Samantha Knight’s mother is living every parent’s nightmare

Michael Guider is a pedophile, child killer and soon to be a free man.

Samantha Knight’s remains have never been found.

Seventeen years ago, in another Sydney courtroom, notorious pedophile Michael Guider’s wicked assaults on numerous children across many years were laid bare.

The killer of Bondi schoolgirl Samantha Knight, who had disappeared in 1986 and whose remains have never been found, knew as he faced that courtroom in 2002 that he would get a hefty sentence from Justice James Wood.

Guider had finally pleaded guilty — but not to having murdered the blonde-haired child. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter, for which he knew he should get a lighter sentence.

He was, he claimed, sorry. He described Samantha’s death in August 1986 as an unfortunate accident arising from a defect in his usual modus operandi of drugging children with Coca-Cola spiked with the sedative Normison.

When he was preying on Samantha, he explained, things just didn’t go to plan. The nine-year-old unexpectedly stirred during his attempts to molest and photograph her. Guider then administered a heavier dose of the stupefying drug, killing her.

Then he set about covering his tracks, disposing of Samantha’s body and getting on with his life from that day in August 1986.

For another 15 years, Samantha’s disappearance was a mystery. Her mother, Tess Knight, was near suicidal, surviving but not living as she searched for her daughter and pleaded for public help. Police had seemingly few leads. Guider was not on their radar.

Another decade of evil

For insight into Guider’s lack of contrition and failure of self-control after his role in the killing and disposal of Samantha went undetected, consider this: he continued to groom, sedate, photograph and molest other children for another 10 years.

Knowing, as only he did, that he already had the blood of a child on his hands and that he had got away with the crime — knowing that Samantha’s mother grieved every day — Guider ploughed on, ruining many more young lives as he indulged his sexual fantasies with youngsters and grew his already vast child-porn photo collection.

As one of his victims, Lisa Giles, put it when she made a personal appearance in the Supreme Court last month: “He had plenty of time to think twice. To stop hurting children. To restrict himself. But he didn’t.

Lisa Giles, who was abused by Guider. Picture: AAP

“He positioned himself to be able to realise his fantasies over, and over, and over. He thought he put ingenious solutions in place to allow for him to repeatedly abuse the same kids so that they wouldn’t tell anyone, they wouldn’t have any noticeable physical symptoms, or any memories of it happening.

“This was not done to protect us. It was to ensure his ongoing supply.

“Michael was proud of his mastery of children when I knew him and even now would probably say that it is us who are limited in our acceptance of his desires. To him, the rest of society is blind, and he is awake and enlightened.

“He could set a plan in action with a child he had only met that day. He was extremely proud of his concurrent relationships with little girls and as one myself, he often showed me his latest printed roll, and described a few other girls photographed to me.

“He presented them as competitors who could take away my feeling of being special and different to everyone else and he wanted me to resent them.

“He had to build people that would do his bidding — little people were simple to placate, they could more easily normalise what he was doing to them, especially if he showed them that their parents trusted him.”

Giles believes that to Guider she was not a child aged five he had known since birth. She was an empty vessel — a messy blob of biology, “trained over time to anticipate their predator’s next move, subservient and compliant, unformed creatures of aesthetic beauty”.

“He can rationalise and take extraordinary pleasure in the isolation, coercion and abuse of small, innocent and naive children and their families, and is willing to intimidate any human standing in the way of his supreme purpose.”

Finally captured

During the sentencing in 2002, Wood explained how Guider, who had worked as a gardener at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital, was eventually stopped. In early 1996, “two young children, each seven years of age, complained that the prisoner had been indecently assaulting them and taking nude photographs of them”.

Police obtained warrants and searches were made of his work shed and his residence

“Some thousands of 35mm slides, photographs and negatives, depicting children in indecent poses and in the course of being sexually assaulted were found,” Wood said. “Also discovered were a number of pornographic books and articles, children’s underwear and cameras, as well as various texts in relation to child abuse, incest and child photography.”

Guider was questioned by police and he admitted the off­ences concerning the two girls as well as an “obsession with photographing them and also with collecting underwear”.

In April and July 1996, Guider also was questioned about the disappearance of Samantha Knight, and he “acknowledged having met Samantha once or twice at Manly, but claimed to have no knowledge in relation to her disappearance. He also acknowledged having kept scrapbooks that included details of missing children, such as Samantha and the Beaumont children, which he said he had thrown away, claiming that he had compiled these books out of his interest in mysteries but for no other reason.

Michael Guider, a notorious pedophile and child killer.

‘Nothing to hide’

In his interviews across two days in July 1996, “he accepted that he may have photographed Samantha at Manly, although ‘not in a sexual way’. He insisted he had nothing to hide”.

It was, according to Wood, a rambling interview in which it became obvious that Guider had a fascination with children who had disappeared. The pedophile suggested they might have been kidnapped “by aliens or by white slave traders”, or Satanists.

By September 1996, police and prosecutors had Guider on about 60 counts involving sexual off­ences against nine girls and two boys across the previous 15 years. Those who have investigated Guider or have been abused by him are sure that those victims are a very small representation of the totality of his offending.

