Derek Percy, a school prefect in 1964, the boy with an IQ of 122, the brilliant student who needed to do little study, failed.
17
Is there more haunting a crime than the disappearance of a child? What theories can be forwarded that haven't been aired ad nauseam; what can be said, after the initial chaos when the news stories die down and the leads go cold; what can be imagined, beyond rumour and conjecture and lies and innuendo, when a child suddenly vanishes? Like three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who disappeared without trace from Praia da Luz in Portugal on 3 May 2007; like thirteen-year-old Daniel Morecombe, who disappeared while waiting for a bus in the Sunshine Coast hinterland on 7 December 2003; and like the three Beaumont children, who vanished without trace from Glenelg Beach on a scorching Australia Day, 26 January 1966. What can be written about a case with no leads, no known motive and no clues, a case that has baffled investigators for more than four decades and which continues to do so?
The Beaumont children, Jane, Arnna and Grant, are the snatched children we can never forget, the children whose names are inexorably linked with a dark, unseen menace and who symbolise an innocent past; whose memory haunts us as we pack our own children off for a day at the beach; who are at the heart of our bleakest stories. Once upon a time, on a warm and sunny day, there were three children. The Beaumont children.
What happened to them?
It is a question that Graham Archer, producer of Channel 7 Adelaide's Today Tonight program, constantly seeks to answer. Tall and lean, Archer's intention is not just to find the truth, but to offer it up to viewers ravenous for justice in a state tainted by corruption and nepotism and not known for its openness and transparency. When Archer goes after someone, their legal team is sure to follow. 'There is a particular African mammal called a ratel, a honey badger, the most fearless animal in the kingdom,' Heinrich Gout wrote of Archer in the Independent Weekly in 2008. 'A ratel will die rather than surrender. Once it bites it won't let go. It will take on leopards and venomous snakes with belligerence and bravery in equal measure. You couldn't keep one as a household pet, but if you did you could call him Graham.'
It was Archer whose investigation into systematic child abuse in South Australia exposed, in an explosive series of programs, the shocking practice over a fifty-year period of orphans raised in welfare homes and community units being passed around by their carers and other predators for adults' sexual gratification. Archer speculated on the involvement of the so-called Family – a well-connected group of people in Adelaide society – in these cover-ups. Amongst his other scalps, Archer also went after respected magistrate Peter Liddy who, after a reputable 25-year career on the Adelaide bench, was exposed as a man with a penchant for sexually interfering with underage boys. When not on the bench pronouncing guilt or otherwise, Liddy was on the beach trawling for innocent boys.
So it is to this ratel that I turn to ask about the Beaumont children. 'It is our most tragically enduring mystery, isn't it,' he says, gulping down a coffee in between editing a story. 'Could there be anything more poignant than a child's room empty of laughter, toys still scattered on the floor and the charm of childish paintings pinned to the walls, all heartbreaking reminders of lives hardly begun? The torture for the children's families is prolonged indefinitely by the absolute absence of any answers to the questions of their fate. These little kids went to the beach together and were due home on the bus in the early afternoon. They never came home.'
The children that never came home. It is a common theme in Adelaide. In 1973, the city was stunned by the sudden disappearance of two children, Kirsty Gordon, 4, and Joanne Ratcliffe, 11, as they walked together in broad daylight to the restrooms during a football match at Adelaide Oval. As the city spiralled into fear, the inevitable questions started. Was the same person who abducted the Beaumonts responsible for Gordon and Ratcliffe's disappearance? Despite an intensive manhunt, no trace of the children, who had befriended each other just that day, was ever found.
