‘Kindergarten cops’ still haunting Tobias Suckfuell 19 years after his girlfriend Simone Strobel died

Nineteen years ago, German backpacker Tobias Suckfuell, publicly lashed out at police on the NSW north coast city of Lismore branding them “kindergarten cops”. His German girlfriend Simone Strobel had just been found dead, her family left devastated and detectives did not have a single suspect. This week Tobias, a City Beach father of three, sat passively in the front row of the public gallery of Court 1 of Sydney’s Coroners Court Complex as he heard police did have a suspect that day and have had one every day, to this very day, for the 2005 murder – and it was him. From the witness box NSW Police Detective Sergeant Dave Mackie was asked by Tobias’ lawyer whether it was that kindergarten cops tag that made him and his fellow detectives so “angry” they only pursued the Perth man. “No,” Det-Sgt. Mackie responded. It was his multiple lies that were “so weighty” and other circumstantial evidence they said that has his police file stamped “probable” as the likely killer. But during an extraordinary hearing this week the public heard for the first time details of how the German travellers had inadvertently entered a sordid local lair of sex, sleaze and violence, fuelled by drugs and alcohol where danger was “lurking” literally in the shadows about them. One local predator in their vicinity was likened in court to the Australian devil himself Ivan Milat — the notorious east coast backpacker serial killer — as he allegedly gleefully “confessed” to others about killing Simone. A second man known to hate women also allegedly bragged to fellow campers “the nazi bitch got what she deserved; I killed her”. When that man was called before court this week, he denied making the comment but said he often played PlayStation and a Medal of Honour game and anyone who overheard him may have confused his remark about killing Germans in the World War II game. Did they or one of a handful of other local men who have curiously created tales and contradictions about their whereabouts that night do it, or was it the man sitting in the front row of the coroner’s court? A coroner and 55,000 pages of evidence will have to decide and finally close the almost two-decade old murder mystery. In August 2004, the 25-year-old kindergarten teacher Simone Strobel embarked on a one-year road trip adventure with her boyfriend of six-years Tobias Friedrich Suckfuell. According to her diary and her friends, the trip was a long-time dream for the pair that was coming true as they travelled up and down the east coast enjoying all it had to offer. The couple were in love, even talked about their future life together and by the time their second-hand campervan rolled into the NSW north coast city of Lismore in February 2005 she had even decided to contact her bosses back in Germany to say she would be extending her leave without pay for another six months. But days later she would be found dead. On the surface, the pair were like any other backpacking couple but her diary as well as Tobias’ private journal, both written in German, hinted that all was not well between the pair in her last days. According to diary entries, written days before she would be found dead, there were emerging issues and “the baddest vibrations”. As they set-up camp at Lismore Tourist Caravan Park on the edge of the city, Simone and Tobias were joined by Suckfuell’s sister Katrin and their family friend Jens Martin. The foursome sat around, played music, drank beer and smoked cannabis and appeared, according to one local resident at the park, like any other hippies travelling that coast road. But large amounts of alcohol — to the point of the foursome being refused service and asked to leave a bar in the city — brought out the truth among the group. Tobias and Simone would have a screaming match that February night, he and his sister an argument about “a family matter”, she and Katrin then were crying together, then there was more screaming and permanent residents in the park told the “nazis” to go to bed. In Jens Martin’s words to police later, he and Katrin had never seen Tobias in such a rage, being “out of control” with anger. Katrin told Jens that night that Simone had confided in her that she planned to travel back to Sydney and travel alone for the next six months. Things had come to a head and Simone had stormed off, according to some witness reports, or she was dead in her campervan according to the police theory. Either way she was never seen alive again. It would be six days later before her body was found on a bocce court less than 100m from her caravan park camp site, she had been stripped naked with her clothes taken and palm fronds placed over her body. An autopsy concluded she had been smothered but could not determine whether she had been sexually assaulted such was her decomposition. The inquest this week, led by the NSW State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan, was the second into her death. The first began in July 2007 and on October 16 that year the coroner ruled there was insufficient evidence to lay charges. Then in 2020 a $1 million reward was offered (a similar reward in Germany was offered but only for 10,000 Euros) for information leading to a conviction. A second inquest was ordered in 2021 but did not proceed due to the pandemic and other issues. Then in July 2022, Tobias was charged with murder and perverting the course of justice. He was extradited to NSW and locked in a cell but as the latest inquest has revealed, police were someway away from making a case. Indeed, almost as suddenly as he was charged, NSW