JUSTICE FOR SAM:
Tessa Knight’s fight to keep her daughter’s killer in prison
Serial paedophile Michael Guider has come to the end of a 17-year jail sentence for the manslaughter of nine-year-old Bondi girl Samantha Knight. But Samantha’s longsuffering mother, Tess Knight, and a band of dedicated supporters are fighting to keep him locked away. Michael Sheather reports.
If Samantha Knight was still alive, she would be 42 years old. She might be married with a couple of kids of her own. She might be living overseas, pursing a career in the arts or academia, or living on a farm somewhere in rural NSW. She was a little girl whose life and vitality promised so much.
But Samantha Knight is not alive. That hopeful future never came to be. Instead, Samantha will forever remain the blonde, green-eyed, nine-year-old child depicted in her family’s photographs, a little girl frozen in time and place, a little girl whose innocence and life were stolen by a monster.
Samantha – Sam as she was known to family and friends – disappeared from a Bondi street close to her home on the afternoon of August 19, 1986. She had popped out to go to the local shops, but never returned – a little girl who vanished and left behind one of Sydney’s longest running and most confronting mysteries.
Michael Guider is a serial paedophile, a man convicted of Samantha Knight’s manslaughter and another 75 child abuse charges. He currently languishes in a NSW high-security jail, where he has been a prisoner for the past 17 years. He is about to complete that sentence, raising the chilling prospect that he may soon be released back into the community.
In all the years since Samantha Knight died, Guider, who had once been Samantha’s babysitter, has never recounted the full story of what really happened to her. His refusals to divulge what he did to her and where he hid her body lie at the heart of this disturbing story. Those stubborn refusals, and the cruelty they represent for her family and friends, are also among the reasons so many people, including Samantha’s mother Tess Knight, believe that Guider remains a dangerous predator who should
stay in jail, where he has no chance to offend again.
In a recent court hearing, Guider’s imminent release from prison was delayed, after an application to the NSW Supreme Court by the NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman, seeking psychological examinations to determine whether Guider may still pose a threat to innocent children.
“He has admitted very, very little,” Tess said outside the court. “He’s only made admissions when the evidence has forced him to make admissions. He has never given us details of what happened to Samantha. He has never given us admissions of what he did to her body. He … he has not been forthcoming in any way shape or form ever about any of the charges that have been laid against him, which are many. It’s not just about Samantha. And that’s the point
I’d like to stress. This is about the ongoing safety of the community. We can’t save Samantha. She’s gone…”
At this point Samantha’s mother, who attended court in support of the application, broke down in tears, unable to continue. A journalist suggested the words that Tess could not say: But you can maybe save others? “Yes.” Is that the end goal here? “Yes, absolutely.”
It was a bitterly poignant moment in a long and often painful ordeal for Tess Knight. Like any parent, Tess and the many people who support her want to know what Guider did with Samantha’s remains. So far, he has provided only vague descriptions of what transpired after he abducted Samantha.
The truth is that, for years, nobody had connected Guider to Sam’s disappearance. His methods were calculating: acquainting himself with potential victims and their families
through mutual contacts to establish a level of trust. That’s how he managed to become Samantha’s babysitter. Tess knew nothing about his intentions or the potential danger. His involvement was only confirmed a decade after she vanished, when he was in prison serving time for other child abuse charges.
A Dutch drug runner named Frank Soonius, who had been assaulted, was placed into protective custody alongside Guider. They played chess together, gradually got to know each other and, as they did, Guider began to recount the frightening details of his crimes, including what happened to a little girl named Sam.
Two years ago, Soonius spoke to the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes program about what Guider told him. He said that Guider was at first reluctant to give too much away, saying that if he ever told the entire story “they’d never let him out of jail”. But eventually Guider let down his guard and told Soonius about a little girl called Sam who Guider had abducted in Sydney. Soonius, as a Dutch national, didn’t know who Sam was but he listened with growing horror.
He said that after Guider had picked up the girl, he’d taken her to a shed, possibly the garden shed at the Kirribilli Royal Yacht Squadron on Sydney’s North Shore, where Guider worked as a gardener. There, Guider drugged the child with a commonly available prescription sedative, Normison, which he dissolved in a cola drink.
While the little girl was unconscious, he abused her and took photographs of her. But during the assault, says Soonius: “She woke up because she was in pain. She said ‘Michael, what are you doing?’ So, she recognised that it was Michael. He gave her another drink with another tablet, and she fell asleep again.”
