The Mysterious Blue Mountains

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SUDDEN DEATH OF STATIONMASTER

Fri 15 Apr 1904:— Mr J Douglass, stationmaster in charge of the Medlow Bath Railway Station, died suddenly on Tuesday afternoon last. Deceased was engaged in shunting at the railway goods yard and while pushing a truck along, he broke a blood vessel. The deceased was recently secretary of the Railway Institute, Sydney.

He leaves a widow and three children and much sympathy is expressed locally. His body was conveyed to Sydney on Wednesday morning and the funeral took place at Rookwood yesterday afternoon and was very largely attended by all brandies of the railway service.

In consequence of delicate health, Mr Douglass a couple of months ago was transferred to the post of
stationmaster at Medlow Bath, and it was at this place, while engaged in shunting that he met his death through a violent fit of coughing, which induced a rupture in the lungs. For ten years Mr Douglass was secretary to the Railway Institute.

Is the alleged ghost in a long coat, similar to the old railway uniform, who stands at the end of platform one, then disappears be John Douglass?

Is he still keeping a watchful eye over the Railway Station?



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The other ghost is a man with a boater hat, who resides on platform 2 then disappears through the walls and into the museum.

While I was researching Mark Foy’s background, I came across some intriguing information.

The man responsible for the birth of 18-Footer racing some 128 years ago (January 1892) was a leading Sydney retailer named Mark Foy, who was a keen sailor as well as being a very successful businessman with an acute eye for promotion.

His efforts resulted in the faster, cheaper, skiff-class 18-footers unique to Australia. In 1891 Mark Foy founded the Sydney Flying Squadron Yacht Club. He challenged the sailing conventions of that time by having coloured sails and prize money. The Squadron’s boats were banned from the 1892 National Regatta because they carried coloured emblems.

It was claimed that the emblems encouraged gambling and spoiled the look of the white sails on Sydney Harbour. In response Mark organised an opposition regatta which he financed himself and advertised it as a spectacle which could be enjoyed by all members of the public regardless of their social background.

In 1898, as Commodore of the Yacht Club, he took his 22 foot boat Irex to England to participate in Australia’s first International Race. Although he did not win the race was a ground breaking event as it began a long history of international competition.

We may have connected the boater’s hat to Mark Foy, however, was there a museum in the vicinity of the Railway Station?



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In 1943, Charles Melbourne Ward moved to the Blue Mountains and opened his Gallery of Natural History and Native Art Museum in a long, narrow fibro building at the Hydro Majestic Hotel, Medlow Bath.

As well as his own natural history collections, including 25,000 crabs, he had inherited from his father, old Japanese armour, weapons, and valuable relics from many foreign lands as well as souvenirs of stage productions.

Ward also acquired convict relics, historical documents and rare Australian books. The museum incongruously combined 'old curiosity shop and scientific exhibits'. He delighted in expounding the minutest detail to visitors. In the late 1950s he appeared on television in Channel 9's 'Mickey Mouse Club' and 'Ninepins' show.

He suffered from diabetes mellitus and died of a coronary occlusion on 6 October 1966 at his Medlow Bath home; he was buried with Anglican rites in Blackheath cemetery.



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Could the ghost on platform 2 be Mark Foy, waiting to greet his VIP guests from Penrith Station, then disappearing into the museum walls a short distance away?

Very strong connections indeed, anyway, that’s for you to decide.

However, the Foy family have one more unsolved mystery.



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At first sight, it looked like a pile of rubbish. Forgotten, neglected belongings, stored in a rain-drenched shipping container. But appearances were deceptive, because this may be one of the greatest finds in our country’s history.

The closer we looked, the more we realised it’s importance. A treasure trove, dating back nearly one hundred years and linked to a still unsolved disappearance involving one of Sydney’s most famed families.

It’s clear the customer who left it at the storage facility needs to be found. In the back corner of the container were 33 boxes of unimaginable importance, filled with photos, a will, handwritten letters, and countless artefacts of the once-renowned Foy family.



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As we continue to sort through the archives, each box told another story and some intriguing revelations. Like Mark Foy’s passport, which shows Foy leaving Berlin, just the day before World War II broke out.

We find the radio transcript from the day Foy died in 1950, along with precious keepsakes memories on old 16mm film. The more we find, the more we realized, no family would want their precious archives to be found mouldy and dusty, left to rot in a paddock in the middle of nowhere.

