Dear Rachelle investigation: Nine people feared for their safety from key murder suspect

Family members, ex-girlfriends and even alleged rape victims are among those claiming Kevin Steven Correll threatened to harm or kill them at some point in the past 50 years.

EXCLUSIVE: At least nine people were left fearing for their safety after crossing paths with the main suspect in Rachelle Childs’ cold case murder, it can be revealed.

Family members, ex-girlfriends and even alleged rape victims are among those claiming Kevin Steven Correll threatened to harm or kill them at some point in the past 50 years.

Their horrifying allegations – including “(I’ll) kill you and your children”, “blow your brains out” and dispose of one man “by the end of the month” – are detailed in the Dear Rachelle multimedia investigation, which is pouring over the 2001 killing of Mr Correll’s ex colleague Rachelle.

Murdered Bargo woman Rachelle Childs’ burning body was found at Gerroa in June 2001.

Mr Correll, her boss at Camden Holden, was one of the last people to see Rachelle alive when she left work at about 5pm on June 7.

Nine hours later, the 23-year-old’s body was found alight in Gerroa, south of Sydney.

She had no known enemies or habits which might have jeopardised her life.

Mr Correll has always denied any involvement in her death and has never been charged with her murder.

“Over the past 23 years I have been interviewed by detectives numerous times, I have attended the inquest and cooperated with police supplying my DNA and answering all their questions,” Mr Correll said on Thursday.

His wife of 11 years, known as “Elise”, recalled the time he threatened to cut her up and bury the pieces of her body on a beach, covered with lime, so that they would not smell.

Another woman, “Evelyn”, who dated Mr Correll in 2002, about 18 months after Rachelle’s death, remembered his phone call to her after their break up.

“One of these days they’re going to find you slit from the fanny to the throat in a carpark,” she recalls him saying.

During the same call, Mr Correll warned her to not let her daughter play in the street. “He said she’s out there in a little yellow T-shirt and no shoes on her feet,” she told the Dear Rachelle investigation.

LISTEN TO EPISODES 1-9 OF THE PODCAST BELOW:

Mr Correll’s casual girlfriend at the time of Rachelle’s death sought to end the relationship a few months later.

“Alice”, who reported to police that she was being stalked by Mr Correll, said she was gathering belongings to stay elsewhere when he confronted her as she walked out her front door.

“I actually thought ‘I’m going to die…’,” Alice told a coroner’s inquest into Rachelle’s death in 2006, which delivered an open finding. “I thought, ‘I’m going to get hit, I’m going to be killed or I’m going to be raped’.”

She left in her car, but said that Mr Correll then ran her car off the road, came to the window and wished her a safe journey.

“I feel I came within a hair’s whisker of being very hurt that night,” she told the inquest.

The woman’s subsequent partner said he received calls from Mr Correll.

“You’ll be dead before long,” he said he was told, as well as, “you’ll be dead by the end of the month.”

“I did draw the line when he made threats against my son,” the man, known as Colin, told the podcast.

Kevin Steven Correll is a key suspect in the murder of Rachelle Childs. Picture: Jeff Darmanin

Mr Correll was acquitted of four separate sexual assault charges in the early 1980s, under his previous surname Cornwall.

In one case, the police arrested Mr Correll at gunpoint at the scene of the alleged attack, where a highly distressed woman said that he had threatened “to blow your brains out”.

Two women were attacked in their homes, one in Punchbowl, in Sydney’s west, the other in Darlinghurst.

Both identified Mr Correll as their attacker from police mugshots although he denied any involvement in the assaults.

LISTEN TO PODCAST BONUS INVESTIGATION UPDATE 2 BELOW:

One of the women said she received a phone threat a day or two after her assault: “If you report me, I will come back and kill you and your children.”

After the Darlinghurst attack, a woman’s husband answered a phone call from a man purporting to be a friend of Mr Correll.

The caller said: “Just remember if your wife puts him away, you and your family can take your choice of a shotgun or broken bones.”

For more information about our investigation, visit dearachelle.com.au.

If you have any tips or confidential information, please contact investigative journalist Ashlea Hansen at [e-mail].

You can also join our Dear Rachelle podcast Facebook group.

Originally published as Dear Rachelle investigation: Nine people feared for their safety from key murder suspect