by Justine Ford
Detective Senior Constable Tony Combridge, who’d been seconded from Moreland CIU in 2008, knew the Kinglake region well so it made sense that he be the one to delve deeply into this frustrating case. ‘It’s been a thorn in the side of a few investigators,’ Tony says. ‘In a case like this, you basically start again. It’s dangerous to accept that the previous investigators have got it right. You can never accept something as set in stone until you’ve got the corroborating evidence.’
Identifying the man after so long was never going to be easy but the investigators at Belier were among the cream of the crop and had learned to approach every case from the same standpoint. ‘The thing Dave’s leadership instilled in us was that every time we looked at a new case, we had an abject confidence that we might solve it,’ Tony says.
Going right back to the very beginning, the detectives at Belier examined the facts before them. ‘The man was aged between eighteen and twenty-five, but most likely between twenty and twenty-two,’ says David Butler. ‘He had a thin to medium build, was about 5 foot 7 or 170 centimetres and had brown hair.’
On 10 August 1981, the coroner had found that the unidentified man had ‘feloniously, unlawfully and maliciously been slain by a person or persons unknown.’ Unfortunately, no-one came forward to say they knew who he was. It was a shame because he was just a young bloke with his life ahead of him.
‘There was also some clothing found which was traced to New Zealand. Inquiries revealed that the clothes were only available for retail sale in Auckland,’ David says. The man had been wearing blue denim Jon Reed brand jeans, a light blue Revelation shirt, a blue, patterned Mr Jump cardigan, black lace-up shoes and a pair of black, size one ladies’ gloves.
‘The clothing was so distinctive that it was later the subject of public release in the hope it would identify the male. But it didn’t,’ David says.
The original investigators believed the man was probably from New Zealand, but as far as David and Tony were concerned, that was only one possibility. ‘There were so many possibilities,’ Tony says. ‘He could have travelled; the clothes could have been bought for him; he could have purchased them from an op shop – we don’t know.’
Tony found out that the original investigators also asked the Australian Dental Association to publish the man’s dental charts, photos of his teeth and x-rays in their journal but no information was forthcoming. ‘There would have been plenty of people who read it – even the dentist who’d done the work might have seen it – but paid no attention,’ Tony says.
The science at the time didn’t allow the pathologists to estimate how long the man had been dead either. ‘The level of decomposition was commensurate with the remains having been exposed in that position for a number of months,’ David says.
Curiously, the coroner was not able to determine the cause of death. Yes, the man had been stabbed in a frenzy, but the coroner was unable to say whether any other factors had contributed to his demise. ‘I think the actual method of his death would tend to suggest it was a disorganised murder, not planned, due to the number of blows,’ Tony says. ‘But you never know. The other possibility was that the person was very organised and that’s how they kill people.’
‘The man’s remains were then released by the coroner on 10 June 1982,’ David continues. ‘He was buried in an unmarked grave in Springvale Cemetery.’
If you’re an unidentified body, however, don’t expect to rest in peace.
Eight and a half years later, on 5 November 1990, the Kinglake West Man was exhumed for the purpose of a facial reconstruction.
A prosthetics technician from the Dental Unit at the Peter MacCallum Institute, Ron Taylor, and an odontologist, Professor John Clement, worked together to reconstruct the man’s face in the hope that the public might be able to identify him if they knew what he looked like. ‘Facial reconstructions were pretty cutting edge in 1990 but they were also fairly nondescript,’ Tony explains. ‘Because they were fairly basic they required people to rely on their imaginations.’
After the reconstruction was complete, the image featured prominently throughout the media in Australia and New Zealand but again, police received no useful information.
Around the same time, another post-mortem was carried out in which the pathologist observed further injuries to the man’s head. ‘It looked like they’d knocked him on the head with some kind of blunt instrument and then stabbed him so you would think there’s some clear intent there,’ David says.
