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Filler Episode - Brenda Hean
33 Plays1 year ago
Another episode that's all filler, no killer - UNLESS IT ISN'T. Was the loss of Tasmanian environmentalist Brenda Hean a tragic accident, or was there something more sinister to it? Evidence of sabotage, suspect investigations, a guy called "Electric Eric" - this episode has something for everyone. Everyone? Sure, let's go with that.
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Transcript
Introduction and Technical Challenges
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Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dint.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello, it's the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. That is the thing you're listening to now. I am Josh Addison. I am in Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. M. Denteth is not in Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. Denteth is in Palma, I think, now. Keeps posting pictures of statues of lions that don't look a lot like lions.
00:00:38
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to their Instagram. So if unconvincing lions are your thing, go look up Dr. Conspiracy on Instagram. You might be in for a thrill. But meanwhile, I've got another filler episode to do. It seems to be coming down to me. I noticed there was one of those weird mallox drones things showed up on our feed again. I assume something's gone wonky with the podcast hosting.
00:01:03
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service, but that's not my problem. What is my problem is that I have to have to make an episode now. So we've got something to give you this week. It seems only polite. So I have another item from our list of things we could maybe do a little episode about one time. And it's not as grim.
The Lake Pedder Story Begins
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as what I talked about last week. So that's nice, but it's not what you'd call cheery either. So let's just play a chime and see where it takes us.
00:01:45
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So today I want to tell you the story of the mysterious disappearance of Brenda Heen. Brenda Heen was a woman who lived in Australia in the 1970s, and decades before that, presumably, who disappeared mysteriously. But before I get to that, I need to do a little bit of scene setting, a little bit of background. So this all starts with a lake.
00:02:11
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Lake Pedder, P-E-D-D-E-R, was, is, slash was, a lake in the southwestern part of Tasmania. It was apparently quite a natural wonder, a remarkable thing to see. It was a mountain lake in the middle of a national park with a mile-long pink quartz beach. It was apparently a very beautiful place. And the reason why I keep saying was, is because the whole area was flooded
00:02:38
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in the 1970s to create dams for hydroelectric power. There is still the flooded area, which is now obviously much bigger than the original Lake Peter was, in which the original Lake Peter is at the bottom of. It was given the name Lake Peter, but it's obviously a completely disparate size and shape from the original, to the extent that some people refuse to call it Lake Peter anymore.
00:03:04
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Now, as you can probably imagine at the time, the idea of flooding a beautiful lake in the middle of a national park to make a dam was not uncontroversial.
Impact of the Hydroelectric Project
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Now, on the plus side, doing this
00:03:20
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was going to create a lot of jobs in the hydroelectric power industry and of course it was going to generate a lot of power for the state of Tasmania. On the minus side though it was destroying a site of natural beauty and potentially didn't need to if they if they had chosen to build the dams differently or in a different place if they had picked some different rivers to dam off in a different area to flood.
00:03:47
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Adding to the controversy, Lake Peter was in the middle of the Lake Peter National Park, but in 1967, the Tasmanian state government had revoked the national park status of the park, specifically to open the door for it being flooded later on, which seems an odd thing. What's the point in designating something sort of a special area that presumably you shouldn't destroy?
00:04:15
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if you can then just take it away when you want to destroy it. Why even bother? But anyway, so a lot of people were opposed to the the damming and flooding of this region, but a lot of people were for it as well and and a lot of powerful people were for it. In particular, the Tasmanian Hydroelectric Commission, the HEC, and state premier at the time, Eric Ries, who was apparently so on the side of the HEC that he had the nickname Electric Eric.
Activism and Opposition Efforts
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And to the extent that some people would complain that the HEC essentially ran the state government rather than it being the other way around. Now the main group opposing the damming and flooding was the Lake Pedda Action Committee. This was a group that had grown out of the Hobart Walking Club.
00:05:03
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Hobart, unless I'm misremembering, is the capital of Tasmania. The Hobart Walking Club was, when we say walking club, it's not like, you know, just going for a stroll. This was sort of a hiking, tramping, out in nature type society. And they had organised what they called the Pedder Pilgrimage, where a thousand odd people went, walked out to the lake. A lake which, by the way, right in the middle of a national park, wasn't accessible.
