Fact, Conjecture, Speculation and the Unsolved Murders of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock

By John Bicknell

On 11 January 1965, 15-year-old best friends, Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock were overwhelmed and slaughtered in the sandhills behind Sydney's Wanda Beach. Not only had the killer struck in a public area and during the summer school holiday break, but he'd done it in broad daylight. Despite the brazenness of the act, several police inve

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Bicknell
• Release date: Jan 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922722935

Book preview

Preface

While I was never what you would call a ‘fan’ of the genre (although I probably am now), I certainly had an awareness of ‘True Crime’ as it played out around me. There were the serial killer cases of Ivan Milat and Paul (Paula) Denyer, the disappearance of Peter Falconio and his enigmatic survivor Joanne Lees, the heart-breaking homicides of Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and her daughter Khanalyce, the murders of the police officers Tynan, Eyre, Silk and Miller and of course, the shooters Martin Bryant, Julian Knight and Frank Vitkocic. There were many more crimes of course, but these were the ones that resonated with me as I went about my life.

The first ‘biggie’ I can recall though, was the death of Azaria Chamberlain in 1980. As a 14-year-old at the time, I remember thinking; no thinking suggests coming to my own considered conclusion; it was more a case of assuming; I assumed that Lindy must have done it. A dingo would not enter a camping ground and take a human. Then there was the strange religion, the suggestions of human sacrifice and the blood spatter in the vehicle… The media and the experts were so sure… Reflecting on that unfortunate death and its shameful fall out, I have become wary of the narratives that surround crimes. Hell, I’ve become wary of the narratives that we all build up about our lives, full stop. Narratives that justify the decisions we or others have made or not made, as the case may be. Narratives that become our ‘truths’ - somewhat ‘post-modernesque’ truths that have a varying reliance on the facts.

This book sets out to create a record of the various narratives regarding the unsolved double murder of two teenaged girls that was more than likely committed in broad daylight in the middle of the summer school holidays of 1965. The crime is known as ‘The Wanda Beach Murders’. While ‘The Wanda Beach Murders’ is a catchy moniker, it is somewhat inaccurate, for the murders were not carried out on the beach, but were perpetrated in the dunes behind the beach. That is narrative right there. And personally, I find ‘The Wanda Beach Murders’ handle to be somewhat de-humanising, so within the book I have tried to avoid using the term and instead refer to the victims themselves- ‘the murders of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock’.

But why a book about the murders of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock? Honestly, I had never heard of the crime until I listened to the podcast ‘Casefile – Episode 1 – The Wanda Beach Murders’. The episode was released in on 9 January 2016, and from memory I think I listened to it shortly after it was released. And while I have gone on to listen to a huge number of podcasts and read several books about murders and murderers, this has been the one crime I could not get out of my head. And I’m not really sure why. The case has become quite an itch though and this book is an attempt at scratching it.

After the podcast, I went straight to ‘The Book’ on the matter – Alan J Whiticker’s Wanda. The Untold Story of the Wanda Beach Murders. I cannot stress enough my reliance on Whiticker’s work, especially his narrative about the events leading up to and then immediately after the murders. Whiticker was granted access to the New South Wales police files on this case. Kudos to him, as I found that trying to get access to what the New South Wales police consider an active and open case, is a real life example of getting blood from a stone. Whiticker also spent some time re-interviewing witnesses and persons associated with the case. While it must be taken into consideration that these interviews were conducted some 35+ years after the killings and as such, the memories they record and any conclusions underpinned by them are, by definition, unreliable, they do still offer valuable insights.

While Whiticker’s book was thorough, in the end I was not really satisfied with his treatment of the victims... and that is not because he disrespected them; on the contrary, he was highly respectful. What I found unsatisfactory was a certain ‘elevation’ of the girls that results in the denial of who they really were. Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock are presented as somewhat one-dimensional stereotypes - what an early 2000’s person might think 1965 teenage girls would, or even should be like. From what I can tell, Marianne and Christine were far from stereotypical. They were a far cry from being cut from the same cloth and went into the dunes on that day as complex individuals that had been formed by seismic societal changes and challenging personal experiences. The majority of the other sources available on the murder of these two young girls also tend to stereotype Marianne and Christine, which reflects the impact that Whiticker’s book has had.

