Australia Claremont Serial Killer, 1996 - 1997, Perth, Western Australia - #3

[aim2solve]

Let's not forget that, with serial killers, it's the signature that remains the same not the method. Methods change depending on situations. Evidence suggests that this guy started off as a serial rapist and gained confidence in new abduction methods as he developed. Is there any official media release that has more information on the 1993/1994 attacks near Swanbourne Station?

 

[Bartholemeus]

Any guesses as to what his signature is?

 

[aim2solve]

Claremont itself

 

[delbertGrady]

I think there has got to be a signature besides claremont, a very obvoius signature most likely because of all the secrecy around macro.
According to Debi Marshalls book, the person who found CG's body said 'whoever did this is one sick ****' which indicates to me something very unusual about the condition of her body.

 

[delbertGrady]

could the reason that the victim attacked in karrakatta has been considered prior to the reported forensic link, to have been a strong possibility to be a csk attack, be due to the nature of it being in such a creepy location rather than just a park or other secluded location?

and i feel so sorry for this victim having it brought up in the media and in her life 20 years later must be horrific.

 

[Basilisk]

I think there has got to be a signature besides claremont, a very obvoius signature most likely because of all the secrecy around macro.
According to Debi Marshalls book, the person who found CG's body said 'whoever did this is one sick ****' which indicates to me something very unusual about the condition of her body.

What about the printing ink thing (to mask DNA)?

 

[Sutton]

I'm a bit behind, but I wanted to say/ask about when the info was released that Ciara was seen talking to someone in a vehicle.

I think it was released in the CIA docu along with the MM footage. This Aug. 16, 2008 article says,

Special crime squad detectives say they will be releasing details of the vehicle seeing alongside Ms Glennon as she waited for a taxi on Stirling Highway on the night she disappeared.

http://mobile.ABC.net.au/news/2008-08–15/police-about-to-release-new-clue-in-Claremont/478606

I read back through 10ish 1997-2006 articles, and can't find any reference to Ciara talking to a vehicle.

This could explain why no one came forward (but the driver being the CSK would also explain why).

 

[Sutton]

A blitz attack makes the most sense, IMO.

The girls were alone, late at night in dark areas. Why bother with a con or a surprise attack? A violent abduction, that totally overwhelms the victim, and includes restraints and a hood, could be part of the killer's fantasy. Or it could just be the quickest way to abduct.

Of all the possible methods to abduct a target victim, this was the lowest risk for the killer.

Karrakatta believed her attack was related to the CSK from the very beginning. Profiler Dick Ault said Karrakatta was related in 1997. Forensics linked Karrakatta to Ciara's abduction in 2009.

We know Karrakatta was assaulted, in a blitz attack, into the CSK's vehicle.

I don't think it's a leap to believe the other victims were taken in a similar manner.

The car info and Det. Stanbury's request that the drivers of those vehicles get in touch, was ridiculous, IMO. It may have been a 'front' for another message, but what it really did was announce to the killer: We got nothing. The police have made this announcement so many times, the killer feels no pressure or threat from police.

 

[billywhizz]

latest from the Post.

Strange article for a local newspaper...

