The release of Peter Rees' Killing Juanita appears to have caused a new surge of Police investigation into the still unsolved disappearance of Juanita Nielsen on July 4, 1975. Last week the cellar of the old Carousel Club, now the Empire Hotel of Sydney's Kings Cross was examined by six crime scene investigators for traces of blood which could yield DNA (see article)

Following is a response by Barry Ward to the review of Peter Rees’ Killing Juanita

" ... Ref  “Killing Juanita” by Peter Rees 

This is described as a true story but in reality it is a work of fiction. Because like virtually every word published about this case since 1975 it is based on a false premise, the official story, that Sydney publisher Juanita Nielsen vanished after keeping an appointment at The Carousel night club in Kings Cross at 10.30 a.m. on 4 July 1975.

Everything turns upon this, the well-scripted police version of events. Over the years it has been the starting point for each review of the case that still intrigues Australia and for the regular outbreaks of media interest.

But Tony Reeves and I can prove it lies at the heart of the conspiracy, that certain detectives knew the facts of the crime and, at the behest of a former colleague who accepted the murder contract, instigated the cover-up that continues.

Thus was the Special Crimes Squad able to manipulate media coverage of events and, as Tony and I learned, build a barrier to truth through the false description, the invented scenario and the misleading sightings that distracted witnesses and created confusion.

But approach it as a cover-up, as we did and the truth begins to emerge, along with witnesses and corroborative evidence. After spending more than three years on our inquiry (during which time we neither saw nor heard of Peter Rees) there may be little of significance that we do not know about the Nielsen conspiracy, the who, when, where and how.

Most of our information, not least the identity of the killers and the venue for the murder, has been confirmed from unrelated sources. The Special Crimes Squad, predictably, denigrated our findings as worthless.

Predictably because the killing had nothing to do with the Victoria Street re-development, as the Rees book insists. Juanita was eliminated because she was about to publish damning evidence of major corruption and organised crime. The Victoria Point scenario was simply a red herring, one of a shoal with which this case abounds.

She was treading on some very important toes and had been in grave danger for several weeks before she was eventually lured to her date with death. It was indeed a murder by appointment but it didn’t take place at The Carousel.

How she met her end, according to Rees and his chief witness, poses some pointed questions.

Loretta Crawford, a former receptionist at The Carousel, had originally said that Juanita left the club with Eddie Trigg, the bar manager, after the “advertising appointment.” Now, 29 years later, she says that Juanita did not leave the club but was killed in the first floor store room there, that she saw a man with a gun standing over Juanita’s lifeless body.

But this man has not been identified, even though Crawford says she knows him and says he is still alive. Why make this public now, I wonder? And why did she not identify him for her own security and to enable police to effect an arrest? By not naming him she leaves herself open to considerable danger. Conversely, if he has since died she would be in no danger by identifying him.

There’s no mention, either, of the removal or disposal of Juanita’s body, although Trigg hints later in the book that it had been buried somewhere which, if this version of events were true, would prove that he knew about the murder.

Indeed, according to Crawford’s latest story he probably witnessed it. Crawford said that when she walked by her desk after the advertising appointment Juanita was accompanied downstairs, which would have taken them passed the store room door, by Trigg and the unidentified gunman. Minutes later, Crawford says, she heard shouting and then discovered the murder scene.

In light of their close co-operation with Rees in his research, can we assume that the investigating detectives will charge Trigg and Crawford with complicity in a murder or, at the very least, with perverting the course of justice by giving false information at the time of the murder? Were the Rees book to be a genuine document this is the only possible response…..

In fact the book provokes more questions than answers. In his acknowledgements Rees thanks Detectives Arkins and Maroney, among many others, for their assistance in his research and tells how he had access to the running sheets of the police inquiry.

He obviously quotes from these in various references, not least the events surrounding our abduction and arrest when Tony Reeves and I are quoted at length, totally inaccurately, I must say, but then he was using official documents….. His source list is extensive but even though he knows Tony he didn’t attempt to contact him for his version of the story.

In short the Rees book is an extension of the police version of events, the cover-up. There’s been barely a ripple on the murky waters of organised crime and corruption in Sydney. The coppers must be delighted.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Peter Rees had little choice. He hadn’t met Juanita, wasn’t around at the crucial time and didn’t have access to our witnesses or our knowledge of events. He had no alternative but to concur with what we know as the cover-up.

Had the book actually been a true story, an expose of a previously unknown murder, it would have been of some merit. As a work of fiction involving dubious evidence in a cause celebre it is at best a questionable public relations exercise for the NSW Police.

SIDEBARS 
* Fact 1: We can prove that Juanita would not and did not go to The Carousel. She despised Abe Saffron and Jim Anderson, the owner and manager respectively, and said she would not consider doing business with them.

Which is why, shortly before her death, she had refused an invitation to a Press launch of a new cabaret at The Carousel. And being highly security conscious following threats because of her activities in the Victoria Point development, she had rejected several other questionable “advertising appointments”, including at least two connected to The Carousel. 

