Inquest into slayings of Sydney nurses Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans told of blood brothers pact between alleged perpetrators CLAIMS: Witness Desmond Edmondstone outside the inquest. FOUR men stood near a bush clearing after the vicious rape and murder of Sydney nurses Lorraine Wilson, 20, and Wendy Evans, 18, almost 40 years ago and swore a pact of secrecy in blood, a witness has claimed. Desmond Edmondstone, 53, who came forward to police just six weeks ago, gave the chilling account to state coroner Michael Barnes yesterday, as an inquest into the women's cold case killings resumed in the Brisbane Coroners Court. See yesterday's full evidence He told the court he had travelled to Rockhampton around 1978 to work at a meatworks with Larry Charles, one of the men police identified as a person of interest in the murders. Mr Edmondstone, who would have been 18 at the time, said he was staying at a caravan park with Charles when he interrupted him crying. ``I knew Larry and he's never cried in his life," he said. ``He said it was two years ago today that the Murphys Creek ladies were killed and he was there. Mr Edmondstone relayed Charles's confession in court, telling how the women were picked up hitchhiking, driven around Toowoomba and how they'd partied with Allan John ``Shorty" Laurie and Wayne ``Boogie" Hilton at Murphys Creek. He said when the women refused to have sex with Terrance Jimmy O'Neill or Donald Laurie, one of them was punched and the other fled ``screaming" into the scrub. Mr Edmondstone told the court Charles told him it took hours to find the missing woman, but when they did they brought her back to the Murphys Creek clearing where Allan Neil Ungie Laurie and Desmond Roy Hilton had arrived in a separate car. ``That's when things went bad," he said. He told the court the women were raped throughout the night, tied up and bashed to death with sticks the next morning. Mr Edmondstone said Charles told him the men made a ``blood brothers" pact to secrecy, and were threatened that if they ever told anyone about what happened, the remaining men would kill them. He told the court Charles called him ``sniffling as though he wanted to forgive his sins" some years later, and admitted to confessing to a minister about the killings. He said Charles ended his own life the following day. Witness Kim Sandercock, in a wheelchair and on heavy medication, struggled to remember her 1984 encounter with a drunk woman called Ellen in a Toowoomba bar who told her she was there the night the women were killed. She gave a statement to police in 1989 after a friend she confided in contacted investigators. It read that two women were picked up by a group of men to ``teach them a lesson" because they refused to have sex with them. Ms Sandercock's statement said one of the women was hit in the back of the head with a metal bar when she tried to escape. ``If I could help, and I understand what you are saying, I'd give my life to give you a hand, but I just don't remember," she said. The women's 1974 disappearance and the gruesome discovery of their bodies bound and beaten in bushland at Murphys Creek two years later sparked a police investigation that has spanned almost four decades without an arrest. An inquest in 1985 ruled the women met with ``foul play" after their bodies were found on June 26, 1976, with fractures to the skull and bound by venetian blind cord. Mr Barnes heard evidence from three of the seven men police suspected of playing a role in the women's deaths earlier this year. Four police suspects - including Allan John ``Shorty" Laurie, Wayne Hilton, Donald Laurie and Larry Charles - are already dead. Surviving persons of interest - Allan Neil ``Ungie" Laurie, 63, Terrance ``Jimmy" O'Neill, 61, and Desmond Roy Hilton, 63, gave evidence in the Coroners Court at Toowoomba in April. The inquiry resumes today for closing submissions.