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You know that story that happened
up there in the Gulf about those people that went missing...
Unbelievable.
People disappear. It'd be an easy place to disappear.
You know, there's no one around.
There's no one going to hear anything.
There's no one going to see anything.
Supposedly, it went missing at sea, but...
it's not what I've heard.
It's not what anybody else believes either.
I feel very uncomfortable talking about it
because there was no doubt that this was a stain upon our soul.
This was evil.
And it really stunned all of us.
The Gulf has tried to put a blanket
over the whole thing.
They just want it all suppressed.
No one talks about it anymore.
As for the young boy, I mean,
I think he was just bloody, um, in the wrong spot
at the wrong time, you know.
Unbelievable.
A 10-year-old bloody kid out with his dad, fishing.
A father and son had gone to do what they always do
and hadn't returned.
So, from a search-and-rescue point of view,
they weren't, like, out in the middle of the ocean,
they were in fairly close.
I mean, they're obviously not just getting beamed up.
It was a calm, sunny morning
when Bevin Simmonds and his 10-year-old son, Brad,
went to check their shark nets.
But the daily routine ended in June 2003.
Missing, presumed murdered,
their bodies have never been found.
The Gulf country
is a different world, a completely different world.
It's a cliche, I know, but up there men can be men.
"Yeah, righto!" You go out the back of the pub.
But it might go further than that, you know,
might end up in a shootout.
And this leads to people killing each other,
which is not an uncommon event.
Professional fishing is the second oldest profession
in the world, after prostitution.
You know, and I'm a killer, I'm a natural born killer.
I love killing things.
If you haven't got a criminal record,
you don't live in the Gulf.
That's what some of them used to say.
We used to call 'em the truckies of the sea,
you know, the fishermen.
They're fighting sharks, they're fighting crocodiles,
they're fighting each other.
If there wasn't three fights in the pub a night,
the pub was closed.
It's just a frontier. It's like the wild, wild west, really.
So to go out on the sea was a very male-dominated place,
and they didn't like women being on the sea.
They didn't mind having sex with us, but they didn't like us.
You know, like, if they're giving me trouble in a bar,
I'd say, "Well, you want to step outside?"
Hello!
These were bulbously muscled, bloody idiots.
But occasionally, you know,
I'd throw a really nice glass jaw,
and down would go so and so, "Oh, isn't that amazing!
"It works, it works!"
And then run like hell.
You know, we're having these blues over turf
every other day.
Because we need to know we can make enough money to pay,
you know, the hundred grand it costs you every month
to get to sea.
If you don't catch, you don't get paid.
So your arse is on the line.
I mean, you try and become civilised.
But the hatred levels can get very, very serious indeed.
And they're in the middle of nowhere.
The police? They may as well not be there.
They don't exist.
There's nothing up there. Have a look on a map.
You've got Karumba,
and you've got Weipa,
and you got bugger-all in between.
A couple of Aboriginal establishments there,
and then you go from Karumba
all the way over to the NT border
and you've got a couple of cattle stations.
You go on the beach there by yourself,
someone drops you off, you're dead.
That's it. You ain't getting home.
You know, you've got so many rivers to cross.
And if you've seen those rivers, they snake around
and around and around like that.
It's-- You just get lost.
It's, yeah, it's, it's dead man's country.
It really is.
We all have traditional homelands...
but that land...
we don't own it. That land owns us.
So when we pass, we go back to that place.
Back to our homeland.
It's just like heaven.
But that's my paradise - homeland.
And we grow up with those song lines
until the day we depart Mother Earth.
Ah, "who am I?" is a good question.
I don't know. I'm an artist, I guess.
You know, it's right.
There's something about the pencil on the page.
The sound of it, the smell of it.
I dig it, you know, like, yeah.
I literally drove to Cairns.
Yeah, straight out of art school.
It just felt exactly right.
But Cairns is pretty much the end of civilisation.
You can go to Port Douglas.
You can get to Cooktown, if you call that civilised.
I don't know, many people wouldn't.
But it's where the bitumen stops,
and after that, there's really, honestly nothing much there.
It's a long drive, man, and I'd run out of money.
And by the time I got there, I had nothing.
And, um, yeah, got on a fishing boat, you know,
literally the next day.
You're on this pristine river.
It's the morning, and the mist is rising off the river,
and, you know, the sun's coming up,
and you're gunning the dinghy,
and it's fucking-- this is beautiful, you know, like...
And then the bugs start hitting you in the face,
and it's like, pom, pom, pom, pom!
and you can't fucking see anything.
You turn your head like that and look out the corner of your eye
and they're going in your ears, you know?
Fuck this beautiful place, mate.
Why does everything here turn to shit?
You know, like, and they were everywhere.
They were up my arse, they were behind my ears.
They're like...
And that was just the sandflies.
Fuck! It's, you know, you have this idea in your head
and then you face the horrible hard reality,
that nature doesn't want you there.
Nature doesn't like you. Nature doesn't give a fuck about you.
In fact, you know, nature would prefer to just either eat you,
or, I don't know, get rid of you in some way,
'cause you're not-- You don't belong.
It's brutal.
Mmm.
Yeah. You got to be tough.
You got to be really fucking tough.
