38
I call former detective Bernie Delaney to ask if he will speak to me. 'Ah, Derek Ernest Percy,' he says, using his full name in the way police and lawyers often do when referring to criminals they have dealt with. 'How could I forget him?'
Delaney joined the force in 1957, racking up time in the armed hold-up and vice squads before joining Homicide twelve months before Yvonne Tuohy's murder. He left the force in 1970, moving to Customs where he became the Assistant Director of the Federal Narcotics Bureau – experiences on which he based his book, Narc – before leaving twenty-five years ago to become a private detective on the Gold Coast. Now seventy years old, he was thirty when he investigated the Percy case, a father of three children then aged seven, five and three. As the informant – the person who charged Percy – Delaney, as is the tradition, was given the brief and crime scene photographs to keep. 'I'll talk to you,' he tells me. 'But you'll have to come up here. It's not the sort of material that I would send by post.'
Delaney's beautifully decorated, bright apartment, just metres from Surfers Paradise beach, is a sanctuary. Though he works from home and the phone constantly rings, his organisational skills are exemplary. On his vast, Indonesian teak desk he has laid out for me a copy of the file and the photographs.
A straight talker with a colourful turn of phrase, Delaney still recalls minute details of the investigation. 'Everyone involved in that case was dedicated to it and intense. From the time that Dick Knight told us to run the investigation absolutely by the book, that's what we did. We were determined to bring Percy to a conviction. It's one thing to arrest someone and another to get it through to a win in court, so we were very, very careful at all times with this one. Nothing was to derail this investigation. Nothing at all.'
'So there was no quiet biff when no one was looking?' I ask. 'He had committed the most abominable of crimes against a defenceless girl. There was no sly punch where the bruises wouldn't show?'
'No way,' he answers. 'Knight was utterly determined on this. We would run Percy straight down the line.'
It was hard, Delaney remembers, for the detectives to hold their tongues when Percy was so intent on being non-communicative and sullen. 'We wanted to rip his throat out, to be honest,' he admits. 'He would appear to be spaced out but none of us was ever convinced that he was. But we couldn't afford any stuff-ups. We had to put all our own feelings aside.'
Delaney had been in the force 13 years when the Yvonne Tuohy case came up. 'I'd covered some pretty awful cases by then,' he remembers. 'The year before the Tuohy murder we were called to a house in outer Melbourne where the father had shot his entire family – his wife, two children, even the dog. He only had one bullet left, which he wanted to use on himself, so he stabbed the third child – a baby – to death before turning the gun on himself. The scene was an orgy of blood. Every murder scene is horrific in its own way, and every major incident. They all have degrees of horror about them. But the Tuohy case, that was truly shocking. That poor child had no hope.'
At the risk of sounding tough, he says, he wasn't emotionally affected by her murder. 'We couldn't do our job if it had that affect on us. What we felt was anger at what had been done to that innocent young girl. But we had made a decision, right from the start, to suppress that anger, collectively and individually, so we could see the investigation through.
Percy was robotic and monosyllabic, he recalls, during all the interviews. 'He didn't lift his eyes once and had the most convenient selective memory. I think he was the most non-emotive person I'd ever met. I got the impression he could sink into himself. It took him a long time to tell us anything at all.' Working at Homicide or in the armed robbery squad, Delaney met some incredibly tough crims. 'That said,' he tells me, 'some of these blokes were real characters; funny or bits of larrikins despite what they had done. They were the sort of blokes under different circumstances that you would enjoy having a beer with. Not Percy.'
Police could not fathom the depths of depravity to which Percy had descended, Delaney says, showing me some more of Percy's notes and drawings to illustrate his point. Percy's voyeuristic fantasies, including what he would do to babies, now degenerate to cannibalism, underpinned by the necessity to imprison his victims in a specially designed, secret cellar in order to avoid detection. I shiver when I read them, and hand them back.
