In August 2000, Detective Mark Winterflood became the investigating officer in the stabbing murder of Michael Petrie, who was thrown off a mountain lookout north of Wyndham, New South Wales, after being killed by Andrew Kraaymaat on 23 August at the home of Brian Peebles. Kraaymaat, regarded by Wyndham locals as a 'bad egg', had a long history of being in and out of the slammer, and just days before Peebles and Kraaymaat had visited Shane Spiller's home, where the three had proceeded to get totally wasted on grog and drugs. When the piss had run out, Kraaymaat, with an alcohol reading of 0.254, had borrowed Spiller's car without his permission, rolled the vehicle and smashed it beyond repair.
After a hung jury in the first trial, Kraaymaat was eventually convicted at retrial for Petrie's murder, receiving a fifteen-year sentence. Spiller was not compensated for the loss of his car and, turning Crown witness, Peebles was charged with being an accessory after the fact, for which he received a fifteen-month suspended sentence. While he was on remand, some of Peebles' associates, not including Shane Spiller, took the law into their own hands, breaking into Peebles' home and taking tools and furnishings as a down-payment for the substantial amounts of money he owed them.
After his release, Peebles relocated to the Gold Coast, where he formed the acquaintance of one Craig Archer. In the winter of 2001, Spiller started receiving a series of calls at his home from a man claiming to be a hitman hired by Peebles. Spiller would have his kneecaps blown off and be killed, the man warned, if he didn't return Peebles' belongings from the house break-in. Distressed and petrified, Spiller contacted police, who traced the threatening calls to a business on the Gold Coast. While Archer was charged with using a telecommunications device to menace, Peebles was not charged, but police were certain that Peebles had masterminded the 'hitman' threats.
Then, on 9 September 2002, Shane Spiller suddenly disappeared without trace.
His abrupt disappearance from a town where rumour and innuendo flowed like molten volcanic lava would fuel speculation about the fate of the likeable larrikin for years to come. And in the speculation Spiller's name – the boy who led police to Derek Ernest Percy – would become inexorably linked to sordid, murky stories of murder, drug abuse, theft and suicide. 'It was well known,' Winterflood tells me, 'that when Shane disappeared he was severely depressed and had spent some time in mental health hospitals. He was not in good shape.' In one suicide attempt, he had taken medication before tying a plastic bag over his head. The bag came loose while he was asleep. 'He was a morphine addict and trying to get help for that, as well. And there was also a wild rumour going around that his fears about Percy somehow bumping him off, using a hitman, had come to pass.' The question then became had Spiller committed suicide, been murdered or, less dramatic but more probable, died of a drug overdose and his body hidden by frightened co-drug users who did not want any heat from police?
After he was reported missing by a friend, police quickly ascertained that Spiller had not touched his bank account since 5 August and still had a balance of $37,000. He had also not accessed his Centrelink benefits since 20 August. Wherever Spiller was, it appeared he didn't need money. Winterflood gained access to his house and noticed that he had not packed to go away. His clothing and medication was still there, along with unwashed dishes and mouldy food in the fridge. There were no signs of violence and no suicide note. He also found no evidence of either Craig Archer or Brian Peebles having had any further contact with him. 'I organised searches of the mine shafts around the area and of places he was known to frequent,' Winterflood says. 'They all turned up nothing.'
Winterflood checked with Victoria Police to see if there was any evidence to support the rumour that Percy had any intention to murder Spiller or the financial wherewithal to take out a contract on his life. 'I asked the stick-up [Armed Hold-Up] Squad to ramp Percy's cell in November 2002,' he says. 'When they left, they sent me a message via New South Wales coppers telling me that I owed them one for them having to put up with the stench in there.'
'Stench?' I ask. 'Of what?'
'Let's just say that years in custody haven't changed Percy's fetishes.'
'Oh.' My voice trails away. In 2002 Percy was fifty-four years old. Nothing, it seems, has changed.
