http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juanita_Nielsen


Juanita Nielsen
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Juanita Nielsen (1937 – ?) was an Australian publisher, heiress to the Mark Foys retail fortune, who was allegedly kidnapped and murdered on 4 July 1975. Nielsen was the publisher of NOW, an alternative newspaper in the Sydney suburb of Kings Cross, New South Wales, where she lived, and she was involved in a campaign against a proposed development project in the suburb. A coronial inquest determined that Nielsen had been murdered, and although the case has never been officially solved, it is widely believed that Nielsen was murdered by agents of the developers. The circumstances of her disappearance were fictionalised in the films Heatwave (1982) and The Killing of Angel Street (1981).


[edit]
Victoria Point development
In the early 1970s, property developer Frank Theeman planned to construct a AUD 40 million apartment complex in Kings Cross. Theeman, who had initially made his fortune in lingerie, moved into property development in 1972 after he sold his Osti company to Dunlop for AU$3.5 million.

The plan involved evicting dozens of people from their houses in Victoria Street, an area which the National Trust compared to Montmartre in Paris, France. Built along a steep sandstone escarpment east of the city centre and lined with rows of large 19th-century terrace houses, Victoria St had commanding views of the city, the harbour and The Domain.

The houses were to be demolished and replaced with three high-rise apartment towers. The local community campaigned against the development, and successfully lobbied the Builders Labourers' Federation (BLF) to impose a green ban on the site in 1972. Supported by the BLF, the residents of Victoria Street, including Nielsen, refused to leave their houses. Nielsen used her newspaper, NOW, to publicise the issue.

In July 1973, resident Arthur King was kidnapped by two unidentified men, who put him in the boot of their car. King was then driven to a motel on the South Coast and held for three days before being released under threat of death. King quit as the head of the residents' action group, and immediately moved out of Kings Cross. It was suspected, though never proved, that the men had been hired by Theeman.

Other residents of the street were regularly harassed by men employed by Theeman, as he attempted to have them evicted from their houses. The men were led by Frederick Krahe, a former detective with the New South Wales Police who had been sacked amidst allegations of organising bank robberies and murdering Sydney crime figures. Police officers did not intervene as Krahe's men worked. Residents would squat in each others houses so that no house was left unattended. On one occasion, when merchant seaman and jazz musician Mick Fowler returned from a period working at sea, he found that his house had been broken into, and all of his belongings taken. Fowler fought a protracted court battle to stay in his home but the strain of the struggle reputedly led to his early death in 1979, aged 50.

Eventually the green ban was broken in 1974 when the conservative federal leadership of the BLF, under pressure from New South Wales politicians, dismissed the leaders of the New South Wales branch, and replaced them with more conservative people. Nielsen and the residents were left as the only significant opposition to Theeman. Nielsen then convinced the Water Board Union to impose their own green ban. By early 1975, Theeman's company had spent about AUD 6 million (about AUD 36 million in 2005 money) purchasing property in Kings Cross, and interest payments on loans were costing about AUD 3,000 a day.

[edit]
Disappearance
On 4 July 1975, Nielsen went to the Carousel Club in Kings Cross in order to discuss advertising for the club in Nielsen's newspaper, Now. She had been invited there by Edward Trigg, an employee of the club. The club was one of a number of bars and strp clubs owned by Abe Saffron, who is alleged to have been a major figure in Sydney organised crime, and it was managed by James Anderson, who, as a later investigation revealed, owed AUD 260,000 (about AUD 1.5 million in 2005 money) to Frank Theeman.

Before June 1975 the Carousel had no connection with Juanita or NOW, but that month Anderson initiated contact by sending Nielsen an invitation to attend a press night at the club on June 13. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, she would not normally have been invited because NOW did not give free publicity to commercial ventures. In the event, Juanita did not attend and both Crawford and Trigg have claimed that Anderson was "furious" about her non-appearance.

A few days later Trigg instructed the Carousel's PR man Lloyd Marshall to invite Juanita to a meeting at the Camperdown Travelodge, supposedly to discuss advertising related to landscaping. but Nielsen's then boyfriend later recounted that Juanita became suspicious and refused to attend.

On June 30, four days before the Carousel appointment, Trigg and another man, Carousel barman Shayne Martin-Simmonds, called at Juanita's house on the pretext of inquiring about advertising the Carousel's businessmen's lunches in NOW. It was later claimed that Trigg and Martin-Simmonds intended to seize Juanita when she opened the door, but their plan was foiled when her friend David Farrell answered the door instead. The two men played out their cover story, but Nielsen was listening in an adjoining room and after they left she complimented Farrell on his handling of the query, teasing him by saying she might send him out on the road to sell advertising in NOW.

Interviewed by police on 6 November 1977, Martin-Simmonds confirmed that the advertising story was a ruse and that their actual intention was to kidnap Juanita if she was alone and take her to see "people who wanted to talk to her". He said that he and Trigg intended to:

"... Just grab her arms and stop her calling out, no real rough stuff, no gangster stuff. We thought that just two guys telling her to come would be enough to make her think if she didn't come she might get hurt ... we talked about when she came into the room, one of us would be standing there and the other one would come up behind her and just quietly grab her by the arms and maybe put a hand over her mouth or a pillowslip over the head."
According to her friend David Farrell, Juanita was by then seriously concerned that her activism was putting her in danger. She mentioned her fears to Farrell about two weeks before her disappearance and she arranged to keep him regularly informed of her whereabouts.

Carousel receptionist Loretta Crawford claims that Trigg instructed her to call Juanita on the night on Thursday July 3 to set up a meeting at the club for the following morning. Crawford now claims that she knew that the advertising story was "bullshit", since the club did not advertise in "local rags", that she was doubtful that Juanita would attend, and that she was surprised that Juanita kept the appointment.

At 10:30am on Friday 4 July, Juanita telephoned David Farrell to tell him that she was running late for the meeting. According to Crawford, when Juanita arrived she proceed to the landing on the first floor where Crawford's reception desk was located. Crawford offered her a seat and a cup of coffee, after Juanita remarked that she had had a "hard night" (i.e. she was hung over), but that Juanita didn't get to drink the coffee because Trigg arrived. Crawford said that she noted that he was on time, which she thought unusual since he was often late. He and Juanita exchanged greetings on the landing and went upstairs to Trigg's office.

At this point in her account, given to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2001, Crawford made a new claim -- that she then made a phone call to Jim Anderson at his home in Vaucluse, told him that Juanita had arrived and that he was "quite pleased" by the news. Crawford was adamant that she was in no doubt whatsoever that Anderson was at his home in Vaucluse -- not in Surfer's Paradise, as he has always claimed.

In statements given to police, Trigg and Crawford said that Nielsen had left the club alone, although in 1976 Crawford changed her story to say that Nielsen and Trigg left together. Nielsen was not seen again. Her handbag and other effects were discovered on 12 July, abandoned near a freeway in Sydney's western suburbs.

New Zealand born transvestite Monet King (who was then called Marilyn King), the former boyfriend of Trigg, told one journalist that Trigg had returned home on 4 July with blood on his clothes. A piece of paper in his pocket, which was later used by police as evidence before the coronial inquest, also had blood on it. This was supposedly a receipt signed by Nielsen for advertising money paid by Trigg. King said that Trigg threw out the shirt, and the portion of the paper with blood on it. King never gave testimony to the police or the coronial inquiry.

In late 1977, Trigg and two other employees at the Carousel Club were arrested and charged with conspiring to kidnap Nielsen. Trigg was imprisoned for three years, one other man was imprisoned for two years and the third was acquitted. However, it was still unclear what had actually happened to Nielsen. After the death of James Anderson in 2003, Crawford changed her story again. She claimed that she had seen Nielsen's body in the storeroom below the club, with Trigg and two other men standing over her. She saw that one of the men was holding a gun, and Nielsen's body had a small bullet wound.

Nielsen's body has never been found.

The obvious motive for Nielsen's presumed murder is her oppostion to the Victoria St development. However there have also been claims that she was working on an exposé about vice, corruption and illegal gambling in the Cross. Her then boyfriend John Glebe gave evidence that Juanita had told him about receiving telephone threats and he also testified that she carried cassette tapes in her handbag. According to Glebe, Juanita had told him that the tapes could "blow the top off" an issue she was working on. An article in The Bulletin in 2005 ran claims by journalist Barry Ward that Juanita had been given dossiers on "prominent Sydney identities" by private detective Allan Honeysett, and speculated that these documents would -- reputedly -- have exposed the principals involved in Sydney's illegal gaming industry.

