Simon Gaskill’s family piecing together his final moments after his body was found at Ocean Grove beach
Talented surfer Simon Gaskill’s life came to a sad, lonely end. But after being ‘brushed aside’ and ‘shut down’ by police, his grief-stricken family and friends are determined to find out what happened.
The blue gravel path that cuts through coastal scrub to Ocean Grove’s main beach is jammed over summer and still busy through March and April as young families and teens smelling of insect repellent and sunscreen lug umbrellas, boogie boards and surfboards to the sand and relatively safe surf of the popular beach on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula.
The track, designated 16w, broadens at the wooden steps that take you over the dunes to the beach. To the left, another cutting leads to a playground, The Dunes kiosk and a fancier restaurant. Step over a wire fence designed to stop people doing exactly that, walk a few metres and you reach some small clearings screened by beach scrub. Close to the pounding waves, but private, it’s easy to see how such a spot would be perfect for an old surfie to pitch a tent. The scrub is thick enough to offer protection from the crowds along the cutting and the crash of the surf provides a soothing soundtrack.
On April 15 last year, Good Friday, a teenager was exploring the scrub near the track and came across a tent. Lying in the sand, not far from the tent, was a body.
Paddling around on his surfboard off Skenes Creek, Simon Gaskill had the knack of picking the right wave. Precision timing and raw power combined as the teenager they called “Simo” or “Guzzy” dominated those left-hand breaks, ripping savage, water-kicking cutbacks. The surf off Skenes Creek, on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, can be scary, often treacherous, but even as a kid in the early to mid-1980s this boy with the big smile and tangle of hair had no fear. Most days he would find an excuse to hit the surf and attack the waves with a daredevil spirit. On those waves, he was indestructible. Even in winter he’d surf for hours. When his parents came to take him home, his lips would be blue from the cold.
When he wasn’t surfing, he was hanging with the 20-strong teenage crew at Bruiser’s burger joint on the main drag in Apollo Bay, 6km down the Great Ocean Road. Fifty cents would get them a bag of salty chips; they’d play pool and crap on for hours. Finding their way back home was part of the daily rhythm of life. Simo’s little sister Amanda would ride her horse between the towns. Some kids would ride bikes. Her brother found an easier way – he’d simply put a thumb out and hitch. The first car that came by always seemed to pull over.
It’s not that Simo wasn’t a smart kid. It’s just that the classroom wasn’t for him. He always wanted to be outdoors, ideally riding his board. And when he and a few other thrillseekers wanted to push it a bit they’d head to the Apollo Bay jetty, where the crayfish boats moored, climb a six-metre dredge and bomb into the water. Only the gamest kids did this.
Around this part of the Great Ocean Road they also called him “Simon the Likeable”, after a character in Get Smart, as he grew into a natural leader and mentor. Kids and parents alike were easily drawn to him.
Cam Miller, who grew up in Lalor in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, had never been on a surfboard until his parents bought a holiday house in Skenes Creek. One day, while walking to the shop in the early 1980s, aged around 10, he bumped into a kid the same age. Simo’s the name, he said. Pretty soon this boy from the ‘burbs was on a board and his new mate was teaching him to surf. He also had a new name, Camo, after Simo added an ‘‘o’’. It’s stuck to this day. “I could see everyone loved him, and I just got accepted into that crew,” Camo Miller said.
“My parents would take me down there most weekends, but for someone from Melbourne to be accepted into this crew was just amazing. We all became best mates, and Simo was the leader of the whole crew. He was a massive personality, even at 12.”
A bond was forged on those waves and around the Apollo Bay jetty as the boys tried to swim the length under water. Simo, with his exceptional lung capacity, got there. Camo couldn’t last the distance.
As Simo and Camo grew into young men, their mateship ebbed and flowed over the decades as life washed them in different directions. But so strong was the bond that it never severed.
As news broke of the “body in the sand dunes”, Amanda Gaskill was enjoying Easter with her husband, Mark, and their two children in Wye River, a couple of hours’ drive away on the Great Ocean Road. Her father, Chris Gaskill, was on the family property in Anakie, 50km inland from Ocean Grove, where he lives with Amanda and her family. For 12 years, Simo also lived in a cabin on the property.
