On a June afternoon eight years ago, in a modest house on a bush block outside Perth, a shotgun crack rang out, and Amy Wensley, a 24 year-old mother of two young girls, lay dead on the floor.
To this day the mystery remains: who pulled the trigger, and why? Police concluded that it was a case of suicide. Her family does not believe this.
The following morning Amy’s aunt, Anna Davey, took the first flight out of Sydney to Perth, to comfort her family and in particular, Amy’s mum Nancy. The entire family was in shock at the news of Amy’s death.
“I was at Sydney airport when Nancy phoned me to say that the police arrived at her house that night to say that Amy had committed suicide,” Anna recalls.
“My first question was: ‘Did they find a suicide note?’ and she said she didn’t know. I asked how they could come to that conclusion so quickly and the only thing I could think of would be a suicide note written by Amy was found. Otherwise how could anyone come to that conclusion so quickly?”
But there was no suicide note, and the uniformed cops who first attended the scene were concerned by what they found.
In an exclusive interview with the ABC’s Australian Story, Larry Blandford, now retired from his job as a uniformed police officer at Mundijong police station, said: “It was a fatal headshot.”
“Constable Pip Dixon and I went into the house. That’s where I located Amy in her bedroom behind the door. I sort of had doubts straight away, as soon as I saw the body, the gun, the positioning, I was alerted to the fact that we had to look at this further.”
But when detectives from nearby Rockingham attended shortly afterwards, they spent no more than 15 minutes examining the scene before leaving the house and moving to the nearby shed, where they told the uniformed officers that in their view, there was nothing to suggest the death was due to homicide.
A heated argument
Larry Blandford recalls a heated argument occurring.
“The crime car was called,” he says now. “They did go inside and they came out with the conclusion that she committed suicide.”
After that, Mr Blandford says: “The detectives drove off and we had a call not five minutes later that the statements were read and it is still deemed suicide.”
The Rockingham detectives directed that the scene be cleaned and left, and no forensic examination of the scene was carried out. Any evidence that might have been uncovered in the process was lost forever.
Mr Blandford says: “The firearm wasn’t treated for forensics. The trajectory of the firearm, the blood splatter, all this evidence is now gone. And that’s really devastated this investigation. It should have remained a forensically protected area.”
Speaking to Australian Story, the family’s barrister Peter Ward says: “The trauma cleaning service turned up first thing the next morning and completely wiped the scene of anything useful forensically. The bloodstains were removed, the carpet was removed, there was nothing left.”
“I sort of thought, well, this is a real shemozzle what’s happening here. You hear about it in the police often, but you don’t ever get involved in it because you think it’s never going to happen. But it does happen,” Mr Blandford says now.
Ron Iddles, the celebrated former Victorian detective, was an expert witness at the inquest into Amy’s death after being approached by Anna Davey to review the case.
He says: “The detectives seemed to have rushed to the conclusion that it was suicide. Once you clean that scene up you can’t go back.”
He adds: “I’ve investigated over a thousand suspicious deaths. I’ve been involved in over probably 250 suicides where firearms have been used on numerous occasions. Looking at the circumstances as to how she’s found, the physical part of where she is, I think this is very strange. The fact that it’s been written off as a suicide, just rang alarm bells.”
Allegations of an abusive relationship
That wasn’t the only police failing following Amy’s death.
“Detectives on the night didn’t even speak to one member of my family, not one,” Ms Davey says. “They didn’t ask the questions about their relationship and physical altercations and violence.”
“A week before Amy died,” Ms Davey says, “she disclosed to her stepfather, Rick, that she had an argument with David Simmons and he had held a knife to her throat.”
On the day Amy died, it is claimed they had a fight.
“Amy spent the morning with a friend, Rachael,” Ms Davey says now. “They went shopping together in the morning and they went back to Amy’s place with the children. David was with two of his friends, Joshua Bryden and Gareth Price and they were out chopping wood or hunting or whatever they do out in the bush.”
None of the three were accused of any involvement in Amy’s death.
At some point, Anna says, “Amy’s gone to pick her eldest daughter up from school and something’s happened when she got home. The children describe their mother as being upset. A fight has happened. David Simmons, Gareth Price and Joshua Bryden were all there, the arguing apparently started between Amy and David.
