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Michael Anthony
GUIDER
Number of victims: 1
Characteristics:
Rape - Child molester - The victim's body has never been found
Number of victims: 1
Date of murder: August 19,
1986
Date of arrest: February 22, 2001
Date of birth:
October 20,
1950
Victim profile: Samantha
Knight (female, 9)
Method of murder: Poisoning(drug
overdose)
Location: Sydney, Australia
Status: Sentenced to
12–17 years in prison for manslaughter on August 28, 2002
Michael Guider is an Australian pedophile
who has been imprisoned on charges of pedophilia and manslaughter.
Early life
Michael Guider was born on 20 October 1950, in the city of
Melbourne, Victoria. He and his mother moved to Sydney in 1952. His
mother had an unstable relationship with an army cook who was an
alcoholic. A brother, Tim, was born in 1953.
The two boys spent time in institutions because their mother was
unstable and unable to look after them. In the 1970s, Guider was
charged with various offences after setting fire to a shop owned by
a woman he had had a relationship with.
Guider had worked as a gardener over the years and also had
developed a keen interest in Aboriginal culture and sites around
Sydney. He had even earned some respect as an amateur expert on the
subject and his material had been used and acknowledged in at least
one published book.
Imprisonment
By late 1995, Guider had been arrested on charges of
child molesting. In September, 1996, he was sentenced to ten years
imprisonment on sixty charges of offences against children. His
usual modus operandi had been to babysit the children of
women he knew and knock them out with the sleeping drug Normasin. He
would then molest and photograph them while they were asleep.
Samantha Knight
Guider eventually attracted the attention of police who were
investigating the disappearance of a nine year-old girl named
Samantha Knight. The latter had disappeared from her home in the
Sydney suburb of Bondi on 19th August, 1986.
She had never been found, but police had reasons to turn their
attention to the convicted pedophile Michael Guider. After a lengthy
investigation, he was arrested and charged with Samantha's murder on
22 February, 2001.
On 7 June 2001, he pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Samantha
Knight. He claimed that he had drugged her the way he had always
drugged his victims, but that he had accidentally given her an
overdose that killed her. On 28 August, 2002, he was sentenced to
12–17 years for manslaughter. Samantha's body has never been found;
Guider said he could not remember what he did with the body. He
showed no remorse.
Guider was placed in conditions of strict protection in Goulburn
prison.
The case of Samantha Knight’s
disappearance happened when I was a little girl. It was almost a ghost
story about “stranger danger”. Samantha had disappeared after buying a
toothbrush on August 9, 1986 at the age of nine.
The pictures of Samantha in a floppy
hat looking off into the distance were plastered all over Sydney, in the
hope that someone may have seen her, to no avail. All that remained was
an image of Samantha frozen in time, as the little girl lost.
Every year on the anniversary of
Samantha’s disappearance, a story in the newspaper was printed. Just a
reminder of a mother’s vigilance in finding her daughter. It was obvious
after such a long time that something bad had happened to that little
girl, there was someone out there who knew, who walked past the posters
of her face, who knew what had happened to little Sam.
Ten years later one of Samantha’s
friends went to police, she had finally plucked up the courage to tell
them about her babysitter, someone who may be involved in Samantha’s
disappearance. Yet it would be another six years before a man was found
guilty of her murder.
Michael Anthony Guider was born on
October 20 1950. According to his story he blamed his later paedophilia
on being sexually abused as a child. He claims to be have been abused by
his mother, a family friend and later by a stranger for money. He also
claimed to have been raped by other boys at a home for delinquents.
The family friend who abused Guider as
a child would take the boy on outings where he drugged and sexually
abuse the boy. The method proved successful for the abuser and later
Guider would himself use drugs in years to come to subdue his victims.
Guider soon became the abuser,
sexually assaulting many of the younger boys, as had been done to him.
As an adult Guider was a true
paedophilic predator. Guider would take children from the neighbourhood
to his house where he would drug them with the sedative Normison. Once
the victim was asleep, Guider would abuse them, taking photos of the
children in various stages of undress.