During the initial exhumation, the forensic pathologists collected tissue samples from the murdered man in the hope those samples could be used to identify him in the future. Somewhere along the way, however, the samples were lost so if Taskforce Belier were to require any histology samples, the remains would need to be dug up a second time.
Before anyone was asked to pick up a shovel prematurely, David’s team had to meticulously scour the list of people who’d gone missing around that time to see if any candidates for comparison came to light. Then, as David and Tony read the osteological report from almost twenty years prior, they noticed that the pathologist had made an interesting observation about the dead man’s bones. ‘They were creamy brown in colour, and greasy to the feel. They also still possessed an odour of decomposition.’
It was encouraging news because the combination of these factors told the team that the bones might still be suitable for DNA profiling. ‘So we put a case up to the coroner,’ Tony says. ‘We said the remains could belong to a number of people but we needed DNA from the body in order to be able to conduct comparisons.’
Kinglake Central Man
Another day in the bush, another dead body …
At about 2.15pm on the afternoon of Friday 28 December 1979, two months after the discovery of Kinglake West Man, a farmer was moving stock and repairing fences on his property on Extons Road, Kinglake. While walking along the boundary to his property he thought he’d located a mannequin on the ground.
On further inspection he realised the arms and legs weren’t plastic; they were human flesh.
Detective Senior Constable Mark Rippon was one of the investigators from five major Victorian regions seconded to the Crime Department to investigate cases relevant to their area. He’d been asked to spend less than a year matching missing people with unidentified remains, but as he and his colleagues uncovered scores more cases begging to be solved, Taskforce Belier took on a life of its own, lasting three and a half years.
Mark had come from Boroondara CIU, so one of the first cases that caught his eye was that of Kinglake Central Man because Kinglake had been part of his jurisdiction. ‘The man was found face down with his arms above his head,’ says Mark. ‘It was apparent that the man had been dragged from the road area.’ The dead man had also sustained a single gunshot wound to the back of the head.
He was described as Caucasian, aged between thirty-five and fifty, between 167 and 170 centimetres tall, with short dark hair and no apparent scars or tattoos. ‘He was also well nourished,’ Mark says, a polite way of saying he was fat, weighing between 80 and 88 kilograms.
‘He’d been extremely eaten by maggots, which were up to twelve millimetres in length, so the pathologist was able to estimate he’d been there no longer than four days.’
The man was wearing a collared chocolate-brown cardigan that had two pockets, imitation leather buttons and three vertical, mustard-coloured stripes on each side at the front. He also wore grey Target brand checked trousers, as well as a long-sleeved, mustard-coloured St Charles brand shirt. On his feet were slightly worn size eight lace-up brown shoes with a pattern on the toes. He also wore black nylon socks and a white athletic singlet.
Again, the original investigators had contacted the Australian Dental Association to see if they could identify him through his teeth, but that inquiry had yielded no result.
On 18 December 1981, the coroner ruled that Kinglake Central Man’s death was due to the effects of a gunshot wound but he couldn’t say who was responsible,
where it happened, or whether or not it was accidental.
It certainly didn’t look accidental but given that a lot of people on rural properties own firearms, it was possible that someone had accidentally shot him in the head, even if it did look eerily execution style. ‘But if he killed himself, he didn’t drag himself through the bush, did he?’ David Butler says wryly.
On 15 November 1990, when the remains of Kinglake West Man were exhumed, Kinglake Central Man was also exhumed by order of the State Coroner.
As in the Kinglake West case, a facial reconstruction was carried out and widely distributed as part of the same media campaign. ‘Unfortunately there was no information as a result,’ Mark says, ‘and on 21 December 1993, the men’s remains were reburied.’
The candidate
‘We went back over the old case files of missing persons that we now knew fitted the time frames,’ Tony Combridge explains. ‘We ruled out females and worked with what we had as a biometric map – ages, heights, weight etcetera, and we worked with that as a filter. In doing so we were aware we might be able to discount someone even if we couldn’t exclude them altogether.’
