The Frankston Serial Killer

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The Frankston Serial Killer Page 11

by Vikki Petraitis


  Ten days after the first public meeting, a policewoman telephoned John Balloch at his office and repeated the Mr Cruel story. It too had happened to the illusive 'friend of a friend' and Balloch decided to look into it in order to put the rumour to rest once and for all. He rang the friend who said that it was another friend of a friend and so the chase began. It was always two friends removed but it concerned the chief superintendent that the rumour had gained such force even among police officers. It was always difficult to quell such rumours when they were passed on with such a conviction of truth. The simple fact that the police didn't have Mr Cruel's fingerprints on file did little to dampen people's enthusiasm for spreading the story.

  From the meetings, it became obvious that people needed to be reassured by an increased police presence. Police from surrounding districts were brought in to work in the Frankston area to supply a more visible police presence and increased patrols, especially at night. Door-knocks were organised, and suspect people and vehicles were checked. All the information was entered into the growing database.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The corridor of death

  On 12 December 1876 the decomposed body of 56-year-old Anne Hastings was discovered among ti-trees in Mt Eliza. Her husband William was charged with her murder and went to the gallows protesting his innocence.

  A year earlier Frankston publican Henry Howard had murdered his business partner Elizabeth Wright and her friend Thomas Harman. Howard had stabbed them both to death, and went to the gallows unrepentant and without emotion. By the time Anne Hastings was murdered, The Age regularly ran long articles entitled: 'The Frankston Murders.'

  Over a century later, the headlines were repeated.

  It wasn't long before the media of 1993 linked almost every unsolved murder on or near the peninsula to the murders of Elizabeth Stevens and Debbie Fream. Newspapers began referring to Frankston and its surrounding suburbs as 'the corridor of death.'

  A dozen years before, the murders of Allison Rooke and Joy Summers - who disappeared, separately, on 30 May 1980 and 9 October 1981 - were being investigated by police; and sensationalised by the media. Allison Rooke, 59, and Joy Summers, 55, both vanished while waiting for buses on the Frankston-Dandenong Road. Allison Rooke's naked body was found on 5 July 1980 in scrub on McClelland Drive in Frankston. Because she had been dead for over a month, pathologists couldn't establish a cause of death. Joy Summers had also been dead over a month when her naked body was found in scrub along Skye Road.

  There were seventeen months between the Rooke and Summers murders but in the intervening time, four women had vanished from other places around Melbourne. Their bodies would later be found buried in scrubland in Tynong North - nearly 60 km east of Frankston.

  Bertha Miller was the first victim of the Tynong North killer. Aged 74, she had vanished from Glen Iris on 10 August 1980. A 14-year-old girl called Catherine Headland disappeared from a bus stop in Berwick on 28 August 1980. The next victim was 18-year-old Ann Marie Sargent who disappeared while hitch-hiking from Cranbourne to Dandenong on 6 October 1980. Six weeks later, the final victim, Narumol Stephenson, vanished on 28 November from Brunswick.

  In early December, the bodies of Bertha Miller, Catherine Headland and Ann Marie Sargent were found in bushland off Brew Road in Tynong North. The body of Narumol Stephenson wasn't found until February 1983. The killer had dumped her remains adjacent to the Princes Highway in Tynong.

  During the Tynong North investigations, detectives had followed thousands of leads in an attempt to find the killer. Interestingly, they too followed up on a rumour that turned out to be an urban myth - the same one followed up by John Balloch 10 years later - of the man dressed as an old woman lying in wait in stranger's cars.

  Whether the same person was responsible for both the Tynong North murders and the deaths of Allison Rooke and Joy Summers was still a mystery a decade later. Despite that, police lost no time interviewing suspects from those earlier investigations when young women began disappearing in Frankston in the 1990s.

  The first disappearance was that of Sarah McDiarmid; followed by the unsolved murder of Michelle Brown two years later in 1992.

  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.

  Sarah McDiarmid was the most likely to be connected to the murders of Elizabeth Stevens and Debbie Fream. She was around the same age as the latest victims and she had disappeared from a railway station. Sarah McDiarmid was never found but if the same killer was responsible, he could have been lucky in the disposal of her body. Elizabeth Stevens and Debbie Fream had been dumped with little attempt to hide them.

  It was likely that if the same killer was responsible, he would have made no greater attempt to hide her body, but may have got lucky by hiding it in a place that was never searched.

  Were all these murders connected or just red herrings to the investigation? Diligently, the detectives worked long and arduous hours to try and sort the rumours from the truth and follow up each of the hundreds of leads that poured in every week.

  Seven weeks after Elizabeth Stevens died, they were no closer to finding the killer. And the unfortunate fact of serial killings - if that was indeed what these two murders were - was that it took a number of victims for police and profilers to gather enough information to catch the killer.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Peninsula Golf Course

  The Long Island golf club opened in December 1937. Its neighbour, the Peninsula golf club, was known as the millionaire's club and catered to Frankston's early elite residents who wished to live in quality rural homes in a seaside setting.

