Lina Marciano

The first day of March 1978 was a Wednesday, and nineteen-year-old Lina Marciano was setting out from her home in Wayville, a suburb of Adelaide, in South Australia. It was a little past six p.m. She said goodbye to her sister Teresa, put on her motorcycle helmet, and hopped onto her blue and white Honda to make the journey to Nailsworth Primary School, where she had a Greek dancing lesson that evening. She never made it to class.

After Lina was reported missing, officers found her motorcycle parked in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant across from the school, but found no other trace of her.

Three days later, on Saturday, March 4th, the body of Lina Marciano was discovered lying on top of a rubbish heap at the Dry Creek dump. She was bound, gagged and shrouded in a brown curtain, and she had clearly been subjected to a savage attack before her death. She had several severe blows to the head, most of her teeth had been knocked out, and nearly all of her fingers were broken. She had also been strangled, and stabbed in the heart.

Police were quickly able to determine that Lina had likely been killed in one of the school’s classrooms, and then dumped in the rubbish at Dry Creek. Despite the restraints and the overwhelming violence of the crime, Lina had not been sexually assaulted, though detectives could not rule out a sexual motive in the homicide.

It seems that police had a particular suspect in mind, even at the time of the slaying, and this individual was evidently interviewed several times, though there was never enough physical evidence to implicate him in the crime.

In 1992, a woman who worked as a cleaner at Nailsworth Primary School came forward with some compelling information about the person of interest. This informant was allegedly assaulted four times subsequently, though she could not say for certain if her attacker was the same person suspected in the murder of Lina Marciano.

The case was reopened again in 2005, and the then-elderly suspect provided a DNA sample to police, though as of this writing, it appears no further progress has been made.

Ironically, though Lina Marciano’s murder remains unsolved, investigation into her slaying helped to uncover and crack the so-called Truro murders, a series of seven crimes that took place in the area during a two-month period in 1976 and 1977. The perpetrators turned out to be twenty-three-year-old Christopher Worrell and his thirty-eight-year-old lover James William Miller; Worrell was never charged with the crimes, as he had died in a car crash in February of 1977, but Miller was apprehended in May of 1979, and subsequently received six life sentences. He died in prison in 2008.