by Justine Ford
Tony always makes sure he tells police the most minute and unusual characteristics he observes in someone’s mouth because sometimes even the smallest piece of information can propel a police investigation. ‘As odontologists we need to be able to recognise the abnormal features,’ Tony says, ‘not just the common, usual features.’
In some cases, however, an unidentified body is not who the police think it is and further investigation has to be undertaken. In other cases, if a person has not been reported missing and an ante-mortem record does not exist, it is a case of ‘sitting and waiting’ until someone who matches the unidentified person’s description is reported missing.
It should be easy in a country as advanced as Australia to match ante-mortem records of a missing person (including their medical and dental records, their height, their hair and eye colour, the jewellery and the clothing they were last wearing) with post-mortem data obtained from unidentified remains, but it’s not as simplistic as one might think – and there’s a reason why.
‘There is no national missing persons database,’ Tony states. ‘I’m talking about a stand-alone missing persons database of information that can be rapidly interrogated between states and territories nationally.’
Victoria Police investigators and odontologists like Tony are constantly populating an Interpol-designed database with ante-mortem information about people who are reported missing along with post-mortem information obtained from examination of unknown deceased remains. But until the other states and territories use this database and an ability to interrogate across borders exists, it remains a resource begging to be used. ‘Most police use a system called Crimtrac, but that was primarily developed for tracking criminal activity – people who have absconded, not turned up for court, not paid their fines, escapees and so on,’ Tony says.
‘They are trying to put some missing persons information into Crimtrac but it’s not adequate,’ he adds. ‘They include information such as the person’s last known address, fingerprints if they are available, and names of relatives for example – but it’s nowhere near enough information.
‘Missing persons are seldom involved in serious crime – some are victims of foul play, others may have committed suicide. The individual reporting someone missing is generally a parent or loved one who’s concerned about the welfare of their missing relative. It could help them enormously if information concerning missing persons investigations were to sit within a dedicated missing persons database.’
And God forbid should our overseas neighbours go missing in Australia.
‘If someone comes from New Zealand and goes missing, New Zealand police have no national database in Australia which they can access – that means a deceased person could lie within a mortuary for many years before identification is established,’ Tony says.
It’s sobering material and all the more surprising in light of the fact that all states and territories have licences for the database, but there appear to be difficulties in its implementation. ‘As soon as we start using this system, we will have results,’ Tony says.
Tony has much faith in the Interpol system (known as PlassData) because it was used and tested fully during the Thailand tsunami in 2009 in the identification of several thousand reported missing cases. It has also been adopted by fifty-two Interpol members as the system of choice in such investigations. ‘We as forensic odontologists examined the teeth and oral structures of deceased individuals and recorded the information into the post-mortem database of the PlassData system,’ he says. ‘If parents said, “I think my son was there,” they would give us all the information they could about him – including his medical records, his dental records, what jewellery he wore and so on.
‘We’d then put this information into the ante-mortem database of the system and the computer would search for matching parameters. And that is basically how we were able to identify people.’
With any luck other jurisdictions will embrace the concept of a national missing persons database but until then, investigators will have to keep slogging it out, while forensic experts will continue to sit and wait for a system that can use their knowledge and expertise to its full potential.
‘Missing persons investigations focus on bringing some form of peace to parents and relatives of missing persons; allowing them to learn of the fate of their loved one,’ Tony says. ‘Families of missing people seldom move on and are tragically stuck in an abyss of not knowing, but always wondering, “What has become of my loved one?”
‘A national missing persons database can help give some of them the answers they seek and the ability to move forward.’
Chapter 8
Epsom Road’s Lady of the Night
The body in the backyard
‘She was the first exhumation we made at the Belier Taskforce. We believe she was associated with the brothel industry.’
Detective Sergeant David Butler, Victoria Police
There’s a hierarchy in the sex industry.
To other prostitutes, street workers rank lowest as they are often drug addicted and are considered less choosy than their higher-paid colleagues.
Next on the ladder are sex workers employed by brothels, followed by ‘high class’ escorts who are paid a bundle to satisfy the desires of wealthy men.
Prostitutes have been around since before biblical times and many would argue they perform a valuable service. But it’s risky business…and as we can see from this woman whose body was found buried in a Melbourne backyard, prostitutes are rarely afforded the same OH&S standards as the rest of us.
•••
The woman’s naked body was found buried out the back of a house on Epsom Road, Kensington, in Melbourne’s inner north.
She wasn’t found by mistake either: a colourful underworld identity had led police to her undignified resting place. He’d contacted them while serving a custodial sentence at Pentridge Prison and had said he’d buried the woman under the ground on an undisclosed date, which police estimate was sometime during the 1980s.
