Leonard John Fraser was convicted of killing a nine-year-old girl and three women in and around Rockhampton, a city on the coast of central Queensland, between 1998 and 1999. When a jury in Brisbane returned its verdicts in May 2003, ABC News reported that he had become the state's first convicted serial killer.
His case is remembered as much for what happened during his trial as for the verdicts. Fraser had been charged with murdering four people from the Rockhampton area. One of them was a girl who had disappeared at 14 in August 1998 and had been presumed dead for almost five years. Days into the trial, police found her alive, living in hiding with her boyfriend in Rockhampton. The murder count was dropped. The Crown went on with the other three counts, relying heavily on recordings made by a cellmate who had been working with police, and the jury convicted Fraser of two murders and one manslaughter. He died in custody less than four years later.
Fraser was born on June 27, 1951, in Ingham, Queensland, according to the findings of the Queensland State Coroner, Michael Barnes, who held the inquest into his death.
The coroner's findings set out his record in summary. He had an extensive criminal history, the coroner wrote, for offenses that included stealing, unlawful use of a motor vehicle and serious assault, with other charges, as well as the manslaughter and murders of 1998 and 1999. He spent more than 11 years in custody between 1985 and 1997 on one earlier conviction. At his death he had been a prisoner for 19 of the last 21 years of his life.
After Fraser died, his lawyer told ABC News that the justice system had failed him. Fraser had first been jailed in the 1970s, the lawyer said, and had been released without psychiatric support. The Queensland criminologist Paul Wilson questioned whether Fraser should have been released at all. "There's no way that the system inside jail could rehabilitate anybody like that," Wilson told the ABC.
By 1999 Fraser was living in Rockhampton. CBS News, which reported on the case for its program 48 Hours Mystery, described him as a meat cutter at a local slaughterhouse who had served prison time for assault, and said local people knew him as a violent loner. His health was already poor. In March 1999, the coroner found, he was admitted to Rockhampton Hospital with chest pain that was later diagnosed as a heart attack; his medical records also showed earlier heart and breathing problems.
Keyra Steinhardt was nine years old. She had a younger brother. On April 22, 1999, she was walking home from school alone, for only the second time, when she was taken. She was killed in North Rockhampton the same day, according to ABC News.
The people who knew her remembered her warmly. Detective Sergeant Darren Lees, who worked on the case, told the ABC ten years later that she had been "a beautiful young girl, she was a very bubbly girl with a great personality." Her mother told CBS News that by the time of the funeral, "Keyra was everyone's daughter."
Fraser was picked up by police the night Keyra disappeared, after he had been seen in her neighborhood, CBS News reported. He refused to confess at first. Detective Lees described him to CBS in blunt terms: "I don't think you'd really want to meet him in a dark alley, to be honest." Blood found in Fraser's car was later identified as Keyra's, and under pressure from police he led detectives to her body.
The State Coroner's findings record that Fraser's last term of imprisonment began on April 23, 1999, under a sentence of life imprisonment for murder. He was convicted of Keyra's murder, and by the time of his 2003 trial ABC News was reporting that he was serving an indefinite sentence for it.
Keyra's death led police to look at Fraser in connection with other disappearances in the Rockhampton area. CBS News reported that the blood found in his car prompted detectives to re-examine the cases of four other people who had gone missing in the same period. David Hickey, the homicide detective who led the task force, told CBS that Fraser "had the hallmarks of a serial killer."
Three of the missing were adult women. Julie Turner was 39. Beverly Leggo was 37. Sylvia Benedetti was 19. Some of their relatives spoke publicly during and after the trial. Julie Turner's daughter said the trial had changed the way she saw other people. Beverly Leggo's father said Fraser deserved to pay dearly for what he had done. Sylvia Benedetti's mother said after the sentencing that she would have liked to see him kept in prison until he was more than 100 years old.
The fourth missing person was a 14-year-old girl who had disappeared in Rockhampton in August 1998. Her family had held a memorial service for her.
For the women's cases, police had no bodies, no crime scenes and little evidence, CBS News reported. So they turned to an informer.
Allan John Quinn had a long record of fraud offenses in Queensland and New South Wales. He described himself to CBS News as "Australia's greatest con man," and said he had conned "lawyers, judges, doctors." He had known Fraser for a long time.
