AUSTRALIA'S HIDDEN - 'SERIAL KILLER'

BEFORE HIS SUICIDE, A FORMER NAVY SAILOR ADMITTED TO THREE MURDERS

- Michael Crooks

The final moment she shared with her friend, Paula Brown, still haunts Margo Hendriks. On the night of May 3, 1996, the Sydney hairdressing colleagues went out for dinner with fellow hairdresser Carla Vestering and her then husband. After dinner, Paula and Margo kicked on to the Burdekin Hotel on Sydney’s bustling Oxford Street.

“We went inside, and Paula said, ‘I’m going to the bathroom.’ I was waiting and waiting,” Margo recalls. “And I thought, ‘Where the hell is she?’”

Margo never saw her friend again. Paula had been invited to have drinks with some men at what was the Dug Out Bar in the Burdekin’s basement, and by the time she left the pub alone she was heavily intoxicated. Just over a week later, the 30-year-old’s body was found dumped in bush scrub. She had been bludgeoned and most likely sexually assaulted.

“Paula was a beautiful person,” Margo tells WHO. “She was always smiling.”

Now, a panel of experts have questioned if New Zealand-born Paula was the first victim of a suspected serial killer. Before taking his own life in 2014, former Australian Navy sailor Richard Dorrough confessed that he had ‘killed’ three times.

Dorrough had already been linked to the murders of two young women, and a panel on Nine Network’s Under Investigation found similarities between those killings and Paula’s, including the fact that all women had Indigenous heritage.

“[Paula] is a Māori Indigenous woman, she’s a pretty young woman, certainly I think this is a real possibility,” lawyer Dr Hannah McGlade told the program.