Lambs to the Slaughter

by Debi Marshall

  Detective Sergeant Adam Barwick of the New South Wales Police, a former cold case officer on the Simon Brook murder, is necessarily guarded when discussing possible 'persons of interest' in this on-going investigation, but he thinks that Wilder – despite there being a 17-month gap after the Wanda Beach murders before his first known murders in the United States – and not Percy – is good for Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt's murders. Wilder's psychological profile, his age (19 at the time of the Wanda murders), the fact he was resident in Sydney and had the gift of the gab which enabled him to lure girls with ease, his history of sexual deviancy, abduction and murder and his likeness to the description given by Wolfgang Schmidt is, for Barwick, a clear pointer that he could well be their killer. But over the border in Victoria, his police counterparts put their money on Percy as being the most likely fit.

  15

  Despite persistent small-town rumours that he was a snow-dropper, Percy returned to Mount Beauty High when school holidays ended in February 1965, a handsome lad in his mid-teens who peered out from his school photograph with a deep frown. His occasional contributions to the school magazine that year hinted at the social isolation he felt. Following a visit from students at Corryong High School, two hours from Mount Beauty, he wrote: 'It would be a good idea to arrange other school visits . . . these trips would give people a chance to make friends and perhaps pen-friends in other districts.' His entry in the school yearbook, though typically adolescent, hints at dark problems too. 'Favourite saying: It depends. Ambition: Playboy. Probable fate: Bachelor. Pet aversion: Girls. And then, chillingly: Perpetual occupation: Isolating himself.'

  For the same magazine he wrote a treatise entitled 'Monday Mornings' that read: 'Monday morning! Ugh! The worst morning of the week. The morning that you most want to stay in bed for another hour or so, but trip over the chair, go in to the bathroom to have a cold shower to wake you up, and turn the hot tap on instead of the cold . . . Then you start to get dressed. First of all you can't find your tie, but after ten minutes search you find it in your pocket. Then you spend five minutes looking for the other sock. You find it in the dog's teeth . . . Why do they have to have school on Monday morning? I suppose if they didn't the same thing would happen in the afternoon.'

  But not all his jottings were light. This poem, co-authored with another boy in his class, entitled World of a Tornado, dealt with the Vietnam War:

  . . . All the talk concerns the war

  The weather matters no more.

  This whole world is like a tornado

  Like a philosophy of foreseeing Plato

  But the tornado has struck,

  The damage is done.

  Who could live in this world at this crucial moment

  When everybody else is trying to own it?

  Ken Hosking is, by his own admission, no longer the fresh-faced lad who is photographed standing next to Derek in their school uniforms in 1965. Now 59 and retired, he and his wife are about to join thousands of other 'grey nomads' wandering around Australia in their caravan. He and Percy, boyhood friends, could not have embarked on more disparate paths: Derek to a life in prison as a child killer, Ken to a distinguished career, a happy marriage, children and grandchildren. He gives a perceptible groan when, in 2008, I tell him the reason for my call and I am concerned that he may not talk to me. Three hours later, when we hang up, I realise that apart from Percy's family, Ken Hosking was probably closer to him than any other person.

  From 1963 until Derek left Mount Beauty in late 1965, he and Ken shared the same classes at school, although they did not sit together. 'Derek was nine months older than me and a genius, as far as I could see,' Hosking recalls. 'I had to work hard to pass but he would get very high marks for very little work. He rarely studied but he breezed through his exams, particularly maths, chemistry and physics.' In 1964, Derek was made Prefect, a decision based on his academic abilities. It wasn't a popular decision. His fellow students couldn't understand how this awkward boy, who was extremely sensitive to any criticism, could earn that honour.

  When they weren't playing cricket or other sport, they were talking about it, although Ken remembers Derek as having the irritating habit of pointing out when he had played better. 'One afternoon we had both scored 14 runs, but Derek was 14 not out. Instead of shutting up, he had to brag about it. He often had a superior attitude.' The Hosking family did not have a television until Ken's last year of high school, so he and Derek would amble over to Peter Couch's house to watch Ken's favourite programs, particularly Homicide. 'Derek wasn't interested in TV, though,' Ken remembers. 'He'd sit in another room or outside and pluck at guitar strings with a pick.'

