Queensland true crime: Jacqueline Leyden

AS the former Penthouse Pet centrefold and up-market brothel madam lay dying, her alleged killer staggered, dripping blood, past trendy cafes. He had just stabbed himself in the neck.

Jacqueline Leyden was murdered at Main Beach in 1999.

‘SLAIN BEACH’ screamed the headline in the local paper the next day. It was a play on Main Beach, where two of the most gruesome murders the Gold Coast had seen had just gone down.

On the trendy Tedder Ave café and restaurant strip, there was bloodshed and mayhem.

In a luxury apartment next to Bar Felix, up-market brothel madam and former Penthouse Pet centrefold Jacqui Leyden and her drug dealer friend John Ski lay slashed to death.

Gold Coast society figures drinking and dining on Tedder Ave watched in horror as the killer, SP bookie Neil Morrison, staggered down the street drenched in blood. He had stabbed himself in the neck after carrying out the killings with what a judge would later describe as ‘clinical, deathly accuracy’.

“You (expletive) dog,’’ Morrison allegedly screamed as he cut Leyden’s throat.

Police escort Neil Morrison from the Gold Coast Hospital in 1999.

The double murder, in February 1999, was among the first major crimes to shine a light on the Glitter Strip’s darkening underbelly as city-style vice began to take a firm grip on Australia’s family holiday playground.

Blonde, attractive and vivacious, Leyden, 42, hailed from Sydney where she had worked for up-market Kings Cross brothel A Touch of Class. After moving to the Gold Coast, she ran an escort service of the same name from the tables of Tedder Ave.

Leyden had a colourful past, having been embroiled in Operation Wallah – a 1995 Criminal Justice Commission and police probe into organised crime. During an explosive Southport court case, it was alleged she was paid $4000 by a Gold Coast restaurateur to supply prostitutes for a ‘sex romp’ with former Labor Cabinet Minister, Senator Graham Richardson.

At the time of the murders, Ski – real name John Adadzynski – was due in court to face drug trafficking charges.

But despite the underworld circles she mixed in, Leyden may simply have been murdered out of obsessive jealousy. Or was she killed, as her family believe, for more sinister reasons? Not by Morrison but by someone else?

She and Morrison had had a brief fling and shared a Surfers Paradise unit for three weeks before an acrimonious bust-up in 1997.

Jacqueline Leyden.

He began relentlessly stalking her, sometimes with a gun.

“He was obsessed,’’ recalls Leyden’s daughter Esha, now 39, who was 20 and living with her mum at Main Beach when she was murdered.

“Neil would hide under a car at (their unit block) and once chased Mum and I around (Main Beach restaurant) Saks with a gun. Mum had a real happy-go-lucky personality and when she and Neil stopped seeing each other he was very jealous.

“He wanted to run Main Beach too and was jealous of the people Mum knew.’’

Leyden’s mother, Dawn, says she first met Morrison at a Main Beach restaurant and took an instant dislike to him.

“He had a scar on his face – he was a bit of a gangster from the old days – and there was something about him I didn’t like,’’ she told couriermail.com.au.

“He and ‘Jacq’ used to fight a lot. He was a violent drunk and nasty and he carried a gun. They split up but he wouldn’t leave her alone. She’d turn up somewhere and he’d turn up too. He was like the Phantom.’’

But Dawn says Jacqui was more afraid of Morrison’s bodyguard, a man named Alf.

“She used to say to me ‘Mum, he (Morison) wouldn’t hurt me’. But she was frightened of Alf. You’d mention his name and she’d shudder.’’

On the morning before she died, Leyden had bumped into Alf in a Main Beach high-rise, she told her mother.

“Alf pinned her up against the lift,’’ Dawn says.

“I never found out what was really the go between the two of them. He’d pinned her up against the walls in nightclubs before and threatened her.’’

Dawn Leyden with photos of her murdered daughter Jacqueline Leyden.

On the night of the murders on February 3, 1999, Leyden, Ski and his girlfriend Nicola Horton were at their friend Brendan Washington’s Main Beach duplex, celebrating the birth of Washington’s child. Horton and Washington had gone for a walk to clear their heads.

When they returned, Morrison’s committal hearing was told, they found him lying in the driveway with a knife sticking out of his neck. Hearing screams from the unit, Washington ran inside to find Ski collapsed against the fridge in a pool of blood, with a fatal neck wound.

Leyden was still alive, barely, slumped in a dining room chair with her neck cut.

She had been on the phone to her friend Meta Fishbourne, and told her that ‘Blocky’ – short for ‘Blockhead’, the nickname Jacqui gave an unappreciative Morrison – was at the duplex with a knife ‘threatening to stab everyone’.

Fishbourne told Southport Magistrates Court that she heard Morrison say, ‘that’s right, call me Blocky’ followed by several expletives.

When Leyden spoke again to Fishbourne again on the phone, her voice had changed.

“She spoke very softly,’’ Fishbourne recalled.

“She said ‘oh my God’ first and then she said ‘help me, help me’.’’

Washington ran back outside to find Morrison staggering down the street, past crowded sidewalk cafes and restaurants, a knife in his hands.

He gave chase and brought Morrison to the ground, but was stabbed in the arm.

Leyden was taken to hospital with critical injuries.

Neil Morrison was transported to the Gold Coast Hospital with critical injuries.

“It was a hot February night but as I was driving to the hospital, I suddenly felt a cold wind gust and got a terrible feeling that Jacq was gone,’’ Dawn recalls.

“When I got to the hospital, she was dead.”

In 2000, Morrison was given a life sentence for the murders and became the first person under new laws ordered to serve at least 20 years behind bars before being eligible for parole.

But both Dawn and Esha Leyden are not convinced he was the murderer.

“I’ve heard so many things to say he didn’t do it,’’ Dawn says.

“Jacq was mixed up with some dangerous people and I don’t know what she was up to. She was broke and could have been involved in things (drugs) to get money.

“After she died, I went to a medium and through him, she told me ‘Mum, Neil didn’t do it’. I have nothing against Neil and couldn’t care less if he gets out of jail.’’

The theory that Leyden and Ski could have been the victims of an underworld execution was put to the jury at Morrison’s trial by his barrister, Jeff Hunter.

In his closing address in Brisbane Supreme Court, Mr Hunter said the pair’s involvement in the sex and drugs industry could have meant they had other enemies who wanted them dead.

“There could have been other people who meant them harm,’’ Mr Hunter told the jury, adding that the prosecution’s circumstantial case failing to rule out that he had himself been attacked.

Jacqueline Leyden’s parents Dawn and Peter Leyden outside the Supreme Court after Neil Morrison was sentenced to two life terms in jail.

Two months before she was murdered, Leyden and her mum went shopping at Pacific Fair and had lunch at Main Beach.

“She was broke and very flat and told me , ‘Mummy, you’re going to outlive me’. She even specified that she wanted a White Lady funeral,’’ Dawn says.

“I said ‘don’t be so silly, darling, I’ll be gone long before you’. We talked on the phone every day after that but it was the last time I saw her alive.”

To Dawn and Esha, Jacqui was as much a best friend as she was a daughter and mother.

“She wasn’t your typical mother – there was never a dull moment with her – but she was amazing,’’ Esha says.

“Every time I think of her, I have a smile on my face.’’

Dawn says: “She did that job (prostitution) but she was a classy lady who was intelligent and could have done anything she wanted. She was the life of the party and everyone loved her.

“When I saw her in the morgue, she just looked beautiful and at peace.’’

Originally published as Queensland true crime: Jacqueline Leyden