WHO CARES ABOUT THE MURDER OF A YOUNG GIRL?

Australian police negligence

The key suspect in one of the state's most baffling unsolved murders is in jail for a different murder. Anthony Apps, 31, executed a friend, Christopher Lamb, in 2003, shooting him in the back of the head at a Maclean farmhouse.

Today, The Sun-Herald can reveal that, despite being at the top of the police list of more than 100 "persons of interest" in the slaying of Lee Ellen Stace, Apps was never questioned about her murder. A shortage of local detectives on the North Coast at the time was allegedly so severe there was simply no one to do the job.

Yesterday, Lamb's elderly mother, Betty, said her 42-year-old son may have lived had Apps been pursued. "He should have been jailed well beforehand," Mrs Lamb said from her Yamba home. "He was always in trouble. When they picked him up he was already due to appear in court on an assault charge. "You always think that it's never going to happen to you. "But it did and we've sure had a trying time the last three-and-a-half years, that we haven't had our son."

Peter Stace told The Sun-Herald he was aware Apps had lived "up the road from us" when his 16-year-old daughter went missing in September 1997. "He was a bad bit of news and if he's behind bars, that's where he should be."

Stace was hitch-hiking in Yamba when last seen, her remains were found in a shallow beach grave about a month later. After waging a lone investigative battle for the past six years, Grafton detective Tony King handed his brief on the the Stace homicide to the NSW coroner's office last week. In it, he is understood to have identified Apps as Stace's most likely killer. Yet before King's arrival the case had been one of more than a dozen in the area allowed to languish for years due to a chronic shortage of investigators, confidential police files show.

Retired Coffs Harbour investigations manager Gary McEvoy said his former command had been staff-poor for so long, it had become a "parking lot" for unsolved crimes. The former senior sergeant said he spent three years filing "basically the same" monthly status report, because nothing ever changed.

Report here

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