A man convicted of killing and molesting a 9-year-old will be released from prison “within days” after serving a 17-year sentence.
Michael Guider, 68, was convicted in Australia of manslaughter and 60 counts of charges related to pedophilia in 2002 after confessing to causing the death of Samantha Knight in 1986. Guider admitted to abducting and molesting the girl but said her death was an accident caused by an overdose of drugs. Guider asserted the child had woken up from an initial drugging, so he gave her a second dose, which killed her.
Knight’s body has never been found, and Guider has said he doesn’t remember exactly what he did with her remains. Tess Knight, Samantha’s mother, pleaded with the court in Sydney to reconsider releasing Guider. “Did she call for me as she died?” Knight wondered during an emotional plea. “Did she wonder why I wasn’t there to help her?”
When Guider was sentenced over the young girl’s death, he was already serving sentences for numerous sex offenses against more than a dozen other children between 1980 and 1996. His modus operandi was to drug children with sedatives to enable his sex abuse. He told prison psychologists that he sexually abused his mother and his younger brother.
Lisa Giles, another of Guider’s victims, said in court, “This is not a man who will fade into obscurity and potter quietly around his garden. He’s not finished yet … he will take a child’s innocence and drink it like a fine wine.”
Guider’s release will be followed by a five-year supervision order that will include “great stringency” in what he is allowed to do and where he will be allowed to go.
Justice Richard Button of New South Wales said that further incarceration would serve no purpose in Guider’s rehabilitation. He expressed a belief that the 55 agreed-upon conditions of release would protect the community. “The fact is, that there is some risk in releasing any person on the complete expiry of his or her sentence who has been shown to commit offenses of the utmost gravity in the past, whatever their particular nature,” Button wrote in a statement.
Guider studied and wrote about archaeology and Aboriginal culture from behind bars.
