Lambs to the Slaughter

by Debi Marshall

  'But isn't that because of the anomaly that he's been found not guilty by reason of insanity and he therefore does not have a criminal record?' I ask.

  'If that's the case, according to psychiatrists he was having these sordid thoughts toward children long before – actually, years before – he was arrested for the Tuohy matter, so wouldn't that make his condition pre-existing before he joined the navy? I mean, if you join the navy with a wooden leg and later say, "Look, I can't stay in because I've got a wooden leg," is that the navy's problem? Is that a pre-existing condition?' He is in top gear now, clearly apoplectic. 'When Percy joined up there were something like 19,000 people in the navy. Amongst that number, there had to be a few looney-tunes that were missed. But for all that, here is a man of very high intelligence who has either failed to disclose or deliberately hidden the fact that he had psychological problems before he signed on. Government ministers and bureaucrats don't know what to do about him so they do everything but use common sense. In the meantime, he's racked up forty years of pension money, payable by the taxpayer.' He quotes Paul Brickhill, author of Reach for the Sky: 'Rules are for the guidance of the wise and the total obedience of fools.'

  'What's the solution, then?'

  'Do what they did to O.J. Simpson. Put him in a civil court where conviction is based on the balance of probability and not, as it is in the Supreme Court, beyond all reasonable doubt. And give his hard-earned cash to his victims' families.'

  'Victims? Plural?'

  'There's no doubt in my mind about that. None at all. The terrifying thing is, if he gets to a psychiatric hospital, such as Melbourne's Thomas Embling, shaves off his beard and manages to escape, no one would ever recognise him.' He offers another quote from Judge Ronald George, who tried the so-called Hillside Stranglers in Los Angeles. 'Why should we call someone insane because he or she refuses to conform to our standards of civilised behaviour?'

  Civilised behaviour. I think about the state of Percy's car after his arrest. For a man so fastidiously tidy in his dress, a credit to the navy, his vehicle was putrid. It is as though all his unravelling, the dirty side of his life, the parts that he didn't want people to notice, were contained in the vehicle in much the same way as they are contained in his diary entries; the filth and stench, the scattered papers and food, the soiled mattress and bits of clothing. Derek Percy, in his outward life sturdy, practical, solemn; thorough, accurate and abrupt; fastidious, precise and meticulous – was there at his slovenly, sordid worst, revealing the side of himself he wanted no one else to see.

  49

  Although I have interviewed so many families in the course of my research, the one that is notable for its absence is the Percy family. Unable to locate Elaine, I manage to find a number for Ernie's brother, Frank Percy. Something he told police a long time ago has been playing on my mind. When I call the number an impersonal Telstra message greets me, but I leave a message anyway. 'Hello. I am trying to locate Frank Percy. If I have the right number, would you be good enough to call me, please?' I leave my telephone number.

  A few days later, I receive a call. 'Hello. It's Frank Percy here.' His voice is modulated and strong, though he is obviously not a young man. He seems unsurprised that I wish to speak to him about his nephew.

  I thank him for returning my call and plunge into the conversation. 'I have just read a deposition you gave police in 1968. Do you recall saying that Derek was badly ill-treated for a time?'

  There is the slightest pause. 'Did I say that, did I?'

  'You don't remember saying that?' Even with the passage of years, it seems to me an odd thing to forget. Frank was only thirty-eight years old when Derek went to prison and it had a massive impact on the family. 'Do you recall saying that?' I prompt him again.

  'I heard from my mother,' he says, 'that Derek had to do all the dirty work. But I wouldn't know if that was right or not.'

  Elaine, I know, did not get on well with her mother-in-law, who thought she was not good enough for Ernie. 'Dirty work? What did she mean by that?'

  'Oh, I wouldn't know, now.' He hasn't seen Derek, he says, since the 'troubles' and can't imagine that he ever will. 'We're not a close family, never have been,' he continues with understatement. 'I guess you could say I'm disappointed in Derek. Nothing more than that.'

  The family, he recalls, 'moved around a fair bit, which changed only when Ernie became sick with Motor Neurone Disease. They were mad keen on sailing and used to travel all over in their caravan.'

