Читать книгу The Frankston Murders - Vikki Petraitis - Страница 10

On Saturday 12 June a Langwarrin father, Rod, had gone bowling with his children and then picked up some timber from Mitre 10 on the way home. In the afternoon his wife Cheryl, who was having a dinner party that evening, sent him out to do some shopping. When he returned, Cheryl had one more job for him. As the party theme was a mid-year Christmas party, she asked him to get a small pine branch from Lloyd Park to decorate like a Christmas tree.

Rod drove around to the football oval near their house, reversed his car near the netball courts and got out to look for a suitable tree. He knew the layout of Lloyd Park because he took his children there for Vic Kick sessions most Sunday mornings. Heavy rain and hail had turned much of the surface of the oval into a quagmire and Rod tried to avoid the larger puddles as he wandered about. He spotted a pine tree a few metres into the scrub adjacent to the football field and while he was figuring out how to cut one of its branches, he glanced further into the bushes and saw what looked like a body.

He took a couple of tentative steps forward and saw a woman lying in a shallow depression with water around her lower body. He could make out that she was wearing runners and grey tracksuit pants. Although a branch covered the woman’s top half, Rod could see part of her face – there was dried blood underneath her nose as if she had had a nose bleed. It was obvious to him that she was dead.

The shocked man jumped back into his car and drove around to the sports club where he knew there would be a telephone. He ran in and asked John, the club’s barman, to call the police.

‘What’s the problem?’ John asked.

‘I’ve found a body,’ Rod said breathlessly. ‘Near the bend in the dirt track. There were a couple of trees down and that’s where the body is.’

The barman quickly telephoned the Cranbourne police station and spoke to Constable Sally Davis who answered the phone.

Davis told John and Rod to go and wait near the location for the police to arrive. The men made their way down the dirt track, where Rod pointed to where the body lay. They didn’t get too close, but John could also see the grey tracksuit pants and the runners, as well as a black watch band, on the dead woman’s left wrist.

‘How did you find it?’ John asked as they stood waiting for the police to arrive.

‘We’re having a dinner party and I was looking for a tree,’ Rod explained.

When Senior Constable Jeff Brennan and Constable Tamara Shauer arrived, Rod and John hurried over to meet them, then indicated where the body lay.

‘It’s over there in the scrub.’

The two police officers left their car near a heavy chain fence and approached the location, careful not to go too close to the body so as not to destroy any possible evidence. They had to ascertain first of all that the person was in fact dead and secondly whether or not the body find was suspicious. After all, it could have been someone walking through the bush who had suffered a heart attack.

The officers stood where the witnesses had stood, several metres away from where the woman lay. Senior Constable Brennan was quick to note the absence of clothing on her upper body; and the blood on her face. It certainly looked like she had met with foul play. They got close enough to see that the area would have to become an official crime scene.

Brennan directed Shauer to protect the area and stop anyone from getting too close, while he returned to the police car to radio D-24. Homicide, forensics and crime scene examiners would soon surround the scene to each perform their respective tasks.

Brennan also radioed his senior officer at Cranbourne, Sergeant Fred Barton. After twenty years in the force, Barton was used to body finds. Just as he was leaving the station, Sally Davis handed him the missing persons report and photograph of Elizabeth Stevens.

‘It could be her,’ she said.

During the afternoon, Sally Davis had kept him up to date on the status of the missing person report and she had told him earlier that she had a bad feeling about the missing student.

‘I don’t like this one, Sarge,’ she had said.

Sergeant Barton also had a feeling that the missing teenager had just been found. As he drove to Lloyd Park in the pouring rain, Barton knew that any evidence such as shoe impressions and blood would literally be washed away and he also knew that he would spend most of the night standing around in the rain co-ordinating traffic, media and the officers under his command. He glanced over at the thick black plastic raincoat on the seat beside him and hoped the rain would stop.

When he arrived at the scene, Barton donned his raincoat and positioned his police hat over his collar so that the rain ran down the back of the coat and not down his neck. He walked through the long grass over to the creek bed where the body lay, careful to walk the same path that the other two officers had taken so as not to contaminate the scene any more than was absolutely necessary.

Within three metres of the body, he noticed immediately that the dead woman bore a strong resemblance to the photograph he had of Elizabeth Stevens; except now her hair was plastered flat against her head so that it almost looked like a wig.

