‘I want you to understand that I am responsible for all the murders in the Rockhampton area.’
—The Imaginary Mr Squeaky
SOMEONE in Rockhampton was on a raping and killing spree, but no one seemed to know it. No one, that is, except for the victims, and they found out too late. The cops didn’t know it, the down-to-earth Rockhampton residents didn’t know it, and most pressingly, poor little 9-year-old Keyra Steinhardt didn’t know it.
The girl from the primary school in Berserker Street had more innocent thoughts in her mind as she made her way through the sunbaked streets of the central Queensland city the locals call ‘Rocky’. She was simply excited at being allowed to walk home from school alone. And then in a moment Keyra Steinhardt was gone. She was grabbed as she cut through a vacant lot in her neighbourhood. Her attacker was brutal and brazen, striking in broad daylight at 3.30 p.m. on Thursday 22 April 1999. There was blood at the scene but no Keyra. There were even shocked witness accounts by onlookers who seemed powerless to act against the swift brutality of Keyra’s adult male attacker. Police reconstructed the attack from witnesses and forensic evidence. It seemed the man had knocked the girl out as she walked through the allotment. He may have sexually assaulted her at the scene and then hidden her body before returning in a car and picking her up while she was still unconscious. For suspects, Rocky had its fair share of eccentrics, sociopaths and lunatics but there was one in particular that police had in mind: a trans-species rapist who fellow villains called ‘Lenny the Loon’.
IT WAS the dog-shagging that tipped off acute observers that Leonard Fraser was not quite right. His carnal knowledge of a poor unsuspecting blue heeler occurred about midway through Fraser’s diverse criminal career but failed to slow it down or stop it altogether. His one-night four-legged stand appears to have been insufficiently unsavoury for authorities to determine Fraser should be permanently kept separate from polite society. The failure of the justice system to keep the public safe from Fraser despite red-hot warning signs would be a recurring theme in this man’s life.
No one knows exactly what turned Leonard Fraser into such a dangerous psycho. It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment in his mundane and mendacious life that it became shiningly apparent. But few would quibble with the underlying diagnosis: Lenny the Loon was not right in the head. Born Leonard John Fraser among the burning sugarcane of Ingham in north Queensland in 1951, he was the second youngest of four children. When he was six, the family moved to Mount Druitt in Sydney’s western suburbs. He was no good at school and dropped out, semi-literate, at fourteen. The three Rs were replaced with just one—robbing—and by fifteen Fraser had been sent to a boys’ home for a year as punishment for stealing. Once out he assaulted a railway guard, stole cars and made a general nuisance of himself until he inevitably won himself a short stretch in a proper prison. Harbouring few scruples, Fraser felt a genuine accord with the criminal life and he returned to it with a vengeance upon release. His only concrete ambition was to become a Hells Angels bikie, but it appears that never happened as Fraser was too delusional and too much of a livewire even for that gang. He got five years in Sydney’s Long Bay jail in 1972 for a string of robberies. Police also fined him for pimping—‘living off the earnings of prostitution’. That same year he had actually been up to far more heinous crimes that police would only discover later.
Fraser’s unhinged amoral behaviour would see him become one of Australia’s worst serial rapists. But his relatively normal looks failed to betray what lay within. His face appeared partly scrunched, and he had a slightly snubbed nose, but his eyes were his most distinctive feature. There was something different about them. His eyes stared through things without looking at them; they were piercing while being completely devoid of emotion. Eyes are meant to be windows to the soul but Fraser’s were like two discs of cold steel, hiding what lay beneath. Fraser had few normal relationships with women. He lost his virginity in a drunken fling with a girl named Sonia when he was sixteen. His other conquests were either Kings Cross prostitutes, bikie molls, or conjugal visits in prison arranged for him by other inmates. He also admitted to having sex with men.
In 1972, prior to his stint in Long Bay, Fraser raped a French tourist in Sydney’s Botanical Gardens in broad daylight as she was on her way to meet her husband and children. In a vicious morning attack he punched the woman in the face and dragged her into an area of dense foliage and sexually assaulted her before fleeing at the approach of some passers-by. Less than a month after being released from Long Bay in 1977, Fraser struck again. He grabbed a young woman in Sydney’s western suburbs. Fraser twisted her arm behind her back, forced her down an embankment and raped her. A week later a female worker at a Mount Druitt drycleaners nearly became Fraser’s next victim. Fraser, as with the previous attack, twisted the woman’s arm behind her back but then fled when disturbed by customers entering the shop. Fraser’s attempts were becoming more frequent. Just three days later he attacked again in Rooty Hill, dragging a woman to a nearby creek with malevolent intentions.
Fraser lived in a psychopath’s weird world of cunning, brutality, thrillseeking and delusional behaviour, recalling the crimes he perpetrated very differently from his permanently scarred victims. After raping a woman in St Marys, Fraser believed the victim had enjoyed herself and walked hand in hand with her back to the roadway. However, he had sufficient marbles and enough of an instinct of self-preservation that he then fled instead of sticking around. Fraser later told police he would not have had to rape the woman in the drycleaners. ‘I would not have had to force her,’ he said. ‘She was just about to come across.’ It seems Fraser’s malleable sense of reality was obvious to his would-be victim at Rooty Hill. He punched the woman in the face and again twisted her arm behind her back. As he walked her to a nearby creek the woman kept her cool and convinced Fraser she was feeling amorous but persuaded him to take her back to his place so they could do it in a bed. They walked back to the road, holding hands, until the woman spied a chance, broke free, bolted to a nearby house and raised the alarm.
