Leanne Beth GOODALL

Name: Sex: Female Year of Birth: 1958 At Time of Disappearance on 30 December 1978 Age: 20 Height (cm): 160.0 Build: Medium Hair Colour: Brown Eye Colour: Brown Complexion: Tanned Nationality: Racial Appearance: Caucasian Circumstances Leanne was last seen at Muswellbrook.

KAREN LESLIE EDWARDS

5 October - 24 October 1978

TIMOTHY JAMES THOMSON (31)

GORDON STUART TWADDLE (21)

KAREN LESLIE EDWARDS (23)

Found in bushland west of Mount Isa, QLD. They had each been shot in the head with a .22 calibre firearm.

Reward - Queensland Police - $250,000

Michelle Veronica POPE

Michelle Veronica POPE

DOB: 1960

HAIR: Brown

BUILD:Medium

EYES: Blue

CIRCUMSTANCES:

Michelle and Stephen Victor LAPTHORNE (also missing) were last seen at 10.30pm on 25 August 1978 leaving his home at West Pymble to drive her home to Berowra. They never arrived and have not been seen or heard from since. Adding to the mystery is Stephen's green Bedford van which has never been located. All leads received since their disappearance have been followed up but to no avail.

Anni TOMINAC

10 July 1978

JOY HODGINS (18) (pictured)

ANNI TOMINAC (17)

Last seen - at the Ambassador Nightclub in Newcastle, NSW. Police believe the ran away.

Joy HODGINS

10 July 1978

JOY HODGINS (18)  and ANNI TOMINAC (17)

Last seen - at the Ambassador Nightclub in Newcastle, NSW. Police believe the ran away.

Trudie Adams

After 30 years, police closing in on teenager's killers
Les Kennedy and Dylan Welch July 30, 2008

On June 24, 1978, Ms Adams, an 18-year-old business student from Avalon, was seen about 11pm leaving a dance at the surf club, and police believe she was picked up by three men, raped and then killed.

Yesterday her father, Charles Adams, appealed to the public to help solve his daughter's murder. "She had her life in front of her, she had just finished school [when her life was] snuffed out," he said.

During a series of investigations spanning four decades, police have identified three men, one living in Queensland, another who was suspected dead 20 years ago but resurfaced in Victoria, and a convicted drug dealer.

It is understood the breakthrough came when the drug dealer tried to make a deal with the NSW Crime Commission, in an attempt to get a lighter sentence for a relative also charged over the same drug importation, the Herald has learned.

Barbara Carol BROWN

Sex: Female At Time of Disappearance on 17 May 1978. Age: 23 Height (cm): 162.0 Build: Medium Hair Colour: Blonde Eye Colour: Blue Complexion: Fair Nationality: Racial Appearance: Caucasian Circumstances Barbara was last seen at Beecroft

LINA MARCIANO

1 March 1978

LINA MARCIANO (19)

Last seen - leaving her home in Wayville, SA, on a motorcycle en route to Nailsworth. Her motorcycle was found at a KFC restaurant in Nailsworth. Her body was found in a rubbish tip at Dry Creek on 4 March. She was bound and gagged and wrapped in a curtain. She had been bashed and stabbed to death.

Reward - SA Police - $200,000

Marie Laenen

Personal Details Last seen: January 28, 1978 Employment: Age: 22 Year of birth: 1956 Height: Build: Eyes: Hair: Fair Complexion: Fair Gender: Female Distinguishing Feature: Circumstances: Marie Laenen, 22, died of fright as an attacker choked her after she disappeared from the Sunnybank Hotel on January 28, 1978, where she had been selling raffle tickets. She was not assaulted sexually, and police advanced no motive for the attack.

CAROLINE JANE DOW

January 1978

CAROLINE JANE DOW (25)

PHILLIP SIDNEY BAKER (24)

Shot dead at Cabarita Beach, NSW. They were naked and had been killed with a shotgun. It has been reported that the killer came from Queensland.

___________________________________

Police cool on cold cases

Les Kennedy June 4, 2007 SMH

TWO hundred murder cases deemed solvable are about to be sent back to local detectives - but senior police fear they will remain unsolved for years because of insufficient resources and a growing backlog of 9000 exhibits for DNA analysis.

