Horrible Murder Of Denise

Denise McGregor was a twelve-year-old girl who lived in Pascoe Vale, a suburb in Melbourne, Australia. By all accounts, she was a normal schoolgirl and was sweet and well-liked within her neighborhood. However, her life was cut short much too soon.

On the night of the 20th of March 1978, Denise was walking home with her sister along Bell Street, a few blocks from her home. Wanting to buy a soft drink and an Easter egg, she turned back to a milk bar (a kind of small corner store) on the corner of Westgate and Anderson Streets around 200m (220 yards) away as her sister continued ahead, carrying food with her (fish and chips) which they had both bought for dinner and ate on the way. This was later found in Denise's stomach when her postmortem was performed. Around 7:30 pm, Denise made her purchase but never come back home.

The next morning around 11:30 issues, Country Roads Board workers were in the region when they found Denise’s body some 45km (28 miles) away from her last sighting along a country road called Mariang Road in Wallan East. The scene itself was horrible – she had been raped, dumped half-naked, and beaten very badly, so much so that the coroner who oversaw her postmortem stated the extent of her injuries were similar to those of plane crash victims.

She had a fractured skull caused by a single blow, which may have been what ultimately ended her life. Her killer had also effort to strangle her with her shoelaces at one point, although this attempt did not seem to be successful. There was no killing weapon ever found, but detectives guess a large rock may have been used at some point. The Easter egg and soft drink were never found either.

To this day, her killer has never been apprehended, unfortunately. A little after Denise was found, detectives broadcasted a dramatic re-enactment over three nights to produce leads. This re-enactment was argued about as it was supposedly too graphic for TV, but investigator Paul Delianis (now retired) stated that it was necessary to depict the gruesome reality of Denise’s death – besides, the re-enactment had been toned down from the real thing, and it seemed to have blown up poor Denise’s case in the media. I’m not sure if this re-enactment is available anywhere, though, but at some point, it involved Denise being beaten with a crowbar. Looking up videos on her case produces only a single relevant YouTube clip with a creepy thumbnail that looks like someone had intense plastic surgery to look like a wide-eyed Billy the Puppet ft. terrible clown makeup. I’m ashamed to admit the thumbnail crept the heck outta me, so I haven’t clicked on it (on the 19th of June I checked for the video again and it’s been deleted. The channel name was Alex Casanas if anybody wants to know.)

A $50,000 reward (250,000AUD / 200,00USD today) was put out for information on the 23rd of June 1978. I don’t know if this generated any good leads, however. A murderer/pedophile rapist named Robert Arthur Selby Lowe was a suspect for a while, but in 2001 DNA proof cleared him.

There isn’t much else available online about Denise’s case. I searched through online Australian archives for articles or reports on her case, but it didn’t produce much apart from information I already knew. If I can, I might have a look at some libraries for records, but I don’t know if told libraries will have Victorian records in them. There is, however, a document of her post-mortem inquiry available to those who can afford to see it.

Most detectives think she was kidnaped as opposed to going to Wallan (or a place along the way) on her own before being murdered. If she was kidnaped from near the milk bar she went to, Denise wouldn’t have been far from home/within her neighborhood – a kind of stupid place to abduct someone without being seen – so I think she was coaxed into going with her murderer as to not cause a fuss, since I see no details of eyewitness accounts that would indicate she was kidnapped. It would’ve been dark when she was abducted, though, so I’m not sure what to think about her abduction being witnessed. Twilight in Melbourne during March starts at 7 pm-ish.

I also think her killer knew her or stalked her to an extent. Since there aren’t any eyewitness statements relating to her getting kidnapped that I could find, my impression is that her killer stalked her to get used to her routine/ the area she lived in, before making a calculated move to avoid a fuss – or coaxed her into coming with them.

Here’s the route she took when she was walking to the milk bar. If these roads have not changed much since 1978, this would place her somewhere around 629 Bell Street (Google maps says it’s 200m away from the corner the milk bar was said to be at).

Assuming she was abducted from this area, here’s a possible route her murderer took – mainly through the Hume Freeway. I’ve chosen to end the route at Wallan East because most sources state she was dumped either “south of Wandong”, “12km south of Wandong” or “Mariang Road”/ “a country road” in Wallan. I cannot, for the life of me, find out where the hell Mariang Road is Edit: thank you to /u/ailurosly for suggesting that Mariang road is probably Merriang Road; I'm going to back and check the sources that say C729 was introduced in 1990 since Merriang Road is on the C729 stretch). It looks like it’s been renamed or demolished since my searches aren’t producing anything. Since the Country Roads Board was working on Mariang Road when they found Denise, I thought looking at their records could locate it. I managed to find a document of theirs from 1978 – it’s long so I only looked at what I thought was a relevant section (pg. 19 onwards of the pdf link details projects they undertook), but there’s no mention of Mariang Road. I’d look at the 1979 document, but I can’t find it, unfortunately. I also found a record of the agreements they had between 1963 and 1986, but again, you have to order it.

I don’t know much about roads in Melbourne, but I do know the Hume Freeway’s been around for a while. The route through C729 on Google Maps isn’t satisfactory, that highway stretch wasn’t available until 1999. Keep in mind the route I’m suggesting involves a stretch of the C272 highway towards the end – also introduced in 1991. Apologies for not dragging the route around and fixing it. I can’t do it without Google Maps screwing the entire route up and directing the destination to Sydney.

Recent articles from 2013 and 2015 indicate the police think her case is “highly solvable” and are still looking into things – but there’s no indication of new information, plus the “highly solvable” has been going on since 1998.

Either way, whoever her murderer is, it’s crazy that they got away with this. Denise was so young, and she was preyed upon by some terrible monster. It makes me very upset to see that she’s never gotten justice. I don’t think the murderer would still be alive at this point, but I do hope we could at least find out who they were, for poor Denise’s sake, and other young children her killer may have targeted. This kind of cold-blooded murder seems far from a one-time thing.

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