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One of the strangest things in true crime is when two genuinely cruel, dangerous people somehow manage to find each other. It’s hard enough to wrap your mind around a single person having the darkest, most depraved desires & the ability to act on them, let alone the fact that they’re able to meet a like-minded partner.
The relationship likely develops in the same way any relationship does; through attraction, trust, shared secrets & gradually testing boundaries. Over time, one person reveals something disturbing & realizes that the other person isn’t judging them.
Eventually, the things they’re willing to admit become more & more extreme & over time, ideas that were once only fantasies are encouraged, normalized & eventually put into action. Violence then becomes their shared secret & the central thing that holds the relationship together.
Today we’re heading back 39 years to Friday afternoon, November 27, 1987 when 12-year-old Sian Kingi waved goodbye to her mom at a local shopping center in Noosa, Queensland, Australia. Before she pedaled away on her bright yellow bike, she told her that she would see her at home soon. Tragically, Sian never made it home & this was the last time Lynda Kingi ever saw her precious daughter.
Sian’s case forced an entire nation to confront a terrifying reality: that danger can lurk in places where people feel the safest & trust can dissolve by those with horrible intentions.
It was late November 1987, only four weeks from Christmas when 12-year-old Sian Kingi said goodbye to her classmates & friends from Sunshine Beach State School where she was a year 7 student. She was looking forward to another fun weekend in her hometown of Noosa on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. She lived amongst stunning beaches, world-class surfing & gorgeous national parks all nestled along the Coral Sea; a place where tourists flocked to.
Sian knew her neighborhood well & she felt comfortable biking around by herself since Noosa was always known as a safe community.
Sian was born in New Zealand on December 16, 1974 to parents Lynda & Barry Kingi. Barry was of Māori descent. The Māori are the indigenous Polynesian people of mainland New Zealand. They descended from East Polynesian settlers, arriving in New Zealand on canoe voyages sometime between 1320-1350.
She left that day as she always did, on her bright yellow 10-speed bike. She was heading toward a fabric shop at the Noosa Fair Shopping Centre to meet her mom so they could pick out the perfect pattern for a new dress since Sian had been invited to a party that was quickly approaching.
When they finished at about 4:30 pm, they began making their short journey home together with Lynda walking while Sian rode her bike. Although they would have normally stayed together, Sian decided she wanted to take a shortcut through nearby Pinnaroo Park while her mom walked around it.
Lynda never hesitated to allow her daughter to go off on her own & when she got back home about 15 minutes later, she expected her daughter to have easily beat her there. When she went inside & saw that Sian wasn’t there, she wasn’t worried since she just assumed that her daughter had likely bumped into some friends on her ride home.
However, as the hours continued to tick by & Sian still hadn’t come home, Lynda’s concern began to grow. She called around to her daughter’s friends & volleyball teammates, but no one had seen Sian since school.
As soon as Barry came home from work, they went out to retrace the route she was known to take home. At 8 pm, they came across her yellow 10-speed bike unsecured, leaning against a tree in the park. Since it had been Sian’s prize possession & she was a responsible girl, they knew she would have never willingly left it there. After loading her bike into their car, they went straight to the Noosa Heads police station with a photo of their daughter to report her missing.
Those who were close to Sian each described her in the same way, sweet, gentle & innocent. She was a strikingly beautiful young girl with an equally beautiful heart. She was athletic & loved to play netball with her friends. Being 5’6” at only 12-years-old, put her at an advantage to the girls she played with.
As officers scoured the park for any sign of Sian, darkness had fallen. A missing person’s notice was also dispatched to the media.
The following day, hundreds of volunteers, State Emergency Service officials & police officers combed through Pinnaroo Park & the surrounding bushland.
As they spoke with area residents who had spent Friday near the park, several people reported seeing a dirty white 1973 HQ Holden Kingswood station wagon that was cruising around the area that afternoon. They indicated that the male driver looked unkempt while the passenger was a heavy-set woman with a head of short bleach blond hair, each of which were acting suspiciously & loitering around.
Of the 17,000 HQ Holden Kingswood station wagons registered in Queensland, 10,000 were white, making it very difficult to track down the specific car that was potentially involved in the case.
Tragically, six days after Sian rode off on her bike, a fruit picker was in what is now known as Tewantin National Park near Mount Tinbeerwah, an area about 9 miles/15 km from where Sian was last seen.
As the man walked through the park on Thursday, December 3, 1987, he first noticed a foul odor. Knowing that Sian was missing, he began looking under tossed branches, which is when he found the young girl’s remains lying along the bank of a dry creek bed.
