Murder of Sian Kingi

Sian Kingi, a twelve-year-old New Zealand-Australian schoolgirl of Maori descent, was last seen at around 4:30 p.m. on Friday, 27 November 1987, riding her bicycle home through Pinnaroo Park in Noosa Heads, Queensland, after shopping with her mother. When she failed to return home, her mother initially assumed she had met friends or been delayed at volleyball. By 8 p.m., her parents retraced her route, recovered her abandoned bicycle from the park, and reported her missing to local police.

Police circulated a missing person's report and gathered information about people seen in the park, but had little to progress the investigation until Kingi's body was discovered on 3 December 1987 in a dry creek bed in the Tinbeerwah Mountain State Forest, roughly 15 kilometres from where she disappeared. Investigators focused on a dusty white 1973 Holden Kingswood station wagon with interstate registration that had been reported in the area, along with several other incidents linked to the same vehicle. The car was traced to Victorian registration LLE-429, owned by Valmae Beck. Beck and her husband Barrie Watts, married the previous year and with extensive prior criminal records, had been living in Perth before relocating through Victoria to a rented property in Lowood, Queensland, and were on bail at the time.

When police visited the Lowood property on 11 December, evidence showed the couple had last been there on 4 December, the day news broke of the body's discovery, and had used cut hair and dye kits to alter their appearance. A rent payment sent by money order from The Entrance, New South Wales, on 10 December led plain-clothes police to locate and arrest the couple there on 12 December. They were extradited to Queensland on 14 December and charged on 15 December with the abduction, rape and murder of Kingi.

During questioning, Watts refused to speak, but Beck was more forthcoming, and secret recordings from adjacent holding cells allowed investigators to reconstruct the crime. According to this account, Watts had fantasised about raping a young virgin, and after earlier unsuccessful attempts on other victims in Ipswich, the couple targeted Kingi, with Beck luring her under the pretext of searching for a lost poodle before Watts forced her into their car. Kingi was driven to Tinbeerwah, raped by Watts, then stabbed, strangled and left in the creek bed.

At a April 1988 committal hearing, Beck pleaded guilty to abduction and rape but not guilty to murder, while Watts pleaded not guilty to all charges. They were tried separately at Noosa Magistrates Court, largely on the basis of Beck's testimony. Beck was found guilty on 20 October 1988 and sentenced to three years, five years, and life imprisonment on the three charges. Watts, who remained unresponsive throughout his trial, was found guilty on 28 February 1990 and sentenced to three years, fifteen years, and life imprisonment.

Watts was later tried in 1995 for the murder of Helen Mary Feeney, who disappeared one month before Kingi, but the case failed due to insufficient evidence; in 2007 he confessed to his role in Kingi's murder in an unsuccessful bid to improve his parole prospects. Beck divorced Watts in 1990 and unsuccessfully applied for parole three times. She died in Townsville Hospital on 27 May 2008 following heart surgery, without regaining consciousness after being placed in an induced coma; police had hoped for a deathbed confession regarding other unsolved murders.