Updated ,first published
The sons of a man found guilty of murdering their beloved mother 40 years ago have vowed to continue looking for her body as they spoke out about the dedication required to bring her killer to justice.
Raymond Reddington – previously known as Robert Fulton and Maxwell Fulton – was accused of killing his then 39-year-old wife Sharon Fulton in 1986.
He denied the accusation and took the matter to trial three weeks ago, but it took a jury just four hours to reach a guilty verdict which they delivered on Thursday in the Supreme Court of WA.
Cold case detectives re-opened the case into Fulton’s disappearance following a Coroner’s Court verdict that she likely met with foul play.
Her body has never been found, and her disappearance has been the subject of two police investigations – one in 2007 and another in 2017 – as well as the coroner’s inquest in 2022.
Despite extensive inquiries by police and family and comprehensive media coverage, there has been no information regarding her whereabouts since her disappearance.
For her children, however, there was little doubt about what happened to her.
“For 40 years, silence worked in his favour,” Fulton and Reddington’s son Heath said outside of court on Thursday after the verdict.
“Silence protected him. Silence isolated us. Silence erased her.
“We were taught not to ask questions, not to speak her name, but to challenge the story we were given as children.
“We internalised that silence. I internalised guilt. I believed for years that somehow it was my fault, that silence was not accidental.
“Speaking about our mother was discouraged while we grew up in confusion and grief.”
Heath Fulton worked with the police during their investigation to try and elicit a confession from his father over what happened to his mother. He wore a wire during a conversation with Reddington that was played during the trial for the jury.
On Thursday he thanked WA Police’s Cold Case team for the work they did on bringing Reddington to justice, as well as his grandmother and Fulton’s stepmother who he said began asking questions in the days following her disappearance.
“If they had not refused to be silenced, she may never, ever have been formally reported missing,” he said.
“They were dismissed. They were minimised, but they were right. Their voices deserve to be heard.”
Heath said he would like to see “stronger resourcing and earlier activation” in relation to the length of time it took to bring Reddington to court, but thanked those that took on his mother’s case “not as a file, but as a human being”.
Reddington, 79, who uses a wheelchair and needed assistance from headphones to listen to the trial proceedings, showed no emotion as the verdict was read out.
Throughout the trial, the court heard how he lied about having dementia when he was questioned by police in 2017, claiming not to recall any of the events leading up to her disappearance but said he had dropped his wife at East Perth train station on the day of her disappearance, a trip that she never returned from.
He also claimed Fulton was having an affair, insinuating she took off with another man.
But prosecutors instead painted her as a devoted mother who would never have left her four young children, and told the court she had consulted a solicitor in the months leading up to her disappearance about filing for divorce.
The jury heard that during that meeting she was advised she would likely be awarded their four-bedroom Duncraig home, their Queensland investment properties, spousal maintenance payments and custody of their four children as part of the settlement and that Reddington would have become privy to that advice.
Prosecutors said Reddington “most likely” attacked Fulton in their home on March 18, 1986 and that “either on that day or in the days following, disposed of her body in a way that meant it has never been found”.
He reported her missing three days later and gave police numerous differing accounts of her last known movements.
Early in the trial, the jury was told a letter sent to WA Coroner Sarah Linton in 2021 ahead of the coronial inquest was found to contain DNA matching Reddington’s, but purported to be from the husband of a friend of Fulton’s and claimed he had “got her pregnant and that he killed her and then hid her under a concrete patio”.
The jury was told that was a complete fabrication and an attempt by Reddington to take the heat off himself.
He will be sentenced at a later date, with the court hearing he was suffering with a terminal illness and “was in the last few months of his life and can have no further treatment”.
“He lived a full life, he travelled, he prospered, he rebuilt, he changed his name,” Heath Fulton said of his father.
“He had the privilege of time. My mother did not. She did not get to see her children grow up. She did not get to watch milestones. She did not get decades.
“I have lived with him. I have experienced the control, the deflection, the blame. Silence gave him space. Today, that silence ends.
“Mum, you are not forgotten. You are not erased. You are not just a case file. You are our mother, and I promise you and my siblings that I will not stop searching for you and for the full truth of what happened to you for the rest of my life.”
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