Newspaper clippings on the Beaumont and Ratcliffe/ Gordon abductions are piled on my desk, next to Percy's police record of interview following Yvonne Tuohy's murder. I look again at what he told police about Shane Spiller. I wanted to take him with me and when he ran off I wanted to stop him from getting away and telling someone. The sentence jars, repeats over and over in my head. There, in the small homicide office, this lean, intelligent, twenty-year-old had laid bare his innermost sadistic desires, the essence of his rich, pornographic fantasy life and frustration he had felt at his failure to abduct the boy as well. He was not content with one child: his preference was for multiple children at the same time; children of both sexes. I doodle a note to myself. 'How many other paedophiles with a penchant for abducting and murdering children or adolescents, multiple or otherwise, were operating in Australia from the mid-1960s? How many unsolved murders of children, multiple or otherwise, were there in Australia during that time that fit the MO – frenzied mutilation and sexual sadism – of the Tuohy crime?'
Corryong High, a small school half an hour south-east of Khancoban, on the New South Wales side of the border, was a nightmare for Derek Percy from the moment he arrived in February, 1966. He was subject to mental abuse, mostly from bullying classmates, and only his size stopped them from physically attacking him; that, and the knowledge that this sixteen-year-old with a hair-trigger temper would fight back – not just fly into a rage but really lose control.
Repeating fifth form did him no favours: he was the laughing stock and Lachlan – younger, athletic and more personable – distanced himself from his brother and the harassment that Derek copped. Lonely, estranged from Lachlan and at a school he loathed, Derek withdrew further into himself. What went through his mind, I wonder, as he made the daily bus trip to school with a brother who was popular, younger and in the same grade? With one other boy, Derek formed a band in which he played the guitar. The Animals had just released their international hit 'House of the Rising Sun' and so they named their band, somewhat lamely, the Rising Sons. It was his only outlet, apart from writing in his diary. Curled up in bed, spewing his darkest, most foul thoughts onto the page, or writing when he was away from the house, the rare occasions he had the luxury of being alone. Before he failed his Leaving, his mother had watched him like a hawk. After, it was worse. And his father, furious that he failed his Leaving Certificate, furious at his behaviour in Mount Beauty, barely spoke to him. Derek was a disgrace.
Derek's constant hawking and spitting was embarrassing for Lachlan, becoming worse when people bestowed on Derek the unflattering nickname 'Hook' and he, as his brother, became 'Sickle'. 'I tried to distance myself,' he later admitted to police. 'It was humiliating.'
Lachlan, who had arrived in the town several months before Derek, had been befriended by a boy his own age, Wayne Gordes. The two knocked around together at school and while Gordes thought Lachlan was a 'terrific guy', he was wary of Derek. He found him surly and withdrawn, with cold, brooding eyes and he couldn't understand how two brothers could be so different. 'Derek was cold and distant, a taciturn sort of bloke and you never knew what he was thinking. I wondered why he was like he was; we were there for a good time, as far as I was concerned, and there was so much to do in the country. It was a great life. Lachlan was embarrassed about his brother.'
February 1966, Term 1 at Carryong High. The air was sticky with a stultifying heat and the adolescent boys, testosterone-charged, hands stuffed deep in short pockets and faces scarred by frequent, unwelcome eruptions of pimples that they failed to hide under newly-acquired bum fluff, stood awkwardly around the school quadrangle, scuffing their shoes self-consciously, moaning about being back at school and exchanging boastful stories of real or imagined sexual encounters in their school holidays. Derek Percy, louche in a James Dean sort of way, was walking across the quadrangle when Wayne Gordes, standing with Lachlan and other boys, noticed him. The first anniversary of the unsolved Wanda Beach murders had dominated newspapers over the summer bre
ak. Gordes knew from Lachlan that the family regularly went to Sydney when Ernie had holidays. 'Hey, Percy!' he yelled. 'We know it was you who killed those girls on that Sydney beach! You're the guy the police are looking for! You've got the same haircut and look like the bloke in the identikit picture. And you were in Sydney on holidays. We know it was you!' The accusation was meant as a joke, a schoolyard tease. Gordes was not prepared for Percy's violent reaction.
'How dare you accuse me of that?' he screamed, his face contorting as he stood head to head with Gordes. 'I did not have anything to do with it!' His fists were up, inviting a brawl, and he shoved Gordes in the chest, pushing him around.
'Settle down, Percy,' Gordes said, alarmed at his reaction and shrugging him off. 'It's only a joke, mate. Piss off!'
