As daylight bowed to sunset, the forensic team started the task of examining the bodies while police formed a human barrier to protect them from the scores of gawking, curious onlookers who had tramped to Wanda for an eyewitness view of the crime scene. Around 7.30 p.m., under crude police floodlights, the girls' bodies were carried by stretcher to a nearby vehicle, the scene a surreal cortege of detectives in dark suits and forensic personnel in white overalls moving against a sky mottled with clouds.
Two hours later, in an enclosure at Cronulla police station, Christine's uncle, Les Taig, was tasked with identifying the girls' bodies. He nodded bleakly when the blanket covering Marianne was removed to show her face and dark hair. 'That's Marianne Schmidt,' he confirmed. 'I have known her for two years. She lives in Brush Road, West Ryde.' The next blanket was removed and he reeled slightly before finding his voice. 'That's Christine. My sister Beryl's daughter, Christine Sharrock.'
Still recovering from her operation, Elizabeth Schmidt repeatedly asked the nurse to let her know if there was any news of her daughter. Late that night, she was moved to a private room at the hospital, where the Medical Superintendent, Doctor Atkinson, broke the news to her just after 11.30 p.m. 'Your daughter has been found,' he started and she looked into his face for a sign of relief. There was none.
'But not alive,' she added, finishing his sentence.
He nodded sadly. 'If you think that, then it is true,' he confirmed. Elizabeth felt numb, the blessed numbness that accompanies shock, and though she cried she could not feel the tears on her cheeks. She did not ask what had happened and no one told her.
Jeanette Taig, her face etched with grief as deep as crevices, would never recover from her beloved granddaughter's murder. It would be fun if we could walk across the sandhills again, Nan . . . Christine's mother, also grief-stricken, carried her shoulders slumped forward from that day on and forever declined all requests to speak to the media.
The post-mortem, carried out by Doctors Laing and Brighton the following morning, outlined the shocking details of the girls' deaths. Christine – most probably in an attempt to flee from her attacker after Marianne had been wounded or killed – had tried to sprint over the hot sand to escape her killer, but lost traction as she ran. He caught her, bringing her down with a blow to the head from a blunt object – a rock, or piece of wood. The blow was so savage that it fractured her skull and blackened both her eyes. A punch to her jaw subdued her further before she endured a multiple, frenzied stabbing attack to her back. Her body looked like a canvas for a deranged artist, the stab wounds erratic and inflicted with ferocious force from her right ear and right shoulder blade to the bottom of her back. Her liver and lungs were full of blood and a weapon consistent with a serrated-edged knife had flirted with her neck, leaving shallow cuts – but the wound behind her left ear was gaping and deep.
The manner of her death left the young woman with a frozen, grotesque expression, exacerbated by the blackness of her eyes. Her sanitary belt and soiled napkin were roughly shoved aside with her shorts as her killer made a crude attempt to rape her but her hymen was intact and no sperm was present, suggesting her killer was unable to complete intercourse. But it was her blood alcohol level – 0.015, consistent with having drunk a 10-ounce glass of beer – that flummoxed police. Christine did not drink. Had she, in a rebellious or flirtatious moment, decided to share a drink with her killer just before her death? Did her killer deliberately take beer to the scene? Had she been somehow forced to drink it?
Doctor Laing determined that Marianne's death was caused by a wound, inflicted with a two-and-a-half-inch knife, so deep it plunged from her left breast between two ribs and perforated her heart. In all, she endured fifteen stab wounds to her outer and inner left arm, left breast, back and shoulder blade. Her swimming costume was slashed jaggedly near the crotch, rolled up to expose her breasts and to allow ease of access to her lower torso. Though her hymen, like Christine's, was intact – a small matter that did not escape her mother who wryly commented to me later, 'Do you believe in miracles? I don't' – a sticky substance, tested to be sperm, was found. Unlike Christine, Marianne's blood-alcohol level was nil.
