Lambs to the Slaughter

by Debi Marshall

  'So you can't fault that investigation?'

  'Look,' he chuckles, 'police are by nature competitive. I've yet to meet a detective who doesn't think they can do a better job than the next one. But apart from the advances in technology that we have today, the investigation under the now defunct ACT Police was sound. What we battle, as in any cold case, is time: the age of witnesses and sharpness of their recollections. That is a major issue in any cold case.'

  'In the Simon Brook murder, evidentiary material was thrown away,' I tell Sheehan. He knows this, obviously; these are details that have been aired at meetings or over a few beers with other jurisdictional officers during Operation Heats, which Sheehan describes as a 'co-ordinated, holistic approach to multi-jurisdictional cases'. 'How has the crime scene evidence been preserved in this case?'

  'In pristine condition. The area was secured and the exhibits have been kept safe with all correct forensic procedures followed since the murder. Some exhibits got wet at the crime scene before Allen was found and the area was secured, but by no means all the exhibits.' At least, I think, Allen's family can rest a little in the knowledge that if there is any DNA to be compared from the crime scene, it may still be available from those exhibits. The Brook family can take no such comfort.

  Derek Percy, a cleanskin to police in 1966, does not feature at all in any running sheets into the original investigation. 'Police didn't know he existed,' Sheehan says. 'Why would they? He didn't come to police attention until the Tuohy matter. They focused, correctly, on the evidence and any possible suspects they had at the time.'

  While Percy's sexual penchant for children is now well known, ACT police believed the strongest links to his possible involvement in the Redston case were the tie found at the scene and the fact that the offender rode a bike. Derek's bike, a distinctive maroon colour, did not match the one witnesses saw, which was red and white with a carrier on the back. And why would he have had it in Canberra if he was only visiting? The tenuous link that police thought may have existed between the tie found at Redston's crime scene and the one Percy wore to school at Mount Beauty, believed to have been made by his mother on her home knitting machine, was put under the forensic microscope in 2004 by the Australian Federal Police's Forensics Criminalistic team. 'The tie was found to be made of green and yellow two-ply wool, woven, not knitted,' Sergeant Crocker says. 'The uniformity was even and the conclusion reached that a knitting machine did not manufacture that tie. It was not homemade. And we also have the situation where we have found nothing to directly implicate Percy in this death. He has also made no admissions.'

  In 2004, Professor David Barclay, the former Head of Physical Evidence for the UK National Crime and Operations Faculty, now at the University of Hull, was invited to Canberra to lecture to Australian Federal Police staff about forensic advances in investigations. Barclay was well acquainted with unsolved Australian crimes: in 2004 he was part of an independent review team on the so-called Claremont serial killings that had assisted Western Australian police in assessing the likely killer of at least three beautiful young girls who stepped out from nightclubs into the warm Perth night and met their terrible fate. In an interview with Barclay he once told me his job was to look at the lead-up to death, which gives opportunity to recover evidence. 'Everything is a sequence of events which we piece together,' he said. 'Was a victim held by her ponytail? Then the scrunchie that tied her hair may reveal low-copy DNA. Was she knocked to the ground or did she fall? The scratches on her knees reveal she was knocked down.'

  In 2006, the AFP turned to Barclay, seeking his expertise on the Redston case, a review which a computer randomly code-named Operation Kobold. While the AFP will not reveal Barclay's findings, their answers to questions regarding other suspects and the drivers that consume Percy – coprophilia, sexual sadism and lust, not seen in Redston's murder – are strong indicators that Percy does not head their list as being responsible for the little boy's death. But he remains a suspect, Crocker confirms, until someone else is successfully prosecuted.

  Police had hoped that low-copy DNA, used for testing against a known suspect might, despite the damp and wet conditions in which his body lay, have been found on some of the elaborate bindings the killer used to tie Redston. But there was to be no magical scientific bullet to wrap up this case. 'A lot of reliance was placed on that low-count DNA,' Crocker admits. 'But by April 2007, the results came back that there was no positive response to those tests. The water had destroyed any DNA.'