  In 1993 Norman White was the security manager of the adjacent Peninsula Country Club in Skye Road. He'd worked at the club for five years, and his duties included patrolling the club house, the golf course and the boundaries of the property.

  The boundary fence line of the golf club was mainly cyclone wire, part of it adjoining the Pines housing estate and the other part adjacent to Monterey Technical School. A bike track ran along one of its borders down to Monterey Tech, separating it from the adjoining Long Island Country Golf Club.

  Norman White inspected the fences most days, sometimes in his four-wheel drive and sometimes on foot, depending on the weather. The western boundary adjacent to the bike track usually presented the most problems. Vandals frequently cut through the cyclone wire to gain access to the golf club grounds, often to vandalise club equipment. It was part of his job to note any damage to the fences and report it immediately for repairs.

  The track was mostly used as a shortcut by kids from John Paul College who lived in the Pines estate and students from Monterey Tech walking up to Skye Road.

  The track was overgrown on both sides by trees pushing against the wire mesh, and its dirt path quickly turned into a series of muddy puddles whenever it rained.

  On Thursday 29 July, White carried out his regular inspection late in the afternoon, patrolling the southern and western boundaries. He could see the Long Island Country Golf Club fence line as well as his own and although he noticed that a hole, about three metres wide, had been cut in the Long Island fence, the Peninsula fence was intact.

  Busy with other duties, White was unable to patrol the fence line the following day.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A schoolgirl disappears

  On Friday 30 July, a postal worker was riding her Australia Post motorbike slowly down the footpath adjacent to Skye Road, delivering mail along her normal daily route. She had started work at 6am and her shift was nearing its e
nd.

  Seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Natalie Russell

  It was around 2.30pm when the postie noticed a strange man in a car. It was a vehicle that in normal circumstances she would probably have ignored, but in Frankston in July 1993 with newspapers screaming headlines about the serial killer, every car - not to mention almost every man - was suspicious. The postal worker wasn't the only woman in the community to be looking over her shoulder.

  The car was an old and rusted yellow Toyota Corona with no number plates - front or back. But what really made the woman feel uneasy was the man sitting slouched down in the driver's seat. She noted he was wearing a dark-coloured cap and, his arms were folded and he seemed to be looking down Skye Road. When she passed him, the man looked over at her and slouched down even further until the top of his head was level with the top of the steering wheel.

  In the climate of fear that had taken hold of Frankston, this man was definitely suspicious.

  The postal worker was so suspicious, in fact, that she decided to go into the nearest house to telephone the police. Just as she turned into a nearby driveway and brought her motorbike to a halt, she saw a schoolgirl crossing Skye Road, walking over towards the bike track.

  The postie knocked on the front door, explained the circumstances to the home owners and said it was part of her job to report any suspicious things she saw while delivering the mail. The owners recognised her by sight and quickly agreed to let her use their telephone.

  The postie spoke to an officer at D-24 and told him about the yellow car and the man with a chubby face sitting in it. The officer told her that he would send a car around to check it out.

  Natalie Russell left John Paul College at the end of fifth period around 2.30pm. She wanted to get home early to do some reading for school. Natalie was an attractive girl with long dark hair and large expressive brown-green eyes. Into her third term of Year 12, she had spent most of the day at school with her friend Carly and the two had chatted between classes about the weekend. During Biology, Natalie had been bored. She wrote a two page letter to a friend saying that her parents were going to Sydney for a week, leaving the following Monday. She wrote enthusiastically about the diet she was about to start and perhaps even some aerobics classes. She wondered if she would stick to her guns, but she hoped to because she had convinced another friend to diet with her and they could both encourage each other.

  After class, Natalie told Carly that she intended staying home that night to study. There was only a couple of months left of VCE and the pressure was on. Natalie also mentioned the Geography excursion on Monday. She told Carly that she was looking forward to it.

  Her final period for the week had been Religion and Natalie had spent a little while in the library finishing an English essay before heading out the school gates. As she left, she waved to a bunch of boys she knew. Although she usually rode her bike, she was walking home today because it had rained that morning and her mother had given her a ride to school. Although Natalie was a fit young woman who rode her bike everywhere and played netball, she had earlier grumbled to Carly about the prospect of walking home. It was a cold, wet day and her bag, filled with books, weighed a ton.

  Many students at John Paul College had stopped riding to school since the killings had begun. Bikes were swapped for the relative safety of cars and buses. Some students had purchased hand-held alarms after the school had warned them about personal safety. Even so the serial killer was far from the minds of most students as they headed home for the weekend.

  Natalie was wearing her tartan school skirt and dark blue school jumper with its red crest, specially designed for Year 12 students. The logo read: John Paul College, With Him is the Fullness of Life.

