Читать книгу The Frankston Murders - Vikki Petraitis - Страница 7

Donna Vanes was uneasy. With her tiny baby nestled in a bassinet, she asked her boyfriend Les to take them on his pizza delivery run. She just didn’t feel like being alone at their flat in Claude Street, Seaford. It was a pleasant flat and they had only lived there for three weeks, but an anonymous telephone call a couple of days earlier had spooked her. The caller had said nothing and then hung up. Nothing unusual about that, but still.

Les packed them both in the pizza delivery car and they drove around the streets of Seaford delivering pizzas to customers with late-night appetites. It was a short shift and they were only gone an hour.

Walking into the darkened hallway of the flat around 11pm, Donna was hit by a foul odour; it was like nothing she had smelt before. She and Les made their way through the lounge room towards the kitchen, then Donna saw the blood. Smeared on the wall just before the kitchen doorway were swirls of blood about shoulder height and splatters of something else near the skirting boards.

Donna suggested that they all get out of the flat as quickly as possible. Les agreed. Shaking and scared, she remained outside while Les called a neighbour to go into the flat with him to see what on earth was going on. Where was Donna’s cat and its two kittens?

Entering the flat again, Les saw a sight he would never forget.

Awakened early the following morning, Detective Sergeant Chris McCann of the special response squad took a call from Frankston CIB detective Peter Stirling.

‘We’ve got some dead cats,’ Stirling told him. ‘Not sure whether it’s your job, but you might want to come down and have a look.’ McCann scribbled down the address in Claude Street, Seaford. The special response squad mostly handled aggravated burglaries and he wasn’t sure whether this was within their charter, but thought it was best to take a look anyway.

After a quick briefing out the front of the flat, McCann and two other detectives from his squad entered through the front door and the odour that Donna had smelt the night before immediately assaulted them. The smell of death reminded McCann of a body-find he had attended where a woman had died in her flat and hadn’t been found for a week. In the forty-six cases McCann had investigated since the squad had begun operations six months earlier, he had never seen anything like what he saw in the Claude Street flat.

Someone had broken into the flat in the hour that Les, Donna and the baby were delivering pizzas. Someone violent and sick. In the lounge room was an orange baby bouncer sitting in the middle of the floor on a pink and blue chequered rug. Next to it lay a baby’s rattle and a disposable nappy. On the white wall of the lounge room, next to the television, the intruder had written what looked like ‘Dead Don’ in a red substance that the detectives suspected was blood. Entering the kitchen, Chris McCann looked down at the body of Donna Vanes’ dead cat. It had been horribly slaughtered.

The police officer shuddered involuntarily. He loved animals and the one before him brought to mind his own cat Daisy, who was safe at home. This one was not. Trailed across the floor about half a metre away from the dead cat, lay a string of intestines that had been ripped out after the attacker had cut it open. One of the cat’s eyeballs was bulging out of its socket while the other was missing. But what made the whole scene even more bizarre was the picture of a naked woman placed on top of the cat’s body, covering its abdominal wounds. To McCann, with fourteen years in the police force under his belt, the attack seemed particularly brutal. Small animals were so defenceless; people could fight back, animals couldn’t.

Written in block letters in blood above the stove were the words, ‘Donna You’re Dead’ and next to that was the name ‘Robyn’.

As McCann took in the scene, he echoed the thoughts of the other detectives: ‘This bloke’s sick!’

In the bathroom, the detectives found the two kittens – their throats had been cut. Floating one at each end of a half-filled bath, the water had turned rust-coloured with their blood.

The attack on the cats had occurred in the laundry over a plastic laundry basket of baby clothes. Blood had splashed everywhere, spraying high up the walls and around a packet of kitty litter that Donna Vanes would no longer need. In the blood was a distinct shoe impression.

Walking into the main bedroom, McCann saw that the attacker had ransacked cupboards and drawers, and he had sprayed a can of shaving cream all over Donna’s mirror and through the creamy swirls, the detectives could make out the words ‘Donna and Robyn.’ One of the cupboard doors had been covered in pictures of scantily clad models. These had been slashed and only a few jagged corners of the pictures remained. The intruder had also slashed the cupboard door, leaving deep gouges in the wood. Oddly, the door had swirls of dirty, dried water marks as if the attacker had cleaned the surface for some reason.

Had he written another message on it then changed his mind?

In the baby’s room, the intruder had put a picture of a naked model into the baby’s crib and stabbed through the picture into the bedding. Some of the baby’s clothes had been slashed.

McCann muttered to the others, ‘Lucky they weren’t here.’

Looking around outside, the point of entry was clear; the intruder had climbed onto a nappy bucket around the back, forced a window open and climbed through. Left behind on the blind was a gloved hand impression in blood.

So brutal and bizarre was the attack on the cats and the threat to Donna Vanes, that detectives called in crime scene examiners, photographics and fingerprint experts to examine the Claude Street flat. They also arranged for officers from the Australian Animal Protection Society to perform post-mortem examinations on the cat and kittens to try and come up with anything that could help in the investigation. The examinations came up with nothing of any value but it was confirmed that the messages scrawled in the kitchen and the lounge room had been written in cat’s blood.

The obvious conclusion was that the attacker knew Donna Vanes and hated her. Chris McCann drove to where she was staying at a relative’s house and questioned her about any enemies she might have. Donna was at a loss to explain the vicious attack. She could think of no enemies except perhaps the father of her child with whom she had ended the relationship before the baby was born. But she doubted that he would have had anything to do with such a violent attack. While the break-up had been acrimonious, it had never been violent. She could think of no one else who could do such a thing. Referring to the second name mentioned in the written threats, McCann asked her who Robyn was. Donna had no idea. Her father’s name was Robert but some people called him Robyn. Otherwise, she was at a loss.

Chris McCann located Donna’s ex-boyfriend and questioned him at the Dandenong police station. He had an alibi for the previous evening and welcomed the detectives into his home to have a look around. The detectives found nothing incriminating at his house, and after speaking at length to the young man, Chris McCann doubted that he would have been responsible.

The detective also contacted Donna’s father to see if he could think of anyone who hated him and his daughter. He couldn’t. After spending all day checking the few leads, McCann headed home to a couple of hours sleep before being called out to a house in Bulleen where an elderly couple and their son had been burgled and attacked by a gang armed with machetes.

Donna Vanes moved out of the flat, staying temporarily with her sister Tricia. One of Tricia’s neighbours, Paul, had known Donna for a while. He told her that she was safe now and that if they ever caught the person responsible, he would take care of him.

It seemed neighbour Paul made a habit of comforting women who lived in flats near him. The previous September, another of his neighbours, Julia, had suffered a similar break-in. While she was interstate, someone had broken into her flat and slashed photographs of her and her fiancé. Chillingly, her throat had been cut in all the pictures. The dress she had worn to her engagement party was sliced, and the intruder had attacked her piano with a knife, and carved symbols of reverse question marks into her wardrobe.

Julia had chatted to Paul and his girlfriend Sharon before the break-in, she immediately suspected that it might have been Paul who attacked her things. She had seen him peeping through her windows, and a couple of times, he had appeared in her backyard. There was something strange about him…

At Julia’s urging, the police questioned Paul, but the young man denied any involvement. The intruder was never caught.