Twisted murders in paradise
The seaside playground of Port Douglas and its magical surroundings have been the scene of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable
WHILE the glitzy seaside town of Port Douglas and its magical surroundings aren’t normally associated with predatory crime and bloodshed, the stunning destination has borne witness to some of the worst.
Many unspeakable acts of violence have put places like Port Douglas, Mossman, Julatten, Daintree and Cooktown up in lights on a national scale over the years and have shaken these easygoing towns to their core.
Mossman CIB Detective Trevor Perham, (pictured inset), arrived in the Douglas Shire from Brisbane in 2001 “expecting a homicide a year”.
Thankfully the experienced cop has only had to endure a fraction of that number, yet the grisly details of the shocking and calculated killings have left a permanent stain.
“It’s not murder central here and it's not a dangerous place to visit, but it’s not immune to homicide,” he said.
“Because they are not a daily occurrence, when they do occur people stop and think about it. And whenever murder happens close to home it has a lasting effect because people can relate to it.”
He used slain 24-year-old Toyah Cordingley as an example of how a horrifying and predatory attack could change the way residents live their lives.
Ms Cordingley was found dead on Wangetti Beach in 2018.
“We have only had two or three murders in my time across the last 20-odd years, so they are few and far between but they do occur,” he said.
“You only have to look at Toyah and the effect her death has had on the greater region; it was phenomenal. That happened on our doorstep.”
Here’s a look at some of the more shocking killings that have gripped Port Douglas.
BOW AND ARROW MURDER
A dispute over a missing GoPro and a hunting knife turned deadly in the quiet Far North town of Mossman almost four years ago.
It took a jury earlier this year just four hours to find Joshua James Richards, 30, guilty of the murder of 38-year-old roof labourer Dennis Beattie from Cooya Beach.
The court heard Richards shot Mr Beattie in the chest with an archer arrow in October, 2018, and disposed of his body near the back of a Mossman cane farm.
The trial heard, it followed an argument over the missing items, with Richards claiming the deceased had pinched them.
Richards pleaded not guilty to murder, admitting to only interference with a corpse and arson.
Justice Jim Henry told the court “the coverup, the lies, the mistreatment of the body and so forth were all at odds with someone who would kill accidentally.”
“You were angry with him, you were obsessed, and in that split second moment when he made the decision to lunge at you, the reaction was ‘stuff you’,” he said.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
ROSSVILLE HORROR
It was a shocking murder suicide that crippled the hearts and minds of a tight-knit township just 60km north of Cape Tribulation.
Shockwaves were sent up and down the Daintree coast when the bodies of Troy Harvey, 45, and son Koah, 4, were found at a River Rd property at Rossville on a September morning in 2020.
Police alleged the troubled father had killed his son following an assault on the boy’s mother earlier that day.
Two crime scenes were established at the property and another residence, with investigations involving multiple detectives, scenes of crime and scientific officers.
Detective Inspector Jason Smith said at the time the event had proved particularly disturbing and traumatic for local residents.
“People in Rossville have been devastated by these tragic events,” he said.
Mr Harvey took to social media several weeks prior to the callous murder, saying he had suffered a “nervous mental breakdown” brought on by long term alcohol and drug use.
Koah’s heartbroken mum, Natsuko Kurihara, posted an emotional tribute following her son’s death, asking him to forgive her.
Her son had been taken from her by Harvey the night before.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you,” she wrote. The horrific tragedy will long haunt the small town of around 200 people.
We have only had two or three murders in my time across the last 20-odd years, so they are few and far between but they do occur. You only have to look at Toyah and the effect her death has had on the greater region; it was phenomenal.
HANGING OF ELLEN THOMSON
Ellen Thomson is the only woman legally hanged in Queensland after being found guilty of the murder of her husband, William “Billy” Thomson, in 1886.
She has been described as a scarlet woman turned violent murderess after an affair with a much younger man, but did she get a fair trial? The question was the focus of an award-winning novel Beyond a Reasonable Doubt? and her story
has been recounted for years in Port Douglas through reenactments by the Douglas Historical Society.
Mr Thomson’s gravestone at the Port Douglas cemetery reads he “met his death by cruel and treacherous murder” on October 22, 1886. He was 66 years old. Mr and Mrs Thomson married in 1880, two years after the latter arrived in Port Douglas to commence work as his housekeeper at a farm on the Mossman River.
