Chapter 18

Serendipity

In his mid-40s, Tim Guider had finally managed to settle down. He’d met the love of his life, Peta, and they had a five-year-old boy together, named TJ. He’d also won critical acclaim for his paintings. Several had been commissioned by the likes of telco giant Optus, and a couple had even featured in the prestigious Sulman Prize exhibitions.

Life was good but old habits were hard to break.

In late 1997, Guider had trouble on his mind. On 11 November, he bumped into a mate he hadn’t seen since his rough and ready days in Western Australia during the 1970s, Solomon Redibaum. Tim told Redibaum he was planning a ‘stick up’ and asked if he wanted to lend a hand.

Redibaum agreed. It was a bank job. Tim reckoned they could earn somewhere between $200 000 and $300 000. He already had another guy who was interested, and a gun.1

The trio spent the next few days collecting the equipment they needed and staking out their target, a small St George branch at Warriewood, on Sydney’s northern beaches. With everything at the ready the following Monday morning, however, the group was forced to abort the heist when two uniformed policewomen blundered onto the scene.

Tim switched to ‘plan B’, a raid on the Westpac bank on Castlereagh Street in the CBD. They went for a ‘dry run’ later that day but he again changed his mind, deciding they would return to Warriewood and go through with the St George job after all.

The next morning, Redibaum pulled into the Franklins car park opposite the bank just before 9.30 a.m. Tim and a second gunman, Filipe Tongilava Uhila, got out and strolled over to a couple of seats on the footpath and pretended to read newspapers. As the doors slid open and the two men readied themselves to strike, they were hammered from all sides by armed police.

Tim’s mistake had been to trust his getaway driver. Redibaum had, for some time, been registered by the police as a criminal informant. He’d contacted them almost immediately following their chance meeting the previous week and Tim had been clueless to it. He’d walked into an ambush.

The carefully co-ordinated sting meant the would-be bandits were prevented from actually staging the hold-up but they had nonetheless been caught red-handed and poised to launch. Between them, they were packing pretty well all the classic tools of the trade: a semi-automatic pistol, a knife, an imitation handgun, balaclavas, rubber gloves, a set of two-way radios and a police scanner.

It would soon become apparent that Redibaum had also been wearing a wire during a series of somewhat conspiratorial conversations they’d had in the days before they were caught.

With Tim’s extensive record, there was no prospect of him winning bail. Since 1976, he’d been convicted on 16 counts of robbery, eight of them while armed. So, with the arrests done and dusted, Dee Why detectives simply focused on the task of preparing a brief of evidence for the courts. While important, it was the kind of work that generally involved less glamorous chores like checking statements, filing reports, cataloguing photos, transcribing tapes and the like.

In due course, however, the beachside investigators would garner a snippet of intelligence that would help send Strike Force Harrisville into overdrive.

***

While still hoping Denise might get Guider to say something during one of the Lithgow visits, by mid-1998 Tuckerman and Leach were seriously troubled by the fact that they didn’t have a single item they could point to that linked their suspect to their victim. Yet the breakthrough they were praying for was about to land.

On 28 May, Tim Guider was sentenced to a minimum seven-and-a-half years’ jail on conspiracy and firearm charges. One of the conditions of his trial had been that the jury was denied any knowledge of his extensive criminal past. To have allowed it would have been unreasonably prejudicial. Nevertheless, in the course of their inquiries, Dee Why officers had given Tim’s background a thorough going over.

In doing so, they noted the suggestion that he’d leased a self-storage unit. It appeared the veteran robber was something of a hoarder; not, as it turned out, necessarily of contraband, mostly just art supplies and equipment, and assorted other bits and pieces he didn’t want cluttering his Collaroy home.

Also brought to their attention was that some of the stashed items probably belonged to Tim’s older brother who, they were informed, was serving time for child sexual assault.

Harrisville, when alerted, embraced the information as if it had been heralded via a beating tom-tom; potentially, they knew it held the key to almost everything they were hoping to achieve. Yet they could only agonise over the fact that there were upwards of 15 000 commercial storage units located across Australia. Their problem – and it was a perplexing one – was that they didn’t know with any real certainty where to start looking. The best anyone could come up with was that the goods were possibly somewhere near Tim’s old stomping grounds around Pendle Hill.

Armed with nothing more than the Yellow Pages, Tuckerman hit the phones. The gods smiled. He struck the jackpot with the second call he made, to an outfit called Rent-A-Space at Girraween. They were literally a stone’s throw from Pendle Hill Park.

The proprietor explained that an account on his books under the name Guider for Unit 102 was so overdue he’d closed it and was going to dump the contents on the street for the following week’s council collection. Tim’s stint on remand over the past eight months explained why he hadn’t been paying the bill.