Delaney remembers the team that worked on the investigation as tight-knit, driven by a common goal. Knight, still in the force, died of a heart attack a decade or so after the Tuohy murder and Porter retired in 1990 as a Chief Superintendent. Delaney looks back at some other people he dealt with at the time. 'Bartholomew, the psychiatrist, was a real character. A funny bloke and a big drinker, the type you'd enjoy having a beer with. But the navy commander, Riley, fainted when we showed him the picture of Yvonne Tuohy's body.' He allows himself a small chuckle. 'Frankly, we were delighted at his discomfort. He had come out to the site the night we found her body but admitted later that he hadn't been able to look at her. We had to help him off the floor and onto the couch after he looked at the crime scene photographs. He had held us up so much in the crucial hours when Yvonne was missing, but we had bigger fish to fry than to wait around while he called top brass with a running commentary on what was going on.'
The images in question are on the desk in front of me, neatly positioned in a folder marked 'Photographs re death of Yvonne Elizabeth Tuohy'. I pick it up and let it rest on my lap. I have already seen the photos of Simon Brook and the Wanda Beach victims in situ and I am in no hurry to look at these. Delaney gestures to the folder. 'Just a quiet warning. They are pretty ugly.'
I open it gingerly. The first photographs are not confronting: pictures of Percy's car, Tuohy's abduction point, of Percy showing police where he hid the knife. And then, Yvonne.
The sound escapes me involuntarily: a guttural cry resonating from deep within me, low and taut. I am stunned, speechless; the horror of Yvonne's death, of her slaughter, so graphically captured here by the pitiless camera lens, is worse than indescribable. This is someone's sister, someone's daughter. Her legs, akimbo, small ankles slightly turned and feet still encased in child's white socks stained with excreta. Mouth gaping open as if crying out, with the gag removed at the morgue. Eyes closed, lashes long and sticky with tears in a young, cheeky face painted with excrement. Intestines oozing from petite belly. The folder falls in my lap and I blink furiously to stem the tears that are banking dangerously and want to fall. This is someone's sister, someone's daughter; this could have been my own daughter. I turn my head to stare out the window, where a sea breeze waltzes with palm trees on this blustery day and birds struggle for lift-off against a hard grey sky. Nature, in all her flawed beauty, is at work outside but here, in the pages nestled on my lap, is an abomination: a senseless, unnatural abomination.
This is what the police saw on that cold winter's night when the rest of the world prepared to watch man first walk on the moon; this is what they saw as they encircled her, protected her and were moved to utter the only words they could find, the only small comfort they could offer – oh, the poor little child; oh, God help her. This is what the jury saw, sitting fresh and eager in the jury box, ready to do their civic duty until forced to witness the savagery Yvonne Tuohy endured, photographs that reduced female jurors to tears and caused one to pass out. This is what caused Commander Riley's knees to buckle, his face to blanch, the world spinning as he fell in a faint. Delaney is looking at me, intently.
'Are you all right? Would you like a glass of water?'
'I'm all right, thank you,' I lie. 'I'm all right.' And I know, as I take a shaky breath and Delaney returns to his work, that the images I have just seen must stay with Delaney like a sordid slideshow being replayed over and over. They must stay with all the police who saw Yvonne Tuohy that night, and with all the lawyers and psychiatrists who have since seen them, just as I know they will stay with me, forever.
We move back to discussing Percy. 'Do you think
he's insane?' I ask.
Delaney pauses, repeats the question. 'Do I think he's insane? I don't know. But I do know we were less than happy with the "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict. We had a degree of disquiet with that one. There is always the thought that someone, one day, a do-gooder with a social conscience, might think him to be sane and let him out. But that must never happen. He must never, ever be released.'
'What about other abductions and murders?' I ask. 'Do you think that he is good for any of them?'
'Yep. Definitely. From 1965 onwards.'
'Some police I've spoken to think he is not responsible for Redston or the Beaumonts. What do you think?'
