I leave some examples of Percy's writings on his desk for him to peruse. 'There isn't much to laugh about in the Percy story, I'm afraid.'
'No, you're right,' he agrees, opening the door. 'Not much to laugh about at all. Ring me in a few days when I've had a look at his writings.'
Dr Sale gets straight to the point when I call him. 'These writings are so disturbing, so totally grotesque, that in thirty-one years in psychiatry I have never read, seen or heard anything like it. They are organised, detailed and leave me in no doubt that he was aroused when writing them and that he savoured every word. This man is definitely not insane, he simply has extreme sexual deviancy.'
'Are they enlightening about what may have caused that?'
'They are almost childlike, infantile, which indicates to me they had their origins in childhood.' Sale is right: Percy's fixation with women, with making babies and the juvenile way he describes sex and procreation seem very childlike, luridly confused with pornographic images. 'So I put my cock in your hole . . . then a certain stuff (sperm) mixes with some stuff . . . and makes a baby start growing. About eight months later, the baby comes out.' The way he describes imaginary conversations and writes about how he wants to cut all the hair off his victims – women, boys and girls – and put dresses on them.
'Percy indulges in fantasies of wearing plastics, for example, and of other children doing the same,' Sale continues. 'Look, you really have to wonder if this boy was exposed to the most unpleasant abuse. You really, really have to wonder.'
'The assumption is that these fantasies started in his adolescence,' I say. 'Do you think they could have started earlier?'
'Given what is known about him now, there are indications of long-standing paraphilias which in my belief would very possibly have shown itself in strange behaviours in primary school. Fire setting and cruelty to animals are classics in younger people. The risk is that the family dealt with it but did so with a sense of denial, perhaps failing to understand this boy's behaviour. Some people are born sociopaths, and sometimes you can't get to find out why that is.'
'Do you mean,' I ask, 'that we are, today, on a relentless quest for answers, for reasons, where there may be none?'
'Sometimes,' Sale agrees. 'Sometimes.'
He pauses. 'When we met the other day you used the word "alibi". That implies an act of trying to deceive. But very often, it is the defence that people erect to try and protect themselves from dreadful things.' A journalist once asked him, he continues, whether Martin Bryant was mad or bad. 'My answer was that he was wired badly. Derek Percy isn't. He's very bright and very, very deviant. In my opinion he has no prospects for rehabilitation. The recidivism rate amongst paedophiles, particularly those who victimise boys, is awfully high, higher than for any other sexual crime. Percy will remain at risk of re-offending until he is too physically frail to hurt someone.'
'I have one last question. What is your opinion of Percy receiving a pension?'
'Well, he's certainly not incapacitated for work in any way,' Sale says. 'It is inconceivable that it could ever be argued that his naval service was a cause of his problem. Perhaps pensioning him off as they did was simply an expeditious way for the navy to get rid of him for the embarrassment he caused.'
53
One of the problems with investigating Percy was that police did not have a sample of his DNA. By law, police in Victoria can take DNA samples from anybody convicted of a crime but Percy, found not guilty by reason of insanity, has never been convicted. It is a legal loophole that politicians have tried to close. In 2004 a Parliamentary Law Reform Committee in the Victorian Parliament began public hearings. One of the tabled suggestions was that this loophole be eliminated so that DNA samples could be taken from people like Percy. The Attorney-General, Rob Hulls, announced he would consider making this change but as yet, this legislation has still not been passed. If police had to check Percy's DNA against that found at a crime scene, they would need to convince a magistrate that there was fresh or compelling new evidence to warrant it The same law that has deemed him not guilty by reason of insanity is the same law that protects him.
Barbara Hosking is petrified that 'do-gooders' may quietly demand Derek's release back into the community. 'I am frightened of what he is capable of doing, even now,' she tells me, a slight waver in her voice. 'I hope to God he is never allowed out. Ken once commented to me that he would see Derek in hell first. I feel the same way. But,' she adds, 'other suspects need to be looked at as well for crimes that Derek may be responsible for. He shouldn't be made a scapegoat without evidence.'
