The Frankston Serial Killer

by Vikki Petraitis

  Lewis obtained a full description of the young woman and filled out a missing persons report form. Neither Paul nor Rita knew what Liz had been wearing when she left that morning; in fact neither had seen her since the night before when she had gone to bed after watching a movie. They guessed that she would be carrying her school books in her navy and white sports bag.

  Rita checked Liz's wardrobe and found her white runners were missing as well as a new grey top that Liz had recently bought. She also guessed that Liz could have been wearing her favourite grey tracksuit pants. The Websters found her passport and showed the officers her photo.

  As they left, Lewis gave the Websters his card, telling them to call the police station immediately if Elizabeth turned up. Offering a parting gesture of reassurance, he told the couple that she may have met up with a friend they didn't know and simply forgotten to telephone. There were many possibilities - not all of them bad. Despite his unvoiced concerns in this case, Steve Lewis had never taken a missing persons report where the person hadn't eventually turned up again.

  Paul Webster asked if it was okay for him to drive around Frankston again to see if he could find his niece and, when Steve Lewis encouraged it, the worried man headed straight for his car. He gave the officers a parting look which did little to quell their own concerns.

  Driving away from the home in Langwarrin, Lewis hoped that Elizabeth Stevens had done something totally out of character and gone to visit a friend, or gone down the pub - anything as long as she came home.

  Back at Cranbourne, the police officers treated the matter seriously. People went missing all the time but this was different. Lewis's gut feeling grew stronger. He telephoned through a description of Elizabeth Stevens to be broadcast via D-24 for all units in the Cranbourne and Frankston areas to keep a lookout for her. He then telephoned the shift supervisor to inform him of the missing teenager and faxed a copy of the report to the Hallam community policing squad.

  Out on patrol again at 3.30am, Sergeant Lewis and his partner duplicated the route taken earlier by Paul Webster, checking the TAFE college and the railway station. He also kept an eye out for her school bag in case she had dropped it in a struggle or left it somewhere. The most frustrating aspect for the two officers was the early hour of the morning. There was no one they could call; the library was shut and so was the bus company. There was little else to do besides cruise around and hope to find the missing young woman. Two of the more remote possibilities were that she had been robbed and assaulted or that she had been abducted.

  While Steve Lewis was aware that the Websters had only contacted police in desperation as the evening had worn on, valuable hours had elapsed before the report, and Elizabeth had now been missing for eight hours. But he also knew that it was a catch-22 situation - if the Websters had reported their niece missing when she was only an hour late home, the police would have just told them to wait - after all, she was eighteen years old. Lewis just hoped for the phone call that would tell him that Elizabeth had arrived home safely.

  But the call didn't come.

  At 7am when his shift ended, Lewis passed on the report to the officers arriving to work the day shift.

  On Saturday morning, Paul and Rita Webster played the waiting game. Elizabeth still hadn't returned and they frantically rang relatives to see if she had gone to visit one of them. When Rita Webster telephoned her boss and his wife to cancel a dinner date that evening, she explained they couldn't make it because their niece was missing. As she spoke to the boss's wife, her voice suddenly broke as a strong feeling came over her that she would never see Liz again.

  Constable Sally Davis came on duty at 2.30pm as watch-house keeper at the Cranbourne police station. She checked the missing persons notice board and made herself familiar with the events surrounding the missing eighteen-year-old.

  At 3.30pm she telephoned the Websters and learnt that Elizabeth still hadn't come home. Paul Webster told her that he had found another photo of Liz, and the policewoman asked if he could bring it to the station. Paul arrived half an hour later with the photo.

  Constable Davis tried to contact the TAFE library but received an answering machine reply. She arranged for police to visit Elizabeth's younger sister in Brunswick.

  Less than an hour later, Sally Davis answered a telephone call from a Frankston-area local who was at the Langwarrin football oval.

  'There's been a body found,' he told the young constable breathlessly.

  'Where?' she asked grabbing a pen to take down the details.

  'In the track off the Langwarrin Sports Club off the Cranbourne-Frankston Road.'

  Constable Davis wrote down the address and told him she would send the police, then she set the investigative wheels in motion by informing a divisional van crew and the duty sergeant of the possible body find. The sports club and football ovals were part of Lloyd Park - the Webster's house on Paterson Avenue backed on to the huge reserve.

  Barely 10 minutes after the news of the body find, Paul Webster rang the Cranbourne police station to tell officers that he had received a phone call from Liz's younger sister who had spoken to Liz around five o'clock the previous afternoon to organise a shopping trip. While he was talking to one of the officers, Paul Webster overheard the discussion in the background about a body being found and then he heard one officer say, 'I bet it is that girl.'

  Paul Webster put his hand over the mouthpiece, turned to Rita and told her what he had heard. 'I think they may have just found Liz's body.'

