Chapter 32

In the Cold Light of Day

On the evidence before him, Justice Wood had identified Amy Harrison’s fifth birthday party in February 1983 as the day Guider and Samantha first met. By all accounts, it was a memorable occasion. Overlooking picturesque Manly Cove from Delwood Beach would have been a sheer delight. With temperatures in the high 20s, the group of 40 or so friends and family present no doubt frolicked to their hearts’ content – the kids splashing about in the shallows, clambering over rocks and scampering across the sand, the adults chatting around the barbie over a grog or two.

Moving among them, Guider probably didn’t commit to any serious conversation. He would have been preoccupied with photographing the children, especially the girls in their swimmers.

His pictures of that day were the earliest located among his vast collection that featured Samantha in any shape or form. Whether, as Wood believed, it was the first time he’d laid eyes on her, though, is debateable. For that, he only had Guider’s say so to go on.

***

Kangaroo Street, Manly, runs perpendicular to Raglan, up a steep incline. Its high side is densely stacked with large, expensive houses and blocks of flats jostling for ocean views. Opposite is a narrow strip of scraggly bushland that quickly falls away to the rows of shops and cafés that face the beach below. Near the street’s apex on this side is a council bus stop. It seems a funny spot for it to be located with the road curved and narrow and virtually no room for passing traffic to squeeze by while passengers climb on board. If not for the unremarkable tinplate sign announcing its presence, no one would know it was there.

Almost meeting the stop from the northern end of the street is a small guard rail. It finishes perhaps a metre or so short of the stop, and on the other side of the signpost is replaced by a rock wall. Between the two barriers and set back a little, a narrow gap opens. Closer inspection reveals a couple of small sandstone steps leading under some shrubs and the start of an obscured walking track.

Ducking under the overhanging foliage, the path quickly re-emerges on a sandstone outcrop that juts away from the rock wall and overlooks Manly Beach. Kangaroo Street, meanwhile, disappears almost totally from view, making it feel like having stepped through to the other side of a secret panel.

It now becomes apparent how the street earned its name. Nestled in the scrub and facing the mighty Pacific is a large, rock-carved statue of an upright kangaroo. The plaque underneath testifies that it was erected by prominent local identity Henry Gilbert Smith in 1856. As it happens, Smith’s most substantial legacy to the Manly area until its demolition in 1939 was Fairlight House, a grand, double-storey mansion several kilometres south on the shores of Delwood Beach.

Perhaps 30 or 40 metres further on, the track dips into a small pocket of Angophora costata, more commonly known as Sydney Red Gum. Under the canopy there are more sandstone steps, the integrity of which have been interrupted by protruding roots and moist deposits leaf litter and bark. Calling birds drown out the distant sound of crashing waves.

Having descended well below the surface of Kangaroo Street, the track now comes to a fork. To the left it winds around and down to a stop at Denison Street but off to the right it crosses a wooden footbridge and begins climbing again. Making things a little easier, earth now gives way to concrete.

At the end of the path, under a small cluster of shrubs, is the rear gate to Kangaroo Street Pre-school.

Here, seated on an adjacent retaining wall, Guider would have been able to see directly into the school playground as kids were digging sand, riding trikes and scaling monkey bars. Below the nearby streetscape and tucked around a corner, no one would have even realised he was there.

Police suspect Guider was visiting the location a full two years before the Delwood Beach picnic, from about the time Tess and Sam had moved back to the peninsula, having recently met Tony Thexton. With Sam’s kindergarten year at Manly Public School still 12 months away, Tess had enrolled her at the preschool in early 1981.

For some time before this, Thexton had also been a member of Manly’s Christian Life Centre, the church group that had later come to Tess’s aid in the days following Sam’s disappearance by helping distribute posters. Its congregation was known to attend services in Goulburn Street at Surry Hills. However, branch leader David Bradley, who was a mate of Thexton’s, also ran a weekly bible study session at a residence opposite the Kangaroo Street bus stop. It’s thought likely Thexton attended the class regularly. By 1983 he was in the habit of taking Samantha and Amy along to various Christian Life functions, and Sam, at least, had struck up a friendship with Bradley’s young daughter, Bekki.1,2

According to Lisa Harrison, it had also been Thexton who’d introduced her to Guider before she’d moved into her house in Raglan Street and while she was still living in the nearby suburb of Fairlight.3 How long the two men might previously have known each other, though, isn’t clear. It’s certainly possible they were already acquainted in 1981.

