Chapter 5

The Devil’s Playground

Every time one of Boeing’s thundering 707s came in to land at Mascot airport, Michael Guider could see the faces of the window-seat passengers from his new front yard. Inside, the whole house shook. George Street, Sydenham lay smack in the teeth of Sydney’s flight path. Just three blocks long, it was also wedged between the city’s Illawarra rail line and the groaning six-lane Princes Highway. Beyond stretched a huge putrescent landfill known as Tempe Tip.

This was where the troubled Guiders had escaped to. At the beginning of the 1960s, the bushland delights of Herne Bay and even semi-rural Granville seemed a world away. Guider’s only reminder of fonder times was a pet duck rescued from the dinner table and allowed to sleep in his bed. He named him Francis Drake after the famous English sea captain.

Minor concessions aside and despite the attempted resettlement, soon after the family’s arrival, dark clouds were again rumbling. In essence, after six turbulent years, attrition had delivered Ruth and Kevin’s common law marriage to ruin. Yet its dissolution would create a bigger problem still, as neither parent alone was really capable of looking after the boys. Ruth’s grip on sanity was now spasmodic and Kevin simply lacked the strength to stay sober. The solution was to abandon Michael and Tim to charitable care again. But this time, their stay would be long term.

The night his parents decided they’d had enough, Guider strangely fretted over Francis, whom he’d released in the big pond in Centennial Park, and cried himself to sleep. He was eleven years old.

***

Long ago demolished, Melrose Boys’ Home exists now only in the memories of those who endured it. Opened in 1953 at Pendle Hill, to Parramatta’s west, the two-storey stone manor was then one of a dozen Protestant refuges across NSW for displaced and troubled kids. Some of them stayed a day or two. However, others remained until they were legally old enough to strike out on their own. For these already needy few, the raw experience of surviving years in institutional care was often traumatic. Sometimes, it was downright brutal.

Four years Guider’s junior and a year younger than Tim, Terry Langham was placed in Melrose at roughly the same time as them in 1964. Four decades on, he doesn’t talk about it easily.1

It was a dispiriting place where you kept your mouth shut unless you were looking for trouble, he says. ‘We were fed, clothed and had a roof over our heads. It was an existence rather than a life of enjoyment. I always felt that I missed out on a childhood.’2

In all, there were some 30 boys. Upstairs, the rooms were set out like dormitories, rows of beds with stainless steel hospital cabinets attached. At dinner time, everyone sat down either side of an old long table to boiled cabbage, broccoli and silverside followed by sago, a rather bland form of edible starch. They grew the vegetables themselves out back and, summer and winter alike, were made to work the rough clay soil with heavy mattocks and picks. Other chores included scrubbing bathrooms and traipsing the neighbourhood selling charity badges and lollies. However, never once were they allowed sweets of their own.

School holidays were a time of banishment, with the boys ‘farmed out’ to local families. A few mere months after one such break, during which he’d been billeted with a clan of Greek-Australians, Langham encountered them again at their home while out door-knocking. ‘They didn’t recognise me and I never said anything,’ he says of the encounter. ‘I just left feeling that I was worthless and no one cared for me.’3

Also etched into his memory is the ludicrous image of 17 kids sardined into a Volkswagen Beetle to go to the drive-in movies. Elsewhere, he recalls being forced to sit for an hour-and-a-half over uneaten meals, and abiding painful boils on his face, neck and torso caused by poor diet and hygiene.

Above all, Langham remembers Melrose as a place without love. ‘There was no family-type affection,’ he declares. ‘You lived in a kind of fear … always frightened something adverse might happen to you.’4

While ugly, Terry Langham’s memories of the time don’t include being physically harmed. Michael Guider’s, however, do. More than three decades after leaving Melrose, and facing the prospect of a long-term prison sentence, he would claim to have been the subject of sexual abuse there. Invited by a court-appointed psychologist to elaborate, he wouldn’t mince words either, alleging that he was ‘gang raped’ by the older boys.5

To avoid repeated assault and win a kind of perverse acceptance, Guider said he was forced to agree to regular oral sex. As repugnant as this must have been for him, he also admitted to becoming an abuser himself by participating in attacks upon other, more vulnerable boys.