  There was nothing for the aunt and uncle to do but wait and pray that Paul was wrong; and the body was not that of their niece.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LLoyd Park

  Still flooded Lloyd Park the day after the body of Elizabeth Stevens was found

  Photo courtesy of Victoria Police

  On Saturday 12 June a Langwarrin father, Rod, had gone bowling with his children and then picked up some timber from Mitre 10 on the way home. In the afternoon his wife Cheryl, who was having a dinner party that evening, sent him out to do some shopping. When he returned, Cheryl had one more job for him. As the party theme was a mid-year Christmas party, she asked him to get a small pine branch from Lloyd Park to decorate like a Christmas tree.

  Rod drove around to the football oval near their house, reversed his car near the netball courts and got out to look for a suitable tree. He knew the layout of Lloyd Park because he took his children there for Vic Kick sessions most Sunday mornings. Heavy rain and hail had turned much of the surface of the oval into a quagmire and Rod tried to avoid the larger puddles as he wandered about. He spotted a pine tree a few metres into the scrub adjacent to the football field and while he was figuring out how to cut one of its branches, he glanced further into the bushes and saw what looked like a body.

  He took a couple of tentative steps forward and saw a woman lying in a shallow depression with water around her lower body. He could make out that she was wearing runners and grey tracksuit pants. Although a branch covered the woman's top half, Rod could see part of her face - there was dried blood underneath her nose as if she had had a nose bleed. It was obvious to him that she was dead.

  The shocked man jumped back into his car and drove around to the sports club where he knew there would be a telephone. He ran in and asked John, the club's barman, to call the police.

  'What's the problem?' John asked.

  'I've found a body,' Rod said breathlessly. 'Near the bend in the dirt track. There were a couple of trees down and that's where the body is.'

  The barman quickly telephoned the Cranbourne police station and spoke to Constable Sally Davis who answered the phone.

  Davis told John and Rod to go and wait near the location for the police to arrive. The men made their way down the dirt track, where Rod pointed to where the body lay. They didn't get too close, but John could also see the grey tracksuit pants and the runners, as well as a black watch band, on the dead woman's left wrist.

  'How did you find it?' Joh
n asked as they stood waiting for the police to arrive.

  'We're having a dinner party and I was looking for a tree,' Rod explained.

  When Senior Constable Jeff Brennan and Constable Tamara Shauer arrived, Rod and John hurried over to meet them, then indicated where the body lay.

  'It's over there in the scrub.'

  The two police officers left their car near a heavy chain fence and approached the location, careful not to go too close to the body so as not to destroy any possible evidence. They had to ascertain first of all that the person was in fact dead and secondly whether or not the body find was suspicious. After all, it could have been someone walking through the bush who had suffered a heart attack.

  The officers stood where the witnesses had stood, several metres away from where the woman lay. Senior Constable Brennan was quick to note the absence of clothing on her upper body; and the blood on her face. It certainly looked like she had met with foul play. They got close enough to see that the area would have to become an official crime scene.

  Brennan directed Shauer to protect the area and stop anyone from getting too close, while he returned to the police car to radio D-24. Homicide, forensics and crime scene examiners would soon surround the scene to each perform their respective tasks.

  Brennan also radioed his senior officer at Cranbourne, Sergeant Fred Barton. After twenty years in the force, Barton was used to body finds. Just as he was leaving the station, Sally Davis handed him the missing persons report and photograph of Elizabeth Stevens.

  'It could be her,' she said.

  During the afternoon, Sally Davis had kept him up to date on the status of the missing person report and she had told him earlier that she had a bad feeling about the missing student.

  'I don't like this one, Sarge,' she had said.

  Sergeant Barton also had a feeling that the missing teenager had just been found. As he drove to Lloyd Park in the pouring rain, Barton knew that any evidence such as shoe impressions and blood would literally be washed away and he also knew that he would spend most of the night standing around in the rain co-ordinating traffic, media and the officers under his command. He glanced over at the thick black plastic raincoat on the seat beside him and hoped the rain would stop.

  When he arrived at the scene, Barton donned his raincoat and positioned his police hat over his collar so that the rain ran down the back of the coat and not down his neck. He walked through the long grass over to the creek bed where the body lay, careful to walk the same path that the other two officers had taken so as not to contaminate the scene any more than was absolutely necessary.

  Within three metres of the body, he noticed immediately that the dead woman bore a strong resemblance to the photograph he had of Elizabeth Stevens; except now her hair was plastered flat against her head so that it almost looked like a wig.

  Barton was puzzled by the scene before him. He could see that the woman's body was naked from the waist up and, through the branch, he could make out the strange criss-cross cuts in her chest. The body was whitish-blue in colour and, considering the chest wounds and the dried blood around her nose, the death was certainly suspicious.

  But what puzzled him was that, in his considerable experience, if the attack was sexually motivated then the pants should have been removed as well as the top. That was how these things normally went. This victim, however, was still wearing her tracksuit pants which seem to indicate there had been no sexual attack - so why was her top missing? Alternatively, if someone wanted to kill the woman out of spite or revenge, why remove her shirt?

