Murder in Queensland: ‘Sadistic’ Craig McConnell murdered two on Gold Coast
POLICE once described this man as one of the “greatest arguments for the death penalty” - and these notorious Queensland murder cases show why.
Crime & Justice
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POLICE described Craig McConnell as one of the “greatest arguments for the death penalty” - an evil killer who showed no remorse and one of Queensland’s most feared prisoners. He was convicted of two murders and was found not guilty of a third.
A confession ... or was it?
IT took Barry Mannix 12 hours to break — 12 hours to admit to the brutal, bloodied murder of his father.
They’d taken him to Broadbeach Police Station on July 6, 1984, to an interview room where the 18-year-old had been grilled without a lawyer or without even a phone call to his mother.
He’d done it, he eventually told them.
He’d killed his father in a crazed, “off the deep end” frenzy of blood and steel at his Palm Beach unit.
And when it was done, he’d regained his cool and methodically covered his tracks.
It had started with an argument.
Barry had made arrangements to buy a Toyota Celica but he couldn’t afford it on his own. His father Kevin, a Gold Coast sex shop owner, would need to help him pay for it.
Kevin had refused. They’d argued and Barry had lost control.
He’d stabbed his own father. And then he’d tied him up, blindfolded and gagged him to make it look like something else.
He’d carried him like that to the bottom of the back steps and dumped him on the ground. He told the police he’d taken the knife and used it to cut his dad’s throat.
Then he’d jogged to the beach at the back of their unit block and thrown the weapon into the sea.
From there, he took his father’s car and drove it towards Burleigh Heads. He hadn’t known what to do with it, so he’d dumped it in a car park with the engine still running.
“I ran home,” he told them. “I watched a little bit of television and then went to sleep.”
It sounded plausible to police. An argument that had gotten so out of hand that an 18-year-old man had killed his father, staged an execution before calmly watching TV as his body lay downstairs.
They charged him with murder.
Barry Mannix would sit in a cell for more than four months before they let him out.
The teenager hadn’t killed his father at all.
Somebody else had.
A sadistic killer so evil, police would go on to say he was the best argument for the death penalty they had.
Woman stripped, tied and raped
LINDA Reed carried the stack of Christmas presents to her car in the lot of the Pacific Fair shopping centre. It was December 13, 1983, and she was headed to her car for lunch.
Linda, a 21-year-old who was saving for a house with her husband, worked behind the counter of one of the centre’s jewellery stores.
It was a habit of many centre staff to eat their lunch while sitting in their car, listening to the radio.
Linda had taken sandwiches to work that day.
She arrived at her car and disappeared.
They found her three days later, 17km away, off a cul-de-sac at Nerang.
Her body was badly decomposed and she lay facedown in a muddy creek bed, her hands tied behind her back.
She was naked from the waist up. Her killer had pushed her bra down around her hips and hooked its straps over her wrists. Her hands had been tied together with a bikini top and a piece of blue cord used for hanging glasses around one’s neck. Neither item belonged to Linda.
Her panties had been ripped from her body and tossed a few metres away. She’d been stripped, tied up and raped.
An autopsy found mud and grit in her lungs. It was likely she’d been held down in the creek bed until she’d drowned.
Nearby, only 70m away, was her car. Inside, police found the remains of her lunch, still in its wrappings. Had she eaten her lunch as planned before being abducted?
Police considered whether the killer had hidden inside her car, before producing a weapon and ordering her to drive.
Either way, it had been a bold kidnapping — Linda had been taken in broad daylight from a busy shopping centre.
As the murder hit the media, witnesses came forward to report unusual activity around Nerang on the day Linda disappeared.
A grader driver had seen a man emerge from the bush close to where her body was found. He’d been young — about the same age as Linda — and lightly tanned with fair hair.
Next, a Gold Coast motorist contacted police to say they’d picked up a hitchhiker matching that same description.
The young man had told the driver he wasn’t going anywhere in particular. He got out at the Surfers Paradise raceway.
A police sketch released by police showed a young man with a “boyish” face framed by blond hair. He had a long, narrow face. The bridge of his nose was flat.
Another abduction in the southeast
Months passed and police were no closer to finding Linda’s killer.
“Get him and hang him,” her husband Rob told The Courier-Mail at the time.
