by Justine Ford
We all feel such guilt that we didn’t look after you better – please forgive us.
We would love to have seen you grown up and married with children but that was all taken away from you.
I try to remember you as you were and not let the hate I feel for what happened cloud my mind to the beauty of your soul. Please God you weren’t too long suffering – I am told children go to another place and I hope that is what you did.
Today is the first time we have had to say goodbye properly and we say goodbye with love my darling.
Your family
Mum, Karen, Gary, and Laura [and] all the extended family who have been born since that dreadful day.
On an investigative level, the first thing Wayne and his colleague Detective Senior Constable Dave Rae tried to do was exculpate Derek Percy. ‘But the more we looked at him, the more we believed he was responsible,’ Wayne says. ‘So we decided to retrace his steps from birth.’
They found out that Percy was born in New South Wales but moved to Warrnambool in Victoria with his family when he was five. When Percy was twelve or thirteen the family moved to Mount Beauty, where Percy attended school. ‘Probably those years were the most significant,’ Wayne reveals. ‘The people of Mount Beauty amazed me. If it wasn’t for the people who knew him we wouldn’t have advanced our new investigation as far as we have.’
Wayne came across one of those people by chance. ‘The thing that opened it up,’ Wayne says, ‘was that I found a piece of scrap paper [in the old files] which looked like it had been torn out of an A4 notebook.
‘It said “R. Anderson” and had a number under it.’
Wayne recognised it as a police identification number, and found out that Ron Anderson was a retired policeman, living in Ballarat. He wasted no time calling him.
‘I’ve been waiting for this phone call for thirty years,’ Ron told Wayne. Wayne knew immediately he was onto something big and drove to Ballarat to meet Ron Anderson.
Ron told him that he had grown up in Mount Beauty and had been school friends with Percy. Wayne also found out that after Percy was jailed for Yvonne Tuohy’s murder, Homicide detectives asked young Constable Anderson to visit Percy in jail in the hope that ‘a friendly face’ would encourage him to open up about the other abductions and murders.
Ron told Wayne that Percy’s first words to him were: ‘It looks like I’ve fucked up this time, Ron.’ Ron then asked Percy ‘if there had been any others’ but Percy replied: ‘I can’t remember.’
‘What about Linda Stilwell?’ Ron Anderson pressed. ‘She went missing in St Kilda.’
‘Yes, I drove through St Kilda that day,’ Percy replied. ‘I had been at Cerberus in the off and was driving along the Esplanade on the way to the White Ensign Club.’
‘And did you kill Linda Stilwell?’ Ron asked again.
‘Possibly,’ Percy replied. ‘I don’t remember a thing about it.’
The conversation continued in the same frustrating vein as Ron asked Percy about other cases, including the murder of three-year-old Simon Brook. Percy replied that he was in the area but couldn’t remember. Ron also asked him about the Beaumont children. Percy said he remembered being in Adelaide ‘near the beach’, but made no confession.
Ron made notes on the conversation but a statement was never taken from him in the early days of the investigation. Seeking to rectify this – and recognising the importance of re-investigating other cases that might be linked – Wayne called his senior sergeant for guidance straightaway. ‘I had goosebumps,’ Wayne recalls.
Soon after, a multi-jurisdiction taskforce codenamed Operation Heats was set up to re-investigate all the crimes Percy was suspected of committing, with all information from New South Wales, the ACT and South Australia being funnelled through police in Victoria.
Wayne Newman also visited Mount Beauty for himself to find out more about Derek Percy’s formative years. He wasn’t surprised to learn that Percy was a loner, but also very intelligent. He was heavily involved in sailing and his father sometimes took him out of school so he could attend regattas.
They are really the only ‘normal’ pieces of information that Mount Beauty residents were able to give police. Everything else they said about Percy was right out of a slasher movie.