00:05:28
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to say, you know, there were no roads going out there. If you wanted to get there, you had to hike. And so they organized a hike of a whole bunch of people to go out there and sort of, you know, see what was being threatened. And then there was a public meeting after this pilgrimage, which led to the formation of the committee. So the committee lobbied fairly hard for the preservation of the lake. They proposed alternate ways of creating a dam.
00:05:56
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They apparently made the case that you could have dammed other rivers. Apparently, they suggested the idea that rather than flooding this whole area, that you could make a canal through which the water could flow to get to the hydroelectric plants and so on. And then that was argued because supposedly canals, they said, we can't
00:06:16
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go digging canals into the side of the mountains around here. That would look worse than a flooded area, but then they reply, ah, but actually there's this lower lying area that you could stick a canal through and it wouldn't show and so on and so forth. Apparently the members of the committee in particular had visited and knew the area and could speak to this quite well, as opposed to many of the people who were pro the flooding.
The Mysterious Disappearance of Brenda Heen
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Now their work would unfortunately not pay off. The flooding was approved in 1972 and the actual flooding happened I think in about 1976. It almost sounds like there was an element of sort of bloody mindedness at play. Apparently the Prime Minister at the time had even
00:07:01
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at one point offered Premier Reese what I keep getting referred to as a blank check to move the dam to somewhere else. And Reese just refused. He said, no, we're not having the federal government coming in and interfering with how we run the state of Tasmania. It certainly sounds like there was a fair bit of no, damn it, we've picked this location and no, none of you bloody, hippy, greeny environmentalist types are going to get in our way of that.
00:07:28
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So backing up a little bit, Brenda Heen was a prominent founding member, I believe, of the Lake Peter Action Committee. Before that she was a member of the Hobart Walking Club, being involved in organizing the Peter Pilgrimage, and she'd sort of taken this on as her cause.
00:07:45
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Now, she was no hippie environmentalist. She was something of a society lady. She was in her late 50s, early 60s while this was going on. Apparently, she'd been inspired after her husband died to make a difference, to do some good in her life.
00:08:07
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had apparently at one point been flown over Lake Peter and sort of marveled at what a pretty sight it was, only to be told by the pilot, essentially, you know, take a good look because they're going to be flooding it at some stage. And she thought, well, that simply will not do and decided to do something about it. I've
00:08:25
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watched a few videos that showed her talking. She has this lovely sort of a cross between the British received pronunciation accent with a bit of an Australian accent sort of popping up from time to time. It's quite lovely to listen to. So when the community level efforts of Brenda Heen and the Lake Peter Action Committee had not had any effect, they decided to go into politics.
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They formed the political party, the United Tasmania Group, which is generally acknowledged to be the first Green Party in the world ever, the first political party dedicated to environmental causes anywhere in the world. And Mrs. Heen ran as a candidate for the United Tasmania Group in 1971.
00:09:12
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Now in 1972, people were still campaigning and lobbying and so on. The flooding hadn't happened yet. And she planned to go and meet with politicians in Canberra, the capital city of Australia on the mainland. I don't know for the people who are listening, I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with Australia or not. But if you know Australia, if you know Australia, you know there's the main body of Australia and then the big
00:09:37
Speaker
island, although the smaller island, but still pretty big, to the southeast of it, which is the state of Tasmania. So she was going to fly from Tasmania over to the mainland to the capital of Canberra to talk to politicians and decided to make this a bit of a
00:09:52
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a bit of a publicity stunt because she's still in lobbying mode. All the attention and publicity she can get was good as far as she was concerned. So to make this a bit of a stunt, she decided that she was going to fly from Hobart to Canberra in a World War II Tigermoth.
00:10:09
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and skyright save lake pedder above parliament before landing and getting on with the lobbying and campaigning. So she and her pilot, a man called Max Price, took off on the 8th of September 1972 and were never seen again. They did not land to refuel at Flinders Island, which is sort of just off the north of northern coast of Tasmania, which was in their flight plan. So when they didn't show up there,
00:10:39
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They were reported missing and a search was conducted. The weather apparently was not overly cooperative, it sort of got worse and worse, and eventually after 10 days they called off the search. Apparently they'd also had some trouble trying to sort of reconstruct their flight path where they might have been. They had a variety of witness reports of people seeing what looked like a Tiger Moth, an old World War II plane flying overhead, but
00:11:07
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it was difficult to put together an exact sort of timeline because a lot of people were like, yeah, yeah, I saw a plane, would it be, I don't know, one o'clock in the afternoon or something? And then someone further along would say, yeah, I saw a plane, it was probably about 12 and the times are not heavy, didn't they? They had trouble working out
Allegations and Documentary Revelations
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just from eyewitness reports. So they were not successful in finding any sign of them. So the plane was basically presumed lost at sea.
