GUILTY Australia - Kylie Maybury, 6, abducted & murdered, Preston, Vic, 6 Nov 1984

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From this quote, taken from the linked article in the original post, there's mention of another child rape in the area the week before:

I have known him to borrow a blue and white car from his father-in-law Bob Brown, who lives in Mornington. This is the same colour as is the car that was used when the little girl was raped in Preston about a week ago.

I wonder who the girl was, and if her attacker was ever caught. She did give police a description.

I cannot fault the investigating police in 1984, they really did cover as many bases as humanly possible.
 
There's no justice in the fact that Kylie Maybury is forgotten. I can think of other reasons beside Ronald Reagan that people didn't care about Kylie - her family was working-class, her mother was a single parent and had had Kylie when she was 18, Kylie and her mother lived in a socially deprived working-class suburb in public housing.
 
Here's how the national media covered the story, in 1984:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=rvZUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ypIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4038,1961004

Pretty pathetic. But the bit of headline she got seemed to get a lot of people calling in to help. I'm pretty ashamed that I didn't know anything about this case -- and I live so close to where it happened!

I agree, why is Kylie not a household name, like Karmein Chan and Sheree Beasley, etc.

Probably for reasons you stated, Tash - kids from 'nice' homes/suburbs make for better headlines.
 
Even Karmein Chan wouldn't be that known had Mr. Cruel not kidnapped two white girls before her. Had it just been Karmein by herself, most people in 2014 would be saying "Karmein who?"
 
Kylie will always be that tiny girl clutching a sugar bag, forever six years old :'(

I hate the fact that she was working class and the child of a teenage mother who was a single parent. meant that almost no one has cared that Kylie was subjected to unspeakable horrors and dumped in a gutter like a rag doll.
 
Natasha (Tash) Simp said:
Kylie will always be that tiny girl clutching a sugar bag, forever six years old :'(

I hate the fact that she was working class and the child of a teenage mother who was a single parent. meant that almost no one has cared that Kylie was subjected to unspeakable horrors and dumped in a gutter like a rag doll.
Click to expand...

Pedophiles zero in on single mothers. While they woo mum they are eyeballing the child.
So long ago but I'm sure the police quizzed all boyfriends current and prior.
I find it very strange for the neighbour to give a 6 year old a task without the OK by the mum.
How easy was it to watch the child walk that distance and did the shopkeeper see anyone suspicious inside the shop. It's late, so was the shopkeeper closing up....did the shopkeeper give her a lift?
Kylie reminds me of my daughter at that age, same freckles and coy look, such a timid little angel.
If Kylie was drugged the perp knew what he was doing and maybe not the first time.

60 minutes had a segment about a cold case on the Murder of Mrs Palasic and all these years later the police found DNA from a close relative that matched the murderer. So now it's a waiting game.
Was DNA existent back in the 80's and do they keep such things for 30 years?
 
Tash - did you make that Wiki page? If so, bless you. :) If not , thank you for linking it.

There was actually a bit of attention given Kylie's case in the media at the time, but then as time went on the case seems to have vanished down that hole so many crimes do, when interest isn't sustained for whatever reason. Glad you're on board to help this case to not get lost down that hole.

TGY, no dna testing back then -- but there was mention of the police in this case saving evidence carefully "just in case" one day they could use it. How awesome is that? I believe it was used to exonerate the family members, unless the heat's addled my pate. So maybe those checks against the 10.000 sex offenders in the perp dna bank were done and came up empty.

I bet not ALL offenders are on that list though... only the ones that have been caught and imprisoned, maybe even then not all of them.. I think that's also a good thing to look up and know. But I'll wait it cools down, I think!
 
I'm fairly sure a lot of people used Kylie's mother's single mother status and the fact that she had had Kylie at 18 as reasons to blame her for Kylie's death. Again the fact she and Kylie were working class and lived in public housing would have also been used against the mother.

No one blamed Sheree Beasley's mother... but then they were "nicely" middle class and had a "good" public image.
 
I grew up in a working class area - a lot of the little girls couldn't afford pretty party dresses so they wore their school uniform/school dress to other kids parties. Arsehat middle class people judged them and their families for it.

I can only imagine what said arsehats did to Kylie's mother
 
I will. Give me time, though, to work out how. I'm not very wiki-savvy.

I come from a single-parent family who at times lived in the 'high rises' - what the Brits would call 'council flats'. Maybe 'projects' in America.. In Australia at the time, people really did expect other people to be decent and always were so surprised as a nation when something terrible happened. I used to walk half a mile on my own, not much older than Kylie, to purchase my mum's cigarettes for her (for 80c a pack). But a lot of people did that - sent the kids for milk, smokes, bread... In the poor communities we lived in, and the country towns too, every female neighbour was "Aunty" someone, who could tell you off for being naughty, send you to the shop, offer you a glass of milk and a biscuit if you wandered past looking hungry. It was almost a completely different world... just in my own lifetime. Single parents now are just 'parents'. My mum could call herself a 'widow', which was an important distinction - even in the 80's.