Her son, Ken is not as solicitous. 'Derek frightens me, even today,' he says. 'I have lots of grandchildren and I know that if he could find our house in Gladstone Park as he did, turning up out of the blue when we hadn't seen him for a few years, then he could find where I live now. The last thing I want is Derek Percy on my doorstep. He's an animal, a truly savage human being.'
'Do you think he's insane, Ken?' After twelve months researching this story, my own view reflects that of many psychiatrists and police officers: that far from being insane either at the time of his arrest or now, Derek Percy is a cunning, dangerous and sadistic child killer who cannot be trusted to be released back into the community and who cleverly feigns loss of memory in order to protect himself from being linked to any other crimes.
'I find it strange,' Ken answers, 'that for a person who was brilliant at school and who had such an excellent memory, he can now apparently remember nothing. But he'd have to be insane to have done what he did, don't you think? And to have such bizarre and vulgar fantasies? It's certainly not normal behaviour.' It's a refrain I have heard many times before, a way for people to try and comprehend the incomprehensible: he must be insane to have done what he did. How else could he have done it?
Derek Percy's favourite hobbies were sailing and cricket. In January 1965 he was on holidays in Sydney. Did he go to watch the moth-class yacht championships at Botany Bay, the only time in a decade they were held there? In January 1966 the English test was on in Adelaide, an event that only happened every four years. Did he go alone or with his family to watch that, hanging around the beach two days before it started? He had opportunity to be in Noble Park in 1967, Dandenong in 1968 and Mornington Peninsula in 1969, when three young girls were almost abducted by a man they are sure was Percy. He was in Hobart twice during the same year that a man attempted to abduct me. Coincidence? In 1968 Percy was at the top of his game with time on his hands and overwhelming compulsions, driven by lewd fantasies. Coincidence? I doubt it.
He was on weekend leave in Sydney when Simon Brook was murdered and on leave in Melbourne when Linda Stilwell disappeared. And tragically for Yvonne Tuohy, he had the weekend off when he happened upon her and Shane Spiller at the beach. Percy has all the hallmarks of a serial killer. Not just opportunity and motive and means, but lead-up offences, too: voyeurism and peeping tom behaviour. Snowdropping. Theft. Mutilation of clothing. Hiding knives and razor blades. A bizarre fascination with blood. Minor sexual assaults: Linda Blue at Mount Beauty, 1964, the two girls in the caravan, 1966. How many others were unreported?
Police did not have the technology at their fingertips then that they do today. The fastest way to contact their interstate colleagues was by a laborious trunk-line call, connected by a switchboard operator. Trunk-line call for . . . Connecting you now. Telegrams, delivered to front doors, were used in emergencies or if a person did not have a telephone. Please call. Stop. Father ill. Stop. There were no computers or email, no linkage of crime scene information or violent crime MO, no way of comparing fingerprints and no DNA testing. Mobile phone technology was years in the future, air travel expensive and ground travel slow. A killer could be in another state as fast as a police officer could alert interstate colleagues of a crime.
Four of the children – Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont and Linda Stilwell – have simply vanished. Police have no bodies, no specific abduction point or murder scene, no
dumping ground, no eyewitnesses and no weapon. Without any of these, they have no way of knowing if the killer has left behind any forensic evidence at the scene.
Despite the obvious social and sexual problems that plagued Derek Percy and the strange behaviours he exhibited witnessed by school friends, family and neighbours, nothing was ever done. Prior to his arrest in July 1969, Percy was a 'cleanskin' – not known to police for any crime, however petty. One way or another, through a fatal, cataclysmic combination of people turning a blind eye, not wishing to become involved or choosing to forget about him when he moved towns, Percy managed to float under the police radar. The consequences could not have been more tragic.
Is the person who murdered Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock, Allen Redston, the Beaumont children, Simon Brook and Linda Stilwell so damn good at what he does that he has left police in his wake? A conversation I had with a former police officer in Western Australia, when I was writing a book on the unsolved case of the Claremont serial killer, comes back to me. 'Sometimes, you've simply got someone who is so bloody good that they don't leave many clues,' he said. 'Sometimes, police just don't get the lucky breaks they need. And sometimes, they don't recognise that break when they get it.'
