Speaker 1: You're listening too. A Mother MEA podcast, Mother Mea acknowledges
Speaker 1: the traditional owners of land and waders. This podcast was
Speaker 1: recorded on It's about eleven PM in the winter of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four in a suburban street in Melbourne, and
Speaker 1: Rosalind Bomford wakes with a start. She can hear what
Speaker 1: sounds like a muffled scream coming from the neighbor's house.
Speaker 1: She waits listening. Her dog growls, but then there's silence.
Speaker 1: Surely she was mistaken. Across the street, another neighbor hears
Speaker 1: a sound. Closer to midnight. The Tap family dog is howling.
Speaker 1: They've never heard the little dog so frantic. The spaniel
Speaker 1: belongs to shawna Tap. She's only nine. She lives in
Speaker 1: the ordinary, single story home with her fourteen year old
Speaker 1: brother Justin, and their mother, Margaret, a local nurse, a
Speaker 1: single mum and a part time law student. Pretty soon
Speaker 1: the night is quiet again. But what is discovered the
Speaker 1: following day in the fern Tree Gully home is so horrible.
Speaker 1: The season detective who discovers it can't help but weep
Speaker 1: when he goes home that evening. A crime so harrowing
Speaker 1: it should be among Australia's most infamous, but instead, all
Speaker 1: these years later, it's obvious this case has fallen through
Speaker 1: the cracks. I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime
Speaker 1: Conversations Amoma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes
Speaker 1: by speaking to the people who know the most about them.
Speaker 1: A warning. What happened to Shauna and Margaret tap on
Speaker 1: a Tuesday night in August four decades ago is hard
Speaker 1: to hear a crime so harrowing it should be one
Speaker 1: that's etched into our bones. The killer surely strangled Margaret first.
Speaker 1: It's inconceivable she would not have fought to save her
Speaker 1: little girl. Shauna died the same way, except she was
Speaker 1: raped first. Both the mother and daughter were found still
Speaker 1: in their nightgowns in their beds. Their names Arena's familiar
Speaker 1: as some of the most famous crimes of our generation,
Speaker 1: and yet this happened in a regular Aussie home, to
Speaker 1: a loving family at the foothills of the Dandenong Rangers.
Speaker 1: To help us understand the crime, the coverage, and the
Speaker 1: police investigation that went cold, we're joined by journalist, podcaster
Speaker 1: and author of Life and Crimes Andrew Ruhl, who covered
Speaker 1: the story when it first broke in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: In more recent stories covering the case, Andrew is adamant
Speaker 1: reporters and police sometimes get it wrong, including him. Andrew
Speaker 1: joins us. Now, Andrew, I want to start with, do
Speaker 1: you remember the night or the day that the Margaret
Speaker 1: and shawna Tap murders came through.
Speaker 2: This is the interesting thing. It was a relatively minor
Speaker 2: I wasn't a minor murder. It was a double murder
Speaker 2: of a mother and daughter. But it didn't achieve the
Speaker 2: splash that it might have had circumstances been slightly different.
Speaker 2: Looking back on it, I was amazed years later to
Speaker 2: look back and see that it only generated something like
Speaker 2: five news stories in newspapers. Five only do you mean.
Speaker 1: In that initial kind of breaking news stay.
Speaker 2: In that first year or whatever, you know when it happened, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it wasn't massive news for days and weeks because there
Speaker 2: were no developments. And also in those cases, usually the
Speaker 2: police will wheel out the grieving relatives who make appeals
Speaker 2: and there's you know, heartbroken people pictures. The family of
Speaker 2: Margaret Tap, for better or worse, were obviously greed stricken, heartbroken.
Speaker 2: They are also shocked, and they are also religious people,
Speaker 2: very respectable, and they were sort of scandalized. Apart from
Speaker 2: all the rest of the stuff, they were scandalized about
Speaker 2: her lifestyle, which she'd had a lot of different blogs
Speaker 2: to visit her and so on, and so they didn't
Speaker 2: really want to drag it all through the media, and
Speaker 2: so they did no media and it died to death.
