The Watagan Forest Suitcase Murders: A Mother and Her Two Children’s Tragic End

Part One: The Discovery

On August 27, 1997, in the middle of the Australian winter, a group of firefighters was conducting a controlled burn in Watagan Forest on the central coast of New South Wales, about 11 km south of the town of Cessnock.

It was routine work for them. Dry vegetation along the roadside was deliberately burned away to prevent larger fires from erupting when summer arrived. Flames licked through patches of grass and layers of decaying leaves beside the trail leading up to Heaton Lookout, where visitors often stop to take photographs.

As they were extinguishing the last of the glowing embers, two firefighters noticed an object lying on the slope just a few meters from the road. It looked like an old suitcase, the kind people sometimes secretly dumped in the forest to avoid the trouble of disposing of it properly.

The suitcase was still smoldering. Part of its outer shell had been scorched by the flames, and several items inside were still partially burning.

Curious, the two firefighters moved closer to see what had been abandoned in such an isolated place. When they looked inside, they saw a white plastic bag swollen into a rounded shape. As the bag opened slightly in the heat, what appeared inside left both firefighters frozen in shock.

It was a human skull. It was extremely small—so small that no expert was needed to recognize it as the skull of a child.

Part Two: The Second Suitcase

Police and crime scene investigators were quickly dispatched to the area. The quiet trail leading to Heaton Lookout was suddenly sealed off with police tape. An investigator began filming and photographing the entire scene. The suitcase lay on a fairly steep slope, and to get a clearer view from below, he had to make his way several meters farther down into the dense undergrowth.

And it was then that his eyes stopped on another object. Not far from the first suitcase, on a patch of ground the flames hadn’t yet reached, there was a second suitcase.

Seeing the two suitcases lying so close together, the investigators understood that they were almost certainly connected. A terrible feeling began to settle over them. Everyone silently hoped that the second suitcase would contain nothing like what they’d just discovered.

But that hope was painfully fragile.

Part Three: The Horror Unfolds

The two suitcases were carefully carried up from the slope and placed on a tarp spread beside the road for examination. The larger suitcase was unzipped first. As soon as the items lying on top were removed, the nearly complete skeletal remains of an adult woman were revealed beneath them.

It was something no one at the scene had expected. In an instant, the nature of the case had changed completely. They were no longer confronting the death of a single child. They were now dealing with a double murder.

When the investigators examined the woman’s remains more closely, they noticed that her head had also been covered with a plastic bag, exactly like the child’s skull found in the first suitcase. Following the body downward, they saw that the victim’s hands had been tied with a thin rope. The rope extended all the way to her legs, binding both ankles together as well. The woman had been hog-tied, with her hands and feet pulled tightly toward the same side of her body.

The investigators then returned to the smaller suitcase and continued removing the remaining items. As they worked, they noticed a chilling detail. All the clothes inside had been neatly folded and carefully arranged, as though the suitcase had been packed for a trip, rather than used to dispose of a body.

As each item was lifted out, numbered, and documented, a crime scene specialist suddenly touched a third plastic bag. He began to lift it. The object inside had the same unmistakable rounded shape. By then, almost everyone already knew what it was.

A human skull. A third skull.

Those present later recalled that in that moment, the entire scene fell into absolute silence. No one said a word. Everyone was so horrified they could barely believe what lay before them.

They’d already found two dead people inside two suitcases, and now there was a third victim. One woman and two children. All three had been tied up, all three had plastic bags placed over their heads, and all three had been packed into two suitcases and abandoned deep in the forest, in a place where no one was ever supposed to find them.

This was the beginning of one of the most haunting criminal cases ever to unfold on Australian soil.

Part Four: The Victims

Watagan Forest lies in the Central Coast region of New South Wales, stretching across a series of hills overlooking a major highway. It’s a dense forest filled with rocky gullies and deep ravines hidden from view. According to local residents, the place where the two suitcases were found had once been used as an illegal dumping ground—an isolated location that vehicles could barely reach.

For that reason, whoever had brought the suitcases there had clearly calculated that no one would simply pass by and discover them. Perhaps not for many years. Had it not been for the controlled burn that happened to take place that day, the mother and her two children might have remained hidden in the forest forever without anyone ever knowing.