Prior to 1975, unless there were exceptional circumstances, no missing person's files were computerised. 'It was like these kids never existed,' former police officer Gordon Davie tells me. 'Nobody knows how many sick pricks were around. The good ones sometimes got away.' The good ones. Like the Claremont serial killer. Thirteen years after he abducted and murdered three women, police are still no closer to charging anyone. 'These killers start mirror imaging what happened to them,' Davie says. 'They start slow and move on to killing and then mutilating. A petty thief doesn't start with the Great Train Robbery. He builds up to things.'
Slowly, slowly.
Softly, softly.
EPILOGUE
I never did make that phone call to my publisher. I could not work out a way to tell the victims' families I was dropping the project, without it sounding trite, like I didn't think their children's lives and deaths were important. Somewhere between piecing together the story of Derek Percy, the tantalising glimpses of the man offered in thousands of pages of depositions, trial reports and interviews; somewhere between the hundreds of newspaper clippings and autopsy reports; somewhere between the tears of the victims' families and my own tears as I collated research, between sleeping and waking and thinking and writing, I came to understand that this story had to be explored. Elaine Percy's sensibilities about her son, her pleas that no good could come of this, were nothing compared with the suffering of the children whose abductions and murders stole their voices, whose abductions and murders robbed them of identity. The telling of their stories would give these children some significance, some triumph, however small. At some point, while piecing together the story of Derek Percy, I realised that publishing the story might just jog a memory, or stir a conscience. It might do some good after all.
For the umpteenth and final time, I consider the possibilities of just what Derek Ernest Percy is capable of, just how many crimes this man with the monstrous sexual pathology and overwhelming urge to hurt children may have committed and just how terrifying and terrible it is to admit that if he is not responsible then there is someone else out there, who is. Terrifying and terrible, too, the thought that while many serial killers keep trophies, Derek Percy keeps his writings. His writings, that he salivates over in private, his own sordid world, where no one can intrude. That which is written cannot be erased.
For the umpteenth and final time, I compile a random list of what I know about Derek Ernest Percy, the odd package that makes up this man: his personality traits, known background, apparent triggers and idiosyncrasies. And I realise that this polite, nondescript character with frigid, staring eyes, who moves quietly between night and day, accepting of his lot, utterly institutionalised; who has outlasted three of his prisons and scores of his gaol-mates and who is servile bordering on obsequious; who sequesters himself from prison strife and does not give up his secrets; this robotic man whose one known crime was so savage, so unforgivable that no society, civilised or otherwise, would embrace him back into its fold, whom no society, civilised or otherwise, would not shun, is as enigmatic to me as the three Beaumont children, those children whose names haunt us, whose story speaks of lost innocence and childhood, or that feisty little girl, Linda Stilwell, whose personality sparkled like the constantly changing colours of the kaleidoscope at Luna Park, who stepped from St Kilda pier into history's black void, her footnote, immemorial, 'Missing, presumed murdered.'
The stories of these children have become a part of me now, their names and personalities so familiar it is as though I huddled with Christine and Marianne myself, as they penned lovelorn notes in their diaries and planned their adventure to Wanda Beach; heard the giggles of Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont before their laughter suddenly stopped; sauntered down the street with Allen Redston like Huck Finn with his side-kick, Tom; tousled Simon Brook's hair before he jauntily stepped outside to play in the front yard of his house in that safe, secluded corner of Sydney; tumbled recklessly down the hill with Linda Stilwell in the gaudy illumination of sideshow alley's lights, against the echoing rasps of the showman promising every child wins a prize; and cradled Yvonne Tuohy in my arms to soothe her terror, as she softly cried for her mother.
Derek Ernest Percy. The Ghost, the Spook, the Phantom. Nondescript, isolated, blending into the crowd, sly and elusive as a fox in the high country, slinking silently on cushioned paws over the soft, powdery snow. Leaving no tracks, standing in the shadows, watching, waiting.
