In the early hours of July 8, 1991, a school teacher named Susie Brown was driving to work through the small New South Wales town of Coolah. Just past a bridge over the Coolaburragundy River, roughly 250 meters from the Black Stump Motel, she spotted a figure lying by a gate post on the left side of the road. It was 20-year-old Penny Hill, barely alive. Her face was swollen and smeared with dried blood, with bleeding from her nose and ears.
Her breathing was so labored that Susie thought she was going to die on the spot. She was wrong only about the timing. Penny never regained consciousness and died 13 days later in Newcastle’s John Hunter Hospital from septicemia caused by her injuries. The assault had become a murder inquiry.
Penny Hill had arrived in Coolah just three days before she was attacked. Born on Christmas Day in 1970, she was the first child of Felix and Jeanette Hill, a fun-loving girl whose dream was to work with children. She trained in child care at Tamworth TAFE and was thrilled to land a live-in nanny position at the Black Stump Motel, employed by its owners, Colin and Barbara Bajent, to look after their three young children. Her parents drove her to Coolah on the Friday, met the Bajents, and left her to start her new life.
On the Saturday she spent time with the children. On Sunday she was given time to unpack and went to the local pub, where she drank lemon squash, played darts, and socialized with locals. She left the pub around 5:30 pm and walked back to the motel, where she was staying in room 14. That evening, Penny took a phone call from her mother, which came through the motel reception and lasted about half an hour.
Jeanette later recalled that there was nothing unusual in her daughter’s voice; Penny said it was too cold to go out that night. At around 8:30 pm, she received another call, this time from her boyfriend, Shane Williams. They had only been dating for three weeks. During the call, Penny mentioned that she had been hanging around at the pub with people.
Exactly what happened in the hours after those calls remains unknown. There were no witnesses to the attack itself. The initial response to the assault was a critical failure. Because Penny’s case was treated as an assault rather than a potential crime scene, her motel room was not preserved.
By the time retired homicide detective Graham Merkell drove out to Coolah to take over the investigation after her death, room 14 had been thoroughly cleaned. The only forensic documentation of the room was a series of photographs taken by police. Among the most intriguing remnants was a torn-up letter Penny had written to Shane Williams. Its contents were never known because the letter was thrown in the bin and sent out with the rubbish.
The envelope was all that remained. Merkell began interviewing people connected to the motel. Colin Bajent said that on the night of the assault, he had gone fox shooting with the motel cook, a man named Bob Lee. They claimed they returned at around 10:30 pm, but their accounts of their movements that night were vague.
Susie Brown’s testimony, however, placed critical limits on the timeline. She noticed that there were no fresh tracks in the dew on the grass around Penny’s body. In winter, dew begins to form in that area around two or three o’clock in the morning. Penny had been dumped there before the dew settled.
The grass beneath her was dry, suggesting she had been there all night. Her attacker or attackers must have placed her there in the early hours of the morning. Bob Lee was a former policeman who had been in trouble with the law for years. He lived in a caravan park just 100 meters from the Black Stump Motel.
A witness at the inquest reported seeing Lee exit his Land Rover and enter his caravan in the early hours of Monday, July 8. Police questioned him several times about Penny’s murder. They later realized he was wanted in connection with an attempted armed robbery of a brothel in Sydney’s Fairfield suburb. When arrested, police found an arsenal of illegal weapons in his caravan, including a rifle and a silencer.
Lee was released on bail but died just a few months later in a mysterious car accident. Some in town suspected suicide born of guilt, but investigators did not agree. They noted that people die in road accidents all the time. Coolah was heaving that weekend, complicating the investigation.
There were rugby league games, a tennis tournament, and a golf tournament, bringing many strangers into town. Among the people of interest was Ross Kitto, a professional golfer from New Zealand. At around 9:30 pm on July 7, Kitto violently assaulted his girlfriend inside their motel room, allegedly with his hands around her neck. She later said she believed he was going to end her life.
Kitto was physically pulled off her by none other than Colin Bajent and Bob Lee. That meant the two men must have returned from their hunting trip earlier than they had claimed. Kitto’s movements for the next few hours were hard to verify because his girlfriend moved to another room. He returned to New Zealand and cooperated with police.
Detective Merkell became increasingly suspicious of the Bajents. He found both Colin and Barbara elusive during interviews, noting that their stories changed even while he was sitting in their living room. The inquest heard that Colin Bajent had a history of violence toward his wives; he was alleged to have been violent with Barbara and with two previous wives as well. Barbara once blamed herself, saying he did not hit her for no reason.
The coroner replied that he should not have hit her at all. The second inquest also heard allegations that Bajent had a history of abusing and acting inappropriately toward his employees. A woman named Tracy, who worked in the motel laundry in 1991 when she was 16, told the coroner that Colin Bajent had come into the laundry with two glasses of wine, trying to get her drunk so he could rape her. She quit and never went back.
