Speaker 1: Twenty three year old Rochelle Charles was brutally murdered. Her
Speaker 1: killer has never been caught. Her sister Christy, has turned
Speaker 1: to a team of investigators to finally get justice. Innocent
Speaker 1: people too afraid to speak out for decades are breaking
Speaker 1: their silence for Rochelle. Join cold case expert Damien Luhn
Speaker 1: and me Ashley hans It for our unmissible podcast series,
Speaker 1: Deer Rochelle. Visit Deroshelle dot com dot au.
Speaker 2: Before we start the show, you've just heard a trailer
Speaker 2: for the new crime podcast from True Crime Australia. Dear Rochelle,
Speaker 2: and at the end of this show, we'll play you
Speaker 2: the first teaser episode of that series. They would hang
Speaker 2: around there and they would play pool. They'd drink beer,
Speaker 2: smoke cigarettes, take drugs, and generally be the sort of
Speaker 2: people at the local police would keep an eye on
Speaker 2: because they could easily get into trouble. What nobody realized
Speaker 2: was just how much trouble they can could get into.
Speaker 2: Because what no one realized then until it was far
Speaker 2: too late, was their propensity for these two to do
Speaker 2: a most remarkably evil and satanic thing. I'm Andrew Rule's
Speaker 2: Life and Crimes One of the worst cases, worst murders
Speaker 2: that I can recall when I was at school was
Speaker 2: the terrible, terrible case of Rosen Naughty in Western Victoria.
Speaker 2: Now Rosen Naughty was a fifteen year old girl. She
Speaker 2: lived with her mother, who was divorced, in Hamilton, which
Speaker 2: is often called the wool capital of Australia, probably if
Speaker 2: not the wall capital of the world. And Hamilton is
Speaker 2: a prosperous regional city. That's prosperous because it's in the
Speaker 2: middle of the Western District, which is full of farms
Speaker 2: and successful area in every way. Roslin's father was Ivan Naughty,
Speaker 2: who was a shearer. Her mother's father, that is, Roslin's granddad,
Speaker 2: was a farmer called Roderick McCallum. So these people, you know,
Speaker 2: local rural family. After Roslin's parents split up, she and
Speaker 2: her mum lived with granddad on his farm just outside
Speaker 2: Hamilton at a place called Wallace Dale. And Granddad Roderick McCallum,
Speaker 2: he milked cows. He was a dairy farmer. And after
Speaker 2: a few years of that they moved together into the
Speaker 2: town of Hamilton, and so by the time the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventies rolled in, they were all living in Hamilton, his
Speaker 2: granddad and his daughter who was forty two, and Roslin
Speaker 2: who was fifteen, and their dogs. They were very keen
Speaker 2: on dogs. They used to show various breeds, small breeds.
Speaker 2: I think they had corgi'es and they had maybe Pomeranians
Speaker 2: and Pekinese that sort of thing. In fact, they had
Speaker 2: six dogs, and one of them was Roslin's pet Corgie,
Speaker 2: a little dog called Jody, a male dog called Jodi.
Speaker 2: And Roslin had gone to school locally at Hamilton, and
Speaker 2: she'd initially been at the mary Noll College, which I
Speaker 2: think is a Catholic college there, and then she was
Speaker 2: about to move and start school when this happened. She
Speaker 2: was about to start school at the local high school.
Speaker 2: She was switching schools and so there she's fifteen. She's
Speaker 2: presumably going into year ten. I would have said what
Speaker 2: we used to call form four, I would think. And
Speaker 2: she's quite a small girl for her age. She's quite lean,
Speaker 2: quite small, so the jockey build. I don't think she
Speaker 2: was brilliant at school, but she was diligent and she
Speaker 2: used to do a lot of needlework and make her
Speaker 2: own clothes and all that sort of stuff, and the
Speaker 2: previous year of nineteen seventy, she had been judged Miss
Speaker 2: Junior Showgirl at one of the local shows, I think
Speaker 2: Coleraine or Castleton, one of the locals. She was a
Speaker 2: junior show girl, and there are photos of that event,
Speaker 2: which is why we often see that photograph because it's
Speaker 2: one of the very few of Rosen Nolty. And no
Speaker 2: one would have ever heard of her outside Hamilton except
Speaker 2: that she became the victim of this awful, awful crime.
Speaker 2: And what happened was there were two young men in Hamilton.
Speaker 2: They were teenagers really, one was nineteen and one was eighteen.
Speaker 2: They were teenagers, but teenagers at a time when people
Speaker 2: left school young and worked at a relatively young age.
Speaker 2: So some, especially boys might leave school at fourteen or
Speaker 2: fifteen and take on jobs apprentices or just laboring jobs,
Speaker 2: or whatever it might be. And the older one of
Speaker 2: this pair, older by a few months, was Christopher Lowry,
Speaker 2: Christopher Russell Lowry. He was the shorter of the pair.
Speaker 2: He was broad shouldered, strong and volatile. He was known
Speaker 2: around the town as a very bad tempered, nasty, bad egg,
Speaker 2: and he was an apprentice bricklayer. He'd almost finished his apprenticeship,
Speaker 2: he worked for his father, Bill Lowry, who was a
Speaker 2: builder around the place, a brickie and builder, and he
Speaker 2: was apprenticed to his own father, and they used to
Speaker 2: work around town and I think were regarded as pretty
Speaker 2: good brick layers. Lowry had always had a reputation. And
Speaker 2: I know this because I talked to a former policeman
Speaker 2: who grew up down there at that time. He was
Speaker 2: a little younger than the bad guys in this story.
