This unknown killer or associates had been spooked by something and it hidden the body in the suitcase and moved it.

DNA in those child's bones match up with DNA from some unidentified bones found in New South Wales in twenty ten, and those bones were found in the Bilanglo State Forest.

I'm Andrew Rulis's Life and Crimes.

The recent search for a little lost boy called gus Lamont in the Upback area of South Australia reminds us of another awful thing that happened in South Australia more than a decade ago.

In fact, it's a crime that spanned several years from the time it happened until the time it was resolved.

And that is a case that some listeners will vaguely remember.

But it's the case of the body in the suitcase.

It's the case of a little missing girl whose remains turned up in an old, faded suitcase by the side of a highway at a tiny, little one horse town called Wanaka, which is right out there in what they call the Murray Malley, which is emptied out farming country where the communities have shrunk to nothing much more than a pair of road signs.

Just west of Winaka on the Karunda Highway, there's a patch of bush just before the big wheat paddocks start pushing up to the road, and it was there on the fifteenth of July twenty fifteen, so that's just over ten years ago that a curious Matra has turned up when something caught his eye.

This driver wasn't the first to notice the faded suitcase that had been abandoned under a bush.

Others had been there over previous weeks and seen it, but no one before had noticed what he saw.

Among the pile of clothes that were scattered around the old suitcase, which had burst open.

It was a human jawbone, a very small one.

When the police arrived, they found the rest of the skeleton was obviously a child's, almost certainly a girl's, judging from the clothes that were also in the case.

It took forensic scientists to confirm the police's working assumption that the dead child was a female age between thirty months and four years.

What investigators would not say at the time was whether they could extract a strong enough DNA sample from the bones to compare with samples already on record.

Obviously, they'd be looking at samples taken from offenders, especially sex offenders.

Their assumption, of course, was that it was highly possible the child was a victim of a sex offender and may well have been related to that sex offender.

Having DNA in such cases gives police a tool to eliminate or implicate any person of interest.

From the police point of view, anyone closely related to the child should be able to unlock the macabre mystery of what had happened to her.

South Australia's Major Crime Squad made an educated guess that the person they wanted was probably in their state, and quite likely within close range of where the body had been found.

They set up a task force called Task Force Malley, and it began its investigation by door knocking every house within twenty five kilometers of that scene of the little hamlet of Wanaka Warnaca permanent residents.

List of eight people.

At this point, the police were conscious of how many notorious murder cases in the past had been ruined from the start by slap dash investigations, and they were keen not to let that happen again, which.

Is a good thing.

The task for investigators did not reveal all they knew about what happened to the child because they had to keep some vital detail secret, something that only the killer, you and that time wasters did not know.

Police interview rooms produced some bizarre and detailed confessions, and not all of them are true.

It's a funny thing out in the world that people turn up at police stations and beg to confess and then make long, rambling confessions that are totally bogus.

And this is one of the problems of investigating notorious crimes.

The police knew that the victim was a little under a meter tall, tiny child, and had shoulder length fair hair, which would probably describe it about half the little girls you know, pre kindergarten kids in Australia.

They knew she had died extremely violently.

Certain factures suggested she was bashed to death.

It looked as if the unknown killer or someone close to the killer had covered the body in a pile of clothes, maybe in an empty room or a cupboard or a shed, and then left it for years, long enough to be reduced to a skeleton.

Then, probably sometime in twenty fifteen, they thought this unknown killer or associates had been spooked by something, and it hidden the body in the suitcase and moved it.

Whatever the reason, it seems that someone took the suitcase from an earlier hiding pace to Wanaka.

It was tempting to assume it must have been moved in a vehicle, but that did not tally with a fact that ended up being a red herring.

But the fact that at the time seemed a very strong clue, and that is this strange coincidence that in early twenty fifteen, between March and May sometimes in the tiny township of Warnaka, which is just a flyspeck on the map, two of the town's eight permanent residents, Denise Edwards and Monica Martin, were out walking their dogs when they saw something that stuck in their memory.

It was a man aged about sixty, they thought, walking briskly up the main street towards the highway.

The man was average height, lightly built, a neat looking with short gray hair.

He was a complete stranger to both women, who are locals, born and bred.

The most unusual thing about the stranger was that he had a large suitcase and was carrying it rather than wheeling it, as if it wasn't especially heavy.

In other words, if it had a big suitcase, be very heavy.

If it's full of clothes and shoes and books and things, they're shocking things.

But if it only had a handful of clothes and a skeleton.

Of a child, it would be very light.

And I think it's fair to say that in modern times, you say this century, you could drive around Australia and probably never see someone walking along a highway with a suitcase.

Carrying a suitcase, it's just not something people do much these days.

They had backpacks or whatever.

The stranger with the suitcase had been close enough to see both women, but he made no eye contact, that made no greeting, which was unusual in the country.