Police and the DPP dropped the case in 2023 and paid him $190,000 in legal fees compensation. Tobias has long denied any wrongdoing. Such has been the build-up for answers after 19 years, Simone’s brother and sister Alexander and Christina flew over from Germany for the inquest. They also sat on the front row of the public gallery separated from Tobias’ family by the narrowest of aisles. Tobias’ father Hugo was also in court alongside his son, who has changed his name to Toby Moran after marrying his lawyer wife Samantha Moran, daughter of prominent Perth dentist Dr John Moran, who was also sat in court. Before them 13 lawyers representing various parties walked the coroner through the volumes of evidence including transcripts from hours of surveillance of Tobias’ family home. From the outset of the inquest, the word “lies” set the scene. There were, according to counsel assisting the inquiry Philip Strickland SC, multiple lies told by many people not least of all by Tobias on the morning his girlfriend went missing as well as by Katrin and Jens. They lied about the intensity and severity of the argument between the group, the state of their intoxication, played down the relationship issues between the couple and Tobias even lied to Simone’s parents when she first went missing, when asked if there had been a quarrel. Tobias did not go looking for her after she apparently stormed off that night, leaving the searching to Jens and Katrin. Police say it was because she was dead in her campervan and Jens and Katrin were not looking for her but a spot to dump her body. Despite all three being adversely named back in 2007 only Jens agreed to give evidence to the first inquest. Tobias was at that time found by this journalist in South Africa and said there was “no point” in him ever returning to assist the inquiry. “The lies he had told police were particularly unhelpful,” police said after he admitted he lied to get police to treat her disappearance more seriously. It had the opposite effect. Police said whoever killed Simone did not act alone since the manner her body was disposed of through a small hole in the bocce court fence would require two people to lift her through. They suspect Katrin or Jens, or both. But then the court heard startling details of more than a dozen “unsavoury” local Lismore characters placed at the scene or thereabouts at the time of the murder, with some having motive, intent and or carnal desire. Two men confessed, two other men said strange things to suggest they knew who did it, more than a dozen people have been named with many having significant criminal records for violence and substance abuse and others with mental health issues, but police have them discounted all. Odd people, Det-Sgt Mackie surmised, say odd things. But still their testimonies don’t sit right. At least two people allegedly confessed to the murder and another detailed where her body would be found before it was discovered. Police have pursued Tobias relentlessly, even having undercover police pose as his cell mates when he was in jail. Another undercover cop codenamed “Sophie” who attempted to entice the Tobias and wife Sam at their home with an alibi that her (fake) brother dying of cancer with just two months to live could confess and she collect the $1 million reward for his children. Police said bugging devices of conversations between Toby and Sam Moran suggested they “twigged” to the ruse. At any rate, no evidence emerged. The inquest had many surprising pieces of evidence but none as startling as when former school cleaner Brett Groth decided to break his decades-long silence to name Toby Moran as the previously unidentified “fixated man”. Mr Groth was just called to give evidence to confirm his 2005 police statement at seeing a man by the roadside with a fixed focus on a woman, suspected to be Simone across the road the night she was killed. He helped produced a police sketch of the man he said was possibly aged in their 40s or 50s but on Friday revealed for the first time he had later seen a picture of Mr Moran and now believed it was him but had been too embarrassed to come forward again; he didn’t go to police years earlier when he came to that conclusion as he had a young family and was too fearful he said. The coroner will consider the plausibility of his new evidence. In 2017, the Morans reportedly paid $120,000 in legal costs after dropping a civil defamation action in the WA Supreme Court against author Virginia Peters and her publisher for a book on the Strobel case “Have You Seen Simone?”. Ms Peters has attended the Sydney inquest every day. “In 2007, I attended Simone’s first inquest, seven years later in 2014 I published a book telling the story and after it was published, I fought successfully for three years in the defamation courts to keep Simone’s story alive,” Ms Peters said outside the court this week. “Eighteen years on from the first inquest here we are again . . . She was a wonderful, kind young woman who died in the most tragic circumstances that have been made all the more tragic due to the complexities and difficulties in this case.” High-profile Sydney barrister Tim Game SC, representing Tobias, raised several “plausible” alternative narratives during the inquest as to what happened that night. He claimed they were backed by credible witness statements including sightings of Simone after police claim she had already been killed. Some of those statements were accepted by police as plausible, but discounted as they maintained Tobias remained their prime suspect. Outside court Tobias would not speak to the media, no doubt hoping the evidence will speak for itself.