A year later, on 1 May 1991, after police had done everything they could to corroborate the information provided by the Midgleys and Marshall, Stevens was arrested in Dubbo and charged with Stacey’s murder. Six months later, Stevens’ committal hearing began at the Glebe Coroners Court before the state coroner, Mr Waller. By this time, however, Tony and Mark Midgley and Mere Marshall had changed their stories, either refusing to give evidence or retracting the information they had previously given. Each claimed that giving their evidence might make them liable to criminal charges themselves. As a result, the charge against Stevens was dismissed. In his findings, the coroner was scathing of the witnesses’ ‘memory lapses’, and voiced his suspicion that there had been gross tampering with the witnesses by people connected with the defendant.
Throughout the 1990s, Stacey Kirk’s murder remained a controversial case, with various individuals accused of the murder, and police accused of corruption and of having botched the investigation. Among other things, it was alleged that the tarpaulin that covered Stacey’s body had not been forensically examined, and that samples that could have been subjected to DNA profiling, when that technology became available, had been tampered with.
In 1995 the investigation was reviewed, together with the evidence given by witnesses to the 1991 coroner’s inquest. The review found no evidence of corruption by police and no evidence that the investigation had been botched. A prisoner who admitted to another prisoner that he had murdered Stacey was found to have fabricated the story and was eliminated as a suspect. No new leads were uncovered. In 1997 the Homicide and Serial Violent Crime Agency undertook another review of the investigation, with the same results. It found that the investigation had been thorough and that all complaints and allegations had been properly examined. In 1998 the results of the review were returned to Newcastle. After some time the case was once again reopened when Strike Force Shylock was established under Detective Senior Sergeant Alex Pollock. Traditional testing in the 1980s to produce blood type had failed. This time the focus would be on newer technology: DNA analysis and comparison. DNA was extracted from seminal fluid found in Stacey’s body. Traces of DNA were also found on the men’s floral underpants that had been used to strangle Stacy. Samples were covertly obtained from several suspects, some of whom had previously been subjected to blood testing. DNA samples once again eliminated them, but one person who hadn’t been tested was Ian Raymond Sargent, one of the original suspects, by now a married interstate truck driver living near Picton, 80 kilometres south-west of Sydney. On 21 February 2002, as the police looked for him, Sargent was killed when his vehicle left the Pacific Highway near Grafton, about 630 kilometres north of Sydney, and hit a tree. Police requested DNA tests of blood samples taken during his post-mortem. They matched.
In August 2003 the coroner, Mr Abernethy, held the third inquest into the death of Stacey Kirk. He found that DNA obtained from Sargent’s body after his death conclusively linked him to Stacey’s rape and strangulation. ‘The prospects of the DNA [found in Kirk’s body] belonging to a person other than Sargent are fewer than one in 10 billion,’ he said. Traces of Sargent’s DNA were also found on the men’s floral underpants that had been used to strangle Kirk. Police told the coroner that several witnesses had named Sargent, at that time a nineteen-year-old sideshow worker, as trying ‘to get onto’ Kirk. The pair had been seen walking together before she disappeared. Sargent himself had given evidence at the 1988 inquest and had been reinterviewed by police conducting the 1995 review. On each occasion he told the same story: he was working at the Maitland Show with his girlfriend and saw Stacey Kirk, but knew nothing about her murder.
Mr Abernethy said the investigation had been hampered by the ‘clannish’ culture of showmen and show workers, who were ‘a difficult breed of suspects’. Despite rumour and innuendo, there was no evidence linking anyone other than Sargent to Stacey’s murder, nor was there any evidence of police corruption at any stage of the inquiry. Mr Abernethy said he hoped the inquest would finalise the matter for Stacey’s parents, her extended family and their community.
Nine-year-old Samantha Therese Knight’s mother, Tess, arrived at the family home in Bondi about 7 p.m. on 19 August 1986 after a day at work to discover her daughter missing. There was evidence that Samantha had come home after school, changed her clothes and left. Tess reported the disappearance to local police, who quickly established that Samantha had been seen by a number of people between 4.30 p.m. and 6.45 p.m. wandering along Bondi Road, accompanied by a man. Samantha was never seen again.
