Shift in focus of Toyah inquiry
Far North’s most chilling murders
POLICE are getting closer each day to finding Toyah Cordingley’s killer as new areas of interest are identified and searched.
Police have shifted their focus from Wangetti Beach to Lake Placid and Caravonica, with police, water police and the SES searching the area.
The searches have now wrapped up and it has been confirmed that several items were found.
A police spokesman also confirmed that divers who had been searching Moody Creek at Bungalow last weekend, along with a sniper that stood guard on croc watch on the bank, “does directly relate to the (homicide) investigation”.
A recent call on social media is also urging Cairns cyclists who rode up to the Barron River Power Station at Lake Placid between 4-6pm on October 21 to contact police.
The post noted that any footage of Impey St, Lake Placid Rd and Lower Barron Bridge may also be of interest.
But despite police turning their attention towards new locations, “the Wangetti Beach area still is a point of interest for (police)”.
A family friend of Ms Cordingley, Wayne ‘ Prong’ Trimble, will lead another search of the beach tomorrow.
He has called for anyone with drones and metal detectors to join in.
“We just want to have an-
other look,” Mr Trimble said.
He also spearheaded a bumper sticker campaign to help generate new lines of inquiry.
More than 12,000 stickers have been printed and are being distributed across the Far North.
Mr Trimble will join today’s Tablelands Toy Run, handing out 400 stickers along the run.
Stickers will also be available to pick up at the Yungaburra Markets today.
“Also we will be doing a southern run with Toyah's bumper stickers as far as Cardwell on Tuesday,” he said.
“Thanks for all your support you are all very special people.
“We will never give up.”
THE brutal and as yet unsolved slaying of Toyah Cordingley is not the only dark chapter in the story of Far North Queensland.
Over the past four decades, the region has been confronted with scenes of violence and tragedy – premeditated, spur of the moment, calculated or driven by the chaotic waves of mental illness.
MARK OF THE BLACK HAND
Thirty-seven years ago, the bodies of William Paul Clarke and his Latvian wife Grayvyda were found by a family friend at their Julatten farm.
The bodies, like the house, had been burned to a cinder.
One day after the story broke about the fire, Mareeba police identified the couple and revealed they had been killed with shotguns.
The Clarkes had been executed in a style reminiscent of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta crime gang, a rural-based organisation akin to the Sicilian mafia with ties to Melbourne and Griffith’s “grass castles” in NSW.
The Clarkes’ murder remains unsolved.
BUCHAN POINT BEACH
On August 4, Sydney TV scriptwriter Miranda Downes, 35, arrived in Cairns for what would have been anticipated as a tranquil tropical holiday.
An hour after arriving, she would be dead at the hands of pensioner Ernest Arthur Knibb.
It was Knibb’s ego that proved his downfall – an interview on TV’s 60 Minutes revealed inconsistencies in his alibi and he was found guilty at trial and jailed for life.
He was released from custody in 2013, aged 72.
CHERRY TREE CREEK
When best friends Vicki Arnold and Julie-Ann Leahy were found slain at Cherry Tree Creek in 1994, police believed Ms Arnold killed Ms Leahy and then herself.
The initial murder-suicide theory has been scorned by Atherton locals ever since.
In 2015, the Department of Public Prosecutions dropped a case against Julie-Ann’s husband, Alan Leahy, who maintained his innocence until his death in Alice Springs in July this year.
After three coronial inquests, the case remains unsolved.
THE DEATH OF INNOCENCE
In 1997, Michiko Okuyama – a Japanese tourist who could not speak English – was lured into a Cairns vault, beaten to death and stuffed in a wheelie bin.
Her death and the callousness of her juvenile killer stripped the tourist city of its innocence.
The youth was tried for murder in Cairns Supreme Court in 1998 and sentenced to life in prison.
During sentencing, Justice Stanley Jones said there was no doubt the crime was violent and particularly heinous – the two preconditions needed to hand down a life sentence to a minor.
