The Frankston Serial Killer

by Vikki Petraitis

  McMannis offered one of their caravans for a command post and he also offered volunteers to hand out pamphlets alerting the public to the missing woman.

  John Noonan asked Brian McMannis to organise a search of Kananook Creek and its surrounding areas. Although a daunting task with its thick surrounding scrub, McMannis had 230 volunteers ready within hours, calling in extras from surrounding SES units.

  After a briefing at the SES offices in McCulloch Avenue, the searchers in their bright orange overalls were transported to various points along the creek. McMannis also called in members of the Doncaster unit who were trained divers. They launched a rubber dinghy and searched the waist-deep creek and its banks while the other volunteers concentrated on the surrounding scrub. The search of the creek was an exact duplication of the one the SES had done three years ago for Sarah McDiarmid. As with the earlier search, they found nothing.

  Michael Glowaski, who had earlier interviewed Garry Blair, was on his way back to the police station from another call when he noticed a grey Pulsar parked outside the New Life Christian Centre in Madden Street, just off the Frankston-Dandenong Road. Thinking it could be the car they were looking for, the detective turned around and headed to Madden Street. The registration checked out. It was Debbie Fream's car.

  Without touching it, Glowaski examined the car and saw that the front passenger side door was unlocked and there was a dent in the centre of the bonnet. The damage looked recent. He notified Inspector Noonan at the Frankston police station, and remained with the car until the crime scene examiners arrived to examine, photograph and impound it as evidence.

  John Noonan and Chris Jones also drove to Madden Street and the first thing they checked was the driver's seat. According to her description, Debbie Fream was short in stature and both detectives noticed the seat was pushed all the way back to the last notch, indicating that a much taller person had been the last to drive the car.

  From the moment her car was found, Debbie's disappearance was definitely viewed as sinister. If the car had broken down, she could have walked home from Madden Street. Forensic examiners swabbed the interior of the car and found traces of blood.

  Noonan and Jones had another meeting to discuss tactics for the investigation. Jones offered the services of the missing persons squad and he offered to co-ordinate the vast amount of information that was sure to come flooding in. One person needed to sift through all the information reports and direct detectives towards further avenues of inquiry.

  Debbie's friend Jeanette gave a statement to police at Frankston in the early afternoon. She told officers that she had called to see Debbie the previous morning around 11.30am and returned for their shopping trip around 2pm. Debbie had told Jeanette that she had felt a bit dizzy earlier in the day and that she also felt tired but, apart from that, the young mum looked fine. The two women had left the Kananook Avenue house as soon as Debbie finished breastfeeding. After shopping they visited Jeanette's mother to show off the new baby.

  Chris Jones, from the missing persons squad, had his work cut out for him. As usual, members of the public came forward with many leads; all of which were painstakingly entered into a central data bank. Each lead was checked by detectives, which was a huge task considering that they were coming in at a rate of around a hundred each day.

  The main difficulty was that detectives didn't know what they were looking for. Was it a murder or a disappearance? They weren't even sure whether an offence had been committed. It wasn't against the law to vanish.

  Most important of all the leads were those involving the grey Pulsar, and the times that people had first seen it parked outside the Christian Centre. Two women reported seeing the car at 7.50pm on the night Debbie disappeared. So what had happened to her in the 50 minutes between leaving home to buy milk and her car being parked in Madden Street?

  Two days after Debbie Fream's disappearance, information came to light from Ann Smith, Debbie's mother, about a telephone death threat that Debbie had received not long after she and Garry had moved to the house in Seaford. According to Ann, Debbie had told her that a man had telephoned her saying he was going to kill her. Mrs Smith had not been overly concerned. She knew her daughter had a way of dramatising things, and had assured her that it was probably just a crank call.

  In light of Debbie's disappearance, that call was now being taken seriously.