From time to time fragments of information about Samantha were followed up by police, and each year, on the anniversary of Samantha’s disappearance, a story was printed in the local newspaper, but essentially the case lay dormant until the arrest, ten years later, of convicted paedophile 46-year-old Michael Anthony Guider. Early in 1996 two seven-year-old girls complained that Guider had indecently assaulted them and taken nude photographs of them. Guider, who was then working as a gardener at the Royal North Shore Hospital, was arrested on 6 February. His workshed and later his house on Eastern Valley Way were searched, and thousands of 35 mm slides and indecent photographs of children were found and seized. Interviewed by police at Manly Police Station, Guider admitted to being a paedophile and spoke of his desire to photograph and fondle children. He was charged with several counts of indecent assault and related offences. As a result, Strike Force Jadite was formed to investigate Guider’s paedophile activities dating back to the early 1980s.
Two months later Guider was again interviewed about the slides and photographs. He admitted to sexually assaulting many of the children in the pictures and identified some of them by name. He admitted having given many of them the drug Normison—which heroin users sometimes used to increase the effects of the narcotic—before assaulting them. Questioned about a scrapbook he owned of pictures and newspaper reports relating to the disappearance of Samantha Knight, Guider said he had met both Samantha and her mother, Tess, in the mid-1980s at the Manly home of a common friend whose child he sometimes babysat. The young girl was a schoolfriend of Samantha. He also claimed to have met Samantha’s father. Guider said he had only met Samantha ‘once or twice’ and denied any knowledge of her disappearance, except for the information he had gathered from newspaper articles. He suggested Samantha might have been ‘kidnapped by white slavers’.
Guider was then charged with 60 offences including indecent assault, administering a stupefying drug (Normison), and sexual intercourse without consent against eleven victims ranging in age from two to sixteen years between 1976 and 1995. In September 1996 Guider pleaded guilty to these charges. Before he was sentenced, Guider was again interviewed about Samantha Knight’s disappearance at the Junee Correctional Centre by officers from Strike Force Jadite. He repeated his earlier story: he had first met Samantha and her mother at a picnic at Fairlight Beach and he had seen Samantha ‘no more than three times’, once at the picnic and a couple of times at the Manly house of a common friend, where he might have ‘photographed Samantha’.
Guider said he could not remember talking much to Samantha, but recalled taking pictures of her in a ‘green’ top when they were ‘laying down’ and were ‘playing dead’, and that he had ‘some older slides’ of Samantha with a ‘painted face’ but that they weren’t his; he had ‘filtered’ [stolen] them. Explaining his relationship with the Knight family, he said, ‘I’ve never ever had Samantha Knight in a car for instance, she never ever entered a vehicle that I owned.’
Guider told police, ‘They call me a paedophile now and I guess that’s a paedophile in a truer sense as a lover of children; I have loved children as children, not as a sexual thing.’ Guider was sentenced to a total of sixteen years’ gaol.
The investigation into Samantha Knight’s ‘disappearance’ went quiet for about eighteen months until May 1998, when Detective Sergeant Tuckerman of the Homicide and Serial Violent Crime Agency was told by an informant that Guider had po
rnographic pictures of young children hidden in a previously unknown storage facility. Strike Force Harrisville was formed to investigate these claims and Guider’s activities between 1982 and 1986. Detective Sergeant Steve Leach of the Homicide and Serial Violent Crime Agency was put in charge. It was Leach who, as a member of Task Force Air, had physically arrested and interviewed Ivan Milat in 1994.
On 16 June police executed a search warrant on Guider’s self-storage unit at Girraween, in Sydney’s western suburbs. They discovered pictures and transparencies of children, including pictures of Samantha Knight with another young girl. The second girl was soon identified; she had been living at Manly at the time the picture was taken. Samantha and the other young girl were in the home of a third young girl who had also been abused.