A WOMAN IN FEAR
“Samantha Rooney didn’t go to work because she was sick in bed, she was dead under it.”
With these words, prosecutor Angus Edwards closed the case in Cairns Supreme Court against Clive William Erasmus, 40, who in 2002 strangled and beat to death his de facto partner before wrapping her body in a sheet and hiding it under their queen-size bed.
Erasmus controlled every facet of Ms Rooney’s life, and when he discovered she planned to escape to Mount Isa, would torment her with whispered threats as they lay in bed at Holloways Beach.
Ms Rooney’s nine-year-old son Joshua was asleep in the next room when his mother died, and spent the next three days unaware her body was hidden under a plywood bed base in their house at Cassava St.
Justice Stanley Jones called the assault “horrifying and particularly callous” and jailed Erasmus for life.
A PANEL BEATER’S SCHEME
Brandon Peter MacGowan was out of money and out of time. He owed Mount Isa couple Scott Maitland, 35, and Cindy Masonwells, 33, a $14,000 debt he could not repay.
The 43-year-old panel beater executed the pair because of an incomplete refurbishment job on a limited-edition Sandman panel van.
MacGowan murdered the Mount Isa couple in 2012, shooting him and stabbing her, before dumping their bodies in bushland behind Kanimbla.
He had just $1200 in the bank and two maxed-out credit cards when he decided to ambush and kill the couple.
MacGowan was sentenced to life with a non-parole period of 30 years, which was reduced to 24 after an appeal in 2015.
A RIVER OF GOLD
In a killing that harked back to the lawless days of the frontier gold rush, Palmerton station owners and graziers Stephen Struber and Dianne WilsonStruber shot miner Bruce Schuler after finding him foss- icking up a dry gully on their vast property in 2012.
A Cairns Supreme Court jury found that the couple killed Mr Schuler and disposed of his body somewhere on their 130,000ha property which spans a “river of gold”.
The High Court ruled it would not hear the appeal of the Cape York graziers and the pair are now serving life sentences.
Mr Schuler’s widow, Fiona Splitt, successfully campaigned for “no body, no parole” laws in Queensland, which means the Strubers will stay locked up until they reveal the location of Mr Schuler.
PARANOIA, ICE AND AN ESKY
Edmonton’s David Leslie
Hickson lived in a world of violence and retribution.
The hardcore ice user, debt collector and enforcer was part of the Cairns drug underworld for two years when he met Campbell Paterson.
After a failed weapons deal for crime world figure “Kadro”, Paterson went to Hickson’s Lord Close home and began to erect tarps and fishing nets for Hickson’s “protection”.
Already clouded by paranoia, Hickson felt caged in.
That night he injected methylamphetamine and after hours without sleep, confronted Paterson on November 7, 2014.
In the violence that followed, New Zealander Paterson was stabbed once above the right collarbone and bled out.
On trial for murder in the Cairns Supreme Court in 2016, Hickson admitted he killed Mr Paterson, but claimed it was self defence.
The jury was not convinced by Hickson’s version of events and he was jailed for life.
TRAGEDY ON MURRAY ST
Schizophrenic mother Raina Thaiday thought God wanted her to stab her children. So she did.
Suffering a chaotic spiral of disintegrating mental health, Thaiday thought the chirping of a bird was a divine signal to stab her seven children and niece in their Murray St home on December 19, 2014.
Her eldest son, Lewis Warria, 20, found the bodies throughout the house.
The Mental Health Court ruled that Thaiday had a defence of unsound mind and would not face prosecution over the children’s deaths.
When the moment of horror revealed itself, Cairns was stunned. Eight children – aged 2 to 15 – were dead.
The court would find that Thaiday – already susceptible to schizophrenia – was in a psychotic state.
The judge said there was no sign Thaiday was affected by drugs or alcohol at the time of the killings. The judge noted that in Thaiday’s mind, her actions were “the best thing she could do for them”.