The man had already been found guilty of two murders and was suspected of other unresolved homicides. Either he’d become strangely civic-minded by the time he told police where to find the woman’s remains, or he wanted something: to avoid suspicion over the woman’s murder, or to secure indemnity against prosecution over other crimes for which he was suspected of committing.
Whatever his motive, at least he pointed police in the direction of a body that otherwise may never have been found.
‘In a conversation with investigators on 15 January 1990 at Pentridge, he said the body could be found at an address on Epsom Road, Kensington, and drew the investigators a map showing the features of the yard and the location of the body,’ says Detective Sergeant David Butler, who later headed the Belier Taskforce.
Digging up a yard to find a body is a big deal, especially when the tip-off has come from a crafty crim, so police did some more digging of their own into the crook’s revelations. The investigators then took their informant to the alleged burial site, where he showed them exactly where they could find the woman’s remains.
Satisfied there was a good chance of finding her body out the back of the Kensington house, police dug up the backyard at Epsom Road on 19 July 1990, and beneath the dirt they found the body of a woman, just as they’d been told. ‘The unclothed body had been encased in lime at a depth of 0.8 of a metre and covered in a layer of concrete material,’ David Butler says.
A fortified concrete grave is the kind of burial site you’d expect to be reserved for underworld hardmen, not a naked, unidentified woman. After the grim scene was examined thoroughly, the woman’s lifeless body was transported to the morgue for examination.
•••
How the woman ended up in her concrete coffin in the first place is a story the gangster was happy to tell police, although what was fact and what was fiction remained questionable.
The underworld raconteur, once the right-hand man to the (no
w dead) owner of a Melbourne massage parlour, said he met the woman at the brothel in the early eighties where she had asked his boss for a job.
An allegedly bent cop who was present around that time advised, ‘Keep an eye on her as she’s trouble.’
The underworld identity told investigators from Internal Security (the forerunner to Ethical Standards) that despite the woman being considered ‘trouble’, the police officer asked her to travel to South Australia to collect drugs. She was to be accompanied by another man, as well as our ‘underworld identity’, whose job it was to act as a minder. ‘The underworld identity said he flew to Adelaide with her and another male to collect drugs from people he believed were corrupt South Australian police,’ David says.
When the mission was accomplished, it was alleged the group drove back to Melbourne in the woman’s Valiant station wagon with the drugs concealed in the spare tyre.
‘One week later, the underworld identity said he was contacted by the police officer who asked for help disposing of a male body,’ David says. The underworld identity alleged that he met the police officer at the St Kilda marina to do the deed. ‘He said he saw the deceased man in a green bag and they disposed of the body in the spoil ground in Port Phillip Bay,’ David reveals. (The spoil ground is where excess material that is suction-dredged from the bay, in order to keep the shipping channels clear, ends up.)
It would be a daunting task for most mortals but not for a gangland heavy, who noticed that the man in the bag was the one who’d accompanied them on the Adelaide drug run.
Alas, the man in the body bag wasn’t the only victim.
‘The underworld identity said that he and the police officer met again a few days later and that this time, the police officer had a dead woman in the boot of the car. He alleged that the police officer told him to dispose of her body in the same way.’
Serial killers aren’t wont to take orders though, so instead, he planted the body in the backyard of his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother. Roses would have been nicer.
‘He put her in a four foot hole and covered her with lime and cement,’ David says. ‘He observed that there were no signs of injury to the body but he recognised her as the woman he’d been to Adelaide with.’
•••
The post-mortem was unable to establish the likely cause of death but it did give the police an idea of what the woman had looked like. She was described as Caucasian, about twenty-five years old give or take three years, and about 151 centimetres tall, plus or minus three and half centimetres. That’s around 4 foot 11 inches in the imperial system. In other words, she was short.
‘As she’d decomposed the sarcophagus around her had set,’ David says. ‘So even though her remains decomposed, the concrete preserved her shape and size.’ It may sound macabre, but it meant the investigators could safely say she’d had a stocky build.
The woman also had brown hair and, as forensic odontologist Dr Tony Hill observed, a set of upper dentures, which was most unusual in such a young woman. ‘In the plastic of the false teeth there was a marker, which said “J8”,’ Tony reveals. He hoped the marker would allow him to trace where the dental work was manufactured as there were so few clues to the woman’s identity. Unfortunately however, the marker didn’t tell Tony her name.
So who did the police suspect their Jane Doe was? And why had she ended up in a hole in the ground?
These were clearly questions for the underworld identity, but he clammed up when he was charged over the execution-style killing of a man whose body was dug up less than a month after police found the woman in the backyard at Kensington.
‘After he was charged with that murder he declined to be interviewed further,’ David Butler says. ‘And he was later sentenced to life in prison.’
The convicted killer, who was extradited to South Australia for his last known homicide, had tried to pin an allegation of murder on an associate before, so it was hard to know which parts of his story were true.