Despite the curious linkages, there is no suggestion Tony Thexton had any idea of Michael Guider’s deviousness. Like others before him, it appears he was used as an unwitting stepping stone by a practised manipulator.

***

The likelihood of Michael Guider coveting Sam over such a sustained period before assaulting her at Raglan Street would seem to dramatically alter her status as a victim. Perhaps she wasn’t just another random notch; perhaps she was the centrepiece in an elaborate fantasy. Rather than her presence in the Harrison household presenting Guider with an unexpected opportunity, perhaps it was something he’d actively cultivated or even arranged. In other words, after discovering her, he became fixated, stalked her and then targeted her for contact.

A question worth asking is whether or not he was capable of manipulating his friendship with both Thexton and Lisa Harrison to somehow bring Samantha and Amy together in the first place. Surely it would be naïve to dismiss the possibility that he manoeuvred himself into the role of Amy’s babysitter all the while hoping Sam would at some stage be left in his care. Whether Anissa’s inclusion in the arrangement was happenstance or he somehow conjured her into the fold as well is unclear. Yet it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time he’d managed to deliberately lure multiple victims under the one roof. At Kirribilli, he assembled six in the same street.

However, if Guider’s thing with Samantha was indeed a slow-burning obsession and not just another chance encounter, a second proposition comes to life: that being that once the Raglan Street scenario had run its course he was so enamoured by her that he was unable to let her go and subsequently tracked her across the harbour to Bondi.

Sam and Tess had moved back to the eastern beaches in 1984 but for some time at least, Sam had continued to visit Amy back in Manly on weekends. When Lisa sold up in early 1986, though, the nexus was severed completely.

Of course, Guider maintains that he came across Sam months later in Bondi Road purely by chance. What his supposed business there might have been, though, no one knows. He has always insisted it had nothing to do with her but when measured against the testimony of Melissa Clarke and Deborah Healey, it’s a claim which beggars belief.

The odds of Guider organising guitar lessons for Melissa 150 metres from Sam and Tess’s flat in Imperial Avenue by mere coincidence, for example, seem astronomical. Her evidence of him taking her to the top of Castlefield Lane and sitting and watching the unit from his car sounds way too much as though Guider was again surveilling Samantha as a prelude to drawing her back into his life.

If so, the Healey account of him walking Sam home from school a fortnight before the abduction clearly demonstrates that he’d moved things to the next level. If this happened on a Tuesday, as she believes it did, there’s reason enough to suspect Guider was conducting a ‘dry run’ in preparation for the real thing. By infer­ence, his meeting with Samantha on 19 August 1986 was a care­fully planned event. Guider knew where she lived, where she went to school, which route she took to get home, what time she was likely to arrive and the fact that she had a flat key. It’s also a fair bet that he was aware of when Tess was due back from art school.

With the logistics of approaching her figured out, he would of course then have needed to give Sam a reason for going with him instead of heading back to Imperial Avenue as she was supposed to. The obvious way to win her over was to ‘arrange’ for her key to go missing.

None of these considerations, however, presented Guider with any genuine difficulty. As Tess had noted during the committal hearing before Janet Wahlquist, ‘a child is a child and an adult can find ways of tricking a child’.4

The only real problem he had was how to get Sam out of Bondi without anyone seeing them. If he could keep her occupied for long enough, the perfect solution would be to wait for nightfall. This, though, created another hurdle: how to avoid bumping into Tess as she alighted from the Oxford Street bus on the corner of Imperial? It was doable but, as Guider would discover, a lot more difficult than he’d imagined.

It was why Rosemary Kinna had seen such a look of angst on his face in the minutes before he had taken flight with Sam in tow.

According to Guider’s explanation, once he’d successfully arranged for Sam to go with him, he drugged her. If true, it would seem almost certain that he would have offered her tainted Coca-Cola immediately after she got in his car.

