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Rarely can we pinpoint a time when our world changed but on January 12, 1976, when a little girl was stolen from her Melbourne home, it altered for the worse.
Eloise Worledge.
Eloise Worledge, eight, was taken from a bedroom in her family’s Beaumaris home and was never seen again.
From that day on, parents locked the back door and kids were no longer encouraged to roam on their bikes until dinner time.
We look back and think it was the time when we lost our innocence. Turns out we weren’t looking in the right places.
Just two streets away from Eloise’s four-bedroom family home was her school, Beaumaris Primary, where she was entering year four. Her parents could not know they were sending her to a place that kept dark secrets for decades.
Eloise’s mother Patsy Worledge.Credit: The Age
During the 1960s and ’70s, four paedophile teachers – Gary Arthur Mitchell, Grahame Harold Steele, David Ernest Keith MacGregor and one who cannot be named for legal reasons – molested between 50 and 100 students, a fact unknown to the Eloise Worledge investigators.
Police looked at 10 suspect categories: sex offenders in Melbourne’s south-east, sex offenders within Australia involved in child abductions or who broke into houses, known local prowlers, local service providers, babysitters, tradesmen, door-to-door salesmen, government agencies with contact with the Worledges, and staff and parents at Beaumaris Primary School.
Senior staff were told of allegations against two of the teachers, but the concerns were not passed on to police. If they had, the investigation would have taken an entirely different course.
That no teacher was ever a suspect is backed up in the 2001 police review of the Worledge case. “[The original detectives] were unsuccessful in uncovering any evidence or creating new leads that could assist the investigation.”
What is certain is that if police had known her school was riddled with child molesters they would have been on the shortlist of suspects.
In 1975 Eloise was in grade three. In the same year MacGregor was a class, sports and guitar teacher, placing him in contact with a wide range of students. He left the school at the end of 1976 – the year Eloise disappeared. This, of course, does not mean he was involved in any way with the abduction, only that important information was concealed from police.
What happened at Beaumaris Primary is now central to an inquiry headed by Kathleen Foley, SC, that began hearings this week. And while it is not a criminal probe, perhaps some of the witnesses might know if Eloise was in any way connected with the teachers.
A local resident told us a friend of Eloise’s had said the missing girl confided to her there was a teacher “who was creeping her out”.
Brian was a student at the school at the time, and a friend of Eloise.
“David MacGregor, my grade three teacher. I remember him being quite a good teacher but that he was a disciplinarian. I was usually a pretty good kid who, to this day, is a bit of a rule follower, but I remember one day getting in trouble and being whacked on the bottom by him with a timber metre ruler that he kept near his desk.
Eloise’s bedroom.Credit: Michael Rayner
“I also remember him being quite open to the kids in class that he was a nudist – a very strange and inappropriate thing to say to a group of eight and nine-year-olds.
“I was also a good friend of Eloise Worledge. I was eight at the time when Eloise went missing, and it still is a very upsetting part of my childhood.
“My sister and I used to grab onto the frame of our beds at night and make sure that our bedroom windows were shut even on hot summer nights because we were so frightened that we would be abducted like we thought Eloise had been.
“I remember having play dates at her house and dancing to songs in her side yard. She was a happy, trusting, kind and gregarious kid.
‘I remember having play dates at her house and dancing to songs in her side yard. She was a happy, trusting, kind and gregarious kid.’
“The school administration building burnt down around 1996, I think, so I imagine there’s not too many old records. I always thought that fire was odd at the time and have wondered if it was arson to destroy records and potential evidence, or a fire started by a victim in anger.
“Given what happened with the three teachers who have been named, I wonder if there is a connection to Eloise’s disappearance. Was she abused by one of these child abusers, did she see something at school or somewhere else, did something happen to her brother Blake and did she stand up for him?
“That’s all speculation and, unfortunately, we can’t ask Blake because he died around 1997 in a tragic road accident.”
So what do we know of the case?
