Sister’s plea for location of body
‘I think about it nearly every day’
WITH the location of her sister’s body still a mystery, former Warwick resident Lyn McMillan couldn’t bring herself to turn on the TV to watch a north Queensland family get the closure she longs for.
Sentenced in a landmark “No Body, No Parole” case last week, an Innisfail man revealed where he left the body of his partner after killing her.
The man said he was motivated by the No Body, No Parole laws passed in Queensland last year, making it compulsory for murderers to disclose the location of their victim’s body to be eligible for parole.
But Ms McMillan said despite this success, it would take an amendment of the laws to get her sister’s convicted killer to confess where her body was.
“I think that is his dirty little secret that he will take to his grave,” she said.
In 2015, Toowoomba man Ian Phillip Hannaford was handed a life sentence after a jury found him guilty of murdering Warwick woman Gail Lynch in 2012.
“He can sit in his jail cell and know where she is while no one else does,” Ms Lynch’s sister Lyn McMillan said.
Ms McMillan said the knowledge gave the convicted man “power” that was unbearable for her to think about.
But Ms McMillan still holds hope for finding her sister’s body.
“I think about it nearly every day,” she said.
“We don’t have anything to remind us of Gail. We don’t have her ashes, we don’t have a grave site, we don’t have a resting place or a memorial of where she was killed.
“If we have those things it would validate that Gail existed in this world.
“She lived up to 55 years of age and then she fell off the face of the earth and there is nothing.”