On Tuesday, September 27th, 1966, six-year-old Allen Redston left school at 3pm, accompanied by a friend. On their way home, they stopped by a local shop to buy popsicles, then both boys continued on to the Redston house, located in Curtin, a suburb of Canberra, Australia. Once there, Allen’s mother gave her son some money and told Allen to take his four-year-old brother Peter back to the same shop to get him a popsicle as well.
Allen apparently didn’t want to take Peter to the store, however, and told the child to go on to the shop alone. Allen and his friend then decided to go play with some other friends at the Curtin tip, a nearby dump site and a common area for local children to gather.
On the way there, the pair stopped at the friend’s house so he could change clothes. Allen waited outside on the sidewalk. When the friend came back out of his house only minutes later, though, Allen had disappeared.
At first, no one was particularly alarmed. Four-year-old Peter had returned to the Redston home without incident, and it was assumed that Allen had simply wandered off to play somewhere. But when the six-year-old hadn’t returned by dinnertime, his older sister Anne went out to look for him; when she could find no trace, the boy’s father went searching. He also came up empty, and the worried family then contacted the police.
Officers combed the area all during the night, but the boy was not found until the following day. At a little past eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, a man walking his dog found Allen’s body partially hidden in the reeds in a creek bed in Curtin. The child had been tied up, strangled, and then wrapped in an old carpet.
During the course of the investigation, authorities discovered that two boys had been tied up in a similar manner the month before, in separate incidents, but neither event had been reported to law enforcement, as both boys had escaped unharmed. But these boys were able to give a description of the suspect who tied them up and who may have killed Allen; this individual was believed to be between thirteen and fifteen years old, with very light blond hair and a small scar over his left eye. Witnesses had spotted a teenager fitting this description riding away from the tip on a red bicycle at around the time of Allen’s disappearance.
Another man, aged in his early- to mid-twenties and standing around five-foot-eight with a medium build, was also seen running from the area at around the same time, and this individual was also sought for questioning.
Despite composite sketches of both suspects being circulated widely throughout Canberra, neither man was ever found, and the case subsequently went cold. In later years, it was speculated that Allen Redston could have been a victim of serial killer Derek Percy, also a suspect in the Wanda Beach murders and the disappearance of the Beaumont children. Though Percy was thought to be in Canberra at the time of the victim’s death, he denied killing the boy. Percy died in 2013.
To this day, more than half a century later, the murder of Allen Redston remains one of the capital city’s most notorious unsolved crimes.
Crime Immemorial 