Police caught Fraser and he admitted to the two attempted rapes and the St Marys rape. On a roll, he also admitted to the rape of the French tourist two years earlier, which police had not quizzed him about. Fraser pleaded guilty to the four rape offences. The court ordered a psychiatric assessment and the psychiatrist concluded Fraser, then just twenty-three, was a classic psychopath with no conscience. The shrink found that Fraser ‘will use anyone and anything to his advantage without giving a lot of thought to other people’s feelings. He has little or no impulse control. Apart from this there is no real psychiatric disability and, unfortunately, there is no known treatment for this type of psychopathic state’.
Fraser was sentenced to twenty-one years inside. The judge was bound by law to set him a minimum sentence of seven years but made his reticence plain, saying ‘I wish to make it clear in doing so that I am not in any way suggesting that you should be released at the end of the period’. The judge had agreement from an unexpected quarter—Lenny the Loon’s mother, Daphne, who told the press: ‘I have abandoned him as my son ... I know it is a terrible thing to say, but I can rest when he is inside. I go to bed at night and when I hear news of an assault or robbery, I know it will not be Lenny’.
Fraser, however, was paroled after serving just the seven years. It was undeniably a system failure. He returned to Queensland. For three years in the 1980s he worked on the railways and lived with a woman in Mackay who ended up having his daughter. But Fraser was immediately up to his old tricks again. Fraser got into one woman’s house by pretending to be interested in buying her car. As with the Rooty Hill woman, the Mackay victim sensed an opportunity to turn Fraser’s dangerous unreality against him and persuaded him to let her call her husband while Fraser attempted to persevere with the rape. During the call Fraser took the phone and told the irate hubby: ‘I hope you’re not going to kill me. I just wanted to prove a point that somebody could break in and rape your missus’. The Mackay court did not buy Fraser’s argument that he was testing home security and he was convicted of aggravated assault and sent back to the big house for another two months.
Lenny the Loon struck again upon release, raping a woman in 1985 in broad daylight on a quiet beach north of Mackay after stalking her for several days. Police checked their files for potential perpetrators and Fraser’s priors docket jumped out like a neon arrow. Fraser was also still using his signature move and twisting his victims’ arms behind their backs. Lenny was arrested, charged and sent to jail in Rockhampton for a twelve-year stretch. This time the prison authorities were taking no chances and made him serve the full sentence. Fraser applied for ‘special parole’ in 1989 so he could marry the mother of a fellow inmate who believed Fraser was innocent. Fraser mooned that he had fallen madly in love with his fellow jailbird’s old lady and had already made her his fiancée. All he wanted was freedom and the peal of wedding bells echoing throughout the Sunshine State. It was all about true love and redemption, Fraser claimed, and not a hustle at all.
A psychologist took another look at Fraser, expressed his viewpoint on psychos and their altered perceptions of reality and concluded: ‘Fraser has a history of antisocial and impulsive behaviour and there is no reason to believe that he will change should he be released from prison’. The cruel romance-denying Rockhampton prison authorities agreed ordered the wedding be cancelled and the groom remain in the can. That was where Fraser stayed until 1991 when he applied for parole again—and again it was denied. He applied a third time in 1993 and a different psychologist took another look at him. When confronted with a professional headshrinker whose assessment can lead to a sentence cut, many a bash artist will adopt a gentleman’s demeanour. Similarly, many a loon will attempt to emulate normal emotional reactions and fake an understanding of basic social mores in the quest for a ‘get out of jail free’ card. But there is failing a psychological assessment and then there is failing a psychological assessment. One golden rule is: Don’t threaten to kill the shrink if she says something you don’t like. Fraser found that rule too hard to keep. He lashed out and pledged to murder psychologist Elizabeth Davison when she told him her findings. He failed with flying colours but not before revealing insights into his fantasy world—an imaginary place where he hobnobbed with bikies and boxers, and was feared in the criminal gangland. Fraser also had delusions of grandeur. When asked about his plans for his future post release, he said he would go to a special place in the Daintree rainforest to paint and his artwork would make him famous. Dr Davison found that Fraser ‘sees himself as a special and remarkable artist’ and ‘denies the present crime and virtually dismisses the past’.
When his twelve years were up the prison system could not legally hold Fraser any longer, despite the unanimous professional conclusion he would offend again once released. Out of jail this time, Fraser floated aimlessly around Queensland, walking the streets at all hours and hanging around outside school gates trying to chat up girls of any age. Fraser would also hang out near employment agencies for the intellectually disabled to pick up women who may have been less perceptive of his strangeness and potential danger. In late 1998 he moved into a flat in Rockhampton with an intellectually disabled 19-year-old called Cristine Wraight and her blue heeler called Xena. True to form, Fraser was promptly interfering with everything in sight, including the pet.
A woman and her 11-year-old daughter moved into the spare room at the flat to help split the rent but they soon left, accusing Fraser of sexually assaulting the young daughter. It was around this time the amorous interlude with Wraight’s blue heeler occurred. The landlady caught Fraser in flagrante delicto breaking all sorts of implied social mores by having inter-species sex with a member of one of Australia’s most-loved breeds of cattle dog. The rape of the blue heeler ended in blue murder—someone, almost undoubtedly Fraser, was slipping the pooch rat poison and it died weeks later. Fraser was given his marching orders in April 1999. A few days later little Keyra Steinhardt would go missing.
