Percy is brought to Russell Street police headquarters before sunrise breaks over the city. It has been a long night, and he is hungry. He greedily scoffs two hamburgers before Knight resumes the interview at 5.40 a.m., with Delaney typing the answers.
'Are you feeling all right?'
Percy keeps his head bowed, appearing to study the floor coverings. 'Yes.' He is more circumspect in his answers now, as he tracks his movements from the moment of the abduction; how he grabbed the girl and the boy ran away.
'Did the girl call out?' Knight asks.
'She could have.'
Inspector Ford, the officer in charge, knocks on the door after twenty minutes. 'Are you being treated all right?'
Still Percy does not look up. 'Yes.'
Delaney records the interaction. 'Suspect agrees he is being treated all right.'
Through the early morning, until just after 8.30, Percy details in his slow, somnambulistic way the horrifying final hours of his young victim, the unspeakable savagery to which she was subjected. He talks about her in a detached, unhurried voice, choosing his words quietly, speaking softly. He only knows her full name, he says, because police have told him. She was just a stranger to him.
'Why did you take the girl back to the car?'
'Just on impulse, somebody to talk to.'
'Why this particular girl?'
'No reason. No special reason.'
Knight blinks. No reason. No special reason. An innocent girl, not yet a teenager, not yet wearing a bra, targeted, hunted, butchered by a grown man. But the girl's identity was immaterial; she simply fitted his fantasy profile. A perfect young victim, walking past with her little friend, right in front of him. Why this particular girl? No reason. No special reason.
Percy goes on, detailing their banal conversation as Yvonne sat captive in his car, shivering with fear; the inconsequential things that he said to try to appease a terrified victim and keep her quiet. 'Your name?' he asked her. 'Yvonne.' 'Where do you live?' 'Warneet.' 'What are you doing here?' 'We're out for a hike.' 'Weather's a bit cold?' 'Mm. A bit cold.' And when the small talk was done she climbed over into the back seat like he had ordered her to do, hiding under the eiderdown while he backed the car out on the roadway and pulled into another track leading off it. And she was a good girl, he remembers. Ate the biscuits saturated in his urine, did what he told her to do. 'What did you do when you pulled up at the other track?'
'I told her to get back over into the front seat, and to take her clothes off. She started acting scared.'
'Did she get over into the front seat when you told her to?'
'Yes.'
Long, long pauses between his answers. Staring at the floor, vaguely, eyes half closed. Shaking his head. Monosyllabic responses. Breathing in, out, in, out; laboured and heavy. Staring at the detectives with his watery blue eyes; his blank, passive, watery-blue eyes.
'Did she take off her clothes?'
'Yes.'
'Do you remember what she was wearing?'
'A tracksuit, singlet, and underpants. Socks and sandshoes.'
'Did she take them all off herself or did you help her?'
'No, she took them all off herself.'
She was naked with her legs open in the front seat and he was looking at her private parts but she started to fight back, this feisty tomboy, yelling, yelling and he shut her up with a gag, her own singlet secured with a piece of rope.
'What else did you do?'
He tied her hands with a bit of cord, he says, his fingers fluttering just a little to illustrate his point. Tied her with the rope and the cord he kept down behind one of the car seats. But even that didn't stop her racket. Even bound and gagged, that girl had tremendous fighting spirit. 'I think she started kicking and trying to yell. She was panic-stricken.'
So was he, with all the commotion she was making, and that was when he tried to strangle her. He had his two hands around her throat but she was kicking and struggling and he couldn't strangle her; it didn't appear to be having any effect.
'What happened after that?'
'I think I put her tracksuit on and pushed her out of the car onto the grass and tried to strangle her again.'
'Why did you try and strangle her the second time?'
Percy looks uncomprehending, shrugs. 'I can't say for sure, but probably because she was still kicking and struggling.' What he doesn't tell them is he could hear her whimpering through the gag, could smell her fear. That was the best bit, inflicting pain; not limp and insipid anymore but powerful, aroused, in control. That was the best bit, dominating her, intoxicated with his power, and he would write it down later, jottings that mirror parts of this girl's murder, the important details that he can re-live in his mind.