[edit]
Investigation
A coronial inquiry with a jury was held in 1983, which determined that Nielsen had probably been killed, although there was not enough evidence to show how she died or who killed her. The inquest did note that police corruption may have crippled the investigation into her death at the time.

A Joint Committee of the Parliament of Australia was formed in 1994 to further investigate her disappearance. It also concluded that corruption impeded the police investigation.

[edit]
Suspects
Although it has not been proved who killed Nielsen, there were several strong suspects.

Frank Theeman, the property developer, was considered by a number of journalists to be the key suspect in the planning of Nielsen's death. The costs and delays to his development offer a highly plausible motive for Theeman wanting to get Nielsen 'out of the way', although no direct evidence has been uncovered conclusively linking Theeman to the presumed murder.
James Anderson has long been considered a prime suspect, although he protested his innocence right up until his death in 2003. Anderson's circumstantial connections to the case are wide and varied -- he owed a considerable sum of money to Theeman; he had business links to both Theeman and Theeman's "drug troubled" son, and he was a known associate and business colleague of all three men involved in Juanita's kidnapping. Anderson always insisted that he was in Surfer's Paradise with another person on the day of Nielsen's disappearance, and that he flew to there with another man on July 4 and stayed for about three days in a room booked in his wife's name at the Chevron Hotel. However, Loretta Crawford claims that Anderson was at his home in the eastern Sydney suburb of Vaucluse that day and that she spoke to him by 'phone. Police did not fully investigate Anderson's alibi, and they only determined that his car, which was left at Sydney Airport, had received two parking tickets. Police reportedly failed to contact the man that Anderson claimed had accompanied him to Surfers, nor did they verify whether Anderson actually flew there on that day or checked into the hotel.
Det. Sgt Frederick Krahe, the former detective, has been named on several occasions by investigative journalists and experts on the case as Juanita's killer. He was a regular customer at the Venus Room, a nightclub owned by Abe Saffron, who also owned the Carousel Club, and it has been repeatedly alleged that Krahe organised the "heavies" hired by the developers to intimidate stubborn residents and force them out. The 1994 parliamentary Joint Committee identified Anderson and Krahe as significant suspects in Nielsen's disappearance. Alleged hit-man James Bazely named Krahe as the killer of Griffith anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay, and it has also been claimed that another allegedly corrupt detective, who was reported to have killed himself with his service pistol in the toilets at police headquarters, had in fact been executed by Krahe.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1046350.htm

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT

LOCATION: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1046350.htm

Broadcast: 16/02/2004

The Juanita Nielsen mystery
Reporter: Emma Alberici


KERRY O'BRIEN: The story of Juanita Nielsen is one of this country's most baffling mysteries.

She was the grand daughter of department store tycoon Mark Foy who became a central figure in the showdown between residents and developers over one of Sydney's most historic suburbs.

It's nearly 30 years since the Kings Cross newspaper publisher and anti-development campaigner disappeared after meeting the manager of a local nightclub to discuss advertising.

Two of the men at that meeting were subsequently convicted of conspiracy to abduct Juanita Nielsen.

While a coronial inquest did conclude she had been murdered, the crime remains unsolved.

Now a new book has unearthed fresh leads on this crime.

Emma Alberici reports.

LORETTA CRAWFORD, WITNESS: I knew she wasn't being invited there to talk about advertising.

I mean, I was too involved in what was going on to know that that was just a well just a load of garbage, and I honestly did not think she'd turn up.

EMMA ALBERICI: But Juanita Nielsen did show up at the Carousel nightclub on that morning 29 years ago ostensibly to talk to the management about advertising in her local newspaper Now.

She has never been seen since.

Loretta Crawford was the 27-year-old transsexual receptionist who greeted her at the Carousel and later witnessed what she has until now refused to speak publicly about.

LORETTA CRAWFORD: It played on my conscience for a lot of years and it has done to this day.

EMMA ALBERICI: Loretta Crawford lied to police to protect her boss - this man, James McCartney Anderson.

Six months after his death, Loretta Crawford says she's now comfortable to tell her story.

Jim Anderson was not at the club to meet Juanita Nielsen on that July 4 morning in 1975.

That was left to his barman Shane Martin Simmonds and the night manager Eddie Trigg.

According to Loretta, there was also a third man there that day.

LORETTA CRAWFORD: They walked down the stairs.

When they were halfway down the stairs, that I could see from my office, Eddie came back and said: "If anyone asks, sweetheart, I didn't leave with her."

EMMA ALBERICI: What was it you really saw after she walked down the stairs?

LORETTA CRAWFORD: She'd been shot, downstairs.

EMMA ALBERICI: How do you know that?

LORETTA CRAWFORD: Because I saw her.

EMMA ALBERICI: What did you see exactly?

LORETTA CRAWFORD: As I sort of turned to go down the last stairs to the storeroom, she was laying there and this third person was standing there with a gun in his hand.

The bullet wound was only very, very tiny.

It was like, probably like a cigarette butt, the size of a cigarette butt, and there was like maybe a trickle of blood that I saw.

VOICE OF JUANITA NIELSEN: Everyone wanted to be a developer and a developer simply wants empty houses.

EMMA ALBERICI: The weight of evidence before the 1983 inquest jury suggested Juanita Nielsen, heard here on ABC radio just months before she vanished, was killed to silence the damaging campaign she was waging through her newspaper against the redevelopment of Victoria Street - an area the National Trust then described as the Montmartre of Sydney.

FILE FOOTAGE, FRANK THEEMAN, DEVELOPER: The final plan involves a great improvement for the street.

FILE FOOTAGE, POLICEMAN: You're going to endanger your own life, you're going to endanger the life of policemen.

EMMA ALBERICI: Disruptions caused by resident protests and union green bans cost Victoria Point, Frank Theeman's $40 million apartment project, $3 million.

For two years, the Builders Labourers Federation refused to tear down the old terraces and put up the new complex.

With pressure from government, the green ban was lifted in 1975, but Frank Theeman had little time to celebrate.

Juanita Nielsen single-handedly convinced the Water Board Union to refuse work on the site and the delays continued.

With each day that passed, Victoria Point lost another $3,000.

MONET KING, WITNESS: He said to me that she didn't feel a thing.

And I said: "Oh, Eddie", I said: "Well, where is she?"

You know, he didn't answer me.

He said: "What you don't know won't hurt you."

EMMA ALBERICI: New Zealand's Auckland Harbour is a long way from the life Monet King knew as a glamorous 31-year-old transvestite in Sydney's seedy Kings Cross.

It was the 70s, and his name was Marilyn King.

He worked as a cocktail waitress at the Carousel nightclub.

Upon his return to New Zealand 20 years ago, he took up painting, became a born-again Christian and a community health worker.

But in all these year he has never forgotten his live-in boyfriend of 10 years, Eddie Trigg.

MONET KING: I said: "Well, what about that blood on your shirt?"

He took off his shirt to change it and there was a piece of paper, notepaper in the top pocket, and he said: "Oh, I'll need that.

Give that to me.

I'll need to show that to the police.

That's my alibi of why I had to see her".

EMMA ALBERICI: That piece of paper was later to become police exhibit eight, a receipt for $130 written by Juanita Nielsen supposedly in recognition of a deposit paid for advertising in her newspaper Now.

MONET KING: I said: "Oh, look, there's a bit of blood on it" and I said: "For goodness sake, what on earth's going on", so the piece of notepaper, instead of being the whole piece, was suddenly cut in half and the piece with her signature on was kept and the other bit with the spot of blood on it, like the spot of blood on his shirt, was cast out into the rubbish.

EMMA ALBERICI: Eight years after Juanita Nielsen's disappearance, Eddie Trigg was sentenced to three years in jail for conspiracy to abduct her.

His colleague from the Carousel, Shane Martin Simmonds, got just two years because he confessed to the crime.

He told police a story about trying to secure advertising in the Now newspaper was just a ruse.

The real intention of a visit to Juanita Nielsen's home in Victoria Street on June 30 was to kidnap her.

But on that day she wasn't alone and their plan was foiled.

PETER REES, AUTHOR, KILLING JUANITA: It's hard to believe that there could be two different plots going on at the same time that were not connected in this way.

After all, both Eddie and Shane were at the Carousel on the morning that Juanita went round to conduct a purported advertising deal which was later proved to be a ruse.

EMMA ALBERICI: For author Peter Rees, Juanita Nielsen's disappearance has become somewhat of an obsession.

He's been following the case since day one and believes his book, Killing Juanita, and the wealth of new information it contains could finally lead to a murder charge, something the coronial inquest, the longest in NSW history, was unable to achieve.