Yet the abuse went completely
unreported, many of the children unaware of their abuse, having been
unconscious when the assaults had taken place. Guider was able to
continue the abuse without reprimand. Guider was a popular man, many
people trusted him with their children, and he baby sat many of the kids
from the neighbourhood. Little did the residents of beachside Bondi know
that they had a predator in their midst.
It was not until 1996 that two seven
year old girls told their parents about Guider abusing them and taking
photos during the assaults. It was the first time that any suspicion
were made of the friendly man.
The police were called and a search
was made of Guider’s residence in early February, 1996. A mountain of
child pornography, photos and children’s underwear was found in a shed.
On February 6, 1996 Guider was arrested and confessed to sexually
assaulting the two young girls. He also went on further to name many of
the children in the photos, but vehemently denied having sexually abused
any of them.
As the investigation and questioning
continued, Samantha’s name came up and Guider claimed to have met the
girl twice in 1986 before her disappearance. He also claimed to have
once kept a scrapbook of news clippings on her abduction and that also
that of the mysterious disappearance of the Beaumont Children in early
1966. He said he had thrown it away years earlier.
The police investigation concluded in
court on September 12, 1996 with Guider being charged with the sixty
offences regarding sexual abuse of nine little girls and two boys over a
fifteen year period. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison with a
minimum sentence of 10 years.
Now that police had the paedophile
behind bars, they pursued further evidence on their suspect, searching a
rented unit in Girraween in 1998. The scrapbook on Samantha Knight was
found in the search along with photographs of two friend of Samantha’s.
One slide found was to be that of Samantha, naked with her genitals
exposed.
Police interviewed the now 22-year-old
victims about the abuse 12 years earlier at the hands of Guider; they
were unaware of the actions of their babysitter until shown the
photographs of their naked prepubescent bodies. Guider was handed two
more concurrent sentences of 6 ½ years for each of the two victims.
Michael Guider had met Tess and
Samantha in 1983 at a birthday party for one of the victims. He appeared
to be a friendly and polite man, and Samantha had often visited Guider
in the company of her friend. During the visits Guider would give the
girls a drink of Coca Cola, laced with the sedative Normison. Once the
girls were sufficiently sedated Guider would strip off their clothes and
take photos of them as he abused them. The abuse occurred during visits
in 1984 and 1985.
Samantha and her mother Tess moved to
Bondi in 1986. Samantha had a regular routine after school when her
mother was still at work, she would come home change out of her school
uniform and play with friends until around 6pm.
On August 19, 1986 Samantha’s
afternoon began as it normally would. She arrived home from school and
changed clothes. She headed back out to find her friends, but instead
she found Michael Guider. The man smiled at her and the two of them
began chatting. He offered her a lift to see her friends and she
accepted. Instead, Guider returned to his house, where Samantha had been
on many previous occasions. The man made a story up about a few of her
girlfriends being on their way over to his house. Guider offered
Samantha a can of Coke, that had been laced with Normison. Samantha
happily took the beverage and drank it all.
In no time she had lapsed into a deep
sleep. However this time something went wrong. Guider had given the
young girl too much and she died from the overdose.
Guider claims that he buried her body
in the salt bushes in Cooper Park. He then returned later, dug up
Samantha’s body and threw it into a dumpster near Royal Yacht Squadron
at Kirribilli where he was working. Her remains have never been found
and in his final confession to police he tried to explain why:
“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 had any effect like that. Naturally I panicked, I went into a, I
knew I was in trouble …[I] tried to find some way out of the problem,
disposing of the evidence I guess. I’ve blanked all of this out of my
mind. I can’t be much more specific. A few years ago I might have been
able to... but since then I’ve suffered a horrendous bashing on the head
with an iron bar…”
When
Samantha did not come home that evening by 6pm, her mother began to
worry she went for a walk down to the local shops and found that
Samantha had bought a toothbrush that afternoon, and had continued on
her way. The last sighting was at 5.30pm, when she had been seen in the
company of a man, no doubt it was Guider.