The only way you could ever live there is on a boat,
because it is... it is unliveable country.
They'll live on the riverbank.
They'll live there, but make these big huts and things,
or dragging caravans,
and they set themselves up there with generators.
They'll live there for months and months and months.
Some of the kids are born up there
on the rivers, you know?
Fishermen are like the ancient sea gypsies.
Always on the move,
living in their little ocean caravans.
I often sit in the wheelhouse, lonely at night.
I'm on watch. The moon's just coming up.
It's flat calm.
The whole world is disappearing behind you,
and in front of you is this massive,
big, large Gulf of Carpentaria, where anything could happen.
Bevin and Brad Simmonds
were last seen in June 2003,
when they left to check offshore shark nets
near the mouth of the Coleman River
on the northwest of Cape York.
Prosecution outlined the turbulent history
between the two fishing families based in the Gulf.
I'm Bevin Simmonds' sister, um, who we lost in 2003.
And that's the Bevin we all remember.
That was his wedding day.
Yeah, he was so excited.
Yeah, he met Cathy and he just thought he hit the jackpot.
For whatever reason, she didn't really like me too much.
She hated the get-togethers.
"Why you always gotta go to your sister?
"You got to tell her everything."
But Bevin and I were close,
so it changed things between him and I.
That's Brad, Katie, um...
Mum and Dad.
My brother, Glen.
And then that's the Wards.
Dave and Beth.
I never really had much to do with any of them.
The family have got a rough, rogue reputation.
It's different to others.
You know, they're, they're a very strong physical family.
They're a tough family.
Old man Ward, I mean, he was a black belt karate.
And his wife, she's the only person ever
to knock him over.
There's no one in the Gulf that would've tackled them.
Some of the members have been on fishing committees
that have helped the Gulf prosper,
helped with legislation to help manage the Gulf.
So they're well respected within the fishing industry,
and they've done a lot for the fishing industry.
A lot for themselves, in the process,
but have been like wild powerbrokers in the Gulf,
relating to fishing.
Well, you've seen here,
my son's still fishing, my daughter's still fishing.
My granddaughters, both granddaughters are fishing.
Um...
Well, you've seen Katie, she's ready to have a baby any day,
and she's still out there, fishing.
She's not doing the hard physical work,
but she's still here on the deck and that's hard work too.
Everybody just sort of comes to an agreement
that I'd like to be here.
It'd be good if nobody came, but if somebody does come,
you can't stop them, because our licences are all the same.
But most people have worked out that they like this area
or they like that area.
Um...
There was just the one family
that sort of didn't respect those rules,
and they're still not respecting those--
Well, they're not... they're not Government-enforced rules.
They're fishermen's handshake rules.
Well, you couldn't write it any better if you tried.
Their last name's Gater, the old man had a hook for a hand.
There's murder investigations.
The mum's nuts with a big dog.
Boys are shooting at each other.
Like, you can't write this shit.
I mean, there's the Gaters, there's old Joan,
there's Michael, there's Vince, the young one.
There's old Vince. I know old Vince really well.
He was a bloody rogue. He was a shocker.
And I don't doubt he's probably passed his attitude down
onto some of the kids.
You know, Vince and Michael.
Like, Vince's dinghy
is decorated with turtle skulls.
The whole front of his dinghy
and the whole light bar at the back
has turtle skulls cable-tied to it.
And Michael makes a very nice turtle bolognese.
I felt like we,
you know, it's hard to say now,
but I felt like we were friends, you know.
Finally get to meet the oldies.
He'd talked about 'em for a while,
and wouldn't take me there a couple of times.
And there's Vince, he's this, like, skinny,
scrawny kind of bald guy.
And he's got a hand missing with a hook! Couldn't believe it!
"In the old days...
"You think this is fuckin' hard, mate. This is easy."
And he'd brag about how he had this really young wife.
She makes fucking strong coffee,
you know, like...
She also made really nice...
catfish fritters.
I remember, they were fucking really nice.
I've had the old lady come into the office.
You know, you think, "Oh, gee, she--"
99 out of 100 women that come to your office
are really, really polite.
She's abusive. She's just... she's unkept.
And she was really proud of Michael.
She'd say it, you know, she'd go, "Look at him, you know,
"he's got his own boat and he's making his own way."
And she was really proud of him, you know,
like, she'd really... she'd talk him up.
She just... she just idolises those boys.
It's as simple as that.
You know? I think she'd do anything for them.
Joan would be pulling the strings
on Vincent and Michael, all the time.
And even if Michael got on his boat
and moved to another area,
he was going there with purpose,
from what direction he was given
by the matriarch.
Similar sort of thing with the Ward family.
Probably not as quite as strong,
but, yeah, definite matriarchs, you know.
Like, and they're respected and feared
because one word from them and people do as they're told.
They've made millions of dollars over years.
They're not a poor family, neither are the Wards.
But they, you know, they look broke.
They got no teeth. They wear no shoes.
I've always said that fishermen with no mongrel in them
don't last five minutes, 'cause they don't.
We were all friends growing up.
'Cause we were sort of the only friends
they were allowed to have,
maybe because we were fishing kids as well.
They weren't allowed to communicate
with many other families.
You got to remember when you're up there,
you are working and living,
and you are part of the food chain.
