Gary's voice drips with contempt when he ponders events surrounding Linda's abduction. There was so much, he says, that police didn't do.
'Like what?' I ask him.
'Like find her, for starters.' It seems a harsh indictment.
'They tried, though, didn't they, although they didn't get there until hours after Jean called, and they stank of grog?'
'Other things happened. A woman saw Linda and a man, whom she described as having thin features and a dark spray jacket similar to those worn sailing, together and reported it to police, but she wasn't taken seriously. She has come forward several times since. It's frightening to think about what police missed in those early hours and days.'
Linda's loss took Gary's family to dark places they shouldn't ever have had to visit. Emotional self-preservation has blocked parts of his memory but he admits that a part of him is obsessed with her disappearance and murder. 'I carry a huge amount of anger. Trust me, if I was in a cell with that animal, Percy, I would rip him apart, limb by limb. Make no mistake about that.'
Gary was driving his car when news broke about the contents of the warehouse and the connections to Percy for other unsolved child crimes. 'It was all so surreal, hearing my name on the radio, listening to my sister's abduction being linked to the Beaumonts.' He is tired of Linda being overshadowed by the famous Adelaide case and insists that the abduction and murder of every child is equally important. 'The Beaumont story is such an iconic case. And it is a tragic case. But in comparison, everything else pales into insignificance. And it shouldn't be like that.'
Police, Gary says, think they have a rough clue as to where Linda's body is. 'There is no doubt in their minds that Percy put her in a car and tossed her in bushland, probably within a radius of Cerberus naval base. He knows the area around there very well. The most we can hope for is that someone stumbles on her body.'
The map marked in texta, he says, further incriminates Percy and he prays that when his sister's inquest finally opens he is present in court. He wants to see Percy up close. 'I want to know where my sister's remains are; we want some form of closure as a family.'
In 2007, magistrate Susan Wakeling awarded the Stilwell family Victims of Crime Compensation, after Gary read a victim impact statement to her court. 'I ask you,' he pleaded, 'to acknowledge our pain and our hurt and our disappointment in a system we feel failed us, please do give the memory of our loved daughter and sister the respect that she deserves and please do not find that there is no evidence of any crime committed, that would be the ultimate betrayal not for us but for her, her name is Linda Stilwell and she was, and is, very much loved.' A $100,000 payout was divided amongst Jean and her three surviving children. For the family, the money is immaterial; what is significant to them is that it was the first time they had received official acknowledgement that a crime had been committed. When Gary returned to Perth, he felt exhilarated. Purged, cleansed.
In March 2009, as this manuscript is in the final edit stages, the Stillwell family is given assurance that Linda's inquest will open at the end of August and that Derek Percy will be subpoened to attend. Finally, it seems, the family may get the closure they so desperately seek. Jean sounds exhausted when I call her for her reaction to the news, though she admits to feeling relief that an inquest may answer all their darkest questions.
'It's been a long time coming,' she says just before she hangs up. 'Forty-one years since my little girl disappeared. A long, long time coming.'
40
The day before I meet Marianne Schmidt's mother, Elizabeth, I pick up the black and white autopsy photos of her daughter again, studying them intently. On 11 January 1965, the day the girls met their deaths, I was only seven years old. But these teenagers were in the full flush of their adolescent prime: slender bodies, wide-open smiles, poised to embrace the adult world yet still innocents. Just five years ago my own daughter was fifteen and her youthful exuberance still echoes with me: the sly preening in front of the mirror, fussing to get the look just right before she stepped out the door; flexing her new-found independence in a haughty toss of her head or a sudden flash of moody petulance; whispering head to head with her girlfriends, the secrets only they could share; tears, plump as peaches at the first sign of love's rejection and the spirited, beautiful laughter of a young woman who already knew that life is precious. Marianne and Christine would not get that chance. What must it be like, I wonder, to be told that your missing daughter or son has been found, waiting, praying for the next words – safe and well – that don't come. Whatever else is said, the words I'm sorry to tell you spell the end of any normal life, any real joy.
