IT was a crisp Sunday morning during the winter of 1978 when plainclothes detective Brian Mooney and an offsider got a call to head out to the old Pacific Highway near Swansea.
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It was supposed to be a nothing job - a tow truck driver was trying to recover a Holden sedan caught a few cricket pitches down a steep embankment and needed a hand with the winch.
But it would become something so sinister that it still haunts them nearly 40 years later.
They were hovering near the top of the embankment as the car was being hauled up, the wreck only an arm's length away when the boot suddenly sprang open.
Inside was a nightmare.
The bodies of a mother and two young children had been stuffed into the confines of the boot, bound and gagged. They had been stabbed to death.
As he stared aghast at the carnage in front of him, Mooney was not to know what the next 24 hours or so would entail. It would take him on the chase for the killer and cause him to spend more than six hours trying to hold a conversation with evil to save the life of another innocent woman.
Two days earlier, on August 11, 1978, parolee John Ernest Cribb had broken into a home at Baulkham Hills, in north-western Sydney and was ransacking it when Valda Connell arrived home with two of her five children. Her husband and three others were a little while behind them.
But by the time they arrived, Valda, her 10-year-old daughter Sally and son, Damien, 4, had vanished.
Cribb was to later tell a homicide detective that he drove off with Mrs Connell and her son in the front seat and Sally in the back of Mrs Connell's car.
They drove north, out of Sydney, through Newcastle before ending up past Taree and Wingham, at a place called Elands.
After his arrest, Cribb was to travel with the investigator and other police to retrace his steps, directing them to a picnic area near Ellenborough Falls.
A committal hearing heard the party came to a T-intersection, seven kilometres from Comboyne and 34 kilometres from Wingham, where Cribb attempted to tell police it was the area he had told the Connells where he was to let them go.
Instead, the party continued to drive around before Cribb said to them: "Check that spot again. It looks like the place."
The cops got out of the car and immediately found bloodstains and congealed blood among the foliage.
The officer told the hearing that Cribb had asked: "Is that it?"
When told it appeared that way, Cribb reportedly said: "Don't take me near it, I don't want to look at it."
It was obviously the place where he stabbed Mrs Connell and her children. He was to reportedly say they were tied up at the time. He had dragged the woman out and carried the children.
It appeared Mrs Connell suffered 13 stab wounds, while there were six wounds on Sally and two on Damien. They were stuffed into the boot and Cribb drove south.
By the following night, a Saturday, Cribb and the car found their way to the car park of what was then called the Mawson Hotel at Caves Beach. Police were later to discover he got full of schooners and even tried his hand at picking up one of the local girls before he left in a huff when she knocked him back.
That's when he probably drove south and lost control of the car at the s-bends on the old Pacific Highway.
Within hours, the towie and police were called.
It has still not been lost on Mooney that as he drove through Swansea on his way to the call-out, Cribb was most probably on the phone to another towing company trying to get the wreck out of the scrub before it was discovered.
But it was too late.
Within hours, police were on his trail and, with the help of a well-known local crook who had spent some of the Sunday with Cribb, they closed in on a few streets at Islington.
Cornered, Cribb knocked on the door of an innocent woman who was on the phone, telling her he had been involved in an accident involving some children and could he use the phone to call an ambulance.
Once inside, Cribb went straight for a knife and held it at the woman's throat.
Not long after, Mooney was inside the house and spent at least six hours, and possibly as long as 10 hours, talking to Cribb through a five-centimetre slit on a bathroom door.
Mooney told Crime Files that he spoke to Cribb a lot about the Vietnam War - Mooney was a veteran - but it was all about keeping in line with the tactics of not upsetting him. Cribb still had the woman inside the bathroom and there were grave concerns for her welfare.
Never once was the conversation moved towards what Cribb was suspected of doing.
The cops ended up smashing the door down and taking Cribb into custody. He had suffered a self-inflicted stab wound but his hostage was not injured, at least physically.
Cribb was later to be sentenced to three life terms and despite trying to get it redetermined through truth in sentencing legislation, he remains behind bars without a date set for his parole.
But he did taste freedom again, if only briefly, after breaking out of Morisset Hospital with another inmate not long after his arrest and going on another horrible spree, where they abducted two 17-year-old girls and raped one of them before they were recaptured.
Mooney says he still gets the odd nightmare about the case, and can still vividly recall the boot springing open.
But he never thinks about Cribb.
"I would say he would have got a pretty rough time in the sin bin, they don't like that sort of stuff."
Immediately after his arrest, as he was being put in an ambulance, Cribb reportedly told a detective: "I should not have killed them".
When asked who, he reportedly said: "You know who. Let me die."