Speaker 2: He was more like Rosalind's age, and he recalls seeing
Speaker 2: Lowry and he said he was just bad news. He
Speaker 2: was volatile, he was intimidating, he was violent, and he said,
Speaker 2: I remember once something upset him in a basketball game,
Speaker 2: and he just grabbed the ball and started swearing at
Speaker 2: the umpire or whatever, and he kicked the ball hard
Speaker 2: into the ceiling of the stadium, just sort of in protest.
Speaker 2: It was sort of the behavior that he exhibited. Now
Speaker 2: that in itself doesn't matter much. It's just a kid
Speaker 2: kicking a basketball into the roof, but it indicated his
Speaker 2: willingness to go outside the bounds of normal behavior. And
Speaker 2: there was another occasion, to give one example of probably
Speaker 2: many things that he did as he was growing up.
Speaker 2: There was some sort of dance or rock concert in
Speaker 2: Hamilton and a band from Horsham was playing in Hamilton,
Speaker 2: and there was a disagreement of some nature with the
Speaker 2: band from Horsham and Christopher Lowry, who's basically sixteen years
Speaker 2: old seventeen years old at this stage, he pulled a
Speaker 2: knife on one of the band members. And pulling a
Speaker 2: knife in those days in regional Victoria was regarded as
Speaker 2: an extremely bad thing to do. It was an era
Speaker 2: when people did not carry knives, and only bad people
Speaker 2: carried knives, and to actually pull a knife on someone
Speaker 2: in an argument at a function like that stood out
Speaker 2: as the act of somebody really bad and headed for
Speaker 2: serious trouble, which this guy was. He was trouble now
Speaker 2: he was free with another guy called Charles King. Larry
Speaker 2: was a domineering sort of character. He had the sort
Speaker 2: of glittering eyes. He was a ball of energy. He
Speaker 2: was sort of like a bit bull terrier. The other
Speaker 2: Charles King was a taller fellow, a bit milder mannered.
Speaker 2: He was intelligent, relatively intelligent. He had left Hamilton briefly
Speaker 2: to go to Melbourne, and he'd gone to Melbourne, I
Speaker 2: don't know, maybe eighteen months two years earlier, to learn
Speaker 2: to be a PMG linesman telephone linesman, PMG being the
Speaker 2: old fashioned name. It was the Postmaster General's Department, which
Speaker 2: was the forerunner of Telstra, and this guy had gone
Speaker 2: to Melbourne to learn to be a linesman at the
Speaker 2: linesman school in Melbourne and to do the equivalent I
Speaker 2: guess of a sort of a trainee ship or a
Speaker 2: cadet ship. But when he got to Melbourne, young Charles
Speaker 2: King from Hamilton didn't go that well. He I think
Speaker 2: probably didn't turn up to work enough, he didn't study
Speaker 2: hard enough, he didn't like Melbourne much, and he got
Speaker 2: involved in two things. He got involved in drugs and
Speaker 2: he got involved in bad company. In fact, he started
Speaker 2: to knock around with the Hell's Angels nomads, which in
Speaker 2: that era the Angels were one of the very early
Speaker 2: organized motorcycle gangs, and I suspect were not as big
Speaker 2: a criminal fraternity as they are now that the Hell's
Speaker 2: Angels of the late sixties. They were bad lads, wearing
Speaker 2: leather jackets and behaving badly, but I don't think they
Speaker 2: were an arm of organized crime all together. At that
Speaker 2: stage they soon would be when they got the recipe
Speaker 2: for how to make empediments from their brothers in San Francisco.
Speaker 2: But that's another story. So our man Charles comes back
Speaker 2: to Hamilton a bit of a failure. He hasn't got
Speaker 2: the good job at the PMG. He's sort of blotted
Speaker 2: his copybook a bit in Melbourne, and he's probably using
Speaker 2: drugs including LSD and hallucinogenic drugs and smoking dope and
Speaker 2: drinking too much beer and bourbon or whatever. And he
Speaker 2: pells up with the dangerous young fellow, Christopher Lowry, and
Speaker 2: King actually goes to work for his grandparents' shop. King's
Speaker 2: occupation is given at the time of his arrest this
Speaker 2: year as a shop assistant, and that was because his
Speaker 2: grandparents did have a store in town and he would
Speaker 2: go and help their working in the shop. He's basically
Speaker 2: filling in time and he's hanging around with Chris Lowry,
Speaker 2: which is not a good thing. Chris Lowry had a
Speaker 2: blue panel van which I think his father had bought
Speaker 2: for the brick laying business, but Larry got to drive
Speaker 2: it around and Chris Lowry, at the age of nineteen,
Speaker 2: has a seventeen year old wife who's heavily pregnant. She's
Speaker 2: an English girl, a migrant family that had landed in town.