I think what also might have contributed to the dying-down of media coverage was the 'shocking' behaviour of the uncle and grandad, their statius as suspects and subsequent suicides. If things were great here for a lot of people in that pre-Keating era, they were terribly hard for anyone who was mentally ill or in any other way a bit 'odd' (unless you were a famous artist, then nothing was out of bounds). Cross dressing combined with a child sex murder would have been something people didn't want to read about over their Weeties, and I bet the news companies got complaints.. Maybe everyone considered it unofficially 'solved' at that point (believing the perp was in the family) so lost interest...

Anyway, she's not forgotten. And I am hopeful there's to be justice for Kylie, sooner or later thanks mainly to those incredibly thoughtful cops who preserved the evidence so carefully.
 
Ausgirl, I think those like us who care about Kylie are incredibly lucky that The Herald's original reporter on the rape-murder from 1984 is still working for the Herald Sun. I checked The Age and there was no thirtieth anniversary article for Kylie in that newspaper.
 
Ausgirl, Maybe you could go to the State Library of Victoria's newspaper archives and get print outs from their microfilm for the original newspapers in 1984? (The Herald, The Sun News-Pictorial, The Age).

The original newspapers might have information that could help us find Kylie's rapist-killer, and also provide details we can add to Kylie's Wikipedia article - it's looking a bit skimpy at the moment.
 
I honestly don't get into the city very often these days, as mobility is an issue and I don't drive. However I do sometimes have appointments not far from the library, so if I get the chance I will certainly do so. There's more than one case I'd LOVE to look up there. Maybe when I am feeling up to it, I could make a day of it.

The wiki could take time also, as I have to learn to post things up correctly, and it's harder than it looks! But I *will* improve her site. Poor little girl, she deserves at least that.

Yes, bless that reporter for keeping up the articles. There's similar cases I've been following where one or two reporters have refused to allow the case to fade completely. I am ever grateful to them.
 
Just imagining that tiny girl with the sugar bag being forced to take the sedative by this animal - animals do this sort of thing, not human beings - makes me shake with rage.

I promise you, Kylie, whether he is alive or dead, we will find him and make sure the world knows his name forever.
 
The sedative is unusual, for a snatch and grab rapist. No wonder the police thought he must have kept her some hours before her death... I concur with everyone who thinks this is a sign he'd done it before. It seems a very planned thing to do.. And it suggests to me that Kylie being alive but quiet was important to him. A nearby house? Was he taking pictures? Somewhere out there, I believe, is another child who was drugged by this man, maybe a lot of children.
 
Ausgirl, I was thinking that too... do you think he forced Kylie into sexually explicit poses and positions for a camera, either with or without her clothes on?

If we still had the death penalty i would happily drop this man through the hangman's trap myself.
 
I wonder if this guy's been excluded by DNA: http://www.mako.org.au/Robert_Keith_Knight_Paedophile_Former_Scout_and_Youth_leader.html

Experts say the chances of Knight not having offended again between 1980 and 1996 are infinitesimal.
Studies done around the world indicate that sex offenders of this type keep on offending until they are caught - they don't have 16-year breaks.
Jobs as a youth worker and volunteer positions with the scouts gave Knight frequent access to hundreds of children in numerous Melbourne suburbs and schools during those years.
Both of the cases Knight was convicted of involved him abducting the girls, sexually assaulting them and taking explicit pornographic photographs of them.
He drugged and raped the 1996 victim.

---- While most of his crimes seem to have occurred on the other side of the city, he WAS familiar with the suburbs on this side, Broadmeadows being an easy drive from Preston:

In 1980 he was appointed as a community education officer at four schools in the Broadmeadows area, a job he held for three years.
He was based at Meadow Fair North primary school, but also did work with children at the nearby Bethal, Dallas and Dallas North primary schools.
His duties included running after-school and holiday programs for children.
Knight then got a job as a youth worker with Waverley Council in 1983 and stayed there for 10 years. During some of this time he managed the Syndal youth centre.

--- Though he moved away in 1983, he *could have* been in the area, maybe took her to a place he still had keys to... all that community work.. and ofc, all those places would be closed for Cup Day.
 
Some kidnappers/child molesters/child killers who force their little girl victims to pose in sexual positions for cameras are prepared beforehand as their victims bodies are found with make-up on their faces (the man wants to make the little girl look more like a woman). As far as i know, no make-up was on Kylie's face... however that's why it's important to look at the original 1984 newspaper reports, as they might give more details than the 30th anniversary article.
 
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