Why was Fraser such a bad bastard? No one knows. Are psychos born, bred, or do they choose evil? And if it is a combination of causes, what is the breakdown? No one really knows, but what is known is that some psychopathic serial offenders have suffered brutalised childhoods or traumatic experiences. This seems to be true for Fraser who said he was happy if he never saw his three siblings again and he hated his father and mother. In prison he told an inmate: ‘What I have gone through has caused me to kill these people. All the hate over the years came to the fore and ended with the murder of the people’. But there was no objective evidence that a wounded inner child was at the core of his badness. What we do know is Fraser was a monster in plain sight. He had numerous encounters with the criminal justice system. He had shown no signs of reforming. His rap sheet spoke of a growing depravity in the crimes he chose to perpetrate: robbery, pimping, violent assaults, rape against women, then bestiality. It was a question of what lows would he sink to next.
THE search squads were out. Teams of police and volunteers combed the banks of crocodile-infested rivers and the bushland surrounding Rocky, looking for their little girl lost. In a reversal of the standard homicide probe, the victim was proving more elusive than the perpetrator. Detectives did not have to look far for their prime suspect. Lenny the Loon was such a hot suspect for this one he was, in criminal parlance, practically tropical. As night fell on the terrible day Keyra was snatched, police dragged Fraser in for questioning. His house was cordoned off as a crime scene and forensic investigators swooped on his little red Mazda. Fraser told police: ‘I’m not a child molester, look at my record—I’ve done other stuff but I’m not a child molester’. Beyond this, he refused to help the investigators.
The search squads—citizens of a city in shock—continued searching in earnest. Fraser was kept under lock and key but Keyra’s killer remained mute. For two weeks Fraser would not tell police where Keyra was. For fourteen days the humid weather and the entropy of passing time took their toll, removing evidence of rape and the method of murder, doggedly eradicating any signs of who had done the dead child wrong. Or at least this is what the heartless psychopath hoped. Fraser, more secretive about his predilection for rape than murder, put a lot of stock in that magic figure of two weeks. He once told a fellow inmate he believed evidence of sex disappeared after a fortnight.
On 6 May 1999 police visited Fraser. They told him they had found blood samples and five blonde hairs in the boot of his Mazda. They told him they were all an exact DNA match for Keyra and that the chance of the blood belonging to anyone other than the missing primary-school girl was one in four billion. (The population of the earth at the time of writing was just over seven billion.) Two weeks had passed since the murder and Fraser found his tongue again. He attempted to bargain. How about I take you to the body and then I go down for manslaughter but not murder? But the police were adamant there would be no deal. He would show them where Keyra was and they would reserve the right to charge him with murder. Fraser took police to the bushland spot where he had left the dead girl. The find sent shockwaves through the Rockhampton community but at least enabled Keyra’s family to farewell and bury their little girl. Fifteen hundred mourners paid their respects at the tiny casket. After that, feelings were running high in Rocky about the monster that had snatched one of their own from under their noses. Fraser’s lawyers did not want him tried before a jury of twelve very angry Rockhampton locals. At their request the trial was moved to Brisbane. The hat was passed around so the dead girl’s mum, Treasa, could afford to travel to Brisbane for the case.
Fraser had killed Keyra Steinhardt. Police also knew of his long, violent history of rape. But following a number of unusual incidents and discoveries police started to wonder whether his rap sheet of known crimes was the full story, or whether perhaps there were blind spots. In particular they wondered whether the schoolgirl was his first kill. Police started asking themselves the question: how many women had Fraser killed? And over time they became more convinced the answer was bigger than just one they knew about.
THERE may have been a perfectly innocent explanation for what police found in Fraser’s Rockhampton flat but it was still as disturbing. On top of a wardrobe, in a brown paper bag, officers found four ponytails of human hair. The sinister find was not the only thing piquing police interest in Fraser’s activities. The blood in the boot of Fraser’s Mazda had been identified as Keyra’s but police had also found other female blood on the car’s boot hinge and on a cigarette paper in the glove box—blood that did not belong to Keyra. There was also the little slip Fraser had made when taking police to Keyra’s body. He had directed police to a bush track off a road north-east of Rocky. Police did not want Fraser at the site of the dumped body in case he damaged evidence. But to verify his knowledge of the scene—in case he later recanted his confession—they asked him to demonstrate how he left Keyra’s body. Fraser said he liked to leave bodies against trees or covered with grass so they looked natural. Police were alarmed they had asked their question in the singular and Fraser had answered it in the plural.
Investigators went back to their files. As they searched, a horrifying pattern emerged. In less than eight months, four women had gone missing from Rockhampton. As with all missing people there were only five possibilities. The women may have either moved on, suffered an accident and not been found, been abducted, committed suicide, or been killed. Natasha Ryan was just fourteen when she went missing. When she was an infant her dad had nicknamed her ‘Grasshopper’ because instead of crawling she hopped all over the place. She had grown into a free-spirited teen. She went to a secondary school in the area where Keyra was snatched. Then in August 1998 Natasha vanished into thin air. She was last seen by friends outside a Rockhampton cinema.
At thirty-nine, Julie Turner was young to be a grandmother but she clearly relished the role. She had brought up her daughter as a single mum and loved the more carefree approach to looking after young kin that being a nana afforded. When she wasn’t belting out the hits at karaoke she was doting on her two grandchildren. She vanished just days after Christmas on 28 December 1998.
