Monday, February 27, 2012

Wanda Beach Murder breakthrough





Forty seven years is a long time for a murder case to remain open but cold case detectives have found a spot of blood on a pair of shorts from a male person taken from the crime scene of the Wanda murder case. The bodies of two 15-year-old girls, Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt were discovered in sand dunes on the southern Sydney beach on the 11th January 1965.



It was school holidays and the two best friends who lived at Ryde asked their mothers if they could take their four brothers and sisters to Cronulla beach for the day. After eating their sandwiches, they decided to walk to Wanda beach, 2 kilometres north, and left their bags near rocks at Cronulla.


The two girls left their siblings and started to walk north, instead of south and when one of the children chased after them and said they were headed in the wrong direction, they just laughed and told him to go back to the others. They never came back.


There was a 40 metre bloody trail up a sand hill where one of the girls had been dragged which suggested she had run for her life before being chased and brought down. The bodies were covered in sand and both girls were sexually assaulted, beaten and stabbed to death.


Police found the evidence in crime scene boxes and are hoping that new testing methods will shed light on the guilty man/men involved. There are a number of known suspects and some are still alive.


"There is one suspect in particular that I would love to see matched against any DNA we may get in the future," one investigator said. "Luckily he is incarcerated interstate and will never be released."


Last year the Cold Case squad cleared more than 33 sexual assault cases and several murders committed in the early 1980s.

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