Australian Police appear to be no further forward in their quest to discover the true identity of the young girl whose bones and clothing were found in and around a suitcase near Wynarka, South Australia.
The township of Wynarka has about eight permanent residents yet a middle aged male stranger seen carrying a suitcase near the highway on several occasions between April and June has never been identified.
An update:
Behind mystery of girl in suitcase at Wynarka, South AustraliaSunday Herald Sun
By Andrew Rule
THE Beaumont children. Truro. The Family. Snowtown. Now there’s Wynarka and the little girl in the suitcase, the latest addition to South Australia’s back-catalogue of horror stories.
Wynarka is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it collection of houses on the highway between nowhere and not much in the Murray Mallee, emptied-out farming country where communities have shrunk to little more than pairs of bullet-scarred road signs.
Just west of town on the Karoonda Highway there’s a patch of bush before the big wheat paddocks start. It was there, on July 15, that a curious motorist pulled up when something caught his eye.
He wasn’t the first to notice the faded suitcase abandoned under a bush. Others had been there over previous weeks and glanced at the case’s stained and rotting contents. But none had noticed the thing he saw among a pile of clothes scattered nearby.
It was a human jawbone. A small one.
When the police arrived they found the rest of the skeleton, obviously a child’s — almost certainly a girl’s, judging from the clothes that had spilled out of the suitcase. It will take time for forensic scientists to confirm the working assumption that the dead child was a female aged between 30 months and four years.
What investigators do not yet know — or are not saying — is whether they can get a DNA sample from the bones to compare with samples already on record: samples taken from offenders, especially sex offenders. Having DNA would also give police a tool to eliminate — or implicate — any “person of interest”.
Anyone closely related to the child should be able to unlock the macabre mystery of what happened to her.
South Australia’s major crime squad has made an educated guess that the person they want is in their state, most likely within close range.
Taskforce Mallee has begun the investigation by doorknocking every house within 25km of Wynarka. Conscious of how easily investigations can veer off-course, miss vital clues or leave gaps that the guilty can wriggle through, detectives are taking their time, cross-referencing each inquiry so nothing is missed and nothing is left to chance.
No one has to be reminded that other investigations of notorious murder cases have been hampered by slapdash initial police work and hunches that didn’t pan out.
The Azaria Chamberlain case, for one. The Falconio case, for another. The Beaumonts and “The Family” murders in Adelaide.
Investigators are not revealing all they know about what happened to the child, because they have to keep some vital detail secret. Something only the killer knows and that timewasters don’t know.
Police know the victim was a little under a metre tall and had shoulder-length fair hair. They know that as long as seven years ago she died extremely violently, almost certainly murdered. Certain fractures suggest she was bashed to death. A defence lawyer might argue that such injuries could be accidental — but why would anyone would hide the body of a child who died in a genuine accident?
The killer or someone close to him or her then covered the body in a pile of clothes — maybe in an empty room, a cupboard or a shed. Then they left it for years — long enough to be reduced to a skeleton.
Then, probably early this year, something happened — something that prompted whoever had hidden the body to want to move it. The killer or an accomplice jammed the clothing and the skeleton into a suitcase and took it from the hiding place.
Why? Perhaps they had to move house and feared the body would be discovered by others. Perhaps they were jittery because of publicity about prosecution of other child killers. The brilliant detection of Daniel Morcombe’s killer — Brett Peter Cowan — generated nationwide publicity after Cowan’s Supreme Court appeal failed in May this year. In April there was a spate of fresh publicity about William Tyrell’s abduction in northern NSW last September. Either, or neither, might have been enough to spook a child killer.
Whatever the reason, someone took the suitcase from the hiding place to Wynarka. It is tempting to assume it must have been moved in a vehicle, but that does not necessarily tally with the strongest clue police have: that a man with a suitcase was seen in Wynarka some time between March and May.
WYNARKA township has about eight permanent residents. Early one autumn morning this year, roughly a quarter of the population — Denise Edwards and Monica Martin — were walking their dogs when they saw something that stuck in their minds.
It was a man, aged about 60, walking briskly up the main street towards the Karoonda highway that links Wynarka with the world, or at least with Murray Bridge.
The man was average height, lightly built and neat looking, with short grey hair. He was a complete stranger to both women, who are locals bred and born and tend not to mix with the “blow ins” who appeared in the district chasing cheap rent when the permanent community started shrinking a generation ago.
