From iconic bushranger Ned Kelly to serial killer Ivan Milat, the promise of cash to solve crimes has long been a feature of Australian policing.
Each year rewards large and small are offered across the country, usually for information leading to a conviction, and often years, if not decades, after the crime.
But these conventions were turned on their head by the case of four-year-old Cleo Smith, who disappeared from her family’s tent at an isolated West Australian campground in the early hours of 16 October. Six days after she went missing, the state government announced a $1m reward for information on Cleo’s location, or that led to the arrest and conviction of her abductor.
“That’s not normal,” former detective inspector Terry Goldsworthy tells Guardian Australia. “It’s highly unusual, in that it’s done at the start of the investigation.”
Dr Goldsworthy, who spent 28 years with Queensland police before becoming an associate professor at Bond University, suggests two reasons for the early reward. One, Cleo’s unique case lent itself to media attention which can influence how quickly a reward is offered. Two, it was an investigative tactic, and not a bad one. “I think they were putting it out there to apply pressure to the suspect or suspects,” he said.
Cleo’s story ended happily, the little girl found in a Carnarvon home 18 days after she went missing. Terence Darrell Kelly, 36, has been charged with her abduction. But – at least according to police – the $1m reward was not the clincher.
What are rewards for?
The point of reward money is to elicit new information and move investigations forward. Most often, they are deployed at the end of an investigation, when leads are exhausted. The prime target, Dr Goldsworthy said, is usually a “recalcitrant witness” who has never come forward. They may be scared, or simply not want to be involved, and the thinking is the money could push them over the line.
Dr Goldsworthy says people like to imagine others would always come forward, but that was “probably utopian”. “Some people aren’t that interested in what happens to other people until there’s a benefit for them,” he says.
Rewards can also be not just a carrot for witnesses, but part and parcel of the policing operation. A classic example, Dr Goldsworthy says, is offering a reward as detectives are tapping the phone of a prime suspect, watching carefully for an incriminating reaction.
However, he says, one major drawback to rewards is that it can have the potential to hamper investigations with “information overload”.
So do police rewards work? Sydney man Peter Rolfe is convinced they can move cases forward. He believes every unsolved murder should have a million dollar reward on offer.
Rolfe started a support group for people navigating the bewildering, desolate aftermath of homicide after his partner of 16 years, Stephen Dempsey, was murdered at Narrabeen in 1994. Since then, Rolfe has poured his grief into advocating for victims of homicide – including lobbying for rewards.
In an interview with Guardian Australia, he lists four New South Wales cases where million dollar rewards were offered and arrests made soon after. “The first one, Scott Johnson…” he begins. Johnson, an American mathematician, was found dead at the bottom of a cliff at Blue Fish Point, Manly, on a Saturday morning in December 1988. His brother, Steve, pledged to double the $1m on offer from NSW police in March 2020. Two months later, Scott White was arrested and charged with Johnson’s murder. He has pleaded not guilty.
He also reels off the arrest of a man in August this year over the 1999 murder of schoolgirl Michelle Bright one day after NSW police announced a $1m reward. Police charged another man with the 2008 Valentine’s Day murder of 66-year-old German national Bernd Lehmann, one month after a reward was offered. And advances were made in the investigation into the 1987 murder of Clayton man Raymond Keam. A man was charged in August 2021; police had offered the reward in June.
“So they do work,” Rolfe says. NSW police declined to comment on whether rewards are likely to be paid in the four cases, which are all yet to go to trial. It is not known whether the reward played any part in the arrests.
But many other cold cases stay on ice.
There is little publicly available information on police rewards claimed across Australia, but scattered freedom of information requests show rewards are occasionally, but not regularly, paid. Last year, former WA police minister Michelle Roberts told parliament rewards are “often offered, but they are rarely given out”.
According to NSW police, the number of payouts is not an appropriate measure of success. “For investigators, success is solving a crime and providing answers to families,” NSW police said in a statement.
The claimants
However, the public does not often hear of those who do collect rewards. “The police keep it very close to their chest,” Rolfe says, adding that across his years of advocacy, he has never met anyone who received a reward.
Dr Goldsworthy put it this way: “You don’t see too many lotto winners putting their face on TV.”
“If you’re putting someone in for murder to collect a reward, and suddenly you’re on TV popping the champagne going ‘Yeah, I just got my million dollar reward’, depending on the offender, you could be putting a real big target on your head,” he says.
Additionally, he says, authorities don’t want to create a norm where people expect money for reporting serious crimes.
But there are a handful of high profile examples.
Paul Onions, who received a chunk of a $500,000 reward for helping to convict serial killer Ivan Milat, told the Herald Sun in 2010 he never cashed the cheque, handing the “hollow money” back to the Australian High Commission in London.
And an £8,000 reward for the capture of the Kelly gang, posted in 1879, was divided among dozens of people after the dramatic siege at Glenrowan.
Among the recipients were numerous police officers, the schoolteacher Thomas Curnow, and seven Aboriginal trackers, named in the Police Reward Board report as Hero, Johnny, Jimmy, Jacky, Barny, Moses and Spider.
But the seven men never received their dues. The board decided it “would not be desirable to place any considerable sum of money in the hands of persons unable to use it” and gave it to the Queensland and Victorian governments.
A court battle to recover the lost money brought by two descendants ended in vain.
‘It took 26 years to get a $1m reward’
Many families fight for years before a reward is posted.
In 1994 Sydney woman Revelle Balmain disappeared without a trace. Six months ago, police upped the reward on offer to $1m.
“It took me 26 years to get my sister a million dollar reward,” her sister Suellen Simpson tells Guardian Australia. Simpson believes it came too late, and wishes her stepfather and mother could have been alive to see it. She is no longer hopeful she will ever learn what happened to her sister.
“I don’t know what happened to Revelle, I don’t know who was responsible. If [those who could provide information] were in their 40s [at the time of her disappearance], or a bit later, they could be on their way to 70. They might not even be around,” she says. “And this is the problem when things get left so long. You never find out.”
A reward may work out, or it may not, Dr Goldsworthy says, but at least it is there.
“You just don’t know who’s going to come forward years down the track.”
