Australian man discovers ‘disturbing letter’ hidden behind a sketch he found at an op-shop

A sketch of an Indigenous man that hung on the wall of a family’s home for years concealed a disturbing secret about the murder of two young children.

A Reddit user recently shared a photo of a drawing — depicting an unidentified Aboriginal man with long hair, a beard, and traditional face paint — that their brother bought for a few hundred dollars at an op-shop.

The portrait hung in their dining room for a year or more before they recently took it down for renovations.

That’s when they discovered a handwritten letter from March 1996 attached to the back of the frame.

The letter details the horrific crimes committed by child killer Dexter Wilkinson and his wife Kathleen Lister in the rural Queensland town of Bell.

It is clear that neither the drawing nor the man depicted had any relation to the letter, which was written by a woman named Germaine Blair-Quigg.

Ms Blair-Quigg appears to have been a campaigner for tougher sentences for serious violent crimes.

She often wrote letters to newspapers complaining about lenient sentences, and the letter appears to be a draft version as it contains corrections and caveats.

On the back of the framed sketch was a letter from a woman complaining about the sentence imposed on Kathleen Lister. Lister was found guilty of accessory to murder after her husband murdered her two young children in 1994

Reddit users suspected that Ms Blair-Quigg’s letter was intended for a journalist, complaining about the light sentence given to Lister.

“What she and her partner did to those two children was monstrous and far beyond my understanding,” Ms Blair-Quigg wrote.

‘Before I came to Australia, I was told about the secretive side of Australian society, the woman bashing/syndrome; the child abuse; the statistics on rape; alcoholism: deep-rooted racism; the inherent weakness of character masquerading as camaraderie.

‘And I was skeptical. I chose to believe that the gentle larrikins who had tamed that vast, sunburnt land must have been essentially a good people. Down to earth, down to earth, good. And nice.’

The gruesome case the letter describes

The Supreme Court of Queensland heard Lister had been living with Wilkinson for a year before he murdered two of her children, Jimmy, 11, and Kimberley, nine, just before Christmas in 1994.

Wilkinson was not Jimmy and Kimberley’s father and was described as an “extremely violent, mentally unstable man” who physically abused everyone in the house, especially the children, according to court documents.

Wilkinson violently attacked Jimmy on December 22, 1994 and threw him across the house, hitting his head on the floor, causing him to lose consciousness.

Jimmy was put to bed and received no medical treatment. He died the next day from his injuries.

Lister had claimed she had gone into town to get medical help for Jimmy, but was told not to do so by Wilkinson, and instead returned with booze and cigarettes.

That night, Lister helped bury her husband Jimmy in a grave.

Kimberley was murdered just a day later.

Wilkinson had instructed Kimberley to complete a task in the backyard, but he told her she was doing it too slowly and started shouting at her.

He then threw Kimberley across the ground near a concrete path and kicked her in the stomach.

She died almost immediately.

“Lister wiped Kimberley’s face and tried to revive her but there was no heartbeat and no response,” the court heard.

‘Wilkinson said: ‘Leave that f**king b***h where she is, she got what she deserved. She should have been the one to go first.” According to Lister, Wilkinson hated Kimberley and called her ‘the devil’s child.’

Lister and Wilkinson buried Kimberley in a shallow grave on Christmas morning, later had guests over and seemingly pretended everything was fine, telling them the children were away with their biological father.

Kimberly and Jimmy (pictured above) were murdered by Dexter Wilkinson as their mother watched

Some of those guests even slept in the kids’ bunk beds.

“Two or three days later there was an odor coming from the graves, particularly from the shallower grave in which Kimberley’s body was buried,” the court heard.

‘Wilkinson decided the bodies should be burned and he, his father and Lister began to dig them up and bury them.’

Even as the children’s bodies burned, Wilkinson ordered Lister to get beer for him from the house.

Jimmy had a crack in his skull and Kimberley’s body was already ‘partially decomposed’ when they were set on fire. Wilkinson is also said to have cut off Kimberley’s legs before dumping her in a barrel bin.

The crimes only came to light when Lister accidentally let them slip during a conversation with a friend in February 1995.

It was shortly after Wilkinson, who was never held accountable for his crimes, was fatally killed in a car accident.

The friend reported what had happened to the children to the local pastor, who then spoke to Lister, who later ended up in police custody.

The judge ruled that Lister had ‘helped’ [Wilkinson] over an extended period and in substantial ways to escape punishment, knowing that he had committed two murders’.

“You made no attempt to leave him and report the matter after the children died.

‘You continued to cover up for him in every respect up to the stage where he could never have been apprehended due to his death, and even for some time afterwards.

“The conclusion is that it probably would have continued if he had not been killed.”

The judge noted that Lister had been dominated by Wilkinson and had shown remorse for her crimes.

Lister was jailed after being found guilty of accessory to manslaughter and accessory to murder.

Lister, now said to be 75 years old, was sentenced to two years for manslaughter and nine years for murder, to be served concurrently following a trial in 1996.

Her prison term expired in March 1995 and the attorney general ruled that she would have to serve five years before being eligible for parole.

Lister’s current whereabouts are unknown.