Speaker 2: And he clearly got Hazel the migrant girl pregnant fairly quickly,
Speaker 2: and was obliged to marry her. And he was living,
Speaker 2: i think, in a flat in Hamilton, and they had
Speaker 2: put their name down to get a house and commission
Speaker 2: house in a new suburb of Hamilton. And all that
Speaker 2: was happening in the background, but none of that stopped
Speaker 2: Chris Lowry from hanging around the main street in his
Speaker 2: blue panel van with his mate, Charles King. And they
Speaker 2: would hang around there and they would watch the girls
Speaker 2: walk past, they'd play pool, they'd drink beer, smoke cigarettes,
Speaker 2: take drugs, and generally be the sort of people at
Speaker 2: the local police would keep an eye on because they
Speaker 2: could easily get into trouble. What nobody realized was just
Speaker 2: how much trouble they could get into, because what no
Speaker 2: one realized then until it was far too late, was
Speaker 2: their propensity for these two to sort of egg each
Speaker 2: other on, or for one to follow the other to
Speaker 2: do a most remarkably evil and satanic thing. One month
Speaker 2: before the murder that we're talking about, back in around
Speaker 2: the end of nineteen seventy, around the thirty first of
Speaker 2: December nineteen seventy, these two guys, King and Lowry had
Speaker 2: gone to a motorcycle race meeting over at Mount Gambia.
Speaker 2: I think it was just over the South Australian border,
Speaker 2: which is not that far from Hamilton, And they'd been
Speaker 2: at these motorcycle races and they were talking and as
Speaker 2: they later told police, that was when one first said
Speaker 2: to the other, and I believe it would be Lowry
Speaker 2: saying it to King. Larry said to King, I wonder
Speaker 2: what it'd be like to kill a chick, to kill
Speaker 2: a girl who used the word chick, as a lot
Speaker 2: of people did in those days. And they had a
Speaker 2: discussion about you know, what it would feel like and
Speaker 2: would it be good? And you know, da da da
Speaker 2: da da. Now King would later claim that he thought
Speaker 2: Larry was just mucking around, showing off whatever, and he
Speaker 2: says he didn't take much notice of it, which may
Speaker 2: or may not be true, but the fact is, no
Speaker 2: matter what he thought it was or wasn't, when they
Speaker 2: were watching the motorcycle races. One month later, they're sitting
Speaker 2: in the blue panel van in Hamilton's main street, eight
Speaker 2: o'clock on a Sunday night on the Australia Day weekend.
Speaker 2: So it's a long weekend, so Sunday night is not
Speaker 2: a school night. Sunday night is the middle of a
Speaker 2: long weekend, and everybody's sort of at a bit of
Speaker 2: a loose end. It's a country town. There's not much happening.
Speaker 2: There's a pool room, there's a cafe. You know, there's
Speaker 2: no pubs open on a Sunday. If the pubs have
Speaker 2: made open, this might never have happened. There's a thought.
Speaker 2: And they're sitting there and Lowry brings up this thing
Speaker 2: about killing a chick again with his mate King, and
Speaker 2: they discuss it in some manner or another. Anyway, a
Speaker 2: girl walks down the street. Now, this is an eighteen
Speaker 2: year old girl that they know. Her name is Cavenana
Speaker 2: like Kevin with an a cavena Butterworth. She's eighteen and
Speaker 2: she's well known to these pair they know probably at
Speaker 2: that age they've all gone to school together or something
Speaker 2: like that. And they talk to her and Larry says
Speaker 2: something suggestive like what's it worth to drive your home?
Speaker 2: Sort of a sexually suggestive comment, and she says nothing
Speaker 2: and sort of takes it as a joke and laughs.
Speaker 2: But she does step in the car with them. And
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if they took her for a drive
Speaker 2: or didn't, but anyway, she stepped in the car with them,
Speaker 2: and interestingly, Lowry punched her on the shoulder and kicked her.
Speaker 2: And she later told Plice she interpreted that sort of
Speaker 2: horseplay and she punched him back or something like that,
Speaker 2: And she didn't make a lot of it until later
Speaker 2: when she was interviewed by the police, when there was
Speaker 2: a darker complexion on all this, and she got out
Speaker 2: of the car and away she went. And that's the
Speaker 2: end of that. But those two are still sitting in
Speaker 2: their pedel van. It's still Sunday night, just after eight
Speaker 2: o'clock at night, so the son has set and what
Speaker 2: happens is, by chance, Rosen Noughty has gone for a walk.
Speaker 2: She's got her little dog, Jody, the corgy, and she's
Speaker 2: going to give the dog a walk. Now, dogs have
Speaker 2: to be walked. They have to be walked every day,
Speaker 2: and some people might walk them twice a day, some
Speaker 2: walked them three times a day. But it's clear looking
Speaker 2: back on that a fifteen year old girl on a
Speaker 2: Sunday night in the middle of our long weekend. She's
Speaker 2: walking down the main street with her dog. She wants
Speaker 2: to go down the main street and have a look
Speaker 2: who's around, you know, see who's cruising around whatever. It's
Speaker 2: a teenage thing to do. So she walks down the
Speaker 2: street with a dog and wearing her tight slacks and
Speaker 2: a purple top and a leather choker around her neck
Speaker 2: that she made for herself, and her boots. She had
Speaker 2: something rather boots on that were sort of fashionable. And
Speaker 2: she's down there walking the dog, and she walks down
Speaker 2: one way and then back up the other, and she
Speaker 2: sees our heroes in the blue panel pan and they've
Speaker 2: just finished talking to the other one, Kevina, and they
Speaker 2: see Roslind turn up and one says the other, oh,
Speaker 2: she's a chance. Now, this is apropos their plan to
Speaker 2: kill a chick. She'd be a chance, Rosalind's a chance.
