“We put it back in the hole which this person dug, and we covered it up, and then we took off. We never went back over there ever again.”
The man said he would frequent the ambulance station to speak to officer Norm Pearson, and one officer “stood out” with red hair and a moustache. He went to the station the day after being at the gully “to see if this person was the same person I’d seen on the golf course”.
John Bowie was arrested in 2019 and charged with Roxlyn Bowie’s murder.Credit:AAP
“It was Norm Pearson and Mr Bowie,” he said, adding that he “didn’t know his name” at the time.
“I spoke to Norm, and who should be standing right next to me? [It] was the same person … it was the red-headed ambulance officer who I’d seen the day before in the gully.”
He said he knew only one red-headed person in town and did not see the officer again after that day.
The court heard he visited the site with police in August this year and it “didn’t look like a gully, it was a lot flatter”. He said that, in the 40 years since, “about 30 floods” would have passed through.
In his opening address, Crown prosecutor Alex Morris said: “The Crown case is that [the two boys] had seen Mr Bowie bury some of the clothes Roxlyn was wearing at the time he killed her.”
Under cross-examination from defence barrister Winston Terracini, SC, the man said he had called Crime Stoppers in 2019 after seeing Bowie on TV.
He denied any knowledge of a $1 million police reward and dismissed the suggestion he had only come forward to make a quick buck.
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He conceded his statement did not include a reference to the sighting being in 1982 but told the court he was born in 1970 and he knew “from fact I was 12”.
In response to Terracini’s suggestion he was a liar, the man replied, “No, I’m not.”
Roxlyn and John Bowie’s daughter, Brenda Boyd, told the court last week that her father had “bright red hair and a bright red moustache”. She said he would go fishing, hunting and had played golf.
Family friend Brian Knight gave evidence about a call he and his wife received from Bowie in 1982 “saying something like, ‘Roxlyn’s bolted.’”
He was asked by Bowie to collect the children from Walgett and drive them to their grandparents in Sydney.
Asked by the prosecutor about the accused’s hair colour, Knight said, “historically, it’s been fiery red hair”.
The defence has said that, while Bowie was not a “perfect fellow”, he did not kill his wife.
The trial before Justice Dina Yehia continues.
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