A number of missing persons proved of interest, but none more so than one Mark Rippon found purely by accident. He’d been studying an unrelated coronial file from 2001 in which he read about a man who was believed to have been involved in illegal activity and subsequently murdered in the late 1970s – around the time the Kinglake bodies turned up. That man’s body, however, had never been found.
Problematically, no official record existed to say that the man had gone missing in the first place, so police had never had reason to compare his vital statistics with either of the bodies found at Kinglake.
Mark started to probe.
‘The man’s last known movements were of some debate,’ he says, ‘and there were some issues around when in fact he was reported missing.’ The last known sighting of the man was on 5 June 1977, when he and his brother watched an AFL match together between Collingwood and Fitzroy.
The man was estranged from his wife, who said she reported him missing in 1979 or 1980 but was unable to recall the actual last time she saw him. ‘She said she reported him missing by phone to [her local] police and that they had phoned her some months later to say he’d been found. It appeared, however, that no police report had been taken.
‘That was not unusual though,’ Mark adds. ‘It was a pretty standard police response back then. “If he hasn’t come back home in twenty-four hours, come and see us.”’
Unfortunately, that was not – and is still not – police procedure.
‘Don’t wait to report people missing,’ David Butler says in an important aside. ‘Do not accept being told at the watch-house desk that you should wait for twenty-four hours. That is wrong. Ask for the supervisor.’ Besides being unable to help families find their missing loved ones, police cannot match missing people to unidentified remains either, unless the person has been reported missing in the first place.
As Mark continued his search for clues, he was re-examining photos of Kinglake Central Man when he noticed something that no-one had picked up on before. ‘I was looking at the old black and white photos and thought, “That looks like a mole on his face.”
‘The man I’d just been reading about in the 2001 coronial file had a mole in about the same spot,’ Mark reveals, ‘so I sought advice from the Australasian College of Dermatologists. I forwarded a photo of the deceased to a doctor at the college, who advised on the balance of probabilities that it was a mole – a compound naevus.’
Mark now had a strong circumstantial case on his hands: it looked like the man who he’d accidentally stumbled upon in that unrelated coroner’s report might well be Kinglake Central Man.
But there was much more work to do if he was to say that for sure.
The DNA conundrum
The coronial method of identification requires one of three primary identification matches: fingerprints, dental records or DNA.
But in this case, police had no fingerprints or dental records so they’d have to rely on DNA. ‘But the only way to source the DNA was to get the bodies,’ Tony says.
Digging bodies out of the ground isn’t as simple as it sounds. ‘It’s quite a big operation to exhume remains,’ Mark says. ‘Often, they’ve been in the ground for a long time and the coffins, which are made of chipboard, break down quite quickly. The plywood at the base can also separate the remains.’
The exhumations took place without incident, however, in August 2009, and the men’s remains were conveyed safely back to the State Coroner’s Office. There, the investigators hoped to obtain DNA profiles from both sets of remains and, with any luck, find out that the man mentioned in the coronial brief was Kinglake Central Man. In order to reach that conclusion, they obtained DNA from the brother of the man from the coronial brief and waited while the DNA was compared.
Despite the detectives’ high hopes, the scientists told them it was not a match. But in a most bizarre turn of events, the DNA from the man mentioned in the coronial brief matched the DNA of the man at Kinglake West.
Confused?
The police were.
‘We initially thought there may have been some co-mingling of remains,’ Tony explains.
‘We considered that they had been buried on top of each other and wondered if there had been a DNA transfer,’ Mark adds. The investigators also wondered if somehow the remains had been mixed up.
Eager for an independent analysis, police requested that more complex DNA profiling be carried out at the same lab used by the FBI in Dallas, Texas. ‘We got the profiles back from America and gave them back to our biologists, who then compared the profiles and they ended up not being a match after all,’ Mark says.