Speaker 2: They knew her name, they know it, right, They know it.
Speaker 2: King's little brother Stephen, who was thirteen or something. He
Speaker 2: knew Rosin. Really well, they all know each other. It's
Speaker 2: not that big a town. And oh, you know where
Speaker 2: you're going, what are you doing? Blah blah blah. Next thing,
Speaker 2: she gets in the car with them, do you want
Speaker 2: to come for a spin? Whatever? And they drive off
Speaker 2: with Roslin and her dog Jodi, and Roslyn is not
Speaker 2: seen alive again. She doesn't get home that night. Her mother, June,
Speaker 2: is frantic. She knows that when Rossen hasn't come back
Speaker 2: home by nine thirty or ten or ten thirty, that
Speaker 2: it's not good, and she's getting more and more frantic.
Speaker 2: She rings the police. She stays awake all night and
Speaker 2: next morning the police start mounting a search. Now they
Speaker 2: don't really know where to look. All they know is
Speaker 2: the teenage girls disappeared, and police in those days took
Speaker 2: the view often and you can't blame them in some
Speaker 2: ways that teenagers often go missing for a while, they
Speaker 2: go off with a boy or a girl and they
Speaker 2: stay the night somewhere, or they hitchhike somewhere or whatever.
Speaker 2: It's not always going to be a sinister outcome. And
Speaker 2: so the police do start a search, but they don't
Speaker 2: really know what they're looking for or where. They haven't
Speaker 2: got a focus yet, but they do know that Rosn's
Speaker 2: mother is very concerned and says it's totally out of character.
Speaker 2: So they're looking and they're talking, and they talk to
Speaker 2: other young people, teenagers, and they're not really getting far.
Speaker 2: And on the Tuesday, something turns up. What turns up
Speaker 2: is the little corgy dog. He's found wandering along a
Speaker 2: little narrow country road, a track really that leads down
Speaker 2: onto the main Hamilton Port Ferry Road. And this little
Speaker 2: track that's got trees and all the rest of it,
Speaker 2: it leads down from what they call the Mountain Apier Bush.
Speaker 2: It's a bush reserve. Mountain Apier is not really a mountain,
Speaker 2: it's more just a bit of a hill and it's scrubby.
Speaker 2: It's got trees. It might be, you know, a couple
Speaker 2: hundred acres of trees or something in the scrub and
Speaker 2: it was a bush reserve about say ten twelve k's
Speaker 2: out of Hamilton that was regarded by young people are
Speaker 2: somewhere to go parking. People would go out there and
Speaker 2: shoot up tin cans with guns all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: You know, they dump old cars there whatever, that sort
Speaker 2: of place, because there's the cover of trees and it's
Speaker 2: out of town. And the little dog is found in
Speaker 2: this track that leads between the main road and this bushland,
Speaker 2: and it's found by an old farmer, an old war
Speaker 2: veteranaturally an old grazier, and he either rings a place
Speaker 2: or takes the dog in because he must have heard something.
Speaker 2: And the police get the little dog and they take
Speaker 2: it round to June Naughty, and that's when she really
Speaker 2: knows that something bad has happened, because she knows that
Speaker 2: Roslin wouldn't leave the dog. If the dog is split
Speaker 2: up from Roslin, it's very bad. That's when June knows.
Speaker 2: That's when she really fears the worst. Before that, she's
Speaker 2: probably hoping they've hitched ike somewhere or something, but now
Speaker 2: she knows it's bad. The police agree with June Noughty.
Speaker 2: They now know that that area near Mountain Apier is
Speaker 2: probably the place to look for Roslin. And an interesting
Speaker 2: thing happens. There's a policewoman, a policewoman called Overend is
Speaker 2: a surname, and she lived in the same street as
Speaker 2: the King family, and she was quite friendly with the Kings.
Speaker 2: The Kings were sort of respectable people. I think missed
Speaker 2: the King. Clive King was a train driver, and they
Speaker 2: were well liked and respected people, and the policewoman knew them,
Speaker 2: and she went around to the Kings and she's chatting
Speaker 2: to Charles King as the eighteen year old, and said, oh, Charlie,
Speaker 2: this girl that's gone missing, Rosalind. She got any sort
Speaker 2: of regular boyfriends or special boyfriends or something that she
Speaker 2: might have bolted with or anything like that. And he says, oh, look,
Speaker 2: I don't really know that well, but I have to
Speaker 2: say she was okay when we dropped her back outside
Speaker 2: the Commercial Hotel. We gave her a ride down the
Speaker 2: street from so many blocks back to the commercial Hotel
Speaker 2: and dropped her at the commercial corner, which was her street,
Speaker 2: and she could walk home from there. Darted on Sunday night.
Speaker 2: She was okay then, And this came as some news
Speaker 2: to the police because the police had been told that
Speaker 2: Roslin had got into a green and white e H
Speaker 2: Holden and gone for a driving that which she might
Speaker 2: have who knows, But it was the first time they
Speaker 2: knew about it. Getting in the blue panel van with
Speaker 2: Lowry and King. Was when Charlie King brought it up himself,
Speaker 2: obviously trying to sort of act casual and all this.
