Nineteen-year-old Robin Jeanne Hoinville-Bartram and her friend, eighteen-year-old Anita Cunningham were roommates, and both studied graphic art at the Prahran Technical College in Melbourne, Australia. On July 4th, 1972, the girls packed their bags and set out to hitchhike the twenty-five-hundred miles to Bowen, Queensland to visit Robin’s mother.
Over the ensuing months, the two women were seen at varying points along their journey, such as stops in Darwin and Mount Isa, but sometime that autumn, they would vanish without a trace.
November 15th would see the discovery of a set of remains under a bridge on Sensible Creek that turned out to belong to missing hitchhiker Robin Jeanne Hoinville-Bartram, who had left on holiday with her friend Anita Cunningham the previous July. Robin had been raped, and killed by two shots to the head with a .22 caliber rifle. No sign of Anita Cunningham has ever been found.
Robin and Anita were only two of seven hitchhiking women who either vanished or were found murdered in Queensland between the years of 1972 to 1976. Police have not ruled out the possibility that both young women, as well as some of the other victims, may have fallen prey to a serial killer, such as Backpacker Murderer Ivan Milat, who was convicted of seven murders in New South Wales in 1996; or perhaps Arthur Stanley Brown, convicted of two murders and twenty-eight rapes in 1998, but suspected in numerous other cases, including the disappearance of the Beaumont children in 1966, and the 1973 abduction of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon from the Adelaide Oval football stadium.
In recent times, Robin’s best friend Kathleen Bertram has stated in the media that she believes Anita is still alive, pointing to a family friend who claimed to have seen her working in a Melbourne bar more than a month after Robin’s body was found. Kathleen is convinced that Anita knows who killed Robin, and has since changed her name to Judy Borland and largely cut off contact with friends and family in order to protect them from this alleged killer.
The killer in question, Kathleen asserts, is John Andrew Stuart, who would be later convicted of firebombing a Brisbane nightclub and killing fifteen people in 1973. According to Kathleen’s sources, Stuart was seen traveling with Robin and Anita in October of 1972.
Most investigators, however, as well as the majority of Anita’s surviving family members, wholeheartedly accept that Anita Cunningham was most likely murdered along with Robin Hoinville-Bartram, though they admit they have no clues as to where her remains could be, or who could be responsible for taking the two young women’s lives.
A large reward for information into the case is still on offer.
Crime Immemorial 