Easey Street suspect unmasked as link to victims emerges

The man arrested in Italy over the Easey Street murders – one of Victoria’s most brutal unsolved killings – was a student at a school where one of the victims taught.

Perry Kouroumblis, now 65, was a student at Collingwood High School – now called Collingwood College – where Susan Bartlett was an arts and crafts teacher.

Perry Kouroumblis, a 65-year-old dual citizen of Australia and Greece, was arrested in Italy.

In January 1977, Bartlett’s body was found near the front door of her home in Easey Street, Collingwood, in Melbourne’s inner north. She had been stabbed 55 times.

In a bedroom was her housemate Suzanne Armstrong, who had been raped and stabbed more than 20 times, with three wounds to the heart. Armstrong’s 16-month-old son, Gregory, was unharmed but found dehydrated in his cot three days later when the bodies were discovered.

Forty-seven years on, Bartlett’s friend and fellow Collingwood High teacher, Carvell Zangalis, said she was still in shock at news of the breakthrough arrest of Kouroumblis in Rome on Friday.

“We’d heard rumours that the police were close but couldn’t get to who they thought it was,” she said.

Susan Bartlett (top) and Suzanne Armstrong were killed in their Easey Street, Collingwood, rental in 1977.Credit: Stephen Kiprillis

Learning that the suspect was a former Collingwood High student had come as a particular shock, she said, even as “relief flooded in” that answers may at last be in reach.

Zangalis and Bartlett became close friends while teaching art at Collingwood High. “Susan had a wicked giggle,” Zangalis said. “She was beautiful, warm. She laughed a lot, she loved parties, she loved art.”

Zangalis remembered life in Collingwood as “rough then but I don’t remember any trouble with the kids and Susan”.

She couldn’t recall Kouroumblis, though she knew the school’s large cohort of Greek migrant families well.

Zangalis said Bartlett had travelled to Greece before she moved into the Easey Street rental with Armstrong.

More than a week after the women’s bodies were discovered, a then-17-year-old Kouroumblis was pulled over by local constable and later homicide detective Ron Iddles, who found a knife in a scabbard in the boot of his car.

Kouroumblis said he had found it on Collingwood railway tracks on January 10, between 10.20pm and 11pm. That was 90 minutes after the two women were last seen alive.

Blood on the knife was found to be human and matched A positive, the same blood type as Armstrong’s.

Susan Bartlett was 27 when she was slain.

According to crime reporter Tom Prior in his book They Trusted Men, the inquest accepted a statement from Kouroumblis but could not question him because he had absconded while facing burglary charges.

“Perry, said by police to be ‘in smoke’, was on the run to escape burglary charges,” Prior wrote. “Perry had been questioned on other matters some days after the murders, police said. A bloodstained knife with a long blade had been found in a scabbard in the boot of the car.”

The inquest was held in July 1977, the same month Kouroumblis’ parents sold their home in Bendigo Street, Collingwood – three streets away from Easey Street.

The parents dropped off the electoral roll in 1980 and are believed to have later returned to Greece. Perry “Dingo” Kouroumblis, Australian-born, also moved to Greece before returning to Victoria.

When approached by cold-case detectives in 2017 to provide DNA over the Easey Street murders, he headed to Greece on a “short holiday” and then refused to return.

Kouroumblis’ brother, Tony, confirmed to this masthead that Perry attended Collingwood High and lived in Bendigo Street at the time of the murders.

Tony said his brother had never been accused of a crime “like that” but said Perry “pinched some cars” in his youth.

He said Perry left for Greece in 2017 “because he was single and all that”.

He added that Victoria Police “haven’t told me anything”, describing the previous 24 hours as “frustrating and numbing”.

Tony last spoke with Perry a week ago, but said there was no mention of a trip to Italy, and he hadn’t been able to contact him since the arrest.

“I’m 99.9 per cent sure [Perry] didn’t do it,” he said. “I don’t know how they [police] have linked him to anything. I find it difficult … that he would have done that, at that age. It doesn’t sound correct at all.”

Keith Fitzgerald, 80, who has lived in the same house in Bendigo Street his whole life, said Kouroumblis’ parents were “nice people” and quiet neighbours in the 1970s.

The only time he had an issue with the family was when one of the Kouroumblis boys, who had an air rifle, shot and broke the glass above his front door.

“I was lucky I never got my eye knocked out,” he said. “I went over and told his father, ‘Get that bloody gun off him.’ [One of the boys was] a little bit on the wild side.”

A colleague’s tribute to Susan Bartlett in The Age.Credit: The Age

He said he could not remember if the boy with the air rifle was Perry or his brother, Tony.

He said the residents of nearby Easey Street were “beside themselves” when the murders happened.

The current owners of 147 Easey Street declined to comment when approached by this masthead on Sunday.

Kaye Jones, a former student of Bartlett’s at Collingwood High, said the news of the arrest had stopped her in her tracks on Saturday.

“I can still remember her face so vividly,” said 61-year-old Jones, who was 15 at the time of the murders. “One day she was there and the next day, she didn’t turn up for class.

“She was tall, so she could seem really stern, but she was lovely. I remember she always wore kaftans to class.”

Jones said that while her teachers were clearly upset, little was said about the murders to the students then. But “we all put our detective hats on”, she said.

“I’d actually seen Susan arguing with a male teacher just a few days before she passed away, so of course, I immediately became suspicious. It made us all a bit fearful. Even when I heard the news, I immediately checked the name, but I was wrong.”

Following the new breakthrough in the case, another former student wrote on Facebook of their relief (“I remember that time, it hit us bad ... we went to her funeral”), while an ex-teacher friend spoke of attending parties in Bartlett’s previous flat in St Kilda in the late 1960s.

Another teacher, quoted in an Age article shortly after the murders, said Bartlett “was an enormously competent person, both as a teacher and as a creative person”.

Police said Kouroumblis was arrested in the early hours of Friday (AEST) at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Rome Fiumicino Airport. He had been living in Greece but could not be arrested there as under local laws, charges must be laid within 20 years of an alleged offence.

Attempts through diplomatic channels to have him returned to Melbourne failed, and he was put on an international watch list that led to his arrest in Rome.

Former Collingwood High student Jones said Bartlett’s murder cast a shadow over her remaining years at school.

“To this day, I can’t go back to Collingwood without thinking of it,” she said. “I never thought we’d get answers after all this time. I immediately thought of her family, and that little boy in his cot left alone.”

Get alerts on significant breaking news as happens. Sign up for our Breaking News Alert.