It was about quarter to eight on the morning of Tuesday, March 21st, 1972, and fourteen-year-old Marilyn Wallman was riding her bicycle to the bus stop near her family’s farm in Mackay, Queensland. Her two brothers, Rex and David, were only a few minutes behind her.
A little more than half a mile from home, the two boys came upon a shocking sight: their sister’s bicycle lay abandoned on its side, its front wheel still spinning. Her book bag lay in the grass beside it, contents spilled haphazardly around the scene.
Police and townsfolk immediately snapped into action to try to locate the young girl, but the search was to no avail. The only possible clues to the child’s disappearance were a few footprints in the dirt and the testimony of Rex Wallman, who claimed he had heard his sister talking and screaming briefly in the tall sugar cane just after her disappearance.
Authorities also followed up on statements that had placed three different cars around the area where Marilyn had vanished. Two of the vehicles’ owners were located and questioned, but subsequently dismissed. However, the third vehicle spotted—but never found—was described as a gray or blue Vauxhall, which was ominously the same type of car thought to be owned by child killer Arthur Stanley Brown, notably also a suspect in the infamous Beaumont children disappearance from 1966, among many other crimes.
No arrests were made in the presumed abduction of Marilyn Wallman, and the case then went cold. But in October of 1974, a macabre find would bring partial closure to the case.
A young man named Greven Breadsell was walking near an illegal dump site alongside McGregor Creek in north Queensland, Australia, when he spotted what appeared to be part of a human skull. When investigators descended on the site, they confirmed the fact that the remains were human, and even had a pretty good idea of who the skull belonged to: fourteen-year-old Marilyn Wallman, who had vanished on her way to school in March of 1972, leaving behind a bicycle with the front wheel still spinning.
In January of 2015, DNA analysis verified detectives’ long-running suspicions: the skull did indeed belong to the missing girl.
After the positive identification of Marilyn Wallman’s remains, Queensland investigators renewed their efforts to solve the case, conducting thorough satellite searches and soil samples on the area where the skull was found, making new appeals to the public for information, and offering a reward of a quarter-million dollars.
As of this writing, however, the murder of Marilyn Wallman is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 