Catherine was named after her mother Vicki’s good friend, Catherine Headland – one of the victims. Her father, Garry, knew Catherine, and his great-aunt, Bertha Miller, was also killed. He was interviewed as a suspect.

Catherine Headland and Bertha Miller never met, yet in death they remain connected. While there was 60 years between them and they lived 37 kilometres apart, their bodies were found separated by just a few metres of scrub at a disused sand quarry at Brew Road, Tynong North.

Both were almost certainly waiting for public transport when they were taken 40 years ago this month. Both were found lying on their backs covered by bracken and branches.

There were six female victims, all taken from the street and dumped in scrub close to main roads over 16 months.

Miller-Reid still wants answers, which is why she has had the old, grainy images of the victims remastered and digitalised in the hope it will spark someone’s memory — or someone’s conscience.

She says her mother remembers Catherine Headland as “charismatic, strong and a great friend”.

Miller-Reid says she is drawn to the crime because as a mother of three girls, the eldest the same age as Catherine, she knows this could happen to anyone. “Someone knows what happened,” she adds.

On December 6, 1980, two local men dumping stumbled on the bodies of Headland and Miller in scrub at the old sand quarry off Brew Road. A police search found a third victim, 18-year-old Ann-Marie Sargent.

It would take a further two years to find a fourth body on the other side of Brew Road: Narumol Stephenson, who was abducted from Northcote in November 1980.

Miller, the aunt of then chief commissioner Mick Miller, left for church on Sunday, August 10, 1980, intending to take a tram along High Street, Glen Iris.

Eighteen days later, Headland, 14, was heading to catch the bus at Princes Street, Berwick, to the Fountain Gate shopping complex.

Sargent disappeared, probably on the Princes Highway, after intending to catch a bus to the Dandenong office of the Commonwealth Employment Service on October 6, 1980.

Around the same time, there were two more murders. Allison Rooke, 59, left her Frankston home to go shopping on May 30, 1980, walking to the nearby Frankston-Dandenong Road to catch a bus. Her body was found on July 5, 1980, hidden in scrub near Skye Road, Frankston.

Joy Carmel Summers, 55, was to have caught a bus on the Frankston-Dandenong Road on October 9, 1981. On November 22, 1981, her body was found in scrub beside Skye Road.

Generations of investigators have grappled with the murders. They agree the three victims found near the Tynong North sand quarry were killed by one offender. They also agree the two found at Skye Road were also taken by one killer.

Then there is Stephenson. Was it a fluke she was left so close to the Tynong North site or was it the same killer? If it was the same offender, why didn’t he go to the same quarry spot? Was he disturbed and panicked? Unlike the other three, there was little attempt to conceal her body.

A 1985 Bureau of Criminal Intelligence review concluded there were probably three killers abducting women around the same period.

“The only conclusion I can draw is that the person(s) responsible for the deaths of Rooke and Summer at Frankston is/are not the same person(s) responsible for the deaths of Miller, Headland and Sargent and it is most likely that a third person or persons was responsible for the death of Narumol Stephenson.”

Yet that conclusion was revoked in a second BCI review five years later that found “on the balance of probabilities the same person or persons were responsible for the murders of Allison Rooke, Bertha Miller, Catherine Linda Headland, Ann-Marie Sargent and Joy Carmel Summers”.

The review said there was insufficient information to draw a conclusion on Stephenson.

So who are the suspects?

The serial offender

Raymond Edmunds murdered Shepparton teenagers Abina Madill and Garry Heywood in 1966 but was not arrested for the murders until 1985.

Police believe he was responsible for at least 32 rapes and a series of unsolved murders in the 19 years before he was caught.

Edmunds knew the murder areas well, having worked and lived on farms at Nar Nar Goon and Officer near Tynong, and one in Chelsea Heights, not far from Frankston. But he moved to NSW in April 1980 and would have had to return to Melbourne regularly to have committed the crimes. Effectively eliminated.

The relative

Garry Miller knows some people suspect he is a killer. He was a friend of Headland, and Bertha Miller was his great-aunt. He lived near the killing zone and his alibi was questioned. He worked at a nearby factory but the clock-on system was easy to beat.

He was just 17 at the time and it seems highly unlikely he could cruise around in daylight hours looking for victims.

He was cleared by the initial investigators, then re-interviewed and cleared again by cold-case detectives.

The cold killer

Bandali Debs is a four-time killer, a violent, vicious, callous man with no compassion and no conscience. A prodigious armed robber, he was convicted of the 1998 murders of Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rod Miller.

He was also an opportunistic and homicidal sex offender.

In 1995, he killed Sydney sex worker Donna Hicks, dumping her body near a sand quarry in Minchinbury, and two years later killed Melbourne prostitute Kristy Harty, also concealing her body in bushland.

During the Silk-Miller investigation, he was bugged bragging about how to kill a woman. “If you put the rod in the mouth and blew her brains away, when you put the rod in their mouth and close their mouth there’s no noise ... I’ve seen it. I’ve done it.”

There are geographic reasons to put Debs on the suspect list. He lived in Narre Warren, not far from the Princes Highway where Headland and Sargent were last seen. Even Bertha Miller was likely to have been taken from a tram stop that was a few hundred metres from the same road.

Debs' two known victims were taken from highways and dumped just off main roads. The two Frankston women were taken from the busy Frankston-Dandenong Road.

However there is no direct evidence to link him to the cases. He remains on the list but not at the top.

The religious man

Harold Janman, now 88, presents as a quiet family man devoted to his church who more than once was caught soliciting for prostitution. This certainly doesn’t mean he is a killer.

He told police he offered women lifts on the Frankston-Dandenong Road, where Rooke and Summers disappeared in 1980 and 1981. He did this, he said, because he was a friendly guy and just wanted to help people. Locally, he was seen as a serial pest. Again, that is far from being a killer.

He drove with the police along the road and pointed to nine bus stops where he offered women lifts. Two of the stops were where Rooke and Summers were waiting when they disappeared.

Asked if he knew the location of Skye Road, he became coy, claiming: “I’ve never heard of it.” This was rather strange, as he previously worked as a projectionist at the local drive-in – in Skye Road.

Taken to the area where the two women were dumped, he seemed to deliberately avoid the spot where their bodies were found.

“[He] became nervous and sweated a lot. He walked around the sites as asked, but at no time did he walk in the immediate vicinity of where the bodies had been lying,” a confidential report reveals.

Janman was interviewed on December 3, 1981, and the murders stopped.

He had opportunity, knew the area and was notorious for offering lifts. That is enough to make him a suspect for the Frankston murders, but what about Tynong North?

For years, Janman lived in Garfield, near the Tynong North murder ground, and he continued to visit friends there.

He worked as a part-time barman at the Tynong Hotel and drove a truck along the Brew Road route. And for a time, he worked at the sand quarry where three of the bodies were dumped.

Janman has declared his innocence to police and to the media when he is occasionally pinned down for a comment, and there has never been any hard evidence linking him to any of the murders.

He even submitted to two police lie-detector examinations. He failed both.

There is a $6 million reward for information in the Tynong North and Frankston murder cases. Crime Stoppers: 1800 333 000.