Lambs to the Slaughter

by Debi Marshall

  It didn't help Derek that the family was constantly on the move. It wasn't a shiftless existence, but there were enough moves for a boy, already a loner, to have little opportunity to establish solid relationships at school. Between the ages of eight and nineteen, the family moved six times between two states and Derek attended five different schools. Enough moves for a boy, already a loner, to resent other children's stable existence, to build up quiet antipathy towards neighbours and classmates and his brother, Lachlan, who easily adjusted to new social circles.

  In 1961 the Percy family – now due to expand with the birth of their fourth son, Leon – moved again, this time to Mount Beauty, in north-eastern Victoria, where Ernie took a promotion to the State Electricity Commission's hydroelectric plant. Nestled in the upper Kiewa Valley, Mount Beauty, then boasting a population of 2000, was a small town whose lights sparkle like glass bauble necklaces at the foot of Mount Bogong, Victoria's highest mountain. When the lights go out, the township is blanketed in a canopy of darkness, tiny and insignificant against the mountains that border her on three sides and which at dusk cast muted shadows of violet and crimson. The last township before alpine Falls Creek, Mount Beauty was created in 1949 during the construction of the Kiewa Hydro Electric Scheme to house its employees. The town's well-designed gardens and avenues of trees were built on the back of the SEC, where Ernie worked as a plant operator, a well-paid position with penalties and shift work. Just outside the town, in the high country, wild brumbies ran in herds and sleek brown foxes slyly tiptoed on the soft powdery snow that fell in winter.

  But Mount Beauty was isolated – almost 60 miles from the main railway or car routes and the mail was inevitably late, as if still being delivered by Cobb & Co. The days turned slowly and with no secondary industry beyond the SEC, young people would leave in droves once they finished school, heading to the bright lights of capital cities. Many joined the armed forces, seduced by the glib patter of recruiting personnel who spun glossy tales of adventure, mateship and a guaranteed job. There was a war on in Vietnam, they told the would-be recruits, and they could make a difference. A lot of lads fell for it.

  The Percy family lived at Freeburgh Avenue, north Mount Beauty, a suburb of uninspiring pre-fab cube houses and looked down upon by the town as lower-class. Remote from the temptations of cities, football and cricket were the main entertainment in the town. Robyn Smith, who spent her primary school years at Mount Beauty before leaving, aged eight, with her family, recalls that it was so small, so quiet, so safe that when she was just five years old her mother regularly sent her to the other end of the town to get parsley from a friend to put in their scrambled eggs for breakfast.

  Derek settled in to Mount Beauty Elementary High School, where he continued his education until 1965. On weekends, grudge cricket matches were frequently held between the 'north' Beauty boys and those from the 'upper' side of town. The new high school opened in 1964 to fanfare and pride; it was a school where, the headmaster trumpeted, 'your wildest dreams will come true.' At the start of Form 5, there were just thirty pupils; seventeen girls and thirteen boys.

  Fifteen-year-old Ron Anderson lived with his family one street away from the Percy's and visited their household regularly between 1964 and 1965, sharing an interest with Derek in music, guitar, cricket and model aeroplanes. Derek, he recalls, had a passion for cricket and loved sailing and he remembers Ernie – a man of 'few words' – built a catamaran in the garage and once made Ron an amplifier out of radio valves for his guitar.

  Anderson found Lachlan cocky and annoying but Derek, he says, was quiet and likeable, a young man with a bland personality. Students and teachers considered him to be intelligent, and he was always well-behaved at school, with a keen sense of right and wrong. 'I don't remember Derek showing any interest in female members of our class,' Anderson ventures. 'He was timid and avoided girls but it never occurred to me that he was interested in boys, or children.'

  Ernie worked hard and was away from home for long shifts. Elaine, a strong-boned woman who brooked no nonsense, was indisputably the boss of the house. 'I found her to be dour and dominating,' Anderson tells me. 'Derek had to get permission to go anywhere outside school hours. She would question his intentions all the time but Lachlan was allowed to go where he liked. We didn't understand why, at the time.'