So how on earth could the false positive result be explained in a world where we’re led to believe DNA is the be all and end all? ‘There’s only a small number, something like 250 or 300 equations in relation to mitochondrial DNA,’ Mark explains. ‘So it’s quite possible one person’s mitochondrial DNA can be a match to someone non-related, whereas nuclear DNA is more definitive.’
‘It probably shook our faith a little in the DNA,’ Tony Combridge adds. ‘I think we had a bit of the CSI factor kicking in, we thought if you had DNA, you’re on, but we learned that sometimes you need more evidence to corroborate.
‘As investigators,’ he continues, ‘we need to look at things from a scientific point of view but not let the scientists solve it for us because often a match is not what it seems.’
Three years on, investigators haven’t given up hope of naming the Kinglake bodies, and have a fresh set of candidates to whom they will compare the remains. ‘It’s still a live job but you’re talking about murders in the late seventies so the chances of meting out justice are getting slim,’ Tony says.
Working out who the men are, however, is still a possibility.
‘To get a result in those terms is still a result,’ Tony adds. ‘And sometimes people aren’t brought to justice.
‘Plenty of people get away with murder.’
Chapter 14
Digging up the Truth
The search for Terry Floyd
‘I don’t want to find my brother in a mineshaft with cow bones and engines and skulls dropped on him. But I have to find the answers …’
Daryl Floyd, Terry’s brother
Daryl Floyd is a man obsessed.
In 1975 his older brother Terry, a keen footballer for the local Under 15s, was abducted from the roadside while waiting for a lift.
Back then, the police thought he’d run away but Daryl knew his brother better than that.
Nearly forty years on, Daryl remains convinced that on the day of his disappearance, Terry met with foul play. Now he just wants to locate his brother’s remains and will journey to the centre of the earth to find them.
•••
Terry Floyd’s dad, Ken, once said his twelve-year-old son was a bad-tempered liar
who’d threatened to run away, but to his ten-year-old brother Daryl, Terry was someone to look up to. ‘He was a typical young boy going into his teens,’ Daryl recalls. ‘He loved his cricket and football.’
There were six children in the Floyd family, three boys and three girls, and while loved and cared for by their parents Ken and Dot, they were no cotton-wool kids. Growing up in Maryborough, Victoria, they spent every spare moment playing outdoors.
Daryl’s fondest memories are of all the simple, rough and tumble fun he had with Terry. ‘We loved kicking the leather footy,’ Daryl recalls. ‘We used bricks as goalposts.
‘We were always running around in the bush too, playing cowboys and Indians.’
Of course it wasn’t all fun and games. The boys had outdoor chores to do as well. ‘We were always collecting bark and wood for the fire, stuff like that.’
One of the other jobs for the boys was to take it in turns to stay over at their Nan’s place next door because she didn’t like sleeping alone in the house since her husband died.
On Friday 27 June 1975, a chill winter’s night, it was Terry and Daryl’s turn to stay at Nan’s. The boys, who slept in a room at the front of the house, went to bed at eight o’clock, but by eleven, Daryl awoke to find Terry had got up. When he went into the lounge room to investigate, young Daryl could see his brother had something on his mind. ‘He was laying on the floor staring into the fire, prodding it with a poker,’ Daryl recalls.
‘What are you doing?’ Daryl asked.
‘Nothing,’ Terry replied. ‘Go back to bed.’
The next morning, Daryl and Terry were meant to go to the Under 15s footy game together, but Terry left his Nan’s house before breakfast without saying goodbye.
Daryl now believes he knows why: one of the trainers at the Maryborough Rovers Under 15s – a man known as ‘Uncle’ or ‘Unc’, was going to drive Terry to Avoca, about 30 kilometres away, so he could visit friends.
Unc’s real name was Francis Robert Drake and he was the son of the local mayor. But despite the apparent veil of respectability, Daryl’s mum, Dot, had a bad feeling about him. ‘This “Unc” was known to be around boys,’ Daryl says. ‘He used to rub the boys’ legs down at training and apparently he used to have a whisky flask under the seat of his car and would take boys on joy rides.’