introduction

amantha Knight loved her mum Tess, her cat Midnight and the Raggedy Ann doll that sat on her bed, Juliet. Her dad, Peter, didnt live with them any more but she loved him too. Her favourite book was an Australian classic called Playing Beattie Bow about an inquisitive little girl not too unlike herself. She collected stickers and rocks and was fond of strumming her guitar and playing dress-ups and board games. Samantha also liked school a lot and everyone thought she was clever, pretty and friendly. She was a sweetheart. In 1986, Sam was nine years old and happily residing in Bondi, home to the most famous of Sydneys sparkling eastern beaches. On a cool, damp August evening that year, however, just a short walk from her front door, she vanished. When no trace of her was found, a wave of public disbelief and sympathy erupted. It was an outpouring that quickly gave way to tremendous anger and fear once the realisation set in that she was never coming home. At the time, perhaps only the heartbreaking abduction of the Beaumont children two decades earlier in South Australias capital, Adelaide had triggered more widespread anguish.1 None of this emotion, though, could bring Sam back. For generations of Sydneysiders, her angelic image, staring out from a million missing-person flyers, would stay so, forever frozen. In the days and weeks after she disappeared, these flyers were plastered on power poles, walls and billboards across the city and sent thousands of kilometres beyond. Long ago rendered sepia
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by countless summer days, some could still be found stuck inside shop windows years later. The search for the petite primary schooler was the largest and most intensive ever undertaken by New South Wales Police. Yet it was doomed to fail: by the time the frantic effort began, Samantha was almost certainly already dead. Successive investigations into the circumstances of Sams fate were similarly fruitless. The men and women who conducted them looked in the wrong places and from the wrong beginnings. While they spent themselves trying to solve a random kidnapping the most obscure and difficult of all cases to crack Sams disappearance was no such thing. Samantha knew her killer well. The simple version is that before moving to Bondi, Tess and Sam had lived on the citys northern peninsula where hed been her best friends babysitter. The arrangement allowed the other little girls mother, a single parent like Tess, to have a night off. Without Tesss knowledge, let alone her consent, the bloke had also been trusted to mind Sam during a number of weekend sleepovers. And on several of the Friday or Saturday nights in question, another of her daughters playmates was invited over and quietly left in the sitters care as well. The circumstances were undoubtedly odd a single man in his mid-30s, childless and unrelated to any of the girls, watching over three primary school friends. However, the fact no one else was told about the arrangement by the woman who organised it whatever her reasons went beyond what was acceptable by anyones standard. She claims she never left the girls alone with the man but too many others simply say that she did. After Sams disappearance, Tess would have no recollection even of having met the contentious locum. It turned out shed once been introduced to him at a birthday picnic but the occasion was both fleeting and unremarkable. Then again, it would eventually emerge that he was highly accomplished at shifting
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in and out of peoples lives without leaving an impression, like a chameleon. He counted on it. Later, when Samantha went missing, the handful of people who were aware of her interaction with the man during the sleepover weekends and occasional after-school visits to her friends house, inexplicably kept it to themselves. Some, of course, were nave and failed to appreciate its tragic relevance. Others had more disturbing reasons. That no one came forward with such vital information beggars belief. As a consequence, the terrible truth about the link between Sam and the man who took her from Bondi Road on 19 August 1986 remained a secret for almost ten years. And even then, it required an impassioned effort on the part of a determined good Samaritan to convince anyone of it.