Barton was puzzled by the scene before him. He could see that the woman’s body was naked from the waist up and, through the branch, he could make out the strange criss-cross cuts in her chest. The body was whitish-blue in colour and, considering the chest wounds and the dried blood around her nose, the death was certainly suspicious.

But what puzzled him was that, in his considerable experience, if the attack was sexually motivated then the pants should have been removed as well as the top. That was how these things normally went. This victim, however, was still wearing her tracksuit pants which seem to indicate there had been no sexual attack – so why was her top missing? Alternatively, if someone wanted to kill the woman out of spite or revenge, why remove her shirt?

Two detectives from the Dandenong criminal investigation branch, Michael West and Steven Mansell, arrived at Lloyd Park at 5.40pm. They had been working a district response shift and heard the body find call over the police radio. They were already on their way to Lloyd Park when they were officially called to attend.

Sergeant Barton, who had procured an upstairs room in the Langwarrin Sportsman’s Club as a temporary command post, directed the detectives inside, out of the pouring rain, and brought them up to date on the situation. He showed them the missing persons report on Elizabeth Stevens, and described the similarities between the missing woman and the body in the culvert. He couldn’t verify they were one and the same, because of the obvious differences between the photograph of the happy, smiling woman and the bluish-white body lying under the branch.

Even so, the grey tracksuit pants and runners fitted the description of clothes belonging to Elizabeth Stevens.

The detectives then followed Barton to the location of the body. As they walked through the rain, up the narrow track towards the crime scene, Michael West didn’t know what to expect. Like Fred Barton, he too had seen countless bodies in his line of work and considered himself lucky that none had been children. But when they reached the site, West was immediately struck by how young and almost child-like this victim looked.

Again, even from a little way away, bruising and a long cut around the left eye were obvious, as was the blood that had formed at the base of her nose.

When Michael West saw the criss-cross cuts in the dead woman’s chest, he said, ‘It looks like someone’s been playing noughts and crosses on her.’

Because of the water running down the creek bed, there was little blood at the scene and the conditions were eerie. Darkness was falling, rain pelted down in the deserted park and the body of the woman lay before the detectives.

‘Doesn’t look like a sexual assault,’ West observed, noting that the woman’s track pants and runners were still in place.

Could it have been a sexual assault gone wrong? Considering the injuries to her face and the fact that her bra was pulled up around her neck, the detectives considered the possibility that someone had grabbed her with the intention of raping her, but that she may have struggled and her attacker may have hit her and accidentally killed her.

Rain had washed away any signs of whether the body had been dragged into the creek bed; and it was impossible to tell if she had been killed at this location, or elsewhere and then dumped in the creek bed.

West gingerly stepped a bit closer to get a better look at the dead woman. He shone his torch through the branch that partially covered her, then looked up at Barton and Mansell.

‘Shit. Her throat’s been cut.’

The police officers discussed this new observation; it put a different slant on the death. If the killing had been an attempted rape gone wrong, it would have been easy for the attacker to hit her to keep her quiet. But it took a different type of person altogether to cut a woman’s throat.

To West, it suggested the killer was some kind of maniac. But their theories were all academic because they knew that the homicide squad would be the ones to investigate this murder.

West and Mansell contacted homicide and made arrangements for a command post to be set up in Lloyd Park. It was Sergeant Fred Barton’s job to direct the human traffic through the scene and help maintain the log of all members coming and going.

Through the rain, Barton saw a huge red Country Fire Authority bus pull into the park’s driveway. He walked over and asked the driver what it was doing there. The driver explained that a police officer from Chelsea, who was also a volunteer CFA member, had heard about the body find via the police radio and organised for the vehicle to be sent to Lloyd Park.

To Barton, this was like a gift from the gods – the rain hadn’t let up and there was no shelter in the immediate area. He directed the driver to park the bus near the chain link fence; it became the command post. The CFA bus was equipped with telephones, fax machines and – of immediate importance to the half-frozen officers – a coffee machine. A huge awning was also lifted from one side of the bus to provide shelter.

As darkness fell, State Emergency Service workers arrived and erected huge, bright scene lights that illuminated the whole area. The body couldn’t be moved until crime scene photographs and video of the scene had been taken.

Sergeant Paul Dacey from the Hastings crime scene section arrived at Lloyd Park at 7.30pm. By then it was freezing cold, raining heavily and hailing intermittently. Dacey knew that the weather conditions in this case favoured the killer because valuable forensic evidence such as blood, hair and shoe impressions would be washed away. In fact, it was the worst weather Dacey had ever struck at a crime scene; he had to balance an umbrella on his shoulder as he made his written notes.