00:11:34
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And Mrs. Brenda Heen and Mr. Max Price were assumed dead, but their bodies were not found, which meant that there was no inquest into their deaths. So that's a damn shame, obviously. That's fairly tragic. This woman on her way to do good in the world, never making it. But
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I wouldn't be talking about this on a podcast about conspiracy theories if things didn't get a little more sinister. So there were allegations of foul play possibly having been involved in the disappearance. Apparently a few days before her flight, Mrs. Heen had received a phone call from a man who did not identify himself but wanted her to stop this campaigning nonsense and just let the dam go ahead when she told him that no, she wasn't going to be stopping anytime soon. Thank you very much.
00:12:23
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and in fact she was going to fly to Canberra to talk to people about it. The man apparently replied, Mrs Heen, how would you like to go for a swim? Ominous enough. To add to this, while investigating the police went to the hangar where the tiger moth had been kept and found that it had been broken into. Upon searching the hangar they found that the plane's emergency beacon had been removed from the plane
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and hidden behind some fuel pumps in the hangar. Apparently there was also documentation that would have given their flight plan or something that could have been used to narrow the search area they were covering, which you would have expected to have been in the hangar was not there as well.
00:13:07
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And so this led people to suspect that possibly the flight had been sabotaged. So some people had suggested it was the good old sugar in the gas tank, which would have gummed up the engine in mid-flight and could have caused the plane to crash. Other people suggested something a little more sophisticated.
00:13:25
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where involving the way that the skywriting setup works, apparently it's to do with you have a sort of, there's a spare fuel tank, which rather than having fuel in it, you put oil in it, and then to do the skywriting, you flick the switch and this oil gets added in with the fuel, which makes the fuel the exhaust extra smoky, and then you write with that. And so I
00:13:47
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I don't know exactly how these things work, but apparently a person who knew what they were doing could have filled with that mechanism so that instead of oil going somewhere, fuel would end up draining out into the wrong place and they'd run out of fuel in the middle of their flight. I mean, obviously there's no evidence that either of these things did happen, but there are just basically ways put forwards to if someone were to sabotage the flight, that's a way they could have done it.
00:14:11
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Now adding to the suspicious factor was the suggestion that the investigations and the searches that were done were perhaps not as thorough as they could have been and the suspicion that the authorities headed by Premier Rees were quite keen for the whole thing to sort of go away, to be brushed aside and tied up with a neat little bow and we never need to speak of it again. Apparently
00:14:34
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Apparently Mr. Rees knew that Brenda Heen was going to be going on this flight and was dead against it. It's that bloody woman environmentalist going off, stirring up trouble for me. So he would have been quite happy for the flight not to have gone ahead. And so apparently, apparently,
00:14:53
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that this did put the wind up the other activists at the time. I'd sort of read of people saying, oh, did they get to Brenda? Was this deliberate? Should we be worried? Is one of us going to be next? Unfortunately, again, these investigations didn't turn up anything around the hangar. They didn't find any fingerprints or anything like that that could have helped them to identify the people who broke in.
00:15:17
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to the extent that the police apparently even suggested that maybe it was members of the Lake Peter Action Committee who had staged the break-in after Mrs. Hien went missing so that they could make it look sinister and sort of get sympathy for the cause. I don't really see how that could work if you have taken the
00:15:39
Speaker
the missing emergency beacon into consideration because that could only have been taken out and hidden before the flight left it wouldn't it's not something that could have been done after the fact so i don't really know about that at all now that was that was sort of where it stayed for a long time mrs heen and and mr price had disappeared people suspected that maybe that maybe some of the people who wanted to get rid of them had actually gotten rid of them but there was nothing more that could be said about that
00:16:05
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But closer to the present day, there was a bit of movement in the case. Now, in 2008, a documentarian by the name of Scott Millwood, an Australian who lives in Europe now, released a book and a documentary film, both called Whatever Happened to Brenda Heen, where he went over the case. In 2003, he had been given police files on the case by an anonymous source and had apparently been given these things and told, use this for good.
