A young woman was murdered in Central Queensland 58 years ago. Her suspected killer never faced justice

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21 hours ago

It's been well over half a century, but Shirley Eldridge vividly remembers the chilling late-night phone call.
It was March 9, 1967, and at the end of the line was the worried mother of her friend and co-worker, Mima McKim-Hill.
Mima, 21, hadn't returned home from a work trip in Central Queensland.
"I knew something had happened," recalls Shirley, then 20.
Seventeen days later, her worst fears materialised.
On Easter Sunday, Mima's body was found dumped in a small waterhole in bushland at Collard Creek, off the Dawson Highway, near Biloela.
She'd been abducted, strangled and sexually assaulted.
"I just collapsed," Shirley says.
The brutal crime rocked the close-knit community.
A police investigation and an inquest yielded no results. Months gave way to years without any arrests, and the case became Central Queensland's longest-running unsolved murder.
As the decades passed, Shirley's frustration became all-consuming. In the 2000s, she launched her own quest for answers, teaming up with retired Vietnam veteran and amateur super sleuth, Trevor Sorenson.
Together they dug deeper, analysing hundreds of pages of inquest transcripts, reinterviewing witnesses, revisiting crime scenes and dissecting Mima's final steps.
What they uncovered was a web of lies and a litany of investigative errors that they allege helped her suspected killer slip through the cracks.
Their dogged pursuit for justice reignited public interest and police agreed to reopen the investigation in 2008.
A breakthrough came in 2009, more than 40 years after Mima's death.
Detectives closed in on a suspect. Mr Sorenson says they had enough evidence to "nail him".
But they were too late.
Shirley and Mima worked at the Capricornia Regional Electricity Board (CREB) in Rockhampton, a then-small country town with deep agricultural roots.
The women regularly travelled throughout the region, demonstrating new electrical appliances for customers. They quickly grew close.
In many ways, Shirley says, they were "polar opposites".
"We'd be walking along together and someone on a construction site would wolf-whistle. My thing was, I'd just walk on. Mima turned around and said: 'Oh, drop dead'," Shirley laughs.
"That was Mima.
The pair joined a local theatre and were both cast in an upcoming production, just weeks before Mima's death.
"She never got to play her role," Shirley says.
The morning of March 9, 1967 began like any other at the McKim-Hill residence.
Around 8:00am, Mima said goodbye to her mother and left for a scheduled work trip to Biloela, a couple of hours' drive south-west from Rockhampton, with her boss, Isobel Hare, 33.
They took the company station wagon for the journey.
Instead, they ended up heading south to Calliope, near Gladstone, to meet up with Isobel's boyfriend, Arthur Brambrick.
Isobel arranged for Mima to pick her up in town in the afternoon and the pair went their separate ways.
Afternoon arrived, but Mima didn't show. Isobel waited until dark. Around 7:30pm, she claims she saw the car "race past her" at high speed.
With no ride back to Rockhampton, Brambrick dropped Isobel off and began making his way home to Hervey Bay.
En route, he spotted the station wagon on a corrugated dirt detour track, which served as the old Gladstone bypass road, a few kilometres north of the town of Benaraby.
The vehicle was unlocked and the keys were still in the ignition. But there was no sign of Mima.
Brambrick called Isobel, who phoned Shirley, and in the dead of night the women drove to meet him at the vehicle.
While he waited, Brambrick moved the car to the other side of the road and removed a novel from the dash to read.
When they arrived around 3:00am, Shirley's gut feeling intensified.
"There was this log with a dirty white cloth on it — I remember it so clearly," she recalls.
Her heart pounding, she peered into the mud-splattered car window.
Mima's brown handbag was perched on the backseat, with cash and some coins still inside. Her savings book was also intact.
The rear vision mirror had been pulled off and the fuse box was dangling.
"At this point, in my mind, it's like, Mima's out there in trouble," Shirley says.
A bright pink fabric-covered button under the front seat caught Shirley's eye. It matched a new outfit Mima was planning to wear at a social club function that night.
Believing Mima was with her boyfriend, Shirley says Isobel asked her to drive the car back to Rockhampton to return it to their employer.
Mima was listed as a missing person the next day.
While being questioned by detectives, Shirley says she offered to take them to the site where the car was abandoned.
But they weren't interested.
More than a fortnight later, on March 26, Alexander Weir was travelling with his family to Biloela when they pulled up at Collard Creek, approximately 80 kilometres from where Mima's car was found.
He saw a rag in a running stream and tried to flick it with a stick. A human leg emerged from the water.
Mima's father was called to identify the remains. Her body was badly decomposed.
Isobel's yellow uniform that had been in the back of their work vehicle was tied around Mima's neck.
Her cause of death was ruled as asphyxiation from strangulation. Her arm was broken. There was evidence of sexual assault.
"Mima was incredibly strong … but police told me she stood no chance," Shirley says.
Mr Sorenson believes the initial police investigation was a "shemozzle from the outset".
Detectives from Brisbane were called in to assist local police and immediately pulled rank, he says, and Rockhampton officers relied on reports in the local newspaper to keep abreast of the situation.