I always had a saying,
like, even the butterflies will bite you.
That first six months was like,
"Get me the hell out of here. What have I done?"
But... I was a bit stubborn. I had to tough it through.
And along the way, I made some friends that helped me
and gave me a bit of direction, and that's what I needed.
It was very much, you looked at the beach,
you looked at the sky, you looked at the ocean.
And once you became in tune with that, you go,
"Oh, it's going to blow in the next couple of days.
"Get the nets out now, before we get swamped."
So you're putting these nets out.
You've got to go every so many hours
because if you don't do that,
your fish will be hitting the nets, they will die quickly.
The water temperature is so high, they will go off.
So, effectively, every three or four hours,
you've got to do another lap of your nets, day and night.
And at the same time, there might be a croc sitting there,
or wild pigs or a scrub bull, all that sort of stuff.
You just got to be quick and watch your back, you know?
'Cause there's lots of things that want to get ya.
So you're just racing against the time, all the time.
Racing the clock, racing the tide.
So, you know, you get that fish out as fast as you can.
I'd have times where I'd just saw the fucking thing in half
just to get it out.
I don't know, man, it's, um...
It's... it's... it's a nightmare within a nightmare, you know?
Yeah.
And, you know... and Michael's living this, man.
Nothing lasts up there.
You're fighting it the whole time. It's a battle.
It's a constant battle.
You cannot be that, you know, that loving,
kind of looking after nature and all that stuff
because it's going to kill you.
Everything does.
Those big sawfish, you know,
like, these beautiful giant gentle creatures,
they couldn't give a shit.
When that's swinging like that
and, you know, bang into something of you
and that's a tropical ulcer and you're fucked.
You will not even risk that.
You just, like, you know, grab the snout how you can,
I'm getting my knife and I'd just cut it off,
and then I'd just watch this beautiful creature
just sink to the bottom, bleed to death.
And I don't feel good about that.
I don't feel good about that at all.
I feel really bad about it now.
And especially now that they're fucking endangered,
you know, like, and we've killed so many.
During monsoon high tide,
that's where we find all the nets full of dead fish.
Those ones...
Sometimes we bring them here, we have to wash it, gerni it,
get all the dead bones out,
clean it, dry it.
Then we create these ones from ghost net.
We call it ghost net because of dead fishes.
My days when I was a boy,
we were plentiful of sawfish, plentiful.
Then I see nothing now.
Then I'm thinking, if sawfish is gone...
part of our culture's gone.
They're just doing their fishing industry.
But the land still belongs to the traditional owners.
As far as I know,
and as far as I see, living in the Gulf,
is that a lot of our communities is a bit of a gold mine
for the outside people.
And these sort of people, they go,
and then you get another cowboy in.
And so our Rangers are very active to apprehend them
and say to them, "So, look buddy, what are you doing?"
And soon as they find a little cowboy,
they report them and he's being acted on by law.
We were just so arrogant as fishermen, you know.
We were white. We didn't... We... It was ours.
We hadn't ever thought to ask anybody's permission.
It didn't come into any of our silly bloody Australian minds.
You have an industry that's mostly unregulated.
You know, you'll be there a long time
before you'd see a fishing inspector in the Gulf.
You know?
And to be honest,
er, I don't know how comfortable some of them are,
going into those areas.
I mean, they're very remote areas.
On your own, definitely not.
We just tell 'em that they're not allowed to fish there.
But it means some of these fishing people,
some of these fishing families, are dangerous?
Oh, yeah. Especially the Gaters. Yeah.
Yeah, don't want to fish close to them, yeah.
Well, they've been on the rivers
for nearly five or six decades now, you know.
They've been polluting all the river.
And I don't know why
they gave them back their licence, you know.
'Cause, one time,
they got - first day of the barra season opening -
they got 40 tonne of barra.
And you wouldn't get 40 tonne in a day.
Which means they were fishing
when the barra season was closed.
Netting during this closed season.
We have no respect for them.
And we'll continue to shut them out
with the support of the Fisheries.
Those type of blokes,
we don't hang around too long.
We're in, we deal with them and we're out.
There's other blokes that, you can go in,
they take it, they cop it on the chin,
they know they've done the wrong thing.
But this is a different breed.
Totally different breed. You don't hang around this mob.
To us, they are very dangerous people
because they have the attitude
and the habit of pulling out guns.
Everybody's got guns.
All right, let's get that-- Everybody's got guns.
You're working in an environment
where everything wants to kill you.
Once you go in, and a fisherman sees ya,
they're on the blower.
Whether they like them or not. It's the code.
"Fisher! Fishos are here. Customs are around.
"Coppers are around. Immigration's around."
Whoever it is, it's the code. They'll call each other.
So you go and you do as much as you can while you can,
until you get to the last boat
and he says, "I've been waiting for ya."
Yeah, he loved that, that fishing life.
I couldn't understand it.
He always wanted us to come and visit,
but I just thought, "Oh, my God,
"I couldn't live on a boat."
Because we were surprised that
he was going into that lifestyle,
the fisherman lifestyle.
But he was such a worker that he made it profitable.
And this is a photo of me and Bevin and Glen.
Bevin was six years younger than I was.