Beverley Leggo, thirty-six, had been a bright Gympie farm girl and athletics star with the world at her feet. When she turned eighteen she flew to Singapore but had to cut the trip short before coming home a mess—soon after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Bev moved to Brisbane and then Rocky in search of work. She went missing in early March 1999. Bev’s family knew something was very wrong when her handbag was found weighted down next to a boat ramp in Rocky. ‘Bev never went anywhere without her handbag,’ her dad said. ‘We knew then that she was gone forever.’
Sylvia Benedetti was just nineteen when she vanished from Rockhampton. Despite her youth, it had been a long and sad journey that had landed Sylvia in Rocky. Born in Melbourne, as a young girl she had been molested by her father and it had left her troubled and rebellious. After the sins of the father were exposed Sylvia and her mum moved to Mildura to try to start a new life. But at fifteen, following another argument with her mum, she left and went to live in Rockhampton with a guy called Joe who became her boyfriend. She vanished in April 1999 less than three weeks after the disappearance of Bev Leggo and just four days before Fraser grabbed and killed Keyra Steinhardt.
Anything could have happened to the missing women. But there was something alarming about the four of them disappearing one after the other in such a short period of time and so close to the brutal slaying of Keyra Steinhardt. Did Rockhampton have a wolf in the flock? Fraser had been released from his last stretch in jail a year before the first of the Rockhampton females went missing. He was a confessed serial rapist. Was he also a closet serial killer? Even before Keyra was snatched, investigators had wondered if the four missing Rocky women were linked. Now they were wondering if what they had in common were the murderous hands of Leonard Fraser. There was a long way to go, but if investigations confirmed the police’s suspicions and a successful prosecution ensued, their man with the cold steel eyes could become the Sunshine State’s first convicted serial killer.
THE day after Keyra was murdered Rockhampton was hit with another grim discovery. The building that once served as the Queensland Hotel had been condemned and was set for demolition. Construction workers were making preparations to bring the old girl down but the hotel had hosted some recent trespassing guests and not all of them had checked out alive. Two workers on the site made a discovery that was like a scene from a horror movie. Room 13 was steeped in blood—there were blood spatters on the wall, the carpet was soaked with litres of blood, there was blood dripping down stairs—and there were fragments of bone scattered around. In a downstairs freezer they found a pair of shoes that were submerged in dirty water.
Rockhampton was like a city cursed. It seemed like murder was everywhere, seeping up from cracks in the dusty bitumen. In 2000 Fraser was convicted of the murder of little Keyra Steinhardt. Detectives paused for a brief clink of glasses before resuming their probe into ‘his other work’. As the material on Fraser and his potential victims grew, a police taskforce was established to investigate the fates of the four missing Rockhampton women. Officers were able to match the mystery ‘other’ blood in the boot of Fraser’s Mazda to troubled missing teen Sylvia Benedetti. The large volume of blood in the Queensland Hotel was found to be Sylvia’s as well. Police also found two witnesses who put Fraser and Benedetti at a bus stop together around the time she vanished.
Fraser was emerging as a convincing common link in the cases of the other missing women too. Police learnt that he had a connection to all of them. He and 14-year-old Natasha Ryan went to the same bowling alley; he used to work with karaoke-singing grandma Julie Turner at an abattoir; and he had become friends with Beverley Leggo when they stayed in the same hostel together. Police were convinced it was Fraser who was the curse of Rockhampton. There was a decent case against Fraser for Benedetti’s murder, based on blood and witness accounts. But authorities were a long way from an evidentiary case that would prove Fraser’s guilt in relation to all the women. They still hadn’t even found the four women’s bodies. Police were starting to hit a wall and they needed some sort of break in the case. A full confession from Fraser would help but he would never talk unless he felt he had something to gain from it. What detectives really needed was a gift from the gods, some sort of white knight delivering a solid prosecution case on a platter. And at that point Alan Quinn, the self-proclaimed greatest con man in the nation, came into the picture.
QUINN had been called a lot of things, none of them very nice, and certainly never anything as complimentary as a white knight. Many of the nastier character assessments of Quinn had been delivered by his victims or by people wearing robes and wigs addressing him as ‘the prisoner’ or ‘the accused’.
Quinn was, after all, one of the country’s most shameless rip-off merchants—a swindler who would con his own grandma for a dollar. By his own reckoning this made Quinn ‘Australia’s greatest con man’ but his penniless victims saw his scams in less praiseworthy terms. An intriguing figure, Quinn was willing to blow his own trumpet about the tricks he had pulled on the high end of town. But he was much less vocal about his crimes against the vulnerable and the elderly. Quinn would boast of his high living and expensive tastes. He said he liked Dom Pérignon in the a.m. He reckoned it was the breakfast of champions. He was, in short, a shameless spiv who would make most decent citizens’ blood run cold. But, unlike Fraser, Quinn was not a completely lost cause. Fraser gave lip-service to ordinary human emotions and wanting to sort his problems out, but really he had no discernible conscience at all. Quinn was heading down a similar path but, unlike Fraser, his conscience was not completely missing in action. Quinn’s exploits had seen him take his conscience for a long drive in the woods, get it to dig its own grave and then tamp it down beneath six feet of compact soil. But against all odds the con man’s conscience was still alive, albeit with a weakened pulse and gasping in its grave. It would take an explosive intervention to see it exhumed and revived.