  She walked down McMahons Road and crossed Skye Road, heading towards the bike track she regularly used as a quick way home. She didn't heed the principal's warning two days earlier at the school assembly when he had told the student body that it would be safer to avoid the bike track until the killer was caught. The track was straight and, even though some overgrown trees spilt over the cyclone wire on either side, you could see from one end to the other. Local kids had continued to use it.

  As she crossed Skye Road, Natalie was seen by two other John Paul College students chatting on the opposite side of the road to the bike track entrance. They had both seen the dirty, yellow car parked near the entrance to the track and had both watched Natalie walk past the car and up along the track.

  They had no reason to suspect that Natalie had only minutes to live and that they would be the last people - apart from her killer - to see her alive.

  Paul Denyer cut this hole in the wire fence beside the bike track, through which he dragged Natalie Russell.

  Photo courtesy of Victoria Police

  On his second day of duty on Operation Reassurance in the Frankston area, Sergeant Richard Brown had patrolled the suburbs since 11am that day. The directive from homicide detective Rod Wilson was to 'show the flag' by providing a visible police presence. Nobody really considered that the day shifts would come up with anything because Elizabeth Stevens and Debbie Fream had both been murdered at night, but the public needed visible reassurance. Ironically, Brown had noticed a distinct anti-police feeling while on patrol and it was obvious to him that some members of the public viewed the extra police presence as an intrusion.

  The previous day, Brown had worked with an officer who had grown up in the Frankston area who had shown him many of the out-of-the-way places such as the virtual labyrinth of paths and tracks connecting many of the main roads, used mainly by school kids. He had checked a lot of cars and recorded their registration numbers on his running sheet which, if required, would help provide detectives with a list of vehicles in any given area at any given time.

  Brown was teamed with Constable Joseph Aiello, who had just graduated from the police academy, so he was being especially thorough showing the new recruit the ropes of checking and listing suspect vehicles.

  Earlier in the day, Brown and Aiello had driven into the car park of the Flora and Fauna Reserve in Langwarrin and seen a yellow Toyota Corona with no registration plates, although a closer check revealed a Roads Corporation registration receipt affixed to the front windscreen on the passenger side.

  Once used as a training ground for army reserve soldiers, the reserve was dotted with foxholes which over the years had filled with heavy native foliage. Paths wound around the area and it was a popular place for joggers who could complete a five kilometre run within the confines of the reserve. When the army reserves stopped using the park for training, it was renamed the Flora and Fauna Reserve, and attracted a surprising number of visitors.

  The car park was busy, considering its out-of-the-way location on McClelland Drive in Langwarrin, and Brown had checked it half a dozen times during his patrols. There was no one in the yellow Toyota so Brown noted the vehicle on his running sheet and radioed an 'if listed' check to D-24 to see if it was listed as stolen. D-24 responded that it wasn't listed.

  A couple of other calls about suspect loiterers had proved to be merely people delivering pamphlets, so Brown and Aiello kept patrolling. Just after 3pm they had been following a car to Skye Road when a D-24 call came over the radio to check a suspicious person in a vehicle parked on Skye Road. Brown radioed that he would do the check since he was only minutes away. When they arrived, the two officers saw the same yellow Toyota Corona they had checked earlier at the Flora and Fauna Reserve. Again, the car was empty.

  When Brown looked through the window, he could see a red Dolphin torch, a pair of sunglasses and a screwdriver on the front passenger seat. The general interior of the car was dirty and messy. Earlier, Brown had noticed a plastic shopping bag containing two loaves of bread. It was now gone. There was an old portable radio cassette player which appeared to be wired to the dashboard.

  Considering the possibility that the driver of this car was visiting a nearby house, the two officers decided to check the five closest homes to
where the car was parked. They questioned each occupant until one woman told the officers that she had seen a man dressed in black walk up towards a house with a high fence. She thought he had gone in through the gate.

  Since it was possible the man could be a burglar, Brown and Aiello checked the front and rear yards in case the man had entered surreptitiously. Back at the yellow Toyota Corona, a local council officer from Frankston stopped and spoke to the police officers. He told them he had driven past around 2pm and the car hadn't been there then. The two officers walked around the adjoining streets and saw a man dressed in black. They questioned him and found out that he lived in the house with the high fence and that the car was not his.

  Brown checked one more house. A woman told him that she had seen the car earlier and a man had got out and opened the bonnet to look at the motor. When he finished, he had walked off but she couldn't tell the officers which direction the man had taken. Sergeant Brown looked under the car at the front and saw a small puddle of water and assumed that the radiator or the hoses were leaking and the car had broken down.

  Brown looked across Skye Road, saw the entrance to the bike track and considered walking its length but a call came over the radio that an armed robbery had taken place in nearby Carrum Downs. Brown radioed for a divisional van from Frankston to patrol the area around Skye Road to look for the driver of the yellow Toyota. He didn't really consider anything would happen in broad daylight. There were hundreds of kids leaving John Paul College and walking along Skye Road. The area was extremely busy. The yellow car and the bike track faded from his mind as he and Aiello raced to the scene of the armed robbery.

 

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