So when nine-year-old Ebony Simpson jumped off her school bus and saw no one was there to pick her up, she meandered across the quiet, country road to watch the sheep graze in the paddock while she waited.

Figuring it was less than a kilometre to her home, she decided to start walking home.

But Ebony had no idea that the whole time she was being watched.

In less than 30 minutes of stepping off the bus, she was abducted, brutally raped and then thrown into a freezing dam to die.

“She was just so beautiful, such a beautiful human being. She was soft, kind, and we were very close. I can’t believe another human would do that to a little girl, or any child,” says Ebony’s mum, Christine Simpson.

“Ebony had been given a talk about stranger danger at school the day before she went missing. She came home and told me about it and I said to her if anything ever happened, if anything came up, to come and tell me.

“We read a story and she went to bed. And then the next day she went to school, and she never came home.”

Christine says Ebony would usually met her a few metres from where the bus dropped her off, on a peaceful, rural road in the sleepy town of Bargo, 100kms southwest of Sydney.

“I was running late trying to sort some insurance out and I asked one of her brothers to go down and meet Ebony.”

The walk from her bus stop to the farm where the family lived was less than one kilometre away.

“But his bus was late and he thought she was home. Then I came home and as soon as I got there I could see her shoes weren’t there, that she wasn’t home.

“My husband (at the time) rang the police, while I went down to the bus stop. I ran around looking for her. I ran to the neighbours, I thought maybe she got scared, but she was a very responsible girl.

“The neighbour says he saw Ebony walking home and he noticed around the corner from where she was walking there was a small yellow Mazda, with its bonnet up and a man looking under the hood.

“We thought, you know we have lived here for 14 years. All kids should be able to get off a school bus and walk around the corner home, it’s part of growing up, but obviously I am wrong.”

Detective Inspector Rodney Grant of the NSW Police Force will never forget Wednesday, August 19, 1992.

“Even though I was a junior detective, I had seen most things and I had just finished working on a murder case of a two-year-old girl who had been bashed to death by her stepfather.

“My partner, a detective senior constable was on leave as his wife was due to have a baby, which left me to manage the office on my own. I finished work at 4pm and, later that evening, played touch football.

“When I arrived home I was greeted by my wife with the news that the Picton station had been trying to get hold of me because a nine-year-old girl was missing.

“I called the station and was told Ebony Simpson had gone missing after being dropped off by the school bus that afternoon.

“My six-year-old daughter was still up and for some reason I asked her, ‘Do you know Ebony?’

“Her answer still lies in my head, ‘Yes Daddy. She’s always smiling, I call her Smilie’.

Detective Grant was trying to convince himself that everything would be OK, that bad things couldn’t happen in such a quiet place. Only weeks before he had responded to a missing child call and had searched for hours when the girl’s mother called to say she had found her sleeping in a wardrobe in their house.

“I drove two minutes down the road to the Simpson house, arriving around 10pm. I was briefed by the responding general duty police, who had already established a command post. The last sighting of Ebony was about 400m from her home.

“The first mistake I made was assuring the family I would find her alive.

“The second mistake I made was asking them had they seen anything suspicious in the last couple of days.

“When I later rephrased the question, ‘Have you seen anyone at all who you don’t know around here recently?’, Christine recalled that she had seen a man in a small yellow car that appeared broken down on Bargo Road a few hundred metres from the bus stop about two weeks ago and then again about a week ago.”

Christine says, “I remember seeing a guy in a broken down yellow car with its bonnet open the other way around, which is different from other cars. I remember looking at him thinking I’ll pick Ebony up and then I’ll come back around and see if I can help him.”

The investigation began to gather momentum and more police arrived at the command post. Detective Grant was about to learn that a teenager’s power of observation is not be underestimated.

“During the escalation phase I was asked to speak to the father of two local teenage boys. I was told the boys had seen Ebony walking home that afternoon. Within a minute of speaking with them, my heart almost stopped.”

One of the boys recalled with detailed clarity what he had seen.

“He told me he’d picked up his brother from the Bargo Railway Station and then had driven up Bargo Road, to Arina Road.

“As they came to a bend in the road they saw Ebony walking toward her home, and they actually waved to each other.

“They rounded the bend and saw a man with a small yellow car parked on the footpath with the bonnet and boot up. He had never seen this man or the car before.

“I asked him what type of car it was and he thought it was a Mazda. I recalled what Christine had previously told me and was now certain that Ebony hadn’t made it past that car, which was just 200m from her home.”

The teen gave a description of the car: “Toward the front of the car there was some patchwork on the front mudguard just before the grille. The patchwork had been painted with new paint, it’s called yellow ocker. That’s the original colour but the rest of the car is faded.”

Detective Grant couldn’t believe what he was hearing. There would be no problem identifying the car, he thought.

Searches were underway around the area where Ebony had gone missing and resources were still pouring in. As the day went on, the investigative team was planning operations for the following day when 350 police and volunteers would be on call.

