On April 20, 1978, Bill Thomas and his brother were hunting mushrooms in bushland beside Swamp Road, near Truro, about forty miles northeast of Adelaide, when they found what they took for a cow's leg bone. Two days later Thomas's wife, Valda, persuaded him to go back. The bone had a shoe attached, and inside the shoe were human skin and painted toenails. The remains were those of Veronica Knight, eighteen, who had vanished from an Adelaide street two days before Christmas 1976. With no obvious cause of death, police at first thought she might have gotten lost and died of thirst. A year later, on April 15, 1979, the skeleton of Sylvia Pittmann, sixteen, turned up about a mile away, and eleven days after that a search party found Connie Iordanides and Vickie Howell across the road. By then police were connecting the bodies to other young women who had gone missing in Adelaide in the same weeks.
The man responsible had been dead for more than two years. Christopher Robin Worrell, born on January 17, 1954, was twenty-three, good-looking and charismatic, and had been in prison for rape and for breaching a suspended sentence for armed robbery. There he met James William Miller, a laborer and drifter fourteen years older, serving time for breaking and entering. After their release they lived and worked together, Miller infatuated with Worrell. At night they cruised the city in Worrell's blue-and-white 1969 Chrysler Valiant station wagon looking for women Worrell could have sex with, Miller driving them to a secluded spot, waiting outside the car, and driving them home afterward.
Then, by Miller's account, the pickups turned to rape, and the rapes to killing. Veronica Knight was separated from a friend while shopping and accepted a ride on December 23, 1976. Tania Kenny, fifteen, had just hitchhiked into the city from Victor Harbor on January 2, 1977; she was killed in a house Miller's sister had been renting and buried at Wingfield. Juliet Mykyta, sixteen, was waiting at a bus stop after her part-time job on January 21 when Worrell offered her a lift. Sylvia Pittmann was waiting for a train at Adelaide station on February 6. Vickie Howell, twenty-six, was with Worrell at a post office the next day. Connie Iordanides, sixteen, also known as Connie Jordan, was offered a ride home on February 9 and became frightened when the car went the wrong way. Deborah Lamb, twenty, a new mother, was hitchhiking on West Terrace on February 12; at Port Gawler Miller came back from a walk to find Worrell pushing sand into a hole with his foot. All seven were strangled, and investigators strongly suspected Lamb had been buried alive.
A week later it stopped. On Saturday, February 19, 1977, Worrell and Miller were driving back to Adelaide from a weekend in Mount Gambier with Deborah Skuse, twenty-one, the former girlfriend of a man they knew from prison. Worrell was at the wheel in one of his black moods and, by one account, had been drinking. The Valiant left the road and rolled several times, in some accounts after a tire blew and in others as he swerved to avoid an oncoming car. Worrell and Skuse were killed. Miller broke his shoulder blade. A year to the day later, he placed a notice in the Adelaide Advertiser remembering Worrell's friendship, thoughtfulness and kindness.
The break came from Worrell's former girlfriend, Amelia. At his funeral she told Miller that Worrell had been suspected of having a blood clot on the brain, and Miller, grief-stricken, told her about Worrell's taste for killing and wondered whether the clot explained it. She kept it to herself, she said, because she had no proof and Worrell was dead; when she read about the Truro bodies she went to the police, and in May 1979 she collected a $30,000 reward. Brought in on May 23, 1979, Miller at first denied everything, then said she had done what he should have done and led detectives to three more bodies at Truro, Port Gawler and the Wingfield dump.
Worrell was never charged with anything. What is known of how the seven died comes from Miller, who told the story in his statements and in a 1984 ghostwritten memoir, Don't Call Me Killer, and who always cast himself as a frightened bystander who went for walks while Worrell killed. He first admitted that six of the women died where their bodies were found, then retracted it when he saw that it incriminated him. On March 12, 1980, a jury convicted him of six of the murders, all but Veronica Knight's, as a participant in a joint criminal enterprise, and he received six consecutive life terms. He died in prison of liver failure in October 2008, still insisting he had never killed anyone. The criminologist Paul Wilson suggested that had Worrell lived the series would have grown far worse, and Miller himself had told Amelia that it was getting worse, happening more often, and that it was perhaps a good thing Chris died.