The girls were murdered at the height of summer. January. Derek Percy was fifteen years old and on holidays. He was fit, healthy. His paternal grandmother lived at West Ryde, less than one kilometre from the girls' homes at Brush Road. Had he seen Marianne and Christine at the local swimming pool, watching them in their bathing suits? Had they met there before? His grandmother lived within walking distance from the train station. Was he the teenage boy seen talking to them on the train to Redfern? Was he the young, tall man that witness Dennis Dostine saw walking along the water's edge?
Percy is obsessed with water and with the beach. He was a loner, but not unattractive. He was particular in his dress and appearance. Was he capable in a shy, maladroit way of engaging two girls his own age in innocuous conversation and finding out their movements; capable of stalking them from a distance and of getting away unseen? No doubt there were countless men in Sydney on that January summer's afternoon with the inclination and opportunity to gratify their perverse sexual inclinations, hanging around beaches, lying in wait to see a half-naked young woman or man. But how many would move beyond fantasising about sexual assault and murder and in broad daylight carry out that fantasy? And how many, not satisfied with the crude, clumsy rape of both victims, would then stab them in an attack so frenzied that it is likely the murder weapon was broken against bone? How likely is it that Derek Percy is the Wanda Beach killer? Perhaps the better question, in the absence of other suspects who match witness descriptions, is how likely is it that it was not him?
Elizabeth Schmidt, now 87 and battling ill health, lives alone in a high-rise flat in Sydney's western suburbs. A warm though no-nonsense woman with a sharp wit and a fierce determination, she fusses around making sandwiches as I sit at her lounge table reading the newspaper articles she has painstakingly kept on her daughter's murder and looking at the precious photographs she keeps in pristine condition. Here, Marianne smiling at the camera, a young girl with a cherubic face; here, growing taller and attractive, with lustrous wavy brown hair as she enters high school; here, on 20 January 1965, her white coffin adorned with six candles and gladiolas, en route to Rookwood crematorium.
Although Elizabeth Schmidt was brave enough to hear the heartbreaking details aired at the inquest and to look at police photographs of her daughter's body, she has never been able to look at photographs of Marianne growing up. 'I can't bring myself to look,' she says, her long fingers absently stealing inside the frames of her gold-rimmed glasses to rub away tears. 'With time, maybe it should get better, but until it is solved, there is no peace.'
Elizabeth can't understand why Marianne and Christine had to be murdered. 'Why kill them? You can get sex anywhere. Why does it have to be the ones who say "no" that suffer? These were innocent girls who never went out in the evenings. They were still virgins.' Her thin hands flutter in the air, like skittish butterflies. 'I think,' she adds, 'the same what he did to the girls should be done to him. They were only kids, really. Only kids.' It is not important for her to know who did it, she says, but she wants to know the reasons why. 'I just hope I am alive long enough to see this person brought to justice and to tell me why he did such a thing. One day he will have to face what he did and to pay the consequences for that. Who knows, he might listen to his conscience and one day confess, even if it is on his deathbed. Even then.'
Elizabeth's
surviving daughter and Marianne's sister, Trixie, muses that justice seems a far-away concept now that her sister – with whom she shared a bed as a child – has been dead for forty-three years, but she hopes it comes before her mother passes away. 'Someone is responsible and it would be good to find out who that someone is.' Trix can barely remember anything of her childhood, a legacy, she says, of the terrible shock of losing Marianne so suddenly. Like the sand hills at Wanda Beach, now long gone, it is as though the past is a barren and hollow place, a place she does not want to re-visit.
The police no longer contact Elizabeth. They know where she lives, she says, sighing as she pours steaming water into a cup for tea, but she supposes they don't have anything new to add. And after so long, how many young police officers would even know of the murders? She is reluctant to criticise the police investigation but the small shrug of her shoulders, the subtle arch of her brow when I ask her opinion of it, speaks volumes. 'What can I say?' she asks rhetorically. 'What can you do? I think they spent too much time with press reports and too little time on the investigation.'
