Leonard John Fraser was born in Ingham, Queensland, on June 27, 1951. He had convictions for rape and assault from 1974 and served twenty years, and was released in 1996 to live in Rockhampton, where he worked as a lawnmower contractor.
In 1998 and 1999 four women and girls disappeared in the town: Beverley Leggo, Julie Turner, Sylvia Benedetti and Keyra Steinhardt, a nine-year-old snatched off the street on her way home from school in April 1999. A witness saw the Steinhardt abduction and gave the registration, and Fraser was arrested within days. He was convicted of her murder in 2000. The Queensland press called him the Rockhampton Rapist.
The other three were made out on very different material. In prison Fraser talked to another inmate, Allan Quinn, who was wearing a recording device for the police, and described the killings. Quinn was an unusually problematic witness, and the admissibility and reliability of what he produced was fought over at length. Fraser was convicted in 2003 of three further murders, with one further count left undecided.
He died of a heart attack at the Wolston Correctional Centre on January 1, 2007. The Queensland Court of Appeal had by then quashed one of the 2003 convictions. The case prompted Queensland to change the law on publishing details of pending trials, after a radio broadcast about it caused a mistrial.