Lambs to the Slaughter

by Debi Marshall

  A distant father and over-protective, though not maternal, mother. Perfect incubators for a young man with Percy's terrible peccadillos.

  It was the gentle lull between Christmas and New Year, 1964; a time when the dry heat was so savage that even a few minutes' exposure on an alabaster skin could land a person in hospital with sunstroke. The lake was shimmering with heat haze and the teenagers loitered on a baking night outside the grey weatherboard hall in the centre of town that doubled as a picture theatre on Saturday evenings. Plastic chairs were hastily unfolded and films shown on a projection screen: Sean Connery, cool and sophisticated in Goldfinger; Julie Andrews as the magical nanny in Mary Poppins and Audrey Hepburn, the irascible cockney Eliza Doolittle, in My Fair Lady.

  Mount Beauty was such a small town, filled with migrants: pommies, Balts, Germans, Scots; a melting pot, where everyone was bestowed with a nickname or an abbreviation of their surname. Whitey, Anderson, Billy Hutton, Cliffy; the lot of them were outside the picture theatre, skylarking about, showing off, trying to outdo each other and get the girls' attention. Percy stood aside from them, grinning at their antics with his arms folded, watching.

  Linda Slight, six months shy of her fifteenth birthday and staying at her family's holiday house in Mount Beauty had gone to the pictures with her older brother and sister. Dark curls in a short cut framed her petite face; small in stature, she easily blended into the crowd, which suited her. A timid child, she normally hung back in the shadow of her brother or sister, not three years apart in age, who would protect her as best they could. But that night they had already gone inside the theatre and she was on her own for the first time, shyly peeping around. The boys noticed her, despite her timidity: she had hips like a child but a voluptuous, womanly figure and they nudged each other in the ribs about her huge knockers, her big udders that strained against her light cotton shift. 'Hey, Linda!' they yelled. The family had been coming up for years and she knew those boys – Whitey, Billy, Cliff – extremely well. 'Hey, Linda!' Kim White repeated. 'Percy wants to see you around the back of the hall!' Naive, innocent and used to doing what she was told, she went.

  The back of the hall was quiet and deserted, with no street lights to illuminate the darkness. Percy was standing on his own, leaning against the weatherboard wall, languid, laid-back. Linda peered up at his face. He looked like a stockman from the high country, she thought: gaunt cheeks, dark clothes and a coarse jacket with a faintly musky smell. Good looking in a strangely angular way, with the hint of a smile in his eyes. And she sensed something else about him: he was in control. At ease. He looked down at her, easy as a fox padding around its prey.

  Suddenly he grabbed her, his hands wrapped tight around the top of her small arms, pulling her toward him with brute force and holding her hard against his chest. She could hear the boys hooting and hollering around the front of the hall but Percy was not perturbed by the chaos, pinning her to him and grinning slyly as she struggled wildly against him. As she flailed from his grasp, his face contorted into an ugly mask, grinning maniacally like Batman's Joker. Free from his grip, breathless and shaking, Linda smoothed out the folds of her flimsy dress, backing away from him. 'I've got something for you,' he whispered hoarsely and as she instinctively turned toward him he grabbed her again and shoved his erect penis into the palm of her left hand. It felt hard, alien, and she tore away from him, blubbering incoherently, belting around to the front of the hall to where the boys were still standing, screaming with laughter. She crept into the hall, head bent, and pulled up a seat next to her brother and sister, trying to calm her erratic breathing. She did not tell her siblings or her mother. The only person she took into her confidence was her best friend, Robyn Smith, the girl who regularly crossed town to get parsley for her mother. Linda tried to put it behind her, but she never forgot his face.

  Never.

  12

  In early January, a week later, the Percy family headed to Sydney, as they often did during Ernie's fortnight off, towing their van and visiting Elaine's mother at The Entrance, twenty minutes north of Gosford on the Central Coast of New South Wales, and Ernie's mother at Deniston, near West Ryde in Sydney.

