Given Bolte's pro-capital punishment stance and the terrible nature of Percy's crime, there was, according to many in legal and political circles, no question that he would have flexed his muscle and executed Percy if he had been found guilty of Tuohy's murder. 'Putting it bluntly,' the psychiatrist says, 'the ordinary Joe Blow on the jury would have had enormous difficulty comprehending the savagery of his crime. They would have thought "he must be barmy". And that saved him a trip through that trapdoor.'
I want to know if he thinks Mr Percy – this bright, dangerous individual caught up in his highly detailed sexual fantasies – is capable of having murdered the other children and young adults with whom his name is often linked in the press. I rattle off the long list: Schmidt, Sharrock, the Beaumonts, Redston, Brook and Stilwell. He waves his hands in an expansive gesture. 'The people who commit the sort of crime that Mr Percy committed are so rare you would not expect to find more than one to be active in Australia in any decade,' he says. The inference is chilling.
'So if that's the case, you're saying the possibility of Percy being responsible for these other child murders is very, very high?'
'Exactly.'
We turn to that most enduring mystery, of how, on a day alive with sunshine, three children could suddenly disappear from a crowded beach area. 'One of the most notorious people on the list of possible suspects is sexual sadist Bevan von Einem,' I remind the psychiatrist. 'But whoever was responsible was capable of entrapping three children of both sexes. How does von Einem fit with this scenario?'
He shoots me a level gaze. 'He doesn't. He didn't do the Beaumont children. His choice of victim – male – and his sexuality – gay – point to this, as does the ages of his known victim and the other murders for which he is implicated. If police had anything at all to link him to the Beaumonts, they would have charged him by now.' On the other hand, he says, Percy has as his central fantasies multiple children whom he would force into becoming available to him, objects to do with as he desired. 'First he developed a complex and extraordinary set of fantasies, and then he acted them out. There is a group of deviants who cross a whole range of anti-social sexual behaviour, but Mr Percy's sexual repertoire is very narrow and specific and he has an obsessive preoccupation with it. The crime we know him to have committed has all the hallmarks of someone who has worked their script out. It speaks to a confidence that he has got away with murder before. It speaks to a confidence that he would get away with murder again.'
What about the Wanda Beach murders? I ask him. How do fifteen-year-old girls fit the profile of Derek Percy's fantasies for young children? 'Offenders of his kind can deviate from the script in their head if the opportunity presents itself. They can be extremely opportunistic.'
Don't forget, he cautions me, that serial killers have a great sense of superiority. 'They think there is something special about themselves, that they are not bound by normal rules and regulations. The common herd wants naught to do with them, and vice versa. Mr Percy has zero interpersonal presence and no following. He turns from us as we turn from him.'
The psychiatrist will not speculate on what may have happened in Percy's childhood to contribute to his behaviour. 'What we do know,' he says, briefly glancing at his watch, 'is that there are a whole set of indicators in his background that may have contributed. He was an antisocial child with no friends or relationships. His interpersonal skills were very poor and he was isolated from others. He came to believe that he was sexually unacceptable and that he could only obtain intimacy through the thoughts or will of another person – in his case, vulnerable children – being overborn. Forcing them to his will is part of the sexual thrill. Consent and intimacy is not part of his fantasy life.' Fear of being found sexually wanting in another person's eyes could well have triggered Percy's vivid fantasy life. 'Who knows what set this off with him, but for one reason or another he developed fantasies connected with innocence. He couldn't make children in awe of him normally, so he had to manufacture a Svengali hold over them in other ways. They had no choice but to acquiesce. They could not reject him.'
Percy's social and sexual isolation fuelled his fantasy world. 'He would masturbate to his fantasies and because there was no one to draw him into the real world, the idea of those fantasies being okay was reinforced in his mind. As the fantasies became more detailed and he orgasmed, the loop was created: fantasy equals satisfaction, satisfaction equals reinforcement, reinforcement equals fantasy. There doesn't necessarily have to be anything profound in his past but there does need to be his inabilities and inadequacies to drive that loop. In normal adolescent sexuality, people help you to come to terms with what intimacy is. Real people also tell you to piss off, to get lost. Thus the real world takes over. Mr Percy did not have that advantage. He was radically isolated with no concept of other people. He acted out his fantasies because he sees people as objects. He could even suffer a form of autism or Asperger's.'