Potential witnesses interviewed during earlier investigations were reinterviewed, as were prisoners who had spent time in gaol with Guider. Several confirmed that Guider had spoken frequently about his exploits with young children and had mentioned Samantha several times. His association with Samantha was much greater than he had admitted to police. Guider told one gaol inmate that the police had interviewed him over the murder, then said, ‘I must have put too much Normison in her Coke and she wouldn’t wake up.’ Another inmate, with whom Guider had several conversations about the abuse of children, said that on one occasion he had been in his cell talking with Guider when something came up about Samantha Knight and Guider said, ‘You know they’ll never find her body . . . They’ll never find her, I know they won’t.’ Later, Guider told the inmate that he had picked Samantha up about a block away from her house and bought her a soft drink and some lollies. He then drove her to an area and carried her to a cave where he left her. Guider said, ‘I didn’t do anything to her she just died, I didn’t want her to die not then.’ Guider said he took naked photographs of her in the cave. Talking about the police, Guider laughed and said, ‘The police can’t get me they don’t know where to look, they can’t touch me.’ Guider had spoken with other inmates and with Corrective Services staff about Samantha, making claims that implicated him in Samantha’s disappearance.
On 19 July 1999 officers from Strike Force Harrisville interviewed Guider. As before, he admitted having met Samantha a few times and having taken pictures of her when she and her family lived at Manly, but denied any knowledge of or involvement in her disappearance. As a result of the evidence found in the Girraween storage unit and information from witnesses, Guider was charged with three counts of indecent assault, five counts of sexual intercourse with a victim under the age of sixteen years and nine other offences involving acts of indecency or incitement to commit such acts. Guider was convicted of the charges and, on 11 February 2000, Justice O’Reilly sentenced Guider, describing him as a ‘compulsive paedophile’ and the attacks as ‘appalling’. Justice O’Reilly noted that these further offences could have been dealt with when Guider was sentenced in 1996, and considered there was little point in increasing the original term.
With no solid case against Guider for Samantha’s disappearance, the strike force sought the help of the New South Wales Crime Commission and Corrective Services, interviewing new witnesses and reinterviewing old ones, executing search warrants, examining photographs, undertaking electronic and physical surveillance and searching various locations where it was thought Samantha might be buried.
A year after Guider was sentenced in 1996, the strike force had sent the accumulated evidence to the deputy director of public prosecutions for advice. The strike force wanted Guider charged with murder. After lengthy consultations and further investigations, the advice came back: charge him. On 22 February 2001 Guider was charged with the murder of Samantha Knight on 19 August 1986. Fourteen months later he was committed for trial. On 23 August 2002 Guider pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Samantha. Justice Woods noted that Guider claimed to be ‘heavily into drugs’ at the time Samantha was killed. Explaining her death, Guider said, ‘I never physically harmed the girl, I intended to take her home, it’s a very sad thing. It caught me by surprise that the drug [Normison] had any effect like that. Naturally I panicked, I went into a, I knew I was in trouble and the other side of me took over, the protective side which tried to find some way out of the problem, disposing of the evidence I guess.’
Guider claimed to have been involved in incestuous behaviour with his mother, who was by then deceased and who had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and to have been sexually abused while in primary school, in boys’ homes and custodial institutions. He also said that he was involved in the sexual abuse of other boys and inmates while in homes and institutions. He didn’t know his biological father, but the person he referred to as his father was an alcoholic with a gambling addiction who had been physically abusive towards him. Guider also claimed to have developed an alcohol and drug habit, using Normison, cough medicines, prescription pills, cannabis and LSD. Justice Wood gaoled Guider for seventeen years. He will be eligible for parole in June 2014.
One critical question remains unanswered. What did Guider do with Samantha’s body? Guider refuses to say, offering a variety of stories and excuses, but not the truth. Guider has already been convicted and is doing time for manslaughter, so what has he got to lose by telling police where to find the body? Perhaps the answer is this: if Samantha’s body revealed a violent death rather than the accidental death Guider has always claimed it was, the additional evidence might justify a murder charge against him. If convicted, he would die in gaol.
On Tuesday, 6 May 1997, 39-year-old Kerry Whelan left her home at Kurrajong, an hour’s drive north-west of Sydney, telling her husband, Bernie, that she had a 9.30 a.m. appointment ‘at the beautician at Parramatta’. Bernie never saw her again. She planned to meet Bernie at 3.45 p.m. that afternoon at his Smithfield office in Sydney’s outer western suburbs before the couple flew to Adelaide. Bernie had business there, but they also intended to visit a few of the local wineries. At about 9.40 a.m., security cameras caught Kerry walking out of the car park at Parramatta’s Parkroyal Hotel and onto the street.
