Unsolved The Wanda Beach Murders
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He may have been in a relationship at the time. although his marriage was short lived.
In my my mind, he's an outside favorite for Beaumont Case. (66)
In his later attacks, Wilder often used props. For instance he carried a professional looking camera and possibly a camera bag. Lets assume he used the same MO in the Wander murders. “come on girls you look like super models!, can I take a few photos?”
The camera bag also served a secondary purpose, it contained an large knife and possibly rope. To tie Wilder into the Wander Beach murders, Id be looking for imprints in the sand, where he placed his bag. Additionally I would be looking for footprints that indicate they would be posing for a photograph, girls either standing side by side or solely. Although at the time, I don’t think they preserved the scene too well and noted/photographed details like this.
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Some pretty heavy circumstantial evidence implicating Wilder, reported in the below.
Especially as Wilder lived in the same suburb as the girls and frequented the shop where Christine worked.
There's a good chance that Wilder pre-arranged where to meet the Wanda murder victims in those far-Northern Cronulla/Greenhills dunes that fateful afternoon in 1965.
Whether a 19yo Wilder in 1965 was already using the lure of a camera as part of his MO, is highly questionable.
'“... Just weeks after the Wanda Beach murders, Wilder’s mother was arranging more psychiatric treatment – this time group therapy – for her aberrant son. It isn’t clear why, but she must have had reason to think the ECT therapy had not worked. Did she believe her son was responsible for the murders?” Andrew writes.
“The circumstantial evidence was strong. Wilder was living in the same suburb as the Wanda victims, frequented the shop where Christine worked, knew the train station well, and, because it was the height of summer, the building sites he worked on would have been shut down for the holidays.
“The most damning evidence against Wilder, however, would not surface for another four years. When it came, it would be from the most unlikely of sources. His wife.”
Wilder – who shot himself dead in 1984 as police tried to apprehend him – was named as one of the official suspects at the time, but he escaped scrutiny from the police even though he’d been put forward by his wife, Christine Paluch. But why?
In the book, Andrew writes: “The newlyweds set up home in a housing commission unit in Union Street, West Ryde. Within a few months, the marital bed had become a terrifying place of pain and torture.
“Three months into their marriage, Christine left him for the first time, after she found photographic equipment and a pile of negatives of naked women.”
On February 19, 1969, Christine left Wilder. “She never saw her husband again, and five days later, with her mother and sister, she walked into Hornsby police station and told
the startled officer on the front desk she believed her estranged husband could be the Wanda Beach killer, and she had information that could help.”
But by the time the police visited the Wilder family home, in November 1969, he had already moved to the US.
“Obviously, attempts were made to track down Wilder, but as they didn’t get around to knocking on the door of his family home until nearly nine months later, those detectives were either hopelessly inadequate, frighteningly slow or, more probably, didn’t take Christine’s claims seriously. At best, they must have considered her allegations unbelievable; at worst, a fabrication.
“Christine’s daring not only to speak up but also to accuse her husband of a murder would have been unorthodox, to say the least. Maybe, just maybe, if attitudes had been a little more enlightened, if there had been just one female officer on the Wanda investigation, then things might have turned out very differently.”'
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GreyCrow
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The comment around Christine going off for a while and returning only for both girls to head towards the surf club later indicates a meeting was arranged or occurred
The presence of alcohol in Sharrocks system supports this
BFew
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'The Wanda Beach Murder: Finally Solved?'
' Streamed live on Feb 26, 2022'
'I discuss the possibilities and how similar this crime is to the murders of Abigail and LIbby in Delphi, Indiana in the US.'
do you think she read this BF thread? we only discussed Wilder in January this year,
this Video is from Feb
BFew
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I'll opine back on this when I've watched all Pat Brown's Feb vid I posted this evening.
I've chatted to Pat a few times but didn't know she did a summary of Wilder. Wilder is better known in the US for his crime spree.
Looking at his early Photos, there is a slight Physical match to the Beaumont suspect description.
I must try and get the book she is referring too
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BFew
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A new podcast summarising and discussing this very old unsolved case released yesterday by a Perth duo Jay & Bee.