Is it possible, I ask, that a female figure in his life could have hurt him? And given the warnings his parents had about his behaviour, why more was not done to change his behaviour early? 'Look at it this way,' he says. 'It's the late fifties, mid-sixties. How many mothers knew about the masturbation fantasies of their sons then? Not many. From what Derek tells her, the doctor has reassured him that he is normal, that he will grow out of it. And nine times out of ten, that GP would be right. So mum is reassured. Female abuse is also very rare, and it is almost always in concert with a man.'
He stands and extends a huge paw of a hand. 'I'm afraid I have to go now. You have chosen a complex character to write about. I wish you well. Mr Percy is indeed a fascinating, fascinating study.'
I turn at the door. 'Sorry, just one last thing,' I say. 'You have met Percy on numerous occasions. What is your personal, as opposed to professional, opinion of him?'
'I feel sorry for him,' he says, with a wry smile. 'He is, after all, a human being: a highly intelligent human being with terrible sexual pathology. What he did was unforgivable. But the person? The person isn't.'
36
In mid-2008, Derek Percy's former defence lawyer, who now boasts the impressive title Professor The Honourable George Hampel, AM, QC, agrees to meet with me to discuss his memories of Percy's trial in 1969. Professor Hampel, admitted to the bar in 1958 and a Supreme Court Justice from 1983 until 2000, is regarded in legal circles as something of a legend, his achievements including Foundation Chairman of the Australian Advocacy Institute and training prosecutors at the War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. A Polish-born Jew and only child, he escaped to Russia with his parents just thirty-six hours before the Germans invaded Warsaw, losing most of his family during the dark days of the Holocaust. He and his wife, Felicity – also a human rights lawyer and Supreme Court judge – are regarded as true humanists.
Professor Hampel's light-filled office in the heart of Melbourne's legal district reflects his encyclopaedic intellect and love of family, pictures of whom are arranged in beautiful frames around the room. Immaculately groomed in a perfectly cut grey suit and mauve shirt, testament to his self-admitted vanity, Hampel has a welcoming, easy manner and smiling blue eyes. 'Please, have a seat,' he says, gesturing to a chair before his vast desk. In front of him, open to the page he wishes to show me, is a meticulously organised compendium with press clippings from Percy's trial.
'My passion was for criminal law and for some time before I became involved in Derek Percy's trial I was interested in the insanity issue,' Hampel says. 'There was a famous Melbourne case in 1968 where a seventy-seven-year-old widow was fatally stabbed by a twenty-one-year-old labourer, Lawrence Hannell. I ran the insanity defence.' Hannell, he continues, faced the death sentence if found guilty of murder but his plea of insanity was supported by Dr Allen Bartholomew – the same psychiatrist who would also support Derek Percy's insanity defence at his trial. 'Hannell was found to have a chromosome imbalance – XYY – and some researchers believe that the extra Y chromosome is fi
fty to sixty times more prevalent amongst criminals than the general population.' Hannell also suffered from a degree of mental retardation and some neurological disorder, and Bartholomew's conclusion that 'he did not know that what he was doing was wrong' convinced the jury, who deliberated for just eleven minutes before deciding he was not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. The story gained so much attention that Time magazine ran it under the headline 'Question of Y' and it also appeared in the British Medical Journal.
'As a result,' Hampel says, 'I was approached to do other cases. [Loel] Caldwell, who had been a solicitor to Frank Galbally, one of Australia's most famous lawyers and his partner, Berkovitch, asked me to look at the Percy case.' A staunch advocate of the belief that a fair trial is one of the cornerstones of freedom, Hampel quickly decided to accept it. Then with a young son and daughter of his own, he had no doubt from the moment he read Percy's writings that he was insane. 'As a layman, when you see the writings, his fantasies, there is no other conclusion that you can draw.'