  I want to return to the subject of Derek's neglect and gingerly broach the subject of his fetishes. 'Do you have any inkling what may have caused these?' I ask.

  Another pause. 'Derek had to look after the littlies,' he says. 'He was only about ten years old himself. He had to change their nappies.'

  He had to change their nappies. He was seven when his little brother Brett died. Was this where his fetish for faeces and urine started, his sexual fascination with boys as well as girls and with severing a penis? Just a boy, changing a dirty nappy and washing his brothers' private parts? Did he find the connection arousing? I make a mental note to speak to a psychiatrist about the possibility. Percy is certainly a coprophiliac. But why?

  I have been trying to contact Percy's mother, Elaine, for months, but white pages and electoral roll searches have drawn a blank. I know she is alive but perhaps she is in a nursing home or lives with a family member. The chances are that she has a private number. Whatever the reason, I cannot find her. 'Frank, do you have a contact for Elaine Percy?' I ask him. It's more than a long shot: given the subject matter, the chances of him handing out a phone number or address of his sister-in-law he is fond of but has not seen for years are extremely remote.

  'Yeah, it's a silent number. Hang on there, mate, I'll grab it for you.' I cannot believe it: months of futile searching and now I have found it through dumb luck. 'Got a pen?' he says, rattling off Elaine's number.

  'Frank, what are the chances that Elaine will talk to me? I know she has never spoken to anyone about Derek before.'

  'She might,' he says. 'She's an affable woman. Lives with her son. It's worth a try.'

  Frank doesn't indulge thoughts that Derek may be responsible for other murders. 'No, I can't imagine that being so,' he says, diffidently. But how would he know? By his own admission he does not keep up with media reports. He quotes Mark Twain. 'If you don't read newspapers you're uninformed. If you do, you're misinformed.'

  I call the phone number given to me by Frank Percy. In forty years, Elaine Percy has never spoken to anyone in the media and only speaks to police under sufferance. My adrenaline is pumping as it continues to ring out. Finally, after what seems an interminable time, a female answers.

  'Hello?' The voice is deep, throaty, obviously that of an elderly person.

  'Hello,' I reply. 'I am sorry to bother you. I am looking for Mrs Elaine Percy?'

  'Yes?'

  'Are you Mrs Elaine Percy?'

  'Yes.' Her voice is suddenly wary. 'Who is this?'

  Two small dogs are yapping loudly in the background and she impatiently excuses herself to settle them down. When she returns to the phone a minute later, Elaine gets down to business. 'They get noisy when the phone rings. Who are you? What do you want?'

  We start talking.

  I fly across the country to meet Elaine the following week. I have told her this is a fair chance for her to talk about her son and the effects of his imprisonment on her family, a fair chance to disclose the person she knows, not the one portrayed by the press. But I have warned her, too, that I am not Derek's advocate. Elaine accepts that. Her conditions are that I do not disclose where she lives or take any photographs. I accept that.

  Friendly but with a slightly brusque air, she ushers me inside her suburban brick home and tries to shush the dogs, who are making a hell of a din. I study Elaine closely as we settle at the kitchen table, Pekinese dogs at our feet, where we will spend the next six hours talking. We like each other immediately and I
guess, correctly, that she is in her early eighties. Hair tinted a rusty orange, bright pink lipstick, roll-neck skivvy and plum tracksuit. Plump, but far from obese.

  The rented house she shares with her youngest son, Leon, is extremely tidy, if cluttered with kitsch objects and tiny knickknacks. Chaotic green and yellow curtains patterned with starfish are drawn against a weak winter sun and a checked tablecloth is strewn with the newspaper clippings that Elaine has got out for me to view. Still fiercely independent, she plays bingo, drives a car and gardens, despite suffering debilitating arthritis.

  From her birth in 1926, she tells me, Elaine's mother treated her as though she were 'not good enough'. 'I never did the right thing, according to Mum,' she remembers with a slight grimace. 'I was an only child, but we just clashed. Mum lived until she was 89 but not once did she tell me I looked pretty, or comment nicely on anything I wore.' Emotional abandonment, it seems, was her mother's stock in trade. Prior to her birth, Elaine's brother had died, aged two, of meningitis, a tragedy that Elaine later came to realise mirrored the death of her own son, Brett.