When these two women told the police about it, it did obviously seem like a really good clue.

If they find the man who had been carrying the suitcase and eliminate him, it would be a very good start on an investigation.

Meanwhile, of course, the forensic experts are back at the labs.

They're doing their best to extract usable DNA from these bones found at Gwanaka.

The other things they were looking at were the clothes that were in the case and a quilt, an unusual quilt that was with it.

The clothing was mostly cheap and mass produced, and most of it.

Was available all over Australia.

From dozens and dozens and hundreds of stores like Target and those sort of bargain stores.

The most distinctive garment, much more rare, really, was a.

Glittery, dark blue tutu.

There was also one pink slipper like shoe with a butterfly emblem, the sort of thing that people buy for little girls.

Police traced the likely origins of most of the fifty odd items of clothing they'd found, but five brand names took longer.

There was Sally Brand, there was miss x Australia, there was HF and GAFF, and there was another quite strange under the long complicated name.

But they found out that the blue tutu was sufficiently rare that only twenty eight of them had been sold in South Australia in the previous eight years.

But it was the quilt that was found in the suitcase or near the suitcase that seemed the most intriguing clue.

It was a one off.

It was custom made, homemade, apparently homemade from mostly hexagonal patches of bright material, but had been machine stitched, not hands sewn, so someone had made this now.

Of course, it could have been made by some relative of the child, grandmother or aunt or something, or just as likely it could have been picked up at an opshop or from some charity group.

Either way, investigators were very keen to know who thought they might recognize the quilt and tell them about it, even anonymously.

There was not much value in the suitcase itself.

It was the Lands brand.

Of suitcase, which is a budget.

Line about the cheapest line of suitcases sold by one of the big national luggage retail chains.

Police learned that the still gave away a large number of these Lands Of suitcases for as little as nine dollars each over the preceding years, so there were hundreds and hundreds of them scattered around the place and the chances of tracing one of them were very remote.

So as the investigation moved into its second month, so we're now getting very late in two thousand and fifteen, the unknown neat man who carried a suitcase in Wanaka early that year seemed to be the only lead.

Every day that he failed to come forward to clear himself seemed to confirm him as a potential suspect.

Fair enough, you would think that, but it's a lesson for all of us that you can't look to those conclusions because, as with so many promising leads, it turned out to be a dead end.

What actually happened was the breakthrough that investigators needed came with two calls made within days of each other in October twenty fifteen.

On the eighth of October, caller number twelve hundred and sixty seven, that's quite a few callers on this case, inform police that the mystery child could be called Candalise Kiara Pierce, who had in effect been missing with her mother, Carly Piers Stevenson since two thousand and eight, when they'd left their hometown of Alice Springs.

A second call, this is soon afterwards, number twelve hundred and seventy one, so it's only four calls later confirmed police interest in the missing mother and daughter that is Candalesse and no mother Carly, because it's it seemed that the pair's family and friends had not physically seen them since they'd left the Northern Territory back in two thousand and eight, so that's years before, seven years before a quick check showed a missing personal report have been filed in the territory in September two thousand and nine.

But that it had lapsed after Carly's.

Mother, Colleen Povey.

So we've got Candillies and her mother, Carli, and Carly's mother Colleen, all starting with the same sound.

So the little girl's grandmother, Colleen Povey had reported hearing from her daughter.

Now that was a genuine.

Report by her because she believed she had heard from her daughter.

Police were intrigued by the reasons for the family's misplaced confidence that the pair, the missing pair, was safe.

But now they had.

Names to work with, they could really focus on those two people, a little girl and her mother, both missing for years.

The search narrowed drastically.

The more the investigators looked, the more they didn't find about Carli and Candlease, which reenforced the growing suspicion that something had gone terribly wrong for them.

Medical records showed that little Candlease had received the usual vaccination shots at eighteen months old, but she had not reappeared in any database in Australia after that.

Significantly, she had never been enrolled in any kindergarten or school, which sort of tells you that she's missing gone missing.

Something happened back then before kindergarten age.

Now.

The South Australian Police called a media conference on the twenty first of October, this is months after the skeleton was found, and he announced the lead investigator that's detected, Superintendent There's Bray, announced that he had DNA evidence to back up what detected.

He has already felt in their bones that the child's remains in the suitcase were all that was left of Candalase, and by comparing the little girl's DNA with DNA obtained from bones found in far away rural New South Wales in twenty ten, they cleared up a second mystery.

So what they've said is we've just tested the bones from the suitcase that is certainly the small girl Candalise, who hasn't been seen since two thousand and eight.

And not only that, DNA in those child's bones match up with DNA from some unidentified bones found in New South Wales in twenty ten.