Immediately after the three sets of remains were discovered, police conducted autopsies to determine the cause of death. Part of that process involved taking x-rays. The results showed no obvious signs of trauma on any of the three victims. There were no bullet wounds, and no metal fragments were found in the bones or among the belongings inside the suitcases.

Experts also examined the remains closely for signs of knife damage, tiny fractures, or cut marks along the edges of the bones, but they found nothing. None of the bones had been fractured by the impact of a heavy object. The scene offered almost no direct clue as to how the mother and her children had died.

Faced with a dead end, investigators returned to a detail they documented from the very beginning. All three victims had plastic bags pulled tightly over their heads, and each bag appeared to have been secured around the neck.

From this, they formed a reasonable theory. The three victims had most likely been suffocated, their airways sealed by plastic bags tightened over their heads. It was an extraordinarily cruel way to die. And with two of the three victims being very young children, bound hand and foot before bags were placed over their heads, that cruelty became even harder to comprehend.

Part Five: The Search for Identity

But at that point, no one knew who these three unfortunate people were. Initially, police had no clues at all about their identities. The victims could have been lying there for months, perhaps even years.

The investigators at the scene began searching their own memories. Had a mother and her children recently disappeared in the area? Was there a family they’d already been looking for? But no one could think of any such case.

This led to another theory. Perhaps the three victims had been brought there from somewhere else and abandoned in the forest. The homicide squad began reviewing dozens of missing person cases. Eventually, their attention settled on one particular case.

It involved a young woman, her son, and her daughter, who had vanished from an area north of Sydney toward the end of the previous year.

The woman’s name was Cheon Park, though she was commonly known by her English name, Susan. She was 31 years old. Her son, Andrew, was only three. Her younger daughter, Amy, was around 2 years old.

The mother and her two children had been reported missing from the family’s apartment on East Parade in the suburb of Eastwood in October 1996, approximately 10 months before the two suitcases were discovered in the forest.

Part Six: The Husband’s Story

So, who was Susan Park? She was originally from China. Years earlier, when she first arrived in Australia, she worked at a Chinese restaurant owned by her uncle in Brisbane. She was described as a kind and gentle woman. It was also in Brisbane that she met the man who would later become her husband, and together they built a home with their two children.

From the outside, they appeared to be an ordinary family, much like many other immigrant families working hard and raising their children in Australia. But the deeper investigators went into the case, the more they began to sense that something was wrong.

Because the person who had reported Susan and her two children missing was none other than her husband—the biological father of both children. He was a Korean immigrant living in Sydney who went by the English name Nick Park.

And now came the question that would drive the entire investigation: On the day police discovered three skulls inside two scorched suitcases in Watagan Forest, where was Nick Park?

Part Seven: The Missing Person Case

To understand why the name Nick Park drew so much attention from investigators, we have to go back 10 months to the time when the mother and her two children were first reported missing. At that point, it was simply a missing person case. No one was yet speaking of murder.

In October 1996, when police first arrived at the family’s apartment in Eastwood to investigate, Nick Park was there. Investigators asked him where Susan and the two children were. Nick calmly replied that his wife and children were in Queensland. Specifically, that they were staying with Susan’s uncle. He said the entire family had flown to Brisbane and was temporarily living at the uncle’s home because they intended to sell all their belongings and move there permanently to start over.

He claimed that he’d stayed behind to finish selling the remaining possessions in the apartment and planned to fly up the following day to reunite with his wife and children.

At the time, the police weren’t particularly suspicious. His explanation sounded reasonable enough. There was nothing unusual about an immigrant family wanting to move somewhere else and begin a new life. They believed that once they spoke with Susan’s uncle in Queensland, everything would be cleared up.

Before leaving, they even asked Nick whether he’d be home all day. He assured them that he would, saying he’d be busy packing throughout the day.

Part Eight: The Lie Exposed

But when police finally contacted Susan’s uncle, the story immediately took a different turn. The uncle said he had absolutely no idea where Susan or the children were. In fact, he explained that he hadn’t been in contact with her for around 6 months.

Susan and her children were not staying with him in Queensland. Nick’s entire account had been fabricated.

