This Norfolk Island murder mystery captured global attention, but left some questions unanswered
Janelle Patton was a young woman who had broken free of a bad relationship and needed to get out of Sydney.
Leaving the city behind, she chose Norfolk Island.
It was a small town on a small island, surrounded by the South Pacific and home to locals who would welcome her in.
That was before someone violently took her life in 2002.
It was the first murder on Norfolk Island in 150 years and it would soon generate global attention.
Because as news of her death travelled across the close-knit community, locals pulled together even more, closing any gaps where police from the mainland might have wedged their suspicions.
The investigation would take four years, but eventually New Zealand man Glenn McNeill was convicted of murdering Ms Patton.
But true crime obsessives followed this case even before the dominance of the genre and, like all stories with unsatisfying endings, there were lingering questions.
McNeill received a life sentence and is currently in prison in New South Wales, but the Supreme Court of Norfolk Island has confirmed to the ABC he is expected to be released on February 1.
It is anticipated that he will be allowed to serve out his parole period in New Zealand, where he may face more questions about what really happened the day Janelle Patton died.
A grisly Easter discovery
Carolyn and Ron Patton were on Norfolk Island when their daughter was killed.(Roger Maynard : Reuters)
Janelle Patton’s family was on Norfolk Island to spend Easter with their daughter.
There was a plan for Janelle to pick them up from their accommodation in the afternoon of Easter Sunday but she never showed.
By the time her parents’ annoyance turned to worry and they called police to report their daughter missing, they were asked to come down to the station.
A body had been found and the police asked Carolyn and Ron Patton for a description of Janelle.
Norfolk Island is too small for coincidences — as Carolyn would later tell NBC News.
“He said that a body of a young woman was found just, and said, ‘We need to identify the body before we go on any further.’ And once I heard that, I just knew it was her because, I mean, Norfolk Island, two young women aren’t going to go missing in one day,” she said in a 2010 documentary.
Easter Sunday 2002 would become a defining day in the story of Norfolk Island — the place already steeped in history had a new dark chapter.
Ahead of the inquest into her death, Janelle’s father Ron Patton told the ABC Norfolk Island “was Janelle’s paradise”.
“Norfolk Island was a lifestyle that she enjoyed. She enjoyed the work, she enjoyed the people,” he said.
The last time Janelle was seen alive was the morning of Easter Sunday, when she was out for her daily walk around the island.
Hours later her body was found at a picnic spot.
The body of Janelle Patton was found at a grassy reserve on Norfolk island in March 2002.(ABC TV)
Janelle Patton was killed with shocking brutality.
She sustained 64 separate injuries, including being beaten by a blunt object and repeatedly stabbed.
A judge wrote that Ms Patton’s “injuries showed that she had fought desperately to save herself”.
There was no obvious motive behind the murder, a fact that would confound police and go on to become a wrinkle in the investigation that curious observers could never quite get over.
Heavy rain on the day of the murder washed away most of the physical evidence, but police found a partial print and then conducted a mass screening of the island’s residents.
Some on the island refused to take part.
Janelle had been on the island for more than two years before she was killed.
And in the years-long investigation and coronial inquest that followed, her relationships and the inner-most thoughts about life on the island documented in her diaries would become public knowledge.
Norfolk Island is a volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific and became and Australian territory in the early 1900s. (ABC News: Emily Clark )
Everyone on Norfolk Island has a story about how they came to be there.
Most are living descendants of the original mutineers who took over HMS Bounty and sent Lieutenant William Bligh adrift in the South Pacific.
The mutineers led by Fletcher Christian, as well as their Tahitian wives, established a community on Pitcairn Island, but they quickly outgrew it.
Norfolk Island had been a penal colony — widely documented as the island’s first dark chapter.
The convicts there served life sentences, most dying in the place that came to be known as the Hell of the Pacific.
Near the historical town of Kingston, the ruins of the penal colony that was once on Norfolk Island can be seen. (ABC News: Emily Clark )
In 1855, the last convicts were sent to Tasmania and Queen Victoria granted Fletcher Christian’s descendants and the Pitcairners the right to settle on Norfolk Island.
And in 1914, the island became an Australian territory, even though the fight for self-determination continues today.