The most unusual thing about the stranger was that he had a large suitcase — and was carrying it rather than wheeling it, as if it weren’t heavy. As Monica recalled this week, “He wasn’t labouring, and he was walking briskly.” Her vague impression was of a man on a mission.
The stranger was close enough to see both women but he made no eye contact and no greeting, unusual in the country. There was no sign of how he had appeared in the street but it seemed unlikely he had walked all the way from some other area. It seemed likely that either a vehicle had dropped him there, or he had walked from relatively close by.
The problem for police is that if he arrived in Wynarka by vehicle he could have started his journey almost anywhere — over the border in Victoria, for a start.
Against the theory that he hitchhiked is that a middle-aged man carrying a suitcase should have stood out enough that motorists would have remembered seeing him and reported it, especially if they had given him a ride.
In an era of backpackers and cheap cars, you could drive around Australia and not see anyone carrying a suitcase on the open road.
INVESTIGATORS are eliminating the most obvious possibility: that the man came from one of the former farmhouses rented cheaply to transient tenants who come to the backblocks to escape unhappy pasts, unpaid debts and people who ask questions.
Some outsiders like isolated houses because they can produce (and consume) drugs there. Others, like the grotesquely inbred family finally uncovered in rural NSW in 2012, move regularly to isolated districts to stay a step ahead of the authorities.
That family, product of three generations of incest over 40 years, moved from New Zealand to South Australia, to Victoria and back to South Australia before their final move to a remote valley outside Canberra. No outsiders would have known if one of the dozen feral children in the family had died — or been killed.
As forensic experts do their best to extract usable DNA from the tiny bones, the investigators have been chasing leads on the clothes and the quilt found with the suitcase — and the case itself.
The clothing is mostly cheap and mass-produced, much of it available all over Australia from stores like Target. Probably the most distinctive garment is a glittery dark blue tutu. There is also one pink slipper-like shoe with a butterfly emblem.
Police have traced the likely origins of most of the 50-odd items of clothing found. But five brand names have not yet been traced back to retail outlets.
One is “Sally”. Others are “Miss X Australia”, “HF” and “Gaf”. The oddest one looks like HAOLAILH, printed on the tag in uneven capitals.
Police dressed a tot-sized mannequin in a new version of the blue tutu in the hope it would jog someone’s memory. So far, it hasn’t, even though only 28 of the tutus were sold in South Australia in the last eight years. Each sale has to be traced.
Perhaps the most intriguing clue is the quilt. It is a “one-off”, apparently homemade from mostly hexagonal patches of brightly patterned material but machine-stitched, not hand sewn.
On one hand, it could have been made by a relative of the girl’s — a loving grandmother, perhaps. Or it could have been picked up at an opportunity shop or some other charity. Either way, investigators want anyone who thinks they recognise it to tip them off — even anonymously.
The other clue is the suitcase itself. Like the clothes, the Lanza brand case is “budget” quality. Lanza is the cheapest line of the brands sold by the national luggage retail chain, Strandbags.
Police have learned that the store “gave away” a large number of the suitcases for as little as $9 each several years ago. Any one of them could have ended up in a charity store, or been picked up from the street during a hard rubbish collection, even recycled at a tip.
The suitcase is variously described as “faded blue” or “grey”, although police have used a black model to use for publicity purposes. Whatever its original colour, it looks as if it was severely weathered before the guilty party put the clothes and the bones in it.
The police suggest the Lanza was sold exclusively by Strandbags outlets at Murray Bridge, McLaren Vale, Rundle Mall, Salisbury and Elizabeth. The question of whether it could have been bought in Renmark or Mt Gambier or over the border in Mildura or Warrnambool — or at any of the other dozen or more stores in Victoria — remains unanswered.
AS the investigation moves into its second month, the neat man with the suitcase seems the strongest lead. Every day that he fails to come forward to clear himself confirms him as a better suspect.
The officer who took charge of the case last month, Detective Supt Des Bray, has since gone on leave.
Before he left he said: “The man with the suitcase is a bit of an unknown that could be something or absolutely nothing to do with the investigation. It is really strange that nobody has been able to identify him.”
Police have spoken to more than a dozen witnesses who saw a man matching the description of the “suitcase man” in the Wynarka district during the autumn.
Two specific sightings were on April 13 and May 26. Either there have been two men, both with suitcases, or the same man was walking around the district on and off for weeks. And then vanished.
www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/andrew-rule-behind-mystery-of-girl-in-suitcase-at-wynarka-south-australia/story-fni0fee2-1227485075838