On the Monday or Tuesday after the body was found at Ocean Grove beach, two police officers arrived at the Gaskills’ place in Anakie. “They came looking for Amanda,” Chris says. “I said, ‘She’s not here. I’m her father, what’s it about?’ That’s when they told me. Look, to be fair, they didn’t just come out and say it in a crass fashion, it was how they are trained to break news like that. But it was one hell of a shock.”
The body in the dunes was that of Simon Gaskill, Amanda’s big brother and Chris’s son. The police asked Chris Gaskill for a DNA sample to help positively identify the body. “They swabbed my cheek, said ‘sorry for your loss’, and off they went. That was it,” he says. “While the police were here, my head was spinning and I felt sick as you can imagine. It just kept spinning in my head; no, no, no. It has got to be a mistake. But part of me was saying I was fearing this. He was in a spiral.”
Chris rang his daughter while the police were still at the property and she spoke to the officers from Wye River. “In one aspect I was shocked and couldn’t comprehend it,” Amanda says. “I can say it was shocking, but on the other hand it was not, if that makes sense, because Simo was mentally in a bad place.”
What happened next – or rather, what didn’t – compounded the shock and the grief. “The police didn’t look into it,” Amanda says. “They didn’t ask anyone [in Simo’s life] any questions.” She adds: “The care factor wasn’t there.” Her father agrees. “The police just ticked the boxes they needed to tick and that was the end of it,” he says. “It was very dismissive.”
The police would later conclude there were no signs of foul play. But now the family wants to know: how are the police so sure? Amanda and Chris Gaskill have felt compelled to run a sister-father investigation after local police, they say, “brushed aside” and “shut down” what happened at Ocean Grove beach. The family’s search for answers about what happened in the Ocean Grove dunes has led them further into the unknown.
Despite his troubles, the family and Camo Miller don’t believe that Simo took his own life. ‘‘I certainly don’t... I don’t believe he was at that stage,’’ Amanda says. ‘‘He said to me on a number of occasions when I was worried about him, ‘Don’t worry, I would never do anything stupid like killing myself’.”
It’s understood that forensic tests on his remains detected no sign of drugs or alcohol in his system. His body was lying face down and his backpack was still strapped to his back. Strangely, his mobile phone is missing and has not been found. Six months earlier, Simo told Camo his mobile had been stolen from a caravan park. Camo had tracked it down and returned it. But when his body was found, police said there was no phone. Was it stolen again or simply lost?
Simo’s laptop was, however, recovered from the scene. The family powered up the computer to find it was logged into on March 28 – 19 days before his body was found in an advanced state of decomposition. With more investigation, what other secrets could it yield?
Some weeks after the Easter-holidaying teenager stumbled across Simon Gaskill’s remains (although the name of the victim was still secret at that stage), The Weekend Australian Magazine walked into the Ocean Grove cop shop looking for answers about the incident in the dunes. Officers handling the case refused to discuss the matter. They directed all questions to the Victoria Police media unit, which also provided no significant information about the case and directed further inquiries to the coroner.
The deputy coroner refused to release any forensics regarding the circumstances of Simo’s death but on September 1 the court emailed this magazine a one-page statement listing the cause of death as ‘‘unascertained’’. This document did contain three important words, however. A name. Simon ChristopherGaskill. And now that the heartbroken people closest to Simo have decided to share their stories about him, the fragments of a life have begun to emerge.
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“The police just ticked the boxes... that was the end of it”
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With the first anniversary of Simon Gaskill’s death approaching, his father and sister are sitting in their Anakie home on a searing day, reliving his life and death. “We’ve been wrestling with this for almost a year now and it [the grief] hasn’t diminished with time,” Chris Gaskill says. “I’m told that over time you learn to live with it. But no, not so far.”
Over several hours they replay Simo’s 51 years; his early days in Skenes Creek and Apollo Bay are happy memories. “Everybody liked him,” his dad says. “He was a great kid.”
As a teenager, Chris says, his son won surfing tournaments and was offered a sponsorship – free boards, wetsuits and coaching – by a major surf brand. “He was only 15, nonetheless he was getting noticed because he was such a good surfer.” But, perhaps hinting at the deep-thinking, complicated and even challenging man he would mature into, the teenage son knocked back the offer. “All he said [to us] was, ‘I don’t want to be obligated to the man’,” Chris says.
