Sex tape clue in double murder of Margaret and Seana Tapp in Cold Case Files

A HOMEMADE sex tape found by a cheated wife could have triggered an unsolved mother and daughter murder.

Margaret Tapp

A HOMEMADE sex tape found by a cheated wife could have triggered the unsolved 1984 murders of a mother and daughter.

The Cold Case Files is a database of every unsolved homicide in Victoria since 2000. Search by name, date, location, reward and map, and alert police to clues.

This report, which first appeared in March this year, is among them.

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Homicide squad cold case unit head Ron Iddles is having a fresh look at the murders of Margaret Tapp and her daughter Seana.

Seana, 9, was raped and killed in her bed while Ms Tapp, 35, was beaten and strangled to death.

Their bodies were discovered in their Ferntree Gully home on August 8, 1984.

Margaret Tapp

Both were wearing nighties and both were choked with some sort of rope.

Det-Sen-Sgt Iddles believes the case remains solvable - despite a set back due to a DNA bungle in 2008 resulting in charges being dropped against a man wrongly accused of the Tapp murders.

Several suspects in the case were initially eliminated through DNA.

But problems with the DNA sample in the case have cast doubt on whether those suspects were correctly cleared.

'Why police never give up on a cold case'

They also discovered the Ferntree Gully house Ms Tapp was murdered in was provided for her by the doctor.

The Kelvin Drive home was their love nest until he died.

Police discovered the dead doctor's wife had known about the long-running affair and that she and Ms Tapp had argued about it several times.

The doctor's wife told police Ms Tapp had once turned up to beg her husband to leave the marital home and come and live with her.

Margaret and Seana Tapp, murder scene

She claimed Ms Tapp threw a rock through their window then stripped naked before lying down on the front lawn. The doctor told his wife and daughter to hide in a bedroom while he calmed Ms Tapp down and drove her home.

The confrontations between Ms Tapp and the doctor's wife continued after the doctor's death, with Ms Tapp taking legal action to try to get ownership of the Ferntree Gully house the doctor allowed her to live in.

Ms Tapp was convinced the doctor had made a will in which he left her the house, and accused the doctor's wife of destroying that will.

She ended up being given half of the Ferntree Gully home and bought the other half from the doctor's estate.

Sen-Sgt Iddles yesterday said the conflict between the doctor's wife and Ms Tapp would be examined again.

Apart from reviewing the Tapp file himself, Sen-Sgt Iddles has also asked officers currently doing the detective training course to go through all the evidence in the case and report back to him with suggestions as to what to do next.

The Tapp murders have already helped force Victoria Police to permanently change the way it uses DNA evidence.

An almighty forensic stuff-up resulted in Russell John Gesah being charged in August 2008 after he was wrongly linked by DNA to the Tapp murders.

It was discovered after he was charged that an unrelated exhibit containing Gesah's DNA from a rape he committed was tested at the Victoria Police laboratory on the same day and in the same place as material from the Tapp crime scene, which led to Gesah's DNA being mistakenly transferred to the Tapp exhibit.

Margaret Tapp, murder victim

Further tests after Gesah's arrest revealed his DNA did not match DNA left at the Tapp crime scene, and the murder charges were dropped.

The family of the Tapps were initially full of praise for police when Gesah was charged.

Ms Tapp's father, Alan Nelson, said the arrest might help give the family closure.

“I am very pleased. We have waited 24 years for this day,'' he told the Herald Sun in 2008.

Ms Tapp's sister, Joan Patterson, said it had been tough living for more than two decades without knowing what had happened.

“But we lived in hope that it would be resolved, and it is a great relief that an arrest has been made,'' she said.

The 2008 Tapp DNA disaster was followed in December 2009 with the freeing of the then 22-year-old Farah Jama after another DNA bungle involving a contaminated sample led to him being wrongly jailed for 16 months for a rape he didn't commit.

The Gesah and Jama bungles were a wake-up call to Victoria Police, which responded by introducing changes to lessen the likelihood more mistakes.

Probably the most important change is that the errors in the Tapp murders and the Jama case resulted in the Victoria Police manual being rewritten to ensure that only in very exceptional circumstances would a suspect be prosecuted on DNA evidence alone, as Jama was and Gesah would have been.

Murdered mother Margaret Tapp

Until the DNA bungle in the Tapp case was discovered, advances in DNA technology looked like being the one thing that would solve the murders.

The homicide squad took a fresh look at the Tapp murders in 1999 after a Herald Sun article prompted a woman to name a man she knew as the likely murderer. 

