Police are chasing new leads in the rape and murder of Denise McGregor
THE sex slaying of 13-year-old schoolgirl Denise McGregor shocked Victoria. Now police cold case detectives are reopening the 1978 murder.
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IT is 40 years since the sex slaying of schoolgirl Denise McGregor shocked Victorians.
Hopes were raised a decade ago that the case was about to be solved when police discovered circumstantial evidence linking convicted child killer and Sunday school teacher Robert Arthur Selby Lowe to the murders of Denise, 13, and Kylie Maybury, 6.
There was no doubt Lowe abducted, raped and murdered six-year-old Sheree Beasley in 1991 before stuffing her body in a Rosebud stormwater drain.
Police just needed a couple of drops of Lowe’s blood for DNA testing to see if he had also murdered Denise and Kylie.
Lowe, a former church elder, got Legal Aid in 1997 to fund a High Court constitutional challenge to the validity of the Act that police were attempting to use to forcibly take his DNA.
It wasn’t until four years later that police eventually won the battle to get it.
We now know Lowe was fighting the bid for his DNA due to sheer bastardry — and to mess with the minds of police and the families of Denise and Kylie.
He knew all along his DNA would clear him — and it did — but, sicko that he is, he wasn’t prepared to do the decent thing and give it voluntarily.
DNA did eventually help solve the Kylie Maybury murder, with paedophile Gregory Keith Davies last year being jailed for life over it.
But the rape and murder of Pascoe Vale Girls College student Denise remains unsolved.
Having her hopes raised and then dashed in 2001 when Lowe was cleared was shattering for Denise’s older sister, Colleen McGregor.
Now Colleen is again hopeful she might finally find out who murdered Denise, following a visit from homicide squad detective Luke Farrell.
Det Sen-Constable Farrell told Colleen the force was having a fresh look at the murder.
A few of those leads were previously provided to other detectives by Colleen and included the names of people she thought should be checked out.
The skull fracture that killed Denise was so severe that the pathologist who carried out her autopsy described it as being similar to those suffered by plane crash victims.
Her killer had removed one of the shoelaces from Denise’s Adidas runners and tried to strangle her with it.
When that didn’t work, the murderer tied Denise’s hands behind her back with the shoelace then used a rock or crowbar to beat her to death.
Denise’s half-naked body was found face down by the side of an unsealed road in long grass on March 21, 1978, at Wallan East, 55km north of Melbourne.
“Sadly, our mother Carmel died at the age of 62 in 2000 without ever knowing who killed Denise and why,” Colleen told the Herald Sun.
“Every year around the anniversary of Denise’s death, Mum would lose a clump of hair on the back of her head. It would grow back and then around the time of Denise’s birthday it would fall out again.
“The not knowing why Denise was killed and by who hurt Mum and still hurts me now.
“Was it just a random attack? Or was it somebody she or we knew? We just don’t know.
“Now, with these recent new developments, I at least have hope I will get answers before I die.
“Denise was a lovely girl and I miss her so much. She had an outgoing personality and would speak to anyone.
“She did a newspaper round for about a year at a very young age when we lived in Penshurst in southwestern Victoria and loved chatting to people as she did it.”
Colleen lived in Bell St, Pascoe Vale, with her single mother Carmel, Denise and her younger sister Sharon. She was 16 when Denise was murdered and was out with her boyfriend on the night Denise went missing.
Carmel McGregor, who separated from her husband Cedric in 1975, sent Denise and Sharon, aged 11 at the time, out about 6.15pm to buy dinner and soft drinks from a nearby hamburger shop, which was about a 15-minute walk along Bell St.
The girls did buy the food, but not the drink. When they got to the corner of Bell and Anderson streets about 7.05pm, Denise gave the food to Sharon and told her to take it to their mother while she went to a milk bar about 150m away to get some Coca-Cola. She never made it home.
THE milk bar owner, Samuel Reginald Sinnott, became an early suspect after giving conflicting accounts about whether Denise came into his shop that night.
He told police she hadn’t, but told Sun reporter Tony Wilson “she came in alone and bought two bottles of soft drink and an Easter egg”.
At Denise’s inquest in 1978, Sinnott stuck to his story that Denise had been in his shop shortly before she disappeared — but changed his story again by giving evidence that four or five “young men around the 20 age group” had been in the shop at the same time.
That was despite the police officer who interviewed Sinnott telling the coroner Sinnott had told him he hadn’t seen Denise at all that night.
Denise’s mother gave evidence at the inquest about the shopkeeper.
“Sharon came home by herself at five past seven by the clock on the wall,” she said. “Sharon told me Denise had gone to the shop around the corner to get the Coke.
“Sharon and myself ate our tea and we left Denise’s for her.
“After we finished, I sent Sharon around to the shop to see what was keeping Denise. That would have been about 25 to eight.
“She came back and told me she was not there.
“I then gave her 10c to go and buy a Herald and ask them in the shop if Denise had been there.
“Sharon then returned to the shop to ask.
“When Sharon returned she told me the man in the shop had told her Denise had not been in the shop.
“I then took Sharon in my car and we drove around the streets trying to find Denise.
“I went around looking at the phone boxes in case Denise was using one.
“I did not see Denise alive again.”
In her statement to police, Sharon said she had described Denise to the shopkeeper and Sinnott had replied, “I know the girl you are talking about, I have not seen her.”
Country Roads Board surveyor Norman Munday was working on Epping Rd, Wallan East, about 11.25 the following morning when he found Denise’s badly beaten body.
Her underwear had been pulled down around her knees; an autopsy later confirmed she had been raped.
The police brief of evidence given to the coroner in 1978 said inquiries had revealed Denise used to go to a pinball parlour in Broadmeadows that was “frequented by the youth of the area”.
“Inquiries at her school showed she used to talk to a lot of boys and skite about having boyfriends around the age of 19 to 21 years,” it said.
“This may have been just talk on her part as her last boyfriend, a Gary Campbell from Broadmeadows, was aged 14 years.
“She was a typical schoolgirl who considered a friendship with a boy for a week meant that he was her boyfriend.
“It was ascertained she used a CB radio at a friend’s place, but the identity of the girl is not known, that she met a youth by the name of Frank who used the call-sign Lightning One.
“In spite of publicity, Frank has not come forward.
“Also that she had asked a school friend to give her an alibi for the night of March 20 (the night she went missing), would indicate that she had made tentative arrangements to meet some person that evening.
“That person has not come forward.”
Police also organised a dramatic television re-enactment of Denise’s rape and murder.
It prompted a huge community response in 1978 when it was shown during evening television news services across three nights.
A scene depicting Denise being repeatedly beaten with a crowbar was cut after complaints to the Broadcasting Tribunal.
The then head of the homicide squad, Paul Delianis, defended the graphic re-enactment.
“We wanted to portray it as realistically as possible,” Mr Delianis said at the time. “The violence was part of the reality. It was really very much worse than that.”
Colleen McGregor yesterday appealed to anyone with information to contact police.
“No matter how insignificant they might think the information they have is, they should just pick up the phone and contact Crime Stoppers,” she said.
“It might be the little piece of the jigsaw that links to something else.
“Even if it is just something like you were in a pub years ago and overhead some drunk spruiking about something in the case you might think is common knowledge, you should still let police know as it might be a vital clue.”
Anybody with information about the Denise McGregor murder should contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or at www.crimestoppersvic.com.au
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