Australia 1983 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community 

A South Australian prison inmate is being questioned and evidence is undergoing new DNA testing as police open a fresh inquiry into the Louise Bell case. The prisoner was previously investigated over the abduction 28 years ago with police saying they have fresh hope of solving one of the state’s most enduring criminal mysteries.

 On the night of the 4th of January 1983, a 10-year-old girl called Louise Bell said good night to her parents and got into bed in the room she shared with her younger sister at the family home in Hackam West in Adelaide South. It was a warm night and the window was open. In the morning, her mother went in to wake the girls and found the fly screen above Louisa’s bed cut open with a blade.

 The bed was empty. her sister, asleep an arms length away, had heard nothing at all. The search that followed was the largest suburban Adelaide had ever mounted. [music] No body, no witness. Then 5 weeks later, somebody folded Louis’s pajama top and left it on a neighbor’s lawn and telephone to say where her earrings were.

 He wanted the police to know he still had her things. It took 33 years to work out what he had handed them. The fly screen told police everything they needed to know in the first 5 minutes. It hadn’t been torn or forced. It had been cut cleanly with a blade in a line above the bed where Louise was sleeping.

 Nothing else in the room was disturbed. Her sister was still asleep in the other bed. This wasn’t a child who had climbed out and wandered off. Somebody had come to that window in the dark, opened the mesh, and lifted [music] a 10-year-old out of her bed without waking the girl beside her or the parents down the hall.

 That takes preparation. It means knowing which house and which window and which side of the room. It means knowing that on a January night in Adelaide that window would be open. It means somebody had been looking at that family before that night, long enough to know the layout of a house he’d never been inside. Louise Bell was 10 years old.

 Her father, Colin, later described her as fairly timid, a bit shy, slightly young for her age. She played sport around the neighborhood with the other local kids, which in a place like Hackam West in 1983 meant she was outdoors most of the summer and known to everybody on the street. That’s close to all there is.

 There’s no version of this where she did anything wrong or took any risk. And there’s no decision anybody in that family could have made differently. She went to sleep in the safest place a 10year-old has. That is the part of this case that lodged in Adelaide and stayed there. Not a child who wandered off, not a child who got into a car, a girl asleep in the middle of her own family, and it made no difference at all.

 South Australia police ran a search on a scale suburban Adelaide had never seen. Officers went door to door through Hackam West and out into the surrounding suburbs. Helicopters flew grids over the district. The primary school near the bell house became a staging ground with aircraft landing on the oval to coordinate the teams on the ground.

Hundreds of calls came in during the first days. Everyone had to be written down, assessed, and chased by detectives who had no idea which of them mattered. The reward climbed fast, which is what happens when a city decides a case cannot be allowed to go unsolved. The state government put up $10,000 within the first week.

 A group of Adelaide business figures added $15,000 more. And there had already been a smaller amount offered before that. None of it produced anything. Not one credible lead about where Louise had gone or who had taken her. Thousands of hours of police work. And at the end of it, the investigation knew exactly as much as it had known on the first morning.

 What it did produce was a change across Adelaide’s southern suburbs that never really reversed. Windows that had stayed open through 20 summers got locked and stayed locked. A city that had assumed a child asleep in her own bedroom was a child who was safe stopped assuming it. Several weeks after the abduction, a woman living close to the Bell family answered her telephone.

The man on the line asked her about medical advice for a child. Then in the same call, without being asked, he told her where to find Louise Bell’s earrings. He said to look under a broken brick at a corner nearby. Police went to the spot he described. The earrings were there, and they matched the ones Louise had been wearing the night she was taken, which settled one question immediately.

 Whoever was on that phone had been in that bedroom or had been given the earrings by somebody who was. Somebody had kept a 10-year-old girl’s earrings for weeks, then walked or drove to a street corner, placed them under a brick, and picked up a telephone to make sure they were found. He wasn’t confessing, and he wasn’t asking for anything. He was demonstrating.

 and he had picked his audience, not the police directly and not a [music] newspaper, a woman on a nearby street who would have to be the one to ring it in. Somebody who wanted to be seen doing it. 5 weeks after Louise was taken, the same house received a second delivery. Louisa’s pajama top was left on the front lawn.

yellow, folded, not dropped, not thrown from a car, set down flat the way somebody leaves a thing out to be found. [music] It was the top she had been wearing when she went to bed on the 4th of January. Somebody had kept it and then given it back like laundry. Police took it into evidence and it went into storage and that’s where it stayed.