About the Cold Case Files database

Ms Tapp, who worked for years as a nurse, had been having an affair with the married man.

It was a strong lead and prompted a new probe into the Tapp murders.

DNA technology was not available in 1984.

Detectives retrieved exhibits from the unsolved murders during the 1999 investigation to see if DNA could be extracted from any of them.

Scientists were not able to get a good enough quality DNA sample then.

It wasn't until 2005, as DNA technology improved, police were able to use the weak sample, from semen stains left on Seana's nightie and panties, for elimination purposes.

That sample still wasn't of good enough quality to be used as evidence to convict anybody or to run through the DNA database in the hope of getting a random match.

But it did clear the married man nominated in 1999 as the killer.

Also among the suspects cleared by DNA was carpenter James Rollins, who found the Tapp bodies.

Mr Rollins had arranged to take Ms Tapp to the opera on the night of August 8, 1984.

He turned up at the Tapp home shortly after 6pm for his date, and was surprised to find the blinds drawn and that he got no answer when he knocked on the door.

He got in through an unlocked sliding door and began looking for Ms Tapp, eventually going into her bedroom.

“I saw the Doona on the bed was raised and crumpled, and I thought Margaret was asleep in bed,'' Mr Rollins said in his statement to police.

“I . . . could see her face from the mouth up. I put my hand on the Doona and said, `Marg'.

“At this stage I could see her complexion was quite pallid and I thought she was sick.

“With my left hand I reached over and pulled the Doona away a few inches.

“Her hands were crossed with her right over her left and resting on top of her chest, just covering the lower part of her neck.

“I don't think I saw blood, but it was blood-coloured.

“I thought Marg was dead. I then rang police.''

After ringing police, Mr Rollins went into Seana's bedroom and made the gruesome discovery that she was also dead.

An autopsy later revealed Ms Tapp was bashed and strangled and Seana was sexually assaulted and strangled.

Fibres found on their necks suggested the killer used a rope to cut off their air supply and asphyxiate them.

Evidence suggested they were killed either late on the night of August 7, after going to bed, or during the very early hours of August 8.

Mr Rollins was an immediate suspect, partly because police know it is often the person who reports the murder who turns out to be the killer.

As police checked out Ms Tapp's background, Mr Rollins was soon joined on the suspect list by others.

The problem for police who investigated the Tapp killings in 1984 wasn't a lack of suspects, but too many of them.

Ms Tapp was a single mother who was attractive to men and made the most of it after separating from her husband, Donald Tapp, in 1979.

She made a wide circle of friends as a nurse at several hospitals and widened that circle when she became a full-time law student at Monash University in 1981.

Police found a married man she studied with at Monash had slept with her in her home on the Friday before she was murdered, and had lunch with her on the Tuesday she died.

Several married doctors were identified as having had affairs with Ms Tapp.

Then there was the 19-year-old man Ms Tapp met at a Melbourne disco in late 1983.

Several people named members of a notorious family living near the Tapp home as possible murderers.

One of them was a teenager whom Ms Tapp regularly allowed to cut her lawn, despite neighbours warning her of sexually suggestive remarks he'd made to other women.

A former police officer and long-time family friend became a suspect when detectives discovered he spent the night at Ms Tapp's house shortly before the murders.

Police were told she complained to friends later he had “come on strong'' and tried to get her to sleep with him.

Interest in him heightened when a search of his car found a whip and a length of rope.

Another friend told police Ms Tapp had been taking driving lessons, and the instructor had taken a fancy to her and started giving free lessons so he could keep seeing her.

He became a suspect after police interviewed him in front of his wife.

While he admitted having often picked up and dropped off Ms Tapp at her home, he assured police he had never been inside her house.

What he didn't know was police had found his fingerprints inside the Tapp home.

A boyfriend of Ms Tapp's older sister became a suspect after police found he visited the Tapp home on the day the bodies were discovered.

Evidence provided by a nurse who had worked with Ms Tapp for eight years further led detectives to believe a spurned or current lover was probably responsible.

The friend described Ms Tapp as a real bitch to the men she had relationships with.

She told police Ms Tapp had a habit of ridiculing her lovers and goading them about their lack of sexual expertise.

“Margaret could chop men up into little pieces,'' the friend said in a statement to police.

Sen-Sgt Iddles yesterday said the cold case squad was happy to follow up any new leads. He appealed to anyone with information on the Tapp murders to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.