However, it is difficult to fathom why the poisoned drink was, as he claims, overloaded with too much sedative. He’d prepared the mixture on dozens of other occasions without getting the dosage wrong, so why now?

Why, too, did he even administer the Normison if, as he would have us believe, he’d intended bringing Sam home some time later the same evening? Whenever he had used the drug before, it had been in the expectation that his victim would sleep off the effects during the night and awake the following morning, unable to remember what had happened. This time, supposedly, his intention was to squeeze the same scenario into a three- or four-hour window at best.

Even if it was possible, the timeframe would have forced Guider into the prospect of delivering a possibly still comatose Samantha to Tess’s doorstep around 10 or 11 p.m.

It’s conceivable he may have contemplated literally abandoning her on the stoop and running off before anyone noticed, but not likely. Tess had been home for some three-quarters of an hour even before he and Sam were seen leaving Bondi Road by Rena Kilbride. He would have realised that she’d already by then have been making inquiries about Sam’s whereabouts and was not far off alerting the police. Within an hour, an all-points bulletin had been issued via the force’s radio network. Under the circumstances, showing his face in Imperial Avenue later that night would have been inviting arrest.

After taking Samantha with him at 6.45 p.m., there was simply no way Guider could have expected to drug, photograph, molest and then drop her home without the game being up. He no doubt would have found himself in custody, his future in peril and his reputation in tatters. It would have marked an abrupt end to his reign of sexual deviance and exposed him to a level of persecution that didn’t bear thinking about.

***

To explain why Samantha died is perhaps the most difficult of all questions to answer. Certainly, it was beyond Paul Conlon’s means to prove Guider intended it.

James Wood noted that there seemed to be no way of telling precisely what Guider had in mind when he’d allegedly administered the Normison. He supposed it possible that he’d only wanted to take photographs or perform indecent acts rather than cause fatal harm. Neither gave rise to the possibility of convicting him of felony murder, and this ultimately meant there was no alternative but to accept his plea to manslaughter by an unlawful and dangerous act and issue a reduced sentence. Wood even found that he was unable to address the notion of Samantha’s abduction. Again, there was no proof – this time of Guider forcing her to go with him against her will.5

However, these were only issues that arose after the manslaughter plea bargain was settled. Beforehand, while still in complete denial about his culpability, Guider’s legal team had actually been keen to argue that ‘death by Normison’ was a highly unusual occurrence. His barrister, Peter Zahra SC, noted that it had been Professor Graham Starmer’s evidence, no less, that the incidence of the drug causing fatal consequences was ‘quite rare’. It was therefore unlikely Normison alone would result in death.6

Starmer told the court the number of deaths reported after using Normison was small even in adults. Usually, he said, another drug was involved in combination. A study in the 1980s in Britain had found that benzodiazepines – of which Normison was one – plus alcohol were responsible for a number of prescription deaths but placed in perspective, the rate was quite low. Asked what quantity of benzodiazepine would be fatal for a nine-year-old, Starmer was unable to say.7

The closer one looks at Guider’s claim of a fatal Normison overdose, the less plausible it actually seems. Evidence of the drug’s potency would appear, at best, sketchy; despite having used it to subdue countless victims over a number of years, he’d never before killed any of them, accidentally or otherwise. And there is also the fact that after Samantha’s death, he continued to use it to enable his molestation of at least four other children – hardly likely unless he wanted to risk another young life and the greatly increased likelihood of being caught.

A possibility alluded to during the committal hearing was that instead of Normison, Sam had fatally ingested ether or perhaps even a concoction of the two.

The suggestion had come from a conversation recalled by Peter Bulgin. He said Guider had asked him about the contents of a first aid cabinet at the National Australia Bank branch where they’d worked as cleaners, one day in early 1986. He’d indicated that he knew the kit contained ether and that he intended stealing it. Bulgin said Guider had later confirmed taking a quantity of the drug but had complained to him about it somehow leaking through the plastic container he’d used to decant it.8

Asked about an untrained person administering ether to a child, Professor Starmer warned that it would constitute a ‘highly dangerous’ procedure.