Things turned sour six years later when Ms Thomson’s friendship with John Harrison “a young marine deserter” caused a major conflict that would lead to homicide.
At a trial in Townsville, Justice Pope Cooper found Ms Thomson and
Mr Harrison “guilty of the crime of murder”, claiming he had “no doubt whatever” it was the latter who killed “old man Thomson”.
“I confidently believe that Thomson’s wife was present at the time aiding and abetting you.”
He sentenced her to death and to “be led to the place of execution, and that you be hanged by the neck until your body be dead.”
Mr Harrison confessed that he alone shot and killed Mr Thomson on the eve of his hanging.
WANGETTI BEACH SLAYING
Few crimes have rocked the Douglas Shire like the brutal alleged murder of Toyah Cordingley.
Innocence was taken on Wangetti Beach on October 21, 2018, when, after taking her dog for a walk, the 24-year-old was allegedly slain in a vicious and random attack.
Her remains were found by her father the following day.
A nationwide manhunt ensued with her killer yet to be brought to justice.
An extradition request has been sought and issued to India for a person of interest – Innisfail resident Rajwinder Singh.
The Cairns Post is not suggesting he is guilty of the alleged murder — only that he is a person of interest in the unsolved case.
Mr Singh flew to India shortly after the body was found.
A permanent memorial of Ms Cordingley has been erected at the beautiful Far North beach near where she took her last steps.
BABY-FACED KILLER
A baby-faced former footballer turned coldblooded killer made headlines around the world when he was found guilty of murdering Cooktown mum Donna
Steele.
The much loved 42-yearold was reported missing from her home on the outskirts of the Far North town.
Her body was found floating, face down, in an inlet off the Endeavour
River.
Police would scour the crocodile infested estuary to piece together who was responsible for her death.
It was that brilliant police work that cracked the case.
A DNA sample, taken from a piece of red twine found near Ms Steele’s body, would return an exact match for Matthew Ross White, 26, who would eventually confess to killing her.
Chillingly, he told police he drove to Cooktown and hid under Ms Steele’s bed wearing a stocking over his head. He strangled her with the red twine and a silk scarf in a twisted attempt to extort money.
He then wrapped her body in a doona and drove her to Leggett’s Crossing, weighing her down with rocks before fleeing.
He pleaded guilty to murder and is serving a life sentence.
Amother and teenage daughter sit in the family car, having the sort of conversation parents and teens have the world over. Outside school and sporting grounds, in suburban driveways and shopping centre carparks, the questions remain the same: “Did you have a good day?”, “School going OK?”, “How was training?”, “Is there anything bothering you?” Or, in this particular car, on this particular day: “Do you want to give up swimming, because it’s completely OK if you do?”
Fast forward 10 years after her mother Susie asked a then-17-year-old Emma McKeon this question, and McKeon notes with characteristic modesty that she’s “pretty pleased” she ultimately didn’t hang up her goggles.
So is the rest of Australia, with the now 27year-old McKeon’s blistering performance at the 2021 Olympics seeing her bring home an astonishing seven medals (four gold and three bronze), the most of any competitor across all sports in Tokyo.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of McKeon’s Olympic achievement, her tour de force saw records tumble like so many tottering pins in a bowling alley.
To list just a few: McKeon’s Tokyo turn saw her become the first woman to win two gold medals on the same day (50m freestyle and 4x100 relay), and the most awarded female competitor in one Games in Olympic history.
If her previous four medals (one gold, two silver and one bronze) from the 2016 Rio Games are included, her 11-medal haul makes the freestyle and butterfly sprinter the most decorated Australian Olympian of all time – and in any sport. So yes, it’s safe to say the champion swimmer gave the right answer to her mother all those years ago. But it was also, McKeon notes, exactly the right question.
“I remember my teenage years were for a while about wanting to swim, then not wanting to swim, and Mum and Dad were always really there for me,” McKeon says from her parents’ home in Wollongong where she is on a short holiday before returning to her base on Queensland’s Gold Coast.
“They’d say if you’re not happy just stop it, but if you are going to do it, do it properly. I was going back and forth, and one time after training I was sitting in the car with mum and I was really upset, and she just said, ‘Maybe swimming is just not for you, you’ve been here before’ and she asked me if I wanted to give up and told me it was OK if I did.”
McKeon is quiet for a few moments.
“What was great about that was that my parents gave me the freedom to come to that decision myself, so that when I did eventually decide to keep swimming, it was all me.”