  On 12 January, the bodies of two fifteen-year-old girls, Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock, both from West Ryde, were found in the sand dunes of Wanda Beach, near Botany Bay. They were lying vertically, side by side, as if arranged symbolically in a top and tail position: one girl's head touching the soles of the other girl's feet. Their killer had made an awkward, clumsy attempt to cover them but nature had other ideas, the sea breeze in the hollow of this sandhill had whipped away the sand covering one's face and the heels and elbow of another. Fully uncovered, the full brutality of their murders was painfully apparent. Sharrock, her head face down in the sand, appeared to be shielding herself from further attack with her left forearm, while her right arm was bent at the elbow. Schmidt lay curled on her right side in a foetal position, her left leg bent at the knee.

  The terror written on their faces and the multiple stab wounds both sustained left no doubt that Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt died in agony and abject terror.

  The Schmidt family, seeking to build a new life away from the post-war resentments and political unrest of their native Germany, had left Europe in 1958, taking advantage of the Assisted Passage scheme offered to migrants. They could have gone to Canada but opted instead for Australia. With six children – Helmut, Marianne, Hans, Peter, Trixie and Wolf-gang – and parents Elizabeth and Helmut, they looked like the Von Trapp family as they, with other migrants, made the long journey by boat to their new homeland. In Europe, Elizabeth left behind a son, Robert, from her first marriage, with whom the family maintained only sporadic contact over the years. She never saw her parents again.

  They arrived to a Melbourne spring bursting with flowers, an alien environment of open skies and wide, tree-lined boulevards, to be shepherded by train, with many other new migrants speaking in their native tongues, to the Bonegilla Migrant Camp at Albury. In the barracks of this barren place they slept twenty to a room. Later, they moved to other camps and a small country town where their seventh child, Norbert, was born in 1958.

  Five years after arriving in Australia, the Schmidts moved to a soulless, red-brick housing commission home, formerly a war service house, in a treeless street in Sydney's West Ryde. Within fifteen months, on a June winter's night of rain and a bitter wind, father Helmut succumbed to the cancer of the lymph glands that had reduced his once-robust frame to a skeletal form. Shattered by his death, Elizabeth called on all her strength to get her through the following months. Settling in a new country was not easy for the Schmidt family. Postwar, people of German descent were not popular in Australia and the children were constantly taunted by a rotund bully who raised his arms in a fierce salute and shouted 'Heil Hitler!' every time he walked past their house.

  Marianne, a brilliant linguist, dreamt of being a flight attendant but her mother, with conservative Bavarian blood running in her veins, preferred she concentrate on marrying well. Marianne's social life consisted of taking her younger siblings to the local public swimming pool at Ryde, but it was easier for Marianne to adjust to Australia when she made a best friend of her next-door neighbour, Christine Sharrock, who was born just 25 days after Marianne on 5 October 1949. Christine's father had also died and she had chosen to live with her grandparents, Jeanette and Jim Taig, after her mother's re-marriage and birth of a son. Soon after the Schmidt family moved in the girls became inseparable, virtually living at each other's homes. Marianne badly missed her father to whom she had been very close. Christine understood her sorrow: she too was close to her father before his death. In their bedrooms, they whiled away the hours listening to Elvis and the new pop sensation, the Beatles, talking animatedly about boys and penning childish daydreams in their diaries. Over the long, languorous summer holidays that led into January 1965 they lamented that they weren't able to go see the Rolling Stones on their first Australia
n tour and that they lived so far from the beach. Marianne was to go on to complete Year 10 when school resumed, and Christine had secured a position in the stationery department in a nearby department store.

  On Monday 11 January, a surreal hue bathed Sydney in a smoky haze from bushfires at the Royal National Park, which lifted to reveal a day that would become typically hot. The girls were grateful: the day before, they had planned an excursion to Cronulla Beach with Marianne's four younger siblings but thick sheets of rain had put paid to that idea, keeping them all indoors. On 9 January Marianne and Christine had visited Elizabeth Schmidt in hospital, where she was recovering from a hysterectomy, and had asked her permission to take the younger children to the beach. Still mourning her husband's loss, Elizabeth, pale against the hospital pillows, was thankful that Marianne and her older brother, Helmut, were caring so responsibly for the younger children while she was ill. She had smiled at her daughter. 'If you are careful, you can go,' she'd agreed. 'But do watch out for the small ones.' Marianne had kissed her mother goodbye, promising her they would take care.

