This breakthrough in the Easey Street murders will turn Melbourne upside down again

The Easey Street murders lodged in the minds of those who lived in Melbourne then at the same level as Adelaide’s missing Beaumont children. That same day, I started my newspaper career.

Suzanne Armstrong who was murdered in her house at Collingwood in 1977, pictured with her son Gregory.

Late in 1976, I was hired as a cadet journalist by Max Newton who, a dozen years earlier, had been launch editor of The Australian. He was a big thinker, a big drinker and had gone off whatever spacious rails he usually relied upon to guide his life. His chaotic Sunday Observer would furnish me with some of the most extraordinary moments of my life.

Like day one. I had been given a start date for late January but the editor called over Christmas and changed it to Monday, January 10. No matter what happened, that Monday would be a landmark.

Days later the date gained unique significance. Two women found dead at Easey Street in inner-suburban Collingwood during the week had been murdered on the Monday night. The Easey Street murders lodged in the minds of those who lived in Melbourne then at the same level as Adelaide’s missing Beaumont children.

The bedroom in the house in Collingwood, scene of the murder of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett in 1977.

In a ferocious, sordid attack, not all details of which are fit to publish, Suzanne Armstrong, 28, and Susan Bartlett, 27, popular school mates from Benalla, reportedly known to friends and family as The Two Sues, had been stabbed to death. In a moment with biblical echoes, it was the sound of Armstrong’s 16-month-old son, Gregory, whimpering in his cot that alerted neighbours that something was amiss.

There were 65 murders in Victoria in 1977 – a record. Six remain unsolved. No one can remember the other four. Easey Street was different because Armstrong and Bartlett were not. The woman had moved into number 147 – an unremarkable, careworn 1880 single-level terrace – weeks before, just after it had sold for $19,500 the previous October, the new owner no doubt delighted to rent it to the quiet country pair.

Almost everyone in the city had been within metres of the house – it was next to Victoria Park railway station and then home of the Collingwood Football Club. In an effort to trap the idea of suburban ordinariness, the television series The Sullivans was filmed at the nearby Retreat Hotel. The women had watched an episode hours before they were killed.

Back then, Easey Street was the everyday. Everyday, uneventful things happened there. Until they didn’t.

Susan Bartlett was murdered in Easey Street Collingwood Picture: Supplied

The women had boyfriends and a wide circle of friends with whom they regularly socialised. Between their murders on the Monday night and concerned neighbours going to investigate on the Thursday, both boyfriends – unable to make contact on the landline – visited the house, one to take down the landline number from the phone receiver, the other to leave a note.

While everyone in Melbourne put on their detective hats, Victoria Police drew up a list of suspects that was soon 130 names long. The boyfriends would have been the quinella, but they were soon ruled out. They were different days when locals and friends would call out over the fence and back doors were commonly unlocked.

The talk of the town was that a prominent racing car driver was involved. Then attention switched to workers at a nearby construction site. But then it was revealed that a newspaper reporter who had been sleeping at another Easey Street address the night of the murders had been one of the last people to see Julie Garciacelay alive.

147 Easey Street, Collingwood, the house at the centre of the Easey Street murders in 1977. Picture: Josie Hayden

Garciacelay, a 20-year-old American living with her sister in North Melbourne, had found work in the La Trobe Street, Melbourne office of News Ltd as a librarian. Both The Australian and long defunct Truth newspaper were published from the site. A Truth reporter, John Grant, with some underworld contacts he had inherited via his crime reporting round, had visited the Garciacelay home on July 1, 1975, the night she disappeared. When her sister returned to the address the next morning, there was a bloodstained towel and some of Garciacelay’s clothing had been cut and strewn about.

She remains missing, presumed murdered, but her body had never been found. The same DNA evidence that led to last week’s arrest cleared the journalist of any involvement in the Easey Street case. He had wanted the cases solved for many years, and told a newspaper two decades ago that he had been “to hell and back” since being linked to the crimes. I met him in a city pub years ago and his business card then, if I remember clearly, read “Investigative reporting and gardening”.

Suspect: Perry Kouroumblis has been named as the man arrested in Italy in connection with the Easey St murders. Picture: Facebook

What has always remained elusive in the Easey Street murders was a motive. The ghastly crime scene threw up plenty of evidence and perhaps suggested that the killer had arrived to murder Armstrong and that he saw Bartlett as an inconvenient witness. The new suspect’s links to arts and crafts teacher Bartlett revealed at the weekend might have turned that long-held theory upside down.

With the clarity of 20-20 hindsight – and almost 48 years of straws clutched and released – it would appear that the longstanding detectives’ adage holds true: there is always a clue in the files.