  Mount Beauty's school uniform – light grey shirt, grey woollen jumper with a green and gold neckband, grey trousers and a green tie with bold diagonal gold stripes – was not optional. In the playground the boys blended together in a sea of grey, green and gold. But Derek stood out for his tie. Unlike the others, whose ties were commercially made, his was thicker, coarser, like it was made from a rough hessian or wool. 'The tie he wore,' Anderson says, 'was definitely not a Mount Beauty school tie. It was not well made.'

  Elaine, typical of mothers in her day, did not work outside the home, and Ernie's wage did not allow for extravagances in the family. They were cautious with their pennies, never owing anything. If they couldn't afford it, they went without and they were frugal on their caravan and boating trips. The Percys were no poorer than anyone else, but they were known to have a tight streak; so tight that Ernie cut the boys' hair at home.

  Amongst the scruffy teenage boys with their shirts hanging out at lunchtime and mud on their knees after a footy match, Derek stood out as obsessively neat and clean-cut. Kim White, the captain of the football and cricket teams at school, recalls that while most of the boys wore casual, open-neck white shirts for cricket matches, Derek's collars, by contrast, were buttoned up to his neck. 'It was,' he remembers, 'as though his mother dressed him every day.'

  White easily conjures up images and memories of Percy, in whom he saw a lot of sporting potential. 'He was a fair batsman and always dedicated to what he did. He always did as I advised on the field. But he was strange, different from the rest of us. He seemed to be a Mummy's boy.' White sensed that Derek was fearful of stepping out of Elaine's boundaries. 'I'd tell him that he could play on the following weekend and he would often say, 'No, I can't.' I just thought he was shy but there was something holding him back. He used to have to smuggle his cricket clothes out of his house and make do the best way he could to play in a game.' Schoolmate Bill Hutton also remembers Elaine being incredibly protective. 'She wouldn't let him go anywhere, particularly at night. She seemed to have a fascination with protecting him.'

  White also recalls Percy's nervous, gross habit of constantly spitting. 'He was very guarded, very sneaky,' he adds. 'You would sense he was around the corner without actually knowing if he was.' In a small town of innocent teenagers, this awkward, obsessively neat, strange boy whose school jumper was too small and whose tie looked different from the other boys' ties would have stood out, like a wild dingo that lurks outside a camp at night, slinking in the shadows, watching and waiting.

  They were innocent days at school, in which the boys indulged in puerile pranks, risking the inevitable punishment of 'six of the best'. Once, using his knowledge of chemistry, Kim White put hydrogen sulphide through the air vents at school, causing a smell so overpowering that students were evacuated, the fire brigade was called and White was threatened with expulsion. On another occasion, when a minister asked students to write down religious questions and put them in a box, the boys wrote: 'If the Virgin Mary had Jesus, how could she be a virgin?' Derek, aware of the prank, sat back, quietly grinning. He showed no interest in girls and rarely let on what he was thinking, as if an emotional moat surrounded him and the drawbridge was never lowered.

  Derek's brother, Lachlan, Hutton says, couldn't have been more different. Short and stocky with blond hair, he looked like a surfie and was very fit. 'Girls liked him, which may have caused some teenage angst for Derek,' Hutton muses. 'Who knows what was going on in Derek's head then?' What Hutton doesn't know is that Lachlan was not plagued by the highly sexualised internal world that haunted his brother, Derek, not tormented by incessant and uncontrollable thoughts of sex that he could
not share with anyone else.

  11

  Derek preferred his own company, collecting more than 10,000 stamps that he painstakingly put in an album. He loved to read and draw and, like his parents, had a passion for sailing in the moth class – another solitary activity. But some of his habits were less than welcome. On a chain fixed to a leather strap on his belt, he kept a slew of locker keys which he flicked painfully onto students with little or no provocation. He did it once to Bill Hutton, who noticed that Percy seemed to take great delight in inflicting pain on people. 'I warned him that if he did that to me again, I'd belt him,' Hutton recalls. 'He looked at me with a steely stare but although he wouldn't run away from a confrontation, I didn't think he'd stand up to me. But he certainly wasn't a coward.'

