Wearing black garbage bags – discovery of 1985 photograph of Sharon Wills wearing black garbage bags

In late 2022, Melbourne Marvels discovered what appears to be a photograph of Sharon Wills from 1985, which shook us to our cores. It was a photograph of Mr Cruel abduction, Sharon, wearing black garbage bags! Those who know the Mr Cruel story well will understand the significance of this find.

How we found the photograph

We discovered the photograph on a Facebook Page for Antonio Park Primary School, the school that Sharon attended in the 1980s.  This is the only photograph of Sharon Wills that we know of that appeared in the public sphere between 1985 to when she appeared in a photograph taken by Karl Jahn in the The Sun News Pictorial in July 1988.  

The photograph of Sharon Wills wearing black garbage bags we found was from 1985, when Sharon was six or seven-years-old, and appears to show her participating in some celebratory activities as part of the 25th anniversary of the school that year.  The photograph depicts a room at the school within which are six children (two boys, four girls) and an adult female.  It’s unclear whether the adult female is a teacher who worked at the school in 1985, but this woman looks to be aged approximately in her 40s.  

The photograph depicts, perhaps, what was then some sort of home economics room of the school as there is an oven in the background.  In the foreground of the photograph there are two large tables upon which is a large cake with the number 25 written on it in what appears to be ‘hundreds of thousands’ confetti.  The children in the room appear to be helping the adult woman in decorating the cake.

Some of the children appear to have been participating in some sort of activities that involved the creation of artistic clothing designs using tin foil.  In the background, a boy can be seen looking at a table on top of which, most of this tin foil-based art and craft, is.  A girl on the very left of the photograph, about 11-years-old, has some of the tin foil adorning her hair.  Sharon appears to be the child second from the left.  She also has tin foil adorning her hair and has some of the tin foil acting as a kind of collar.  

Wearing black garbage bag

What is most startling about this photograph though is that it quite clearly shows the girl, who appears to be Sharon, wearing a black garbage bag.  Her arms have been placed through holes in the bag so that she can adorn it.  Anyone who knows the ‘Mr Cruel’ case well knows that the offender dressed Sharon in black garbage bags before releasing her at Bayswater High School.  It was believed by police that he dressed her in the bags in order to conceal her identity as he carried her from his vehicle to the location where he dumped her at Bayswater High School.  The following quote is from the Melbourne Marvels post on the abduction of Sharon and specifically on the 2016 Keith Moor article for the Herald-Sun about this specific abduction:

“The offender finally told Sharon that she was to have a shower rather than a bath where he “made her wash her hair and body really well”. When she was dry the offender dressed Sharon in the shirt he had taken from the basket in the Wills family lounge room and put her inside two garbage bags. He pulled the bottom garbage bag up to her neck and taped it to her shoulders, while he put the other one over her head and taped it to her waist. Then he made a hole so that she could breathe before carrying her to a car and placing her on the floor in front of the front passenger seat. After some time he stopped the vehicle, got out and lifted Sharon out of the car with the garbage bags still on her. He began jogging while carrying Sharon “stopping now and then to put her down while he rested”. After an unstated period of time the man put Sharon down and “told her how to get to a nearby Food Plus store”. Moor states that the offender then removed the garbage bags and blindfold and told Sharon not to look at him as he left.”

What are the odds therefore, that the only known photograph of Sharon, pre-July 1988 is an obscure photograph that shows her donning black garbage bags!

How do we know this really is Sharon?  It certainly looks like her.  The similarities between it and the image of Sharon from when she participated in the Victorian Children’s Choir on The Early Bird Show in December 1988 are striking.  The girls in both images are wearing identical ‘see-through’ framed spectacles and identical pearl earrings and both images depict a girl with the same colour of hair. In fact, the girls in both images are so similar it’s hard to believe three years have passed between when they were taken. I thought I better confirm it though in order to be sure, so I sent it to Sharon herself. Sharon had initiated contact with me previously online and we have been in touch several times, but I generally don’t like to bother her if I can avoid it. I did think it was a good idea that she was given the opporunity to be made aware of the existence of this photo though, so I sent it to her. When asked if it was her Sharon simply stated that she thought it was, but that she wasn’t 100% sure.  

What are the implications of this photograph?  While we can’t be certain there is any link between this photograph and the offender, it certainly raises a number of very relevant questions.  For example, is it possible the offender saw this photograph of Sharon and this in some way inspired him to commit the crime in which he abducted the girl in December 1988? Was the offender offering a clue to his identity as he had seen the photograph of Sharon? Is this just some bizarre coincidence?

Who is the person who took the photograph?  I contacted Antonio Park Primary School, and they were unable to answer this question.  They simply said it was one of a number of photographs the school had in their possession and they posted it as part of the 60th anniversary celebrations in 2020 and it was displayed on their Facebook Page that year.  

Did police investigate teachers or other employees of the school as part of the investigation into Sharon’s abduction?
It’s unclear to what extent employees of Antonio Park Primary School staff were investigated by police, but we do know that an individual named Ewen Gracie, who worked at the school as a physical education teacher in the 1980s, was questioned by police after a tip-off.  Gracie inadvertently publicly identified himself as being a suspect in the ‘Mr Cruel’ investigation when he was exposed by www.whoismrcruel.com in a blog post in April 2022.  Shockingly, www.whoismrcruel.com also exposed the former Antonio Park Primary School staff member claiming he was ‘a rapist who’d never been caught’.  All of this former teacher’s claims were made publicly, online, with anonymous accounts, so it is unclear if these claims were the truth or just attention-seeking.  

Gracie claimed he had been cleared by police after proving he had been overseas for one of the four canonical Mr Cruel cases, but it is unclear if this really is the reason why police cleared him.  Melbourne Marvels has no evidence Gracie, or any other staff member was involved in the abduction of Sharon. Nevertheless, now that this photograph has surfaced we do think it’s important that police look into the origin of the photo, who took it and who had access to it between 1985 and 1988.  In fact, we did provide it to Crimestoppers in early 2023 as a, possibly, significant lead in the case, but have heard nothing back from detectives.  

Having waited one year since contacting Victoria Police about this photograph, we are now releasing this image publicly to raise further interest in this lead.  

Melbourne Marvels, 4 Jan 2023.