Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Bones found in 2007 from missing Oz cocaine dealer

Mark Johnston was 36 when he was last seen leaving the Bellevue Hotel in Sydney about 7pm on September 1, 1986. He was never seen nor heard from again. In 2007 work crews unearthed human bones while building a desalination plant in the Kurnell Peninsula. They could not be identified at the time.
Kurnell Peninsula in Sydney's south is where Captain Cook first set foot on Australian soil. It was also the location of much of the filming for 'Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome'.

The sand dunes at Kurnell had a reputation as a place to get rid of bodies during the 1970s and 1980s - the area was remote enough and corpses decompose quickly. A week after vanishing, Johnson's rental car was found. There were no signs of a struggle. Inside the glovebox were two one-ounce bags of cocaine, while half a kilogram of cocaine was found in the trunk."A very clean job" was how homicide detectives described Johnston's disappearance at the time.