After lunch, for the first time, Elizabeth decides she now has the courage to watch a commercial television program her daughter videoed that has recently screened on the Wanda Beach murders. The program shows a re-enactment of Marianne and Christine's death that is so graphic, so explicitly, unnecessarily violent that Elizabeth lets out an involuntary cry, heaving herself out of the chair and moving quickly away from the television. I am trying to find the volume control to stop the sound of the girl's screams but I cannot locate it in the gloom of the darkened room, instead turn the television off completely and go to comfort Elizabeth in the kitchen. She is trembling, as much from anger, I think, as from being upset. 'Marianne's murder has become sensational entertainment. Just entertainment.' She pauses and her feisty spirit returns, registering her disgust in the way that the program has handled the story. 'The girls would not have screamed so much, either. The poor darlings would have been too frightened for their lives to scream. How dare they air this sort of rubbish!'
Trixie, a shy, quietly-spoken woman, reflects on her sister and Christine's unsolved murders. 'Marianne was a very responsible and loving girl. She knew she wasn't allowed to speak to strangers. But at fifteen, she probably felt comfortable talking to someone her own age. It's very possible that they made an arrangement to meet someone and left us in a safe place while they went to the sandhills.' The irony of what she has just said does not escape her. Trixie wills herself to remember events from that day but nothing comes back. Like Denise Tuohy and Karen and Gary Stilwell, she has blocked memories of that time. There is no point me trying to talk to anyone else in the family, either. Her brother Peter lives in New Zealand and doesn't discuss it, Hans and Helmut weren't at the beach and Norbert was only five years old. And Wolfgang – the boy who wanted so badly to help police with their inquiries? 'His nerves were shot after Marianne was murdered,' Trixie says. 'He's grown into a nervy, timid man. He doesn't even have a licence to drive.'
I wonder if Trixie is aware of the status of the investigation into Marianne and Christine's murder today. 'No, I wouldn't have a clue,' she admits. 'We're not told anything.'
The Schmidt family doesn't talk about Marianne much, she says. They don't talk about that day. 'It was a horrid time in our lives. We had lost Dad only six months before, Mum was in hospital and Marianne was murdered. Mum's been the strength of our family.'
She still is, although it is doubtful that Elizabeth will live to see her daughter's killer brought to justice. In December 2008 she is hospitalised and later found to have stomach cancer. She is pragmatic and accepting of this news, a reaction that doesn't surprise me. I imagine she would be as courageous in the face of her own life-threatening illness as she was when she heard that Marianne had been murdered. So much has happened in this woman's life. For the umpteenth time, I wonder what incredible strength of spirit she and the other victims' families call on to get through.
An officer at the New South Wales cold case unit, who does not wish to be named, is surprisingly forthcoming when I call to ask the status of the evidence on Wanda Beach. 'At this stage, it is not considered that further assessment is viable on the Wanda Beach murders,' he admits. 'The girls' clothing is at the analytical laboratory but there are no results back from that, yet. Obviously if any DNA comes back, that could prove to be very strong evidence.'
'What about any sperm sample taken from the scene?'
'We haven't put a team to assess it as yet,' he says, 'so I don't know the status of that sperm sample at this point.'
41
Linda Slight, who reverted to her father's name, Blue, was reading Melbourne's Age newspaper in April 2007 when an article on Derek Percy caught her eye. 'One Man, So Many Faces of Evil.' And she realised with a jolt that he was the same person who had pulled her roughly to him all those years ago behind the town hall at Mount Beauty, forcing her to take his erect penis in her hand. 'I had never heard his name from the time when I was at Mount Beauty on that Christmas holiday and I never saw him again,' she says, her voice low and hoarse as she inhales another cigarette. 'I often think about what happened that night and I am repulsed at what he made me do. I was only a young woman who was totally naïve about sexual matters. My girlfriend, Robyn, later had to spell out the fact to me that his penis was erect. I didn't know.'