And those bones were found in the Bilanglo State Forest, which of course is notorious because it's where the several victims of the Terrible murderer Ivan Malatt had been found and these unidentified bones found in twenty ten at Blanglo State Forest had been called They had been named in the media as the Angel of Blanglow because I think there was a T shirt or something with the angel on it, but the police didn't know who the bones belonged to.

But now the suitcase bones had shared DNA with the Blanglow bones, and what the police had was a scenario where the mother and daughter had both been killed and disposed of a thousand kilometers apart in two states.

And once they'd established that, I think they were very keen to talk to the last people to see the mother and daughter alive, which person, which male person they would be thinking had been with Carli and candales Now it didn't take the police long to work out that they were probably looking for a called Daniel Hold them, that's h O l M hold them, not hold them as in car hold on, and to go back and work out what probably happened.

One of the reasons the police had such good DNA results was that they were able to obtain a tiny sample of Candalesse's blood from her medical records, so they weren't just looking at these old dry bones that have been kicked around out beside a road somewhere.

They were able once they knew who it was that they were probably looking for, that is Candalesse, they were able to access her medical records, and in the medical records was a tiny sample of her blood which gave them really good DNA results, and that led them to the match up on the database with her missing mother, Carli.

So the scenario is now doubly sinister to apparent murders young mother and then her daughter, bodies dumped one thousand kilometers apart.

The police go looking for their prime suspects.

They found a witness who had seen Candalise and her mother at Adelaide's Marion shopping center in November two thousand and eight.

Now, this witness, who was not a bad person, this witness who's helping police at this stage, photographed to Candlease in a pink dress identical to that found in the suitcase.

So that was a great piece of evidence for the police to get.

Police also obtained photographs of Candlease in a stroller a pusher with the handmade quill that had been found in the suitcase.

Each of these findes moved them closer to the people they wanted.

But even when Detective Superintendent des Bray was outlining the facts at his big media conference on twenty first of October in Adelaide, he already had a suspect in mind, and he knew that that suspect was in fact behind baths on unrelated charges.

Surprised surprise, Top.

Adelaide crime reporter Nigel Hunt, one of our colleagues here at News Corp, broke the story next day.

Nigel Hunt is one of the great South Australian news reporters of all time, and he was able to tell the world that police had identified a man who'd been seen with Carli and Candalies around the time they'd last been seen.

It turns out that Carly's family, that is, her mother and I think a grandmother, had falsely believed that the missing pair was still alive because they'd received text messages from Carl's mobile phone purporting to be from Carli.

Naturally, when you get a text message from somebody's mobile phone, you tend to think it's from them, and on one occasion, one of these texts had been a begging from money from home, which was sort of classic Carli behavior anyway, so they believed it.

They had obligingly placed money in her account, from which it was then withdrawn, so you know, they were, oh, yeah, Carli's out there somewhere, she needs some money.

We'll put some money in her account and it's been withdrawn.

Happy days.

She's alive somewhere now.

In the seven years from when Carli and Candalesse were last seen on the Stuart Highway just south of kober Pedy in November two thousand and eight until the suitcase bones were found at Wenaka in two thousand and fifteen, that's a seven year gap.

Ninety thousand dollars had been harvested from Carl's bank account because her bank account was replenished by her Center Link payments.

And this is all very Snowtown, very similar.

It says a lot about the private ingreed of some people that someone had killed a young mother, probably before her twenty first birthday, presumably to steal a benefits money, which of course is much like the Snowtown killers had around Adelaide a few years earlier.

And if killing Carly young mother, you know, twenty twenty one whatever wasn't sickening enough, the killer had then murdered her tiny child, It's hard to imagine a more cold blooded crime.

If one death wasn't premeditated, if it was a crime of passion or you know whatever, the other one surely must have been premeditated.

If there was one small mercy, it was that Carly's mother, Colleen, had died in twenty ten, not actually knowing that her daughter and granddaughter had been murdered so foully.

The killer's cruel trick of sending false messages on Carli's phone was a sort of an accidental kindness.

It had lulled her mother, her worried mother, into believing they were safe out there on the road somewhere, out there, on the road to nowhere.

Okay, for the police, having a prime suspect exactly where you wanted him, that he's behind bars on other charges was one thing, a good thing, but proving the case against him was another.

So the police worked out that the victims mother and daughter had visited Darwin, Alice Springs, Adelaide and Canberra at different times.

They appealed for people from those places and the roots between them to think about possible contact and to think about who was with them, who was the last to see the victims alive.

This is always the big question.

Police asked hotel and caravan park owners to check records for Carlly P.

Stevenson, and for landlords to check leases for the same more similar names.

They also appealed to the public to study photographs of Carly and Candales and scan their memories of whether they'd seen either of them.

So, while friends and family of Carly and Candales started an online appeal to bring home their remains and to give them a decent farewell, the police doggedly built their case against the man in jail.

