Lost, Missing, Murdered
Lost, Missing, Murdered
William Tyrrell. Daniel Morcombe. Samantha Knight. These are some of the most infamous cases of missing children in Australian history. This is the story behind In Plain View.
William Tyrrell. Daniel Morcombe. Samantha Knight.
These three names are some of the most infamous cases of missing children in Australian history. For years they remained missing, their cases unsolved. In the case of William Tyrrell, aged 3 when he disappeared on 12 September 2014, it remains unsolved.
Each year, 30,000 people go missing across Australia, including 3,000 children aged 0 to 12 and 19,000 aged 13 to 17. The authorities proudly state that 98% of all these missing are located, alive.
But that means each year, 2% remain unaccounted for. Some 440 people. They do not access their bank accounts, use their passports, contact family or friends. They simply…vanish. They join the ranks of what the police call “lost, missing, murdered.” Their actual status remains unknown. After seven years their families can apply to the Coroner for them to be deemed “deceased.” By comparison, in 2022/23, the “official” homicide rate in Australia was 232.
The idea for my novel In Plain View is based upon an amalgamation of these cases and more. It is the story of one missing girl, 11-year-old Cassie Edwards, who the police are determined to classify as a runaway, and another missing girl, 16-year-old Fiona Carlisle, daughter of wealthy Eastern Suburbs parents. Whilst Fiona’s disappearances is the keen focus of wall-to-wall media attention and daly police briefings, Cassie is unheard of. Until Detective Sergeant Jon Roth becomes entangled in the case.
Tess Knight arrived home from work on August 19, 1986, to the Imperial Avenue, Bondi, unit she shared with her nine-year-old daughter, Samantha. The apartment was unusually quiet and a half-eaten snack on the kitchen bench was the only sign Samantha had returned from school. When neighbours told Tess they hadn’t seen her little girl that afternoon and family and friends also had no idea where she was, panic set in.
With nowhere left to search for her daughter, Tess called the police, kickstarting one of the biggest missing person searches in the state’s history.
Despite that effort, no solid leads or arrests were developed and with not a clue as to what had happened to Sam, the case eventually started to go cold. It would be 16 long years before the horrible facts of what happened that evening would finally be revealed with the eventual arrest of Michael Guider, who was arrested and pled guilty to Samantha’s manslaughter in 2001. Guider had a long history of drugging and molesting children or their friends whose mother’s he had befriended, showing indecent pictures he had of Samantha to people in 1996.
Guider was sentenced to seventeen years imprisonment.
For many, there remain a lot of unanswered questions about Guider’s story and what actually happened to Samantha Knight. Guider's statements about Knight over the years have been contradictory. Initially, Guider claimed he could remember nothing about what he did with Samantha. Later, he said he had buried her in Cooper Park, in the Sydney suburb of Bellevue Hill, but later dug her up placed her body in a skip at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, Kirribilli, where he had worked as a gardener at the time. In March 2003, he told police he had buried Knight in the grounds of the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron. On 15 May, 2003, a dig took place at this location but nothing was found.
Samantha’s remains have never been recovered.
On 7 December 2003, Daniel Morcombe decided to catch the 1:35 PM bus from his home to the Sunshine Plaza Shopping Centre, Queensland, for a haircut and to buy Christmas presents. That bus had broken down, and the replacement bus refused to stop to pick up the 13 year old by the side of the highway because it was an “unofficial stop”.
In the time between that bus refusing to stop for Daniel and the next bus arriving, just 3 minutes later according to records, Daniel Morcombe had vanished.
Despite a massive search and a $1,000,000 reward, it would take eight years for Daniel’s parents to discover what had happened to their son.
On 13 August 2011, after an extensive undercover police operation, Queensland detectives took Brett Peter Cowan into custody and charged him with murder, child stealing, deprivation of liberty, indecent treatment of a child under 16, interfering with a corpse, and other offences related to Daniel Morcombe after Cowan led undercover detectives to Morcombe’s remains. In 2006, Cowan had been interviewed over the Morcombe case where he had admitted to police that he travelled along Kiel Mountain Road on his way to purchase marijuana from a drug dealer on the day of the disappearance and admitted to having seen and approached Morcombe to offer him a lift to the shopping centre, having parked his car in a nearby car-park of the church he attended.
On 21 August 2011, two shoes and three human bones were found during a police forensics search at the Glass House Mountains. By the end of the search, seventeen bones had been found, including a rib, hip, leg, arm, and vertebrae. They were all confirmed as belonging to Morcombe using DNA from his toothbrush to make the match.
As a result of the find, Morcombe's funeral was held at Siena Catholic College on 7 December 2012 with more than 2,000 people attending.
Brett Cowan, convicted of two previous child sex offences, was tried and found guilty at the Queensland Supreme Court of murder, indecently dealing with a child under the age of 16, and improperly dealing with a corpse on 13 March 2014. He was sentenced to life with a minimum non-parole term of 20 years.