PETER REES: So far as the involvement of the third man is concerned - we don't know, we can't say for certain, that he fired the gun.

He was standing there with a gun in hand when Loretta Crawford walked into the storeroom.

EMMA ALBERICI: What Monet King, formerly Marilyn, reveals in our interview, he has never before told police.

Having previously denied being a witness, he now links Eddie Trigg to a sinister deed.

Monet King says for a month before Juanita's disappearance, he helped Eddie track her movements.

We caught up with Eddie, now 63-years-old, and living in Sydney.

He refused an on-camera interview, maintaining he has no idea what happened to Juanita Nielsen.

His girlfriend at the time believes he's lying.

MONET KING: And I said: "Well, thank goodness.

Is she all right?

Where is she?

Has she gone home?"

And he showed me his fist and it was swollen, dreadfully swollen, and he said: "If the police ask, if the police ask what happened, say that I hit you."

And I said: "Well".

EMMA ALBERICI: Juanita Nielsen wasn't the first anti-development campaigner to face intimidating tactics.

ARTHUR KING, ANTI-DEVELOPMENT CAMPAIGNER: I was asleep at the time, yeah.

Two guys came, one on either side of the door, opened the door, bundled me out, out here to Victoria Street.

We were away from Sydney for three days.

But a condition of my release was that I would take no further part in any anti-development activities in Victoria Street.

EMMA ALBERICI: For a time before his abduction, Arthur King was head of the Victoria Street residents action group, another thorn in the side of Frank Theeman's development plans.

LORETTA CRAWFORD: The entrance was actually those three whole doors.

There was the one entrance to the Carousel Cabaret.

There were three small stairs, then a landing, then two lots of stairs going up which would have led to my office, and after Eddie and Juanita had their meeting.

Then Juanita, Eddie and the third man came down the stairs.

Once they went to the stairs below my office where the grill was, that's where I heard a clang and I heard someone make the statement about trouble makers get what they deserve.

EMMA ALBERICI: The manager of the Carousel nightclub, Jim Anderson, was a close friend of property developer Frank Theeman and his drug-troubled son Tim.

The inquest heard that on Sunday May 25, 1975, just six weeks before Juanita Nielsen's appointment at the club, the Theeman's family company, FWT Investments, paid $25,000 to Jim Anderson.

Anderson claimed the cheque was an advance for a club bought here on Bondi Beach on behalf of Tim Theeman.

He told the jury he paid $23,000 to a local club owner.

But when questioned at the inquest, the club owner said he'd never received any money from Anderson or the Theemans.

So the question still remains - what was that $25,000 for?

PETER REES: That's very much the case.

EMMA ALBERICI: What do you suspect it was for?

PETER REES: I suspect the money was paid to remove Juanita Nielsen.

EMMA ALBERICI: Hit money?

PETER REES: Hit money indeed.

EMMA ALBERICI: Those close to Juanita Nielsen have all passed away and are resting here in the Foy-Smith family crypt.

A lone cross stands in the place she would have been buried had the 38-year-old's body ever been found.

Her nemesis, property developer Frank Theeman, died in 1989.

But the three men present on the morning of her last apparently fateful meeting are still alive.

Twenty nine years on, the project Juanita fought so desperately against now dominates the harbourside landscape.

LORETTA CRAWFORD: I felt guilty, I think, yeah.

Because I often wonder what would have happened if I would have sort of said something to her like: "Just go.

Just don't stay here". I just want the people who did this to be brought to justice.

KERRY O'BRIEN: And police have confirmed they'll follow up those fresh leads in the Nielsen case.

Emma Alberici.

http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/investigative/case2.asp

The Disappearance of Juanita Nielsen

It remains one of Australia's most enduring mysteries. On July 4, 1975 a wealthy heiress who had been at the forefront of a crusade against redevelopment of Victoria Street in Sydney's redlight Kings Cross district, went to an appointment at a Kings Cross nightclub - and then disappeared.

Her name was Juanita Nielsen.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, her disappearance still intrigues people around Australia. What nobody in the know doubts is that Juanita is dead and somebody murdered her.

A long Coronial Inquiry probed her disappearance. But the problem faced by investigators was that so many people had so many reasons for wanting her dead.

Her boyfriend John Glebe said in evidence to the Inquiry how Ms Nielsen had told him of telephone threats. He said she'd carried cassette tapes in her handbag which she had said could "blow the top off" an issue she was working on. Journalist Bob Bottom reports in his book "Connections - Crime Rackets and Networks of Influence Down-Under" [Sun Books. ISBN 0 7251 0491 0], that John Glebe was later threatened by an anonymous caller who said: "Juanita has been killed...it was an accident. Back off, or accidents can happen to other people."

Her last appointment before her disappearance was with a man called Edward Trigg, then a manager of the Carousel Nightclub in Kings Cross - a club owned by Abe Saffron and managed by James Anderson. She has never been seen since that meeting. Her black handbag and personal effects were found on a freeway in Western Sydney.

Two and a half years after she disappeared, Trigg and two others were arrested and charged with conspiring to abduct Nielsen. Trigg pleaded guilty and got three years jail. Bar man Shayne Martin-Simmonds was convicted in 1981 and got two years. A third man, Lloyd Marshall, then a PR man for the Carousel Nightclub, was acquitted.

But there has always been concern that the full story of the disappearance of Nielsen has never been told. The Coronial Inquiry heard how Juanita Nielsen was a thorn in the side for some crime bosses and developers. When Trigg was apprehended in the US by American Police he was quoted as having said: "It's all bloody politics, anyway....It's all about crooked cops, dirty politics and one big cover up. The guy who is benefitting from this is an alderman who made megabucks out of this."

More recently, the Bulletin magazine in 1995 ran claims by journalist Barry Ward that Nielsen was given dossiers on some of Sydney's unsavoury high rollers by a private detective called Allan Honeysett. The article speculated that with these documents Nielsen could have lifted the lid on the principals involved in Sydney's illegal gambling industry. It said Honeysett claimed that the documents were the reason why Nielsen was killed, because it seemed likely she was about to expose some big names in vice and illegal gambling.

The Bulletin story also interviewed two anonymous female staff who had been showgirls at the Carousel nightclub. They named three men who did the murder and the story went on to detail how the men who ordered the murder are still at large.

Do you know more about the Juanita Nielsen case?

email me or send me an Anonymous email.

The safest way to contact me if you have some really hot info is via snail mail. Address it to:

Ross Coulthart, Reporter
Sunday, Nine Network Australia,
P.O Box 27, Willoughby, NSW 2068 Australia
Telephone: (61.2) 9965 2470
Facsimile: (61.2) 9965 2487

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/02/1078191318068.html

Juanita Nielsen, casualty of ideological war
By Padraic P. McGuinness
March 3, 2004

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The mystery of the disappearance, and certain death, of Juanita Nielsen of Kings Cross in 1975 remains unsolved despite the publication of a new account of the circumstances.

Was Nielsen the first victim of urban developers (have there been any others?), of local thugs working for developers who exceeded their brief, or of anyone else? Did the police and the National Crime Authority have any culpability for a lack of zeal or incompetence in pursuing the matter?

Is there any chance of someone coming forward who can testify as to what actually happened?

In Killing Juanita, Canberra journalist Peter Rees, with the help of long-term collaborator Arthur King, has put together what is so far the best account of the whole issue. They think they know who murdered Nielsen, and quote a person who claims to have been a witness to the killing. They may be right, but their informants have yet to give new evidence either to police or in public.

King, who runs a small business in Sydney, has good reason for his deep interest in this case. It could have been him.

In July 1973 he was abducted from his flat in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, by a couple of thugs who shoved him into the boot of a car and held him for a couple of days in a motel somewhere on the South Coast. He was threatened about his part in the protests about redevelopment plans for Victoria Street and was in real fear for his life. Finally they let him go with further threats. Not surprisingly, his fright soon gave way to anger.

There is no doubt that there were criminals closely involved in the whole business.

One of the chief of them was the late James McCartney Anderson, who seems to have cleverly played along the police, and especially the NCA, by acting as an informant.

The police role was also curious, in that while the immediate investigators seem to have been straight, there was a curious lack of interest in higher circles. Anderson may not have been Nielsen's murderer, but he was certainly not far from it.

There is evidence that Anderson received money from Frank Theeman, the developer. But there is no other reason to suspect Theeman of culpability, except in encouraging Anderson and his friends in their threats and violence against the protesters.