Despite her brother’s talent on the waves, Amanda says he didn’t have a big-noting personality. He didn’t even want to be seen as a leader within the Apollo Bay-Skenes Creek crew, she says; it’s just something that happened. Natural charisma. “He was very much looked up to by all the kids ... yes, it was his surfing that attracted that, but it was more.
“He just had this way that drew people to him. It was an easygoing nature, laid-back, extremely friendly, an infectious laugh… He was kind to everyone. He didn’t have an enemy.”
After high school, Simo completed a horticulture apprenticeship at a Geelong nursery. “He knew all the plants by their Latin names,” Chris says. Then, as a young man, he worked at nurseries, including Bunnings in Werribee, and travelled through Australia, spending a few years working and enjoying life in northern Queensland, where his father was working and living at the time. Through his twenties and thirties he had girlfriends and a long-term relationship, but never married.
As her brother hit 30, however, Amanda says some alarm bells started ringing – mostly around his heavy drinking. As a teenager he had been known as a “happy drinker” when the Apollo Bay-Skenes Creek crew started experimenting with grog. But by his 30s a darker side was emerging when he drank. “Alcohol was not good for him,” Amanda says, adding that Simo also used marijuana along the way. “He was always the funny one, the joker, never aggressive. Always the happy drunk … but that didn’t seem to be the case the older he got. [For a while] he could still hold down a job, but his alcoholism got progressively worse as he got older. He hated the fact of where his life was and that he was dependent on alcohol, even though he wouldn’t admit he was dependent on alcohol… If he didn’t have to admit it to other people, he didn’t have to admit it to himself.”
Chris took his son to numerous Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and stints in rehab over the years. But nothing worked, at least in the long term. “There were many occasions when we all tried to help him, financially or whatever, and he refused it. It was all out of pride. He was stubborn,” he says. He recalls that in later years, he could hear his son ranting at non-existent people during drinking sessions. “In the end, he’d only have a couple of drinks and his whole personality would change.”
Simo was close to his mother Dianne growing up but not so much in his later adult years. She was unavailable to comment on her son for this article due to illness.
Camo Miller feels he owes it to his mate to do everything he can to find out how his life ended. “I keep saying to everyone, this is shrouded in mystery,” he says. “People don’t just die in the sand dunes for nothing. We need to stand up and ask questions.”
Camo says he hadn’t had much contact with Simo for the better part of two decades. But in 2017, Simo reached out to his old friend on Facebook and soon they were catching up every week. Camo could see his friend was a changed man. “I was trying to help him personally with his demons,” he says. “When we would catch up for lunch I would say, ‘You can get your life back together’, and we would talk about going on surfing trips together. He’d say, ‘Yeah, we’ll get a couple of long boards and hit the waves’.
“And then he started talking to me about God. He said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I do. So he started talking to me about this stuff. He was upset that he didn’t live up to his potential. I kept saying to him, ‘You’re 50, you’ve still got time to turn this around’. He was certainly down on himself, and was reminiscing about the good old days. He was disappointed and troubled by how his life played out. You could say he was broken-hearted by life.”
In October 2017, police caught Simon Gaskill drink driving in Horsham. He blew 0.21, lost his licence for 21 months and was fined $400. By February 2020 he was experiencing financial problems, mostly credit card debts, and declared himself bankrupt.
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“This is shrouded in mystery. People don’t just die in the sand dunes for nothing.”
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Almost four months before he was found dead, Simo sent Camo a text about a fall he suffered near Riverside caravan park, between Ocean Grove and Barwon Heads, where he was living. The following exchange began at 7.18pm on December 10, 2021.
Gaskill: I’ve been in hospital for the last three days for a CT and MRI scan. Fractured my spine in 4 places years ago and didn’t even realise. Knocked my head so bloody hard a week ago – but brain is ok
Miller: Mate I’m sorry to hear that what happened. Did someone hit yar. You don’t have a head fracture do you
Gaskill: Fell off a small cliff, landed on my shoulder then my head kept going and I’ve some hard hits but this one was really BAD
Miller: F*** Mate. Was the ambulance called
Gaskill: Be here for observation until they say I can leave, head injury is not bad.
Miller: Which hospital are you in mate.
