How one of Australia’s worst paedophiles was caught after 30 years
SHE had no name, no suspect and no forensic evidence, just the knowledge of the terrible harm a serial paedophile had caused 30 years before. Three years of painstaking “old fashion detective work” later, she found him.
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DETECTIVE Senior Constable Ellen Quinn had few leads to go on.
She knew there was a paedophile who had been raping children in Sydney’s inner west.
She didn’t have a name, a suspect, or forensic evidence.
But the horror she encountered in the first victim’s statement was enough to drive her on.
By the time Quinn finished her three-year investigation, nine people had told their story of child sexual abuse — some as girls as young as six — and one of Australia’s worst child molesters would be off the street and behind bars for a sentence of 15 years.
Now, True Crime Australia can identify the serial paedophile who terrorised Sydney’s inner west as Jack Keith King.
A monster who used a young girl to lure other victims, allowing him to commit a string of sickening sexual offences against children during the 1980s. He would use ploys to attract kids such as setting up a trampoline or getting one child to invite others over to celebrate their birthday.
It can now be revealed King was also interviewed by police in relation to the 1968 murder of seven-year-old Linda Stilwell who vanished from Melbourne’s Luna Park.
King was found to be in the area at the time. However, in 2009, the coroner named serial child-killer Derek Percy, who was also nearby at the time, as her murderer.
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King’s string of sexual offences against children began in the 1970s and stretched for over a decade.
And until recently, he thought he’d got away with it.
The serial paedophile was enjoying his retirement, soaking up the sun and the easy lifestyle of the West Australian coast … until one courageous woman came forward and a dogged detective made it her mission to crack the toughest case of her career.
“The first piece of information that came in was an extraordinarily brave woman, who at the time was in her late 30s,” said Quinn.
“She walked into her local police station, in rural NSW, and she told the guy at the counter, ‘Something really bad happened to me when I was a kid and I want to talk about it. I want to tell my story’.”
In December 2013, the woman told police she was raped by a man called Lionel for several years, from the age of six until nine, and that the offences occurred around the inner western Sydney suburb of Stanmore during the 1980s.
“Her story was a bloody hard one to tell and it took a lot for her to do that, to walk into that police station that day, so I will always admire her for it — that’s the first piece of information that started everything,” said Quinn.
But this was no average case.
The first name the victim could recall for the perpetrator turned out to be a pseudonym he was using. He also gave her a fake last name; chillingly, it was a surname he’d appropriated from one of his victims.
Moreover, three decades had passed since his crimes, meaning there was no possibility of setting up a crime scene for forensic evidence.
“In this case you can’t rely on forensic evidence — although fingerprints did become relevant later in identifying him — but 30 years had passed. So we had no forensic evidence, memories fade in that time. The best you can do is just thoroughly and comprehensively examine the evidence that you do have and in this case it was that (first) victim statement,” she said.
The victim told police she recalled seeing a young boy with her molester. Although the boy was not in any way involved or privy to the crimes committed, the woman could remember his name — Jason King — and that was a lead worth following.
“She wasn’t quite sure of the relationship, she believed it was this guy’s son and she could also remember Jason’s mother’s name, but then there were a lot of people with that same name,” said Quinn.
A White Pages search of the name J. King returns more than 8000 results, nationally.
So systematically and methodically Quinn began to interview anyone she could find who was in some way connected to the victim and could verify events.
“It’s all old fashion detective work: talking to lots of people, making lots of inquiries … lots of which don’t go anywhere but those that do, piece them together and you sort of build a good picture,” she said.
The first victim’s allegations were not only confirmed but increasingly the people Quinn interviewed admitted they had their own story.
“I’d been speaking to all of these different people and what is remarkable is that they all told me very consistent things about him. They described a slightly English accent; they described some thick glasses that he wore and they described pockmarked skin, scarring on his face,” she said.
Quinn found social work records that referenced King.
“They even spoke about him in quite glowing terms,” she said.
“It soon became apparent that he was using that first victim as a lure of sorts, to lure other vulnerable children into his sort of life and his care. And he committed numerous sexual offences against all of them over a lengthy period of time.”