  The beach: in Australia, like Hawaii, it is iconic, a place that by the 1960s embodied all that was fashionable in popular youth culture; a place where bronzed surfers strutted their stuff and teenage girls in modest two-piece bathing suits waited on the sand, giggling. Right across Sydney's seaside suburbs the surf culture exploded, including Cronulla, where the last bastions of 1950s culture – bodgies and widgies – brawled with the new breed on weekends. Cronulla was the only beach that had direct railway access, perfect for those who lived far from a beachside suburb.

  While the southern end of Cronulla Beach, with its protective rocks, provided shelter for beachgoers if the weather turned inclement, Wanda Beach was by comparison isolated and windswept – an odd choice, police would later consider, for two adolescent girls to head on a windy day when they had Marianne's younger siblings in tow.

  Marianne rose early on Monday to prepare for their excursion. Helmut and Hans were staying home to prepare the house for their mother's homecoming but the other children – Norbert, 5, Wolfgang, 7, Trixie, 9, and Peter, 10 – obediently dressed for the beach while Marianne assembled the food: sandwiches, fruit and water. Next door, Christine prepared drinks for their outing, chatting to her grandmother before she left. She and Marianne had gone to Cronulla beach on New Year's Day, when they had trekked across the sandhills and she was keen to do it again, she told her nan, screwing the lid tightly on the thermos flask and zipping up her beach bag.

  Her grandmother was not keen on the idea. 'Don't walk across the sandhills today, love,' she told Christine. 'You've got the four little ones with you.'

  Christine, resolute by nature, was nonetheless always polite and respectful to her elders. She tried another tack. 'But we would only be away from them for half an hour.'

  Her Nan was adamant. 'No, Christine. You stay with the children.' Christine knew that she could not swim today and did not bother to pack a bathing suit. She was menstruating, and the pad she was wearing would be seen through her costume.

  The group boarded the train at West Ryde station, the same station Derek Percy used when he stayed at his paternal grandmother's house. They changed trains at Redfern, before going on to Cronulla, but when they arrived at the beach they were disappointed: high, dangerous seas and nasty southerly gales had forced closure to swimmers and they beat a retreat to the shelter of the rocks. Wolfgang was restless; after a wade in the shallows with Marianne, the group ate the simple lunch she had packed before following her suggestion to walk to the sandhills beyond Wanda Beach, leaving their beach bags behind at the South Cronulla rocks.

  Wanda – an Aboriginal name for sandhills – is the northernmost beach on Bate Bay in Cronulla, a south-east suburb of Sydney. It forms part of a spectacular five-kilometre arc of beaches just south of Botany Bay. Green Hills, a recreation reserve, borders the west side of Wanda Beach, defined by dunes that undulate high above sea level, shimmering and rippling with the shifting sands. Beyond is the Kurnell Oil Refinery, an ugly, isolated outcrop of buildings that frames the background. And it was to Green Hills, with Kurnell squarely in view, that the group headed. If they had known the seamier side of the area – that the sandhills gave protection and isolation for homosexuals, whose sexual habits were still criminally illegal in 1960s Australia, seeking trysts; married couples having illicit affairs; and sexual predators looking for a quick thrill – they might not have been so keen to go. But this stretch of beach was where the Schmidt family had often come when their father was alive and this was Australia, a place of innocence.

  Leaning into the blustery wind, the group trudged along the pathway to North Cronulla beach before turning onto the sand at Elouera beach. But it was too much of a hike for the littlies: tired and grizzly, their small legs ached and they were irritated by the whips of sand that flicked and bit their ankles. At the older girls' suggestion, rugged up in towels and with Christine's transistor radio for company, they took shelter around 1 p.m. between two sand dunes, huddling together and waiting for Marianne and Christine to retrieve their beach bags and take them home.

