A Siem Reap bar owner and real estate developer who previously was investigated in one of Australia’s most infamous cold cases was sentenced on Tuesday in Australia to more than 10 years in prison for a series of child sex crimes dating back to the 1960s.
One of his victims also said on Tuesday that he had been questioned on Sunday by South Australian Police working on the cold case, which involves allegations that Anthony Munro was complicit in the unsolved 1966 disappearance of three siblings.
Mr. Munro, 72, was arrested for the child sex crimes in June last year upon his return to Australia from Cambodia, where he is also under investigation on child sex crime allegations. In Australia, he faced 10 counts of abuse of two boys, including sexually violating one child “over 400 times” beginning when he was 11. Mr. Munro pleaded guilty and in December was convicted.
On Tuesday, he was sentenced to 18 years, but the term was reduced by 40 percent in light of an early plea, according to South Australian district court documents. Mr. Munro will be eligible to apply for parole after serving just over 10 years of the sentence, records show.
“Given his level of cooperation and early plea, I thought that it was a reasonable sentence,” his lawyer, Stephen Ey, said by phone. But Andrew McIntyre, one of the victims, who waived his anonymity in order to speak out about the crimes, said the sentence wasn’t enough.
However, he said what appeared to be renewed police interest in the disappearance of the three Beaumont children from a beach in his childhood hometown more than 50 years ago left him confident that Mr. Munro would remain imprisoned long past the end of Tuesday’s sentence.
Mr. McIntyre and his sister, Ruth Collins, had long appealed to police to investigate their accusations against Mr. Munro in the disappearance of the children.
“Finally, after 10 years, I was interviewed by major crimes on Tuesday,” Mr. McIntyre said. “He’ll never get out of prison and he’ll die there because I’ll keep him in the prison with the Beaumont children.”
Ms. Collins claims that her late, estranged father, Max McIntyre, showed her the mangled bodies of the Beaumont siblings in the trunk of his car after he and Mr. Munro, his friend, returned from a trip to the beach in 1966.
Andrew McIntyre claims that later that day, he saw a “big patch of blood” on the seat of Mr. Munro’s car. The siblings say they believe their father buried the children in a well on family property and that its excavation would reveal the children’s fate. “There’s a 100 percent chance those children are buried in that well,” Mr. McIntyre said on Tuesday. Detective Senior Sergeant David Sheridan, the lead investigator in the Beaumont case, could not be reached for comment, but has previously said the siblings’ allegations held no water.
“Major crimes is satisfied that my client has no involvement in it,” said Mr. Ey, Mr. Munro’s lawyer. “The assertions are completely without merit.”
