source : the age
In the snow gum-heavy bush of NSW’s Southern Tablelands, a suitcase on the side of a gravel road attracts a certain amount of attention. Naturally, the conspicuous luggage piqued the interest of the two men who had pulled over about 60 kilometres south of Goulburn to take a quick break from their Sunday drive.
Curious about the bag’s contents, the pair opened the suitcase and moments later, distressed, called police; stuffed inside the suitcase, they thought, was a woman’s body.
Little over 18 hours later, what had quickly escalated into a murder investigation culminated in a welcome anticlimax for police: the suspected remains were not human, nor were they animal or of any living creature. The woman in the suitcase, further examination had revealed, was a life-like sex doll complete with hair and a nose piercing.
“Some good news here that we don’t have a suspicious death of a human on our hands,” Superintendent Linda Bradbury said on Monday.
Citing the doll’s human likeness, which included markings that resembled bruising and grazes, police had initially treated the lunchtime discovery as a probable murder.
“They are very realistic in the terms of looking like human remains, but we’ve confirmed by other means that they are not,” Bradbury said.
Conscious of the need to preserve any evidence at the crime scene and suspecting the remains were in a somewhat advanced state of decomposition, local officers at the scene enacted standard procedure for such a situation; specialist forensics officers were summoned to comb the roadside, and homicide squad detectives called in to begin unravelling a horrific crime.
“The members of the public did initially think that they’d come across human remains,” Bradbury said.
“They made the right decision, thought that it was something suspicious and gave us a call straight away.”
By Sunday night, police intelligence analysts were scouring the long list of active missing persons cases – of which there are more than 10,000 across NSW each year – to find a possible match for the nameless woman in the suitcase.
Active and unsolved missing persons cases – both short- and long-term – are often the first place police go in the search for answers when unidentified bodies or human remains turn up. At present, there are 283 in the state, dating back to 1961.
The search for a potential match was abruptly ended by the news from the Forensic Medicine laboratory in Lidcombe, where post-mortem examinations are undertaken, that all had not been as it seemed.
While heavy rainfall throughout Sunday, combined with the crime scene’s remote location, had prolonged the formal identification of the suitcase’s contents, Bradbury praised officers who she said followed procedure “to a tee”.
“I couldn’t be, actually, more proud of my team than I am,” Bradbury said when asked if police regretted the short-lived investigation.
Ensuring the integrity of the crime scene was preserved was crucial, Bradbury said.
“We don’t necessarily like to disturb crime scenes because that’s our links to making sure that offenders are brought before the court,” she said.
How long the suitcase was on the roadside and who had dumped it was part of the ongoing investigation, Bradbury said, as was whether it had been staged as part of a prank.
“We’ll still continue our inquiries to see how this has come about, of course, and see what we can find out from the remains, or the object,” she said.
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Daniel Lo Surdo is a breaking news reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. He previously helmed the national news live blog for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.