Gaskill: Geelong city.
Miller: Allowed to have visitors. I’m asking because of Covid.
Gaskill: No I’m in an area that’s quiet and isolated – no stimulation allowed unfortunately.
Miller: that’s okay mate stay strong okay. Can I ask a question – what were you doing on the cliff.
Gaskill: It was at Barwon Heads, wasn’t looking where I was going and tripped on something, I think it might have been a rock sticking out of the ground.
Miller: I’m glad you’re okay mate.
At 10.19pm the next day, December 11, Miller texted Gaskill:
How are you feeling mate?
Gaskill replied the next day at 12.50pm:
I’m out at 1pm today Camo, just had lunch, waiting for my medication first. Feeling ok. Cheers.
Miller: That’s good. Glad you’re okay mate.
During his stay in hospital after the head knock, Simon Gaskill was a difficult patient. On several occasions staff had to deal with his aggressive outbursts. “After he got out of hospital, he called me – and I’ll never forget this as long as I live – and he was incoherent,” Camo Miller says. “It didn’t even sound like him. He was all over the place.”
At the time of his death, court records show Simo had been due to face Geelong Magistrates’ Court the following month. He had told Camo that police had charged him with assault after he intervened to help an old man being harassed by youths. Police have refused a request to release details of the alleged offence.
By early 2021, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaskills to have Simo living with them in Anakie. They made the gut-wrenching decision to tell him to leave. After this, his family didn’t hear much from him. From there, Camo says Simo moved to a caravan park in Queenscliff, on the Bellarine Peninsula, 20km from Ocean Grove. He lived in a few other caravan parks, including Riverside. It’s a short distance from where his body was found.
There’s a raw honesty to the way Simo’s father, sister and mate chart his descent from a boy with the world at his feet to a middle-aged man with nothing, racked by alcoholism and, most likely, mental illness. It’s grief and love that appear to be driving family and friends to plead with Victoria Police and the coroner to reopen their investigation into his death, although it is understood that a formal request is yet to be made.
When Simon Gaskill was found on April 15, exactly one year ago today, his body was seriously decomposed. That and his last texts with Camo Miller suggest he died in the final few days of March, or in the first few days of April 2022. Camo believes he was one of the last people to have contact with his friend. Their final exchange was on Saturday, March 26. It must have been one of the last days of Simo’s life – when he still had his phone.
Gaskill, 9.40am: Hey Camo, sorry can’t do lunch today. We can make it Monday if you like.
Miller, 10.15am: Monday is bad time for me. How about Tues or Wednesday.
Gaskill: Wednesday would be good.
Miller: No worries mate Wednesday it is.
On Tuesday, March 29, at 6.21pm, Camo Miller texted his friend: See tomorrow yeah mate.
Simon Gaskill never responded.
Camo Miller says police never reached out to speak to him or any of Simo’s other friends after his body was found. The Gaskills and Miller assert that the coroner and police investigation was inadequate, and they are unsatisfied with Coroner Jacqui Hawkins’ finding – without having held an inquest – that the cause of death was “unascertained”.
“I’m not totally convinced there were suspicious circumstances,” says Amanda Gaskill. “But it would have been nice for the police to actually look into it a bit more.”
The Gaskills say it’s the lack of action from Victoria Police that has left them with no choice but to embark on their DIY inquiry – and they are trying to navigate their way through red tape to get access to his text and call logs and his emails. There’s nothing to say Simo hadn’t simply lost his phone shortly before his death, but it’s a confusing twist.
“One of the things we’re keen to do is try and get some answers,” Amanda says. “The phone calls I had with the detectives, the phone calls I had with the coroner and the eventual coroner’s report told us nothing, so we’re left with no closure about what happened. We haven’t been able to locate his phone, or even know whether he had that phone at the time of his death. We thought that if we got hold of his mobile phone we could understand who he was in contact with and see the text messages or get an understanding of if he was arguing with someone.”
Amanda adds: “I felt it was considered by the police to be a homeless guy who just died in the dunes. They had no interest in it. They didn’t see [him] as important.”
She says police had told her there were no signs of alcohol or drugs found at the scene of the death. While the family said toxicology tests had also not detected any drugs or alcohol in his system, they are also aware that given the serious decomposition of his remains, traces would have been difficult to detect.
