The Frankston Serial Killer

by Vikki Petraitis

  A couple of hours after he arrived, homicide detective Rob Hardie went around to Paterson Avenue to speak to the Websters. He told the couple that he couldn't confirm it yet but to prepare themselves for the worst; on the strength of the evidence, it was probably Elizabeth they had found.

  Angry at the frightening uncertainty they were enduring, Paul Webster asked why they couldn't confirm it was Liz. Hardie gently explained that the identification couldn't be made until the family identified the body. The distraught uncle fell silent. He had a fair idea that it was Liz. He had watched over his back fence which backed on to Lloyd Park and had seen the police cars, the SES lights and the police helicopter flying around. Neither he nor Rita had sat still for a minute since they had reported Liz missing. They had both been prowling like restless animals, unable to sleep, eat or rest.

  They just didn't want to believe it.

  Another homicide detective, Sergeant Charlie Bezzina, cleared the crime scene at 11.35pm. In the appalling weather, crime scene examination was limited - visibility was poor and the area to be searched was best left to daylight hours. Police began packing away their equipment and a number of officers were given the duty of guarding the scene until the following morning.

  Once the area was officially cleared, the body could be removed. The body itself was an important piece of evidence, and to maintain the continuity of evidence, Charlie Bezzina had the task of escorting the body in a Tobin Brothers van to the car park of the Mornington Peninsula Hospital en route to the city mortuary. Dr Helen Hewitt came outside to the van, unzipped the body bag and examined the young woman. She noted that her pupils were fixed and dilated, there were no heart sounds present, there was no evidence of respiration, and the body showed obvious early signs of rigor mortis.

  Life was pronounced extinct fourteen minutes before midnight.

  When Sergeant Steve Lewis came in at 11pm to work the night shift, he had slept most of the day and hadn't seen the news. The watch house keeper gave him the update.

  'They found your girl. She's dead.'

  Lewis felt like he'd been hit. He immediately thought of the Websters and their grief and, not knowing the circumstances of Elizabeth's death, he wondered if he could have done something to prevent it. Lewis knew that they hadn't even checked Lloyd Park the night before; they had concentrated on the route between the TAFE college and the Webster's home.

  The inevitable 'what if…' question came to mind. What if he had driven around to Lloyd Park the night before, could he have somehow prevented the young woman's death?

  It would be weeks before he would learn that Elizabeth Stevens was dead hours before he took the report that she was missing.

  At around 3am, Steve Lewis took one of the marked police cars and drove to Lloyd Park to relieve the police guarding the scene. They spoke briefly about the murder and Lewis heard that the victim's throat had been cut.

  By this time, the scene was almost clear of the earlier investigations and the command post bus had returned to the CFA station. He parked near the football oval and watched as the rain ran in intermit sheets down the windscreen. Lewis could see the fences of the houses bordering the park and he reflected that most of the families living there wouldn't be touched by the death of a friendless eighteen-year-old girl.

  Keeping his solitary vigil until daybreak, Lewis had hours to ponder the tragedy of the situation. He wondered who could have killed Elizabeth Stevens and why. The thought suddenly struck him that life plods along and then something like this happens that totally destroys one family's security and happiness forever. Its rippling effect would spread and affect everyone who knew the young woman. They would have to come to terms with her death and the fact that some bastard had taken her life. He remembered how Rita Webster had told him that Elizabeth had swapped History for Australian Studies. Now she would never finish her course. She would never do anything again.

  Her life had ended.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Post mortem

  At around 1am, homicide detective Charlie Bezzina lodged the body at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, where it was placed in the secure and refridgerated storage area of the mortuary. He had only a couple of hours to catch some sleep before he was due back on duty for the post-mortem examination at 7.30am.

