And perhaps even waiting to strike again?

That’s the disturbing theory posed by a grieving father two decades after the disappearance and presumed murder of his daughter.

Three young women disappeared within a few years of each other from 1992.

All three had one thing in common — associates in the drug scene

Two of the women remain missing. The third women’s body was found in a shallow grave at an abandoned Lithgow mine site.

On a warm April day in 1992 a visibly distressed woman rushed into the old Lithgow police station in Bridge Street with a disturbing story.

She had been walking her dog and collecting wild flowers among the State Mine relics at Dobbs Drift when the dog drew her attention to a mound of earth and the horrifying discovery of a protruding human arm.

It took some time for the body to be identified as that of Maureen McLaughlin who had been reported missing from Leura days earlier.

Seeking public assistance the police circulated her photograph, one of which was placed in the Main Street window of the Lithgow Mercury office.

That led to another alarming twist when a male person threw open the front door and yelled profanities at the office staff demanding to ‘..get that xxx photo out of there’.

He ran off up the street before the startled staff could get a good description.

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A subsequent inquest was told of the young woman’s seedy associates at Katoomba and one of her final sightings with known drug associates in Lithgow.

Twenty six years later her murder remains a cold case with a very large unclaimed reward.

Six years after the Dobbs Drift discovery another young woman, Belinda Peisley, disappeared from Katoomba, leaving behind two small children.

She became another Homicide Squad cold case.

Her father, Mark Wearne, believes there are possibly links with the McLaughlin case and also  that of another young woman, Kellie Carmichael, who was last seen at a Katoomba hostel in 2001.

Mr Wearne said the common thread between the three woman was their ‘similar age and social situation and travelling in the same circles in the drug scene in Katoomba’.

“Was there a serial killer operating in the Blue Mountains at that time?” he suggested to the Blue Mountains Gazette.

Interestingly a theory tested at the time of Maureen McLaughlin’s death was the involvement of Australia’s worst serial killer, Ivan Milat.

The psychopathic Milat had been working with the then Department of Main Roads in the Lithgow-Mountains area around the time.