Bridge, but he goes
down into the lake district and as you head into
this area, it gets kind of more swampy and there's
estuaries and it starts to look a lot more sort
of barren the landscape, and you have to cross a
(12:36):
couple of rivers on ferries, and so it takes two
to and a half hours to get to Minningi that way,
and along the way you pass some pretty dry and
empty landscape, and so Lucy would have had a sense
that she was I think heading out to quite a
remote spot, and that was obviously Bristow's intention to make
(13:00):
her feel that she was a long way from Adelaide.
Along the way, he's chatting to her about the work
they'll be doing, and he's sort of talking it up
that she'll be interacting with the animals and that this
company Genesis that he supposedly works for. And so it
takes them about two and a half hours to reach
(13:21):
his place, and he also drives into his property through
a back road, so she never sees the town of Meningi.
And I'm sure that to her it seemed like she
had been taken to quite a remote spot, and she
would have had no idea that she was really only
(13:41):
a little over ninety minutes from Adelaide and just really
like a five minute walk from the town of Minindi,
just down the street.
Speaker 6 (13:51):
We told me I could take a bus to murray Bridge,
so I looked it up and it seemed fine to me.
It was not that far and it was easy to
go there. They told me that he would pick me
up at a bus station, so I just had to
look for the bus, get there and there will be it.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
So he takes her to a almost like a farmhouse.
Can you describe the facility that she's sort of walked into.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Well, it's a pig shed, and it's essentially an abandoned
pig shed. Because Bristow was not really a farmer. I mean,
he had been a farmer and worked on dairy farms,
but he was really a laborer who'd been in and
out of employment in Mininghi and was had a terrible
reputation as an employee. He'd been sacked from a number
(14:44):
of jobs, and when I spoke to people in the town,
they described him as just an argumentative, sort of trouble
maker sort of a guy. And he worked at the
council dump and had taken them to court for unfair dismissal.
So his farm was really just a hobby farm with
a few head of cattle on it, and his house
and this pig shed. He didn't have any p So
(15:07):
this thing was cinderblock building, corrugated iron ruth sort of
open to the elements, straw on the floor, stalls for animals,
and a fridge that wasn't plugged in, a huge hive
of bees in one corner, and this filthy sofa which
(15:27):
was all cut up and clearly worse for wear and tear,
which was actually positioned over a grate where you were
designed to sweep animal droppings into. And so Lucynau walks
into this place with Max as she thinks he's called,
and looks around and realizes that this is where he's
(15:50):
proposing that she's going to stay. And at this point
she's obviously completely confused, and he's still talking and talking
to her, and then he says that he needs to
make sure she's not a druggie, and he needs to
check her feet for needle marks, and so he needs
(16:11):
her to lie face down on the sofa, which she does.
And it's at that point that the whole thing turns
very nasty.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
And you can understand why she would, because she's a
woman completely alone in what she thinks is a very
isolated country town with a man that she doesn't know.
You sort of don't have an option to stand there
and say no, why would I do that?
Speaker 3 (16:33):
Well, I think she must have realized at that point
that she'd made a very big error because she actually
didn't know where she was. He had told her they
were near a town which was actually about an hour away,
and she didn't know who he was. She didn't know
where she was, and he's quite a big guy. And Lucy,
I know, is quite a small girl and even a
(16:55):
young woman.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
She was twenty four, and even though she had traveled
a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
I saw her in court when she presented her victim
impact statement, and she did have an air of sort
of innocence about her, and I could imagine that she
would have been sort of panicking at this point and
wondering what to do, and so she complied with his
instructions to lie down, and at that point he suddenly
(17:23):
grabs her arms and ties them behind her and jabs
her in the shoulder with something and she looks back
and it appears to be a gun. She then realizes
that this guy has ill intentions.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
And what did he then proceed to do to her
over the course of this sort of afternoon.
Speaker 4 (17:44):
Well, he he.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Took her clothes off apart from I think her bra
and he sexually assaulted her a number of times over
the next twenty four hours, and he kept her tied
up for most of that time. I didn't mention this
in my story, but Bristow was actually impotent, So it
(18:11):
was just this weird aspect of the case where he,
you know, he was incapable of committing full rape, but
he sexually assaulted her and sort of groped her, and
he seemed to at one point he even kissed her.
There was something kind of pathetic, even though what he
(18:33):
did was incredibly malevolent, at the same time, there was
something quite kind of pathetic about his behavior as well.
