By Seamus McGraw
(Continued)
Leonard Fraser detailed account of Ryan's murder
Natasha Ryan's disappearance at the tender age of 14 had certainly touched a nerve in the community of Rockhampton. It turned to horror when the details emerged about how Fraser had allegedly killed her. According to prosecutor's accounts, gleaned from Fraser's own boasts to a fellow inmate while in jail, her murder had been a singularly brutal one.
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| Natasha Ryan |
The way Fraser had described it, the rage inside him just exploded when she told him that he was the father of the child that was growing inside her. All the brutality, all the resentment, the loathing, the lust-all of it was behind his gnarled fist as it crashed into Natasha Ryan's 14-year-old skull. Her eyes went vacant, and her doe-like legs collapsed beneath her. He punched her over and over, knocking her to the ground, then yanked her to her feet by her arm and looked into her eyes. He saw pure fear. Her entire body emanated terror as he walked behind her, pushing her through the rutted fields of the old farm near Rockhampton, a small town in Queensland, Australia.
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| Leonard John Fraser |
There was no turning back now. He forced her to her knees in the slimy muck at the edge of an old lily pond, reached into his pocket, pulled out his knife and dragged it slowly across her throat. Using a backhoe that the farm's owner carelessly left where Fraser could find it, he dug a hole, dumped the girl's lifeless body in it, and covered it over. Now she was just another dead runaway, another troubled teenage girl who vanished into the Australian night never to be seen again.
It was a horrifying and compelling story told by a man who had enough of a history of violence to make it credible. The only problem was that it was not true.
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