Speaker 2: And that story, I'm ashamed to say that the media
Speaker 2: of which I was a part really didn't get teeth
Speaker 2: into it for years. And the biggest story ever written
Speaker 2: was on the twentieth anniversary of the murders. I went
Speaker 2: back to it and said, I'm going to do this
Speaker 2: properly now, and I did it twenty years later.
Speaker 1: For those that haven't heard the story, because as you've said,
Speaker 1: it's not a really well known case, let's talk about
Speaker 1: some of the details. Firstly, Fern Tree Gully, I mean,
Speaker 1: I've never heard of it. What's that area of Melbourne, like.
Speaker 2: Outer of eastern suburbs, probably now a bit like then
Speaker 2: working class and up a fair way out out of east.
Speaker 2: This is towards the dandiong Rangers.
Speaker 1: Family suburbia kind of.
Speaker 2: Oh, definitely family out of suburbia. You know, it's well out.
Speaker 2: It's thirty odd case from the central city. They were
Speaker 2: in Calvin Drive, which is just off Ferntree Gully Road,
Speaker 2: a major busy road, and you could hear that traffic
Speaker 2: from their house. Their house is number thirteen, so it
Speaker 2: was only six houses off the big road. It was
Speaker 2: a rented house which she'd taken possession of through an
Speaker 2: affair she had with the doctor who bought it for her,
Speaker 2: which is relevant because his widow, the doctor's widow, was
Speaker 2: one of the suspects for the murder wrongly in my view,
Speaker 2: a ridiculous suspect, but the police were pretty keen on
Speaker 2: her for a while and thought she'd had Margaret knocked
Speaker 2: off by a murdering pedophile, which would strike me as
Speaker 2: a fairly long shot that a doctor's widow would employ
Speaker 2: a hipman who was also an active pedophile who was
Speaker 2: sexually assault the child. Shawna Well kind of.
Speaker 1: Gives you an idea of what the police were working with,
Speaker 1: which is not a lot.
Speaker 2: Not a lot, and the police don't always get it right.
Speaker 2: In the eighties in Melbourne homicide Squad had patchy results,
Speaker 2: and in the seventies with several murders that didn't get
Speaker 2: investigated properly in my view, for various reasons. One is
Speaker 2: they were busy doing other things, and of course in
Speaker 2: those days they didn't have all the things that we
Speaker 2: have now to find people. These days, you go out
Speaker 2: and say, where's the cameras on them highway, where's the
Speaker 2: cameras at the seven to eleven, where's the cameras next door?
Speaker 2: Where's the credit card stuff? And all that registration plate recognition.
Speaker 2: None of that existed. So if somebody got away with
Speaker 2: murder in nine to eighty four or before, if they
Speaker 2: shut up about it, they had a big chance of
Speaker 2: getting away with it for good.
Speaker 1: From your recollection, what happened to Margaret and shaunatap late
Speaker 1: on the.
Speaker 2: Night of August seventh, So the Los Angeles Olympics are
Speaker 2: on at this stage, someone a male person obviously, has
Speaker 2: entered the house without forcing anything. This would suggest there
Speaker 2: was somebody that might have had some knowledge of the place,
Speaker 2: or that they knew possibly, but those who knew them
Speaker 2: well knew that the back door didn't lock properly. It
Speaker 2: was faulty, and you could walk in the back door
Speaker 2: quite easily, and that would have been known to a
Speaker 2: few people. Next day, the little girl next door usually
Speaker 2: walked to school with Shauna, and Shawna was nine years old.
