THE KEY PLAYERS
scribe the “frustrating’’.
“You don’t like to think someone got away with such a serious and horrendous crime,’’ Inspector Pease said.
“Linda had such a strong work ethic that everyone found it strange when she didn’t come back from lunch that day and it was a complete mystery at first.’’
Even after Linda’s body was found, police were still baffled how and why she had been taken from the car park.
Two years after her death, there was a breakthrough when a Boggo Road Jail prisoner asked to see police.
That prisoner, Graham Steer, told officers that another inmate, Craig McConnell, had confessed he had killed Linda Reed and then eaten her sandwiches.
Steer, then 45, was on remand and McConnell, then 21, murder as was a murderer.
McConnell, a former printing apprentice, had surprised many people by pleading guilty in the Supreme Court in convicted double Brisbane in 1985 to the murders of Tweed Heads sex shop owner Kevin Mannix and Surfers Paradise call girl Lovina Cunningham. He had cut the throats of Mannix and Cunningham during robberies.
McConnell was serving two life sentences when he was linked to the Reed homicide.
The Crown case, which was largely based on Steer’s statement concerning McConnell’s confession, was that McConnell and Greg Rooker, who died of a self-administered drug overdose, had been trying to steal from a car in a Pacific Fair car park and thought Linda Reed had spotted them. They bundled her back into her car and drove off from the car park to the murder scene.
“It made sense to us and until then we had no idea why she would be taken from the car park,’’ Pease said.
When he interviewed McConnell in Boggo Road Jail on December 17, 1985, McConnell told him: “You’ve got the wrong man.’’
Steer had six meetings with detectives and told of many discussions with McConnell over the Reed murder.
In court, he said Linda had warned her killer “Rob will get you’’ as they drove from Pacific Fair.
Pease said Linda always called her husband Rob, never Bob or Robbie or any other derivation of Robert.
“(Steer) also told how McConnell told him he had eaten Linda’s sandwiches and that they had cheese and pickles in them,’’ Pease said. “Our scientific people even found traces of cheese in Linda’s car.’’
Pease said McConnell had drawn a mud map for Steer of the murder scene at Gaven.
“The map was drawn on a welfare sheet and it showed a line of pine trees and where the body was in the creek and it was exactly as we found the murder scene to be,’’ he said.
But after a Supreme Court trial lasting almost three weeks and involving 59 witnesses, on October 7, 1986, a jury of nine men and three women found McConnell not guilty of the murder.
McConnell stood motionless, his hands at his sides as the jury returned the verdict.
“I never believed in going down for something I never done,’’ McConnell said from the dock before he was returned to prison to continue serving his two life sentences.
An inquest was held into Linda Reed’s murder in 1987.
Outside the coronial hearing, Mrs Fein had blinked back tears and said Linda’s death was a chapter of the family’s lives that would never close. “It’s not fair – all she did was go to work and never return,’’ she said.
But the enormity of pain felt by the family was uttered by Linda’s shattered husband Rob, who told coroner Mr L. O’Connell: “I still cry myself to sleep sometimes.’’
THE VICTIM
LINDA REED: The newly married 21-year-old took a break from her retail assistant job at a Pacific Fair department store, escaping the Christmas crowds of 1983 by retreating to her car for a sandwich. She never returned, sparking a threeday search that ended when her bound and gagged body was found in bushland at Gaven.
THE HUSBAND
ROBERT REED: When he learned Linda had not returned from lunch, the young husband began his own frantic search of the Pacific Fair car park and places he knew his attractive wife liked to frequent. Her death left him a shattered man, with him telling an inquest years later that he still cried himself to sleep.
THE MOTHER
NANCY FEIN: The worried mother went to Broadbeach police to report her daughter missing, later telling the Bulletin it was out of character for Linda to “just disappear’’. In recent years she acknowledged time was running out for her to see justice for her daughter.
THE FATHER
OSKAR FEIN: Tragically, the grieving father went to his grave never knowing the outcome of the decades-long hunt for whoever was responsible for Linda’s abduction and death. The cancer patient said in 2010 he just wanted answers. “I deserve that,’’ he said.
CHIEF SUSPECT AT THE TIME
CRAIG McCONNELL: The former apprentice was serving two life sentences for the grisly murders of sex shop owner Kevin Mannix and Surfers Paradise call girl Lovina Cunningham when another prisoner told police McConnell had confessed to killing
Linda Reed.
A map McConnell allegedly sketched of the murder scene and details he mentioned to the prisoner convinced police at the time he was the killer. McConnell was charged but another witness vital to the case died from a drug overdose before the trial. McConnell strongly denied killing Linda and was found not guilty.
I KNEW MY DAUGHTER WELL. LINDA WAS VERY RESPONSIBLE AND WOULDN’T JUST DISAPPEAR. IT WAS TOTALLY OUT OF CHARACTER.