Beckoning her over to his car, he complained that he could not find the address and asked her to put her bike in the back of his vehicle and go with him to show him the way. It was the same line the man used in 1968 or 1969 to try to lure me into a car in Hobart.
The woman's witness statements have never been found.
The years slipped by uneventfully, the changing seasons marked by shifts in temperature and the skies that prisoners could see beyond the exercise yard: brittle blue in summer, slushy charcoal in winter, muted in autumn, pink hues in spring. And on a still, cool afternoon in late 2001, after returning from a walk in the yard, Derek was given news that his father Ernie had died from Motor Neurone Disease. He took it implacably, with just the slightest quiver of his mouth, the slightest flicker of his eyes. He was welcome to make application to attend the funeral, he was told, but he understood, of course, that permission would not be granted. In private, prison authorities aired the horror of what could go wrong if he were given a day pass: nothing short of a circus if the press got hold of the story. It'd be a fucking security nightmare. He was refused permission to attend. The funeral came and went.
In 2002, the Act was again amended to provide that major reviews were to take place at intervals not exceeding five years for detainees who had served twenty-five years in prison. Over seven days between November 2003 and March 2004, Justice Murray Kellam heard the issues that had been raised before Justice Eames: the risk of Percy re-offending, the status of his mental health and whether he still entertained sadistic fantasies.
From the outset, Kellam confirmed the custodial supervision order on the grounds that he was satisfied members of the public would be seriously endangered if Percy were released. He turned, too, to a submission by Ms Carmel Randazzo, Senior Counsel, acting for Legal Aid on behalf of Percy, that a blanket ban should be placed on publication of the proceedings. To the relief of the press, Kellam ruled against the submission. Publication of the proceedings would go ahead, he intoned, although he could not resist a slap at some sections of the media. 'I accept the weight of concern expressed . . . about the effect of past inflammatory, irrelevant and misleading information that some sections of the tabloid media and some sections of commercial talk-back radio may have engaged in, both in other cases and in relation to this case . . . But the public has a right to know the nature of the proceedings and to have information which is hopefully accurate . . . [and] there are considerations in this particular case which should be transparently public.'
Foundation Professor of Clinical Forensic Psychology at Monash Universtiy and Director of Psychological Services at Forensicare, Professor James Ogloff, gave his assessment of the case. 'It is an understatement to say that this is a unique and disturbing case,' he said. 'The horror of the situation cannot be overstated and is amongst the worst I have seen in almost twenty years of work with adult offenders . . . It is agreed that contemporary approaches to forensic crimes mental health would not result in clinicians finding that Mr Percy ever met the criteria for a major crimes mental illness and that he would not have been found Not Guilty by reason of insanity if the offence occurred today. Mr Percy does not have a major mental illness at the present time.'
Lengthy incarceration had not changed Percy's personality. Still a loner, Ogloff noted that he was emotionally withdrawn and distant, and did not engage with other prisoners. He echoed Dr Vine's opinion from the 1998 review: it was likely that Mr Percy had a personality disorder, namely schizoid personality disorder.
The schizoid personality is rare, affecting less than 1 per cent of the population. A person with schizoid personality disorder shows at least four of these characteristics: a clear and consistent preference for solitary activities; preoccupation with a fantasy life; a lack of interest in having a sexual relationship with another person; emotional coldness and affection; few, if any, close relationships, including friends or family; indifference to criticism, praise or social conventions and lack of interest or pleasure in social activities.
Percy ticks every box.
In 1969, psychiatrist Harry Guntrip further described the schizoid personality. 'For some patients . . . insensitivity becomes manifest in the extreme as cynicism, callousness or even cruelty.' He went further: removed from outer realities, sequestered in their own aloof world, the schizoid constructs an emotional moat around his or her self, perceiving reality as dangerous and keeping a safe distance from others. On a sexual level, the schizoid can be asexual or celibate, free of romantic interests and averse to sexual innuendo, at the same time capable of living a secret life of pornographic or voyeuristic interests and leaning toward compulsive masturbation or perversions. A fantasy life lived internally becomes the schizoid's substitute relationship, unencumbered by emotional connections to real people.
