Australia 1984 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

Australia 1984 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

The 75-year-old man who kidnapped and murdered Melbourne schoolgirl Kylie Maybury is likely to die in prison. On Melbourne Cup Day, November 6, 1984, a 6-year-old girl in Preston, north Melbourne, was upset that she couldn’t go to a birthday party nearby. Instead, her mother gave her 90 cents and sent her to the store to get a pack of sugar. She left the house barefoot. The store was 140 meters away, on a street she had already walked down before. She bought sugar at about half past five but never returned home. The next morning she was found in a drainage ditch in her own neighborhood, and 2 days later the police questioned a man who lived 650 meters away, had a matching car, and had already served 12 years for a brutal attack on a teenage girl. They accepted his alibi. No one knocked on that door for the next 32 years. Her mother no longer expected to live to see this moment. That’s how they finally caught him.

Kylie Marie Antonia Maybury had turned six two weeks earlier, on October 24th. She lived on Gregory Grove in Preston with her mother, Julie, and younger sister, Rebecca. She was in first grade. She did gymnastics. Her mother says she was capable of everything, especially sports, and remembers her as a little princess. This was all that was in her life, because there was nothing else to be. No school years to describe, no job, no relationships, nothing that anyone could later investigate looking for a cause. She was six.

Cup Day 1984 was a public holiday throughout the state of Victoria. That day, the family watched the race on a big screen at a local pub and then walked home together. Then Kylie found out that there was a birthday party nearby that she couldn’t go to, and she was very upset. So, she was given 90 cents and given a small task. Anyone who has raised a young child will understand what this is like. A frustrated 6-year-old, a holiday weekend, and parents looking for something useful for her to do. This is one of the most common situations in family life. She went to the store barefoot. The shop was located on Plenty Road, the main thoroughfare running through the center of Preston. It was 140 meters from her doorstep—a distance most parents would call “the end of the street.”

The salesman served her at about half past five. Then she went back out onto the main road on a weekend, in broad daylight, carrying a packet of sugar, and a man drove past. He was in his early 40s. He had gotten out of prison two years ago and lived a few minutes from here. Preston in 1984 was a working-class area of Melbourne. Narrow streets, small houses, located close to each other. People who knew each other by name. Plenty Road ran through the center, full of shops and small businesses. This was a place where a 6-year-old’s trip to the nearest store wasn’t considered a calculated risk. Because on the afternoon of the holiday, there were adults on each of these streets. There was no plan. No one was watching her house or studying her daily routine. This man didn’t choose Kylie Maybury in advance. She just happened to be on the sidewalk at the moment his car was driving down the road, and he made his decision while he was slowing down. Witnesses described a white Holden station wagon. This description defined the next 32 years of investigation.

At about a quarter to one the next morning, a driver on a quiet residential street in Preston saw something in a gutter and stopped. It was Kylie Maybury, less than a mile from the store she went to, in the middle of the suburb where she lived, abandoned on the side of the road. The autopsy established the rest, and there is no version of this that can be sustained. She was given a sedative. An autopsy showed that she had been put to sleep and died during the attack. She turned six exactly 13 days earlier, on October 24th. Two weeks, a six-year-old child. Two of these facts are important for what happened next. Someone gave her a sedative, which means someone planned everything in advance to have something to put her to sleep. And someone had a private place where he could take her close enough to Preston to bring her back later. And in that night, there is a span of time that determined everything that happened afterward. She was kidnapped around half past five, and they didn’t leave her in that ditch until after midnight. Whoever kidnapped her didn’t take her outside of Melbourne. He kept her somewhere nearby for hours, then brought her back to her hometown and left her there.

