Lambs to the Slaughter

by Debi Marshall

  Widely regarded as decent and charming, the Brook family is known to be very private with their grief. 'An ungenerous estimate of our motive might be that we do not wish to contribute to what has become a ritualised form of public entertainment,' Donald writes to me. 'A kinder interpretation might be that we do not wish to distress people unnecessarily. It is also much easier to have a relationship with people who do not know anything about this part of our lives. It is not, after all, a matter that can ever become a topic of casual conversation, as in, 'Did we ever tell you about the time we got lost in Nooriootpa?" ' It is, he adds, a curious situation, akin to living with an elephant in the room that nobody ever acknowledges, and not knowing whether the people with whom one establishes relationships even knows about the elephant. 'After forty years it is reasonable to assume that most people don't, and that is the most comfortable way to have it,' he writes.

  Donald reflects that if police were waiting for someone to kill again with his signature MO in order to draw a comparison with Simon's murder, it would never have happened. 'Derek Percy had been caught and was in detention in Melbourne throughout the entire period. I assume that there was no regular exchange of information between the New South Wales and the Victorian police forces in 1968 and '69. If a connection between the cases was made then, we were not told about it. I strongly suspect that as a matter of fact, no connection was made.'

  Even by 2008, Professor Brook had not been advised that detectives had looked at Percy for Simon's murder within just a few days of his arrest. I wonder why they chose to keep this information from him. Was it because they did not wish to traumatise the family further?

  While there are similarities with the Simon Brook and Yvonne Tuohy murders, there are also differences. Age, obviously: Brooke was three and Tuohy twelve. Sex: one male, one female. Yvonne's wrists were tied, Simon's were not. Her face and body were smeared with faeces; his was not. The method of their asphyxiation was not quite identical. Yvonne was mutilated with a knife; Simon with a razor blade. Simon suffered genital mutilation, while Yvonne was disembowelled.

  I read over the list several times. And it is clear – painfully, obviously clear – that the differences in the two murders are as telling as the similarities. The similarities are manifested in Percy's writings, his fetishes; his opportunism and overwhelming urge to do what he needs to do. There are similarities in the abduction points for both children, in exponential risk of his being caught and in his carrying what he needed: razor blades on foot, knives in his car. The similarities go to the heart of Derek Percy.

  Is Derek Percy a serial killer – worse, a child serial killer; that most disturbed and predatory of humans, known for their sly cunning and outward normality, a man who repeatedly, consistently tells the battalion of psychiatrists who assess him, who try to get him to discuss Yvonne Tuohy's murder: I don't think about this anymore. I'm a normal person and therefore I don't need treatment. A serial killer with a radar that is constantly primed for the next kill, about whom psychiatrists agree that part of his enigma is that he presents as terribly normal? The more I read, the more I believe this to be the case.

  The contents of the Brook file are so disturbing that even forty years after the murder, the Coroner at Sydney's Glebe Coroner's Court is adamant that I have permission from the family to view and use it. I have also asked to see the Wanda Beach inquest files. 'Please ask Marshall whether she has permission from families of Schmidt and Sharrock and/or of Brook,' the Coroner instructs her assistant in writing. 'Would NOT consider release without.'

  I follow the assistant into a windowless room where I will sit for the next two days going through these files. The assistant hands me the box of papers, prefacing it with some cautions as he leans against the wall. 'You know, when you work in here you think you've seen it all. Only this week, two mothers have lost five kids between them. But this story; it's vile, truly vile. You can't believe it until you read it. You just can't imagine a person doing this to another human being. Worse, to a child.'