As I read these other sources - books and articles about this case, I became increasingly aware of an unsettling tendency that I felt needed to be addressed. This includes the fashioning of narratives where the notorious serial killer Christopher Wilder or the despicable Derek Percy have become the killer of Marianne and Christine. When discussing this point with my son, he quipped, ... what was Ivan Milat doing in 1965? …. Attempted humour aside, there is a real problem of integrity here, because these theorists tend to be dogmatic evangelists that appear to be choosy with regards to the evidence that leads them to their pre-determined destination.

When reading and reflecting on the sources regarding the murders of Marianne and Christine, I have also been left with a sense that the whole affair tends to be scrutinised in isolation. That is to say, it feels as if it has been somewhat removed from the context of Sydney and its surrounds in the mid-1960’s and examined without due reference to what else was going on at the time; especially with regards to crime, its investigators and the New South Wales police as a whole. I hope to some extent that I have addressed this concern and given some historical context to these elements.

In the spirit of historical context, I’d also like to address how a vague notion for this book, actually lead to it becoming a manuscript. The idea that I should write this book occurred to me around 2016. Friends and family will testify that for the next four years or so, I talked about writing ‘the book’ without ever putting pen to paper. Then in early 2020 I travelled to Sydney while on a road trip from Melbourne to the Gold Coast. We specifically stopped in Sydney, so that I could walk what would likely have been the route taken by Marianne and Christine on that fatal day. While useful and interesting, in the end I was left feeling underwhelmed. The reality was that the 2020 Bate Bay beaches were not the 1965 Bate Bay beaches and the 2020 sandhills are definitely not the 1965 sandhills.

There was however, one thing that struck me on that that day. We noticed some towels and bags that some kids had stashed in the rocks at the south end of Cronulla Beach before heading off, maybe for a swim, or a walk up to the Cronulla shops. These were the very same rocks where Marianne and Christine had secreted their bags some 55 years earlier; before walking off to meet their fate…

On returning to Melbourne in March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic became a reality. Melbourne’s second lockdown, 112 days between early July and late October, was particularly hard. At its most stringent we were not allowed to go further than five kilometres from our homes, were only allowed outside for one hour a day to exercise, only in exceptional circumstances could you visit another home, shops were all but closed and we were under enforced nightly curfew between the hours of 8:00pm and 5:00am – not that there was anywhere to go! But for all the hardships, it was during this lockdown that I finally sat down and wrote the first draft of this book. Silver linings and all that.

Introduction

A Place in Time.

After walking out of Cronulla Railway Station, crossing over Cronulla Street and meandering down Beach Park Avenue with its busy outdoor cafes and apartment frontages, then crossing over Gerrale Street and walking through Cronulla Park, you then walk directly onto Cronulla Beach. I remember being quite surprised at just how small the actual beach is. It is not much more than a sandy cove, set just so, between rocks at both its south and north ends. Looking north over the rocks, you can see an unbroken line of beach curving to the North-East and ending at a distant dark green headland. This is Bate Bay and at about 5 kilometres in length, it is the longest stretch of beach in the Sydney area. About a third of the way along that stretch of sand is the infamous Wanda Beach.

If you start walking northwards, you can either cross the rocks at the north end of Cronulla Beach, passing a couple of those iconic Sydney ocean pools as you do so, or follow a walkway above the rocks, passing more apartments at your left shoulder and descend some 150 metres down onto North Cronulla Beach. While it is not apparent, you are now standing on an ancient tombolo, a bridge of sand that formed some 8000 years ago from the silt of the Georges River that connects Cronulla to Kurnell. The eastern side of the tombolo, the side you’re standing on, faces Bate Bay and its beaches, and the western side, the other side, is where the old Georges River empties into Botany Bay.

As you walk along North Cronulla Beach you will see on your left what journalist Ben Sandilands rather grandly called: ‘… ‘the wall’, a monumental sloping terrace of hollow concrete polygons built (in 1985) at vast cost to deprive the patient sea from reclaiming an ancient dune that happens to be keeping a large part of the suburb out of the Pacific Ocean...’ ( from his article Wild Wanda: still a blank on the map printed in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1987). Above ‘the wall’ is a steep grassy embankment and the residential Princes Street. After you pass ‘the wall’ and reach the Elouera Beach Surf Living Saving Club, the sand on your left slopes up to and obscures the carpark that is Mitchell Road. Ahead, some bare sand dunes and dark green shrubs are coming into sharp relief. These are the remains of the notorious Wanda Beach sandhills.