Speaker 2: So the police suddenly thinking Lowry and King and the
Speaker 2: blue panel van are very interesting. They've got the little
Speaker 2: dog from the old farmer and on the Wednesday morning
Speaker 2: they must have got the dog. On the Tuesday night,
Speaker 2: I think, or Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday morning, they go out
Speaker 2: to Mountain Apier Bushland with the dog. They take the
Speaker 2: dog with them, which was smart, and the search starts
Speaker 2: there and the little dog leads them to Roslyn's body.
Speaker 2: And this was the most shocking thing that any of
Speaker 2: those people had ever seen, and probably the most shocking
Speaker 2: thing any of them ever saw. Even coppers that worked
Speaker 2: for thirty or forty years never saw anything probably as
Speaker 2: grueling and as awful as what they saw, because what
Speaker 2: they saw was fifteen year old girl's body. It's battered,
Speaker 2: it's bruised, it's broken, she's got broken arms, she's got
Speaker 2: burn marks I think from cigarettes. She's naked apart from
Speaker 2: a pair of socks. Her bra has been knotted around
Speaker 2: her neck. But that's not the worst of it. And
Speaker 2: she's died from strangulation because whoever tortured her like that,
Speaker 2: and a dragged along over rocks, possibly dragged using a car.
Speaker 2: Who knows whoever did it, had tied her up hog
Speaker 2: tied her with a piece of electrical flex with a
Speaker 2: slip knot around her neck, and they passed the end
Speaker 2: of the slip knot back behind her and tied it
Speaker 2: to her feet. So she was trussed up backwards, hog tied,
Speaker 2: as the description is, in such a way, a calculated way, planned, premeditated,
Speaker 2: so that when she struggled to get loose from this
Speaker 2: awful posture of being tied backwards, that it would choke her.
Speaker 2: And so she was left to die choking. After being bashed, kicked, dragged,
Speaker 2: had cigarettes burnt, the whole thing, she was left to
Speaker 2: die by choking herself to death. It was the most
Speaker 2: horrible scene that those people had ever seen, and the
Speaker 2: most horrible thing I think that the Australian public had
Speaker 2: heard in the post war civilian world. These awful things
Speaker 2: happened in wartime, of course, and everybody knew that, you know,
Speaker 2: terrible things had happened in the war with the Japanese
Speaker 2: and the Germans and the whole thing. But this was
Speaker 2: in provincial Victoria, in a tidy, clean, nice town where
Speaker 2: everybody should be nice and kind, and you know, not
Speaker 2: anything worse than drink too much beer. On a Saturday
Speaker 2: night or something like that, and this had happened. It
Speaker 2: shocked Victoria. I remember this clearly. I was probably thirteen,
Speaker 2: and it shocked Australia. Really, it was a terrible, terrible crime,
Speaker 2: and Hamilton was in total shock and to some extent denial.
Speaker 2: I suppose the first instinct was it must be somebody
Speaker 2: from outside, you know, bad guys from somewhere else have
Speaker 2: done this, who came to town. Which strangers have been
Speaker 2: in town and a copple's a ken on, you know,
Speaker 2: looking where their bikies that have come to town and done
Speaker 2: this or whatever. But the fact that Larry and King
Speaker 2: and their Panelman have been mentioned in relation to Roslyn
Speaker 2: by King gives them a bit of a head start.
Speaker 2: So they go and see Larry and King separately and together,
Speaker 2: and they interviewed them a couple of times. And Larry
Speaker 2: and King story, which they obviously colluded, was, oh we
Speaker 2: saw yeah, we saw Caverna and then we saw Rosalind
Speaker 2: and we dropped rosn off outside the commercial hotel and
Speaker 2: then we picked up a hitchhiker. We picked up a
Speaker 2: hitchhike and drove to Coleraine with the hitchhike and dropped
Speaker 2: the hitchhiker off, which seemed a bit of a stretch.
Speaker 2: Why would you do that? And the main advantage of
Speaker 2: that story if it was believed, which it wasn't. The
Speaker 2: main advantage of that story it gets them out of
Speaker 2: town at the relevant time, and it would explain why
Speaker 2: they're blue panel van is out on the road. If
Speaker 2: it's seen out on the highway somewhere, that would explain it.
Speaker 2: So they stick to this Coleraine hitchhiker story. I don't
Speaker 2: know that the police are totally believing them. I think
Speaker 2: Lowry's reputational persona preceded him. There was something about him
Speaker 2: that was in QR right. And the police are starting
Speaker 2: to think that these two guys know what happened to Rosslyn,
Speaker 2: and they lean on these guys and lean on those guys.
Speaker 2: They stick to the hitchhiker story, but they start to
Speaker 2: alter a bit under pressure. Homicide squad turns up the experts.
Speaker 2: In fact, Victoria police took this really seriously. An Assistant
Speaker 2: commissioner came from Melbourne with the homicide squad to work
Speaker 2: on this, and one of their best fingerprint experts turned up.
Speaker 2: A senior Constable Kelvin Glair. Kel Glair was a fingerprint
Speaker 2: man in the Fingerprint Division Forensic and he, of course
Speaker 2: later within sixteen or eighteen years or so, became chief Commissioner.
Speaker 2: But he was a young man on a mission and
Speaker 2: very good at what he did and what he did
Speaker 2: on that trip down he went out to the crime
Speaker 2: scene and he very carefully picked up things that the
Speaker 2: and including a fresh beer can, a new one, and
Speaker 2: he fingerprinted it and he found a perfect middle fingerprint
Speaker 2: on the can and he matched that to the middle
Speaker 2: finger of Christopher Russell Lowry, and so the police had
Speaker 2: cast iron smoking gun evidence that put Lowry at the
Speaker 2: crime scene. Now, once they had that, thank you, kell Glare.