Soon
posters of Samantha were seen all over Sydney, asking people if they had
seen her. We all hoped that she would be found alive and well. There
were news reports of her being abducted and raised as someone else’s
daughter. Yet all the stories were in vain. By the time she was reported
missing she was already dead.
The
years continued, until finally on February 22, 2001 Guider, while in
prison for the other paedophile charges, was charged with Samantha’s
murder. The man had told another cellmate that he had drugged Samantha
and she had died accidentally, it was the break that police were after.
The task force into the disappearance had a mountain of circumstantial
evidence, but nothing concrete, until the prison cell confession.
Yet
when confronted with the confession, Guider claimed he had not made any
such admission. Police decided to take a different course of action.
They made a deal with Tim Guider.
Tim
Guider is the younger brother of Michael and was in prison for planning
a robbery with a weapon. He had been sentenced to less than ten years in
prison and had served two-thirds of his sentenced when he made a deal
with police. If he was able to get his older brother to plead guilty to
Samantha’s murder he would be pardoned from his own prison sentence.
Tim
talked to his brother about his involvement in Samantha’s death and
overtime the older brother admitted his guilt. Yet Guider refused to
plead guilty to Samantha’s murder, he continued to claim that it was in
fact an accident, he had drugged the young girl with sedatives and she
had not woken back up. After consulting with the prosecutors of the
case, Tim talked further with his brother asking him to plead guilty to
an alternative charge of manslaughter.
Guider agreed and confessed to police, telling them how he had
accidentally killed her, however he refused to say where the body was,
perhaps hiding the forensic evidence her body may provide.
Finally, on September 6, 2002 seventeen years after Samantha death, her
killer was brought to justice. Guider was sentenced to seventeen years
for the manslaughter of Samantha Knight. With an eligibility for parole
in June 2014 he will be 64 years old.
My brother, my confessor - the darkest
secret
The Sydney Morning Herald
August
31 2002
It took Tim Guider to draw the
confession out of his brother - that he had killed Samantha Knight. "I
knew he would open up to me," he tells Neil Mercer.
It's a classic family snap.
There they are, the brothers Tim and Michael Guider, side by side, at
that wonderful age of innocence and adventure, where the sand is
always white and the skies seem permanently blue.
It was 1962, and looking at
those cheeky faces who could have predicted what was to come - the
tragedy, the heartbreak, the horrendous crime.
Fast-forward 40 years, to
early April, and once again Tim and Michael Guider are side by side,
but this time the smiles and funny faces have long faded. Tears are
flowing.
They are sitting on a veranda
in the legal visits area of Silverwater jail, where Michael, by now
notorious, is awaiting his committal hearing on a charge of murdering
nine-year-old Samantha Knight in 1986. He's already serving 16 years
for sexually assaulting other children in the '80s and '90s. As it
happens, Tim is also in jail, doing 10 years for conspiring to rob a
bank.
That day he'd been brought
from Long Bay jail on a compassionate visit, but it was a meeting that
occurred with the full knowledge and support of the crown prosecutor
in the case, Paul Conlon, and the police leading the investigation,
Neil Tuckerman and Darren Sly.
Although Michael had been
charged with murder, he was pleading his innocence, stonewalling any
inquiries to do with Samantha. While the prosecution had a brief, it
could hardly be described as strong.
The prosecutors and police
were looking for a breakthrough, for someone to unlock some of the
terrible secrets in Michael Guider's mind. His younger brother, Tim,
now 48, would prove to be the key. It had been tried once before, by
the secretive NSW Crime Commission, which arranged a couple of years
ago for Tim and Michael to meet in its Kent Street offices. Nothing
came of it, with Michael holding up a piece of paper saying "this room
is bugged' the moment his brother entered the room. This time things
would prove to be different.
Paul Conlon had met Tim in
jail around February as a matter of routine after the defence said it
wanted him called as a witness at the committal. The two men started
to talk.
Tim Guider told the Herald
this week how he had offered to help - but on his own terms. There
would be no listening devices, no subterfuge. He would neither gather
nor give evidence against his brother.