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Death-bed admissions of a child serial killer
Detective Wayne Newman was possibly just days from a confession from convicted serial killer Derek Percy over two of of Australia's most infamous cold cases dating back to the 1960s, before he died
This article is fascinating for some insights into Wanda beach murders evidence. In particular it mentions cutting crutch out of one of the girls swimmers and it also mentions that men's clothing had been found nearby in which they had deficated. These are two highly irregular things yet were known features of Percy modis. I know Pat Brown dismisses Percy but I'm inclined to think he may be as likely as Wilder
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Apparently Percy suffered from Coprophilia where a person gets sexual gratification from faeces and defecation. He was diagnosed in his teens after regularly soiling his pants well into his teens. If that article is true then I think those soiled men's garments become vital clues
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It's hard to believe that in January the Wanda Beach murders be a cold case unsolved for 60 years. It's one of those cases that makes you think if it had occurred in more recent decades - even in 1995 - would it have been solved due to more advanced forensic and investigation techniques?
The theory about the pre-arranged meeting, with Christine vanishing for a while and the unexplained alcohol in her system may make this the correct one. However, in the book 'Twelve Crimes That Shocked Australia' author Alan Whiticker includes mention of one thing not often reported on the case, that Christine had her period on the day of the trip to Cronulla, this the reason that unlike Marianne and the four younger kids Christine was not wearing a swimming costume for the excursion.
At face value menstruation may not appear relevant and this might well be the case, but factor it in with some of the known events that day it could explain some anomalies and it could push it back to being a random killing - the girls in the wrong place at the wrong time - rather than something pre-planned from previous visits to the beach by Christine and Marianne.
Christine leaving the group earlier and being gone some time before returning might have a more normal explanation - she needed to deal with time of the month things when she went to the toilet - than her meeting the guy who would turn out to be her and her best friend's murderer to arrange a secret rendezvous later in the day.
The two girls during the ill-fated walk to the Wanda dunes took the four younger kids with them initially, and it was only the kids complaining about the strong winds and biting sands in deteriorating weather conditions that stopped all six of them going further, not the older girls directing them to stop and wait. Would they have taken the kids with them into the dunes if they were planning to meet up with and fool around with boys, actions that didn't fit with the girls' personalities anyway?
As for the older girls continuing on and not heading back to the spot where they had left most of their belongings, perhaps Christine again was troubled by girls' problems and therefore they headed towards Wanda Surf Club in the other direction where there were more reliable and closer toilet facilities for them to use? It would have been likely that Christine would have advised Marianne as her best friend that she was menstruating, but not the younger kids, and the girls would have been discrete in discussing such matters. This would be the case back then and would be the same today if two teenage girls were babysitting younger kids and one of them had period problems.
What of the alcohol Christine consumed? This could well tie in with a theory in the 'Twelve Crimes' book which is extremely plausible but which seems to have been forgotten over time; that there were two Wanda Beach killers in action that afternoon, working together. The teenage surfer boy described by Marianne's siblings seems too real to have been a figment of their imagination, but what if this boy was a patsy, an accomplice of the real killer? It appeared that the surfer boy, seen talking with Christine and Marianne earlier in the day, was following and harassing the two teenagers as they walked further into the dunes. Then another guy, an older guy responsible looking hiking through the dunes appears and demands an explanation from the boy about what he is doing bothering the two girls. Some words follow, and the man warns the boy to get lost, and also that he is going straight to the nearest police station to report the incident. This leaves the girls with their 'rescuer', who while they thank him jokes that both he and they could do with a cold one and produces some beer he his carrying. He drinks some himself, offering beer to Christine which she drinks, and to Marianne who either refuses or never gets the chance to drink it.
After so long I doubt the case will ever be solved and the person or people responsible may be dead too, but sometimes small factors that come to light can push a case in a different direction.
GreyCrow
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Your initial points are also valid
The above scenario is also the one posited by Mark Marshall in the Beaumont case - that the younger guy helped an older guy
Which ties in with Munro and co
Thanks for the extra info
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Sometimes murder victims can be just downright unlucky. I heard that one of Ted Bundy's victims met her end after he 'rescued' her from another dangerous situation, and a similar example with a German serial killer Peter Kurten back in the 1920s.