Guider would also tell of being molested by an approved Melrose visitor during a rail excursion to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. He said the man gave him some pills, possibly while in a vestibule attached to one of the carriages, that left him vague but aware of being violated. Terry Langham says he recalls visiting a Methodist retreat in the mountains a couple of times and thinks the organiser might have been Ron Trowell, a prominent Methodist at Parramatta whose daughter, Dawn, was one of the Melrose house parents. However, he has no knowledge of anything untoward happening at the camp, during the trip there or home or, for that matter, at Pendle Hill.

According to Tim Guider, who would eventually break his silence following his brother’s revelations, he and some of the other boys were abused by a self-styled ‘philanthropist’ who had permission to take them on various outings. There was no suggestion he was referring to Trowell. Instead, he described the fellow as well spoken, perhaps English, with white hair and a pencil-thin moustache. He said he’d also walked with a cane. On different occasions, the man had checked them into a city hotel, drugged their drinks – usually glasses of milk – and assaulted them.6

After considering this account, though, Langham says it too is unfamiliar.

***

During this time, Guider’s scholarly prowess markedly deteriorated. Seven Hills High School accepted its first students in 1959 and he enrolled two years later without ever achieving anything noteworthy.

Obtaining his Intermediate Certificate in 1965, he simply packed his bags, walked out the front gates of Melrose and set his own compass.

Tim, by now, was 12 and attending Pendle Hill High School.

Beyond family and institution, Guider’s existence becomes more difficult to trace. For the next two years at least, he remained in Sydney, drifting in and out of menial employment and residing in boarding houses. Free of the appalling torment he said he’d suffered and helped inflict at Melrose, he also set off in search of consensual interaction with the opposite sex.

His first girlfriend was purportedly the sister of one of his Melrose mates.7 However, Guider would also claim during pre-sentence interviews 35 years later that while he was seeing the girl, he was carrying on with both a married woman and her daughter. Almost certainly false, the boast was likely an attempt to convince the mental health experts involved that he was as red-blooded as the next guy when it came to chasing skirt and hardly the kind to be enamoured by children. In any case, he seems not to have bragged of such conquests elsewhere.

While it apparently had no bearing on his newly acquired independence, Guider did make a point of reconnecting with Ruth, and he would stay in touch with her over the next decade or so. How and how often they made contact, though, is generally not clear.

At 17, he took up residence in Bondi once again, with a family who’d befriended him. He discovered he was actually quite adept at winning people over by promoting himself as naturally charming and helpful, and when they moved house he went with them. In fact, he tagged along as an ‘add-on’ for the next several years. The kids particularly thought him a bit of a hoot and introduced him to everyone as ‘Uncle Mick’.

During this period, Guider was employed as a gardener at the University of NSW in Kensington. The sprawling inner-suburban campus was undergoing a major upgrade as part of an ambitious expansion program and he was involved in the landscaping work. It wasn’t his dream job; Guider was a little too intellectual to toil only with his hands. Yet it went some way towards stimulating his passion for the environment. In keeping him outdoors, it also released him from having to account for each minute of his day and he quite enjoyed the fact that there was no one constantly peering over his shoulder.

Gardening was something Guider was good at, too. Eventually, he was given the run of one of Sydney’s more recognisable public enclosures, the 13-hectare grounds of Royal North Shore Hospital at St Leonards. The position carried a fair level of responsibility but also had its perks. It came with several staff to whom he could delegate work, and there was even less need to justify his whereabouts to anyone. He also enjoyed personal access to several of the hospital’s vehicles. In fact, it would become quite easy, whenever he felt the need, to slip away and take a little personal time. So long as the job got done, he found that some days he could almost do as he pleased. It was a bit like being in two places at once.

All of this, though, was still years away, and in the interim Guider, as young blokes seemed increasingly to do during the 1970s, simply coasted along. While unemployment rates trebled during the decade, he managed to stay in paid work but found ample time to chase other interests.