00:16:35
Speaker
Now I have to say I've read a few different articles about this and it's never quite been clear to me of the suspicious things I've already talked about and of the suspicious things I'm going to talk about exactly what which of them were known at the time and which of them were things that came out in this documentary but nevertheless there were people definitely had their doubts at the time
00:16:56
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And people looking at the case these days were given much more to worry about.
Motives and Theories Behind Foul Play
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So when he was making this documentary, Mr. Millwood offered a $100,000 reward for any information leading to a solution to the mystery of these disappearances. And he also set up a tip line to try and gather more information for his documentary.
00:17:18
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He received around 150 tips from people. He reckoned that all the tips he received seemed genuine. They weren't just people messing around. And a lot of these tips were from people who at the time had seen or found things that could have related to the disappearances. And the common theme seemed to be that no one had ever had ever come to them or questioned them about it. So this was something that had never been included in the police investigation.
00:17:46
Speaker
So one of the more damning things was talk of a search aircraft had apparently spotted wreckage in the water near, I believe, to Flinders Island, but had been told, okay, you go return to base, we'll send a boat out to check on it. Now, there apparently was a boat that could have gone and checked on it.
00:18:09
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are relatively nearby that could have been there soon but rather than sending that boat they sent a police boat out which was not nearly as close and took three days to get there by which time any wreckage that might have been in the area would have been swept away by the currents.
00:18:24
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There were other claims, some scallop fishermen claimed to have dredged up parts of a plane, wings, tail and fuselage parts during the 1980s, but they, having pulled these things up, just threw them back into the water because they didn't want to get involved with whatever
00:18:43
Speaker
with whatever that happened to be. They supposedly didn't want to get involved with the cops. Who knows? Who knows why? There was a report from a fisherman who said he had pulled up a dress and a bottle of champagne from the waters in that area. And apparently Mrs. Hien had packed a bottle of champagne with her in the hopes of celebrating either a successful flight or who knows, successful lobbying. I don't know.
00:19:10
Speaker
Then there was another story about reports that wreckage had washed up on shore somewhere and then had been promptly taken away and buried on the order of the authorities. This one, I read about a reporter who had supposedly heard from someone else that this had happened and had gone to the area where it seemed like
00:19:35
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there was Earth that had been freshly, freshly dug up and stuff like that. But then he had been told to get out of there and mind his own business very quickly. So there were these stories that sort of again made the whole thing look suspicious from the perspective of the idea that there may have been more evidence out there that could have helped solve the case and that maybe the people who are investing the case were choosing to ignore certain information or indeed maybe choosing to cover up certain evidence.
00:20:05
Speaker
for whatever reason. Now the book and the documentary, whatever happened to Brenda Heen, I am not, I do not have first-hand experience with. I listened to a podcast called Murder in the Land of Oz, another one of your true crime murder type podcasts with
00:20:25
Speaker
People discussing mysterious tests, they did an Australian true crime murder podcast. They covered the disappearance of Brenda Heen. So if you were interested, go look up Murder in the Land of Oz and hunt for their Brenda Heen episode. And that one of the hosts said that she had read the book.
00:20:42
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and watched some of the documentary and said that the book, while good, she thought it contained a bit much of Mr Millwood making things about himself a little bit and apparently the documentary had a bunch of slightly odder stuff of guys following some guys looking using dowsing or something to try and find the wreckage it seemed a little bit odd but nevertheless
00:21:03
Speaker
contained a whole bunch of details that had not been known up until this point, all of which made the disappearance of Mrs. Heen and indeed Mr. Price much, much more worrisome. So if, if, assuming that the flight had been sabotaged and that this, the flight didn't just get into trouble for some reason and crash into the sea or what have you,
00:21:26
Speaker
Assuming it was sabotage, well, then who might have been responsible? Obviously, powerful people were not happy with Mrs. Heen and what she was up to. The first assumption might be, oh, she was knocked off by the government. But it does seem a strange thing to happen that a state government would take out a hit on an environmental activist in her 60s.