In addition to almost 20 counts of indecent assault, Guider pleaded guilty back then to 15 counts of sexual intercourse — penile, penetration with a finger, with objects, and oral intercourse. His victims were as young as two.

Wood noted how “the victims in these cases had, in most inst­ances, come into contact with the prisoner after he had befriended their mothers. He had been a regular visitor to the homes of the women whom he had befriended, and he had provided gifts and outings for the children”.

At his 1996 court appearance over the pedophilia to which he pleaded guilty, Guider was still denying any wrongdoing over Samantha Knight’s disappearance.

But he was lying even as he “proffered shame and disgust for what he had done, and claimed to be facing his criminality head-on”.

With no prior convictions for sexual offences, his pleas were accepted as having been offered at the earliest possible time.

But in May 1998, significantly as a result of the persistence of Denise Hofman, a woman who knew Guider and was deeply suspicious of his self-confessed connections to Samantha Knight, police set up Strike Force Harrisville.

They discovered Guider held another secret stash in a rented storage unit at Girraween.

It was a temple to his pedophilia, a trove of pornographic photographs “depicting other young girls”, noted Wood, “some of whom appeared to be drugged, and who had their genitals exposed”.

“Two further victims were identified through these ­photographs.

“Apart from the photographs police also recovered the three scrapbooks containing newspaper cuttings, concerning the ­disappearance of Samantha Knight, which the prisoner had previously said had been thrown away.”

The images included acts of oral intercourse and digital ­penetration by Guider on girls aged between five and eight, and led to him making further admissions — but he was still denying knowledge of Samantha Knight’s disappearance.

Guider also denied having assaulted or photographed her despite his collection including pornographic slides taken on a night in mid-1985 when she was present with two other girls who had already been the subject of ­offences.

“One of these photographs, showing the exposed genitals of a girl, was excluded as having related to those girls, and by inference it must have been a photograph of Samantha Knight,” Wood said.

Tess Knight, mother of Samantha Knight, outside court. Picture: AAP

“Additionally, several slides from this series were missing.”

Police were closing in. They knew that Guider “first met Samantha Knight, and her mother, Tess, in early February 1983 at a birthday picnic” for one of the two girls who had been a victim. Samantha had been “a visitor to the home of that girl, and while there she had been photographed by (Guider) during the years 1984 and 1985”.

The crown’s case was that Guider took Samantha to an unknown location in August 1986 and gave her Normison.

“Tragically, she stopped breathing and died,’’ wrote Wood. “The prisoner then disposed of her body.

“Samantha was at the time of her death only nine years old.”

Prison confession

Police received important evidence from another prisoner who was behind bars with Guider in 1996. He said Guider was speaking of Samantha when he disclosed: “Well, I didn’t mean to do it. I must have given her too much.”

He added: “I must have put too much Normison in her Coke and she wouldn’t wake up.”

Another witness heard further admissions, including that Guider had buried her body, then dug up the remains and put them in a dumpster with garden waste near his workplace at the time, the Royal Yacht Squadron at Kirribilli.

Wood found it particularly disturbing that Guider had not given specific or firm information to police about the whereabouts of Samantha’s body.

It was “not until he was faced with the possibility of going on trial for the murder of Samantha Knight, that he finally accepted the additional criminality which he had been concealing for approximately 16 years”.

To one of the psychiatrists who assessed him, Guider spoke of the day Samantha died: “I can’t remember back … that day is particularly blank in my mind. I’ve obviously put it out of my mind. I have very vague recollections. I dissociate myself from aspects of my life that I have difficulties with.”

In another session, Guider said: “I never physically harmed the girl, I intended to take her home, it’s a very sad thing. It caught me by surprise that the drug had any effect like that.

“Naturally I panicked, I went into a … I knew I was in trouble and the other side of me took over, the protective side, which tried to find some way out of the problem, disposing of the evidence, I guess.

“I’ve blanked all of this out of my mind. I can’t be much more specific.”

Lack of remorse

Wood commented on a disturbing “lack of remorse and of a failure to confront his offence. Additionally it is consistent with the manipulative and deceptive way in which he dealt with police in 1996 and 1999, and with the way in which he obviously disposed of and/or concealed evidence relating to Samantha’s death.”

Guider told the psychiatrists of a disturbing childhood.

Wood noted Guider “appears to have been quite intelligent and to have involved himself in a range of activities and interests, including the study of Aboriginal sites and culture, writing, reading, acting as an honorary ranger, horticulture, photography, and compulsively collecting articles and books”.

But when one of his adult relationships went awry, Guider set fire to the business premises of his partner and her new lover.

Clearly, Wood said, Guider “felt more comfortable in the company of children, and regrettably they appear to have found him ­entertaining”.

Damningly, Wood noted that Guider was not capable of remorse: “If he truly felt remorse or contrition for what he had done, then it is inconceivable that he could have exposed other children to the same danger that led to Samantha’s death.”

As a compulsive and long-term pedophile, it was doubtful that Guider would benefit from prison programs designed to treat such deviancy, according to Wood.

Or as Giles puts it: “We are not physically safe if he is released. Our children are not safe. And our minds are not safe.”