Soonius said that Guider left Sam asleep on a couch and when he returned two hours later, she was cold and lifeless. Guider buried the little girl nearby but 18 months later returned to disinter the body when he feared construction work might reveal it.
The horror story continued, Soonius said, with a description of how Guider put the body in a bin and took it to a rubbish tip, where he made sure it was destroyed.
Soonius turned state witness against Guider and it was this evidence that impelled Guider to plead guilty to Samantha Knight’s manslaughter, saying that it was an accidental death. But in the years since, he has persistently refused to discuss details with police. Chief Inspector Darren Sly, who has worked on the case for many years, says Guider is a master manipulator who is only out for himself.
“I’ve looked him in the eye on several occasions and asked him where the body is,” Inspector Sly told one journalist, “but each time he says, ‘I don’t know’... He goes so far and then there is a part where he just can’t bring himself to tell us. Until he tells us where it is, the investigation isn’t over.”
One of the most disturbing aspects of Guider’s story is that, despite Samantha’s death, he continued drugging and abusing children for many years afterwards, revealing just how irresistible his sexual obsessions are.
One of those victims is 30-year-old Chantelle Hamilton, who was probably the last of Guider’s young victims before he was charged. She was just six when Guider inveigled his way into her family’s life.
“Michael Guider is a predator,” says Chantelle, now a mother of two children, speaking to The Weekly from South Australia, where she now lives. “He is a repeat offender. The only reason why he has not offended during the past 20 years is that he was locked safely behind prison bars.
“I was only six years old, which is just horrible. He used the same drug on me as he used on Sam. He used to take me and another girl to isolated places, drug us and take photographs. It’s simply too awful to contemplate.
“You have to remember that he did these things after Sam’s death, long after Sam’s death, so he did them in the knowledge that he had already taken it too far. There were many, many victims after Sam, including me. The worst outcome possible had already happened and that did not deter him. If that isn’t not showing remorse, then I don’t know what is.
“It’s black and white – Michael Guider is and always will be a predator and a threat to children. He has proven himself to be a master manipulator.
Everything he did was designed to deceive the people he interacted with, to charm his way into a family for his own purposes. It was a different time when people were more trusting. People like Michael Guider were able to hide in plain sight. He was very good at getting inside families. He seemed so happy and friendly and so fun, which is why children trusted him.”
Chantelle believes that Guider has not changed. Today, he is unshaven and bearded and looks much like a shambling wreck in photographs taken of him in jail. But Chantelle argues it’s another charade intended to deceive. “The way he looks, with his beard and long hair, he looks like a deranged man,” says Chantelle. “No one would let their child near a man who looks like that. He definitely didn’t look like that when we knew him. I guarantee that when he comes out of jail, he will not look that way.
“He is very smart. Everything he does, he does for a reason. I think he has made himself look the way he has so that when he is released, he can change his look completely. He will be clean cut and shaven and no one will be able to recognise him. He’s not going to come out of prison looking like a monster. He will come out of prison looking like an everyday person. Paedophiles are smart people – they manipulate children, they manipulate families, they manipulate the system and that is what he will do.”
Chantelle is now behind a national petition calling on politicians to legislate “Knight’s Law”, a law that honours Sam Knight’s name and stipulates that convicted child sex abusers and child killers who do not provide information on the whereabouts of a body spend their lives in prison. Her petition has attracted more than 155,000 signatures so far.
The Attorney General has filed an application in the NSW Supreme Court seeking a 12-month continuing detention order against Guider, as well as an additional five-year extended supervision order. And as we go to press, a judge is deliberating on Guider’s fitness for release.
Chantelle believes there are three possible outcomes. The first is that Michael Guider will be detained in prison. The second is that he will be released with surveillance. Finally, though, it is possible that he will be released with no restrictions on his movements.
“There are people who are saying that his release shouldn’t be a problem because he has done his time,” says Chantelle. “To them I would say that just because our law system says something doesn’t mean that it is right. Law changes all the time depending on the views of society.
“When Michael Guider was put in prison, social media and access to the internet on such a wide scale did not exist. The community he knew isn’t the community that we have now. Laws constantly change to fit the need of society. The law says people like Guider should be released because they have done their time. It seems wrong to me that someone like Guider, who has not revealed what happened to Samantha’s body, can take a young life but then be given a second chance at life themselves. Child abusers and child killers like him should never be released, not ever.”
To read more about Chantelle’s petition and Knight’s Law, visit: change.org/p/ don-t-let-michael-guider-hurt-any-morelittle-girls