‘It’s very easy to overshoot the anaesthetic dose and to take someone into Stage Four, which is far too deeply anesthetised,’ he said. ‘It’s too liable to produce cardiac … disturbances in heartbeat and it is, of course, extremely explosive.’

By this last remark, he literally meant that the compound itself was notoriously volatile and flammable.

Questioned further by Guider’s solicitor, John Stratton, Starmer told the court that ether would normally be administered using a specially designed anaesthetic machine. However, open drop anaesthesia, where a mask was placed over a patient’s face and the ether was dripped onto it, was used back in the 1800s. He said it was not a drug which could be mixed into a drink because it would float to the surface and had an extremely irritating smell.9

The notion of Guider choosing such an option surely smacks of desperation. Is it possible he employed the drug, believing it would allow him to stage a kind of blitz attack whereby Samantha would be rendered almost immediately unconscious? We’ll never know. Of course, this would also have again involved him hoping rather ambitiously that she would rouse from her stupor in time for him to return her to Imperial Avenue before all hell broke loose.

Unfortunately, there is another, far less forgiving explanation for what happened that dank and cheerless afternoon: that Guider knew there was no turning back once he’d persuaded Sam to go with him yet took her anyway. Perhaps it was his intention to kill.

It is a claim he has steadfastly denied to perhaps everyone but himself for more than half his adult life. Yet evidence points to the fact that Guider has long held an unnatural fascination with death and more than once acted out in a way that could easily have had fatal consequences.

By his own admission, as a young boy he twice launched violent attacks on his brother, Tim, because he hated him and wanted him out of the way. Disturbingly, one of the episodes amounted to an attempt to drown him while he was helplessly trapped inside his stroller.

As a six-year-old, he’d been holding the hand of his school mate, Billy, when the boy was struck and killed by a speeding car. Was it simply a miracle that the vehicle didn’t slam into Guider as well? Or did he manage to save himself but fail to warn his friend, or worse still pull or push him towards the car as it roared past?

While still a pre-teen, he allegedly punched his mother to the ground when she accused him of stealing and later attempted to burn down his school classroom to avenge the canings he’d received from his teachers.

As an adult, Guider’s latent capacity for hostility dramatically re-emerged in response to being cuckolded. While he may have pleaded that he hadn’t meant to endanger anyone, setting his former girlfriend’s flat ablaze in mid-1978 while she and her new lover were inside could easily have resulted in him being charged with attempted murder.

His interest in gravesites and cemeteries bordered on the obsessive. While working at Royal North Shore Hospital, he befriended Rod Margetts, the next-door caretaker at Gore Hill Cemetery. Apparently, he often visited the decaying necropolis and occasionally helped tend some of the 14 000 plots. According to Cathy Clarke, Guider repeatedly took them to visit various of the more prominent headstones and mausolea at Waverley Cemetery and its companion graveyard at South Head. Denise Hofman also recalled him speaking at length and with quite some authority about the historic Church Street burial ground at Parramatta, while numerous photos were found at his Castle Cove flat of children posing before a series of elaborate memorials at Manly Cemetery, as well.

Liz Clarke says Guider more than once told her he knew his way around a morgue, having ‘spent a lot of time in them’.

‘I have no doubt he was into some very strange things when he was at RNS,’ she would later remark. Considering the fact that for a time he lived at the hospital – a place where people die every day of the week and at all hours – it was a comment that invited gruesome speculation. What kind of access Guider had to the hospital’s mortuary rooms after hours isn’t known. How long patient’s bodies may have been stored in them prior to removal is also unclear.

Perhaps more morbid than any of his preoccupations was Guider’s ambition, as he put it, to stage a photographic exhibition of corpses and other deathly imagery. Playing raconteur on the subject for Denise’s benefit over a cup of tea in the visiting room at Lithgow jail in late 1998, he’d segued neatly into his ghastly supposition about what it might feel like to sever her arm and watch it bleed out on the floor. At one point, he even boasted to her that he possessed the requisite knowledge, should he ever want to utilise it, with which to perform an autopsy.

With everything considered, if Guider didn’t murder Samantha it surely wasn’t because the thought hadn’t crossed his mind.