Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Like it sounds silly, but you feel guilty sleeping or getting food. I burnt out quite a bit, but I would use that time when I'm back at home to quickly try and get as much rest as I can, as much food and go back because I felt as though like if mum needs my help, then I can't be, you know, sitting at a restaurant having fun or having a drink because that's unfair.
I would say the first three years were still panic mode in that there was hope that we could potentially find mum.
Usually when we leave the country, our mothers nag us to be careful and to stay safe. Anna Jenkins had more to worry about than most mums because when her son Greg went travelling, it was often with the Australian Armed Forces.
Chapter 2: What happened to Anna Jenkins during her trip to Malaysia?
But it was Anna who met with foul play on a trip away. In 2017, Anna Jenkins and her husband Francis travelled to her home country of Malaysia, as they had many times before. But this time, only Francis made it home. With little help from the local authorities, their son Greg ended up launching his own investigation.
He learned a lot about the dark side of Malaysia and eventually Anna's remains and personal belongings were recovered on a building site. Greg Jenkins joins us on Australian True Crime to tell his story. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.
And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.
So dad was in the Defence Force. He did a couple of tours of Vietnam and then he changed over to be a carpenter and they had some tasks on in Butterworth, so some rotations. And through meeting a couple of the Malaysians over there, he then got hooked up with mum's sister to go out on a date, went to go pick her up and then liked mum a lot better, which caused a bit of a rift.
So he ended up taking mum out and then it just went from strength to strength there.
How many kids do they have?
Two. One really intelligent, beautiful, handsome bloke. And then another sister. So two kids. So my sister was born in Penang and then mum was pregnant and then flew to Adelaide where they settled to have me. Love growing up there. So we moved out to the country, home of McLeod's daughters out at Freeling. Wow. That's all it's got for it. He had two pubs and sport. Great.
But, you know, absolutely loved it, like out in the farmland. So we had free reign to do whatever we wanted in terms of, you know, riding our bikes and And Adelaide itself is like a big country town. Like it's fairly slow moving, but as kids, it's absolutely brilliant to grow up in and we had quite a lot of fun.
Sounds lovely. And it sounds very different to Malaysia, obviously. I know that both our cultures are very different. Did your mum grow up in a busy city like in Penang or where did she grow up in Malaysia?
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Chapter 3: How did Greg Jenkins begin his investigation into his mother's disappearance?
She's a little tiny sparrow, wasn't she, your mum?
Yeah, a little firecracker. So she didn't work in Adelaide. What she did was volunteer their time helping out the homeless, refugees and anyone that needed help. So
Chapter 4: What challenges did Greg face with Malaysian authorities?
She went out and rented a house and just used it as like a bit of a safe house. So if anyone was in trouble, they'd just message her. She would go open it up, bring them food, look after them. She had deals with like there was a couple of bakeries.
So at the end of the day, whatever they didn't sell, they would donate to mum and then she would then take it to these places or to the homeless place. She was a very stubborn lady too. There was a story I told at the funeral where I came down to visit and my favourite is mum's chicken curry and she was making this big pot of chicken curry.
Like it was enough to probably last a couple of weeks for me and I thought this is amazing. But what had happened was she was a big Christian lady as well so she liked to say her prayers and And she pulled over. She felt like someone needed her help. So she just pulled over and then started saying some prayers. And she was outside of a bikey headquarters.
So while she was just sitting in a little dinged up red Festiva, they came out and told her to get lost. She refused and got out of the car and said, someone needs my help. If you want to kill me, kill me. So anyway, turns out, The chicken curry that she was making, turns out someone within the headquarters was going through some personal stuff. Yeah.
So she made chicken curry for the bikies.
Yeah. So she told me to get in the car and then she drove out and I was gutted to, like, great to feed people, but, like, that's my favourite, you know what I mean?
So, yeah, and so, yeah, we went to drop it off at the bikey headquarters and then they gave her a card and said, you can stop anywhere you want and say your prayers and do whatever you have to do and if anyone gives you any dramas, give us a call. And she got in the car and said, oh, that were lovely men. It's like, give me that card and... Don't call them.
That's a handy card. Have you still got it?
No.
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Chapter 5: What were the findings of the investigation into Anna's remains?
So he decided to stay at the hotel and have a sleep. And then mum was going to go out to the dentist, quickly get the checkup, go see grandma. So she had some clothes and she would also, she made friends with the hotel staff to do the cleaning. And so she managed to get like toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoos, and she donates that to the nursing home.
Yeah, right.
Yeah. So she said she's just going to drop that off and then come back and they were going to go out for dinner.
Now, did she phone your dad, though, from the Uber? Because we know that she got in an Uber, right, after the dentist?
Yeah.
Yeah. So the way that Uber works in Malaysia at the time, so Uber didn't come in until September 2017. So it was still fairly fresh. So you didn't need the app with your credit card attached to it. So you can just pay, like in Malaysia, you can pay by cash. So mum's phone, like her Australian phone wasn't working and she couldn't use the app.