Sian wore her blue & white vertical striped school uniform dress that was pulled over her waist while her pants lay nearby. She still wore her pink socks & gym shoes while her green nylon school backpack was lying about 30 feet (10 meters) into the brush.
After the scene was secured, detectives were tasked with delivering the devastating news to Barry & Lynda Kingi while the partially decomposed remains were confirmed to be their daughter.
According to an autopsy, after she had been repeatedly raped, Sian had been stabbed twelve times in the chest, three of which pierced her heart. She’d been strangled & her neck had been slashed twice, one wound was so severe that it went as deep as her spine while one of her hands had been nearly sliced off.
On Tuesday, December 8, family, friends, teachers & police gathered together to honor & remember Sian in a small service held outside on the Kingi property.
As word of the young girl’s brutal murder reached the public, the community came together, determined to find her killer. A $10,000 reward was offered for any information that could lead to an arrest. Over 700 tips came in while police worked around-the-clock to check into each & every one in hopes of finding the person or people responsible.
On Sunday, November 29, two days after Sian went missing, a woman named Elizabeth Young came forward to make a statement to investigators. She & her boyfriend, Noosa surfing legend, Bill Wallace, had been sunbathing at Castaway Creek on Friday afternoon eight minutes away from Pinanaroo Park. Elizabeth noticed a man in a white Holden station wagon who made her feel very unsettled after he gave her a cold, intense stare.
Bill came down to the station the following morning to provide his statement. At about 5pm on Friday, he noticed that the male driver of the station wagon had been acting suspiciously in the parking lot about 90 minutes before Sian was kidnapped. When the man in question noticed that he was watching him, he sped away in his car.
Since Bill’s car had been previously broken into in this parking lot, he jotted the number down from the Victoria license plates on a scrap of paper & stuck it to a clip attached to his dashboard just in case. It was a black & white plate with the number LLE 429.
When detectives entered the number into the system, they learned that the car was registered to a woman named Valmae Fay Beck. The address associated with the car’s registration belonged an elderly man, Roland Watts. Roland was Valmae’s father-in-law, her husband, Barrie Watts’ adoptive father who lived in Mooroolbark, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in the southeastern portion of the country.
Looking into her background, authorities saw that Valmae Beck had a criminal record in Western Australia for offenses that ranged from petty theft to armed robbery. Both Valmae & her husband, Barrie Watts, had outstanding warrants that were issued by Western Australian police, Barrie for armed robbery, Valmae for breaking & entering.
They learned that Barrie & Valmae had only just relocated to Queensland from Perth in October, only weeks before Sian’s abduction. When investigators spoke with Barrie’s adopted father in Melbourne, they learned that the couple had traded in their small sedan on their way to Queensland for the white station wagon in hopes of evading the police.
44-year-old Valmae had six children, all of which were either wards of the state or were being cared for by their fathers. She had been divorced twice & was currently married to her third husband, Barrie Watts, a career criminal who was ten years her junior. At the time of Sian’s abduction & murder, they were each out on parole.
Seeing the coverage of Sian’s case on the nightly news, along with the description of the white station wagon that was potentially involved, a 24-year-old nurse named Nicole came forward. She told investigators that she had an interaction with two people driving this car on November 10, 1987, about two weeks before Sian vanished.
When Nicole left her shift as a nurse at Ipswich Hospital by herself at around midnight, she crossed Chelmsford Avenue towards her parked car & noticed a station wagon that was parked along a median strip. The car’s lights were on & she immediately felt unsettled by its presence since it was so late.
Ipswich is in South East Queensland, about 2 hours south of Noosa where Sian was abducted. As Nicole climbed into her car, the white station wagon came barreling down the hill to prevent her from pulling out. She saw that a woman with frizzy, blond hair was driving while a man sat in the backseat.
As the car came to a stop, the man climbed out holding a map & approached Nicole, asking her for directions. He wanted her to physically point out which direction they needed to go, something she believed was a ploy to lure her out of her car. As she stepped out, she positioned her door between them as she explained that they were on the wrong side of town. From where she stood, she could see ropes & burlap sacks in the backseat of their car.
As the man began slowly edging closer, she felt her body screaming that something wasn’t right. She could see that he was just about her height & he had empty, black eyes. At that moment, a man walked to the only other car in the lot & Nicole took her opportunity to jump back into her car & speed off.
When Ipswich police officers showed Nicole a photo of Barrie Watts & Valmae Beck, she immediately identified them as the couple she’d interacted with.
