WHEN bushwalkers found Steven Quire's shallow grave in the Watagans scrub on Saturday, they stumbled on a piece of the dark legacy scattered among the trails.
At the range's eastern edge, near where Mr Quire was found, the mountains loom above the F3 Freeway and are blanketed in 13 forests.
Their cover was used in 1996 by Sydney-based Korean expatriate Sung Eun "Nick" Park when he suffocated his wife and children and hid their remains.
Qian "Susan" Park, 31, and her children, Amy, 2, and Andrew, 3, were found in a charred suitcase on the forest floor by backburning firefighters just off the Heaton Lookout tourist trail.
Police tape wrapped the red cedars again in 2005 when officers, acting on a tip-off, searched fruitlessly for a body in a shallow grave.
A restaurant in Martinsville, four kilometres south-west of Mr Quire's grave, became the eye of a police and media storm in November 2002 when a terrorised woman burst into the kitchen.
Sandy Hain, 31, had been kidnapped at gunpoint with her parents Michael and Lindy from their Hexham farmhouse at dawn.
The gunman was never found.
Two months earlier, two families picnicking together on Watagan Forest Road were menaced by a man and a woman with a rifle, which was fired once.
The attackers melted into the forest, which once harboured Ronald Ryan, hanged in 1967 for murder in Australia's last execution.
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