Eloise was the eldest of three with a sister, Anna, and a brother, Blake, to Patsy and Lindsay Worledge. Bright and creative, she was becoming more outgoing through Brownies.
Behind closed doors, her family was falling apart. Patsy was outgoing and popular, while Lindsay was razor sharp with a razor tongue to match. “He was often described as thinking of himself as intellectually superior,” a 2001 police review concluded.
Four months before the abduction, Patsy had asked for a separation.
Eloise’s father, Lindsay Worledge.Credit: The Age
Lindsay agreed to leave by his wife’s 33rd birthday on January 10 – two days before Eloise disappeared. He reneged on the deal, adding to the tension. The parents had told the children their father was preparing to move out.
On Monday, January 12, Lindsay had a speaking engagement, went to lunch, returned briefly to work and, as it was a summer break, headed to the pub where he shared a carafe of wine and a jug of beer with colleagues.
He went home and played Monopoly with the children then returned to drinking, polishing off a couple of scotches, a bottle of wine with dinner and then sat drinking port until he fell asleep in front of the television.
When Patsy came home from her jazz ballet class, the fly wire door was unlocked. A police report found “the front door was unlocked and wide open. It was not an overly hot night.”
Patsy told detectives, the passage light was left on for the children, then switched off by the last parent to bed. On this night police found, “Lindsay Worledge did not turn off the passageway light”.
At 4.45am, Patsy left her bedroom to go to the bathroom and noticed the passage light was off leading police to believe Eloise was grabbed in the early hours.
Scott Street, Beaumaris, where Eloise Worledge was taken from her home.Credit: Shannon Morris
At 2am, Daphne Owen-Smith, from 66 Scott Street, (150 metres from the Worledges) heard the cry of a child and the sound of a car door slamming. Another neighbour heard a car door slam around the same time.
Eloise’s window was open, the flywire cut and rolled up from the inside. It was a wind out window opening 38 centimetres, which meant it would be difficult for an adult to clamber out from the inside.
Police dismissed the theory that an opportunistic child molester walked into a strange house, grabbed Eloise, spent time setting the scene as if the victim were grabbed through the open window, then walked past sleeping parents to escape. Police concluded, “On balance, based on all the information on-hand, it appeared more likely that the person or persons responsible for Eloise Worledge’s disappearance had affected their entry and exit through a point other than her bedroom window.”
Original investigator, detective senior sergeant Jan Lierse, told me, “I believe she was taken out the front door, which had been left unlocked.”
Detectives believed it was someone the child knew, and soon the main suspect was Lindsay Worledge, with the theory he wanted to punish Patsy for ending their marriage.
While Patsy grieved publicly, Lindsay appeared cold and aloof. But if we learnt anything from the disastrous case of baby Azaria Chamberlain (taken by a dingo in 1980) where her mother, the sometimes expressionless Lindy, was blamed and wrongly convicted of murder – people mourn in different ways.
Within days Lindsay Worledge was interviewed as a suspect. More than 20 years later he agreed to a lie detector test that proved inconclusive.
More than 25 years after Eloise disappeared a police review found, “At the conclusion of investigations into Lindsay Worledge, no evidence in regard to his involvement has been uncovered.”
Lindsay died in 2017 and Patsy in 2022, neither knowing the truth.
There are many things we don’t know. But what we do know is that if the authorities at the school had passed on concerns about the behaviour of some of the teachers at Eloise’s school, the investigators would have asked: Was the little girl ever in their classes? Had any of the teachers been to the Worledge home? Could a trusting kid have been lured into the night by an authority figure such as a teacher?
It is a long shot but perhaps some of the witnesses at the Foley inquiry, while telling their own story, may give voice to the little girl who lost hers when she was abducted 47 years ago.
Naked City – the book. Pan Macmillan. Available October 31. What the critics say: (He is a) ”Bald-headed alien”. Convicted drug trafficker Tony Mokbel.
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