Liaison officers were sent out to the Simpsons’ house where they interviewed Christine, asking her numerous cognitive questions which prompted detailed narrative responses about the man she had seen (weeks before in the yellow car).

She provided such a detailed description of the man that the officer from the Crime Scene Section was called to the house to complete a ‘Penri’ image of the man.

About the same time of this interview, a search party was being briefed.

“Little did we know at that time, but there was a clash of good and evil in that briefing. The man who would eventually confess to the murder of Ebony Simpson had volunteered to help search for her and was a part of the search,” Detective Grant says.

As the search parties were moving off to their allocated areas, two young constables from Campbelltown arrived. After being told the description of the vehicle they were looking for, one of them said to the sergeant, “What type of car did you say they were looking for?”

“A Mazda 808.”

The constable then said, “Like that one there?”

A yellow Mazda 808 was parked directly across from the command post.

The owner of the car, who allegedly was involved in the search for Ebony, returned to his car and was confronted.

“He was asked if he would drive his car back to the police station, and he agreed. Prior to this, the car was photographed by the crime scene officer who was at the Simpsons’ house compiling the Penri. As soon as that officer saw the car owner, he knew he was looking at the man who Christine had just described to him moments before,” Detective Grant says.

Andrew Garforth, 29, had moved to the area a few weeks before from Western Australia with his defacto wife and two children.

“Garforth was asked about his whereabouts leading up to 4pm the day before and commits to a particular version, in that he travelled to a nearby town to return a video.

“However, each time he is asked to recount the route, he consistently tells the investigators that he travelled on every other road except Bargo Road and Arina Road, which was the easiest and most direct route,” Detective Grant recounts.

“He eventually realises that his account can be checked and found to be lies.

“At this point his confident and pleasant demeanour changes. His shoulders drop and his head goes down, and the interviewing officer adopts the powerful tactic of silence.

“At question 80, Garforth makes the fatal flaw of saying that on his return journey from the video store he’d gone down Bargo Road, turned left onto Arina Road, which clearly contradicted his previous account.

“After admitting that he had been in Arina Road, when he previously had denied it, the interviewing officer started honing in on this inconsistency and managed to get Garforth to admit he had actually stopped in Arina Road when Garforth said, ‘I pulled the car round the corner’,” Det Grant continues.

“He admitted raising the boot and bonnet to “put some oil in the car”, and then he said, ‘I had the bonnet of the car up and I had the boot of the car open, put the oil in ... and then the young girl was walking past the car. I grabbed her and put her in the boot’.”

At this point he had just admitted to the abduction of Ebony Simpson.

Garforth continued his chilling confession.

He said that he parked his car on the side of the road and pretended to do some work on it. As she walked past he grabbed her and forced her into the boot of his vehicle.

He then told how he had turned up the car radio as loud as it could go to muffle the sounds of Ebony’s screams.

Under further questioning, he admitted that he drove her to a bush area off Charles Point Road at Bargo to a small dam.

He described how he removed her from the boot, sat her on the front seat and engaged her in conversation for about 15 minutes.

She asked him if he was going to let her go and he told her he didn’t know.

The interviewing officer then asks, “Did she say anything else to you?”

Garforth replied, “She pleaded with me to let her go. I just sat in silence.”

Coldly continuing his confession he told the police officers how he molested her for about ten seconds then “swung her around like a rocking horse”.

Garforth said he got some speaker wire from the boot of his car and tied her hands and feet behind her back and threw her into the dam.

The interviewing officer asks, “What did you believe would happen to her when you threw her into the dam?”

Garforth replied, “I didn’t really know.”

The interviewing officer then asks, “Did you believe she may die?”

Garforth replied, “I believed that she could have drowned or maybe made it to the bank.”

Detective Rodney Grant says contrary to what Garforth said, Ebony was thrown at least eight metres into the middle of the dam. The way she was tied, there was no way she could have made it to the bank.

“All she would have done once she hit the water was sink straight to the bottom.”

For the Simpsons, for the police involved, for the Australian public, nothing would ever be the same again.

The toll on the investigating police officers has been vast.

“I am the only police officer who worked on this case who is still on the force,” Detective Grant says.

For the family, the heartbreak is unimaginable.

“It was 2am and two young constables came to the front door and told me they had found her body. I just fell to the floor. I cried and begged them to let me hold her, that maybe if I held her I could bring her back to life,” Christine says.

“I couldn’t brush my teeth. I was just a zombie. I just sat and stared. Nothing meant anything anymore. All the things about life that are so precious had just been ripped away.”

Tragically it wasn’t the end of the suffering for the Simpsons. More heartache was to come.

Read the final chapter of the special two-part feature tomorrow detailing the aftermath: Garforth’s appeal, the group fighting for Garforth’s access to privileges inside prison, Garforth’s links to previous crimes and the warning Christine Simpson has for parents.