A crime scene photographer took pictures of the surrounding area, including the gravel road, the chain link fence and the nearby scrub, carefully noting the photograph number and each location.

After the dead woman had been photographed, Dacey measured and described the culvert in which she lay.

Once photos were taken, the branch could finally be removed from the body. Detectives West and Mansell watched as further injuries became obvious. The savage throat wound could be seen properly and the detectives counted at least six knife wounds to the woman’s chest, four deep cuts running from her breast to her navel and four running at right angles – forming the criss-cross pattern that they had seen earlier through the branch. There were cuts and abrasions to her face and the bridge of her nose was swollen enough to suggest it was broken. Her bra was caught up around her neck. Dacey photographed the body and collected the branch for evidence.

Six-and-a-half metres from the body was a tree with similar foliage to the branch and Dacey noted that the tree had a broken limb. He arranged photographs of the damage to the tree.

Homicide detectives arrived at 8pm and were briefed by Detective Mansell. They made their way over to view the body and speak to the other officers.

A couple of hours after he arrived, homicide detective Rob Hardie went around to Paterson Avenue to speak to the Websters. He told the couple that he couldn’t confirm it yet but to prepare themselves for the worst; on the strength of the evidence, it was probably Elizabeth they had found.

Angry at the frightening uncertainty they were enduring, Paul Webster asked why they couldn’t confirm it was Liz. Hardie gently explained that the identification couldn’t be made until the family identified the body. The distraught uncle fell silent. He had a fair idea that it was Liz. He had watched over his back fence which backed on to Lloyd Park and had seen the police cars, the SES lights and the police helicopter flying around. Neither he nor Rita had sat still for a minute since they had reported Liz missing. They had both been prowling like restless animals, unable to sleep, eat or rest.

They just didn’t want to believe it.

Another homicide detective, Sergeant Charlie Bezzina, cleared the crime scene at 11.35pm. In the appalling weather, crime scene examination was limited – visibility was poor and the area to be searched was best left to daylight hours. Police began packing away their equipment and a number of officers were given the duty of guarding the scene until the following morning.

Once the area was officially cleared, the body could be removed. The body itself was an important piece of evidence, and to maintain the continuity of evidence, Charlie Bezzina had the task of escorting it, in a Tobin Brothers van, to the car park of the Mornington Peninsula Hospital en route to the city mortuary.

Dr Helen Hewitt came outside to the van, unzipped the body bag and examined the young woman. She noted that her pupils were fixed and dilated, there were no heart sounds present, there was no evidence of respiration, and the body showed obvious early signs of rigor mortis.

Life was pronounced extinct fourteen minutes before midnight.

When Sergeant Steve Lewis came in at 11pm to work the night shift, he had slept most of the day and hadn’t seen the news. The watch house keeper gave him the update.

‘They found your girl. She’s dead.’

Lewis felt like he’d been hit. He immediately thought of the Websters and their grief and, not knowing the circumstances of Elizabeth’s death, he wondered if he could have done something to prevent it. Lewis knew that they hadn’t even checked Lloyd Park the night before; they had concentrated on the route between the TAFE college and the Webster’s home.

The inevitable ‘what if...’ question came to mind. What if he had driven around to Lloyd Park the night before, could he have somehow prevented the young woman’s death?

It would be weeks before he would learn that Elizabeth Stevens was dead hours before he took the report that she was missing.

At around 3am, Steve Lewis took one of the marked police cars and drove to Lloyd Park to relieve the police guarding the scene. They spoke briefly about the murder and Lewis heard that the victim’s throat had been cut.

By this time, the scene was almost clear of the earlier investigations and the command post bus had returned to the CFA station. He parked near the football oval and watched as the rain ran in intermit sheets down the windscreen. Lewis could see the fences of the houses bordering the park and he reflected that most of the families living there wouldn’t be touched by the death of a friendless eighteen-year-old girl.

Keeping his solitary vigil until daybreak, Lewis had hours to ponder the tragedy of the situation. He wondered who could have killed Elizabeth Stevens and why. The thought suddenly struck him that life plods along and then something like this happens that totally destroys one family’s security and happiness forever. Its rippling effect would spread and affect everyone who knew the young woman. They would have to come to terms with her death and the fact that some bastard had taken her life. He remembered how Rita Webster had told him that Elizabeth had swapped History for Australian Studies. Now she would never finish her course. She would never do anything again.

Her life had ended.