Crime Immemorial

Twenty-one-year-old Mima McKim-Hill worked for the Capricornia Regional Electricity Board in Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia, and on March 9th, 1967, she got into a company car with her boss, Isobel Hare, for the more than sixty-mile drive to Gladstone. Mima’s friend and colleague, Shirley Eldridge, was actually supposed to be the one accompanying Isobel that day, but Mima had volunteered in her stead so that Shirley could attend a meeting. It was a decision whose catastrophic repercussions would resonate over the ensuing decades.

Mima and Isobel separated to perform their various tasks at around eleven a.m., with the understanding that Mima would pick up Isobel in the town of Calliope at around four-thirty p.m., and the two women would drive back to Rockhampton together. Mima had also planned to have dinner and see a movie with Shirley Eldridge once she got back into town; she had even bought a new outfit that she was going to wear that night, which she had already stowed in the company vehicle.

However, Mima never arrived to pick up Isobel that afternoon, and Shirley began to become concerned when Mima likewise failed to show for their scheduled dinner later that evening. Very early on the morning of March 10th, Shirley and a superior at Capricornia began driving along the route that Mima and Isobel would have taken, hoping to uncover some clue as to the young woman’s whereabouts.

At around three a.m., on a dirt road off Bruce Highway near Calliope, Shirley spotted the work car that Mima had been driving. Inside, she noticed that Mima’s purse was still sitting on the back seat, which seemed an extremely bad sign. Even more sinister was the fact that the car’s rearview mirror had fallen or been broken off and lay in the front seat, along with a lone button that Shirley recognized as one that had previously been attached to Mima’s new outfit.

Shirley was certain that something was wrong, but when she reported her fears to police, they initially believed that Mima had perhaps just gone off willingly to spend time with her boyfriend, and they therefore didn’t feel it necessary to treat the deserted vehicle as a crime scene.

Shirley’s instincts nagged at her, as she knew that it was unlikely Mima would have simply disappeared without telling her where she was going, but she acquiesced to the police’s lack of concern for the time being.

Two days later, though, authorities realized that Mima had truly vanished, and began an all-out hunt for her, but for weeks they would have no luck.

Then, on March 26th, Easter Sunday, a man who was driving from Gladstone for his niece’s wedding stopped by the side of the road to urinate, and stumbled across the body of Mima McKim-Hill, lying at Collard Creek near Biloela. She had been raped, and strangled with a piece of fabric from her work uniform. Her remains were discovered almost fifty miles from where the company car had been found abandoned.

The initial stages of the investigation focused on a mid-1950s Ford Customline containing three or four young men, which was spotted between three-thirty and four p.m. on the afternoon of March 9th, in the area where Mima had disappeared. The car sported a bull-head mascot, and witnesses reported that the men had been talking to Mima that day, and that they had some unspecified accent.

This description handily fitted three of the Milat brothers, the half-Yugoslav offspring of a couple that lived in New South Wales. The most notorious of these individuals, later serial killer Ivan Milat, would eventually be convicted in 1996 of seven slayings, known as the Backpacker Murders, and would be suspected of several more.

However, later information uncovered by investigators proved that Ivan Milat had been in prison for theft on the day Mima vanished, and could not have been responsible for her death.

In a related tip, a man who managed a hotel in Emu Park claimed that two foreign tourists who drove a Ford Customline had been staying there, working on a local painting job. He said that the men seemed sketchy, and that he had seen a hunting knife under a pillow in the room where they were staying. The witness also stated that a girl who had been hanging around with them later left the room, looking “upset.” This lead was apparently looked into, but nothing seemed to come of it.

Another vehicle that was seen in the area around the same time as the Customline, though, held more promising prospects. This was a two-tone green tractor-trailer that was towing fifteen tons of tallow from Rockhampton to Sydney. This truck was also spotted by another witness at a little past seven-thirty p.m. on March 9th, less than four-hundred yards from where Mima’s abandoned car was found.

The vehicle in question was thought to have been driven by a German man named Erich Johann Seefus, who later told police that he had parked the truck at around five-thirty p.m. in the location where witnesses saw it, because he was having problems with the truck’s thermostat. Another employee of the same trucking company had driven past and seen the vehicle at around this same time, but hadn’t seen the driver. Detectives speculated that perhaps if Seefus was the killer, he had used Mima’s work vehicle to transport her to the location where her body was found, and after dumping her remains had driven back to where his tractor-trailer was parked.

Seefus was questioned by police not long after the murder, but was never charged, and his possible involvement was thereafter largely forgotten. However, when the case was reinvestigated in 2009 at the behest of Shirley Eldridge and researcher Trevor Sorensen, authorities felt the case against Seefus was compelling enough for them to perhaps file an arrest warrant.

Unfortunately, it was quickly established that Erich Seefus had died of cancer only six weeks prior to the Mima McKim-Hill case being reopened. In 2018, another long-haul truck driver who reportedly worked for the same company as Seefus came forward with more information pertaining to the case, though investigators are still looking into it as of this writing.

Shirley Eldridge, who wrote a 2016 book about her murdered friend called Mima: A Case of Abduction, Rape and Murder, is convinced that Seefus was the killer, and many researchers share her opinion, though if he was, then his 2009 death practically ensures that the crime will remain forever unsolved.