Speaker 2: She looked up no sign, as Shauna, the blinds are
Speaker 2: still drawn, the newspaper is still on the porch. The
Speaker 2: newspapers delivered, it hadn't been picked up, and she wondered,
Speaker 2: what's happening. So she walked to school by herself. Later
Speaker 2: that afternoon, a man who knew Margaret, a nice fellow carpenter,
Speaker 2: armless guy. He came around to see her to see
Speaker 2: if she wanted to go to the opera with him,
Speaker 2: and knock, knock, knock, no sign. Her brother in law
Speaker 2: is another one who turned up and saw the paper,
Speaker 2: saw the lockdoor, no sign. One of those two guys, Jim,
Speaker 2: the carpenter, the friend of the opera guy. He goes
Speaker 2: in the back door and finds the crime scene. He
Speaker 2: finds both of them in beds with the covers pulled
Speaker 2: up to their necks as if it's done by somebody
Speaker 2: covering up the crime, the psychology of it, and both
Speaker 2: of them had been strangled with something. In the case
Speaker 2: of Shawna, the nine year old girl, there was seamen
Speaker 2: found on her night dress, which would suggest a sort
Speaker 2: of a sexual motive. So this wasn't a burglary gone wrong.
Speaker 2: This wasn't a hit on Margaret performed by a hitman.
Speaker 2: This was a weird sexual murder. Perhaps somebody has known
Speaker 2: to them that had done something bad with Shauna, and
Speaker 2: then Margaret realized or yelled, or you know, the little
Speaker 2: girl yelled, and maybe then the perpetrator killed both the
Speaker 2: cover up. This is what it looks like to me.
Speaker 1: I know you've spoken to one of the detectives that
Speaker 1: found that scene and he was pretty shaken up by it,
Speaker 1: wasn't he.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's detectives, many of them are married with kids.
Speaker 2: It does shake them up when they see dead kids.
Speaker 2: That really wears them. The problem with this whole case,
Speaker 2: and there's no use sugar coating it, is that from
Speaker 2: the start the police wasn't a case of not having suspects.
Speaker 2: They had too many, and all about equal height. So okay,
Speaker 2: let's look at Margaret. Who's she know, her ex husband
Speaker 2: that she divorced five years earlier. Get him in. He'll
Speaker 2: be good. Well he's not, he's harmless, alibi, not a problem.
Speaker 2: Then the Margaret's sister's boyfriend, he was sort of brother
Speaker 2: in law. He'd come around there. They'd have to clear him.
Speaker 2: Then the alleg's boyfriend, the guy that came around to
Speaker 2: take her to the opera, But he was a harmless
Speaker 2: guy and nice guy. These three they clear rapidly. Then
Speaker 2: there's Margaret's brother, who's a strange cat. Lindsey. I talked
Speaker 2: to him quite a lot, and he worked at the
Speaker 2: local council with a lot of rough guys, truck drivers
Speaker 2: and sort of rough blugs. Some of them might had
Speaker 2: a bit of form for crimes. One of them drove
Speaker 2: a really hot Falcon newt red with mags. Such a
Speaker 2: vehicle was seen in that street at some point that week.
Speaker 2: Some of those guys had helped move furniture into the
Speaker 2: house as a favor to the brother, so you had that.
Speaker 2: Then Margaret, she was a nurse at a local hospital
Speaker 2: in the Hills. She was very friendly with a lot
Speaker 2: of different doctors. She'd had affairs with seven of them,
Speaker 2: including a leading an ethetist.
Speaker 1: There were all of those, so seven more suspects.
Speaker 2: Well potentially. And then she was a nurse, but she
Speaker 2: was doing law at Monash University because she wanted to
Speaker 2: become a medico legal. She was bright, she was smart.
Speaker 2: She clearly had an enormously warm and engaging personality because
Speaker 2: men just fell for her one after the other. She
Speaker 2: was clearly an intriguing person with a force field of charisma.