*
Denise Hofman met Michael Anthony Guider in 1993. Beyond his pudgy-faced cheerfulness and near faultless charm, however, she had no idea who he really was. That is until some two-and-ahalf years later, when Guider was suddenly arrested and charged with more than 60 child sex offences, some of them dating back almost two decades. In a state of deep shock, Denise then discovered that Samantha had almost certainly also been one of his victims. She immediately reported her suspicions to NSW Police. Of course, her actions should have brought the matter of Sams murder to a head right there and then. But they didnt and, shamefully, wouldnt for another two years despite her repeated pleas. Why no one in the force was prepared to take Denise seriously for so long is something shes not precisely sure of, even now. The sick and sorry state of the organisation she had to rely upon, though, certainly didnt help.
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The 1990s were a pitiful era for NSW policing. Criminal investigations were an enterprise under siege, courage under fire at headquarters was scarce, and detectives of the calibre required to resuscitate cases like Samanthas found themselves hopelessly shackled. Nearing the middle of the decade, theWood Royal Commission opened for business. Headed by Supreme Court Justice James Wood, it amounted to a three-year probe into predominantly ground-level corruption within the ranks. Its findings were sensational.The countrys oldest and largest constabulary was deemed rotten to its boozy core: crooked payments were rife; drugs, guns and money were being stolen; officers were turning a blind eye to and in some instances running with the mob.Wood believed the stench was systemic. It was the most many respectable policemen and women could do to simply walk away. The fallout from the inquisition was far-reaching too. The humiliation of those summoned to its hearing rooms became a daily spectacle splattered across the media. High-profile sackings and resignations followed, suicides were committed in the double digits, and for those left behind life on the thin blue line became a cold, cutting and sombre experience. At Bondi, the command where the inquiry into Samanthas whereabouts stagnated, no less than seven young officers came to public attention for using and selling party drugs during 1996. One, Clinton Moller, was arrested for refusing to appear before Wood to answer for his conduct and was found dead in his jail cell in April the following year. A month later, police internal affairs launched a covert drug operation targeting two more Bondi patrolmen, Rodney Podesta and Anthony Dilorenzo. On 28 June 1997, while still under scrutiny, the pair then shot and killed emotionally disturbed Frenchman Roni Levi during a standoff in front of scores of startled witnesses on Bondi Beach. It happened a mere six weeks after Wood had handed down his final report.
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Its hard to imagine things in the force could have gotten much worse. Perhaps it was little wonder then that Denise struck such unwillingness from them to follow through on her belief that Guider was literally getting away with murder. Astoundingly, senior commanders assured her that theyd checked her story and didnt even consider him a suspect.When she implored them to reconsider, they fobbed her off. There is little doubt the boys from Bondi seriously took their eyes off the ball when it came to properly evaluating the information Denise gave them. Rock-bottom morale aside, they simply failed to recognise that a suburban housewife had come to them with a lead that could help close the biggest case on their books. Instead, sidelining a somewhat meddlesome informant became more important than good police work.

*
Denise was warmly advised to put Sam behind her and go home, and for a time she did just that. In mid-1998, however, her hopes were rekindled with the announcement of a new strike force named Harrisville to look at the case independent of Bondi commands involvement. Giving things one more shot, she picked up the phone and contacted the officers in charge of Harrisville, specialist detectives Sergeant Steve Leach and Senior Constable Neil Tuckerman. To her amazement, 35 minutes later they were standing at her front door. After all that had happened, just inviting the two men into her home was nerve-racking. What Denise hadnt publicised or even told her family, for that matter was that shed been regularly visiting Michael Guider in jail for the previous two years in the desperate hope that hed offer a clue to the murder. Doing it had made her flesh crawl, but she was so certain of his
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guilt she was determined to have something done about it. Leach and Tuckerman were soon pretty certain too; they just needed proof. With their support, Denise kept on with her mission over the months that followed but hit a wall in the form of Guiders sociopathic refusal to talk. Nonetheless, the few vital details she was able to glean helped get things moving in the right direction. In stark contrast to the disconnected and misguided efforts that had gone before, the quality of the investigation that followed was first rate. Michael Guider was formally charged with the murder of Samantha Knight by the Harrisville team in February 2001 and committed for trial the following year.

