Читать книгу The Frankston Murders - Vikki Petraitis - Страница 8

As 18-year-old Elizabeth Stevens stepped down off the bus which had brought her from Frankston to Cranbourne Road, Langwarrin, she was unaware that she was being watched.

It was 7.15 pm on the evening of Friday 11 June 1993, and heavy rain had soaked Elizabeth’s short wavy hair so that it clung damply to her neck. She didn’t usually come home this late, but she had been working at the Frankston Library for a bothersome English assignment – one she had already completed but her teacher had asked for more research on the topic.

A couple of weeks earlier, Elizabeth had dropped a history course that she had been taking at the Frankston TAFE college. While she enjoyed her English course, history wasn’t a subject that she was good at. She figured that she was at a disadvantage because she hadn’t studied it in Year 11. Her real dream was to join the army and the TAFE course was a means to that end.

Elizabeth shivered in the cold June rain and hurried quickly towards the home she shared with her aunt and uncle, Paul and Rita Webster. Her own parents were separated and Elizabeth had lived in a children’s home in Tasmania from the time she was 14 until her 18th birthday the previous October. She had lived for a while with her mother, and then another aunt, before the Websters had offered her a home in Langwarrin. It was only a 20-minute bus ride to the TAFE college and Frankston Library, so the arrangement suited Elizabeth perfectly and she finally felt settled.

As she walked along Cranbourne Road that Friday night, she was unaware that a man had followed her. He was drawing closer as she turned into Paterson Avenue.

The rain grew heavier and it was hard to see.

Out of the darkness, the man in the green army jacket and navy baseball cap lunged at her from behind, clasped a hand roughly around her mouth and pushed what felt like the barrel of a gun to her head. She screamed in fright but the sound was drowned out by the wind and the rain. He dragged her onto the front lawn of somebody’s house. She struggled against him, thinking she could protect herself; she had taken karate lessons for four years, but he was a big man, strong, and he had a gun. There was nothing she could do.

The sexual urges that had apparently overcome the man when he first saw Elizabeth step off the bus, were replaced by urges of a much more deadly nature.

‘Shut up or I’ll blow your head off,’ he shouted at her, his voice rising above the heavy rain, chilling her into submission.

‘Kiss the end of the gun!’ he ordered.

Elizabeth was too afraid to move.

‘We’re going to take a walk,’ he told the young woman, pushing her to her feet and leading her on down the road.

She was terrified. What did he want with her? Was he a rapist? Or worse? A couple of cars drove past and the man grabbed her hand trying to make their walk down Paterson Avenue look innocent.

As they walked past one house, a man and a woman ran from the driveway towards a car parked in a street. They barely noticed the man and his captive hurrying past them. If it hadn’t been raining so hard, the couple would have recognised the large man whom they had both known at school.

The man forced Elizabeth Stevens down another street towards Lloyd Park. He knew exactly where he was going. Passing bushland and the park’s tennis courts, the man dragged Elizabeth into a clump of bushes; still holding the gun to her head. He stopped her when they had passed a dirt track near some sand hills.

‘Can I go to the toilet?’ she asked, desperately trying to think of some way to get away from the man. He agreed and led her to a mound of dirt and grass, gesturing that she go behind it. It was dark.

The man watched Elizabeth open her school bag and remove two pieces of folder paper to use as toilet paper. She went behind the mound and he turned away, not wanting to watch.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked when she reappeared.

‘Elizabeth, but everyone calls me Liz,’ she told him, not believing what was happening to her.

‘How old are you?’

‘Seventeen,’ lied the eighteen-year-old. Perhaps she thought seventeen sounded younger and he wouldn’t hurt her.

She was wrong.

‘Do you want a fuck?’ he asked bluntly.

The terrified young woman stalled. She told him she didn’t know how and her abductor asked if she was a virgin. She nodded.

‘Well, I won’t rape you or anything,’ he assured her.

Elizabeth Stevens’s relief was very short-lived. The man began walking her towards the football oval goal posts and the urge to kill overcame him. He grabbed her around the throat and started choking her. Elizabeth had enough oxygen in her body to struggle feebly for a couple of minutes before darkness overcame her and she collapsed onto the wet grass.

The man pulled a red-handled knife from his pocket and lunged at her throat, slashing in a frenzy until the blade bent. Elizabeth momentarily regained consciousness, struggled against her killer and tried to stand. He grabbed her and she slowly stumbled around him in circles, bleeding heavily. Her track suit top was up around her head. The man grabbed it, pulled it off and flung it in a puddle. He slashed at her as her arms flailed wildly, cutting her arms, her hands and her face.

When he finally let her go, she fell to the ground where he stamped his foot viciously on her neck. The frenzy was over. He took a couple of steps backwards to survey his work. He could hear the blood and air gurgling from her neck and calmly watched for a full five minutes as the life blood drained from her body.

Impatient for her death, the man lifted his foot above her head and brought it crashing down on her face, shattering her nose and cutting her cheek and eyebrow with the sheer force.

Elizabeth Stevens died.

The man dragged her by the legs the short distance to a creek bed flowing with shallow dirty brown drain water. Blackberry bushes clawed viciously at her skin but she was beyond feeling now. As she was dragged, her bra top ended up around her neck, exposing her chest.

Then the man broke the blade off the bent knife and slowly and methodically made long cuts from her breasts right down to her stomach. He didn’t slash; he wasn’t in a frenzy now. He was enjoying himself. The rain fell heavily all around him but he hardly noticed. When he had finished carving the vertical lines, he then carved four lines across at right angles. After the crisscross pattern was complete, the man plunged the knife into her chest six times.

When he had finished his handiwork, he put the broken pieces of the knife back into his pocket. Water lapped around Elizabeth’s body washing away her blood. He grabbed a branch from a tree above the culvert, wrenched it free and partly covered the body. The rain and the creek water would wash away clues of footprints and blood.

The man threw Elizabeth’s bag 10 metres from where her body lay and began the long walk to his girlfriend’s mother’s house for dinner. When he passed the golf course on Cranbourne Road, he tossed the pieces of knife into bushes and continued on through the night.

This man just wanted to kill. He had wanted to kill since he was fourteen. Now he had fulfilled the urge that had been gnawing inside him for seven years.

Elizabeth Stevens died because she was the only person to get off the bus on that cold June night. She had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Less than an hour after the brutal murder, the man tucked into a hearty meal of soup and a roast, and waited for his girlfriend to come home from work.