Kings Cross police alone will be handed 37 old murder cases on top of an already heavy crime load for the 15 detectives. Seventy detectives at the Homicide Squad can normally only manage 50 to 60 cases a year.
The cases include a series of gangland killings amid suspicions they went nowhere because of corrupt police involvement.
But the Unsolved Homicide Unit, dubbed the "cold case squad", believes the 200 murders can be solved with the aid of modern forensic techniques such as DNA analysis of blood, saliva and hair found at crime scenes, along with fingerprints and ballistics evidence.
It chose the 200 from more than 400 unsolved murders committed between 1970 and 2000 after it was asked to review them in June 2004, with an expectation it would take six months to identify cases worth reinvestigating. But it took the small team three years of searches as it tracked down and read each case file.
Even with new techniques that could solve the murders, investigators will have to compete with the backlog of 9000 exhibits from other cases - such as robberies, sexual assaults, burglaries and muggings - dating back to 2000. These are are still awaiting analysis at the Government's understaffed DNA forensics laboratory at Lidcombe.
While Queensland has 100 scientists working to clear a backlog of 12,000 crime scene exhibits, only 10 now work at the Lidcombe laboratory. Nevertheless, the 200 unsolved murder cases will be handed back to detectives at 80 suburban and country commands over the next six weeks.
"We don't know how many of the local squads will get the time to do them on top of their existing work," a Major Crime officer told the Herald.
"The emphasis in local area commands now is on solving volume crime [such as break-and-enters and car thefts]; that's all commanders are interested in.
"There are on average 100 murders a year in NSW, and the Homicide Squad, with about 70 detectives, actively examines 50 to 60 of them. The rest are handled locally. So how is Kings Cross going to cope with 37?"
The state police strategy has also shifted priority in funding and staffing to counter-terrorism, security for the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum in Sydney in September, and public order squads. "Major crime resourcing has dropped off the radar," one officer said.

Compounding the crisis are similar DNA backlogs in every other state, while there is still no functional national DNA database from which suspects can be identified if they move interstate and are arrested for another crime. This is because legal problems persist, with differing state laws on the collection of DNA, as revealed in the Herald on Saturday.
One of the 200 cases that will be hampered by stalling on the national DNA databank is the murder of Caroline Jane Dow, 25, a trainee nurse, and her boyfriend, Phillip Sidney Baker, 24. Their naked bodies were found blasted by a shotgun in the dunes at Cabarita Beach on the North Coast in January 1978. The killer is believed to have come from Queensland.
Police have been guarded about the cases that will be returned to local area commands, but the cold case squad will also ask Cowra detectives to reopen investigations into the April 1987 murders of Catherine Pollard, 28, and her friend Georgina Watmore, 24. They were found bludgeoned to death in their home after a party.
Among the "solvable" Kings Cross cases are: the murder of Kato Mo, who died in a gang fight outside a brothel in 1986; the 1994 murder of Talal Assad, a suspected drug dealer bashed to death by a rival drug trafficker; the shooting death of Ali Ghazzawie; and the 1988 shooting murder of the Rex Hotel bar manager Mark Gregory Rogers. The gun used to kill Rogers was identified as the weapon used to kill William Rogers, a taxi driver - not a relative - in Ashfield later the same year.
There is a promise to increase the Sydney DNA analysis team from 10 to 20 and create a new laboratory at Greystaines, but police say it will still be a fraction of Queensland's effort.
Compounding the crisis are similar DNA backlogs in every other state, while there is still no functional national DNA database from which suspects can be identified if they move interstate and are arrested for another crime. This is because legal problems persist, with differing state laws on the collection of DNA, as revealed in the Herald on Saturday.
One of the 200 cases that will be hampered by stalling on the national DNA databank is the murder of Caroline Jane Dow, 25, a trainee nurse, and her boyfriend, Phillip Sidney Baker, 24. Their naked bodies were found blasted by a shotgun in the dunes at Cabarita Beach on the North Coast in January 1978. The killer is believed to have come from Queensland.
Police have been guarded about the cases that will be returned to local area commands, but the cold case squad will also ask Cowra detectives to reopen investigations into the April 1987 murders of Catherine Pollard, 28, and her friend Georgina Watmore, 24. They were found bludgeoned to death in their home after a party.
Among the "solvable" Kings Cross cases are: the murder of Kato Mo, who died in a gang fight outside a brothel in 1986; the 1994 murder of Talal Assad, a suspected drug dealer bashed to death by a rival drug trafficker; the shooting death of Ali Ghazzawie; and the 1988 shooting murder of the Rex Hotel bar manager Mark Gregory Rogers. The gun used to kill Rogers was identified as the weapon used to kill William Rogers, a taxi driver - not a relative - in Ashfield later the same year.
There is a promise to increase the Sydney DNA analysis team from 10 to 20 and create a new laboratory at Greystaines, but police say it will still be a fraction of Queensland's effort.