Samantha Knight
(25 March 1977 to 19 August 1986)
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Let
us not forget Samantha Knight, every year on 25 March and 19 August. We made
her one of The 82 murdered children of Unit 1012 where we
will not forget her. Let us remember how she lived on
this earth.
Samantha Terese Knight was born Samantha
Terese O'Meagher on the 25 March 1977. She lived at Manly with her parents, Tess Knight and
Peter O'Meagher, but they divorced at an early stage. Samantha then lived with
her mother in Bronte. By 1986, they were living in a
block of flats in Imperial Avenue, Bondi. Samantha Knight went missing on 19
August 1986. Despite an intensive campaign, in which posters of her were
displayed all over New South Wales, she was never found.
Guider eventually attracted the
attention of police who were investigating the disappearance of Samantha,
partly because of pressure from Denise Hofman (author of Forever Nine),
who had worked with Guider on Aboriginal sites around Sydney. Freelance
journalist Di Michel, who had introduced Hofman to Guider, had told Hofman how
Guider had talked about Samantha Knight in a way that had sounded odd, arousing
her suspicions. Michel, however, was reluctant to go to the police because she
felt she would be informing on a friend. Hofman, therefore, decided she would
have to go to the police herself with this information. She duly passed the
information on to a detective at Castle Hill police station.
Questioned by police, Guider initially
told police that he had only met Samantha Knight a couple of times over the years,
but it eventually turned out that he had molested her and two other girls at a
house in Raglan Street, Manly, a number of times during 1984 and 1985. After a
lengthy investigation, Guider was arrested and charged with Knight's murder on
22 February 2001. On 7 June 2001, he pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of
Knight. He claimed that he had drugged her the way he had always drugged his
victims, and claimed he had accidentally given her a fatal overdose, after she
regained consciousness and Guider administered a second dose of prescription
sleeping pills, saying he did not want her to recognise him.
On 28 August 2002, Guider was sentenced
to 17 years' imprisonment with a non-parole period of 12 years for manslaughter,
to be served cumulatively with his sentence for the child sex offences.
Knight's body has never been found; Guider showed no remorse, and said he could
not remember what he did with her body.
Guider's statements about Knight over
the years were contradictory. Initially he said he could remember nothing about
what he did with her body. Later he said he had buried her in Cooper Park, in
the Sydney suburb of Bellevue Hill, but had dug her up
later and put her in a dumpster at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, Kirribilli,
where he had worked as a gardener at the time. In March 2003, he told police he
had buried Knight in the grounds of the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron. On
15 May, a dig took place there but nothing was found, in spite of a police
sniffer
dog reacting positively to soil from the site. The dog's handlers said the
reaction was as positive as the dogs were capable of being, and were surprised
that nothing was found. Police believe Samantha's remains may have been removed
accidentally during the construction of a car park eighteen months after Guider
buried her at the site, or that Guider himself may have removed them when he
heard the site was going to be dug up.
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