Crime Files: The rape and murder of Miranda Downes in Cairns in 1985

WHEN a woman’s body was found on a Queensland beach, a man came forward to say he was there and he was innocent. But he had “the biggest ego” — and his attempt to clear his name cracked the case open.

Miranda Downes was found raped and murdered on a Cairns beach in 1985.

WITHIN an hour of arriving in Cairns for a two week holiday, emerging Sydney scriptwriter Miranda Downes set off for a run on a tranquil beach. She never returned.

Her naked and battered body was found washed up on Buchan Point Beach, some 25km north of Cairns, at 1.50am on August 4, 1985.

The 35 year-old had set off at sunset after telling the two friends she had arrived with that “I’d love to run on that beach”.

When she failed to return for dinner, her friends raised the alarm.

Police searched the area that night. They found her body on the foreshore, while her running shoes were found at the bottom of a hill.

Miranda Downes had only been in Cairns for an hour when a decision to take a jog on a beach led to her death.

A police tracker dog led searchers to a drain where her tracksuit pants were recovered while other articles of her clothing were found washed up on rocks, 400m from where her body was discovered.

“Her clothes had been ripped from her body. It was a brutal and vicious death,” police said at the time.

Scientific test revealed she sustained a savage beating to the head before her death.

Investigations revealed a possible link to a yellow Ford Bronco four-wheel drive with a white canopy.

A female beach jogger had told police that she believed a four-wheel-drive vehicle had once been aimed at her. But the male driver called out to reassure her that he hadn’t, and it became the focus of the police enquiries.

The vehicle owner, invalid pensioner Ernie Knibb, came forward volunteering to be questioned and the Ford Bronco was impounded. No charges were laid.

Miranda Downes’ killer Ernest Arthur Knibb.

Knibb went on the offensive and claimed to the media that he was being persecuted.

“I was on the beach in my vehicle at the time police said the murder was committed. I rang them and told them that and asked if they wanted me to come in. They agreed,” Knibbs told reporters in 1985.

Police said Knibb chose to declare his innocence to the media and he had admitted he was on Buchan’s Beach the day Ms Downes was murdered.

When police later asked Knibb to come in for a second round of questioning, he refused.

It would take another 14 months, and 18 months since the murder, before police charged him but it was only after 60 Minutes reporter Ian Leslie interviewed the then-46 year-old from Blackall.

The breakthrough came when Knibb gave a conflicting version of the events of August 3 1985.

The current affairs program paid all the expenses for Knibb to return to the murder scene where the crime was re-enacted.

Buchan Point, north of Cairns, the site of the murder of Miranda Downes.

It was while the pair was driving onto the beach that Knibb’s story altered from him being on the beach for two to three minutes that afternoon, to half an hour.

“I wouldn’t have been any more than half an hour,” Knibb told Mr Leslie.

The 60 Minutes reporter immediately picked Knibb up on contradicting himself.

“You told me earlier you thought you were only on the beach for two or three minutes,” Mr Leslie said.

Knibb fired back: “OK, so I was on the beach for no more than two or three minutes then. I wouldn’t f***ing know mate. I’m not a computer and I don’t look at my watch when I am driving down the beach, so I don’t know.”

The magistrate conducting the committal hearing watched three hours of unedited footage of the 60 Minutes interview with Knibb, which included the pensioner undergoing hypnosis and undertaking a lie-detector test.

How the story was reported.

The lie detector test was not submissible as evidence but Mr Leslie later told New Idea (November, 1987) that Knibb “did very badly”.

The 60 Minutes interview was the cornerstone of a murder case based solely on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of witnesses on or near Buchan’s Point beach on the day of the murder.

It was enough for a jury of five women and seven men to find Knibb guilty of murdering Ms Downes. He was given a life sentence.

He unsuccessfully appealed to the Queensland Court of Criminal Appeal against his conviction and later failed to have the High Court to grant him leave to appeal.

Knibb was released from Rockhampton Correctional Capricornia Correctional Centre in February, 2013.

Mr Leslie later said that had Knibb not contacted 60 Minutes to tell his side of the story then he would never have been convicted of the crime.

Miranda Downes was a scriptwriter whose last project, Cane, was posthumously released as Fields of Fire in 1987.

“He had the biggest ego of anyone I’d ever met. He loved the centre stage and had no idea it was leading to his downfall,” Leslie told New Idea.

“I hate to say it now, but he brought out a feeling that you had to be careful. Physically careful.”

In 1988 Leslie told TV Week that, “Knibb was telling me about his sexual past and he’d warned me never to disclose it … under any circumstances or he’d blow my brains out.”

Downes’ was working on the six-part miniseries Cane when she took a much-needed break from writing.

The year before her death, her first feature film Undercover, a comedy about underwear empire Berlei starring US actor Michael Pare and Barry Otto, was released.

Cane, about North Queensland cane farmers before WWII, was posthumously released as the two-part miniseries Fields Of Fire in 1987.