And from then on, McKeon was all in, putting her own doubts – and the crushing setback that had fuelled them – behind her. Because at 17 years old, McKeon had missed out – by just one spot – for selection in the Australian 100m freestyle relay team in the 2012 London Olympics. It was a tough pill for a teenager to swallow, especially as her older brother David did secure a berth in the 200m and 400m freestyle, as did the sibling’s then training partner Jarrod Poort in the 1500m.
“I was in Year 12 at the time I missed out and I was pretty upset about it,” she remembers.
“I did go to London to support David but I just lost my own enthusiasm. Because I knew I wanted to go to the Olympics myself, but the next one was four years away and when you are 17, well, four years just seems like forever. So, with my parents’ support, I did stop for a little while and just enjoyed being a teenager, hanging out with my friends and not missing out on things because of training.”
But after a few weeks, McKeon found herself missing it all; the sharp smell of chlorine, the camaraderie of the pool deck, even the early
I REMEMBER MY TEENAGE YEARS WERE FOR A WHILE ABOUT WANTING TO SWIM, THEN NOT WANTING TO SWIM, AND MUM AND DAD WERE ALWAYS THERE FOR ME
morning starts. So she got back in the water, literally and figuratively. And she’s hoping her sliding door moment might help another young person who feels like their life is at a crossroads.
“I’d like to say to young people who might be unsure about what they’re doing, or who have missed out on something that it’s never too late to try again. There will always be another opportunity, and you can learn from any setback you experience. I think you can learn as much from losing as you can from winning, maybe more in some ways.”
In her lengthy swimming career McKeon has
known the agony and ecstasy of both. But judging from her megawatt smile every time she stepped up to the Tokyo Games podium, victory feels a whole lot sweeter.
More so, perhaps, because for McKeon, particularly as an individual swimmer, it’s been a long time coming.
“It was Emma’s moment,” Michael Bohl says of the Tokyo Olympics “it was just absolutely her moment.”
Bohl, 59, who recently won Swimming Australia’s “Olympic Coach of the Year” has been coaching McKeon since 2014; first at Brisbane’s western suburbs St Peters club, and since 2017, in his elite squad at Griffith University’s Gold Coast Campus. But his ties to McKeon go much further back.
A former swimmer, Bohl was part of Australia’s 1982 Commonwealth Games swim team, alongside McKeons’s mother Susie. He also was on the Australian Institute of Sport 1984 swim team with McKeon’s two-time Olympian father Ron.
Indeed, when Ron McKeon, who had previously coached his children (David, Emma and Caitlin) at the family’s McKeon’s Swim School in Wollongong, decided it was time for someone else to take over the role, it was his old friend Bohl he ultimately turned to (after relocating to Brisbane in 2013, Emma McKeon also trained for a time under Vince Raleigh at Brisbane’s Chandler club).
Apart from her own family, there is perhaps no one who is more thrilled than Bohl with McKeon’s Olympic performance – or who knows better what it took to get there.
“She really wanted this from the depths of her being,” Bohl says of her three individual (gold in the 100m and 50m freestyle, bronze in the 100m butterfly) and four relay (gold in the 4x100 freestyle and medley, bronze in the 4x100 mixed medley, and women’s 4x200 freestyle medley) medal haul.
But it was McKeon’s individual medals that saw her step out of the long shadows cast by swimming sisters and freestyle specialists Bronte and Cate Campbell.
“Emma has been known as a relay swimmer predominantly for some time, and everyone knows how good she is at that,” Bohl says.
Indeed, McKeon has swum on every single Australian relay team since 2014, in freestyle and butterfly 100, 200 and 400m events, and as part of the record-setting 400m freestyle relay team at the 2016 Rio Games. But an individual Olympic gold has eluded her, until Tokyo where she stepped into the spotlight as a solo act.
“Emma has been in a position to do something special for the last few years but then she has become sick or gotten injured at some really inopportune moments” Bohl says.
“She did really well in 2017 at the World Championships in Hungary (McKeon won silver in the 100m butterfly), but in 2018 she had shoulder issues and wasn’t really able to train with much consistency. Then in 2019, she had prepared so well for the Korea World Championships, and then I think it was the day before her first swim she fell really ill with a really stuffy nose, and aches.”
McKeon’s sickness saw her pull out of 200m freestyle in Korea, an event she was widely tipped to win.