Nielsen was essentially a loose cannon. She ran a little local rag largely as a hobby, initially, and it was mainly the accident of her connection with Victoria Street, where she had lived for some time as a child and where she at this time owned a house, which led to her involvement in the protests.

But by the time of her death she had become just one of a motley movement of protest by residents, joined by ideologues of various kinds and the leading figures of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLs), then headed by the now well-known figure, Jack Mundey.

It was the first alliance of note between the upper middle class (anarchists and communists) and the working class left. The reality was that neither Theeman, Anderson, nor Nielsen understood what was happening around them.

They were all caught up in the passions created by the youth movements of the 1960s and the opposition to the Vietnam War.

Most of the most vocal activists of Victoria Street were educated and middle class, and many were liberated feminists in their first flush of enthusiasm. Some became sexually involved with the working class BLs, who did not understand such women, and were, in effect, destroyed by them. So the BLs fell apart, and Norm Gallagher from Melbourne moved in to pick up the pieces.

The fight for Victoria Street was in fact only one battle in a much wider ideological movement. But many of those involved also had an interest in opposing development for personal motives - they liked the bohemian lifestyle of the Cross and the cheap rents, and suffered under the illusion that the growing population of Sydney had no better claim than they did as squatters, in name or effect.

Poor Juanita Nielsen may have known who killed her, but she never knew what did.

(Declaration of interest: King is a friend of many years' standing whom I believe to be entirely truthful. I had lived in Victoria Street some years before all this.)

ppmcg@ozemail.com.au

Juanita NIELSEN

Age when missing - 38 years

Last seen - 4th July 1975

Circumstances - Juanita Nielsen was a prominent Sydney newspaper publisher, anti-development campaigner and wealthy heiress who went to a 10:30am appointment at Kings Cross nightclub The Carousel and has not been seen since. Her disappearance is being treated as a homicide.

Juanita Nielsen was a wealthy heiress and local newspaper editor who had been at the forefront of a crusade against redevelopment of Victoria Street in Sydney's redlight Kings Cross district.

On July 4, 1975, she went to an appointment at a Kings Cross nightclub - and then disappeared.

A long Coronial Inquiry probed her disappearance. But the problem faced by investigators was that so many people had so many reasons for wanting her dead. Her boyfriend John Glebe said in evidence to the Inquiry how Ms Nielsen had told him of telephone threats. He said she'd carried cassette tapes in her handbag which she had said could "blow the top off" an issue she was working on. John Glebe was later threatened by an anonymous caller who said: "Juanita has been killed...it was an accident. Back off, or accidents can happen to other people."

Her last appointment before her disappearance was with a man called Edward Trigg, then a manager of the Carousel Nightclub in Kings Cross - a club owned by Abe Saffron and managed by James Anderson. She has never been seen since that meeting. Her black handbag and personal effects were found on a freeway in Western Sydney.

Two and a half years after she disappeared, Trigg and two others were arrested and charged with conspiring to abduct Nielsen. Trigg pleaded guilty and got three years jail. Barman Shayne Martin-Simmonds was convicted in 1981 and got two years. A third man, Lloyd Marshall, then a PR man for the Carousel Nightclub, was acquitted. But there has always been concern that the full story of the disappearance of Nielsen has never been told. The Coronial Inquiry heard how Juanita Nielsen was a thorn in the side for some crime bosses and developers.

The Nielsen case is still open and the investigation is active.

Juanita NIELSEN

Age when missing - 38 years

Last seen - 4th July 1975

Circumstances - Juanita Nielsen was a prominent Sydney newspaper publisher, anti-development campaigner and wealthy heiress who went to a 10:30am appointment at Kings Cross nightclub The Carousel and has not been seen since. Her disappearance is being treated as a homicide
http://www.supernerd.com.au/~glittercot/NSWfemaleCOLD.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juanita_Nielsen


Juanita Nielsen
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Juanita Nielsen (1937 – ?) was an Australian publisher, heiress to the Mark Foys retail fortune, who was allegedly kidnapped and murdered on 4 July 1975. Nielsen was the publisher of NOW, an alternative newspaper in the Sydney suburb of Kings Cross, New South Wales, where she lived, and she was involved in a campaign against a proposed development project in the suburb. A coronial inquest determined that Nielsen had been murdered, and although the case has never been officially solved, it is widely believed that Nielsen was murdered by agents of the developers. The circumstances of her disappearance were fictionalised in the films Heatwave (1982) and The Killing of Angel Street (1981).


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Victoria Point development
In the early 1970s, property developer Frank Theeman planned to construct a AUD 40 million apartment complex in Kings Cross. Theeman, who had initially made his fortune in lingerie, moved into property development in 1972 after he sold his Osti company to Dunlop for AU$3.5 million.

The plan involved evicting dozens of people from their houses in Victoria Street, an area which the National Trust compared to Montmartre in Paris, France. Built along a steep sandstone escarpment east of the city centre and lined with rows of large 19th-century terrace houses, Victoria St had commanding views of the city, the harbour and The Domain.

The houses were to be demolished and replaced with three high-rise apartment towers. The local community campaigned against the development, and successfully lobbied the Builders Labourers' Federation (BLF) to impose a green ban on the site in 1972. Supported by the BLF, the residents of Victoria Street, including Nielsen, refused to leave their houses. Nielsen used her newspaper, NOW, to publicise the issue.

In July 1973, resident Arthur King was kidnapped by two unidentified men, who put him in the boot of their car. King was then driven to a motel on the South Coast and held for three days before being released under threat of death. King quit as the head of the residents' action group, and immediately moved out of Kings Cross. It was suspected, though never proved, that the men had been hired by Theeman.

Other residents of the street were regularly harassed by men employed by Theeman, as he attempted to have them evicted from their houses. The men were led by Frederick Krahe, a former detective with the New South Wales Police who had been sacked amidst allegations of organising bank robberies and murdering Sydney crime figures. Police officers did not intervene as Krahe's men worked. Residents would squat in each others houses so that no house was left unattended. On one occasion, when merchant seaman and jazz musician Mick Fowler returned from a period working at sea, he found that his house had been broken into, and all of his belongings taken. Fowler fought a protracted court battle to stay in his home but the strain of the struggle reputedly led to his early death in 1979, aged 50.

Eventually the green ban was broken in 1974 when the conservative federal leadership of the BLF, under pressure from New South Wales politicians, dismissed the leaders of the New South Wales branch, and replaced them with more conservative people. Nielsen and the residents were left as the only significant opposition to Theeman. Nielsen then convinced the Water Board Union to impose their own green ban. By early 1975, Theeman's company had spent about AUD 6 million (about AUD 36 million in 2005 money) purchasing property in Kings Cross, and interest payments on loans were costing about AUD 3,000 a day.

[edit]
Disappearance
On 4 July 1975, Nielsen went to the Carousel Club in Kings Cross in order to discuss advertising for the club in Nielsen's newspaper, Now. She had been invited there by Edward Trigg, an employee of the club. The club was one of a number of bars and strp clubs owned by Abe Saffron, who is alleged to have been a major figure in Sydney organised crime, and it was managed by James Anderson, who, as a later investigation revealed, owed AUD 260,000 (about AUD 1.5 million in 2005 money) to Frank Theeman.

Before June 1975 the Carousel had no connection with Juanita or NOW, but that month Anderson initiated contact by sending Nielsen an invitation to attend a press night at the club on June 13. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, she would not normally have been invited because NOW did not give free publicity to commercial ventures. In the event, Juanita did not attend and both Crawford and Trigg have claimed that Anderson was "furious" about her non-appearance.

A few days later Trigg instructed the Carousel's PR man Lloyd Marshall to invite Juanita to a meeting at the Camperdown Travelodge, supposedly to discuss advertising related to landscaping. but Nielsen's then boyfriend later recounted that Juanita became suspicious and refused to attend.

On June 30, four days before the Carousel appointment, Trigg and another man, Carousel barman Shayne Martin-Simmonds, called at Juanita's house on the pretext of inquiring about advertising the Carousel's businessmen's lunches in NOW. It was later claimed that Trigg and Martin-Simmonds intended to seize Juanita when she opened the door, but their plan was foiled when her friend David Farrell answered the door instead. The two men played out their cover story, but Nielsen was listening in an adjoining room and after they left she complimented Farrell on his handling of the query, teasing him by saying she might send him out on the road to sell advertising in NOW.

