antechinusRAWR
Active Member
- Joined
- Dec 8, 2013
- Messages
- 194
- Reaction score
- 93
I tried to reply to this twice last night but I was having a ridiculous amount of posting drama so I just gave up. Anyway, I just wanted to say a big "me too" to the bolded part.
If you look at the recent pics you'll see the grass at the base of the trees/scrub is quite deep - it's amazing how quickly it grows & what it can conceal, my own tip-pile suitcase would've disappeared several times by now if I didn't keep moving it & mowing. As a kid I've cartwheeled/crashed over several large pieces of abandoned farm machinery for this very reason so (IMO) while ever the suitcase was concealed beneath one of those trees, at times it could've been even more difficult to see from a moving vehicle & I expect only someone who happened to stop there would've even had the opportunity to spot it. I can also see highway road crews not wanting to get involved if they happened upon it given Ivan Milat's employment history - imagine the speculation now from certain sections of the media if a road crew member had called it in, it would be even worse now that the link to Belanglo's known.
I do believe the suitcase was moved after being placed there, but I don't necessarily think it was someone with knowledge of the crime. I really think it could very easily have lain unnoticed & undisturbed for years before anyone realised what it concealed. I also think that if the suitcase was deliberately placed closer to the road, specifically as a means of drawing attention to Khandalyce's death, it was only because someone randomly found it & had suspicions that the bones might be human, but wanted to avoid contacting the police themselves.
Years ago I occasionally rode shotgun on the interstate truck routes between NSW/QLD/VIC/SA. You have a very good view from a truck cab, much better than a car & for over a decade now, I've lived in an area with similar stretches of bush highway (my profile pic was taken on the hwy 10 mins from my house). I could not begin to count the amount of clothing, bedding, stuffed toys, shoes etc, even furniture (& sometimes bags, suitcases or washing baskets) I've seen strewn on the roadside or off into the bush. It's a pretty regular thing & most of the time it's just from tourists/people moving house not securing their loads properly. Most people would never consider the possibility that roadside debris could be linked to anything more nefarious than illegal garbage dumping & the vast majority aren't going to pull off the highway to rummage through someone else's discarded junk, even when it's clearly visible from a (moving) vehicle - which this suitcase wasn't (IMO), at least until it was moved. So the idea it could sit there for years doesn't seem at all implausible to me, these aren't areas with council clean-up crews.
A few other posters have mentioned this too but I just want to emphasise that those little cairns, & other unofficial markers like them, are incredibly common in the bush. Once you start looking for them you'll see them everywhere. Sometimes it's not a cairn but a marker sprayed on the road or sprayed, tagged, tied or cut into a tree. Other times it's a line of rocks, or old tyres - pretty much anything. They're markers for local tracks & property entryways that aren't recorded on official maps - the Mitchell Hwy between Dubbo & Bourke has lots.They're often placed to guide delivery drivers or visitors from out of town who'd otherwise have trouble telling a fire trail from someone's 20km long driveway - if you're not local, all dirt tracks look alike.
ALSO - if the google images showing all the discarded clothing items in the new poster's first post (sorry!! forgot your name) are definitely from the same stretch of highway as Khandalyce's suitcase & were also definitely taken in 2010, police should be able to narrow the date the suitcase was left there with some certainty because that particular section has very obviously been affected by fire in the 12 mths before those images were taken.
- Whoa that's long - if anyone actually gets through it, apologies for the massive TL/DR issues :blushing:
