EXCLUSIVE

A heartbroken family has been told they ‘should be grateful’ to property developers in Malaysia who covered up the discovery of an Adelaide woman’s buried remains. 

Greg Jenkins, 44, has spent the last six years on a quest for justice after his mother Anna Jenkins, 65, went missing while on a trip to the island of Penang in 2017. 

Mr Jenkins said the comment – made this month by a Malaysian High Court judge as she threw out a negligence case against local police he alleges failed to properly investigate – ‘highlights the disrespect’ his family have consistently encountered. 

Mr Jenkins said the judge told his family they should be grateful that construction workers involved the police when his mother was found but he alleges they only did so after he put pressure on them. 

After his mother disappeared, Mr Jenkins, a member of Australia’s Defence Force, got leave from his post in Hawaii. He flew back to his home in Adelaide before making 34 trips to Malaysia at a cost of more than $300,000 in an effort to track her.

His persistence paid off when a construction worker in 2020 replied to a missing persons flyer he posted saying his mother’s body had been found during works on a building site and it had been quietly moved nearby to not disrupt the development. 

The last call Ms Jenkins made from Penang’s main city of Georgetown indicated she was being followed by men after her passport and her family believe she was robbed, murdered and left at the building site – which at that point was still jungle. 

Mr Jenkins has received the backing of SA-Best MLC Frank Pangello who also accompanied him to Malaysia for the recent ruling.

Mr Pangello said the Jenkins family, who just want someone to answer for what happened to Anna, have been repeatedly brushed aside by Malaysian authorities. 

Ms Jenkins had dual citizenship because she had lived in Australia since the early 1970s, raising a family in Adelaide after she married RAAF serviceman Frank Jenkins as a young woman.

‘It’s high time the Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, made strong representations to the Malaysian Government about the treatment of the Jenkins family,’ Mr Pangello said.

Her son Greg said none has been held to account after a project manager and landscape contractor who were working on the housing development moved his mother’s remains in a deliberate effort to cover up the body.

‘We have proof they found and reburied mum’s remains,’ Mr Jenkins told Daily Mail Australia.

‘How is tampering with evidence and contaminating a crime scene not a criminal offence in any Commonwealth country?’ he said.

‘Instead the judge absolved them and said we should be thanking them that they brought the police in – which they only did because of the amount of pressure I put on the construction worker.’

‘They at first didn’t do anything and the police refused to go there until we forced their hand because it was getting some local media coverage and I said I would go to the foreign minister.’

A 2023 coronial inquiry into Ms Jenkin’s death was declared an ‘open verdict’ due to a ‘lack of evidence’.

Anna’s daughter and Greg’s sister, Jen Bowen, said she felt authorities ‘did not care’ for her mother and didn’t want to help.

The housing development was aimed at wealthy Chinese buyers – and traditionally they can’t buy a home anywhere that’s had human remains on it.

‘This development cost over $100million to build but the selling price of the luxury villas made it worth more than a billion – so everyone just hushed it all up,’ Mr Jenkins said.

‘They didn’t want word leaking out that dead bodies had been found there as it’s taboo and could have killed off the market for Chinese buyers.

‘So they moved my mother’s bones off to the side to an area which was going to be a water feature in parkland, and wouldn’t be residential land.

‘We found 34 bones from my mother but the police and deputy public prosecutor called the search off. They said the excavation equipment could destroy any more remains which is ridiculous.

‘When I first went to the site the Chief of Police told me we were not allowed to tell the press we were going or post it on social media.

‘The developer has put a lot of money into Penang and they don’t want anything putting that at stake.

‘They are setting the profits of this developer above a kidnapping and murder investigation.’

Mr Jenkins said during his investigations he found out that an Australian passport is worth $100,000USD on the black market in Malaysia as they are used by transnational criminal groups.

‘Someone holding an Australian passport can access 129 countries without a visa, which is very valuable to these people.’

There is no suggestion the construction workers had anything to do with Ms Jenkins’ disappearance, only that her remains where later found at the building site.

Despite the fact Ms Jenkins was an Australian citizen her case has largely gone under the radar at home.

‘If this had been a younger blonde Australian woman there would be outrage.

‘That just crushes my heart, my mother was the most beautiful person.

‘She was a Christian woman who dedicated her life to helping others. She helped the homeless and refugees in Adelaide through her charity work and an Aboriginal group through the church.

‘It’s just indicative of the person she was.’

Mr Jenkins said the Malaysian High Court judge won’t accept an appeal until he pays the legal costs of the defendants – the government, the police, the land developers, the project manager and a landscape worker.

‘They just want me to drop the case but I haven’t let this go for six years and I’m not going to let an unjust system deter us.’

The quest to find Anna and the legal case has cost the family about $600,000 and the Australian government has provided little in the way of help.

‘Anthony Albanese goes out of his way to send a text about David Warner’s missing baggy green, yet there’s been an Australian citizen go missing overseas and we’ve had no assistance at all.’

By Chikamso Chukwuenyem for Mailonline

Published: 08:43 EST, January 27, 2024 | Updated: 10:23 EST, January 27, 2024