Interviewed by police on 6 November 1977, Martin-Simmonds confirmed that the advertising story was a ruse and that their actual intention was to kidnap Juanita if she was alone and take her to see "people who wanted to talk to her". He said that he and Trigg intended to:

"... Just grab her arms and stop her calling out, no real rough stuff, no gangster stuff. We thought that just two guys telling her to come would be enough to make her think if she didn't come she might get hurt ... we talked about when she came into the room, one of us would be standing there and the other one would come up behind her and just quietly grab her by the arms and maybe put a hand over her mouth or a pillowslip over the head."
According to her friend David Farrell, Juanita was by then seriously concerned that her activism was putting her in danger. She mentioned her fears to Farrell about two weeks before her disappearance and she arranged to keep him regularly informed of her whereabouts.

Carousel receptionist Loretta Crawford claims that Trigg instructed her to call Juanita on the night on Thursday July 3 to set up a meeting at the club for the following morning. Crawford now claims that she knew that the advertising story was "bullshit", since the club did not advertise in "local rags", that she was doubtful that Juanita would attend, and that she was surprised that Juanita kept the appointment.

At 10:30am on Friday 4 July, Juanita telephoned David Farrell to tell him that she was running late for the meeting. According to Crawford, when Juanita arrived she proceed to the landing on the first floor where Crawford's reception desk was located. Crawford offered her a seat and a cup of coffee, after Juanita remarked that she had had a "hard night" (i.e. she was hung over), but that Juanita didn't get to drink the coffee because Trigg arrived. Crawford said that she noted that he was on time, which she thought unusual since he was often late. He and Juanita exchanged greetings on the landing and went upstairs to Trigg's office.

At this point in her account, given to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2001, Crawford made a new claim -- that she then made a phone call to Jim Anderson at his home in Vaucluse, told him that Juanita had arrived and that he was "quite pleased" by the news. Crawford was adamant that she was in no doubt whatsoever that Anderson was at his home in Vaucluse -- not in Surfer's Paradise, as he has always claimed.

In statements given to police, Trigg and Crawford said that Nielsen had left the club alone, although in 1976 Crawford changed her story to say that Nielsen and Trigg left together. Nielsen was not seen again. Her handbag and other effects were discovered on 12 July, abandoned near a freeway in Sydney's western suburbs.

New Zealand born transvestite Monet King (who was then called Marilyn King), the former boyfriend of Trigg, told one journalist that Trigg had returned home on 4 July with blood on his clothes. A piece of paper in his pocket, which was later used by police as evidence before the coronial inquest, also had blood on it. This was supposedly a receipt signed by Nielsen for advertising money paid by Trigg. King said that Trigg threw out the shirt, and the portion of the paper with blood on it. King never gave testimony to the police or the coronial inquiry.

In late 1977, Trigg and two other employees at the Carousel Club were arrested and charged with conspiring to kidnap Nielsen. Trigg was imprisoned for three years, one other man was imprisoned for two years and the third was acquitted. However, it was still unclear what had actually happened to Nielsen. After the death of James Anderson in 2003, Crawford changed her story again. She claimed that she had seen Nielsen's body in the storeroom below the club, with Trigg and two other men standing over her. She saw that one of the men was holding a gun, and Nielsen's body had a small bullet wound.

Nielsen's body has never been found.

The obvious motive for Nielsen's presumed murder is her oppostion to the Victoria St development. However there have also been claims that she was working on an exposé about vice, corruption and illegal gambling in the Cross. Her then boyfriend John Glebe gave evidence that Juanita had told him about receiving telephone threats and he also testified that she carried cassette tapes in her handbag. According to Glebe, Juanita had told him that the tapes could "blow the top off" an issue she was working on. An article in The Bulletin in 2005 ran claims by journalist Barry Ward that Juanita had been given dossiers on "prominent Sydney identities" by private detective Allan Honeysett, and speculated that these documents would -- reputedly -- have exposed the principals involved in Sydney's illegal gaming industry.

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Investigation
A coronial inquiry with a jury was held in 1983, which determined that Nielsen had probably been killed, although there was not enough evidence to show how she died or who killed her. The inquest did note that police corruption may have crippled the investigation into her death at the time.

A Joint Committee of the Parliament of Australia was formed in 1994 to further investigate her disappearance. It also concluded that corruption impeded the police investigation.

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Suspects
Although it has not been proved who killed Nielsen, there were several strong suspects.

Frank Theeman, the property developer, was considered by a number of journalists to be the key suspect in the planning of Nielsen's death. The costs and delays to his development offer a highly plausible motive for Theeman wanting to get Nielsen 'out of the way', although no direct evidence has been uncovered conclusively linking Theeman to the presumed murder.
James Anderson has long been considered a prime suspect, although he protested his innocence right up until his death in 2003. Anderson's circumstantial connections to the case are wide and varied -- he owed a considerable sum of money to Theeman; he had business links to both Theeman and Theeman's "drug troubled" son, and he was a known associate and business colleague of all three men involved in Juanita's kidnapping. Anderson always insisted that he was in Surfer's Paradise with another person on the day of Nielsen's disappearance, and that he flew to there with another man on July 4 and stayed for about three days in a room booked in his wife's name at the Chevron Hotel. However, Loretta Crawford claims that Anderson was at his home in the eastern Sydney suburb of Vaucluse that day and that she spoke to him by 'phone. Police did not fully investigate Anderson's alibi, and they only determined that his car, which was left at Sydney Airport, had received two parking tickets. Police reportedly failed to contact the man that Anderson claimed had accompanied him to Surfers, nor did they verify whether Anderson actually flew there on that day or checked into the hotel.
Det. Sgt Frederick Krahe, the former detective, has been named on several occasions by investigative journalists and experts on the case as Juanita's killer. He was a regular customer at the Venus Room, a nightclub owned by Abe Saffron, who also owned the Carousel Club, and it has been repeatedly alleged that Krahe organised the "heavies" hired by the developers to intimidate stubborn residents and force them out. The 1994 parliamentary Joint Committee identified Anderson and Krahe as significant suspects in Nielsen's disappearance. Alleged hit-man James Bazely named Krahe as the killer of Griffith anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay, and it has also been claimed that another allegedly corrupt detective, who was reported to have killed himself with his service pistol in the toilets at police headquarters, had in fact been executed by Krahe.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1046350.htm

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT

LOCATION: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1046350.htm

Broadcast: 16/02/2004

The Juanita Nielsen mystery
Reporter: Emma Alberici


KERRY O'BRIEN: The story of Juanita Nielsen is one of this country's most baffling mysteries.

She was the grand daughter of department store tycoon Mark Foy who became a central figure in the showdown between residents and developers over one of Sydney's most historic suburbs.

It's nearly 30 years since the Kings Cross newspaper publisher and anti-development campaigner disappeared after meeting the manager of a local nightclub to discuss advertising.

Two of the men at that meeting were subsequently convicted of conspiracy to abduct Juanita Nielsen.

While a coronial inquest did conclude she had been murdered, the crime remains unsolved.

Now a new book has unearthed fresh leads on this crime.

Emma Alberici reports.

LORETTA CRAWFORD, WITNESS: I knew she wasn't being invited there to talk about advertising.

I mean, I was too involved in what was going on to know that that was just a well just a load of garbage, and I honestly did not think she'd turn up.

EMMA ALBERICI: But Juanita Nielsen did show up at the Carousel nightclub on that morning 29 years ago ostensibly to talk to the management about advertising in her local newspaper Now.

She has never been seen since.

Loretta Crawford was the 27-year-old transsexual receptionist who greeted her at the Carousel and later witnessed what she has until now refused to speak publicly about.

LORETTA CRAWFORD: It played on my conscience for a lot of years and it has done to this day.

EMMA ALBERICI: Loretta Crawford lied to police to protect her boss - this man, James McCartney Anderson.

Six months after his death, Loretta Crawford says she's now comfortable to tell her story.

Jim Anderson was not at the club to meet Juanita Nielsen on that July 4 morning in 1975.

That was left to his barman Shane Martin Simmonds and the night manager Eddie Trigg.

According to Loretta, there was also a third man there that day.

LORETTA CRAWFORD: They walked down the stairs.

When they were halfway down the stairs, that I could see from my office, Eddie came back and said: "If anyone asks, sweetheart, I didn't leave with her."

EMMA ALBERICI: What was it you really saw after she walked down the stairs?

LORETTA CRAWFORD: She'd been shot, downstairs.

EMMA ALBERICI: How do you know that?

LORETTA CRAWFORD: Because I saw her.

EMMA ALBERICI: What did you see exactly?

LORETTA CRAWFORD: As I sort of turned to go down the last stairs to the storeroom, she was laying there and this third person was standing there with a gun in his hand.

The bullet wound was only very, very tiny.

