Lambs to the Slaughter

by Debi Marshall

  Beryl Couch, too, made her feelings plain in her deposition to Lynch. 'Mrs Couch,' he wrote, 'describes the suspect as a very quiet natured person who looks as though he has something on his mind. She is also of the opinion that Mrs Percy did not have as much love for the suspect as she did her other son.'

  Was Derek emotionally neglected, overlooked in his mother's affections when Lachlan was born? Stunted emotionally, trapped in an infantile never-never land, an entrapment he carried through to adulthood? I jot a note to myself. Normal childhood, my arse.

  It was one of the saddest inquests ever held in Sydney, so terrible that Coroner J.J. (Jack) Loomes spoke for all the public when he expressed his outrage at the crime. 'It would be almost impossible to find words to express the repulsion one feels at the fiendish crime perpetrated on this little innocent child,' he said. 'The sympathy of all associated with this court and the whole community goes out to the parents of the child on this tragedy.'

  Twenty-eight exhibits, including the razor blade and newspaper jammed in Simon's throat, were shown to the court, with photographs of the crime scene and other relevant areas. Yellow pins marked the position of his body; green pins were where Mrs Lrbec last saw him; blue showed where he lived. It lent a dispassionate air to proceedings, a surreal detachment to the death of a small child. Lampasona's statement to police was read to the court. 'I got such a shock. I can't remember anything about his face . . . I merely touched the piece of tissue what was covering him to ascertain whether it was a child or a doll.' Through it all, Donald Brook sat quietly, listening.

  On 15 January 1969, the Coroner returned an open finding into who was responsible for the little boy's murder, echoing La'Brooy's opinion that Simon died from asphyxiation caused by suffocation as the result of some person or persons unknown forcibly inserting wads of paper in his throat.

  *

  In the wake of Simon's murder, further tragedy stalked the Brook family. Phyllis, bereft with grief, miscarried a child conceived after Simon's death. Later a daughter, born with serious birth defects, died one week after her birth. The unrelenting heartache – Simon's murder, a miscarriage, and an infant death – would derail the sanity of anyone with less courage. Only after the couple adopted a son did some happiness return to their lives.

  The Brook family stayed in Sydney until 1973, when they moved to Adelaide, where Professor Brook took up a position at Flinders University in 1974. Although they tried, bravely, to start again in Adelaide without their precious Simon, after several years word reached Professor Brook of vicious rumours, instigated at the university, that he was responsible for his son's murder. He mounted a successful defamation case, which the university settled out of court, followed by a lengthy letter of apology, but the pain of the allegations was still raw. Clearly, the rumour-monger had not read Maddison's report, that a parent is the rarest of possibilities. Professor Brook, under the terms of the settlement, is not at liberty to discuss any detail of it. But others, who knew him, are more than willing to defend the personal and professional honour of their friend and former colleague.

  Professor Ian Laurie was Dean of the School of Humanities at Flinders University when Donald Brook took up his chair. 'He never allowed the terrible event in Sydney to affect the performance of his duties at Flinders, although a disaffected person got hold of the story and, incredibly, actually attempted to use it against him to smear his reputation,' he recalls. 'Simon's murder has altered the whole of life for the Brooks, to the extent that it has been too painful for them to discuss in much detail. It is a wound that has never healed, although they have done their best to hide it as far as possible from their friends. In addition,' he adds thoughtfully, 'the fact that the murderer had been identified but somehow escaped explicit and public conviction meant that conclusion was never reached. In all my forty years in academic life at Flinders and earlier at Cambridge, I have never encountered anything to come close to it in horror. The crime was almost worse than one which cried to heaven for justice; it has produced a recurring nightmare for absolutely decent people who, in spite of it, have led admirably productive lives.'

  After the defamation case was settled, Donald, now an Emeritus Professor, retired from the University and he and Phylis moved to Cypress for a time before returning to Australia.

  The trail on the Brooks' tiny son's murder was cold and they resigned themselves to the probability that they would never know who was responsible, unless that person killed again with his signature MO. For the killer appeared to have disappeared into the ether.