The massive search for clues amongst the shifting sands of Wanda Beach began. As police crawled on their hands and knees looking for the murder weapons, a rake towed by a tractor and a tip-truck scoured the grains of sand, which were sifted by police hands. More than 2,500 square metres of beach was scoured, police going down to a depth of 45 centimetres. Odd items, including a towel, articles of clothing and knives unrelated to the murder, were found. Four days after the murders an eerie cross covered in seaweed suddenly materialised near the murder scene. How it got there without police noticing, and who erected it, were never discovered.
It was eight days after their bodies were discovered that a clue of any real value was located by a member of the Police Rescue Squad: a stained, steel knife blade, broken top and bottom, which tested positive for blood. But if police hoped that it would give them a much needed breakthrough in a case that had received worldwide attention and about which the public was clamouring for answers, they were disappointed. The stains were insufficient to warrant any further testing. A report by a metallurgist from the University of New South Wales, however, helped narrow the possibilities. In his opinion, the blade was made from the high quality stainless steel seen in kitchen knives and was most probably manufactured in the United States or Europe. Suspected to be the murder weapon that was broken during the frenzied attacks, the blade became Exhibit 23, the lone piece of physical evidence beyond the girls' bodies and their clothing that police were able to produce at the inquest.
The police were overwhelmed with work on the case and at its peak twenty detectives were assigned to work it. By the time it slowed down, they had waded through 14,000 interviews and more than 10,000 pages of documents. All correspondence had to be typed and without the aid of computers, DNA testing or the sophisticated system since devised to connect evidence to other cases, they battled against the nightmare of trying to keep the investigation as one cohesive whole. Many officers worked torturous shifts, collating evidence, speaking to witnesses and trying to piece together the psyche of the killer.
Four weeks after the murders, a 10,000-pound reward was offered to the public, which served only to add to the workload and confusion. Police were flooded with the names of thousands of suspects, including many a jilted girlfriend or bitter wife ringing in to implicate their boyfriend or husband as the killer.
Reporters, too, work around the clock in those first weeks, Bill Jenkings recalling forty years later how it gripped the public. 'It excited terrific competition between the newspapers,' he told Who Weekly magazine. 'There wasn't one other case I covered that surpassed it for public interest. A scoop on Wanda was a terrific seller. The editor demanded we never keep our noses out of it.'
Sexual deviants were targeted by the investigation, including a man who regularly approached women on the beach for sex and others with a penchant for wandering nude in the area. One, dubbed by police as the Fat Man, was known to have accosted young women on the beach the day of the murders, flashing a pornographic magazine he was carrying and mumbling obscenities. Despite repeated calls for him to come forward, the Fat Man never materialised.
Men came forward making false confessions, one enduring hours of police interrogation before admitting that he had confessed simply to win a fifty-pound bet. Unimpressed with having their precious time wasted, the police unceremoniously showed him the door and threatened him with the lock-up if he wasted their time again. Others were mentally unsound, proving, when grilled, that they had no intimate knowledge of the crime.
It was a Herculean task that faced the investigators, interviewing witnesses who might have seen the girls or anyone else on the beach on the day of the murders. One such witness was fire officer Dennis Dostine, who had been walking with his young son at Wanda Beach that day. Around 12.45 p.m., he told police, he had noticed two tee
nage girls matching Marianne and Christine's descriptions, walking alone in a northerly direction. Two things had stuck in his mind: that one girl had been looking behind her as if being followed, and that they had been walking unusually fast. Dostine also gave police descriptions of other people on the beach that afternoon: people on horseback; a stocky, well-tanned man between forty and fifty who had casually remarked on the weather as they passed each other; and a tall, pale young man, about nineteen years old, walking along the water's edge. A tall, pale youth, in a white short-sleeved shirt and khaki shorts, walking 200 yards from where the girls' bodies were later found. Neither this youth nor the well-tanned man came forward to police.
More witnesses gave accounts of people in the area that day. A naked man, carrying some clothing and walking south, never identified; girls on horseback and fishermen with rods at the shoreline; a derelict, never identified, seeking shelter under a piece of tin; a jogger taking his daily exercise. One man on a weekly walk to Kurnell from Cronulla had seen two youths, around twenty years old, talking to two girls near the sandhills. When he had returned, all four had gone. Were these girls Christine and Marianne?