"I was in a unique position
... if he was guilty of the crime and he was going to open up to
anybody, I knew he would open up to me. The only thing I could ever
offer them [the prosecution] was 'let me talk to him. I can almost
guarantee if he's guilty, he will come to you and tell you that'."
And so the visits started,
with Tim escorted from Long Bay to see his big brother in Silverwater.
"He didn't know I was coming,
but he was glad to see me. I made it clear to him that I had refused
to be of any assistance in terms of providing evidence.
"I also let him know my
position on the crime [the killing of Samantha]. It was heinous,
putrid ... he was a bit pissed off that I thought he was guilty."
Their talk lasted about five
hours, but the second visit was longer, and proved crucial to Michael
eventually pleading guilty to manslaughter.
(His story is that he
accidentally gave Samantha an overdose of the sedative Normison, the
drug he used to stupefy his victims.)
The brothers, for the first
time in their lives, discussed what had happened at Melrose Boys' Home,
where they had been abandoned by their parents in 1963, the year after
the photo published today was taken.
Versions vary as to just what
family life was like. Tim insists there was no sexual abuse in the
home. "She gambled, he drank the money away," he said of his mother
and father. "They were not bad parents as such. Both showed a lot of
affection."
What is not in dispute is that
the marriage crumbled and the brothers were sent to the boys' home.
"Our parents put us in there
saying it was a temporary situation, but they didn't come back. They
forgot to come back. I was nine years old, the same age as Samantha.
Michael was 12."
It was while they were in the
home that the brothers, along with others boys, were sexually abused.
Tim describes the man who
molested them as well-spoken, perhaps English, with white hair and a
pencil-thin moustache. He walked with a cane. He would take the boys
out "sightseeing" but then book into a city hotel, drug their drink,
usually a glass of milk, and molest them.
It was something Michael had
never spoken of; when finally confronted this year in Silverwater, he
burst into tears.
"His voice went into this high
pitch like a kid's voice and I was just looking at this 52-year-old
man weeping about his own childhood trauma," Tim said.
He wasn't sympathetic.
"I didn't feel in the least
bit sorry for him, because there he was weeping about his own trauma
when I didn't see the same response for his victims ... He had become
my worst nightmare, and that is how I put it to him."
Tim says the sexual abuse is
no excuse for what happened to Samantha. "I don't want people to see
it as an excuse for what's been done. It's an insight into how Michael
was created into the monster he became."
It was during that second
visit, after he opened up about some of his own personal demons, that
Michael started talking about pleading guilty to accidentally killing
Samantha.
The two police officers, Neil
Tuckerman and Darren Sly, went to talk to him themselves and, finally,
a plea of manslaughter was entered.
Throughout the whole process,
Tess Knight, Samantha's mother, was kept fully informed, including
about Tim Guider's role.
Paul Conlon said yesterday: "We
believe that his contact with Michael in prison, and the trust that
had been built up between them over many years, was instrumental in
Michael ultimately admitting he was responsible for Samantha's killing."
For his part, Tim Guider
received a pardon, having served five years. He is still visiting his
brother. He's trying to get work and make up for lost time with his
partner and his child, who this year turned nine.
The deadly silence that doomed Samantha
The Sydney Morning Herald
June 8 2002
Samantha Knight's killer finally came
clean yesterday but Philip Cornford reveals how the predator was
allowed to roam free for 10 years.
A month before Michael Guider
killed nine-year-old Samantha Knight, her best friend had told her own
mother that he was a sexual predator. But her mother did not go to the
police.
It was at the woman's house in
Raglan Street, Manly, that Guider sexually abused her daughter,
Samantha and another young girl from 1984 to 1986.
Her daughter, then aged 8,
told her in July 1986 how Guider had played a game he called statues,
which involved her sitting absolutely still while he exposed his penis
and touched her genitalia.
Yet the woman maintained her
silence even after Samantha vanished from a Bondi street on August 19
the same year, feared murdered, last seen in the company of a man.
The woman came to Sydney to
comfort Samantha's frantic mother, Tess Knight, then aged 28 and a
friend. But even while police and citizens searched for Samantha, she
did not tell Ms Knight or detectives about Guider, who had been her
free babysitter.