In preparation for the trial, Hampel spent weeks with the psychiatrists, delving into the mind of his client. 'There were clinical suggestions of schizophrenia,' he recalls, 'but this was by no means clear. My challenge was to show his gross psychosexual abnormalities to the jury.'
Despite the long passage of time, Hampel remembers Percy well. 'He was very polite, quite pleasant and extremely quiet. You wouldn't pick this mild young man as being capable of doing what he did.' Percy made no demands on his legal team, proving to be a model client. 'I've met some cold, hard criminals but Percy wasn't one of them. He was nondescript. He left it all to us and didn't protest or complain at all. I explained the insanity defence to him and from that point he said nothing.' From the moment Percy sat in the dock, Hampel had little contact with him. None was needed. 'The only issue was the medical evidence. Despite the horrors of the event, this case was not forensically difficult.'
The trial, which began on a cool Thursday in Court 4 of Melbourne's Supreme Court, was open to the public. 'It had received a lot of publicity so people drifted in and out,' Hampel remembers. 'It was a big case but despite the lurid headlines, there was little public outcry. When people read about this sort of crime they imagine the perpetrator to have horns. But they seemed to understand that Percy had a medical condition.'
Though Professor Hampel can no longer remember his closing address, he says he would have emphasised that the evidence pointed all one way and that he would also have cautioned the jury to realise that the mere nature of the crime suggested insanity. Forty years after his client was found to be insane, I wonder what Professor Hampel makes of today's opinion from psychiatrists that he no longer suffers a 'disease of the mind' – and perhaps, never did. 'We know that Percy is very intelligent,' I venture. 'Do you think it possible he used that intelligence to fool the experts into thinking that he was insane?'
'His intelligence has nothing to do with his illness,' Hampel shoots back swiftly. 'I can't possibly disagree from a professional viewpoint that he was not insane, but to my mind he clearly was. Let's not forget that when he was arrested and interviewed he did not remember what he had done. His mind shut off the horrific acts. It took a very clever, very patient police officer to take him through the details in reverse, to trigger his memory. The chances of him being released are Buckley's and none. My impression is that he is a very dangerous man, but that doesn't mean he's not insane.'
A very dangerous man. 'Dangerous enough, do you think,' I ask, 'to have murdered many more children?'
Hampel nods. 'The fact that we know he does these sorts of things to children points to his proclivity toward that behaviour. There is, therefore, no reason at all to think he couldn't be responsible for many more child murders.' He rises. 'You must excuse me, I have a luncheon engagement,' he says, walking me to the door. He leaves me with the enigmatic words that Berkovitch said about Percy: 'He commented that he was a man who always lost out just as he was nearing his goal.'
37
Detective Sergeants Wayne Newman and David Rae, while building a behavioural profile of Derek Percy, were aware that to best advance the Stilwell inquest they needed to look not just at the Tuohy case but also at the Beaumonts, Redston and Wanda Beach cases. Given clearance by Melbourne Coroner Graeme Johnstone to gather that evidence in order to show behavioural patterns, they now awaited a date to be set for that inquest.
Acting on a tip-off, in June 2007 police obtained a warrant to seize the contents of a lock-up at a South Melbourne warehouse. They were amazed at what they found: volumes of sick stories and hundreds of sordid jottings contained in more than thirty boxes. It was material that Percy had penned from prison, even more graphic than that which Newman and Rae had previously read. At the end of August, Magistrate Belinda Wallington gave them permission to interview Percy about what they had found in the warehouse.
The media circled and speculation was rife. But despite the rumours, a cartoon found in the warehouse, headlined 'Wicked Wanda' did not refer to the Wanda Beach murders; like other material police found in his possession, it had been torn from the pages of a girlie magazine. Razor blades he had put in storage were not from the same batch as those used in the Simon Brook murder; Percy had used them in prison to fashion model boats.
