Gold Coast cold case: Who killed hitchhiking friends in 1973?

THE family of teenagers Gabriele Ingrid Jahnke and Michelle Anne Riley who were murdered while hitchhiking to the Gold Coast more than 40 years ago fear their killer will never be found.

Murder victim Gabriele Jahnke was hitchhiking with Michelle Ann Riley from Brisbane to the Gold Coast in 1973 — her body was found at Ormeau.

ONE thing sticks in Barbara Jahnke’s mind when her family learned of her sister’s unexplained murder 43 years ago — her mother’s tears.

“Mum would always just constantly break down (after it happened),” said Ms Jahnke yesterday about her older sister Gabriele’s death in October 1973.

“We lost Dad about seven years ago and it would have been nice for that to be solved before it,” she said. “He always wanted answers.

Police at the scene where the girls’ bodies were found in 1973.

“After all this time if they haven’t found him now they never probably will, he might be dead.”

A decision to save money for partying proved fatal for Gabriele Ingrid Jahnke and her best friend, Michelle Anne Riley, who, on October 5 1973, decided to hitchhike from Brisbane to check-out the night life in Surfers Paradise and Coolangatta.

Gabriel Jahnke.

While the pair had known each other for only two months, they’d become inseparable and were often seen together in pubs in the Brisbane area.

Ms Jahnke and Ms Riley were last seen alive at Michelle’s home in Emperor Street, Annerley, about 5pm on October 5.

Eight days later, two children made the gruesome discovery of 19-year-old Gabriele’s decomposed body on the side of the Pacific Highway at Ormeau.

Her body lay at the bottom of an embankment and it looked as if she had been thrown.

She was dressed in a black caftan-style dress with white flowers and a black bra, but no other underwear.

Her dress had been pulled up, suggesting she may have been raped.

Eleven days after the discovery of Gabriele, her best friend’s body — 16-year-old Michelle Riley — was found in bushland off the Camp Cale Road at Loganholme.

She too had massive head injuries and her clothes were pulled up.

The killer had hurriedly tried to conceal her body by pulling some branches over it.

Police at the time said one person — “a frenzied maniac” — was responsible for both murders.

Homicide detectives followed up several leads in the double murder case, but no arrests were made.

Police working on the case in 1973.

Barbara Jahnke said she had only recently began thinking about her sister’s case again while watching crime stories on TV.

“You think after all these years they would have found something,” said Ms Jannke, 14 at the time of her sister’s murder.

“I don’t know how many years back it was that they said they were going to (get a cold case team to look into it) but we still never heard anything.

“We haven’t heard anything about it for years.

“They put the occasional piece in the paper and just stuff like that.”

Just days after the double murder, police were given a third case — an 18-year-old Ipswich girl who was raped, stabbed and left for dead near Nerang.

Police initially linked all three murders and focused their attention on the description of a man and his car wanted in relation to the stabbing attack.

He was eventually caught, but to the disappointment of the investigators at the time, was found not to be connected to the Jahnke-Riley murders.

A detective with one of the girl’s sandals.

The pair weren’t the only ones to meet a violent death in the southeast corner of Queensland during the 1970s.

They were in fact the third and fourth to endure such a gruelling end.

The murders began in July, 1972, with the deaths of 18-year-old Robin Hoinville-Bartram and Anita Cunningham, 19. The pair were hitchhiking from Melbourne to Bowen in northern Queensland to visit Ms Hoinville-Bartram’s parents when they disappeared near Coolangatta.

Ms Hoinville-Bartram’s body was found four months later under a bridge at Sensible Creek, west of Charters Towers. She had been shot in the head with a .22 rifle.

Ms Cunningham’s body has never been found, but there is not much doubt about her fate.

Ms Jahnke and Michelle were the next to be murdered, and then on October 5, 1974 — one year after Ms Jahnke and Ms Riley vanished — two Sydney trainee nurses, Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans, both 20, disappeared while hitchhiking from Brisbane to Goondiwindi after their car broke down.

Then there was Surfers Paradise teenager Margaret Rosewarne, 19, who was last seen alive trying to hitch a ride near her home to Burleigh Heads on May 5, 1976.

16 days later, her battered body was found in grass in a West Burleigh cul-de-sac.

She had been so savagely beaten that her forehead was pulped, both upper and lower jaws were broken and the top row of her teeth shattered.

Police were never able to pin anyone to the “hitchhiker” killings and avoided suggesting the evil acts had been committed by one serial killer.

However there was no denying the chilling common denominators. All seven women were under 21, all were hitchhiking in the Coast-Brisbane area, they all suffered serious head injuries, it appears they were all sexually assaulted and, in most cases, there was little effort to hide the bodies.

CAN YOU HELP? CALL CRIMESTOPPERS ON 1800 333 000