The Sun News-Pictorial newspaper put her on the front page and gave her a name that Melbourne has not forgotten and still remembers: The girl from “Cup Day,” a 6-year-old child sent to get sugar, kidnapped from the main street before dark and found in a ditch before sunrise. Every parent in the northern suburbs read this and remembered the last time they let their own child go to the store. Hundreds of calls were received by Preston police in the first week. People called from all over Melbourne and even beyond. Each of these calls had to be recorded and reviewed by detectives who didn’t know which ones were important. Such is the arithmetic of high-profile cases. Public attention creates a flow, and in this flow, the very call that matters gets lost.

Victoria Police worked intensively. Officers seized registration details for white Holden station wagons in the northern suburbs. Hundreds of cars were checked and removed from the list one by one. They went around Plenty Road and every street around it. They questioned hundreds of people. They brought in men who had convictions for crimes against children in Melbourne’s north and checked their whereabouts on the evening of November 6. Some were interrogated more than once, and someone was put under surveillance. The alibi was checked, cross-checked with other data, and checked again. Nothing worked. There is a version of this investigation that should have worked. The description of the car was specific, the area was small, and the timeframe was tight. In a suburb of this size, with this much police attention, the odds had to be on their side.

They had all these advantages, but it didn’t change anything, because what ultimately exposed him was something no one in the world could read in 1984. Investigators recovered biological samples from her clothing and from the crime scene. In November 1984, this was proof that a specific man had done it, but there was no way of knowing who exactly. DNA profiling did not exist. It was not used in criminal cases anywhere in the world until 1987 in England. Someone in the chain of custody of evidence made a decision anyway. They sealed these samples, labeled them, and sent them for storage instead of throwing them away. No one involved could read them, and no one knew if they ever would be able to. This decision is the reason this story has an ending at all. It is worth understanding what these samples were in 1984. Not a catch. Not proof. A sealed physical object that everyone agreed was the most important thing in the case, but with which no one could do anything. It was an answer written in a language that had not yet been invented. Whoever made this decision had no idea whether it would ever have any value. Evidence storage is not limitless, and old physical evidence is constantly being destroyed. Someone looked at a sealed sample in a child murder case that was never solved and decided to keep it, and that decision survived the initial investigation itself.

On November 8, 1984, two days after Kylie’s body was found, police knocked on a door in Preston and questioned the man who lived there with his mother. He fit the bill on every count, and the officers in that room saw it with their own eyes. He lived 650 meters from the drain where her body was abandoned. He was driving a white Holden HQ station wagon—the exact model described by witnesses. His car was one of hundreds on that list. He was in that area that day. And the detective sitting across from him knew about his criminal record. In 1970, he was convicted of a brutal attack on a 14-year-old girl. Court records show that he confessed to police his intentions towards her. He spent the next 12 years behind bars. He had only been free for 2 years and 3 days when Kylie Maybury was kidnapped. 2 years and 3 days. A man convicted of such an attack was released. And 734 days later, a 6-year-old child was kidnapped from the street in the suburb where he lived.

The officers in that room had it all. They did not work blindly, and they did not miss a single detail. In the first week of the investigation, they had the file, the address, the vehicle, and the suspect himself. What they didn’t have was a way to prove it, and took it as a lack of evidence at all. They knew it. It was in the case. So the interrogation on November 8, 1984, was not an ordinary check of a person whom no one had reason to think about. Detectives sat in a house with a man who, 33 years later, confessed to the crime. He told them he left the barbecue at about a quarter to five and spent the rest of the evening at home alone. He stated that he had never met Kylie and had no contact with her. He hadn’t even seen her in the neighborhood. Didn’t even pass her on Plenty Road. Nothing at all. And he told them something else—a phrase that would make the detectives stay in that house for the rest of the day. He said it was pure coincidence that the body was found 650 meters from his home. They believed him, and there is no record of anyone trying to verify it. No DNA sample was taken, because in 1984, this did not exist yet. But there was no surveillance, no re-interrogation, no mark against his name. A man with a conviction for assaulting a schoolgirl, who lives a 7-minute walk from where the body of a 6-year-old girl was found and owns a matching car, was ruled out as a suspect based solely on his own words.

