Читать книгу The Frankston Murders - Vikki Petraitis - Страница 12

Just before 8am on Sunday morning, Senior Constable Andrew Herdman along with five other officers from the search and rescue squad were briefed at the Frankston police station by members of the homicide squad. Experienced in conducting line searches, the officers had been called in to make a thorough examination of the crime scene at Lloyd Park and its surrounding areas. The officers consulted maps of the area and planned the course of their search before heading to the muddy grounds of Lloyd Park. Search and rescue officers briefed forty SES volunteers to assist with the line search.

Half an hour after the search began, Herdman found a small silver-coloured knife blade in long grass adjacent to a footpath on the Cranbourne-Frankston Road. The blade looked like it had broken off from a pocket knife. Continuing the search in the long grass and bushes bordering the road, searchers failed to find either the handle or anything else of note.

Back at Lloyd Park, Sergeant Paul Dacey joined other crime scene examiners searching the area. Twenty-two metres northeast of the culvert where the body was found, Dacey discovered a blue and white striped sports bag at the base of a sand hill.

Opening it, he found textbooks and stationery items labelled ‘Elizabeth Stevens’. Further away in a pool of muddy water, he found a blue, hooded windcheater top with a blood-soaked grey T-shirt inside it. He had them photographed, then collected them as evidence.

At the Hastings crime scene section later in the afternoon, Dacey was back by the time Charlie Bezzina arrived after attending the post-mortem examination. Bezzina passed on the items that Cordner had removed from the body of Elizabeth Stevens.

The media were quick to jump on the story of yet another young woman murdered in the Frankston area. They immediately linked the death of Elizabeth Stevens to those of Sarah MacDiarmid and Michelle Brown.

Sarah MacDiarmid disappeared from the Kananook railway station on 11 July 1990. Her body had never been found although a pool of blood near her car led detectives to believe she had been murdered.

On 1 March 1992, Michelle Brown had telephoned her mother from the Food Plus store on the Frankston-Dandenong Road asking to be picked up from the Frankston railway station at 8pm. When her mother arrived, Michelle was nowhere to be seen. Her naked body was found two weeks later in a shed behind a gun shop in Playne Street, Frankston. Due to decomposition, a cause of death couldn’t be established.

The moment that Paul and Rita arrived home from the mortuary, a young reporter ran over to them in the driveway and asked awkwardly whether they knew the dead girl.

‘She was my niece and we’ve just come back from the morgue,’ growled Paul, marvelling at the utter lack of respect.

Once inside the house, the couple discussed the inevitability of media interest and, after some consideration, they saw the wisdom of getting the media to focus on Liz’s murder so that the police could catch her killer. They decided to go back outside and invite the reporter in for an interview. The reporter and her crew made their way into the lounge room and the cameraman immediately bumped his head on a low-hanging light fitting. It was to become a private joke between the Websters; every time another reporter or crew member would bump into the light fitting, they would add to the tally: light-six, media-none.

It was the one light moment during the whole terrible time.

When they set up office at the Cranbourne police station, homicide detectives Rob Hardie and Charlie Bezzina had little to go on. Usually, detectives began with the family and worked their way outwards. Most murders are domestic in nature and detectives often need look no further than the immediate family or a disgruntled boyfriend. In the case of Elizabeth Stevens however, the normal avenues were few. She had no immediate family in Victoria except her young sister who lived in Brunswick. Aunties and uncles were investigated as were the Websters, but detectives came up with very few clues.

Could Elizabeth have been murdered by someone she knew in passing? The Websters had told them that Elizabeth was friendly to many of the neighbours and that they often saw her stop as she walked up the street to chat to whoever happened to be in their front garden. Rita Webster could only imagine that her niece may have accepted a ride from someone she knew vaguely.

Another avenue of investigation arose when Paul Webster told the homicide detectives about a day a couple of weeks earlier when Liz had rushed in the front door, violently banging it shut. He had asked her what was wrong and she had told him that someone had followed her and that she had run all the way home from the bus stop. Paul had rushed out to look, but hadn’t been able to find the man who had frightened his niece.