 It was the last physical trace of Louise Bell that would ever surface, and nobody handling it in 1983 had any way of knowing what it was carrying. Louise has never been found, and in more than four decades, nothing else belonging to her has ever been recovered. Two objects, that is the entire physical inventory of what happened to Louise Bell.

 and the man who took her chose both of them and decided when the police would get them. Everything else about that night belongs to him. Where he took her, what he did, where he put her afterwards. 43 years on, the only things the investigation has ever held in its hands are two items he decided to hand over. Those two acts told investigators a great deal, and almost none of it was useful at the time.

 Whoever did this wanted contact with the investigation. He wasn’t hiding from it. He was taking part in it. There is a particular kind of offender who can’t leave a case alone. And every detective who works these knows the shape of him. He follows the coverage. He wants to see the effect. And at some point, he needs the people looking for him to understand that he is better at this than they are.

He knew the area well enough to pick a specific household near the Bell family and know its telephone number and the local streets well enough to choose a corner. He still had access to Louisise’s personal belongings more than a month on, which meant he had somewhere to keep them. Everything about it pointed at somebody local, somebody inside the community rather than passing through it.

 Police understood that in 1983 it didn’t help them because the community was thousands of people and they had nothing to narrow it with. In 1984 they charged somebody. Raymond John Geing was a prisoner. The case against him rested on statements from fellow inmates who said he had confessed behind bars.

 A jury convicted him of Louise Bell’s abduction and murder and he was sentenced to life. There was no body, no forensic evidence, and no witness who had seen anything. The conviction lasted less than a year. In 1985, the South Australian Court of Criminal Appeal quashed it. The court didn’t order a retrial.

 Geing walked out, having served roughly 17 months for a crime he had not committed. That is worth stopping on because it isn’t a footnote. A man went to prison for the murder of a child he had nothing to do with. The police and the courts had produced a wrong answer and moved on. The family of Louise Bell had been told the case was resolved when it wasn’t.

 Every month Geeseing spent inside was a month nobody was looking for the man who had actually done it. It also did something longerlasting which nobody could have seen in 1985. It poisoned a category of evidence in this specific case for the next three decades. Everything a prisoner said about Louise Bell after 1985 arrived predisredited.

 No matter who said it or how true it was, the person who actually took her hadn’t gone anywhere. He was living on Holly Rise in Hackam West. Land title records show he had owned that property since 1977. He’d been living there in January 1983 in the same suburb a short walk from the Bell family home. He stayed there afterwards, a school teacher, maths and science with children of his own, which made him exactly the kind of person a 1983 investigation would never look at twice in exactly the position the profile described. Local, embedded,

known. Nobody was looking at him, and he had no reason to move. He watched the helicopters go over. Officers would have knocked on his door or on his neighbors. The same front pages landed on his street as on everybody else’s. And when a man he had never met was convicted of what he had done and then walked free again, he stayed exactly where he was for another 6 years.

 On the 18th of January 1989, 6 years after Louise disappeared, a 10-year-old boy named Michael Black was fishing at a reserve near Murray Bridge about 75 km from Adelaide. A man struck up a conversation with him. Michael got into that man’s van and was never seen again. His body has never been found and 37 years later, his family are still waiting for it.

 What happened next should have connected the two cases immediately. The man took Michael’s dog, his bicycle, and his fishing gear, drove about 2 km to a different reserve, and left them there. He placed them upstream, arranged so that anybody finding them would conclude the boy had drowned while swimming. He staged the scene again, [clears throat] 6 years apart, in two different districts with two different children.

