It’s hard to know what to expect when a prime suspect is called to give evidence in a 25-year-old missing persons case.
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But when serial rapist Paul Vincent Phillips appeared at the 2009 inquest into the 1984 disappearance of Canberra schoolgirl Megan Mulquiney, the most - or perhaps least - surprising thing about him was how creepy he was.
Tall, weatherbeaten, with dark, piercing eyes and a long, white beard, he could have come straight from central casting.
The news that he would be brought before the court in Canberra to give evidence at a re-opened inquest into Megan’s disappearance had been another installment in what was already a horrifying case.
Seventeen-year-old Megan, a year 12 student at Narrabundah College, finished her shift at Big W at noon on July 28, 1984, and left the mall to catch a bus home to Mawson.
She was last seen soon after midday, but never made it to the bus.
There has been no trace of her since then, just a heartbroken family and a well-worn image of a smiling teenager with a 1980s flick in her hair.
It’s that hair that serves as a reminder - obvious but important - that Megan went missing in a time before CCTV, mobile phones, or a solid understanding of DNA.
But when the same family was told that one of the few persons of interest in the case - a serial rapist who was living in Canberra at the time of Megan’s disappearance - would be brought before the court almost 25 years later, it was like an episode of a modern police drama brought to life.
When Phillips, who had been in jail for most of his adult life, entered the courtroom, you could feel the air shift. He was tall, and forbidding, and, worst of all, defensive.
By this time, he was just a year out of prison after a nine-year stint in Tasmania’s Risdon jail, for the abduction and rape of a teenage hitchhiker.
He had earlier been convicted of the abduction and rape of a Canberra teenager in September 1984, also at Woden Plaza, just two months after Megan disappeared, and the attempted abduction of a woman in Tasmania four months after he was released from prison for this offence.
During the hearing, which lasted two days, he was cross-examined about his childhood in Tasmania and Canberra - one marred by abuse and neglect - as well as details about the offences for which he served a combined 16 years in prison.
He agreed and offered further details as counsel assisting the coroner, Margaret Hunter, gave chilling accounts of each of the attacks.
A key part of the evidence at the inquest was that each time Phillips had attacked a woman, he had been at a low ebb in his life.
On the day before Megan vanished, a Friday, Phillips was sacked from his job at an autowreckers in Queanbeyan.
Twenty-four years later, he was still unable to explain why he had given police three false alibis to account for his whereabouts on the day Megan went missing.
But during the 2009 inquest, when Ms Hunter asked him what it would take for him to admit what he had done to Megan's family, he said, ''It would take for me to have done it. I swear that on my children. I have children of my own.”
He agreed with the coroner that while there was no physical evidence, there was a range of circumstantial evidence that pointed to him as a prime candidate.
''I'd be thinking that too, your honour,'' he said.
And with that, he was gone - a free man who had done his time and given no closure to a family desperate for answers.
Chief coroner Ron Cahill was left once again to deliver an open finding into Megan's disappearance and presumed death, saying it was likely Megan was murdered by an unknown person.
But he said Phillips would remain a person of interest - words that have taken on a new meaning now that Phillips is dead.
