With all of Brown's work files missing or destroyed, that proved impossible
In July 2001, after years of legal wrangling and the jury unable to reach a verdict at his first trial, due to inadmissibility of some evidence, the then Queensland Director of Public Prosecutions, Leanne Clare, dropped the charges against Brown on the grounds that dementia rendered him unfit to stand trial. The further 28 charges of rape and sexual assault, heard only before the committal hearing, were also dropped. Police interviewed him regarding the abduction of Linda Stilwell but he told them nothing.
A year later Brown died in a nursing home. If any of his victims or their families had hoped for a deathbed confession, none was forthcoming. Brown took his dirty secrets to his grave. What he didn't take with him was the stark reality that he, like Derek Percy – both thin-faced and hollow-cheeked – bore a striking resemblance to the man seen with the Beaumont children and Ratcliffe and Gordon.
44
Why hasn't the Beaumont case been solved? Conspiracy theorists – and in South Australia, there are many – suggest protection of the culprit, or culprits. But this idea, as intriguing as it is, ignores the obvious: that for more than forty years some of the best criminal minds in Australia and overseas have turned their attention to the mystery. A cover-up of that magnitude and for that length of time seems patently absurd. A cover-up from within a paedophile ring to protect the perpetrator – and others in the group – seems much more likely.
Dr Bob Moles, who graduated in law from Queen's University, Belfast, and later completed his PhD at Edinburgh University, runs the Networked Knowledge Project, which examines alleged miscarriages of justice in South Australia over the last three decades. Despite the massive hunt for the Beaumont children by police and volunteers, it is likely there were missed clues and opportunities in the first vital days after the abduction. Police procedure in 1966 was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is today. 'We know from other cases that there have been serious deficiencies in relation to the simplest of things such as cordoning off crime scenes or keeping adequate records in forensic science and forensic pathology. Where the investigatory record is seriously and systemically flawed, it is by definition incomplete and unreliable. Genuine suspects can easily fall between the cracks in such a system.'
Lack of that age-old indefinable ingredient – luck – has also obviously eluded police in these unsolved cases. 'To any successful investigation involving serious criminal conduct there are at least three phases: the investigation, scientific evaluation and prosecution,' Moles tells me. 'Regrettably, over the last thirty years in South Australia there have been serious systemic defects in each of those aspects in the conduct of some criminal investigations. Of course, it is not possible to determine if any such defects have occurred in cases that are still unsolved and therefore not brought before the courts, such as the Beaumont case. The most that can be said is that where a system leaves diagnosable error uninvestigated, the true extent of the problem cannot be determined.'
Moles cites the case of British girl Madeleine McCann's abduction in Portugal as one of the most recent stoushes involving child abduction and inter-agency rivalry. 'If it happens now it surely happened in the '60s,' he says. 'And if South Australia has one major failing it is its parochialism. Because of its clubby, isolated nature, people with power and influence can call on mates and buddies to keep a lookout for them. It's interesting that we have one magistrate convicted of child sex offences here and another currently before the court. Are there others? The offences for which they have been charged go back over twenty to thirty years. How is it that it is only now coming to the light of day?'
I look back over the sexual predilections of the men whose activities, over the years, have brought them to police notice as possible persons of interest in the Beaumont case. It's a long list. That the Beaumont and other cases are still unsolved is frightening enough. Worse is the number of people with a fetish for children or adolescents whose names have been linked to it.
Arthur Brown and Percy seem to me, however, to be front runners. I email Graham Archer again. 'What about Derek Percy?' I ask. 'If you were a betting man, what odds would you put on him?' I'm betting Archer will know the Percy case without me having to give him background. I'm right.
'His story is a truly chilling one,' Archer says, 'and more so because he was the product of what appears to be an outstandingly normal family. The anecdotal evidence is of a young boy becoming increasing sadistic and developing a pathological hatred of women and children, which manifested in stealing female clothing from neighbours, slashing the items with razor blades and mutilating children's dolls. His parents, by all accounts, desperately tried to cover up any whisper of scandal.' Archer, however, sounds a note of caution. 'Adelaide police are doubtful that at the age of seventeen Percy would have been capable of pulling off such a difficult feat as abducting three children but he remains, as they say, "a person of interest". Of course when Ratcliffe and Gordon disappeared in 1973 Percy was under lock and key so unless von Einem is in fact the culprit, evil still remains at large. With his form, von Einem is at least a "master's apprentice" and on present knowledge the most likely candidate.'
'So, what do you think of Percy as a possibility?'
'I think he is the perfect homicidal maniac,' Archer says. 'He may be too inexperienced at seventeen but if there was hard evidence he'd been to Adelaide without his parents he'd be my stand out.'
And mine.
45
In May 2008 I receive an email from a woman called Enza. 'The year was 1967 when I was nearly abducted by who I believe might have been Derek Percy,' she writes. 'I was about six years old. I would be grateful if when you write your book, you could find out where Derek Percy was in 1967.'
