by Justine Ford
‘We’ve had four or five Rides for Daniel,’ Denise says. ‘Bikers turn up and they want to help. We get a lot who are weekend riders but some are from clubs. They might look rough but they’ve got hearts of gold.’
The downside to all the community goodwill is that everyone recognises the Morcombes, and the temptation for people who have lost children to disclose their own tragedies can become draining. ‘Sometimes you just want to go to the shop and get the groceries and go home,’ Denise says. ‘But our lives will never be that simple again.’
The Morcombes’ lives became even more complicated in October 2010, when a coronial inquest sought to find out what had happened to Daniel, who was responsible, and how well the investigation had been handled. For the first time, the Morcombes saw the full police brief of evidence – including 18,000 pieces of information and 10,000 police interviews.
Part way through the inquest, the proceeding was adjourned so that the coroner could consider the way forward. With the hearing in hiatus, the Morcombes decided to take a much-needed break. They flew to the UK where they met with Gerry and Kate McCann, the high-profile parents of abducted toddler Madeleine.
The McCanns live in a small English village, north of Leicester, where they continue to hold out hope they’ll be reunited with their daughter. ‘We enjoyed a beer, shared each other’s tragedy and drew some parallels,’ Bruce says.
Their three-hour meeting at the pub went by quickly, so the McCanns invited the Morcombes to stay over at their place the following week. ‘We really understood each other,’ explains Denise. ‘The thing is, there are support groups for families of murder victims, but Daniel hadn’t been found, and there is no-one to support families of missing kids like him. So meeting the McCanns was a real help to us, just knowing that they understood where we were coming from and vice versa.’
‘We’ll probably be friends for life,’ Bruce adds.
Not long after arriving back in Australia, the investigation into Daniel’s disappearance went into overdrive.
The nation learned that undercover police had spent months watching the every move of forty-four-year-old former truck driver, Brett Peter Cowan, who had earlier been called to the inquest as a ‘person of interest’.
Cowan, a father of three, had been living in a van at Perth’s Crystal Brook Caravan Park with no idea that his neighbours were detectives whose specialty was covert surveillance.
After months of spying on Cowan, police arrested him over Daniel’s murder on 13 August 2011. He was also charged with deprivation of liberty, child stealing, indecent treatment and interfering with a corpse.
The Morcombes were flooded with messages from Australians everywhere, who wanted the family to know they held them in their hearts.
The next big breakthrough came when police mounted a search for the teenager’s remains in an area off Kings Road at Beerwah in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland.
Suddenly, it was all happening so quickly. Bruce and Denise visited the search area for a few minutes, where they gazed into the bushland and offered ‘a silent prayer’ for their missing son.
Soon after, the search party found a pair of shoes and some human bones. DNA tests were fast-tracked and revealed that the bones belonged to Daniel Morcombe, missing for eight years.
•••
No-one would argue that the Morcombes have been through more than most people can ever imagine. Now they have a lengthy court proceeding ahead of them that could prove just as gruelling.
Throughout it all, however, they have never lost sight of their goal to protect Australian children.
In September 2011, Bruce and Denise agreed to help devise a child safety awareness curriculum for Queensland schools, which former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, hoped would be adopted Australia-wide. As part of the curriculum, which Bruce says is not about scare-mongering but ‘life-saving skills’, they are considering the introduction of a universal hand signal that children can use to get attention if they are in any kind of danger.
‘In fact, anyone at risk could use the signal,’ Bruce explains. ‘Even rock fishermen who are in need of help.’
It’s another great idea from the couple who were nominated, but missed out on, Australian of the Year awards in 2012. The Morcombes don’t do anything for themselves, though, it’s all for the kids, so they saw the award ceremony as just another way of getting people to talk about child safety.
Despite their dedication to the cause and the incredible energy they give to others, Bruce and Denise are still coming to terms with the reality that their son’s remains have finally been found. Daniel’s brothers, too, are still trying to cope with his loss. They generally keep a low public profile these days for self-preservation, but Daniel is never far from their hearts. Or arms, in Dean’s case.