  Professor Stephen Cordner, the Director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Pathology, performed the post-mortem examination. While other boys dreamed of driving trains or being firemen, Stephen Cordner had wanted to be a forensic pathologist since he was a child. His father was a doctor and he had grown up immersed in the world of medicine. In his career, Cordner had performed nearly 6000 post-mortem examinations in the quest to find the reasons why people had died. In his youth, he had been excited by the detective elements to forensic pathology. Now he realised that police did the detecting and he was but an aid in their work. The real challenges lay in his courtroom appearances; helping to prove or disprove the accuseds' accounts of murders with his own findings. He was well used to the sight of death.

  Cordner came into the spotlessly-clean, brightly-lit examination room and greeted the detective through the glass separating the examination room and the viewing area. He dressed in dark-blue surgical pants and top, put on a green surgical gown and covered the garments with a white plastic apron.

  Snapping on surgical gloves, the professor turned to the young woman's body which was still sealed in the zipped green body bag. The professor opened the bag and his two assistants helped him remove the body. Cordner began his external examination while a crime scene photographer from the state forensic science laboratory caught the proceedings on film.

  The body lay on the stainless steel mortuary table, bent with rigor mortis and still clothed in the grey tracksuit pants, white runners and socks. A floral vest was rolled up to her neck exposing her chest. The black-banded wrist watch that the detectives noted at the crime scene was still on the dead woman's wrist; its blackness contrasted with the pallor of her bloodless arm.

  Cordner, although used to such signs of carnage, was nonetheless saddened by the loss of life before him. It didn't interfere with his work but he was fully aware of the gravity of the situation; he always found it impossible to totally divorce himself from what the victim had gone through.

  The black humour sometimes used by the police in situations of death had no place in the mortuary. Cordner had a strong sense of his duty. The young woman's relatives had every right to expect the best possible examination, not to mention that his findings might help police apprehend her killer. A common rhetorical question among forensic pathologists was: what can we do to help those of us who are still here and living? It helped to look beyond the death stretched out before them in the form of a murder victim, to a more positive approach.

  After photographs were taken, assistants removed the dirty water-logged clothing which was bagged and labelled to be passed on to Charlie Bezzina as evidence.

  One of the first things the professor noticed when he looked at the face of the young woman, was the tiny pin-point haemorrhages that dotted the whites of her eyes and extended out to the skin around her eyes. Looking a bit like fine red pepper had been sprinkled on her skin, these petechial haemorrhages were commonly suggestive of strangulation.

  Professor Cordner weighed and measured the body and then began to describe into a hand-held tape-recorder the measurements and locations of each of the cuts, scratches and stab wounds on the body. There were cuts and abrasions on the dead woman's face and her nose had been broken. Cordner regarded himself as a conservative pathologist and while he described the wounds, he was careful not to draw absolute conclusions as to how they came about, knowing that such absolutes were conjecture and could be misleading in the investigation. However, taking into account the abrasion above her left eyebrow, her broken nose and the abrasion under her right eye, Cordner suggested the possibility that the killer had stomped on her face with his foot or used some type of blunt instrument causing all
three injuries with the one blow.

  The dead woman's left cheek had fifteen scratches, some up to six centimetres in length. The right cheek had ten similar wounds. Charlie Bezzina had described the manner and the location in which she had been found and considering the blackberry bushes growing nearby, it was possible that the woman had been dragged through them and they and other vegetation had caused the scratches.

  Professor Cordner described the wounds to the dead woman's throat which had been slashed many times. Of interest was the fact that the cricoid cartilage, located just below the Adam's apple, was fractured yet the more delicate hyoid bone above the Adam's apple was intact. Usually in cases of strangulation, the hyoid bone is broken. The professor concluded that the force to the neck was inflicted below the Adam's apple and reasoned that a blow by a foot, fist or knee could have been responsible for the fracture of the tough cartilage.

  The professor noted the criss-cross patterns clearly visible on the dead woman's chest; the cuts ranged in length from six centimetres to thirty-three. The chest wounds showed no obvious signs of bleeding or bruising, indicating that they had been inflicted after death. The stab wounds were neat and contained within a small area of her upper chest, indicating that they had been done deliberately and with precision rather than in a frenzied fashion which would have caused tearing around the wounds.