It was like, probably like a cigarette butt, the size of a cigarette butt, and there was like maybe a trickle of blood that I saw.

VOICE OF JUANITA NIELSEN: Everyone wanted to be a developer and a developer simply wants empty houses.

EMMA ALBERICI: The weight of evidence before the 1983 inquest jury suggested Juanita Nielsen, heard here on ABC radio just months before she vanished, was killed to silence the damaging campaign she was waging through her newspaper against the redevelopment of Victoria Street - an area the National Trust then described as the Montmartre of Sydney.

FILE FOOTAGE, FRANK THEEMAN, DEVELOPER: The final plan involves a great improvement for the street.

FILE FOOTAGE, POLICEMAN: You're going to endanger your own life, you're going to endanger the life of policemen.

EMMA ALBERICI: Disruptions caused by resident protests and union green bans cost Victoria Point, Frank Theeman's $40 million apartment project, $3 million.

For two years, the Builders Labourers Federation refused to tear down the old terraces and put up the new complex.

With pressure from government, the green ban was lifted in 1975, but Frank Theeman had little time to celebrate.

Juanita Nielsen single-handedly convinced the Water Board Union to refuse work on the site and the delays continued.

With each day that passed, Victoria Point lost another $3,000.

MONET KING, WITNESS: He said to me that she didn't feel a thing.

And I said: "Oh, Eddie", I said: "Well, where is she?"

You know, he didn't answer me.

He said: "What you don't know won't hurt you."

EMMA ALBERICI: New Zealand's Auckland Harbour is a long way from the life Monet King knew as a glamorous 31-year-old transvestite in Sydney's seedy Kings Cross.

It was the 70s, and his name was Marilyn King.

He worked as a cocktail waitress at the Carousel nightclub.

Upon his return to New Zealand 20 years ago, he took up painting, became a born-again Christian and a community health worker.

But in all these year he has never forgotten his live-in boyfriend of 10 years, Eddie Trigg.

MONET KING: I said: "Well, what about that blood on your shirt?"

He took off his shirt to change it and there was a piece of paper, notepaper in the top pocket, and he said: "Oh, I'll need that.

Give that to me.

I'll need to show that to the police.

That's my alibi of why I had to see her".

EMMA ALBERICI: That piece of paper was later to become police exhibit eight, a receipt for $130 written by Juanita Nielsen supposedly in recognition of a deposit paid for advertising in her newspaper Now.

MONET KING: I said: "Oh, look, there's a bit of blood on it" and I said: "For goodness sake, what on earth's going on", so the piece of notepaper, instead of being the whole piece, was suddenly cut in half and the piece with her signature on was kept and the other bit with the spot of blood on it, like the spot of blood on his shirt, was cast out into the rubbish.

EMMA ALBERICI: Eight years after Juanita Nielsen's disappearance, Eddie Trigg was sentenced to three years in jail for conspiracy to abduct her.

His colleague from the Carousel, Shane Martin Simmonds, got just two years because he confessed to the crime.

He told police a story about trying to secure advertising in the Now newspaper was just a ruse.

The real intention of a visit to Juanita Nielsen's home in Victoria Street on June 30 was to kidnap her.

But on that day she wasn't alone and their plan was foiled.

PETER REES, AUTHOR, KILLING JUANITA: It's hard to believe that there could be two different plots going on at the same time that were not connected in this way.

After all, both Eddie and Shane were at the Carousel on the morning that Juanita went round to conduct a purported advertising deal which was later proved to be a ruse.

EMMA ALBERICI: For author Peter Rees, Juanita Nielsen's disappearance has become somewhat of an obsession.

He's been following the case since day one and believes his book, Killing Juanita, and the wealth of new information it contains could finally lead to a murder charge, something the coronial inquest, the longest in NSW history, was unable to achieve.

PETER REES: So far as the involvement of the third man is concerned - we don't know, we can't say for certain, that he fired the gun.

He was standing there with a gun in hand when Loretta Crawford walked into the storeroom.

EMMA ALBERICI: What Monet King, formerly Marilyn, reveals in our interview, he has never before told police.

Having previously denied being a witness, he now links Eddie Trigg to a sinister deed.

Monet King says for a month before Juanita's disappearance, he helped Eddie track her movements.

We caught up with Eddie, now 63-years-old, and living in Sydney.

He refused an on-camera interview, maintaining he has no idea what happened to Juanita Nielsen.

His girlfriend at the time believes he's lying.

MONET KING: And I said: "Well, thank goodness.

Is she all right?

Where is she?

Has she gone home?"

And he showed me his fist and it was swollen, dreadfully swollen, and he said: "If the police ask, if the police ask what happened, say that I hit you."

And I said: "Well".

EMMA ALBERICI: Juanita Nielsen wasn't the first anti-development campaigner to face intimidating tactics.

ARTHUR KING, ANTI-DEVELOPMENT CAMPAIGNER: I was asleep at the time, yeah.

Two guys came, one on either side of the door, opened the door, bundled me out, out here to Victoria Street.

We were away from Sydney for three days.

But a condition of my release was that I would take no further part in any anti-development activities in Victoria Street.

EMMA ALBERICI: For a time before his abduction, Arthur King was head of the Victoria Street residents action group, another thorn in the side of Frank Theeman's development plans.

LORETTA CRAWFORD: The entrance was actually those three whole doors.

There was the one entrance to the Carousel Cabaret.

There were three small stairs, then a landing, then two lots of stairs going up which would have led to my office, and after Eddie and Juanita had their meeting.

Then Juanita, Eddie and the third man came down the stairs.

Once they went to the stairs below my office where the grill was, that's where I heard a clang and I heard someone make the statement about trouble makers get what they deserve.

EMMA ALBERICI: The manager of the Carousel nightclub, Jim Anderson, was a close friend of property developer Frank Theeman and his drug-troubled son Tim.

The inquest heard that on Sunday May 25, 1975, just six weeks before Juanita Nielsen's appointment at the club, the Theeman's family company, FWT Investments, paid $25,000 to Jim Anderson.

Anderson claimed the cheque was an advance for a club bought here on Bondi Beach on behalf of Tim Theeman.

He told the jury he paid $23,000 to a local club owner.

But when questioned at the inquest, the club owner said he'd never received any money from Anderson or the Theemans.

So the question still remains - what was that $25,000 for?

PETER REES: That's very much the case.

EMMA ALBERICI: What do you suspect it was for?

PETER REES: I suspect the money was paid to remove Juanita Nielsen.

EMMA ALBERICI: Hit money?

PETER REES: Hit money indeed.

EMMA ALBERICI: Those close to Juanita Nielsen have all passed away and are resting here in the Foy-Smith family crypt.

A lone cross stands in the place she would have been buried had the 38-year-old's body ever been found.

Her nemesis, property developer Frank Theeman, died in 1989.

But the three men present on the morning of her last apparently fateful meeting are still alive.

Twenty nine years on, the project Juanita fought so desperately against now dominates the harbourside landscape.

LORETTA CRAWFORD: I felt guilty, I think, yeah.

Because I often wonder what would have happened if I would have sort of said something to her like: "Just go.

Just don't stay here". I just want the people who did this to be brought to justice.

KERRY O'BRIEN: And police have confirmed they'll follow up those fresh leads in the Nielsen case.

Emma Alberici.

The Disappearance of Juanita Nielsen

It remains one of Australia's most enduring mysteries. On July 4, 1975 a wealthy heiress who had been at the forefront of a crusade against redevelopment of Victoria Street in Sydney's redlight Kings Cross district, went to an appointment at a Kings Cross nightclub - and then disappeared.

Her name was Juanita Nielsen.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, her disappearance still intrigues people around Australia. What nobody in the know doubts is that Juanita is dead and somebody murdered her.

A long Coronial Inquiry probed her disappearance. But the problem faced by investigators was that so many people had so many reasons for wanting her dead.

Her boyfriend John Glebe said in evidence to the Inquiry how Ms Nielsen had told him of telephone threats. He said she'd carried cassette tapes in her handbag which she had said could "blow the top off" an issue she was working on. Journalist Bob Bottom reports in his book "Connections - Crime Rackets and Networks of Influence Down-Under" [Sun Books. ISBN 0 7251 0491 0], that John Glebe was later threatened by an anonymous caller who said: "Juanita has been killed...it was an accident. Back off, or accidents can happen to other people."

Her last appointment before her disappearance was with a man called Edward Trigg, then a manager of the Carousel Nightclub in Kings Cross - a club owned by Abe Saffron and managed by James Anderson. She has never been seen since that meeting. Her black handbag and personal effects were found on a freeway in Western Sydney.

