Murder of Clare Morrison | |
---|---|
Born | c. 1979 |
Died | 18 December 1992 |
Cause of death | Strangulation |
Body discovered | Bells Beach, Victoria |
Nationality | Australian |
Occupation | Student |
Known for | Victim of unsolved murder |
Clare Morrison was a 13-year-old Australian girl who was murdered on 18 December 1992 in Geelong, Victoria. [1] Her near-naked body [2] was discovered by surfers early morning on 19 December near Bells Beach, bashed, strangled and shark-bitten. As of 2022, the murder remains unsolved. [3]
Morrison was last seen on the evening of 18 December in Geelong Mall telling her friend that she would take the bus home to get money for Christmas shopping. Some witnesses also claimed that she "appeared to be drunk." [4] The only lead the local police obtained was from 18-year-old Shane McLaren who reported that she was seen getting into a blue Commodore with two men. However, several months later, the police discovered that the report was false and McLaren was booked under perjury. Since the passing of one other suspect, McLaren, a self-confessed ice addict, remains the only suspect in Morrison's murder. [5]
The police announced a A$50,000 reward in exchange for any information related to the murder. [5]
In December 2017, Morrison's brother Andrew, in an interview with Geelong Advertiser, said, "I’ve only just been made aware that on the night they (Clare and friends) were all hanging around town, about eight of them, before they’ve nicked off in one car and all went to Point Addis. That’s where they were all meeting, at the cliff that overlooks Bell Beach. Clare didn’t leave with them though. It was dark and, at this time of year with daylight savings, they must’ve been there past 9pm or 10pm." He added, "My sister was found early in the morning and she must have been in the water a long time for her to be attacked by sharks if that’s true, so I’m thinking they’ve just missed seeing her, it’s a very small window. One of these people, they could be the one who breaks the case right open." [6]
Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, was an American woman found murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on January 15, 1947. Her case became highly publicized owing to the gruesome nature of the crime, which included the mutilation of her corpse, which was bisected at the waist.
Jane Nartare Beaumont, Arnna Kathleen Beaumont and Grant Ellis Beaumont, collectively referred to as the Beaumont children, were three Australian siblings who disappeared from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide, South Australia, on 26 January 1966 in a suspected abduction and murder.
Lorenzen Vern-Gagne Wright was an American professional basketball player for 13 seasons in the National Basketball Association. He was drafted seventh overall in the 1996 NBA draft by the Los Angeles Clippers and played for the Atlanta Hawks, Memphis Grizzlies, Sacramento Kings, and Cleveland Cavaliers.
This is a timeline of major crimes in Australia.
The Wanda Beach Murders, also known simply as "Wanda", were the unsolved murders of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock at Wanda Beach near Cronulla in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, on 11 January 1965. The victims, both aged 15, were best friends and neighbours from the suburb of West Ryde, and their partially buried bodies were discovered the next day. The brutal nature of the slayings and the fact that they occurred on a deserted, windswept beach brought massive publicity to the case. By April 1966, police had interviewed some 7,000 people, making it the largest investigation in Australian history. It remains one of the most infamous unsolved Australian murder cases of the 1960s, and New South Wales' oldest unsolved homicide case.
Levi Bellfield is an English serial killer, sex offender, rapist, kidnapper, and burglar. He was found guilty on 25 February 2008 of the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, and sentenced to life imprisonment. On 23 June 2011, Bellfield was further found guilty of the murder of Milly Dowler. On both occasions, the judge imposed a whole life order, meaning that Bellfield will serve the sentence without the possibility of parole. Bellfield was the first prisoner in history to have received two whole life orders.
Lindsay Jo Rimer was a 13-year-old British girl from Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire who disappeared on the evening of 7 November 1994. The following year, her body was found in the Rochdale Canal outside the town; she had been strangled.
Peter Britton Tobin was a Scottish convicted serial killer and sex offender who served a whole life order at HM Prison Edinburgh for three murders committed between 1991 and 2006. Police also investigated Tobin over the deaths and disappearances of other young women and girls.
April Fabb was an English schoolgirl who disappeared on 8 April 1969, when aged 13, between the villages of Metton and Roughton in Norfolk, England, United Kingdom.
The murder of Muriel Drinkwater, also known as the Little Red Riding Hood murder, is an unsolved 1946 child murder case from Wales. Drinkwater, a 12-year-old schoolgirl, was raped and shot in the woods in Penllergaer, Swansea. It is one of the oldest active cold cases in the United Kingdom. In 2008, a DNA profile of the suspect was extracted from her clothes, possibly the oldest sample in the world to be successfully extracted in a murder investigation. In 2019, the DNA was used to rule out notorious Welsh murderer Harold Jones as a suspect.
The death of Helen Bailey is a British child murder case dating from 1975 in which an eight-year-old girl's death was originally classified by a coroner as being due to undetermined causes and potentially sourcing from an "accident or [a] practical joke gone wrong" despite the fact the child was found in a secluded area and that her jugular vein had been severed.
Alun Kyte, known as the Midlands Ripper, is an English double murderer, serial rapist, child rapist, paedophile and suspected serial killer. He was convicted in 2000 of the murders of two sex workers, 20-year-old Samo Paull and 30-year-old Tracey Turner, whom he killed in December 1993 and March 1994 respectively. After his conviction, investigators announced their suspicions that Kyte could have been behind a number of other unsolved murders of sex workers across Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. He was apprehended due to the ground-breaking investigations of a wider police enquiry named Operation Enigma, which was launched in 1996 in response to the murders of Paull, Turner and of a large number of other sex workers. Kyte was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years imprisonment for the murders of Paull and Turner.
The murder of Lisa Jane Hession is a notorious British unsolved murder which involved a sexually-motivated attack on a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Leigh, Greater Manchester, while she walked home from a party shortly before Christmas. On the evening 8 December 1984, Lisa Hession was found strangled to death in an alleyway only 200 yards from her home, with the murder occurring after a spate of sex attacks on women and girls in the area. Despite a reconstruction and appeal on Crimewatch in 2005 and the subsequent isolation of a partial profile of the killer's DNA, the murderer has not been apprehended.