Murder Of Patricia Carlton

One of the most controversial cases was that of Aboriginal woman Patricia Carlton.

She was murdered in Mt Isa, in Queensland’s northwest, about seven weeks before the Gloria Pindan murder.

Her husband Kelvin Condren was imprisoned for life for the murder. His conviction was secured after he confessed to the police. But at the trial, he refused he had murdered his wife. Condren claimed he was bashed by officers until he admitted to the killing.

And he had an alibi.

He was imprisoned for public drunkenness by police at 6 pm on September 30, 1983. He spent the night in the watch house. His wife was last seen alive at the Mt Isa Hotel at about 7.30 pm. Witnesses remembered her because she laughed at her new thongs - which looked a little odd. She was found very injured in the hotel carpark about 5 am.

Condren was released from custody about two hours later, just in time to see his wife pass away in hospital.

And yet he was sentenced for her murder following a nine-day trial. The Crown case rested on Condren’s confession during his record of interview with police, which he made under duress.

“They kept at me, charging me and threatening to lock me away in a cell. I was under pressure, shaking with fear and very afraid,” he told a journalist.

“Eventually I signed it, just went along with it to stop the pressure.”

But if an alibi wasn’t enough to satisfy police and prosecutors of Condren’s innocence, another man confessed to Carlton’s murder from a prison cell 1300km away. That man was Andy Albury.

Four weeks after Condren was arrested for killing, Albury told five policemen, including Chapman, and a psychiatrist that he had killed an Aboriginal woman in Mt Isa in late September 1983. Investigator Sergeant Geoffrey Barton - who was the officer-in-charge of the Carlton murder - confirmed Albury left Mt Isa on a Greyhound bus for the Territory about 8.30 pm on the night of the attack.

But when Sgt Barton questioned Albury, he said nothing. And when he was put on the stand at Condren’s trial, he recanted his admission to the killing.

Condren’s incarceration lasted almost seven years before proof he was in police custody at the time of the murder emerged.

His only avenue of appeal had been exhausted so it seemed Condren was convicted to stay in the Stuart Creek Prison, in Townsville, for a murder he did not commit.

But the then-Queensland attorney-general Dean Wells referred the case to the Full Court, which later quashed the killing conviction and ordered a retrial.

Albury signed an affidavit, saying he found “a black sheila, took her into a vacant lot and killed her” in Mt Isa on September 30, 1983. It was handed to then-Queensland director of public prosecutions Royce Miller QC, who decided not to proceed with the retrial and dropped all charges.

“It is my firm belief that my arrest and conviction were because I am an Aborigine,” Condren said the Sunday Territorian about five months later. And to add insult to injury, the Criminal Justice Commission did not submit action be taken against the police officers who put him in jail. That, he believed, was the most humiliating part of his ordeal.

The commission listened to witness Louise Brown signed a statement saying she’d seen Condren hitting his wife with an iron bar. She told it was untrue but she signed it because the police told her: “You will be in trouble if you don’t.”

The Queensland cabinet awarded Condren $400,000 in compensation for the wrongful custody in 1995. But his wife’s killing is still an open case. Albury was never tried over the killing and it is unlikely he ever will be.