Chapter 30

Beyond Reasonable Doubt

The day before Anzac Day, 24 April, Janet Wahlquist heard from the last of the Bondi Road witnesses, Rosemary Kinna and Virginia Carroll. Neil Tuckerman and Darren Sly were then briefly recalled to tidy up some minor housekeeping matters. This left only one player unaccounted for, Paul Conlon informed the court: Tony Thexton. Every effort had been made to locate him, he said, but he simply couldn’t be found. The prosecution rested its case.

For the first time in the proceedings, Wahlquist was now obliged to inquire as to whether Michael Guider had anything to say for himself. Did he wish to answer to the charges against him, she asked.

‘No,’ he said.

Did he want to call any evidence on his behalf?

‘No, I’m not guilty and I reserve my defence, Your Worship.’

Having considered everything, Wahlquist said, she was of the opinion the evidence was capable of satisfying a jury beyond reasonable doubt.

Barring mishap during the closing addresses, it very much looked like things were about to go the prosecution’s way. It would be up to John Stratton to haul back the tide, so to speak, but again, he would have to wait his turn.

***

Conlon began his final tilt at the lectern after the break. The aim was to sum things up without lapsing into tedium and, along the way, address any perceived weaknesses. His focus was quickly evident: The conversations involving Guider’s cell mates were central to the Crown’s argument but needed to be placed in context in order to be understood.

When he’d first divulged that he’d been responsible for Samantha’s death, Guider had been at a ‘very low ebb in his life’, Conlon said.

It had happened not long after his devastating courtroom confession about the years he’d spent drugging, photographing and sexually molesting young children. But as horrific as these crimes were, they weren’t the only demons Guider had wanted to exorcise, Conlon emphasised.

The ‘biggest demon of all’ had been Samantha Knight.

Regret, remorse, guilt, each of them rolled into one perhaps; ultimately it had been the horror of Guider’s deeds weighing on his conscience that had prompted him to ‘fess up’. Three men had been separately privy to his penitence and had simply told what they’d heard.1

Whatever others might say, it was a compelling conclusion.

After a day’s adjournment for Anzac Day, Stratton came out swinging on Friday morning. The jailhouse testimony was unreliable at best and the men who’d offered it needed to be regarded with caution, he warned. Snitches often had ‘hidden motives to concoct confessions which may not be apparent’. In this case, there were three of them and each seemed to have a curiously different take on what Guider was supposed to have said.

One of the trio had allegedly been told about the Normison, another that Samantha had died in a cave and the third that she was buried somewhere in a park but later dug up and put in the garbage. These and other statements attributed to his client could all have been plucked from newspaper stories written over a long period of time, Stratton said.

It was also to note that in the ten years before Guider had been jailed, he’d not confessed anything to anyone. While in prison, however, where admitting to child molesting was ‘tantamount to signing a death warrant’, he’d allegedly spilled his guts. It didn’t add up.

Stratton said the police had bugged Guider’s cell and put an undercover agent in with him in a bid to get an admission on tape but to no avail. They’d planted stories in the media to try to get him talking as well.

‘Nowhere on these tapes does the defendant confess to being the killer of Samantha Knight,’ he said.2

Stratton argued that it was also crucial that not a single witness had positively identified Guider as being the person last seen with Samantha on Bondi Road. By this he meant that the Kinna, Carroll and Woodbridge sightings, however detailed, were ultimately inconclusive.

Finally, Stratton asserted, it was ‘a seductive line of reasoning but not a logical one’ to say that if Guider knew Samantha and was a sexual predator, he must have abducted her.

‘At the end of the day, in my submission, the possibility cannot be excluded of another sexual predator having taken advantage of the fortuitous situation of a beautiful young girl locked out of her flat in the early evening,’ he said.3

The day finished with Wahlquist declaring she would take the weekend to consider her position.

***

The proceedings reopened on Monday morning, 29 April, to a full house. Before delivering her verdict, however, Wahlquist elected to go to the breakdown. She felt it important that she outline the individual elements of the case in terms of their admissibility. In other words, how they might be received by a Supreme Court trial judge.

What she called the ‘tendency’ evidence – Guider’s lengthy history of molestation and his alleged abuse of Samantha and her friends – would most probably be accepted, she said.

The ‘propensity’ evidence, which had come largely from the jailhouse informants, was also something a jury would be permitted to make up its mind on. Bradley Roberts, known by the pseudonym Witness N, had spoken to the authorities before any media stories had been published about Guider’s link to Samantha, Wahlquist said. Witness O, Vince Dekker, hadn’t but neither had he received any advantage for having come forward and he had since completed his sentence and left Australia. Witness I, Nicholas Evans, had been successful in securing a letter of comfort from the police addressed to the NSW Parole Board advising of his assistance, she noted. Yet it was also reasonable to expect that his testimony would at least be heard.