Both times the objects were arranged before anybody knew there was anything to look for. A 10-year-old boy’s bicycle doesn’t end up 2 km upstream by itself. Somebody carried it there and thought about where to put it. In 1983, it was the earrings and the top. In 1989, it was a bicycle and a dog beside a river.

Both times he took the objects that belonged to a child and put them somewhere deliberate to tell the people looking a story he had written. He was arrested in 1989 and charged with Michael Black’s murder. Later that same year, he admitted abducting and sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy in a separate incident, and he pleaded guilty to it.

 In 1992, a court convicted him of murdering Michael Black and sentenced him to life with a nonp parole period of 38 years. That conviction relied in part on the guilty plea in the other case admitted as evidence of a pattern of offending against children. That legal question went all the way to the High Court of Australia. And in 1995, the High Court upheld the conviction.

 In doing so, it set the Australian standard for when evidence of a defendant’s past conduct can be put before a jury. It’s one of the most cited criminal decisions in the country. He had been living a short walk from Louise Bell. He was now in prison for life for killing a child the same age, and nobody could charge him with her murder. While he was inside, he talked.

He told a fellow inmate that Louise Bell’s body was in the same place as Michael Black’s. Separately, an ordained Baptist minister who provided spiritual counseling inside the prison came forward and said the same man had confessed to killing Louise during one of those sessions. Two people, two separate accounts, both saying he had admitted to killing a 10-year-old girl taken from her bedroom in 1983.

It wasn’t enough. And the reason [music] is Raymond Geeseing. Prison informants had already destroyed one prosecution in this exact case and taken an innocent man’s freedom doing it. No prosecutor in South Australia was going to build a second one on the same foundation. They needed something physical, something that didn’t depend on a word anybody said.

 The only physical thing they had was a yellow pajama top in an evidence locker. And in the early 1990s, there was no test anywhere in the world that could get anything useful off it. So, it sat. Major crime detectives went to the Holly Rise property in 1991 with an excavator. They dug through the backyard and around the shed looking for human remains.

 They found nothing connected to Louise Bell. Then the case stopped again. The years went by in the way they do in a case like this. The 10th anniversary came, then the 15th, then the 20th. Colin Bell kept his daughter’s name in front of the public where he could. And every few years, a journalist would revisit the story, and every few years, police would confirm the file was still open.

 Open isn’t the same as active. There was nothing left to work with. In 2011, 28 [clears throat] years after Louise disappeared, South Australia police reopened the case as a formal cold case review. The reason was DNA testing had advanced to a point where biological material that was too small, too old, or too degraded to read in 1983 or in the 1990s or even in the early 2000s could now be analyzed.

Detectives sent samples from the yellow pajama top to the Netherlands Forensic Institute, one of the leading DNA laboratories in the world. The Dutch scientists got a male profile off the fabric. Not a partial, not a mixture. They could argue about a profile. It came from more than one place on the garment.

 A small piece of fluff, a biological stain. Material lifted from the surface with tape. The top had been sitting in a police locker since February 1983. For 28 years, it had been holding the answer, and nobody had been able to read it. Police went back to Holly Rise in July 2012 for the second time in 21 years.

 This time they brought ground penetrating radar borrowed from the Australian Federal Police. The same equipment had been used in South Australia’s bodies in the barrels investigation. Instead of digging where they guessed, detectives could scan for disturbances underground and dig where the machine told them to. Detective Superintendent Grant Moy ran the operation over 3 days.

Items were taken from the property for analysis. For the second time, no human remains were found there. Whatever the man they were looking at did with Louise Bell, he did not do it in his own backyard. That is 21 years to come back to the same two patches of suburban ground with better equipment and get the same answer.

 But by then, the case didn’t need a body. It was 30 years after Louise Bell was taken from her bed in November 2013 that South Australia police charged a man already serving life for the murder of another 10year-old Diet Penic. He had been in continuous custody since 1989, which meant that for 24 of the years police spent unable to charge him, they knew exactly where he was.