Yes, it was true that a woman’s body had been buried in a Kensington backyard…but who had killed her? Had it actually been him, and had he tried to deflect the blame and curry favour to escape prosecution over other matters? It’s hard to say without any solid evidence and without knowing the identity of the woman who’d been killed in the first place.
‘At the time, police believed there were four possible scenarios,’ David explains. ‘The information he provided may have been correct, or it may have been fabricated and designed to put the heat on the police officer.
‘Alternatively, the murders might have been committed by the underworld figure himself, or he may have been hoping to prevent extradition to South Australia, believing that if he became a crown witness he would remain incarcerated in Victoria.’
The gangland killer’s motives aside, police had to continue concentrating their efforts on the identification of the unknown woman. In an effort to do so, they arranged for a cranio-facial reconstruction to be produced in her likeness. ‘The image was widely published and circulated with no success,’ David Butler says.
‘The detectives looked at other missing persons cases in Australia but none of them were found to be of assistance. Eventually they exhausted their inquiries and were unable to reveal her identity so her remains were released to the undertakers on 21 February 2000, when she was buried at Springvale Cemetery.’
•••
Eighteen years after the woman was found, Taskforce Belier decided to have another go at identifying her.
Detective Senior Constable Tony Combridge examined records of women who’d gone missing around the same time to see if he could find a possible match. As it happened, several cases captured his attention.
One of those had not been considered previously because even though she’d disappeared in the early eighties, her family had waited eleven years before they reported her missing, fearing she’d get into trouble for minor criminal matters.
The woman, who’d worked as a barmaid, was short – 153 centimetres tall – of solid build and with brown hair, remarkably similar to the woman found in the ground.
When the investigators found out this next piece of incredible information, they really pricked up their ears. ‘Information from the family revealed that she’d been working as a prostitute at the same brothel as the deceased woman,’ David says.
It seemed like too much of a coincidence.
The investigators also learned that a friend of the missing woman had visited her in Sydney where she revealed that she was in fear of her safety. The friend also claimed that an unknown associate of the missing woman had blown up a car matching the same description as the one belonging to the owner of the brothel where she worked. As well as that, the missing woman was known to have kept company with some of Melbourne’s most notorious underworld figures.
It was a potent mix and police believed that circumstantially, the information pointed to her ending up in the concrete and lime.
‘We needed to collect the ante-mortem background from the family as well as the family’s DNA,’ David says. ‘We didn’t have any post-mortem DNA as yet either.
‘During the initial examination, they had tried to extract DNA, but bear in mind that in 1990, DNA was a brand-new science in Australia and it was only advancements in the technology that would make it possible to extract a profile.
‘When bodies are buried for a long time, DNA leaches out. We noticed from the osteological report, however, that the bones were well preserved, which meant we could probably extract DNA.’
So in 2008, Taskforce Belier exhumed its first body.
But when they tested DNA from the skeletal remains against the DNA they’d collected from the family of the missing woman, the investigators were startled. It wasn’t a match. ‘So she was eliminated,’ David says.
The team didn’t give up, though, and found a fresh clue that may still lead them to the woman’s identity. ‘When Tony Combridge looked back at the photos,’ David says, ‘he sa
w something on the ground [where the body was located] and said, “Boy, what’s that?”’
On closer inspection Tony believed he was looking at a set of breast implants, which the excavators may have overlooked. ‘He showed the picture to a cosmetic surgeon who confirmed that they were indeed a type of implant,’ David reveals. Early implants were not degradable, which explains why they had not decomposed in the same way as the woman’s flesh.
So even though police don’t have a name for the dead woman yet, with the advances in modern technology and the information they continue to gather, it’s only a matter of time.
‘She was a distinctive person,’ David reminds us. ‘And we believe she was associated with the brothel industry.’
The young woman’s short stature, solid build, breast implants and false upper teeth should also provide strong clues as to her identity.
Epsom Road’s lady of the night might not have been seen for almost thirty years but prostitutes usually know a lot of people…and the chances are, someone still remembers her.
Chapter 9
The Long White Cloud to the Final Frontier
The disappearance of Kiwi traveller Jamie Herdman
‘The mystery never leaves us because it has never been answered. It’s always there. We try to get answers but the same questions keep coming up.’
Steve Herdman, Jamie’s father
Outside Darwin, a modern city rebuilt in the wake of Cyclone Tracy, the Northern Territory is ruggedly beautiful, boasting endless kilometres of paperbarks, yellow scrub and termite mounds as tall as people. Dotted with remote Aboriginal communities, occasional roadhouses selling beer and frozen croc meat, and friendly settlements where tourists are treated like old mates, the Territory is still Australia’s Final Frontier.
It’s also the site of some of our most notorious missing persons cases, including the 2001 disappearance and murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio, and the most famous case of all, the disappearance in 1980 of nine-week-old baby Azaria Chamberlain at Uluru.