Young Wolfgang, whom Peter had sent to look for the girls after a few minutes, waded in with a description of a 'fat boy' he said he saw walking into the sandhills with the girls. Under gentle questioning, the seven-year-old extrapolated on his story: the boy, he said was the age of his brothers; his face was unshaved and he had fair hair; he was wearing grey trousers and had a towel with him. But over the following days and weeks Wolfgang's story changed. The boy's hair was light brown, not fair; he had seen the boy earlier in the day than he had originally told police; the boy was carrying a knife; the knife was missing when he walked out of the sandhills. He even claimed to have spoken to this boy with the 'angry face'. 'Where are the girls?' he said he demanded, but the boy ignored him and kept walking. Every time police spoke to him, Wolfgang agreed with every proposition they put to him. His statements, more than any others, stalled the investigation as police chased the lead of the blond surfie youth. In the 1960s, with no internet, no instant mobile phone access to friends and no home theatres, young people flocked to the beach. And young men imitated their surfie idols, living the free-spirited counter-culture in their summer holidays: the Beach Boys music blaring, sun-kissed or bleached streaks of blond in their hair and surfboards tucked under their arms. Finding this suspect, police knew, was akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. In a vain hope that the killer might still have been loitering around the area, young female police officers in bathing costumes, under the watchful eye of surveillance teams, head in the same direction the girls took on 11 January, hoping for a breakthrough. They didn't get one.
Two months after the girls' murders, Trixie Schmidt also spoke to police. Bewildered at the sudden loss of her sister, a feeling that stayed with her throughout her life, she told them about the girls' encounter with a 'tall, 15-year-old boy' on the train to Redfern the day they were murdered. She couldn't hear their conversation but recalled that when the group got off at Redfern station, the boy had stayed on board. Had the girls made arrangements to meet with this youth at the sandhills later in the day? Or had he, unbeknownst to them, got off the train at Redfern, boarded the train to Cronulla in another carriage and followed them at a discreet distance?
There is another possible scenario, too: had they met someone on their earlier trip to the beach on 1 January and made a time to meet him? Christine's diary entry from this date suggested it was possible: 'Marianne and I went to Cronulla and we met 2 boys. When they were going they kissed us for New Year.' Trixie, though, believes it is unlikely that a tryst was planned. The family had planned to go to Cronulla the day before they actually went, but the weather had been so squally and unpleasant they had cancelled that plan. How likely is it that someone had turned up the next day, waiting at the closed beach on the off chance that the girls would appear?
Police trawled through the names of boys mentioned in the girls' diaries: school friends and a boy whose family was at a migrant hostel with the Schmidts. They leant hard on them, trying to get a breakthrough they desperately needed, discounting alibis and intimating ways in which these young men could have murdered the girls. It all led to nothing. The '2 boys' – Ted and Jim – who had kissed them for New Year were also tracked down. While Jim was interviewed by police at his home, Ted – blond-haired and fitting a general description of the suspect given by Wolfgang – was taken into the police station for questioning. Their alibis stacked up.
Police theories that the girls were known to the killer were losing traction. They now faced the more likely scenario, as unpalatable and chilling as it was, that Sharrock and Schmidt were murdered by a stranger who opportunistically grabbed his chance on Wanda Beach's lonely, windswept sandhills. New South Wales Government forensic psychiatrist Dr John McGeorge, not known to be circumspect in his opinions, aired his views about the killer's character. 'This appears to be an insane, sadistic killing rather than a sex crime,' he told the Daily Mirror newspaper. 'I believe the murderer is a schizophrenic – a late teenager or in his early twenties – withdrawn, unsociable, peculiar in his mannerisms. The sexual side of the crime is secondary. The killer is young, cunning and given to sudden violence. He is suffering a grave mental disturbance.' Later McGeorge was even more blunt. Given the violent nature of the girls' deaths, he said, he believed the Wanda Beach murders were just the beginning. The killer would strike again. And soon.