Detectives ran the names of all the students at the TAFE college through the police computer, checking them for prior convictions, especially of a violent or sexual nature. A number of students did have priors – one was a convicted paedophile but he was investigated and cleared.

An initial objective for Hardie and Bezzina was to establish whether Elizabeth Stevens had in fact made it into Frankston on the day she died and secondly, whether she had travelled home again.

Inquiries at both the Frankston and TAFE libraries brought no direct evidence one way or another. None of the librarians at either library could remember Elizabeth but then again, they were big libraries and just because nobody remembered her, didn’t mean she hadn’t been there.

A road-block was set up near the bus stop in the days following the murder with a mannequin dressed in clothes similar to those worn by Elizabeth Stevens when she was killed. Police stopped all cars and asked if anyone had seen the murdered woman. There were few leads.

A major door-knock was initiated, with detectives visiting every house in the areas surrounding the bus stop and Lloyd Park. They spoke to every resident and asked if they had seen anything.

One resident initially looked suspicious. He told doorknockers to ‘fuck off’ and when detectives returned, they found traces of blood around his house. Further investigations revealed that the man had acted suspiciously after the murder. Because rain had washed away evidence at Lloyd Park, detectives did not know if Elizabeth Stevens had actually been murdered there or murdered elsewhere and dumped at the park. When the man’s house was searched, police took blood samples but the blood was found to belong to the man, who had recently cut himself. The suspect also had an alibi for the time of the murder.

Because of the location of her body, detectives assumed that Elizabeth Stevens had probably caught the bus from Frankston to Langwarrin and was grabbed by someone as she walked home, but they weren’t absolutely certain. The bus driver hadn’t taken much notice of his passengers that night. It had been raining heavily and he didn’t want his passengers waiting in the rain so he had hurried them on by giving only a cursory glance at their Met tickets. He couldn’t recall anyone fitting Elizabeth’s description but he told police that if she had caught his bus that Friday evening then he would have dropped her in Long Street between 7.45 and 7.50pm.

Appeals for passengers on the Langwarrin buses that night to come forward brought a mixture of information; some passengers said that they remembered a girl fitting Elizabeth’s description while others were equally adamant that she wasn’t on the bus.

Until people began coming forward with information, the only certainty was that Elizabeth Stevens had called her thirteen-year-old sister from a public telephone around five in the afternoon to organise a shopping trip for the following day. Liz had told her sister that she was in Frankston at the time.

Media coverage of a murder was always helpful and in the case of Elizabeth Stevens, putting her picture on the front page of newspapers soon brought forward hundreds of people who remembered, or thought they remembered, seeing her in Frankston the afternoon she was murdered. Information reports were filled out and passed on to detectives and every lead was thoroughly investigated. There would eventually be over 1500 such reports.

One resident who owned a house that backed on to Lloyd Park telephoned police and reported seeing a suspicious car on the night of the murder. Charlie Bezzina and his crew considered it a promising lead but the driver was located, questioned and released.

A number of people reported that a woman fitting Elizabeth’s description was seen hitch-hiking in the direction of Langwarrin. Bezzina tried his best to investigate the sightings but, taking into account the dead woman’s personality and habits, he doubted that it was Elizabeth, however, it couldn’t be discounted.

Marko, a take-away food shop owner in Young Street Frankston, saw Elizabeth Stevens’s picture in the paper and recognised her immediately. She’d been in his shop many times and he had thought her a nice girl. He remembered that she had been in his shop that last Friday afternoon, so he contacted police at Frankston. He told detectives that he thought she had been after the lunchtime rush probably between three and four. He thought that she had ordered either chips or potato cakes. This information was confirmed by the stomach contents found during the post-mortem examination. He was the first eyewitness to definitely put Elizabeth Stevens in Frankston. It was a start.