Two of Percy’s schoolmates remembered going in late 1964 to a watering hole called The Gorge where they spotted Percy, then aged fifteen, wearing a woman’s petticoat. ‘They watched as he slashed at the petticoat,’ Wayne says. ‘He started cutting the crotch out with a knife then walked over and defecated in the water.’
(Wayne suspects this early behaviour escalated to murder because the following year, when two teenage girls were slaughtered at Wanda Beach, the crotch area of their swimmers was cut out and Percy was staying less than two kilometres from where the girls lived.)
The Mount Beauty locals also told Wayne that Percy was a known peeping Tom and a ‘snow dropper’; that is, someone who steals women’s underwear. There was also an incident in which he pulled down a girl’s pants.
The two young girls next door appeared not to have escaped Percy’s perverted behaviour either. One day, after having worn pretty dresses for a family outing, their mum told them to put on their yard clothes. After washing the dresses and hanging them outside to dry, the mother and her two daughters went out again. When they returned, the dresses were gone.
If only that were the worst part of the story.
Weeks later, another neighbour found a suitcase containing not just the dresses but numerous newspaper clippings of women in swimsuits, with their eyes, breasts and genitals cut out with a razor blade.
Hearing this, Wayne Newman had more reason to believe that Percy’s behaviour had escalated since leaving Mount Beauty.
He knew that at the time of Percy’s arrest for the murder of Yvonne Tuohy, police had also found a little green book in his car with entries such as ‘go to the city…abduct a girl…try to get the mother with her as well…get a three-year-old boy…sever genitals with a razor blade.’ Horrifically, three-year-old Simon Brook’s genitals had been severed before he was found. It was sickening to think that Percy might have been planning such an attack for years.
There were other similarities between cases that Wayne couldn’t ignore either. For example, the Wanda Beach victims were last seen with a teenage boy with a knife in a scabbard. ‘Percy had a knife in a scabbard when he was arrested for the murder of Yvonne Tuohy,’ he says.
Additionally, all the disappearances and murders happened around water, the beach or sailing clubs, places with which Percy was familiar.
The evidence – although strongly circumstantial – was mounting.
In December 2005, investigators’ hard work did result in a small but meaningful victory, when New South Wales Coroner John Abernethy found that someone had committed an indictable offence in the Simon Brook murder.
Again, after decades of silence, someone was paying attention.
‘That did give his parents some closure,’ Wayne reveals.
Unfortunately, when the Director of Public Prosecutions reviewed the material before them, there was still not enough evidence to proceed against Percy.
There was another interesting development though.
The cold case detectives discovered that a witness had reported seeing Percy near the fun park at St Kilda the day Linda Stilwell went missing.
After Yvonne Tuohy’s murder, Edith Jamieson saw a photo of Percy in the paper, and recalled having seen him herself at the Esplanade, sitting and staring out to the water. According to Wayne, she’d ‘sensed something wasn’t right’. Even though Edith had contacted police in 1969, her report wasn’t followed up until Wayne Newman took over the brief and re-interviewed her in time for the inquest.
It was another piece of the puzzle that he’d been waiting for.
Wayne has questioned Percy on several occasions himself over the disappearance of Linda Stilwell, as well as the other child murders. ‘He has a
stare that goes right through you,’ Wayne says. ‘It pierces you.’ Still, Wayne doesn’t let that stop him from asking Percy, whose detention is reviewed every five years, if he killed Linda Stilwell.
‘He says he can’t remember, so we dance a merry dance and go in circles. I put it to him: “You want to be able to get out [of jail] one day so you’re never going to tell us.”’ And he concedes that’s the case.’
•••
If Linda were alive today, she’d be a woman in her fifties.
Jean, widowed again after losing her third husband to cancer, knows she’ll never see her daughter again, but would at least like to see justice done.
The coronial inquest finally commenced in 2009, with Jean, Karen, Gary and Laura forming a united front as they came face to face with Percy for the first time. Jean tried to steel herself and shut out thoughts of what the killer in front of her might have done to her beloved Linda. ‘Because I found out what happened to Yvonne Tuohy, I couldn’t go there,’ she says.