And if you keep walking another 400 metres or so, you happen upon Wanda Beach and its Surf Lifesaving Club. At this point, it feels like things are beginning to change. While walking up from Cronulla you can always see the low sandhills ahead, from Wanda, you seem to be in them. As you look to your left, you see the dunes rising above you and ahead they seem to stretch into the distance. They will shimmer green and silver, an effect caused by the wind blowing through marram grass, part of the reclamation project that is hopefully holding what is left of the dunes together. Tautological perhaps, but the beach that stretches for another couple of kilometres past Wanda is called Greenhills Beach.

As I look at a photograph of a similar outlook in the 1970’s, I can still see the same line of verdure that I see today, but what I don’t see is the mountain of naked sand dunes cresting metres upon metres in height, as its stretches back towards Botany Bay. Today, as you stand on Wanda Beach and look back at the sandhills it all seems… well, underwhelming. Today’s measly dunes are four meters high, maybe peaking at five. You cannot help but wonder what it would have been like standing on Wanda Beach and looking back into the dunes in the mid-1960’s.

If you follow one of the sanctioned paths up into the dunes, you can still see sandhills stretching to the north-west and towards the old oil refinery and some other industry located around Kurnell. These modern dunes however, are sparse and low, bland and clearly just remnants of the Sahara-esque arrangement that was there in the mid-1960’s. While your vision is too all embracing to blot out the 21st century gestalt, if you point a camera in just the right direction, you might capture an image that just may evoke that desolate expanse of sand, that bleak wasteland that featured shifting dunes, reaching so they tell me, up to 40 metres in height and that stretched almost uninterrupted between the beaches of Bate Bay and the waters of Botany Bay.

So where did all the sand go? Despite what the locals swear is the truth, it was not transported to Hawaii to make Waikiki Beach. Rather, from the early 1930’s, strip miners began quarrying the sand from the tombolo where it soon became a vital ingredient in the making of the streets and buildings of modern Sydney. It is hard to conceive, but it is estimated that some 70 million tonnes of sand were carried away before mining was halted in the 1990’s. In fact, the sand that had stretched between Bate Bay and Botany Bay was mined so extensively, that during storms and heavy swells from the mid-1970’s to the late 1990’s, the severely undermined tombolo was under threat of just being washed away into the Pacific Ocean.

Speak to the people who experienced the sandhills in the 1960’s and 1970’s and they will tell you that when you were in the dunes, you could have been transported to some out-of-the-way desert. Film makers obviously agreed, as the arid and lifeless settings offered by the sandhills provided the desert backdrop to the Australian films ‘The Forty Thousand Horsemen’ (1939), "The Rats of Tobruk’ (1943) and ‘Mad Max 3, Beyond Thunderdome’ (1984).

These days though, it just does not feel that remote. This maybe, is where you get a real sense of the loss of the sandhills. There are perhaps, 20 to 30 metres of remaining sandhills before you then look across the manicured Don Lucas Reserve and an emergent housing estate. This new estate is bounded to the east by the reserve and a slither of sandhills and to its west by Captain Cook Drive. Yet, as I write this, I am looking at a 1965 archival picture of a sand dune threatening to cut in half Captain Cook Drive, even as cars continue to drive by. There was no housing estate in 1965, just a 40 metre high mountain of sand.

In 1965, Wanda Beach and the sandhills were well past Cronulla’s residential sprawl and were very remote. In 2014, Hans Schmidt, a younger brother of one of the Wanda Beach murder victims was quoted as saying: "…I went to the scene with Mum and the police. I wanted to. The place the girls were killed was very isolated even though it was only two dunes back from the beach. It was so quiet I couldn’t even hear the waves crashing. You could scream your head off and no one would hear a thing. No one would have heard the girls screaming for help… (printed in The Sydney Morning Herald article Call to release Wanda Beach murder pictures").

Today, if you were to walk past the Wanda Surf Lifesaving Club and proceed in a northerly direction you would walk along what appears to be a pretty much unspoiled beach. If you head up into the sandhills and walk along the paths that lead between the fenced off rehabilitation areas, except for some windblown food wrappers, or odd pieces of general litter, all appears pristine. But in 1965, this was far from being the case. An article from The Sydney Morning Herald in 1965, titled Death Came on a Dirty Beach, published just a couple of days after the bodies of Marianne and Christine were found, described things as follows: ‘The murder scene is a mile north of Wanda Surf Lifesaving Club, which is about a mile north of North Cronulla beach. For about 200 yards around the clubhouse the beach is clean and white and there are wire rubbish baskets on it. Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock walked to their death along a mile of what is surely Sydney’s filthiest and loneliest beach. Smashed bottles, old shoes, rusted cans, broken toys and other rubbish litter the stone studded sand. The almost unbelievable amount of rubbish is bewildering detectives in their search for clues. Six old shoes yesterday evening lay in a pile beside the blood stained sand at the spot where the bodies were found. Police had picked them up as clues and then discarded them.’

