Now, she’s released a tell-all book, Mima: A case of abduction, rape and murder in which Shirley tells this deeply personal story, from the events leading up to Mima’s abduction, the re-evaluation of key evidence, the unravelling of lies, the exposing of bungles, and finally, the naming of Mima’s killer.
Below she shares an exclusive edited extract from this uniquely gripping tale of dogged persistence…
THURSDAY, 9TH MARCH, 1967
I work alone in our office on the third floor of the CREB [Capricornia Regional Electricity Board] building but receive no call from Mima later in the day. I make alternate transport plans for Helen, one of the staff, to the drive-in, since Mima was intending to borrow her brother’s new ute and pick her up on the way.
Very few women have cars, but, with a small inheritance from a wealthy great uncle, I own an ex-taxi that’s still going strong after hundreds of thousands of miles of service.
It takes only ten or fifteen minutes to drive home from the office and change. I’m about to leave at 5.30 when Isobel phones.
“Have you heard from Mima?”
When I tell her I haven’t she says, “I’m at Calliope.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I’m with Arthur. Will you come and pick me up?”
She doesn’t exactly answer my question but I have no time to pursue her reason for being near Gladstone, south of Rockhampton, instead of south-west at Biloela. She says Mima should have picked her up by then, but hasn’t shown.
I have actually collected her once before at Calliope on a Saturday afternoon, but decline this time and rush off to the drive-in, leaving her to sort it out.
While we eat our unhealthy deep-fried, pre-ordered food, we hypothesise about what might have held Mima up: flat tyre, broken windscreen, smashing into kangaroos at dusk – all are possibilities since they’ve happened to us before.
9TH MARCH, 1967
I arrive home that night, Thursday 9th March, 1967, around 11 pm. My mother is still up.
“Mima’s mother rang. She wants you to call. Mima hasn’t arrived home.” Our parents know each other. I look at my mother and frown. “It’s late.”
She passes me the handset of the black Bakelite phone and I dial Mima’s four digit number. Mrs McKim-Hill answers and asks me if I know where Mima might be. I can hear Isobel in the background, and the phone is passed to her. She tries to convince us that Mima is with her new boyfriend, Chris Finkel.
That doesn’t ring true, since Mima has lamented that she doesn’t know Chris’ address, or where he works in Theodore.
She’s only recently broken up, on her parents’ orders, with her long-standing love, David Jealous, since she is Protestant and he is Catholic.
I go to bed but don’t sleep. It’s summer-time here in the Tropics. The double doors onto the veranda are open along with the air-vent above, but in my pink baby-doll pyjamas and a light cotton sheet on, it’s still hot and humid. My brain is in overdrive.
Around 1.00 am Isobel phones. “We need to go and look for Mima. We especially need to find the car. I can explain if Mima’s not at work in the morning but I can’t explain a missing car.” She collects me in her two-tone green station wagon.
As we drive southward along Queensland’s Number One Bruce Highway and past Mima’s house at 115 Gladstone Road, she relates the day’s events. The trip destination changed because it looked as though ANA airlines’ staff might be going on strike, so Arthur drove up from Scarness, and Mima and Isobel drove down to Calliope, near Gladstone, to meet him.
Mima dropped her where Arthur was waiting in his late-model brown Dodge Phoenix just south of the Crossroads. Mima was then left to her own devices before needing to pick Isobel up again in Calliope at 4.30, as arranged. But Mima didn’t arrive. Isobel waited there till 7.30, when it was dark, under a streetlight outside a shop.
“Then she drove straight past me,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it. She didn’t even look at me. I moved towards the road waving like mad. I even got Arthur to follow her, but she had too much of a start.”
Arthur was eventually forced to drive Isobel back to Rockhampton.
After Isobel and I drive south for about ten miles looking unsuccessfully for Mima and the CREB car, I return home and wake Mum and Dad as I climb onto their bed. They turn on a reading lamp and sit up.
It’s after 2 am. We’re concerned and disturbed. I finally go back to bed, but toss and turn till the phone rings again around 3.30 am.
Isobel says that while Arthur was driving back to Scarness he found the CREB station wagon on a rough dirt detour section of the new Gladstone bypass road that’s under construction.
Mima: A case of abduction, rape and murder (Short Stop Press, $34.99, from August 1, 2016)