Speaker 2: You know, she'd met a guy at UNI that used
Speaker 2: to come over and see her. And then she was
Speaker 2: having truck driving lessons from a bloke who had a truck,
Speaker 2: who was giving a lessons driving the truck. And so
Speaker 2: there's you know, ten eleven, twelve suspects right there, let
Speaker 2: alone anyone those guys knew what about that guy's friend,
Speaker 2: what about that guy's brother. And in the end it
Speaker 2: sort of collapsed under the way to all these potential
Speaker 2: suspects that I don't believe were cleared properly back then
Speaker 2: and only half heartedly cleared later because Margaret's brother, Lindsay,
Speaker 2: assured me that he hadn't been cleared by DNA samples
Speaker 2: until twenty years later, a big gap he himself. Now
Speaker 2: he had to be regarded as a suspect.
Speaker 1: Because they had DNA from the scene, They had DNA
Speaker 1: from this, they had semen, they had fingerprints.
Speaker 2: They did not have finger or footprints. They had a footprint.
Speaker 2: The one clue no one's ever been able to explain
Speaker 2: it who it is, if it's innocent, was the footprint
Speaker 2: of a Volley sanchu. Now you may not remember them,
Speaker 2: but when I was young, everybody had Volly sancho's that
Speaker 2: are Rippley sold.
Speaker 1: Now they're back again, they're back, pleased to know.
Speaker 2: And you know everyone more than then. They wore them
Speaker 2: with jeans. And it was a thing, and it was
Speaker 2: a certain size, and it had left a mark on
Speaker 2: a clean floor because it had been recently used on it.
Speaker 2: Probably they think on an onto car tennis court, you know,
Speaker 2: the red dust tennis courts. And I were never able
Speaker 2: to work out whose it was, and it would strike
Speaker 2: you as a very intriguing clue. I have to say.
Speaker 2: Among the other clues we haven't been through. Down the
Speaker 2: road was a kid that all the neighbors said, this
Speaker 2: kid's win, he's a teenager, right them down on his
Speaker 2: bike and make filthy comments to women working in the garden.
Speaker 2: I went and found this guy as an adult, very
Speaker 2: strange cat, but he knew exactly where the grave was.
Speaker 2: Explained to me how to go to their graves to Margaret,
Speaker 2: and he said, yeah, you're going there, and then you
Speaker 2: walk about fifty minutes in your turn left at a
Speaker 2: black grave and it's a shiny one. He knew it precisely.
Speaker 2: Just down the road, I think next to his house
Speaker 2: was a house full of pretty rough people. One of
Speaker 2: them had some form for badness and madness. His sister
Speaker 2: lived at a caravan out the back of the house.
Speaker 2: That guy did jail for rape on a separate case.
Speaker 2: So our pool of potential suspects is what thirteen and
Speaker 2: fourteen and fifteen, But.
Speaker 1: That shouldn't matter, doesn't a police investigation.
Speaker 2: It's interrogated that I found those guys. I found those
Speaker 2: brothers from that house. They were all rough heads. Obviously
Speaker 2: they can't all be guilty or none of them are guilty, right,
Speaker 2: And I spoke to them. They said, yeah, the couples
Speaker 2: should have come and say ah's he said, I was
Speaker 2: working night shift. I was a perfect candidate. Why didn't
Speaker 2: they come and talk to me and clear mate? Why
Speaker 2: didn't they clear my brother? Yeah? They reckoned. The police
Speaker 2: just didn't do their job properly, so it fell through cracks.
Speaker 2: Another potential thing is, you know, Shauna was a Brownie,
Speaker 2: the junior girl gods. We now know looking back on it,
Speaker 2: that girl gods, brownies, cubs, scouts were full of pedophiles, which,
Speaker 2: looking back, with the wisdom and mindsight, you think that
Speaker 2: would have to be an interesting connection. Having gone through
Speaker 2: all these things, I wrote a big story about it
Speaker 2: twenty years later and since then. Some years ago now
Speaker 2: I was approached by a young man said he was
Speaker 2: a friend of the estranged children of a local doctor
Speaker 2: from up there. This doctor was a GP who lived
Speaker 2: in the dandinongs, so Danny Loong Rangers. I've got pleased
Speaker 2: hills with trees and birds and flowers and pedophile doctors.