  I turn the pages in the file slowly, apprehensive about what I will see. But if the depraved, obscene writings are bad, I am totally, utterly unprepared for the stark, black and white images, the hideous silhouette of this tiny boy, his throat cut and a jagged gash from throat to scrotum. The police photograph of Simon Brook's mutilated body is so confronting I want to retch. 'You poor, darling little soul,' I whisper to myself, flicking the pages. I want to turn away but cannot, as if magnetically drawn to this horror. Here, his brightly coloured clothes are laid out for the police photographer, as though his mother has freshly ironed them and placed them on his bed for him to wear; here the razor blade wrapper, hurriedly opened; here the gag that was shoved into his mouth with ferocious force. I think of Yvonne Tuohy, helpless to defend herself with her hands tied behind her back. Simon was only three years old, just a little boy with a friendly personality who was always going to be defenceless against this predator. Like Yvonne, he would not have needed a gag. But it is the photos of Simon in situ that are so desperately, desperately sad, the cold, horrific photos of a murdered child, caught in the harsh glare of the camera's flash. The terror of his final moments, reflected in his eyes.

  If the Brook family were hoping for some closure with the coronial finding, they were bitterly aggrieved to find there was none. On 28 April 2006 they received word that the DPP was not satisfied that there was sufficient evidence to lay charges against Derek Ernest Percy at that time. Forty years after the terrible murder of his son, Donald Brook does not dignify Percy with a Christian name. 'The Coroner found at the second inquest that, in his estimate of the evidence presented, a jury could be expected to find beyond reasonable doubt that Percy was guilty,' he says. 'This opinion was passed to the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions who has not to this point been persuaded that a prosecution would be in the public interest.'

  On 3 May 2006 Professor Brook, using the diplomatic skills for which he is well known, wrote to the Director of the DPP asking that they reconsider their decision not to prosecute. Admitting that 'we are not inclined to raise a clamour in the press about this matter', he did not deny the personal trauma both he and his wife felt at the decision. 'We are distressed by your decision not to lay charges and believe that it may not have been sufficiently considered in your office . . .' Professor Brook also penned a thank you note to the Coroner for his kind assistance, receiving a reply two weeks later. Abernethy was very disappointed, he wrote, as he felt that there was sufficient admissible evidence to get the matter before a court of law. After discussion with Adam Barwick and Mr Peter Zahra, SC, Zahra was of the opinion, he added, that the DPP would reconsider its decision not to prosecute.

  Deputy Senior Crown Prosecutor Mr Tim Hoyle, SC, was tasked with reconsidering the DPP decision at the request of Mr Peter Zahra, QC, and delivered its devastating decision on 26 June 2007. 'The Director has again recommended no charges be laid in this matter,' he wrote.

  34

  I read and re-read Professor Brook's acknowledgement, penned in such polite terms, of the family's heartache. Do families who have had the closure of a court verdict, albeit a 'not guilty' verdict, fare better with grief? I resolve to try to get an answer to that question from Yvonne Tuohy's elusive sister, Denise. But it is a long shot. In the forty years since her sister's murder neither Denise nor the rest of her family has ever spoken to the press.

  Sub-tropical summer rains lash the windows of the small aircraft which bounces around the sky like a bird in a storm. After serendipitously finding Denise's phone number through a third party and after numerous calls to her, she has finally agreed to speak to me on the proviso I not disclose where she lives. She has decided to talk now, she says, because it is cathartic. Now in her fifties, she has bottled her emotions up for a long, long time.

  Through the steamy heat of a summer's afternoon in the heart of Queensland's sugar-cane country and into a mellower evening, Denise speaks of the sister she loved, of a life that
ended abruptly on that long ago day, the day before man walked on the moon. Copper-haired and petite, Denise is a friendly, though somewhat reticent woman who describes herself as none too trusting of other people. Her two children are now adults and she lives with her partner, from whom she separates a few months later, in a compact home visited by currawongs in the late afternoons. Denise has lived here for years but even people in this close-knit community are unaware of the trauma of Yvonne's death.

  'You know,' she says, settling in at the dining table spread with yellowing newspaper articles covering her sister's murder, 'a lot of the time Yvonne's name wasn't mentioned for fear of upsetting Mum. But when something like this happens, it shatters the entire family, shadows your whole life. We had only moved to Warneet that year, for a quiet sea change.' She recalls snippets of that time, brief moments: police standing in the kitchen, friends offering condolences, people in and out of the house for the first few weeks. But vivid in her memory is standing in her mother's bedroom, flanked by her sister, when her mother delivered the news that Yvonne was dead. She remembers the terrible sounds that came from her mother's bedroom when she thought no one could hear, the quiet weeping that turned into anguished sobs, and the pain in her father's eyes that no amount of military training could disguise.

