Sheree Beasley murder: Why paedophile Robert Arthur Selby Lowe and ‘Mr Cruel’ changed suburban life

SHEREE Beasley would have turned 30 this year had a paedophile not pounced as she innocently rode her bike to the milk bar. It’s a case that still haunts us.

Copy picture of murder victim Sheree Beasley. Picture: Supplied

IN police and criminal slang, Robert Arthur Selby Lowe was a true “rockspider”.

Like all proficient paedophiles, Lowe blended into society and hid his sick predilection for sexual contact with children.

He was patient while waiting to pounce.

It is hard to believe it was 24 years ago when he struck in Rosebud and stole away a young girl named Sheree Beasley who, had she not wandered unknowingly into the cunning creep’s path, would have turned 30 years old in February this year.

Lowe the paedophile disguised himself to those around him. Picture: Supplied

Robert Lowe was a true ‘rockspider’. Picture: Supplied

As a six-year-old on June 29, 1991, the innocent freckle-faced kid rode her pink bicycle to the local milk bar.

She never made it home.

Her abduction marked a change of the times — kids could no longer play on their own on the streets and residents had to start locking their doors.

Lowe and others like him — namely the mystery paedophile known as “Mr Cruel” — were the epitome of the bogeyman.

Mr Cruel’s abductions of young schoolgirls had titillated Lowe and drove him to his ultimate crime.

Lowe, a salesman and avid church goer, snatched Sheree streetside and drove her away.

One witness said Sheree gave her a “terrible look” and another said she mouthed the word “help” from inside the car as it drove on.

Tragically, Lowe had a history of approaching young girls but those incidents had gone largely unreported.

Sheree was a healthy, happy and cheeky little girl.

This is how Supreme Court judge Justice Philip Cummins described the despicable abduction and murder, when sentencing Lowe, aged 57, to life with no chance of parole.

Lowe, a former Sunday school teacher, had spied Sheree the previous weekend.

“You went back on Saturday the 29th under the pretext of fixing the tiles in the bathroom of your Rosebud flat, to kidnap her,” Justice Cummins said.

“What you did was every child’s fear and every parent’s nightmare. You inflicted on two families a terrible legacy.

“Your own good family was still in Glen Waverley. That morning you had been to a prayer meeting at your local church at which you are an elder.

“Your sexual interests, fuelled by an interest in the Karmein Chan abduction (carried out by Mr Cruel), led you to Rosebud to abduct this little girl.”

Lowe drove up next to Sheree and, according to a young witness, spoke from inside his car and told her to get off her bicycle.

Sheree replied: “I’m not getting off the bike for nothing.”

Justice Cummins said Sheree had acted intelligently and bravely, but Lowe got out of his car, took her off the bike and bundled her inside “and in a skid drove off”.

“A series of witnesses along the Nepean Highway leave with us a haunting, indeed indelible imprint on our minds of the fear and distress of that young girl,” Justice Cummins said.

“You, Mr Lowe, had determined to force yourself upon her and having kidnapped her, you took her away and you forced yourself upon her.”

Sheree’s crude resting place, as pictured from the sky.

Lowe forced himself upon his little victim, whose dead body he dumped in a concrete drain along Mornington-Flinders Rd.

“Her final resting place was a cold concrete cylindrical drain, 30cm wide,” Justice Cummins said.

Sheree’s decomposed body was found nearly four months after her disappearance.

Detectives arrested the egocentric and manipulative Lowe after a long investigation.

“In the end your conduct assisted (the investigators) because of a series of lies and half-truths you told the police over a period of time,” Justice Cummins said.

“Walter Scott wrote in 1808: ‘O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.’

“You wove a tangled web around yourself, which eventually captured you.”

After the life sentence was handed down, Sheree’s mother, Kerri Lee Ludlow called out from the public gallery: “Just remember Lowe, Sheree got the death sentence.”

Before he was sentenced, Lowe admitted a number of previous convictions for theft and minor sex offences committed in England, New Zealand and Victoria.

Outside court afterwards, her grandfather Neil Greenhill said: “I hope (with) all those shadows in his cell that he thinks to himself maybe that’s the anti-Christ in their moving with him.”

Lowe tries to spin his web of lies during a police interview.

Lowe leaves court after his appeal was dismissed.

The face of evil.

Despite his incarceration, it appeared the cunning Lowe was able to continue his sick child fantasies.

In December 2010, Mr Greenhill called on the Baillieu Government to move Lowe to a tougher jail and strip him of all his privileges after the Herald Sun revealed Lowe was the mastermind behind a sick prison paedophile ring.

According to reports, Lowe regularly accessed child porn on prison computers with smuggled USB and memory cards, and was grooming young, mentally ill inmates through a prison program.

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