Three cars lurked in Balga’s bushland the night a woman was murdered

John Napier-Winch remembers in vivid detail a late evening in October, 1974.

He and his wife had been driving home from their parents house in Girrawheen about midnight with their sleeping children, through the backstreets of Balga.

Napier-Winch remembers how still and eerie it was when he slowed his car to a crawl on the dimly lit Balga Avenue and saw a car parked near the bushland.

The car stood out on the dark street, with all four doors ajar and its interior lit up.

“I remember ... because it was parked in a funny place,” Napier-Winch told this masthead.

The spot on Balga Avenue had no houses bordering it, and was practically enveloped in bush. There were no driveways, and the nearest sign of life at midnight would have been the nearby Malthouse Tavern.

“The doors were open, and the lights were on … but there was no one around,” Napier-Winch said.

His first thought was someone had crashed their car and gone to get help. But a quick look around revealed there was no damage to the exterior at all, and it appeared to be running fine. The odd thing, Napier-Winch said, was that no one was there.

It was only days later he realised what he and his family may have just stumbled across.

This week, WAtoday has brought you the story of Gwenneth Graham’s murder, which remains unsolved after five decades. The first two parts of this series were published on Monday and Wednesday. This is part three.

The missing window

Gwenneth Graham was murdered in September 1974.

She was last seen at the Malthouse Tavern in Balga, the evening before the WAFL grand final.

A bartender called a taxi for her, but it’s not known whether she ever got in, accepted a lift or attempted to walk to her house which was about two kilometres away. She never made it home.

Gwen was found murdered in Balga’s bushland nine days later, inexpertly concealed under some leaf litter and an old refrigerator. She had been bashed, strangled and sexually assaulted.

Napier-Winch remembers reading the paper the day after her body had been found, and realising he and his family had likely only been metres from the dead mother-of-two.

“We thought, ‘That’s the same location we saw the car’,” he said.

“We ran to the police, and they came out [to the house], and I described to them the exact make and year of that car.”

More than 50 years on, Napier-Winch and his wife find it difficult to place when exactly they had come across the car parked on Balga Avenue, but place it only days before Graham’s body was discovered.

As an avid car fan, Napier-Winch was able to recall the vehicle down to minute details – it was a Ford Valiant, he said, with a swapped-out boot lid that appeared to be chrome. It had a spoiler at the rear that didn’t match the rest of its body.

“It means one of two things – they changed the boot, or they just put on a fancy chrome lid that came off another model,” he said.

“We gave police all the details, but we don’t know what they did with it.”

Muddying the waters

Identifying the cars became a primary focus of detectives, particularly due to the last sighting of Graham taking place in a pub’s carpark.

Police released details of a number of cars and implored their drivers to come forward so they could eliminate them from the investigation, and ended up going through about 4000 separate vehicles.

However, three went unclaimed.

They included a Holden station wagon and two separate Valiants that had been seen in the time frame narrowed down by police: between 11.30pm, when Gwen was last seen, and 10am the next day when locals remembered seeing some discarded shoes on Redcliffe Avenue.

For officers, it was tough sorting out fact from distraction.

The Valiants

There were reports relating to two Valiants that had been seen in the Balga area on the night of Graham’s murder.

A 16-year-old boy said he heard the voices of a man and woman coming from a green sedan parked on Balga Avenue around 11.30pm.

The witness told police at the time he heard the man demand a “perverted sex act” from the woman, and “threats to kill if the other person did not do as he asked”.

Witnesses said they also saw a car of the same make but in a light colour parked on the verge of Balga Avenue about the 11.40pm.

In an account that matches the one Napier-Winch gave in 2025, witnesses said they too came across the car parked up near the bush with all its interior lights on – but there was no driver.

The witnesses said they drove past again about half an hour later, and saw a man get into the car and slide across the front bench seat towards the driver’s side.

The man looked to be aged between 28 and 35, about 5′10 with a thin build, and was in a light-coloured, long-sleeved shirt with medium-length curly, dark hair. It would later emerge the car was seen extremely close to where Graham’s body was eventually found.

On interrogating the statements, police were unable to rule either vehicle in or out and neither car nor driver were ever located.

Teen comes forward

However, it wasn’t long before one car emerged as an interest to detectives.

A WA police gazette from 1974 recalled what a witness told officers about what he saw in Balga on the evening of September 27.

“About 11.30pm a 15-year-old youth observed a white woman being forced into the front passenger seat of a 1964 model (Holden) station sedan, bluish/green colour, with a white top. The vehicle may have a roof rack, but this is not certain,” it reads.

While this was set out in the gazette, a vintage car expert told this masthead the year was likely inaccurate, given the Holden model identified was only built from February 1965 to April 1966, making it unlikely it was a 1964 car.

“The youth described the person who pushed the woman into this vehicle as a part Aboriginal man about 5ft 8in to 5ft 9in, stocky build, black hair, wearing a white shirt with sleeves rolled up and dark trousers,” the police gazette read.

“His age is not known but he has an untidy appearance. He then hurried around the front of the car, entered the vehicle and drove off in the direction of Balga Avenue.”

The car was again spotted just about 1am the next morning, near where Graham’s body was found.

But neither the driver nor the car were never located.

A taxi driver’s account

Police experienced a further headache when a taxi driver came forward and told them he had picked up a “part-Aboriginal man” and a woman matching Graham’s description from the Malthouse Tavern on the night of September 27.

The driver said he had been parked at the taxi rank outside the pub when a man approached him and got in the passenger seat.

The driver described his passenger as a “casually dressed” and “well-spoken”, and claimed he directed him towards a woman who appeared drunk, sitting nearby behind the local service station.

The driver said the woman claimed to have hurt her ankle – he said he wasn’t sure if she was feigning or if was a real injury – and accepted a lift.

He said she was carrying two bottles of beer, and was wearing a white cardigan and a skirt when he dropped them at a house in Balga.

While he was unable to tell police which house he took them to, he said he did remember the man pulling the woman from the car and the exact fare he paid.

As detectives sought to check, verify and exclude all the claims surrounding the cars that evening, sorting fact from fiction was proving difficult.

“Extensive enquiries have failed to trace those vehicles or the persons referred to,” the police gazette said.

One thing police knew for sure is that Graham was not en route to her house when she left the pub that night.

Her home on Felpham Avenue was in the opposite direction of where her body had been found, making it more and more likely she had been in a car before her death.

But with all the car sightings seemingly leading to dead ends, detectives had to ask other questions. Had she noticed mid-drive they were not going in the direction of her house? Had she said something? What about the reports she got in an argument the night of her murder?

And why was her murder so similar to one that happened months earlier a few kilometres away?

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.