Two and a half years after she disappeared, Trigg and two others were arrested and charged with conspiring to abduct Nielsen. Trigg pleaded guilty and got three years jail. Bar man Shayne Martin-Simmonds was convicted in 1981 and got two years. A third man, Lloyd Marshall, then a PR man for the Carousel Nightclub, was acquitted.

But there has always been concern that the full story of the disappearance of Nielsen has never been told. The Coronial Inquiry heard how Juanita Nielsen was a thorn in the side for some crime bosses and developers. When Trigg was apprehended in the US by American Police he was quoted as having said: "It's all bloody politics, anyway....It's all about crooked cops, dirty politics and one big cover up. The guy who is benefitting from this is an alderman who made megabucks out of this."

More recently, the Bulletin magazine in 1995 ran claims by journalist Barry Ward that Nielsen was given dossiers on some of Sydney's unsavoury high rollers by a private detective called Allan Honeysett. The article speculated that with these documents Nielsen could have lifted the lid on the principals involved in Sydney's illegal gambling industry. It said Honeysett claimed that the documents were the reason why Nielsen was killed, because it seemed likely she was about to expose some big names in vice and illegal gambling.

The Bulletin story also interviewed two anonymous female staff who had been showgirls at the Carousel nightclub. They named three men who did the murder and the story went on to detail how the men who ordered the murder are still at large.

Do you know more about the Juanita Nielsen case?

email me or send me an Anonymous email.

The safest way to contact me if you have some really hot info is via snail mail. Address it to:

Ross Coulthart, Reporter
Sunday, Nine Network Australia,
P.O Box 27, Willoughby, NSW 2068 Australia
Telephone: (61.2) 9965 2470
Facsimile: (61.2) 9965 2487

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/02/1078191318068.html

Juanita Nielsen, casualty of ideological war
By Padraic P. McGuinness
March 3, 2004

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The mystery of the disappearance, and certain death, of Juanita Nielsen of Kings Cross in 1975 remains unsolved despite the publication of a new account of the circumstances.

Was Nielsen the first victim of urban developers (have there been any others?), of local thugs working for developers who exceeded their brief, or of anyone else? Did the police and the National Crime Authority have any culpability for a lack of zeal or incompetence in pursuing the matter?

Is there any chance of someone coming forward who can testify as to what actually happened?

In Killing Juanita, Canberra journalist Peter Rees, with the help of long-term collaborator Arthur King, has put together what is so far the best account of the whole issue. They think they know who murdered Nielsen, and quote a person who claims to have been a witness to the killing. They may be right, but their informants have yet to give new evidence either to police or in public.

King, who runs a small business in Sydney, has good reason for his deep interest in this case. It could have been him.

In July 1973 he was abducted from his flat in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, by a couple of thugs who shoved him into the boot of a car and held him for a couple of days in a motel somewhere on the South Coast. He was threatened about his part in the protests about redevelopment plans for Victoria Street and was in real fear for his life. Finally they let him go with further threats. Not surprisingly, his fright soon gave way to anger.

There is no doubt that there were criminals closely involved in the whole business.

One of the chief of them was the late James McCartney Anderson, who seems to have cleverly played along the police, and especially the NCA, by acting as an informant.

The police role was also curious, in that while the immediate investigators seem to have been straight, there was a curious lack of interest in higher circles. Anderson may not have been Nielsen's murderer, but he was certainly not far from it.

There is evidence that Anderson received money from Frank Theeman, the developer. But there is no other reason to suspect Theeman of culpability, except in encouraging Anderson and his friends in their threats and violence against the protesters.

Nielsen was essentially a loose cannon. She ran a little local rag largely as a hobby, initially, and it was mainly the accident of her connection with Victoria Street, where she had lived for some time as a child and where she at this time owned a house, which led to her involvement in the protests.

But by the time of her death she had become just one of a motley movement of protest by residents, joined by ideologues of various kinds and the leading figures of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLs), then headed by the now well-known figure, Jack Mundey.

It was the first alliance of note between the upper middle class (anarchists and communists) and the working class left. The reality was that neither Theeman, Anderson, nor Nielsen understood what was happening around them.

They were all caught up in the passions created by the youth movements of the 1960s and the opposition to the Vietnam War.

Most of the most vocal activists of Victoria Street were educated and middle class, and many were liberated feminists in their first flush of enthusiasm. Some became sexually involved with the working class BLs, who did not understand such women, and were, in effect, destroyed by them. So the BLs fell apart, and Norm Gallagher from Melbourne moved in to pick up the pieces.

The fight for Victoria Street was in fact only one battle in a much wider ideological movement. But many of those involved also had an interest in opposing development for personal motives - they liked the bohemian lifestyle of the Cross and the cheap rents, and suffered under the illusion that the growing population of Sydney had no better claim than they did as squatters, in name or effect.

Poor Juanita Nielsen may have known who killed her, but she never knew what did.

(Declaration of interest: King is a friend of many years' standing whom I believe to be entirely truthful. I had lived in Victoria Street some years before all this.)

ppmcg@ozemail.com.au

New South Wales



Juanita Nielsen
Location: Sydney, NSW Australia

It has been a quarter of a century since flamboyant Sydney newspaper publisher and heiress Juanita Nielsen disappeared after attending a meeting. Her body has never been found and it remains one of Australia`s most notorious mysteries. 14 years after the disappearance and presumed murder of Ms Nielsen a witness claims he got a confession from a flatmate to the killing of the 38 year old woman.

The "witness", who only wants to be known as such, has told CrimeNet he has long pushed for the truth of the Juanita Nielsen case to be brought to the surface, claiming the "go slow" by the NSW police is all part of a huge cover-up.

"I am sick of it. Absolutely sick of it," he said. " I know what`s happening, the authorities are not prepared to move on the evidence against certain high profile people. They are just turning a blind eye until these people are dead and will just say `Oh, well, too bad, it`s too late now`".
The " witness" said the man that confessed the killing to him had been working for a well-known criminal - and remains - a prime suspect in Ms Nielsen`s killing.

The suspect allegedly said:
" Well, I killed her."
" I didn`t mean to. I was only supposed to frighten her."
"The b****h just wouldn`t shut up".
"When he said those final words the darn hairs on the back of my neck stood up," the witness said.
"There was this huge man, breaking down crying, sobbing as he told me he killed Juanita".

In 1998 police flew to London, where the suspect was living. He was interviewed but no charges were laid. The witness said he told police he was prepared to wear a wire and talk to the suspect again, believing he would confirm the killing to him.

"When they came to me and said they had tracked this guy down in London, I told them I was prepared to travel with them there to help in obtaining the confession,"the witness said. He said after a period of long delays, the police finally told the witness that it was too costly for him to be sent to England and another policeman was going there on another matter, so he would help in the questioning of the suspect.

"They go and interview the guy, ask him a few mamby-pamby questions and that`s it," the witness said

Despite fearing for his life, the witness said he would continue in his push for the killer of Juanita Nielsen to be brought to justice.

On July 4, 1975 38-year-old Ms Nielsen arrived at the Carousel Club in Sydney to discuss adverting in her newspaper, Now with Edward Frederick Trigg, who had rung her the previous night to set up the meeting. Four days before the fateful appointment Trigg and another man, Shayne Martin-Simmonds, had gone to Ms Nielsen`s residence at 202 Victoria Street, Kings Cross with the intention of abducting her.

Martin-Simmonds later told police they intended to get her as she opened the door where one of them would " just quietly grab her by the arm and maybe put a hand over her head". But their plan was foiled when Ms Nielsen`s friend David Farrell answered the door.

In 1981 Trigg was convicted of conspiring to kidnap Ms Nielsen. Two years later the same fate befell Martin-Simmonds. However neither men gave a motive for the attempted abduction. On the day of Ms Nielsen`s disappearance she was last seen leaving the Carousel Club after her meeting with Trigg, who was an employee of the club.

It is here the story becomes somewhat murky. Trigg told police Ms Nielsen left the club by herself after their meeting. However, 18 months later Carousel Club receptionist, Loretta Leanne Crawford told police Ms Nielsen did leave the club with Trigg. Ms Crawford said she was "told" to say the newspaper publisher had left on her own, claiming Trigg said to her: " If anyone asks, sweetheart, we didn`t leave together."

Another fact police discovered much later was that Martin-Simmonds was also at the Carousel Club on that day. At the time of her disappearance and apparent murder, Ms Nielsen had been causing great angst to businessman Frank Theeman. Theeman`s $60 million development of Victoria Street had been halted for two years by Ms Nielsen, who refused to sell her property. She continued to stall him even after Builders Labourers Federation green bans were lifted. The delays were costing Theeman $3000 a day.

