Forever Nine Extract

7/16/2019 Forever Nine Extract

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introduction

Samantha Knight loved her mum Tess, her cat Midnight and

the Raggedy Ann doll that sat on her bed, Juliet. Her dad,

Peter, didn’t 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 Sydney’s 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 tre-

mendous anger and fear once the realisation set in that she wasnever coming home. At the time, perhaps only the heartbreaking

abduction of the Beaumont children – two decades earlier

in South Australia’s 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 Sam’s 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 – Sam’s

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 city’s

northern peninsula where he’d been her best friend’s babysitter.

The arrangement allowed the other little girl’s mother, a single

parent like Tess, to have a night off. Without Tess’s 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

daughter’s playmates was invited over and quietly left in the

sitter’s care as well.

The circumstances were undoubtedly odd – a single man in

his mid-30s, childless and unrelated to any of the girls, watchingover 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

anyone’s standard. She claims she never left the girls alone with

the man but too many others simply say that she did.

After Sam’s disappearance, Tess would have no recollection

even of having met the contentious locum. It turned out she’d

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 people’s 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 sleepoverweekends and occasional after-school visits to her friend’s house,

inexplicably kept it to themselves. Some, of course, were naïve

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-a-

half 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 oneof his victims. She immediately reported her suspicions to

NSW Police.

Of course, her actions should have brought the matter of

Sam’s murder to a head right there and then. But they didn’t and,

shamefully, wouldn’t 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 she’s not precisely sure of, even now.

The sick and sorry state of the organisation she had to rely upon,

though, certainly didn’t help.



forever nine

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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 Samantha’s found themselveshopelessly 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 sensa-

tional. The country’s 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 adaily 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 Samantha’s

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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It’s 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 thatGuider was literally getting away with murder. Astoundingly,

senior commanders assured her that they’d checked her story

and didn’t 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

command’s involvement.

Giving things one more shot, she picked up the phone andcontacted 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 hadn’t publicised –

or even told her family, for that matter – was that she’d been

regularly visiting Michael Guider in jail for the previous two

years in the desperate hope that he’d 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 overthe months that followed but hit a wall in the form of Guider’s

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 whathappened 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 Samantha’s

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 andclosed 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 hadn’t meant to. All he had

to say was, ‘It was an accident, Your Honour.’

The official slate shows that Guider admits causing Sam’s

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. Indoing so, he described the failure to establish exactly how or for

what purpose Sam had died as particularly disturbing. Indeed,

Wood found Guider’s 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 Sam’s 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, Guider’s assertion that Sam’s death was

accidental is one that can’t be disproved; not by legal standards

anyway.In this sense, his conviction was a hollow victory for justice,

one that has left Sam’s loved ones waiting in pathetic hope that

he will one day relinquish the truth.

*It’s been such a long time since Samantha was alive. The worldhas changed so dramatically, there’s much of it she wouldn’t

recognise or perhaps even comprehend. There’s so much she

missed out on.

She didn’t 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 Where’s Wally puzzles or watched The Simpsons. Unlike

other little girls of the 1980s, she didn’t 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 wasn’t there. She

didn’t own a mobile phone or try surfing the net. She didn’t get

to do much at all.In the last year of Sam’s life, Bob Hawke was Australia’s 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 city’s 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 city’s 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 Streetcinema 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 mid-

1980s were often a two-horse consumer race. The ‘cola wars’

between Coke and Pepsi were raging, Fab and Omo had thewashing powder market pretty well cornered and, as far as

family cars went, everyone’s dad drove either a Ford or a Holden;

today’s European and Japanese makes didn’t 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 didn’t 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 Jackson’s

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 didn’t live longenough 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 experi-

ence 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 younglife cut desperately short.

Denise Hofman and John Kidman

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Forever Nine Extract