Speaker 2: This doctor was popular, He was well known. He was
Speaker 2: well liked by some people, not by others. He had
Speaker 2: three kids of his own. Turned out he was a
Speaker 2: sexual deviate of the darkest dye. Turns out that he
Speaker 2: molested a lot of kids, including his own, and including patients.
Speaker 2: So this is an interesting figure because he was very
Speaker 2: well known up there as a GP. He would go
Speaker 2: regularly to that hospital where Margaret worked. He wasn't one
Speaker 2: of the hospital doctors, but he would go there to
Speaker 2: treat you know, somebody's granny or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: So it's another potential call totally.
Speaker 2: And he was a sexual predator, and he was a
Speaker 2: good looking athletic tennis playing fellaw.
Speaker 1: Right, and he's never been investigated for this crime.
Speaker 2: Well, that's a good question. When I was told about
Speaker 2: this fellow only a few years ago. Now they nailed
Speaker 2: one pedophile incident to him, obviously it'll be one of many.
Speaker 2: But and he got struck off as a doctor. His
Speaker 2: wife left him, his kids hated him, and he moved
Speaker 2: up to a riverside town on the Murray River where
Speaker 2: a lot of people go to retire and play golf.
Speaker 2: That's where he's gone. And not long ago, a couple
Speaker 2: of years ago, I went up there and sat off
Speaker 2: his house and watching Walky's little dog down the street.
Speaker 2: And everybody locally knows who he is in the background,
Speaker 2: and they all watch him, all the parents. If he
Speaker 2: ever steps out of line, he'll end up in the Murray.
Speaker 2: That guy is intriguing because he played tennis with a
Speaker 2: group of other men, one of whom I know. One
Speaker 2: of them was the father of a girl that was
Speaker 2: molested by this doctor, and he used to play at
Speaker 2: a little tennis caught up there Fernie Creek and it
Speaker 2: had an onto car court, you know, the red dust stuff.
Speaker 2: I'm told that his feet were about the right size
Speaker 2: for the shoes. Now, whether that's just a lot of coincidences,
Speaker 2: I don't know. It may well be, but he's a
Speaker 2: doctor that should easily have known Margaret. He played tennis
Speaker 2: e will volley sanshoes. He was a sexual predator. He
Speaker 2: was a sexual predator with a lot to lose and
Speaker 2: later lost it. He was a big, strong, sort of
Speaker 2: athletic guy, be quite capable of strangling mother and daughter there.
Speaker 2: He is living in a country town in New South
Speaker 2: Wales on the just on that side of the river.
Speaker 1: You're listening to true crime conversations with me, Jimmy Bath.
Speaker 1: I'm speaking with Andrew Ruhle about the murder of Shawna
Speaker 1: and Margaret. Tap up next, we discover why this unsolved
Speaker 1: case didn't get the coverage it deserved. It's interesting because
Speaker 1: hearing that obviously there's a lot of alarm bells there,
Speaker 1: but then there's another really credible suspect that you write
Speaker 1: about a lot, which was Margaret's dad's friend, the ex
Speaker 1: policeman who we haven't even.
Speaker 2: I haven't because there's number what don't we can talk
Speaker 2: about him? He died. I went knocked on his door
Speaker 2: twenty years ago to find he was on a cruise somewhere.
Speaker 2: He was an amateur door but he used to paint.
Speaker 2: He painted a picture after Margaret and Shawna were murdered
Speaker 2: of Shauna beside a campfire, and it ended up with
Speaker 2: uncle Lindsey, with Shauna's uncle. He sent me a photograph
Speaker 2: of it, and I was very intrigued by they saying
Speaker 2: Cook he was a bit of a predatory guy. That
Speaker 2: doesn't make him a killer and a pedophile. I have
Speaker 2: to say he was an old copper that he'd known
Speaker 2: the family for years. They were sort of friends. I
Speaker 2: reckon he was in the Masonic lodge with Margaret's father.