Another thing to know about Wanda Beach and more particularly, the sandhills immediately behind Wanda Beach, was that in 1965 and for some time prior, it was known as that place where topless and nude sunbathers; what they called ‘exhibitionists’; came to practice their peccadillo. And if these naturists were not defined as perverts - and in the 1960’s they were probably regarded as such - then the men who inevitably came to watch and do what these men do, undeniably were.

While on the intriguing topic of sex and perversion, the sandhills were also a notorious homosexual hangout. From the popular moral point of view of the mid-60’s homosexuality was considered to be an appalling perversion and according to Whiticker’s book, a clearly bigoted local described the Wanda sandhills to be: ‘a paradise for perverts and poofters’.

The beach was also considered circumspectly in the eyes of the New South Wales legal system. Former police Superintendent Keith Paull, who worked on the murders of Marianne and Christine for some years, confided to Whiticker in September 2002, that the more the police looked, ‘the more homosexuals, suspected perverts and people, shall we say with loose morals, frequented the area not far from where the bodies were found’. It seems a bit awkward and even laughable from today’s perspective, but from the aforementioned article Death Came on a Dirty Beach: ‘About 10 years ago, Cronulla residents complained of naked men in the sand-hills. It was feared they might be perverts. Residents said that… complaints were so numerous that they refused to allow their children near the beach. About then Sutherland Council appointed Mr. Bob Bland, a muscular six-footer, as a ranger.’

Furthermore, in 1990, The Sun-Herald newspaper reported in their droll article Police blitz on beach bums: ‘Nudists be warned – Wanda beach is not the place to head this summer in search of the all-over tan. Cronulla policemen and women disguised as beachgoers have busted 17 nudists – all men – in the past six weeks… Sgt Shane Harcombe, of Cronulla Police, said going topless or sporting G-strings was fine but if police spotted a naked body through their sunglasses it could mean a fine of up to $500.’

But the story of the Wanda Beach sandhills is not just one of perversion, strewn disorder and ultimately a shocking double murder. While Wanda’s surf beach was well regarded by the ‘surfies’ and surf ‘clubbers’ alike, the sandhills behind the beach became a popular place for athletes, amateur and professional alike, to build strength and stamina while running up, down and along the soft sand dunes. They were also ‘the’ place for the peculiar sports of hang-gliding, dune bugging, sand skiing and sand surfing.

In the late 19th century, Cronulla became a destination, firstly for Sydney’s holiday makers and later for its day-trippers. The bleak sandhills behind Wanda and Greenhills Beaches were a beguiling attraction. By the mid-1960’s, with ‘The Shire’ and its surrounds well and truly absorbed into Sydney proper – at least physically if not psychologically – the sandhills were still regarded as somewhat of a Sydney icon. To be sure, they were no longer pristine and had taken on some of the detritus of an emerging megalopolis. But that just meant that while they remained desolate, they were now also shrouded by a sense of insinuation and intrigue. It is no wonder then, that they became a popular place for Sydney’s youth to explore; two of these youngsters being Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock.

Chapter 1

There, but for the Grace of God…

Monday, 11 January 1965. It was the middle of the summer school holidays and five of the seven Schmidt children; Marianne aged 15, Peter aged 10, Beatrice (otherwise called Trixie) aged 9, Wolfgang aged 7, and Norbert aged 5 had decided to spend a day at the beach. Given the children’s dependence on public transport, they would of course be attending Cronulla Beach; the only Sydney beach accessible by train. Accompanying them was 15-year-old Christine Sharrock, Marianne’s best friend and next-door neighbour. The Schmidt’s and Christine lived in Brush Road, West Ryde, a north-west suburb of Sydney located about 16 kilometres from the Sydney Central Business District. Brush Road was working class and principally consisted of free-standing housing commission homes set on quarter acre blocks.

Marianne had an older brother Helmut, who was 16 years of age and another younger brother Hans, who was 13. While Helmut and Hans were staying home to paint the kitchen and to mow the lawn however, it appeared that Hans was disappointed that he would not be accompanying his siblings. As reported by Whiticker in his book Wanda. The Untold Story of the Wanda Beach Murders, Trixie later told the police that on the night of 10 January, ‘Hans said to Marianne that he wanted to go