Amie Ryan tries to move on from her father’s horrific murder

The young daughter of slain Queensland mechanic Gary Ryan has revealed for the first time what she saw the day he was stabbed 59 times, the evil motivation for his murder and her journey from tormented teen to brave woman.

Amie Ryan has revealed for the first time what she saw the day he was stabbed 59 times, the evil motivation for his murder and her journey from tormented teen to brave woman. Â

On August 23, 2016, the day her father was brutally murdered, Amie Ryan was at home sick from school.

The 16-year-old Burnett State College student had woken up feeling nauseous from an ailment she put down to a stomach bug, and decided to sleep it off in the cozy Mundubbera home she shared with her father, Gary, and grandmother Jeanette Ferguson.

As Jeanette would later testify before Brisbane Supreme Court, while Amie was resting in bed at around 10.30 that morning Gary, 43, had spotted someone making his way through the piles of tyres and vehicle chassis strewn across the yard outside the workshop next to the house.

In one of the Burnett’s most shocking murders, Gary Ryan was stabbed to death at his Mundubbera home in August 2016.

“I’ll go and see what this strange looking man wants,” Gary said to Jeanette, and walked down the front steps of the highset Queenslander.

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Around 45 minutes later when Gary had not returned to the house, Jeanette, then 72, went down to the yard and found him lying on the floor of the toilet block next to the workshop with blood pouring from wounds to his head and neck.

“Mum, I’m dying,” Gary said.

“I will never forget as he looked up at me with those beautiful crystal blue eyes, knowing that he was bleeding to death and I was helpless to save him,” Jeanette would say in her victim impact statement.

Gary Ryan's mother, Jeanette Ferguson, said "I will never forget as he looked up at me with those beautiful crystal blue eyes, knowing that he was bleeding to death and I was helpless to save him".

Speaking exclusively this week about that horror day, Amie said she was woken by the sound of Jeanette screaming “Amie, Amie your Dad needs help, call triple-0!”, and ran from her bedroom to find her grandmother halfway up the stairs.

“Your father’s had an accident, he’s in the toilet block call triple-0,” Jeanette repeated.

Taking Jeanette’s phone from her, Amie punched in the number and handed the phone back.

“Grandma take the phone, I’m going to see if I can help Dad,” Amie said, and ran over to the toilet block.

There she found her father, “just bleeding everywhere, still conscious, still talking, kind of”.

“All I could understand through all the gurgling was ‘get me up’,” she said.

Seeing her grandmother was distraught while talking to emergency services, “an absolute mess”, Amie called triple-0 on her own phone to be advised she should find anyone to help nearby.

After recruiting the help of some cleaning ladies working in the house across the road who put pressure on Gary’s wounds with towels, Amie continued talking to emergency services.

It was at this point she realised that her father’s wounds were not the result of an accident, but he had been the victim of a vicious assault.

The weapons used by Gary Ryan's killers were found near a pile of tyres next to the toilet block in which he was found by Amie and Jeanette.

“As I was on the phone I was walking around, because I pace when I’m anxious,” she said.

“And I walked around the side of the block and there was just blood everywhere.

“There was a samurai sword and a little knife in among the yard with piles of blood around them, and you could see his handprints where he had pulled himself up along this white wall.”

After a few more minutes paramedics arrived, who called in firefighters from the local volunteer fire and rescue service to help move Gary into the ambulance.

With Mundubbera a small town of less than 2000 people, Amie said some of the firefighters were teachers at Burnett State College who knew her family well.

“As they’ve turned up, they’ve seen the disaster and they’ve just lost all the colour on their face,” she said.

The ambulance rushed Gary to Mundubbera Hospital, with Amy and Jeanette to follow around 20 minutes later.

Soon after they arrived at the hospital, medical staff called them into the family room and informed them Gary had died from a cardiac arrest while arrangements were being made to airlift him to a Brisbane hospital.

A later autopsy found Gary sustained 59 stab wounds to his head, neck, mouth, arms and hands.

Amie said a doctor who was “as white as a ghost” would not let anyone in to view Gary’s mutilated body, she believes out of a misguided attempt to protect them from any further trauma.

Amie Ryan said she was struck afterwards by the lack of emotion in Marilyn’s response when she told her about Gary’s death.

