In January 1965, two 15-year-old girls were brutally assaulted and murdered on Australia’s Wanda Beach. Over the next year or so, there were a handful of other attacks on women in the area—but not only have the cases of assault and murder never been concretely linked, they’ve all gone unsolved.
On that day in 1965, teenage friends Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt were sexually assaulted, stabbed, and attacked with a blunt object. The murders rocked their community—more than 14,000 people were interviewed during the investigation and 5,000 were considered persons of interest—but no arrests were ever made.
Not that there was a shortage of suspects. Some investigators believed the girls had been killed by one of the most notorious criminals in Australian history—convicted murderer Derek Percy. Another Australian serial killer, Christopher Wilder, was also strongly suspected. Wilder was eventually convicted of kidnapping, murder, and rape in the United States, where he fled after pleading guilty in a Sydney Beach gang rape case in 1962.
Today, it seems unlikely that anyone will ever be convicted of the murders—especially now that a key piece of evidence has been lost. Shortly after the murders, male DNA was found on the victims. It was almost certainly from the killer. But when Derek Percy died in 2013 and attempts were made to compare his DNA to the killer’s, investigators found that the DNA from the case had vanished from the Glebe forensics lab.
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