The stick-up boys also spoke with Correctional Services staff who handle Percy and found he had accumulated savings of just over $3000, a small amount of which he was able to access. 'They didn't find one thing in Percy's cell referring to Shane. The Correctional Services people reckon they have never heard him mention Spiller's name, or anything about him. They found that the only people recorded as having visited Percy since 1993 were his parents and the solicitors who prepared his application for transfer to a psychiatric institution. There was no hit man and no basis for the rumour that Percy even recalls Spiller, let alone has some long-held grudge against him.'
'So Shane Spiller has spent his whole life tormented and haunted by a bloke who doesn't give him one thought?' I say. 'That's pretty sad.'
'Yeah, it is. The whole thing is sad. It's tragic. I've prepared a brief for the Coroner, who wants it left open, probably until the usual seven years has expired and he can then be found to be legally deceased.'
'What do you think is the most likely scenario about what happened to Shane?' I ask.
'I reckon he accidentally overdosed and the junkies he was with at the time have freaked out and disposed of his body. The bush animals would have got rid of any evidence of him by now. But, in a small place like Wyndham, it's amazing that there has never been even one whisper of that happening. Either that or he has gone bush to commit suicide, but how did he get there? He couldn't have walked any distance. He wasn't up to it. My money is on an accidental overdose.'
'What about Shane's parents? He was not in contact with his family for a decade before he disappeared. Have you met them?'
'No. They haven't once come down to talk to me about him or made enquiries about his house, which was repossessed by the bank in 2006, or belongings. Makes you wonder, eh? I reckon Shane Spiller was another victim of Derek Percy, in the end. He had his problems, for sure, but for all that, he didn't deserve what he got. He didn't deserve that.'
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If Spiller was tormented by Percy, South Australians are still tormented by the seemingly unanswerable question of what happened to the Beaumont children. In 2005, current affairs program Today Tonight located a family whose two children and a third boy had been approached by a single male at Glenelg Beach just days before the Beaumont children's disappearance. Piecing together the image of the man seen on the beach that day, the family gave a description very much like the blond-haired man whose identikit picture was circulated at the time. 'Despite reporting this incident to police at the time and their repeated insistence that it might be significant, almost nothing was done,' Channel Seven producer Graham Archer says, incredulously. 'No record remains of their witness statements.'
The three children, Kirsty McGregor, then nine, her sister Fiona and a boy companion, both eight, had been left briefly to play on the beach while the girls' mother, Dot, went to the hairdresser nearby. She told the children she would check on them periodically and shortly after she left a man approached them, becoming quite aggressive when they asked him to leave them alone. When she came out to check on them Dot intervened, but when she returned to the hairdresser, the situation became more serious. Trying to lure the children away, the man told them he was from Sydney and was returning there to look after his mother who was an invalid. Again Dot intervened, this time wading into the water fully clothed to rescue the children, who were swimming. The last sighting the children had of the man was of him getting on a tram.
Dot gave a statement to police but no action was taken. A day or two later, when news of the Beaumont children broke, she again rang the police station. No one seemed interested. Finally, police asked Dot to come in and look at identikit photos but since then, she says, she has heard nothing and their request for their police statements thr
ough Freedom of Information was fruitless. Today Tonight put two related FOI requests to the South Australian Attorney General's department and found that both had disappeared. One was sent to the dead letter office in Tasmania. The other had simply vanished.
After the exposé on the other children approached at the beach had aired, Archer handed what material he had to Major Crime. 'Typically,' he says, 'we have heard nothing ever since.'
Bevan von Einem's possible connection to the Beaumont case gained further traction in late 2007 when old footage from the Channel 7 archives revealed an image of what appears to be a remarkable likeness of him, then aged twenty, in a group of spectators at Glenelg, avidly watching the police search for clues to the Beaumont children's abduction. Professor Maciej Henneberg, a facial identification expert from the University of Adelaide, checks the photograph for me. 'All the features of the man you indicate point to him being von Einem,' he says. But while detectives quizzed von Einem, they would not reveal what he said. 'There is no evidence produced which furthers this line of inquiry and it is now complete,' then-acting Superintendent Crameri told the press.