“I asked if they [police] were going to ask any more questions and they said, ‘No, it’s up to the coroner now. We’ve determined there are no suspicious circumstances.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ [They said] ‘That’s what we have determined but if the coroner comes back to us and says there may be suspicious circumstances then we’ll look into it, but that’s pretty much it.”
Following the initial contact with police, the family says there was no further contact initiated by the authorities – it was left to the family to chase up investigators for updates. And as far as the family is aware, the police have not contacted anyone close to Simo in an effort to uncover his movements in his final days. “Even just to say ‘let’s see if we can get some answers for the family’, that’s just common decency given the devastating situation,” says Chris.
Chris stresses that the family’s decision to come forward and talk publicly about Simo should not be seen as an attack on police. “I don’t want to denigrate the police or anything, they have a daunting task at the best of times,” he says. “But.. once they got their DNA, that seemed that was the end of the matter for them. It was easy-peasy. No suspicious circumstances, that’s it. Thank you very much.
“The digital footprint is there, but the motivation to find that isn’t [there] because he was a homeless guy, and they can just say, ‘Well, there was no phone’. It just strikes me that this was piecemeal, it was just dismissive. It was just ‘nothing to see here folks, let’s move on’.”
Amanda says the coroner’s report provides few answers. “When we did actually get the findings it didn’t really tell us anything at all, which was quite frustrating. That didn’t give us a lot of closure – it’s left us hanging. When I contacted detectives who were called out at the time, they had basically shut it down and said that ‘he was obviously sleeping rough’ and ‘we don’t have any answers on why or how he passed away’.”
She says she was made to feel like she was wasting police time by continuing to call and seek fresh details around her brother’s death. “I was made to feel like I was asking silly questions… he was found, and he passed away, and that’s it. And with the coroner, they’ve said ‘no idea’. So you’re back to square one again. That’s the circle we’ve been trapped in.”
“Even though it’s probably not going to be suspicious circumstances, it’s not completely out of the question... because nobody knows,” Amanda adds. “We want police to look… into his phone. Look into his emails. Speak to his friends. Speak to us about it.”
Telecommunications industry experts say it is a straightforward process (one describes it as ‘‘bread-and-butter’’ policing) for police to seek a warrant to obtain data records of texts and calls to and from mobile phones, which the telcos are legally bound to store for two years. This information can be accessed and handed to police within hours of the legal request being served, a telco industry figure said.
There’s also something called the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI), which is unique to every mobile phone handset, that could be identified from the call and text log, the industry expert said. Police could seek an IMEI warrant to check if Simo’s handset is still being used with a new SIM card.
Camo Miller says: “Police have treated him like some John Doe. Like nobody cared for him. That’s what disturbs me.”
Victoria Police confirmed in an emailed statement to The Weekend Australian Magazine that the death was not being treated as suspicious but would not disclose the reason for arriving at that conclusion.
“Police thoroughly investigated the death, and all leads and avenues of inquiry were made,’’ the statement says, while refusing to respond to questions about specifics of the investigation, including whether mobile phone records were considered. “The coroner’s findings are complete, and investigators did not receive any further directions from the coroner regarding the investigation.”
While standing by their approach, police did officially acknowledge last week the pain of the Gaskill family: “Victoria Police extends its deepest sympathies for the family and loved ones of the deceased and understand how difficult it would be when there are unanswered questions.’’
In her single-page statement released to this magazine, after noting that she did not hold an inquest, the deputy coroner adds: ‘‘I make no further findings with respect to the circumstances in which the death occurred”. Further, “there is no public interest to be served in making a finding regarding those circumstances’’. A spokesman for the Coroner’s Court says it has not ruled out reopening the investigation into Simo’s death if there are new facts and circumstances to consider and if they determine it is appropriate to do so.
The Gaskills and Camo Miller know intimately that Simon had his problems. But battling demons doesn’t disqualify you from being loved. And love him they did. Deeply. Last May, just weeks after his body was found, in a fitting, final act, Simon Gaskill’s family and friends paddled out on surfboards into the ocean off Skenes Creek. In the exact spot that had given him so much joy as a boy they scattered his ashes, belted the water and yelled his name in a celebration of the Simo they knew and loved.
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