Theeman was a known associate of Carousel Club manager, James McCartney Anderson, who ran the club for owner Abe Saffron. Anderson had the reputation of dealing in "strong arm" tactics, and had shot dead a standover man in 1970, but no charges were ever laid. A Federal Joint Parliamentary Committee reported that Theeman lent Anderson $260,000 which was never repaid. Did Anderson maybe perform a task for Theeman to clear this debt?

The committee also concluded in 1994 that Anderson was a "prime suspect" in the Nielsen case and there was a "view that Anderson was blackmailing Theeman ( and) this was related to the disappearance of Nielsen". Another angle of the disappearance involves the 1974 hiring of discredited policeman Frederick Claude Krahe by Theeman. Krahe had a gang of thugs that terrorised tenants in Victoria Street who defied Theeman`s offer to vacate the premises. Krahe was also well known to Saffron and Anderson as a frequenter of another of Saffron`s club, the Venus Room. The Parliamentary Joint Committee said: " There was a widespread rumour that Krahe had killed her."

At the 1983 inquest Anderson named Krahe as Nielsen`s killer, with similar claims coming from freelance journalists Tony Reeves and Barry Ward. However there was no evidence to prove this claim. Krahe died in 1981. Was Krahe`s death a convenient tool for Anderson placing the blame on him? Or has the killer of Juanita Nielsen been dead for almost 20 years?

The police`s handling of the investigation has also been seen as not being overly active in the pursuit of finding the killer or killers.

The 1983 Nielsen inquest jury of six people found: " There is evidence to show police inquiries were inhibited by an atmosphere of corruption, real or imagined, that existed at that time".

Furthermore, the Parliamentary Joint Committee said that " the adequacy of the police investigation" into who ordered the killing of Ms Nielsen " can be questioned, as can the (police) conclusion that there were no further leads to be followed up".

"Despite the evidence linking Anderson with Ms Nielsen`s disappearance, the attempt by police to investigate the role of Anderson seems to have been cursory," the Committee said.

In 1976 journalists Barry Ward and Tony Reeves released a media statement saying their investigations into the Juanita Nielsen case had uncovered a police cover up and implored Premier of the day, Neville Wran to conduct a judicial inquiry into the police investigation.

After receiving no joy, the two journalists sent a telegram to Premier Wran on July 22, 1977. In part the telegram said:

We are dismayed and disgusted at your refusal to conduct a Royal Commission into the murder of Juanita Nielsen and the subsequent cover-up of that event. One of the significant points your announcement neglects to consider is that the police officer upon whose advice the Government`s conclusions are based was involved significantly in the original investigation about which we made allegations of a cover-up. We will continue in our campaign for exposure of then truth in this affair, despite your Government`s cowardice to come to grips with this most serious issue. We will explore and expose numerous other references of police impropriety to their fullest.

It is shameful that we will have to embarrass this Government into action.

When Edward Trigg was captured in the US, before being returned and jailed for conspiracy to abduct Ms Nielsen, he said: "It`s all bloody politics, anyway....It`s all about crooked cops, dirty politics and one big cover up. The guy who is benefiting from this is an alderman who made megabucks out of this."

If you have any information on this matter, please email.

Information Source: Crimenet

http://www.personsmissing.org/juanita.html

http://z13.invisionfree.com/PorchlightAust...topic=370&st=0&

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/appeal...0329375016.html

Appeal for clues to Juanita's disappearance
By Les Kennedy
July 4, 2005 - 3:52PM

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Juanita Nielsen.

There is emotion and heartfelt grief still in David Farrell's voice when he speaks of the loss of the love of his life, Sydney newspaper publisher and heiress Juanita Nielsen.

"I know it is 30 years [in the past]. Many have said it will go away but, take it from me, Juanita Nielsen will never go away," he says in a message of defiance to those in the community who have kept a three-decade secret about her disappearance.

Mr Farrell, now one of the state's senior public servants with the Electoral Commission, is standing outside 202 Victoria Street, Kings Cross, a tiny two-storey white and red coloured terrace where he lived and worked with Nielsen on her magazine Now and where she fought to oppose the eviction of long-term residents by developers.

It was her opposition to developers that led to her disappearance on a rainy July 4, 1975, after she stepped from her home for a meeting at the Carousel night club, now the Empire Hotel.

Mr Farrell, who said he still loved Nielsen, joined police in an appeal today for those who know anything about her disappearance to contact them, even anonymously, to tell them at least where her body is so that she can be laid to rest beside her father's grave.

Advertisement
AdvertisementThe case officer, Homicide Squad Detective Sergeant Nigel Warren, was 10 years old when Nielsen, 38, went missing in what has become one of Australia's most baffling crime cases.

Detective Sergeant Warren concedes that in eight years since he was appointed to manage the case, he had found no evidence that could convict anyone.

"Juanita was a beautiful, gracious, intelligent Australian girl who loved life," Mr Farrell said today. "She was my partner, my soul mate, and my love for seven wonderful years. I still love her deeply. She's unforgettable.

"I believe she was the brave victim of a cruel murder. She died for what she believed in. Caring for the ordinary people of Sydney. She did not march in protests, she wasn't a squatter, but she cared, and she did it her way right till the moment that she fought to save her life and I believe was killed.

"As Detective Warren has said. I believe that there are still people out there who know what happened to her and importantly where her body is located. I believe she was probably dumped there."

Anyone with information about Juanita Nielsen should contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

Juanita Nielsen: The Silent Conspiracy
Posted October 23rd, 2007 by Anonymous
Next year will bring the 33rd anniversary of the murder of Kings Cross newspaper publisher Juanita Nielsen. It will also mark another year in the silent conspiracy of corruption that surrounds what may have been the crime of the century in NSW.

When Tony Reeves and I began our journalistic investigation back in 1975 we described it as the story of a lifetime, then The Story That Won't Go Away. For three decades we've been rebuffed in our attempts to force a commission of inquiry, to expose the truth behind this sordid tale of police and political corruption, of betrayal and heinous brutality.

But the story hasn't gone away, and neither have I -- although I was forced to leave Australia because of my activities.

The story surfaced again recently with the publication of a book by a Canberra journalist who claimed to have found a witness with new evidence. I wrote a critique showing that his book was merely an extension of the official version of events, the cover-up, and e-mailed it to all of the Sydney media.

Even though I am well known to most of them, and the fact that my critique contained some astonishing facts, only one editor bothered to reply and that to tell me that he preferred the police story!

This shouldn't really have surprised me. Our erstwhile colleagues in the Sydney media have long been not merely ambivalent but antagonistic in their approach to this story and to Tony and I.

Orchestrated by the PR Dept of the NSW Police, they have accepted the official version of events without the slightest attempt at corroboration. Even though they all reviewed the book in question they wouldn't consider my critique of it, just as they ignored a major story that touched upon the case back in 1975.

Let me explain. In the course of our investigation Tony and I traced Eddie Trigg, the last person said to have seen Juanita alive. Within minutes we had been beaten up, abducted and handed over the Darlinghurst Police who threw us into jail for the night. "A good yarn," we agreed, when the goose bumps had abated. There was more good copy to come.

We pleaded not guilty to the spurious charge of being found drunk in Darlinghurst and, thanks to two pro bono barristers, fought the case as it lasted eight days over as many months. The charge was eventually dismissed but not before the case, which also involved two QC's on "watching briefs" for unidentified clients, had set two legal precedents. Another good yarn, we agreed. The transcript ran to 520 pages and 175,000 words.

But not one of those words was reported by the Sydney media. Like our allegations surrounding the killing of Juanita, the story was ignored. It might never have happened. No one wants to know the truth about all of this. My rationale is that the political implications are too far-reaching, too dangerous. That, though, doesn't explain the shameful attitude of Sydney's journalists. They are a disgrace to the calling that Tony and I love.

Somehow, though, I shall get the truth into the public domain. This story is not going to go away.

If you'd care to read my critique and get an insight into what Tony and I achieved you can do so courtesy of the only branch of the Sydney media not afraid to run it.

It was published without question by Fiona Prior on the Henry Thornton current affairs website. There's not been a whimper of response from anywhere.... Read it by clicking on to the hyperlink below: No, there was no response to it, legally or officially…….

http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=2714

Barry Ward

http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/juani...lent-conspiracy

http://cpppcltrust.tripod.com/ecologyactionsydney/id28.html

http://www.australianmissingpersonsregister.com/Juanita.htm