Speaker 2: Once they had that, they had a big stick to
Speaker 2: work on these guys and say, well you were there.
Speaker 2: What happened? Now by the Saturday with the homicide squad
Speaker 2: working on them, the homicide squad splits these two guys up,
Speaker 2: classic thing, split them up different rooms, different coppers, and
Speaker 2: they turned them against each other and they say, listen,
Speaker 2: your mate's in there telling our colleague how you did it,
Speaker 2: and you're going to cop it all and you're going
Speaker 2: to swing for this son if you don't tell us
Speaker 2: what you think happened, tell us your side the story.
Speaker 2: And so both of them are constructing stories that make
Speaker 2: it bad for the other guy. It's funny about crooks
Speaker 2: the good mates until this sort of stuff happens, and
Speaker 2: then they just point the finger at the other guy.
Speaker 2: So the police did the classic divide and rule. They
Speaker 2: both come up with stories implicating the other one. By
Speaker 2: and large. By the time it got to court and
Speaker 2: they had a chance to sort of thrash out these
Speaker 2: storylines with their expert defense counsel, they'd come up with
Speaker 2: a scenario each of them. Charles King said that he
Speaker 2: was hallucinating from taking LSD and he thought the trees
Speaker 2: were moving and he was talking to animals and while
Speaker 2: he was out of it in this days, wicked Lowry
Speaker 2: was killing Rosen Nalty, which may well be true. And
Speaker 2: the other bloak Lowry, who's the tough guy. He said, Oh, no,
Speaker 2: I was scared of Charlie King. He's frightening, especially when
Speaker 2: he's on the drug side. Dad, I was very scared
Speaker 2: of him, and I was scared to kill me. So
Speaker 2: I was afraid from my life. And so they each
Speaker 2: blamed the other they're charged with murder. There's an inquest,
Speaker 2: preliminary hearings, committal hearing. I think down that way it
Speaker 2: was held down might have been held in warnable one
Speaker 2: of them. And I know that the defense counsel from
Speaker 2: Melbourne went down for each of them, and they couldn't
Speaker 2: get anywhere to stay. No local place would give their
Speaker 2: defense counsel anywhere to sleep, no hotel, no motel, No
Speaker 2: one would even talk to the defense council of lawyers,
Speaker 2: and people spat on the lawyers in the streets. There
Speaker 2: was so much feeling about it, bad feeling that the
Speaker 2: lawyers were made totally unwelcome. Wasn't their fault, but anyway,
Speaker 2: that's the way it goes, totally unwelcome down there. Naturally,
Speaker 2: the inquest finds that, you know, they killed her, and
Speaker 2: naturally they are charged with the murderer and they appear
Speaker 2: at the Supreme Court sitting in Ballarat. The first jury
Speaker 2: is impaneled. This is getting late in the year of
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy one. First jury is impaneled and early in
Speaker 2: the piece the jury is shown photographs from the crime scene,
Speaker 2: photographs of Rosslyn's body. This has such a terrible effect
Speaker 2: on one jura. One juror had a physical and mental breakdown.
Speaker 2: They got physically ill and had a mental meltdown and
Speaker 2: couldn't proceed. A doctor was called came in attended to
Speaker 2: this person and said this person cannot go on. And
Speaker 2: so the judge had to discharge the jury and in
Speaker 2: panel a new jury just to find a group of people,
Speaker 2: which they did and they impanel a new jury and
Speaker 2: the trial happens. During the trial, King's father, Clive King,
Speaker 2: sits in court and cries when he hears the evidence.
Speaker 2: The most grueling part of the evidence was a reconstruction
Speaker 2: of the crime where police have gone out with the
Speaker 2: bad guys and they've got him to reconstruct what they did,
Speaker 2: and they film it. Police film it and with the
Speaker 2: flex and tying the hands and tying their feet, the
Speaker 2: whole thing. And this is very graphic because it's been
Speaker 2: filmed and a screened in the court and his dead silence,
Speaker 2: and I know what it was like because one of
Speaker 2: my former colleagues is no longer with us Ian Livingstone,
Speaker 2: known in the trade as Doc Livingstone. He was then
Speaker 2: a young reporter and he'd been sent up there to
Speaker 2: cover this case. He'd gone to Hamilton when it first happened,
Speaker 2: and then he covered the case. He saw the whole
Speaker 2: thing all the way through, and he described it in
Speaker 2: one of the most chilling and searing pieces of journalism
Speaker 2: I've ever read. And he described the scene in court,
Speaker 2: and he described the reactions of those there, and how
Speaker 2: sick everybody felt, how King's parents were distraught, how King
Speaker 2: looked ashamed, and how Christopher Russell Lowry smiled, didn't care,
Speaker 2: he smiled. And after they were found guilty by the
Speaker 2: jury after just less than two hours, pretty quick, really,
Speaker 2: they were found guilty. King looked pretty shattered, and Lowry
Speaker 2: attempted to do like a victory salut or a victory
Speaker 2: wave until a policeman grabbed his hands and pulled them down.