As soon as Tuckerman rang off, he began organising a search warrant. It was obtained and executed the following morning, Tuesday, 16 June, with a young plain clothes officer, David Zdrilic, recording the exercise using a VCR.

The value of what they found inside the unit might not have been entirely apparent to the untrained eye but Tuckerman and Leach knew the cache would take them places.

Among the items seized were three scrapbooks full of news­paper clippings. They were tagged ‘24’, ‘24A’ and ‘24B’. Two of them were exclusively about Samantha, while 24A was, for the majority, also about her but included material on some other children. Book number 24 was titled Vanishing Children Samantha Knight, August 1996, book 24A was Vanishing Children, Samantha Knight, Beaumonts and Others and book 24B was simply Vanishing Children.

The labels were written in Michael Guider’s hand, while the scrapbooks themselves were contained inside a suitcase with the initials ‘MG’ on either side of the handle. It was the same one seized by Jadette during the Castle Cove granny flat raid almost two-and-a-half years earlier and returned to Guider after his initial interview while he was still on bail.2

As a matter of priority, when Harrisville first turned its focus on Guider, the detectives had revisited the Junee inmate, Bradley Roberts. Now on the home stretch of his five-year sentence at Kirkconnell, a minimum security centre between Lithgow and Bathurst, they’d taken a fresh statement from him on 14 May. True to what he’d explained, they now discovered among the Girraween haul an assortment of Aboriginal artefacts including a collection of stone tools and a human skull and separate jawbone.

The clincher, however, was that there were also more incrimi­nating photographic slides that would prove to have been taken with Guider’s equipment.3 Just maybe, somewhere among them would be some of the images of Samantha he’d claimed to have shot after he’d abducted her.

It would be Darren Sly’s job to find them.

Sly’s main task since joining Harrisville had been to re-catalogue the Castle Cove slides. He’d spent a large amount of time sorting them into two rather fat albums. This lot, however, would involve far more work. First, he would have to group the images according to the rolls of film they belonged to. Then he’d need to further classify them by locations, subjects and – crucially as it would turn out – by what the children in them were wearing. Eventually, Sly would also painstakingly organise the pictures into dozens of small batches linked by their common elements.

Next came the process of comparing the slides with the 1996 collection. To distinguish one lot from the other, the Girraween batches were individually marked with yellow dots.4

Among them, the detectives’ attention was drawn to one depicting Samantha in a green sloppy joe, blue pants and ugg boots. She was sitting with a dark-haired girl in a white night dress inside a small timber boat. It was the same top Guider had been referring to when interviewed by Wayne Mathes and David Donohue in Junee, six months after his arrest. He’d described the garment as ‘the same sort of thing they had in all the photos when she disappeared’ and said the scene was from the second occasion he’d met Samantha, at the gathering at Lisa Harrison’s house in Raglan Street, Manly. The girls had been lying down in the boat ‘playing dead’, yet Guider had insisted that there’d been nothing sinister about it. He’d also called the other girls Samantha’s ‘friends’, although it wasn’t clear whether he’d used the term generically or had, in fact, known them to have been mates.5

During the long hours of cross-referencing work ahead, the image would become one often used by Tuckerman and Sly as a key for contextualising the other Girraween slides. They’d also find a second image with Samantha and the same girl dressed in white in a kind of dancing pose.

A third slide of the pair was then discovered among those collected by Jadette. This one was apparently over-exposed and needed to be viewed with the help of fluorescent lighting. However, it too became important because it featured a distinctive pink edging pattern on the other child’s white nightie.

There was also a slide that stood out because it showed the same unnamed girl standing, holding a large fork, possibly a fireplace ornament.

As Guider had maintained, these were all happy snaps, harmless and non-sexual. But there were plenty mixed in with them that weren’t.

Once again, many of the slides were the kind Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cuneen had described in September 1996 as stomach-turning. At the very least, the Harrisville detectives knew these represented further evidence of sexual assault for which Guider could be made to serve extra time in jail. Yet the problem would again be putting names to the victims. They were almost exclusively close-ups of the girls’ genital areas and didn’t show their faces. It wasn’t even clear if the person responsible had taken all the images in this way on purpose so no-one could be identified or if he had later gone through and simply discarded any carelessly photographed slides that disclosed who the girls were.

It was generally agreed that the indecent pictures featured at least two girls. Of course, the challenge was to be able to prove that they were linked to the non-explicit shots that featured Samantha and clearly identified her.