Gordes was bewildered as to why Percy behaved as he did. He knew that the Percy family were in the yachting community and while he doesn't know for certain if they had been in Sydney in January 1965 for sailing, he did know from Lachlan that they were in the general area.
After this incident, Derek and Gordes struck an unspoken, uneasy truce. Once after a school social both Lachlan and Derek stayed at Gordes parents' house instead of going home. Gordes' four-year-old sister wandered around the house before being tucked into bed; an inconsequential event, but one that later terrified Gordes, when he heard about Percy's involvement in Yvonne Tuohy's murder.
Tania and Lynnette Harrison, aged five and six, were playing in the backyard of their Khancoban home in mid-1966. Neighbours of the Percys, they readily followed Derek when he beckoned them inside his family caravan, closed the door and made small talk, staring at them both with a slight smile playing around his mouth. 'Take your pants down,' he instructed them and they did so, with the innocence of childhood, standing with their legs together and hands clasped in front of them. He was staring at their genitals when suddenly he heard their mother call out for them. Quickly he told them to pull up their pants and leave.
'Where have you been?' their mother asked them.
'In the caravan with Derek,' they told her. 'He made us pull our pants down.'
The incident was kept quiet. So quiet. The girls' father, livid, had a word with Ernie. 'Your son is sick. Get him to a doctor otherwise I'll deal with him myself.' Ernie had a word with Elaine. And Elaine organised Derek to see the local GP.
Years later, Tania reflects that she wasn't scared that day with Derek, didn't feel threatened. He didn't touch them or anything, she says, and didn't hurt them, but reading her police deposition I shudder when I imagine what could have happened. Derek, increasingly overwhelmed by the dark, sadistic fantasies that he committed to his diary, targeted two girls, both known to him, and was so driven by his compulsion to act that he did so despite the high – and very real – risk of being caught. What could have happened if the girls' mother had not called out to them? How safe would they have been then?
After his arrest in 1968, Percy mentioned to police surgeon John Birrell what had happened in the caravan. 'When I was living at Khancoban I took a little girl's pants down,' he offered. 'The kids told their mother and Mother made me go to the doctor, who said it was quite normal.' But was a country GP equipped to assess what was 'normal'? Why didn't Elaine and Ernie recognise how sick their son was and act? Did he even go to the doctor, or simply tell them that he had been? All records have been destroyed now; there is no way of checking. Everyone, it seemed, paid scant attention to his problems. Best not kick up too much of a fuss. But if Percy had received the help he clearly, desperately needed, could Yvonne Tuohy's life – and perhaps the lives of other children – have been saved?
18
In September 1966, Curtin – only a few kilometres from the national capital's Parliament House – was an outer suburb of Canberra, a soulless new sub-division of lean brick houses standing to attention in rows of orderly streets, bereft of trees or charm. Curtin abounded with young families making a go of it and the Redston family – Brian, a professional soldier at the Department of Defence, his wife, Violet, and their four children – Anne Maree, 7, Allen, 6, Peter, 4, and baby Stephen – was no exception. Hardworking and decent country folk who had moved to Canberra just a year before from rural Bendigo, Victoria, they kept a firm but loving eye on their young brood. They wanted their children to enjoy the freedom of childhood and to learn independent thought, while still accepting parental rules and boundaries.
Allen Redston, like most other kids in the neighbourhood, was discouraged from playing at the unofficial rubbish dump near where Yarralumla Creek embraces Lake Burley Griffin at the end of its journey. The area was littered with discarded building supplies, mounds of dirt and deceptively high weeds that bordered the creek. It was a magnet for children who indulged in their innocent games of hide and seek and cowboys and indians and was used by nearby residents to discard their rubbish and construction workers to offload extraneous building supplies. To get there required a degree of local knowledge.
It was there that Allen Redston, the little boy who stood just 3 feet, 71/2 inches tall, with fair hair, an angelically handsome face and an impish grin, was found dead on the miserably cold morning of 28 September 1966, his body wrapped in filthy old carpet and a woman's housecoat.
