THREE New South Wales homicide detectives were, last month, winding down a year-long investigation into the abduction and brutal murders of two British tourists, whose bodies were dumped in a forest 120 kilometres south of Sydney.
Despite 7,000 inquiries, hundreds of interviews conducted across Australia and numerous sightings of backpackers Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters, both 22, in the days before they died, police were no closer to solving the killings than they had been 12 months earlier.
Detectives privately admitted the case would probably never be solved.
Police weren't expecting new clues, and certainly not five more bodies. The five were all of tourists, dumped within several kilometres of where the remains of Clarke and Walters were found, and all left in similar bush graves.
On October 5, two men scouring Belanglo State Forest with metal detectors stumbled across the skeletal remains of Victorian hitch-hikers James Gibson and Deborah Everist.
The discovery prompted a massive police search and, by November 4, three more victims, German tourists, had been recovered.
The remains of Gabor Neugebauer, 20, and his girlfriend Anja Habschied, 19, were found under piles of leaves and branches 900 metres from where the body of Simone Schmidl, 21, was discovered.