Three years later, in July, 1991, Pat Wilson watched as her beloved niece died after being bashed and left for dead in a mysterious unsolved murder. 

What followed, however, was a friendship only the two Woodberry women can truly understand.

EMMA SWAIN reports.

In the mid-winter of 1991 Penny Hill left her home town of Narrabri to begin work as a nanny for three little boys in a tiny north-western town.

Sweet and naive, Penny wore a ­solitary penny around her neck and her favourite song was Cher’s hit single If I Could Turn Back Time.

Penny, 20, had met a lovely young man who worked for the Salvation Army, she didn’t drink and she didn’t smoke.

But three days after leaving her home to help care for the sons of Col Baigent (former drummer with Australian rock band Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs) and his wife Barbara, Penny was found bashed and left for dead.

Her body slumped against a ­paddock gate on the side of the road.

A fortnight later, Penny – the fair-haired girl who spent scorching hot summers swimming in her auntie’s pool – died having never regained consciousness.

“My brother came and woke me after they found her,” Penny’s aunt, Pat Wilson, said.

“She had been taken to the John Hunter Hospital in a helicopter but I had no idea how bad it was.”

Soon after, Pat found herself ­waiting anxiously to see her niece. 

Nothing, however, could have ­prepared her for what she was about to see.

“You can’t explain what you’re feeling when you’re sitting there waiting to see her,” Pat said.

“The sisters at the hospital sat us down and were trying to tell us how Penny was like. 

“But when we went in there and saw her it was just shocking. 

"Her face was twice as big, you couldn’t see her little ears.

“She had a mark around her neck and she was bleeding from the ears.

“At one stage she started moving her hands and I was so pleased because I thought that was a good sign, but it wasn’t. 

"She never came to.”

In the hospital ward, following Penny’s tragic death, Pat met Dawn Gilbert a woman struggling with her own horrific grief.

 Detectives investigating Penny’s death had brought Dawn along to support the devastated Hill family.

“I was probably still in a trance back then,” Dawn said.

“The tragedy at the time unfortunately changes your whole life and it doesn’t matter how much time passes, time doesn’t change anything.”

On March 8, 1988, three years before Penny’s brutal murder, Dawn’s daughter Tracey Lee was shot point-blank in the head while working in a small Woodberry hair salon. 

The gunman, Tracey’s 

ex-boyfriend Craig Victor Bruderlin, then shot himself. 

Craig, then 27, lived but Tracey, 19, did not.

In the months leading up to death, Tracey feared for her life. Even on the morning of her murder, the Gilbert family woke to find police cars out the front of their average suburban house.

“We were hiding in the lounge room, looking outside waiting for someone to come and tell us what was going on but no one did so we all went back to bed,” Dawn said.

Hours later Tracey went to work.

But, in a twist of fate, Tracey’s boss went home sick and her co-worker stepped out, leaving the young hairdresser alone with her client Sia Lemonis.

Shortly before 2pm, Tracey was cutting Sia’s hair when Craig barged into the salon ordering Tracey to go with him.

Sia said Tracey’s last words were: “If you want to shoot me, shoot me now.”

At 9am the next day Tracey’s life support was switched off. Craig was sentenced to life in prison but walked free after just six years.

“Tracey would be 46 on November 30 this year,” Dawn said.

“When it first happened, it was like reading a book, you can’t really comprehend it and it’s like you’re in a trance.

“I cope pretty well but every now and then I’ll have one of those weeks and it will be like here we go again.”

On November 20, 1989, just months after the stalking and subsequent murder of her daughter, Dawn called a public meeting.

More than 500 people attended the meeting at Beresfield Bowling Club. 

By the end of the night the Victims of Crime Assistance League was formed.

A few years later Pat joined the fold and in March this year – more than 20 years after Penny’s death – police relaunched the case after a new person of interest was identified.

In 2012, a second inquest into Penny’s death returned an open finding.

“There have been a couple of inquests but we’re no closer to an answer. People keep changing their stories and there are a lot of things that don’t add up,” Pat said.

“She had this chain with a penny on it and she never, ever took it off but when the police went [to where she worked] they found the chain and the penny in the till. They said she took it off but that would have been very out of character because she never took that penny off.

“Penny was shy and wasn’t allowed to go out much. She was a very sweet country girl and she was only at this job for a night and that’s when it all happened.

“I have things in my head that I cannot shake because of what I know. Penny was my niece but she was like a daughter to me.

“I want who did it to pay for it. Penny didn’t deserve this, she went over there to look after a couple of children and ended up out on a road, next to a gate dead on the driveway.

“I know someone out there knows what happened.”

In 2004, VOCAL Inc NSW adopted an American Tree of Angels Christmas project in memory of lives lost or changed by crime, sudden death and tragedy.

Penny’s birthday falls on Christmas Day.

“It’s good to go to the Tree of Angels because even when they call Penny’s name out and you go up and put the angel on the tree, you feel glad you can do this for her,” Pat said.

Dawn actively gave her support to VOCAL for 10 years but when the organisation was given government funding in 1999, she stepped back to spend more time with her family.

“What VOCAL really did was create a lot of really good friendships that you never lose. We’re like this little family,” she said.

Obviously, Dawn and Pat are part of a club nobody wants to join, but it’s a club that has also brought them unexpected joy and companionship.

“It was a nightmare really,” Pat said.

“But Dawn has been there for me morning, noon and night. 

"There have been times when we have sat at Dawn’s kitchen table all night talking.”

It’s now been more than 20 years since Pat and Dawn, both 65, met in the wake of tragedy in that quiet ­hospital ward filled with grief.

“They [Tracey and Penny] were very different young girls I guess, but either way it hasn’t made much ­difference, has it?” Dawn said.

So this Christmas Day, like every day of the year, Pat will remember Penny.

“I never stop thinking about her,” Pat said.

“There are songs that come on the wireless, special songs that Penny liked, and every time one comes on I have to stop and listen because you know it was her song.

“In one case it was If I Could Turn Back Time ... it makes you freeze.”

The 2013 VOCAL Christmas Tree of Angels will be held on Friday, December 6, at St John’s Anglican Church, Cooks Hill, at 7pm. For more information phone 4961 4755 or visit www.vocal.org.au