Juanita Nielsen

Juanita Nielsen

Juanita Joan Nielsen (22 April 1937 – probably 4 July 1975) was an Australian publisher and heiress.

She was born Juanita Joan Smith in New Lambton, New South Wales to parents Neil Donovan Smith and Vilma Grace Smith (née Meares) (1905-1978). Her parents separated soon after her birth and she was raised by her mother at Killara, Sydney. Her father, Neil Donovan Smith, was an English-born heir to the Mark Foys retail fortune via his parents, John Joseph Smith (1862-1921), who was a Chairman and Managing Director of Mark Foys Ltd, and his wife, Kathleen Sophie Foy (1870-1919). Mrs. Kathleen Sophie Smith was a sister of Mark Foy and Francis Foy.

Juanita was educated at Ravenswood School for Girls, in the Upper North Shore of Sydney. She worked at Mark Foys from 1953 until she travelled abroard in 1959. In 1962, she married a Dutch seaman named Jorgen Fritz Nielsen at Kobe, Japan although the marriage only lasted for a few years. Juanita returned to Sydney in 1965 and returned to work at Mark Foys for about 5 years. In the early 1970s, Nielsen was the publisher of NOW, an alternative newspaper in the Sydney suburb of Kings Cross. She lived in a terrace house at 202 Victoria Street, and she became involved in a campaign against a proposed development project in her street and across the suburb.

Nielsen disappeared on 4 July 1975 and it is generally believed that she was kidnapped and murdered because of her anti-development and anti-corruption stances. A coronial inquest determined that Nielsen had been murdered, and although the case has never been officially solved, it is widely believed that Nielsen was killed by agents of the developers. The circumstances of her disappearance were fictionalised in the films Heatwave and The Killing of Angel Street.