Chapter 12

Obsessed

Readers skimming the late morning edition of Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph on 29 September were struck by a rather startling double-decker headline on page eight. ‘A new lead on missing Sam’, it announced, ‘Surprise tip-off reopens inquiry’. Alongside a companion piece titled ‘Longest 15 minutes’ about the interval between the Kilbride sighting and Tess’s call to the police, the story ran about 650 words in total.

No one was named in the article; it was based on information from an undisclosed police source. This was probably the main factor limiting its prominence in the paper. What it achieved, however, was to obliquely identify Michael Guider. To those in the know, the person described in the copy could not have been anyone else.

He was variously referred to as someone never before questioned by police, aged in his late 40s or early 50s, a bachelor and, until recently, a resident of Sydney’s northern suburbs. The article also said he had known Samantha and Tess and discussed Sam’s disappearance a number of times in settings that witnesses considered strange or inappropriate.

What gave the piece credibility was that it quoted Donohue and Mathes, in a kind of stilted, tight-lipped way, confirming the fact that Samantha’s long dormant case had indeed been reactivated. By news journalism standards, it was a strong endorsement – the kind that prompted other outlets to join the fold. As word circulated, calls to the force’s media unit began and a press conference featuring Tess was duly organised for that afternoon at police headquarters.

It was well enough attended to produce articles in each of the city’s three dailies the following morning. The Daily Telegraph led the way on page three with ‘A terrible secret – Family friend questioned over missing Samantha’. Ten years on, it was the first time the notion that Sam’s abductor had been anyone but a stranger was publicly canvassed.

Donohue told the paper their person of interest had been spoken to but wasn’t being held. Had he been asked to clarify this remark, he might have been forced to concede that the guy was not being held by the police, at least not in relation to Samantha. Guider, of course, was securely locked away in jail on the assault matters.1

The Australian managed to squeeze a few extra details into its report on the press conference on page five. It mentioned that police had, in fact, interviewed the man in July, which was obviously a reference to the Junee episode, but that this had followed a concerned member of the public contacting them in June. Who this might have been is anyone’s guess, as Denise, of course, had first reported her misgivings about Guider’s remarks at Castle Hill, way back in February.

It was all the more curious considering the fact Mathes and Donohue knew this well, having both read her statement and spoken to her about it at length.2

Asked during the conference whether she believed it possible Samantha was still alive after all this time, Tess had told the media contingent her answer depended on what day it was. Of the man who’d been interviewed, she’d said she’d been unaware of him as a suspect until recently.

‘He was someone tangentially involved in our neighbourhood,’ she said. ‘So it wasn’t someone I was overly aware of but someone who I was aware of their presence.’3

Late on the Sunday, NSW Premier Bob Carr chimed in with an appeal to anyone with further knowledge of the case to come forward. He’d said he sympathised greatly with Tess for the ongoing agony she’d experienced and could ‘only imagine what she went through not knowing anything about her daughter’s whereabouts over ten years’.4

***

Emotions aside, the day’s events had been a pretty fair catch for the journalists chasing the story. Unless there was some kind of live drama unfolding, Sunday usually offered little in the way of newsgathering opportunities. A ready-made yarn likely to run near the front of the paper was pretty rare, especially one so steeped in mystery and heartbreak. Even more so considering that in a sports-mad city like Sydney this particular weekend had been about sport, sport and more sport. On Saturday, the town’s AFL side, the Swans, had been dealt a crushing grand final defeat at the hands of the North Melbourne Kangaroos, while on Sunday, the Manly Sea Eagles had brought home the National Rugby League premiership with a 20–8 victory over the St George Dragons.

Back at the Daily Telegraph’s Holt Street bunker in Surry Hills, however, there was a feeling the item on Samantha wasn’t just a one-off in the news cycle, that it still had legs beyond the coverage of the conference they’d laid out on the page for the following morning.

The paper’s decision-makers wanted more. But in order to acquire it, they realised they needed to find the unnamed suspect the police were onto, whoever he might be.

