Face-to-face with evil murderer Daryl Francis Suckling who kept women’s body parts as souvenirs

I still remember the day I came face-to-face with one of the most evil individuals to walk Australian soil.

It was June 1996, and Daryl Francis Suckling was gazing from a dock in the Sydney Supreme Court where he was standing trial for the murder of 21-year-old Jodie Larcombe.

His reptilian stare trained on me as I stood in the witness box, instilling terror even as he was surrounded by prison officers. 

Even hardened police would say that encountering Suckling was like being in the presence of evil and here he was, trying to impress a jury with his ‘innocence’.

Suckling was finally on trial nine years after murdering Jodie, whose partial remains he had buried in a secret spot. 

He later boasted he had kept her intimate body parts as grisly souvenirs, dried them with salt and had plans to fashion a tobacco pouch for his own sadistic entertainment.

Suckling was a farm worker and odd jobs man, a diminutive figure considered ‘harmless’, but his dead eyes told a different story. 

Jodie Larcombe, 21, had walked from Pentridge prison three days before she met Suckling on the St Kilda streets and he drugged, chained and murdered her, disposing of her body in the bush

In Suckling’s bedroom at Wyarama Station, police found the purple dress Jodie was wearing when last seen alive, her silver jewellery and her dental plate wrapped in tissue paper in the wastepaper basket

He had 137 convictions on his record since the age of 11. Theft and burglary kept him behind bars for much of his early life, before he graduated to jail escapes and harming women. 

Like every murderer who has successfully disposed of the body – think wife killer Chris Dawson and double murderer Bruce Burrell – he was trying to convince everyone that Jodie was still alive.

False sightings of people who have mysteriously vanished aided this delusion, and were fanned by his defence.

As it would be with with Lynette Dawson, and Burrell’s victims Dottie Davis and Kerry Whelan, searches of government, bank and hospital records couldn’t find a flicker of activity by Jodie since the day she vanished.

As with every ‘no body’ murder case, it was the Crown’s job to prove before Justice Greg James that Jodie was dead, and Suckling’s defence that she had changed her identity and fled overseas was false.

After researching how criminals can create fake identities, as in the Australian Federal Police case of a US fraudster known as ‘Whitecloud’ who had posed as an Indigenous American and flown in to rip off Sydneysiders, I had written a story about creating my own fake identity.

Suckling’s defence team had subpoenaed me to testify with the hope of convincing  the jury that Jodie had created a fake ID and vanished overseas. 

However I proved a poor defence witness when quizzed by the accused’s lawyer, but not before the creepy Suckling had worked his sinister presence into my psyche.

I left the witness box with an internal plea to the court, the jury, the system, to please find him guilty and lock him up forever.

Daryl Francis Suckling was a psychopath with a rap sheet going back to when he was 11 , and police found Jodie Larcombe’s dental plate and clothing hidden in his bedroom at an Outback station

Jodie was addicted to heroin and aged just 21 and three days out of Pentridge Jail working the streets of St Kilda when she unfortunately was picked up by Suckling

Police found photos of Jodie taken inside Suckling’s ute, naked and clearly drugged and with red handcuff marks clearly visible on her wrists  

The trial heard from compelling witnesses for the Crown that on the night of December 25 or 26 1987, Suckling had met up with Jodie on the streets of St Kilda, Melbourne after striking up a friendship with her months before.

The young woman, originally from Perth, was addicted to heroin and forced into street work . She had been released from Pentridge Prison three days earlier where she had spent time for a minor offence.

Then 55, Suckling had driven his battered 4WD LandCruiser from outer Melbourne, where he occasionally stayed with his niece, to look for sex workers.

On the night in question, her gave Jodie sedatives that he took for anxiety before abducting her and driving to NSW.

At the time, Suckling was working as a caretaker at Wyarama Station, a remote 2,500ha property in southwest NSW, about 170km north of Mildura.

Prosecutors contended that he raped Jodie at the remote station – Suckling had earlier walked from three rape charges – then killed her to prevent disclosing what had happened, and subsequently buried her body.

The NSW Director of Public Prosecutions had charged him with Jodie’s murder in 1988, but later dropped it for lack of evidence.

It was only years later, when investigating the abduction and rape of another young woman, that they found Jodie’s belongings in Suckling’s possession. 

Police found photographs of Jodie naked and heavily drugged in the front seat of Suckling’s LandCruiser, with red handcuff marks clearly visible on her wrists.

The purple T-shirt dress Jodie was wearing when she was last seen alive was stuffed into a wardrobe in his bedroom at Wyarama. 

Her silver jewellery was in a cardboard box and her dental plate wrapped in tissue paper was in the wastepaper basket.

Suckling had a note saying ‘JODIE 27.12’, the day she disappeared. His rap sheet in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland courts was six pages long, and included attacks on another four women, two of them around the time Jodie vanished.

It also emerged that when Suckling had confessed about the murder to a cellmate when he was back in jail for social security fraud. 

In 1994, police wired up inmate ‘Bob Collins’, and caught Suckling boasting that the Larcombe family and police knew he had murdered Jodie, but couldn’t prove it. 

Jodie Larcombe’s parents spent years travelling around Australia in a caravan searching for their daughter whose murder evil killer Daryl Suckling laughed about getting away with until he was charged

Jodie’s father Ken Larcombe said Suckling’s bid to walk from jail was not worth finding out where his daughter’s remains are: ‘he’s a weasel. He’ll try anything

He told Collins: ‘All they have on me was Jodie’s teeth. They were in the truck. She was a s**t and a prostitute and they always get what they deserve.’

Wracked with grief over her disappearance, Jodie’s parents, Ken and Dot, had sold their house and travelled around Australia in a caravan looking for her. 

But Suckling told Collins that he had cut up Jodie’s body and placed her hands and head on the bumper bar of his vehicle. He boasted about taking her genitals and nipples as souvenirs. 

He had told other witnesses, including a woman that ‘they won’t get me because they will never find the body’ and showed them chains, saying ‘I used the chains to tie up Jodie when we were having sex’.

On July 18, 1996 the jury in Court 7 convicted Suckling of Jodie’s murder.

Justice James sentenced him to life without parole, making him one of 15 inmates slated as never to be released, but that didn’t stop Suckling from launching several bids to get out.

Even as his health dwindled in 2021, Suckling was still trying to fix a deal to get out on parole. He was secretly taken from his cell at Long Bay’s aged and frail unit down to the Mildura sandhills where he claimed he had buried Jodie’s head and hands.

It was 33 years after Jodie’s murder, and Suckling said he had plans to live out his days in a nursing home rather than prison. 

Police dug up a patch of land at Mourquong, NSW, near Mildura, but found nothing. 

Jodie’s father said he would rather Suckling remained in prison than to have him freed based on her remains being found. 

Mr Larcombe remarked that Suckling couldn’t be trusted or set free: ‘He’s a weasel. He’ll try anything’. 

After Suckling launched one of his appeals, Jodie’s mother tragically took her own life. 

Suckling ended up dying in a prison cell on August 30, 2021, aged 85 from emphysema and heart disease three months later. 

NSW Coroner Carmel Forbes has found Suckling died from a cerebral haematoma, chronic obstructive airways disease and ischaemic heart disease.