He returned to his life in Preston. And here it is worth being precise, because this is not a look into the past from the height of today. No one needed 2016 technology to understand: the man in that room deserved a return visit. Everything that made him pay attention a second time was already in the file in November 1984, recorded by the officers who had just spoken to him. The investigation turned inward, as it always does. Kylie’s grandfather came under suspicion. Not only under suspicion from the police, but also of another kind. The one that spreads through the suburbs and clings to a person forever. Less than a year after killing Kylie, he committed suicide. Investigators later determined that he had nothing to do with it. Then it happened a second time. Kylie’s uncle came into the police’s sights, and a few years later he died in the same way. He was also innocent, acquitted, and dead. Two men in the same family died because of a question no one could answer. None of them ever learned that the answer existed. This is what the unsolved murder of a child does to the people around him. It doesn’t just leave a void. It forces everyone who was close to the child into a certain category and leaves them there because the only way out is the name.

And he wasn’t there. Although the answer was already recorded. His name, his address, the make of his car, his previous conviction for assaulting a girl with a hammer. All of this lay where it had been placed in November 1984. And the man, who would later admit his guilt, continued to live nearby, go to work, and return home for another 32 years. The 1980s are over. Then the 1990s. Kylie would have turned 18 in 1996, 21 in 1999, and 30 in 2008. But none of those years came. Rebecca grew up and grew old. Julie stayed in Preston, in the same house, on the same street. DNA profiling has come to Australian courtrooms, and a sample seized in 1984 has finally been turned into a profile. It was clean and pointed to one and only living man. It was uploaded to the Victoria State database, and it sat there with no matches. A DNA database is not a search engine. She can’t identify anyone on her own. All she does is check the profile for those who have already been forced to give a sample. And no one forced him to hand it over. So, the case had the perfect answer, but no way to read it out loud. It would remain that way until someone thought of going and collecting another part for comparison.

The detectives took turns working on the case. The new investigators read the same testimony, checked the same chronology, and came to the same conclusion. Each of them read the same page, and each of them put the case back on the shelf without going to Preston to ask the man to take a swab. Nothing prevented this. There were no rules, no costs, or technical obstacles to this. It’s just never been done. Julie raised Rebecca in the same suburb where her older daughter was murdered. She later said that she never expected to live to see anyone convicted for it. Ultimately, the police offered a reward of up to a million dollars. They publicly addressed the anonymous callers who called them in 1984, and later those who called in 1997. No one mentioned a name. Which is not surprising, because the people who could solve this case were not ordinary citizens. These were police officers who had access to the file.

In 2014, Victoria Police reopened investigations into a number of “cold cases” of murders, and Kylie’s case was among them. There was media coverage, and the publicity generated phone calls. This is the whole mechanism of public appeals, and that is why the police continue to do them. Names came up that had never surfaced before. Old suspicions that people had been harboring for 30 years were finally voiced. Cold case detectives have done the obvious thing, which is also the most difficult. They went back to the beginning and began to read. Every person interviewed in 1984, every alibi provided, every name recorded—and one of them made them stop. Not because of something new, but because of something that was recorded back in 1984 and has consistently gone unnoticed ever since. Work on “cold cases” is often described as depending on the emergence of new scientific methods. Often it depends on whether someone reads an old case slowly enough to notice what is already in it. A man who lived in Preston in November 1984, had the relevant car, was interviewed two days after the body was discovered and released on his own recognizance; someone’s case they had already read along with everyone who touched it for them.