  While most of his schoolmates gave Derek a wide berth, irritated by his shifty habit of not looking them in the eye and the way he constantly pulled out a comb from his back pocket and did his hair, Ken, with a nature his mother describes as 'sympathetic', was more patient. Ken helped to teach Derek to shoot when he was 14 and in 1964 they went on a school trip together to Melbourne, catching public transport and touring the sites. Mostly Ken's memories of hanging around with Derek, who relaxed more at Ken's home than at his own, are mundane, pleasant. But not all of them.

  One day, he tells me, they had been rock-hopping for miles along the Kiewa River, drinking handfuls of cool Alpine water as they went. Around a bend in the river, a huge grey kangaroo had bounded down through the scrub and smashed itself to death on a rock. Its carcass was sprawled in the water, covered in maggots. Ken's family had once rescued a joey and raised it as their family pet before releasing it to a wildlife sanctuary and the sight of the dead animal affected Ken deeply. 'It made me feel sick,' he recalls. 'To make it worse we had just been drinking water that was maggot-infested. But far from bothering Derek, he thought it was really funny and couldn't stop laughing. He wasn't at all concerned about the mess of that dead kangaroo. In hindsight, it probably showed his fascination for dead things.'

  While they hung around together a lot of the time, Ken remembers that most things Derek wanted to do, he wanted to do alone. Like his father, Ernie, Derek was a loner. 'Derek was a dead ringer for his father in looks and personality,' Ken tells me. 'They had the same thinning hair with receding hairline and the same skinny face. When they smiled, it looked like a grimace. And they had the same arrogant aloofness.'

  Derek, Ken insists, did not have a normal upbringing. 'Far from it. He was petrified of his old man. Ernie ruled with an iron fist. You couldn't raise your voice above a whisper lest you incurred his anger. Derek took me inside one afternoon to show me a yachting trophy that he was really, really proud of. We'd gone in quietly because his father was in bed but suddenly Ernie started screaming at Derek. "Get out of here! Get going!" It wasn't a normal reprimand for us to shut up because he was trying to sleep; his tone of voice was really nasty and he gave me the impression that he was violent. Derek ran out of the house, petrified and shaken. We all ran. Derek shit himself every time his father screamed at him and I never went near that house again. I'd wait outside from then on.'

  With no dances or even a basketball court, the only social outlet for men in Mount Beauty was the Workman's Club, but Ernie didn't go there. 'He was an obnoxious man who didn't mix easily with others. I don't think he drank at all and he certainly never made any effort to do anything with Derek in Mount Beauty that I noticed, apart from the family going on sailing trips. He seemed to not spend any time with his son.' One night a week, Elaine went out and played table tennis. Ernie stayed home to look after the boys.

  Ken remembers Elaine Percy as a big-boned woman, self-conscious and withdrawn; a nice woman who, he thought, put on an act about her personal happiness. 'There was definitely an unfriendly atmosphere in that house,' he says, 'something not quite right.' Elaine was also dominating and pernickety, an over-protective mother who fussed about her delicate son. 'I look back now and still think that in many ways Derek was perfectly normal. But I think he was a person who stifled his feelings, and that h
e was dominated by his mother, although she didn't strike me as particularly maternal. Derek was always obsessively neat and tidy, worried about getting dirt on his clothing. If he played sport he always made sure that he was clean before he got home. I suspect that was because Elaine didn't like him coming in dirty and he may have got into trouble if he did.'

  In 1965, Ken was House Captain, a tag that carried with it the responsibility of checking students' school uniforms. He thought it incongruous that while Derek was a meticulously clean person and his uniform always extremely neat, his tie was frayed a little at the edges.

