Former head of Daydream Island and Q1 in chilling threat to teen girl: ‘I have a knife, get into my car’
Decades before he became a successful hospitality executive, Warren John McCorriston menaced a teenage girl in a terrifying incident she would never forget.
Decades before he became a successful hospitality executive, Warren John McCorriston menaced a teenage girl in a terrifying incident she would never forget.
“I have a knife, get into my car, I want to talk,” McCorriston demanded of the girl, Newcastle District Court was told on Thursday.
McCorriston was 18, just a couple of years older than the vulnerable and alone girl who had stepped off a bus at night at Gateshead in Lake Macquarie in 1980.
The girl screamed. She ran. And she was so affected that 43 years later she picked McCorriston’s face out of black-and-white photographs of 20 people shown to her by police, the court was told.
McCorriston, now 64, is a former manager of Daydream Island Resort and the former body corporate manager of the Gold Coast’s Q1 apartment complex.
He has admitted to the abduction incident, pleading guilty to a charge of detaining the girl for advantage without causing injury.
The victim came forward after publicity related to NSW Police Strike Force Arapaima, investigating the disappearances and suspected murders of two teenagers from the same region, Robyn Hickie, 18, and Amanda Robinson, 14, The Australian understands.
Hickie, a dental nurse who attended the same school as McCorriston, was last seen at a Pacific Highway bus stop at Belmont North on Saturday, April 7, 1979.
Robinson disappeared after a school dance on April 20, 1979.
After the dance, she took a bus from Gateshead to Swansea and was walking a few hundred metres to her home when she vanished.
McCorriston became a person of interest in the Hickie and Robinson disappearances as Arapaima investigators, led by detective Kristi Faber, re-examined the case, with investigations uncovering a web of offending by members of a Scouts group of which McCorriston was a part.
He has not been charged in connection to Hickie and Robinson, but he has been convicted of other serious offences against women.
Strike Force Arapaima arranged for their Queensland counterparts to arrest him at Q1 in January 2020 on charges of sexual assaults against three women in the NSW Hunter Region between 1979 and 1997.
He was jailed for 8½ years for the offending against those women, with a non-parole period of 4½ years.
The non-parole period ended in July last year, and he was released in February this year, the Newcastle District Court was told.
Separate to his NSW offences, he has also been charged with sex offences against four Queensland women in 2019, when he was aged in his late 50s.
Those charges relate to McCorriston allegedly procuring sex acts from the women through false pretences after meeting them online, and of raping one of the women, who has since taken her own life.
The Queensland charges will be mentioned in Southport Magistrates Court again next month.
Currently on bail on the abduction offence, he arrived at the District Court in Newcastle on Thursday in a suit and tie and flanked by supporters. His defence barrister presented a picture of a reformed man.
Ben Bickford said none of his submissions were “intended to downplay the seriousness of this offence, or how frightening the event must have been for the victim”. However, McCorriston was a young man at the time and “He appeared to have a distorted view of the world and relationships, in part it seems, at least according to the psychologist, because of the modelling that he was exposed to by his dysfunctional and abusive father”.
A forensic psychologist explored those issues and McCorriston was also undergoing counselling, Mr Bickford said.
“It appears to be the second offence in time on Mr McCorriston’s criminal history. A degree of leniency would have been afforded to him … had he been sentenced a very long period ago.”
He added: “The long delay before prosecution has enabled him to establish, right up until today, very positive and proactive steps towards his effective rehabilitation. With the help of programs and education and therapy, Mr McCorriston’s attitude towards his past conduct has evolved since his last sentence.
“Mr McCorriston is not someone who is justifying his behaviour or trying to blame his youth. Rather, he’s trying to contextualise the offence by understanding how immature and perhaps warped his way of thinking was when he was a much younger man.”
Paul Marr, for the prosecution, told the court there were “a number of outstanding allegations that the offender is yet to face in Queensland”.
McCorriston served sentences in Queensland and NSW at 22 and 23 for unrelated matters of car stealing and fraud, he said.
“He was by the age of 20 a person who ultimately was convicted for very, very serious allegations of maliciously (inflicting) bodily harm within a domestic relationship,” Mr Marr said.
He now stands to be sentenced for the “kidnapping of a young woman from the side of the road at night … He only desisted because of her efforts to ensure that he did so. There is a significant impact upon the victim in this matter such that she was able to recall his features for such a long period of time.”
A non-publication order forcing media outlets including The Australian to take down previous online articles about McCorriston pending the case being resolved was lifted on Thursday. Judge Timothy Gartelmann will sentence McCorriston next week.
‘We hurt a lot of people because of what I did’: Fiji’s PM on doing what’s necessary
Sitiveni Rabuka on leading a coup, his country’s growing suicide problem, how he says no to China and why Israel ‘will have to survive.’
Owner of $15m Toorak mansion speaks of ‘shock’ over ‘arson attack’
Aussie extension king Gerry Hoggard is revealed as the victim of Friday’s firebombing and says mystery attackers wanted to burn his mansion to the ground.