The key, they learned from a discreet inside source and to their considerable delight, was right under their noses in the court papers they’d examined while researching the front-page article a fortnight earlier on Guider’s sexual assault convictions. Among the documentation lay the quite remarkable statement taken from Melissa and Cathy Clarke’s mum, Elizabeth, by the Jadette investigators back in May. In it, she had claimed of Guider: ‘I remember that he was really obsessed with Samantha Knight. When she disappeared, he actually went out there with the search party.

‘I said: “Why are you so obsessed with her?” He said: “Oh, she is such a pretty little thing.”’5

In newspaper parlance, it was gold. The Tele extended the quotation and ran it as an oversized print graphic. The main story rolled down three full-length columns under the imposing header, ‘Samantha: this is the man named’, while a banner across the very top of the page stated: ‘Paedophile linked to new lead into schoolgirl’s disappearance’. However, the piece de resistance was a large, repellent image of Guider in profile, off to the left, standing in long pants and short sleeves with his camera around his neck. Placed in careful contrast below was an endearing portrait of Sam wearing a natty little cap angled to one side.

Asked again whether she’d specifically known Guider, now that he had a name, Tess was this time quoted as saying, ‘It’s not something they [the police] want me to talk about at all at the moment. This is really something for the detectives. It’s a bit out of my league.’

The story would set off a new storm of public interest. When the Tele then asked David Donohue to comment further as he had for the Sunday article, however, he would also shy away from doing so. It was clearly time to pull back a little.

Responding even to a relatively innocuous inquiry about the progress of the investigation from the Herald, Donohue was circumspect about whether or not charges were imminent.6 What he did say, however, was that more than 100 calls had been received by police since the Sunday press conference and that he was hopeful the new information flow would drive some new leads.

At least on the face of things, it seemed at long last Guider had been well and truly outed and that some answers were on the way if not immediately, then soon. As always, though, there was more going on than met the eye.

While Denise had been the first to speak up about Guider, by the end of September 1996 she was no longer a lone voice. The Clarkes, whose more detailed revelations about him had carried considerable weight during the assault case, had taken things somewhat further.

But there was more.

The momentum that was now building actually had nought to do with the public phone-in over the previous 24 hours. Unbeknown to all but Mathes, Donohue and one or two others, before all the fuss had erupted there had been someone else who’d stepped forward with some quite telling information about Michael Anthony Guider. And he’d allegedly gotten it straight from the horse’s mouth.

***

Since being taken into custody in late February, Guider had managed – at least until his debut in the Daily Telegraph – to keep a low profile in a hostile environment. This had largely depended upon none of the other inmates he mixed with every day discovering the real reason he’d been locked up with them. Whenever one of them asked what he was in for, he’d simply lied and said he’d been done for murder. In the company he was keeping, it was a fairly safe cover.

Most of the hardened clientele Guider was being forced to reside with frightened the hell out of him. Yet there were a few exceptions. One bloke he’d come to know and strike up a kind of friendship with was 35-year-old Bradley Roberts†, who was doing a stretch for his part in an attempted murder in 1994. He’d explained to Guider that while he’d been approached to do the ‘hit’ himself, he’d instead pressured someone else to stand in for him. The fellow who’d been shot survived but it was enough to earn Roberts a four-year sentence for being an accessory before the fact.

All things considered, he was a reasonably affable sort of guy. For the sake of convenience, they referred to each other as Mick and Brad. The two met soon after Guider’s arrival at Junee and had managed to get along quite well. They would often sit in each other’s cells and chat, Guider mostly about his interest in Aboriginal artefacts and bushwalking. Eventually, he would compose several poems for Roberts’s children and even write a song for his wife.

After Mathes and Donohue’s two-day visit in early July, Roberts was curious as to what the two coppers had wanted. Guider told him they’d been to question him concerning another unsolved murder that they were investigating. He said he wasn’t prepared to reveal the identity of the victim but mentioned that after the killing the body had been dumped on a bush track somewhere. He said he been previously interviewed about the case, too, when he was being held in Goulburn. When Roberts asked whether he thought the cops would get him for it, Guider played along, puffed out his chest and said he reckoned they wouldn’t.

For now, Guider’s new mate had no reason to doubt the story – but he soon would.

