By Seamus McGraw
Natasha's plan worked too well
The charade worked. In fact, it worked too well. Two years after she went missing, her parents, Robert and Jenny, gave up hope that she would ever reappear. Jenny Ryan in particular "couldn't accept that her daughter would not have made some contact to say I'm safe for Christmas," LoMonoco said. Rather than believe that their princess was, like other teen runaways, possibly trading sex for smack at Sydney's infamous King's Cross or the equally seamy Valley in Brisbane, the Ryans concluded that Natasha must be dead. Perhaps even savagely murdered. "The police ... became involved in... a murder investigation of this runaway," LoMonoco said, and for the sake of closure, the Ryans held a funeral service for their lost daughter.
In the meantime, police found a suspect in her murder.
With all the mayhem on his rap sheet, it was of course, only natural that authorities believed Fraser when he claimed to have killed Natasha, said prosecutor Paul Rutledge. A lifelong criminal, the 51-year-old sociopath was out of prison only a few months after serving 12 years for rape when, in April, 1999, a horrified neighbor witnessed him murdering a 9-year-old girl on a Rockhampton street.
"A woman across the street saw that attack and called the police by which time Fraser had gone. But... as luck would have it a prison officer was driving to work late on that afternoon saw Fraser in the area and as soon as police heard thatthey tracked him down," Rutledge said. What's more, when cops burst into Fraser's apartment and searched his blood-spattered car, they found evidence linking him to at least three other murders, each singularly vicious and involving women. In one instance, according to Rutledge, Fraser strangled one of his victims with her own panties. Police also found several locks of women's hair — none of it matching the known victims — all carefully braided in pigtails and held together with rubber bands.
"You can draw your own conclusions from that," Rutledge told Stuff in a 2003 interview. The conclusion Queensland authorities drew was that Fraser was responsible for killing any number of women, perhaps even Natasha Ryan.
The fact that Natasha's body never turned up didn't trouble prosecutors. In recounting other homicides to the jailhouse snitch, Fraser always included false or misleading information. "He called it a gig trap," Rutledge told the magazine.
Convinced that sooner or later they'd find the body, and confidant that they would win a conviction even without it, Rutledge and his team charged Fraser with the murder of Natasha Ryan.
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