Had she passed on the
information told to her by her daughter, Guider would probably have
been arrested. Instead, he remained free and continued to assault
children for 10 years until his arrest in 1996.
Yesterday, Guider, 51, his
greying beard flowing over his chest and his hair over his shoulders,
pleaded guilty in Supreme Court to manslaughter. He had originally
pleaded not guilty to murdering Samantha.
He faces a maximum a 25 years'
jail when he is sentenced on August 23. He already is serving 16 years
for sexual offences against children and was due for release, with
parole remissions, in 2006.
A statement of facts says
Guider intended to sedate Samantha so that he could sexually molest
her, but accidentally gave her a fatal overdose of Normison.
Guider claims he buried
Samantha in Cooper Park at Woollahra, but dug up her body 18 months
later when workmen came close to her grave.
He says he put her remains in
a dump bin on a construction site at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron
at Kirribilli, where he was a gardener. Waste from the site went into
landfills.
If this account is true, there
is virtually no chance that Samantha's remains will be recovered and
given a proper burial, the dearest wish of her parents, Ms Knight and
Peter O'Meagher.
"Guider is the only person who
knows where Sam is," Mr O'Meagher said. "We've got to bury her. We
really just want that." Ms Knight said: "There is no reason why he
can't tell us where Sam is. I think I would like to know a little bit
more about what happened."
But Guider is unlikely to give
police more information until he is sentenced, fearing he might still
be charged with murder.
Police had no idea Guider was
Samantha's killer when they arrested him in February 1996 after two
mothers said he had sexually molested their two young daughters.
Investigators found thousands
of pornographic slides which Guider had taken of his victims. They
identified nine girls and two boys aged between two and 16, molested
over 10 years.
Confronted with this evidence,
Guider pleaded guilty to 60 charges of sexually abusing and drugging
minors. But he admitted offences only against those children already
identified and refused to give information about any other victims.
Guider told investigators that
he did not select his child victims but targeted their mothers, who
were lonely single parents, many of them drug-addicted. He met them at
the methadone clinic at Royal North Shore Hospital, where he was a
gardener from 1989.
"Every day I picked up my
methadone, he was there," the mother of one victim told police. He had
encouraged her to go out while he baby-sat her five-year-old daughter,
telling her: "You haven't been out in a while." He always had his
camera.
Guider, who told prison
psychologists he was sexually abused by his mother and later at a boys'
home, was contemptuous of the mothers.
One said Guider told him that
"in some cases the parents found out what he was up to and their
reactions varied ... they were not often extreme and damning of him".
To them he was just a free babysitter.
Guider told a psychologist
about another mother. "She was bad. I was screwing her two kids and
she asked me to do it to her after I'd been doing it to them."
But it was not until 1998 that
detectives from Strike Force Harrisville, who had reopened the
investigation into Samantha's disappearance, began to focus on Guider.
In September detectives found
thousands of photographs that Guider had concealed in a storage
facility at Girraween.
They identified a photograph
of Samantha and two young friends and traced them to Manly Public
School and then to Raglan Street, where one of Samantha's friends
lived.
She had met her friends while
her mother lived with a partner at Manly, and continued to visit on
weekends after Ms Knight ended the relationship and moved to the
eastern suburbs.
Among Guider's collection were
pornographic photos he had taken of Samantha's two friends while
babysitting them at Raglan Street in 1984. He was a friend of the
mother of Samantha's classmate. There were pornographic photos of
another young girl who police were certain was Samantha, but they were
unable to prove it.
There were other, innocent
photographs showing all three girls together in Raglan Street.
They located one of the girls,
now a young woman, in Queensland in December 1998. She told them that
Guider had sexually assaulted her at least five times when she was
aged between seven and eight and staying overnight at Raglan Street.
Often, Samantha had been there too.
The woman described how Guider
played hide-and-seek with the three young girls. They hid in different
rooms and he would find one of them and sexually assault her. This
continued until he had found and sexually assaulted all three.
On another night she had been
invited by her friend's mother to stay over at Raglan Street. Her
friend wasn't there, but Guider was.