  Hutton couldn't take to Percy. He remembers he often had cause to tell him to piss off, and that his response was unnerving. 'He had a quiet, strange demeanour and I always thought he was a weird bastard. Worse, he had a high-pitched, sniggering giggle. Whenever I had a go at him that was how he would react. It was eerie.' Hutton noticed something else about his classmate on occasions. 'He had a peculiar smell about him, like a soiled baby's nappy. At first I thought it was bad breath, but it was a definite smell of excrement.' Only once did Hutton ever see Derek, then fifteen, with a girl, a neighbour who lived in a nearby street. They were holding hands but he looked uncomfortable, Hutton remembers, like a nervous little kid.

  To earn some money, Derek worked part-time for the Hosking family in the nearby tobacco fields. With his wages, he bought himself a second-hand maroon-coloured push bike with distinctive ram-horn handles, which he rode everywhere in town.

  The Couch family lived two streets away from the Percys. Derek passed their house every morning, and he would call out to their son Peter, with whom he'd walk to school. Beryl Couch had shared the maternity ward with Elaine Percy when their youngest sons, Graham and Leon, were born. 'She was a quiet woman with strange little ways,' she recalls. 'Old-fashioned, but a nice type of person. I remember she refused to breast-feed even though the nurses begged her to. She probably had her reasons but I got the impression she found it a bit distasteful. She used to admire my girls and tell me that she would have loved to have had girls and I always wondered if she pushed Derek back a bit, because of that; whether she'd have preferred that he had been a girl? Derek was always spotlessly turned out and the home was comfortable but I sensed he was emotionally neglected, held back, by his mother.'

  Ken Hosking is another of the few genuine friends Derek had at school, but he too found some of Percy's behaviour unnerving. Most of the boys carried pocket knives and once, while playing handball, the sole of Ken's shoe became loose and needed to be cut off. Derek offered to do it, bending his knee so that Ken could rest his foot on Derek's leg. But the knife slipped, plunging deeply into Derek's thigh. 'Christ, Derek, take the bloody knife out,' Hosking yelled but Derek ignored him, watching, fascinated, as blood trickled down his leg, the knife still embedded in the wound.

  Under the headmaster's watchful eye, students were urged to do their best in all endeavours. The editorial in the school magazine, the Yurnga, from 1964 – a year that Percy achieved high grades – reflects that philosophy: 'We would like to think that you, too, will one day be observed by people, not for your misdeeds, but for your achievement of high ideals.' At news of Percy's arrest, those who remembered the sombre teenager from school were horrified not only at what he had done, but also that he had sullied the good reputation of their school.

  In a town populated by only a few thousand people, where the local newspaper, the Alpine Observer, afforded front-page coverage to a story on two street lights being broken by an unknown hooligan wielding a shanghai, the sudden and frequent disappearance in 1964 of women's clothing from clotheslines was never going to go unnoticed. Brassieres, panties, lingerie, dresses: the only evidence of the snowdropper was the missing garments from clotheslines. No one saw him. No one heard him. Like Chinese whispers, the story gathered strength. There is a snowdropper in town. Tongues wagged. Neighbours talked over fences. The rumours were repeated in whispered voices behind cupped hands in the schoolyard. Elaine Percy was approached by her next-door neighbour who asked if she had seen anyone lurking around at night. No, Elaine said, she hadn't.

  Articles of clothing continued to disappear. The snowdrop-per, it was murmured, was that strange young man who rode his maroon pushbike around town with the handles turned down, the one whom they sometimes saw wandering around the streets late at night. The young man with the unfortunate habit of spitting all the time, who lived in north Mount Beauty in one of those pre-fab houses. The Percy lad. Derek.

  Bill Hutton heard the rumour from the Ranton brothers, Peter and Terry, as their father drove them back from a cricket match one Saturday afternoon. 'Ernie Percy is telling his workers that if he gets wind of any of them repeating that shit about Derek being a snowdropper, he'll sack 'em, too right,' Peter announced.

  'What's a snowdropper?' Hutton asked innocently. He was sixteen years old, but had never heard of anything like this.

  Later that same year, one warm, sunny Sunday afternoon White and Hutton decided to take a hike to the Gorge, a remote swimming hole five kilometres from the Mount Beauty township. There, the West Kiewa River is set in a basin hollow, bounded on both sides by heavily-wooded embankments that do not easily give up their secrets: caves, abandoned litter and large stones worn smooth by water over the millennia.

