Suspicion straight on boyfriends for stabbing murder of Shandee Blackburn

Police responding to the murder of Shandee Blackburn immediately focused on past and present boyfriends – asking her chef partner where he kept his knives.

Shandee Blackburn’s boyfriend Arron Macklin, a chef, was asked where he kept his knives. He was later cleared by police. Picture: David Kelly

Police responding to a savage knife attack on Shandee Blackburn on a public street immediately focused on the potential involvement of past and present boyfriends.

Digital recordings made by first-response police officers reveal pointed questions they asked the young hospitality worker’s mother, Vicki, within hours of the brutal murder in Mackay, central Queensland.

The Australian’s new podcast, Shandee’s Story, is out now for The Australian’s subscribers.

Vicki wanted to call Shandee’s boyfriend Arron Macklin straight away but Constable Belinda Gregg stopped her, knowing victims of crime were often close to their attackers.“Please don’t,” Constable Gregg said.

Detective Sergeant Anthony Cowan, accompanying Constable Gregg, added at the time that police did not know who might be involved.

“So we obviously want to get to him before other people inform him,” Sergeant Cowan said.

Police activated digital recorders at key times and the recordings form part of The Australian’s new investigative podcast series on the unsolved 2013 murder, Shandee’s Story, by national chief correspondent Hedley Thomas.

In memory of Shandee: Paul Beardmore, Vicki Blackburn and Arron Macklin, before attending a concert. Photo Lee Constable / Daily Mercury

Sergeant Cowan asked Vicki Blackburn and her partner Paul Beardmore whether Shandee, 23, had any former boyfriends.

Vicki: “Yes, she has.”

Cowan: “Did they have any ­issues?”

Paul: “John … he lived just around here.”

Vicki: “And he’s nasty.”

Vicki and her partner were ­referring to Shandee’s former ­boyfriend and amateur boxer John Peros, who lived 750m away in ­Juliet Street.

Peros would later be charged with Shandee’s murder and acquitted at a trial after a jury deliberated for less than two hours.

He denies involvement.

The same police who woke Vicki and told her about her daughter’s murder then paid a dawn visit to Macklin.

It, too, was captured on a police digital recorder, the officers arriving to find Macklin’s father, Stephen, doing the washing.

“What’s he done? What’s he done?” Macklin Sr demanded.

Woken from his sleep, Arron Macklin was speechless when told Shandee had died in an assault.

In the next few minutes, police learned that Macklin had been home with his family that evening, on a night off work.

He was a sous chef at the Harrup Park Country Club, where Shandee worked in a coffee shop. That was how they met.

The officers asked Macklin about his knives – did he leave them at the restaurant or take them home? Macklin said he left them at work.

The night of the murder, he watched TV and had a few beers, Shandee earlier having agreed to find her own way home.

He readily handed police his phone so it could be forensically examined.

Messages exchanged with Shandee were overwhelmingly positive, police later found.

Shandee’s final message to Macklin was sent minutes after she completed her shift on the night of the murder.

“Finally finished baby. Walking home now. How was your night?”, she wrote.

Macklin was already asleep and didn’t reply.

Shandee’s friends and family say she had a loving relationship with Macklin, and that in the lead-up to the murder she was the ­happiest she’d been.

A day before the attack, she had shared on Facebook a photo of herself with Macklin in popular tourist town Airlie Beach.

“Amazing day in Airlie with my man,” read her caption.

Arron Macklin mourning Shandee’s loss soon after the murder.

Shandee and Macklin had planned to travel to the US later that year and follow the popular Route 66.

Macklin confided in a friend he planned to propose on the road trip, police were told.

Macklin was ruled out as a suspect by detectives investigating Shandee’s murder in Operation Lima Zimzala.

Anyone with information about the murder of Shandee Blackburn can contact Hedley Thomas confidentially at