Another woman came forward to tell investigators about an interaction she had with a similar couple driving a similar car on November 11, 1987, only one day after Nicole’s interaction with Barrie & Valmae. She was a Target employee who was in the parking lot of a store in Booval near Ipswich when the couple tried to abduct her at knifepoint.
While Valmae Beck asked her for directions, Barrie Watts pulled a knife & tried to drag her into their car. She wrestled the knife from Barrie, cutting his hand in the process while Valmae tried to drag her into the car by her hair. Thankfully, she was able to get away.
Not only did she identify them by their mugshots, but investigators were able to match the fingerprints left behind on her car to Barrie Watts.
Investigators eventually came to learn that Barrie & Valmae had been growing frustrated by their failed abduction attempts in Ipswich which is why they decided to head north to the Sunshine Coast. Here, they began scoping out Noosa, frequently loitering along local school routes for their victims.
After their car’s description was released nationally, an officer in Lowood, Queensland, a 2 ½ hour drive south of Noosa where Sian had been abducted, recognized the car & contacted Noosa detectives. As detectives drove around the area, they spoke with a telecom technician who was installing a phone in the area who had also noticed the car & led officers to the house where he had seen it parked.
Two weeks after Sian was abducted, officers arrived at Barrie & Valmae’s renal home in Lowood on Friday, December 11, 1987. Finding it empty, they spoke with the landlord who informed them that the couple had suddenly moved out one week earlier on December 4. This had incidentally been only hours after the media release about Sian’s murder after her body had been found.
After the landlord gave them permission to search the home, they found hair cuttings as well as empty bottles of hair dye that suggested the couple had altered their appearances before moving out.
The landlord gave officers a key piece of evidence when he handed them a money order that Valmae had sent only a day earlier to cover their rent as she & Barrie were hoping to eventually come back. The envelope was postmarked from The Entrance, a coastal town in the Central Coast region of New South Wales, a little over 9 hours south of Lowood.
The following day on Saturday morning, December 12, an undercover officer spotted the station wagon leaving a grocery store & followed it back to the Tienda Motel. At 5 pm, officers used a key to enter their room & 44-year-old Valmae Beck & 34-year-old Barrie Watts were taken into custody.
The pair were extradited back to Noosa on Monday, December 14. While Barrie was entirely uncooperative, they took advantage of the fact that Valmae was a mother of six who had a teenage daughter herself. During recorded audio interviews as well as a typed & signed statement, investigators eventually learned every heartbreaking detail of sweet Sian’s final moments.
According to Valmae, even though they’d only been married for a year, Barrie no longer found her attractive as he much preferred blond girls who were far younger. In an attempt to appease him, she dyed her hair blond & played the role of a school girl.
Realizing this wasn’t working, Barrie continued to speak incessantly about his desire to kidnap, sexually assault & murder a virgin, specifically saying he wanted to be his chosen victim’s first & last sexual partner. He assured his wife that if she helped him fulfill this fantasy, he would never look at another woman again.
Since Valmae didn’t want to lose him, she offered to help fulfill his sick fantasy. Knowing that her husband’s unsettling appearance would scare a young girl away, she volunteered to act as the bait.
On the morning of Sian’s abduction, Friday, November 27, 1987, Barrie whispered in Valmae’s ear, today is the day. They had been discussing their dark plan for months. They drove around on the hunt for a victim for some time, but each time they saw a young girl, she was with someone or a passerby would come along. At about 5:30 pm, they still hadn’t found anyone, so they pulled into Pinnaroo Park.
As they climbed out of the car to stretch their legs, they just so happened to spot Sian riding her bike through the park, eager to beat her mom home. Valmae acted distraught as she approached the young girl. She explained that she’d lost her white poodle who wore a pink bow after the dog had run off into the woods & she wondered if Sian would help find her.
The area where they interacted was only about 50 yards from passing cars that had a full view of what was happening, had they looked over.
It was tragically a split-second decision made from compassion & the goodness of a little girl’s heart, that cost Sian her life. Since she was a caring child who loved all animals, she agreed to help Valmae.
After she climbed from her bike & followed her into the shrubs, Barrie grabbed Sian from behind. He placed a cloth over her mouth to quiet her screams, dragged her toward their white station wagon & threw her into the backseat, climbing in with her. As Valmae drove away, he hid Sian from view.
Before he swapped seats with Valmae, Barrie bound & gagged Sian with masking tape. Now behind the wheel, he drove them to Tewantin National Park, about 16 minutes from the abduction site, driving a little over 1 mile/2 km into the park.