And Glen and I were only 14 months apart.
It's another photo of Bevin and my two kids,
Jolene and Luke.
He was always cuddling the kids just before he had his own.
All he wanted was a family.
I think the first year was probably happy.
But, um, when the kids came along...
he got to maybe show his domineering side.
He was an arrogant bugger at times.
We didn't get along overly
in the last couple of years that he was there.
But it was like the more money we made, the more he needed.
And then we bought the El Dorado,
and he wanted to turn it into a shark boat.
And I didn't want to be out every day, every night,
out in the ocean with the kids.
It's just, like, I said to him, "We bought a barra boat,
"I want to be a barra fisherman, not a shark fisherman."
But he wanted the big money in a hurry.
Because with shark and mackerel,
you can make, like, 180 grand in four weeks, easy.
And that's what he wanted.
He was a very motivated person.
You know, he wanted a home for his kids.
He wanted to set his kids up.
You know, to him he had three kids
so then he had three properties
and he was going to have something for them.
If Bevin was sitting here having a conversation with you,
there is no doubt in my mind
that there would be a kid hanging here,
kid hanging off his... you know, one sitting here.
They were just... they wanted to be in his presence all the time.
He was just very loving, especially towards her.
I think Cathy knows a lot more than what she has told us.
Bevin and I made a connection
'cause he was on the outer.
I was a new kid on the block, I was on the outer.
So there was a lot of good reason for us to develop
a good friendship and an honest mateship.
And he loved coming down to us because
it was an escape for him, from the family clan stuff,
because he was never full--
I don't believe he was ever fully accepted.
And, you know, they would say things about Bevin.
And then when I got to know Bevin,
they certainly weren't true,
but I think they never forgave him
for getting their little girl Cathy, pregnant,
when she was 16 or whenever.
Um...
And I think they never forgave him for that,
and he was never quite in the fold, if you get what I mean.
He was sort of always on the outer a little bit.
Apparently there was a bit of animosity
between Bevin and Michael over the shark fishing thing,
of Michael saying, "Well, I want to fish the sharks
"out the front of Pormpuraaw, so you can't."
And him going, "Well, I'm gonna, whether you like it or not."
There's nothing worse than a fisherman
that blowflies other fishermen and follows 'em around.
You're not a fisherman at all. You're just a blowfly.
At the end of the first season,
Bevin came to me
because we were getting ready to travel with them.
They invited us to come down to Karumba
and travel down there with them,
and go to the fishermen's annual meeting there.
And that's when Bevin said, "Look out, Rod,
"the Gater family are moving down this way.
"They've got lots of licences.
"They will do whatever to catch fish and block you out.
"And they're coming this way, Rod. Watch your back."
And David Ward was a very smart,
sort of streetwise type person.
And I have a high respect for David.
He tried to be as diplomatic and friendly as possible
at the time,
because he didn't want to engage with them in a war.
He's got blue, the bluest of--
Michael, the bluest of blue eyes.
He looks at ya, he doesn't look, he doesn't see ya,
he just looks straight through ya.
It's just... just weird, strange look.
You think he's looking at you but you can just feel the eyes
going through your head out to the back.
He's as fit as a mallee bull,
you wouldn't want to take him on.
So, I'm getting a bit concerned
and I was told they're heading my way.
But they were looking for their own patch...
and they were prepared to do whatever to get it.
You can grow up being afraid of the bogeyman,
and that's what they've been, my whole life.
They're just there. They're in your dreams.
They're in your nightmares.
Every single day for the last 17 years,
that's all I've thought about.
But, one day, everything's going to come back to them.
And then, one day, they're going to work out
how it felt to be us.
Dad said that I had to stay home,
so Brad went and, yeah, that was it.
And Dad, he went to the nets happy that day.
He was...
He was happy.
But, oh...
It should have been me that went with my dad,
because I was always there.
Brad never went with Dad, like, not to the shark pen.
And the one day I didn't go...
and I just regret that every day.
My little brother was such a happy person.
And...
He was just happy. He was always happy.
He'd go fishing.
He was... he was an adventure.
He... he just...
He was... had a love of life.
And...
in five minutes it was all gone.
We were so left in the dark with the whole scenario.
Until I got the phone call, um...
the day after he went missing,
at six o'clock in the morning when Cathy rang me and said,
"Bevin and Brad are missing."
And I said, "What do you mean, missing?"
She said, "Well, they went to check the nets yesterday,
"and they never came back."
And I said, "And you're telling us this now?"
She said, "Well, yeah,
"we've been out looking for 'em all night."
And I said, "Oh!"
She said, "So you'll have to tell your mother."
And that was pretty much the end of the phone call.
And we told Mum and she just...
Poor Mum, she just... Yeah.
'Cause Bevin was the baby.
You know, we always said he was the favourite
'cause he was, you know, the baby of the family.
I think there was, like, a dozen or 20 aeroplanes.
Volunteer Rescue, Marine Rescue from Burketown,
Karumba, Weipa, the Water Police from Thursday Island.
Everyone congregated into what turned out to be
a massive, big search area
of over a thousand miles of surface--
You know, one of the biggest searches I'd seen.
I'm guessing there was... there was over 10 boats,
it's got to be closer to 20, that were out there doing it.