Now a snowy-haired, flint-eyed detective who does not suffer fools, Brian Swan was a seventeen-year-old police cadet when the Beaumont children went missing, and was personally involved in the search, first in waist deep water at a boat haven at Glenelg and later at a dump and in sandhills. Now the lead investigator on the case, he has had the file for years, commenting a decade ago that his greatest wish was for the children's remains to be found so their parents could at least bury them and know where they are. Attempts to speak with Swan via the head of Major Crime, John Venditto, whom I email in early 2009, are not fruitful. 'Thank you for the notice of your book,' he writes by return email. 'However, my office does not comment or contribute to commentary involving the naming of suspects particularly when the case remains unsolved.' This case has been unsolved for 43 years and still police retreat behind the blue wall of silence. The best I can run, it appears, is the hackneyed South Australian police line: 'Derek Percy remains a person of interest in the disappearance of the Beaumont children.' Perhaps, I muse to myself, that given the length of time this case has been unsolved, South Australian police could try a different approach and welcome any publicity brought to it.
I turn back to Archer. 'Knowing South Australia as you do,' I ask him, 'and the deviants who have come to the fore in the past few decades, would you take a punt as to who is responsible for the Beaumont children? Von Einem, for example, whose name is often tagged with their disappearances: was he into young children of both sexes?'
Archer considers the question for a brief moment before answering. 'To my knowledge he has no recorded history of paedophilia. The victims of the "Family" were young men. But who knows what his early predilections were or what the preferences of his colleagues might have been? It is known that he drugged drinks and that the last sighting of the Beaumont children was buying drinks with money their mother hadn't given them. Perhaps that would explain how the children appeared so co-operative.'
One of the assumptions in the Beaumont case, Archer continues, was that the seemingly flawless abduction of three children could not have been achieved by one person acting alone. 'This fitted the notion of a gang. When in the early 1990s one of von Einem's associates claimed he'd bragged about being responsible for the disappearance of the Beaumonts as well as Ratcliffe and Gordon, the idea had instant appeal. Not only was it possible these were the early efforts of the "Family" but it might also mean the city had only one enclave of monsters rather than an infestation. If we accept the conventional view that the abduction of three children and later Gordon and Ratcliffe was not the work of one person – though with the right ruse it still could have been – then von Einem at nineteen or twenty might have been trying to impress his older "mentors" and could well have had help. I think this is the most likely scenario if he was involved, so yes, I think it is possible.'
Then again, it is also possible the Beaumonts were taken by Arthur Stanley Brown. In 1998, at the age of eighty-six, this hollow-cheeked, wiry man, whose second wife used to wear children's pyjamas to please him, was finally charged with the murders of sisters Judith Mackay, five, and Susan, seven, in Townsville, Queensland, on 26 August 1970. Within days of his arrest, this former roving carpenter was also under suspicion for the Beaumont and Ratcliffe/Gordon abductions.
The Mackay sisters were last seen waiting for the school bus around the corner from their home but when the bus arrived, they had vanished. Tragically, some sightings of the girls were not regarded as suspicious. One woman later came forward saying she had seen a girl sitting in a man's car at a service station, asking, 'When are you taking us to Mummy?' while a younger child, in the back seat, cried, 'Are we there yet?' Following a massive manhunt, the sisters' bodies were found two days later, 25 kilometres from Townsville in a dry creek bed. Their school uniforms were folded with precise neatness next to their little bodies.
Born in Queensland in 1912, Arthur Brown was known to be an immaculately well-dressed womaniser with, as his second wife's sister attested, a liking for 'big and little girls'. Suspected of murdering his first wife, Hester, just prior to marrying her sister Charlotte, after his arrest for murder it became apparent that he had molested at least five young girls in Hester's extended family. Wanting to avoid the trauma of revealing in court what he had done to them, the family kept its sordid secrets. Until 1998.
Nothing will kill a search for answers more than bureaucratic brick walls and silence. To research a story of this magnitude, I have to rely on the goodwill of other people – very often, strangers – to help me and the elusive good luck that can open doors when least expected. I call Townsville police to ask who the lead investigator was on the Mackay murders. This time luck and goodwill are on my side. 'You need to speak to Charlie Bopf,' a detective tells me. 'He retired in 1982 but I'll call him for you and ring you back with the number.'
