DAN BOX
INTERVIEW
INCENSED WITH THE LACK OF PROGRESS ON A SERIES OF SERIOUS CRIMES IN AUSTRALIA, CRIME REPORTER DAN BOX VISITED BOWRAVILLE TO INVESTIGATE WHAT HAPPENED TO THREE ABORIGINAL CHILDREN WHO VANISHED OVER 30 YEARS AGO
The Bowraville murders were a series of three killings that occured over the course of five months, from September 1990 to February 1991, in the town of Bowraville, New South Wales. All the victims were Aboriginal, all three disappeared after parties in their community.
Only one person, Thomas Jay Hart, was tried for two of the murders and was subsequently acquitted. No-one else was a suspect, no-one else has been investigated since - a source great pain and resentment towards the police among the local Aboriginal community. Dan Box, a crime reporter for The Australian newspaper, raised the profile of the case in 2016 when he conducted his own piece of investigative journalism. He spoke with everyone that mattered, including the man originally accused and then acquitted of the murders, Thomas Jay Hart. Dan’s Bowraville podcast has attracted a huge number of listeners, downloaded hundreds of thousands of times since it was released in May 2016. Due to the increased interest in this long-standing cold case, the detective inspector of New South Wales Police made a submission to the attorney general calling for a retrial with Mr Hart in the prosecution box. Real Crime caught up with Box to talk about his visit to Bowraville over 30 years on, and to hear the heartbreaking story of a town divided by racism,
What made you decide to investigate this case?
A couple of years ago I sat down with the lead detective in the case, Gary Jubelin. We sat down for a cup of coffee. I thought it would be a half an hour meeting, but two hours later I was still there, we were inside his office and he was pulling documents out saying, “Look at this, this is something that is wrong and it needs to be put right.” And it was then that I thought, “Right, there is something here that needs looking at.” What got me was that he’d given evidence to the parliamentary enquiry and said, “We know who killed these children and we have the evidence to put them away,” and the state government weren’t letting them do that. I’ve covered a lot of murders but never one where the police have said, “we can solve this if the government will let us.” It wasn’t until February 2016 that I finally did what I should have done years ago and went up to Bowraville itself and spent a week there – and t