The family listened to shocking details about the abductions and murders of which Percy is suspected, and again heard graphic detail of Yvonne Tuohy’s knife-slashing murder.
Wayne made sure that Edith Jamieson finally had her say, and when she did, she said that not only had she seen Percy at St Kilda the day Linda disappeared, but that she’d also noticed a little girl tumbling down an embankment near the Esplanade as Percy watched on.
Even then, it was a chilling image.
‘Go home little girl,’ Edith had thought. ‘You are in grave danger.’
As the inquest continued, Deputy Coroner Iain West handed down an interim finding that Derek Percy had been in St Kilda on the day Linda Stilwell disappeared, that she had met with foul play, and that if Percy were to give evidence the matter could be solved.
‘Jean started to cry and I was fighting a tear,’ Wayne remembers, both relieved and amazed that he and his team had been able to progress the case that far. ‘I didn’t think in our wildest dreams we’d get that determination.’
The coroner decided, however, not to compel Percy to give evidence in case he incriminated himself, so the inquest has been adjourned while Jean fights to make Percy take the stand. ‘I don’t think he’ll talk but at least if you get him up there you’ve got a chance,’ Jean says.
While Jean waits for a ruling from the Appeals Court, she remains hopeful that one day there will be an ending – of sorts – to her real-life nightmare. ‘All I would like is to be able to give Linda a funeral, not be thrown away like a piece of rubbish,’ Jean says, her eyes welling with tears. ‘I’m still going to get upset but at least I’ll know I’ve done all I can.’
Her and Wayne Newman, both.
Chapter 21
Who is Fred Marriott?
Identifying a missing sailor
‘That’s what we wanted to know even though we knew his name. Who is Fred Marriott? We made it our job to find out.’
Senior Constable Karen Clarkson, Western Australia Police
When the owner of a pastoral station in Western Australia’s mid-north found an old, abandoned Ford Falcon 5 kilometres away from his property, he thought it might come in handy. He arranged for it to be towed back to his homestead and if police were agreeable, he wanted to claim the unwanted vehicle as his own.
Soon, however, police learned that the car belonged to a man known only as ‘Fred’, who was also understood to have owned a blue boat. But when police started looking for Fred, they could find neither him nor his vessel.
Almost a year and a half later, when station hands from a property at remote Wooramel were trying to retrieve a washed-up dinghy, they happened upon a man – or what was left of him – laying lifeless in the mud flats.
Police had good reason to believe that those remains belonged to ‘Fred’.
But who was Fred exactly?
•••
The first police knew of the apparently unwanted XE Falcon was when the owner of Hamelin Station phoned them about it on 18 February 2005.
‘He wanted to know if he could retrieve it and asked the police if that was all right,’ says Senior Constable Karen Clarkson from the Western Australia Missing Persons Unit. The station owner was given the okay and he arranged for the car to be towed back to his property the same day.
There were no registration plates on the car, so the station owner provided police with a chassis number instead. It didn’t help police find who owned it, though, because the number was incorrect.
Three and a half weeks later, on 14 March 2005, police got in contact with the station owner again to ask for more details about the deserted car. During the conversation, the station owner asked police if he could have the boat trailer he’d found as well. It was the first time police had heard about the boat trailer and they became concerned that the owner of the car and boat might have met with misadventure, possibly at sea.
‘The officer realised it didn’t sound good,’ Karen says. ‘An abandoned car is one thing, but a boat trailer as well?
‘As a result, police went to the property where they examined the vehicle and the trailer, which had already been recovered by station hands and cleaned out.’
The police also cast their eyes over the area of Hamelin Bay where the car and trailer had been found. ‘Examination of the scene where the vehicle was originally located revealed blue paint flakes on a coral outcrop at the launch site,’ Karen says, ‘and the paint flakes were the same colour as the paint located on the trailer. It was also apparent from drag marks that a boat had been launched at that site.
