Lambs to the Slaughter

by Debi Marshall

  She held herself tight, becoming more insular as their questions intensified, answering her interrogators in a steady voice. 'When I hurt the most, I don't cry.'

  'That doesn't make any sense.'

  'Well, that's the way I am.' She held their gaze. 'That's just the way I am.'

  Reading the transcript of her interview I am reminded of Lindy Chamberlain, how she remained implacable and strong against her accusers who deemed it implausible that a dingo had taken her baby on that freezing desert night in August 1980 and deemed, too, that she should react as women always react: tremulous, distraught and tearful. But Jean, burdened with the sickening maternal instinct that her daughter was not being held captive somewhere, was not lying hurt but had been murdered, did not cry. Her bright, bubbly girl, she knew, would easily have fallen into step with a stranger, walking along side by side, chatting and oblivious to imminent danger. She was always vivacious, always cheerful; even a malodorous wino at St Kilda beach, just weeks before she disappeared, had won her attention, as they sat together on a park bench, chatting. Admonishments from Jean to be careful about who she talked to fell on deaf ears. Linda was bubbly but also defiant and determined.

  More witnesses came forward. Linda was seen rolling down the lawn at St Kilda esplanade; Luna Park attendants claimed she had no money and had asked for a free ride on the dodgem cars; teenage boys, a dark-haired young man and two older men were all reported as having being seen in the area. The older men came forward but despite repeated pleas for the five foot ten, slim, dark-haired young man to identify himself, he did not. A further report suggested that a man who looked like this person, whom police had now elevated to the position of chief suspect, was seen walking very quickly along a nearby street with a young, laughing girl in tow.

  By day three, hope of finding Linda alive or dead was fading. 'One of the most intensive searches in the state's history yesterday failed to uncover any trace of the lively child . . .' the Herald Sun reported. By day six, the same newspaper reported that homicide detectives now had little doubt that Linda had met with foul play.

  Her disappearance also sparked the interest of Adelaide police who had investigated the Beaumont children's abduction two years earlier. The head of Homicide, Detective Sergeant Stan Swaine, who would go to his grave dogged by allegations that he was obsessed with the case, felt there were uncanny resemblances between the two cases and that Linda had 'vanished in circumstances similar to those surrounding the disappearance of the Beaumont children'.

  Police undertook an intense search for 33-year-old Brian Stilwell, in New Zealand with his daughter, Laura. He made contact, after a week, by telegram, assuring police he knew nothing of his daughter's whereabouts, had no plans to return to Australia and was ill. It was three months before he returned to Melbourne.

  Five days after Linda went missing a local reverend visited her family, offering solace from on high. He perched on the edge of a chair, fingering greasy shirt cuffs, and his small eyes set in a podgy, pasty face flickered around the room. In a solemn voice, he delivered Jean comfort born from the knowledge that God was surely on his side. 'You must understand, uh, Jean . . .' he stumbled slightly. 'You don't mind that I call you Jean? You must understand that God works in strange ways.' An insipid smile flirted around pale lips and his thin hands flapped through the air. 'He will not let your daughter be found until you have reunited with your husband. Linda's disappearance is God's revenge for your marriage breakdown.'

  Jean stared at him, willing him to change expression, to do anything to indicate that he was not serious, but he did not. His eyes were boring into hers, waiting for her response. It came, finally, from a mouth wide open with shock and disgust and a face flushed with fury and indignation.

  'I want you to leave, thank you,' Jean said, rising and seeing him to the door. She spoke to the police officer handling Linda's case about the reverend's comments. 'Don't let him in your house again,' he advised her.

  Eight days after his sister's disappearance, on 18 August, it was Gary's tenth birthday. A birthday cake was organised by The Sun newspaper and though heartbroken and bewildered over the sudden, unexplained loss of their sister and also missing their baby sister, Laura, Gary and Karen smiled widely for the camera, as they were told to do. 'Big smile. That's the way. And another one. Hold that look. Beautiful.' Click.

