In April, 1999, schoolgirl Keyra Steinhardt was bashed, raped and murdered in a brazen daylight attack as she walked home from school in the central Queensland town of Rockhampton. The disappearance of Keyra made international headlines as the community and law enforcement officers hunted for the nine-year-old. No one uttered it out loud, but everyone knew they were searching for a body.
When her killer, Leonard Fraser, finally led them to her two weeks later, it was the catalyst that went on to expose him as a murderous sexual predator. In 2000 he was found guilty of Keyra's murder. In 2003, he was tried in the Bribane Supreme Court for the murders of three women and a teenage girl in Rockhampton between December 1998 and April 1999. During the trial teenager Natasha Ryan was found alive hiding in the cupboard of her boyfriend's Rockhampton home - her emergence presented an intriguing twist in the story of this brutal and cunning killer.He was convicted for the murder of Beverley Leggo and Sylvia Benedetti and the manslaughter of Julie Dawn Turner.
Fraser is a suspect in up to eight unsolved disappearances of women in Queensland and NSW, although no remains have been found. He was serving four indefinite life sentences until his death on New Year's Day 2007 when he died of a heart attack in a Brisbane prison hospital.