The minute hand turns on the wall. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Long, long pauses. And now he's describing her murder, how he got the knife out as she lay on the ground near his car and plunged it into her neck. Put it in and ripped it across while she was still alive.
Knight's fingers curl and uncurl as he listens, but his face betrays nothing. 'Okay. What did you do then?'
'I must have gone crazy and started slashing. I just slashed her up the belly.'
Describing now how he dragged Yvonne behind a bush by her feet, hurled her shoes out of his car and drove off. He stopped for petrol, combed his hair, put his jumper on and washed the blood off his hands with some water from a plastic canteen he carried in the car. 'I dried my hands with a bit of rag I had in the front. I think the rag is still in the car.' The story is recounted in a flat monotone, as though he is discussing the weather. The flat, dreary monotone of a man devoid of human emotion.
'Right. What did you do after that?'
'I came onto the Flinders–Frankston Road just before the Hastings bypass turn-off and followed the road back to Flinders.'
He admits the drawings that they found on top of his locker are his, nodding yes and then Inspector Ford returns to the room, at 7.50 a.m., to enquire solicitously about his welfare. 'Are you still being treated all right? Would you like some breakfast?' No, he wouldn't, Percy says. He has just eaten a couple of hamburgers. He doesn't normally eat breakfast.
'Why did you find it necessary to kill the girl?' Knight waits while Percy collects his thoughts.
The answer – the banal, terrible answer, delivered in his disconnected voice – comes neatly packaged in one short sentence. 'Just panic, I suppose; I thought if she got away she would tell on me.' Nothing more: this is his justification, his terrible, banal justification. If she got away she would tell on me.
'You knew you were doing wrong to kill her?'
'Yes.'
'And the reason for killing her was so that she wouldn't tell on you?'
'Yes.'
Knight glances at Delaney; says nothing. 'Did you have intercourse with the girl, or attempt to?'
'No.'
'Did you sexually interfere with her in any way?'
'Yes, when she was sitting there with nothing on I played with her private parts.'
This slip of a girl had raised an unholy racket when he touched her, screamed in terror and indignation. She would not give in easily so he killed her, so she wouldn't tell on him. 'Is there anything else you want to tell us about this matter?'
'Not that I can think of.'
Knight does not ask him about the origin of the foul-smelling, sticky substance smeared on her body, and Percy doesn't volunteer.
He now has to read aloud the record of interview. His sentences are spaced apart and he speaks slowly, finally nodding and signing agreement that it is a fair and correct interpretation of what he said.
The detectives rub their eyes and look at the clock. It is just after 10 a.m. 'At this stage I will tell you that you will be charged with murder,' Knight informs him. 'You are not obliged to answer any further questions or make any statement, unless you wish, but whatever you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. Do you understand that?'
Not a flinch. 'Yes.'
Jack Ford fills out the paperwork, the perfunctory, formal end to Yvonne's shocking death. 'SUBJECT: TUOHY, Yvonne Elizabeth – Murdered at Devon Meadows on 20.7.69. PERCY, Derek Ernest – Charged with murder.' Brief details; to the point. 'Relatives of the deceased girl have been informed.'
7
After a lunch break, they take Percy back to Warneet to re-enact his movements from the time he abducted Yvonne. The cars pull up at the deserted beach and begrudgingly, poker-faced, he answers their questions as police cameraman Ewan Cunningham films his movements. 'Show us what you did here,' they ask Percy. 'What did you do then?' 'The girl was only wearing socks; where did you put her shoes?' They want to know why he was sitting so high in the seat when he had passed the Payden family and he tells them in his blank, nondescript way, that he was sitting on the girl. To hide her. He volunteers nothing further, answering what he is asked, and only what he is asked.