  Allen's father, Brian, is a gravelly-voiced, down-to-earth bloke whom investigating officers protect from the prying press. On a cold winter's day, I locate his number and call him. It is not my style to skirt contacting families; as primary sources, they often have insights that other people do not and just as often they are grateful for the opportunity to talk. If they don't wish to, they quickly tell you.

  Another sound reason for making contact is to check facts. 'A writer who wrote a book about my daughter's murder claimed I was dead!' an indignant Elizabeth Schmidt told me the day we met. 'He simply hadn't bothered to contact me. In his next book, I was resurrected with no explanation. It caused our family a lot of unnecessary grief.' But that initial cold contact is still the part of research that I loathe most, finding the right words to say to bridge a distance between strangers without being disingenuous and trite, to break the initial uncomfortable silence. And so it is today.

  Brian Redston is unfailingly polite, quiet and decent in an old-fashioned way, but there is tiredness in his voice as he describes his son and it is painfully obvious his sorrow is still horribly raw. 'He was a good outgoing kid, with a good sense of humour.' There is an elongated pause. 'He enjoyed life.' I catch myself before I blurt out what short life he had but I am thinking of the void created by violent, sudden loss, and of what Donald Brook said to me about grief: There is no end to grief; it just comes upon one less suddenly as the years go by.

  This family is one of the rare few that did not succumb to emotional pressures following a child's death, who 'stuck together' as Brian puts it, he and Violet and the kids, living in the same house for thirty years before shifting to another suburb eight years ago. He finds it strange, he says, to have watched Allen's brothers and sisters grow up, to see how they've turned out, to know that Allen would be forty-two now. The dreams that wake him are still the same, the sort of dreams you wouldn't wish on anyone, the kind you realise are real as soon as you open your eyes. He is grateful to the police, who visit him about three times a year and who keep him informed of any changes in the investigation. They have assured him, he says, that Derek Percy is completely cleared from their suspect list for Allen's death.

  There is little more to say beyond thank you and farewell. 'We don't speak to the press,' Brian says. 'Never have. So, I think we'll just leave it at that, then.'

  Acting Superintendent Sheehan admits that no behavioural aspects at Redston's crime scene correlate with the Tuohy murder. 'Look at it logically. Tuohy was only a few months afterwards and the two just don't match up. He wouldn't have started with behaviour shown at Redston's crime scene and escalated so quickly to that seen at Tuohy's. It's just not realistic.' This is not an opinion shared by all of Sheehan's Victorian counterparts, who have not ruled out Percy for Allen's death. Sheehan went to Victoria in 2007 when documents were recovered from the warehouse but there was nothing found amongst it to implicate Percy in the Redston case. 'From my visit to Victoria when I met with Newman and the team from Operation Heats, it is fair to say that some members of that team believe Percy could be responsible,' he says. He is angry when I tell him I have spoken to Brian Redston.

  'I hope that was before you first spoke to me. I particularly asked you not to contact the family.'

  'It was, yes,' I assure him. 'It was months before I spoke to you. But with respect,' I add, 'if I listened to every police officer who warned me not to contact victims' families or other people, I would never get any material for my book.

&
nbsp; 'Actually,' I laugh, to break the tension, 'it's taken me months to even get this information from Federal Police.'

  'Yeah, but can you feel the love now?' he quips.

  We make small talk for a moment or so, before he wraps up the conversation. 'Okay. I think that about covers it. Will that be all?'

  48

  At seventy-two, Alan Porter still boasts the dapper good looks of his youth. Although his once dark hair is now white, he still has the chocolate brown eyes and olive complexion that prompted his old colleague Bernie Delaney to comment that 'Alan used to get the girls in'. Like Delaney, Porter has kept copies of what he dubs his 'autopsy-turvy collection', grim reminders of some of the cases he covered during his time at Homicide. By the time he covered the Tuohy investigation he was thirty-three years old and had been in the force twelve years. He was seconded to the Homicide squad the day Pentridge prisoners Ronald Ryan – the last man hanged in Australia – and Peter Walker escaped. With a new era of opportunity now open to younger detectives, he stayed with the squad.