  The room was filled with balloons and the table set with a beautifully iced cake, but there is a sense of melancholy in the photograph, despite Gary and Karen's best efforts. A sense of terrible bewilderment.

  Linda's eighth birthday on 22 August came and went with no trace of her. Jean couldn't face going to work, couldn't face anyone. She sat in the gloom of her lounge room, falling deeper into the depression that threatened to engulf her.

  On the same day, Derek Percy prepared for his return to work on HMAS Sydney, based at Cerberus in Victoria. He had enjoyed an extended leave from 5 August, with nothing to do but wander about in his car and go sailing. But the fun was over. He was back in uniform and back to work.

  Four months after Linda's disappearance, Jean still had not cried, holding in her emotions as though she was holding her breath. She felt helpless, slept little. And when sleep did come it was invaded by agonising, dark dreams that Linda had been murdered and her body buried under a piece of land near the flats where they lived. In the nightmare they were digging up the land and looking for Linda, but she was not there. Every time Jean closed her eyes, seeking respite from her tortured wakefulness, it was the same nightmare. Every time.

  Most people were kind and helpful but the days were empty and hollow and Jean got through them, painfully, just one at a time. She received a card from a stranger accusing her of killing Linda and another stranger approached her on the street, invading her space and intruding on her grief. 'You're the mother of that girl who has disappeared,' the woman said, but there was something in her voice, her manner, that startled Jean. It was the way she said it, as though she thought it amusing, a wide grin like a crescent moon on her full face. And on that summer's day, in the middle of the street, in front of a laughing stranger, Jean broke down. She started to cry and couldn't stop. They came from deep within her, the agonising cries of a keening mother, her shoulders convulsing in spasms, harsh sobs that racked her body and tears, gushing like a waterfall, that soaked her clothes.

  Jean had entered a dark pit, racked with guilt about not keeping Linda safe and unable to see her way out of the fog that enveloped her. She took a handful of tablets to obliterate the pain and then panicked that Gary and Karen would find her dead. Stumbling to the phone box, she called her trusted police officer, who sent an ambulance. She was admitted to psychiatric care and stayed in hospital for three weeks. To help the family cope, her mother came out from England, her passage assisted by an organisation to help families of migrants. When she left the family hobbled along, trying to get back to some patchy routine. It was, Jean recalls, the worst of times. Linda's abduction splintered any resemblance of normality that the family had.

  The police had few leads and those they did have petered out. The investigation, headed by Detective Sergeant Doug Baker, regarded as a crack Homicide detective, rolled into its fifth month. A mobile caravan at the site of Linda's disappearance attracted much public interest but no significant leads. In the mire of 2000 statements, police still had no clue as to the identity of the slim, dark-haired man seen walking with a laughing girl who answered Linda's description.

  In the midst of the mayhem, homicide detectives received a tip-off from a sailor at HMAS Cerberus. 'Regarding Linda Stilwell,' the man said, 'have a look at naval rating Derek Percy.' They filed the information with the hundreds of other leads. Had they checked, they would have found that Derek Percy was on leave from HMAS Sydney, based at Cerberus, between 5 August and 22 August. He had a car, was regarded as a weird loner and his nickname was the Ghost.

  A month later, Percy joined the frigate trainer HMAS Queenborough. He was about to get his
first real taste of sea life, on an around-Australia trip.

  Six months after Linda went missing, Jean married again. Her husband, Max, with whom she went on to have two children and who died in front of her from an aneurism twelve years after they wed, was impatient with her grief. 'Put it behind you, Jean,' he told her gruffly. 'It's over.' But it wasn't. For many years, Jean could not even breathe Linda's name or dare to imagine what might have happened to her. And every time a child was reported missing or a body was found, the black pit opened up again, threatening to overwhelm her. She could never put the grief behind her.

  23

  Tim Attrill joined the navy in February 1968, three months after Percy, and went on to serve with him on the Queen-borough. He remembers him as a strange, emotionless loner who commanded no presence. 'He had a pronounced cleft in the tip of his nose and a shallow, unhealthy pallor to his complexion,' he tells me, sipping a cold beer in an inner-city Melbourne pub. 'He always looked jaundiced and had a high forehead, wrinkly, mousy-brown hair and bulging eyes. His is not the sort of appearance you would forget, but you could forget his personality very easily. He was anonymous, a quiet, humourless chameleon who never seemed to be really there.'