By then, we sort of knew that Bevin had had his nets
set out off the Coleman River quite some ways.
You know, I just thought it was a matter of time.
I was surprised
by sunset that first day,
that we hadn't found them.
Because if they had broken down,
the currents are only two, three knots.
So, break down, here's the nets.
Righto, okay, went missing 10 hours ago.
They're going to be within 30 miles at most.
You know, we know tides, we know currents,
we know tinnies, we know the ocean.
And we're all talking on the radio,
all the different search vessels.
I had my big spotlights on the top of the roof
of the boat, which I turned to one side.
So as I was idling along, it was just lighting up the beach.
As we got past the Mungkan,
which is a creek just north of Pormpuraaw,
we saw a fire on the beach.
And we go, "Here they are." And we're spotlighting it.
It turned out to be a group of local Indigenous community
camped down there.
It was like, "Oh," you know.
You go from this level down to that level.
So, yeah, we're getting more and more worried by that time,
'cause that's where I thought they'd be.
So this was becoming,
you know, like, how could this really happen?
How can you just, really, that close in,
just disappear, in reasonably good weather?
And then we'd well and truly covered that area.
I had my charts out and everyone's calling in
latitudes and longitudes as they're going.
I had my charts out and went, "That's covered.
"Let's work our way back north towards our camp
"in case something's happened and they've gone that way."
So I then did a grid pattern all the way back.
Yeah, you're thinking of all possible scenarios.
And next thing, a dinghy comes flying up to us.
In that dinghy,
it's Michael Gater, Cathy Simmonds.
And they pulled up alongside the boat.
I gave Cathy a big hug and said, "Don't worry.
"There's that many boats coming, everyone's coming."
I'd been speaking to other fishermen
that were heading that way.
"We'll find them, we'll find them.
"I'm going to keep working my way down here
"and then we're going to head out and join the search."
She said, "No, Michael and I have just been
"along all that area.
"You don't have to do there. Go out and join the grid here."
And it was like they didn't want us looking
down along that area.
And it seemed funny, as like... Bevin and Brad are missing.
Why are they... what are those two doing
roaring around in a dinghy together?
Around the 5th of June 2003,
I was working in the CIB.
Here in Cairns.
And basically I was advised of the disappearance
of Bevin and Brad Simmonds.
My role is purely from an investigative perspective.
Is this situation a kosher disappearance
or is there a potential for third party involvement?
I said to Glen, "We got to go looking for him."
And Glen said, "What are we going to do?"
I said, "Well, if this was us missing,
"Bevin would come looking for us."
So my boss organised a small plane.
And, um...
Anyway, we got to Edward River,
Pormpuraaw as it's called now.
And we stayed there for ages,
waiting for someone to pick us up - we didn't know who.
And, anyway, Cathy ended up coming to pick us up,
and Michael.
You know, Cathy... she didn't want to talk to us.
Like, "What are youse doing here? Why did youse come?"
She was uneasy about us being there. Definitely.
You know, I started hearing, I suppose,
a bit of wharf gossip.
What you have to appreciate
is about the fishing industry in the Gulf.
They're the greatest bunch of rumour-mongers in the world.
The story was that, um, Michael was, um...
having it off with the fella's wife.
Cathy, and, in fact, pretty much the entire witness group
concealed the fact that there was an active relationship
and an overt relationship
between Cathy Simmonds and Michael Gater.
Yeah, for me, it's not a matter of public interest.
You know, we all keep our secrets, good, bad, ugly,
close to my heart.
So, you know, whether Cathy had slept with Michael Gater or not,
really, it's none of my business.
A person who conceals the fact of a relationship
in that circumstance, you wonder why.
You're thinking, "Well, that can't be, you know.
"This can't possibly happen.
"You can't, this can't-- No, no, no.
"There'll be another explanation for this
"and we'll look again tomorrow."
At the centre of it all, Catherine Simmonds,
wife of Bevin, mother of 10-year-old Brad
and one time lover of Michael Gater.
Things apparently turned sour
when she said there was no future for them.
Oh, look, Cathy was obviously...
had a child missing at sea and her husband.
And originally on the face of it
you found Cathy an honest witness.
But, um, it was like pulling teeth.
But eventually we got the information from her.
After I realised something was...
something bad had happened, or they were missing,
I rang Mum.
Mum ended up getting onto the police.
And then, um,
I went over, I was talking to Michael Gater
and he jumped in and he come searching as well.
Because I had a bit of an affair with Michael and...
And so how long had that fling been going?
Oh, only a week maybe. Yeah. Five days. Yeah.
And, frankly, it was overt, you know.
This was known through the entire community, you know.
So, concealment was nonsensical
and concealment was suspicious.
Clearly.
And that's why she never wanted me around, always,
because she knew that I would see what she was up to.
Subsequently, we learned of a rumour
of actual physical dispute between Bevin and Michael,
down in Karumba, some months before.
I dunno what... how they got into the blue,
but I think Michael had Bevin down on the ground
with his legs on his neck or something, yeah.
And then we left Bevin there 'cause he was really drunk.
And we went out, 'cause we had a place in Karumba,
so we went and stayed there for the night -
the kids and I, and Michael.