'I think he's good for both. It's always been my belief from our inquiries that he was in Canberra and Adelaide at the time in question with those children. He told us that he went to Canberra with his parents for a few days when they lived at Khancoban or Mount Beauty. He didn't think he was there in winter; more likely the Christmas holidays. He didn't think it was the end of September, when Redston was murdered, and nor could he remember reading anything about the crime. But this bloke feigned loss of memory. He also told us that he had been on holiday trips to Adelaide from Mount Beauty with the family.'
'Do you have any thoughts about what may have caused him to become like he is?'
'Like his childhood, you mean? I don't have much time for that sort of stuff. I've met good people raised in terrible homes and bad people raised in good ones. I don't think there is any rhyme or reason to it.'
'You're not alone there,' I tell him. 'Some psychiatrists I have spoken to about Percy say there are always theories about why people are peculiar, but that it "ain't necessarily so" that it is caused by child abuse. They say that belief colours opinion and that they want proof, not theories.'
'Exactly,' Delaney nods. 'But having said that, we know Percy plays his cards very close to his chest. He will never tell us.'
We turn to discussing Elaine Percy. 'By all accounts,' I tell him, 'Derek never left her sight.'
'Hard to know what she knew,' he comments. 'It's not at all uncommon for a mother to support her child, adult or otherwise. I've seen parents go to great pains to tell us their offspring is not – could not – be responsible for a crime that we know that person has committed. They defend them without knowing the facts of the case or even caring what the facts are. If Percy's mother has created alibis for him, I'd be totally unsurprised.'
'So, of the unsolved child crimes in Australia during that time, you think he could be responsible for all of them?'
'Look, so much time has expired since then. These crimes remain unsolved and they all fit the pattern about which he's written in his diaries. There is no better suspect. In my opinion, he's the man. But he'll never tell us. He's such an introverted oddball. A lot of bad guys want to talk about what they've done; they reason that there's not much point committing the perfect crime if you can't boast about it. But Percy is not out to skite or to impress; he does this for himself, for his own gratification. And that makes him very, very dangerous.'
'Yes, it does. If you're right, it makes him Australia's worst serial child killer.'
'Yep,' he agrees. 'Look at the ID images that have formed part of inquiries associated with these murders and disappearances. All the different witnesses describe a young male, aged around his early twenties, with a thin face and distinctive hairline. At the time of his arrest, Percy had the appearance of being older than his years. He had a thin face, sharp features, distinctive hairline and was showing signs that his hair was receding. He had no facial hair and no spectacles.' Delaney taps his fingers on his desk. 'He had the motive: that's in his writings. He had the means: a vehicle and a knife. And he had the opportunity: right place, right time. If the world had got rid of him back in 1969, so much the better. Everyone who worked on this case would have been delighted to see him hang. He is evil personified.'
*
When we speak a few days later, Tim Attrill agrees with Delaney's assessment of Percy. 'As far as I'm concerned he's not insane. He obviously remembered everything the day I spoke to him; he was just covering all quarters. Percy is bad, not mad. This is not a drooling, slobbering man who bays at the moon. He is articulate, conniving and of superior intellect, a person who is utterly without emotion, utterly contemptuous of others. And because of that, he is capable of anything.'
'Capable of abducting all three Beaumont children?' I ask him.
'Abducting and hiding children is his thing,' he muses. 'But I find it hard to think he could get away with three kids. How could he? Then again, it's not beyond the realms of possibility, of course. He is manipulative, highly intelligent and opportunistic. Like I said before; he's capable of anything.'
Attrill recalls there were rumours that Elaine Percy disposed of evidence, writings and drawings, that might have implicated Derek in other abductions and murders. But he realised that might just be speculation. One aspect bothers him greatly, though. 'Percy brought a sailing dinghy when he was at Cerberus which he kept on the roof rack of his car,' he tells me. 'I have full confidence in Wayne Newman to have investigated this, but if police can find that dinghy, who knows what today's DNA tests could uncover? He was a great sailor and it seems very logical to me that he could have taken Linda Stilwell out to sea after he abducted her. And other kids, too.'
'But that was not his MO with Yvonne Tuohy, Tim,' I remind him.