After he pulled Sian from the car, Barrie instructed Valmae to remove the masking tape from her mouth & wrists, which she did using scissors. Barrie went back to the car to get a large bedspread that he laid out on the ground. While he repeatedly raped & committed unspeakable acts to the 12-year-old girl for over an hour, Valmae stood nearby at the car.
When he finished, he ordered Sian to put her dress back on before he tied her ankles with a rope, bound her hands, gagged her with tape & ordered her to lie face down. He took a belt that belonged to Valmae & used it to strangle Sian before he slit her throat & stabbed her.
They dragged her body further into the forest before heading home. Along the way, they stopped off at Lake Macdonald where they discarded the bedspread, the knife, the tape, the rope as well as the belt.
Once home, she & Barrie had sex before they enjoyed the rest of their evening on the couch, watching TV. Just as Valmae had hoped, their despicable act seemed to have brought her closer to her sickening husband.
Investigators who were dispatched to search Lake Macdonald recovered the knife, duct tape, the bedspread & a rope along with blond hair.
Investigators decided to get more creative when they were still getting absolutely nowhere with Barrie, even after Valmae’s confession. They housed the couple in neighboring cells with an empty cell separating them to prevent them from whispering. The cells were equipped with hidden recording devices that captured 20 hours of conversation.
Not realizing that authorities could hear every word they spoke, over the following days, they discussed the details of young Sian’s abduction, rape & murder. In one recording, Barrie could be heard callously saying that he would like to do it again.
The lead investigator, Queensland’s now former police commissioner, Bob Atkinson, wrote in his report that Barrie was a determined, ruthless, cunning man who was unlikely to confess or display any remorse. He went on to write, it was later to become apparent that Watts was a psychopathic killer who enjoyed his murderous activity.
Barrie John Watts was born on July 15, 1953 as John Fulton Beck. He grew up an orphan with a troubled childhood, committing a string of petty crimes in Perth.
Valmae, a twice divorced mother of six, met Barrie four years before Sian’s murder in 1983 at a tavern in Perth where Barrie worked as a doorman. One year later, he was imprisoned for 2 ½ years at Barton’s Mill Prison for two counts of breaking & entering.
On his release in 1986, after he promised Valmae that he would stay out of trouble, they moved in together. In December 1986, Barrie Watts married Valmae Forte under his birth name, John Fulton Beck & they lived on the outskirts of Perth.
Being ten years older than her husband, Valmae was exceptionally insecure & desperate to keep her marriage which caused her to be submissive to Barrie’s desires. He was very abusive & often hit her. Having an obsession with younger girls & child pornography, he demanded that she dye her hair blond & wear school uniforms to satisfy his fetishes.
By mid-1987, Barrie & his best friend were back at their criminal ways, using Valmae as their lookout. They spent several weeks in prison for theft & fraud offenses, but were released on bail & fled from Western Australia before they could be charged. They arrived in Queensland in the white station wagon on October 4, 1987 & lived with Valmae’s sister in the Ipswich area before they rented their home in Lowood less than two weeks later.
According to phone calls Valmae made to a friend in Perth, Barrie was hanging around school bus stops to watch the young girls.
When the couple first appeared at the Noosa Magistrates Court for Sian’s murder, outraged members of the community pelted them with rocks & hung a noose from a flagpole as they demanded the return of the death penalty for what they had done.
Based on Valmae’s accounts, her recorded conversations with Barrie, as well as forensic evidence, investigators were able to reconstruct the exact sequence of events in Sian’s case. Cloth fibers found in the couple’s car matched what the young girl had been wearing while traces of blood consistent with her blood type were also found.
Although Valmae tried to distance herself from the crime, they were both charged with the abduction, murder, rape & sodomy of 12-year-old Sian Kingi.
Valmae Beck’s trial began in October 1988 after she pleaded guilty to Sian’s abduction & rape, but not guilty to her murder.
She was found guilty of all charges, including murder & she was sentenced to three years in prison for the abduction, ten years for rape as an accessory & life in prison with a non-parole period of 14 years for the murder with all sentences being served concurrently. She was also found guilty of the attempted abduction of the Target employee.
She told the court that Sian never cried, never shed a tear or uttered a peep. She went on to say that she was a brave little girl who did everything Barrie told her.
Justice Jack Kelly described her as callous & depraved, telling her that no decent person could not feel revulsion at what she did, let alone a woman with children of her own.
Barrie Watts’ trial began in February 1990 & he pleaded not guilty to all charges. Four hours of his 20 hours of recorded conversations with Valmae were played for the jury who found him guilty on February 28, 1990. He was sentenced to 15 years for the rape charge, 3 years for the abduction & life in prison for murder. He was also found guilty of the attempted abduction of the Target employee.
