An Australian inquest has heard a chilling detail about the case of a missing schoolgirl: her skull was once used as an ashtray in a pub. The man who found it says he had no idea whose remains they were, and the revelation has added a disturbing new chapter to a decades-old mystery.
Marilyn Wallman was 14 when she disappeared. Two years later, in 1974, a local man named Greven Breadsell came across part of a skull at McGregor Creek near Mirani. No one has ever been brought to justice over her death, and a coronial inquest is now trying to establish exactly what happened to her.
A grim discovery
The court was shown footage from a 2015 reenactment of the find, in which Breadsell described what happened next. He had gone to a cattle paddock to collect pal fronds when he spotted the top of a skull lying on the grass.
He assumed it belonged to an Aboriginal person. "Who else’s skull would it be?" he said. He kept it in the shed at his home for at least a fortnight or three weeks.
Breadsell admitted on the recording that the skull ended up at a local pub. "I don’t like to say this, but we took it over to the pub and used it as an ashtray one night," he said.
At a pre-inquest hearing earlier this year, the court was told that new DNA testing techniques had confirmed in 2006 that the skull belonged to Marilyn.
A friend remembers
The inquest also heard from Trudy Voltz, now 68, a friend of Marilyn at North Mackay State High School. She said Marilyn seemed frightened the day before she vanished.
According to Voltz, Marilyn was unusually quiet at lunch. She walked off toward the school gates, then sat near a window looking out at the same entrance. Voltz recalled asking her, "Who’s out there?" and said Marilyn gave an answer. "I think she said the word ‘uncle’," she told the court.
The man at the school
John Aberdeen, who is assisting the coroner, asked Voltz about an incident on March 17, 1972, only days before Marilyn went missing. Voltz said she had noticed her friend on the other side of the road outside the school when a man walked up to her.
She remembered Marilyn’s reaction clearly. "A man approached her, and when she saw him, she took a couple of steps back," she said. "He started talking to her… Marilyn had a very defensive pose. She was not happy to see him at all."
The man was reportedly aged 19 to 20 and stood about a head taller than Marilyn.
Where things stand
The inquest is still under way, and the questions around Marilyn’s final days remain unanswered. Her skull has been identified, but nobody has been held responsible for what happened to her. The testimony of a school friend who remembers her fear, along with the strange fate of her remains, is now part of the court’s effort to piece together the truth.
Source: Daily Express US
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