Unlikely to pass muster at trial were the identifications pro­vided by Rosemary Kinna, Deborah Healy and Virginia Carroll based on their examinations of the Harrisville line-up photos. These were too prejudicial to be of proper value especially since they’d been made 12-and-a-half years after the event, Wahlquist explained. However, this still left their all-important verbal descriptions of the man they saw with Samantha on the footpath and crossing Bondi Road on the evening she disappeared.

On the contentious dichotomy of evidence regarding the extent of Samantha’s presence at Raglan Street, Wahlquist was as clear as she could be. She said she ‘preferred’ what had been put forward by Michael Watt, Cliff Allan, Anissa Morel and Andrew Chadwick to the version of events given by Lisa Harrison. She didn’t brand the woman a liar or even suggest she was unreliable. Yet the remark paid short shrift to Lisa’s insistence that Sam had somehow eluded Guider’s depravity while repeatedly visiting her home.

Hanging on every word in the bleachers, Neil Tuckerman and Darren Sly breathed a collective sigh of relief. Without further ado, Wahlquist then formally committed Michael Guider to stand trial for murder. As gavel sounded on block, the shambolic 52-year-old figure stood motionless before picking up his pen and noting down his arraignment date – 27 June 2002.

Looking on intently from the gallery, Tess Knight and Peter O’Meagher received the decision with restraint. Once outside, they said it had brought them if not closure then at least a little closer to the truth.

‘It is a step in the journey,’ Tess explained. ‘We have got a few more steps to make yet. I take every day as it comes.’

‘It’s not joy, it’s part of a nightmare that’s going on,’ Peter added. ‘There is relief that it’s going somewhere because it has been a long time [but] our daughter’s dead. She’s dead somewhere …

‘You drive through a national park and you can’t help but wonder whether you’ve just driven past her. That’s the life we have to live.’4

***

On the surface, everything appeared to be in pretty fair shape. The opening courtroom skirmish had been won without incident and the main game beckoned. Box ticked. Privately, however, Paul Conlon knew he had a problem and had done since taking on the job.

When first measuring up the pros and cons of running the case at trial, he’d started with the realisation that the tools at his disposal were limited. There were no gruesome autopsy images or bloodied weapons with which to shock the jury this time. In fact, there was no known crime scene. Instead, he would place his faith in his ability to deliver a robust narrative crafted from the considerable witness testimony so painstakingly collected by the Harrisville detectives.

True, some of the details were second- and even third-hand but Conlon was confident that when push came to shove the story he had to sell would be convincing; at least up to a point. He’d use it to portray Michael Guider as the consummate sexual predator obsessed with his young victim before and after her death, and almost certainly as the last known person to have seen her alive.

As strategies went, it had certainly been enough to get them through the doors of the Supreme Court.

But now that they were there, Conlon knew the bar was about to be raised.

The one element of Guider’s profile that he hadn’t been able to speak to during the committal was motive. He was convinced in his own mind that the bloke was a killer but no matter how he looked at it, Conlon knew he couldn’t explain what had driven Guider to do the deed. Certainly, none of the witnesses had provided the answer, and neither did it make sense for him simply to argue that Guider had suddenly graduated to murder because it was a natural thing for a paedophile to do. The facts were that he’d molested literally dozens of other kids over a very considerable period of time and that they had all survived, some of them, in fact, to tell the tale.

Conlon knew it wasn’t uncommon to secure a conviction without accounting for a motive. In cases where there was strong physical evidence, for example, it was often a secondary consideration. But here, he recognised, its absence would prove a telling blow, and sooner rather than later.

In fact, the issue was even more complicated again than it seemed at first glance. Not only did the testimony put forward by the case’s three most important witnesses – the inmate informants – fail to identify a motive, it actively pointed to the notion that no known motive actually existed. If the jail cell evidence was to be believed, as Conlon had so far hoped it would, then Guider had certainly admitted to each of the men that he’d taken Samantha’s life. Yet he had also clearly indicated to them that what had happened had not been something he’d intended. It was beyond dispute that he’d told all three of them that it was an accident.

In effect, what the prosecution was relying upon to prove murder was really evidence of something quite different: homicide by manslaughter.

It occurred to Conlon that convicting Guider of this lesser charge instead of going for the top prize would still put him away for a solid stretch; in theory, at least, up to 25 years.

Manslaughter would also be a much safer bet when it came time to call upon a jury to decide his guilt because it would eliminate for them any need to consider motivation as an element of the crime. In other words, it would simplify the equation for them. Yet Conlon figured there was really only one way to secure Guider’s conviction without having to gamble on it, and that was to offer him a deal and hope he would have sense enough to come in out of the rain.

The idea of attempting to strike a plea bargain had weighed on Conlon’s mind for some time. It was why he’d organised to meet with Tim Guider in Long Bay jail after discovering the defence were planning to call him as a witness, back in February. The two men talked and Conlon had put forward a proposal. Far from being hostile, the convicted armed robber – now more than halfway through his sentence – agreed to help.