At that moment, investigators began to feel that something was deeply wrong. Why would a husband lie about the whereabouts of his own wife and children? They decided to return to the Eastwood apartment. But this time, no one answered the door. They looked through the windows and saw no one inside. Nick Park had disappeared.

Police began questioning neighbors around the apartment complex, hoping to uncover some kind of clue. One neighbor said that the last time she’d seen Susan was 11 days earlier. And Susan had confided in her that she and Nick might be getting back together.

That detail revealed something important. Before Susan disappeared, their marriage had already fallen apart, and the couple had been separated for about a month.

The reason was that Nick was having an affair. But he’d hidden it from his wife, claiming that he had to work night shifts and sleep at a friend’s house to explain why he was absent at night.

It wasn’t until around September 1996, just 1 month before everything happened, that Susan learned her husband had been involved with the other woman for nearly a year.

Part Nine: The Affair Discovered

The shock was overwhelming. According to some accounts, around the time she discovered the affair, Susan attempted to take her own life by drinking a large amount of alcohol at once. About half an hour earlier, she’d called a relative who rushed to the house and summoned emergency services, partly out of fear that something might happen to the children.

At this point, a question emerged in the minds of investigators. Could Susan, overwhelmed by despair and no longer thinking clearly, have harmed her children before taking her own life?

During the early stages of the missing person investigation, this was one possibility they considered. But when the three sets of remains were found bound and packed inside suitcases, that theory collapsed completely. No mother could place herself in that condition and then dispose of her own body in the forest.

The deaths of Susan and her two children had unquestionably been caused by someone else.

Meanwhile, Nick Park himself had already left Australia. Just days after Susan and the children were last seen, he and his mistress, Demi Huang, attempted to leave the country. By then, police had become suspicious and issued an alert at border checkpoints in case Nick tried to flee.

Their fears were soon confirmed. One afternoon, they received a call from customs officials reporting that Nick was attempting to leave the country with a woman.

Part Ten: The Escape

The problem was that at that point, police had no grounds to detain him. They still didn’t know where Susan and the children were or whether they were alive or dead.

Police contacted federal authorities and asked them to board the plane and question Nick one last time about the whereabouts of his wife and children. Nick repeated the same story—insisting that his family was in Queensland while he was returning to South Korea to visit a sick relative and would be back in Sydney in 10 days.

Federal officers checked his ticket and it was indeed a round trip ticket. With no legal reason to hold him, they had no choice but to let him leave.

But in the minds of the investigators, the truth already felt unmistakable. This man was running. He’d done something, or he knew that something had happened, and he was trying to escape it.

Just as they’d expected, 10 days passed. Then several months, and Nick Park never returned to Australia as promised. He remained in South Korea with Demi.

Part Eleven: The Confirmation

The victims’ identities were confirmed through Susan’s dental records and through the belongings inside the suitcases that the killer hadn’t bothered to sort through. The missing person case officially became a triple homicide investigation.

But solving a case like this would be anything but simple. There’s a principle every homicide investigator must follow. When a murder occurs, they’re required to consider every possible theory, no matter how unlikely it may seem.

And in this case, there were many. People speculated about gangs, prostitution, and love triangles. But in the end, only one theory would prove to be true.

The first theory, and the one that most deeply haunted the public, involved Korean criminal gangs. Remember, Nick Park was a gambler. Less than a year before Susan disappeared, a temporary casino had opened in Sydney. Its arrival attracted not only gamblers like Nick, but according to rumors, loan sharks who came looking to prey on those who lost money.

At the time, there were frightening reports about how Korean loan sharking gangs operated. It was said that two rival groups were competing for control of lending at the casino, both charging crushing interest rates. And that the ultimate price for failing to repay a debt could be a person’s life.

Police even sought intelligence from overseas, particularly from the United States. The information they received only deepened their concerns. In some places, loan sharks had forced debtors to send their wives, their girlfriends, and even their daughters into sweatshops or brothels to pay off what they owed.

From this, a horrifying scenario began to take shape. Could Susan and her children have become the victims of a gang-style act of revenge used as payment for Nick’s gambling debts?