Justice Kelly said that he should never be released from prison or be released on parole if he was of an age where he could not cause menace to young girls.
Investigators also began to look into other attempted abductions & missing person cases as their recorded conversations in prison alluded to the fact that there had been other victims.
Investigators were able to link Barrie to the disappearance & presumed murder of 31-year-old Helen Mary Feeney, a single mother of a little boy & a teaching student who vanished one month before Sian on October 29, 1987. Police believe she was abducted from a parking lot at Carseldine College where her white car was found abandoned with the driver’s side window smashed.
Not only had Barrie boasted to his fellow inmates about Sian’s murder, but also of Helen’s.
During Barrie’s trial for Helen Feeney’s murder in August 1994, Valmae testified against her now ex-husband, saying that Barrie murdered Helen after she came upon him breaking into her car. She watched as he put something wrapped in a red bedspread into the trunk of their car with light colored hair sticking out of the end of the sheet.
She went on to say that he dumped Helen’s body & burned it at a garbage dump near Lowood, allegations that Barrie denied. Since there was no physical evidence to prove his involvement, he was acquitted of the murder & manslaughter charges. Helen’s body has sadly never been found.
Velmae Beck, who changed her name to Fay Cramb, had a miserable existence behind bars as she was repeatedly assaulted by her fellow inmates. During one attack, she was seriously injured after being struck in the head with a tin can wrapped in a sock. She was isolated much of her time moving forward to protect her from future attacks.
She divorced Barrie in 1990, saying that she regretted everything they had done together. Each of her three applications for parole were denied.
While she remained behind bars, her health began to deteriorate. She became morbidly obese & suffered from sleep apnea, diabetes as well as heart disease. On May 5, 2008, she was transferred to the hospital from Townsville Correctional Center in Queensland after she complained of shortness of breath. After she had a pacemaker implanted, her condition went downhill & she was placed in a medically-induced coma. Never regaining consciousness, she died in the hospital at 64-years-old on May 27, 2008.
Police had been hoping she would regain consciousness so they could interview her for a potential death-bed confession regarding three other unsolved Brisbane-area murders of young women.
20 years after the fact, Barrie finally confessed to Sian Kingi’s murder in 2007, not out of the goodness of his heart, but in an attempt to improve his chances of parole. In Queensland, Australia, a life sentence has a standard non-parole period of 20 years, but this period can be increased if a person is charged with multiple murders or the murder of a police officer.
Barrie first became eligible for parole in 2000 as prior to 1997, Queensland life sentences allowed prisoners to apply for parole after 13 years. He chose not to apply at this point, but he did apply for an early release in November 2020 & again in October 2022.
The community was outraged & the Kingi family were notified. In February 2024, the Queensland Parole Board utilized laws that were passed in 2021 that would block him from applying for parole again for ten years until 2034 when he’ll be 80-years-old after determining he remained an unacceptable risk to the public.
The legislation, dubbed Sian’s law, granted the president of the Queensland Parole Board the ability to block applications for up to ten years at a time or indefinitely so families affected by violence aren’t re-traumatized when their loved one’s killer is reapplying each year.
What happened to 12-year-old Sian Kingi on November 27, 1987 hadn’t been the result of a momentary loss of control, it had been carefully planned by two sick & depraved humans. They didn’t see Sian as a young girl full of life & promise, but instead, a pawn who could fulfill a sick sexual desire. Although both were ultimately convicted, nothing will ever bring Sian back to her loved ones or restore the life that was taken from her.
References:
- Wikipedia: Māori people
- Thar Tribune: How Sian Kingi was lured into a deadly nightmare by a depraved couple
- ABC News: Barrie Watts & Valmae Beck: Tracking the crimes of one of Australia’s most sadistic couples
- ABC News: Nurse recounts chilling escape from murderers Barrie Watts & Valmae Beck
- ABC News: Barrie Watts denied application for parole, deemed risk if freed from prison for 1987 killing of Noosa schoolgirl Sian Kingi
- Criminal Law Group: Jail sentences for crimes in Australia: Prison time, parole rules & penalties
- Facebook: Australian Missing Persons Register
- Daily Motion: Crime documentary – The Sian Kingi story
- Murderpedia: Valmae Faye Beck
- Medium: “Today is the day”: The abduction & murder of Sian Kingi
- The New Zealand Herald: Sian Kingi murder: Four words that led to the killing of a 12yo girl
