Volume 4 · Chapter 3
The Body in the Bag
Will Matheson
Victim: Lyndsay van Blanken
Case at a glance
- When
- November 2003
- Where
- Bondi Junction and Queens Park, Sydney, Australia
- Perpetrator
- William “Will” Matheson
- Victim
- Lyndsay van Blanken
- Outcome
- Convicted of murder with an 18-year non-parole period; granted parole in 2023
The case
Will Matheson was a cellist in Sydney, and from 2001 he dated Lyndsay van Blanken. When she ended the relationship in September 2003, he refused to accept it. For the next two months he followed her and kept appearing where she was.
On November 24, 2003, security cameras recorded Lyndsay leaving Bondi Junction railway station. It was the last time anyone saw her alive. Matheson strangled her with plastic cable ties he had linked together, then hid her body in a storage room inside an apartment building in Queens Park, zipped into a cricket equipment bag. He had bought the bag two days earlier, a detail that pointed to planning rather than a sudden loss of control.
Lyndsay was missing for almost seven weeks. On January 10, 2004, residents of the building complained about a smell, and a maintenance worker opened the bag. Matheson was convicted of murder and given a non-parole period of 18 years, and his overall term was later reduced on appeal. The New South Wales State Parole Authority granted him parole in 2023.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 4 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 4 on AmazonCase photographs
7 photos
Where it happened
Why this case
“Stalking cases unsettle me more than most, because the warning signs are usually visible to everyone. Lyndsay did what people are told to do and ended it. Two months later she was gone. I wanted readers to notice how ordinary those two months looked from the outside.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