Part Twelve: The Investigation Continues

But when investigators compared that theory with what Susan’s relatives knew about her, it began to fall apart. Everyone who knew Susan described her as a decent woman. When she first came to Australia, she’d owed her uncle more than 20,000 Australian dollars. And she worked day and night at his restaurant until every cent had been repaid.

She was the kind of person who would only earn money honestly. It was difficult to believe that someone like her would willingly enter such a dark world to take on her husband’s debts.

Even so, police didn’t dismiss the possibility immediately. They brought in an entire task force specializing in Asian organized crime. At their request, investigators carried Susan’s photograph from one brothel to another throughout the inner city area, holding onto the faint hope that someone might have seen her.

But the search produced nothing. The theory that she’d been forced into prostitution to repay a debt led nowhere. There was no evidence that Nick Park had any deep connections to criminal gangs. For that reason, the gang theory, which had once caused widespread public alarm, was eventually set aside.

Part Thirteen: The Financial Clue

As one investigative lead after another outside the family was ruled out, the police slowly turned their attention back to a single person—the husband, the father—Nick Park.

They obtained a warrant to search Susan’s apartment in Eastwood. Inside, almost everything remained exactly as it had been when they last visited. The bed had been stripped of its sheets, the closets were empty, and the belongings had been packed as though they were ready to be moved. It looked as if Nick Park had never returned after his conversation with the police.

Investigators searched for any sign of something suspicious, but there was no evidence of a struggle, no blood, and no biological material of any kind. They then searched the apartment Nick shared with Demi, but the result was the same.

Just when the investigation seemed to have reached a dead end, a financial clue emerged. As a matter of routine, when someone goes missing, police examine that person’s bank accounts.

Susan had an account with Commonwealth Bank. The bank revealed that a transaction had taken place on October 24th, about a week after Susan and the children were last seen. $300 had been withdrawn over the counter, the exact amount remaining in the account. And that was not all.

Police also discovered that $400 had been withdrawn from the children’s accounts, leaving them empty as well.

At first, this offered a faint glimmer of hope. Perhaps Susan was still alive and had withdrawn the money herself. But one detail immediately caught the investigators’ attention. The transactions had been carried out at a branch Susan had no apparent reason to visit. It was located in the suburb of Ashfield. And Susan’s only connection to Ashfield was that her husband was living there with his mistress, Demi.

Part Fourteen: The Forged Signatures

Police immediately asked the bank to provide security camera footage from the day the $300 was withdrawn. They needed to know for certain who had taken the money from Susan’s account. If it was Susan, then she was still alive. But if it was someone else, the case would take an entirely different turn.

When police played the bank’s security footage from the day the $300 was withdrawn from Susan’s account, the woman on the screen was not Susan. It was Demi, Nick Park’s mistress. Demi had also been seen at a car rental agency that police would later identify.

But her presence alone wasn’t enough. Investigators needed a direct link tying Nick Park to those transactions. They collected the withdrawal slip from that day, along with the account closure forms used several days earlier to close the children’s accounts.

Susan, their mother, was the only person authorized to sign for those accounts. Police immediately sent the documents to a forensic handwriting expert. The conclusion was unmistakable. Every signature on the withdrawal slip and the account closure forms had been forged. Someone had copied Susan’s handwriting to drain every last dollar from her accounts and those of her children.

Part Fifteen: The Handprint

But the real breakthrough came in the next stage. The forms were sent to a forensic laboratory to determine whether any fingerprints could be recovered. Because paper is a porous surface, a specialist used a chemical treatment designed to react with such materials and reveal latent marks invisible to the naked eye.

And on the form bearing the name of 3-year-old Andrew, a clear handprint appeared near the bottom. It had been made by a left hand.

Demi had no criminal record, so police had no fingerprints or handprints on file to compare with it. But Nick Park was a different matter. When he was younger, he’d been involved in a minor fraud case and police had taken his prints. Those prints were already stored in the system.

When the handprint recovered from Andrew’s withdrawal form was compared against the database, it matched. It belonged to Nick Park.

And consider what that meant. Nick Park had placed his hand on a form bearing the name of the very son he had just killed, simply so he could take the last of the money held in the child’s name. It was proof that he’d personally taken part in closing his children’s accounts. Just 1 day after police believed the children had been killed.

