The Bloody Tale of the Rockhampton Rapist

The Second Spree

After seven years in jail Fraser was released in 1981. He moved to Mackay where he took a job as a railway labourer. In 1982 he forced his way into a woman’s house and appeared to want to rape her. However, to the surprise of everyone he allowed the woman to make a call to her husband, at which time Fraser explained that he was intending to show how easy it would be for someone to rape her. He was sentenced to just two months in jail.

After his release, he took up with a woman who had a young son and managed to stay out of trouble for two and a half years. He even had a child. But in 1985, after stalking a 21-year-old woman for several days who enjoyed walking on a isolated beach, Fraser brutally raped her, again relying on his signature move. Police quickly found him, and sentenced him to twelve years in prison. The judge slammed Fraser and his actions, particularly Fraser’s belief that his victims wanted, or enjoyed, his sexual attention.

The Loon

Fraser developed a reputation in prison as being particularly wild. His unpredictable and chaotic behaviour led other inmates to refer to him as Lenny the Loon. Management were so worried about offending that he was made to serve every single day of his 12 years sentence. Even though they were sure it wouldn’t be long before he was back, Fraser was released in 1997.

He started living with a terminally ill woman who had written him letters while he was in jail. Their relationship became sexual, but Fraser’s violent nature caused the woman to leave their residence for cancer treatment in Brisbane. Fraser followed her there, and allegedly raped her in the hospital chapel. He wasn’t charged for this, and the woman died just six months later.

By the end of 1998 Fraser moved to Rockhampton to live with an intellectually handicapped 19-year-old named Cristine Wraight. At the start of the following year, a woman and her 11-year-old daughter moved into the spare room of their house, but left soon after accusing Fraser of assaulting her daughter. Then Fraser himself was kicked out of the house by the landlady, who accuses that she caught Fraser having sex with Wraight’s dog in the backyard.

Now The End

All of these things, all of the jail time and the crimes and the opportunity, led Fraser to the 22nd of April 1999. It was on this date that he followed 9-year-old Keyra Steinhardt home from school, and attacked her as she walked through a vacant lot. Striking her on the head, he raped and murdered her before disposing of the body. Amazingly, one woman witnessed the entire crime, but waited 20-minutes before she had the courage to call police. At this point, it was too late to save Keyra. Police quickly arrested Fraser, but it was two weeks before they were able to extract from him the location of Keyra’s body. It appeared her throat had been cut, but decomposition was advanced to the point if was difficult to tell what had actually happened.

Fraser was sentenced on the 20th of November 2000. The judge could see no reason to support Fraser’s prospects of rehabilitation, so he handed down an indefinite life sentence, without any possibility of parole at all.

What Happened After

To add insult to injury, Fraser was later implicated and confessed to the murders of three other woman who had all gone missing in Rockhampton between September of 1998 and April of 1999. When he was able to lead police to their bodies, yet more time was added to his sentence. Unfortunately, the damage was already done.

By the time Fraser was convicted of the rape and murder of Keyra Steinhardt he had already been in jail for almost 20 of the 22 years that preceded the crime. He was responsible for a number of murders, and an even larger number of rapes, all because Australia’s own legal system stopped the courts from doing what they all knew needed to be done, and locking Fraser up for a long time.