Melissa Jane Ryan: Gold Coast woman murdered by Charles David Sewell at Currumbin in 1993

A young woman went to a Gold Coast hotel to meet a man for a rendezvous and was violently murdered before her body was dumped in a remote location. WARNING: DISTURBING.

Sex worker Melissa Jane Ryan drove to Currumbin to meet a client at a hotel.

Unit 9 of the Sun Valley Motel was her destination where she was planning to meet a man who she had ­spoken to by phone just hours earlier and agreed to spend four hours with for the sum of $500. She never returned.

The Kirra woman’s murder, in the early hours of May 2, 1993 became one of the most infamous in the city’s history and is still remembered 30 years later.

Melissa Jane Ryan was just 21 years old when she died.

Her killer, Charles David Sewell, would later be dubbed “one of the most dangerous criminals and escape artists Australia has produced”.

The alarm was raised about Ryan’s whereabouts by 6am on May 2 after she failed to return from the meeting with Sewell, and her associates travelled to the motel to check on her.

Instead she was nowhere to be seen.

Police were called and detectives began to interview the people who had been inside the motel during that night.

Police at the Sun Valley Motel in 1993

Several reported hearing screams and a loud thumping during the early hours of the morning.

Officers entered unit 9 and found the room stripped of its bedding, some blood, strands of hair and a sponge which was found to have belonged to Ryan.

A witness told investigators, led by Det Sgt John Goobanko and Det Sen-Constable Carl Gibson, he had seen a man carrying something large and loading it into a station wagon before leaving the motel. Forensics officers painstakingly worked through the scene of the crime and found a tyre tread mark, a footprint and a bloodstained cardboard roll from a roll of duct tape.

Sewell’s XD Ford Station Wagon at the Southport Police Station holding yard after police arrested him.

The crime made front page news and a security guard soon reported seeing a station wagon which matched the police description which was linked to Sewell who was arrested just two days after the killing and charged by detectives from Burleigh Heads CIB.

The unemployed 44-year-old denied any involvement in the crime.

However detectives searched Sewell’s house on Southport’s Geoffrey Ave and found a trove of evidence, including “several dossiers on prostitutes and newspaper fragments with strange handwritten notes”.

A search of his car found blood and more blonde hair.

Police searching for Melissa’s body in the water behind Currumbin Sanctuary.

However Ryan’s body had not been found.

During Sewell’s 1994 trial, the jury was told he was a “loner who did not mix with other people and resorted to the comfort of prostitutes”.

Giving evidence in his own defence, Sewell claimed that he couldn’t have killed Ryan because he had spent the night driving between Southport and Tweed Heads three times while high on speed.

1995: Police recovering Melissa Jane Ryan’s skeletal remains.

However, the case took a dramatic and shocking turn in May 1995 when Sewell confessed in court to the killing after being found guilty of murder.

He agreed to take police to the location where Ryan’s body had been dumped two years earlier.

Handcuffed and snobby, he smoked a cigarette as he directed police to the site just 6km from the Binna Burra Lodge site.

1995: Police recovering evidence at the scene when Melissa Jane Ryan’s body was found.

Police found Ryan’s skeletal remains just five minutes before they planned to call of the search. Det-Sgt Goobanko said Sewell had told officers he decided to confess for the sake of his victim’s family.

He revealed that he had killed Ryan after an argument and dumped her body in a hollow tree.

Today the Sun Valley Motel is long gone, with a townhouse complex now standing on its former home on the Gold Coast Highway.

Sewell was jailed for life in 1995.

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Originally published as Melissa Jane Ryan: Gold Coast woman murdered by Charles David Sewell at Currumbin in 1993