Читать книгу The Frankston Murders - Vikki Petraitis - Страница 15

Garry Blair couldn’t understand where Debbie had gone. The previous day he had slept in because he was working an afternoon shift. Debbie had given Jake his four-hourly feeds and Garry had noticed that she seemed a bit weary, but she hadn’t complained. In fact she had chatted about visiting her friend Jeanette and about how they had planned to go shopping. Debbie also spoke about Russell coming for dinner that evening.

Jeanette and her two children had called in around 11.30am for a half-hour visit, promising to return in the early afternoon for the shopping trip.

Debbie, cradling Jake in her arms, had kissed Garry goodbye as he left for work just after one in the afternoon. She seemed cheerful, standing there on the front porch, and she told him she would see him after work.

Now she was gone; and no one knew where.

Early Friday morning, Senior Detective Michael Glowaski drove to the house on Kananook Avenue to talk to Garry. The distraught young father repeated the information about Debbie going to buy milk around 7pm the previous evening and that no one had heard from her since.

Glowaski took down Debbie’s description and Garry described the black skirt and white windcheater she had been wearing the day before. He also gave the detective a description of Debbie’s grey Pulsar and the registration number. Glowaski returned to his office at the Frankston police station and began to make inquiries.

In light of the young mother’s disappearance, the attack on Roszsa Toth the night before was seen in a more sinister light.

Senior Detective Andy King had begun work at 6.30am on Friday morning in preparation for an early-morning drug raid. When he arrived back at the CIB offices, he checked the crime reports in-tray and read the report about Debbie Fream’s disappearance and Roszsa Toth’s attempted abduction.

Thinking that there could be a connection, King, together with an officer from the Frankston community policing squad called around to interview Roszsa Toth again. The morning after the attack, the woman looked ragged. She told King that she walked along Railway Parade every night and nothing like this had ever happened before. Mrs Toth repeated details of her ordeal and accompanied the two officers to the toilet block at the Seaford Reserve to reconstruct the events of the night before. She showed them where the man had been standing when she had first seen him and where he had grabbed her.

Mrs Toth was then driven to the Victoria Police complex on St Kilda Road where she described her attacker to a photo-fit expert. Her injuries were also photographed for police records and she was examined by a police doctor.

Andy King felt there was a strong likelihood of a connection between Roszsa Toth’s attack close to the Seaford railway station around 6pm and Debbie’s disappearance from near the Kananook railway station an hour later. And of course, there wasn’t a cop worth his salt who could ignore the connection to the disappearance of Sarah MacDiarmid from the Kananook railway station in 1990.

Every police officer in the district remembered the unsolved MacDiarmid case from three years earlier. Debbie Fream’s disappearance from the same area was alarming.

Also concerned for the safety of Debbie Fream was Detective Inspector John Noonan from the Frankston police. As head of the district’s six detective divisions, Noonan was informed on Friday morning that the young mother had vanished. He too made the link with the assault on Roszsa Toth, and put all his available resources into finding the missing woman.

Senior Sergeant Chris Jones from the missing persons squad was lecturing new recruits at the police academy on Friday morning when his beeper sounded. An officer from his squad informed him that they had a missing woman in the Frankston area; last seen around 7pm the night before. The woman had left a 12-day-old baby with a friend and gone to the shop in the middle of cooking dinner. Both the woman and her car were missing.

Chris Jones headed straight to Frankston thinking about the case he was about to investigate. Since his squad had been set up a year earlier, they had dealt exclusively with old missing persons cases, going over files trying to find a new perspective. This was their first call to investigate a fresh disappearance.

At Frankston police station Chris Jones met with Inspector John Noonan for a briefing session and, together with other detectives, had a round-table discussion about the various possibilities. Debbie Fream was missing and so was her car. She could have suffered post-natal depression and sought refuge with a friend. She could have had a nervous breakdown, or she could have vanished in some sort of suicide bid. More sinister was the possibility that she had been abducted.

Chris Jones knew that the missing person squad worked at a disadvantage compared to a normal homicide investigation. When a body is discovered, detectives can look for evidence to match the clues found on and around the body. If the victim is shot, the detectives look for bullets, bullet holes and a gun. But when a person is missing, there may be no evidence of a crime even when a crime is the most likely explanation.

Chris Jones remembered his boss, Chief Inspector Peter Halloran’s favourite saying – always go back to the facts. The facts in this case were: Debbie Fream was missing, her car was missing and she left a 12-day-old baby in the middle of cooking dinner. After dismissing the more innocent possibilities, it didn’t take long to conclude that the most likely explanation was that something untoward had happened to her.

The first priority was to co-ordinate a search for the missing woman. John Noonan telephoned Brian McMannis at the State Emergency Service office, ironically located on McCulloch Avenue not far from the milk bar closest to Debbie Fream’s home.

