Chapter 27

All Australian Girl

With Sydney reeling over the disappearance of nine-year-old Samantha in late August 1986, Guider was nowhere to be seen. When he finally showed up in Stanmore towards the end of the third week of the month, Liz couldn’t actually recall having noticed him for some days.

While Sam had been missing since Tuesday night the 19th, the first reports signalling the gravity of the situation had only emerged the following afternoon. The media floodgates then opened on Thursday morning, the 21st. Yet when she sat down to tell Task Force Jadette about everything ten years later, Liz wasn’t really sure which day it was that Guider had reappeared. She thought the Thursday but couldn’t be certain.1

It was evening when he’d walked through the door, she knew that much. And he’d been babbling about ‘the little girl who disappeared at Bondi’ and how he’d been out helping look for her. Somehow, though, he was already convinced that they would never find her. What hadn’t escaped her memory was the way Guider had appeared. He looked terrible: ragged and unkempt, like he’d been sleeping out in the bush or something. He’d explained that this was because he’d spent the last however many hours assisting the search party.

Yet there was something more than just the fact that he stunk because he hadn’t showered, his clothes were rumpled and his hair was mussed and greasy. He’d been wild-eyed with anxiety. The words Liz had used were ‘dishevelled and agitated’.2

Guider had talked a lot but said little. He kept repeating himself about the impossibility of ever locating ‘her’, meaning Samantha. Yet he’d ignored them when they’d asked him why he was so sure.

Finally, Liz had gotten impatient with him.

‘What do you know about it?’ she snapped, hoping more to shut him up than elicit an answer.

‘I just know they’ll never find her,’ Guider countered. ‘She’s … she could have been taken away by aliens, she could have been taken away by people and put in the white slave trade. They’ll never find her, they’ll never find her.’

‘So why are you so concerned about her, Michael?’

‘Well, why wouldn’t I be? She’s such a pretty little thing. She reminds me – doesn’t she remind you of Cath?’

‘What, did you know her?’ Liz prodded.

‘No,’ he pleaded. ‘She was just such a pretty little girl.’

For a long time after, Guider would look to reactivate the conversation where- and whenever the opportunity presented itself. Sam’s abduction remained a big news story for some days and he was at the Clarke house a number of times as it featured on radio and TV bulletins.

‘Well, they’ll never find her,’ he would chant. ‘They’ll never find her.’3

The mantra quickly wore thin but Guider wasn’t to be denied. He took to carrying a manila folder filled with newspaper clippings about the mystery and the futility of the police efforts to solve it.

‘Eventually, when I asked him why he was still so interested, he said [it was] because he knew her mother,’ Liz would later inform Jadette. Fifteen-year-old Cathy had been there and heard him say this as well.

‘He would come over and it would be on the news,’ Cathy confirmed when it came time to provide her own statement.4 ‘There was a lot of press coverage of it. It was always on the news and it was a topic of conversation and press clippings and stuff, and he was talking about it.

‘He said that he knew Tess, Samantha’s mother, and that’s why he was so interested in it.’

Cathy would also recall Guider had reckoned the police should have enlisted the assistance of a clairvoyant; someone, he’d said, they could have taken to various places around Sydney to see whether they could pick up on the vibe of a murder having been committed or a body buried.

According to Melissa, Michael’s obsession had even extended to looking through other people’s newspapers for articles he’d missed.

‘He collected billposters [sic], anything he would find,’ she explained. ‘He would even go through stacks of newspapers put out for council collections.’5

Guider’s most disquieting behaviour, as it had been in the days before Samantha had vanished, seemed reserved for the times the two of them were alone, Melissa felt. Several days after the abduction and with Bondi police arranging for Sam’s mannequin to be placed on display, he’d driven both Clarke girls over to see what all the fuss was about. As far as Cathy per­ceived things, Guider had simply wanted them to see the dummy and all the posters wrapped around power poles and lining the shop windows in Bondi Road because he was so taken by it himself.

But for Melissa it would only be the first of several more expeditions along what had become a well-worn path for them. A day or two later they returned alone to the corner of Bondi Road and Imperial Avenue where the life-sized doll stood, fixed to a metal base-plate beside the bus stop.

Its hair and clothing were all wrong, Guider had objected. And the location wasn’t right either. She’d last been seen on the other side of the street, he insisted, up from the chemist shop.6

There was also another trip to Castlefield Lane a day or two later again. This time, Guider had parked their vehicle further down, towards Castlefield Street and not so close to the units in Imperial Avenue. Melissa, though, could still see the front of the darker coloured of the two blocks.

Guider pointed to it. ‘That’s where she lived,’ he told her.7 He said he’d known her and babysat her.

Afterwards, they’d driven over to Peter Bulgin’s mum’s apartment back on Old South Head Road. Guider went inside but Melissa waited for him in the car. When he came back out, he began ranting about child slavery rackets. He was of the view that Samantha had ‘gone away’ and, of course, said they would never find her or the person who’d taken her.

He then also spoke to her about Amy. She’d been a ‘good girl’ and had learned to play ‘mummies and daddies’, he said. She’d done to him ‘what Mummy did to Daddy’. He said this had happened while Lisa had been asleep inside the house in Raglan Street.

Repulsed by what she was hearing, Melissa had tried remon­strating with him. ‘You need help!’ she challenged, but with a kind of warped pomposity, Guider had dismissed her outright. He informed her that all the good he’d done in his life would simply cancel out anything bad.8

***

Every sordid and disturbing detail the Clarke women remembered would eventually drive a fresh nail into Guider’s coffin. Yet many of the atrocities he’d personally inflicted upon them they knew so little of.