He’d gone ahead with their dream to build their own home. They’d saved and saved before selecting their perfect block of land.
“We had to struggle so hard to get it together for this place,” he said.
“Then along comes some sick idiot and destroys everything. I don’t see why he should be kept alive.”
In January, 1984, another woman was abducted in Broadbeach as she walked home from work.
The man had crept up from behind as she walked along Old Burleigh Rd. He’d used a knife to force her off the road and onto the beach.
Once there, he tore off her bra and used it as a gag. Her hands, he tied together with a piece of nylon cord.
But she was saved by sheer luck.
It was after midnight and a passer-by making their way along the beach heard her screams. Her attacker fled.
When she called police and told them what he’d looked like, they were convinced Linda’s killer had struck again.
“He’s becoming arrogant because he hasn’t been caught,” Gold Coast Superintendent Bernie Hoppner said.
“I don’t think there is a woman safe on the coast while this man is at large. And we’re sure somebody knows this man but has not come forward.”
Next victim — the high class escort
LOVINA Cunningham’s naked, mutilated body was found by her daughter on August 26, 1984.
The 45-year-old had been killed in her luxury unit, on the seventh floor of The Moorings on Cavill Ave.
She was naked on her bedroom floor.
Her killer had stabbed her in the chest and slit her throat down to the bone.
Then they’d poured bleach down her throat and over her genitalia to cover their tracks.
Her 24-year-old daughter had gone to the unit, concerned that she had not heard from her mother for several days.
A devoted mother to her two children, Lovina had partially funded her son’s career as an international race car driver.
“There are things I don’t want made public,” Lovina had told a journalist a year earlier, “but for the last two years I have been working 16 hours a day, seven days a week to help (my son) race”.
When she died, Lovina had been working as a high class escort. She’d wanted her children to have every opportunity to make it in life. She did it for them.
“Mum started to worry about what would happen to us and how we’d get on without her. Mum would often get grumpy and stay at home worrying about money,” Lovina’s son said in an interview.
“We had enough to eat but nothing flash. And we’d burn a lot of candles to cut down on electricity … things like that to make ends meet.
“She came home one day and there was more food on the table. Nice food like cheese, instead of baked beans, and fruit and soft drink.
“She bought me a jumper and a pair of sandshoes.”
Lovina wanted her son to realise his dream of being a racing car driver. So she made sure it happened.
Her children found out the truth about her new career eventually. They were upset. There was yelling and tears.
Lovina didn’t care. They’d been $30,000 in debt and she’d found a way to give her children the life she wanted them to have.
“I don’t care what society thinks,” she told them. “Society doesn’t help us.”
Police were convinced it was one of Lovina’s clients who’d so brutally murdered her.
They called on the men who’d visited her apartment to come forward and help with their investigation.
Many did — but not the one they wanted.
They had their eye on him.
The change of heart that changed everything
KEVIN Mannix had been dead — and his son in prison — for several months when Tony Rau had an attack of conscience.
Tony said his mate had stolen a Mazda RX7 with plans to carry out an “insurance job”. But the insurance company caught on and called police.
Now, Tony sat in his lawyer’s office with something bigger on his mind.
It was mid-October when Tony told Gold Coast solicitor Bill Potts about another car he’d taken possession of — a white Toyota Supra, registration KJM 00.
It was another insurance job, he told Potts. The owner of the Supra had asked him to take it so he could claim it was stolen. He’d left it in a rented storage shed in Burleigh.
The owner, he told his solicitor, was Kevin Mannix.
And Kevin’s son Barry, in his signed confession, said he had taken the car on the night of the murder.
Tony knew that wasn’t the case. Barry hadn’t touched the car.
Potts would have counselled Tony to go to the police. Tony thought for a while about destroying the car. He’d never been in trouble with the police before and he didn’t want to go to jail.
Finally, on November 7, after many discussions with his lawyer, Tony went to the police.
He took them to Burleigh and showed them the Supra, sitting, as described, in a Burleigh storage shed.
He knew nothing about the murder, he assured police. He’d only taken the car. They charged him with stealing.
That night, in an interview room at Southport police station, Tony broke down.
“I’m sorry Bill … I’m so sorry,” he said.