Brian McMannis had been an SES volunteer for 17 years and had been in charge of the Frankston branch of the SES for the past eight. Inspector Noonan had great respect for the work the volunteers did and had called on them often to assist in searches and to provide lighting for crime scenes and road accidents. With 62 volunteers, the Frankston SES worked closely with the police. Various police experts would lecture the volunteers at their Monday night training sessions to keep their methods up to date. What Noonan appreciated most was the enthusiasm of the volunteers. If he asked them to search an area, they did it immediately and thoroughly. They also brought with them much needed equipment and even food and hot coffee.

McMannis offered one of their caravans for a command post and he also offered volunteers to hand out pamphlets alerting the public to the missing woman.

John Noonan asked Brian McMannis to organise a search of Kananook Creek and its surrounding areas. Although a daunting task with its thick surrounding scrub, McMannis had 230 volunteers ready within hours, calling in extras from surrounding SES units.

After a briefing at the SES offices in McCulloch Avenue, the searchers in their bright orange overalls were transported to various points along the creek. McMannis also called in members of the Doncaster unit who were trained divers. They launched a rubber dinghy and searched the waist-deep creek and its banks while the other volunteers concentrated on the surrounding scrub. The search of the creek was an exact duplication of the one the SES had done three years ago for Sarah MacDiarmid. As with the earlier search, they found nothing.

Michael Glowaski, who had earlier interviewed Garry Blair, was on his way back to the police station from another call when he noticed a grey Pulsar parked outside the New Life Christian Centre in Madden Street, just off the Frankston-Dandenong Road. Thinking it could be the car they were looking for, the detective turned around and headed to Madden Street. The registration checked out. It was Debbie Fream’s car.

Without touching it, Glowaski examined the car and saw that the front passenger side door was unlocked and there was a dent in the centre of the bonnet. The damage looked recent. He notified Inspector Noonan at the Frankston police station, and remained with the car until the crime scene examiners arrived to examine, photograph and impound it as evidence.

John Noonan and Chris Jones also drove to Madden Street and the first thing they checked was the driver’s seat. According to her description, Debbie Fream was short in stature and both detectives noticed the seat was pushed all the way back to the last notch, indicating that a much taller person had been the last to drive the car.

From the moment her car was found, Debbie’s disappearance was definitely viewed as sinister. If the car had broken down, she could have walked home from Madden Street. Forensic examiners swabbed the interior of the car and found traces of blood.

Noonan and Jones had another meeting to discuss tactics for the investigation. Jones offered the services of the missing persons squad and he offered to co-ordinate the vast amount of information that was sure to come flooding in. One person needed to sift through all the information reports and direct detectives towards further avenues of inquiry.

Debbie’s friend Jeanette gave a statement to police at Frankston in the early afternoon. She told officers that she had called to see Debbie the previous morning around 11.30am and returned for their shopping trip around 2pm. Debbie had told Jeanette that she had felt a bit dizzy earlier in the day and that she also felt tired but, apart from that, the young mum looked fine. The two women had left the Kananook Avenue house as soon as Debbie finished breastfeeding. After shopping they visited Jeanette’s mother to show off the new baby.

Chris Jones, from the missing persons squad, had his work cut out for him. As usual, members of the public came forward with many leads; all of which were painstakingly entered into a central data bank. Each lead was checked by detectives, which was a huge task considering that they were coming in at a rate of around a hundred each day.

The main difficulty was that detectives didn’t know what they were looking for. Was it a murder or a disappearance? They weren’t even sure whether an offence had been committed. It wasn’t against the law to vanish.

Most important of all the leads were those involving the grey Pulsar, and the times that people had first seen it parked outside the Christian Centre. Two women reported seeing the car at 7.50pm on the night Debbie disappeared. So what had happened to her in the 50 minutes between leaving home to buy milk and her car being parked in Madden Street?

Two days after Debbie Fream’s disappearance, information came to light from Ann Smith, Debbie’s mother, about a telephone death threat that Debbie had received not long after she and Garry had moved to the house in Seaford. According to Ann, Debbie had told her that a man had telephoned her saying he was going to kill her. Mrs Smith had not been overly concerned. She knew her daughter had a way of dramatising things, and had assured her that it was probably just a crank call.

In light of Debbie’s disappearance, that call was now being taken seriously.

The following day, the Sunday Herald Sun ran with the front-page story: ‘Murder Threats to Missing Mother’. The link between the telephone call and Debbie’s disappearance seemed obvious; it was a lead that had to be followed. If the man who had threatened her was responsible for her disappearance, then there had to be a connection somewhere. Investigating officers began looking for someone who may have held a grudge against the young mother, although it seemed unlikely.

Who could have hated Debbie enough to threaten her life?

That afternoon, Debbie’s friend Jeanette was again questioned by detectives. They asked her what she knew about Garry Blair.

This was routine questioning. People closest to victims are usually the ones responsible for any harm that comes to them. Stranger killings are relatively rare so detectives wanted to get a picture of Debbie Fream’s de facto.