'No, but that doesn't mean it wasn't different with others. He would have disposed of bodies where he was least likely to be caught. Percy worked on the iron deck, behind the bridge on the HMAS Queenborough. We were issued with a "pusser's dirk" – a knife – and Percy wore his on a leather strap around his waist, which we thought was ridiculous. The gun belt is a part of a professional seaman's tool-kit but he was just an ordinary seaman in electronics and there was no earthly reason for him to wear that. We were contemptuous of him but he was impervious to that. He suffered from a high degree of supercilious elitism. He was obsessed with knives.'
39
If Derek Percy was obsessed with knives, Linda Stilwell's sibling, Karen, is obsessed with what happened to her sister. Like her mother, Jean, and brother, Gary, she waits and frets to hear when a coronial inquiry into Linda's disappearance will finally be held. Now fifty-two, Karen boasts the same arresting good looks and intense personality as her mother, but there is sadness in her eyes that no amount of counselling can heal. Years of internalising her pain has made her insular, wary of people, but she nevertheless welcomes any publicity about her sister. We meet at her flat in Melbourne's eastern suburbs on an overcast, windy day that broods and threatens rain. Life has proved tumultuous for Karen, a mother of four and grandmother of five. Depression has shadowed her: she had a nervous breakdown at 30 and has attempted suicide. She desperately seeks peace from the guilt that dogs her about leaving her sister at St Kilda.
'Linda was a loving, mischievous little character who was gullible and naïve,' she says with a smile, caressing the cat perched on her lap. 'We were just three innocent kids having fun on a Saturday afternoon. It was a different era, everyone pitched in then because Mum was always busy. I kept Linda and Gary close, protected them, but I changed a lot after she went missing. I became very rebellious and ended up a ward of the state within a year. That would never have happened if she hadn't disappeared.' Karen's problems worsened, resulting in regular visits to psychiatrists who diagnosed post traumatic stress disorder.
Karen was sure that she would die before Linda's case was investigated properly. 'Very little was done before the cold case unit took over. The police never contacted us and missing persons said she wasn't on their list because she was assumed murdered. So she was nowhere.' It is a poignant image, one that floats in the air. Linda Stilwell: the nowhere girl.
Karen has no doubt that Derek Percy is responsible for her sister's abduction and murder. 'Police know that he was on leave that day. Did he abduct her and throw her in the boot of his car or
hide her in the back of a sedan like he did Yvonne Tuohy? He knew the area around Cerberus very well: did he throw her where he knew the tides would suck her out to sea or toss her body away in some remote bush place? Not knowing what happened to her is the worst part. When people aren't found, you grieve forever. You can't get past it.'
Karen's brother Gary can't get past it, either. Now fifty, snippets of his childhood still return to him, changing, moving like the kaleidoscope he and Linda peered into at Little Luna Park. The long boat voyage to Australia; the breakdown of his parents' marriage; baby Laura moving to New Zealand; Linda's disappearance; his mother's aborted suicide attempt; the emotional torture that his stepfather Brian dished out, resentful of sharing Jean's affections with both Gary and Karen.
'Mum has been through so much,' Gary tells me on the phone from his home in Perth, Western Australia. 'She was sexually abused by her grandfather and endured the London blitz. She did the best she could after her marriage broke up; it was incredibly hard for her to support three young children.' He is at pains to protect his mother from any criticism, pointing out that the 1960s was an age of innocence; that people left their doors and windows open and keys in their car. Adults still allowed children to roam around on their own with no supervision. The need for caution was not realised. 'And then,' he says, 'Linda was abducted. It changed everything.'
Gary can't recall the face of the man who he believes stalked him and Linda as they peered through the kaleidoscope, but he has no doubt that it was Derek Percy. 'He is such a cold, intelligent man, an opportunist capable of standing back and waiting until just the right moment to strike. His disgusting writings detail his fantasies about abducting multiple children and that day there were three of us at St Kilda. Karen was tall and feisty and she would not have been easy to subdue but Linda and I were just little children. She was very trusting; he could so easily have lured her away. It follows his MO, exactly.'
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 25