You know, this relationship was overtly occurring
on the El Dorado,
while, you know, her husband was away.
We were in a different territory when we're dealing with
the potential murder of a child.
Something as serious as this,
you bring in the heavy artillery, you know,
and we brought in the heavy artillery.
We were joined later by...
I think they came from Maritime Safety Queensland.
Two guys that the police had requested
come down with a sonar.
And they set up on board our vessel
with a machine that would read the soundings.
And we towed that torpedo
around rivers and creeks and offshore,
extensively over the next days and days.
They don't do that when people go missing at sea.
They don't turn up with a sonar
because we are looking for somebody in the ocean.
Never! 25 years, no one's ever turned up with a sonar
and asked me to drag it around the ocean
looking for the people that drowned.
So then you get a chill down your back
and you get a bad feeling that, you know,
this could be a double homicide.
I couldn't believe it.
I don't think anyone could believe it.
You know, you didn't know what to believe,
what was true, and...
And I know when we were there,
the beach is as clear as.
The ocean was like glass.
You could see for miles, absolute miles.
And I remember standing on the beach, thinking,
"How can we not find anything?"
You know, not anything.
Because Bevin and Brad were supposed to be both
in the orange overalls,
and they would've had a net and bits and pieces in the boat.
But not one ounce of debris at all.
Nothing.
And that's the type of boat that Bevin was in.
That's Beth Ward and Brad.
So it's a big dinghy, for that to vanish.
Like, somebody knows where it went.
You know, all that stuff just doesn't disappear.
You get a teaspoon of oil
and pour it on water,
you'll see a rainbowy shimmer
for a long way.
An outboard motor,
well, firstly, it's two stroke, so it's got oil in the fuel.
So if it would've sunk, that fuel would've floated
with a shimmer of oil.
Would've been spotted by a plane, if nothing else.
There was lots of things that could float out of that boat.
Our specialised barra net hooks, they usually had floats on,
so if you dropped 'em over the side, you could lean over
and grab 'em before a crocodile did.
You know, when a boat goes down, things turn up.
Nothing was found.
And that's the extraordinary thing.
Not just extraordinary,
but extraordinary piled on extraordinary.
We were in the field for 50 days.
You know, this investigation really commenced
on the 6th, 7th of June
and ran through to May of the following year.
So what we've got is Joan and Michael Gater
within five kilometres of the offshore net,
at the same time that Bevin and Brad are at that net.
And there was nobody else.
There was nobody else. You know, it is isolated.
Half a net had been cleared of fish.
And then an event occurs,
which they stopped clearing the net.
So, bottom line is Michael and Joan arrive
somewhere... 9:30, 10:00.
So, they're unaccounted for four hours.
Michael attributes the delay to vehicle breakdowns.
And I think I said to the crew that - [exhales] -
"If he's lying, he's a good liar."
"He's a good liar."
Now, upon arrival, they then swap boats.
So why that is relevant is because the vessel
that they used on that morning goes missing,
and is, some weeks later, found secreted and sunk.
The motivation was attributed to
the fact that the vessel had been "stolen"
and it was necessary to conceal this from the police.
Um, stories...
Stories are they'd take it up a creek
or up a river somewhere, anchor it up,
go around the back, take the motor off,
put the motor in the bush,
undo the bungs on the back of the boat,
and it would just slowly
sink in situ in the river.
They know where it is, no one else does.
Certainly this family has been associated with suspicion
for many, many years about things like that.
And Michael...
obviously intelligent.
Simply the fact is
that we would never have laid a glove on him
if he was by himself.
It was only separately when Joan's statement was obtained
and his mother couldn't keep the story together.
So it was that...
which turned the smoke into a fire.
From that point in time,
we have to treat these people as suspects.
The game is formally on.
For whatever reason, Joan Gater come into our camp.
She wanted to buy... That's right, she wanted to borrow,
and wanted to see if I had some refrigerant gas.
We did the normal neighbourly thing.
Would you like a cup of coffee and a biscuit?
We're sitting at the table
having a cup of coffee and a biscuit.
And somehow, for some reason,
she brought this conversation up,
saying how she knew things about the bush.
And that her uncle or something like that,
I'm pretty sure it was her uncle, was in special forces
up in New Guinea
and had taught her
if you wanted to get rid of a body, how to do it.
You wrapped 'em up tightly in trawler net
and weighted 'em down.
So if you sunk them down to the bottom,
they would sink in the mud.
The bones, nothing would ever float to the surface.
And in these northern waters,
all the plankton and everything would eat everything away
and nothing would ever be found.
And I'm sitting there going, well, that's weird.
Why would you want to tell me that?
And that made me very much on guard.
We were lucky we had two big dogs.
So when I was not in the camp,
I carried my shotgun with me at all times.
We established that all firearms
owned, registered to Michael Gater were missing.
Entirely gone.
Um, Joan Gater, in explanation of this,
said that sometime prior,
Michael Gater had attempted suicide in a vessel
and that they'd thrown the firearms overboard
as a consequence.
However, Vincent Gater discounted this
as just a straight lie.
So, therefore, Joan Gater's explanation
in regard to why the guns are missing
is not only false,
it's a direct lie, proven by her son.
And they were never recovered. We never found them.