‘Dean, who is two and a half years older than his brothers, dedicated an arm to Daniel,’ Bruce says. ‘It’s a tattoo that says “Never Forget – Memories” and is a life depiction of Daniel’s face.’
Winding its way up Dean’s arm, there’s also a red rose, and a permanent reminder of Daniel’s fourteenth birthday: three candles, one for each of the brothers.
Two are alight, and one extinguished.
Chapter 20
Gone, But Not Forgotten
The abduction and presumed murder of Linda Stilwell
‘Six years ago a turning point came when Detective Wayne Newman from the Cold Case Unit rang me…I burst into tears. At last, somebody cared.’
Jean Priest, Linda Stilwell’s mother
Jean Priest’s seven-year-old daughter, Linda Stilwell, was snatched by a monster at a children’s fun park more than forty years ago.
Since then, Jean has been racked with guilt that she didn’t do enough to protect her; that she should never have let her children play alone; and that Linda’s disappearance – most likely at the hands of one of Australia’s most terrifying sex killers – was all her fault.
After the initial investigation failed to find Linda, Jean felt as though her outgoing, talkative little girl had been forgotten.
Then in 2004, thirty-six years after Linda went missing, Detective Sergeant Wayne Newman re-opened the case, uncovering startling new evidence about this and other horrific child abductions and murders, as well as offering Jean the support she had so desperately craved.
Four decades after her daughter was kidnapped, Jean wants everyone to know that no matter how short, her daughter’s life was important and her family loved her.
She believes that finally, we’ll get the message.
•••
Not long after Jean Priest (then Stilwell) separated from her husband, she and three of their children, Karen, aged eleven, Gary, ten, and Linda, who was seven, moved from the Melbourne suburb of Avondale Heights to St Kilda on Port Phillip Bay. The children’s father moved to New Zealand, taking the youngest child, eighteen-month-old Laura, with him.
A glamorous seaside resort in the 1930s, St Kilda was once like something out of the Great Gatsby. By the 1960s, however, St Kilda was a faded old dame; her buildings were in disrepair, and her streets home to ladies of the night. However, for Jean and her family, life in St Kilda represented a fresh start, and according to Detective Sergeant Wayne Newman, ‘The kids didn’t want for anything.’
On Saturday 10 August 1968, a month after moving to the bayside suburb, the children went to play on the foreshore, which, as Wayne Newman points out, ‘wasn’t uncommon for children to do in the sixties and seventies’. It gave twenty-eight-year-old Jean time to go to the shops on a special errand.
‘I went to get Linda’s birthday present,’ Jean explains. ‘She would have been eight in twelve days.’
Jean returned home first that afternoon, followed by Karen, who had left Gary and Linda on the pier. At about five o’clock, Gary and Linda then went to Little Luna Park, not far from the main fun park, where they became separated. When Gary realised he couldn’t find his sister, he returned home to tell his mum. �
�Jean had Gary go back to the place where he’d last seen her to get her to come home,’ Wayne says. Gary returned to Little Luna Park but when there was still no sign of his little sister, he went back home to tell Jean the news.
At first, Jean presumed there was a logical explanation for Linda’s no-show. ‘Because she often wandered, she’d go off and play with her friends and I’d have to go off looking for her,’ Jean says. ‘So that’s what I thought had happened at first.’
But when she couldn’t find Linda anywhere, Jean started to panic.
‘I saw an ambulance come and I ran to it because it stopped,’ Jean explains. ‘I thought maybe Linda had had an accident and that she was in the ambulance.
‘She wasn’t, but I often wish she was …’
Jean called the police, who arrived at around eight that night.
‘They told me to speak to as many journalists as I could to get people’s interest,’ Jean says, recalling how she had to force herself into the spotlight to help find her daughter.
