Samantha Knight’s killer due to be released but refuses to tell where he dumped her body
Michael Guider confessed to kidnapping, drugging and molesting nine-year-old Samantha Knight in 1986, but the serial paedophile refuses to divulge where her body can be found. One of the lead investigators on the case speaks out.
NSW
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- A-G’s fight to keep Samantha Knight’s killer behind bars
- Michael Guider kept chilling newspaper clippings of missing children
Detective Chief Inspector Darren Sly leans across the desk in the interview room at Long Bay prison, looks directly into the eyes of the portly inmate slouched in loose greens, and asks: “Just tell me where the body is.”
The man sitting opposite, sporting long, straggly hair and a grey beard, averts his eyes, taps his fingers nervously and calmly offers: “I don’t know — I can’t help you.”
As recently as 16 months ago Michael Guider, the serial paedophile who has graced the covers of so many newspapers, who has monopolised the evening news so often, and whose crimes have incited the same reaction in NSW as the “bogey man” did elsewhere, has steadfastly refused to reveal where he disposed of Sydney schoolgirl Samantha Knight’s remains.
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“I went to see him a little more than a year ago and he still won’t confess,” says DCI Sly, one of three leading investigators who put Guider behind bars for 18 years in 2002 after he admitted to kidnapping, drugging and molesting the pretty nine-year-old from Bondi, who he claims died of an accidental drug overdose.
“It’s as if giving away that final piece to the jigsaw is admitting to himself what he really is,” DCI Sly says.
Guider, a gardener at Royal North Shore Hospital, was serving a 16-year sentence imposed in 1996 for 60 offences against 11 children when police realised he was responsible for one of Australia’s most high-profile unsolved crimes.
Samantha’s death, following her disappearance from her beachside unit after school, changed the way parents across the country considered their children’s safety, as hundreds of thousands of posters were distributed featuring smiling images of the confident, honey-blonde, green-eyed girl.
Guider’s maximum sentence expires on June 6, when he will be set free from Long Bay Correctional Complex unless the state government wins a court action to keep him inside.
NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman last Friday moved to stop Guider’s release, launching an application in the Supreme Court seeking a 12-month continuing detention order against him as well as an additional five-year extended supervision order.
That second order would have “stringent conditions controlling where the offender lives, where he can go and who he can associate with,” Mr Speakman has said.
It is likely to include an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet.
The Saturday Telegraph can reveal Guider, now 69, has never applied for early release to the parole board, after pleading guilty to manslaughter for Knight’s death — so can walk without any release conditions on June 6.
Although he first became eligible to apply through the Parole Authority in June 2014, he did not officially apply and was refused for consideration.
He was instead advised to apply in 2015. He chose not to do so.
He also elected not to apply for early release in 2017 and 2018.
In a chilling insight into the child abuser’s mind, DCI Sly says: “He has always said he wants to serve his sentence in full so he can go into the community without any supervision orders and conditions placed on him. As far as I’m aware, he’s never applied for parole.
“He says he wants to continue his hobbies when he gets out and be left alone … to visit
Aboriginal heritage sites, carry on his archaeology studies and go into the bush to take photography of wildlife — he likes nature reserves.
“I’m sure he’s fulfilled what the law requires of him in terms of reform for sex offenders but, for me, there’s still the empty feeling that, until he tells us where the body is, the investigation isn’t over,” he adds.
“It’s of interest to him and the family to put it to bed.
“He will always be reminded of it when he’s out in the community if he doesn’t tell police where Samantha is — and it will finally give Tess Knight (her mother) the closure she longs for.
“What Guider did to Samantha changed Australia forever. The country lost its innocence.
“I want that final piece to the jigsaw puzzle.”
Sam was one of perhaps scores of children aged between two and 16 who loner Guider molested over many years.
Guider’s modus operandi was to sedate then molest boys and girls, some — unlike Samantha Knight — the children of single, drug-addicted mothers he had befriended at the methadone clinic at Royal North Shore Hospital, where he was a gardener from 1989.
He sexually assaulted the children during babysitting sessions, often playing a “game” he called statues with some, in which he’d order them to stand still while he exposed himself and touched their genitalia.
He claimed some of the drug-addicted mothers knew what he was doing, and told a psychologist at least one of them did not mind.
“She was bad,” Guider said of the mother.
“I was screwing her two kids and she asked me to do it to her after I’d been doing it to them.”
It was not until 1998 that detectives from Strike Force Harrisville, who had reopened the investigation into Samantha’s disappearance, began to focus on Guider.
