Bid to keep Samantha Knight killer in jail: victim breaks silence
Abused by Samantha Knight’s killer, Lisa Giles is speaking up to keep him in jail.
Three decades after a traumatised girl confided to her mother about being sexually abused by a family friend — the serial paedophile who molested and killed Bondi child Samantha Knight — the once-timid victim has found her voice.
Lisa Giles likens it to “exercising a new muscle”.
Today in the Supreme Court, as Michael Anthony Guider, 68, and his lawyers argue for his immediate release from prison, Ms Giles, 43, is going to take her seat in the witness box, clear her throat and give her newly found muscle a searing public workout.
Ms Giles’s face, voice, family and the abuse she suffered as a five-year-old child — all of it is going on display for the first time as she sacrifices “the fierce privacy I have demanded and cultivated for most of my life”.
“I have played this scene out in my mind many times since I decided to finally do it,” Ms Giles told The Australian yesterday.
“If I need to have my mother holding my hand, then she will. I’m not going to let anxiety stop me. My husband Ben has been able to set the space for me to explore this without worrying about whether I’m putting us in danger. He helps to make me feel brave. I can’t go back now.”
Ms Giles believes that what she’s doing might be cathartic for her and other survivors of Guider’s depravity. She suspects they struggle every day.
But more than anything, she hopes that by making her case to judge Richard Button with 6000 words of carefully crafted reflection on Guider and the criminal justice system, she may halt his quest for freedom.
Guider ultimately pleaded guilty to the abuse of Lisa and 12 other children between 1980 and 1996. His modus operandi was to photograph and sedate children with sleeping tablets in their Coke and Fanta, then assault them.
His subsequent plea of guilty in 2001 to the 1986 manslaughter of nine-year-old Samantha Knight, whose body has never been found despite exhaustive searches, meant a speedy outcome for the criminal justice system. He was jailed for 17 years in 2002 and is now due to be freed. However, his victims, Samantha’s mother Tess and the NSW government are objecting.
Ms Giles and other survivors are concerned that his guilty pleas cut short police investigations into Guilder’s suspected culpability over other children, some missing presumed dead. It meant he avoided further scrutiny.
Police have recently told Ms Giles that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photographs of children snapped by Guider sit in archive boxes — many unmatched with possible victims.
It isn’t too late, Ms Giles says, for unacknowledged victims of Guider to come forward themselves and talk to police.
“Michael is relying on us all to assume that what’s done is done, and he’s probably quite smug at his success at avoiding being charged with any further crimes,’’ she said.
“And there are a lot of us. More of us than those who came forward to make statements, and even more still who could not use their experiences for the purposes of putting him into jail. You might have been led to believe that what you experienced was ‘not that bad’ or that there is some kind of trauma hierarchy that you think you are at the bottom of. You are not. Everything counts.”
As Ms Giles confided yesterday, she’s nervous on the eve of her appearance. The abuse she and others suffered, the fate of Samantha and the permanent scarring have caused her to lead what she calls a “half-life”.
She says she cannot conjure back the other half of her life but she might mitigate damage by taking charge — giving up her right to suppression orders that have protected her identity since she went to police aged 21.
Ms Giles has painted a remarkable word picture for Justice Button of what she calls “the psychotic bad guy you see in the movies: deeply single-minded, manipulative, narcissistic, and delusional”.
She will argue that while his body has aged, his mind doesn’t change. He will, she says, always be a scheming predator. Tess Knight brands him as one of the state’s most dangerous criminals who should die behind bars.
Ms Giles hopes her powerful message in the courtroom today will resonate beyond its four walls. “We are not physically safe if he is released,” she said. “Our children are not safe. And our minds are not safe.”
As a boarder at Ms Giles’s grandmother’s Bondi house in the 1970s, Guider was like a familiar piece of the furniture years before she was born. Her family grew fond of him, unaware of his stealthy grooming and abuse of children. He preyed upon Lisa in 1980 when she was five.
Ms Giles recalls that “Uncle Mick” was “like a travelling showman”, pulling out his camera to photograph the kids while impressing adults with free glossy prints. He handed trinkets and sweets to the children. She remembers the smell of his sweat, and the imprint of the camera’s viewfinder on his face.
In prison Guider has been a prodigious student, achieving tertiary qualifications in Aboriginal culture. His publications are in the State Library of NSW — something Ms Giles finds abhorrent to the memory of Samantha and others.
She expresses anger that Guider has shown no remorse for having decimated the minds of his victims and she argues that a further 12 months of extended supervision — prison — is “the very least that needs to be done”.
Ms Giles is also determined to go further than today’s hearing — in coming months she wants to investigate his life and crimes from her perspective as a survivor for a podcast series that she will write and narrate.
At a hearing two months ago, Justice Button said he could not be sure that Guider’s “chronic, intense, longstanding sexual attraction to children” had entirely ceased, adding “experience shows that a committed paedophile can complete a grave offence of child sexual assault in a matter of moments”.
Guider’s lawyer described him as a model prisoner who had been on multiple day-leaves from prison without incident.
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