“According to the three men that were present that night, Amy was furious with David and attacked him and then tried to hit him with a mirror. He restrained her, and after that happened, she got up and she went out to a shed and pushed over a glass tank. Not long after the tank was smashed, Joshua Bryden left the property. At about 5pm she spoke to her mother on the phone.”
According to Amy’s mother Nancy, who was calling her: “When she answered the phone, I’ve never, never heard her cry like that, never in my life. I said to her, what’s happened? Straight away, she said ‘I f***ing hate him’. I told her, ‘pack your s**t, get the girls. Come and stay with me’. I said, ‘I’ll come and pick you and the girls up’ and she said, ‘no, mum, I’ll be there soon’, and that’s when she started calming down, she wasn’t hysterical.”
According to her mother, Amy told her that she had a fight with David and had thrown a beer bottle at him and punched him in the mouth.
“She said that David Simmons had grabbed her by the throat and slammed her to the floor, which made Nancy extremely angry because Amy was recovering from two fractured vertebrae, following a car accident,” Ms Davey recalls.
Shortly after this account was reported to the police, and due to the fact that they were on the property at the time of Amy’s death, David Simmons and Gareth Price were taken into custody for questioning.
The two men were released without charge and the police declared again that Amy’s death was a suicide.
The police investigation
Ms Davey couldn’t accept that Amy had taken her own life.
Charandev Singh, a dedicated advocate for victims of domestic violence, has worked with Ms Davey on Amy’s case for the past seven years.
This week he paid tribute to Amy’s aunt.
“Anna has demonstrated an unrelenting commitment to truth and accountability for Amy’s death every day for eight years,” he said.
“Amy and her family are at the centre of Anna’s life. Anna has demonstrated a total commitment to accountability for Amy’s death, to integrity, strength, courage and compassion.”
As unanswered questions mounted for Amy Wensley’s family, Ms Davey pushed for the case to be re-examined.
“Three years after Amy died, in 2017, we finally got some encouraging news,” she says. “The coroner, who had the police brief, was so concerned about what she had read that she referred the matter to the DPP and they in turn referred it to the police cold case unit.”
One of experts brought in to examine the evidence was Tim Ackland, Emeritus Professor of Biomechanics and Applied Anatomy at the University of Western Australia.
Professor Ackland was asked to give his view as to whether Amy, who was right-handed, could have shot herself in her right temple, given the position in which her body had been found, with her right hand tucked under her thigh.
Using a model to reconstruct the shooting, Professor Ackland investigated the theory that Amy had shot herself in her right temple by pulling the trigger with her left hand.
He says: “The model was able to reach the trigger with her left hand, but without the use of a right hand she had no way of controlling the position of the barrel.”
He says: “We then tested whether Ms Wensley could have shot herself using her right hand and her left hand holding the barrel against her right temple.”
But that wasn’t plausible either.
“In ten trials, the right hand of the model ended up away from her body and certainly not tucked under her thigh.”
Professor Ackland has told Australian Story that: “My conclusion back to the cold case squad was it was more likely, it was highly consistent with her having been shot by another person.”
The cold case review, the last complete police investigation before the inquest, left open three possibilities.
One, that Amy killed herself. Two, that somebody had killed her. And three, that there was an accidental discharge of the firearm while Amy and somebody else were holding it.
But there was no proof of who pulled the trigger that fired the fatal shot.
The inquest
Finally, last year, more than six and a half years after Amy Wensley’s death, an inquest was held into her death.
Larry Blandford gave evidence that nobody had taken a statement from him for the major crime investigation or the cold case investigation.
“I believe the police investigation was bungled,” he says now. “The people concerned ought to be ashamed of themselves because we may never get to the truth.”
But despite the abject failure of police to consider that Amy may not have killed herself, senior WA officers continued to maintain at the inquest that suicide was the correct conclusion, based on the available evidence.
Ron Iddles disagrees with this conclusion.
“The evidence I gave at the inquest was that you cannot rule out a homicide,” he has told Australian Story.
David Simmons vehemently denies any involvement in Amy’s death.