Like Fraser, Quinn was a boomerang convict. The two crims had met while doing time for their respective crimes in Sydney in the 1970s. When Fraser was sent back inside for the murder of Keyra Steinhardt, Quinn too was back in the big house and the two jailbirds were reunited. It was Fraser who approached Quinn but it was Quinn who sensed in the unlikely figure of Fraser a chance at cleaning his slate. Quinn had seen little Keyra’s mum on television. He saw the raw overwhelming grief of a mother whose young daughter had been senselessly murdered. He saw that four other Rockhampton women were missing. Women with mothers and loved ones, just like Keyra. The unreconstructed reprobate watched the broadcast and a strange feeling passed over him. Somewhere in the woods something long-buried stirred. ‘In a flash, I thought, “it’s my job, he’s speaking to me”,’ Quinn recalled. ‘I’ll befriend this guy and I’ll get the information.’ Quinn had spent much of his life running from the fuzz. Equally, many police had devoted weeks of their time bringing Quinn, who was one of Australia’s top ten most wanted fugitives, to justice. But all that was about to be filed under ‘bygones’. Quinn reached out to Queensland Police, offering to rat on his reunited prison pal if he could get him talking about the Rockhampton women. It was an unorthodox proposal but, having hit all sorts of walls in their investigations, the authorities agreed. An unusual alliance was formed between some of Queensland’s finest and one of the nation’s worst. For Fraser it would be a devastating union.
Quinn set about in earnest befriending, charming and beguiling Lenny the Loon. He would walk and talk with him in the prison yard, slowly breaking down Fraser’s walls and inveigling himself into the killer’s trust like a true professional. Fraser told Quinn some gruesome stories, but without vital details. Quinn suppressed his disgust and nodded along for two years—for Quinn it was a marathon sting, a test of his true talents as a confidence man. But as the stories grew more detailed and more degraded, Quinn must have sometimes felt like a lost tourist trapped in Fraser’s hellish world of madness. Quinn was risking all by going after Fraser. In the beginning he spent his nights taking notes from memory of what Fraser told him during the day and then sneaking the small documents out of prison to police. This escalated to wearing a hidden recorder when he was around Fraser. Eventually authorities arranged for Fraser and Quinn to be moved into a bugged cell together. Quinn came to realise the psychotic in his cell did not distinguish between human and animal life. He came to know Fraser could become violently angry and kill in an instant. Quinn was a police informant, in prison slang a ‘dog’. He likely came to know what Fraser did to dogs.
As the pair talked it became clear to Quinn that Fraser was impressed by serial killers. The first card Quinn played was to tell him that you only get into the pantheon of notorious serial killers if people know you’re a serial killer—you should tell police where the bodies are and tell your story. When that card didn’t work, Quinn tried another one from the bottom of the deck. On tests, Fraser registered as having a low IQ—but he was cunning enough to always be working one angle or another. During his latest stretch his plan was to get classed as a psychiatric case so he could be moved from prison to a psych ward where he might get more privileges and life might be a bit cushier. So Quinn’s next card was to tell Lenny that if he admitted everything, they would send him to the nuthouse.
Eventually Fraser was persuaded and agreed to take police on a tour of his victims’ final resting places. The governor’s personal jet was brought in and Quinn and Fraser, accompanied by several detectives, got a brief excursion from jail. Upon meeting police, however, Fraser made it clear the grim daytrip would be on his terms. One of the detectives had started to explain the purpose of the trip when Fraser interrupted: ‘Just shut up and do as you’re told’. But as Fraser got closer to his victims, who were by now little more than skeletons, his mood changed to something resembling that of an excited schoolboy. Fraser took his entourage into the thick jungle-like bushland around Rocky to where two of the women lay. Officers secretly filmed the killer as he led them to his victims. Following Fraser’s directions, police found the remains of doting grandma Julie Turner and then, in another spot, Bev Leggo. From Fraser, there was no inkling of normal human emotion about the women. But when Fraser passed the grave of another of his coerced conquests, Xena the blue heeler, he broke down in tears.
Back in prison, Quinn kept working on his mark. Fraser admitted to the murders of Bev Leggo and Julie Turner, who he had helped police find. He also admitted to the murders of 14-year-old Natasha Ryan and 19-year-old Sylvia Benedetti. The remains of the latter, killed in the condemned Queensland Hotel, were found near the beach. Fraser also discussed killing an additional two women, which would take the total number of victims to seven, but this may just have been a homicidal narrator’s dramatic flourish. Fraser described burying Natasha Ryan with a trench digger but police still had not located Ryan’s remains. One of the ‘extra’ murder victims was a female backpacker Fraser claimed he had killed north of Rocky and then dumped in the crocodile ponds of an abandoned zoo. Police tore the ponds and property apart but found nothing.
Quinn had sold his con artist’s pitch like a true pro and Fraser had bought it all. But when Fraser’s push to be moved out of prison to a psych ward floundered, the killer suddenly got a big case of buyer’s remorse. He needed to find a way to take back everything he had shown and told police. He went to Quinn for help to reverse his admissions, only to inadvertently finish the job of incriminating himself completely.