  The first child murder he covered, he tells me as he stirs a cappuccino in a noisy seaside café south of Hobart, was five-year-old Rhonda Irwin, abducted and sexually assaulted from Richmond, Melbourne, by a person known to the family. Porter had two young daughters, aged seven and nine at the time, and the evilness of this murder hit home. But forty years after finding Yvonne's body, Porter admits he still gets a lump in his throat when he thinks about the way she died. 'We hold ourselves together at the time. We have a job to do and we need to remain impersonal, to remember it is not our child. But the Tuohy murder was particularly terrible.' Percy's MO, he adds, is not to travel far with his quarry. 'He must have realised Shane Spiller would have raised the alarm and that people would come looking for Yvonne. He could have taken her much further away to ensure he wasn't caught but he didn't.'

  'That's because he had an urgent need for gratification,' I comment. 'Nothing else mattered to him.'

  Porter played squash with psychiatrist Allen Bartholomew – 'Bart', as he calls him – for years. 'Bart would often say, "How's our mate Percy going?" He couldn't get a handle on him, either.' The mention of Bartholomew's name prompts me to ask Porter's opinion on Percy's apparent lack of memory. 'What do you think about that? Is he faking it?'

  His coffee, still untouched, is going cold. 'I thought it quite possible that a psychopath could do these things and put it out of his mind,' he says. 'But by the time it got to trial I wasn't totally convinced that he wasn't being cagey and didn't want to get into further trouble.'

  Porter is visibly aggravated at any suggestion that the Homicide Squad was told about Percy's former school friend Ron Anderson's conversation with Percy in the cells the day of his arrest. 'I have read the statement made by ex-Constable Anderson,' he wrote in 2004. 'I do not believe he informed me of that conversation. As the information was most significant, had he informed me about it, I would have either taken a statement from him, made a file note or asked him to submit a statement.'

  Unlike other detectives who expressed disappointment with Percy's prison sentence, Porter was not perturbed that he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. 'If he had got life for murder, he'd be out now,' he says, his hands moving in an expansive gesture. 'So fate, in its strange way, has acted in the best interests of the public.'

  I think about what Porter has said as I drive home. 'The best interests of the public.' But what about the best interests of the victims' families? Short of an unlikely confession, perhaps their best bet, after all these years, is a scientific breakthrough. Perhaps the sperm samples could provide a clue?

  Elizabeth Schmidt's disbelief that her daughter's hymen remained intact despite the sexual assault was not consistent with the findings of Marianne's post-mortem report, which was very succinct. 'The hymen of the girl SCHMIDT was found intact, but there was evidence of a recent abrasion indicating that intercourse had taken place and a number of male spermatozoa were present. A vaginal swab taken from the girl showed the blood grouping substances "A" and or "B" were not present which indicates that the offender is probably a Non Secretor of the blood group "A" or "B" or belongs to the blood group "O".' If that sperm sample was matched to a person known to police, whose DNA is on their database, then a match could be found.

  In early 2009 I call the Government Records Repository to ask if they are holding those sperm samples. 'The Government Repository only sells shelf space to government agencies,' an employee explains. 'We don't have intellectual control over what is kept here and because we don't know what is here, we can't confirm what we have or don't have. We don't assess, catalogue or appraise it. But,' he adds, helpfully, 'police archives might be of some help.'

  They aren't, though the woman there is very keen to assist. 'We only keep paper records and photographs,' she tells me. 'Every now and then we may come across an old sample that shouldn't be there but that's an error. Try the State Crime Command; they may know.'

  Investigating co-ordinator at the Unsolved Homicide Team at the New South Wales State Crime Command, John Lehmann is businesslike but polite and assures me that he will look into it. 'It may well be that it's lost,' he says, explaining that they have cases going back to the 1940s and they number somewhere in the order of 600. 'The problem we have is that this case is decades old, which makes tracking down exhibits and witnesses difficult.'