  In the 1990s, Donald and Phyllis Brook lived briefly in Perth, and it was from there that Donald decided to make enquiries of the New South Wales Police Commissioner about the status of the investigation into Simon's murder. What he heard dismayed him. There seemed little if any hope of ever solving his son's case.

  22

  Through the long night of 11 August, 1968, Jean Stilwell sat in a green vinyl chair in her dingy, bleak flat on Melbourne's Beaconsfield Parade, near St Kilda, staring at the fire flickering in the grate. Mute and numb, she did not take out the silver ribbons that were braided through her hair, plaited like a Greek Goddess for the fancy dress ball she was due to attend the night before. The long, white Grecian dress hung on a coat hook, unworn, and during the night she moved only to answer the door when police intermittently returned to update her on news of her missing seven-year-old daughter, Linda. 'No news yet, we're afraid, Mrs Stilwell. Still no news.'

  Jean's marriage to Brian Stilwell in Portsmouth, England, was rocky from the outset. A willow-thin, attractive eighteen-year-old bride who stood five feet, eleven inches tall, she had little interest in being wed: she wanted to be a teenager, to enjoy her young life. But she had no choice: pregnant to her best friend's brother, the shotgun marriage was born in resentment. Jean was keen for new horizons, to escape the dreary, relentless rain of English winters, the soggy dampness and smell of stale beer on the acrid breath of men in the hotel where she worked. In 1965 she moved with Brian, a vain, handsome metalworker she found 'weak, boring, but nice', to Australia, joining thousands of other 'ten-pound Poms' on the assisted passage scheme. Their children were young when they emigrated – Karen was eight, Gary almost seven and Linda was five – and with just three years between them, they were close friends.

  The family started their new life at a hostel in Maribyrnong, West Melbourne, arriving in an unseasonably warm early April marked by iridescent flashes of lightning and the resonating boom of thunderstorms. Jean stood, mesmerised, and watched as nature performed at her theatrical best. She had seen nothing like this in Britain. The hostel was a place of migrants' post-war hopes and dreams but of hostility and futility, too. An infestation of earwigs forced the kids to check their bedding every night and Brian whinged constantly that England was better than Australia. But the kids loved it: there were always other children to play with and they especially enjoyed hiding under the table waiting for the money that rolled their way from the card games their father played with other men. The marriage floundered soon after the family arrived, limping along through the birth of another daughter, Laura, in 1967. Now fractured by intermittent outbursts of violence, for which Jean blames herself, by 1968 it was irreconcilable.

  Brian was keen to take one of the children with him to New Zealand, where he moved after the marriage break-up, forcing Jean to make a terrible Sophie's Choice. Working two jobs since Laura was three weeks old, she had not bonded with that child as she had with the others and knew that she could not break up the other three siblings, who were so close. She made her decision: it was best that Brian took Laura.

  They were bleak days. From the moment Brian left the marriage, Jean, just thirty years old, had no job, no home, no money and no help. But within a day she had found a job as a barmaid at a hotel and soon moved the family into a flat in suburban Middle Park. Karen, the oldest, took on the responsibility of her younger siblings when Jean was at work. She did most of the cooking for the family a
nd shared a bed with Linda. Gary slept in the same room.

  Then, three weeks after moving into their new flat, Linda disappeared.

  Jean had spent Saturday morning, 10 August, shopping with Linda to buy a pair of shoes for her imminent eighth birthday on 22 August. Around midday, they arrived back at the flat and Linda set off with her siblings to walk to nearby St Kilda pier to play. Jean, preparing to go on a date that night to a fancy dress ball, was vaguely distracted and needed to go shopping for herself. 'Be back home by four o'clock,' she told her children. They wandered off, a little band of gypsies, with eleven-year-old Karen leading them like the Pied Piper. She understood she needed to look after her siblings.

  The St Kilda area was a huge drawcard for children: Luna Park, with its enticing entrance, offered a showground atmosphere every day; brightly coloured mechanical horses on the turning carousel; dodgem cars and Ferris wheels; arcades with promises of games and jukeboxes blaring rock and roll music. It was an equally strong lure for paedophiles, who lurked in the shadows, watching, waiting for the first opportunity to strike up a liaison with a child.