When Kerry didn’t turn up to meet Bernie, he rang family and friends and tried without success to contact her on her mobile. Knowing she would park at the Parkroyal Hotel, he went there and found her car locked in the car park. When she left the house, Kerry had been wearing more than $50,000 worth of jewellery.
Bernie reported his wife’s disappearance to Parramatta Police, and detectives were in touch with him the next morning. Bernie did not open the mail until about seven o’clock that evening. When he did, one letter grabbed his attention. He opened it. The letter was typed in capital letters and began, ‘THERE WILL BE NO SECOND CHANCES. FOLLOW ALL INSTRUCTIONS OR YOUR WIFE WILL DIE.’ It went on:
TO ENSURE HER SAFE RETURN YOU MUST AT NO TIME BRING IN THE POLICE THE PRESS ANY AUTHORITIES OR OUTSIDE ASSISTANCE. WE WILL KNOW IF YOU DO SO . . . YOU ARE NOT OUR FIRST AUSTRALIAN TARGET THERE HAVE BEEN OTHERS . . . DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE OUR CAPABILITIES . . . THE RANSOM FOR HER RETURN IS ONE MILLION U.S. DOLLARS. THE RATE OF EXCHANGE MEANS YOU WILL PAY ONE MILLION TWO HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND AUSTRALIA DOLLARS TO BE PAID IN ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR NOTES.
The extortionist gave detailed instructions about the make-up of the ransom cash and how it was to be paid. In seven days a notice was to be placed in The Daily Telegraph: ‘ANYONE WHO WITNESSED A WHITE VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE PARKED BESIDE THE EASTERN GATES OF THE SYDNEY OLYMPIC SITE AT 10.30 PM ON TUESDAY 5.4.97 PLEASE CALL . . . THEN PUT YOUR HOME TELEPHONE NUMBER AT THE END OF THE ADVERTISEMENT.’ Within three days the extortionist would contact with further instructions. A distraught Bernie contacted police, and Strike Force Bellaire was formed under the command of Detective Inspector Mike Howe and Detective Sergeant Dennis Bray.
The police began by asking questions about the Whelans’ marriage. Was either of them having an affair? Had Kerry run off? They were obvious questions, but Bernie’s answers convinced them that the kidnapping and demands were genuine and that Kerry’s life was a
t risk. Her safe return would depend on the police operation remaining covert for as long as possible.
Through interviews with family friends, detectives found that two weeks earlier Kerry had been visited at their 30-acre Kurrajong property by a man and that she had been upset after he left. Amanda Minton-Taylor, a friend who was employed by the Whelans as a horse trainer and nanny, told police that Kerry had asked her not to mention the incident to anyone, but Amanda suspected that the man’s visit might have something to do with Kerry’s disappearance. She thought she remembered Kerry saying the man’s name was ‘Bruce’ and that he was ‘an old family friend’. Shown some family pictures, Amanda identified Bruce Burrell as the visitor. The Whelans’ eleven-year-old son, James, also identified Burrell as the person who had visited his mother.
Bernie told police that he had met Burrell, then an advertising manager, in 1985 when Bernie’s company, the Australian and Asian arm of Crown Equipment, employed Bruce’s agency to handle its account. From that time Bernie liaised regularly with Burrell and they became friends. Bernie sacked Burrell in 1990, but the pair continued to socialise, at times going on shooting expeditions together. Two years later, Bernie mentioned to Burrell that the drought had made it difficult for his cattle to graze. Burrell said that his property, a 500-acre farm next to a national park at Bungonia in the Southern Tablelands, had plenty of feed and the cattle could stay there. Bernie accepted the offer and shipped his pedigree cattle to the property. A few weeks later, Bernie received a call from Burrell who said that the cattle had wandered off the land and couldn’t be found. The following year, 1993, Burrell rang Bernie and asked if he wanted to sell his Ruger .223 semi-automatic rifle as Bruce said he had a neighbour who was interested in buying it. Burrell picked up the rifle, then two weeks later rang Bernie to say it had been stolen from the boot of his car when the car was parked at Redfern in Sydney.
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