Introverted. Withdrawn. Superior. Depersonalised. The description by Dr Allen Bartholomew, who dealt with Percy for years, seems now perfectly, eerily accurate: 'He is the nearest thing to a robot I have met.'
The Victorian cold case unit started in 2000 under the stewardship of experienced Homicide investigator Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles, its charter to reinvestigate unsolved missing persons cases around the state and, where possible, prepare briefs for coronial inquiries. It was a new innovation: prior to 1985 the law did not require an inquest into a missing person's case.
After a decade in Ararat, Percy was moved to Port Phillip Prison, in Laverton, half an hour's drive from Melbourne's CBD, on 24 November 2003. It was a fortuitous move, closer to city police and courts.
In January 2004, senior detectives Wayne Newman and David Rae, working on the Linda Stilwell abduction, discovered newspaper reports on Derek Percy's capture for the Yvonne Tuohy murder tucked inside Stilwell's file. They also found a note, recorded at the time, from one of Percy's naval colleagues, advising Homicide to look at Percy for the Stilwell abduction, and notes on queries for the Simon Brook murder. Widening their search in an effort to exclude Percy from the list of persons of interest was like throwing a stone into a pond: even the smallest splash made huge ripples. The Tuohy file was like opening an Aladdin's Cave of depravity and the investigators became to seriously wonder whether Derek Percy was responsible for other murders or abductions interstate. The best way to check was to compare points of difference and similarities between each crime scene, which required a hard-headed, multi-jurisdictional approach. In 2004, Operation Heats – encompassing taskforces from New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory – was born.
Detectives Newman and Rae built up a profile of Percy, interviewing an exhausting number of his former school friends, family and naval acquaintances. Sometimes the reasons for their enquiries flummoxed people. 'I didn't understand at first why Newman was so interested in the story about Percy crapping in the river,' Bill Hutton tells me. 'I understand now though, of course.'
Ken Hosking was blunt with police when they interviewed him. 'I told them that if they had come to me and said that Derek's father was responsible for those murders and abductions, I wouldn't have been at all surprised. But even though I knew about the Tuohy girl's murder, I was still totally shocked to find out that Derek may be in the frame for more kids. It was unbelievable to imagine.'
In 2004, Wayne Gordes rang Crimestoppers to tell them what had happened at school, when he had jokingly accused Percy of the Wanda Beach murders, although he figured it probably wasn't much of a story. Detective Newman thought otherwise, going to Gordes' home to take a statement. 'I didn't think my story was necessarily that important,' Gordes says, 'but Newman reckoned it tied up a heap of stuff.'
Not long after Gordes gave his statement, he read an article by the Age newspaper's senior crime reporter, John Silvester, quoting him. 'I was so pissed off,' Gordes recalls. 'I'd never spoken to the bloke but I know he gets a lot of his stories straight from the coppers. I rang him and said that if he was going to quote me, he should at least have had the decency to interview me first. His
response was that the cops had given him a copy of my statement and that he had a right to publish it.'
The cold case unit re-interviewed Lachlan Percy. The family mostly toured Victoria for holidays in the 1960s, he told them. It was difficult for his father, working at the Kiewa Hydro, to get Christmas or school holiday breaks so they would take them when they could, often in September or at other times. Police knew that Allen Redston was killed in September, in Canberra. They might have passed through Canberra, Lachlan agreed. They might have.
They did go to Adelaide at one stage, too, but he couldn't recall when that was and they didn't just go away on annual holidays: there were shorter trips of three and four days to sailing regattas. He wasn't always with his brother on every holiday, he admitted. What about Wanda Beach, the officers asked? 'I don't recall ever going to Wanda Beach for a holiday with Derek,' Lachlan answered . . . 'I would not have considered he could be responsible for those murders but now I suppose anything is possible.' He couldn't remember travelling to Sydney during January 1965, he added, but it was possible. It is improbable, too, he opined, that Derek would have driven him to work in Glebe in May 1968, the day Simon Brook was murdered. But it was possible.
