Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  The brother suggested they look into the rooms off the darkened hall, but Stan decreed that that would be unmannerly – and they left.

  For more than 20 years, an assortment of male friends and acquaintances of the Easey Street victims remained ‘persons of interest’ to the Homicide Squad. But in the end, no case could be made against any of the men. Even when DNA technology emerged as a powerful new instrument in solving cold cases, the real murderer’s identity remained as murky as ever.

  A typically frustrating episode in the investigation occurred in 1999 when two detectives flew to Kent, England, and, with Scotland Yard’s help, tracked down a British citizen who had long been a prime suspect.

  The man, gaunt, shabby and long-unemployed, was shocked to be confronted again by the policemen whose questions had made half his life a misery. But when they told him they simply needed a pinprick blood sample, to match material taken from the murder scene, he brightened and offered full cooperation. The DNA test showed him to be innocent. The story was the same with the other men police had continued to interrogate across the years. Without exception, they offered their blood eagerly – knowing it would clear them at last.

  Senior-Detective Stuart Bateson, who headed the reopened inquiry, recalled, ‘One of the men looked incredibly relieved. He told me, “Thank God, after living under suspicion for 20 years. I just wish you’d had DNA testing back then.”

  Senior Detective Rod Collins, head of the Homicide Squad said, ‘The outcome of our new inquiry was disappointing. But it did prove the ability of DNA to clear people as well as convict them.’

  Both Suzanne and Susan came from loving provincial families who were permanently shattered by the horror in Easey Street. Orphaned baby Gregory was taken into the Armstrongs’ care. Shortly afterward, Suzanne’s sister Gayle legally adopted him. Judith Peirce, who ran the law firm for which Suzanne occasionally worked, set up a publicly funded trust for Gregory. It enabled him to attend university, where one of his subjects was Modern Greek. At age 25, as an accomplished speaker of the language, he travelled to Naxos to meet his father Manolis, now married to a local woman. Gregory experienced an ‘immediate and astonishing’ rapport with his half-sister Litsa Margaritas.

  The Homicide Squad has vowed that it will never close its file on the sadistic killings. Some people believe that the case might be soluble by less conventional methods than detectives use. In 2003 a production company made a documentary, Sensing Murder, for Australia’s Seven Network, in which two purported psychics offered the names, addresses and physical descriptions of what one called ‘three new suspects’ in the mystery.

  For legal reasons these details were blipped from the telecast, but given to police. If homicide detectives have found the leads useful they have never said so. But the program’s producer was so convinced the clairvoyants’ information was accurate that she began to fear for her own safety.

  In the Age (11 September 2003) Paul Kalina wrote:

  The interview with the maker of Sensing Murder could well mark a milestone in the history of television. After all, how often has a producer – a breed rarely known as shrinking violets -foregone a credit, let alone insisted her name not be used in promoting the show?

  ...For the makers of Sensing Murder, anonymity is perhaps understandable, given the documentary’s promise to reveal new evidence about the person behind one of Australia’s most gruesome crimes.

  ‘... When I first started to do this film,’ says the anonymous producer, I don’t think I realised the danger involved. It’s an unsolved murder-and there’s a killer walking around out there.’

  Riddle of the Tiger that Rose from Its Tomb

  The Thylacine Puzzle

  Few believed the reports at first. But as the number of sightings grew it became clear that an extraordinary animal had invaded the bushland around Byron Bay, NSW. Witnesses variously described the creature as being roughly three times the size of a cat, and having a striped coat and long straight tail. One of its most distinctive characteristics was an ability to escape at flashing speed. Many observers were convinced that the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) – officially considered extinct for 70 years – had made yet another tantalising reappearance...

  THE LAST-KNOWN MEMBER of the thylacine species died in Hobart Zoo on 7 September 1936. But the enigmatic animal – popularly known as the Tasmanian tiger – refused to lie down.

  Extinct – or in hiding? A 19th-century depiction of the thylacine.

  Over the seven subsequent decades, people on the mainland and in Tasmania have reported more than 3000 sightings. Sometimes these encounters resulted in photographs – all, inevitably, surrounded by storms of argument.

