Julie-Anne Leahy and Vicki Arnold murder: Police name Chris Dunlea as ‘prime suspect’

POLICE have named a slain gangster and suspected serial killer as the new “prime suspect” in one of Queensland’s most baffling murder mysteries.

Julie-Anne Leahy (left) and Vicki Arnold at Julie-Anne's wedding in 1988. Picture: File

POLICE have named a slain gangster as the new “prime suspect” in one of Queensland’s most baffling murder mysteries.

Vicki Arnold and Julie-Anne Leahy were found dead on an isolated bush track near Atherton, in far north Queensland, in 1991.

With next week marking 25 years since the grisly double homicide, The Courier-Mail can reveal that police are trying to “eliminate or confirm” suspected serial killer Chris Dunlea as responsible for the brutal slayings.

Dunlea, a violent stand-over merchant, ruled over the criminal underbelly of the deep north — once notorious for large-scale marijuana plantations.

Police suspected, but could not pin him for at least three other unsolved murders of rival underworld figures in the cannabis trade in the late-1980s and ’90s.

The vehicle in which the bodies of Julie-Anne Leahy and Vicki Arnold were found at Cherry Tree Creek on the Atherton Tableland in 1991.

The sadistic rapist boasted he executed crop-sitter Franco Byatt, who was found shot dead on a cannabis plantation near Ravenshoe in 1992.

Dunlea told criminal associates he killed Byatt, a man in Cooktown, another at Innot Hot Springs, and reportedly claimed to have “knocked those (two) bitches up home for being in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

“We had to get rid of them so they didn’t bring heat to the area, and my mates (alleged corrupt police) put it down as a murder and suicide,” he said.

Dunlea, 33, was shot dead in an “execution-style murder” near Bundaberg in 1994.

Family of the two women, locals, former police and private investigators all accept the theory that self-declared serial killer Dunlea did it.

Detective Inspector Brendan Smith, who headed the latest police investigation into the Arnold-Leahy case, said until officers could rule out Dunlea, they were unable to consider other suspects.

Wedding picture of Julie-Anne Leahy.

“He (Dunlea) was a crook … But if we can rule out Dunlea, and prove he was nowhere in the area at the time, it removes doubt and our ­investigation can proceed,” he told The Courier-Mail.

True crime author Robert Reid, who has written three books on the murder mystery, has obtained a written statement putting Dunlea in a 4WD vehicle with the two women about the same time they disappeared.

“Dunlea was a brutal man, he was born evil and died evil, he terrorised a lot of people,” Reid said.

Reid details the Dunlea Factor in his latest book Third Party To Murder: The Search.

In a badly botched case, originally ruled a “murder-suicide”, it was said Arnold, a mild-mannered accountant, shot her best friend with a sawn-off rifle before killing herself.

State Coroner Mich­ael Barnes — after three coronial inquests and seven top-level independent reviews — overturned the murder-suicide finding and ordered Julie-Anne’s husband Alan Leahy be committed to stand trial on two counts of murder in 2013.

In June last year, the ­Dir­ector of Public Prosecutions found insufficient evidence for a murder conviction and ruled Leahy had no case to answer.