  With 300 people on board the Queenborough there was limited space, but in the entire trip between mid-September 1968 and mid-March 1969, nautically criss-crossing the country – from Sydney to Melbourne, Hobart, Jervis Bay, Adelaide, Fremantle, Port Lincoln, Port Pirie and back to Sydney – no one ever got to know Percy. By the end of the trip, he was still the Ghost, the Spook, the Phantom. 'When you're in a place like Port Lincoln, blokes naturally gravitate to the pub,' Attrill says. 'Not Percy. He would disappear as soon as he got off the ship. We never had a clue what he was up to or where he went.'

  Charles Wattle also served with Percy on the Queenborough and learned how to sail a navy dinghy with him during their Fremantle stopover in Western Australia. 'When we were on course at HMAS Cerberus, Percy had a small sailing dinghy, which he put on the roof rack of his car and went sailing in Port Phillip Bay, probably around Frankston. He was a total loner,' he tells me. In the same class at HMAS Cerberus when they did their Electronic Trades Course in 1969, Percy sat at the table and chair behind Wattle. 'One time I was having trouble with my mathematics and I borrowed his slide rule calculator to try to work out the answer,' Wattle says. 'I couldn't work it out so I asked him how to do it. He went into an immediate rage and ripped the slide rule out of my hands, abusing me for not being able to use it properly. I never asked him again. He always had a short fuse and a quick temper.'

  On a long ago Saturday in 1968 or 1969, when I was about nine years old, I walked alone down a main street in a seaside suburb of Hobart – a sleepy hollow in the 1960s where I grew up – to buy the newspaper for my mother. People bustled about doing their weekend shopping and I stopped close to the kerb to tie my shoelace. A car crawled to a halt next to me and the driver leaned over the seats to the passenger side and opened the door, just a little.

  'Excuse me,' he said, smiling. 'I am a little lost. Could you tell me where the Sunday School is?' I peered up at his face and was about to point in the direction of the church when he spoke again, waving the map he held in his hands. 'Why don't you hop in and show me where it is on the map? Or take me there? It would be much easier.' There was something in his demeanour that I didn't trust: instinct made me wary and I remembered my mother's advice to never go with a stranger.

  'Today is Saturday, not Sunday,' I said, standing up. 'Sunday school is not on today.' I ran home, without the newspaper, and more than forty years later I realise I cannot recall the make of the car but I can vaguely remember the man's features. Brown hair. Perhaps in his 20s. A quietly determined demeanour.

  Who was that man? Is a child safe anywhere? My mother did not report the incident to police – you just didn't, in those days though we're more aware now she said – and I regret that she didn't as I research any abductions or attempted abductions from areas around Australia where Percy travelled on ships in the late 1960s.

  I think about what the police found in the glove box of his car after Tuohy's arrest: a Shell touring guide of Tasmania. And I realise, with a start, that if he wasn't driving when the ship was in port in Hobart, why did he need a touring map?

  I look at the sailing schedule for the HMAS Queenborough in Hobart in 1968 and '69. The ship had visited three times for a total of 14 days from November '68 to February '69. On the third trip, for the Hobart Regatta, Percy could not find anyone to sail with him on the bosun's dinghy and Ed Pietsch, who had joined up with Percy, obliged. 'How much shore leave would you guys have had on that trip?' I ask Pietsch now. I am still rattled at the prospect that Percy was in Hobart during the same period of time that a man tried to abduct me. 'Enough,' he says. 'On long trips you could get a day off or a weekend.'

  'So how would blokes get around?'

  'By cab, or if we wanted to go somewhere we'd hire a car.'

  'Would Percy go with you?'

  'God no, never. He would just disappear on his own once he got off the ship.'

  'Is it possible he hired a car himself during those trips?'

  'Yeah, that's absolutely possible. Yes.'

