here is a paraphased version of the news story, sorry its not great
the Beaumont children. Truro. The Family. Snowtown. Now theres Wynarka and the little girl in the suitcase, the latest addition to South Australias back-catalogue of horror stories.
if police can manage to get dna they will match it against sex offenders on record,
South Australias major crime squad has made an educated guess that the person they want is in their state, most likely within close range.
Taskforce Mallee has begun the investigation by doorknocking every house within 25km of Wynarka. Conscious not to miss vital clues or leave gaps that the guilty can wriggle through, detectives are taking their time, cross-referencing each inquiry so nothing is missed and nothing is left to chance.
Investigators are not revealing all they know about what happened to the child because they have to keep some vital detail secret. Something only the killer knows and timewasters dont know
Police know the victim was a little under a metre tall and had shoulder-length fair hair. They know that as long as seven years ago she died extremely violently, almost certainly murdered. Certain fractures suggest she was bashed to death. A defence lawyer might argue that such injuries could be accidental but why would anyone would hide the body of a child who died in a genuine accident?
The killer or someone close to him or her then covered the body in a pile of clothes, maybe in an empty room, a cupboard or a shed. Then they left it for years long enough to be reduced to a skeleton.
Then, probably early this year, something happened to prompt the person to move the body, were they jittery because of recent prosecution of child killers, or the brilliant detection of Daniel Morcombes killer Brett Peter Cowan generated nationwide publicity after Cowans Supreme Court appeal failed in May this year. In April there was a spate of fresh publicity about William Tyrells abduction in northern NSW last September.any of these things may spark fear in a child killer.maybe they were moving house.
people may be tempted to assume the case was thrown from a vehicle but their strongest clue is the man with the suitcase seen in wynarka between march and may,
WYNARKA township has about eight permanent residents. Early one morning this year, roughly a quarter of the population Denise Edwards and Monica Martin were walking their dogs when they saw something that stuck in their minds,it was a man aged about 60 with short grey hair, lightly built neat looking, the unusual thing is that he was carrying a large suitcase, rather than wheeling it, he wasnt struggling with it,it seemed light, he seemed to be a man on a mission
was close enough to see both women but he made no eye contact and no greeting, unusual in the country. There was no sign of how he had appeared in the street but it seemed unlikely he had walked all the way from some other area. It seemed likely that either a vehicle had dropped him there, or he had walked from relatively close by.
police say if he arrived by vehicle he could have come from anywhere
investigators are eliminating the most obvious possibility: that the man came from one of the former farmhouses rented cheaply to transient tenants who come to the backblocks to escape their unhappy pasts
Some outsiders use the empty houses for their drug use or there are cases like the inbred family who moved from nz to rural areas including south australia
That family, product of three generations of incest over 40 years, No outsiders would have known if one of the dozen feral children in the family had died or been killed.
As forensic experts do their best to extract usable DNA from the tiny bones, the investigators have been chasing leads on the clothes and the quilt found with the suitcase and the case itself.
the clothing is cheap brands with origins of most of the 50 items identified, but some neo yet,
one is Sally. Others are Miss X Australia, HF and Gaf. The oddest one looks like HAOLAILH, printed on the tag in uneven capitals, Perhaps the most intriguing clue is the quilt. It is a one-off, apparently homemade from mostly hexagonal patches of brightly patterned material but machine-stitched, not hand sewn.
the lanza brand suitcase is another clue with the Lanza brand being budget quality. Lanza is the cheapest line of the brands sold by the national luggage retail chain, Strandbags.
Police have learned that the store gave away a large number of the suitcases for as little as $9 each several years ago, the bag could have been picked up from kerbside cleanup, charity shop, or from the tip.
The suitcase is variously described as faded blue or grey, although police have used a black model to use for publicity purposes. Whatever its original colour, it looks as if it was severely weathered before the clothes and the bones were put in it.
The police suggest the Lanza was sold exclusively by Strandbags outlets at Murray Bridge, McLaren Vale, Rundle Mall, Salisbury and Elizabeth. The question of whether it could have been bought in Renmark or Mt Gambier or over the border in Mildura or Warrnambool or at any of the other dozen or more stores in Victoria remains unanswered.
he neat man with the suitcase seems the strongest lead, with every day that he fails to come forward to clear himself confirms him as a better suspect.
Police have spoken to more than a dozen witnesses who saw a man matching the description of the suitcase man in the Wynarka district during the autumn.
Two specific sightings were on April 13 and May 26.