1967. The year police describe as Percy's 'lost year', when he helped his father in the petrol station and drifted around looking for work until he joined the navy. I call the number Enza leaves for me and in a rapid-fire voice she expands on her story. 'I opened up the Herald-Sun newspaper in 2007 and saw his photograph, the one where he is sitting side on and pointing to the weapon he had hidden under the car seat,' she explains. 'I panicked. All I could say was, "That's him! That's the guy who nearly kidnapped me when I was in grade one."' Forty-one years later, Enza's trauma is still evident. It bugs her, she says, that she can't prove the man's identity for certain, but instinct and memory tell her that she is almost one hundred per cent positive that it was Derek Percy.
Enza was walking home from St Anthony's primary school at Noble Park, Melbourne, for lunch when she noticed a grey-blue Volkswagen parked across the school crossing. A man was standing outside the passenger door and beckoned her with his fingers to come over to the car. 'He was wearing a hat and a long grey coat,' she recalls, 'and he was tall. I was six years old, so everyone looked tall to me.' The man opened the passenger door. 'Come here,' he told her. 'I want you to show me where a street is on the map.' Enza was about 12 feet away from him. 'I knew I wasn't allowed to talk to strangers. I ran for my life. Leonard Avenue is a small street and I didn't stop for breath until I got inside the house.'
Gibbering, Enza tried to explain to her mother what had happened. 'I couldn't guess at the man's age but he wasn't as old as my parents. Mum spoke very little English but when my father came home she told him.' By 6 p.m., Enza's father reported the incident to police, but Enza was too traumatised to go to the police station with him. 'Dad would have found it hard to explain to the police, with his poor English skills, what had happened. They did not offer him an interpreter. It was all pretty useless.' The incident affected Enza so badly that until she was fifteen years old, she would not walk down the street alone.
I think about how the man tried to seduce Enza into his car. I want you to show me where a street is on the map. Again, it is chillingly similar to the line my attempted abductor used on me. Why don't you hop in and show me on the map? Or take me there?
'Have you contacted the cold case unit?' I
ask her.
'Yep. I rang Wayne Newman in 2004 when I heard they were asking for people to come forward with information. He asked me if the car the man was driving was an orange sedan and I told him it was a Volkswagen. He had it in his head that Percy drove a sedan and when I mentioned the Volkswagen I got the feeling he wasn't interested in pursuing it any further. The conversation lasted ten minutes at most and that was that. It didn't go any further.'
Enza is desperate to speak to the woman who came forward to tell police she had been the victim of an attempted abduction from Dandenong in 1967. 'Dandenong is a five minute drive to Noble Park and on the way to Flinders Naval Base,' she says. 'The cold case unit made a plea for her to come forward again. But as for me, I've never heard from them since.'
With renewed police interest in the investigation, the families of several of the murdered and missing children have been receiving correspondence from people now coming forward with information they had previously kept to themselves. Linda Stilwell's sister, Karen, receives an email from one Angela Dyer, now fifty-three, that suggests a link to her sister's abductor that may prove telling. Twelve-year-old Dwyer and a four-year-old friend used to go to the Coney Island area of St Kilda every weekend, and it was there that one day she saw a man with 'sandy brown hair' talking to a child. He wore 'army style' suit pants, she remembered, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. It was between four-thirty and five in the afternoon, and Dwyer assumed he was the little girl's father. It was not until she saw a photo of Percy in the newspaper that she realised the man's face had remained in her mind all those years. When she recognised him, she was terrified.
When I talk to Angela, she tells me she thought the man might be the child's father, but she realises now he was too young. The man and the girl had been just casually walking along, talking. It seemed like the girl was easily engaged.
The day after Linda's disappearance, Angela's parents notified the police about the man their daughter described, with dirty blond hair like one of the Beatles. Police spoke to Angela the next day at Coney Island. 'They didn't take a statement, though,' she recalls.
The failure of the police to take a statement is an oversight that Karen Stilwell finds unbelievable. 'Not only did police not follow up some of these witness statements and record them, they also failed to follow the leads given to them by Ron Anderson, who spoke to Percy about Linda and other children straight after his arrest. It has been such a balls-up. All leads should have been pursued at the time. Instead, we are left in limbo.'
Karen has set up a website, Remembering Linda, which honours her abducted sister. On it, she appeals for help from anyone who may know something. 'Our family has been traumatised enough and all we want is to find some peace,' she said. 'I appeal to any shred of decency within Percy to come forward with any information he has so that we can find the remains of my sister.'
Exactly forty years from the day Linda disappeared, the Stilwell family, now divided by internal problems, and friends came together for a long-overdue memorial service for Linda. Forty pink balloons were released outside a church in Keilor, Melbourne, and the family spoke of the little girl they loved. In an emotional admission, her mother, Jean, told those assembled that the family should have looked after her better and Karen, still rent with guilt for not returning to look for her sister properly, read a letter to Linda asking for her forgiveness.