  The following day, the Sunday Herald Sun ran with the front-page story: 'Murder Threats to Missing Mother'. The link between the telephone call and Debbie's disappearance seemed obvious; it was a lead that had to be followed. If the man who had threatened her was responsible for her disappearance, then there had to be a connection somewhere. Investigating officers began looking for someone who may have held a grudge against the young mother, although it seemed unlikely.

  Who could have hated Debbie enough to threaten her life?

  That afternoon, Debbie's friend Jeanette was again questioned by detectives. They asked her what she knew about Garry Blair.

  This was routine questioning. People closest to victims are usually the ones responsible for any harm that comes to them. Stranger killings are relatively rare so detectives wanted to get a picture of Debbie Fream's de facto.

  Jeanette told police that she had met Garry Blair, and Debbie, when they all lived in Casterton, about 360 km west of Melbourne. Explaining about life in the country with its huge unemployment problems for young people, Jeanette confessed that they had all partied quite a bit and it wasn't unusual for many of them to indulge not only in alcohol, but also marijuana. She described Garry as a moderate marijuana user but she assured detectives that she had never seen him violent. Not long after Jeanette met Garry, he had started dating Debbie Fream.

  Debbie and Jeanette had become close friends and confided in each other. Debbie would often tell Jeanette how much she loved Garry. When Jeanette moved to Frankston, Debbie followed soon afterwards.

  Debbie's reasons were twofold: she wanted to find a job, and she also wanted to get Garry away from the group in Casterton whom she believed were a bad influence on him. Early in the pregnancy, Debbie and Garry experienced a rough patch in their relationship. Garry, it seemed, had been spending a lot of time with Debbie's brother, Troy, who had temporarily moved into the Kananook Avenue house. Troy and Garry had spent a lot of nights out partying, leaving Debbie alone with the effects of her pregnancy sickness.

  Jeanette told detectives she had advised Debbie to tell Troy to move out, but it wasnt't until the eighth month of her pregnancy, that Debbie's patience really ran out. Telling her brother to leave wasn't easy. She told Jeanette that Troy had been really angry and that her brother's anger had scared her. The decision, however was for the best. Garry started coming straight home from work and Debbie was a lot happier.

  Jeanette explained that, following Jake's birth, Debbie had been over the moon about how supportive Garry was, and that everything had worked out well. Debbie even expressed milk so Garry could feed the baby at night.

  Jeanette again repeated the events of the day Debbie vanished. She added that while shopping, Debbie had mentioned she needed milk but the two women had spent their time looking at fabrics and Debbie hadn't bought milk in the time they had been together.

  Jeanette told of minding the baby the night after Russell called her when Debbie had failed to return from the shops, and how Troy had arrived around 1.30am.

  The detectives asked Jeanette if she knew about the threatening telephone call. Jeanette told them that about three or four months before, Debbie had told her that someone had threatened her over the telephone. She had said the man had sounded drunk but had referred to her by name. At the time, Debbie couldn't think of who she might have upset enough to have been threatened in such a way.

  Debbie's brother Troy was also questioned by police. Troy told detectives that he had a close relationship with his sister and they spoke often, although he did admit that as they'd grown older, they tended to fight.

  'P
robably because we're both stubborn,' he explained. He described Garry Blair as 'pretty easy going and gets on well with everyone. I've never heard anyone say anything bad about Garry.'

  On the subject of drugs, Troy said, 'When Garry and Debbie were living in Casterton, they got into a bit of shit with the coppers over marijuana. Basically growing and possession of the plants, but nothing big. Garry got done for having four or five plants but they were seedlings really and if mates rocked around and asked for a smoke then he'd give them one. He wasn't selling if that's what you want to know.

  'Around October, November 1992, Debbie got done by a copper from Casterton with a gram of marijuana.'

  Troy explained that the car that Debbie and Garry were passengers in was pulled over by police.