  When she was six years old, Elaine's grandmother asked her what she was doing. Innocently, Elaine looked up at her and spoke her mind. 'Mind your own business,' she retorted. The punishment from her mother for her insolence was swift. 'She marched me out of there and tied my hands behind my back, leaving me like that when we went to visit someone else later that day. Looking back, I now know I was an abused child.'

  The revelation shocks me. 'Was that the only incident in your childhood like that?' I ask, but Elaine appears suddenly awkward, as if she regrets the confession. Instinctively, I sense that there were further occasions but that she will not admit it. Why would she describe herself as an 'abused child' if it was a one-off? I think back to what one police officer told me: Don't be fooled. Mother is dominating and controlling. Father was distant. There was very likely abuse somewhere in Derek's background. I've heard it rumoured he was locked in cupboards, perhaps by Gran.

  'Is there any way your mother could have abused Derek when he was young, when he stayed with her at The Entrance?' I ask. Elaine looks at me, hard. 'No, I could swear that she didn't. Why do you ask that?'

  'It is common to see childhood abuse amongst people who commit the type of crime Derek has. Your mother punished you – why would she not have punished him?'

  'Good Lord, no! She wouldn't punish him without telling us.'

  'He stayed with her on his own. How would you have known?'

  'We wouldn't have left him if things hadn't been okay there,' she assures me. 'I don't remember anything bad.' No, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen, I think, but don't say. Children locked in cupboards, for example – a suggestion mooted as a possibility for Derek – very often develop coprophilia. There is a suggestion that he was locked in cupboards and hogtied when Gran wanted to punish him. 'Are you sure that nothing happened, Elaine?'

  There is something in Elaine's voice, something irritating that grates; more than a hint of a country drawl but a slight, almost imperceptible whine when she is being defensive. 'I've answered that question,' she grizzles. 'Why don't you believe me?' It's time to change the subject.

  I am unsure how much Elaine knows of Derek's fetishes and couch the question in as delicate a way as possible. 'Derek was toilet-trained normally, was he?'

  Elaine doesn't hesitate. 'Yes, he was. He was very easy to train, took to it easy.'

  'There were some early signs that things weren't quite, um, right with Derek.' I fumble to find words that will not offend. What I want to say is, Do you know of any reason why your son gets sexual excitement from excreta and sadism? But I can't bring myself to ask her so bluntly. Instead, I bolster the questions with a subject with which I know she is familiar. 'Can you think why he may have been interested in dressing in girls' clothing?'

  Her answer is immediate. 'No. I always had to be covered up around the house. That's just the way I am.' This is not the question I asked and I am surprised at her defensive answer, but a picture suddenly emerges of a conservative, sexually repressive household in which Derek Percy's childhood and adolescent fantasies had to flourish in secret because any talk of sex was strongly discouraged. 'I didn't have anything to do with talking about those things,' she admits in a tone that suggests she thought it somehow embarrassing. 'Ernie did that. They never asked me questions or anything.' And what, I think would she have done if Derek had opened up to her? Even normal sex education was not open for discussion in front of her, so what hope would Derek, a deeply troubled adolescent recognising now that he was different from other boys, have had of admitting the sordid sexual fetishes that inhabited his fantasy world?

  Elaine didn't enjoy a good relationship with Ernie's mother, who, she recalls, didn't think she was right for Ernie. 'She wasn't at all happy that we married. She was a bit like my mother – not lovable or cuddly.' What must it have been like for the boys, I wonder, having to visit both grandmothers, neither of whom was lovable or cuddly, emotionally frigid women who made them keep a respectful distance? I recall what Frank Percy told me on the phone: that it was his mother who had made the observation that Derek was neglected and badly treated for a time after Lachlan was born. Did she say it out of spite – or was it true?

  Elaine is pottering in the kitchen, making us a brew. 'Was Derek ever confronted by anything abnormal in his childhood?' I ask her.