However, the younger Guider stipulated that the assistance would be strictly on his own terms. There would be no listening devices or role playing, and there was no prospect of him giving evidence against his brother either at the committal or beyond, he warned.

The only thing he had been prepared to offer, Tim later told the Sydney Morning Herald, was to sit down with Michael and thrash things out.

‘I was in a unique position,’ he said. ‘If he was guilty of the crime and he was going to open up to anybody, I knew he would open up to me.’

When Conlon had asked him what he thought he might achieve, he’d simply replied, ‘Let me talk to him. I can almost guarantee if he’s guilty, he will come to you and tell you that.’5

With Michael on remand at Silverwater, the first visit was arranged almost immediately. Conlon’s approval granted the two men were afforded some privacy on the verandah of the jail’s visitation area, where they were allowed to sit together for some five hours.

‘He didn’t know I was coming but he was glad to see me,’ Tim said. ‘I made it clear to him that I had refused to be of any assistance in terms of providing evidence.

‘I also let him know my position on [Samantha’s homicide, that] it was heinous, putrid. He was a bit pissed off that I thought he was guilty.’6

During a second, even longer, visit soon after, Tim decided to play his ace. For the first time in their lives, the brothers would talk about the abuse they’d endured at the Melrose Boys’ Home.

‘Look, Michael, I’ve always wanted to tell you this and I don’t know if I ever have,’ Tim began. ‘I just wanted to know, did you ever feel guilty for the fact that you hadn’t blown the whistle, so to speak, at the boys home, and that I was molested [along with] the rest of the kids, thanks to you?’7

According to Tim, it was an emotional encounter with Michael bursting into tears.

‘His voice went into this high pitch like a kid’s voice and I was just looking at this 52-year-old man weeping about his own childhood trauma,’ he would tell the Herald. ‘I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for him because there he was weeping about his own trauma when I didn’t see the same response for his victims. He had become my worst nightmare, and that’s how I put it to him.’8

As Tim saw it, the premise for challenging his brother was that Michael had been among the first of the boys at Melrose to be drugged and abused by the approved visitor who’d infiltrated the home not long after they’d arrived. His understanding of the long-suppressed scenario was that the fellow had told Michael he’d kill him if ever he reported him.

Tim had managed to push the right buttons.

Still blubbering, Guider looked at him and said, ‘I want you to do something for me.’

‘What?’ Tim asked.

‘I want you to find out from the detectives what I have to do to plead guilty.’9

Over the coming weeks, the brothers continued the discussion until Guider finally agreed to come clean. But, of course, he had a proviso: he would only do so in the event that as a result of the committal verdict he was ordered to stand trial. To put things another way, he was prepared to go quietly if he didn’t have any other option. It appeared that one last time he’d wanted to hedge his bets.

However, when Wahlquist decided to send the proceedings to the next stage, Neil Tuckerman and Darren Sly were summoned and a deal was struck. Two months shy of 16 years after committing one of the nation’s most horrendous crimes, Michael Guider finally conceded if not responsibility, then at least that Samantha Knight’s death had been his doing.

***

On Friday morning, 7 June 2002, NSW Supreme Court Justice Graham Barr was running a couple of minutes late. After declaring his courtroom open for business at 9.33 a.m., he asked Michael Guider to stand.

‘You are charged that on or about the 19th of August 1986 you murdered Samantha Terese Knight. How do you plead?’ he asked.

‘Ah, not guilty of murder, guilty of manslaughter, Your Honour,’ Guider replied.

Conlon formally accepted the plea, a date was set aside for sentence and Guider was returned to a subterranean holding cell to await his ride back to Silverwater. So long coming, everything was over and done with in the blink of an eye.

‘Numb but good,’ Tess responded several minutes later, when asked how she’d felt upon hearing the words.

‘I don’t have anything to say about Michael Guider,’ she added. ‘I think that I’d like to know a little bit more about what happened.’

The decision to accept the manslaughter plea was ‘acceptable and part of an answer’, Tess said. ‘It’s confirmation of what we knew and that’s good.’

Guider no longer had a motivation for keeping their daughter’s fate a secret, Peter informed the circle of journos gathered in close.

‘He is the only person who knows where Samantha is [and] until now he’s had his reasons for not saying anything. But really he has no other reasons now; we have got to bury her.’

He said he felt nothing towards Guider: ‘I don’t understand him, I don’t understand paedophiles.’10

Guider, however, understood only too well how the law worked. Until he’d formally copped his sentence and the case was officially closed, there was next to no chance of him revealing anything about Sam’s whereabouts.

The extra years he was about to serve for a manslaughter conviction were one thing but he figured that giving up even the suggestion of anything that might expose him to the risk of being recharged with murder would mean life without hope of parole. He wasn’t going there.