Speaker 2: He was just a piece of work. There was evidence
Speaker 2: led by a psychologists from Melbourne University, a Professor Cox,
Speaker 2: who said that Lowry was a psychopath, a saddest and
Speaker 2: words the effect that he was manipulative and cunning. King
Speaker 2: was regarded as probably more intelligent than but relatively easily
Speaker 2: led a weak out personality, which is probably true. It
Speaker 2: was one of those situations where one influences the other.
Speaker 2: Ian Livingston is covering the case. He follows the prison
Speaker 2: van out of Ballarat to drive back to Melbourne, and
Speaker 2: he's got with him a female reporter or photographer, whatever
Speaker 2: doesn't matter. And he said, as we pulled up behind
Speaker 2: the prison ban there was a window in a prison van.
Speaker 2: He said, Lowry's making obscene gestures at the female passenger
Speaker 2: in my car. So this man has been sentenced to death.
Speaker 2: They were probably, I believe, the last people in Victoria
Speaker 2: ever to be sentenced formally to death. But it didn't
Speaker 2: worry him. He probably didn't think he was going to hang,
Speaker 2: and he was right. He wasn't going to hang. The
Speaker 2: death sentence, although it was still on the books, was
Speaker 2: in effect already in a de facto way, had been
Speaker 2: retired already. The fact that these two guys did not
Speaker 2: get hanged proved that the death sentence was never ever
Speaker 2: going to be used again in Victoria, because if you
Speaker 2: weren't going to hang this pair for this crime, you
Speaker 2: couldn't hang anybody. The death sentence was duly commuted to
Speaker 2: life imprisonment by the Governor Sarhundalecam. These two reptiles were
Speaker 2: sentenced to sixty years jail with a minimum of fifty
Speaker 2: which was fair enough. That meant the rest of their lives, effectively,
Speaker 2: the rest of their lives in jail. And although June
Speaker 2: Naughty and her father and probably her ex husband Roslin's father,
Speaker 2: although they would have preferred these killers to be hanged,
Speaker 2: they realized that that wasn't going to happen, and they
Speaker 2: said that a minimum of fifty years was a just
Speaker 2: result because it was life, life for a life. Well,
Speaker 2: they were cheated, those people. June not He died two
Speaker 2: and a half years later of a brain tumor. Her father,
Speaker 2: mister McCallum, he died the same year as she did,
Speaker 2: three months apart. I think Rosen's father lived on for
Speaker 2: a few years. But they were cheated because the system
Speaker 2: totally let them down, having told them that their daughter's
Speaker 2: killers would get fifty year minimum in the late eighties.
Speaker 2: This is only the next decade. We're going from nineteen
Speaker 2: to seventy three. I think the actual death sentence was
Speaker 2: pronounced nineteen seventy three to about eighty seven or eighty eight.
Speaker 2: It was revealed that King had been released from jail
Speaker 2: overnight to take a visit to suburban Melbourne. He was
Speaker 2: led out of Beechworth Jail and put on the train
Speaker 2: or driven to Melbourne so he could spend the night
Speaker 2: with a female friend. And within a little more time
Speaker 2: he was given more and more privileges from a very
Speaker 2: soft prison Beachworth, Durranguy, those sort of soft jails, because
Speaker 2: he wasn't regarded as a heavyweight security risk. I think
Speaker 2: Lowry was regarded a little bit differently. But the point
Speaker 2: remains that by the late eighties one of them was
Speaker 2: getting out regularly and it was clear to everybody that
Speaker 2: they were both going to get out well ahead. Those
Speaker 2: two guys were released because of a change in sentencing laws,
Speaker 2: a retrospective change in sentencing laws. They were both released
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety two. I think it was ninety two
Speaker 2: or ninety three. They'd served twenty one years and they
Speaker 2: were led out for good twenty one years instead of
Speaker 2: fifty minimum. That I believe was an absolute betrayal of
Speaker 2: Rosen Naughty's and friends and everyone who loved her. They'd
Speaker 2: believe that those guys were going to get jail for
Speaker 2: the rest of their lives. It was a fair expectation,
Speaker 2: and the system, politicians, judges, lawyers, whatever, the system betrayed Wilson,
Speaker 2: not his mother essentially, and her parents and her grandfather.
Speaker 2: They weren't around to see it, at least two of
Speaker 2: them weren't. But it was a shameful thing. And it
Speaker 2: was that betrayal that led Ian Livingstone, who, as I said,
Speaker 2: he's no longer with us. He was a very fine
Speaker 2: journalist on the forerunner of the herald Son, the Sun
Speaker 2: News Pictorial, and I worked with him and he was
Speaker 2: a very fine journalist. And he wrote a searing, absolute
Speaker 2: crackerjack piece about Lowry and King and how it was
Speaker 2: about the worst thing he'd ever covered in his life.