So who was the keeper of these priceless archives?

From what we can gather, they belonged to Mark Foy’s granddaughter, Mary Shaw.

Glenda Lane lived just down the road from Mary, in the Blue Mountains Megalong Valley, directly below the Hydro Majestic.

“Everybody should have a Mary Shaw in their life, you never visited Mary without having to sit on the couch, with the dogs and the donkeys and the cats and the dogs and the chickens and whatever in this old cottage, the windows were broken the electricity was off, it was fabulous, every bit of conversation was delightful.” Glenda Lane said.

Over a cup of tea in her antique farm cottage, Glenda makes me feel right at home as she describes her friend, who Glenda says had a passion for preserving history, especially when it came to her family.

“We would pore over this material, we would sit down on the floor, squat legged, with these realms of paper all around us, photographs, cuttings and all sorts of things ... and I'd say, ‘Mary this is unbelievable, the stuff you have discovered’. I'd say, ‘if this house falls down, it's all going to go’, and she'd say, ‘I'm looking after it my dear, I'm looking after it, you don't need to worry about it, I'm looking well after that’,” Glenda said.

Mary Shaw could best be described as eccentric – she was quite the socialite but also a private eye. Someone used to wealth, but who had fallen on tough times. A woman who held close to her heart, perhaps, some secrets she took to her grave on 2011.

“Mary didn't show a lot of emotion, she was very straight-forward, but very, very determined to get the truth out, she was adamant that the truth had to be unfolded,” Glenda said.



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We discover in Mary’s diary two words, written on July 4, 1975: “Juanita disappeared”.
Juanita Nielsen was Mary Shaw’s second cousin. She was Mark Foy’s great niece and heiress to the Foy family fortune.

She was also a newspaper journalist, who relentlessly campaigned against ruthless developers trying to replace low-income housing in King’s Cross with a $40 million development. In the collection, we find Juanita’s publication NOW, issued just a few days before she disappeared. She was falsely lured to a meeting at the Carousel Club in 1975, where she was never seen or heard from again.

Juanita’s body has never been found, and nobody has ever been charged. We find multiple folders containing the entire transcript of a coronial inquest into Juanita’s disappearance. Countless newspaper clippings and eve photos of Juanita riding a horse when she was a young girl. As we talk more and more about Mary, stories start to come back to Glenda Lane. Some more poignant than others.

“She said there is an untold story and she said I am going to make sure it is told," Glenda said.

What was the truth Mary wanted to expose?



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The intrigue prompts me to show Glenda another puzzling item found in Mary’s archives. It’s a pencil sketch of the Hydro Majestic, drawn by John Wayne Glover, known as the Granny Killer, who murdered six elderly women on Sydney’s North Shore in 1989 and 1990.

In the back of the frame, a handful of newspaper clipping are found, from when Glover took his own life in his Lithgow jail cell.

“Mary never revealed anything like this and the fact that all of these clippings are in her belongings along with this – it is a mystery, a major mystery,” a stunned Glenda exclaims.

As Glenda ponders on the picture, she tells us perhaps one of Mary’s best-kept secrets.



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“She said there's a body at the foyer, at the entry to the Hydro Majestic and she said so that has got some intrigue to it,” Glenda says.

“Every time I walk into that foyer there, I always think, ‘I wonder where the body is’, never ever crossed my mind, and I would think, ‘why has nobody written about that?’ that's why I am quite startled when you show me this here, it's quite amazing.”

I ask Glenda if she thinks Mary knew whose body it could be. Her response is swift.

“I'm sure she would. I am sure Mary would know, Mary never did things by halves, she didn't gossip and she didn't recount thing that weren't true, very matter of fact,” Glenda says.



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Even more matter of fact is Dennis O’Toole, the lead homicide investigator on the John Glover case. Now retired, he meets me in a quiet, closed restaurant, where I show him the controversial sketch.

“That's certainly John Wayne Glover's signature. That's his trade mark sketches. Why someone would get a sketch from John Wayne Glover and frame it is beyond me,” Mr O’Toole said.

What makes this so compelling, is that Glover sketched Dennis O’Toole the same drawing of the Hydro Majestic before he died in 2005.

“This is just something I find quite bizarre, to be quite honest. Why he would keep going back to the Hydro Majestic and why he would sketch that, there is some connection, I just don't know what it is,” Mr O’Toole said.