For Melissa, it was her father, David, who told her about the allegations against Guider involving the two girls at Manly in 1996. He said the police investigating the case had contacted him and informed him that they had found pictures of her in Guider’s home.

When Melissa saw them for herself, she burst out crying because she didn’t understand. Sitting there, numb, as the Jadette detectives handed them to her one at a time, felt unreal. They also showed her some of her clothes and personal effects they’d con­fiscated from him, including a Tweetie bird singlet, a T-shirt with ‘All Australian Girl’ written across the front and some underwear.

Several days later, she began having nightmares.

‘Things started coming back to me when I was asleep and then eventually when I was awake,’ she would later tell the detectives. ‘Since then, I have barely slept. Everything that Michael did to me has come back. I am very depressed all the time and can’t sleep.’9

The earliest memory Melissa was able to retrieve had been of an incident on Cathy’s sixth or seventh birthday at Taronga Zoo. She remembered Guider had given both of them shoulder rides and that in doing so, had touched her genitals on the outside of her underpants. She’d told him she didn’t like it and wanted to get down.

She also said she recalled around the same time seeing Guider grab Gabriella Nardi on her breasts. Whenever these things had happened, he’d always had his camera with him but had not perhaps taken any incriminating images.

There had also been an incident, Melissa said, when Guider had assaulted her in the middle of the night in her bed. She knew it must have happened when she was in sixth class at school because she’d been watching the 1980 Moscow Olympics on TV and taken special notice of the giant bear that had been used as the mascot. At the time, she’d also been wearing a plaster cast after breaking her arm in the playground.

She said she remembered moving during the attack and Guider putting his hand over her mouth. After a moment, he stopped and then left the room.

Everything said and done, Melissa could at last explain why she’d often suffered such troubling anxiety, memory loss and depression as a teenager. It was nothing to do with the epileptic syndrome she’d been diagnosed with as a ten-year-old. She now knew it had been caused by the Normison or other sedatives with which Guider had repeatedly drugged her so he could sexually and indecently assault her as she slept.

For Cathy, it meant she no longer needed to fear that her own bouts of amnesia were linked to the onset of schizophrenia or some other debilitating condition either. She and her mum would endure one further episode before ridding themselves of Guider’s intrusions.

By 1987 the two of them had returned to Neutral Bay so Cathy could begin her higher school certificate back at Mosman High. Meanwhile, Melissa had moved out to go travelling, effectively placing herself beyond Guider’s reach. Instead of getting rid of him, though, Melissa’s absence seemed to trigger a fresh round of visits.

Perhaps by now suspecting what he was up to, Liz found herself not long after the move going to check Cathy’s room in the middle of the night. When she discovered Guider dressed in a pair of boxer shorts and apparently asleep on the end of her bed, all hell broke loose.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ she began wailing.

As he jumped to his feet, she laid into him with punches and kicks.

‘All right, all right,’ he implored. ‘I’m going.’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she’d repeated. But Guider had offered no answer and quietly left the house.

Arguably the only thing that had startled her more than her own fury had been the fact Cathy hadn’t so much as batted an eyelid during the entire ruckus, Liz thought. The following morning she asked her about it and Cathy couldn’t even remember Guider being there.10

***

With detailed and updated statements from the Clarke women finally locked in, the office of the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions was able to complete its long-running evaluation of the Harrisville brief by early 2001. It indicated that a prosecution could indeed be mounted despite the absence of Sam’s body or proof that she had been murdered. It was concluded that the likelihood of a homicide having been committed was virtually beyond question.

The next step was to appoint and turn the case over to a senior prosecutor. The man who got the job was former Wollongong-based Crown advocate Paul Conlon SC.

Seconded to the personal staff of then NSW attorney general Frank Walker after completing his law degree in the mid 1970s, Conlon had been called to the Bar in 1979. He’d next spent four years in Hong Kong as British Crown Counsel before being summoned home to take up a position as NSW Crown Prosecutor.11

Between 1989 and 1999 in Wollongong, Conlon successfully prosecuted some of the country’s most bizarre and high-profile criminal cases. They included those of family killer Ljube Velevski, convicted of murdering his wife and three young children in 1994; teenager Matthew De Gruchy, found guilty of bashing his mother and two siblings to death in 1996; and the man sentenced to life for the 1998 slaying of former Wollongong mayor Frank Arkell, Mark Valera.

One of the first moves Conlon now instigated upon receiving the case was aimed at finding a way of extending the potential impact of Melissa’s testimony. Because she’d known Guider over such a long period, he liked the idea of having her show Neil Tuckerman and Darren Sly some of the key incriminating locations Guider had taken her to. The tour would include Upper Pitt Street, Castlefield Lane, the corner of Bondi and Wellington Roads, Yamba Court and Raglan Street. Where possible, she would also need to be able to describe the interiors of some of the relevant buildings, things such as room layouts and fixtures.

Following the recent re-drafting of her 1996 statement, the process took an additional three days and was completed at the end of March 2001.

Conlon also felt it was time to inform Guider he was going to be charged with Sam’s murder. A final listening device warrant was subsequently applied for to cover the days in which he would need to be brought to Sydney again and given the offer of attending another interview at the SPC in Surry Hills. However, Guider declined to speak and the exercise amounted to little more than a distraction.

It mattered not, though. It was time for the police to put their money where their mouths were.