Perth 1979. A Young Woman Accepted a Lift. 45 Years Later, They Named Who Did It. | MMA

This is the final series of the Midnight Mystery Archive — the last two-parter before the podcast goes on hiatus. It ends in Australia, one of MMA's largest listener bases, with a case that captures something essential about why this show existed: what happens when a young woman's life is cut short, and what forensic science can now do that nobody could have imagined when the crime occurred.

Kerryn Tate was 22 years old when she was murdered in bushland southeast of Perth, Western Australia, on December 29, 1979. Forty-five years later, in March 2025, Western Australia Police named their prime suspect. He died in 2000. He will never stand trial. But his name is now on the record.

This is Part 1: who Kerryn was, what happened on December 29, 1979, and how a case with almost no leads in 1979 eventually had a name to put to it.

Kerryn was born in New South Wales and had been living in Western Australia for about a year. She worked in the arts. She was warm, social, well-connected — the kind of person whose presence in a room you noticed. She also hitchhiked. In 1979 Perth, this was not reckless. It was mainstream. Young Australians hitchhiked to the beach, between suburbs, between cities. It was an ordinary mode of transport. Kerryn was so accustomed to it that she carried a black motorcycle helmet specifically so she could accept lifts from motorbikes. That helmet is evidence of a routine, not a risk.

On the night of December 28th, Kerryn attended a dance at the North Cottesloe Surf Life Saving Club. She stayed with friends in Swanbourne. The following morning, December 29th, a friend drove her to her house-sitting address in Mount Lawley at approximately 11 AM. That is the last confirmed sighting of Kerryn Tate alive.

She was heading to Karragullen, approximately 40 kilometers southeast of Perth, to house-sit for other friends. She presumably hitchhiked. The next morning, December 30th, forestry workers found her body in bushland near the Canning Dam catchment. She was slumped over a smoldering tree stump. A fire had been deliberately set around the scene — calculated, not panic. A bloodstained piece of wood was recovered nearby. Kerryn had been beaten to death. Her jewelry was gone: the watch, the earrings, the bangle, the pendant, the rings that the Christmas Day family had noticed just four days earlier.

In 1979, without CCTV, without DNA, without any digital record of vehicle movements, identifying a stranger who gave a hitchhiker a lift on a rural road was essentially impossible. The case went cold. But it never closed. Police kept the biological material from the 1979 scene. In 2023, that evidence went to Western Australia Police's investigative genetic genealogy team. What they found is the story of Part 2.

ECHO 1953 - THE HOLLIS FILES, BOOK ONE
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