FRASER concocted a story that he knew where the bodies were because the real killer, who he called ‘Squeaky’, had forced him on a grisly tour of the sites at gunpoint. With Quinn as his press secretary Fraser set about drafting confessional letters from Squeaky owning up to the crimes to be sent to media outlets. Fraser figured if the letters contained details only the real killer could know they would have to be taken seriously and would provide a strong red herring to his involvement. The letters began with ‘You can call me Squeaky’ and then went on to say ‘I want you to understand that I am responsible for all the murders in the Rockhampton area … Now I will give you information on these matters that only the real culprit would know’.
Fraser then detailed how he had stabbed Natasha Ryan, strangled both Bev Leggo and Julie Turner, and then bashed Sylvia Benedetti to death with a chock of wood. The details matched what police had discovered and the results they were still getting back from the lab. A combination of police work, Fraser’s recanted admissions and the facts attributed to the non-existent Squeaky meant a full picture of the monster’s crimes was finally emerging and families of the dead would know what happened to their loved ones.
According to Fraser, 14-year-old Natasha Ryan had been his first murder victim. She was grabbed off a Rockhampton street in September 1998. He stabbed her to death because she was pregnant to him and he had buried her somewhere out of reach of police with a trench digger. Next, he killed the fun-loving Julie Turner—the karaoke-singing grandma who had worked at the abattoir with Fraser. Her de facto was violent and she told friends she was going to move in with Fraser. After 2 a.m. on 28 December 1998, an intoxicated Julie staggered from Rockhampton’s Airport Liberty Nightclub. She stopped and steadied herself on a bridge to roll a smoke. Fraser snuck up on her in bare feet and struck her across the jaw. While she was knocked out he went to get the car. Fraser said a pair of her sandals would be found nearby. Police searched the area and found one of her sandals and a bra.
Fraser and Bev Leggo had met while staying in the same hostel in 1997. They had remained friends and he had even given her a television he had stolen from the defunct Queensland Hotel which he haunted. In March 1999 he took Bev to a swimming hole at Nankin Creek north-east of Rockhampton. When the 36-year-old rejected his advances he knocked her out with a punch, hanged her with the swinging rope, strangled her with her underwear and dumped her body in a ditch in long grass. As with Julie Turner, Fraser made his move on 19-year-old Sylvia Benedetti when she was at a low ebb. Benedetti’s life had been full of pain starting from her molestation as a young girl. On April 18 1999 Fraser met her in the Rockhampton Mall. She was unhappy with her boyfriend and her living arrangements. He told her he kept drugs in Room 13 of the abandoned Queensland Hotel and the pair went there together. Like what had happened with Bev Leggo, Fraser had made a move on the teen and when she objected, he knocked her out with a punch. He heard a noise and went downstairs to make sure the coast was clear before furthering his terrible crime. ‘I went back upstairs and she was just lying there staring at me,’ Fraser said. ‘When they are unconscious they still stare at you.’ Fraser then killed Sylvia, bashing her to death with a wooden block, rendering her life short in addition to being full of suffering. It was four days before little Keyra would have her trip from school cut short in such tragic circumstances.
With the highly detailed Squeaky admissions on tape, Alan ‘Australia’s greatest con man’ Quinn had delivered detectives and prosecutors the final pieces of evidence they needed, making him one of the more unusual and successful operatives in contemporary policing. Despite Quinn’s life of bombast and chicanery it seems there really was an element in his quest to get Fraser that was a personal attempt at redemption—a chance to use his notable skills at deception for good for a change. On its face it seems Quinn may have just been hustling his cellmate for a sentence cut but in the end it had actually meant extra time served. Quinn remained behind bars nearly nine months beyond his release date as a voluntary prisoner in order to net his target.
In August 2001 Leonard Fraser was charged with the murders of Natasha Ryan, Julie Turner, Beverley Leggo and Sylvia Benedetti. And that might have been the end of the matter but for one more almighty twist.
LEONARD Fraser pleaded not guilty to all four murders, putting the prosecution to their proof. At the trial the families of the victims stuck tightly together, their common tragedy having forged a shared bond between them. They supported each other as graphic evidence was presented on what had happened to their loved ones. It was clear to these grieving families their dead girls had simply been freakishly unlucky in crossing the path of a serial killer. But no matter how much they might wish it and will it, none of the four dead women would be coming back from the dead. And then one day in April 2003, while the trial rolled on, one of them did.
Robert Ryan, the father of Fraser’s first victim, Natasha Ryan, had been attending court every day and eyeballing Fraser—the gloating killer in the dock. On the twelfth day of the trial, during the lunch recess, the prosecutor got a call and frantically started looking for Robert. ‘We found Natasha,’ the prosecutor told Robert. The father slumped, assuming her dead body had been found. Then the prosecutor said: ‘She’s alive.’ Victim number one, Natasha Ryan, the 14-year-old last seen outside the Rocky cinema, had re-emerged in the land of the living. Fraser had owned up to killing her and she had been declared dead by police and deemed murdered by prosecutors. Three years after she vanished, with no body to bury, Natasha’s parents had said goodbye to their daughter by holding a memorial service for her on her birthday.
But on Thursday 10 April 2003 police found Natasha, now eighteen, hiding in a cupboard at the home of her 26-year-old boyfriend, Scott Black. The search, police said, was the result of a tip-off arising from the trial. She had been hiding in the Rockhampton house for four-and-a-half years, staying out of public view, while her parents, peers and fellow Rocky residents came to believe she had been murdered by a serial killer. Robert Ryan had to identify his daughter by telephone. He spoke to the woman on the other end of the line and asked, ‘If you’re my daughter, what would your dad call you?’ Natasha’s response was ‘Dad, it’s me, Grasshopper, and I love you and I’m sorry’. Robert Ryan dropped the phone. For Natasha’s loved ones relief came before recriminations. Her relieved father said he ‘couldn’t stop cuddling her. It was like I saw a ghost’.
