Andrew Rule: The Easey St murders and the missed chances to catch a killer
There is no soft way to say this: every time someone takes a hard look at the Easey St murders, it underlines how slipshod the first police investigation was, writes Andrew Rule.
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There is no soft way to say this: every time someone takes a hard look at the Easey St murders, it underlines how slipshod the first police investigation was.
Two generations of investigators to revisit the case have been astounded that their forebears in Homicide managed to do so little for so long. Detectives who picked up the original 1977 file in the 1990s asked where the rest was, looking for a box of documents. There was nothing but a manila folder with a few skinny statements from a handful of people.
No wonder that when journalist Helen Thomas started to rake over Melbourne’s most notorious cold case, she uncovered leads ignored, or done half-heartedly or missed altogether.
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Thomas doesn’t claim any particular lead would have solved the murders. But she wonders, “If they missed this, what else did they miss?”
She pulls together some new information to add to the known facts, which go like this. Suzanne Armstrong and her friend Susan Bartlett, mates from Benalla, moved into 147 Easey St, Collingwood, in late 1976. Suzanne was a single mother with a 15-month-old son, Gregory. Susan Bartlett taught at a Collingwood school.
The “two Sues”, aged 27, led a busy social life. A few days after New Year’s Eve, Suzanne took a blind date with shearer Barry Woodard, brother of her sister Gayle’s boyfriend. They went out twice more. Barry took Suzanne home after an outing, on Sunday night, January 9. He promised to call the next day, and did. But no one answered.
On that Monday, January 10, Susan Bartlett made dinner for her brother Martin and his girlfriend, Vicki Crowe. When Martin and Vicki left about 9pm, the two Sues were watching television.
Sometime later that evening, while Suzanne was reading in bed in the front room of the long, narrow cottage, the killer arrived. The house had three bedrooms opening off a narrow hallway. The kitchen and bathroom were at the back, cut off from the bedrooms by the living room. So if Sue Bartlett was taking a bath or doing washing “down the back” late that hot Monday night, she might not at first have heard what was happening 15m away.
The killer might not have realised Suzanne was not home alone until Susan heard the noise and came running to help, only to be attacked in turn in a stabbing frenzy.
That’s what happened, though whether it was early in the evening or long after midnight no one can tell.
Next day, the neighbours on the other side of the shared wall at number 149 got up early after a late night. Ilona Stevens, who worked at the Truth newspaper office, had brought home her work colleague John “Grunter” Grant to play pool and have a drink. Stevens’ housemate Janet Powell had come home at midnight and they had stayed up until 2am. Grant slept on the couch.
Ilona and Janet did not know the two Sues well but had seen them with little Gregory and a big pup. When Ilona left around 8am, she heard Gregory crying next door. Later, Janet saw the pup loose in the street and caught it. She knocked next door but no one answered. Later that evening, Ilona shouted over the side fence but there was no answer.
Late that night, they pinned a note about the pup to the front door. Even later, they could hear the phone next door ring out. The note was still on the door the next afternoon and they could hear Gregory crying. Janet noticed that the same light had been on in the neighbours’ house and it spooked her. Then they went into the back yard next door and Ilona walked through the back door and through the kitchen and living room.
Then she saw Susan Bartlett’s feet at the end of the hall. She approached the body, then saw Suzanne Armstrong in the front bedroom.
She found Gregory in his cot in the middle bedroom, weak and dehydrated. She called to Janet to ring the police.
The killer had washed himself. There was blood in the bathroom and a bloodied towel on a couch. There was a footprint on the bedspread in Sue Bartlett’s room, where the window was ajar. There was a note in the kitchen from Barry Woodard, asking Suzanne to call him. The police talked to Woodard and his brother Henry, who were subsequently cleared of any involvement, twice, through DNA testing. The Woodards said they had dropped in to see Suzanne on the Tuesday night; when no one answered their knocks they had gone in the unlocked back door and left the note on the kitchen bench.
They had called out but didn’t go further into the house because Barry thought it was impolite. A shaken and shocked Barry Woodard said he was numbed by the murders. “I stood only six metres from her body, not knowing she was there,” he said at the time. “I think I would have asked her to marry me if she was still here.”
THE Woodard’s account was no harder to believe than the watertight story of an acquaintance of Sue’s who arrived with a friend and climbed through her window (hence the footprint) and found the telephone to write down the number. Like the Woodards, he hadn’t looked up the hall and seen Sue Bartlett’s body.
The other person of interest in the early days was John Grant, who had slept next door on the night the killer struck. Grant was unlucky: he had been one of the last to see the missing Julie Garciacelay, a 19-year-old Californian who had worked at the same newspaper office before disappearing from an address where Grant and two notorious figures had been drinking with her.
Grant has repeatedly denied any involvement in the murders
Julie Garciacelay was never seen again and almost certainly was murdered. The Herald Sun is not suggesting that the Woodards or Grant were in any way involved in the murders. Like the Woodards and several others, Grant was on a list of potential suspects police would eliminate using DNA testing.
But how comprehensive was that list? After her research, Helen Thomas wonders if the case was lost in the first few days and weeks. It did not take her long to find out about a neighbour, Gladys Coventry, who lived on the other side of the side lane, metres from the murder house.
Gladys told neighbours she had seen a man with a knife step into the lane from the back gate on the night of the murder, but she had been uncooperative with police. Then there is former apprentice jockey Peter Sellers and his mate, who said they heard two car doors slam in quick succession and a car speed away from Easey St late on the night of the murders.
It is unlikely either lead would have solved the crime, of course. But the fact police did not bother pursuing them at the time suggests they probably missed others as well.
Thomas gathers some intriguing angles. The spookiest comes from former newspaper columnist Tess Lawrence, who visited 147 Easey St weeks after the murder to write about the heartbreak of the two families packing up the women’s possessions.
Lawrence recalls that her article described the scene in detail, which police hoped would get someone to come forward with information. She says she got a frightening phone call from a man who asked her why she had not specified the name of the record on the record player. He also listed (she claims) other objects in the house not named in her story.
Lawrence says she tried to have the call traced, and had told police immediately that she thought the caller worked at Victoria Barracks.
She still wonders whether her lead was followed up, and so does Helen Thomas. It’s a good question.
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