  Ken could never understand, either, why Derek took to the nervous habit of spitting. 'It wasn't as though he had any congestion and needed to clear his throat; it was a shallow spit, something he did all the time.' He imitates the noise Derek made. 'It sounded like ptt, ptt, ptt. He used to get sideways glances when he did it. It put people off.'

  16

  In September 1965, the Percy family moved to Khancoban, a transient State Electricity Commission town on the edge of the Kosciusko National Park, 80 kilometres north of Albury where Ernie had a job with the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Derek needed to stay behind in Mount Beauty to sit his Leaving exams but Elaine couldn't find anywhere for him to board. Ken's mother, Barbara, discussed it with her husband, Harold, and they agreed to take Derek in for a couple of months: he was good friends with Ken and one more boy in the house wouldn't make much difference. They managed a tobacco farm and Derek took turns with Peter Couch to help Ken uncover the seedbeds, disciplined work for which they had to rise early. Derek did not let them down.

  Angelina Casarotto lived next door to the Hosking family. There was little privacy between the neighbours, only a small fence and a few straggly trees separating their gardens. One morning as she hung the washing out on the line, she was unnerved to see Percy in the Hoskings' backyard, bending down over his upturned bike. She watched as he spun the wheel with his hand, hypnotised by its repetitive revolution. Round and round. Round and round. When he looked up, he stared at her slyly, his eyes glazed. After that she warned her girls, aged seven and nine, not to go over to the Hosking house without her. There was something about this boy she instinctively didn't trust, though she struggled to pinpoint what it was. It was, she would tell her husband, as if he was watching her, and casing their house.

  When the family went out to visit a sick friend in hospital, Angelina secreted the key in the usual spot, in a tin can behind their gate. On their return, she realised someone had been in their house. About twenty of the girls' dresses were missing from their wardrobe. Angelina fretted that the person responsible for the theft was the strange boy staying next door with the Hoskings, but she had no proof. She decided to keep her suspicions to herself and not to go to the police.

  The day the boys sat their leaving exams, Derek was sure he was going to pass. It didn't seem to occur to him that he wouldn't. It didn't seem to occur to anyone. It didn't seem to occur to anyone, either, that he needed help for his odd behaviour.

  The next day, Derek packed the few belongings he had at the Hosking household and when his mother picked him up, left Mount Beauty without a backward glance. The rumour mill started grinding again: did the family really leave Mount Beauty for Ernie's work or did Ernie pack them up to avoid the stigma and shame of Derek's strange behaviour?

  Bill Hutton remembers the reaction to Derek leaving Mount Beauty. ' "Oh well," people said, "at least our undies are safe on the line now." ' Angelina Casarotto was particularly relieved when Percy left town. Shortly after, a neighbour found her daughters' dresses hidden behind blackberry bushes near her home, along with a doll. The doll's eyes had been slashed out with razor blades and the body mutilated. Tucked inside the dresses were razor blades and newspaper clippings of women and children in swimsuits, their genitals and breasts also mutilated. The eyes of the woman in the newspaper pictures were heavily pencilled, giving them a bizarre, sinister appearance.

  Nothing was done. The newspaper clippings and razor blades were thrown in the rubbish bin and the Casarotto girls continued to wear their dresses. Percy had left town, and that was good enough.

  But even forty years later Angelina Casarotto does not find anything amusing about Derek Percy. In a rapid-fire voice, barely pausing to draw breath, she tells me by telephone that she does not wish to speak about Derek, that all these years later she still remembers what she calls 'that worrying time' and that it is 'shattering' to realise that someone like him lived so close to her family, in such a small town. 'Oh, I could tell you some stories about him, but I won't,' she says, enigmatically. 'I know a lot of things.' But Angelina is adamant that she won't talk further. 'Barbara Hosking might talk to you,' she says. 'She left town a long time ago. But it was such a worrying time. It still is.' I can hear the shudder in her voice. 'It could have gone either way. I know he won't get out ever, but I'm scared he might escape. And he would know his way back here.'

  I search on the internet for Barbara Hosking's phone number in the suburb that Angelina has given me. By chance, a woman with the same surname answers the call and gives me Barbara's number. How surreal, I think, as I punch in the digits on my phone. Research is like starting a journey, blindfolded and realising, when the blind is removed, that you are exactly where you need to be. And luck helps.