Jeanette told police that she had met Garry Blair, and Debbie, when they all lived in Casterton, about 360 km west of Melbourne. Explaining about life in the country with its huge unemployment problems for young people, Jeanette confessed that they had all partied quite a bit and it wasn’t unusual for many of them to indulge not only in alcohol, but also marijuana. She described Garry as a moderate marijuana user but she assured detectives that she had never seen him violent. Not long after Jeanette met Garry, he had started dating Debbie Fream.

Debbie and Jeanette had become close friends and confided in each other. Debbie would often tell Jeanette how much she loved Garry. When Jeanette moved to Frankston, Debbie followed soon afterwards.

Debbie’s reasons were twofold: she wanted to find a job, and she also wanted to get Garry away from the group in Casterton whom she believed were a bad influence on him. Early in the pregnancy, Debbie and Garry experienced a rough patch in their relationship. Garry, it seemed, had been spending a lot of time with Debbie’s brother, Troy, who had temporarily moved into the Kananook Avenue house. Troy and Garry had spent a lot of nights out partying, leaving Debbie alone with the effects of her pregnancy sickness.

Jeanette told detectives she had advised Debbie to tell Troy to move out, but it wasn’t until the eighth month of her pregnancy, that Debbie’s patience really ran out. Telling her brother to leave wasn’t easy. She told Jeanette that Troy had been really angry and that her brother’s anger had scared her. The decision, however was for the best. Garry started coming straight home from work and Debbie was a lot happier.

Jeanette explained that, following Jake’s birth, Debbie had been over the moon about how supportive Garry was, and that everything had worked out well. Debbie even expressed milk so Garry could feed the baby at night.

Jeanette again repeated the events of the day Debbie vanished. She added that while shopping, Debbie had mentioned she needed milk but the two women had spent their time looking at fabrics and Debbie hadn’t bought milk in the time they had been together.

Jeanette told of minding the baby the night after Russell called her when Debbie had failed to return from the shops, and how Troy had arrived around 1.30am.

The detectives asked Jeanette if she knew about the threatening telephone call. Jeanette told them that about three or four months before, Debbie had told her that someone had threatened her over the telephone. She had said the man had sounded drunk but had referred to her by name. At the time, Debbie couldn’t think of who she might have upset enough to have been threatened in such a way.

Debbie’s brother Troy was also questioned by police. Troy told detectives that he had a close relationship with his sister and they spoke often, although he did admit that as they’d grown older, they tended to fight.

‘Probably because we’re both stubborn,’ he explained. He described Garry Blair as ‘pretty easy going and gets on well with everyone. I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about Garry.’

On the subject of drugs, Troy said, ‘When Garry and Debbie were living in Casterton, they got into a bit of shit with the coppers over marijuana. Basically, growing and possession of the plants; but nothing big. Garry got done for having four or five plants but they were seedlings really and if mates rocked around and asked for a smoke then he’d give them one. He wasn’t selling if that’s what you want to know.

‘Around October, November 1992, Debbie got done by a copper from Casterton with a gram of marijuana.’

Troy explained that the car that Debbie and Garry were passengers in was pulled over by police.

‘Garry had already been in the shit for drugs so, to keep him out of trouble, Debbie said it was hers. I think Garry had been to, or was going to, court for the other drug charges so he didn’t need this one as well. Since they’ve been down in Frankston, Debbie has really gone anti-drugs and gets right up Garry when he smokes. I think it was more the money side of it, cause Garry was spending too much on drugs and they had a kid on the way,’ Troy said.

‘I know that since Garry and Debbie have been in Frankston, Garry has bought marijuana from some seedy joints; and he said he’s been to some weird places to score. But he always kept Debbie out of it cause she just didn’t want to think about it and wanted nothing to do with it.’

Troy also told police that, on the day she disappeared, Garry had told him at work that Debbie had gone to the shop and hadn’t come back. The first thing that had occurred to Troy was the threatening phone call that Debbie had received months earlier.

The information regarding Garry Blair’s use of marijuana, presented another avenue of investigation to the detectives working on Debbie Fream’s disappearance. Could there be a drug connection? Even though Garry Blair was just a casual user and Debbie was against the use of marijuana, violence in the drug world was certainly common enough.

Once the media got wind of the story of a missing young mother of a newborn baby, they flocked to Garry Blair. And he was grateful that his appeals for Debbie to return or be returned were spread to such a wide audience. A photograph of Garry holding baby Jake wrapped in a white blanket, was printed in newspapers and splashed across television screens nation-wide.

As soon as she heard her cousin was missing, Sara Smith, who had grown up with Debbie in Casterton, told her boss she needed to take time off work. She packed a bag and – along with a number of other relatives and friends – moved into the little house on Kananook Avenue, to help care for the baby and to wait for news.

In the days following Debbie’s disappearance, the house was kept perfectly clean by restless family members, unable to leave and unable to sit still. They carefully avoided any mention that anything terrible might have happened to Debbie; almost as if to say it might make it come true. The only possibility they discussed was that Debbie might have had an accident and could be wandering around in a daze.

And that meant she would eventually come home.