  The girls headed off in the wrong direction, walking north instead of south to where the bags were hidden at the rocks. 'You're going the wrong way!' Peter bellowed after them, his voice small against the screech of hungry seagulls, waves crashing and the squall kicked up by the wind. The girls turned, windswept hair dancing around their faces and their heads thrown back in an exuberant laugh. Christine lost her footing and fell, then scrambled to her feet, still laughing.

  'You're going the wrong way!' Peter called again. They ignored him, and kept walking.

  At 5 p.m., tired of trying to amuse each other and sick of waiting for Marianne and Christine to return, the four youngsters trudged back along the beach to Cronulla, where they retrieved their belongings. There was no sign of the older girls, and they had not been back to pick up their bags, as they had promised. They caught the train home and by 8 o'clock, hungry and frazzled, the children arrived back at their West Ryde home. Helmut, visiting his mother in hospital later that night, was unsure how to tell her of his concerns for his sister. 'What did Marianne do today?' Elizabeth asked. 'What did she cook for lunch? Did she have washday?'

  'I cooked fried potatoes and scrambled eggs,' Hans replied. A small frown creased Elizabeth's face. Marianne was responsible, reliable and so bright that she was dux of her class in 1964. 'Why did not Marianne cook the dinner?' she asked.

  Hans shuffled his feet. 'You know, I have to tell you. The boys came home about eight o'clock this evening but the girls, they did not come home.'

  During his visit, Hans rings Christine's household three times to see if the girls have returned. 'I said to him, you must ring me once you know they are all back, safe,' Elizabeth tells me, more than forty years later. 'But Hans, he did not leave a message for me that night.'

  While Elizabeth slept fitfully, Jeanette Taig rummaged through Christine's beach bag that Hans had returned to her. In it, she found Christine's purse and return railway ticket. At 8.30, she reported the girls missing, but it was a further two hours until two police constables knocked on her door and took a statement. It was so out of character for her obedient granddaughter to be late home, she fretted, pacing around her lounge room. And how were they to get back, now? The last train from Cronulla had long departed.

  13

  Seventeen-year-old Peter Smith had moved from the central coast of New South Wales and was staying with his sister in Caringbah that January while he looked for employment. On 12 January the sun was blazing and the wind had dropped, so he decided to take his three young nephews to Wanda Beach. The kids wanted to run and play and around 2.30 p.m., Peter walked with them about 2.5 kilometres past the Surf Lifesaving Club before they turned to head back the way they had come. Suddenly, they spied what appeared to be a shop dummy. A foot was poking out of the sand just a fraction and Peter touched it before tentatively scraping sand away from
the head. He recoiled in horror: this was no mannequin. The head had real hair. It was the body of a young woman.

  Staggering to the Surf Lifesaving Club, he used their telephone to call Cronulla police. He was gibbering, spluttering, as he recounted his grisly find. 'There's a body in the sand, a girl,' he told the duty constable, his words rattling out. 'I think she's dead.'

  Within the hour the area was teeming with detectives from 24 Division, who looked out of place on the beach, dressed in their dark suits and hats. The more experienced investigators realised immediately that the body had not been given even a hasty burial in a shallow grave; instead, sand had been shovelled over in a swift attempt to cover her body. Carefully brushing the sand away, they also realised within minutes of arriving at the crime scene that Smith had been mistaken. 'There are three feet here,' a detective noted grimly. 'We've got two dead girls.' A bloodied drag mark indicated that one of the girls, later identified to be Christine, had been hauled towards the grave where Marianne lay.

  Bill Jenkings, a hard-hitting 40-year-old crime reporter for Sydney's Daily Mirror, was there when the bodies were discovered. 'Experienced detectives were ashen-faced and it turned me, too,' he later said. 'It was very, very grim.' Jenkings did what many people on the front-line of crime stories do when faced with this sort of horror: after filing the first of hundreds of stories on this murder, he retreated to the pub to calm his nerves.