Constable Paul Jones knows the Tuohy family from Warneet. He identifies Yvonne's body at the coroner's court on 21 July, nodding quietly when the sheet is pulled back to reveal her face. 'Yes, that's Yvonne. Yvonne Tuohy.' He has known her for two years, he says. The haunted expression on her face will stay with him all his days. He knows she died in pure agony.
The murder of a young girl, however newsworthy, would never take centre stage against the historic drama of the moon landing. While the story, 'So Now It's Goodbye, Moon!' made the front page of Melbourne's Sun newspaper on 22 July, Yvonne's murder is relegated to page 21 with the headline 'Man Seizes Girl With Knife At Throat'. The next day, Percy's arrest appears on page 15: 'Killing's Girl. Man Charged'.
The detectives examine the handwritten notes confiscated from Percy's naval locker. Sickened by the contents, they read in silence, not seeking retreat in the gallows humour so often employed by police officers to disguise shock and abhorrence. Squirming in their seats, they pass the notes quietly between each other, reading the obscene ramblings of a depraved paedophile. 'Get two boys, (6-10) and two girls (6-14) or boy, (6) or three girls (6-14) and take them out to place. When I get there, blindfold them and strip them and have a good look and feel. Tie them to trees and ropes coming from behind under armpits, around behind neck and under other arm, and around tree. Nail a stick to the tree and tape their heads to it. Put a pair of plastics on each and tie string around legs so they won't leak . . .' A page of fantasies in his small, tight handwriting about babies and faeces, imprisonment and torture, mutilation and cannibalism, so utterly foul that the detectives need to take breaks from reading them every few minutes. Percy reveals perfectly laid out depraved plans, starting with abduction and building to a crescendo, ending when he is sated with his own filth, when the children cannibalise each other, 'til only bones left.
The notes, secreted in his locker, detail abduction, torture, murder, mutilation. 'If it is a boy (under 3) the penis is cut off.' His fetishes for urine and faeces and for cross-dressing; of the cunning way he will entice his prey with promises and threats. Percy, the ineffectual loner who has no presence in real life, who never stands out in a crowd, fantasising about his power; about abducting his quarry from a crowded area. 'Go into town and find girl (6-10) walking around with mother. Hold them up quietly and take them out of crowd. Keep gun pointed at kid and give mother a list. Two pairs of pantihose, (to fit you), four pairs plastics, four pairs thick undies (to fit kid.) Tell her got five minutes to get. Tell her no one will get hurt if she co-operates.' Children fighting to the death and blocking the cargotid [sic] artery or windpipe. Writing about people he knows – 'Two girls at Barnsley' – and what he will do to them. 'Entice them into car. Take them to secluded place, strip them and tie their hands behind their back. Inspect them thoroughly. Make them sit on me and piss and shit.' The food supplies he will need – one large can of beer; two packets of chips; two large chocolates – and miscellaneous needs: one washer, one small towel, one piss blanket.
The writings are so degenerate that no one who reads them will ever forget their contents. And something else is dawning on police, as well. This bloke is so bent that God only knows what else he has done. God only knows.
Armed with Percy's writings, at 8.30 p.m. Monday, Knight and Delaney resume their interview of Percy. They want to know about his highly sexualised writings. 'The one found in the ash tray of your car is headed "Two Girls at Barnsley",' they ask him. 'When did you write that?'
'Around about March this year when I was home on leave in Sydney.'
'Why did you write that?'
'I got the feeling, I got the urge. Thoughts came into my mind.'
'What sort of thoughts?'
'The thoughts came into my mind to try and do these things one day.'
'How long have you been writing articles like this?'
'About four years.'
Knight has him now, playing it by the book and quietly hammering him about details of his sordid writings. Finally Percy admits the terrible truth about what he forced Yvonne to do, how he degraded her as she sat whimpering with fear, insisting she defecate and urinate, telling her he would hurt her if she did not comply, playing out his fantasies on this terrified victim and smearing her body with both their faeces.
'Do you agree that your writings also show a list of articles to take with you when you pick up girls and boys, and that list includes a washer and a small towel?' Knight asks.