  Percy was stationed back at HMAS Cerberus for four months from early April 1969. It was a typical Victorian autumn – blue skies turning charcoal with little warning, cool days and crisp nights. Children, rugged against the chill, made the most of playing outdoors before a long and bitter winter sent them scuttling inside until spring.

  A sea breeze whipped around the twelve-year-old girl's legs as she rode her bike along a dirt track on Mornington Peninsula, a scenic half-hour drive from Cerberus naval base, and a place where many sailors went fishing. Her father warned her to be careful of sailors, a warning she found amusing as he had been in the navy. The bayside village was sleepy in autumn, habituated by shack owners taking a weekend break and retirees who had made the move from the city. The girl was suddenly aware that a car was cruising along behind her and sped up to get away, cutting across bush. In the next street, the man, who she thought was a sailor because of his short back and sides haircut, was waiting for her in the car. He beckoned for her to stop and speak to him as he wound down his window, asking directions on how he could get back to where he lived, in a voice she later recalled as 'pathetic little boy lost'. When she did not respond, he asked her to get into his car and show her the way. She took note of the car: a light-coloured station wagon, with a sign on the side window. 'Go . . .' Heeding the advice of her parents not to talk to strangers, the child sped away on her pushbike, pedalling into a nearby driveway and screaming for help.

  Ken Hosking had no interest in remaining in contact with Derek after he left Mount Beauty for an apprenticeship with Ansett Airlines in early 1966, and was surprised when Percy suddenly materialised on his doorstep in early 1968 in Melbourne, dressed in his naval uniform. He visited a few times and not long before Tuohy was murdered, Ken invited Derek to a twenty-first birthday party. Later, Ken's brother-in-law commented on his old school friend. 'There's something strange about that kid, mate. Something very odd.' Always neat and clean, now Derek was in the navy he was meticulously so, obsessive, folding his naval shirts perfectly on the bed and ensuring the creases in his trousers were immaculate. He still didn't have a girlfriend and was still extremely solitary. Ken found it difficult to relate to him.

  Ron Anderson hadn't seen Derek since August 1966, when they saw each other at the second challenge ski championships between Mount Beauty and Corryong High Schools. Like everyone else in the small communities, Anderson had heard about the incident with the girls in the caravan and he was profoundly shocked at the change in his mate when they met at the graduation of a mutual friend in June 1969. Derek, who had always been so meticulous in his appearance, was driving a 'grotty Datsun that needed a good clean', Anderson remembers, and he had aged ten years. 'His face was extremely drawn and pale and his hair was standing on end. The change in h
im was extraordinary.' Anderson barely recognised this young man who had once taken so much pride in his appearance.

  After leaving school, Derek's friend Peter Couch became a teacher and was now working at the local primary school in Harrietville, an hour from Mount Beauty. He, too, got a hell of a shock when Percy turned up unexpectedly at the school on 19 June 1969. His former school friend had changed dramatically: his face, once full, had become pathetically gaunt and his large eyes stared coldly from deep sockets. Peter hoped his face didn't register the alarm he felt at seeing the changes in Derek. 'I can't leave school right now,' he told him, 'but go and see Mum. I'll come over when I'm free.'

  Derek slept in his car that night before driving to Mount Beauty the next morning in his mother's light-blue Datsun wagon. He stayed with the Couch family, including Peter's three young siblings – twelve-year-old Anne, nine-year-old Marg, and seven-year-old Graeme – on Friday night before leaving the following afternoon to drive to Sydney. Three miles from Mount Beauty his car broke down and he had no choice but to abandon it at the nearest garage for repair. The mechanic drove him back to the Couch household, where he stayed for four days until the car was repaired.

  Two days after Derek's arrival, Beryl went into his room to make his bed. He had left a book open with a picture of a girl stripped to her waist, a picture that Beryl thought had deliberately been left there for her to see. Affronted, she slammed the book shut and put it in his suitcase under the bed. The incident was never mentioned. 'I always found Derek to be a little on the sly side,' she muses today. 'Like he was keeping secrets. Like he was always thinking about something.'