46
I want to meet Derek Percy, face to face. Almost all his police investigators have been men; would he, I wonder, respond differently to a female writer, knowing he is the subject of his own biography? I want to gauge his personality myself; assess whether that implacable mask hides a host of secrets; whether this softly-spoken man is as clever as they say. I want to see the face of this sexual sadist whose writings delight in pain and suffering, who is outwardly normal and does not behave floridly or badly.
I want to meet the man whose life I have been tracing for a year. How does he look? Is he sketching, drawing? If he is, what is he sketching? Is he writing? If so, what is he writing? But I am only too aware of the torment that can follow these sorts of interviews, the exclusives where you have to sift the interviewees' truths from their lies, weighing their stories in the balance. The murder of Yvonne Tuohy was so disturbing, so graphic, that it was months before I could even begin to start turning the research into writing, so terribly dark and real that it beggared belief. Now I want to try and interview this man, the subject of that research. I write him a letter, polite though informal, outlining my request.
In early July 2008 I receive a letter from Len Norman, Assistant Director of the Prison Services, thanking me for my correspondence and informing me that, regardless of the willingness of prisoners to be involved with interviews with journalists, it is not in the best interest of Percy, the community, or Corrections Victoria for the interview to take place.
'The unnecessary attention this process will attract towards Mr Percy,' the letter continued, 'and the potential for such interviews to jeopardise other possible legal proceedings, means that I am unable to approve your request to interview Mr Percy.'
It is not in the best interest of Mr Percy, the Community or Corrections Victoria. Why is it not in the best interests of Mr Percy, I wonder? Granted, as I was once gruffly reminded by a correctional services officer when I made an application to interview Snowtown killer Robert Wagner, prisons are 'not the bloody Hilton'. But who is to say what an interview with Percy could reveal, an interview not staged by a police officer, psychiatrist or correctional services? Does he even know that I have tried to make contact with him? Did he receive the letter I wrote him or was it intercepted by prison authorities, opened, read and a decision made on his behalf, without his knowledge? Are authorities frightened that Percy might embarrass them by saying something he has not said earlier? With so many unsolved murders and abductions linked to him, isn't it worth a shot? Why is it not in the best interest of the community to allow an outsider in to talk to him, if he had agreed? It is the community that wants to know what he knows, that demands answers about what has happened to its children.
The letter strikes me as perfunctory, a foregone conclusion.
In May 2009 I contact Corrections Victoria to enquire whether Percy ever received my correspondence. The Acting Manager of Prisons Directorate, Emma Law, returns my call. 'I can confirm,' she tells me, 'that we have received advice from Port Phillip Prison, where Mr Percy is incarcerated, that he was not provided with your letter.'
'Oh? Why is that?'
'The reasons are outlined in the letter from Mr Norman.'
'That tells me why I couldn't interview Percy. It doesn't explain that he was not even given my letter. What is the reason for that?'
'I can only tell you what is in Mr Norman's letter to you.'
'So Percy has no knowledge of the fact that I tried to contact him?'
'No. The letter was intercepted by prison staff. I'm afraid that is the only information we can give you.' We finish the call.
Who is to say what an interview with Percy could have revealed? Who is to say?
We will now never know.
Percy is not just a prisoner; he is a hot political potato, prime media fodder. He is the caged beast whose silence makes a mockery of everyone around him. He is, as a prison officer once noted, 'Australia's Hannibal Lecter'.
47
Detective Constable Mark Travers was originally tasked with the massive job of reviewing all the files of the Allen Redston investigation and collating crime scene material. In 2006 Acting Superintendent Chris Sheehan took over as case officer on the file, in turn passing that baton to Detective Sergeant Tony Crocker in late 2008. Early in January, the three of us talk via conference call. 'Look, we need to be careful here,' Sheehan says. 'We haven't eliminated Percy from the inquiry. But if we eventually charge someone with Allen's murder, which of course we hope is the case, then any decent defence lawyer will jump on it and raise Percy as his potential kil
ler.'
'In other words,' I say, 'you can't rule Percy out, but equally you can't rule him in?'
'That's right. There are reasons for that. The key issue is that we can't place Percy in Canberra on that date but we also can't definitely say he wasn't there. He was then living with his parents at Khancoban, four hours south of Canberra, and while there is some anecdotal rumour about him visiting an aunt at Curtin, there is no proof. It was a school day and four hours is not a huge distance but how did he get there if he was on his own? Did he travel with his parents on one of their shorter trips? As far as we know he did not have a licence. Allen suffered no sexual assault and certainly not the genital mutilation of Percy's one known victim. His killer did not use a knife and the location where his body was found was not widely known. This all speaks to a degree of local knowledge of that area. It appears likely that the offender knew that materials to bind a child would be found there and probably went there for that purpose. He also knew that he would have a degree of privacy. We have a number of suspects who were all spoken to during the initial inquiries. And it is highly likely that the person responsible is one of those people.'
Sheehan proudly defends the thoroughness of the original investigation. 'Every hotel, motel and caravan park's records were checked for people who had come from out of town. They spoke to almost every boy in surrounding areas. They did a lot.'
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 28
