When the murder scene was examined, Schmidt was found lying on her right side with her left leg bent. Sharrock was face down, her head against the sole of Schmidt's left foot. Both had scratch marks on their faces. From a 34 metre (37 yard) long drag mark leading to the scene, police determined that Sharrock had fled, possibly while Schmidt was dying, only to have been caught, incapacitated and dragged back to the body of her friend. An intensive search was undertaken to find the murder weapons, a long knife and some sort of blunt instrument, but they were never found. (later converted to 20,000 in 1966), which stood unchanged . In April 1966 the coroner handed down his report, by which time police had interviewed some 7,000 people, making it the largest investigation in Australian history. and in February 2012, the
New South Wales Police Force's Cold Case Unit announced that a weak, male DNA sample had been extracted from a pair of white shorts worn by Sharrock. While admitting that current technology was unable to provide more information, police were confident that future advances would give more assistance. Two years prior to the murders, Wilder had been convicted of a gang-rape on a Sydney beach which led police to include him as a suspect. Wilder had emigrated to the United States in 1969; while visiting his parents in Australia in 1982, he was charged with sexual offences against two 15-year-old girls whom he had forced to pose nude. Wilder fled back to the US, and in the first half of 1984, he committed eight murders and attempted several more. He accidentally killed himself during a struggle with police in
New Hampshire on 13 April 1984. A third suspect, not well publicised until 1998, is
Derek Percy, who had been imprisoned since 1969 for the murder of a child on a beach in Victoria. While Percy can be linked to Cronulla on the date of the murders, no other links have been found. It was hoped he would make confessions on his deathbed, but these never came.
Possible linked cases Two far less well-known murders also occurred during early 1966 (in the days following the nationally publicised disappearance of the
Beaumont children) which, police at the time speculated, might have been connected to the Wanda Beach murders. • On Saturday 29 January 1966, a 56-year old cleaning lady named Wilhelmina Kruger was killed in the Piccadilly Centre on Crown Street in Wollongong. Her bloodied body was discovered around 5:45 a.m. at the foot of the basement-level stairs by a butcher who had arrived for work. Having been first assaulted three floors above, probably around 4:30 a.m., she had been brutally dragged down the escalators and stairs. She was then strangled, stabbed, mutilated and was found naked from the chest down. Police also found cigarette burns in her clothing and blond hair was found at the scene. In the time prior to the murder, Kruger had become nervous that someone was watching her and had been driven to work by her husband. Police believed that the murder might have been the work of the Wanda Beach killer, but would not say why. • Around midnight on Wednesday 16 February 1966, a 27-year-old shop assistant and prostitute from
Bondi named Anna Toskayoa Dowlingkoa went missing after leaving the Taxi Club in Kings Cross. Most of Dowlingkoa's clothes and belongings were missing, and drag evidence showed that her body had been moved to a more visible location around three to four days prior to discovery. primarily based on circumstantial evidence and similarities in
modus operandi. In both the murders of Kruger and Dowlingkoa, police believed that the killer was taunting them. In the Kruger murder, a witness calling himself "Gary" gave a statement that he and a girlfriend were sitting in his car parked in Railway Square, directly behind the Piccadilly Centre, when he saw the utility pulling into the square sometime between 2:30 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. on the morning of the murder. "Gary" also stated that the vehicle circled Railway Square three times before turning back onto Gladstone Avenue and parking opposite the Piccadilly Centre. Police checks revealed that no such person existed on any record and the address that "Gary" gave detectives was false. == Media ==