12:00a.m. 11th May 2008

| By Jane Gardner

In a crowded Brisbane courthouse in 1990, Elizabeth Young stared into the cold eyes of a child killer and bravely gave the testimony that would put him behind bars for life.

Three years earlier she had encountered the same chilling gaze of Barrie Watts when she watched him scour Castaways Beach for what she now presumes was a victim.

Just an hour later he and Valmae Beck abducted 12-year-old schoolgirl Sian Kingi from Pinnaroo Park in Noosaville.

Beck approached Sian in the street and concocted a story about a missing poodle to lure the girl to their car.

Watts snatched the youngster; her arms and mouth were taped and she was driven to Tinbeerwah forest, where she was raped, beaten and murdered.

The atrocity was the beginning of a waking nightmare for Elizabeth, who turned 52 yesterday and has lived with the torment of never knowing what would have happened if she had confronted Watts or called police earlier.

As a result of what happened more than 20 years ago, the Eumundi nursery worker has never had children, for fear they would come to harm like Sian.

The events of 1987 also made her stop believing in God.

She still has frequent nightmares about Watts and is gripped by an icy fear when her imagination plays tricks and she thinks she sees his face in a crowd. And she has never returned to Castaways Beach, although she still weaves plastic flowers through a swing set at the place where Sian was taken.

With Beck close to death in a Townsville hospital, Elizabeth has chosen to tell her story for the first time in two decades.

“I’ve never had children, even though I was in a relationship for 16 years,” she said.

“One of the reasons I’ve never had children is having known what her parents went through, that you can have them but you can lose them that easily.

“It (the hospitalisation this week of Beck) is the best birthday present I could ever have. If ... (Beck) died today I would have some closure.

“I hope she rots in hell. I only wish Watts was on his deathbed.

“When I heard it on the radio, I spent the whole day in a blur and thought maybe now I can finally get some peace.”

On November 27, 1987, Elizabeth, a 31-year-old bartender at the Royal Mail Hotel, was swimming at Castaways Beach with friend Bill Wallace when her flatmate’s black Labrador growled at a dishevelled man walking on the beach.

He was unshaven, wearing King-Gee shorts and a work shirt, and appeared to be looking for something.

“He looked like a farmer looking for his cows,” Elizabeth recalls. “There was something very odd about the way he was dressed and he wasn’t looking at the water. I’d never seen anyone like him on the beach before.

“When the dog started going berserk I said to Bill ‘something is not right here’.”

She left the surf and approached Watts, realising she had seen him at the beach the day before, dressed almost identically and behaving in the same bizarre manner.

With a slender 55kg frame and long blonde hair, Elizabeth was used to male attention but when she approached Watts, his reaction froze her blood.

“When I waved to him and said g’day, there was no reaction, no expression. He stared at me with this cold expression. It made the hair stand up on my neck.

“I thought he was looking for a lost wallet, at first. He was just looking towards the dunes, not towards the water, kept scouring the dunes, back and forth.”

Concerned by Watts’ actions, she and her friend checked out a white dust-covered Kingswood station wagon in the car park – the only other car there apart from their Landcruiser.

Because the car looked as if it had been travelling on dirt roads and was not from the local area, they wrote down the plate number on two slips of paper and returned to the beach.

Just before 3pm, Watts disappeared and Elizabeth and her friend decided to follow his car.

They made it to Noosa Junction before they lost him in traffic.

“He went straight down through the shops, towards Pinnaroo Park,” Elizabeth said.

“We didn’t think anything more of it because he hadn’t physically threatened me, but Bill said to me, ‘this is weird, creepy, I don’t want you coming on your own’.”

Not even half an hour later, Beck and Watts abducted Sian.

Days later, her disappearance was all over the media and police were hunting for a white Kingswood station wagon.

The news sickened Elizabeth, who had worked with Sian’s mother at the Mango Tree cafe in Noosa four years earlier.

“Sian and her younger brother used to come in and get iced coffee and have milkshakes while they waited for Mum to knock off, so I knew her personally,” Elizabeth said.

“I used to call her black-eyed Susan because she had long, dead-straight blonde hair and, because her father is Maori, she had olive skin and dark, black, enormous eyes.

“She was one of the most beautiful children I had ever seen.”

Elizabeth and her friend gave the car’s plate number to police. They were interviewed and produced an Identikit.

After the arrest of Barrie Watts, Inspector Bob Atkinson, who was heading the investigation, asked them to testify.

“Inspector Atkinson drove me down to Brisbane and back for the trial and he said they only knew someone had seen a vehicle, no one had got the rego, no one had seen the guy, and we were the only ones who had taken the rego.

“He said without Bill and I, he would still be running free.”

Despite her worst fears, Elizabeth decided not to testify anonymously. She wanted Watts to remember her name “for the rest of his miserable life”.

“He stared at me. I stared at him. He knew that I was the one who had got him there ... that he’d still be running around if it hadn’t have been for us.

“It was just like a huge chill. I could feel the hairs go up on the back of my neck.

“There was a frost in the air and you could’ve heard a penny drop.

“I wanted him to go to bed every single night thinking there is a woman out there who put him behind bars.

“I felt I had done my duty as a citizen. But then I think that if I’d only reported him two days before (the first time she saw him on the beach) he would never have got Sian and it wouldn’t have happened.

“But you can’t report a person for walking up and down the beach looking weird – it’s not a crime, is it

“My one big regret is that I didn’t do something on the first day, but it’s like trying to prevent a car accident before it happens.

“Nothing I did was ever going to bring her back, but I stopped him from doing it to anyone else and that was the only thing that got me through.”

The past week has been difficult for Elizabeth because of the rage she still feels towards the monsters who took the life of an innocent child.

She says she will never feel at ease until both Watts and Beck are in their graves.

“Sometimes I go to bed at night and I see his face, and then other times I’ll see someone on the street and they look like him and I think ‘no, no!’, but realise he’s in solitary confinement and he’s not going to escape.

“Then something like this comes up and 20 years just vanishes and brings me right back to that day on the beach.

“To this day it often comes up in the paper ... (Beck) is trying to get an early release and that they should’ve just given them a lethal injection. I would have done it myself. I would have gladly, because I have to live with this pain every single day.”

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