The mother left and Guider
took her to the mother's bedroom, sat her on the bed, she said. He had
molested her for about 20 minutes and taken photographs. "Every time I
was at [Raglan Street] and Michael was there, he sexually assaulted
me."
But police ran into a hurdle
with the woman who owned the Raglan Street house. Neither she nor her
daughter, then aged 21, wanted to talk to police.
Eventually police subpoened
them to appear in July 1999 before the NSW Crime Commission, the
state's most draconian interrogatory body.
They were shown and identified
the pornographic photographs taken by Guider. Even then, they were
reluctant to talk about him.
The daughter was the first
witness. She gave evidence about the statues game. She said that after
they moved to Yamba, on the North Coast, she told her mother about
Guider. She was eight at the time.
"I can't recall how specific I
was with details," she said. "My mother asked me if I wanted to go
back to Sydney to fight the matter and I said I didn't. After that
time, I didn't want to talk about Guider."
The mother was brought to the
crime commission 10 days later. She revealed that her daughter told
her in July 1996 - the month before Samantha disappeared, when they
were living in Yamba - that Guider had molested her at Raglan Street.
"[her daughter] told me around
this time about a game called statues that Guider played with her,"
she said. "I asked her about whether she wanted to discuss the matter
further. We both decided to put it behind us."
Police sent a brief of
evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions recommending that
Guider be charged with Samantha's murder.
While awaiting a decision,
they charged him with sexually molesting Samantha's two friends.
Once again, Guider pleaded
guilty and was sentenced to 6 years' jail. However, much of it was to
be concurrent with the term he was serving, and it added only six
months to his total sentence.
By pleading guilty to sexually
assaulting her friends, Guider avoided being examined about Samantha,
and he did not have to confront his victims.
That ended in April. Charged
with murdering Samantha, Guider pleaded not guilty. Four young women
who had been his victims as children, two of them Samantha's friends,
gave evidence at the committal hearing.
Not once did Guider look in
their direction. While they testified, he sat with his head bowed,
staring at the floor, a shrunken man.
In court, the mother denied
that Samantha had ever stayed overnight at Raglan Street or that
Guider had been left alone with her daughter or her friends.
But her evidence was
contradicted by her then boyfriend and a couple who lived at Raglan
Street who testified that Guider babysat Samantha and her two friends
while the mother and her friend went out.
But the most telling
contradiction came from the young woman who had willingly helped
detectives. Samantha was there, she said. They all were. And Guider
sexually assaulted them.
TheCrimeWeb.com
Sam's killer 'linked to other child
deaths'
John Kidman Police Reporter
The Sydney Morning Herald
November 26, 2006
IT took Denise
Hofman nearly two years to convince senior police that Michael Guider
was one of Australia's most notorious child killers.
Now the mother-of-five says
they are refusing to consider her concerns that Guider, who killed
nine-year-old Samantha Knight, may have murdered other children.
Mrs Hofman, 58, has revealed
that a set of scrapbooks once kept by Guider contain newspaper
cuttings about the unsolved abduction and homicide of five-year-old
Renee Aitken on the state's South Coast in 1984.
Other circumstantial details
potentially link the 55-year-old pedophile to the disappearance, she
said.
However, senior police insist
that without more evidence they can't take the matter further.
None will allow Mrs Hofman
access to the scrapbooks, which they say are filed in the force's
investigative archives.
Nor are they willing to
examine the exhibits or discuss their contents with her, she said.
Mrs Hofman, who learnt of the
scrapbooks' existence through the Guider investigation, now wonders
whether at least some of the clippings have been lost.
"I'm getting the same sort of
responses from the police that I did when I was trying to tell them
about Samantha," Mrs Hofman said.
"They're not answering the
questions I'm putting to them. They're refusing to produce the
scrapbooks and they're saying at a very high level that they don't
even need to go and look at them for themselves."
Guider, 55, was sentenced to
12 years' jail in August 2002 for Samantha's manslaughter, thus
closing the book on a 16-year mystery. He could be released as early
as 2014.