Speaker 2: I reckon there's a bit of a bond there, which
Speaker 2: might be one of the reasons the case didn't get
Speaker 2: publicized much. The police force in those days. There are
Speaker 2: a lot of that Masons versus Catholics very big in
Speaker 2: the police force until recent times, and those sort of
Speaker 2: things would apply that if they said, oh, he's a
Speaker 2: brother and he does on this publicized it's embarrassing. That
Speaker 2: might well happen. So that fellow Anne Cook. He'd known
Speaker 2: Margaret when she was a young runaway. She'd run away
Speaker 2: from home at sixteen, and he'd gone to Saint Kildraa
Speaker 2: somewhere and picked her up and brought her home. But
Speaker 2: he used to visit and she used to complain to
Speaker 2: her sister, so that bloody and Cook's coming around here.
Speaker 2: Da da da da da. And he was allowed back
Speaker 2: into the crime scene. He said to retrieve a book
Speaker 2: or books or letters or something, and the coppers let
Speaker 2: him in because he was either still a serving copper
Speaker 2: or just out of the job. Now that puts him
Speaker 2: at the crime scene. That means he can get his
Speaker 2: fingerprints there legitimately, which covers him if his prince are
Speaker 2: found back. I think so, But very hard to get
Speaker 2: the sense out of the police later, because I think
Speaker 2: there were a lot of gaps. They had different waves
Speaker 2: of DNA test over twenty years, and they didn't clear
Speaker 2: everybody in the first instance. When DNA came in, they
Speaker 2: cleared you know, a short listen, and they cleared a
Speaker 2: few more, and then a few more. And if if
Speaker 2: these guys were too far away or too hard to find,
Speaker 2: I think they slipped through the net for a long time.
Speaker 1: Would you give people a little bit of an idea
Speaker 1: of the developments that did happen. They did actually charge
Speaker 1: someone with the murders in two thousand and eight. Tell
Speaker 1: us about that.
Speaker 2: Well, there's front page news.
Speaker 1: Finally makes sense.
Speaker 2: It was leaked by a friendly homicide squad detective to
Speaker 2: a colleague of mine. You know, big breakthrough. We've got him.
Speaker 2: He's a boats in jail at Sale, which is a
Speaker 2: regional city in Victoria. We've had a match with DNA.
Speaker 2: It's him and front page news. Great crime solved. And
Speaker 2: then there's a photograph of Margaret's poor ole father holding
Speaker 2: a photograph of Margaret and a little girl and wrong.
Speaker 2: Within days, turns out that he's been a balls up
Speaker 2: in the laboratory. They'd spatted DNA around the room and
Speaker 2: had fallen on the microscope and it wasn't him at all.
Speaker 2: He gave no comment interview, which made the place pretty
Speaker 2: keen on him. But when his lawyer pointed out that
Speaker 2: his client was in Darwin at the time, provably or somewhere,
Speaker 2: it all fell apart and they realized it was a
Speaker 2: screw up at the lab not the only screw up.
Speaker 2: They've had the lab either, it has happened before.
Speaker 1: It just feels like with this police investigation, there was holes,
Speaker 1: but then there was these big bungles that happened.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, tell me a better. Homicide squads are interesting.
Speaker 2: They're regarded as an elite squad, but they're regarded as
Speaker 2: sort of corruption free because there'sn't a lot of opportunity. Really,
Speaker 2: those would be good detectives doing their best, and most
Speaker 2: of them are or were. But you have to realize
Speaker 2: that homicide scott is mostly a case of turning up
Speaker 2: at an address where somebody's rung in and said two
Speaker 2: dead on the floor, and they go in and there's
Speaker 2: you know, mumster skilled dab with a breadknife and says,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I couldn't take it anymore. Take me to jail.
Speaker 2: You know, it's that easy. Most homicides, eight out of
Speaker 2: ten of them, are like that. Their clean up rates
Speaker 2: are artificially inflated by those walk up starts. It's not
Speaker 2: like catching arm robbers who run away from you and
Speaker 2: are good crooks. You're catching basically mostly people that have
Speaker 2: been involved in a once in a lifetime domestic incident
Speaker 2: where a murders b and then says, you got me GV.