In 2020, it was not illness or injury that set
McKeon back, but Covid, the global pandemic delaying the Tokyo Olympics just as McKeon was really making her mark, winning gold in the 100m butterfly in the NSW State champions, and clocking the fastest time in the world.
“She was visibly upset when it was announced Tokyo was going to be postponed” Bohl recalls, “she just started to cry. It was about a week after the NSW championship, and she had come so far, and was so ready, it was a bit tough to initially accept.”
McKeon agrees. “I think I was just in shock because I had been so focused, I didn’t allow myself to think about it being cancelled. Bohly said we needed to just take a break, take a reset and come back stronger, so he did the smartest thing he could do for me and sent me home.”
McKeon spent from March to July of that year in Wollongong with her parents, and younger sister Caitlin, spending time with her family, going to the beach and plotting her return to competition.
And when a well rested and relaxed McKeon did return to her first major meet, the Queensland State Championships in December, she put the swimming world on notice, recording the fastest time in the world for the 100m freestyle in 2020.
It was a taste of what was to come in Tokyo, and while some were surprised by her blistering form, Bohl and McKeon were not.
“I’d seen what she could do, what she was capable of, given the right circumstances …” Bohl says. “I always believed she could do it, give Emma a setback and she’ll come back stronger every time.”
As for McKeon, she says Bohl’s belief in her has propelled her through every moment of self-doubt.
“I think the biggest gift he’s given me is self belief,” she says. “To have someone like him believing in you is pretty affirming … Bohly is always right there to say ‘of course you can’. More importantly, he has taught me to base that belief off hard work. You have to believe it yourself of course, but you have to put in the work. It takes time, and it takes practise”.
It also takes nine, two-hour swims weekly, three one-and-a half-hour gym sessions, three spin-weight sessions, as well as regular pilates, physio, massage, psychology and diet sessions.
“When you’re training, every single decision you make, from what you eat to when you sleep 24/7 is about performance,” McKeon chuckles. “We’re all a little crazy”.
Right now, though, McKeon is taking a little time off from the crazy, relaxing after the Olympics, and also the European World Titles where she competed after Tokyo. She is also – all these months later – still digesting her breakout performance in the Japanese capital.
“I think it’s finally sunk in as much as it’s going to,” McKeon muses.
“The thing is, straight after Tokyo we all (the Australian team) went into quarantine in
Darwin for two weeks, and then I went to Wollongong to be with my family and straight into a lockdown for two weeks. Then I left Australia and raced in Europe and didn’t get home until last December, so it’s only really been since January this year that I’ve had a chance to really think about it all.”
And what does she think about it all? McKeon muses: “Well, it’s pretty wonderful, and now I am back and starting to do interviews and meet people who come up to me to say ‘congratulations’, it’s just really nice. I like reflecting on what happened, and the thing I really like is people have been telling me how good it was to watch the swimming during lockdown, that the Olympics helped get them through a tough time, I hadn’t really thought about that, and it made me feel pretty good.
“But I think the best part for me is the little kids who come and chat to me, because I’ve been that little kid. I’ve been that little person so in awe of athletes.”
McKeon is making the most of her time in Wollongong, spending time with friends, playing with her new puppy, Hud, and going to the beach before the craziness begins again.
Because when McKeon returns to the Gold Coast next week, training with her Griffith teammates under Bohl, she will be “all in” again.
“That’s why I’m having this long break now, since January,” she says. “Because I’m getting ready, physically and mentally, for training again. I want to be fresh, and I want to be motivated. Bohly and I wouldn’t keep going if we both didn’t know I could keep improving, and that’s what motivates me.”
McKeon, who holds a Bachelor of Health Promotion, a degree she undertook part time for seven years, admits that as wonderful as her break has been there is part of her that’s itching to get back in the pool.
While the next Olympics might seem a while off, the postponement of the Tokyo games means Paris is now just two years and four months away.
McKeon will be one of the older swimmers in Paris, a testament to her long career in the water, and giving her, Bohl says, valuable experience at competing at an Olympic level.
“I think Michael Phelps was 32 when he won, and I think the youngest swimmer to win ever was 15,” Bohl says. “So if you’re fast enough – either way – you’re old enough.”
I’M GETTING READY, PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY, FOR TRAINING AGAIN. I WANT TO BE FRESH, AND I WANT TO BE MOTIVATED.