Watching, waiting.
Circling, circling, closer, closer.
Lambs to the slaughter, mauled and savaged till only bones left.
Till only bones left.
DEREK ERNEST PERCY TIMELINE
15 September 1948 – Derek Percy, the first son for Elaine and Ernest Percy, is born in Strathfield, New South Wales.
1954 – Attends Missions Point Primary School, New South Wales.
1956 – The Percy family move to Chelsea, Melbourne.
1958 – The Percy family move to Warrnambool, Victoria.
1961 – The Percy family move to Mount Beauty, in north-west Victoria. Derek starts at the local high school.
1963 – Some anecdotal evidence that Percy may have started keeping graphic diaries from this time, writings that outline his bizarre and violent sexual fantasies about children. Some of his victim's injuries match those graphic details.
1964 – Percy becomes a suspect for snowdropping and mutilating neighbour's dolls. Witnesses see him dressed in female negligee and slashing women's clothing. A fourteen-year-old girl later alleges Percy sexually assaulted her at Mount Beauty.
January 1965 – The national moth-class sailing competition held early in the new year at Botany Bay, Sydney. On 12th January, the bodies of the Wanda Beach victims, 15-year-old Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt found on sand dunes at the beach.
September 1965 – the family moves to Khancoban, south-west New South Wales. Percy, despite an IQ of 122, fails his leaving certificate.
26 January 1966 – The Beaumont siblings, Jane, 9, Arnna, 7 and Grant, 4, disappear from Glenelg Beach.
February 1966 – Percy starts school at Corryong High.
Mid-year 1966 – Percy molests two young girls in caravan.
September 1966 – Six-year-old Allen Redston's body, hog-tied and strangled, is found near his home in Curtin, Canberra.
1967 – The Percy family moves to The Entrance and then to Jesmond, Newcastle, where Ernie operates a service station.
November 1967 – Percy joins the Royal Australian Navy, training at HMAS Cerberus, Flinders Naval Depot, Crib Point, Victoria. A six-year-old girl avoids abduction from Noble Park, Melbourne and later alleges Percy was her would-be abductor.
9 March 1968 – Percy relocates to Sydney with the navy, stati
oned at HMAS Kuttabul, Darlinghurst.
18 May 1968 – Simon Brook, 3, is abducted and murdered, his mutilated body found the next day.
July 1968 – joins HMAS Sydney, stationed at Crib Point.
5–22 August 1968 – Percy is on leave from the navy.
10 August 1968 – Linda Stilwell, 7, is abducted from St Kilda pier in Melbourne. Her body has never been found.
November 1968 – Percy starts first of three around-Australia trips on the HMAS Queenborough between November, 1968, and February, 1969. A young man tries to abduct the author from a seaside suburb of Hobart during this time.
April 1969 – Percy is stationed at HMAS Cerberus. A twelve-year-old girl escapes from an attempted abduction at Mornington Peninsular.
20 July 1969 – Yvonne Tuohy, 12, is abducted, tortured and murdered at Westernport Bay, near Cerberus. Yvonne's friend, eleven-year-old Shane Spiller, escapes attempted abduction. Yvonne's body is found the next day. Percy is charged with murder.
2 April 1970 – Percy's trial starts at the Supreme Court of Victoria. He is found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity and detained at Governor's Pleasure. He spends the next 16 years at Pentridge prison's G Division, the psychiatric wing.
1971 – A raid of Percy's cell reveals he is still writing pornographic material about children.
August 1986 – Percy is moved to Beechworth prison.
September 1987 – Percy is moved to Castlemaine prison. It closes down in 1990.
1997 – Governor's Pleasure laws relating to mental health prisoners changed to Crimes (Mental Impairment and Unfitness to be Tried) Act.
October 1998 – Percy's first custodial review under the new Act. Justice Eames orders he remain in custody.
June 1990 – Percy returns to Beechworth prison.
June 1993 – Percy is moved to Ararat prison.
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 34