"They wanted to run the show, they did not want to work with the regional detectives … they were kept at an arm's length," Mr Sorenson says.
"It wasn't until six weeks after the vehicle was located and four weeks after Mima's body was found that the Brisbane detectives decided to have critical and important locations … photographed by a police photographer such as where the abandoned CREB vehicle was located," he adds.
Witness statements weren't taken until after Mima's body was found.
"Those statements were taken basically on the run," he says.
"They were hand-written, scrawled, taken on the bonnet of a car or on the side of the road."
All leads went nowhere and an inquest into Mima's murder began in earnest in November 1967.
It was overseen by five different coroners, none of whom had "any of the legal qualifications that they're required to have today", Mr Sorenson says.
Shirley gave evidence and was reprimanded for insisting there were signs of a struggle where the vehicle was found, which police denied.
"The coroner interrupted and threatened to hold me in contempt of court if I continued to contradict," she says.
Two key lines of inquiry were pursued.
According to witness reports, on the afternoon Mima disappeared, three young men aged between 19 and 23 were seen on the road where her car was found in a blue two-tone 1960 Ford Customline with NSW number plates.
The Customline sported a unique bull mascot with red eyes.
One witness reported seeing Mima in her vehicle speaking with one of the men.
But despite a nationwide search, it amounted to nothing.
There were also multiple sightings of a large green prime-mover and tanker trailer on the road where Mima vanished.
One witness saw it parked some 300 metres from where her work vehicle was abandoned.
The driver was identified as 27-year-old Erik Johann Seefuss, originally from Germany but living in Redcliffe, north of Brisbane.
He was questioned by police for 17 hours before being released.
On that crucial March 9 afternoon, Mr Seefuss admitted to driving his rig in the area. He regularly drove return trips from Rockhampton to Sydney carrying tallow from abbatoirs and knew the region well.
He gave evidence at the inquest and vehemently denied any involvement in Mima's murder, but Mr Sorenson alleges he spun a "web of lies".
Using an original witness as a guide, he's spent years trying to untangle them.
"Seefuss deliberately gave false details regarding times, locations and reasons for his movements and non-movements," he says.
"He lied about where he was parked, he lied about having a thermostat problem with his truck … he claims he went down to Yeppoon to see a nephew but never saw him … the list goes on."
Geoff Smith, a retired long-distance truck driver who worked for the same company as Mr Seefuss, came forward in late 2016​ and discounted large parts of his story.
"This witness knew Seefuss and his truck very well and on that very same day, had come down the Detour Road and saw Seefuss's truck abandoned on the side of the road … he looked for Seefuss and he couldn't see him,' Mr Sorensen says.
"Yet, Seefus says he was asleep, parked much further down the road."
Mr Sorenson says Mr Smith, who was also a qualified motor mechanic, crawled under the tanker and concluded it had been "stationary for a lengthy amount of time".
"Smith has [also] been emphatic that Seefuss' claims of having had thermostat problems were false as the truck would not have been able to be driven the lengthy distances which it did cover," Mr Sorensen says.
Mr Sorenson believes it was a crime of opportunity.
He says Mima likely pulled over onto the side of the bypass road to read her book or sleep to pass time while she waited for Isobel.
He alleges Mr Seefuss spotted her by chance, abducted and attacked her, then drove to Collard Creek to dump her body.
"Mima was unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time," Mr Sorenson says.
"It comes down to one person and one person only.
"It all points circumstantially at Seefuss."
The inquest ruled Mima's death was caused by "some person or persons unknown".
Mr Sorenson says he spoke with Mr Seefuss' daughter, who detailed years of violent and problematic behaviour by her father, tracing back to his youth in Germany.
She said she "wanted a ringside seat" if he was charged with Mima's murder and the case went to trial, according to Mr Sorenson.
By late 2009, Mr Sorenson says Queensland cold case detectives informed him and Shirley they had "enough evidence" to question and potentially charge Mr Seefuss, who was living in South Australia.
"When they got the green light, they rang the South Australian police to check he was still in situ … and they got a phone call back: 'Forget it, he's dead'."
He had died six weeks earlier from cancer.
"I felt as though I'd been slapped hard across the face," Shirley says.
Mr Seefuss was cremated, ruling out the chance of securing DNA evidence.
Mima's grieving parents died without knowing what happened to their daughter. Her younger brother, Graham, had a fatal heart attack in his 50s, less than a kilometre away from where Mima's body was found.
Mr Sorenson believes the case was bungled at the peak of poor police practices and procedures.
Original evidence has been retested using modern forensic techniques.
As of 2025, the investigation remains open, with a $250,000 reward for anyone with information that leads to a conviction.
Mr Sorenson hopes police will one day "publicly name" Mima's alleged killer.
In Shirley's book about the case, which she says she felt "duty-bound" to write, she alleges Mr Seefus was responsible for her friend's murder.
Now in her 70s and living in Western Australia, a long way from her hometown, she says she's "found peace".
"There's no such thing as closure," Shirley says.
"I'm at peace with it."
Queensland Police has been contacted for comment.