That September detectives found thousands of photographs that Guider had concealed in his “scrapbook”, in a storage facility at Girraween.
They identified a photograph of Samantha and two young friends and traced them to Manly Public School and then to Raglan St, where one of Samantha’s friends lived.
She had met her friends while her mother lived with a partner at Manly in 1984 and 1985, and continued to visit on weekends after Ms Knight ended the relationship and moved to the eastern suburbs.
Guider admitted to giving the drug Normison to 13 victims aged two to 15.
Police identified another 25 victims who did not want to go to court, and there are many more they could not identify among the more than 5000 pornographic photographs Guider took of his victims.
Even after Samantha died, Guider gave Normison to at least another four victims.
Mother-of-two Chantelle Hamilton, 30, was six years old when Guider drugged her at the home of a friend he was babysitting in Manly, seven years after he targeted Samantha.
Her evidence played a crucial role in putting Guider behind bars.
“Guider’s manipulative and cunning, he’ll fool anyone, he even tricked my mother, who was acutely aware of the dangers of child molesters,” she told The Saturday Telegraph from her home in Moana, Adelaide.
“Police found pictures of what he did to me in his scrapbook. I was drugged. I remember parts of it, like a horror movie in slow motion.
“What he did to Samantha he did exactly to me.
“I long for the day I can meet him in jail, to show him little girls grow up, have lives and have to bear the scars of what he did.
“He’s never showed any public remorse, he’s a disgusting human being and I don’t want him to ever hurt another child again.”
CONFESSION
Guider was arrested and charged with Samantha’s murder in February 2001, but he pleaded guilty to manslaughter under the weight of damning evidence — including a confession to his brother Tim, a jailed armed robber.
He snatched her from near her home in Imperial Ave, Bondi, after school on August 19, 1986. She had been seen that afternoon walking on the streets in her uniform.
Within days Sydney was plastered with “Find our Sam” posters, which described her as intelligent, outgoing and well-spoken.
Guider later claimed he had drugged Samantha by lacing Coca-Cola with the sleeping pill and she died of an overdose on his lounge while he went out to the shops.
He was charged with murder but confessed to manslaughter.
He told investigators he buried her in Cooper Park at nearby Bellevue Hill but dug up her body 18 months later when he saw workmen came close to her grave.
Guider said he then put Sam’s remains in a dumpster containing landfill at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron at Kirribilli on the other side of the Harbour.
A search using cadaver dogs was conducted but no remains were ever found.
Mrs Knight has welcomed legal moves to extend his jail sentence, but says not burying her daughter has made it virtually impossible for her to move on.
“It never goes away. There are birthdays, anniversaries, reminders … you never forget,” she says. “Her body has never been found. Until it is, how can we (move on)?”
BIBLE STUDIES
Guider was sentenced in August 2002 to 17 years in prison, with a non-parole period of 12 years for manslaughter.
He has served his time largely in isolation to avoid bashings by inmates at Lithgow and Goulburn maximum-security jails, and more recently Long Bay, where he has been allowed to mix with inmates of a similar age.
It is understood Guider — a manic depressive who said he had been abused by his mother — has attended group and one-on-one counselling in jail, and is believed to have undergone an intensive sex reoffenders’ program for high-risk offenders known as CUBIT, despite having resisted previous courses.
Over four sessions a week, for nine to 12 months, inmates talk with psychologists and among themselves about what drove them to offend, their alcohol and other drug problems, and their anti-social attitudes.
They learn about coping mechanisms and plan for the healthy, responsible lives they might lead on the outside.
The model is cognitive behavioural therapy — the same kind used to treat depression and anxiety — and emphasises relapse prevention.
Curiously, Guider has completed bible studies, pursued an archaeological degree, and written a number of short books on Aboriginal culture and history.
In a pre-sentence assessment in 2000, psychiatrist Bruce Westmore stated treatment for paedophilia to control his deviant sexual urges, including medication, was unlikely to work.
“His background and lifestyle to date … leaves me with little confidence that he would be able to respond positively to any such program,” he stated.
“His remorse and contrition for the offence is very limited. He can only be categorised as that of a compulsive and committed paedophile who has little, if any, insight into the consequences of his behaviour, that he remains a serious danger to the community.”
DCI Sly says Guider has never confessed the true extent of his crimes and claims to suffer bouts of amnesia, even though he has a sharp memory and is acutely intelligent.
“Even after he said he buried Samantha by a gum tree at Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, he later said ‘I didn’t say that’.
“He looks to the side, he looks away … he never looks you in the eye.”
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