Unlike others of his generation, however, this didn’t mean surfing, drinking or playing footy. Guider preferred to read, especially about his pet subjects – native flora and fauna and Aboriginal artefacts. It’s quite likely he devoted hundreds of hours over several years independently researching them. Certainly much of his time was spent buried in the various collections held in the NSW State Library on Sydney’s Macquarie Street and just up the road at the Australian Museum, off Hyde Park.8

Records show that from the late seventies, Guider also began submitting his own findings on various local Aboriginal heritage sites to the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Ever restless, he indulged his passions while almost randomly wandering; there was never a question of putting down any roots. After leaving his adoptive family, he resumed living in a succession of private hotels around the city’s North Shore and Eastern Suburbs. Between various gardening jobs, he also took up as a labourer, a storeman and packer, a copy boy, a clerical assistant and a cleaner.9

It wasn’t that Guider couldn’t settle into permanent employ­ment and accommodation or form lasting ties, he simply didn’t want to. Some of the practitioners who later examined him would attribute his transience to an avoidant personality but he was actually far from introverted. When he wanted, he could lay it on thick with the best of them. Some who knew him would recall him as being chatty or even gregarious.10

Closer observation might have, in fact, revealed that there were two quite distinctly different Michael Guiders in action at any given time: one the knowledgeable, happy-go-lucky suburban ‘bushman’, and the other an unattached and somewhat obsessive loner.

Guider liked to explain the private side of his character as having a special place of solace to retreat to. Absurdly, as it turned out, he insisted that this ‘inner circle’, as he called it, had nothing to do with needing to ‘hide any dark secrets’. It was just an escape from the pitiful experiences of his childhood, he would claim, a mechanism to keep people at arm’s length.11

For whatever reason, however, this practice of shutting himself off from everyone would itself eventually prove impossible to maintain.

***

Despite his asocial side, in 1975 Guider became deeply infatuated with a married woman – not a fictitious one this time – and it landed him in hot water. They embarked upon a rather stormy two-year affair but things unfortunately went awry when she suddenly dumped him.

Stung by rejection and desperate to win her back, Guider stole a credit card addressed to one of his boarding house neighbours in Balls Head Road, Waverton. Lavishing his estranged lover with gifts, he used the plastic to run up a $700 bill.

The foolhardy spree saw him hauled before a magistrate to face 18 counts of stealing and false pretences. In January 1978, he was fined $900, placed on a three-year good behaviour bond and ordered to repay the full amount of the fraud. The court was told Guider had pestered the woman at her home, refusing to accept their relationship was over.12

One wonders whether the episode might have fizzled right there had Guider not discovered that while he was paying his dues to society, his ex had quietly started up with another man. Instead of causing Guider to leave off and put everything behind him, though, the other guy’s arrival ensured Guider’s old and sinister friend, jealousy, reared its ugly head. Deciding revenge was a dish best served cold, he brooded over the affront for some four months. Stalking the couple to Bondi – of all places – where they’d opened a picture framing shop, he set it on fire, with them still inside.

Guider initially denied being the arsonist but, with lawyer in tow, turned himself in to police the day after the blaze. He then phoned his former girlfriend and pleaded that he was ‘very, very sorry’. He would later tell friends he was relieved no one had been hurt and that he’d never intended to endanger anyone.

In June 1980, Guider was ordered to compensate for the damage in seven monthly instalments of $100 deducted from his wage as a factory storeman. Despite still serving out his previous bond, he was spared any further punishment in return for agreeing to undertake a new five-year term of legal good behaviour. It was a soft option and one for which he was no doubt grateful. Had the magistrate been aware of his somewhat curious fondness for setting things aflame, however, he might not have been so lenient.

Fire was something with which Guider had long been fascinated. He’d first been struck by how excited it could make him feel one afternoon back in Herne Bay. Ruth had decided to dry his wet shoes on the stove but went next door, chatting, and promptly forgot about them. When she returned, thick black smoke was billowing from the windows and the unmistakable wail of approaching fire brigade sirens could be heard.

As the fighters charged in with their extinguishers and brass helmets and the engine lights flashed red and blue, Guider was spellbound. ‘It was to have a strange effect on me,’ he’d concede.

His uncle, also named Michael, had been a fireman and he’d quite idolised him for it. Once he even tried burning down a neighbour’s outhouse in the childish hope his uncle would come and put it out.

Another time, Ruth had caught him with a lit match as he was about to set fire to one of the wooden classrooms at St Joseph’s. ‘It was partly because of the canings I regularly received there that I wanted to burn it down,’ Guider would reason. ‘But of course, I [also] loved the fire’s flames.’

His mother naturally informed Kevin, who meted out a severe hiding with a length of electrical chord.13

***

Between her boy’s run-ins with the law, Ruth Guider was diagnosed with lung cancer. She died, aged 52, in January 1980. Guider continued visiting with her until the very end and with the last words she spoke she managed a feeble goodbye.14

As mother and oldest son, they’d shared a flawed relationship. Whenever she was feeling well and was present in his life, there had been a loving bond between them. But when she wasn’t well, Guider seemed to have to bear the brunt. Ultimately, it had been Ruth’s absences that had forsaken him to the care of strangers, some of whom were found seriously wanting.

