Christine Sharrock & Marianne Schmidt

Case background and investigation

Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock were 15-year-old neighbours and close friends from West Ryde in Sydney. According to ABC News, Marianne lived with her mother and siblings, her father having died, and her mother was in hospital in January 1965. Christine had lost her father as a small child and lived with her grandmother and aunts. Marianne's family had migrated from West Germany, according to a local history feature published by Neighbourhood Media.

ABC News reports that the girls had planned a beach trip for January 10, 1965, which was put off because of rain. On the morning of January 11 they set out for Cronulla with four of Marianne's younger siblings. The younger children came home without them that evening, and Marianne's older brother Hans raised the alarm. The girls had walked on toward the quieter sandhills at Wanda Beach, north of Cronulla.

Their bodies were found the following day, partly buried in sand in the dunes. Both had been stabbed repeatedly, and ABC News reported that the injuries were so severe that relatives had difficulty identifying them. The murder weapons were never recovered, according to Wikipedia's account of the case.

The investigation that followed was one of the largest Sydney had seen, and ABC News reports that more than 7,000 people were interviewed. The detective who led the 1965 inquiry said at the time that he believed the killer was compulsive, and a senior NSW Police forensic officer told the ABC in 2012 that the girls were known to have last been seen with a teenage boy. A reward of 10,000 pounds, equivalent to 20,000 dollars after decimal currency was introduced, was offered and has never been increased, something Marianne's brother criticised publicly on the 60th anniversary in January 2025.

The case was reviewed again from 2007 by cold case detectives. In February 2012 the ABC reported that a bloodstain found on clothing worn by one of the girls had produced a weak male DNA profile, which police said was not strong enough to identify anyone with the technology then available. ABC News later reported that other stored samples were too degraded to test and that a semen sample listed in the records could not be located despite extensive searching.

Over the years several men convicted of other crimes have been discussed publicly as possible suspects, including Christopher Wilder, who died in the United States in 1984, and Derek Percy, who died in prison in Victoria in 2013. None of them was ever charged over the Wanda Beach deaths and no link has been proven. NSW Police told the ABC in January 2025 that the case is still open.