To me, I don't know if a woman would agree
with that. But so for the first I don't know,
several hours, he sexually assaulted her, and then he told
(18:57):
her this whole story in order to frighten her into compliance,
which was that he was working for this organization that
essentially kidnapped young women, and that there were other women
who were being held on other farms, and that if
she tried to escape, he would shoot her because the
(19:19):
operation could not be exposed, and that the people he
worked for were paying off the local police, and so
there was no point trying to escape because if the
police picked her up, they would simply bring her back
here and she would end up on one of the
other farms, where the people who were running them were
far more cruel than he was, and she would be
(19:41):
drugged and even more appalling things would happen to her,
whereas he was one of the nice guys.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Didn't he say something too about snakes or something about
the wildlife around it?
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Yeah, he also it intimated that it was incredibly dangerous
in the surrounding areas, And I think he was trying
to give her the impression that they were virtually in
the desert and that she would be lucky to sort
of get far without being bitten or somehow attacked by something,
(20:15):
and of course she had no reason to disbelieve that,
because all she had seen was acres and in fact
miles and miles of empty paddocks on the drive there,
and you couldn't see the farmhouse from where she was,
so she wasn't even aware, for instance, that Bristow's wife
and son and daughter in law were living just two
(20:38):
hundred meters up the hill in the farmhouse, and nor
were Bristow's family aware that he had carried out this
bizarre kidnapping which he somehow seemed to think that he
could get away with.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
So they didn't hear anything, because she wouldn't have even
thought that if she yelled that people would hear, right,
because she's imagining that she's completely isolated.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
That's right, And so she, I think, decided for self
preservation to just comply with him, and he would leave
her in the shed for hours and then come back
with food or water, but then sexually assauld her again,
(21:20):
and eventually he rigged up this chain arrangement, so she
was chained with one foot and one arm to the
wall using a kind of g bolt, and from memory,
she had one arm and one leg free. As it
grew dark, he left her there, and at some point
(21:44):
I think he suggested to her that she might be
let free the next day, and then he went back
to his wife and son in the house and presumably
had dinner and watch TV with them.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
Bizarrely enough, in.
Speaker 6 (22:01):
The beginning is very commanding. When I walk in here,
we'll be always undressed. You don't put on anything anymore
that I'll have to be kind. Don't run away or
he would find me and shoot me with the gun.
I was just stuck there, and I thought it would
(22:22):
take a while for someone to notice I was gone
or even to find me. So I was like, I'm
not getting out of here. I thought, this is this
is it. This is where I'm gonna die.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
And so while he's inside and he's sort of left
her for a few hours, and at this point I
think he's taken her phone and stuff. Doesn't she have
access to a backpack?
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Yeah, he had taken her phone and her main bag,
but he had left her backpack in the shed with
her and failed to look at its contents. This was
the thing that struck me about this whole bizarre case
was Bristow's complete and competence. You just couldn't fathom how
(23:13):
he thought he was going to get away with this,
and you couldn't fathom his complete lack of thinking through.
He certainly was no criminal mastermind. So he leaves her
there in the shed with this backpack. Darkness is falling,
and she has a laptop in there, and she's got
a dongle, an Internet dongle, and so she reaches across
(23:39):
to this fridge because he had opened it and she'd
seen that there were some implements in there, and she
managed to get something out of the fridge which she
managed to loosen this g bolt with over a period
of some time, and so she was able to free
herself after I think about half an hour of working
away at this g bolt on the chains, and she
(24:01):
scurried over to her backpack and pulled out her laptop.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
And USB dongle.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
And by this stage it's dark, and she of course
has no idea when he's going to come back, and
she gets an Internet connection on the dongle and she
contacts a number of people. First of all, she sends
a message to Belgium, where her family live, and then
(24:28):
she manages to I think that was a Facebook message
to a member of her family, and then she managed
to contact a friend in Queensland on an audio connection
and had a conversation with her and basically told her
that she mean kidnapped and she was in the shed
somewhere outside Adelaide and she had no idea where she was.
(24:52):
And the friend contacted the police while she was on
the phone, and so she knew the police had been
alerted at that point. But then that connection dropped out,
and while she was still had the Internet connection, she
sent these frantic messages to She thought it was the police,
(25:14):
but it was actually the Police Association, the Police Union.