The Metropolitan Fire Brigade illuminated the foreshore and the next day Police Search and Rescue divers scoured the seabed off St Kilda. A group of soldiers also joined in the search.
The Homicide Squad was quick to get involved, believing from the outset that something sinister had happened. ‘They had to question me and they were saying that any normal mother would be crying,’ Jean remembers, ‘but I don’t cry when I hurt the most ’cos I hold it all inside.’
Jean felt that the officers couldn’t understand that she and the children were in shock. ‘The kids were almost as if they’d been stunned. I don’t think any of us believed it,’ she says. ‘I don’t think any of us knew how to feel.’
One thing that Jean did feel by that time was that something bad had happened to her daughter. Call it a mother’s intuition. ‘It was no time at all before I thought she’d been taken.’ That theory was supported by the fact that divers couldn’t find Linda’s body in the bay. ‘In the following weeks, had she gone into the water, the remains would’ve washed up due to the tides,’ Wayne points out. ‘There was a sewage pipe that came out at Black Rock and it’s where the tide would have taken her if she’d gone into the water.
‘In any case, the last sighting of Linda was by Gary at Little Luna Park and that was quite a distance from the water.’
In an exhaustive effort to find Linda, the Homicide Squad doorknocked houses in the area, and asked residents to look for her in their own backyards, even at their gates and in their fridges. ‘Anywhere,’ Wayne says, ‘where a child exploring by themselves could’ve got trapped.’ Police interviewed dozens of ‘persons of interest’, and boarded ships that were docked in the bay at the time, but to no avail.
‘Police in New Zealand were contacted to make inquiries with Linda’s father, who lived there, to make sure she hadn’t been taken out of the country,’ Wayne adds. ‘Her previous address at Avondale Heights was also searched in case she’d become disoriented and had gone back there.’
But she was in neither location.
Meanwhile, Jean worried that her daughter’s friendly nature had contributed to her disappearance. ‘She was bright and bubbly, always full of life,’ Jean remembers. ‘She once went up to a tramp sitting on a bench and started chatting.
‘She’d talk to anyone.’
That was what police were worried about too, so they quickly turned their attention to known paedophiles.
One witness described seeing a man who Wayne Newman says ‘vaguely fitted a description’ of a sex offender who had a connection to the St Kilda area. The man was ruled out quickly, however, because all of his offences were against boys, not girls.
Wayne adds that the original investigation led police to all sorts of other shady types too. ‘Local divisional police saturated the area, going to houses of ill repute, boarding houses, gaming houses, bringing in persons of interest to police, even if they were vagrants. They went a long way to eliminate them as being involved.’
But as time passed, the chances of finding Linda became increasingly slim. Understandably, Jean was beside herself, but tried to bottle her pain up inside.
Then one day, a minister visited her with an unsolicited word of advice. ‘He said unless I allowed my husband to come back, God wouldn’t allow my child to be found.’
More than forty years later, Jean is still haunted by the clergyman’s comment, even though she didn’t believe him (and found out later that he was forced to leave the ministry).
But one day it all became too much.
‘I used to have nightmares every night that I was walking on Linda’s grave,’ Jean says. ‘I tried to commit suicide. I was in the Prince Henry Hospital so my mum came out [from England] and got me into a new flat ’cos I couldn’t stay where I was in St Kilda.
‘We moved to Kensington – they were horrible flats – but it was a lifeline at the time.
‘So Mum stayed for a while to help look after the kids and my shaking body, then came back three or four other times to help out.’
Jean knew then that her life would never be ‘normal’ again. ‘I didn’t go to St Kilda for a long time,’ she reveals. ‘I couldn’t go along the beach or anything …’
Four months after Linda disappeared, Jean met her second husband (who later died, leaving her a widow). ‘He was a good support,’ Jean says, ‘but I think he thought I should stop thinking about it.’
So Jean hid her pain all over again. ‘I couldn’t talk about it and the kids couldn’t talk to me,’ she says sadly. ‘The black hole would open up sometimes but I couldn’t let them see that.’
