The younger sisters of Maureen Braddy have told a court they heard two bangs and screams the night the California Gully teen disappeared.
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Jennifer Dawn Braddy and Debra MacDonell told the Coroners Court they were in bed and woke to sounds outside their room.
Ms Braddy was 11 when her sister Maureen and boyfriend Allan Whyte disappeared in 1968.
She told the court she heard an argument that included her parents’ voices and thought “Maureen was in trouble”.
Maureen Braddy. Picture: SUPPLIED
Ms Braddy said she got out of bed and went into a passage and listened to the argument until her mother saw her and told her to go back to bed.
“To me, the argument only started when (Maureen) came home,” she said. “I just heard Mum and Dad yelling at somebody and the rest of the kids were in bed.”
Ms Braddy said she didn’t see or hear Maureen. She said soon after returning to bed, she “heard screaming and I heard the bangs and that was it”.
“To me, I heard (an) argument, I had heard a bang, I... heard a scream, I heard another bang and that was it,” Ms Braddy said. Mrs MacDonell was 10 and shared a room with Ms Braddy and Lyn Ireland in 1968.
She told the court she heard a muffled scream and loud thuds that sounded like someone being pushed up against the wall. Mrs MacDonell said the sounds appeared to come from outside her bedroom window.
Her comments were not in the statements she made to police in 1999 and 2003.
“I recall them now because I have come to an age where I am not frightened by my father any more,” she said, before breaking down in the witness box.
The Braddy daughters told the court how their father used to beat them as children.
They spoke of their father soaking a strap in water before hitting them with it. The sisters said their father would also hit them with a wire fork and wood.
“I (would) drop to the floor, I would wet myself. I would go numb. I would not feel it anymore... you (would) crawl into bed when he was finished,” Mrs MacDonell said.
She said she used to put books down her trousers to soften the blow of the hits her father would inflict on her.
“You did not have to do much to upset Dad,” Mrs MacDonell said.
Ms Braddy detailed her recollections in a written statement in 2009, six years after giving a formal statement to police.
She said new information appeared in the written document because she had been battling mental health conditions in 2003 that prevented her from fully recalling the night Maureen disappeared. “This (handwritten) document, to me, is what I believe,” Ms Braddy told the court.
On Monday Judith Olive Paynting, a neighbour and close friend of Maureen’s, told the inquest she had heard two shots and screaming the night of the couple’s disappearance. But the sisters’ brother Robert Braddy told the court on Tuesday he hadn’t heard any sounds.