  St Moritz ice-skating rink, where the Stilwells headed to first, was always packed with children on weekends. On the bay, motor-boats and yachts bobbed up and down at their anchors or cruised around near the foreshore, their bright sails fluttering in the breeze.

  Three boys, rods and fishing lines in hand, were planning to hijack a fishing boat moored at the pier nearby, to use as their own private fishing vessel for the afternoon. It seemed a great adventure and the Stilwell children eagerly joined them, sharing their rods. The owner, when he turned up two hours later, did not share their enthusiasm. 'Get off my bloody boat!' he yelled at them. 'You're trespassing!' The kids tried to scamper away but the owner meant business, confiscating the boys' fishing tackle and scribbling a note for them to hand to the police. 'Pick your gear up from St Kilda police station,' he said, shoving the note into one of the boys' hands. 'I've written to them saying you were on my boat without permission.'

  Karen and Gary were scared. They didn't want to go to the police station and they didn't want Linda to go, either. 'She was adamant she was going to go with the boys,' Karen recalls. 'Gary told her that she wouldn't find her way home on her own but she was so headstrong, she just laughed. 'Course I will' she told him. 'I'll ask someone how to get there.' In a snap decision that would forever haunt her, Karen walked away from the group to return home.

  Time and grief have muddled Gary Stilwell's memories of the last day he saw Linda. He doesn't know, he says, if he has since imagined this or whether it actually happened, but he has a vague memory of he and Linda taking turns staring through a kaleidoscope machine at Little Luna Park, squinting through the tube, mesmerised by the rotating bright colours – purple, orange, red, green – and the changing shapes. He sensed someone was watching them, straightened up and looked around. A man was standing behind them, stock-still. Just staring at them, with no expression on his face.

  Gary turned back to the kaleidoscope, entranced by the rotating bright colours. He can't remember seeing Linda again. Around 4 p.m., an hour after Karen went home, Gary followed her.

  *

  Jean wanted to know where Linda was. She knew that her daughter often walked off on her own and had scolded her for doing so. A few months earlier, police had been called when they couldn't find Linda but she had turned up, shortly after. She might have been a wanderer, but she always went home. 'Go and look for her, Karen,' Jean said, 'and tell her to come home straight away.'

  Karen dawdled back toward where they had last been with the boys. But she was tired, and sick of her little sister's shenanigans. Instead of going all the way back, she stopped halfway, playing on the swings before returning home shortly after. 'I can't find Linda,' she told her mother desultorily. 'She's not there.'

  Jean was irritated. Her hair was in ribbons for the ball and now she had to walk down to the pier to look for Linda. A block from the flats, she heard the siren of an ambulance, close by. She panicked, broke into a run and found the ambulance drivers loading their patient into the back on a stretcher. It wasn't Linda.

  It was nearing dark and there was no phone in their flat. At 6 p.m., Jean made the ten-minute walk to the nearest phone box where she made a frantic call to the police. 'My seven-year-old daughter is missing,' she told them. 'Please help.' Jean returned to the flat and waited for police, sitting in the chair and watching the clock. Darkness had fallen and she knew that wherever she was, Linda would be scared. She hated the dark. Jean's date for the ball arrived but though he offered to help in the search, she told him to go home. At 7 p.m., she walked again to the phone box to call the police. It was a walk and phone call that she would make five times that night. 'Mum was hysterical by then,' Karen remembers. 'We knew no one, apart from a woman who we called "Aunty Ruby", in Melbourne. There was no one Mum could turn to for help.'

  At 10.30 p.m., two young police officers, their faces flushed from alcohol, finally arrived. 'They absolutely stank of grog,' Jean grimaces in recollection. She is still peeved at the memory. 'I was frantic by that stage and demanded to know what had taken them so long. They told me that kids wander off all the time and they usually come home. That was cold comfort to me when I knew that Linda had by then been missing for more than six hours. She was only a small child, who was afraid of the dark.'