In July 1999, the prosecutor Paul Rutledge told the jury in 2003, Quinn was moved to the Moreton Bay Correctional Centre, where Fraser was being held. Over the next two years, the Crown said, Fraser told Quinn many details about the deaths of Julie Turner, Beverly Leggo and Sylvia Benedetti, though he was reluctant at first to talk about the missing girl. Quinn went to the police, and from then on he wore a concealed recording device. CBS News reported that Fraser, who wanted to be transferred to a psychiatric ward, was persuaded by Quinn that confessing would help him, and that Quinn arranged to share Fraser's cell.
Quinn later told the jury that he had given up the chance of early parole, and eight months of freedom, to keep working on Fraser and to try to learn what had happened to the missing girl. He told CBS that he had "got to do something good." Fraser drew Quinn several maps of where he said the girl was buried. Police searched, CBS reported, but found no grave.
In December 2000 Detective Senior Sergeant David Hickey went with Fraser to a site near Rockhampton. The trip was secretly recorded on video, and the jury later watched it. The tape showed Fraser leading Hickey and other officers to the area where Beverly Leggo's remains were then found, ABC News reported. CBS News reported that Fraser led police to the remains of all three women.
Hickey also interviewed Fraser in jail, on tape, in 2000 and 2001. In those interviews Fraser denied any part in the missing girl's disappearance and named several small-time criminals, suggesting she might have become involved with one of them. The jury also heard a recording in which Fraser claimed that the girl was alive. In other recorded conversations, according to Quinn's evidence, he said he had killed her.
Fraser's trial began in the Supreme Court of Queensland in Brisbane on March 31, 2003, before Justice Brian Ambrose. He was 50. He pleaded not guilty to four counts of murder: Julie Turner, Beverly Leggo, Sylvia Benedetti and the missing girl. The Crown alleged that the killings had taken place in the Rockhampton area between August 1998 and April 1999.
Rutledge opened by telling the jury that Fraser had confessed to a long-time prison acquaintance. The recordings Quinn had made would be played in court. Fraser was defended by Adrian Gundelach.
Partway through the trial, in April 2003, the hearing was adjourned. One of the people Fraser was charged with murdering had been found alive. Police acting on a tip found the missing girl, by then 18, hiding in her boyfriend's house in Rockhampton, almost five years after she had been reported missing. CBS News reported that an anonymous letter had told police she was alive, and that she had been hiding less than a mile from her mother's home.
The murder count was dropped. Rutledge told the court that Fraser was not guilty of her murder, CBS News reported. The girl later said she had been too scared to come out of hiding after a man was charged with her murder, because she thought she would be sent to prison. "I do not want to go to jail but I do deserve to be severely punished for what I've done," she told an Australian television program.
The trial resumed on Monday, April 14, 2003, on the three remaining counts. Justice Ambrose was concerned about the coverage of the discovery. He told the jury that "the media coverage is extremely unfortunate" and directed them to disregard reports in which "so-called experts" had commented on whether the Crown should rely on confessions and admissions. Only the jury, he reminded them, could weigh all the evidence in the context in which it had been given.
The defense argued that a man who had falsely admitted to killing the girl could not be believed about anything else. Rutledge later summed up that argument to CBS News in the same terms: if Fraser had falsely admitted to killing the girl, how could anything he said be relied on? His answer was that Fraser's recorded statements about the three women contained details that only the killer could have known. The young woman herself was subpoenaed and gave evidence that Fraser had not killed her; Rutledge told CBS that she had, in effect, testified on Fraser's behalf.
Quinn spent at least three days giving evidence. On April 17, 2003, he told the jury that Fraser had boasted to other inmates. "They're trying to get me on all these murders," he quoted Fraser as saying, sarcastically, "they won't be able to pin them on me." Quinn also testified that Fraser had confessed to killing the girl who had since been found alive, and had claimed that the weapon would never be found.
Under cross-examination the exchanges between Quinn and Gundelach became heated. Gundelach put Quinn's fraud convictions to him and suggested that he had helped the police in return for a reduced sentence. Quinn angrily denied it, ABC News reported, and repeated that he had given up early parole to keep working on the case.
The Crown closed its case on May 2, 2003. Rutledge reminded the jury of the close personal violence involved in the three deaths: Julie Turner had been strangled, Beverly Leggo had been beaten and strangled, and Sylvia Benedetti had been beaten. He told the jury that Fraser had tried to avoid responsibility by building a series of lies that showed his own cunning, manipulation and guilt. Justice Ambrose began his summing up after the Labour Day long weekend.