In the sketch belonging to Mr O’Toole, the number nine can be seen in one of the trees. Glover was convicted of six murders, but is suspected of more.

“I believe he was responsible for at least three other murders,” Mr O’Toole said. “He asked me, specifically, to go back there and see how close his sketch was to the Hydro Majestic, as it was then. I, in fact, went there on two occasions and compared his sketch to the Hydro Majestic. It certainly wasn't exact, but it was similar to it. His exact word to me was that trees are significant.”



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We call in forensic criminologist, Dr Xanthe Mallet, to try and help us make sense of the leads, starting with the controversial sketch.

“What I find most fascinating is, amongst all of this family history, which is prolific, she's collected everything, there's also these links to John Glover, you know, so I find that a real juxtaposition, because most of it is keepsakes,” Dr Mallet said. “It seems a bit of a dark kind of thing to keep, unless you've got a really good reason.

The fact he then gave a copy of this drawing he's done to the lead investigator, I think signifies it has an importance.”

John Glover, Juanita Nielsen, the Hydro Majestic. All clues? Or just coincidence?



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“Well it could be, it could be Glover playing games, or he could be trying to say there is somebody buried under that portico ... he may know something,” Dr Mallet tells me. “Just because he is a game player, doesn't mean he not slipping in truths in there, just keep everyone guessing.”

Dr Mallet says the only way to test Mary’s claim and challenge any hint behind Glover’s sketch is to investigate further.

“You'd need imaging equipment, so that could be ground penetrating radar, or some other archaeological techniques that could be applied,” she said. “Certainly concrete can be viewed from the surface without any kind of excavation or damage at all. Now what you’re not looking for is a body ... it's not like the films where you're looking for the outline of a body lying there or a skeleton lying there. But what you'd see is something that looks out of place, something that's an anomaly in that area, something different.”

“It could be an interesting time ahead – yeah, you never know, you might actually find something that might break this case wide open and if you do the police will be open to new leads; is this the end of the mystery, are you going to solve it at last?”



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Among the intrigue and many mysteries of the Foy family legacy, is a lingering question: where is Mary’s son Max? Before her death, she entrusted the priceless collection to him. Finding Max was crucial for our investigation, and it wasn’t easy.

We finally track him down by finding a mobile number in one of his mother’s diaries from 2001. Max is shocked to receive my phone call, but in our single conversation, an important part of Australian history is saved. Max travelled a thousand kilometres, making a desperate dash to Sydney. He knew just how important our meeting would be.

Max is the great grandson of Mark Foy, and his family history means a great deal to him.

“I'm proud of it and proud of sharing it with my children, and if nothing else it's a pretty interesting story to tell,” he told me.

An interesting story that came so close to taking a tragic turn. Max arrived at the Channel Nine headquarters a little anxious, but relieved. During our interview, he tells me the collection was unlawfully accessed and removed from the Queensland property where it was being stored. By who and why, will now be a matter for police.

“As far as we knew, they were under lock and key and safe, so again we are very surprised to hear that they ended up in Sydney in your hands. I had no idea that our materials and archives were on the loose, so it certainly came as a shock,” he said.



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Finally Max is reunited with the precious memories, which he immediately recognises. We learn more about Mary Shaw and her love of being a Foy.

“She took a really serious view on what she saw as her role in the family. It was very much her focus to keep things as complete as possible,” Max said.

We learn just how close Mary Shaw was to her missing second cousin, Juanita Nielsen.

“They were very close. She always said she was an amazing looking woman, and very strong willed, very head strong and very determined, which I think is very reminiscent of the whole family at that time,” Max said. “She was very confident and certainly saw it as her duty to do what was right for our family and for Juanita of course.”

I then put John Wayne Glover’s artwork before Max, hoping to get some answers about why the Granny Killer’s sketch was found in Mary’s collection.

“It is very difficult to explain, it's pretty mysterious how that came to be part of the collection … I wish I could say that I did, but I don't I'm sorry,” he said.

He went on to joke, “We like to collect items from serial killers, we like to have that as part of our family archives … it is a little bit off-putting.”

When we first cast eyes upon the collection, we could never have guessed its true value. It really is the trash that turned out to be one of Australia’s greatest treasures.



Our next location in the Blue Mountains we investigate 9 mysterious pits.



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[KANACKI]

Hello Headless a very interesting story full of mystery.

Was there any building work going on at hydro majestic July 4, 1975: “Juanita disappeared"

Kanacki