Elaine didn't volunteer, either, to show police the slide photographs that she has and they didn't ask. 'Thank God they didn't know that they exist,' she says, giving a sly chuckle and clearly pleased with having outsmarted them. 'They'd still be here.'
'You don't like police, do you?'
'Nope. And I don't have any time for prison officers, either. They treat you like dirt, as if I'm the one who did the crime. Once, it took me five interstate phone calls to be informed that Derek had been shifted to another prison. He's at Port Phillip now.' I don't tell her that the most likely reason he has been moved there is to be within closer reach of the law if police do decide to press further charges.
50
Derek's arrest had wider repercussions: the minute news got out, the Percys had to close down the service station and were told to leave their flat at Jesmond. 'The owners didn't want us there after that, mate.' Leon was then only seven years old and with the story dominating headlines, he had to leave his school.
Elaine is very close to her youngest son, a bond undoubtedly strengthened during those early days when she had to protect him from news about what his brother had done. 'When something like this hits a family, it's indescribable. It injured him for the rest of his life. Both boys, actually.' She pauses. 'I don't remember what I did when police told me what had happened. I haven't cried for years but I would have done, then. It was a major shock to the body.'
The family moved to a flat at West Ryde and tried to start again. Seeking to protect their other sons, they got on with their own lives as soon as possible. 'Words wouldn't cover what we went through. If we could have stopped this happening, we would have. But what's done is done and we've got this far without the press badgering us. I decided after Ernie died that if anyone asked I would say that Derek had passed away. I mean, nobody asked where he was at Ernie's funeral. Only two of our neighbours know he even exists.' Dumbfounded and heartbroken, she says she and Ernie never discussed what had happened. 'There was nothing to discuss. The shock took over and there was nothing we could do to undo it. Derek was just about to turn twenty-one. He could have had such a good life.' I wait for her to add and so could the poor girl he killed, but she doesn't say it.
She never asked Derek why he killed 'the girl', whom she does not once name, all day. 'I didn't like the thought of talking about it. It was terrible.'
Now I turn to speculation regarding Derek's involvement in other child crimes. 'What is your opinion, Elaine?' I ask her.
She doesn't hesitate. 'I do not believe Derek has been involved in any other murders,' she says, emphatically. 'He never gave us any reason to suspect that he was. Ever.' I gently remind her that Simon Brook's second inquest showed Derek to be a person of interest but the DPP didn't think they had enough evidence to successfully prosecute. She digs her heels in. 'We asked him at the time, straight out,' she says. 'We said to him, "Are there any others, son?"'
'And what did he say?'
Elaine raises her shoulders, shakes her head. 'I can't remember his answer.' This directly contradicts what she tells me later in the same interview when I ask her the same question. This time, she clearly remembers that his answer was an unequivocal ' "no" '. I did no more murders,' she says he told her. But Elaine contradicts herself again. 'I was not convinced. I don't know if he's committed any more. Having done what he did I wouldn't take what he told me as full truth.' Doubting him, she got into the habit over the years of writing down the dates of where the family had been to rebut suggestions by police that Derek was responsible for other murders and abductions. 'If the cops and media want to think he did more, let 'em. I know different. I've got dates and things.' But now she can't find them. She has looked everywhere for that piece of paper to show me, she says; has 'gone silly trying to find it'. Maybe, she muses, she may have accidentally thrown it out. She pauses. 'I can't believe he's responsible for anything else. I just can't.'
She no longer misses Derek, she says. It is too long ago, now; he has been in gaol more than forty years. 'How could I still miss him?'
'Well, I guess because he's your son?'
'No, not after what he did. I don't forgive him. How anyone could do that.' She is still skirting around what that is. 'He let us down. He really did. No, I wouldn't say I loved him. Not now.'
Soon after the murder she saw a news article about Derek. 'I couldn't believe it was my son.' She veers wildly between blaming him for his own actions – 'it's not like he was a child' – and deftly separating his responsibility from the family's. 'I am not ashamed of him,' she says. 'Something must have snapped in his brain that day.' But what about the other days, I think, the tortured, obscene scribbles that Elaine knew about and the incident in the caravan, when Derek was sent to the doctor on his own and they never followed it up?