http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/

Mark Dixie, a British mur-derer and violent sexual preda-tor who lived in Subiaco in the 1990s, has been implicated in three more brutal sex attacks in Spain.
After leaving WA, Dixie’s DNA was matched to DNA found in the underwear of a 19-year-old Thai economics student who had been sexually assaulted at her home in West Leederville in 1998.Now 44, Dixie is serving a minimum 34-year sentence for the murder and rape of 18-year-old Sally Anne Bowman, whom he had followed from a London nightclub in 2005.The WA Thai woman gave pro-pensity evidence at his murder trial.Earlier this year, Dixie broke down in prison and confessed to the rape of a woman in the seaside resort of Fuengirola in August 2003. His DNA was found on the victim.An innocent Dutchman is serv-ing a long sentence for that crime and for two other rapes now con-nected to Dixie.Dixie lived in Australia from 1993 until 1999, when he was con-victed in Busselton Magistrates Court after leaping naked out of bushes in Dunsborough and making lewd suggestions to a woman walking on a path.He was then working there as a chef under the alias Shane Turner, and was deported for overstaying his visa, without being charged for the rape of the Thai teenager.His DNA was linked to that crime only years later.The British detective who investigated Ms Bowman’s mur-der is convinced Dixie has left a string of victims in Australia.“I can’t believe Sally Anne’s murder was Dixie’s first be-cause of the way in which it was carried out,” Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy said outside London’s Old Bailey court after Dixie was convicted in 2008.“The problem is pinning it down. There are a lot of people who go missing. There are a lot of travellers out there.“The injuries Sally Anne sustained were so off the scale that I am convinced it was not his first killing. The answer lies somewhere in Australia.”WA police said in 2006 they had written off Dixie as a sus-pect for the Claremont serial killings, though he had been a person of interest.Spain’s Supreme Court last week accepted an appeal by Romano Liberto van der Dussen, who has served 12 years of his 15-year sentence for the rapes in which the victims were brutally bashed, according to London’s Telegraph newspaper.

 

[aim2solve]

The information was made public as part of the documentary. MACRO had LKW as their prime suspect for a number of years up until 2007. The description that one of the bus stop men provided was not consistent with LKW's vehicle. A rework of evidence requires nondiscriminatory categorization of information to be released to the public.

 

[Bartholemeus]

A blitz attack makes the most sense, IMO.

The girls were alone, late at night in dark areas. Why bother with a con or a surprise attack? A violent abduction, that totally overwhelms the victim, and includes restraints and a hood, could be part of the killer's fantasy. Or it could just be the quickest way to abduct.

Of all the possible methods to abduct a target victim, this was the lowest risk for the killer.

Karrakatta believed her attack was related to the CSK from the very beginning. Profiler Dick Ault said Karrakatta was related in 1997. Forensics linked Karrakatta to Ciara's abduction in 2009.

We know Karrakatta was assaulted, in a blitz attack, into the CSK's vehicle.

I don't think it's a leap to believe the other victims were taken in a similar manner.

The car info and Det. Stanbury's request that the drivers of those vehicles get in touch, was ridiculous, IMO. It may have been a 'front' for another message, but what it really did was announce to the killer: We got nothing. The police have made this announcement so many times, the killer feels no pressure or threat from police.

I can't think that far back but I've always been under the impression that the information about the cars was released early on. I'm going to have to do some digging. Maybe it did first get released in 2008 and as I only really started getting interest in this case after that, maybe my brain has been tricked.

If it is the case then it explains perhaps the biggest quandary of the case - if there were blitz attacks then how do we explain the presence of the cars and them not coming forward?

Potentially they weren't aware they were announcing they knew little, or perhaps it was a trick to lull the CSK into a false sense of security.

 

[billywhizz]

Barnett cutbacks threaten forensic reforms


21/02/2009

By Bret Christian

Justice John McKechnie’s scathing criticism of a “catastrophic” string of errors in a Perth murder case this week echoed problems identified by a British expert brought to WA to review the Claremont serial killings.

Valiant efforts by WA police to fix problems identified by Professor David Barclay have been set back by new government spending cuts.

Last month the cuts halted the building of a new forensic science centre, a combined faculty where physical exhibits were to be tested.

Justice McKechnie delayed a murder trial after a police bungle with getting clothing tested and late delivery of prosecution documents to the defence meant that the defendants could not get a fair trial.

The judge said police claims that systems had changed since blunders in other high-profile murder cases were “little more than public relations spin”.

Back in 2005 forensic scientist Professor Barclay was brought to Perth to review the Claremont murder cases and later to report on forensic procedures in WA.

He found much to criticise. In a 2006 interview, he likened problems with WA justice to problems in South Wales in the 1990s, when nine people were wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.