Quinn painstakingly made her way through the endless list of “Jason Kings”, ruling people out as she went and refining her list.
She visited the location of the old fish and chip shop run by King and his wife on Henderson Road, Alexandria during the early 80s. While King’s wife would serve fish and chips to punters, he would often disappear to the living quarters upstairs where he would rape primary-school aged girls.
Quinn walked through the Stanmore apartment block where one of the victims lived. There on the stairwell wall, preserved for more than 30 years, was a piece of childish graffiti scrawled on the red brick of the apartment block. It was signed with the little girl’s name.
“It didn’t have any investigative significance but it really made it real, that they really were there. And they were kids, talking about graffitiing their name on the wall, talking about someone loving someone, just kid stuff. It really hit home how vulnerable they were,” said Quinn.
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A break came when Quinn met a St Vincent de Paul volunteer who encountered Jason as a child. Jason was frequently hospitalised, a victim of constant and relentless abuse, and the volunteer remembered his little face being littered with scars.
Those markings would become key to tracking down the right Jason King.
“For every inquiry I’m telling you about there were 20 that led me nowhere but that took up a lot of time,” said Detective Quinn.
“That includes running through every single Jason King that I could find and narrowing it down to — I can’t even tell you how many — but there were pages of Jason Kings that this could have been but the scarring was really relevant.”
Then Detective Quinn found a Jason King with a website advertising services as a paranormal investigator. The man’s face bore heavy scars.
Quinn assessed her approach. If this went wrong, it could jeopardise the entire case.
“I was going in blind, this guy could be in contact with his dad, he could be an offender like his dad, I really had no idea what to expect,” she said.
She bit the bullet. Jason told her he was also looking for his long-lost father and that he’d accepted the help of filmmaker Ben Lawrence who was documenting the search for his film, Ghosthunter.
Jason’s experience of coming to terms with the knowledge his father was a wanted paedophile is documented throughout the film, as he grapples with life under the shadow of his father’s crimes.
But his shock only grew when coincidentally he was also contacted by a childhood friend, on Facebook.
She confessed she too was a victim.
“He really f---ed us all up” she wrote.
“He took my childhood away and many others. I was never the same little girl.”
After sourcing Jason’s birth certificate, Quinn now had his father’s real name.
Government records showed that Jack Keith King didn’t have a passport — so he hadn’t left the country. He didn’t have a driver’s license and there was no death certificate, which meant he was still alive.
Victorian police records also came up with a match, revealing that King had committed a sexual offence against a child during the 1970s but that he had skipped his bail. After that, he adopted his fake name.
NSW police had his fingerprints recorded for another minor offence.
Quinn found a man with King’s name and date of birth living in Western Australia through details he had provided to utility companies.
But in the end, it came down to an Instagram post.
The same Jack Keith King had a daughter whose Instagram account showed a photo of him.
“He had a pockmarked face, he had thick glasses and I thought, well, this looks like how I’d imagine this guy would have turned out,” said Quinn.
Now she was 99 per cent sure she’d got her guy but fingerprinting him, to see if he matched the prints on file, would be the final confirmation.
When Fremantle police took King to the station his prints matched perfectly and he was extradited to Sydney, where he was charged and tried before the District Court before being sentenced in 2017.
Jason attended the trial and supported the nine female victims, who sat together in the court. Each of the women provided a moving victim impact statement. Some told of developing panic attacks or mental health disorders as a result of their abuse, others said they had felt trapped in the pain of what happened to them for more than three decades.
“It was really a powerful thing to witness,” said Quinn.
“For every job I do I try and do the best job that I can but there was something special about these women, especially because of the truly horrible nature of what happened to them.
“I was thoroughly determined. I could have written this case off, just put it in the too hard basket a trillion times but I was determined not to. There’s nothing too flash about it. You can’t wrap it up in an hour episode, it’s a hard slog. It’s chasing a lot of rabbits down holes and going nowhere but it’s worth it,” said Quinn.
Do you know more? Contact amelia.saw@news.com.au
• To pre-order your copy of Ghosthunter visit www.jbhifi.com.au
• Ghosthunter is now showing at Classic Cinema and Lido Cinema, Melbourne