The only scenario I can come up with,
if they've both been shot, if that be the case,
I can only think that, for some reason...
the shooter never saw the kid until after Dad had been shot.
And then the kid's head's popped up.
I dreamt that Brad...
He's still in my dreams.
I said, "Are you okay?"
He said, "Yeah, I'm with Dad and Granddad."
And I said, "Are you all right?"
He said, "Yeah."
I said, "What happened?"
He said, "They rolled us up in an orange net,
"and put us in a croc hole."
I have vivid dreams sometimes.
The rivers themselves are lush
and full of beautiful creatures.
But then when you're in the estuary, which is the mangroves,
which is the ugliest place of all, man,
like, these ugly trees and this mud and the water's all brown.
You look at it and go, "This place is shit, man."
But the estuary is a breeding ground for everything
and it's full of fish.
And where all these fish are, of course, is crocodiles, man,
and they're all over the place.
And I guess the lesson in all of that nature,
is that there's no room for the weak in there, man.
You won't survive.
So, we were brutal out there.
I learned that off of Michael, that you got to assert yourself.
When you have to hand-kill animals with a knife,
over and over and over,
you know, you discover your brutality
and you start pushing it away and then you know...
we're the alpha here and we've got guns
and we'll fuck ya and we'll fuck ya first.
And that way you stay on top.
And I learnt that from Michael, I reckon, and I felt it too.
Yep.
You just harden up.
It's a sordid tale involving two fishing families
from the far, far north.
Father and son, Bevin and Brad Simmonds missing,
presumed murdered by Joan Gater and her son Michael.
What I'm trying to do is bring to the jury...
as transparent a story as I can,
because, you know, what ultimately your jury sees
is but a mere shadow.
But there were undertones
of a potential third party involvement.
Now, to be specific,
and to cut to the chase, Catherine Simmonds.
I never seen that woman shed a tear. Never!
And I don't think that's normal.
She stopped all engagements with us.
Why would someone do that?
You know, you rally around your family,
you pull them in closer and you, you know, share stories
to get to the bottom of something.
She didn't. She just distanced. She distanced the kids.
And that's the way she kept it.
And I've believed that right from the start,
that she put the thought out there.
I honestly believe that it was orchestrated.
With the promise that, you know,
I can't be with you, while Bevin's here.
And Bevin knew, like...
Bevin said that Michael had been buying her jewellery.
$3,500 they paid for this watch,
Joan and Michael Gater.
It was an enormously expensive gesture by Michael.
Like, this watch, apart from it being effectively
a glamour costume bit a jewellery,
it was entirely unsuitable for use in that environment.
You know, how does Cathy Simmonds explain this watch?
So it indicates a level of lack of respect.
And he said, "She will not take my kids."
And she knew that.
There's no way in the world
she could have left Bevin for another bloke
and took them kids 'cause he would've fought tooth and nail.
And there are
at least four or five witnesses that relate to us
direct conversations with Michael Gater,
in regard to, if Bevin went missing at the net,
no one would ever know.
Well, every investigation comes to a point
where you've got to make a decision.
Also, you know,
when push comes to shove that you're arresting them,
that creates a different mindset for these people.
So there's opportunities
potentially there that might arise.
Someone might decide, "Well, too good for me, boys,
"I'll tell you everything about it. I'll fess up."
That didn't occur.
When you believe you've exploited and gathered
as much information as you could potentially
likely to ever gather,
and the only further information
can come from the perpetrators...
time to act.
13th of December 2003, we acted.
And we charged them, Joan and Michael Gater...
of the murder of Brad and Bevin Simmonds.
Only Michael and Joan Gater have been charged with this matter.
I sat there during that court case,
and I sat there for almost the whole two weeks.
I don't think they knew I was there,
but I was just listening to everything.
And I just thought, "Man, they're just there."
"That's all you've got.
"He's the easiest person to blame."
You know, I sat in the courtroom
with my mum and my grandma every day.
And Bevin was the father
and he was the husband.
Yeah, he could be tough, but he was not the monster
that he was made out to be.
It was almost like it was justified what happened to him.
The jury came out, there was very little eye contact.
There was a lot of the Gater family
present in the courtroom,
which at the time was quite intimidating.
A lot of people were so scared to speak out.
And those that did speak...
um, were belittled.
It just looked completely like,
they happened to be there at that time,
"Yeah, let's pin it on them,
"because we've got no fucking imagination.
"We can't work anything else out.
"And, look, let's go for the easy target," you know.
Who's going to believe him?
Michael, his entire life
had effectively lived the closed environment
on the vessels with his family.
It was only in his late twenties, early thirties
that he discovered the benefits and pleasures
arising from female companionship.
Whereupon he's lost the plot,
and he's doing anything else but fishing.
He's off pursuing women,
which is a quite natural and sensible course of conduct
for a young man in his situation.
However, from Joan Gater's perspective,
her husband has a single arm.
He's effectively an invalid on the vessels.
She doesn't actively go fishing.
Michael is the fisherman for the family.
Vincent is probably too young.
Vincent, his brother, he's probably too young at this stage
to actually shoulder the major responsibility.
So, from Joan Gater's perspective,
the empire is tottering because Michael is not on the job.