  'What about the evidentiary material that was incinerated in the Brook matter?' I ask him. 'Is that routine?'

  'Wouldn't think so. Sounds more like human error. But I'll check that, as well.'

  I am consumed by finding out what Percy did do in his so-called 'lost year', 1967. Is it possible that there were reports made to police around the Newcastle area of attempted abductions of children? My best bet to try and find out is to call the newly-formed Northern Region Unsolved Homicides, but the investigator who answers the phone says getting that information would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. 'It's very, very unlikely that anything like that would be archived,' he says. 'Unless there was a name linked to the abductor or it formed part of a major investigation, none of those intelligence-based reports would be kept. They would have been hand-written or typed, and it would be virtually impossible for us to find them even if by some miracle any still exist. You could try the Newcastle newspaper,' he suggests.

  The young bloke who answers the phone at the Newcastle Herald has never heard of Derek Percy. 'Got any other names?' he asks me.

  'No, afraid not. Percy didn't come to police attention until July 1969.'

  'So, let me get this clear,' he says, sounding slightly bewildered. 'You want me to try to find any newspaper articles in 1967 about a bloke who wouldn't have been named who may have tried to abduct girls or boys, or both, who also wouldn't have been named?' His deadpan tone makes me laugh.

  'I'm afraid so. What're the chances?'

  'About as good as me winning the lottery. I can't promise anything. But I'll see what I can do.'

  He does not get back to me. I widen the search to include all areas of Australia where Percy travelled on ships, newspaper records for any unsolved murders or attempted abductions during his time in the navy, or with his parents. They, too, turn up nothing. This does not necessarily mean that nothing else happened. Perhaps an attempted abduction was not reported to police. Perhaps a sexual assault was hushed up within the family. Perhaps the child's stories of the strange man who had watched them playing near water was dismissed as imagination. Perhaps, just perhaps, Percy got lucky.

  While I am researching newspapers, David Southwell, who was on his electrical weapons radar course with Percy in March 1969, and who is incensed that Percy still receives a naval pension, is doing his own research, relentlessly chasing every rabbit down every burrow to find its source.

  'I wrote to Greg Hunt, the Federal Liberal member for Flinders, concerning the pension,' he tells me over a cold beer in an inner-city Melbourne pub. 'Hunt passed my letter to Bruce Billson, the Depar
tment of Veterans Affairs Minister in the Howard government. The reply duly came back that nothing could be revealed because of the Privacy Act. Very convenient, to hide behind that.'

  Unhappy with this response, in October 2007 Southwell wrote to Billson directly, stating he owed the taxpayer an explanation as to why Percy was receiving a government pension. 'Billson did not even have the decency to acknowledge receipt of my letter,' he says. 'So when the last federal election was announced, I sent a copy to Alan Griffin, the Shadow Minister for the Department of Veterans Affairs. This time I received immediate telephone acknowledgment and a subsequent follow-up when Griffin became DVA Minister, confirming that neither DVA nor Defence were paying a pension to Percy and that the only department that could be paying him was ComSuper [Commonwealth Government Employees' Superannuation] or DFRDB [Defence Forces Retirement and Death Benefits Fund]. This is a medical pension, which is outside Griffin's jurisdiction. According to Griffin that is the only possibility.'

  Anyone discharged from the services with a medical condition that can be attributed to their service is entitled to a DFRDB Medical Pension. Percy was discharged medically, so 'obviously a lawyer or supporter of Percy has been alerted to this and the claim has been accepted,' Southwell fumes. 'ComSuper now administers the Defence Forces' DFRDB Fund.'

  Tim Attrill believes that Percy has in excess of $200,000 in the bank, compliments of his investment in gold. He believes that Percy's condition was pre-existing before he joined the navy, so on what grounds is he entitled to a medical pension? 'There are blokes that went to war or who have genuinely suffered ill health as a result of being in the services who fight the Department of Veterans Affairs tooth and nail for the right to receive their TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated] pension. Percy is not one of them. He does not receive a TPI but there is no way this animal should still be getting money from the government.'