  Yvonne's murder has skewed Denise's view of the world, made her more distant. 'It has affected my mental and emotional health,' she says, flatly. 'I find it very hard to have relationships with people; I don't open up easily and hate intrusions.' The memory of what happened to Yvonne never goes away. 'You carry it everywhere. I was very over-protective of my own children as a result of what happened to Yvonne.' I can understand that, I tell her. More than twenty years of writing stories about paedophiles, child killers and serial killers has skewed my own view of the world a little, too. While I constantly tried to keep a balance on the dark material I work with and my home life, I was often berated and chided for walking my own daughter to primary school, just a block from our home. But I did it, anyway. Denise nods. 'People call it paranoia. I call it experience.'

  Nancy Beaumont sent her parents a condolence letter, Denise recalls, a heartfelt letter from one grieving mother to another. She was twelve when the Beaumont children disappeared – the same age as Yvonne when she was murdered. It is a small coincidence in a story littered with them. 'We grew up in Adelaide's Glenelg, where the Beaumont children were abducted,' she says. 'We left in late 1965, not long before they disappeared. There were three children in our family, and three in theirs. We played exactly where they did and caught the bus at exactly the same place.' There is a shudder in her voice as she speaks, a horror about what happened on that blistering summer's day in Adelaide. She doesn't have to articulate what she is thinking: It could have been us. And then it was us.

  Her father died in 1982 and her mother, now in her eighties, has returned to Adelaide, trying to put the grief behind her and get on with her life. It was almost thirty years before Denise could bring herself to find out just what Percy had done to her sister. Her children were asking questions and she wanted to answer them properly. But the details made her ill, fretful, and she realised with sudden, frightening clarity that it could just as easily have been her on that mid-winter's day; Percy could have targeted her.

  If she had just one thing to say to Percy, she tells me, she would ask him why he murdered her little sister, why he robbed her of the chance to live a full, happy life. 'They reckon he is insane – or was – but how do they define that, really?' she asks, with the cynical tone of one who thinks the law is an ass. 'Is someone who talks to himself insane, or just eccentric? Is someone who plans to murder a child, or children, insane or just unlucky to get caught?' She thinks of Percy as a pathetic man, who ruined his own life as well as theirs. 'My sister Maxine married six months after Yvonne was murdered. We had all shared the same bedroom and then suddenly it was only me there. It had a profound effect on me as a teenager.'

  She is convinced that Percy is responsible for other child murders and abductions. 'I don't think he could have done what he did to Yvonne unless he had killed before. He carried it through with precision. Everything was planned in his writings and he had the knives in the car. He admitted that he would have abducted Shane Spiller as well, if he could.' Denise recalls something of Shane's despair. 'He was a lovely boy, but very traumatised. When he was sixteen, he rode his motorbike off the end of the Warneet pier. The tide was out so he wasn't hurt. But it was definitely a suicide attempt.'

  Closure is important, Denise tells me as she says goodbye. 'But we haven't had that. We don't know if Percy will get out, so we won't ever have closure until he is dead. And I think he deserves a slow and painful death. Just like he made my sister suffer.'

  On the drive back to my hotel, along a wide expanse of river and past grand old homes on hectares of sugar cane, I ponder the tragedy of how many opportunities to escape Yvonne missed. The married couple who heard her cries for help, and ignored them; Yvonne submissively climbing over into the back seat as Percy had ordered her to do and lying there, petrified, instead of climbing out the rear door; Bill Little, who called his children back to him thinking the vehicle's occupants were a courting couple seeking privacy. All those tragic, missed opportunities. Yvonne Tuohy went to her death as meekly as a lamb to the slaughter.