“Which I fully understand, but at the time, it was more devastating that we had seen him in those moments, still kicking and breathing, than actually being dead,” Amie said.

“So we couldn’t say our farewells or goodbye or anything like that … we all just broke down.

“That’s all I remember, everything else was kind of a blur after that.”

In the coming hours and days, her mind racing as to who could have killed her father, Amie’s initial thoughts went to a disgruntled client of Gary’s business as a mobile mechanic and making small repairs for people around the town.

“My dad had made some enemies over time. I thought it could have been anything (like) someone who wasn’t happy with the job that Dad had done” she said.

The first hints as to the killer’s identity came the day after Gary’s death when Amie called her mother, Marilyn, who was living in Orange with her partner, Mark Crump, having separated from Gary many years before.

Gary Ryan was known as “Mr Fixit” around Mundubbera.

Thinking she was informing Marilyn of Gary’s passing, Amie was struck afterwards by the lack of emotion in her mother’s response.

“I called her and told her Dad had gone, and it wasn’t until a little bit later that I realised her reaction wasn’t surprised, it was really neutral,” Amie said.

The explanation for Marilyn’s response dawned on Amie when police informed her a day later that Crump and an associate, Trevor Spencer, had been arrested and charged with Gary’s murder.

“It actually didn’t surprise me, it’s like my subconscious knew it but I refused to accept it,” she said.

“It wasn’t until they all were arrested that it sunk in, a bit like ‘oh, they did this, they ruined my life’.”

Abuse, opiates, NASA hacking

Gary and Marilyn lived together with Jeanette in the NSW town of Orange when Amie was born, but Marilyn moved out when Amie was around one year old to live with a friend and broke off all contact with Gary, later telling Amie she wanted a break from Jeanette.

Soon after separating, Marilyn formed a relationship with Crump, with whom she was later to have two children.

Marilyn separated from Gary when Amie was around one year old.

After a short period of shared custody, Gary, Amie and Jeanette moved to Hervey Bay and then Mundubbera, where Gary’s brother lived, on the promise of a job for Gary in the local piggery.

Gary later started his mechanic business for which he became known around town as ‘Mr Fixit’, a time for which Amie has fond memories of going around with her father as “his little sidekick”.

“He was a delight, he’d always have a smile on his face or be yelling at a car, it was hilarious to watch,” she said.

“If we had to do a long drive I’d sleep during the day in the car with him, and then as we got later into the night I’d keep him awake by talking his ear off.

“Apparently I was good at that, too.”

Amie has fond memories of going around with her father as ‘his little sidekick’

Amie maintained occasional contact with Marilyn throughout her childhood, and visited her mother, Crump and her half-siblings in Orange when she was in her early teens.

While she said her mother and Crump’s house “wasn’t a bad environment” and was a “homely space” on the first visit, her experience took a drastic turn for the worse when she next visited for Christmas in 2015, initially planning to stay through to Easter.

By this time, Amie said Crump had built up a store of opiates including morphine tablets kept in a back shed behind the house, and had begun to make wild claims that he had hacked into NASA bases and other military facilities.

Amie said Mark Crump physically and sexually abused her during an 8-month period when she stayed with Marilyn in Orange, NSW.

“There was a lot of medication inside the house,” she said.

Crump and Marilyn forced Amie, then 15 years old, also to take medication under the pretext of treating her overactive hormones which she said “messed with her head”.

“I wasn’t capable of thinking, I couldn’t make a rational decision,” Amie said.

Crump would get physically violent when Amie tried to resist taking the medication, at one point throwing her against a brick wall, and later choking her to the point of blacking out during an argument over his refusal to let Amie return home to Gary at Easter.

Amie said the latter, terrifying experience brought home the physical power Crump had over her.

“It proved to me that at any point that he decided to, he could end my life very quickly without much of a fight,” she said.

“It was a very clear threat, and a terrifying one at that.”

At this time Amie said Crump began sexually abusing her in her bedroom, adjacent to the living room where her mother spent most of her time.

“She lived on that couch, she didn’t do anything,” Amie said.

“You could see whenever I went into my room, or when anyone else went into my room.

“So I got the idea that she knew (about the abuse), but she didn’t want to admit it.”

Amie believes Mark refused to let her return home at Easter out of a desire to prolong the sexual abuse, but she was eventually able to return to Mundubbera in July 2016.