  Two detectives from the Dandenong criminal investigation branch, Michael West and Steven Mansell, arrived at Lloyd Park at 5.40pm. They had been working a district response shift and heard the body find call over the police radio. They were already on their way to Lloyd Park when they were officially called to attend.

  Sergeant Barton, who had procured an upstairs room in the Langwarrin Sportsman's Club as a temporary command post, directed the detectives inside, out of the pouring rain, and brought them up to date on the situation. He showed them the missing persons report on Elizabeth Stevens, and described the similarities between the missing woman and the body in the culvert. He couldn't verify they were one and the same, because of the obvious differences between the photograph of the happy, smiling woman and the bluish-white body lying under the branch.

  Even so, the grey tracksuit pants and runners fitted the description of clothes belonging to Elizabeth Stevens.

  The detectives then followed Barton to the location of the body. As they walked through the rain, up the narrow track towards the crime scene, Michael West didn't know what to expect. Like Fred Barton, he too had seen countless bodies in his line of work and considered himself lucky that none had been children. But when they reached the site, West was immediately struck by how young and almost child-like this victim looked.

  Again, even from a little way away, bruising and a long cut around the left eye were obvious, as was the blood that had formed at the base of her nose.

  When Michael West saw the criss-cross cuts in the dead woman's chest, he said, 'It looks like someone's been playing noughts and crosses on her.'

  Because of the water running down the creek bed, there was little blood at the scene and the conditions were eerie. Darkness was falling, rain pelted down in the deserted park and the body of the woman lay before the detectives.

  'Doesn't look like a sexual assault,' West observed, noting that the woman's track pants and runners were still in place.

  Could it have been a sexual assault gone wrong? Considering the injuries to her face and the fact that her bra was pulled up around her neck, the detectives considered the possibility that someone had grabbed her with the intention of raping her, but that she may have struggled and her attacker may have hit her and accidentally killed her.

  Rain had washed away any signs of whether the body had been dragged into the creek bed; and it was impossible to tell if she had been killed at this location, or elsewhere and then dumped in the creek bed.

  West gingerly stepped a bit closer to get a better look at the dead woman. He shone his torch through the branch that partially covered her, then looked up at Barton and Mansell.

  'Shit. Her throat's been cut.'

  The police officers discussed this new observation; it put a different slant on the death. If the killing had been an attempted rape gone wrong, it would have been easy for the attacker to hit her to keep her quiet. But it took a different type of person altogether to cut a woman's throat.

  To West, it suggested the killer was some kind of maniac. But their theories were all academic because they knew that the homicide squad would be the ones to investigate this murder.

  West and Mansell contacted homicide and made arrangements for a command post to be set up in Lloyd Park. It was Sergeant Fred Barton's job to direct the human traffic through the scene and help maintain the log of all members coming and going.

  Through the rain, Barton saw a huge red Country Fire Authority bus pull into the park's driveway. He walked over and asked the driver what it was doing there. The driver explained that a police officer from Chelsea, who was also a volunteer CFA member, had heard about the body find via the police radio and organised for the vehicle to be sent to Lloyd Park.

  To Barton, this was like a gift from the gods - the rain hadn't let up and there was no shelter in the immediate area. He directed the driver to park the bus near the chain link fence; it became the command post. The CFA bus was equipped with telephones, fax machines and - of immediate importance to the half-frozen officers - a coffee machine. A huge awning was also lifted from one side of the bus to provide shelter.

  As darkness fell, State Emergency Service workers arrived and erected huge, bright scene lights that illuminated the whole area. The body couldn't be moved until crime scene photographs and video of the scene had been taken.

  Sergeant Paul Dacey from the Hastings crime scene section arrived at Lloyd Park at 7.3
0pm. By then it was freezing cold, raining heavily and hailing intermittently. Dacey knew that the weather conditions in this case favoured the killer because valuable forensic evidence such as blood, hair and shoe impressions would be washed away. In fact, it was the worst weather Dacey had ever struck at a crime scene; he had to balance an umbrella on his shoulder as he made his written notes.

  A crime scene photographer took pictures of the surrounding area, including the gravel road, the chain link fence and the nearby scrub, carefully noting the photograph number and each location.

  After the dead woman had been photographed, Dacey measured and described the culvert in which she lay. Once the body had been photographed as it had been found, the branch could be removed. Detectives West and Mansell watched as further injuries became obvious. The savage throat wound could be seen properly and the detectives counted at least six knife wounds to the woman's chest, four deep cuts running from her breast to her navel and four running at right angles - forming the criss-cross pattern that they had seen earlier through the branch. There were cuts and abrasions to her face and the bridge of her nose was swollen enough to suggest it was broken. Her bra was caught up around her neck. Dacey photographed the body and collected the branch for evidence.

  Six and a half metres from the body was a tree with similar foliage to the branch and Dacey noted that the tree had a broken limb. He arranged photographs of the damage to the tree.

  Homicide detectives arrived at 8pm and were briefed by Detective Mansell. They made their way over to view the body and speak to the other officers.