Speaker 2: And when I thought that it's time to have another
Speaker 2: look at this, I thought of that piece that I
Speaker 2: read back in nineteen eighty eight, and I could remember
Speaker 2: nearly every phrase in it, and I looked it up
Speaker 2: and there it was, and I've quoted it extensively in
Speaker 2: the story that I've done for the Sunday herald Son
Speaker 2: to mark the anniversary of the first time those pair
Speaker 2: of vermin were put before a court, that is in
Speaker 2: April of nineteen seventy one. PostScript. Lowry was a bad
Speaker 2: guy who stayed bad. He was a thief, He was
Speaker 2: a bash artist. He was a drug user and probably
Speaker 2: a drug dealer, ended up using a different name and
Speaker 2: all the rest of it, but ended up dead not
Speaker 2: before time, and around two thousand and six, I think
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven he ended up dead. Pity, it
Speaker 2: wasn't much earlier. And Charles King, the gentler one, the
Speaker 2: not so bad one, perhaps the weaker one. He'd made
Speaker 2: a name for himself very early in jail as being
Speaker 2: a model prisoner. He'd studied hard, he'd become quite a
Speaker 2: gifted artist. He had an artistic bent, and he did
Speaker 2: get quite a few people on side to push up
Speaker 2: for the fact that he was rehabilitated, etc. And when
Speaker 2: he got out he was able to drift into the
Speaker 2: community and lose himself using I presume a false name.
Speaker 2: But he did have one advantage. Although he went through
Speaker 2: the system under the name Charles King when he'd been
Speaker 2: charged with the murder, Charles King, and he'd always been
Speaker 2: called Charlie Charles, but on his birth certificate it turns
Speaker 2: out he was named after his father and his real
Speaker 2: name on his birth certificate was Clive Clive Ian King,
Speaker 2: not Charles, and so it was that King was able
Speaker 2: to go through life, later producing that ID under the
Speaker 2: name Clive and he would never have to worry about
Speaker 2: passing a police check. And ten years ago our newspaper
Speaker 2: Shannon Deary on a Sunday Herald Son wrote a story
Speaker 2: exposing the fact that this murderer, torturer and murderer who'd
Speaker 2: been sentenced to death for his crimes, he'd worked for
Speaker 2: the Catholic Church, in fact, for the Carratus Christie hospice
Speaker 2: out in the Northern Suburbs for eleven years as a
Speaker 2: maintenance manager, I think, and that was very good that
Speaker 2: he'd held down a job for eleven years. Of course,
Speaker 2: he needed a steady job because he'd been able to
Speaker 2: get married and he had kids growing up that he
Speaker 2: had to support, so he needed to look after them
Speaker 2: rather better than he'd looked after Ross and Noughty. Before
Speaker 2: we leave, don't go away, because coming up we have
Speaker 2: the first episode of the new crime podcast series Dear Rochelle,
Speaker 2: and we'll be speaking to the host of that show
Speaker 2: next week on life and Crimes.
Speaker 3: I'll happen through I've seen this fire on the right hand,
Speaker 3: thought grabbed me to watch, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: I've got this flash of gold in my face and
Speaker 3: I've got back, And there was a Bengal on a hand.
Speaker 3: Burnt body was found on a lonely South Coast road.
Speaker 1: The twenty three year old disappeared from a pub in Bargo.
Speaker 3: The callous way that she was dubbed here and just
Speaker 3: discarded like a percy rubbish and set on fire.
Speaker 2: A young woman in a prime of alive.
Speaker 1: Her name was Rochelle Childs and her killer has eluded
Speaker 1: police for more than two decades.
Speaker 4: Sister was vivacious. She was everything to me growing up.
Speaker 1: She was attractive, friendly, funny, but loved cars.
Speaker 4: One of the members I've Rocky team. She really cared
Speaker 4: about the people around her. We just all got ripped
Speaker 4: off and and her especially.
Speaker 1: This case should never have been left to run cold.
Speaker 4: It has been twenty three years. It's time for the
Speaker 4: truth to come out.
Speaker 1: Join some of Australia's sharpest criminal minds in this live investigation.
Speaker 4: I think the person who killed her would be worried
Speaker 4: about this podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm absolutely sure that we've interviewed the crow us in
Speaker 2: that brief. Have we got a shirkill on the hand.
Speaker 3: When you're dealing with sex offenders, it takes years of
Speaker 3: experience to realize how clever they are.
Speaker 4: What would it mean to find justice everything? I'd just
Speaker 4: love to see person off the streets.
Speaker 2: Its no doubt about. It's a red odd suspect. Rochelle
Speaker 2: was killed by someone she knew.
Speaker 4: She was very trusting, and I think she'd trust to
Speaker 4: the wrong person.
Speaker 2: People saying to me, oh, you know you're going to
Speaker 2: be a suspect, and they're like, oh, you're the ex boyfriend.
Speaker 4: What do you mean, Like, I'll help it, They'll think
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 3: What sorry?
Speaker 1: People too afraid to speak out for decades of breaking
Speaker 1: their silence for Rochelle.
Speaker 4: He doesn't scare me at all anymore.
Speaker 2: What you're doing is potentially very valuable to the public,
Speaker 2: but potentially very harmful to a dangerous person. I'm afraid
Speaker 2: you fit the profile.
Speaker 4: He's in and around everything like he's just there. My
Speaker 4: heart was racing, it was confronting. I will never have
Speaker 4: peace until my sister's murderer is found. My worst sphere
Speaker 4: is that person who Hill Rochelle has killed again.
Speaker 3: This is solvable if Fender, responsible for this crime is
Speaker 3: still alive.
Speaker 4: He's the devil.
Speaker 1: Dealershell A groundbreaking podcast series exclusively from True Crime Australia,
Speaker 1: hosted by me Ashley Hanson, Available now. Visit Dealershell dot
Speaker 1: com dot a U for more. That's d E A
Speaker 1: R R A c h E w l E dot
Speaker 1: com dot a U.
Speaker 4: You can run away, but you can't hide.