However, Marilyn and Crump continued to pursue Amie through the courts, and in July it was determined that she return to live with her mother.

After telling Gary about all she had witnessed and experienced, he consulted with a solicitor and Amie reported Crump’s sexual abuse to Bundaberg Police Station.

On August 12, less than two weeks before Gary’s murder, the court decision was reversed and it was ordered that Amie live with her father.

‘Over my dead body’ is actually a thing that can happen’

As revealed in evidence heard in the trial of Crump and Spencer, after learning of the reversal of the court decision Crump was incensed at having spent $10,000 on legal fees to recover Amie and contacted Spencer to ask him to “go up to Queensland to bash a bloke” with him.

After making a trip to Sydney to obtain the samurai sword and knives, Crump and Spencer drove to Gary’s Mundubbera home where they arrived on August 23.

According to Spencer, after Gary came down from the house to confront the pair, they initially discussed some of the tyres near the toilet block before Crump asked Ryan when he would be returning Amie to Marilyn.

Trevor Spencer, nicknamed 'Bear', appealed his conviction for Gary Ryan's murder which was dismissed by the Supreme Court in October 2023,

When Ryan told Crump that Amie did not want to go back to her mother, Crump assaulted him in a “frenzied attack” with the sword, knives and a crossbow.

Amie, however, imagines the fatal attack being triggered by a favourite saying of her father’s whenever the subject of her return to her mother was raised.

“Whenever the subject of someone trying to take me away from Dad came up in conversation, he would always say ‘over my dead body’,” Amie said.

“So I get the feeling at some point throughout the altercation (with Crump) that he would have refused for me to go back with anybody unless it was ‘over his dead body’.

“I guess that little saying really sunk in later on – ‘over my dead body’ is actually a thing that can happen.”

Crump, 38, and Spencer, 73, were tracked down by police through service station CCTV footage and convicted of Gary’s murder at a 2019 trial, with both men sentenced to life imprisonment.

A 2021 retrial reaffirmed the pair’s guilt, and a last-ditch appeal by Spencer was dismissed by the Brisbane Supreme Court in October 2023.

Marilyn Ryan was convicted of manslaughter in 2019 and sentenced to eight years imprisonment with immediate release on parole.

‘I just want to go about trying to live my life’

Rather than feeling any anger towards Marilyn and Crump, Amie said she was initially beset by feelings of confusion that they could have conspired to take the life of “such a kind man”.

“He had his faults but he never did wrong by me, he looked after his mother and he always helped people whether they liked it or not,” Amie said.

“I was so confused, I didn’t understand why they could do this to him.”

After returning to her high school, Burnett State College in Gayndah, Amie found the well-meaning concern offered by her friends to be overwhelming.

“They were very polite, but there was too much pitying and trying to console me when I didn’t want to be consoled,” she said.

“It was just not a place I wanted to be to cope.”

Racked by feelings of guilt that she had brought the cruel fate on her father by returning to Mundubbera, Amie began the long road to recovery the following year when she moved to Bundaberg.

“I felt self-loathing that I did this, it mentally tormented me,” she said.

“But once I moved away from the environment, you could say I started to heal.”

Now 22 years old, Amie Ryan said "I just want to go about trying to live my life, doing the things that I’ve always wanted to do".

Amie’s progress through the years to come was disrupted only by the recurrent updates sent to her as the prosecution of Crump and Spencer took its course.

While Amie baulks at the word ‘closure’, she hopes that she and her grandmother will finally be able to move on following the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Spencer’s appeal.

“I hope this brings an end to the misery of what it’s brought to myself and my family,” she said.

“If it is finally over, we can start moving on with our lives without getting dragged back into it every couple of years.”

Amie, now 22 years old, lives in Dysart where she works in the mines as a truck operator and helps her partner, Lachlan, with his burgeoning automotive parts business.

Now that she is free of the abuse, torment and poverty that she endured through her childhood, she is focused on reviving a sense of enjoyment in her life, starting with a trip to the Gold Coast theme parks, a Christmas present from Lachlan.

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“There was never time, there was never money,” she said.

“The drama of Marilyn and her cronies always following Dad around making his life miserable, it was never going to work out for him.

“I just want to go about trying to live my life, doing the things that I’ve always wanted to do.”

Originally published as Amie Ryan tries to move on from her father’s horrific murder