  In February 2006 the tiger planted its powerful paws – not for the first time – in the Byron Bay area. The Byron Shire News (3 March 2006) said:

  More sightings of a mystery animal have been reported since [our] story last week on the Tasmanian tiger puzzle.

  Raelene Mudge of South Golden Beach was driving along Shara Boulevard about 11 pm three Saturdays ago when she saw a large animal on the road in front of her. Raelene said the first thing she thought was, ‘God – that feral cat is big.’

  She said the creature, which was standing over a dead animal, was about three times the size of a cat, with a long straight tail. She went home and told her neighbours to keep their cats inside.

  Annette Deckman of Mullumbimby had an encounter with the mystery animal about five or six months ago. Driving on Brunswick Road she saw an animal in the distance in front of her. At first, because of the long tail, she thought it was a kangaroo or wallaby...She eventually stopped and got a close look at the ‘dog-like’ animal. It had a very unusual long body-shape, a skinny long tail and a long small face.

  ‘I was straight-away thinking of a Tasmanian tiger-greyhound mix,’ she said.

  Sue Stirton, owner of a local post office, gave a similar description, saying the animal she had seen was ‘like a cross between a greyhound and a kangaroo’.

  Among other witnesses were local resident Barbara Eady (who described the intruder as ‘a creature from hell’) and builder Mick Stubbs, who encountered the animal while driving on the old Pacific Highway with wife Fabi. ‘It wasn’t a dingo or a dog of any kind,’ he said. At first we thought it might be a fox – but its golden eyes and exceptionally long tail put paid to that idea.’

  Mr Stubbs drew a picture of the animal: a classic Tasmanian tiger.

  IN THE DAYS WHEN THE THYLACINE (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was officially alive, zoologists described it as a carnivorous marsupial which feasted on birds, rodents, wallabies, possums, bandicoots – and sheep. Its wide-gaping jaws were powerful enough to break a small animal’s spine with one snap. The fur was coarse and sandy brown, with dark tiger-like stripes across the back, increasing in width toward the rump.

  Fossils, some as recent as 4500 years old, offer evidence that thylacines were once widespread on the Australian mainland. The conventional scientific belief is that the more aggressive dingo rendered them extinct – but as the dingo never reached Tasmania, the ‘tiger’ continued to thrive there. For a time.

  A Farmer’s Photo Coup

  However, many researchers are convinced that the thylacine, shy and in hiding, survives today in mainland Australia. The august British magazine New Scientist has treated such beliefs with respect. In its 24 April 1986 issue it published an article by Athol M. Douglas, discussing five photographs which appear to depict one of the species strolling through deep bushland.

  The pictures were taken by farmer Kevin Cameron of Girrawheen, WA. Two of them clearly show the ‘tiger’s’ striped rump and large tail. Athol Douglas writes:

  As I looked at the photographs the identity of the animal in them was unmistakable. It was about the size of a dog, with dark bars across the rump and a thick base to its tail. I realised without doubt that Kevin had found the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, alive in the southwest of Western Australia.

  Dr Ronald
Strahan, former director of Sydney’s Taronga Park Zoo, concurred. ‘He agreed that the pictures were authentic and could be nothing other than a thylacine,’ the journalist writes.

  Kevin Cameron’s photographic evidence is possibly strengthened by the paw-print casts he made in the same area. He insists that their configuration – five toes on the forefeet and four on the hind feet – are the unmistakable signature of a thylacine. Similarly distinctive five-four tracks were found at Mt Eliza, Victoria, in 1981 – and as a snowprint photographed in Victoria’s central highlands in 2005.

  Official scepticism about the thylacine’s existence has helped make it an international celebrity. For reasons not immediately obvious, the African nation, Tanzania, placed its image on a stamp. And foreign media companies occasionally send reporters and camera crews to Tasmania, to assess the latest evidence.

  On 16 November 2004 the Los Angeles Times commented:

  Like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, the legend of the Tasmanian tiger has a life of its own. Hundreds of people claim to have seen one. Volumes have been written. Websites are devoted to the search. A handful of tiger hunters have dedicated their lives to finding it. The disappearance of the species has spawned a new breed of Tasmanian adventurer, the thylacine hunter. Often secretive and solitary they distrust one another, yet believe in the beleaguered tiger’s ability to survive against all odds.

