Читать книгу The Frankston Murders - Vikki Petraitis - Страница 13

On Thursday 8 July 1993, 41-year-old Roszsa Toth caught the 5.25pm train from Cheltenham to Seaford station. She had worked from 8.30am until 5pm at a Cheltenham bank and was on her way home to her family. Originally from Hungary, Mrs Toth had lived in Australia for six years. Her voice still carried strong traces of a Hungarian accent.

At 5.50pm, the train pulled slowly into the Seaford railway station and Roszsa Toth stepped down onto the platform, bracing herself against the July chill. She walked down the ramp towards Railway Parade, heading for her home.

Passing the sports reserve on Railway Parade, Mrs Toth saw a man about twenty metres away on her right hand side, near the toilet block. She took little notice of him and kept walking. However, as she passed him, he moved away from the toilet block and began following her. Still, she took little notice. It was dark and the station was poorly lit, but there were others getting off the train and Railway Parade was reasonably busy with cars.

The man quickly covered the distance between himself and Mrs Toth and suddenly grabbed her around the chest. Shocked, she turned to face him and he grabbed her by the hair and tried to force her off the footpath towards the toilet block in the reserve. Pushing her roughly, they both fell to the ground. Mrs Toth landed on her knees. Another violent shove sent her rolling onto her side and one of the many thoughts racing through her mind was of her expensive ring that felt loose on her finger. In a panic, she offered the man the ring if only he would let her go.

The man didn’t say a word; he just grabbed her and pushed her onto her back, struggling to get on top of her. Roszsa Toth lay on the damp grass of the reserve near the busy road and couldn’t believe what was happening to her.

A 12-year-old boy, riding his bike to soccer training at the field next to the reserve, saw a man dragging a woman in the distance. He heard her screaming and saw her struggling violently to get away. The area was dark but as the two struggled under an overhead light, he could see pretty clearly what was going on. As the woman continued to scream, he saw the man drag her away from the light and behind some bushes. He figured, with the logic of a 12-year-old, that they were probably a boyfriend and girlfriend having a fight and continued riding past.

‘I don’t know what I’ll do if you keep screaming,’ the man yelled at Roszsa Toth, putting his large hand over her mouth to stop her from crying out. She couldn’t breathe because his huge hand covered both her nose and mouth. Slowly suffocating, she bit his fingers hard and gasped for air as he quickly pulled his hand away and yelled at her not to scream because he had a pistol. In the confusion, Mrs Toth heard him pronounce the word pistol as pistole with some kind of accent.

The man then placed something hard at her temple. Mrs Toth thought that the object felt more like wood than the metal of a gun; it didn’t feel cold enough to be metal. Although terrified and in fear of her life, she had the presence of mind to think the young man was bluffing about the gun.

Lying on the grass, Mrs Toth caught sight of oncoming lights which she thought might be a bike or a car. She managed to push the man away and got up off the ground and ran towards the road. She had barely taken three steps before the man grabbed her by the hair, pulling out a handful in the process, and dragged her down on the ground again. Struggling on her back, Mrs Toth continued to scream and bit him once more on the fingers. He again told her that he had a pistol. A train went by with a thundering roar drowning her cries for help, but it heralded the arrival of more traffic on Railway Parade as people drove out of the car park and others were picked up by waiting cars.

Mrs Toth summoned all her energy and pushed the man off her. She grabbed her handbag and one of her shoes which had fallen off in the struggle. This time, she managed to scramble to the road, running in front of some oncoming cars waving her hands desperately for them to stop. As she ran onto the road, her attacker disappeared into the reserve.

One of the cars pulled over and a young woman called Michaela got out and ran towards Mrs Toth.

‘What happened?’ she cried, alarmed when she noticed Roszsa Toth’s torn stockings and trousers.

‘A man attacked me,’ sobbed the terrified woman. ‘Can you please take me home?’

Roszsa Toth jumped into the back of the car and then said suddenly, ‘I’ve got to get my shoe.’ She pointed to where her other shoe lay near the driveway to the Seaford reserve. When Michaela saw her reluctance to leave the safety of the car, she offered to get the shoe for Mrs Toth but the distressed woman urged her to remain in the car. She would get it herself.

As Mrs Toth raced to pick up her shoe, she begged Michaela, ‘Please wait for me. Don’t leave me.’

When she returned with the shoe, Michaela asked what had happened.

‘The man grabbed me. I don’t know what he wanted to do with me – perhaps rape me? He told me he had a gun but I didn’t believe him. He tried to drag me into the building.’

Michaela thought Mrs Toth meant the toilet block, which was the closest building to where she had run from.

Further up the road, the 12-year-old boy on his bike was nonetheless scared by what he had seen even though he had thought it was a boyfriend girlfriend argument. He had stopped his bike a little way off and saw Mrs Toth run from the man. He heard her cry out in a language he didn’t understand and then saw a white car stop and heard a woman asking if she was okay. The boy felt relieved and continued on to soccer practice. He told a couple of his mates, but they all agreed that it was probably a boyfriend and a girlfriend arguing so they didn’t do anything about it.

