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- Death of a beauty queen
By ADRIENNE JONES
Sunday 25 March 2001
The image of 20-year-old Miss Australia hopeful Anne Zappelli is forever frozen as a young figure in a white dress walking briskly down a dimly lit country highway to her death.
She was raped and murdered somewhere either side of midnight on September 25, 1969, in a vacant block 50 metres from the road in the West Australian country town of Geraldton as she walked home alone from the local drive-in.
Until a deathbed confession to rape and murder 19 years after the event and a second inquest 31 years on, her death remained one of Australia's greatest mysteries. An initial inquest failed to identify who killed her, and, despite more than 9000 interviews, three police inquiries and endless public controversy, the crime remains, to this day, unsolved.
But tomorrow, after a sensational second inquest into her death, Anne Zappelli's family and friends hope their nightmare will end; that, after hearing eight days of evidence, WA Coroner Alastair Hope will tell them, finally, who killed her.
The apogee of years of campaigning by Rhonda Zappelli, Anne's younger sister, the new inquest turned the spotlight on repeated criticisms of police handling of investigations, and on two prime suspects never charged.
Former partners in petty crime, the late Norman Raisbeck and his accomplice, Thomas John Craig, fled Geraldton for South Australia the night of Anne Zappelli's murder. Like several other men in Geraldton at the time, they were key suspects, but were not charged - because both had alibis.
They fled, according to Thomas Craig, because they had committed burglaries in Geraldton, for which they were later extradited to WA and jailed.
Norman Raisbeck, however, on his 1988 deathbed in a South Australian hospital, confessed to two WA detectives interviewing him that he and Mr Craig were involved. He said he had raped Miss Zappelli, but blamed Mr Craig for her murder. Still no charges were laid, and when the Zappelli family found out about Mr Raisbeck's dying confession six years after his death, Thomas Craig was living a citizen's life with his wife and family in the seaside town of Bunbury.
Rhonda Zappelli began campaigning for a new inquest when the family also learned that critical forensic evidence had been misplaced or destroyed. Former state attorney-general Peter Foss took up their cause in May last year, and the inquest opened in late February with the now 60-year-old Thomas Craig in the public gallery.
He heard his late friend's deathbed confession read to the court, charging that Thomas Craig was obsessed with Miss Zappelli and angry that she had gone to the drive-in with a local police officer instead of going out with him. The two men had found her walking alone on the main street back to Geraldton from the drive-in and attacked her. Both men had raped her, but it was Mr Craig who had strangled her. Raisbeck said he had raped her first, and when he went back to the car, Mr Craig had Miss Zappelli in a headlock. Mr Craig had returned to the car with blood on his clothing and scratches on his face. They then fled to South Australia and agreed never to discuss what happened.
Former police internal investigations officer Michael O'Halloran confirmed in court that Miss Zappelli had died from strangulation, a fact police had kept secret and which only the killer could have known.
The Zappelli family's lawyer, Felicity Zempilas, told the court the evidence very strongly suggested Mr Craig and Mr Raisbeck were responsible for raping and murdering Anne Zappelli and that Mr Craig should be committed to stand trial in the Supreme Court.
But Mr Craig said he had never met Miss Zappelli, that it was just coincidence he and his friend Mr Raisbeck had left for South Australia at the time she went missing, and that Mr Raisbeck's statement was "completely false, everything in it".
In eight days of drama, the inquest brought together for the first time the full cast of people linked for decades in unresolved grief and collective suspicion.
Among them were key witnesses Graham Batt, the young constable who was with her at the drive-in that night with two other friends, and Geraldton schoolteacher Roy Ryan, who wanted to date her but missed out to the policeman.
The policeman told the inquest that he and Anne Zappelli had kissed at the drive-in but Miss Zappelli had been tired and suddenly decided to walk back to Geraldton. He and his friends spent hours looking for her when she didn't return, and reported her missing.
The schoolteacher was probably the last to see her alive, except for whoever killed her. Dating another girl, he had passed Miss Zappelli hurrying along the gravel verge of the road towards town with two men following her, and said he had always felt guilty about not stopping to help her.
The policeman and the schoolteacher bore the brunt of suspicion, especially in Geraldton, where relationships are close and murder is everyone's business.
Five years younger than Anne, Rhonda Zappelli was 15 when her sister was murdered. She can't remember much about her sister and says her memories are frozen in the amnesia of grief. She remembers Anne Zappelli was a role model she could never emulate, a pretty girl with a wicked sense of humor, but very shy.
But Rhonda Zappelli remembers more. She remembers when her sister died her family life shattered, with her distraught mother constantly sedated and her father, her two brothers and herself floundering, rudderless.
She remembers the iconisation of her sister into a kind of perpetual celluloid beauty queen, frozen forever in perfection.
"That's the worst thing about it, she's stuck as this Perspex kind of Miss Perfection, and she would be horrified to think she had 20 years and all there is is a photo of her with the bouquet and a tiara on."
She also remembers a quarrel between Anne and her mother about a new dress. Her sister's death robbed them both of the chance to make up.
"The thing that really bugs me is the fact that someone is taken away by someone else and you lose all that ... the humanity that's part of a normal relationship."
Whether the inquest has resolved the 30-year mystery of her sister's murder, it may fulfil one other mission for Anne Zappelli's family: to deconstruct the creation of yet another saintly icon from the memory of a stolen life. [1]
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1949 - 1969 (20 years)
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