She did not take the allegation to police at the time. Bajent denied the claim and was never charged. Colin’s wife Barbara told police that on the night Penny was attacked, her husband locked up the motel and stayed with her for the rest of the night. But a neighbor, Stephen Davis, who lived right next door, reported hearing a strange sound at approximately 1:30 am.
He heard what sounded like a sliding door on a van closing very quietly, then a car idling away without the engine revving or changing gears. He believed Colin Bajent owned a van at the time. While Penny lay in a coma, the Bajents called her parents at the hospital three or four times a day for the first week, repeatedly asking whether she had regained consciousness. Jeanette found it strange.
She later wondered whether they were frightened that Penny was going to say what had happened. Following Penny’s death, Colin Bajent became the prime suspect. He gave very little to say for the next 30 years. In 2012, a second coronal inquest was held.
Important new evidence emerged regarding DNA profiles for the key persons of interest. Samples were taken from Colin Bajent and Ross Kitto, and police sought samples from Bob Lee’s family. At this inquest, Barbara Bajent changed her story. She could no longer be certain that Colin had not left their bed during the night, though she insisted that if she had any knowledge of what happened to Penny, she would have said so.
Asked directly whether she was protecting her ex-husband, she replied, No, I’m not. Investigators also turned their attention to Shane Williams. On the night Penny was attacked, he was in Armadale, roughly 300 kilometers from Coolah by road. He told police he had attended an event with the Salvation Army, then gone home to his family and gone to bed.
Detective Merkell initially found nothing suspicious about him and eliminated him from the inquiry. But at the 2012 inquest, Williams had difficulty recalling the exact details of his movements that night. When questioned in 2015, he said he could have been at church, walking around a property he had access to, or at home with his parents. Superintendent Danny Doherty, commander of the State Crime Command’s Homicide Squad, who was in charge of the reinvestigation, noted that Williams was an obvious line of inquiry.
Penny had only been dating him for three weeks, but she was clearly besotted with him, and he had called her that night. Police noted that Williams had access to a blue Datsun Stanza at the time. Barbara Bajent had reported seeing a dark-colored car similar to a Commodore driving through the motel car park without lights on around 11:40 pm on July 7. Police believed she may have mistaken the Stanza for a Commodore.
A forensic team searched Williams’s old Stanza in 2013 looking for clues. When asked directly whether he killed Penny, Williams said, No, of course not, I would not hurt her in any way possible. Retired detective chief inspector Wayne Hayes, known among friends as the homicide whisperer, reviewed the case files. He focused on room 14.
He reasoned that someone who gained access to that room either had to be known to Penny, had to have a key, or had to knock and have her open the door. Given the motel setting, he saw enormous potential for a crime scene there. But because the room was not preserved, investigators were left with almost nothing. Hayes pointed to the torn-up letter Penny wrote to Shane Williams and the phone call that placed Williams in Armadale.
A 600-kilometer round trip at night was possible, but it was a big drive. Williams could not account for his movements that night. Hayes believed, however, that the answer lay at the motel itself. He noted that two people were very proximate to the deceased that night, both known to her and both with potential access to her room.
He believed one of the people mentioned had a sexual interest in Penny, went to her door, gained access, and something she said triggered an enraged reaction. The assault then spiraled out of control. Penny was only taken 800 meters down the road and left in plain sight of passing motorists, which suggested the attacker needed to get home quickly and could not afford to be away for long. There was another detail that had not been revealed publicly before.
When Penny’s mother rang the Black Stump on the night of July 7 to speak to her daughter, it was Barbara Bajent who answered the phone. Barbara told Jeanette that Penny was not working out as their nanny and that she was going to sack her. Jeanette was stunned, since Penny had only worked one day and had been given the next day off. Penny had also stayed with the Bajents in their family home on the night she arrived, but they moved her into room 14 the very next day.
Something, in the eyes of the retired detective, had clearly happened. Penny Hill died on July 21, 1991, after 13 days in the hospital. Her father Felix was traumatized by her murder until the day he died. He never got over losing his daughter.
Penny’s family never gave up hope that her killer would be caught, and neither did police. In 2021, 30 years after her death, New South Wales police launched a one million dollar reward for information leading to a conviction. Detectives reviewed the original investigation and both coronial inquests, and re-examined contemporary information and forensic evidence. The jumper Penny was wearing on the night she was attacked has been retained as an exhibit in the hope that advances in DNA technology might identify her killer.
Police have obtained DNA samples from Shane Williams, Colin Bajent, and Ross Kitto. They have not revealed whether they have conducted DNA analysis using samples from Bob Lee’s family. The case remains open, unsolved, and unresolved.