Online sleuths fear a serial killer is on the loose in paradise after linking dozens of attacks and murders in Byron Bay, northern New South Wales, over the past 50 years.
Laura, 37, and Kayley, 28, who wish to keep their surnames secret after chilling online threats, revealed on social media how they had escaped the clutches of a sinister predator.
But they have since been inundated by others who have suffered similar terrorist experiences, as well as grieving relatives who fear their loved ones have been murdered in possibly related cases.
“This goes back to the ’70s and is as recent as last week,” Laura told Daily Mail Australia.
“People tell me such alarming details of things that happened to them too, sexual assault, harassment, excessive alcohol consumption and they even give me names.”
The shocking revelations come as NSW state MLC Jeremy Buckingham this week called for a special investigation into more than 60 women who were brutally murdered or missing on the NSW north coast in unsolved cases.
Police and locals have long suspected a link between the cases, spread between Newcastle and Byron, but limited resources have hampered their new investigation.
Now Kayley from Melbourne has revealed her own terrifying experience when she was stalked by a disturbing stranger while on holiday in Byron in August this year.
Kayley was so traumatized by a sinister man wearing gloves that she began mapping unsolved murders.
Two women have revealed chilling incidents in the Byron Bay area, 15 years apart, prompting a flood of similar accounts from others.
“I was walking along the road in (nearby) Suffolk Park towards the beach when a car with a couple in front slowed down,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
‘The look of terror on their faces as they looked past me made me turn around.
‘There was a man right behind me in a hat, sunglasses and gloves and I had never felt such evil in my life.
“I don’t know what his intentions were for me, but I had a feeling he wasn’t there to rob me.
“It was just horrible.”
Kayley immediately fled to the safety of the beach where her friends were waiting, but the feeling that she had dodged a sinister fate remained with her.
“I knew something violent was about to happen,” he added. “This was in broad daylight on a busy street and I couldn’t let it go so I reported it to the police.”
But she said she endured a “grueling experience” being shuttled between Byron Bay police station and the local police station in Melbourne.
“They were both telling me I had to show up at the other and I just couldn’t get anywhere,” he said.
Kayley vented her frustrations on Tiktok to warn others weeks before Buckingham raised his concerns in the NSW Parliament.
The cases of Jasmine Morris and Daneeka Nixon are unsolved
Thea Liddle’s belongings were found thanks to a tip about Theo’s case, her death remains a mystery.
But since then, like Laura, she has also been inundated with dozens of messages making disturbing new allegations of similar attacks over the past decades.
“There are brutal sexual assaults, people have escaped kidnapping attempts and I can see that there are common similarities,” he said.
‘I don’t know how to support these people. I’m trying to tell them to call the police, but some people are scared and it’s very worrying.’
The new attention on cold case murders also triggered Laura’s memory of her own terrifying experience hitchhiking with a friend on the 5km journey from Suffolk Park to her home in nearby Byron Bay in 2008.
A van stopped to take them, but they found a chilling scene inside the vehicle.
“When I got into the guy’s truck I could see a huge rusty knife on the front seat and I moved it to the floor,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
“I didn’t really think much about it and asked him why he had the knife.”
But when the mysterious stranger in his 30s said it was because he was a chef, Laura immediately felt uncomfortable.
“I knew that knife wasn’t a kitchen knife,” he said. ‘It was huge and rusty.
“(And when) I asked him where he worked, he said he was unemployed.”
Laura and her friend immediately sped off after pretending to the driver that they had arrived at their destination.
Laura took to Tiktok to share her situation and was surprised by the messages she received.
Theo Hayez’s disappearance in Byron remains a mystery despite extensive investigations
Laura warns that Byron Bay has a dark and dangerous side
He said he had all but forgotten about the disturbing encounter until this week’s revelations about dozens of unsolved murders in the area.
But Laura now believes she, too, may have cheated death, and others have sent her dozens of messages with new details of similar cases and incidents.
“Some people have given me names of family members they believe are involved,” he says. ‘Parents, ex-partners and colleagues.
‘Many are too afraid to go to the police or think that the information they have is not enough to move forward.
But Byron is not the place people think. There is a dark and dangerous side.’
The high-profile disappearance of backpacker Theo Hayez in May 2019 remains a mystery five years later.
The last known images of the Belgian national captured him on CCTV leaving Byron’s Cheeky Monkeys nightclub, where he was seen looking at his phone walking down the street.
Despite an extensive search with Theo’s family flying from Brussels to help, the case was never solved.
But in a disturbing twist, an anonymous tip in 2021 to a website set up to help find Hayez led a private investigator to a dilapidated squatter’s home in nearby Nimbin.
Inside they discovered personal belongings of Thea Liddle, a local woman whose skeletal remains were discovered almost a year earlier.
The circumstances surrounding Liddle’s death remain a mystery.
As were the circumstances surrounding the death of Daneeka Nixon, whose body was found in a dam in April 2006, several days after a rave party at The Channon.
Friends wondered how the 25-year-old, who was a good swimmer and surfer, could have drowned on private property less than an hour from Byron and an autopsy could not determine the cause of death.
And teenager Jasmine Morris, who lived near South Grafton, is another of dozens of unsolved cases plaguing the area.
The 19-year-old has been missing since October 6, 2009 after she told her mother she was going to the pub.
However, an investigation in December 2020 found there are three persons of interest linked to his death and his case was referred to the New South Wales Police unsolved homicide squad for investigation.
But former Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham warns that these cases could be just some of the 67 possible murders that remain unsolved in the area and which he said had an “alarming similarity”.
He has accused New South Wales police of failing victims’ families by failing to properly investigate unsolved cases.
‘Some of these were individual incidents, there’s no doubt about that. But many are linked and there is only one author,” he said.
‘It is impossible to think that there are 67 individual murderers in the area from the north coast to Tweed Heads who have escaped justice.
“Someone has done these things repeatedly.”