Allen had arrived home from primary school the day before eating an ice block and was sent by his mother to the nearby shop to buy his brother Peter one as well. Instead, unbeknownst to Violet, Allen sent Peter to buy his own treat and went next door to play. He stayed there only a short time before wandering off down the road with another small friend, who veered off at his home. Allen went on alone toward Yarralumla Creek. Just before 7 p.m., when Allen was still not home, the Redstons called the police to report him missing.
Throughout the long night, as Violet was comforted by neighbours, Brian joined police and neighbouring volunteers in the thorough and frantic search for his son, fanning out across backyards, scouring likely hiding places where he might have been lying injured, looking in drains clogged with silt and weeds and over scrubland. Exhausted and sick with fear, at 8 a.m. Brian learnt the search for his little man had come to a heartbreaking conclusion. A volunteer's German shepherd, driven by his natural instinct, picked up the scent of an object lying in the creek bed's dense reeds. The dog raced over to it, sniffing and tugging at the package. Allen's small face was submerged in inches of water, but obvious drag marks indicated to police that he was killed somewhere else and his body dumped there in an effort to conceal him.
The post-mortem revealed elaborate, complex binding, far in excess of the bondage necessary to subdue a small boy. Cloth was knotted around his neck, he was hogtied from wrists to ankles and his slender body was encased in three and a half layers of carpet and housecoat. Allen's killer used electrical cable, rope, a man's green and gold tie and a piece of felt and plastic for binding him, the simple knots suggestive of those used to tie shoelaces. Whoever had done it had clearly picked up the items at the dump site, not taken them with him as a premeditated act. Poignantly, the little boy who was playing where he had been told not to still had the handkerchief that his mother had given him to take to school tucked inside the left sleeve of his jumper.
In the weeks and months following the murder, time marked by the Redston family in wretched grief, a number of suspects were brought forward and eliminated from the inquiry. But one line of the police inquiry could not be dismissed. A month before Allen was murdered, two similar assaults on young boys had occurred in the same area. Chillingly, the MO was virtually identical.
Miraculously for one eight-year-old boy, three teenagers, noticing someone around their age acting strangely near a pile of dirt, had found the hogtied child close to death, wrapped inside a sheet of plastic with his mouth and neck also tied. When he was released, the terrified child later told police he had been approached by an older boy, a stranger to him who he thought was around 13 years of age, wearing clothing that could easily have been a school uniform. The older boy had lunged at him, forci
ng him to lie face down and tying him up when he refused his offer to play cowboys and indians, grabbing further bondage material from around the dump site as his victim lay on the ground. It was only weeks later, just prior to Redston's death, that the young victim had seen his attacker again, riding a red and white pushbike with a white carrier holding a spade behind the seat.
Three weeks after the first attack, two young brothers, in a game of cops and robbers with an older boy at the same area, found the boy quickly became rough and aggressive, tying up the youngest brother around his body and mouth. When it became clear that the older brother, aged 7, was not going to leave him alone until he stopped his assault, the attacker fled the scene on a similar pushbike.
But after Allen's murder descriptions given to police by the young witnesses at the scene varied, adding extra pressure to an investigation already deemed extremely sensitive. The expertise of two detectives working on the unsolved Wanda Beach murders was sought but despite their opinion that the same person had committed all three assaults, and that Allen's death could have been a tragic misadventure resulting accidentally from binding his body, no one came forward.
The coroner's report was succinct: Allen Redston was found dead with marks of violence on his body, the cause of death 'strangulation by a loop of double-stranded rope at or near Yarralumla Creek' by person or persons unknown. Coroner Dobson offered the court's condolences to Allen's grief-stricken parents, sympathies shared by a public shocked and outraged at the child's senseless murder. As the months passed following Allen's death, despite Herculean efforts to find the offender police had to face the unpalatable reality that while the killer's name was most probably somewhere in their running sheets from the first intense few days of the inquiry, the trail had gone cold.
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 10