Tragically, Linda Stilwell wasn’t the only young girl to go missing from a seaside location in the sixties, leaving behind shattered families.
On 20 July 1969 – the day man landed on the moon – the Homicide Squad arrested a man named Derek Ernest Percy over the mutilation murder of twelve-year-old Yvonne Tuohy. ‘When the Homicide Squad became aware of the nature and the brutality of what happened to Yvonne Tuohy, police thought, “This is not the first time this person has done what he’s done,”’ Wayne says.
Yvonne had been walking along a beach at Westernport Bay in Victoria with her friend, eleven-year-old Shane Spiller, when she was grabbed by twenty-one-year-old Percy, who held a knife to her throat. Shane was carrying a tomahawk, which he waved at Percy to keep him away. He succeeded, but Percy sped off with Yvonne.
‘Shane had taken down a very good description of the vehicle and had noted a naval sticker on the back,’ Wayne explains.
‘He alerted the family who contacted the authorities, and from interviewing Shane, police converged on [naval base] Cerberus, where they walked Shane through the car park, and Shane was able to identify the vehicle he believed was involved.
‘The naval police said the vehicle belonged to Derek Percy, so they converged on his billet.
‘Percy – who was washing his clothes at the time – was taken back to his car where police found a knife with apparent bloodstains.’
Back at Russell Street Police Headquarters, Percy initially denied any involvement in Yvonne’s disappearance, claiming he didn’t remember, but eventually confessed to her abduction, sexual assault and vicious murder.
After his arrest for the murder of Yvonne Tuohy, police questioned Percy over several other crimes, including the Wanda Beach murders of teenagers Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt in1965; the disappearance and presumed murders of the three Beaumont children, who famously vanished from Adelaide’s Glenelg Beach in 1966; six-year-old Allen Redston, murdered in Canberra the same year; and three-year-old Simon Brook from Sydney, whose lifeless body was found in a cubbyhole in1968.
Percy didn’t confess to those crimes, however, claiming he was elsewhere when they took place.
He was also asked about the disappearance of Linda Stilwell, but he had a cover story that police could neither prove nor disprove. ‘I believe he put himself interstate – in Newcastle, on leave,’ Wayne says.
Despite strongly suspecting that Percy was responsible for Linda’s disappearance, police were unable to pursue him any further due to a lack of evidence, and also because he was found not guilty, by reason of insanity, for Yvonne Tuohy’s murder. (These days, suspects considered insane can be actively investigated.)Percy was nevertheless considered culpable for Yvonne’s murder and too dangerous to release, and was detained at the Governor’s Pleasure.
As the years passed, questions about the fate of Linda Stilwell began to fade from the public consciousness. Linda was never far from her mother’s mind though, and Jean continued to contact police to find out if they had any new leads. ‘I would go to Russell Street but no-one knew who Linda was,’ she says. ‘She had slipped through the cracks.’
For years, Jean was angry that her daughter was gone and, it seemed, forgotten by everyone but her. Then, in 2004, Wayne Newman, a Homicide Squad cold case investigator, was given the case to prepare for a long overdue coronial inquest. ‘I dearly wanted to give the family some closure,’ Wayne says. ‘That’s why we do what we do.’
From day one, Wayne was a godsend.
‘He was the first one to get us [the family] any counselling after all those years,’ Jean says. ‘The counsellor made me write letters to Linda and it was wonderful. We all feel a lot stronger now and we can finally talk to each other about it.’
Following is one of Jean’s letters:
To my darling Linda,
It’s been forty years since you went out happily to play and didn’t return.
How I’ve wished, time and time again, that I could have protected you from the evil that took you that Saturday.
I just wanted to tell you – we still love you and think of you.
We would love you to have had time to get to know all the new members of the family.
You would have loved them, I know, because you were such a loving little girl with a big smile who would talk to anyone.