Derek, she tells me, witnessed a close mate kill himself on a naval ship. She knows none of the details – not the friend's name, where it happened or how. But, she ruminates, perhaps that was the turning point for Derek because 'it' – Yvonne Tuohy's murder – happened just after.
Elaine has a way of flicking things off with a dismissive air if she thinks the idea absurd. 'I have heard that you set an extra place and an empty plate at the Christmas table for Derek and took of a photo of it, which he keeps in his cell?' I say.
'What rot!' she explodes. 'People misconstrue things. I was good enough to send him a photo of home, that's all. He probably hadn't seen a photo in years. I thought it was a nice thing to do. That plate was probably just waiting for me to put food on it!' She returns to the subject a minute later. 'I'd like to know who dug up that story! I'd ring their neck. We don't even have Christmas dinner!'
She looks exasperated when I ask where Derek used to go to on his own. 'He didn't go anywhere on his own! Never! They weren't like teenagers today. He went nowhere.' She is smarting that police paid her sixty-year-old niece a visit to inquire as to whether Derek had visited her in Canberra when Allen Redston was murdered. 'All they managed to do was upset and annoy her,' she comments.
Elaine admits that when Derek was fifteen and Lachlan fourteen she and Ernie left them alone for four days while they went to Sydney to have Leon christened in the Church of England. 'There was no harm in it,' she tells me. 'They'd been taught how to look after themselves.'
But Elaine has told me earlier Derek was never out of her sight. This is at odds with him staying with the Hosking family at Mount Beauty, with his grandmother in 1967 at The Entrance and now on his own with Lachlan.
'Never, Elaine?' I press her. She fingers a daintily adorned plate with green and pink flowers, tracing its pattern as she contemplates my question. 'Until Derek went into the navy he was never apart from us. I've told the police this, over and over. But it goes in one ear and out the other.'
She is at particular pains to point out that he was nowhere near Adelaide when the Beaumont children disappeared, an assertion she later puts in writing. In January 1966, she says, she, Leon and Derek were returning home from Newcastle in the car when they heard about the Beaumont incident. 'We had been in Newcastle because Derek wanted to watch the English cricket team play. We picked him up after and bought the daily newspaper with the school's Leaving results. His wasn't in there because he had failed; something you don't forget easily!'
On the same trip, while shopping in Albury, they left their Pekinese dog, Snowy, tied up in the car. When they returned, they found that Snowy had jumped into the back seat and, entangled in the rope, had hanged himself. They rushed to the vet in the next street but were unable to revive him. I have a vivid sense of the trauma that Derek must have felt in finding the dog he loved dead in the heat of the car; and then I have another thought: is it possible, despite Elaine's apparent memory of events, that Derek was in the car with the animal while his family went shopping? Killers – particularly those who gain enjoyment from the kill – frequently practise their perverse art on vulnerable animals.
'The thing is,' Elaine continues, 'the cops reckon
Derek was in South Australia when those children went missing but he wasn't. He was with us when we were returning home to Khancoban, via The Entrance.'
'Did Derek ever have a fall and hit his head when he was younger?' I ask her. It is known that many psychopathic killers have suffered frontal lobe damage, caused by accidents, falls or a blow to the head which effectively shuts down the circuitry that allows them to care about other people's pain or suffering.
She considers the question. 'When I was four months pregnant with Lachlan, my mother and I took Derek up to northern New South Wales for a break. The roads weren't completely sealed and as I was walking off the footpath, holding Derek in my arms, I fell and busted all the skin around my knee. An ambulance took me to hospital where I stayed a week. I can't remember, but maybe Derek hit his head when he fell. He was only eighteen months old.'
'Who did Derek stay with while you were in hospital?' I ask.
'My mother.'
Elaine is at pains to tell me her fifty-nine-year marriage to Ernie was 'perfect'. 'He was a gentleman, never lifted a hand to me.' I am tempted to ask if she gauges this as the criterion for a good marriage and why she feels it necessary to reiterate how happy her marriage was, but I refrain. I think this is another way for her to distance herself from her son's heinous behaviour. He did a crime, we had to take it all well and good. But he had a good upbringing. There was nothing wrong in our household. We had a perfect marriage.
