Flinders Highway HORROR
DOES A SERIAL KILLER PROWL QUEENSLAND’S REMOTE STRETCH OF ROAD?
A775-kilometre highway snaking across Queensland could have been the hunting ground for an unfettered Australian serial killer for decades.
Over the past 50 years, the Flinders Highway has played host to nearly a dozen murders and disappearances, and the unknown perpetrator could still be out there.
The road has been aptly nicknamed the ‘Highway of Death’ and some experts believe the crimes were the handiwork of one bloodthirsty serial killer.
New leads in the disappearance of Perth hitchhiker Tony Jones, who vanished on this stretch of highway in 1982, have intensified theories that a prolific lone killer was once at large.
Jones’ case was the subject of Channel Nine’s Under Investigation series, which investigated why the remote highway was the perfect setting for horrific crimes.
“If somebody, even if they hadn’t planned to do what they did, there’s the sort of person who would see an opportunity and take it,” former Queensland detective Jim Slade explained on the show. “And this place adds to his feelings of safety because there’s no witnesses, he feels safe operating there.”
Former FBI criminal profiler Mike King is also among a panel of criminal experts who believe Flinders Highway was the playground of a deranged serial killer.
King, who hosts the podcast series Mapping Evil, said he became fascinated with the history of the treacherous stretch of road and began researching victims to find links.
“I thought it would be better to start looking at the victimology and the victim selection process to determine if you have a single serial killer,” he told The Cairns Post in 2021.
“Or maybe there have been multiple serial killers, or it could be natural events, accidents, and this road becomes the bogeyman.”
Among the dead is 22-year-old Jayden Pennotompsett, the most recent victim of the unforgivable Flinders Highway.
Penno-tompsett went missing on New Year’s Eve in 2017 while on a road trip from Newcastle to Cairns. The young NSW man had vanished after walking into the bush near Charters Towers in Queensland following an argument with a friend.
His still-unsolved disappearance occurred just days after 26-year-old Reece Kearney also went missing on Flinders Highway. He was last seen filling up his motorcycle in the same area.
Both men have never been found.
Talk of the Flinders Highway serial killer can be traced back to 1970, when sisters Judith and Susan Mackay disappeared from
a bus stop in Townsville.
Aged just 7 and 5, they were found two days later in a creek bed 25 kilometres away. They had been raped and stabbed to death.
Locals were horrified at the idea a serial killer may be stalking young children as they walked home from school. But the suspect’s modus operandi never quite remained the same.
The next victims were teenage hitchhikers Robin Jeanne Hoinvillebartram,19, and Anita Cunningham,18.
They managed to cross the border into Queensland before they unfortunately crossed paths with evil.
Four months after they went missing, on November 15, 1972, Hoinville-bartram’s remains were found buried in a shallow grave, 80 kilometres from Charters Towers. Cunningham has never been found.
Just two years later, in 1974, 18-year-old door-todoor saleswoman Catherine
Graham called her mother from a payphone in distress.
She had spotted a stranger following her along the road as she knocked on doors around Townsville.
The next day, her badly beaten body was discovered near the Flinders Highway, eerily close to where the Mackay sisters had been found.
The killings took a fouryear hiatus before the highway became the scene of a horrific triple murder. This time, it was three friends who were out on a motorcycle road trip in 1978.
Known as the ‘Spear Creek Killings’, Karen Edwards, 23, Timothy Thomson, 31, and Gordon Swaddle, 21, were found murdered and their bodies propped up against trees in bushland.
It wasn’t until April 2019, over 40 years later, that police finally made an arrest; former prison guard, 64-year-old Bruce John Preston.
He is accused of killing the three friends following
‘Maybe there have been multiple serial killers’
a cold case investigation and is not believed to be linked to any other disappearances. In January 2020, he was granted bail, and no trial has been held.
The horror highway killer supposedly didn’t strike again for decades, with some believing former Queensland police officer Mick Isles was also a victim of foul play.
Isles disappeared off the stretch of road in 2009, leaving his abandoned police car 80 kilometres from the station. His body has never been found and, while a coroner eventually ruled it as suicide, his friends and family believe he may have been killed.