14
The girls' funerals, held on 20 January, were sombre affairs in which both families vainly sought comfort and understanding. 'You had high hopes for her,' Marianne's minister intoned at her service at the Metropolitan Funeral Home, Burwood. 'She had bright hopes for a happy future, but by a brutal and bestial act, this has changed.' On the same day, 200 mourners also paid their respects to Christine Sharrock. While the Schmidt family kept their sorrow private, poised and dignified at Marianne's service, it was a different picture at St Michael's Catholic Church, Meadowbank, where Christine's mother, Beryl, leaning heavily on her husband, gave way to uncontrollable grief and Jeanette Taig, Christine's grandmother, collapsed at the conclusion of the service.
Police motorcycle escorts follow the corteges at a discreet distance and police officers mingled amongst the mourners at both funeral services, mindful that their killer could well turn out in the crowd, paying respects amongst the families, friends and acquaintances. Surveillance teams with long-lens cameras shot rolls of film, unseen by the mourners. Police knew that just as it is often the pyromaniac who is the first to volunteer to help put out the bushfires he has started, so a killer loves to be in the frontline after a murder, helping to search for a missing child, eavesdropping on conversations to see what police know, playing the role of a concerned citizen helping in any possible way. Officers scanned the crowd for the slightest sign of unease extending beyond grief; for a teenage boy whose behaviour could be questionable. They drew a blank.
With police and Hans, Elizabeth went to Wanda Beach to pay her respects to her daughter and Christine. When I ask her forty-three years later about the pain she felt when standing on the desolate, windswept sandhill where they were murdered, she cannot speak. She just shakes her head and turns away.
With Marianne dead, the Schmidt household shifted a gear. The children no longer broke into impromptu song or dance; a sombre air pervaded all. They clung together, protecting each other and Elizabeth, with her fractured English, found herself the victim of stares in the street. Often she returned home in tears after venturing out. Instead of the country of sunshine and opportunity that had promised so much, Australia seemed now to be a hostile, strange land that had taken her husband and daughter. For the sake of the children, she put on a brave face and continued to be a strong, loving mother but grief gnawed at her incessantly. The one hope that kept her sane was that her daughter and Christine's killer would be hunted and haunted for the rest of his days. She had litt
le interest in the killer's identity; she just wanted to know why he did what he had done.
In the years since Christine and Marianne's deaths, suspects drifted in and out of the New South Wales Police's possible frame for the murders. In the 1970s, their attention was drawn to one Christopher Wilder – the Australian-born son of an American naval officer and Australian mother – who, from 1971, became a regular fixture in the US courts for sexual misconduct, including rape. Having emigrated to the United States in 1968, Wilder's glib charm earned him a fortune in real estate and allowed him to lead a wealthy, louche lifestyle while he practiced his hobby, photography. During a visit to his parents in Australia in 1982, he was again charged with sexual offences, this time against two fifteen-year-old girls whom he lured from a Sydney beach. Wilder was allowed to return to the United States while he awaited trial, after his parents footed his bail.
In 1984, Wilder was linked with the murders, a month apart, of two beautiful young women – one a former girlfriend – whose bodies have never been found. Sensing that his luck was wearing thin, Wilder went on the run, murdering another eight young women across the country, and abducting and torturing several others. His killing spree ended on 13 April in New Hampshire when he was approached by state troopers who recognised him from the FBI Most Wanted list. In the ensuing struggle, Wilder's gun fired twice, killing him outright. On the books, police recorded Wilder's death as suicide.
Wilder's death robbed Australian authorities of the opportunity to hear his court case on the 1982 assaults of the fifteen-year-old Sydney girls. He left behind a personal fortune of two million dollars and, officially, eight murdered girls in a two-month killing spree. Unofficially, police in the United States believe he could well be responsible for both the abductions and murders of many other women. When the Australian authorities looked into Wilder, they discovered that in 1963, aged 18, he had received a probationary caution after pleading guilty to a gang-rape in Sydney. As part of his probation he had been given electroconvulsive shock therapy, which, far from helping the troubled adolescent, probably worsened the violent and frequent sexual fantasies that consumed his thoughts from that time.
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 8