When Tuckerman and Sly showed Tess the happy snaps, they were deflated to find she’d never seen them before. She was able to confirm Sam as one of the girls in the rowboat but didn’t know who the other was. Of the pornographic material, she couldn’t say whether any of the images were of Sam at all.6

It wouldn’t be ideal but there were still other ways to advance this part of the investigation. The first step involved calling in a forensic document examiner to find out when the relevant slides had been taken and whether any or all belonged to the same or related rolls of film. If so, it would effectively narrow the odds of Sam being one of the close-up subjects. For this, Tuckerman and Sly contacted former federal police director, Dr Paul Westwood OAM, who happened to be among the world’s best in his field and conveniently based on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

While that was happening, Samantha’s school records needed to be located. Between Bondi and Manly there were four years’ worth. They provided an exhaustive but ready-made list of who her friends were and came complete with class photos.

Their search ultimately led Tuckerman and Sly interstate to a lady named Julie Morel†, or more specifically, her 21-year-old daughter, Anissa†. She’d attended Manly Public School with both Samantha and Lisa Harrison’s daughter Amy while living just a short walk from Raglan Street. After asking Queensland Police to make initial contact on their behalf in late 1998, the two detectives flew to Brisbane to interview the women three weeks before Christmas.

By now, Westwood had come back with the news they’d been waiting for: the overwhelming likelihood was that the key slides belonged to the same roll of Kodak film and that it had been issued by the US company some time between 1984 and 1987. He said he also believed the relevant Girraween images shared identical and distinctive imperfections or blemishes, indicating that they had also been created contemporaneously. Furthermore, Westwood found the clothing worn by the girls was indeed common throughout the sample. In short, all the slides, good and bad, had been taken on the same occasion using the same camera.7

***

While the positive scientific results were a case of ‘so far, so good’, the visit to Anissa Morel would take things to the next level. Being shown Guider’s abhorrent images of her for the first time was bewildering and heartbreaking for the woman, but she wanted to see him punished for it.

Anissa’s best recollection was that the slides had been taken at Raglan Street in 1985. She said Guider had been there on practically every occasion she’d visited to play with Amy. She mostly remembered his sun-browned features and the khaki King Gees he wore while tending to Lisa Harrison’s garden. He’d always had a supply of lollies and Coca-Cola ready and his camera with him. There’d been a series of weekend sleepovers, some during which Lisa had gone out with her friends, leaving Guider to play babysitter.8

Like Tuckerman and Sly, Anissa knew only too well that the other girl in many of the horrible slides was Amy. But the real news she had for them was that when these images had been taken, Samantha had been there too.

As an illustration of the closeness of the relationship that had been shared between the three girls, Julie Morel also provided the detectives with photographs showing them on the water near Berry Island at Wollstonecraft on Sydney’s Lower North Shore. They’d been taken on 12 January 1986, while they’d been staying on board a boat belonging to Amy’s estranged father, Alex Christos†. They’d spent five days together and everyone had attended a family get together when they’d returned. It was the last time the girls saw one another.

***

While Amy Harrison would eventually acknowledge that she too had been one of Guider’s victims, for the time being she either wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about it. When approached by Tuckerman and Sly she said she simply didn’t recollect her friends ever staying overnight at her home.

As far as Lisa Harrison was concerned, Guider’s appearances in their lives had been spasmodic at best. Down the track, she too would be forced to concede that the slide images were obvious proof that he’d violated her daughter in the most disgusting way. But for now, she was adamant that she had never permitted him to babysit Samantha in her absence and that Sam had never been an overnight guest in their house; period.9

By early 1999, Harrisville was left with two accounts of what had happened at Raglan Street and these were in sharp conflict with one another. According to the law, what they were now obliged to do as police investigators was find a way to validate what they believed to be the true version of events.

One means open to them was to urge the Harrisons to reconsider their position. Another was to again challenge Guider by taking another run at interviewing him in lock-up, and a third and longer-term option was to find additional witnesses to his interactions with the girls.

Of course this was all dependent upon the detectives being convinced that Anissa hadn’t somehow been mistaken about Samantha’s presence during the assaults. Thankfully, they had good reason to have confidence in what she’d told them.

Two among the hundreds of Raglan Street slides showed a portion of white shoe and either a red sock, stocking or tight. Darren was able to group those together with a series of others that Anissa had discarded from a batch depicting her own pubic region, that were not of her. Because the two girls had often bathed together, she had also been able to point out the slides that featured Amy by identifying a distinctive mole near her vaginal area. On this basis, the white shoe slides were not of Amy then, either.

According to Dr Westwood, the two analogous slides had almost certainly been taken at the same time as all the others, and there was no suggestion that anyone else other than Samantha had been present. There was only one conclusion that could be drawn.