New forensic science leads help identify mystery remains found in NT bush in 1976

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, investigators are closing in on identifying the pair.

Glen Chatto, head of NT Police's Cold Case Taskforce, said finding answers was always going to be a "long shot", but advances in forensic science have given investigators new hope.

New leads in a decades-old case

When police first found the two men's remains near Mount Bundy Station, 110 kilometres south of Darwin, in 1976, 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.

Police believe one of the men is Trevor Wheeler, who was found dead near Mt Bundy cattle station in 1976.

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

"FIGG gives us a very good idea" that the man found near Mt Darwent is Trevor Wheeler, Acting Sergeant Chatto said.

"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," he said.

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

His name is Trevor Wheeler.

A 'fairly chequered past'

Acting Sergeant Chatto said FIGG 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 said.

Trevor Wheeler's tattoos were documented in his previous prison records.

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 said.

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, who wishes to remain anonymous, said her family was living in a tent on a beach in Queensland when a chance encounter led to her crossing paths with Trevor Wheeler.

"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 said.

Kathy said 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 said 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.

Kathy in the 1960s at about the same time she started travelling with Trevor to work as fruit pickers.

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

After a misunderstanding over some hard rubbish, Kathy said 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.

During Trevor's final stint in jail, Kathy said 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 said.

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 said.

A photo taken when Trevor Wheeler was about 18 or 19 years old and had come back to visit Kathy and her family.

"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."

"[The connection is] very distant, I imagine, but somewhere along, I suppose, he's a cousin, way, way down the line."

From her own research Kathy discovered Trevor Wheeler was a distant cousin of hers.

The DNA test has enabled her 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 said.

"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

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 said.

"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 said 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.

Glen Chatto says some "old Darwinites" may have information about how Trevor Wheeler ended up dead in the bush and who he was with.