“That happened in the UK and it’s happening now in the United States and it may be happening in Western Australia because the police investigative techniques used to rely on identification evidence and confession evidence and writing things up in notebooks and so on,” he said.

British courts now want physical proof to corroborate confession and witness evidence, especially after the infamous Guildford Four and Birmingham Six cases.

“The courts don’t like that any more, they tend to rely on physical evidence,” Professor Barclay said.

“There are opportunities to inadvertently or deliberately manufacture confession evidence, to put words in people’s mouths and sometimes that’s really quite innocent on the part of the police.

“I think what’s happening in Western Australia is you’re just catching up.

“I think Western Australia is making particular strides, efforts to close that gap, to learn from the lessons that we went through in the UK, the pain that we went through in having to move our systems to an integrated and physical evidence-based approach.”

The strongest new weapon against crime, DNA testing, has been embraced by the WA police, but our courts have not reached the stage where witness testimony is not accepted unless there is physical evidence to back it up.

DNA has proved something shocking about justice systems around the world – the most trusted evidence is also the most unreliable.

Witness testimony has been proved again and again to be wrong when measured against accurate DNA testing, especially in rape and murder cases.

In the United States, where hundreds of people waiting to be executed on Death Row were exonerated by later DNA tests, more than 60% had originally been convicted by mistaken eyewitness evidence.

Multiple studies have shown that memory is extremely unreliable and subject to tampering, especially when there are multiple interviews of the witnesses.

The process of trying to remember conspires to contaminate the memory.

But juries love eyewitness evidence. It grabs attention and sympathy. Without a witness, juries convict only one-sixth of the time. Studies have shown they might acquit due to sympathy, or if the crime is especially gruesome, convict on the flimsiest evidence.

The studies have also shown that witnesses who deliver their evidence with the greatest confidence and force can be catastrophically wrong.

But apart from “repressed memory” cases, no judge in an Australian court has ever allowed a jury to hear expert scientific evidence on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

The two main laboratories that prepare physical evidence for court cases, Path West and the Chemistry Centre, will continue to operate independently despite criticism of the set-up by Professor Barclay.

He said that although individual scientists working in the facilities were thoroughly professional, they worked in isolation from each other and from investigating police.

This approach was abandoned in the UK after it was found that crimes were best solved by working from the start with the scientists, whose trained analytical minds often contributed to decipher non-scientific aspects of crimes.

It was for that reason that the new Joint Forensic Centre was about to be built, but it has fallen victim to the Barnett government’s budget cutbacks.

However, good progress was being made before the cutback, resulting in more arrests made more quickly.

Last May, 29 extra forensic officers were appointed.

The backlog of DNA tests for serious crime such as murder, rape and large drug seizures, has been reduced from 51 cases to 37 in the past year.

In “volume crime”, such as burglary, stealing and minor assaults, backlogs have been reduced from 465 to 132.

Turnaround times are two to three weeks. For serious crimes, the time depends on the trial date.

“This has resulted in the swift arrest of many recidivist and prolific offenders over the past eight months,” said a spokesman for Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan.

Fingerprint turnaround has been reduced to 72 hours from three weeks.

 

[Bartholemeus]

latest from the Post.

Strange article for a local newspaper...