The prosecutor then stood up in court and announced Fraser was not guilty of murdering Natasha Ryan because, in fact, Natasha was still alive. The city of Rockhampton had gone through fear, then shock, then anger. Now Rocky was just dazed and confused. There were a hundred questions and no immediate answers. Had she been held against her will? Apparently not. Then why had she done it? There was no satisfactory answer that rang true. The next question was how had they done it? How had a missing teen runaway and a milkman tricked a whole city for so many years? Before emerging as a kind of pale and pasty agoraphobic Lazarus, Natasha Ryan had lived the bulk of her teen years indoors behind drawn blinds with her boyfriend, first in Yeppoon, then later in North Rockhampton.
The house where she was discovered huddled in a cupboard was just a kilometre from her family home where for years her mother had kept a fretful vigil. Natasha spent her days cooking, sewing and watching television. If anyone came to visit, including police coming around to check if she was there, she hid in the closet. Sometimes her boyfriend snuck her out to nearby Yeppoon beach to feel the sand between her toes and wade in the warm water. But the seaside sojourns were very rare—just a few times in five years—and only ever in the dead of night. The boyfriend had few guests to the house. Mainly it was his parents who visited and the young lovers claimed that during those visits Natasha would dutifully head back to her cupboard.
Some suspected there must have been others in on the ruse—perhaps Scott Black’s parents. Natasha said she had done without bras because Scott could not buy them without drawing attention. But what about when she had her period? One neighbour theorised that pads and tampons were what was in the plastic containers that Scott’s mother would bring on her visits to the house. Scott did all the grocery shopping, but there was a two-week period when he was hospitalised following a motorbike accident. Did Natasha survive on bread and water or did she have other help from outsiders during this fortnight? Was there at least someone telling her why Scott had not come home? It seems someone apart from the young lovers knew about the suburban stowaway. A concerned resident, perhaps a relative, sent police a note that tipped them off to the runaway’s location.
It would be unusual if Natasha did not need a doctor during her nearly five years in hiding. If she did see one it did not lead to any alarms being raised. But it seems there had not been a total absence of signs Natasha was hiding away at the house. Months earlier it seemed Natasha herself had made a call to a Brisbane-based phone counsellor. The counsellor passed on information to police that a woman presumed murdered had been hiding in Rocky for five years. But with bodies popping up all over Rocky and a serial killer claiming Natasha as one of his victims, it seems the tip was not given priority.
One question all of Rocky was asking itself was whether the boyfriend, Scott Black, eight years her senior, was a creep who had abused the power disparity in their ages. Scott had previously dated Natasha’s older sister. Some said the 26-year-old deliveryman was Natasha’s protector—saving her from a troubled home life. Others saw him as a controlling figure. On the streets of Rocky there were conflicting reports on his character. Some Yeppoon milk customers described him as helpful, amiable and talkative, but another said he could be secretive and aggressive. There was even a school of thought that the older boyfriend was henpecked and simply doing what he was told by the teen runaway. Scott Black later pleaded guilty to perjury for telling police he did not know where Natasha was. His lawyer claimed Scott was powerless before his girlfriend’s orders to hide her away.
The primary question on locals’ lips, though, was: why would she do this? Natasha Ryan’s parents had been divorced for years. She lived with her mum but maintained a good relationship with both parents. After she came back from the dead, reports emerged that Natasha had a history of running away, attempted suicide and drug experimentation. Local barrister Ross Lo Monaco offered little to clarify matters, saying that Natasha had ‘personal problems’ that would ultimately ‘remain personal’. But despite such claims, nothing emerged that supported the suggestion something deeper was going on. The closest thing the runaway gave to a reason for her strange conduct was a minor and seemingly trivial incident at school. She said she got in trouble with a teacher and decided it was the last straw—she would stop going to school and move in with Scott Black. According to the police investigation into her disappearance, the last time Natasha had been seen by anyone was by two friends near a Rockhampton cinema several days later. Even close relatives like Natasha’s half-sister Donna Bradbury, who once dated Scott Black, were left scratching their heads about what motivated the teen’s strange exile.
The absence of any explanation just deepened public confusion about whether Natasha Ryan was the villain or the victim of the piece. If there had been some sympathy for the teen because of her youth, there was soon a tectonic shift pushing her into the villain category. Natasha refused to front the public to explain her actions and to apologise to all those who had desperately searched for her. Instead she sought to profit from her exploits. Slick Sydney celebrity PR agent Max Markson flew into Rocky to broker Natasha a lucrative media deal. Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes was the winning bidder, handing over $100 000 for the scoop. Emergency service volunteers and even the Queensland premier were critical of the runaway’s lucrative payday. One State Emergency Services volunteer, Lyle Dobbs, was frustrated that the whole episode had dragged on for so long, saying ‘She must have realised how much effort was going into trying to locate her and she could have let somebody know she was all right’.
