The Truro Serial Murders

Fate Steps In

Deborah Skuse

While returning from Mount Gambier on Saturday, February 19, 1977, Christopher Worrell was killed in a car accident. A female passenger in the car, Deborah Skuse, was also killed. James Miller, escaped with a fractured shoulder.

Miller and Worrell had become friendly with Debbie Skuse when they first went to visit her boyfriend, whom they had known in jail, only to find that he had walked out on her.

To help Debbie get over losing her boyfriend they had taken her to Mount Gambier for the weekend but Worrell had become moody and they decided to return to Adelaide on the Saturday afternoon. Late in the afternoon Worrell was at the wheel after drinking several cans of beer and was driving recklessly through countryside north of Millicent.

Debbie begged for him to slow down and a row ensued with Worrell screaming at the distraught girl and telling her to shut up. Then Worrell yelled, "We've got a blow out," and the car careered out of control onto the other side of the road into the oncoming traffic.

In an effort to avoid a head-on collision with a vehicle coming the other way, Worrell careered the old Valiant off the side of the road where it spun over and over many times until it came to rest with the three occupants spilled out onto the grass. The accident had been witnessed by several bystanders who ran immediately to the scene but there was little they could do.

Debbie Skuse and Christopher Worrell were dead where they lay. James Miller suffered a shoulder injury and was taken to hospital in shock. It was his worst nightmare come true. The one and only friend he had ever had in the world was dead.

At his funeral, a distraught Miller spoke with Chris Worrell's girlfriend, Amelia, who would later come forward as 'Angela', and told her that Worrell had had a suspected blood clot on the brain. This prompted Miller to tell Amelia that Worrell had been murdering young girls and that maybe the blood clot had caused him to commit these horrendous crimes.

Although Amelia had been seeing Worrell for only a short time, she had liked him very much and was deeply distressed by his death. Amelia kept her dark secret until the skeletons started turning up almost two years later. Then she told police about what James Miller had told her at the funeral.

In her statement to the police Amelia claimed that Miller had said the victims "were only rags and weren't worth much". She also claimed that Miller had said: "They had to be done in so that they could not point the finger at us". Miller strenuously denied ever making either statement.

After Worrell's death, Miller moved from place to place, sometimes sleeping in abandoned cars and at other times staying at the St Vincent de Paul and the Central Mission day centre. With Worrell dead and Miller living the life of a transient, it is highly likely that the murders would have gone unsolved if Amelia hadn't come forward.