Nine News: the Wanda Beach murders

On 12 January 1965 the bodies of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock, both 15 years old, were found in the sand dunes at Wanda Beach, near Cronulla, in Sydney.

They had been brutally murdered the previous day. Within 18 months police interviewed 7,000 people, making it the largest investigation in Australian history.

Countless theories and leads have been proposed since then. As recently as 2018 a new suspect has been identified, Christopher Bernard Wilder, who emigrated to the United States in 1969 and became known as 'The Beauty Queen Killer'.

But despite all the theories, the 'Wanda Beach Murders' case remains one of the most famous unsolved Australian murder mysteries of the 1960s.

This clip includes two news stories from 1965 featuring reporter Ian Ross (1940–2014) as well as silent news footage of police investigators searching the beach.