  $3 Million in Tiger Prizes

  As part of its 125th anniversary celebrations Australia’s Bulletin magazine offered $1.25 million to anyone who could capture a ‘live, uninjured thylacine’. The offer lapsed without the editors seeing so much as a stripe of the fabled beast. CNN founder Ted Turner’s offer of $US 100,000 was equally unsuccessful, as was a promise of $1.75 million by Burnie travel company owner Stewart Malcolm.

  Many Tasmanians disliked seeing a price being placed on the tiger’s head. It was government and private bounties, they recalled, that had destroyed the island’s thylacine population in the first place.

  In the 19th century, most Australian farmers obeyed the injunction, ‘If it moves, shoot it – if it doesn’t, chop it down.’ This philosophy would become doubly attractive when financial rewards were involved.

  It quickly became apparent to European settlers that native birds and animals were pests, the sooner felled by a bullet the better. Sheep farmers were particularly distressed to find valuable animals lying dead in their paddocks in the mornings, their throats torn open. In Victoria such killings of stock were attributed to dingoes and foxes; in Tasmania to the thylacine.

  Tasmanian farmers were anxious to shoot as many of the striped predators as possible – but complained, in the 19th century’s early years, that they were almost impossible to trace: a characteristic still reported today. Not until 1805 was the first ‘tiger’ killed in Tasmania. Between then and 1819 only three more of the elusive beasts were slaughtered.

  In cold weather many farmers optimistically poisoned the carcasses of their preyed-upon animals then left them lying overnight in the paddocks. But they never found the bodies of thylacines nearby – and correctly deduced over the years that the tigers never returned to a kill.

  Particularly worried about the thylacine’s elusiveness and cunning were the owners of the Van Diemen’s Land pastoral company in northwest Tasmania. After consulting workers and neighbouring property-owners, they concluded that the job of eliminating Tasmanian tigers should not be left to farmers, who were too busy to devote more than a few hours a week to the task.

  What was needed was a dedicated squad of tiger-trackers and shooters, who, over time, would become pest-executing experts. It would be ideal, of course, if the company were spared the cost of paying wages to these people. The canny pastoralists quickly devised a solution. In 1830 they established Tasmania’s first tiger-bounty scheme, paying a reward of 10 shillings for every thylacine killed in the region.

  The idea was so ‘successful’ and widely copied that by 1863 the naturalist John Gould was warning that the Tasmanian tiger might face extinction. Few cared. The assumption of the time was that God had created the world for man’s convenience and pleasure. The soil, the trees, the rivers, the beasts, the birds, were all to be used, or misused, as the earth’s human masters saw fit.

  As Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson point out in their book Carnivorous Nights, thylacine bounty-hunting is little different from today’s clear-felling of old-growth forests: government-backed, highly profitable, but unsustainable.

  From 1878 to 1909 Tasmania’s grazier-dominated government offered a bounty of one pound for each thylacine scalp, prompting an island-wide frenzy of snaring, trapping, shooting and even a few successful poisonings. A slowly increasing number of Tasmanians began to realise that this unmitigated destruction of a natural part of the environment was wrong – and in 1928 mounted a campaign to protect thylacines. But the graziers and their government prevailed and the slaughter continued.

  By this time the tigers’ numbers had shrunk almost to extinction level. Only the poorest and most desperate riflemen persisted in the time-draining task of tracing and shooting the striped will-o’-the-wisps.

  A captive thylacine, restless and bored in a bleak brick cage.

  It was becoming apparent, anyway, that the Verminous pests’ were worth more alive than dead. Mrs Mary Roberts, owner of Hobart Zoo, had become an eager buyer of living, healthy thylacines, which she on-sold to London Zoo and its counterparts in Washington, New York and Berlin. Melbourne Zoo had always been interested, having bought 44 Tasmanian tigers between 1863 and 1930. Other tiger traders made sales to foreign vivisection laboratories and anatomical and veterinary schools.

