David Lloyd-Williams

David Lloyd-Williams was a 32-year-old Concert Manager with the ABC who died on 24 August 1978 at North Head in Manly. Born in Barnhurst, England on 20 June 1946, he had been living in Australia for approximately seven years at the time of his death.

In the months before his death, Mr Lloyd-Williams was suffering severely from depression, triggered by the breakdown of his marriage in April 1978. He had spent time as an inpatient at North Ryde Psychiatric Centre and was under the care of psychiatrist Dr J E Hoult. In the days immediately before his death he was staying with his mother-in-law, Anna Louisa Worton, at her home — on his psychiatrist’s advice that he should not be alone. His mother-in-law controlled his medication and dispensed each dose to him.

On the morning of 24 August 1978, Mr Lloyd-Williams had breakfast with his mother-in-law, told her he was going home to Mosman to clean his flat, and said he would phone to arrange lunch. She did not hear from him again. At some point that morning, he drove to North Head. His white Volkswagen station sedan (registered AKP 007) was later found parked at the southern end of Scenic Drive with the keys left in the ignition.

At approximately 11:45am, Robert Steele, who was looking for a fishing spot, found a body on the rocks below the cliff at the south-eastern point of North Head, with waves crashing over it. The Police Rescue Squad recovered the body and conveyed it to Manly District Hospital, where it was identified by Herbert Charles Russell, a friend and ABC colleague who had worked with Mr Lloyd-Williams for five or six years.

A post-mortem by Dr Grace Higgins on 26 August 1978 found multiple injuries consistent with a fall from a significant height of approximately 90 metres (300 feet). No alcohol was detected. At an inquest on 23 October 1978, City Coroner Leonard James Nash found that Mr Lloyd-Williams had “cast himself from a cliff with the intention of taking his own life whilst in a state of mental depression.”

The Sackar Inquiry’s expert pathologist, Dr Linda Iles, provided an independent report in January 2023. She found the forensic pathology alone could not rule out misadventure or foul play, but that “circumstances as described in the materials available, suggest that suicide was most likely.” Justice Sackar accepted this, and the submission of Counsel Assisting that the evidence “overwhelmingly” supported a deliberate act of suicide.

Inclusion in the SCOI. Mr Lloyd-Williams’ death came to the attention of the Inquiry through a spreadsheet prepared by former NSW police employee Sue Thompson titled “Possible Gay Hate Murders List.” The entry recorded him — as “David Lloyd Williams” — as having been found naked at the base of a cliff at Manly in 1979, with his clothes neatly folded. The source was listed only as “Dave Davies.”

Strike Force Parrabell attempted to investigate in 2017 but could not locate any records under any variation of the name. The BCIF was only partially completed. Justice Sackar found this “not adequate or satisfactory,” noting that Parrabell had access to leads it did not pursue: Sue Thompson’s source “Dave Davies” (subsequently identified by the Inquiry as Justice David Davies of the NSW Supreme Court), a reference to “David Davies” in DCI Pamela Young’s statement about the Scott Johnson matter, and Manly Daily press articles that the Inquiry itself later located.

The claim that the body was found naked with clothes neatly folded — a distinctive detail also associated with the death of Scott Johnson at North Head in 1988 — was found by Justice Sackar to be unreliable hearsay. There was no contemporaneous record supporting it; witnesses who had heard it could not recall when or from whom; and it appears to have become confused over time with the Johnson case. (Justice Davies and Dr McEwan, when contacted by the Inquiry, were themselves uncertain of the source.)

Cliff location and the beat. North Head was a well-known gay beat in the late 1970s, particularly in the area between Blue Fish Point and Shelly Beach. However, Justice Sackar found that the specific location of Mr Lloyd-Williams’ death — the south-eastern point of the headland, near the Scenic Drive carpark — was “significantly to the north” of the beat area, and does not appear to have been in the part of North Head most associated with beat activity. (The SCOI’s characterisation in para 5.481 should be read alongside the geography: Scenic Drive is at the southern end of the headland; the beat was at the northern end near Blue Fish Point.)

SCOI finding. There was no evidence that Mr Lloyd-Williams was a member of the LGBTIQ community. Dr McEwan, who had known him well, told the Inquiry he did not understand Mr Lloyd-Williams to be gay. The death location was not in the known beat area. Justice Sackar found “objectively no reason to suspect that LGBTIQ bias was a factor in the death” and made no recommendations.

The case is historically significant as an example of how poor record-keeping (the lost police investigation file) and methodological failures by Strike Force Parrabell allowed a well-documented suicide to circulate for years as a suspected unsolved hate crime — in the same Thompson spreadsheet that also captured genuine cases of violence. The confusion between this case and the Scott Johnson death (both at North Head; Parrabell conflating their details) illustrates how inadequate investigation practices compound over time.