But his conviction would never
have happened without Mrs Hofman's determination to expose her former
friend as a suspect and then go under cover to help prove his guilt.
Mrs Hofman and Guider met in
1993 via a mutual interest in Sydney's Aboriginal rock sites but three
years later she was shocked to learn that Guider, who worked closely
with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, was in jail awaiting
trial over child sex allegations.
When a colleague confided to
her that Guider had been obsessed with Samantha and helped search for
her when she disappeared, Mrs Hofman decided to act.
Bondi police would not meet
her, so she decided to visit Guider in prison and did so more than a
dozen times before anyone would believe her story.
At one stage, she was told to
walk away because Guider was simply not a suspect.
Mrs Hofman said Guider's
police photograph was privately identified by a key witness in the
Renee Aitken case.
She said a poem Guider sent
her from jail also confirmed that he was working in the Canberra
suburb of Red Hill, just two hours from Renee's Narooma home, around
the time she was snatched.
A letter Mrs Hofman received
from police two weeks ago said: "The [police] followed up the issues
you raised in your representations and [are] satisfied that, unless
further evidence is forthcoming, there are no additional avenues of
investigation that can be legitimately pursued.
"I understand that you feel
strongly about this issue; however, I must reiterate that, without
further evidence, NSW Police is unable to take the matter further."
Former NSW Police consultant
and serial crime authority Richard Basham said it was easy enough for
police to question specifics "but the general issues being raised
about this guy are more difficult to deal with because the police know
what the actual chances are of him being a 'one-off' offender".
"Essentially any crime against
a stranger needs to be regarded as part of a series until proven
otherwise."
Dr Basham agreed that the mere
fact Guider was already behind bars was not enough to dismiss whatever
else he might have done.
"The parents [of other
potential victims] certainly deserve better," he said.
Mrs Hofman believes the
scrapbooks feature cuttings on other missing child cases as well.
While Guider's age would all
but rule out any direct connection, she knows they include the 1966
disappearance of the three Beaumont children in Adelaide.
"Even tracking Michael's
whereabouts over the past 20 years through the NSW National Parks and
Wildlife registry would have to be be worthwhile, and very easily
done," Mrs Hofman said.
"Wherever he was, the days,
the dates, the sites, all of it, it's there in the register but it is
something the police have never looked at."
- Samantha Knight
walked out of her mother's Bondi flat on August 19, 1986, and never
returned. For the next 16 years, her disappearance would be considered
one of the nation's most baffling and disturbing crimes. A neighbour
was the last person to see her alive when she waved to the pretty nine-year-old
in Bondi Road. Samantha had earlier visited her nearby Imperial Avenue
home to change out of her school clothes and fix something to eat.
Knowing her mother was to return from an art class at 6pm, she then
decided to walk down to a local pharmacy to buy a toothbrush.
- Michael Anthony Guider
was 35 when he abducted Samantha in Bondi's Wellington Street. For the
previous three years he had secretly drugged and abused her but it was
not until 2002 that he confessed to her manslaughter, claiming to have
accidentally given her a fatal overdose of the sedative Normison.
Guider was already serving 16 years' jail following his conviction in
1996 for the sexual assault and drugging of 11 other children aged two
to 16. Even so, he refused to talk about Samantha's death or say where
he had left her body. Former prisoners told police Guider may have
buried her in an eastern suburbs park before exhuming the remains and
dumping them in a construction site bin.
- February 16
will mark 23 years since little Renee Aitken's
bewildering disappearance and suspected murder. Exhaustive search
efforts failed to find a trace of the five-year-old, snatched from her
Narooma bedroom in 1984. Various sightings of her over time have all
proved false, including an American woman's bizarre claim to being the
adult Renee. A computer-generated likeness of what a 22-year-old Renee
might look like, which was circulated in 2001, also failed to produce
a lead. Hope of a breakthrough then emerged the following year, when
police declared interest in a man previously convicted of assaulting
one of Renee's relatives. However, he died in a car smash without
being questioned, just weeks before Coroner Carl Milanovich returned
an open finding at inquest.