Part Sixteen: The Murder Weapon

From that point on, the remaining pieces began to fall into place. Because the crime scene wasn’t where the bodies had been found, police needed to prove where the mother and her two children had actually been killed.

And the clue once again lay in the murder weapon itself. The plastic bags placed over the victims’ heads bore production batch numbers. Using those numbers, police traced the bags to a store in the suburb of Marsfield.

When the owner was shown Susan’s photograph, he recognized her immediately and said she was a regular customer who often came in to shop. That detail couldn’t reveal where the mother and children had died, but the bags that sealed all three victims’ airways were the very bags Susan herself had brought home.

Near the place where the two suitcases were discovered, police also found hardened tire tracks pressed into the soil beside the road. They were traces left by a vehicle that had stopped at the very spot where the bodies were dumped.

Piece by piece, the scattered clues began to reconstruct the entire sequence of the crime.

Part Seventeen: The Motive

But one haunting question remained. What was his motive? How could a father kill his own 3-year-old son and his 2-year-old daughter?

Even the most experienced investigators struggled to accept it. After all, if Nick simply wanted to leave with Demi, he could have quietly fled Australia for South Korea without murdering his wife and children. Clearly, something must have acted as the catalyst that set this brutal act in motion.

Police focused their efforts on finding that catalyst. And eventually, they did.

After the incident that led to her hospitalization, Susan received care from a psychologist. The psychologist advised her to think about the future of herself and her children, then helped her begin the process of seeking child support from Nick.

A letter from the child support agency was prepared and sent to Nick’s address in Ashfield in mid-October 1996. And it most likely reached him around October 17th. That letter was believed to have been the trigger.

When Nick opened it and saw that Susan was formally demanding long-term financial support for herself and the children, he flew into a rage. To a gambler who was always desperate for money, years of compulsory support payments must have felt like a chain around his neck.

And it’s also worth remembering that all the money he managed to gather after killing his wife and children—by emptying their bank accounts, selling possessions, and pawning property—came to only about 2,200 Australian dollars.

Demi later testified that the money wasn’t even used to buy plane tickets as police had once believed. Nick took it to the casino and gambled it away.

Part Eighteen: The Extradition

With the chain of evidence now strong enough, police began the process of extraditing Nick Park from South Korea to Australia. But finding him wasn’t easy. Nick rarely contacted his family. At one point, he called home and claimed he was working at an English language school. But when South Korean police checked, he’d already left and gone into hiding.

After a long and persistent search, exactly 1 year and 7 months after the day police believed Nick had murdered his wife and children, he was finally brought back to Australia to face justice.

While Nick remained silent and refused to cooperate, his mistress Demi, who was still in South Korea, was willing to tell police what she knew.

According to Demi, Nick received the letter from the child support agency at the Ashfield apartment on October 17th. After reading it, he became furious. Demi said that Nick then went to the Eastwood apartment. And in the early hours of October 18th, at around 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, he called her and said that all the problems had been taken care of and that everything would be fine.

In the days that followed, Nick obtained the withdrawal documents needed to close his children’s accounts, leaving behind the handprint that would seal his fate. Then he rented a car. Demi admitted that she was with Nick when he rented it.

According to her, after renting the vehicle, the two of them drove to the Eastwood apartment that evening. Demi waited in the car while Nick went inside. When he came back out, he was carrying two suitcases, which he placed in the trunk.

They then drove to an area north of Sydney. Demi couldn’t remember the exact location, only that it was a forested area with a dirt road. Nick stopped the car, threw the two suitcases into the bushes, and then they both drove back to Sydney.

She also admitted that she was the person who went to the bank and withdrew the money, and that she’d done everything under Nick’s instructions.

Part Nineteen: The Trial

Demi was offered immunity from prosecution for fraud if she agreed to testify against Nick at trial. However, she wasn’t guaranteed immunity if she were later charged in connection with the murders. Remaining in South Korea was clearly the safer option for her.

But in the end, Demi voluntarily returned to Australia to testify. Her decision to come back of her own free will convinced investigators that she hadn’t been directly involved in the deaths of Susan and the children. Ultimately, no charges were brought against Demi, and she returned to live in South Korea.