    
* Fact 2: According to the police version of events Juanita, wearing a red leather coat over a tangerine coloured sweater and with a floppy beret part-covering her shoulder-length hair, was last seen with two males climbing into a yellow Mustang sports car on Darlinghurst Road just before 11 a.m. that day.

But her security policy predicated that Juanita would not get into a car with strangers so the two men must have been friends and would have come forward to tell where they left her. This didn’t happen. Neither the car nor its occupants was ever traced.

* Fact 3: Eddie Trigg told police that Juanita referred to “a business lunch she wasn’t keen on keeping.” This, too, must have been with someone she knew and trusted who would have come forward, particularly if Juanita had not kept the lunch date. Neither the man nor the restaurant concerned has been traced.

* Fact 4: Trigg was the only person with knowledge of the lunch date. Juanita’s business partner told us he knew nothing of it, despite their policy on security.

Reeves and I believe that the yellow car sighting and Trigg’s knowledge of the lunch date were invented to validate the bogus advertising appointment and to infer that Juanita was seen in public after keeping it.

This confirms our information that The Carousel was connected to the real murder scene, a nearby establishment with similar provenance.

* Fact 5: Reeves and I traced a female witness who knew Juanita well
and who saw her on foot in Darlinghurst Road at noon, an hour after the yellow car sighting and an hour after “the murder scene” witnessed by Crawford.

“She wasn’t wearing a red leather coat, though,” the witness told us. “It was a brown boucle coat with a fur hat, an outfit I had often admired.”

This witness contacted the police when the disappearance became public four days later, on July 8, but detectives broke three appointments to see her. After further phone calls by the witness  two policewomen finally interviewed her on July 24.

The following day the police released a media statement apropos of Juanita’s “last sighting” and a photograph purporting to show her wearing the red leather coat, a tangerine top and a floppy beret.

“The police completely ignored my information,” the witness told us. When challenged, detectives said the witness was confused about dates. But she had an irrefutable reason for remembering that she saw Juanita at noon on 4 July, a reason I was able to confirm.

* Fact 6: Despite the hue and cry, the front page headlines and almost daily newspaper posters, the witness involved in the yellow car sighting took three weeks to come forward with his news. It transpired that he was a business associate of Jim Anderson.

* Fact 7 A senior officer of the Crimes Squad lied to Premier Wran about us when he said we had been interviewed and had no useful information to give.
       We had not been interviewed by the Crimes Squad, in fact Det. Sgt. Norman Maroney, then one of the investigators, had let it be known that they would not be interviewing us.

* Fact 8: In attempting to interview Eddie Trigg, Reeves and I were beaten up, abducted, handed over to the police and jailed on spurious charges. Our phones were tapped and we were subjected to constant police surveillance.

Plainly we were on the right track: we had touched a raw nerve.

* Fact 9: After the attempted interview with Trigg, his boss Jim Anderson sent a message that we were “playing with fire.” That “anybody poking his head into the Nielsen thing will get it blown off.”

This seemed an extreme and incongruous response to a normal journalistic inquiry into the police version of events. Tony Reeves twice phoned Anderson for an explanation but he hung up on both occasions.

* Fact 10: The chief killer, the former detective, leaked the theory that Juanita had “run off with a new lover”. She had, he told reporters, a habit of such behaviour.

He made similar remarks apropos the equally mysterious disappearance of Donald McKay, the anti drugs campaigner from Griffith. This was one of many modus operandi points of similarity in the two cases…..

If the police are involved to this extent one wonders how this murder will ever be solved. The answer is that it won’t. The Nielsen Conspiracy continues.

• Barry Ward is the author of “State of Fear" the story of the Nielsen murder conspiracy, which is yet to be published.
• Tony Reeves is the author of “Lennie”, the life story of Sydney gunman Leonard Arthur McPherson, which will be published by Allen & Unwin later this year.

Barry Ward may be contacted at barryw@clara.co.uk  ..."

More Juanita (added to page 22 July, 2007)

Barry Ward has kept *Henry in the loop as to his investigative journalistic approach to his original working title novel State of Fear, which is an exploration of the circumstances and personalities who were involved in heiress, publisher and political activist

Juanita Nielsen’s life before her disappearance. After a great deal of discussion with lawyers etc - primarily over issues of defamation and related concerns - Mr Ward has changed tack . Please find his new path to writing/righting the wrongs of the beautiful Juanita Nielsen below:

"... The consequence of this is that I intend using Publishing on Demand, a DIY job. I'm sure you must be aware of the concept.
To further this I have launched a blog, to gauge public response and establish a likely print run.
The address of this is: http://thenelsonconspiracy.blogspot.com/
...A blog is not a great deal of use if people can't find it, although it is registered and available through Google "

For our virtual Juanita trail please see:
http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=2552  29/04/04
http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=2714  22/07/04
http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=3645  05/10.05