  None of the exported thylacines survived long. They either died painfully in ‘scientific’ experiments, or pined and perished as the winds of northern winters chilled their concrete cages.

  In 1936 Tasmania’s government finally acceded to pressure and declared the thylacine a protected species. In the same year the last Tasmanian tiger in captivity died in Hobart Zoo.

  It is accepted scientific practice to declare an animal extinct if its continuing existence has not been proved during a 50-year span. Today, 70 years after the tiger was last, indisputably seen in Tasmania large numbers of the island’s population remain convinced it survives. Many who have never seen a thylacine argue that the species, even more cautious than before, must still, logically, lurk in the island’s dense primeval bush. Others, who claim actually to have seen one, can be found in such places as Pyengana, Mole Creek and Milkshake Hills, all steeped in tiger-lore.

  Destroyed like rats when they were plentiful, the ‘pouched dogs with wolves’ heads’ now enjoy a mythic status. Bushmen sometimes claim they have inside information that wildlife authorities know precisely where Tasmania’s thylacine population is hiding, but are keeping the locations secret. The bushies insist that, like the kangaroo, the tiger can both leap and stand erect, using its long tail as a balance. Stories also abound about a ‘mate of a mate’ who shot a thylacine, then hastily buried it, fearing prosecution.

  Evidence of the tiger’s presence on the mainland is more persuasive. Andrew Rule, a special writer with the Age, has interviewed an array of respect-worthy witnesses who have described personal encounters with the animal in Victoria.

  One of Rule’s articles (Sunday Age, 31 May 1997) recounts conversations with then 74-year-old John Anderson and his family. Before retiring, Mr Anderson worked as a soil scientist with the Department of Agriculture. One overcast afternoon in the late 1970s he set out from his farmhouse to walk around his property in the coastal grazing country between Sale and Seaspray. He carried a .22 rifle and was accompanied by his red kelpie dog. While he checked the stock, fences and water, his daughters were also walking around the farm, out of each other’s sight:

  He was nearing a belt of ti-tree along the rear boundary fence when his kelpie growled. He looked up – and saw an animal he’d never seen before, or since. ‘It was about a chain [20 metres]
away,’ he says, ‘and looking straight at me. At first I thought it was a wallaby. Then it loped away on all fours.

  ‘ It had a peculiar gait, not like a dog. The tail was thickish at the butt. There were markings on the hindquarters. It was coloured in autumn tones. The body was rusty-brown and the stripes were dark-brown from the loin backwards...I didn’t know what it was, so I certainly wasn’t going to shoot it.’

  John Anderson stared after the animal, then walked home, wondering how to explain the singular sighting to his family. He needn’t have worried. Anne, 16, the younger of his two daughters was listening to sister Julie telling her mother she had been frightened by ‘something big’ creeping on its belly in the bracken. Anne interrupted to stammer out her own news. She had been chasing rabbits with her dog Devil, a border collie. They were near a shallow soak where wild animals pushed through the fence, to drink:

  ‘The dog ran in to where the dam was,’ Anne was to recall 20 years later, sitting on her husband’s farm near Sale. ‘This animal ran out of the ti-tree, sort of towards me, then veered. It was maybe a bit bigger than the dog. It had heavy shoulders but was bigger at the back and looked funny in the hind legs. I thought its spine was injured because it moved strangely – a bit like a Manx cat, which are long-bodied – and sort of bound along.’ An expert horsewoman, she was struck by the unusual gait. ‘It was as if it was trotting with its front feet and bounding with its back feet. It was a browny tan colour...the stripes seemed to start mid-loin and were definite, going back to the tail.

  ‘Devil chased it till it got about 15 feet from me. Then it spun around to face him. It left its front legs planted on the ground and flipped its hind legs around. The dog ran towards him. The animal’s muzzle stayed straight. That is, the top didn’t move but he dropped his bottom jaw right down...like a medieval drawbridge over a moat. Then he made this really bizarre sound. It was a weird “yip, yip!” from the bottom of the throat. The hairs went up on the back of my neck. I was terrified. So was my dog. He...bolted. I ran all the way to tell Mum, but the dog beat me.’