  Examining her arms, the professor recorded each of the many cuts, bruises and abrasions covering the entire length of both.

  After the external examination was complete, Professor Cordner opened the body to explore the internal damage caused by the stab wounds. Internal organs were removed and the professor sliced a tiny section of each and placed it in a microscope slide to be examined and stored as evidence. Samples of blood and urine were also taken to be sent to a toxicologist to be tested for the presence of drugs and poisons. The organs were each examined and weighed, and then placed back inside the body which was sewn up.

  In his summary of the cause of death, Professor Cordner wrote:

  …this woman has sustained a substantial compression of the neck. A fractured cricoid cartilage usually implies more force than can be applied by hands or a ligature alone and suggests things such as blows with a fist or foot…

  A number of bruises and abrasions to the arms and hands suggest that these may have been used in attempts at self defence…

  The absence of incised or stabbed defence wounds means that at the time the knife was used, the deceased was not able to defend herself for whatever reason. In this case, it is quite possible this was because of the effect of the other injuries to the head and neck…

  The professor found no indication that the dead woman had been sexually assaulted.

  In his report, Cordner wrote: 'In my opinion, the cause of death was: aspiration of blood and haemorrhage from stab wounds to the neck in a woman whose neck has been compressed.'

  Detective Charlie Bezzina watched the entire proceeding with detached professional interest. Forensic pathology could tell him a lot about the type of crime that had been committed, whether the girl had suffered and most importantly whether injuries were made before or after death occurred. Details like this could help lead to her killer.

  Once the examination was complete, Charlie Bezzina took his evidence bags from the South Melbourne mortuary and made his way to the Hastings police station. There he lodged the items with the Hastings crime scene section and prepared for one of the more difficult aspects that a detective has to deal with - talking to the relatives. Bezzina drove to the home of Paul and Rita Webster.

  When they had watched the Channel 10 news the previous evening, Rita and Paul Webster had heard sketchy details of the woman's body found in Lloyd Park. They were still hoping against hope that somehow the body was not that of their niece, despite their conversation with the detectives who had tried to prepare them for the worst.

  Those faint hopes were dashed when Detective Charlie Bezzina arrived and showed them two sleeper earrings and a watch with a black band. Rita identified the items as belonging to her niece, and tried to comprehend that the innocuous pieces of jewellery meant that her niece was dead.

  Bezzina gently questioned the couple to try and establish Elizabeth's last movements. At his request, Rita checked the pantry to see if Elizabeth had eaten anything before leaving home on Friday. She told him that a tin of baked beans was missing.

  Bezzina nodded, although he didn't mention the fact to the Websters, this was consistent with the contents that Professor Cordner had found in Elizabeth's stomach.

  After giving their written statements to police, Bezzina asked Paul and Rita Webster if they could accompany him to the mortuary to formally identify the body of their niece.

  On the long drive from Langwarrin to the city mortuary, Rita still prayed it would not be Liz. She realised that it was hopeless, but until she saw her niece, there was always a chance that there had been some kind of teriible mistake.

  At the mortuary, the Websters were led into a small glassed-in viewing room. A silent mortuary assistant added to the surreal atmosphere by pressing an unseen button so that a curtain slowly drew back to reveal a body on a trolley covered by a sheet. Another assistant on the other side of the window delicately pinched a corner of the sheet and drew it back to reveal a face. Paul and Rita Webster stood frozen in their places.

  Rita Webster suddenly understood with profound clarity why there was a glass window separating the bereaved from the dead. Her first instinct was to run forward and grab her niece to shake the life back into her.

  Paul Webster simply stared sadly at the scratches on her face. He heard his wife say quietly, 'Poor little girl.'

  Mortuary assistants had cleaned the facial wounds, and the sheet covering the body hid the rest of the wounds.

