Michael Anthony Guider

Case record: Michael Anthony Guider

Background

Michael Anthony Guider was born on 20 October 1950 in the city of Melbourne, Victoria. His mother moved with him and later his brother, Tim, to Sydney in 1952. Tim was born in 1953.

Guider and his brother spent time in institutions because their mother was unstable and unable to look after them.

In the 1970s, Guider was charged with various offences after setting fire to a shop owned by a woman he had had a relationship with.

Guider worked as a gardener over the years. He developed a keen interest in Aboriginal culture and sites around Sydney, and he earned respect as an amateur expert on the subject; his material had been used and acknowledged in at least one published book.

The offence

By late 1995, Guider had been arrested on charges of child molesting.

In September 1996, he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment on sixty charges of offences against children.

Guider’s usual modus operandi was described as babysitting children of women he knew, knocking them out with the sleeping drug Normasin, then molesting and photographing them while they were asleep.

Samantha Knight eventually attracted police attention during the investigation into the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl named Samantha Knight. She disappeared from her home in the Sydney suburb of Bondi on 19th August, 1986 and was never found.

Guider was charged with Samantha’s murder on 22 February, 2001. On 7 June 2001, he pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Samantha Knight. He claimed that he had drugged her the way he had always drugged his victims, but that he had accidentally given her an overdose that killed her.

Guider said he could not remember what he did with Samantha’s body. Samantha’s body has never been found.

Investigation

Police had reasons to turn their attention to convicted pedophile Michael Guider after Samantha Knight’s disappearance.

Investigators searched for Samantha after she disappeared. By the time she was reported missing, she was already dead, according to the narrative in the record.

In February 1996, police were initially able to arrest Guider after two mothers said he had sexually molested their two young daughters.

Investigators found thousands of pornographic slides which Guider had taken of his victims, identifying nine girls and two boys aged between two and 16. Police described the offences as occurring over 10 years.

A statement of facts said Guider intended to sedate Samantha so that he could sexually molest her, but accidentally gave her a fatal overdose of Normison.

Police reopened focus on Guider in 1998 as part of detectives from Strike Force Harrisville beginning to focus on Samantha’s disappearance. In September, detectives found thousands of photographs concealed in a storage facility at Girraween. They identified a photograph of Samantha and two young friends and traced them to Manly Public School and then to Raglan Street, where one of Samantha’s friends lived.

One slide found was described as Samantha naked with her genitals exposed. Police interviewed victims about abuse that occurred 12 years earlier. They were unaware of the actions of their babysitter until shown the photographs of their naked prepubescent bodies.

Police believed Guider may have been linked to other child deaths, including the abduction and homicide of five-year-old Renee Aitken on the state’s South Coast in 1984. Denise Hofman said Guider’s scrapbooks contained newspaper cuttings about Renee Aitken’s case and potentially linked details, but senior police insisted they could not take the matter further without more evidence.

Arrest

By February 1996, Guider was arrested after two mothers said he had sexually molested their two young daughters.

On 22 February, 2001, Guider was charged with Samantha’s murder.

Trial

Guider pleaded not guilty to murdering Samantha.

At the committal hearing, four young women who had been his victims as children gave evidence; two of them were Samantha’s friends.

The record states that Guider did not look in the direction of these women while they testified.

Sentencing

In September 1996, Guider was sentenced to ten years imprisonment on sixty charges of offences against children.

He was later described as having been sentenced to 12–17 years for manslaughter on 28 August 2002.

In the same narrative, it was stated that he pleaded guilty in Supreme Court to manslaughter and faced a maximum of 25 years’ jail when he was sentenced on August 23. The record also stated that he was due for release, with parole remissions, in 2006.

The record also stated that eligibility for parole was in June 2014.

Appeals

No appeal information was provided in the material.

Outcome

Michael Guider was sentenced to 12–17 years in prison for manslaughter on August 28, 2002.

Guider said he could not remember what he did with the body. In one account, he claimed he buried Samantha in salt bushes in Cooper Park and later dug up the body and threw it into a dumpster near Royal Yacht Squadron at Kirribilli.

In another account, Guider was said to have told police how he accidentally killed Samantha but refused to say where the body was.

The record also states that Guider showed no remorse.

Guider was placed in conditions of strict protection in Goulburn prison.

Aftermath

Denise Hofman, mother-of-five and aged 58, said she took action to expose Guider as a suspect for other child killings. She met Guider in 1993 via a mutual interest in Sydney’s Aboriginal rock sites. Three years later she learned Guider was in jail awaiting trial over child sex allegations.

Hofman said she visited Guider in prison more than a dozen times before anyone would believe her story. She was told at one stage to walk away because Guider was simply not a suspect.

Hofman said Guider’s police photograph was privately identified by a key witness in the Renee Aitken case. She said a poem Guider sent her from jail confirmed he was working in the Canberra suburb of Red Hill, just two hours from Renee’s Narooma home, around the time she was snatched.