  'Not that I know of, no. He shared a bedroom with Lachlan at Warrnambool and at Jesmond but Lach never noticed anything unusual, anything that made him suspicious.' She spent a lot of time with her kids, she adds, teaching them good manners. 'Today's children,' she offers, 'you wonder if they've been brought up at all.'

  Elaine remembers hearing the news about a young girl taken by a man in Victoria. A short time after, they received a knock on the door from police telling them of Derek's arrest. Elaine has 'no time for cops', she says. The family had never been in trouble with the law and it came as a terrible shock to have them on her doorstep. 'Right from the start they were nasty. Atrocious, as though I had something to do with what Derek did.' The next day, they came back to the Percy house in Jesmond and took his belongings. 'That wasn't the end of it,' she sighs. 'When the cops started looking at Derek again in 2004, they paid us another damn visit.'

  On 13 August 2004 Detective Senior Constable David Nicoll knocked on the door at 8.30 in the morning and flashed the search warrant made out by a magistrate. 'There was a dame from New South Wales Police with them and two men,' Elaine recalls. 'The woman had an arrogant attitude and the men weren't much better.' She was still in her dressing gown and Leon was in the shower. 'I told them he was showering but they didn't believe me, said they couldn't hear him.'

  Nicoll handed Elaine the warrant, which she now shows me. 'I am satisfied there are reasonable grounds for suspecting evidence of the commission of an offence is at this place . . . That Derek Percy on the 11th day of January 1965 in the state aforesaid of New South Wales did murder Marianne Schmidt and further Christine Sharrock and further on the 18th day of May 1968 did murder Simon Brook . . .' The warrant continued that police could search and seize any and all documents, including those from the navy and any notes, letters, diaries, journals and photos [relating to the] whereabouts, movements, or travels of Derek Percy and the Percy family.

  The police stayed for hours, poking around rooms and going through boxes and bags, eventually leaving with Elaine's knitting machine and a bunch of family photographs. 'They came upstairs with a heap of loose photographs and asked me if that was all I had. I wasn't going to help them in their search.' Stubbornly, Elaine stood back and watched them. 'They were there most of the day,' she says, bitterly. 'I never offered 'em even a cup of tea. Getting us up before breakfast and denying Leon was in the shower – they got nothin' from me.'

  The police gave Elaine a Field Property Receipt of what they took, written on four sets of carbon. 'Look at it! It's impossible to read,' she says indignantly, thrusting it i
nto my hands. I squint at the writing. She is right: It is illegible, most words faded beyond recognition. 'What happened to the machine and photos?'

  'They returned the machine and even though I told 'em I didn't want it, they left it here. I don't know why they even wanted it.'

  I tell her about them checking for evidence at Allen Redston's crime scene. 'Oh, how ridiculous!' she snorts. 'I never made a tie on that machine. I might have made one school jumper each, but I never made a tie on it.' Police did not return the photos. 'I've never seen 'em again. The only one I have seen is a picture of Derek when he was eight years old that flashed up on television. Someone in the police force must have slipped the picture to a reporter.'

  'Why don't you contact the police and ask for the photos back?' I venture.

  'Wouldn't give 'em the satisfaction. I want nothin' to do with 'em.'

  In an interview I had with a psychiatrist prior to meeting Elaine, he told me that though it was not common knowledge, Derek used to take his own photos and develop them in a dark room. What were those photographs of? Scenery? Sailing boats? Naked children, surreptitiously snapped when no one was watching? Were they part of the photos that police wanted to see, as well as family snapshots showing where the family had been on holiday?

  Elaine admits that she shredded all letters from Derek that the police missed that day, in case they returned. 'What sort of letters?' I ask, stunned. 'Letters from Derek were on their search warrant. What was in them?' She hesitates, flutters her hands, vaguely irritated. 'Oh, just letters.' Just letters? From Derek to the family? From Derek to himself, his dark fantasies? Or letters that could have specifically outlined his movements? Nothing that Derek Percy penned would be just letters. If they were innocuous family letters, why would she shred them? And if they weren't, how did police miss them when they raided their home in 1969? And did Derek, prior to his arrest, have a secret hiding place where he kept his pornographic material?