'I didn't actually have a small towel, sir, I had a big one which I carry around when I am sailing. It's normally in the car all the time.' Percy corrects Knight, politely. Subordinate, controlled. He wanted to take the boy, too, he admits, and followed him for about forty yards along the beach after he ran off.
'Why was that?'
'I wanted to take him with me and when he ran off I wanted to stop him from getting away and telling someone.'
He's not sure, Percy continues, but after he killed Yvonne he thinks he could have cleaned the knife on her tracksuit. Knight wants to know how often he thinks about the things he describes in his writings. 'It varies,' Percy admits, sullenly. 'It could be a couple of weeks; it could be a couple of months. Depending on other things I am doing.'
'How long do you think about them when they occur?'
'It could be a couple of days; it could be shorter or longer. Sometimes when I'm on leave with nothing to do it could be longer.'
'After you saw the children did you want to do to them some of the things you describe in your writings?'
'Yes.' Driving back from Cowes, he stopped and put on the pants, he admits. He defecated and got an erection. 'I was, most likely, off my head when I saw the kids.'
Is there anything else he would like to tell them about this matter? He shakes his head. No, he says, eventually. He can't think of anything.
8
The day after Percy's arrest, one of his former school friends, Ron Anderson, is summoned by the Homicide Squad. Anderson and Percy lost touch after leaving school, with Anderson joining the Victoria Police in early December 1968, a year after Percy joined the navy. But it is hoped that he might be able to elicit information from his old school mate, to find out what makes him tick. A nineteen-year-old probationary constable and still a fresh-faced country boy, Anderson remembers Percy as likeable and quiet. His immediate reaction is to find out what he can do to help him. Percy, he assumes, has asked to see him.
Then he sees the photographs. Detectives put them on the table, one by one; quietly, wordlessly. Anderson feels sick to his gills as he sights them, the terrible series of pictures taken by police at the morgue. He is taken to the City Watch House, opposite the Russell Street headquarters, and walks straight to Percy's cell. He holds his constable's hat in his hand, containing his police notebook. Percy is sitting on the cell cot, sobbing and distraught. He looks up as Anderson enters.
'Hello, Derek,' Anderson says. There is an awkward pause, a moment between two old school friends: Anderson shifts uneasily on his feet, police hat in hand; Percy looks up at
him with a plea for help, panic written on his features.
'Hello, Ron. Looks like I've fucked up this time.'
What does he mean, Anderson thinks: this time? He remains standing, registering nothing on his face. 'It certainly looks like it, Derek. Yep.'
Percy is openly crying, his hands clammy with fear. 'What am I going to do, Ron?' His voice is quiet and low, choked with tears.
'I really don't know what's the best thing to do, Derek. Maybe you could ask to see a doctor or a psychiatrist. They may consider you were sick at the time. I don't think they will consider this is normal, anyway.' He flashes back to the police photographs. She looked like a gutted rabbit.
'Would that help, Ron?'
'Best I can think of, Derek.' Anderson has not been briefed to ask Percy about other unsolved crimes but he does so anyway. 'Were there any others, mate?'
Percy howls, cradling his face in his hands, sounding like a wounded animal caught in a trap. 'I cannot remember.'
The 'others'. Names that have made front-page headlines around Australia since 1965, children who have either disappeared into the ether or whose bodies have been found and their killers not brought to justice. The stabbing murders of fifteen-year-old Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock at Wanda Beach, Sydney, in January 1965. The abduction of the three Beaumont siblings – Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4 – from Glenelg Beach, Adelaide, in January 1966. The strangling murder of six-year-old Allen Redston in Canberra in September 1966. The mutilation murder of three-year-old Simon Brook in Sydney in May 1968. The abduction of seven-year-old Linda Stilwell from St Kilda, Melbourne, in August 1968. The 'others'.
Anderson fingers the brim of his hat and stares at Percy. 'If you can remember it's better to say now than after you are released and have to serve more time. It would assist in deciding your mental health at the time.'
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 4