00:21:53
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I don't know that anyone actually suggested that the government themselves were behind it, or indeed the powerful hydroelectric commission. From what I've seen, people seem to think that if it was sabotage, it was probably more likely to be an individual, someone maybe who sort of worked
00:22:10
Speaker
for the hydro electricity industry, someone who had knew what was going on and had a bit of an axe to grind, maybe had a bit of a personal stake in it. They thought that if the dam didn't go ahead, that would cost them their job. It would affect their livelihoods or something like that. I think
00:22:27
Speaker
People seem to think it was probably someone who was taking this a lot more personally. I mean, we all know if you've ever read a comments, letters to the editor or a local community Facebook page or anything like that, you know, some people get very hot under the collar over what others might consider to be more trivial matters. So it's possible that somebody took matters into their own hands. Now, of course,
00:22:50
Speaker
The government and the powerful folks might not have been directly responsible for sabotage if that is what happened, but you could still blame them for not properly investigating or possibly even actively covering up a disappearance that would have looked very bad for them if it turned out to be due to
Legacy of Activism and Environmental Successes
00:23:09
Speaker
sabotage. So there are a variety of conspiracy theories you could run there.
00:23:14
Speaker
Now, there is one other one other wrinkle. There was also the suggestion that maybe the people talking about these disappearances had got it all wrong. There was a suggestion that maybe it was the pilot, Max Price, who was the actual target of any sort of murder by way of sabotage, and that Mrs. Heen had simply been collateral damage rather than the other way around.
00:23:41
Speaker
Going by this theory, supposedly Mr Price's business partner had been stealing from the business and had killed Mr Price to stop it from getting out. There was also the matter that this particular theory apparently was put forward by Max Price's mistress. He was having an affair with his sister-in-law, apparently, and I've seen a couple of the articles sort of suggested that or maybe he'd been, you know, killed by a jealous husband or something, but I hadn't
00:24:09
Speaker
I didn't see it like the fact that it was this woman he was having the fear with was the one who actually came for I don't know I hadn't seen much of that but I did read about that apparently the police did look into this this possibility again
00:24:25
Speaker
When people talked about the investigation they did here, there was a suggestion that maybe they didn't put as much effort into it as they could have, that maybe they were not as thorough in it as they could have been. But nevertheless, what investigating they did do didn't turn up any sort of financial irregularities that would have provided a motive for murder. So maybe
00:24:46
Speaker
Maybe there is nothing to that, and maybe if something sinister took place, then it is Mrs. Hien who is the more likely target. And that really is where things stand to this day. Despite the fact that this extra information came out due to the 2008 documentary, there has never been anything conclusively determined about the deaths of Brenda Hien and her pilot Max Price.
00:25:12
Speaker
Now, last time when I talked about the Rabant killings, it was all just a little bit bleak. A whole bunch of people died and there was terrible violence and nothing good ever came of it. Now, in this case, there was not a happy ending for Mrs. Heen, but if you want some kind of a happy ending, you could consider the fact that the environmental groups in Tasmania that came after Antony grew out of
00:25:41
Speaker
the Lake Peter Action Committee, went on to successfully challenge the construction of the Franklin Dam in the late 70s and early 80s and actually had a lot more that while they did not have success saving Lake Peter, they did manage to save the environment in other areas. And people have sort of said, you know, it was a
00:26:01
Speaker
I can't find a decent construction of the so-and-so had to walk before these guys could run, but essentially the Lake Peter activism had to happen so that these other successful acts of environmental activism could occur in the future. So positive things did result even after
Ongoing Restoration Efforts and Conclusion
00:26:20
Speaker
even after Mrs. Hien's death, the organisation that she'd devoted the latter part of her life to carried on, and bore fruit. And indeed today, there is the Lake Pedda Restoration Committee, who are people campaigning still to this day to actually have the area drained so that the original Lake Pedda area can be restored. So who knows, maybe
00:26:43
Speaker
Maybe there will be a lake pedo once again. I don't know what would happen, what happened to the area for being underwater for about 50 years, I don't know, but presumably stuff could be done. So who knows, maybe Mrs. Heen will get her wish posthumously after all. That would be nice. Let's assume that's going to happen and then we can go out on a cheery note. So that is the story of the mysterious disappearance of Brenda Heen.
00:27:12
Speaker
I don't know right now whether or not Em is going to be back at this time next week, so we may have a regular episode for you next week, or you may have another one of these further episodes next week. Well, we'll just have to find out. But for now, I think that's all I have to say. So thank you very much for listening and goodbye. The podcast is guide to the conspiracy stars, Josh Addison and myself.
00:28:00
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.