She found the Police Association website and she managed to
type out this frantic message which I could read, being
kidnapped murray Bridge to Lamarue. I think a cow farm
crossed two ferries, got chains loose, afraid to run away,
(25:36):
he might chase and shoot me. Please help look for me,
please please, I'm so afraid. Please, I'm on a farm somewhere.
He drives a red pickup. So she loses the internet
connection short out to sending that, and she's fearful in fact,
that the light from the laptop screen will alert him,
(25:56):
or that he'll come back, And so she shuts the
laptop down and puts it back and then rechains.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
Herself up to the war and just waits.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
And she's naked on this sofa with just I think
he gave her a coat to throw over herself. And
so she spends this sleepless night in this peak shed
with these bees buzzing in the corner, waiting to see
what's going to happen the next morning and whether the
police are going to respond.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
What are the police thinking at this point, because that
would be very bizarre getting a message like that in
terms of even understanding whether it was real or not.
Do the police take this seriously straight away?
Speaker 3 (26:40):
My sense of it is that the police did take
this very seriously straight away, because they immediately held a
press conference and released photos of her early the next morning.
Her photo was on the front page of the Adelaide
Advertiser in fact as a missing person, and they sent
a large number of cars from various different squads down
(27:03):
to the Meningi area. And because they had such specific information,
you know that they were looking for a red pickup
and it was around the Lamaroue sort of area. They
seem to have narrowed it down to Meningi quite quickly,
so by I think mid next morning, there were police
(27:26):
planes circling over Meningi and there were certainly a lot
of police presence in murray Bridge, for instance, and so
it did seem like the police responded very.
Speaker 7 (27:37):
Quickly, good evening major crime police so leading the search
for a Belgian tourist they fear has been abducted while
on the holiday in South Australia. There are tonight grave
fears for her safety.
Speaker 8 (27:51):
We believe she was potentially picked up by a person
in a red pickup top vehicle. We have grave concerns
that she's been held against her will.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Did Bristow have any idea that this was happening.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
He came in the next morning and he gave her
some breakfast and.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Sexually assaulted her again.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
You know, this weird sort of combination of giving her
food and expressing this idea that he was going to
set her free and he was one of the good guys,
while at the same time, you know, sexually assaulting her.
And then he went into Meningi and he picked up
the fact that there were a lot of cops.
Speaker 4 (28:34):
In the area, and.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
I think in fact that her photo would have been
in the Adelaide Advertiser perhaps that morning. I just can't
remember that entirely myself, but he certainly by ten o'clock
knew that something was up, and he himself was pulled
(28:59):
over driving his red pickup by two cops outside Meningi,
and they photographed him and took down some details, but
didn't really press him all that much. And because the
police plane had spotted his pickup and reported it in
(29:19):
and so he got back to the farm and he
was of course in a total panic at this point
because he realized that somehow word had got out, and
so he said.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
To her that they had to leave immediately.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
He got her to throw on some clothes, and she
grabbed her backpack and he told her to run across
the farm to this cluster of trees a few hundred
meters away, and he came around in his wife's car
because he didn't want to be driving the red pickup
to collect her.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Was he a suspect at this point? So the police
have taken a photo of him and seen the car,
Are they thinking of investigating any further?
Speaker 3 (30:03):
I'm sure he was a suspect at this point because
he'd already been pulled over and photographed. Look, I don't
know how many people had red pickups in that area,
but my sense of it was that they had narrowed
it down to Meningi and had him in their sights.
He seems to have had this bizarre idea that he
(30:23):
could drive her back to murray Bridge, and that she
would be so freaked out that she would just book
a flight back to Belgium and go straight to Adelaide
and get on the plane and leave, and he would
somehow be able to kind of wash his hands of
the whole thing. But in fact he left behind a
(30:45):
trail of evidence that was a mile wide, which later
came out in court. But that is in fact what
he did. He drove her to murray Bridge. He actually
went into the motel reception area with her. She of course,
is looking terrible at this point. She's had a sleepless night,
she's been sexually assaulted, she hasn't showered for a couple
(31:08):
of days, and she's fearful and traumatized by her experience.
And the woman at the motel immediately registered this, and
Bristow tried to sort of make out that he was
I don't know, some friend of hers or some farmer
who was just dropping her off and tried to organize
for her to book a ticket back to Belgium while
(31:31):
she was at the motel, and then he basically skid addled.