http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/

Mark Dixie, a British mur-derer and violent sexual preda-tor who lived in Subiaco in the 1990s, has been implicated in three more brutal sex attacks in Spain.
After leaving WA, Dixie’s DNA was matched to DNA found in the underwear of a 19-year-old Thai economics student who had been sexually assaulted at her home in West Leederville in 1998.Now 44, Dixie is serving a minimum 34-year sentence for the murder and rape of 18-year-old Sally Anne Bowman, whom he had followed from a London nightclub in 2005.The WA Thai woman gave pro-pensity evidence at his murder trial.Earlier this year, Dixie broke down in prison and confessed to the rape of a woman in the seaside resort of Fuengirola in August 2003. His DNA was found on the victim.An innocent Dutchman is serv-ing a long sentence for that crime and for two other rapes now con-nected to Dixie.Dixie lived in Australia from 1993 until 1999, when he was con-victed in Busselton Magistrates Court after leaping naked out of bushes in Dunsborough and making lewd suggestions to a woman walking on a path.He was then working there as a chef under the alias Shane Turner, and was deported for overstaying his visa, without being charged for the rape of the Thai teenager.His DNA was linked to that crime only years later.The British detective who investigated Ms Bowman’s mur-der is convinced Dixie has left a string of victims in Australia.“I can’t believe Sally Anne’s murder was Dixie’s first be-cause of the way in which it was carried out,” Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy said outside London’s Old Bailey court after Dixie was convicted in 2008.“The problem is pinning it down. There are a lot of people who go missing. There are a lot of travellers out there.“The injuries Sally Anne sustained were so off the scale that I am convinced it was not his first killing. The answer lies somewhere in Australia.”WA police said in 2006 they had written off Dixie as a sus-pect for the Claremont serial killings, though he had been a person of interest.Spain’s Supreme Court last week accepted an appeal by Romano Liberto van der Dussen, who has served 12 years of his 15-year sentence for the rapes in which the victims were brutally bashed, according to London’s Telegraph newspaper.

Have we got details, as in an MO from the Spain crime?

Dixie was in Australia from 1993-1999. Could he have done any of the other rapes. Pulling a girl from a car while she's stopped at traffic lights seems like it's straight out of Dixie's play book.

 

[Sutton]

Any guesses as to what his signature is?

No, not really. I haven't even thought about this. He may not have one. Good question.

What's your theory?

 

[Bartholemeus]

How is "signature" defined in the serial killer world?

 

[billywhizz]

Jewellery.

why were police in CIA doco looking for SS's sunflower key ring? Not her bag. No wallet. Just mention of what clothes she was wearing and looking for key ring.

 

[Sutton]

Have we got details, as in an MO from the Spain crime?

Dixie was in Australia from 1993-1999. Could he have done any of the other rapes. Pulling a girl from a car while she's stopped at traffic lights seems like it's straight out of Dixie's play book.

This article is about the man falsely convicted for the crimes:

On September 2, 2003, he was arrested near the beach by several police officers. Only later was he informed of the charges: he was the main suspect in a sexual assault case against three women in Fuengirola on the night of August 10, between 4.30am and 6am. In all three cases, the attacker approached the victim, violently beat her and then tried to rape her. Every time, a passerby or a car interrupted the attack before the victim was raped, but all three women – aged 19, 29 and 33 – were terrified.

Two of the women's purses were stolen.

http://elpais.com/elpais/2015/05/11/inenglish/1431344834_427386.html

 

[Sutton]

How is "signature" defined in the serial killer world?

I always think of it as what the killer does that he doesn't have to do to commit the crime and to evade capture.

Something like restraints could be MO or signature. If the killer tied them up to prevent their escape, it's MO. If he tied them up bc he wanted to see them helpless it indicates signature.

There are many definitions. Someone else might prefer/post one of those, but same thing in the end.

 

[aim2solve]

The great Glenn D Wilson describes it as any common fundamental aspect of crimes that provides for a positive "linkage analysis". So in other words, any part of a number of crimes that is common and that can prove it was committed by the same person. Things like specific injuries, specific locations etc.

MO and signature are designated as different by the FBI profiling specialists.

 

[Sutton]

Has anyone been able to find information on these two? Ausgirl posted about them in an old CSK thread (April 2014).

Barbara Westorn , found in bushland north-east of Canning Dam , Perth , murdered.

Kelly Turner , 18 , body found near Canning Dam , July 1991 murdered.

No. Other than brief comments or references, I haven't located additional information.

I believe the names in that post are misspelled. The correct spellings are:

Kerry Turner
Barbara Western

If you search on the WA cemetery site, both of the women list deceased dates in 1991.

http://www2.mcb.wa.gov.au/NameSearch/