Linda had just bought a new swimsuit and surmises that Percy may have seen her at the local pool earlier in the day. 'Some guys called out to me and I got out of the pool. Given his strange interest in hanging around water, he may have been lurking about watching me or looking at the kids in the pool. Who knows?'
Linda recalls not just Percy's physical strength but also his quiet menace. 'I will never, ever forget his face,' she says. 'The thing that plays most in my mind is how much he enjoyed it, how relaxed he was and in control. I was the perfect victim – vulnerable, shy and demure. I did what I was told. It didn't occur to me to not go around the back of the hall when the other boys told me Percy wanted to see me.'
Linda was completely ignorant of Percy's violent history and appalled to read what he had done to Yvonne Tuohy and possible other victims. 'I dread to think what he could have done to me, had he had a better opportunity. As it was, he didn't seem to care that he might be caught forcing me to take hold of his penis. The frightening thing is I had a voluptuous body – hips like a boy, breasts like a woman. I wasn't a skinny little child that he fantasised about, or a pre-pubescent girl like his victim, Yvonne. And then, just a couple of weeks later, the Wanda Beach murders happened. I have absolutely no doubt at all, given his strength, that he is capable of overpowering multiple people at once and of opportunistically pouncing despite being in broad daylight. Get up close to those eyes and that awful grin and you realise that Percy is evil. He would kill anyone.'
'Have you told anyone about this, Linda, like the police?' I ask her. She gives a cynical laugh. 'I tried to.'
In response to the newspaper article's call for people to come forward with any information regarding Percy, Linda rang her local police station at Williamstown in Melbourne to report her late 1964 encounter with him. The Melbourne media was hot on the Percy story but the young constable who answered the phone had never heard of him. 'Who?' he asked Linda quizzically.
'Derek Percy. I want to make a report about an incident with Derek Percy at Mount Beauty in 1964,' she persisted. 'Who is he?'
Linda took a deep breath. 'He murdered a young girl in 1969 and newspaper articles are asking for anyone who had any encounters with him prior to that time to come forward. So I'm coming forward.'
The constable sighed deeply. 'Hold the line.'
Linda waited through three minutes of elevator music until he returned to the phone. 'I've asked around the station and no one knows who this person is.'
'Oh. Great.' There was an awkward silence. 'Guess there's not much point me trying to talk to someone then, is there?'
Another silenc
e. 'Guess not,' the constable replied, failing to suppress his lack of interest.
Linda hung up.
Why didn't police officers at that station realise the significance of Linda's phone call or at least take down her details? Her unpleasant encounter with Percy could not be brushed off as an adolescent's rampant sexual drive. Linda had not invited his attention. She could have screamed for help. At any moment someone could have walked around the back of the hall. Of more weight, in light of future attempted abductions and murders, it proves that at Mount Beauty, when Derek Percy was fourteen years old, he was not just snowdropping, dressing in women's clothing or slashing underwear with a knife. With Linda, he proved himself capable of giving in to his uncontrollable urges despite the risks of being caught; proved his disdain for normal behaviour and his ingrained belief that he was superior to other people; proved his innate indifference and coldness and his genius in using sex and fear as a weapon of power. And Linda Slight wasn't a baby, a young child or a pregnant woman. She was a vulnerable young woman with a curvy, inviting bust, the same type of victim, physically and in age, as the Wanda Beach girls. When opportunity presented itself, Derek Percy, icy calm and controlled, took it.
42
Shane Spiller seemed to attract all the losers who drifted into Wyndham – junkies, thieves, scammers, drunks. He had tried to better himself with the compensation payout, using it to pay a deposit on a small house and to buy a flash four-wheel-drive. But the hollow-eyed stoners and dissolute characters who crashed on his floor circled like crows at a feast when his money came through, full of sudden bonhomie or hard-luck stories.
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 26