When detectives from the Australian Federal Police were flown over from the mainland to investigate the murder of Janelle Patton, they were not treated to the same hospitality Norfolk Island now sells itself on.
Detective Bob Peters would later say: “I felt like a fish out of water. It was just a totally foreign environment to us.”
Diary airs Norfolk’s dirty laundry
Police who travelled to Norfolk Island to investigate the murder of Janelle Patton repeatedly called on the local community for assistance and information. (ABC News)
The investigating officers had a list of everyone who was on Norfolk Island the day Ms Patton was killed.
Somewhere among the names was that of the killer.
It was a list of 2,271 people and detectives stared at it, willing a lead to emerge.
But the people of Norfolk Island have little reason to trust authority figures from the mainland, and knowing the killer was among them, the community closed its doors, drew its curtains.
The AFP wrote to 1,000 Norfolk Island residents — of which there were 1,500 in total — asking for them to submit their fingerprints to a database.
Police hoped they could find a match for a partial print that had been found on the piece of plastic Ms Patton’s body was found in.
The chief minister at the time said the fingerprint drive brought a sense of relief, and that it could help to dispel some of the rumours and finger-pointing that had taken hold in the months following the murder.
But by 2004, there was no fingerprint match and no prime suspect and so an inquest was held.
Details from Janelle Patton’s diary were read out during an inquest into her unsolved murder in 2006. (ABC TV)
It was here that Janelle Patton’s private diary entries were read in open court and the island’s residents would learn that 16 of them were on a list of possible suspects.
When McNeill was eventually convicted, reports from the time note a cloud of suspicion that had been hanging over the entire island was lifted.
Because in the end, it was an outsider who was convicted of the first murder in Norfolk Island’s modern history.
Fingerprints, DNA lead to an arrest
Of the physical evidence police did have to work with, the piece of black plastic that Janelle’s body was found in became very important.
It was subject to forensic examination and 10 fingerprints or partial prints were found on it.
Police had hoped for a match or two from the public fingerprint drive and there was one local builder who flagged, but was later dismissed as a suspect.
Years passed and investigators kept working as retirement age arrived, determined to stay on the job until Janelle’s family had answers and the young woman who had come to Norfolk Island for a better life had justice.
Janelle Patton’s murder was the first on the island since it had been a penal colony more than 150 years earlier. (AFP PHOTO, Lawrence BARTLETT: AFP)
It was in 2004 that they would discover they had a fingerprint match tucked away in their files all along.
Coincidentally, in 2002 and not long after Janelle’s murder, then-Norfolk Island resident and New Zealand national Glenn McNeill had been brought in for questioning over a burglary.
His fingerprints were taken and put on file, and he was asked if police could also collect DNA evidence as part of their murder investigation.
According to court documents, McNeill “agreed to all requests and signed a consent form”.
“The consent form recorded that his DNA ‘will not be used in evidence’.”
At the time, a match could not be made, but when detectives took another look in 2004 they caught a break.
Their forensics team confirmed two of the fingerprints on the sheet of black plastic belonged to McNeill and, even though he’d moved off Norfolk Island, they set about finding more evidence from his time there.
McNeill had abandoned his white Honda Civic and when police caught up with it, they discovered an evidence goldmine inside.
“Police carried out forensic analysis on the Honda Civic which revealed that the glass particles found upon the deceased’s body were from a similar source to glass particles located in the boot of the Honda Civic,” court documents noted.[1]
“Human hairs were also discovered in the boot, a number of which were sent to the United States for mitochondrial DNA testing. One of the hair samples was found to have a full mitochondrial DNA profile and two others having a partial mitochondrial DNA profile of the deceased.”
Glenn McNeill was arrested after DNA evidence led to a breakthrough in the case. (AFP: Lawrence Bartlett )
Police had their man and obtained a warrant for the arrest and extradition of McNeill from New Zealand.
When he was in custody, McNeill confessed, saying: “It was just an accident.”
“I was just driving along the road and I dropped my smokes. I bent down to pick them up and hit her.
At first I thought I’d hit a cow or a dog. I got out and saw that she was under the car and I panicked,” he told police at the time.
According to McNeill’s original confession, he put Ms Patton’s body in the boot of his car and then later, inflicted stab wounds to “make sure” she had died, wrapped her body in plastic, drove to the picnic area at Cockpit Reserve and left her in the rain.
