On January 16, 1988,
Aboriginal teenager Mark Haines was found dead on train tracks seven k's
outside of Tamworth.
The crime scene was very strange. Christmas wrapping paper scattered around Mark’s body,
a small white towel was scrunched up under his head,
and there was no blood except for one
small spot, even though he was hit by a train.
Police came to the conclusion that 17 year old Mark had either committed suicide, or
gotten drunk and lay down on the tracks.
But his family have never believed that.
They think Mark was killed and placed there.
So the question is:
was someone else involved in Mark’s death?
When the police arrived at the crime scene, all around Mark’s body they found heaps
of random items - like the wrapping paper, a sock, a piece of lace, broken sunnies, a
cushion, and even a broken teapot.
Further up the train line - one and half ks from where Mark was - there was a white Torana.
It was crashed and wedged in the grass beside the tracks.
So the police formed the theory that Mark had: gotten drunk and crashed the car, grabbed
some presents out of the boot, carried them as he walked along the tracks - for a k and
a half, in the dark, away from town - then lay down on the tracks, put a towel under
his head, and got hit by a train. And the lack of blood on the scene
was because rain had washed it away.
Let's take a closer look at the police theory and how the evidence stacks up.
First up, the blood.
The lack of blood at the scene was one of the things that struck me first off.
Glen Bryant was actually the first person on the scene and the first person to see Mark's body.
He’d been called by a train driver who said they’d run over someone and didn’t
want to get out of the train and look.
Glen jumped on his motorbike and got there at about 6:00am.
There was almost no blood around Mark - just one small spot the size of a 50 cent piece.
Mark also had no mud on his shoes.
I just thought, well, if he's walked here then he certainly should've had mud on him.
Say this rain could wash away the mud on Mark's shoes - could it have washed away
all of Mark's blood?
You would absolutely expect there to be a lot of blood at the scene if all the injuries
happened at the train track.
Rain can certainly remove blood from a scene. But to remove blood to the extent that it's
removed all the blood, yeah, I don't know.
That must have been quite some rain.
Professor Johan Duflou took a look at Mark's autopsy report almost 30 years later.
Now we know that he bled a lot, because his organs were pale. The brain had a pale appearance,
the heart had a pale appearance, the liver was pale, the kidneys were pale, and all of
those are features of very, very significant blood loss. In terms of bleeding and then
having no blood on anything, that really is even stranger. And, you know, the simple
answer, of course, is a much more obvious scenario is that he didn't walk. In which
case he must have arrived there in some other way.
So if he didn't walk there, how did he get there?
Did he drive and crash the car that was found a k and a half from his body, like the police
originally said?
It turned out the Torana had been stolen the night before. The owner reported it to the
police that morning. He told them that in the backseat of his car he had a bunch of
presents. This explained the shredded Christmas paper and random items found at the scene,
like the broken teapot and sunnies.
But the police didn’t bother to fingerprint the car.
They made no attempt to cover that motor vehicle. There was no attempt by them to even look
in there. There might have been another dead body in there! They found the boy an Aboriginal
boy dead about one and a half kilometres thereabouts from that motor vehicle, and there was stolen
goods strewn around his body. So they added it up: Aboriginal boy - stolen goods. That's
the end of the matter.
Without fingerprints or forensic testing, there’s no way to know if Mark was in that car.
What we do know is that Mark could not drive. In fact, his friends and family admit he was
terrible at it. So it basically rules out the idea that he drove that car.
What we also know is that the night Mark died a white Torana was hooning around the back
streets of Tamworth.
One witness says she heard a car racing near where Mark was last seen alive saying goodbye to
his girlfriend. In the inquest, another witness saw a Torana that night with two males in
the front and three in the back, at around the same.
So if Mark was in that Torana, he wasn't driving and it's likely he was there with at least
one other person.
The other part of the cops' theory
was that Mark lay down on the tracks
and was killed by an oncoming train.
This was also backed up during the inquest into his death.
Dr Thomas Oettle was the forensic pathologist who performed one of two autopsies on Mark in 1988.
His theory was that Mark was killed by a train
and Mark’s body had somehow tumbled underneath it,
with his head landing on the scrunched up white towel.
So somehow when the train hits him and the carriages are still passing over Mark,
he's meant to have flipped or turned 180 degrees under the moving train,
without losing any limbs.
His body is then meant to have laid back out,
with his head magically landing on a towel.
In the 30 years Glen Bryant has spent working on the tracks
he’s seen a lot of bodies hit by trains.
He says there no way Mark’s body could have tumbled like that.
This doctor said the body did turn under the train,
and I just maintain that it couldn't -
it's impossible without severing arms and legs
and crushing the body.
So I feel he was put there by someone
whilst he was dead.
To try make it look like he had committed suicide.
Another key piece of evidence that piqued the interest of Professor Duflou from the report
was something that wasn’t even raised during Mark’s inquest.
A head injury called a subdural hematoma.
A subdural hematoma is a type of head injury where blood pools or builds up on the brain.
The longer it’s left untreated the bigger it gets before it kills you.
Mark's hematoma was one centimetre long and that's actually really big.
Subdural hematomas take time to develop.
For a one centimetre subdural hematoma it can take hours.
Yet, this injury was never spoken about at Mark’s inquest
by the police or by Dr Oettle.
I think that I am
as confident as I can be,
that the subdural haemorrage pre-dated
the
railway events.
And if that's the case it must have happened somewhere else.
And reasonably, I think, a car crash is a typical example
of where you can get that constellation of injuries to the head.
So the evidence shows that Mark most likely didn’t die from the train impact
due to the lack of blood at the scene and the type of subdural hematoma he had.
In fact, Mark may have gotten the head injury and suffered internal bleeding hours before all of this.
Possibly from a physical assault or a car crash.
The part of this crime scene that may hold the key to what happened that night
lies under Mark's head -
the scrunched up white towel.
It’s something that the police couldn’t explain at the time.
At the inquest into Mark’s death one cop who was there at the crime scene
says he has no idea how the towel got there.
Police officer: Sir, I’m unable to say because it was one thing that stumped me,
if not other people that were there how the towel did get under his head.
Coroner: Did you assume that another person had been at he scene prior to yourself?
Would it give the appearance that some person had place the towel under the head of an injured person?
Police officer: It would give that appearance, yes.
There's a few theories as to how the towel got there.
Mark placed it there himself as a kind of pillow,
or he landed on it when his body was hit by the train,
or someone else put it there to prop up his head so it would be hit by the train
or even as a kind of comfort.
Whatever the case, any chance to test the towel for blood, DNA, or any other clues is gone.
That's because along with not fingerprinting the stolen car,
police lost the towel
along with other key pieces of evidence from the scene.
This year, after a lot of back and forth with the Coroner's Court,
I received one page from Mark's Coronial inquest -
it was a page that the family had never seen.
It said Mark could've been alone and 'placed himself' on the tracks,
'or was placed there by another unknown person or persons.'
So if the Coroner was willing to accept the possibility that there were other people involved,
who were they?