Demi’s testimony, together with the entire chain of circumstantial evidence, was enough for the jury to find Nick Park guilty of the deaths of Susan, Andrew, and Amy.

In August 2000, Nick Park was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 19 and 1/2 years. Under the terms of his sentence, he’s expected to be considered for parole around 2028.

One of the investigators later said it was among the most brutal and savage murder cases he could remember in his entire career. He’d seen people shot to death. He’d seen people beaten to death. But the killing of two young children, together with their mother, was, in his view, one of the most horrific crimes he had ever encountered.

Part Twenty: The Final Chapter

It seemed as though the story had ended there, with the killer paying for his crimes behind bars. But this case still had one final chapter. A chapter that would leave people speechless in an entirely different way.

Only after Nick Park was convicted did a heartbreaking truth come to light. The bodies of Susan and her two children had still not been laid to rest. The mother and children remained inside a cardboard box at the Newcastle morgue. And they stayed there not for a few days or a few months, but for 11 long years.

No one had stepped forward to arrange their funeral. The husband and father who had killed them was in prison. Nick’s family in Sydney, as well as Susan’s distant relatives in Brisbane, all refused to pay for a funeral when they were contacted. Susan’s own family was far away in China.

And so, the three victims were gradually forgotten.

Part Twenty-One: The Detective’s Compassion

The person who couldn’t bear to let them be forgotten was one of the very detectives who had solved the case. His name was Inspector Peter Fox.

He could still remember the exact day Susan and her children entered his life. It was August 27, 1997, when he received the call reporting that human remains had been found in the forest. At the time, he was a detective sergeant in Cessnock.

During the investigation, he traveled all the way to China to meet Susan’s family. He later recalled how devastated they were. And to him, this was a tragedy in its deepest form. A woman and her children had died, and there was no one there for them.

In early 2007, Peter Fox was informed that unless someone took action, the three bodies would be cremated as unclaimed remains with their ashes placed in three urns and buried together in an unmarked grave. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

He personally arranged for the cremation, then kept the three urns inside a safe in his office while he searched for a way to return them to China. But then he encountered another obstacle.

Susan’s family didn’t want the ashes sent back, partly for religious reasons, but also because they believed that the two children had been born in Australia and belonged there, and that they should remain beside their mother. They asked Inspector Fox to arrange a Buddhist funeral for them.

Part Twenty-Two: The Final Farewell

And in 2009, at Nan Tien Temple near Wollongong, Peter Fox and his wife sat quietly in a room as Buddhist monks performed the final rites for Susan and her two children.

A victim support worker who had accompanied him later recalled a moment that sent chills through her. It was when one of the monks turned to Peter Fox and told him that after all those years, it was finally time for him to let go.

When Peter Fox was reminded of those words, he simply smiled. He said that he had let go and that he felt able to do so because he knew their family would be very happy to know that at last the mother and her two children had been laid to rest there.

The case of the mother and her two children found inside two suitcases in Watagan Forest will be remembered for a long time. Not only because of the cruelty of the crime, but also because of the compassion shown by a stranger toward victims whom no one else might have remembered.

Epilogue

The Watagan Forest murders remain one of Australia’s most haunting criminal cases. A mother and her two young children—Susan, Andrew, and Amy—were brutally killed by the man who was supposed to protect them. Their bodies were stuffed into suitcases and abandoned in the forest, where they lay for almost a year before being discovered by firefighters conducting a routine controlled burn.

The investigation was long and complex, spanning multiple countries and involving numerous theories. But in the end, justice was served. Nick Park was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Yet, even after justice was served, the victims remained forgotten—until one detective refused to let that happen. Inspector Peter Fox’s compassion ensured that Susan and her children finally received a proper funeral and were laid to rest with dignity.

As for Nick Park, he remains in prison, his parole eligibility set for 2028. Whether he will ever be released remains to be seen. But for the family of Susan, Andrew, and Amy, the pain of their loss will never fully heal.

The case serves as a grim reminder that sometimes the greatest dangers come not from strangers, but from those closest to us. And that justice, though it may be delayed, must never be denied.

THE END