Jean Stilwell, now seventy-one years old, describes Newman as her hero. He contacted her early in the piece, explaining the reinvestigation of Linda's disappearance. 'I burst into tears when he told me,' she recalls. 'It was such a relief that somebody still cared about her; about us. It seemed, a few months after she disappeared, that the case was just put away, as if none of us existed. Without the work of the cold case unit, we would still be where we were forty years ago. Nowhere.' It took months, Jean said, for the cold case unit to collate the material relating to Linda's abduction. 'Papers had gone missing and patchy messages scrawled on pieces of paper. It was a real mess.'
Stillwell has been widowed for five years following the death from cancer of her third husband, with whom she was blissfully married for a decade. I wonder at the losses this attractive auburn-haired woman, reed thin and tall, has endured in her lifetime and what strength she has called on to get through it. When I meet her at her home, framed pictures of her family – including her nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren – jostle for position on the sideboard, but it is the pictures that are not there – of her daughter Karen, with whom she has long had a difficult and combative relationship, one that they are now, tentatively trying to heal – that say the most.
Jean wants Linda's case closed, once and for all. It has drained the family of normality, dogged their every footstep through to adulthood. In that one moment when Linda stepped into the void, Gary and Karen's own childhoods were stalled and suspended, parts of them inexorably left at St Kilda pier, in the shadow of Linda. 'I want a finding at an inquest or a trial that that creature is responsible for my daughter's murder,' Jean says, sipping a cup of tea in her spotlessly clean kitchen. There is a slight quiver in her hands, legacy of the nervous stress she has suffered for years. Jean admits that the only way she was able go forward was to convince herself from the outset that Linda was dead. 'I don't believe in false hope,' she says. 'It is too hard to live with that.' The day she heard that Percy was still receiving a naval pension, she was apoplectic with rage. 'That man is earning money for murdering my child.'
Newman also organised counselling for Jean, for which she is eternally grateful. 'Counselling helped me enormously. Not knowing what happened to Linda is the hardest part to bear and also imagining the terror she would have gone through. I can't bear to think about what happened to Linda between her abduction and her death. But the counsellor told me that children switch off, go into another place. That gives me great comfort.'
Jean can't bring herself to mouth Derek Percy's name. 'I think,' she says, 'that that horrible man picked Linda up.' She remembers the photographs of other abducted and murdered children that were in the press following Percy's arrest; remembers, too, the dread she felt then for her own daughter.
Newman also spoke to Graham Couch, who had walked with Percy to the garage at Mount Beauty. 'Mate, I've gotta tell you that given you walked three kilometres on your own with him such a short time before he murdered Yvonne Tuohy and he didn't lay a hand on you: you're probably the luckiest seven-year-old around. But without doubt, the only reason you were safe was because he was on his home turf and people knew he was around.'
From March 2004, when contacted by Victoria Police about the Simon Brook matter, New South Wales Detective Sergeant Adam Barwick spent countless hours preparing the file, codenamed Strikeforce Argowon, for a possible inquest, taking the case notes home and spreading them on the kitchen table. But first he contacted Donald Brook, then living in Adelaide, to keep him abreast of new developments. It was the first time that Brook had ever heard the name Derek Percy.
In early May, Barwick went to the Sydney Police Centre where evidentiary exhibits of Simon's murder investigation were being kept. He couldn't believe what he saw: a note from Detective Inspector Peter Coe of CIB, since retired, advising that all the evidence was incinerated on 15 September 1988. All Simon's clothing. The razor blades and wrappers. Every scrap of evidence, except a biological sample relating to this unsolved murder case. Barwick was staggered. What the hell were they thinking to destroy this evidence while the case was still live? Any DNA on the clothing and razor blades could have proved immeasurably valuable. Four days later, he searched the Government Records Repository for slides containing post-mortem samples. These, too, were missing. A batch of ten in the sequence containing Simon's samples were not in their trays.
That razor blade, Barwick knew, could well have had opposing DNA on it. It was unconscionable to get rid of it.