  'Garry had already been in the shit for drugs so Debbie said it was hers to keep him out of trouble. I think Garry had been to, or was going to, court for the other drug charges so he didn't need this one as well. Since they've been down in Frankston, Debbie has really gone anti-drugs and gets right up Garry when he smokes. I think it was more the money side of it, cause Garry was spending too much on drugs and they had a kid on the way,' Troy said.

  'I know that since Garry and Debbie have been in Frankston, Garry has bought marijuana from some seedy joints; and he said he's been to some weird places to score. But he always kept Debbie out of it cause she just didn't want to think about it and wanted nothing to do with it.'

  Troy also told police that, on the day she disappeared, Garry had told him at work that Debbie had gone to the shop and hadn't come back. The first thing that had occurred to Troy was the threatening phone call that Debbie had received months earlier.

  The information regarding Garry Blair's use of marijuana, presented another avenue of investigation to the detectives working on Debbie Fream's disappearance. Could there be a drug connection? Even though Garry Blair was just a casual user and Debbie was against the use of marijuana, violence in the drug world was certainly common enough.

  Once the media got wind of the story of a missing young mother of a newborn baby, they flocked to Garry Blair. And he was grateful that his appeals for Debbie to return or be returned were spread to such a wide audience. A photograph of Garry holding baby Jake wrapped in a white blanket, was printed in newspapers and splashed across television screens nation-wide.

  As soon as she heard her cousin was missing, Sara Smith, who had grown up with Debbie in Casterton, told her boss she needed to take time off work. She packed a bag and - along with a number of other relatives and friends - moved into the little house on Kananook Avenue, to help care for the baby and to wait for news.

  In the days following Debbie's disappearance, the house was kept perfectly clean by restless family members, unable to leave and unable to sit still. They carefully avoided any mention that anything terrible might have happened to Debbie; almost as if to say it might make it come true. The only possibility they discussed was that Debbie might have had an accident and could be wandering around in a daze.

  And that meant she would eventually come home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Taylors Road

  Fred Michelmore had lived with his family on Taylors Road for seven years. He was by trade both a fencing contractor and a farmer, running cows, sheep and agistment horses on his farm in Carrum Downs. The eighty-acre farm had been in the family since 1933 and he came from a long line of farmers. Although only a short drive from the built-up areas of Carrum Downs and Seaford, Michelmore's farm seemed as if it were in the middle of nowhere. Access by bumpy unmade roads added to the country feel.

  On Monday 12 July 1993, Fred Michelmore had worked on the motor of his tractor until lunchtime. After lunch, he went about repairing the electric fence behind his truck shed and fixed a broken insulator. He then had to move ten horses from beside the house to a paddock alongside Taylors Road. After wheeling his motorbike from the shed, Michelmore set off to round up the horses. Travelling slowly behind them down a stock lane towards Taylors Road, he kept an eye on the waist-high electric fence as he went, knowing that one gap or breakage could result in the loss of valuable stock.

  Michelmore shut the paddock gate behind the horses and began riding along the eastern boundary, checking his fences. About 20 metres from where the southern fence began, he noticed what looked from the distance like a pile of rubbish among an isolated clump of metre-high ferns growing by the side of Taylors Road. He rode past but something didn't seem right so he swung the motorbike around and rode back once more. Pulling to a halt, he looked through the fence. The object was not a pile of rubbish; it looked more like a shop mannequin lying among the ferns. Fred half smiled to himself. The blokes up the road were obviously playing some kind of joke on him.

  Moving closer however, Michelmore realised that it wasn't a mannequin - it was a woman's body. And it didn't take the farmer long to realise that the dead woman could be Debbie Fream. He had seen the intense television and newspaper coverage of the missing young mother and that very morning, over a cup of coffee, he had read another story about her on the front page of the newspaper.

  Michelmore knew instinctively that he had found her. He looked at the dead woman and saw her half-closed eyes and noticed that she was wearing a white bra and that she had a black belt loosely around her midriff with a gold buckle. She had white underwear beneath a pair of flesh coloured pantyhose and she was wearing a pair of black boots. Blood and dirt had washed through her damp blond hair.