  With the other children tucked up in bed, Jean stayed at the flat while the police, now grown in numbers, searched the streets for Linda and doorknocked nearby flats and houses. They issued an all-points bulletin to other squads. 'Name: Linda Jane STILWELL. Age: 7. Height: 4 feet 6 inches. Hair: light brown. Eyes: blue.' They also broadcast what Linda was wearing: light blue jeans, mustard-coloured jumper, black shoes and odd socks. As the hours progressed with no sign of her, police brought Jean intermittent updates. 'No news, we're afraid. Still no news. But she is probably at a friend's house, or has run away from home. We'll find her.' It was too dark for the search to be of much value so they floodlit the entire area and enlisted the help of the military. But as dawn approached, the mood had changed. Neighbours searched alleyways and the talk turned to darker realities. Perhaps Linda had fallen off the pier and drowned. Perhaps she was lying hurt somewhere and couldn't get home. Perhaps she had decided to run away and follow her father and baby sister to New Zealand. Or perhaps, God forbid, she had been abducted.

  Then the questions started. Where was Jean's husband? How long had he been in New Zealand? Could he have returned to Australia without her knowledge and abducted Linda? Was there anybody else she could think of that might have taken the child? No, she told them. No one she could think of. Some strange people lived in the flat above them, she said bleakly, but there was no reason for them to have taken Linda. Police talked to Karen and Gary, prodding them about what they remembered of the afternoon's events. Karen told them she saw a skinny blond man hanging around near the pier.

  By morning, police had made the decision to call in the Homicide squad and they took Jean to South Melbourne station to take formal details. 'I lost my stomach, then,' Jean remembers. 'They were no longer assuring me that children wander off all the time. I knew this was very serious. I knew, really from the start, that it was serious. I was always waiting for that knock at the door from police.' The silver ribbon was still plaited through Jean's hair as she sat at the police station. It was an irony that did not escape her: there was nothing festive in that occasion.

  She was surrounded by people all the time, now; police, reporters and camera crews, their intrusive flashbulbs going off in her face. The local press took up the story of the little girl lost and it seemed the whole city was camped on her doorstep. Jean spoke to them, explaining that her daughter was a 'compulsive wanderer' and that she had in the past offered her inducements of presents if she got home on time. But the press were intrusive and the family sat inside with the blinds shut so the reporters who constantly knocked on their windows and doors couldn't peer in at
them. A demented woman who lived in the upstairs flat tormented them day and night with her screeching voice, arguing bitterly and loudly with her husband, so loud that it rattled Jean's already fractured nerves.

  While Jean's weight plummeted from shock, Karen and Gary seemed to take it in their stride, going about their business quietly in the background. Knowing how upset Jean was, they shut down, saying nothing. But enforced silence and internalising their grief, combined with the toxic guilt that they did not stay with Linda the day she disappeared, ate away at them. In truth, Karen will later admit, she wanted to die. Whoever abducted Linda should have taken her, instead. She was the oldest. She was responsible for Gary and Linda that day. It should have been her.

  The search continued. St Kilda beach looked like a quagmire where police had dug over the sand looking for any clues to the missing child. Filthy drainpipes, clogged with years of rust and clay, were searched. The entire area from where she was abducted was lit up, casting a surreal, eerie light over the skyline and Luna Park. The Bureau of Meteorology checked for tidal movements and skindivers trawled the nearby Albert Park lake and a canal, with no result. Reports of sightings poured in from the public, none of any benefit. A man came forward and told police that it was his daughter and himself who had been seen getting into a car at a Dandenong service station, not Linda and her abductor as police had hoped. Another man, seen hitchhiking with a little girl, was later located in Adelaide: the child was his step-daughter. A report of a man and a child getting into a taxi at St Kilda was not confirmed and the cab driver never located.

  Forty-eight hours after Linda went missing, Jean, deep in shock, was summoned to the Homicide Squad at Russell Street, where two male detectives ramped up the questioning. There was little gentleness: they needed to eliminate Jean from the inquiry and found her dignified demeanour suspect. 'Why aren't you crying?' they demanded of her over several hours of questioning. 'Any normal woman would be crying by now.'