On May 9, 2003, after a trial of four and a half weeks and ten hours of deliberation, the jury found Fraser, then 51, guilty of the murders of Beverly Leggo and Sylvia Benedetti. On the count concerning Julie Turner, it returned a verdict of manslaughter. Fraser seemed calm as the verdicts were read, ABC News reported, and at one point sat back with his hands behind his head.
Outside the court, Julie Turner's daughter said the trial had affected every one of the victims' families. "I suppose I'm more aware of people now and what some people could be like," she said. Beverly Leggo's father said Fraser deserved to pay dearly, and added that he thought there were many cases in which the death penalty could be imposed.
Rutledge told Justice Ambrose that he would seek indefinite sentences for the two murders and a 30-year term for the manslaughter. Outside court he explained what an indefinite sentence meant. "Under an indefinite sentence an offender cannot be released from custody until they've gone back to the court after 20 years," he said. Gundelach said the defense would seek a psychiatric report before sentencing.
At the sentencing hearing in June 2003, Rutledge sought indefinite sentences on all three counts, with a 30-year minimum period should Fraser ever persuade the authorities that an indefinite term was no longer needed. He described Fraser as a sexual sadist and a "current and continuing threat" to any woman who crossed his path, and said he should stay in prison until he was no longer physically capable of doing harm.
On June 13, 2003, Justice Ambrose sentenced Fraser to three indefinite terms of imprisonment, for the murders of Beverly Leggo and Sylvia Benedetti and the manslaughter of Julie Turner. He was already serving an indefinite sentence for Keyra Steinhardt's murder. Relatives of the victims said the sentencing would help them find closure. Sylvia Benedetti's mother said she would have liked to see him kept in jail "till over 100 years old."
The young woman who had been found alive and her boyfriend faced their own cases. In May 2003 ABC News reported that police were taking action against both of them for making false representations that had caused a police investigation, and were preparing a brief for the Director of Public Prosecutions. Her boyfriend later served a 12-month jail term for perjury, after lying to a court about where she was, the Australian Associated Press reported in 2024; CBS News described it in 2005 as a one-year sentence for lying to police. In 2006 she was fined $1,000 and he was found guilty of causing a false police investigation, according to AAP. The couple later married.
Fraser served his sentences at the Wolston Correctional Centre, near Brisbane. In December 2006 he fell ill, and the State Coroner later traced the course of that illness through the prison's medical records.
On December 7, 2006, Fraser reported two days of central chest pain spreading to his left arm. An electrocardiogram could not be done, because the prison's machine was not working. Over the following days he was seen by several doctors, who considered a breathing complaint or a viral illness. On one visit no thermometer was available to take his temperature. By Christmas Day he could not keep food or fluids down.
On December 26, 2006, he was acutely unwell and was taken by ambulance to the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. Doctors there found that he had suffered a heart attack, treated him, and admitted him to the coronary care unit. He developed signs of heart failure and was moved to the hospital's secure unit on December 29. At about 3 a.m. on January 1, 2007, he was found not breathing. Attempts to revive him failed, and he was pronounced dead at 3:40 a.m.
An autopsy found two heart attacks, one about a week old and a more recent one, and a recent clot blocking an artery to the heart. The coroner recorded the cause of death as an acute heart attack due to coronary thrombosis and coronary artery disease, and found that he had died of natural causes.
Under Queensland's Coroners Act 2003, every death in custody must be the subject of an inquest. The State Coroner, Michael Barnes, announced the inquest in June 2010, ABC News reported, to examine the cause of death and whether Fraser had been given adequate treatment in the weeks before his heart attack. A pre-inquest conference was held on June 16, 2010, and the inquest itself on April 20, 2011.
Barnes delivered his findings on March 20, 2012. He found that no correctional officer or inmate had caused or contributed to Fraser's death, and that the care he received at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in his final week was adequate and appropriate. The medical care at Wolston, he found, had fallen short of the expected standard in some respects, including the missing electrocardiogram on December 7 and the lack of a thermometer on December 18. He did not find that those shortcomings had contributed to the death. Health care in Queensland prisons had since moved to Queensland Health, and the coroner noted improvements in equipment and record keeping. He made no recommendations and closed the inquest.