“I’m not lying and I’m not holding anything back. I’ve lost the best person in my whole life and now I have to live with that and listen to people like you and whoever is trying to blame me for it.”
Anna and Nancy would wait another agonising eight months before Sarah Linton, the Deputy State Coroner handed down her findings.
“It was an open finding, which means that she couldn’t determine if Amy took her own life or if someone else was responsible for that,” says Ms Davey. “It was devastating. We were in tears.”
By reaching an open finding, the coroner didn’t accept the police’s submission that, despite the errors committed by detectives on the night Amy died, she could be satisfied that Amy had died by suicide.
But she also concluded that Gareth Price and David Simmons had not colluded to conceal the truth.
“Gareth Price did not strike me as the kind of person who would be able to maintain a lie for any length of time, nor the kind of person you would enlist in a conspiracy to conceal a homicide,” she wrote.
She added that: “In my view there were aspects of David’s evidence that minimised the difficulties in his relationship with Amy and his controlling and aggressive behaviour towards her, but there was nothing in his demeanour to suggest he was lying about how Amy died.”
The coroner said she was persuaded by the views of two experts that the position of Amy’s
right hand when she was found “raises doubt as to whether Amy committed suicide”.
The wash-up
Following a review conducted by the WA Police Internal Affairs Unit, the two detectives who first attended the scene, Detective Weidmann and Detective Kirkman were found to have neglected their duty by not adequately investigating the matter in the first instance.
Both detectives were referred to the Integrity Review Panel, following which they were issued with Assistant Commissioner’s Warning Notices.
When asked at the inquest why he didn’t call in a forensic team on the night, Detective Kirkman put it down to “arrogance, overconfidence, feeling like I was the person that was responsible and I was the one that had to make the decision, and I made what I consider to be the wrong decision.”
He gave what the coroner described as “a somewhat begrudging apology to the family for making that error”.
The coroner paid tribute to Anna and her family’s “tireless efforts to see justice served for Amy and to ensure that no other family has to endure a similar situation. In my view,” she wrote, “it was due to their efforts that the inadequacies in the investigation were properly brought to light.”
But to this day, WA Police has refused to issue a formal apology to Amy Wensley’s family for the failure of their investigation.
Instead, Deputy Commissioner Col Blanch (who becomes the new Police Commissioner later this week) wrote to Amy Wensley’s mother Nancy in October last year, offering his “deepest sympathy and sincere condolences on the loss of your daughter, Amy in February 2021 (sic).”
Amy Wensley died in June 2014.
He added: “I wish to formally express regret for the fact that the Western Australia Police Force officers who investigated her death on the evening of 26 June 2014, did not request the attendance of specialist services or specialist units. I also wish to express regret for the manner in which our internal processes addressed issues in relation to the initial investigation.”
He concluded: “As you will be aware from evidence led at the inquest, the Western Australia Police Force has recently undergone significant improvements in relation to police supervision and accountability, particularly with respect to requesting the attendance of the homicide squad and forensics at unexplained deaths. I hope that this letter will be of some comfort to you and your family.”
The wider tragedy
The family is hoping that new witnesses will come forward and fresh evidence will be revealed, following the two-part special by the ABC’s Australian Story.
“I’ve been told by the police that this is now a cold case and they don’t intend to do
anything about Amy’s case unless new evidence comes to light,” says Anna Davey.
More Coverage
“And I just thank God that there is interest coming now, even after the inquest, from people of legal and political backgrounds, which is encouraging for us in the hope that somehow, someone is able to help resolve this matter.
“So how can I, as her aunt, not continue this?”
Part Two of “Jumping the Gun”, a two-part Australian Story investigation introduced by Rosie Batty, airs tonight, Monday July 4, at 8:00pm on ABCTV, iview and YouTube
Read related topics:PerthncG1vNJzZmivp6x7r7HWrGWcp51jrrZ7y6Kdnqukrrmme9GemKVlnJ6zpnvNnq6sZZyes6Z71Z6psmWjqb%2BiusaeZKaxo6mys8WMqK2eql2Wurp51p6lrKSVrsBusMSaq6FnnprEtHnSraarsV9rgnStwW1wbm5haIZ6g5NwnW2ak26Eo4SWbmhta5OZgA%3D%3D