Four years after Janelle Patton’s violent death, detectives listened as their main suspect confessed to the crime.
McNeill later changed tack and pleaded not guilty, and so the case returned to Norfolk Island for a five-week trail, in which all jurors found the accused guilty of killing Janelle Patton.[2]
Court documents from sentencing note that it was commonly accepted that his original confession had not been “wholly truthful”.
McNeill’s account “could not be reconciled with the nature and extent of the injuries” Ms Patton had suffered, something that left open the door for theories as to what really happened that day.
True crime enthusiasts take the case
The lack of motive always left people wondering and when American network NBC aired a Dateline Special they called Cracked: The Case of Janelle Patton in 2010, the whodunnit entered a new era.
The NBC special included an interview with McNeill’s girlfriend at the time of filming, Shelley Hooper, who told a new story.
Ms Hooper alleged Ms Patton was actually killed by a drug-dealing couple who forced McNeill into disposing of her body.
Neither Hooper nor McNeill offered any evidence of this claim. Police called it a “desperate act”.
It wasn’t until 2011 when New Zealand filmmaker Bryan Bruce released a documentary on the case that police took another look.
Bruce presented the same theory as to McNeill’s involvement, as well as what he described as new evidence.
From inside prison, McNeill issued a statement saying he had been asked to dispose of the body by a couple who threatened his girlfriend.
McNeill also claimed that he had used surgical gloves when he was wrapping the body and he had buried them near his home on Norfolk Island.
The AFP was handed the statement and did send officers to McNeill’s Norfolk Island home to search the gardens, but they reportedly found no new evidence and the case stayed closed.
In an interview with documentary maker Bruce, McNeill named the couple and phone records established he did have a connection to them in the weeks before and after the murder.
Among other sticking points raised by true crime fanatics, is the issue of DNA found on Janelle’s body.
Most notably, the DNA of an unidentified woman.
In the years since, Norfolk Island’s only modern murder case has bounced around true crime podcasts and YouTube channels, under the headlines “who really killed Janelle Patton” and “murder unsolved”.
The case is now more than 20 years old, but still the next generation of true crime content creators have latched onto it, offering amateur understandings of forensic science and increasingly wild theories about who had a reason to harm Janelle Patton.
The murder of Janelle Patton has become a case pored over by true crime fanatics and content creators. (YouTube: @BellaFiori)
The questions over McNeill’s motive have never gone away and as he approaches release, one of his lawyers maintains he should never have been convicted of murder all those years ago.
John Brown is based on Norfolk Island and was part of the team representing McNeill.
He told the ABC there were “quite a few” inconsistencies with the prosecution’s case.
“One was that the only DNA found on the deceased person was female,” he said.
“And there’s no way he could have put female DNA on the deceased person that was one of the things, but there were a number.”
Peter Garling — who also represented McNeill, but is now a judge on the Supreme Court of New South Wales — opened his defence at the time by claiming a woman had killed Ms Patton in a frenzy of “jealousy, rage, anger, revenge”.
The Norfolk Island jury didn’t buy that story, nor did any of the appeal court judges and McNeill was sentenced to 24 years in prison, with the possibility of release after serving 18 years.[3]
The shorter term will expire at the start of February next year.
As a convicted murderer and New Zealander, it is unlikely McNeill would have been allowed to live in the Australian community after serving his full sentence, but he is also unlikely to want to.
He had two small children when he went to prison 18 years ago and when the ABC approached the McNeill family in New Zealand, they said it was his priority to be near them.
The Patton family did not wish to comment on McNeill’s release, but when the sentence was originally handed down, they told the ABC they would have liked to see him spend more of his life in prison.
“We are Janelle’s parents and I don’t think any parent would be satisfied with any length of time, we’re just glad he was convicted of the crime and that he has been sentenced to a fairly lengthy time in jail,” Carolyn Patton said.
References
- ^ court documents noted. (www8.austlii.edu.au)
- ^ in which all jurors found the accused guilty of killing Janelle Patton. (www.abc.net.au)
- ^ McNeill was sentenced to 24 years in prison, with the possibility of release after serving 18 years. (www.abc.net.au)