A letter from police to Hofman was quoted as: "The [police] followed up the issues you raised in your representations and [are] satisfied that, unless further evidence is forthcoming, there are no additional avenues of investigation that can be legitimately pursued. "I understand that you feel strongly about this issue; however, I must reiterate that, without further evidence, NSW Police is unable to take the matter further."

Hofman believed the scrapbooks feature cuttings on other missing child cases as well, including the 1966 disappearance of the three Beaumont children in Adelaide.

Police records and investigative archives were described as filing the scrapbooks, and Hofman said senior police refused to allow her access to them, refused to examine the exhibits, and refused to discuss their contents with her.

Guider, who was sentenced to 12 years’ jail in August 2002 for Samantha’s manslaughter, was described as closing the book on a 16-year mystery. The record stated he could be released as early as 2014.

A quote attributed to Richard Basham, described as a former NSW Police consultant and serial crime authority, was: "Essentially any crime against a stranger needs to be regarded as part of a series until proven otherwise."

Another quote attributed to Basham was: "The parents [of other potential victims] certainly deserve better."

Other details

The record included extensive narrative details about Samantha Knight’s disappearance and Guider’s conduct.

Samantha Knight walked out of her mother’s Bondi flat on August 19, 1986 and never returned. For the next 16 years, her disappearance was described as one of the nation’s most baffling and disturbing crimes.

A neighbor was described as the last person to see Samantha alive when she waved from Bondi Road.

The record stated that Samantha had earlier visited her nearby Imperial Avenue home to change out of her school clothes and fix something to eat, then decided to walk to a local pharmacy to buy a toothbrush.

The record described Guider as having sexually abused a girl and another young girl from 1984 to 1986 at a woman’s house in Raglan Street, Manly. Her daughter, then aged 8, said Guider played a game he called statues, described as involving her sitting absolutely still while he exposed his penis and touched her genitalia.

The record also stated the woman maintained silence even after Samantha vanished on August 19 and feared murdered, last seen in the company of a man.

A quote attributed to Peter O’Meagher was: "Guider is the only person who knows where Sam is," Mr O’Meagher said. "We've got to bury her. We really just want that."

A quote attributed to Tess Knight was: "there is no reason why he can't tell us where Sam is. I think I would like to know a little bit more about what happened."

The record included Guider’s quoted statement from his confession to police: "I never physically harmed the girl, I intended to take her home, it’s a very sad thing. It caught me by surprise that the drug had any effect like that. Naturally I panicked, I went into a, I knew I was in trouble …[I] tried to find some way out of the problem, disposing of the evidence I guess. I’ve blanked all of this out of my mind. I can’t be much more specific. A few years ago I might have been able to... but since then I’ve suffered a horrendous bashing on the head with an iron bar…”

The record described Guider’s younger brother, Tim Guider, as being in prison for planning a robbery with a weapon. Tim was said to have been sentenced to less than ten years and to have served two-thirds of his sentence before making a deal with police. The record stated that Tim would be pardoned from his own prison sentence if he could get his older brother to plead guilty to Samantha’s murder.

The record stated that Tim talked to his brother about his involvement in Samantha’s death, and the older brother admitted his guilt over time, but Guider refused to plead guilty to Samantha’s murder and continued to claim it was an accident.

The record said Tim asked Guider to plead guilty to an alternative charge of manslaughter and that Guider agreed and confessed to police, telling them how he had accidentally killed her while refusing to say where the body was.

The record stated that on September 6, 2002, seventeen years after Samantha’s death, Guider was brought to justice and sentenced to seventeen years for manslaughter of Samantha Knight, with eligibility for parole in June 2014.

The record included a quoted exchange attributed to Paul Conlon, described as the crown prosecutor: "We believe that his contact with Michael in prison, and the trust that had been built up between them over many years, was instrumental in Michael ultimately admitting he was responsible for Samantha's killing."

A quote attributed to Tim Guider was: "I was in a unique position ... if he was guilty of the crime and he was going to open up to anybody, I knew he would open up to me. The only thing I could ever offer them [the prosecution] was 'let me talk to him. I can almost guarantee if he's guilty, he will come to you and tell you that'."

Another quote attributed to Tim Guider was: "He didn't know I was coming, but he was glad to see me. I made it clear to him that I had refused to be of any assistance in terms of providing evidence. " "I also let him know my position on the crime [the killing of Samantha]. It was heinous, putrid ... he was a bit pissed off that I thought he was guilty."

A quote attributed to Tim Guider about his views on the sexual abuse in boys’ home was: "I don't want people to see it as an excuse for what's been done. It's an insight into how Michael was created into the monster he became."

The record described Guider’s age as 51 when he pleaded guilty in Supreme Court to manslaughter and described him as 55 in the context of the later discussion in 2006.

The record also stated that Michael Anthony Guider was 35 when he abducted Samantha in Bondi's Wellington Street and that for the previous three years he had secretly drugged and abused her.