http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0...549-952,00.htmlBalaclava Killer case reopened
Article from: Font size: Decrease Increase Email article: Email Print article: Print Submit comment: Submit comment By Greg Stolz
April 07, 2008 12:00am
POLICE have re-opened investigations into one of Australia's most baffling murder mysteries – the case of the Gold Coast's notorious Balaclava Killer.
The cold case is being thawed in the hope DNA evidence might solve the murder of one man and the rape of several women during a reign of terror on the Gold Coast and northern NSW in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Adventurer Ashley Coulston – now serving three life sentences for the "thrill kill' murders of three people in Melbourne – has previously been identified by police as a suspect in the Balaclava Killer/Balaclava Rapist case.
Coulston was dubbed "Captain Bathtub" in 1988 when he sailed his 2.4m boat, G'day 88, across a storm-tossed Tasman Sea to New Zealand.
He had set out from Port Stephens, north of Sydney, on Australia Day and was rescued by a tanker 46 days later north of New Zealand after enduring cyclonic seas.
His abandoned boat was found washed up on the New Zealand coast but Coulston repaired it and sailed back to Brisbane in 1989.
Three years later, he was making headlines of a different kind.
He was convicted of murdering three people after answering their share-house advertisement in a Melbourne newspaper.
Student teachers Kerryn Henstridge and Anne Smerdon, both 22, and Peter Dempsey, 27, were bound, gagged, moved to separate rooms and shot in the head.
Coulston was arrested after a botched attempt to abduct a couple in Melbourne. They tackled him as he was pulling plastic ties from his bag. He was still wearing a balaclava and toting a gun.
A security guard who came to their aid was shot in the hip. In Coulston's bag, police found handcuffs, a black balaclava, knife, cartridges, plastic cable and condoms.
Coulston was living in northern NSW when the Balaclava Rapist began terrorising women at gunpoint in the summer of 1979-80.
And he was living in Sydney in the early 1980s when several women were attacked by a balaclava-clad, gun-wielding man dubbed the Sutherland Rapist.
Evidence at the time indicated the Balaclava Rapist, Sutherland Rapist and Coulston had the same blood type.
In 1980, English migrant Jeffrey Parkinson, 33, and a female friend were abducted at Tweed Heads by a masked man.
Mr Parkinson grappled with the man and was shot dead. The victim's son, Garry, said last week his father had drawn blood from his attacker but a small blood sample had been lost by Tweed Heads police during a police station move.
He said if Coulston was responsible, the Melbourne murders could have been prevented had the blood sample been preserved.
"At least three people would be alive today and several women might not have been raped," he said.
"I've been after justice for 28 years for the man who killed my father."
Tweed Heads detectives refuse to say if new evidence has come to light.
The detective heading the investigation, Brett Edmonds, said: "With any unsolved murder, the investigation is never really closed."