On 14 May 2004, the Herald-Sun newspaper ran a front-page splash by journalist Geoff Wilkinson headed 'Did He Kill Them?', with the strap-line: 'Police are investigating prisoner and sadist Derek Percy over a string of baffling child murders and the mystery of the Beaumont children'. Detective David Rae was apoplectic. Police needed to keep the lid on this story as best they could, at least until they saw some results. The last thing they needed was an intrusive press circling like vultures and pre-empting stories. Rae knew also that any mention of the Beaumont children, however spurious, was guaranteed to grab readers' attention.
After phone conversations with Rae and Newman, in which they discussed re-interviewing Percy for the Stilwell and Brook matters, at the end of May Barwick and Detective Inspector Robert Jarrett travelled to Melbourne to meet their Victorian counterparts. Once back in Sydney, Barwick searched police archives and pored over the case notes on Simon Brook, including photographic evidence and witness statements. Desperate to track any evidentiary material, he resorted to visiting police officers who had worked the case, retired or otherwise, to check if they had any files. At day's end, when his family was due to arrive home, he would pack up his notes, resuming the role of husband and father. But like other investigators on unsolved child murders, the brutalities that were inflicted on Simon and the shocking aftermath for his parents drove Barwick hard to effect a resolution on the case.
He hit brick walls at every turn. In early June he checked with the Road Transport Authority Certificates Unit regarding when Percy gained his driver's licence. Records, he is advised, have only been held since 1974. There is nothing to substantiate driver's licences or registrations from 1968 and even if they had been available once, all records are destroyed after seven years.
Barwick emailed microbiologist Joy Kuhl to ask her about what might have happened to the biological samples. Now that the other evidence had gone, they were precious. It was usual, Kuhl responded, to hand exhibits back to the police as there was no storage area at the laboratories. She remembered the Brook investigation, but couldn't recall how the samples left the lab.
By mid-July, frustrated and stymied, Barwick's cold case colleague, Detective Erica Nuttall, went to the Sydney Police Centre to look at all historical CIB exhibit books. She found no entry for
Brook. A check with Glebe police, who originally dealt with Simon's abduction, yielded no results either. Exhibits, she was told, were only held from the late 1990s. A search of the Sydney Crime Scene Office archives was equally fruitless. Officers now knew that if they were to bring this case to an inquest and get the desired result – a recommendation that it be referred to the Department of Public Prosecutions to consider if murder charges could be laid against Derek Percy – they were going to have to pull together a very strong circumstantial case.
Barwick set to the exhausting task of notating points of similarity between Percy's known murder of Yvonne Tuohy and the unsolved Simon Brook matter. It was a long, disturbing list of escalating deviant behaviour between 1965 and 1969: apparently normal until 1965 when he inexplicably failed his Leaving Certificate, then the Gorge incident, the 1966 assault on the Harrison girls in the caravan and his admission to Delaney and Knight that 'something came over me'; the 1967 suspicion of snowdropping clothing and the 1969 murder of Yvonne Tuohy.
'There is a four-year gap,' Barwick wrote, 'from when he first developed his fantasies and began to act them out and a three-year gap from when he first committed assaults on children. With the high level of compulsion Percy had to commit these acts, it is unlikely he would not have offended for that period of time.' Barwick also made note of Percy's documented fantasy of cutting off a boy's penis, and the fact that both Tuohy and Brook had material placed in their windpipes and their arteries cut, which Percy had written about. The list also contained reference to Percy's admission to Bartholomew that he had abducted Tuohy from compulsion and that he had thought about this for four years, and his obsession with intercourse or buggery of both boys and girls.
Barwick noted other similarities, too. Both children were abducted near water. Both had injuries consistent with attempts to strangle them. Both their throats had been cut. Both had post-mortem genital mutilation. Cause of death for both: asphyxiation. Both bodies were concealed by bushes. 'The number and manner of similarities between the two child murders is so striking,' he wrote, 'that they indicate that one perpetrator with a tendency to commit this type of crime is responsible for both.'
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 20