Wayne Newman was extremely guarded when he spoke to me about what was found in the warehouse; understandable reticence, given that the Linda Stilwell inquest is yet to be heard. 'Much of what we found was run of the mill paperwork, but other items warranted our further investigation,' he said.
'What sort of other material was it?'
'I'm not at liberty to discuss that. There was nothing that we found in the warehouse to indicate that it was put there recently. It is Percy's own paperwork that he has accumulated in prison, much as we would accumulate material and then store it in our shed. Prisons have organisations to send material out but perhaps the material that left correctional institutions was not as closely scrutinised in the 1970s as it is today.' He won't comment beyond this on how Percy was allowed to continue writing such filthy material and how he managed to get it past prison authorities.
Sex offenders are sometimes encouraged to write down fantasies as part of their therapeutic process, to see if their fantasies have changed or become less intense, but Percy is not part of any such process and prisoners are not allowed to collect pornographic material, even if they have written it themselves. Former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon gave an enigmatic response when reporters grilled her on the subject. 'The piece of information that came to us is significant,' she said, 'and may lead to many, many matters being dealt with, but that's a matter of investigation . . .'
Wayne Newman would not elucidate what that information is, but what is absolutely certain is that an answer is required about how that material got out of prison, unchallenged. Someone needs to furnish an answer to that question.
I had hoped to meet Newman in early 2008 but a scheduled interview with him stalls when I get to Melbourne. He no longer wishes to talk to me, he says, abruptly and unapologetically, on the telephone. There is an inquest coming up, he says, though he does not yet have a firm start date. He cannot give personal or professional opinions of Percy nor can he in any way cloud the memories of witnesses. Another call to Newman on 21 November to enquire as to the status of that inquest and whether startling new evidence will be presented before it evokes an equally blunt response framed in stiff police language. 'We found material believed to belong to Mr Percy which warranted further questioning regarding the Stilwell matter. It's new evidence because it's not evidence that has been yet held before the court,' he tells me.
'Yes, I understand. But is it new evidence that has never been aired before, as in new material you have found placing Percy at Stilwell's abduction site, or is it circumstantial evidence that you have put together that has been aired in news reports?'
'I can't answer that.'
'You can't tell me if you have new evide
nce?'
'It's new evidence. It's all new.'
'So it's startling new evidence that no one has seen before?'
'It hasn't been aired before the court. I don't know what else to say to you.' We are going around in Pythonesque circles. I thank him for his time and place a call to David Rae, who is more forthcoming.
'Hopefully the inquest will be really worthwhile, and all the evidence we have will be packaged together for that. But there is no startling new evidence, as such.'
I think about what Gary Stilwell told me: that it was Percy's MO to lure a child away. But as much as there are chilling similarities between the missing and murdered children, there are differences, too. Linda Stilwell's body has not been found. The Beaumont children have not been found. If Percy is responsible for all four murders, did he have opportunity to take them further, to hide their bodies in dense bushland where they would not easily be discovered, or to dispose of them at sea? The latter, despite Percy's competence as a sailor, seems unrealistic; the chances of being seen disposing of bodies at sea is very high. It is far more likely that, like Yvonne Tuohy, they have been tossed away in the scrub, somewhere. The touring maps found in Percy's belongings prove he did a reconnoitre of areas, and he had ample time while driving on his own, to find isolated bush tracks. The other victims – Schmidt, Sharrock, Brook, Redston and his known victim, Yvonne Tuohy – were all found within twenty-four hours of their abductions. None was afforded the decency of a bush grave and Schmidt and Sharrock's bodies were hastily covered with a light doona of sand that shifted during the night. The probability of the bodies of all five victims being found was extremely high. Did their killer tire of the game shortly after their deaths, no longer interested in lingering with the bodies? Once his overwhelming urge was sated, was he frightened of being discovered, so leaving them behind at the scene with not a backward glance? Was he certain that he would get away with murder, and that there was therefore no need to hide them?
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 24