“I should have told you before. I didn’t want to do it … I didn’t want to do either of them.
“I helped kill Mannix. And the prostitute.”
He told them everything.
The truth revealed
There’d been three of them who’d killed Lovina Cunningham.
Craig Andrew McConnell, 20, Nigel Phillip Vincent Andrews, 25 and 23-year-old Tony.
A fourth man, 21-year-old Nicholas Koutras, had helped them kill Kevin Mannix.
Kevin’s son Barry was released. His “confession” would become the subject of a Police Complaints Tribunal hearing.
Kevin had been murdered over a $10,000 debt, the court would hear.
The men would tell a series of stories about what really happened that night. There were homosexual affairs, drug debts and a robbery gone wrong. Each version was denied by the others involved.
Tony told police Lovina had been murdered for her money.
McConnell, he claimed, had come up with a plan to murder sex workers and steal their cash.
“We’ll start with Angie,” he’d said, using the name Lovina went by.
“We’ll do the Big M on her. They won’t find her for days.”
After they’d left her dead on her bedroom floor, he said McConnell had told them: “We’ve got time to do four more tonight.”
The others refused to keep going.
McConnell pleaded guilty to both murders and was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment.
Tony Rau pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter. He was given a 12-year sentence.
Andrews took his two murder charges to trial. A jury took just two hours to find him guilty. He also got two terms of life imprisonment.
Koutras, who was only involved in Mannix’s death, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was given six years with hard labour.
‘There’s no bloody witness, what does it matter?’
MCCONNELL wasn’t in prison long before trouble came to him again.
Police wanted him for another murder. They had statements from prisoners saying he’d “proudly” admitted to murdering jewellery store assistant Linda Reed.
The court would hear McConnell told three prisoners he was good for five murders. He said police had no idea he’d murdered Linda.
He told them he’d abducted the young woman after she spotted him and a mate trying to break into a car at Pacific Fair.
He’d threatened her with a screwdriver and forced her into her car, his mate following behind.
“She looked pretty terrified,” he was said to have told them.
The court heard he told them he’d driven her to a cul-de-sac in Nerang where she’d tried to escape.
“I had almost stopped when she opened the door and jumped out and started to run towards the highway,” a prisoner claimed he’d told them.
“I caught up with her and grabbed her and threw her on the ground. She was struggling that much I was flat out hanging on to her and I ended up strangling her.”
After raping and murdering her, McConnell apparently claimed to have taken the sandwiches Linda had made for lunch. Cheese and pickles. Or meat and pickles. He couldn’t quite remember. He’d taken them and casually eaten them as he walked back to the road.
His mate, he was said to have recalled, was panicking.
“He’s still panicking. But there’s no bloody witness so what does it matter?” the court heard McConnell said.
Police tracked down the mate who’d apparently been with McConnell that day and questioned him. Three days later, he took a fatal overdose of heroin.
McConnell, who bore a striking resemblance to the police sketch of the young, fair-haired man seen leaving the scene, was found not guilty of Linda’s murder.
He’d denied it from the start.
“You’ve got the wrong man,” he’d told detectives when they’d come to see him.
“I’ve never believed in going down for something I never done. I admitted to my crime and I’m paying my penalties,” he’d said of his other murders.
‘You can hear her screaming’
BARRY Mannix appeared before the Police Complaints Tribunal in 1986 to explain why he’d confessed to murdering his father — when in fact, he hadn’t.
He claimed police had beaten him and threatened to throw other members of his family in prison if he didn’t put his hand up.
“They said somebody would be charged with dad’s murder that night so I may as well confess,” he said.
“They said: `We will get your mother. You can hear her screaming from the other end of the cells if you like’.”
But the Tribunal found police had no case to answer.
And now he’s a free man
POLICE described Craig McConnell as one of the “greatest arguments for the death penalty”. An evil killer who showed no remorse and one of Queensland’s most feared prisoners.
“It wouldn’t be a sad day if he went to the gallows,” one detective said at his committal hearing.
They were relieved when he was sentenced to two life terms.
But in reality, he’d only serve 18 years.
He was 38 when the parole board released him in 2003. Within 24 hours, he was put on a plane to New Zealand, his country of birth.
He was released to live out his life, with no parole checks and no conditions.
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