  Meandering along the dirt road that carved through the south embankment, the teenagers suddenly noticed, 100 metres below them on a flat rock, what appeared to be a girl standing in a long, see-through dusky pink negligée, holding in her hand a pair of women's underpants. Next to her was a pile of women's clothing and underwear and a separate pile of other clothing. They thought the girl was about to take a skinny dip but, edging closer, they realised they were mistaken. 'That's Percy!' Hutton cried. They were genuinely startled: young, naïve country boys, for whom holding a girl's hand or copping a clandestine feel of a firm breast in the picture theatre was more than they could hope for. A male school friend prancing around in a negligee was completely outside their experience.

  Hutton picked up a stone to startle Percy, but White stopped him. 'No, don't do that,' he said. 'Let's just watch him to see what he does. This is not normal.'

  'You're bloody right it isn't,' Hutton said, resorting to dark humour to hide his discomfort. 'But at least the nightie fits him.' The boys knew that no one had been caught stealing from the clotheslines. 'Fuck!' Hutton blurted. 'Percy is the bloody snowdropper!'

  Slinking down on the earth they watched, fascinated, as Derek started slashing the crotch of underpants with the blade of a four-inch knife that he was holding in his left hand, dancing on the rock and making swishing noises with his mouth. Slash, swish, slash, swish. His eyes were glazed, bright with excitement but, Hutton later comments, also sinister and cold. 'We felt a sense of dread as soon as he picked up the knife. This was very obviously sick behaviour.'

  The pantomime lasted five minutes and when he was finished, Derek removed the negligee, rolled up the women's clothes into a ball and dressed in his own clothes. He moved to the river, crouched down and defecated, wiping himself with the panties he had slashed before standing up and looking around to see if anyone had seen him. The boys crept along a discreet distance from him, watching unnoticed as he nonchalantly rock-hopped down the river to an old broken-down bridge where he hid the clothing under a rock before riding away on his pushbike back to town. He passed two school girls, Caroline Addinsal and Joan Moore, who were heading up to the gorge, but he didn't speak to them.

  The boys came down from the road to look under the rock where Percy had hidden the clothes. They were there, but the knife was not. 'We didn't touch anything,' White recalls. 'We were pretty stunned by what we had just seen and seriously thought he may have killed someone. "This guy's a fucking weirdo," we said to each other. Even then we realised th
at the slashing of the knickers was symbolic of something, but we didn't know what. All we knew was that he was not right.'

  The following day at school, the boys bailed Derek up in front of twelve of their peers, wanting to see him squirm. 'Hey, Percy!' they confronted him. 'We saw you up at the Gorge yesterday, dancing around in women's clothing!'

  Percy spat nervously, several times in quick succession. 'You're a bullshit artist, Whitey. I wasn't there.'

  'Yes you were. We saw you!'

  'No you didn't. I wasn't there.'

  Derek's friends, Ken Hosking and Peter Couch, stepped in. 'Lay off him. He said he wasn't there. Give it up.' But they won't. In the Deputy Principal's office a short time later, White and Hutton, known as the school larrikins, outlined what they had witnessed.

  'Don't go bringing these sorts of things up,' the deputy warned them in a tone that suggested he meant business. 'It'll only cause you trouble.'

  'It's true,' the boys protested. 'We saw him up there. Something should be done.' But the deputy principal had heard enough. Showing them to the door, he warned them again that he did not want to hear that sort of nonsense repeated.

  Forty years later, Kim White is only too aware of the consequences of the deputy's reaction to what they had told him. 'If Derek had got the help he obviously needed, then, who knows what tragedies could have been prevented?'

  Despite his pleas for White to lay off Percy, Peter Couch, whose parents were friends with Elaine and Ernie, told his mother about the incident at the Gorge. Almost immediately, the small-town rumour mill kicked into high gear again. The snowdropper was that strange young man who rode his pushbike around town and spat all the time. Derek Percy. How Ernie dealt with his son behind closed doors at home, no one knew. But, he told detectives when later questioned, he did not raise either the Gorge or snowdropping incidents with him. Elaine, ever-protective, went into battle on Derek's behalf when she heard rumours that he was responsible for knocking women's clothing off the line. He was busy with his school work, she argued. He went fishing, played guitar. He wouldn't have done that. Her son, Derek, wouldn't do that.