Charles Bopf's broken voice is a dead giveaway to his advanced age – eighty-five – but he remembers the impact of the murders. 'They were a terrible thing,' he says. 'A terrible thing.' He is frugal in his description of Arthur Brown – 'bastard' – but more forthcoming about the system that let Brown walk in the interests of justice: 'a lot of bunkum'. Bopf details the investigation to catch Brown, this small, forthright man on whom good fortune smiled while police leads were hampered by the ineptitude of a lazy constable, silent witnesses, natural disaster and the exclusion of key evidence. Bopf is at pains to point out that while Brown boasted about knowing top police brass in Townsville, including himself, it was untrue. 'A journalist wrote a piece and reckoned I knew Arthur Brown. Well I'm tellin' you, I never met the man.' It is an assertion disputed by others, who claim Brown was well known to fraternise with police.
Bopf details what Brown did to those children, how he raped both and stabbed them in the chest, strangling Susan and asphyxiating Judith by shoving her face into coarse sand. Some details were so confronting, he says, that they were kept from the jury at his trial in late 1999. He doesn't know that I am crying as I write down what he tells me or that my 'dark stomach' is roiling, over and over. These children were simply standing at the bus stop on their way to school. Wrong place, wrong time. Is a child safe anywhere?
'Charlie,' I say when he pauses for a moment, 'there is so much speculation about Arthur Brown. Do you think he could have abducted the Beaumont children and Ratcliffe and Gordon?'
'You'll need to talk to Dave Hickey about that,' he says. 'You'll find him in the Brisbane office.'
Suspecting Brown might have been responsible for the murders of the Mackay sisters, one of his victims – a relative – decided to break her silence and contact police, who were then undergoing a cold case review of the murders. Based on Brown's anecdotal obsession with the Mackay murders and his burying of incriminating evidence that could link him to the deaths, police built up a case against him. The principal cold case investigator, Detective
Sergeant (now Inspector) David Hickey, made the arrest for the murder of the sisters and other charges. 'For a bloke who reckoned he'd never been in trouble with the law,' Hickey says, 'Brown was pretty savvy. He told us straight away that he wanted a solicitor.'
Brown's chilling likeness to the identikit pictures of the suspect in the Beaumont and Adelaide Oval cases added weight to the argument that he might be responsible for those crimes, but South Australian police cautioned that identikit similarities did not add up to evidence and that while they would investigate him, he was not a suspect. 'We could not find Brown's work files for that period of time,' Hickey tells me. 'They weren't archived back three decades and so we were reliant on family stories about Brown's movements.' Hickey spent seven months in North Queensland backtracking over any files relating to Brown and his possible involvement in other child abductions and murders but he could not find anything that indicated he was in North Queensland when the Beaumont children disappeared from Adelaide. 'The Beaumont case was not my brief,' he says, 'but Brown's family told us that he was interstate sub-contracting during the mid to late '60s. He could have been in Melbourne; he could have been in Adelaide. I can't offer anything more definite than that but it's possible that he is responsible for the Beaumonts, Ratcliffe and Gordon and other abductions. Certainly the artist sketch of the man seen with the Beaumonts and Ratcliffe and Gordon is an extremely good likeness. A woman who worked in a real estate agency at the time of the Beaumonts also said she had spoken to a man who called himself Arthur Brown who was looking for accommodation.'
South Australian police, Hickey says, elected not to go to Queensland unless there was firm evidence of Brown's involvement. In this evaluation of what happened, it appears he is extremely generous. Other investigators I have spoken to from different Australian jurisdictions tell me that South Australian officers have admitted over the years that the Beaumont file was in disarray, with some case notes carelessly strewn around garages where officers had taken them home to read and those remaining filed with no rhyme or reason. They would only send a team to question possible suspects interstate after officers in those jurisdictions had done the groundwork. This is not an assessment shared by former Major Crime Task Force Chief Superintendent Paul Schramm, who told the media that the arrest of Brown had precipitated South Australian police working closely with Queensland to try and piece together any connection.
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 27