Warning: this article contains descriptions of child abuse and murder. 

Keith Moor had just started at the Melbourne Herald, and being the newest to the team, he'd been given the midnight to dawn shift.

That's how he found himself standing on Donald Street in Preston in the early hours of the morning after Melbourne Cup day, staring at a sheet atop a tiny body in the gutter, while a lone policeman stood guard.

The ambulance arrived and then the homicide squad, and Moor watched on as they inspected the little girl's lifeless body.

Watch: What happened to Kylie Maybury? Post continues after video.

After following the story all morning, he finally drudged through his front door at about 10am.

"Have you had to do the awful Kylie Maybury story?" asked his wife.

Moor burst into tears, as he did 40 years later during our interview on Mamamia's True Crime Conversations. 

"Maybe it was because I was a first time father, maybe it's just because I'm human. You wouldn't be human if you weren't affected by seeing the dead body of a six-year-old girl who has been raped and murdered," he said.

For months and than years after, Moor kept seeing little Kylie's arm lying in that gutter. He made a pledge to himself that he'd never stop following her story. He'd never stop writing about what happened to her.

He just wasn't expecting it to take 32 years to find her killer.

Melbourne Cup Day, 1984.

Kylie, her mum Julie, and her little sister Rebecca had spent the afternoon at the pub to watch the 'race that stops a nation', popping in at the neighbour's apartment for some tea on their way home.

But as the neighbour Lorna busied herself with hot water and tea leaves, she realised she didn't have any sugar.

Six-year-old Kylie was put up to the task. The corner store was only 150 metres away, and the little girl had been there plenty of times by herself.

It was just after 4pm when she left on her errand, but Kylie never returned home.

Kylie Maybury. Image: Vic Police.

They were able to trace Kylie's footsteps to the shop, she'd definitely bought the sugar. But a witness then described a girl that fit her description getting into a white vehicle and being driven away.

Police searched long into the night, but couldn't find any trace of her. Until a fire brigade electrician driving home after night-shift discovered her discarded body laying face down in a gutter just after 1am, a few streets away from where she was last seen.

"There was a massive search for Kylie from about 5:30pm, where all the streets in the area were searched, including Donald Street, where the body was found.

"That body wasn't there at 7:30pm, so what the police presume and later found out to be correct, was that whoever took Kylie had held her prisoner somewhere for a number of hours before dumping her body in the gutter," Moor told True Crime Conversations.

An autopsy revealed Kylie had been given valium, and while they weren't able to determine a direct cause of death, they did find shocking internal injuries which could have only been inflicted by rape.

They were able to extract semen samples from Kylie's clothes, but DNA hadn't even been heard of in 1984. It wasn't used anywhere in the world until 1987.

A 32 year wait for answers.

Moor struck up a friendship with Kylie's mother Julie in the days after her daughter's murder.

They shared the same birthday, and Moor became the grieving woman's confidant as she grappled with the depravity inflicted on her little girl.

As the years passed and Julie moved to Queensland, Moor even started putting flowers on Kylie's grave at her request.

Julie Maybury pleading for information. Image: A Current Affair.

Early on in the investigation, Kylie's grandfather was investigated as a possible suspect following a tip-off from his own son.

It wasn't him, and John Moss died by suicide before the first anniversary of Kylie's death citing in his suicide note that the pressure of being considered her killer was to much for him to bear.

His son and accuser, Mark Maybury, also died by suicide two years later.

In the 90s, police focused their attention on Robert Arthur Selby Lowe after he murdered a six-year-old girl, dumping her body in a storm-water drain in another Melbourne suburb.

It was realised that Lowe had worked in Preston, and her little handbag where she kept the change for the sugar was found not far from where he lived.

But after a huge rigmarole in the courts, with Lowe refusing to provide DNA, it was eventually realised that he wasn't a match. The case went dormant.

Moor had covered every development, but his stories also dried up as the leads did. Until he got a call.

"It wasn't until the 30th anniversary in 2014 that Julie rang me again and said, 'hi, Keith, are you still at the Herald Sun? Will you do a piece?'" Moor said.

It was that anniversary that sparked detectives in the Cold Case squad to have another look at the case, and so Moor did in fact have a fresh angle to take the story down, publishing a big piece for both print and online.

Crime Stoppers was inundated with calls about the case, but one name in particular stood out: Gregory Keith Davies.

He'd been interviewed in 1984, but his sister-in-law had provided him with an alibi.

As detectives looked at him with fresh eyes, they realised he'd already served time for a sexually related crime, he'd lived 650 metres from where the body was found and he'd even told police he'd driven his white car past the shop Kylie disappeared from. But his alibi had him driving past at a later time, and so he'd been eliminated.

In 2016, detectives knocked on Davies door and asked him for a DNA sample.

"It would have been hard for him to say no, because his wife [who opened the door] would have then said, 'why are you saying no?'" said Moor.

His DNA was a match, and he was arrested.

While the then 73-year-old initially denied it, he eventually pleaded guilty during his committal hearing. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Gregory Keith Davies. Image: AAP/Joe Castro.

"His actual sentencing had to be delayed because the day before he was due in court, his testicles were scalded because some prisoners threw boiling water over him. He had burns to 50 per cent of his body," said Moor.

Even though he pled guilty, Davies said he didn't remember anything about what he did to Kylie with the judge describing his offending as "simply disgusting".

Outside court, Julie called him "a monster."

"But you know what? It's all over now," she added.

"My daughter and I can move on … we can all be together as one big happy family again."

For Moor, seeing Davies sentenced in court was one of the proudest days of his journalistic career.

"I started off covering the story as a reporter, but it's one of only two or three cases that I have covered for decades where you don't become a reporter to the victim's family….I became a personal friend of Julie's, and I know she relied on me and Peter O'Connor, the homicide squad detective…I think we helped her cope and eventually have a very rewarding life," he told True Crime Conversations.

"Sadly, Julie is no longer with us. She said [to me] 'my fear is that I'll die before anybody's found guilty of Kylie's murder.' She was very frail by the time Gregory Davies was sentenced to life, and she died a couple of years later."

Keith Moor will be a guest on Mamamia's True Crime Conversations, this Thursday. You can find the podcast here.

Feature image: Vic Police.