Speaker 1: Can we compare it, because when you look at this
Speaker 1: story on its own, it feels kind of mind blowing,
Speaker 1: all of the mistakes. Let's compare it to one of
Speaker 1: the stories that you cover in your latest book, which
Speaker 1: is the Easy Street Street which most people will know about.
Speaker 2: Easy Street correctly has become one of the most celebrated
Speaker 2: unsolved cases in Australia. I guess there's others that compare
Speaker 2: in scope. It's two young women with a little child
Speaker 2: in the house who wasn't hurt. The two suits. One
Speaker 2: was Suzanne, one was Susan, our friends. They were living
Speaker 2: together in a rented housing Easy Street, Collingwood in Melbourne
Speaker 2: in a suburbs nineteen seventy seven, very hot summer. They're
Speaker 2: found by a neighbor who'd found their dog wandering around
Speaker 2: and went through the back gate in the back door
Speaker 2: and walked down the hall and found a total scene
Speaker 2: of chaos and blood everywhere. Both of them stabbed to
Speaker 2: death multiple times. And in the middle bedroom. There were
Speaker 2: two bedrooms and a long, thin terrace house. So one
Speaker 2: is dead in the front room. Then there's a middle
Speaker 2: room with a little boy dehydrated, very thirsty, very sad
Speaker 2: eighteen month old baby Greg in his cot and then
Speaker 2: then the other young woman is dead in the other bedroom,
Speaker 2: stabbed in a frenzy by an unknown assailant. Similar problem.
Speaker 2: The police when they looked into it, they said, oh god,
Speaker 2: you know, says An Armstrong was going out with this
Speaker 2: sheer from Euroa and his brothers knows them, and then
Speaker 2: there's this one. They backtrack and find all these different
Speaker 2: people that had been the parties there whatever, and in
Speaker 2: the end the police couldn't sort of work out who
Speaker 2: was the best candidate, and they ended up with a
Speaker 2: least to go to and no pretty keen on a
Speaker 2: few of them. They were keen on Susan Armstrong's boyfriend,
Speaker 2: but ultimately they got nowhere. It was a very patchy investigation.
Speaker 2: Another generation of police were shocked when they pulled out
Speaker 2: the easy Street file. It was a Manila a little
Speaker 2: Manila folder with twenty four sheets of paper in it.
Speaker 2: I mean, school essays are longer than that, you know.
Speaker 2: It was just rubbish and they had bugger roll. They
Speaker 2: just didn't get anywhere. And again they had too many
Speaker 2: potential candidates. One guy climbed through a window after the
Speaker 2: murders gone in and left a note for them on
Speaker 2: a cigarette packet, you know, ring me on this number.
Speaker 2: The police track him down and said what's with you,
Speaker 2: and he said, well, I've been there before. I knew
Speaker 2: I had to open the window, but I didn't go
Speaker 2: that way towards the bedrooms. And he was one of
Speaker 2: two people that did that. The boyfriend, the sheerer guy,
Speaker 2: had also walked in the back door and called out
Speaker 2: no answer, so he didn't being a well mannered country boy,
Speaker 2: he did not walk up into the house. He just
Speaker 2: called that from the kitchen. So two different men that
Speaker 2: are known have been in that house after the murders.
Speaker 1: Do you think that particular case did get more attention
Speaker 1: from police in the end because it was getting more
Speaker 1: attention from us, from the public, from the media.
Speaker 2: Big media story. Easy Street. There's something about the name
Speaker 2: that just works. It's the Beaumont children an Easy Street
Speaker 2: have always been. They just caught the imagination, they caught
Speaker 2: the headlines, and people never forgot them. You know. The
Speaker 2: Margaret tap case actually is just as awful in every way,
Speaker 2: but never caught attention in the same way. And that's
Speaker 2: why I concentrated on it years later to sort of
Speaker 2: remedy that.