*
In many ways, though, the book that follows is more about what happened after Guider was finally cornered. Prior to facing a jury, he decided to cut a deal and plead guilty to manslaughter. The case against him was a powerful one, but because Samanthas body was still missing he knew it relied on circumstantial evidence. It meant the prosecution would be more inclined to accept a compromise. The result was a legal win-win: the Crown got its man and closed the books on a 17-year-old mystery, and Guider escaped with just six years added to his original child molestation sentence. Even better for him, the capitulation meant he avoided having to explain himself to the world no third degree in the dock over his unnatural obsession with little girls, no grilling about how he found Sam, where he took her and why he killed her. All he had to do was admit he did the deed but hadnt meant to. All he had to say was, It was an accident,Your Honour. The official slate shows that Guider admits causing Sams death at an unknown location on or about the evening that
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she vanished and in circumstances he claims he can no longer recollect hardly inspiring stuff. It was none other than former royal commissioner James Wood who was on hand to sentence Guider on 28 July 2002. In doing so, he described the failure to establish exactly how or for what purpose Sam had died as particularly disturbing. Indeed, Wood found Guiders refusal to disclose either detail clearly indicative of his lack of remorse. Yet he felt there was little he could do about it. A quarter of a century on, another unanswered question lingers too: Where indeed are Sams remains? Over the years, Guider has given several explanations, each of them dubious, and certainly none have led to her recovery. Sadly, she has therefore never been found and has no known resting place. Without her body, Guiders assertion that Sams death was accidental is one that cant be disproved; not by legal standards anyway. In this sense, his conviction was a hollow victory for justice, one that has left Sams loved ones waiting in pathetic hope that he will one day relinquish the truth.

*
Its been such a long time since Samantha was alive. The world has changed so dramatically, theres much of it she wouldnt recognise or perhaps even comprehend. Theres so much she missed out on. She didnt get the opportunity to finish primary school let alone attend high school or discover what she was going to be when she grew up. Along the way, she never tried rollerblades, mastered Wheres Wally puzzles or watched The Simpsons. Unlike other little girls of the 1980s, she didnt become a teenager enthralled by Mariah Carey or Kylie Minogue in the 1990s either. She was already gone before either of them arrived.
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When other Gen Xers celebrated the Sydney Olympics and witnessed the horror of September 11, Sam wasnt there. She didnt own a mobile phone or try surfing the net. She didnt get to do much at all. In the last year of Sams life, Bob Hawke was Australias prime minister and Ronald Reagan the leader of the free world. Sydney, too, was a slightly smaller and gentler place.There were fewer cars and crowds and everyone seemed to have more spare time. The citys population was a relatively modest 3.4 million and its mightiest skyscraper was the now mundane MLC Centre on King and Castlereagh streets. When Sydneysiders visited the CBD in 1986 they often made a point of touring the newly renovated Queen Victoria Building next to the citys iconic Town Hall and within walking distance of the other big construction project of the day, Darling Harbour. Moviegoers flocking to see the latest blockbuster Top Gun, maybe, or Crocodile Dundee tended to stroll to the George Street cinema strip, rather than visit a suburban shopping centre as we do now. For those who preferred to stay in, DVD and Blu-ray were still a way off but VHS had managed to eclipse Betamax as the modern home entertainment system of choice. In fact, the mid1980s were often a two-horse consumer race. The cola wars between Coke and Pepsi were raging, Fab and Omo had the washing powder market pretty well cornered and, as far as family cars went, everyones dad drove either a Ford or a Holden; todays European and Japanese makes didnt get much of a look in. Neither, for that matter, did overseas beers or fancy wines. Blokes drank VB or Tooheys New and women enjoyed a glass of riesling or moselle. Eighties kids didnt know about PlayStation, Wii or iPads. Instead, they played Atari and Pac-Man and rode skateboards and BMX bikes, or they learned how to perfect Michael Jacksons moonwalk or the latest yo-yo tricks. Sam, though, never got to
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master any of the crazes from the end of the 1980s and beyond that we thought were so cool none of them. Pop charts for much of the decade hosted a hit-for-hit battle between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. But Sam didnt live long enough to see who won the contest or just how hugely popular Madonna eventually became. She was still with us as girls everywhere began wearing the leg-warmers and layered socks Madonna made so famous in her early video clips along with her wildly teased hair, lace gloves and trademark mole but ever so briefly. When Reebok high tops and shoulder pads came into vogue, Samantha Knight was already long gone. She never got to experience a first kiss, do her HSC, turn 21, marry or have babies. Instead, she had the fatal misfortune to be happened upon and systematically abused by Michael Guider. Her delicate innocence and trust were betrayed by him, a man who knew better but placed his own appalling needs first despite the cost of a young life cut desperately short. Denise Hofman and John Kidman

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