  Barbara Hosking, too, is at first reluctant to talk about Percy. His legacy, it is obvious, looms like a dark pall over people from Mount Beauty, as though they too feel soiled and stained by what he has done. The subject is a tender one, she says and though they were not in any way involved in what Derek did, her family will never really be free of it. She will have to check with them first about whether or not to talk to me. But her reticence softens as we begin to speak. Barbara is astute, with an engaging personality and a down to earth sense of humour. 'Derek was allowed to play cricket, tennis and table tennis,' Barbara recalls, 'but not football. Elaine thought it was too rough a game. But in the footy season I always seemed to have his football uniform on my line.' Barbara asked Ken why she was always doing Derek's washing. 'He told me that his people wouldn't let him play, and he asked me not to say anything to her. So he played football, but he had to do it sneakily, at school.'

  Barbara remembers Derek as a quiet, lonely sort of boy who always seemed to stand apart from other people. 'My kids were very forward so I noticed this about him. There's always one who stands further back in a crowd, who listens quietly and laughs. A lot of boys at school didn't like him at all, perhaps because of his personality. But I thought he was all right.'

  Amongst the rough and tumble teenage boys, Derek's manners were impeccable. 'He was very, very well mannered, almost as though he was scared to put a foot out of place. He wasn't noisy like most adolescent boys. His mother expected him to be a gentleman at all times.' A gentleman. The pictures of Yvonne Tuohy in situ come flooding back to me. Derek Percy, I think, may be a lot of things, but a gentleman is not one of them. Barbara senses what I am thinking. 'My kids can shape up good as any, but I used to look at Derek and think, if that's how you have to behave to be a gentleman, I don't want it.' She remembers something else. 'I commented to my son, Peter, once that Derek was a gentleman. He said, "If I was like Derek, Mum, I'd cut my throat."'

  Barbara had little to do with Ernie Percy, whom she found taciturn and silent. 'Some of the men who worked with Ernie described him as a grumpy old bastard, who would not acknowledge their presence if the mood didn't suit. He would often go to work and never speak a word to anyone.' There was something about Elaine, too that she couldn't quite take to. 'She used to drop in and see me, even after they left Mount Beauty. But I got the impression that the family thought they were better than anyone else.'

  Elaine was visiting one morning when Barbara had an innocent exchange with her oldest son, who was about to sit an exam. 'Good luck son!' Barbara called to him from the door.

  'Thanks, Mum. I'll need it!'

  'You'll be okay,' she told him. 'Just keep
your eyes off that blue-eyed blonde sitting next to you and you'll have a better chance at passing!'

  As soon as the door closed, Elaine chided her. 'You shouldn't talk to your son like that!'

  'Why not?' Barbara responded, stunned. 'It's normal for a man between the ages of fourteen and ninety to look at a pretty girl's face.' It was, Barbara recalls, the first inkling she had of Elaine Percy's conservative, repressed attitude. 'Our household was open and while we were very busy, we also had lots of fun. The boys used to torment and chiack me, but Derek stood back and never laughed out loud. I don't think there was much fun in his household. There was something wrong.'

  Barbara was shattered when the family returned from a trip to Melbourne to find that it was Derek who had broken into the Casarotto household and stolen the girls' clothes. She defended him, at first, adamant that he had not left the backyard where he was fixing his bike apart from ducking up to Ron Anderson's house to borrow a tyre pump. 'I wouldn't have it that it was Derek. I couldn't see that this boy who was not rough and tumble or cruel could do what Angelina's first husband, Lallo, said he did. Lallo suspected him from the outset. I must have gone inside to do some washing when he took the chance to sneak over to their house. He must have been so stealthy and fast.'

  In January 1966 the Percy family left Khancoban, towing their caravan for their annual two-week vacation. That month, Victorian school students received their Leaving results. Ken Hosking, Kim White and Bill Hutton passed.