This is where the impact of this on her became
really evident, because you would think that at this point
he's left, she's in this motel, she would just pick
up the phone or say to the woman in the reception,
can you please call the police, But in fact, she
(31:54):
goes to her room, she has a shower, she walks
to McDonald's and gets herself some food, and she's walking
back from McDonald's off Judy cop spots her and checks
her appearance against the bulletin that's going around and realizes
(32:14):
that it's her, the missing girl from Belgium, and so
he gets out of his car and approaches her, and
she starts to hurry away from him. And so it's
clear that this story that Bristow had told her about
the cops being corrupt and being in on this whole
(32:35):
kidnapping scam was real to her, very very real to her,
and she was absolutely petrified of the police, and in
fact she really wouldn't let this guy approach her, even
when he pulled out his badge and she said to him,
how do I know you know that's a genuine police ID.
Eventually a police female police officer was brought to talk
(32:57):
to her and she described Lucy I know, as being
just shaking with fear even talking to the police. They
eventually convinced her that their intentions were good, and they
showed her a photo of Bristow and she id'd him,
so that's when they definitively knew it was him.
Speaker 9 (33:19):
Good Evening nine News has filmed the moment police arrested
a fifty two year old man who's accused of abducting
a tourist at murray Bridge. Police alleged the man from
Meningi rape the young woman while holding a hostage for
more than twenty four hours.
Speaker 8 (33:32):
What I'd like to say is thank all the members
of the public who provided an information, because some of
the information was crucial. She is still with police and
she is well, unharmed, and obviously her family are very
grateful for everything that's occurred in the fact that she
is safe.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
And when you say there was a mile of evidence,
what sort of evidence had he left behind.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Well, when the police got his computer from home, they
discovered that he had been for two months trawling through
Gumtree spinning all sorts of lies to various different backpackers,
trying to lure them to his farm. And he'd had
conversations with a number of young women in that time
(34:15):
where he'd spun all the same lies about being from
this company and that they ran this chain of farms,
and that they preferred female workers, and he was even
asking them how old they were, did they have a
boyfriend with them? Very leading questions, which in fact made
many of them suspicious, And in fact, it had taken
(34:38):
him more than two months to actually get his first
victim because of his suspicious sort of behavior online. On
top of that, he had purchased online a replica pistol
and a set of novelty handcuffs.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
So when you say a replica pistol, not a real.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
One, no, right, essentially a kind of a talk but
a realistic looking toy.
Speaker 4 (35:08):
And the day before he picked Lucy.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Arnaut up in murray Bridge, he had gone to the
hardware store in Meninghi and bought a whole lot of
cable ties and so all of the things that she
described to the police, the pistol that was jabbed into
her back, and the cable ties that we used to
tie her up he didn't actually use. The handcuffs were
(35:32):
found on the farm. The pistol was found discarded in
a paddock, the cable ties were there, and he had
thrown her phone into the bottom of a water tank,
and the phone was discovered some weeks later when his
own son was repairing the tank and drained it and
found her phone at the bottom of the water tank.
(35:52):
And of course the police had Lucy Arnau's direct testimony
of who he was and how the circumstances of how
she ended up there, and she had injuries consistent with
being tied up and consistent with being sexually assaulted, and
so there was, you know, a massive evidence implicating him.
Plus which he had completely lied to his family about
(36:16):
his whereabouts over that forty eight hour period. So he
told them he'd gone to murray Bridge for a job interview, which.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
Was a lie.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
He didn't tell anyone in the family that he had
a willing worker backpacker down in the shed. He didn't
even concoct a story about why she might be there.
He just of course, hid that from his son and
his wife, and when the police arrested him the next day,
he had shaved all his hair off and his beard
off to alter his appearance, and had thrown a whole
(36:49):
lot of objects over the sofa and tried to discuss,
you know, tried to hide the existence of the sofa
in the pig shed. So there was a massive incriminating
evidence and direct testimony from her that pinned the crime
on him, And to my mind, it was just inexplicable
that he chose to plead not guilty and try to
(37:16):
throw this line out in court that she was this
sort of fantasist who didn't like farm work and found
it too grinding, and had concocted this whole story in
order to cover the fact that she didn't have the
umph to be a farm.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Worker, even though none of his family knew there was
a woman just like meet us away in a picture.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Well, when it got to so he was arrested immediately,
of course, and it got to court, and over the
course of the investigation the police found all this evidence
that I've just mentioned. Then he agrees to testify in
the trial, and you know, I didn't observe him giving
evidence in court. But the transcript just he argued with
(37:59):
the prosecutor. He seemed to think that he could sort
of argue his way out of this case. And so
his whole demeanor in the court was quite sort of
strange and just completely out of touch with the reality
of the situation he was in, because there was just
such an overwhelming amount of evidence and his story was
(38:20):
so implausible, and his own family had agreed to give
evidence against him because his son. Once his son found
the phone in the water tank and learned that his
father had lied to him about a number of things,
clearly was so disgusted that he agreed to testify as
a prosecution witness against his own father. His wife was
(38:41):
going to be called, but in the end wasn't for
reasons that I don't think I'm allowed to talk about
because they were sort of subject of a suppression order.