Neither she nor Ernie noticed that anything was wrong with their oldest son, she says, and she is certain that Ernie had no favourites amongst the boys. But, she admits, she doesn't know what he thought about Derek. 'You can't tell how a father would feel about his son.' It's an enigmatic comment, one I don't understand, but she does not wish to elaborate, beyond repeating what she has just told me. 'Ernie had no favourites.' Derek, she says was the 'most prettiest baby'. He was 'way too pretty to be a boy'.
I had hoped that she would raise the subject of Brett's death, and I can't avoid it any longer. 'What effect do you think that losing his baby brother may have had on Derek?'
'Who knows?' she answers, slowly. 'Maybe that triggered something deep within him? I don't know what a child's brain will absorb.'
'Did Derek go to the funeral?'
'Yes, he did. But I don't know if he went to the crematorium with his father. I didn't go.' Elaine admits she has set ideas and doesn't go to funerals, apart from to Ernie's. 'I didn't even go to my little son's, except to the service. I won't attend Derek's, either, if I receive word that he has died in prison.'
51
How accurate is Elaine's memory? I wonder. For a woman in her eighties she is astute, switched on, but on some subjects she is vague and unsure. I don't know how much detail she has on Yvonne Tuohy's murder and so I tread carefully. 'Elaine, do you know the name of Derek's victim?'
She shakes her head. 'No.'
'Do you know any details of what happened to her?'
'No. I don't dwell on it. I only know the scarce details.'
'Do you know the girl was twelve years old?'
'No. I didn't know that.' This seems inconceivable at best, ridiculous at worst. Heartbroken and bewildered, Elaine had sat outside the court for six long days while Derek was on trial. She read the newspapers. She spoke to police. She would have had to be blind and deaf to have missed the sordid details; either that, or hiding behind what Simon and Garfunkel called the 'Sounds of Silence', I wonder, too what she understands of Derek's memory. 'I've got no idea what his memory is like,' she says. 'It's never come up for me to have to test his memory.'
She recalls a conversation she had with her son, Lachlan. 'He said, how would Derek have the sense to get away with the Simon Brook murder? And I said to him, he wouldn't.' Derek's IQ is far above the national average. How hard would it be to get away with the murder of a defenceless three-year-old boy? By the time of Simon's murder, Derek had learned to drive in his mother's Datsun. He was on weekend leave. Did he borrow her car that morning? He initially told police that he drove Lachlan to work that day in Glebe before he changed his story and said he didn't know what he would have been doing driving around Sydney when he didn't think he even had a car at that stage. How does Elaine explain his first admission? Her answer is flatly simple: 'He lied to the cops.'
We move through what Elaine and Ernie knew of Derek's odd behaviour at Mount Beauty and Khancoban. She is adamant that she knew nothing of the snowdropping rumours. 'Definitely not. No, I didn't know about that.' In a small place like Mount Beauty, filled with gossiping women and adolescents who thought Derek strange and working class blokes with little patience for those sorts of shenanigans, surely the dogs would have been barking these rumours? How could she not have heard about it?
'What about the incident in the caravan with the young girls?' I ask. Both she and Ernie, she admits, knew about that incident. 'I didn't say a lot to him about it, but Ernie grounded him. I went to the door of the doctor with him but didn't go in. Anyway, the doctor passed it off as nothing serious, a thing he would grow out of. We did what we reckoned was enough to set things right. We did what we thought we had to.' She shrugs. 'We thought it was a one-off.'
This does not stack up against what Ernie Percy told Detective Bradstreet when he interviewed him at the Shell Auto Port in Wallsend on 13 August 1969. 'Mr and Mrs Percy arranged for Derek to attend Dr Webber's surgery, and told the boy to ask the doctor to contact them if any treatment was required,' Bradstreet wrote. 'The parents did not hear from the doctor and in actual fact they did not know whether Derek attended the surgery or not, although the suspect told them that he had and that the doctor said that in time he would grow out of acting in such a manner.' The parents did not hear from the doctor and in actual fact they did not know whether Derek attended the surgery or not. Why would Elaine tell me such a blatant untruth?