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In the Saturday Telegraph today
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Post 40 - and in no way discrediting your earlier post
A google search using "Wanda Beach DNA" quickly reveals a 7 year old article where NSW Police claim they lost the semen DNA evidence, and only refers to the testing of girls clothes continuing, apart from a more specific mention of Trace DNA on Christine's shorts that only 'indicated female DNA only'
and a 2012 article
DNA clue could solve 47 year-old Wanda Beach murders
A BLOOD spot may hold vital DNA evidence that could solve one of Sydney's most enduring mysteries.www.news.com.au
'FEBRUARY 27, 2012
A BLOOD spot may hold vital DNA evidence that could solve one of Sydney's most enduring mysteries.
The blood, taken from the scene of the Wanda Beach murders 47 years ago, belongs to an unknown male and was gleaned from crime scene boxes after cold case detectives revisited the case.
Now police hope new testing methods will give them a fuller profile and provide a breakthrough in the case.'
'A button and zipper were removed from one of the victim's shorts and a sub sample sent to New Zealand for DNA testing but the profile which came back belonged to one of the victims.
Surprised that DNA profiles could still be obtained from a sample so many years old, officers decided to test a blood mark on the shorts that could be a knife wipe mark. A weak male profile was found.'
Double killing DNA sample lost
www.smh.com.au
By Anne-Louise Brown
July 3, 2014 — 5.56pm
'The identity of the Wanda Beach killer may never be revealed through scientific means after it was revealed a DNA sample taken from one of the victims almost 50 years ago has been “lost”.
Police told The Sun-Herald the semen sample, which holds the DNA profile of the person who brutally r*ped and killed West Ryde teenagers Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock in January 1965, was listed as an exhibit but, despite exhaustive searches of the Glebe forensic laboratories where it was housed, had not been located.
The DNA was taken from Marianne at the time.
The head of the NSW Unsolved Homicides Unit, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Lehmann, said after a search,“not a trace'' of the sample had been found.
He said testing of the girls’ clothes was continuing and he believed the key to solving the case was still through the physical evidence.
“Trace DNA was detected (on Christine’s shorts) but it was very old and degraded. It only indicated female DNA , probably Christine’s,” Chief Inspector Lehmann said.
“There is an indication of male DNA but it has not been definitively identified as yet. We just have to keep on re-examining all the available evidence as the science improves.”
Chief Inspector Lehmann described the initial investigation into the Wanda Beach murders as “exhaustive”, with more than 14,000 people interviewed. About 5000 persons of interest were identified, some of whom are still alive.
In 2007, Inspector Ian Waterson, was appointed head of the now-disbanded NSW police Cold Case Justice Project, and was directed by Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione to review the Wanda Beach murders.
Mr Waterson, who is now retired, said the loss of the semen sample had been a major blow to the case and, if found, could be the key to solving it.
One of the key suspects in the girls’ killings was Australia’s longest serving prisoner, child killer Derek Percy, who has also been implicated in another infamous cold case, the murder of the Beaumont children in Adelaide.
Percy died in prison in 2013.
Mr Waterson, however, believes the man who killed Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock was serial killer Christopher Wilder.
Wilder is best known for abducting, raping and brutally murdering at least eight women in the US during a cross-country murder spree lasting six weeks in 1984. He is suspected of killing another six.
The son of an American naval officer and Australian mother, Wilder immigrated to the US in 1969 after pleading guilty to a gang rape at a Sydney beach in 1962.
“He (Wilder) was mentioned in the case files. He has a good resemblance to one of the ‘suspect’ sketches at the time and continued on a life of rape and murder in the States before being shot and killed with his own gun,” Mr Waterson said.
Mr Waterson said to prove his theory on Wilder a full DNA profile would need to be obtained from the evidence, which could then be compared with the DNA of one of Wilder’s male relatives or a sample taken from his brain, which has been preserved in the US.
“That would be the start of the re-investigation,” he said.
“A full brief would have to be prepared and submitted to the Coroner to make a finding but a DNA match would be a heads-up start.”'
GreyCrow
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Another suspect confessed in 1974 but was dismissed - maybe on mental health grounds
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Returning to the Wilder theory and claim on DNA - last paragraph
Macca180
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