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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Tammy Shipley believed someone was out to hurt her. I thought someone was after me and I wanted to just be safe. She's put under 24-hour surveillance.
I tried to get in contact multiple times.
And then something strange happens. She just drank and drank and had something like 20 litres of pure water.
Ambulance emergency. I've got a woman unconscious.
Tammy's story. Search Background Briefing on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
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In 1986, Sharon Fulton disappeared in Perth. She dropped her children at school in the morning, but wasn't there in the afternoon. For decades, nothing happened until suddenly her husband was charged and put on trial for her murder. I'm Stephen Stockwell. This is episode one of the case of Sharon's disappearance.
Special Crime Squad detectives extradited Reddington back to Perth. They were experiencing marriage difficulties and Reddington thought he would suffer financially if she left him.
I am instructed to assert that he protests his innocence.
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Chapter 2: What happened on the day Sharon Fulton disappeared?
There's nothing here to prove what you say has happened.
Raymond Reddington is charged with the murder of Sharon Fulton, his wife, the mother of his four children, the youngest of them three years old. This seems like such a mystery, David. How does a mother of four just disappear without any charges laid for 40 years?
I'm not aware of anything like this in Western Australia. There has been at least one other case in Australia that I'm aware of, of course, is Chris Dawson, that bears similarities. No body, a circumstantial case, sort of pieces of a jigsaw being put together.
When was she last seen?
So in March 1986, according to her husband, he'd said that he'd come home and she wasn't there. But then he later said that he had dropped her off at a train station, so he gave different versions of events. But the last time anyone actually saw her was her children in the morning. They were being prepared to go to school, as she usually did, various schools, high school, primary school.
And in the case of Heath, a place called the Sound and Coordination Centre in Wangarra because he was only three years old. So the children would have been the last people to see her alive aside from her husband, Robert Fulton.
Yeah. And did she have a series of appointments that day that she didn't rock up with that kind of raised concerns amongst some of the friends and people that she'd associate with in Perth?
So the court heard that she had dropped her son Heath at the Sound Coordination Centre in Wangarra. So the family home was in Duncraig, which is a northern Perth suburb, and Wangarra is slightly inland. There was a plan to go to something... that was known as a print party, a bit like a Tupperware party where people turned up to have a look at decorative prints.
And this print party was going to be held in Bayswater, which is a suburb closer to the Perth CBD. And the plan was that she was going to go there. She did actually ring the house and say, can I bring my son Heath? And she never arrived.
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Chapter 3: What evidence led to Robert Fulton being charged with murder?
I mean, are those lies, the stories that he told, changing or were there other things that he had lied about?
Well, the key lies, of course, were his different versions of events. The children, in their evidence, said that nothing was ever said, really, about her disappearance. It was something that just wasn't talked about. There were what would seem to be some efforts to try and create a picture to help support his claim that she'd gone to a train station.
So with Heath, for instance, he remembers Dad going to a train a service counter at the train station so that he was only three years old, but he would then perhaps remember, oh, yes, we did go looking for mum at the train station, so she must have left. But what does stick out is that initially, oh, I came home, she wasn't there, and then, oh, I actually dropped her off at a train station.
She was going to meet a bloke.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. David, that's the prosecution case against Raymond Reddington, Robert Fulton. What about the defense case? Where did the defense kind of take the argument or take the discussion to try to convince a jury that Raymond Reddington, Robert Fulton was not guilty of the murder of Sharon Fulton?
So Jonathan Davies was representing Raymond Reddington, and he told the jury the case was built on circumstance, no direct evidence of any crime, was the quote. And they said it's not a technicality. You can't be convicted on suspicion alone. He said no body, no confession, no weapon, no crime scene. No witnesses saw any killing. And he said it was a tunnel or suggested it was a tunnel vision
investigation. Sharon Fulton intended to take a short break and what happened after that is unknown. The other thing that he floated was the idea that what he referred to as active serial killers at the time may have been involved. That was suggested by Raymond Reddington and Robert Fulton to a later partner. Oh, the Burnies were involved. So that was something that was pushed in court as well.
And that's where we sort of see this tunnel vision. Well, maybe they should have looked at them or perhaps other serial killers who were active at the time. No body, obviously no body and no murder weapon. So a very challenging case for the prosecution to prove without that key evidence.
Raymond Reddington, David, you know, through the trial, he's almost 80 years old at this point. How did he look in court?
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