  The formal identification was brief. Paul Webster looked down upon the face of his dead niece and gave a short statement to the coroner's clerk: 'On the thirteenth day of June, 1993, at the Coroner's Court, I identified the body of Elizabeth Ann-Marie Stevens who formerly resided at Langwarrin and was aged eighteen years. She was by occupation a student. The deceased was my niece. I have known the deceased for eighteen years.'

  The wait was over. Uncle Paul's Lizzie had now officially become 'the deceased.'

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The investigation begins

  Just before 8am on Sunday morning, Senior Constable Andrew Herdman along with five other officers from the search and rescue squad were briefed at the Frankston police station by members of the homicide squad. Experienced in conducting line searches, the officers had been called in to make a thorough examination of the crime scene at Lloyd Park and its surrounding areas. The officers consulted maps of the area and planned the course of their search before heading to the muddy grounds of Lloyd Park. Search and rescue officers briefed forty SES volunteers to assist with the line search.

  Half an hour after the search began, Herdman found a small silver-coloured knife blade in long grass adjacent to a footpath on the Cranbourne-Frankston Road. The blade looked like it had broken off from a pocket knife. Continuing the search in the long grass and bushes bordering the road, searchers failed to find either the handle or anything else of note.

  Back at Lloyd Park, Sergeant Paul Dacey joined other crime scene examiners searching the area. Twenty-two metres northeast of the culvert where the body was found, Dacey discovered a blue and white striped sports bag at the base of a sand hill.

  Opening it, he found textbooks and stationery items labelled 'Elizabeth Stevens'. Further away in a pool of muddy water, he found a blue, hooded windcheater top with a blood-soaked grey T-shirt inside it. He had them photographed, then collected them as evidence.

  At the Hastings crime scene section later in the afternoon, Dacey was back by the time Charlie Bezzina arrived after attending the post-mortem examination. Bezzina passed on the items that Cordner had removed from the body of Elizabeth Stevens.

  The media were quick to jump on the
story of yet another young woman murdered in the Frankston area. They immediately linked the death of Elizabeth Stevens to those of Sarah McDiarmid and Michelle Brown.

  Sarah McDiarmid disappeared from the Kananook railway station on 11 July 1990. Her body had never been found although a pool of blood near her car led detectives to believe she had been murdered.

  On 1 March 1992, Michelle Brown had telephoned her mother from the Food Plus store on the Frankston-Dandenong Road asking to be picked up from the Frankston railway station at 8pm. When her mother arrived, Michelle was nowhere to be seen. Her naked body was found two weeks later in a shed behind a gun shop in Playne Street, Frankston. Due to decomposition, a cause of death couldn't be established.

  The moment that Paul and Rita arrived home from the mortuary, a young reporter ran over to them in the driveway and asked awkwardly whether they knew the dead girl.

  'She was my niece and we've just come back from the morgue,' growled Paul, marvelling at the utter lack of respect.

  Once inside the house, the couple discussed the inevitability of media interest and, after some consideration, they saw the wisdom of getting the media to focus on Liz's murder so that the police could catch her killer. They decided to go back outside and invite the reporter in for an interview. The reporter and her crew made their way into the lounge room and the cameraman immediately bumped his head on a low-hanging light fitting. It was to become a private joke between the Websters; every time another reporter or crew member would bump into the light fitting, they would add to the tally: light-six, media-none.

  It was the one light moment during the whole terrible time.

  When they set up office at the Cranbourne police station, homicide detectives Rob Hardie and Charlie Bezzina had little to go on. Usually, detectives began with the family and worked their way outwards. Most murders are domestic in nature and detectives often need look no further than the immediate family or a disgruntled boyfriend. In the case of Elizabeth Stevens however, the normal avenues were few. She had no immediate family in Victoria except her young sister who lived in Brunswick. Aunties and uncles were investigated as were the Websters, but detectives came up with very few clues.