He's lost focus.
Joan then starts making overtures to the Ward family
about the benefits of
a Michael Gater/Cathy Simmonds formal union.
And Joan starts to offer a range of incentives,
in regard to fishing licences, financial remuneration...
to effectively a dowry,
I suppose,
to facilitate this.
And it would've been a satisfactory conclusion,
from both families' perspectives,
for this to arise in a natural course of events,
of a relationship devolving and a divorce
and everyone moves on,
and if it moves into Michael and Cathy's direction, well,
yahoo, the two clans have been joined,
and Michael becomes very focused
and the empire can continue steaming along.
But I suspect that there was no...
clear sign of a formal separation between...
Catherine and Bevin.
So Michael's limbo was set to continue.
Bevin leaves for about a two-week period,
to work on some boat-related issues,
particularly for a shark reel.
And in his absence, the romance was continued
in quite overt fashion, where Michael was in fact living
on the El Dorado with Cathy and the family.
Clearly, Cathy is not of a mind to end the relationship.
There are a whole range of consequences of that.
Financial is one of them.
And then within five or six days of his return,
the father and son disappear at the net.
Brad Simmonds and his father Bevin
haven't been seen in more than two years.
And prosecutors say it's all because of the affair
Cathy Simmonds was having with a jealous trawler skipper.
It's alleged - with the help of his mother, Joan -
he murdered father and son and disposed of their bodies.
He then spent the night with an oblivious Cathy
aboard the family boat, the El Dorado.
You know, they painted the whole picture, right?
So, you know, alcohol
and, you know, all this stuff out of control, you know.
And I'm sitting there, thinking,
"Yeah... it doesn't sound like the picture I remember.
"No, it doesn't sound like what I experienced at all.
"You're just... you're bullshitting."
Now forget the fact that we had no bodies,
we had no forensics, no witnesses to the event.
And we had an entirely circumstantial case.
You don't know. None of you know shit.
Whatever it was, it's tragic,
and would've been violent and messy, but...
third party involvement led to their deaths
of a homicidal nature.
I couldn't even go to the last day of the trial,
because I knew that they were going to get off,
and I couldn't bear to be there.
I knew they were going to walk free, and they did.
They walked out of the courtroom free people.
But I still remember the look on Michael's face
when... when the verdict was read.
And he turned around,
and he just had this shock look on his face,
like, "Oh!"
That was it. "Oh!"
As he turned around and then he faced back.
And that was pretty much it.
I remember being so angry
and...
You know, they sort of come over to interview us,
but they were just so hell-bent on Michael's story.
Michael and Joan, they've just been acquitted of murder!
And I just think Bevin and Brad
were kind of really forgotten in that moment.
I guess that, well, I'll take that to my grave.
This is a void of information.
This whole investigation
surrounds the reconstruction of the surrounding events.
But the actual events are a black hole of information.
None.
No one knows what happened.
There's only the perpetrators of this crime are the--
And I say it's a crime, incontrovertibly it's a crime.
This isn't a disappearance at sea.
This isn't an accident.
There's third party involvement of some nature in this.
So the only people alive
are the perpetrators who can tell us what happened.
And I don't know. I don't know.
You know, and, sure, I can understand,
you know, killing the things you have to,
but you don't kill the things you don't have to.
It's not that I don't think that Michael, you know...
or they aren't capable of doing it.
I mean, you're capable of doing it for sure, man.
We're all capable of doing it.
And I guess you're on the edge there a lot more
because of your lifestyle.
Our family unit definitely fell apart after that.
You know, I don't even speak to any of my other cousins
because of this.
You know, Glen and I were sort of at loggerheads too about it.
So we didn't talk for a while.
Just really rocked the whole family, I guess.
My role here is justice.
Maybe my law was a bit stronger then the Westerners.
That's how I feel.
You do anything wrong or murder committed in the bush...
There's a justice spear, it's a three-prong spear.
It's painful.
That's the only way they can settle a matter
in two different clan groups.
Justice spear.
Then when that happens, everything's back to normal.
But our way...
revenge, before everything stops.
Day one of a murder.
"Hm! All good."
Day three, four, five. "Yep, I got this."
Week one...
Week two...
A month... A year...
10 years...
20 years...
A murderer has to live with the guilt.
Part of the reason I'm sitting here...
There's...
I feel guilty that I didn't speak to the police
prior to the event.
And part of my not speaking up earlier,
even... I was gutless as I was scared.
Part of it was my own survival.
You know?
So if I've got it,
then a lot of other people have got it a lot more.
Bevin and Brad's bodies remain missing.
They haven't been recovered.
These matters remain live investigations, forever.
You know, it's... it's a bleeding sore.
We'll never know.
You know, we'll never know that last moment, you know?
Did they feel fear? Did they feel scared?
Did they feel peace? Did they...?
Little Brad, his heart was a bit like his dad.
He'd had this great heart.
And I'm not going to say goodbye to 'em.
Because... they will never die to me.
They will always be in my memory.
Yeah, I'm not saying goodbye. Sorry, I can't.
Wherever they were missing,
their spirits should be hanging around that area
where they were killed or murdered.
After life, we believe we still roam our country.
Sometimes, we do see them...
but they are all spirit now.