‘After they’d examined the scene the police realised that somebody must have launched a boat and that that person was unaccounted for so they considered it to be a case of a missing person in a boat.’
After a little more research into the car, police discovered its previous owner was a man from Victoria. ‘He hadn’t kept any paperwork on who the vehicle was sold to but he described the person as a male Aborigine in his fifties,’ Karen says.
With no sign of the boat or its mystery sailor, police spoke to locals at Hamelin Pool, near where the car was found, who remembered meeting its owner.
The locals recalled that a man who was about sixty years old and possibly of Aboriginal or Islander descent had been camping at Hamelin Pool Caravan Park in January 2005. They described him as having a light brown complexion, short grey hair and a full beard. They said he was about 5 foot 9 or 175 centimetres tall, and of solid build.
Importantly, he’d told the locals his name was ‘Fred’ but hadn’t offered his surname. ‘He was also described by witnesses as having a limp and one leg “thicker or more solid” than the other,’ Karen says. ‘He also told them that he’d had a heart attack several years earlier.’
Significantly, the witnesses remembered that Fred had owned a blue hulled boat with a white sail and had told them that he’d sailed to the area from Perth and planned to sail to Darwin.
‘After a week, one of the men Fred had spoken to then assisted him in launching his boat,’ Karen explains. ‘At the time he had food supplies, 10 litres of UHT milk and approximately 60 litres of water in six containers.’
Uneasy that there had been no sign of Fred since, police launched a land, air and sea search. The Police Air Wing, the Fisheries Department and the Water Police were all involved, as well as Carnarvon Sea Search and Rescue and local police in vehicles and on quad bikes. ‘Unfortunately there was still no sign of Fred or his vessel,’ Karen says.
Police turned to the media in the hope that a member of the public would know what had happened to Fred, or be able to tell them more about the identity of the man they were looking for. The media coverage prompted a police officer with a good memory and a well-kept notebook to come forward after seeing a report about the missing man on the news.
‘Sergeant Andrew Greatwood of Eucla police had been conducting a routine vehicle/quarantine stop on the border of Western Australia and South Australia on 30 April 2004, wh
en a man who he described as a male Aborigine with a distinct full white beard and an unkempt appearance pulled over,’ Karen says. ‘The man was driving a blue XE Ford sedan and towing a boat trailer and a blue hulled boat.’
The driver told Sergeant Greatwood he was born in 1946 and that he had an address in Victoria. When asked his name, the driver with the long white beard said that it was Frederick Marriott.
Fred.
So now police knew the name of the man they were looking for – but what had become of him?
Nothing good, by the looks of what turned up next.
‘On 15 April 2005, a Customs Air Support plane was flying over the coastline and located a blue vessel washed ashore of Gladstone, between the Overlander Roadhouse and Carnarvon,’ Karen reveals.
Police forensic officers examined the boat and analysed the scene, determining that the boat had capsized in deeper water and that the mast had hit the ocean floor. ‘That eventually destroyed the mast,’ Karen says, ‘and we now know that allowed the boat’s dinghy to drift into shallow water and wash up on shore.’ It was a classic shipwreck and unless the sixty-year-old had somehow been able to swim to dry land, it didn’t look good. Police immediately launched another air and land search but again, there was no sign of the missing Fred Marriott and it looked for some time as though he’d perished at sea, never to be found.
On 31 July 2006, however, station hands from the tiny outpost of Wooramel were doing an aerial muster when they noticed an abandoned yellow aluminium dinghy in the mud flats at Wooramel Station, 120 kilometres south of Carnarvon.
‘The owners of the dinghy had previously tried to retrieve it but weren’t able to,’ Karen says. ‘They lost their motorbikes in the thick mud so they gave up.’
She continues, ‘When the musterers flew past and saw the dinghy they decided to go back to take a closer look.’ Keen to claim the craft for themselves, the musterers decided their best chance of retrieving it was to do so on foot. When they got about 500 metres away from the dinghy, however, they were confronted with another unexpected find – a human skeleton.