Security guard Craig Duck couldn’t work out the flames. A bushfire in the middle of the night? After rain? In June?

The fire raged from a bundle on the ground, close to the lonely road’s edge, lighting up the trees above.

He got a torch. That’s when he saw the glint of gold, and the flash of a bangle on an arm.

“Wow,” Duck said to himself, before ringing triple-0.

Rachelle Childs was killed, then set on fire, before her loved ones knew that she was gone.

Almost 24 years on, we still don’t know what happened in the hours after she left work, in the historic town of Camden, south west of Sydney, and her body, naked from the waist down, was found ablaze in beachside scrub in Gerroa, more than a 100km drive away.

Her death was big news, initially.

Rachelle, who was 23, was one of those people who spread humour and curiosity.

Her infectious abandon made people happy.

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Rachelle sold used cars at Camden Holden. She was new to the game – “honest”, as her father Graham called her.

She drove her 1978 Holden Commodore VB with the seat reclined, imitating the racing car drivers she hoped to become, including her idol Peter Brock.

There was a ciggie in one hand, a phone in the other. As a coroner would later say, Rachelle was “highly memorable”. In life, and in death.

Evil blotted her sunshine on June 7, 2001. It’s still unclear how and where Rachelle was killed.

Someone poured unleaded petrol on Rachelle’s remains and set them alight.

There was no logical motive. No questionable lifestyle choices which could explain her death. Everyone adored Rachelle, it seems, everyone except the person who killed her for no good reason.

Rumours would engulf the local regions as fear, and grief, went unchecked in an absence of facts. Was a serial killer among us? Had her fingers had been severed, as one story went, as a show of punishment after a drug deal went wrong?

Hundreds turned out for Rachelle’s funeral at the Mary Mother of the Church in Macquarie Fields, where her father spoke of a daughter who saw the positives in everything and everyone, while police officers in the audience asked mourners if they knew this or that person in the crowd.

Rachelle’s death got squeezed in the news cycle. The internet had changed the world, but iPhones had yet to put the internet in everyone’s hand.

The federal government declared war on people smugglers. TV’s Sex and the City peaked in popularity.

Peter Falconio went missing in the outback five weeks after Rachelle died. 9/11, three months later, rocked our notions of safety.

Breakthroughs in Rachelle’s case did not develop. The initial police investigation had been intense, but misguided.

Statements were obtained from persons of interest. Nine of them, including some exes, a spurned suitor and a local bikie leader, would be highlighted for particular attention; eight of these men would later be eliminated from inquiries.

Then, there was one, who has always denied any involvement in Rachelle’s death.

But there was no forensic evidence. Not from Rachelle’s remains. Not from her beloved car, which may – or may not – have been used to transport her body.

A “solvable” case – to borrow from the chief investigator of the initial inquiry – floundered in a scarcity of collected facts.

Was Rachelle smothered, which seems to be the best guess? Was she sexually assaulted? Did she suffer in her final moments?

This is the question which haunts Kristy Childs, her younger sister who is now in her forties.

“I know she’s looking down on me. Willing me to find the person who killed her,” says Kristy.

Kristy spoke to her big sister briefly on the last day of Rachelle’s life, at 5.15pm, when Rachelle was probably driving home from Camden to Bargo.

One minute later, a council ranger logged a cigarette being tossed out the driver’s window of Rachelle’s distinctive car; the family would receive a fine a few weeks later.

The car would be located in the Bargo Hotel carpark, more than 30 hours after Rachelle’s remains were set alight. Did she herself park her car where it was found?

Kristy thinks not. Rachelle used a club lock, and was particular about how she set it on the steering wheel. The lock was placed upside down to its usual position. Her prized car stereo was gone. And Rachelle would never have left her car in a pub carpark overnight.

The investigation, run by local police, seemed doomed to misfortune. The pieces of evidence which could have sent detectives down this or that compelling line of inquiry were elusive.

It’s still unclear whether Rachelle entered the Bargo Hotel, which was less than 2km from home, but not a venue she was thought to have attended before.

Some people later said that Rachelle had mentioned planning to go there that night, but none of them asked her why and with whom.

It’s just another detail that defies straight lines. Why would a young woman choose to go to a pub on a topless barmaid night?

Her car was said to be spotted in the carpark between 6.30pm and 10pm.

Yet four witnesses, in accounts varying from clear to vague, also describe seeing a car that matched hers more than 100km away in the hours before Rachelle’s body was discovered at 2.20am.

In an exciting development, Rachelle had told her family, and others, that she would be driving a Holden Walkinshaw, loaned from Camden Holden, for the upcoming long weekend.

A Walkinshaw, for non-car people, is an enticing prospect for Holden devotees. Only 750 were made: they can now sell for $500,000 each.

Rachelle hoped to embrace her four days off: get her nails done, go out with friends on the Friday night. And she would have that special car.

An alert was instead triggered late on the Friday. Rachelle’s phone was off. She wasn’t returning calls. She always returned calls.

She lived with Kristy (and their horses), who was staying at their parents’ Sydney home while her parents Graham and Anne holidayed at Port Stephens, north of Newcastle, NSW.

Kristy and friend Fiona found the lights and TV on at Rachelle’s place. Rachelle had apparently come home from work, changed, and gone out again.

Kristy called hospitals and police stations. She made flyers to distribute.

The next morning, she worked on the barbecue at the markets. She hoped her sister would materialise: Rachelle had promised to take a friend’s little daughter to the markets. Kristy finally rang her parents. She told them that Rachelle was missing, and they didn’t understand what she meant.

There can be no softening of the sharp edges to Rachelle’s death and its investigation. It was no perfect murder; the killer made mistakes.

Burning the body appeared to be a belated decision after the concrete lid of a nearby water tank could not be levered open with a branch.

The manner of Rachelle’s disposal was grisly; the search for her truth cluttered by distractions, police politics and missteps.

Her handbag, and shoes, later separately turned up near roadsides between Camden and Bargo. Nothing.

The facts of Rachelle’s death have lain hidden for longer than the entirety of her life.

There are no rough edges to her mother Anne and sister Kristy. They share the measured impatience of Rachelle’s father, Graham, who spearheaded the family’s campaign as a dynamo who took pride in training police about the needs of victims’ families.

They resent that the person who punctured their family has gone unpunished for so long.

It also seems remarkable, to use that word again, that not a single serving NSW police detective was, for so long, across the brief of evidence of Rachelle’s death.

Over the years, Kristy has composed polite letter after polite letter. There have been phone calls and an occasional meeting. Yet a mooted assessment of a case review in 2021 did not lead to a case review.

Scarce cold case resources in NSW means that some cold cases come to seem to matter more than other cold cases. And so the mystery of Rachelle’s death hangs as an indictment of a system which could and should have done better.

Former NSW Detective Inspector Mick Ashwood joined the investigation about a year after Rachelle’s death, and immediately noted shortcomings in the police response.

“The NSW police failed in this case,” he says. “We let down the family, and we let down Rachelle.”

Ashwood reaches the same conclusion as other police officers, Rachelle’s loved ones, and a growing family of keen observers.

A bungled investigation does not alter the firm certainty that the killing of Rachelle Childs remains “solvable”.

As an 18-year-old Kristy said at Rachelle’s farewell so many years ago: “We only hope that who took her life will be brought to justice.”

For more information about our investigation, visit dearachelle.com.au

If you have any tips or confidential information, please contact investigative journalist Ashlea Hansen at dearrachelle@news.com.au