Having such a troubled connection to the person closest to him no doubt had a telling impact on Guider’s early psychological development. From a young age, he was hostile towards anyone who begged Ruth’s affection, especially Tim. Once her maternal loyalty towards him became an issue at Blaxcell Street, however, he then turned his aggression on her. And, finally, when Guider feared his emotionally crippled mother was lost to him, he ineptly retreated to places where there were no adults at all, such as the solitude of the bush or the escapist realm of children’s literature.

Now a 30-year-old man, Guider appeared to shun human interaction altogether unless it was strictly on his own terms and governed by his own motivations. He was furtive and tended to compartmentalise his everyday affairs. In addition, his only proper attempt at romance had been a dismal failure and had reawakened his disturbing capacity for vindictiveness.

None of it boded well.

When his past caught up with him many years later, Guider would cleverly attempt to convince the court system that he didn’t want to blame anyone for his problems, least of all his parents. It was meant to convey the notion that he was willing to take responsibility for his actions and was therefore a good candidate for rehabilitation rather than outright detention. He was partly successful in achieving this aim too. One of the appointed psychologists who assessed him would sympathetically note that he was ‘almost forgiving’ of the appalling upbringing he and Tim had suffered.15

But one seriously suspects that this was just a ruse. When pretending to claim ownership of his problems didn’t really get him what he wanted, Guider reverted to Plan B. This, in fact, involved accusing Ruth of the most shameful and hurtful behaviour imaginable and then carefully suggesting that she couldn’t help it because she was schizophrenic.

Clearly, this was specifically designed to actually use her illness as a means of excusing his own behaviour. As manipulations go, it was one that was as cowardly as it was brilliant. It also had the unavoidable effect of consigning his mother’s reputation, regardless of whether or not her mental impairment was taken into consideration, to the scrapheap.

In the first place, Guider alleged that, as a boy, Ruth had sexually fondled him and forced him to dress as a girl. This purportedly went on both during the time they were living in Melbourne, before his earliest recollections, as well as throughout primary school.16

More startling still, Guider reckoned he wasn’t Ruth’s first-born child and that she’d actually mothered a boy several years before him. He also claimed she’d been so promiscuous during his early years that he and both his brothers had different fathers but didn’t know who any of them were, and neither did she.17

In yet another version of his somewhat warped family tree, Guider maintained that at least Tim’s father was known to them, and that it was Kevin. If true, though, this subsequently casts into doubt his account of the family moving to Sydney in 1954.

For this to have been the case , Kevin either had to have come onto the scene prior to Ruth and the boys leaving Melbourne or Tim was, in fact, born after they arrived in Sydney. Either way, there seem to be some serious questions arising.

While willing to divulge humiliating details of his own experience to support his brother’s claims of mistreatment at Melrose, Tim Guider would draw the line at besmirching his mum. There was no such sexual abuse of his brother within the family, he would insist.

‘She gambled, he drank the money away,’ was how he would sum up Ruth’s and Kevin’s shortcomings. ‘They were not bad parents as such. Both showed a lot of affection.’18

As for Pendle Hill, ‘[They] put us in there saying it was a temporary situation but they didn’t come back,’ Tim would say. ‘They forgot to come back.’19

Like they did Michael’s, neglect and abuse would exact a heavy toll on Tim’s adulthood. As brothers in strife, the difference between them was how quickly Tim ran off the rails. He was already serving serious time before he was 21 for holding up a fast food outlet with a stolen but unloaded rifle.20

Guider, however, wouldn’t come to notice until his mid-20s and even then only for summary offences. He’d avoid serious detection for another two decades.

Of course, this didn’t mean he was behaving himself. By the time of Samantha’s disappearance in August 1986, he was already thoroughly immersed in a secret life of appalling crime.

Outwardly, he came across as a kind of kooky but good-natured environmentalist who otherwise enjoyed his own company. But behind the façade, Guider was what upstanding folk would describe as a reprobate, and others would gladly call much worse. Yet, to the intolerable misfortune of dozens of innocent children, he was supremely artful at flying below the radar.