But certainly there's no doubt that his family knew that
he lied to them about it, and that his son
felt he was guilty, and so the son's testimony was
(39:02):
pretty damning, I think.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
So they have all of that evidence in court, what
is the conviction? What do they decide to do with Bristow.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Well, he's charged with rape and kidnapping and he's put
on trial in the district Court in South Australia.
Speaker 4 (39:21):
Because he's pleaded not guilty.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Lucy Arnau is forced to testify and his lawyer, you know,
grills her and pursues this story that he Bristow is telling,
which is that she's a fantasist and you know, she's
made all this stuff up.
Speaker 4 (39:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (39:39):
The trauma of everything she'd been through is then compounded
by having to be presented in court as a liar
who's invented this whole story. She gave testimony over a
number of hours. She's a very quiet, sort of demure
sort of person, and she had a sort of basic English,
you know, so her expressions of what had happened to
(40:02):
her were quite kind of simple and straightforward.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
The testimony is.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Extremely convincing because it's so plainly expressed and her story
just so plainly coheres with all of the rest of
the evidence in the case. Bristow then spends hours and
hours in the dock, arguing with the prosecutor and engaging
in these rambling monologues about his prowess as a welder
(40:30):
and various other aspects of farming, and just seems completely
lacking in any self awareness, seemingly unaware of the fact
that by pleading not guilty, by subjecting Lucy Arnaut to
this ordeal, he runs the risk of having a much
heavier sentence than he would normally because his sexual assaults
(40:53):
were to use the legal jargon at the lower end
of the scale, and he didn't use extreme violence, for instance,
and so I think there was a possibility that he
not have got that heavier sentence, But because he did
this chose to plead not guilty, he.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Ended up getting a heavier sentence than you know, he
got eighteen years.
Speaker 10 (41:16):
Wow nine News can reveal for the first time the
identity of the man accused of holding a backpack of
hostage near murray Bridge and repeatedly raping her. Jean Bristow
today pleaded not guilty to three counts of rape and
one count of detaining the woman against her will.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
What was her victim impact statement when she sort of
delivered that to the court. What was the contents of it?
Speaker 3 (41:43):
It was very simple, simply expressed she came to court,
but she didn't actually deliver the statement herself and she
got the prosecutor to read it, but there were a
number of things in it that she said. She said
she felt foolish for the situation that she'd put herself in,
(42:04):
her naivety at putting herself in this situation, and she
described the terror that she felt when she was being
held in this shared by this guy, that she would
never see her parents again. I think there was a
very real fear for her that the only option form
would be to kill her once he'd done whatever he
(42:25):
wanted to do with her. And in fact, it's difficult
to understand what Bristow's exit plan for this crime was.
And that was one thing that really struck me about it,
is he just didn't seem to have thought through anything
of what he was doing. And so was he planning
to just, I don't know, drive her back to murray
(42:47):
Bridge and or drive her to Adelaide and put her
on a plane back to Belgium. I mean, he had
apparently no history of violent crime, he didn't have a
mental illness. It's not like he had bipolar disorder and
so was in the throes of a mania attack when
he did this, and so you wonder, really what was
(43:09):
he planning to do. And I'm sure that question must
have been haunting her the entire time she was in
that pig shed. You know, how is this going to end?
Speaker 2 (43:20):
And what would have happened if she hadn't disrupted that
plan by having, you know, access to the internet.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yeah, And so she spoke about the impact of that
on her and how it had really profoundly affected her
now because she had been this adventurous person who traveled
and she was now it had taken her nearly a
year to be able to sort of just drive on
her own in her hometown. She was did not feel
(43:49):
safe walking around the streets on her own at all,
and that it had this profound impact on her, which
she had been taking sleeping pills to sleep. She had
been undergoing counseling fairly constantly to get over it. There
was one I think she said at the end where
she said, sometimes I think it's a curse to be
(44:10):
born a woman. I think we're not safe at all.