It panned out that both prisoners were due to appear in court in Sydney towards the end of 1996 and were transferred together to Long Bay to have access to their solicitors. Guider, of course, needed to prepare for his sexual assault trial in the city but made out he’d been charged in relation to the fictitious murder. Roberts, meanwhile, was scheduled to give evidence about a week later out at Penrith in an ongoing matter connected to his conviction for the 1994 shooting.

Despite the extra stress of preparing to climb back into the dock, the monotony of life at the maximum security Malabar lock-up rolled on for the two men without incident. That is, until the day after Guider’s dramatic appearance before Judge Flannery on 13 September.

As Roberts approached Guider in the courtyard attached to a section of Long Bay known as Nine Wing that morning, he was hailed aggressively from across the enclosure by another prisoner, Peter Blanch.

‘Don’t talk to him, he’s a putrid rocky,’ Blanch yelled, indi­cating towards Guider. ‘Haven’t you seen the paper this morning?’7

The cat was out of the bag and along with it the jailhouse façade Guider had so carefully cultivated came crashing to earth.

Roberts hadn’t seen the Tele, but in a kind of desperate bid to salvage the one friendship he’d been able to forge Guider decided to save him the trouble by immediately confessing his deception. He wasn’t really a murderer, he said. He was facing sentence on 60 child sex charges, which had involved him luring kids with lollies and Coca-Cola and drugging them using a medication known as Normison. The only reason he’d lied about everything, he pleaded, was because he feared Roberts would have abandoned him had he known the truth.

Guider then dropped another bolt: the interview he’d had with the police in Junee hadn’t been about just any random homicide, it had been about the abducted Sydney schoolgirl, Samantha Knight.

‘And why would they want to ask you about that?’ Roberts demanded.

‘[Because] I must have given her too much,’ Guider mumbled.

‘Too much what?’

‘Normison…I must have put too much Normison in her Coke and she didn’t wake up.’

When Roberts asked how he’d even come to know Samantha, Guider said, ‘I knew her mother, she used to work in a bookshop. I was a friend of the family, I minded her a few times.’

As if proof was required, Guider also blurted out that he had photos.

‘I took them after she went missing,’ he said. ‘They’re safe. I’ve got them with my Aboriginal stones.’

When Roberts became curious as to where the images were hidden, however, Guider claimed they were in a factory somewhere in Sydney but he couldn’t really describe the precise location.

Similarly, when Roberts asked about where Samantha’s body had been taken, Guider made a cryptic reference to Cooper Park, which was not far from Bondi. He also suggested, though, that a body could be hidden virtually anywhere in a place like Lightning Ridge, in the state’s northwest, because there were so many mine shafts there.8

As far as Roberts was concerned, he and Guider were finished as bosom buddies. When it came to life outside the law, shit happened, even if it meant people got hurt or worse. But he drew the line at kids.

After mulling things over for a day or two, he decided to act. Snitching on another inmate inside a maximum security prison was risky at the best of times but there was a ready-made solution to the problem.

The following Thursday, 19 September, Roberts had a quiet word with the corrective services officer in charge of the cells at Penrith court where he was waiting to be called to give evidence. One of the plain-clothes coppers he’d previously dealt with then came to see him on the premise they needed to discuss the case upstairs.

The officer took down his account of the series of disturbing disclosures Guider had made and promised to pass it on.

If the story checked out, Roberts reasoned, he’d probably receive a response soon enough. But the next he learned of the saga wouldn’t be from Bondi detectives. Like everyone else, he would have to read about it two weeks later in the papers.

***

The following evening, 20 September, Guider returned from his final appearance before Flannery, his sentence hearing, and settled into his first official night as a long-termer. He wouldn’t be eligible for release now until 27 February 2006.

When he’d first been interviewed by police at Chatswood seven months earlier, he’d joked that if he got ten years he would be old enough when paroled to retire and collect the pension.

‘I won’t have to work again,’ he’d chuckled.9

All he had to do now was figure out how to survive.

Three nights later, Guider was savagely bashed in his cell. From where he was housed, Roberts couldn’t actually witness the attack but knew who it was because he recognised the screams. The next morning Guider was admitted to the prison hospital with compound fractures to his right hand and leg and multiple abrasions, bruises and cuts including one gash requiring 16 stitches that had left his ear hanging by a thread.

He was lucky to be alive.