  Michelmore took in the flattened ferns nearby, figuring that somebody had pushed them flat to try and conceal her body.

  The farmer sat quietly on his bike for a couple of minutes, trying to take in the scene before him. He was stunned. A day so far filled with mundane farm duties had suddenly taken on a new light and now, for a short time, he was the only person on earth who knew the whereabouts of Debbie Fream - apart, of course, from her killer. He didn't get off his bike to look more closely, aware that it would be best not to disturb anything.

  Finally coming to his senses, Fred Michelmore turned his motorbike towards the house and rode home to tell his wife Beverley and to telephone the Cranbourne police station.

  A policewoman at Cranbourne took the call at 3.50pm.

  'I think I've found the body of that girl,' he told her without preamble.

  'Are you positive it's a body?' she asked.

  'Yes, I think so,' the farmer replied. 'I thought it was a mannequin. She doesn't look too good. It's hidden in some ferns outside my property on the side of the road.'

  The policewoman asked Michelmore to hold the line while she put him through to homicide.

  Senior Detective Colin Clark took the call and Fred Michelmore again described his find, agreeing to wait at his house until the police arrived. Clark had been with the Frankston CIB for 15 years and he had been seconded to work with Rob Hardie and Charlie Bezzina in the homicide investigation into the murder of Elizabeth Stevens.

  Clark had been seconded once before to the homicide squad. He assisted in the investigations of the so-called Tynong North killings in the early 1980s. In that case, the bodies of four women were found in Tynong North bushland a few months after they'd gone missing between August and November of 1980.

  Homicide investigators relied upon Clark's local knowledge of the district and its criminal element. Working out of the Cranbourne CIB offices, Clark had followed Debbie Fream's disappearance with interest because of its similarities to the Stevens case. Both women had disappeared around the same time of the evening in the Frankston area within a month of each other. Colin Clark had also investigated the still-unsolved Sarah McDiarmid disappearance in 1990 and that case was always in the back of his mind.

  Fifteen minutes later, Michelmore jumped into a police car with detectives Clark, Graeme Arthur and Andrew Patterson and directed them to the body on Taylors Road. Michelmore was asked to wait by the car, and the detectives walked over to where the body of Debbie Fream lay.

  They
kept their distanace and took a couple of photographs with a Polaroid camera. On a branch of one of the trees that concealed her from the road, detectives saw a white windcheater, heavily bloodstained around the neck area. The officers were careful not to get too close, so as not to taint or lose evidence.

  Although Fred Michelmore had said that Taylors Road was a popular track for horse riders who had their horses agisted at surrounding properties, and 20 or 30 could have ridden past in the previous four days.

  While Andrew Patterson stayed to guard the scene, Clark and Arthur drove the farmer back to his house. Michelmore checked his records and told the detectives that he was last in the paddock on 7 July, when he had moved some cows out. Debbie Fream had gone missing the following day.

  The detectives telephoned for back-up and then returned to the scene, blocking off Taylors Road with Clark standing at one end of the road, and the police car parked sideways at the other end to prevent traffic entering the area. Soon after, uniformed officers and marked police vehicles converged on the scene.

  Debbie, who had lain alone and undetected for four days, suddenly had an audience of many.

  Detective Inspector John Noonan arrived to take charge of the crime scene. Connecting the murder of Elizabeth Stevens with the attempted abduction of Roszsa Toth and the disappearance and now death of Debbie Fream, Inspector Noonan had a strong suspicion there could be a serial killer operating in his district.

  He had already put every available detective onto the missing person investigation, which was named Taskforce Pulsar after Debbie's car.

  And now he stood on the isolated stretch of Taylors Road staring down at the body of the young mother. Although he had a strong feeling from the moment she disappeared that she would never be found alive, it was still disturbing to be faced with the truth of it.