And this was kind of an expression of how profoundly
shaken she had.
Speaker 4 (44:18):
Been by this whole experience.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
So the prosecutor read this out in court while she
sat behind him, and she was flanked by a couple
of support people. That court hearing actually only took perhaps
about fifteen minutes. She walked in, she sat down in
the front bench of the courtroom. The prosecutor got up
and read her statement, and then the hearing ended and
(44:43):
she left. And it was then a couple of months
later that the sentence was actually brought down by the
judge in fact quite recently, and Bristou was sentenced to
eighteen years in prison with a minimum of twelve and
a half.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Was that sentence of surprise or do you think that
because he didn't plead guilty that was sort of expected.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
I thought that he might get something like that. I
never know how people react to sentences. I think eighteen
years is a pretty long stretch for a guy who's,
you know, fifty four or fifty five. In many ways,
it's a really shocking crime to kidnap an innocent young woman,
(45:27):
tire up in a filthy shared, take off her clothes,
sexually assault her with no plan apparently of how to
how you're going to kind of extricate yourself from this,
at the same time threatening her with all sorts of violence.
But there was one thing about the case that I
didn't really put this in the story because I didn't
want it to be misinterpreted. But when police searched Bristow's computer,
(45:55):
they found that one of his Google searchers was fed
up with life, and you know, he was sexually impotent.
And I got these of him as rather a pathetic
kind of individual, even though what he did was so malevolent.
There was an aspect of the crime that was out
(46:18):
of him that I thought was sort of pathetic. And
he seemingly had no history of this, unlike a lot
of the other people men who've been convicted recently of
crimes against backpackers, who do have a history of sexually
offending and you do seem to have misogynistic impulses. Bristow
(46:42):
didn't seem to be like that, and I found that
a curious part of the story. And when I went
to Meninghi and interviewed people who knew him, they all
sort of told the same story, which was that he
was this sort of slightly hapless character who worked as
a laborer. He worked, bounced from job to job, was
sort of argumentative but sort of a bit hapless, and
(47:04):
they were just that he would attempt to carry off
such a ghastly.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
Crime because this wasn't an isolated incident in that it
had happened before the Gum Tree ad and having someone
come to property for farm work, had that inspired what
he had done?
Speaker 3 (47:25):
I think there's evidence of that. So a year before
he committed this crime, a man called Roman Heinz, who
was also based in Adelaide and was in fact a
very predatory, misogynistic man.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
Had.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
He had been involved in a series of sexual assaults
of backpackers who he met up with through Gumtree ads.
In fact, over the period of I think it was
two thousand and fourteen to twenty sixteen, Hines had arranged
to meet a number.
Speaker 4 (48:01):
Of backpackers, two of them in Adelaide.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
He had sexually assaulted, and he'd attacked his own partner,
And he'd in fact taken a Japanese backpacker to Salt Creek,
which is a fishing beach about two hours outside of
Adelaide and it's not far from Meninghi and the only
reason that she didn't get attacked by him, apparently is
that she had posted a photo up on Facebook saying
(48:27):
where she was.
Speaker 4 (48:28):
But shortly after that, some.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Months after that incident, he picked up these two young backpackers,
a Brazilian woman and a German woman, on a pretext
of taking them to Victoria, and he took them to
Salt Creek, the beach where he previously visited, and he
perpetrated an absolutely atrocious attack in which he tied up
(48:51):
the Brazilian woman and sexually assaulted her, and then when
the German woman tried to intervene, he attacked her with
a hammer and beat her with a hammer and then
chased her around the beach in his four wheel drive.
Just this nightmarish scenario of her trying to evade this
(49:11):
guy while the Brazilian girl was running in the opposite
direction to escape him. And those two girls miraculously managed
to survive that attack, and so Heines had been arrested
a year before the Bristow incident happened, and the modus
operandi of Hines had been revealed in the Adelaide Advertiser
(49:35):
that he'd placed these gumtree ads, And when police went
to Bristow's computer, they found that he had done searches
and looked up information about the Salt Creek incident. He
followed the modus operandi he'd sort of researched the crime
on the Internet, and he lived in Meningi, which was
(49:58):
I think half an hour up the coast from Salt Creek,
so that crime was in fact investigated by the Meningi police.