  35

  I meet him in his office, this physically imposing professional man with a slightly crumpled air, sprawled casually in a lounge chair amongst a pile of textbooks. His fingers intertwine as he recounts the occasions he met Derek Percy in his professional capacity as a forensic psychiatrist. As he has consulted with the man he calls 'Mr Percy', he asks for professional reasons that I do not reveal his name. He is a genial man, easy to converse with and relaxed in the knowledge that he has many years of experience in his field.

  'I have met Mr Percy on five or six occasions,' he says. 'He presents as a quiet, mildly suspicious man. Even though we had met on several occasions and had extended interviews, he remains detached and becomes mildly irritated if pushed on issues.' In the past, he says, Percy has been misled by mental health professionals, revealing things he thought would remain private but which instead were made public. 'This has made him wary of people in my profession. He feels he has been trapped into making admissions.'

  Percy's reticence to get close to anyone has ensured he has made few contacts in the prisons in which he has been incarcerated, keeping his distance even from people he has known for decades. 'This is not a man who gathers close friends around him. He is polite to staff but that is as far as it goes. He is not psychopathically detached; he just lives entirely in his own world.'

  I tell him I don't understand why Percy, deemed insane by the court, was not sent to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. 'In those days, in Victoria people were only ever sent to prison,' he explains, with a vague shake of his head that indicates how ludicrous he thinks the system was. This situation did not change until 1994, when Professor Paul Mullen arranged the first transfer from prison for prisoners requiring long-term care. Percy, he adds, stands out because of the high public profile of his crime and because of concerns over his security. 'He is an odd individual with grotesque sexual disturbances. But I don't think anyone in the last twenty years has thought he suffers a mental illness. He is fit and intelligent. But mentally ill? No.'

  From early on in his incarceration, he says, Percy's preference was to stay in the prison section and not be transferred to a gaol hospital. 'He knew that in a hospital environment people would be at him, exploring what led him to offend. He wanted to avoid that. And he did.'

  I look around the room, at the framed credentials of this psychiatrist's achievements. 'Is Percy cunning?' I ask. 'Is he capable of fooling people for this long?' He considers the question, shakes his head. 'Cunning? No. That assumes a wish to mislead others. The thing about Mr Percy is that he doesn't care about others. He wants to hide from them. His dramatic appearance – the long gre
y beard that grows to his chest – is indicative of his personality. This is not some demonstration of his prison style. He hides behind this beard. It is his cover, his armour.' It makes sense. From adolescence, Percy's preference was for his own company, something he made clear in his 1965 end-of-school yearbook, when he listed his favourite occupation as isolating myself.

  If Percy had fooled authorities into believing he was insane, how has he managed to keep up this façade through the length of his incarceration? Could he be such a good actor? 'He simply doesn't answer questions that he doesn't want to,' the psychiatrist tells me. 'If he is irritated with a line of questioning, he shows it by shuffling in his chair and becoming mute. He lets us know he is not happy.'

  Mr Percy, he continues, is unique. 'He fits within a group of sadistic sex offenders but his type, fortunately, is very, very rare. Add in his bizarre sexual preoccupations and fantasies and you have a case that psychiatrists would see only once in a lifetime.'

  'Could psychiatric treatment ever ensure he was capable of returning to the community?' I ask.

  He shifts in his seat. 'What you're asking is, could we render Mr Percy safe? And the answer is, probably, yes. Age kills most things that are sexually driven. But the real issue is: could any civilised society let him back amongst it? And the answer is a resounding no.'

  We turn to the subject of the death penalty in Australia, abolished by the Federal Government in 1973. By 1985, it had been abolished for all crimes in Australian jurisdictions. The last man executed in Australia was Ronald Ryan – a petty thief with no record of previous violence, convicted of shooting a prison guard during an escape attempt from Pentridge in 1965. Ryan fell to his death through the infamous D Division Pentridge trapdoor in 1967 with the blessing of Victorian Premier Sir Henry Bolte, who refused all pleas for mercy and defied the protests of thousands of people gathered outside the prison walls and around Australia.