Cold case breakthrough: DNA genealogy identifies missing man from 1976 NT remains

Half a century after the bodies of two men were found near a cattle station in one of the most remote parts of the Northern Territory, Glen Chatto knew finding answers was always going to be a "long shot".

But as head of NT Police's Cold Case Taskforce, long shots are Acting Sergeant Chatto's bread and butter.

When police first found the two men's remains near Mount Bundy Station, 110 kilometres south of Darwin, in 1976, while they were intrigued by the unusual circumstances, they had little to go on.

Investigators believed the pair likely ventured out to the remote location together, but by the time the bodies were discovered, they'd already been in the elements for years, leaving few clues about why they had gone there, how they died and even who they were.

In the decades since, forensic science has advanced in quantum leaps, so by the time the file landed on Acting Sergeant Chatto's desk, he was able to enlist the help of experts in the field at the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

Using the same technology Californian detectives deployed in the effort to identify Golden State serial killer Joseph James DeAngelo Jr, the AFP scientists went to work.

Through a technique known as forensic investigative genetic genealogy (FIGG), the scientists could compare DNA from one of the men with profiles uploaded to websites by members of the public searching for long-lost relatives.

"You can work out that he's related to this person or related to this person, you build a family tree and then you conduct investigations to see if anyone in that family tree is actually missing," Acting Sergeant Chatto says.

"And in this case, we have located a male who we believe is missing and hasn't been seen since 1972.

A 'fairly chequered past'

While Acting Sergeant Chatto says "FIGG gives us a very good idea" when an investigation is on the right track, it wasn't enough on its own "to build a case to take to the coroner for an identification just yet".

With none of Trevor's family members identified through the FIGG process still alive, the next steps would involve some more old-school detective work.

By going back through Trevor's "fairly chequered past", Acting Sergeant Chatto found a clue in old arrest records that yielded the next piece of the puzzle.

"He did come to the attention of law enforcement quite a bit before he went missing, he had a lot of homemade style tattoos," he says.

On the inside of his right forearm there was a pin-up girl bearing the letters WCH along with two hearts with arrows through them, as well as the initials LG and the year 1959.

"We believe they're probably initials of, potentially, girlfriends," Acting Sergeant Chatto says.

And above a skull and crossbones on Trevor's left wrist: "A heart with a rose with the word 'Kathy' in a scroll".

Who is Kathy?

Kathy's first relationship as a teenager in the 1960s wasn't one filled with happy memories for her to look back on in her twilight years.

"I used to get a lot of beatings from him, so it wasn't pleasant times for me because I really wanted to get away from him, but he always seemed to find us wherever we went," she says now from her home in regional Queensland.

Kathy says her family was living in a tent on a beach in Queensland when a chance encounter led to her crossing paths with Trevor Wheeler.

She says after their mothers bumped into each other on the beach, her mother offered Mrs Wheeler a place to pitch her tent on some land the family had just acquired.

Over the years that followed, Trevor would be in and out of Kathy's life, striking up a friendship with her brother and later, she would become his girlfriend while the trio travelled around the country picking fruit.

Which is how the couple came to the attention of police.

After a misunderstanding over some hard rubbish, Kathy says she and another teenage girl were sent home while Trevor and her brother ended up behind bars for offences now lost to the sands of time.

After his release, Kathy says Trevor continued to pop up in the various places her family moved, eventually catching up with them again in Brisbane.

"I was a little bit older and that's where he came and put tattoos on my arms," she says.

During Trevor's final stint in jail, Kathy says she wrote to him to say she wanted nothing more to do with him — "and so I got free of him".

Kathy's brother managed to clean up his act too and the last time she remembers seeing Trevor was about 1970, two years before his last confirmed proof of life.

A family connection

When Kathy answered a phone call from Acting Sergeant Chatto three years ago, the news that her first boyfriend had likely been found dead in remote bushland came with mixed emotions.

But despite their complicated history, not only was she eager to share her memories of Trevor with the detective — she set about trying to track down a living relative herself.

"I don't hold grudges," she says simply now.

Kathy called Trevor's primary school and asked the librarian there to send her copies of his old yearbooks.

"I picked Trevor out of each one of them," she says.

"I just kept on researching things, and it came up somewhere along the line that [one of his relatives] carried the Burton name.

"One of those names he used as an alias, Arthur Burton, I found that one of our distant relatives had married a Burton.

"One of my family members way back had married a Burton and that Burton led to the Wheelers.

Kathy says the FIGG analysis also allowed her family to put to rest a troubling, longstanding rumour that Trevor's father was also Kathy's sister's dad.

"The DNA test has enabled me to find my sister's [real] dad," she says.

"So now she's put that to rest, she's happy now that she's found that she's had half-sisters and stuff there too.

"Finding out about [Trevor] after all this time, in a way it's given me peace of mind that I don't have to watch my back all the time.

"It's sad that it's ended up like that, but I just wanted to do all I could to provide any information that Glen would need, to solve the [mystery]."

The second man

Back in Darwin, Acting Sergeant Chatto is still on the case, hoping to find definitive evidence to explain who the men were and what they were doing together in the middle of nowhere before their lives ended at the edge of an isolated mountain.

"There's a railroad track going through that general area, there was various mines out in that area, but we haven't established why they might have been out there in the first place," he says.

"We've approached Mount Bundy Station to see if they've got any records but unfortunately, no records are available for staff from that time period."

Acting Sergeant Chatto says police are still keen to speak with "any of the old Darwinites that might have known this person", as well as anyone who recognises their name among Trevor's tattoos.

"If they are girlfriends, he may have had children with them, if we're able to identify living children that'd be a very good way of confirming the identification, if we were able to get that sort of confirmation, we'd be better placed to take that to the coroner," he says.

"We're interested in anyone that might have had contact with him in the NT, to build a bit of a circumstantial case to help us put him here in the first place and what we're hoping, if someone does know him, they might know the second person that was found with him.

"We believe they're probably associated, it'd be rare for two bodies to be found that aren't associated, so if there's anyone out there that knows Trevor or knows who Trevor might have been travelling with at the time, it might go a long way in identifying that second body."