Keyra Steinhardt's death stayed with Rockhampton. Ten years later, Detective Sergeant Lees told ABC News that some residents were still affected, and praised the way the community had supported her family and one another. "Stuck together" was how he described it.
On April 22, 2014, the 15th anniversary of her death, a memorial service was held in Rockhampton. A police chaplain read a poem written by Keyra's teacher. Senior Sergeant Ben Carroll, a father of a nine-year-old himself, said he could not begin to imagine the family's grief. Keyra's mother released pink and purple balloons and thanked the police, the State Emergency Service and the community for the support they had given 15 years earlier.
In 2018 Keyra's mother spoke to ABC Capricornia about the years after the trial. She said she had carried a great deal of guilt, feeling she had not kept her daughter safe. About two years after Keyra's death she left home and spent around a decade largely alone, much of it playing video games, before returning to her son. The two later bought a house together, worked at the same service station and found common ground in gaming. Keyra's ashes are kept at the family home in a pink box. "I have my son back," her mother said.
The count for the girl who was found alive. Fraser was charged with her murder, and Quinn testified that Fraser had confessed to killing her and had drawn maps of a grave that police never found. She was alive, and the count was dropped in April 2003. The episode became the center of the defense case that Fraser's other admissions could not be trusted. The jury, after hearing that argument, convicted him on the three remaining counts. Why Fraser confessed to a killing that never happened was not established in court. CBS News quoted one view of his motive: "He wants to be known as a serial killer."
The Julie Turner verdict. Fraser was charged with her murder; the jury convicted him of manslaughter instead. Her death is the subject of a manslaughter conviction, not a murder conviction.
The sentences. ABC News reported in June 2003 that Fraser received three indefinite sentences, and in 2003 and 2007 that he was serving an indefinite sentence for Keyra Steinhardt's murder. The State Coroner's 2012 findings describe the sentences differently: life imprisonment for the Steinhardt murder, then, in 2003, 16 years for manslaughter and another life term for a second murder offense. ABC News in 2010 described him as serving four life sentences, and CBS News described indefinite sentences for all four deaths.
June 27, 1951: Leonard John Fraser born in Ingham, Queensland.
1970s: first jailed, according to his lawyer.
1985 to 1997: more than 11 years in custody on an earlier conviction.
August 1998: a 14-year-old girl disappears in Rockhampton; Fraser is later charged with her murder.
August 1998 to April 1999: period in which the Crown alleged Julie Turner, Beverly Leggo and Sylvia Benedetti were killed.
March 1999: Fraser admitted to Rockhampton Hospital with a heart attack.
April 22, 1999: Keyra Steinhardt, 9, is killed in North Rockhampton; Fraser is picked up by police that night.
April 23, 1999: his last term of imprisonment begins.
July 1999: Allan Quinn is moved to Moreton Bay Correctional Centre, where Fraser is held, and begins about two years of conversations with him, later recorded for police.
2000 and 2001: taped jail interviews with Detective Senior Sergeant David Hickey.
December 2000: secretly videotaped trip with police to a site near Rockhampton, where Beverly Leggo's remains are then found.
March 31, 2003: trial opens in the Supreme Court of Queensland, Brisbane; Fraser pleads not guilty to four counts of murder.
April 2003 (before April 14): the missing girl is found alive in Rockhampton; the trial is adjourned and that count is dropped.
April 14, 2003: trial resumes on three counts.
April 17, 2003: Allan Quinn's third consecutive day of evidence.
May 2, 2003: Crown closes its case.
May 9, 2003: guilty of the murders of Beverly Leggo and Sylvia Benedetti and the manslaughter of Julie Turner.
June 13, 2003: three indefinite sentences imposed by Justice Brian Ambrose.
2006: the young woman found alive is fined; her boyfriend is found guilty of causing a false police investigation.
December 26, 2006: Fraser taken from Wolston Correctional Centre to the Princess Alexandra Hospital.
January 1, 2007: Fraser dies in the hospital's secure unit, as the coroner recorded.
April 22, 2009: tenth anniversary of Keyra Steinhardt's death.
June 2010: State Coroner announces an inquest.
April 20, 2011: inquest held.
March 20, 2012: coroner finds death by natural causes.
April 22, 2014: memorial service for Keyra Steinhardt in Rockhampton.