Local polls showed 96 per cent of people felt neither Ryan nor boyfriend Black should profit from the saga. The mother of little Keyra perhaps most accurately summed up Rocky’s feelings on the teen runaway following the chequebook escapade. ‘Natasha Ryan needs a slap across the face,’ Treasa Steinhardt said. ‘How dare she put her family through that.’ Some suggested she should put her earnings toward her $500 000 search costs. When it eventually screened, the expensive interview shed little light on the strange chapter. ‘I just felt angry at everybody and everything. I didn’t want to be at school, I didn’t want to be at home, I didn’t want to be there in that life,’ Natasha said. She said after she ran away the stakes rose and she was too afraid to go home because she thought she ‘would be sent to prison’.
60 Minutes: So many people find it hard that you would put your family through so much pain, that if you really loved them you could never do this to them. How could you do this to them?
Natasha Ryan: I honestly don’t know. I can’t answer that.
So despite the six-figure sum, the chequebook journalists still never got a proper answer to the hundred-thousand-dollar question: ‘Why?’ Perhaps a proper answer simply did not exist. Natasha’s father distanced himself from the controversial payment deal. He accused his former wife of selling out before returning to his home in Bundaberg. ‘I’ve never given a story for any money and I’m never, ever going to. And I think it’s atrocious. I want people to know that.’
Naturally the resurrection of murder victim number one had profound repercussions for the Fraser prosecution. Natasha Ryan’s re-emergence had called into question in the most dramatic way possible the reliability of Fraser’s other homicidal admissions. Perhaps, the defence argued, their man was all talk when it came to his boasts about Julie Turner, Bev Leggo and Sylvia Benedetti as well. The court declared Fraser not guilty of Natasha’s murder. Fraser’s lawyers applied for the whole trial to be cancelled, but the move was unsuccessful and the trial continued on the remaining murder counts. Natasha Ryan was subpoenaed and testified she was not a murder casualty and was in fact very much alive. She said she had never seen the accused, Fraser, before in her life. The prosecutor later quipped he had created legal history by ‘cross-examining the deceased’.
The dramatic scenes and return to life of Natasha did not imperil the prosecution of Fraser for the other three victims. Fraser was already in prison serving a maximum life sentence for killing little Keyra when the quadruple-turned-triple murder trial concluded. The jury needed less than a day’s deliberation. When they returned they convicted Fraser of the murders of Sylvia Benedetti and Bev Leggo and the manslaughter of Julie Turner. The jury had concluded Fraser did not intend to deliberately kill Ms Turner. As the verdicts came down, the killer went red in the face and then feigned nonchalance, stretching and yawning. Fraser appealed the convictions but the judge sentenced the ‘untreatable psychopath’ to three indefinite jail terms. The judge found it was Fraser’s unusual sexual desire that drove him to kill. Fraser would almost certainly never be paroled but in any case he would not become eligible for parole until he was eighty-one years of age.
MANY had suspected Fraser either never had a heart, had a black heart, or had a heart that didn’t work properly. On Boxing Day 2006 such suspicions were borne out. Fraser had a heart attack in prison and was rushed to a secure unit at Princess Alexandra Hospital. Five days later, while sleeping, the curse of Rockhampton ceased to be. The obituaries were not glowing. Queensland’s then-premier Peter Beattie said Fraser would not be missed. Keyra Steinhardt’s step-father Blair Crewther said news of the killer’s death was like a weight lifted from his shoulders.
In 2004 Natasha the former teen runaway—who was fined $1000 for causing a false police investigation—and her perjuring milkman boyfriend who then got a twelve-month jail sentence for the same offence—welcomed baby son Corey into the world. Natasha’s father Robert learnt about his grandson from the media, having lost contact with his daughter again. The convention-bucking couple later announced their September 2008 wedding through paying outlet Woman’s Day. Natasha’s mum was to give the ‘runaway bride’ away. The name of the venue for their wedding, just near Rockhampton, was oddly appropriate—Fern’s Hideaway.
NOTHING in the story of the curse of Rockhampton had turned out to be as it had first appeared. Leonard Fraser was a serial killer who, when he was still alive, could no longer claim to be quite as serial as his twisted ego would have liked. Alan Quinn was a lifelong villain who risked all to work for police and secure the conviction of a murderous monster. (Some police had even become fans of Quinn, with one detective on the case saying ‘He’s a likable rogue, and I’ll go and share a beer with him any day’.) And the perpetrator of the biggest con in the whole saga was not Quinn but Natasha Ryan. She had not been murder victim one but was alive and well—just a silly teen living in her boyfriend’s cupboard. In keeping with the contradictory nature of the care, the mother of Fraser’s youngest victim found comfort in an interesting view of her daughter’s murder.
Treasa Crewther (nee Steinhardt) came to see the death of Keyra—who would remain frozen in time, existing in memories as a 9-year-old forever—as ending the curse. As Ms Crewther saw it, Fraser had been on a relentless killing spree against the females of Rockhampton until he ran into the plucky primary-school girl. Keyra had lost her life but her hair and her blood had exposed a serial but unsuspected killer who would not otherwise have stopped. In 2002 a $2.3 million police station operating twenty-four hours a day was built on the site of the vacant lot where Keyra Steinhardt was grabbed. It contained a memorial plaque for the little girl. ‘If only it was there before she was killed,’ Ms Crewther said of the new station. ‘But then, maybe Keyra wouldn’t have walked that way and she wouldn’t have caught Leonard. I believe my daughter caught him. It wasn’t the other way around. She’s saved a lot of women in Rockhampton and Rockhampton has honoured her.’