So when she left, the hotel staff called her an Uber and then she just paid in cash. When she left the dentist, the dentist staff called her the Uber. She called Dad at 5.22. The Uber driver said that he had dropped her off around about quarter to five. So she called Dad at 5.22 to say that there was someone trying to steal her passport. And Dad just said, you know, come back to the hotel.
Her passport was at the hotel. What I found out was an Australian passport is worth up to $100,000 US in Malaysia because sex trafficking and human trafficking are so prolific. So what it does is it gives you access to 169 countries without a visa. So some of these ports you don't need to scan in.
You just need to basically, you know, hold up your passport and then off you go if it's during working hours. If you come late at night, it's not manned. So you can take, I believe it's 20 girls out in one trip. So you can act as a school teacher. And that's how they move the girls. So the girls move from house to house every 24 to 48 hours.
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Chapter 6: How did the police respond to Greg's search efforts?
So I thought, bugger it, I'll do it myself. So I would fly to Malaysia, I'd do a search again of Penang and then I'd push out onto the mainland because at that stage mum was still missing and so we still, you know, had hope that... You know, we could potentially find her whether, you know, she's been kidnapped. So they do kidnap elderly women that they see caring.
And what they do is they then put those women in those safe houses or what they call safe houses. And like I said before, they move the young girls every 24 to 48 hours to different houses.
Right, but they set up safe, like house mothers almost in those houses.
Pretty much, yeah. You know, I asked a simple question to the police. I was like, well, if you're not going to search outside your jurisdiction, can you just, you know, send an email to all of the police stations, like they call it a bolo, so be on the lookout for this person. They said, no, that's too big of a task. That was part of my reasoning for going across all of Malaysia.
So I've travelled over, I would say, 150,000 k's just travelling around and every town I would stop at hotels, churches, police stations and elderly homes. I made a little pack and I would just hand out flyers and posters and like it sounds silly but you feel guilty sleeping or getting food.
I burnt out quite a bit but I would use that time when I'm back at home to quickly try and get as much rest as I can, as much food and go back because I felt as though like if mum needs my help then I can't be, you know, sitting at a restaurant having fun or having a drink because that's unfair.
I would say the first three years were still panic mode in that there was hope that we could potentially find mum. I found, you know, with... Having to do the searches, a lot of our friends chipped in as well. So they would join me on the search as well, which was amazing. So then I could hire out a couple of cars and then we could actually split and get more of the country done.
So putting up stickers, I made banners. And there was this railing that went weirdly across traffic, but you couldn't walk up it. And I've got no idea why it exists. It just doesn't make sense, but it just seems a perfect place and I made up this massive banner.
So I just stopped at the hardware store, bought some cable ties, put it in my mouth and then just shimmied across in traffic and then managed to put it up like silly because if I fell off, I'd get struck by traffic.
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Chapter 7: What role did social media play in raising awareness for Anna's case?
I don't want anything to do with this to change their mind. And it worked.
Yeah, yeah. So it worked to a certain degree in terms of so this guy was too scared to go to the police. So everyone knows that they don't really trust the Malaysian police because if they give them the items, he was scared that they're just going to point a finger at him and go, case closed, you did it, it's all done.
Oh, we'll just tell this annoying guy from Australia that he can leave us alone now because we've solved it.
Correct. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So he was too scared to go to the police and I said, no worries, I'll get the police to come out to you. They refused. And even worse than that, we're using the controller emergency centre through DFAT, sending them through everything, like here's the pictures, here's where the construction site is, here's everything. They passed it on to the police, got nothing.
It took me 10 days for the construction worker to then go to the police and take the items there. So that happened on the 24th of June, 2020.
Were there any remains in this parcel that he had?
One.
Okay.
So there was a coccyx bone.
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Chapter 8: What were the outcomes of the coronial inquest into Anna's death?
I mean, tell me about that day, that moment.
A lot of it was anger and frustration, especially when the police have said, we've done a thorough search of the area.
And you've shown up and there are her shoes.
Yep. Like I said, within two minutes. I didn't allow myself, I guess, to process the gravity of the situation because at that point it's like, all right, well, we found a shoe. What else is there?
And you've got so much more to do because no one's helping you. So it's not like, you know, you go, I found a shoe and the cavalry arrives. It's like, well, I've got to keep trying to find everything.
Yeah, so then I went down and then I found more, I found another card with mum's stuff, so more stuff from her purse. So then it took ages to convince them to get a forensic team to come out and grab the shoe. When the forensic team came out, so I just stood off to a side, they just walked in and then they picked up the shoe and was like, shouldn't they be wearing gloves to do the search?
And so then he had to stop them and go, hey, put your gloves on. It's like, what level of searching are you guys? Like, you're contaminating everything. It was a shambles. There was a big cliff. And I said, has anyone checked up there, like above? And they said, no, no need.
So it took me ages to convince the police, firstly, to do a check of the surrounding areas because if it was during their construction stage, there's a potential that ā You know, her body was up there and then made its way down.
So, yeah, they finally gave me a team and went up there and searched it because they also said that one of the things that was claimed was mum went hiking for the first time in 65 years. And the former officer in charge of the police of Penang District said, yeah, to my face that, you know, mum's just gone for a hike and she's just gone into the bush and she'll come out in a couple of days.
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