Have been the talk of the town at the time.
I don't think there's any doubt that Bristow got some ideas.
Speaker 6 (50:13):
Yeah, I thought he would kill me. I would die there.
I feel kind of a bit ashamed in the beginning,
because you let someone trick you, let someone fool you.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
Do you think that this has changed Australia's reputation. Have
these stories been reported internationally?
Speaker 3 (50:37):
My sense of it is not. And I contacted a
number of travel companies who do backpack of packages and
they all expressed quite a dismissive attitude about this. Heinz
and Bristow are just too of a whole range of incidents.
I mean you mentioned, of course, my lad is the
(50:58):
kind of legendary. I mean he killed five foreign backpackers
and two Australian travelers over a three year period. There
was a more recent case. In fact, it was happening
around the same time as Bristow was kidnapping Lucy Arnaut.
This is addicted young guy in Queensland befriended a backpacker
(51:20):
from Liverpool and ended up kidnapping her and terrorizing her
so much that she ended up on this wild sort
of car journey with him through northern Queensland in which
he was beating her and sexually assaulting her in a
sort of meth frenzy. And he was eventually caught. Now
(51:42):
he was recently jailed for ten years. He pleaded guilty
to those crimes. There's been a whole series of them,
and the Salt Creek crimes were on sixty minutes. The
one I just mentioned was aired on Sunday night. I
wrote my feature about the Bristow case, and so these
things have had a lot of attention here. But when
(52:05):
I spoke to backpacker companies, they expressed sort of puzzlement
that anyone would talk about.
Speaker 4 (52:11):
Safety issues or be afraid of that, or be conscious
of that.
Speaker 3 (52:15):
And as I say, one of the main backpacker companies,
the head of that company joke that, you know, people
were more afraid of our wild animals than the possibility
of being attacked or.
Speaker 4 (52:28):
Molested by someone.
Speaker 3 (52:29):
And look, you know, hundreds of thousands of people come
to Australia every year, and so it's true that these
cases are anomalous in some way. But when we published
our story, we got a number of letters from people
who described, if not similar, but certainly threatening situations that
they'd been in. You know, one person had been forced
(52:52):
to milk cows dressed in a bikini, you know, because
of this perverse sort of attraction that the farmer had
for her. And there've been a number of cases of
farmers being convicted for more minor kind of sexual assault,
if you want to put it that way. But it
does seem like you're in a vulnerable situation. If you're
(53:12):
a traveler, you don't know the country, you're in an
isolated rural area, you are in quite a kind of
vulnerable situation. You're far from home, and it does seem
that there are people out there who are certainly prepared
to take advantage of that.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
Thank you so much for speaking to us today. I
really appreciate it, and I think your story is really
important for sort of shedding a light on that. And potentially,
I mean, it might need regulation. If this is a
requirement that they have to go and do eighty eight days,
then there's got to be some sort of regulating that
you don't just go and find someone on gum tree
like that can't be safe.
Speaker 4 (53:53):
Well, one would.
Speaker 3 (53:54):
Think that there must be some way of at least
compiling some information about which farms have been the subject
of complaints, or some sort of central body that would
take complaints, because I think one of the things with
backpackers is they perhaps don't know how to lodge complaints
(54:15):
or what to do, and you know, maybe they've suffered
some sort of harassment or molestation which they're just they
just think, well, I'll just get away from it and
carry on with my holiday. And you know, when you're
on holiday, do you want to spend a whole lot
of time, you know, talking to the police, getting the
police to take a statement and going through that whole
(54:37):
process if you feel like you haven't suffered a major trauma,
Well perhaps not. But I think it probably would be
good if there was some sort of central place that
you could at least report incidents too, because it seems
that there are quite a number of people who are
taking advantage of the of these young people.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
That's so true, so true. Thank you again for making
time for us today.
Speaker 4 (55:03):
Thanks very much.
Speaker 2 (55:06):
You can read Richard Gilliat's feature about the story of
Lucy r nord or Devine Arkins online at the Australian
website via the link in our show notes. True Crime
Conversations is a mum and maya podcast hosted by me
Jesse Stevens. Our. Senior producer and editor is Elise Cooper.
(55:28):
If you liked this episode, you can join the True
Crime Conversations Facebook group. Just search true Crime Conversations or
click the link in the notes of this episode. True
Crime Conversations will be back next week, looking at crimes
through the eyes of those that know the most about them.
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