‘It’s unbelievable’: The families and detectives who never gave up hope for an arrest over Easey Street murders

The detective made an extraordinary promise to Gayle Armstrong years ago.

The next time he visited her, he would have something significant to tell her about her sister’s murder. When he came to her door at 7.30 on Saturday morning, he kept that promise.

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

He revealed that a 65-year-old man had been arrested at an airport in Rome over the double homicide of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett in their home in Easey Street, Collingwood, in 1977. It was the development both families had been waiting nearly half a century for.

“There’s no words to describe it,” Gayle said hours later from her home in country Victoria. “I shake and I cry and I laugh and I’m here all by myself … It’s unbelievable.”

Two years ago, Detective Senior Sergeant Paul Rowe had reassured her, again, that he and Victoria’s homicide team were still on the Easey Street case. They weren’t giving up.

So Gayle clung to the sliver of hope she maintained that her sister’s case could be solved after such an agonising stretch of time; that there would be justice for the two young women fatally stabbed – more than 80 times, collectively – in their small cottage nearly five decades ago.

Suzanne Armstrong with her son, Gregory. He was 16 months old when his mother was murdered.

Adding to this heartbreak: Suzanne’s 16-month-old son was left in his cot for several days before their bodies were found – unharmed, but alone.

“You know, [the detective] actually added up the minutes since it happened. I said, ‘how long has it been?’ And he said [it was] 47 years and eight months,” Gayle Armstrong says. “And my brain’s not working now, but that’s however many minutes ...”

For the record, it’s more than 25 million minutes.

This highlights the extraordinary length of time that’s passed since the two young women were killed, nearly two generations of lives lived without them, a terrible if receding shadow always there as those years rolled by – as well as the dedication of police to bring this suspect back to Australia.

He has been a person of interest “for a number of years”, according to Victortia Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton.

For retired detective Peter Hiscock, it highlights something he first told me seven years ago – ironically, it seems around the same time police were identifying their new lead – as I researched the book Murder On Easey Street.

The answer is in the file. Or it should be.

He and his colleagues were taught that there was always something to find, a detail – however small – to dig out of an old dossier, especially on a difficult case like the Easey Street killings. And it seems he was right.

Arts teacher Susan Bartlett, 28, lived in the Easey Street home with her friend from Benalla, Armstrong.

“What they’ve obviously done, I’m just assuming, is gone back through that file and thought, ‘there’s somebody [in here] that might have blood we can test; let’s get them all’. And here’s this obscure kid ...

“But I would always work on the principle that just because something is unusual doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

As a 30-year-old detective, he and his partner were the first to attend the murder scene on that hot Thursday morning of January 13, 1977, and he’s never forgotten it. Since that hard summer, hardly a day’s gone by when he doesn’t think of the “two Sues”, as friends and family called them – and he says he never drives along Hoddle Street without looking over at Easey Street.

What remains unanswered, for now, is how the killer could wreak such havoc on so many lives. Did he know the two young women? Had he passed them in the street, or watched Armstrong’s son, Gregory, playing in the backyard, often with other children who also lived in Easey Street?

What led to him entering their Collingwood home that night and acting so savagely, before attempting to clean himself in the bathroom and leaving the property, knife in hand, via the adjoining dunny lane – if what the two Sues’ closest neighbour claimed she saw is correct?

Such questions linger. For now, even veteran investigator Peter Hiscock is incredulous that checking through such an ancient police file has led to this arrest, that a detail, overlooked for so long, has provided so significant a breakthrough.

So too is Susan Bartlett’s brother Martin. Tall and taciturn, he’s never allowed despair to overwhelm the quiet confidence he’s always had, that exactly this kind of detail could lead to such a breakthrough, to somehow shed new light on an important way forward.

Over nearly five decades, he’s dealt with several senior investigators and is thankful they also never gave up in their professional determination to crack what Patton has described as “Victoria’s most serious cold case”.

Yet, this development has taken so long, there are now few people around who knew Martin Bartlett’s sister. Let’s all hope that justice for Susan and Suzanne Armstrong is finally within reach.

And they are always remembered.

Helen Thomas is the author of Murder on Easey Street.

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