Samantha Knight (25 March 1977 to 19 August 1986)

Samantha Knight

(25 March 1977 to 19 August 1986)

            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.