Online detectives fear a serial killer is on the loose in paradise after linking dozens of attacks and murders around Byron Bay in northern NSW over the past 50 years.
Laura, 37, and Kayley, 28, – who wish to keep their surnames secret after chilling online threats – revealed on social media how they had escaped the clutches of a sinister predator.
But they have since been inundated by others who have suffered similar terrifying ordeals – as well as grieving relatives who fear their loved ones may have been murdered in possibly connected cases.
‘This is as far back to the 70s and as recent as last week,’ Laura told Daily Mail Australia.
‘People are telling me such alarming details of things that happened to them too, sexual assaults, stalking, drink spiking and even giving me names.’
The shocking revelations come as NSW State MLC Jeremy Buckingham this week called for a special inquiry into more than 60 women who were brutally murdered or disappeared on the NSW North Coast in unsolved cases.
Police and locals have long suspected a link between the cases, dotted between Newcastle and Byron, but limited resources have hampered their re-investigation.
Now Kayley from Melbourne has revealed her own experience when she was stalked by a stranger while holidaying in Byron in August this year
Kayley was so traumatised by a sinister man in gloves she started mapping unsolved murders
Two women have revealed chilling incidents form the Byron Bay area, 15 years apart, sparking a flood similar accounts from others
‘I was walking along the road in [nearby] Suffolk Park towards the beach when a car with a couple in the front slowed down,’ she told Daily Mail Australia.
‘The look of terror on their faces as they looked just past me made me turn around.
‘There was a man right behind me wearing a hat, sunglasses and gloves and I have never felt such pure evil in my life.
‘I don’t know what his intentions were for me – but I just had a gut feeling he wasn’t there to rob me.
‘It was just awful.’
Kayley immediately fled to the safety of the beach where her friends were waiting, but the sense that she had dodged a sinister fate has stayed with her.
‘I just knew something violent was about to happen,’ she added.
‘This was broad daylight on a busy street and I couldn’t let it go so I reported it to the police.’
But she said she endured an ‘exhausting experience’ of being bounced between the Byron Bay police station and her local one in Melbourne.
‘They both kept telling me I had to report at the other one and I just couldn’t get anywhere,’ she said.
Kayley vented her frustrations on Tiktok to warn others weeks before Mr Buckingham aired his concerns in NSW Parliament.
Both Jasmine Morris and Daneeka Nixon’s cases are unsolved
Thea Liddle’s belongings were found via a tip off for Theo’s case, her death remains a mystery
But since then, like Laura, she has also been inundated with dozens of messages making disturbing fresh allegations of similar attacks in recent decades.
‘There are brutal sexual assaults, people have escaped attempted kidnapping and I can see there are common similarities, ‘ she said.
‘I don’t know how to support these people. I’m trying to tell them to tell the police but some people are scared and it is very concerning.’
The fresh spotlight on the cold case murders also triggered Laura’s memory of her own terrifying experience when she hitchhiked with a friend on the 5km trip from Suffolk Park to their home in nearby Byron Bay in 2008.
A van stopped to give them a lift – but they found a chilling scene inside the vehicle.
‘When I climbed into the guy’s van, I could see a huge rusty knife on the front seat and so I moved it onto the floor,’ she told Daily Mail Australia.
‘I didn’t think much of it really and I asked him why he had the knife.’
But when the mysterious stranger in his 30s said it was because he was a chef, Laura immediately felt uneasy.
‘I knew that knife wasn’t a kitchen knife,’ she said. ‘It was huge and rusty.
‘[And when] I asked where he worked, he said he was unemployed.’
Laura and her friend immediately made a quick exit after pretending to the driver that they had reached their destination.
Laura took to Tiktok to share her close call and was shocked by the messages she then received
Theo Hayez’s disappearance in Byron remains a mystery despite extensive investigations
Laura warns there is a dark and dangerous underbelly to Byron Bay
She said she had almost forgotten about the encounter until this week’s revelations about the scores of unsolved murders in the area.
But Laura now believes she may also have cheated death, and has been sent scores of messages from others with fresh details of similar cases and incidents.
‘I have had people give me names of family members they think are involved,’ she says.
‘Dads, ex-partners and mates. Many are too scared to go to the police or think that the information they have is not enough to go on.
‘But Byron is not the place people think it is. There is a dark and dangerous underbelly.’
The high profile disappearance of backpacker Theo Hayez in May 2019 is still a mystery five years on.
The last known images of the Belgium national caught him on CCTV leaving local Byron nightclub Cheeky Monkeys where he was seen looking down at his phone walking down the road.
Despite an extensive search with Theo’s family flying in from Brussels to help, the case has never been solved.
But in an eerie twist, an anonymous tip in 2021, to a website set up to help find Hayez led a private investigator to a dilapidated squatter’s house in nearby Nimbin.
Inside they discovered personal belongs of Thea Liddle, a local woman who skeletal remains were uncovered almost a year earlier.
The circumstances around Liddle’s death remain a mystery.
As is the circumstances surrounding the death of Daneeka Nixon whose body was found in a dam in April 2006 several days after a rave party at The Channon.
Friends questioned how the 25-year-old who was a good swimmer and surfer could have drowned on the private property less than an hour from Byron and an autopsy could not determine the cause of death.
Teenager Jasmine Morris who lived in close by South Grafton is another of the dozens of unsolved cases plaguing the area.
The 19-year-old has been missing since Oct 6, 2009 after she told her mum she was going to the pub.
However an inquest December 2020 has heard that there are three persons of interest linked to her death and her case was referred to the NSW Police unsolved homicide squad for investigation.
But former Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham warns these cases could be just a few of the 67 possible murders that remain unsolved in the area which he said had an ‘alarming similarity’.
He has accused NSW Police of failing the families of the victims by not investigating the unsolved cases properly.
‘Some of these were individual incidents, there is no doubt about that. But many are linked, and there is a single perpetrator,’ he said.
‘It is impossible to think that there are 67 individual murderers in the area from the North Coast to the Tweed Heads who have escaped justice.
‘Someone has done these things repeatedly.’