Michaela drove Roszsa Toth to her house and at the trembling woman’s urging, went inside with her and telephoned the police to report the vicious attack. Roszsa Toth’s right leg was badly grazed and her head was aching where the man had pulled her hair out in the struggle.

Michaela waited for Mrs Toth’s son to come home and after exchanging names with the woman she had rescued, left the family to wait for the police.

Senior Constable Danny Hower and Constable Michael Lynch were working the 6pm-2am shift out of Frankston on routine patrol when a call came over the radio: ‘Report of man having assaulted a female at a toilet block, Seaford North Reserve on Railway Parade. Victim at her home address. Offender solid build wearing a beanie. Offender decamped through fields behind toilet block. Minutes old.’

Michael Lynch wrote down the details on his running sheet. It was officially a job for the Chelsea station, but their officers were tied up so Hower and Lynch took the call, heading straight to the toilet block at the Seaford Reserve. This was a lights and siren job. The offender could still be in the area.

Further down Railway Parade, the soccer field was lit with bright overhead lights, but when the two officers pulled up at the toilet block, it was in total darkness. Hower parked the police divisional van outside the block and left the high beams on, lighting up a wide area.

The officers grabbed their police batons and made their way over to the toilet block. Attacks in this district were frequent, usually drug addicts in search of easy money. Shining their torches around, they saw no sign of anyone and walked over towards the toilets. Hower took the women’s side and Lynch took the men’s.

Details about the attack were sketchy and the officers didn’t know what type of offender they were looking for, but if it was a drug addict, he could be spaced out inside the toilets. Lynch experienced a vague feeling of apprehension as he walked through the dark doorway, breathing out heavily against the smell common to such public conveniences. His baton hung at his side, the end of it sitting in a leather loop on his belt. He held his torch in his left hand and his right hovered next to his firearm – just in case.

The area containing the basins was empty and Lynch stepped further inside and turned towards the closed doors. Behind any one of them could be the man who had attacked the woman earlier. Rather than use his hand to push the doors, Lynch stood further away and kicked open the first one. It was empty. Adrenalin pumped through his system and quickened his heartbeat. He repeated the procedure on the other cubicles but they were all empty so went back outside to see if his partner had any more luck. Hower hadn’t found anyone either, so both men walked around the back of the block and shone their torches around. There was no one there.

It was important to speak to the victim as soon as possible and the officers made the short drive to Roszsa Toth’s home.

Hower and Lynch pulled into the driveway of the Seaford home and a young man who looked to be in his late teens came out to meet them. As the officers got out of the van, he introduced himself as Roszsa Toth’s son. On the way to the house he explained that his mother had been attacked as she walked along Railway Parade.

Michael Lynch’s first impression of Roszsa Toth was that of an attractive woman with long black hair, who looked to be in her early thirties. He was mildly surprised when she said she was forty-one. Immediately obvious to the officers was the fact that Mrs Toth, with her thick Hungarian accent, was very difficult to understand. Danny Hower noted that she was sitting calmly on a chair and it was at first difficult for him to grasp the severity of the attack. She did most of her speaking through her son who translated for the police officers.

Mrs Toth indicated the graze to her knee and told them she thought the man could have been someone desperate for money. She had calmed down considerably once she got home and she explained that the man hadn’t really hurt her although she knew that the matter must be brought to the attention of the police. She didn’t want to make a fuss. Lynch and Hower admired her strength in the way she was coping with the aftermath of the attack.

As the interview progressed, Lynch took down the details. Mrs Toth described her attacker as being between eighteen and twenty years of age, wearing a black jacket. She told the officers that he was around 180 centimetres tall with a round face and blue eyes. He had been wearing a light-coloured beanie.

Painstakingly leading her through her statement, Hower heard Mrs Toth mention a gun. Through her son, he learnt that the attacker told her that he had a gun and that she had felt something hard pushed against her head. She explained that it may not have actually been a gun because it didn’t have the cold feeling of metal.

This put a different light on the attack. In most of these types of offences, it was common for the attacker to be either unarmed, or armed with a knife. A gun was different. Danny Hower considered bringing in a police dog, but he realised that by the time the nearest dog could attend, it would be too late for it to be of any assistance.

One thing that disturbed Michael Lynch was the fact that Roszsa Toth had offered the attacker her expensive ring during the attack and he had refused it. If the attacker was a drug addict after money, he would have taken the opportunity to grab the ring and run. Most attacks that Lynch had investigated were snatch-and-grab types. He had anything up to five or six a month. This attack was different. There seemed to be no reason for such a violent attack on the middle-aged woman.

Hower and Lynch stayed at Roszsa Toth’s house taking her statement for an hour then headed back to the Frankston police station to fill in the reports and alert the CIB detectives of the attack.