We can now name this fellow openly in a way that we could not do back in twenty fifteen, because at that stage, of course he faced looming murder charges.

Daniel James Holdham.

He was then forty one.

In twenty fifteen, the police were able to establish that his mobile phone news put him at both crime scenes.

The mobile phone triangulation put him at both scenes.

Very very good evidence.

But there's a more sinister thing.

When the police looked through Holdham's belongings, they found a digital camera, and in digital camera they found a data card, and on the data card they found an image of Carly's body.

Holdham had killed his so called girlfriend by stomping at a death essentially a brutal, brutal murder, and he'd taken a trophy photograph and he kept it and the police found it.

This would seem to be overwhelming evidence, and so it proved to be.

He was arrested in jail and prison in Cessnock and he appeared by video link within days now.

Back when we were writing about this story back in twenty fifteen, we weren't naming him, and he's had charges to face.

But the reality is that he eventually worked his way through the court system, and in twenty and eighteen, just before the day before, two days before he's due to appear in a Supreme court to face double murder charges, he pladed guilty and that was locked up for a very long time.

You'd like to think that he has locked up with people that would take offense at his offenses, but we'll never know.

A view sort of postscripts to this story look back on without exploring the relationship between the victims and Holdham, one thing is overwhelmingly clear.

As with so much crime at every level, from the top end to the very bottom street crime, drugs are at the center of it in one way or another.

The dead rode only the truth, and the truth is that this little girl, Candeleise, even as a baby, was condemned from the time she was born, to suffer from the so called lifestyle choices of those around us, especially, but not only her mother.

Reporters who uncovered a photograph of Carli as a six year old, this is Carli, This is the mother of Candlease.

They found a photograph of Calie as a six year old, and reporters were struck by the similarity with Candleise, that the mother and daughter looked so similar it was hard to believe.

One reporter wrote that the child, with her strawberry blonde hair and angelic face gazing at the camera she blew up a balloon at a birthday party, would so soon be drifting to the dark side.

That birthday party snapshot was taken in nineteen ninety four.

Just fourteen years later, almost to the day, Carli would be dead, obviously at the hands of the reptile boyfriend who was heavily involved in the drug scene and had snared Carly into his world when she was a rebellious teenager with no real friends.

Police came to believe that carl had run up a twenty five thousand dollars drug dead in the months before she was murdered.

In fact, they believed that she fled Ella Springs with money meant to buy drugs to be smuggled from Adelaide to the Northern Territory along the Inland Highway.

Route, which was used.

By, among others, the convicted Falconio murderer Bradley John Murdoch, who of course has now left us.

He exited the building.

Tone Now, Carly's family knew a bit about drugs.

Police dole report us that Carl's grandmother, Connie Duffy.

All these names is Connie, There's Colleen, there's Carli and his candle.

There's a line here, four generations.

Police stile reporters that her grandmother, Connie Duffy, then eighty, was charged with possession of a commercial quantity of cannabis in twenty ten.

Carlie had lived with that old woman as a young teenager.

So she's had a fractured life and the dear old Grannie that she's living with is mixed up with growing dope.

A man who was charged along with missus Duffy claimed that Carlie had been doing drug runs between Adelaide and Darwin before her murder and had been heavily involved with Holdham, the man charged with her death.

This witness said that Carlie had insisted on taking baby Candlease with her when she left Ellice Springs, despite pleas from family members to leave the little girl with them.

Tragic, and of course, the family's fears were well founded.

When Carli's grandmother that would be the one called opened the missing girl's mail in late two thousand and eight and noticed her senti link payments had not been touched for a fortnight, she immediately suspected something was wrong and began looking for.

Her lost girls.

Sadly, however, that worried mother was persuaded by the bogus messages sent from Carly's phone.

She was persuaded that Carli and Candalesse were still alive and well and interstate, and so she was relieved, as she would be.

You were always looking for good news in those situations, and she went down and withdrew a missing persons report after only a few days.

So officially, Candalesse and her mother officially had only been missing a few days because Granny had pulled out the missing persons.

Report because she thought it was all going to be okay.

And meanwhile, as we know, Carly's bank card was used for more than a thousand transactions at fast food stores and service stations over many years.

It does tell us a little bit about how there's probably not enough checks and balances on social Security payments hard the know.

None of this surprised the retired detective who had led the investigation of the infamous Snowtown murders years before.

Retired Major Crime Chief Paul Schram told reporters that the Snowtown case had been made so hard because stolen identities meant that many of the dozen victims were never declared missing until much too late, if at all.

Before Snowtown, he said, police assumed that someone's Social Security payments were still being drawn, then that person was probably still a li Snowtown changed that, but it didn't save Carlie and Candales from bad company that eventually condemned them to death.

And that is all we can say about that sad story.

Thanks for listening.

Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia.

Our producer is Johnty Burton.

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