This is how Kylie Maybury’s murder was solved, and you should brace yourself for how mundane it all turned out to be. In 2016, detectives came to his home and asked for a DNA sample. He agreed to provide it, and there is no sign that he hesitated for even a moment. They sent it to a lab and compared it to a sample that had been stored in evidence storage since November 1984, where it had been kept by someone who had decided not to throw it away 32 years earlier. It coincided. Of all the living people on the planet, it was him, and he had been a suspect since the third day of the investigation. That’s the whole mechanism. There were no breakthrough technologies, genealogical databases, or secret operations to retrieve the cup from the trash. Two officers approached the door, asked the man to give a swab from his mouth, and he agreed. The technology that made this comparison possible has existed since the early 1990s. The profile was in the database. The man had been at the base for some two decades. The only step that was missed was that someone should have gone to Preston and asked the question that had already been asked before. He could have answered “no.” He was not obligated to provide anything. And he could have refused on the spot. After 32 years of no one asking anything, the case was resolved because he decided not to give up.

Gregory Keith Davis. He was 73 when he was charged in June 2016, a pensioner and lived in Waterford Park, north of Melbourne. He never left the state, never changed his name, and never went into hiding. During re-interview after his arrest, he repeated what he had told detectives in 1984. He never met Kylie Maybury. He knew nothing about this case. He said this when his own DNA was already on the table in front of him, and he stuck to this version until the morning of the first day of the preliminary hearing. Then he stopped. To this day, he says he can’t remember how he did it. On May 29, 2017, just minutes after the start of a preliminary hearing in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, Davis pleaded guilty to murder. Then the rest of his story was read, and none of it was a secret. Every line was available to someone in the file exactly when it mattered most.

The hammer attack on Lucy Steitzewitz in 1970 and the 12 years that followed. Then, in 1996, he was accused of sexual crimes against six children in his care. For this he was imprisoned for 2.5 years. Six children. 2.5 years. These allegations come 12 years after Kylie Maybury was killed by the same man in the same city, while his name was on the case for her murder. Each of these later victims suffered after the Preston interview. Each of them was a child who could have been spared harm if someone had come back and knocked on that door a second time. Six girls in 1996 and a 14-year-old with a hammer in 1970—on top of everything else. Kylie Maybury found herself at the center of a chain that the police were able to break back in November 1984. The alibi they adopted in 1984 cost more than just the Maybury family. He was still living freely in Melbourne’s north when the detectives finally returned.

On December 21, 2017, Judge Lex Lasry sentenced him in the Supreme Court of Victoria to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 28 years without the possibility of parole. Davis was 75. At that time, he would have been over 100 years old before he could apply for parole, meaning the sentence was designed to keep him behind bars until his death. Lasry told him that he treated Kylie with absolute disdain. The judge said he killed a defenseless child, lied to the police, and kept the crime a secret for 33 years. Five months before his sentencing, while in custody, Davis was severely beaten by another inmate and required treatment, and the court was told he would be a target for the rest of his life. The court agreed that he would serve his sentence in a protective cell and under stricter conditions than most prisoners, but this did not affect the harsh sentence. Both the prosecution and his own lawyer agreed that a life sentence was appropriate.

Julie Ryan spoke outside the court. She said she didn’t think she would live to see this day. She called him a monster and said that there was no other way to call him. When asked how she felt about him, she replied that there were no words for it. Then she turned to the other mothers, saying that she used to accompany Kylie everywhere, but that day she couldn’t. Her advice to them is not to let children go shopping alone. This is a mother with 33 years of suffering who tells other parents to be more afraid than she was, because of a 140-meter walk in the middle of the suburbs where she lived for years.

Kylie Maybury was 6 years old and wanted to go to her birthday party. Instead, she was given 90 cents and sent 140 meters up the road for a pack of sugar. She left the house without shoes. A man drove by. She was found before sunrise in a drainage ditch 650 meters from his door. He told the police it was a coincidence, they believed him, and it took 32 years and one voluntary oral swab to prove it wasn’t. Julie Ryan waited 33 years from the morning her daughter was found to the day the judge finally said it out loud. Her father didn’t live to see this. Like her brother. 90 cents, one errand, one man passing by, and a pack of sugar that was never found. If this case struck you, share your thoughts in the comments.