Still to this day I can remember Gerard Ross' framed picture sitting on my teacher's desk as a local police officer stood at the the front of our classroom talking to us about stranger danger.
Just days earlier, Gerard's body had been found in a pine plantation not far from our school.
Several uniformed police officers came to my Year 6 demountable classroom to warn us to be extra vigilant in the wake of Gerard's murder, to tell our teachers or our parents about suspicious cars or any "strange people" we were unsure about.
I recall sitting very close to my teacher's desk as the police officer spoke clearly and calmly to us. He had placed Gerard's framed photo on the desk and I remember thinking to myself as I looked at his smiling face, 'who would do such a thing.'
It was a very unnerving time to be going to school in Rockingham, as I was in 1997.
Even as an 11-year-old kid, the same age as Gerard, who had just moved to Australia from Ireland two years prior, I could feel a change in the atmosphere and a nervousness among my classmates and indeed all of their parents, as well as my own.
Indeed it was a tense time to be living in Perth and in Western Australia.
This was around the same period when three young women, Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon, vanished from Claremont in Perth's western suburbs. Two of their bodies were later found north and south of Perth in the case which became known around the country as the Claremont serial killings.
The fear and anxiousness young women would have felt when they went out late at night in Perth at this time was likely a similar fear felt by children and their parents in Rockingham at the time of Gerard's murder.
Current WA Labor leader Mark McGowan had been elected to the state seat of Rockingham a year prior and said on Tuesday, as police renewed calls to catch Gerard's killer, that "the entire community was traumatised."
Everyone was talking about the case and how shocking it was that a child could be snatched from the street in broad daylight.
After Gerard was abducted, I can recall an incident when one particular teacher kept us back after school well after 3pm. For what, I can't remember exactly. Maybe we were misbehaving and playing up.
I can still see the fury on the faces of the parents with the teacher in question because many of us had not arrived home at our usual time. They were terrified we had met the same fate as Gerard.
There was already a large amount of fear in the community after Gerard's death. Being kept back after school for a long period only elevated those fears for our parents who were at home waiting for us.
Rockingham has come a long way since 1997. Kent Street, the road where Gerard was snatched from, is now home to a new range of modern cafes and apartments.
Despite the fact I no longer live there, I find myself spending many of my weekends in Rockingham visiting my parents and my mates who still call it home.
Whenever I head to Kent Street to grab a coffee or a bite to eat, Gerard's smiling picture sitting on my teacher's desk pops into my mind.
In recent months WA Police have made major breakthroughs in several cold case murders, most notably last month when they charged a man with the murders of Jane Rimmer and Ciara Glennon in 1996 and 1997.
Late last year they also charged a man with the 1989 murder of Van Phan Nguyen near the Mciver train station.
Detectives attached to the Special Crime Squad are clearly working tirelessly behind the scenes on these investigations.
Lets hope for the Ross family's sake, police can soon make a similar breakthrough in this case.