A fellow TAFE student called Samantha contacted D-24 after she heard about the murder on television. She said she had been in Frankston with her father on that Friday afternoon and they had parked in the car park adjacent to the Frankston library. Samantha told police that, while she was walking towards the Cash Converters store, Elizabeth Stevens had passed her going towards the library with her bag slung over her shoulder. Not knowing Elizabeth particularly well, Samantha didn’t say hello.

A couple of days after the murder, a security guard at Frankston’s Time Zone Amusement Parlour contacted police. He said he was sure that, on the day she disappeared, Elizabeth Stevens had been in his Time Zone playing the machines alone. She’d been near a group of children he’d spoken to. When police showed him a photograph of Elizabeth, he identified her as the girl in the windcheater he had seen the previous Friday. He also told detectives he’d noticed a young man standing near the machine but he didn’t know whether they had been talking. Around 7pm, the man had left by himself and ten minutes later, the girl had left – going in the same direction as the man.

Three members of the McCrae Alcoholics Anonymous told police that around 7.40pm on the Friday night, while they waited under the cover of the TAFE porch for someone to arrive with a key, a young woman fitting Elizabeth’s description had dashed through the heavy rain to the front door. They said the woman was carrying a sports bag, and was soaked and shivering. She tried the doors, found them locked, asked politely for the time and then left.

Elizabeth Stevens’s thirteen-year-old sister Catherine was questioned in detail about her sister and the kind of girl she was. From Catherine’s statement, detectives learnt that six of the eight children in the family still lived in Tasmania – four in welfare homes and two with their father. Their mother Christine lived in Adelaide. Catherine explained that the day after her eighteenth birthday, Liz had left the welfare home in Tasmania to live with her mother in Adelaide but it hadn’t worked out. Catherine and Liz had lived in different welfare homes in Hobart and Liz would visit her little sister a couple of times a week. Catherine described how the family used to tease Elizabeth because she wasn’t interested in boys but Liz hadn’t cared.

When Liz had moved to Langwarrin, and Catherine to her grandmother’s house in Brunswick, visits to her little sister became monthly because of the hour-and-a-half drive separating them. Liz telephoned regularly using either the Webster’s phone or a public phone in Frankston. Catherine told the detectives that Liz was happy living with the Websters.

On her last visit to Brunswick, Liz had said that she intended taking karate lessons again and as Catherine looked through her sister’s purse, she saw a card for a karate club. Catherine used to look through her sister’s purse all the time and check her address book. She knew all the names listed and she also knew that Liz hadn’t added any new ones since she had been in Melbourne.

Catherine said she spoke to her sister on the afternoon she died. Catherine had been watching The Flying Nun on television when Liz called, and mentioned she was in Frankston and had to go to the library because she had lots of homework to do. After a few minutes chatting, Liz said she had to go because someone else was waiting to use the phone.

The detectives asked Catherine if Liz had ever mentioned being scared of anyone or if she had ever been followed. Catherine said that Liz had never mentioned anything like that.

The difficulty with any investigation was the amount of information that came flooding in. The detectives had to take into account the dead woman’s personality and habits in order to deduce which information was likely to be true and which was not. It was unlikely that it was Elizabeth Stevens at the Time Zone because she didn’t usually frequent pinball parlours.

It was also unlikely that it was Elizabeth who ran to the door of the TAFE library because that meant that she would have missed the last bus.

Another young man reported that he had seen the Websters with Elizabeth at the Berwick pub the night before she died. When detectives questioned Paul Webster he told them that he didn’t even know where the Berwick pub was.

One of the more bizarre leads that Charlie Bezzina and his crew looked into was an occult connection. A TAFE student told detectives that Liz had once taken out a book on the occult. Considering the strange criss-cross markings on her body, it was worth looking into. But the lead went nowhere. Cults and covens don’t advertise their presence and Bezzina failed to find any operating in the area.

The hours were long and the leads dwindled, but Charlie Bezzina and a number of his crew continued to travel daily from the western suburbs to continue their investigation. They would leave at five in the morning, make the hour-and-a-half drive and return home rarely before ten at night. They did this seven days a week for nearly seven weeks in an attempt to find the killer of Elizabeth Stevens.