Elaine grimaces when she recalls hearing about police finding Derek's writings in the warehouse. 'They didn't bother to warn me about it. I just saw it on the television news.' Again, she says, her world was changed in an instant. 'I had no one to talk to about it. My other sons won't discuss it.' She fretted for weeks, sleeping badly and quietly cursing police for not giving her the courtesy of telling her what they had found. What Elaine heard disturbed her greatly. 'I was so disgusted with what was in that warehouse, I thought, this is the living end. I didn't send Derek a Christmas or birthday card after that.' Elaine only got in contact with Derek after he sent her a birthday card, and she wrote him a perfunctory card back, signing it, Love Mum.
'What would you say to him now, Elaine, if you talked to him?' I ask.
She sighs. 'I'm so disgusted and disappointed in him that all I would ask him is, why, Derek?'
'Is he insane, do you think?'
'Well, he wouldn't do what he did for fun, would he? You'd have to be out of your mind, wouldn't you?' It sounds like the last refuge of a bewildered mother with nowhere mentally to go, grasping at a reason for unfathomable behaviour. 'My aunt's child committed suicide many years ago so I reckon that there's a mental streak somewhere in our family. I mean, he wouldn't do what he did for fun, would he?' she repeats.
Elaine hasn't seen Derek since 2000, the year before Ernie died. She hates flying and to travel a long distance by road is out of the question at her age. 'Ernie was heartbroken about what had happened and it wore on him heavily. We just couldn't understand why.'
'What about Lachlan and Leon, now they are adults? Do they see Derek?'
The chess games Percy played with Lachlan had long stopped. Lachlan visited his brother once but vowed never to go again. His marriage broke down, partly as a result of the ongoing trauma in his family, and he no longer admitted to anyone that Derek Percy was his brother. Embarrassed and ashamed, Lachlan distanced himself completely. Leon has never married; now in his late forties he shares a house with Elaine and keeps busy with cars, cricket and computers. Though Elaine describes him as an 'absolute wonder', he refuses to talk to her about Der
ek. It's all best left alone, he says. All of it.
I glance at my watch. Elaine and I have been talking for six hours. 'I've taken up a lot of your time,' I say, standing to leave. 'I'm going to get out of your hair now.'
'No, don't say that,' she admonishes. 'I've enjoyed having you.' She presses a crocheted doily she has made into my hands. 'Here, have this. Something from me.' She stands and sees me to the door, both yapping dogs in full flight behind.
'Do you have a photo of Derek in your purse?' I ask her.
'No,' she answers, immediately. 'I don't want people to know he's my son. To be honest, I'd be grateful if someone rang and said he had died in prison. He's had a hell of a life but he's brought it all on himself. I'm being selfish, I know, but it has taken its toll.'
On the long flight home, I ponder what a sad life Elaine has had, in many ways; the heartache of losing one son to diphtheria and another to prison. I go over my notes of the interview. Some of the things Elaine told me just don't seem to stack up. But what at first felt like a good 'get' in journalism now feels like I am betraying an elderly woman's trust. It makes me uncomfortable; betrayal is not in my nature. I go over and over in my head the terms on which we agreed to talk. You understand this is your opportunity to tell your side of the story, but that I am not Derek's advocate? You understand that this story is about him and his possible involvement in other child abductions and murders and that whatever I find, I will use? And she had agreed. She understood. I start checking some facts against what Elaine has told me.
Derek wanted to watch the English cricket team play. Where did they play over the summer of 1965/66? I check the internet. England had its third test in Sydney from 7 to 11 January 1966. The fourth test was in Adelaide, 28 January to 1 February 1966. The Beaumont children disappeared in Adelaide on 26 January. Was Derek, a cricket fanatic, in Adelaide with his family to watch that test, or on his own? Would Elaine, the woman described by everyone who met her as an overprotective mother, tell me the truth if he was? Has she established an elaborate alibi for her son?
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 31