 He had been a person of interest in the Bell case since police first dug up his backyard in 1991. It had taken another 22 years to charge him. For most of that time, he had been in a cell roughly an hour’s drive from the suburb where Louise Bell had gone to bed. Police knew his name, his address, and his history and could not touch him. The trial ran in the South Australian Supreme Court across 2015 and 2016 before Justice Michael David sitting alone without a jury.

 The prosecution case was the DNA. Prosecutor Sandy Macdonald told [music] the court the chance of a random unrelated male producing that match was greater than one in a billion. Fenig’s answer changed as it went along. [music] He began by challenging the DNA results themselves. He eventually abandoned that. What his council, Paul Charman, argued instead was innocent transfer.

 Fenig’s daughter, Petra, had been at the same primary school as Louise in a year below the same grade, but a different class, and the girls had played basketball in the neighborhood. His DNA could have moved from him to his daughter, to Louise, and onto the top she wore to bed. The prosecution called that idea so remote as to be fanciful.

Fenig didn’t give evidence. He sat through months of proceedings and offered no account of where he had been on the night a 10-year-old was taken from a bedroom a short walk from his house. On the 10th of November 2016, Justice David found him guilty. The transfer argument wasn’t merely weak. It was impossible. And two dates prove it.

Both of them came out properly when Fenig appealed. The last possible contact between Louise Bell and Petra Popenig was at a pool party in late November or early December of 1982. Louise didn’t own the pajama top until Christmas Day 1982. She was given it as a present weeks after the last time she was anywhere near Fenick’s daughter.

 There was no window in which Petra could have touched a garment that didn’t yet exist in Louise’s house. And there is a second fact on top of the first. The pajama top was machine washed before Louise was abducted. So the defense required Fenig’s DNA to travel from him to his daughter, survive on her, and cross to a girl at a pool party.

 Then wait, [music] then transfer again onto a top that girl didn’t yet own. then survive a wash. On the 6th of December 2016, Justice Michael David sentenced him. He gave Fenig a non-parole period of 35 years for Louise Bell, added to what he was already serving, producing a combined minimum of 60 years from the day he was first jailed in 1989.

Fenig was 68. He’d be past 100 before he could apply for release, which the court understood perfectly well when it set the number. The sentence was written to make sure he died in a cell. Justice David called it the most evil of crimes and said it was in no way lessened by the passing of time.

 He told Fenig that the shock his offense caused South Australia could not be compared to what Louise’s parents and family had suffered. Then he did something judges rarely do. He asked directly through council for the locations of both children. He wanted, he said, to bring [music] the whole ghastly thing to an end and told Fenig plainly that it might or might not affect the sentence.

Fenig’s council, Grant Ali, told the court his client couldn’t say where Louise was buried because he maintained he wasn’t guilty and that if he did know, he would tell them. Colin Bell didn’t read a victim impact statement himself. A detective read it for him. It said that the day was the culmination of the family’s struggles to find answers for Louise.

 33 years of struggling in a single sentence. Fenig appealed. He was granted leave in April 2017 and argued in November of that year that the verdict was unsafe because the forensic evidence couldn’t establish how his DNA had reached the top. He had by then been arguing about that pajama top for 5 years.

 On the 1st of May 2018, the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed it. The court found the evidence established a cogent basis for the verdict and excluded any innocent explanation for his DNA being on that garment. Justice Tim Stanley set out the Christmas Day timeline and the machine wash. He said he was satisfied the DNA had been deposited in circumstances that implicated Fenig in Louise’s abduction and murder.

 Louise Bell has never been found. Neither has Michael Black. Two 10year-olds taken 6 years apart by the same man and two families who have never had anything to bury. What convicted him was the pajama top. He took it off a girl he had lifted out of her own bed. He kept it for 5 weeks while a city searched for her and a father waited by a telephone.

 Then he folded it, carried it to a front lawn near her family’s house, set it down where it would be found, and telephoned to make sure the earrings were found, too. He did that to show the police what he had and to prove they couldn’t touch him. And he was right about that for 33 years. Then a laboratory in the Netherlands read what was on the fabric.

 The thing he folded so carefully and left out on the grass turned out to be the only piece of evidence that could put him in prison for the rest of his life. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.