CHILLING witness accounts of two women being abducted and bloodcurdling screams in the night have emerged at a cold-case inquest in Queensland.
Fresh evidence about how two Sydney nurses died almost four decades ago and who might have killed them was revealed in Toowoomba Magistrates Court on Monday.
The evidence in the second coronial inquest into the 1970s deaths of Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans raises serious questions about the initial police investigation.
Wilson, 20, and Evans, 18, disappeared while hitchhiking in Queensland in October 1974.
Their skeletal remains were found, bound and with multiple skull fractures, two years later at Murphys Creek, near Toowoomba.
A 1985 inquest failed to result in charges being laid but police have uncovered new evidence.
On Monday, for the first time, the names of seven persons of interest were revealed in court.
A former officer described how in 1974 he had listened helplessly to two women's distant screams for more than half an hour, unable to detect where they were coming from in the bush.
Former Toowoomba policeman Ian Hamilton had been about four or five kilometres from where the women's bodies were eventually found.
He and his partner were called to a youth camp near Murphys Creek near the foot of the Toowoomba Range one night in October 1974.
"(It's) probably the only time in the service I've ever experienced the hairs stand up on the back of my neck," he told the court.
"They were just the most blood-curdling, horrendous screams I've ever heard in my life.
"It was obvious that they were in desperate trouble."
Other witnesses told of seeing two women matching the victims' descriptions being manhandled by two or more men into a green Holden by the side of the road at Toowoomba.
One woman screamed: "Help me, oh God help me", according to witness Brian Britcher, who said he was too scared to stop or call police until at least the next day.
"I've lived with that for (more than) 30 years," he said.
The inquest was played a recording of a 2008 police interview with one of the three surviving people of interest.
In it, Desmond Roy Hilton tells of hearing some of the persons of interest bragging "that they gave two girls a good hiding ... down the bottom of the range".
Mr Hilton is to give evidence at the inquest on Wednesday.
A former police investigator told the inquest he believed there was enough evidence to arrest Hilton's cousin, Wayne Hilton, for the murders, but he'd died in 1986.
Former senior sergeant Paul Ruge also called the original police investigation inadequate, saying lines of inquiry weren't followed up.
Outside court, Wendy Evans' sister Michelle Tuifufu said it was a difficult day but the two murdered women needed "their day in court".
Lorraine Wilson's brother said it was harrowing listening to the account of what was possibly his sister's screams.
"Something should have been done way back then," Eric Wilson said of the failed investigation.
"It would have saved a lot of angst, a lot of grief."
The inquest continues in Toowoomba on Tuesday.
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