Speaker 1: And what do you put that down to?
Speaker 2: Well, is nowhere to go. See, the thing is about
Speaker 2: day to day reporting. You need a development of some sort,
Speaker 2: or you need somebody saying tomorrow we're going to have
Speaker 2: Margaret's sister, and next day we're going to have a grandma,
Speaker 2: and next day we're going to you know, we're going
Speaker 2: to have something. So everything just split it out. It
Speaker 2: was awful and I feel bad that that's what happened.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't a media conspiracy. It wasn't a police conspiracy.
Speaker 2: To some extent, it was the family. If the family
Speaker 2: had been really keen to pursue it, they would have
Speaker 2: fed the media. They weren't going to do that.
Speaker 1: I think it also comes down to what people want
Speaker 1: to read as well.
Speaker 2: It does. And you know what, there's not an appetite
Speaker 2: for child's sex stories. I have to say, they're so
Speaker 2: awful abhorrent that nobody approaches them the way we approach
Speaker 2: when a gangster gets shot, happy days, it's wonderful. As
Speaker 2: long as no one innocent gets hurt, we're all happy.
Speaker 2: No one thinks it's a great story to do something
Speaker 2: about a dead child that's been sexually assaulted, it's just
Speaker 2: too awful to contemplate.
Speaker 1: When you did pick up the story twenty years after
Speaker 1: the fact and started writing about it again, did you
Speaker 1: find that people were interested they wanted to hear more.
Speaker 2: Well, they really. If you write a story graphically enough
Speaker 2: and with some sort of style and timing and effect,
Speaker 2: that people will read it for sure. But it wasn't
Speaker 2: until I did it for Good Weekend magazine. It was
Speaker 2: the twentieth anniversary of Good Weekend Magazine and it was
Speaker 2: the twentieth anniversary of the Tap murder, so that was
Speaker 2: the perfect crime story to put in that mag and
Speaker 2: I did it as a big, long piece. It's probably
Speaker 2: five thousand words and read, examining a case that most
Speaker 2: people couldn't remember or had never heard of. No one
Speaker 2: in Sydney would have heard of it at all before that.
Speaker 1: I don't think many people in Australia might.
Speaker 2: Have heard of it. Oh true, But I'm just saying, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean some Melbourne people. I mean I certainly remembered
Speaker 2: it happening, but I was a crime reporter, so naturally
Speaker 2: I should remember. But it's only become more notorious in
Speaker 2: the last twenty years, when we'd focused on it a bit.
Speaker 1: Do you think that that crime could ever be solved
Speaker 1: now that we are forty years down the track.
Speaker 2: It depends on whether they have usable DNA. I don't
Speaker 2: know if they have or not. And if they have,
Speaker 2: who knows. One day somebody somewhere might fall into the net.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you more generally, because you've written
Speaker 1: about a lot of crime in your career, what has
Speaker 1: it taught you about people looking into the worst of society.
Speaker 2: Nature and nurture both apply. But most of the most
Speaker 2: awful violent killers have been to a large extent, created
Speaker 2: by what happened to them as kids. And this is
Speaker 2: not to excuse anyone, but I've just realized in the
Speaker 2: last decade or so that I keep saying these patterns emerge.
Speaker 2: The family caught bomber up here. Leonard the mad fireman,
Speaker 2: killed people everywhere, shot them, he bombed them, he burnt
Speaker 2: places down, He did terrible things, very angry man. And
Speaker 2: when you go back and look at that story, you
Speaker 2: go now, Leonard was all right until his mom died
Speaker 2: when he was ten, and then he ends up in
Speaker 2: that notorious boy's home where kids were abused. And so
Speaker 2: this smiling little kid pictured in grade six, by the
Speaker 2: time he's fourteen, he's sullen and vengeful and weird. Were
Speaker 2: why because he went to that place and he will
Speaker 2: have been raped undoubtedly that place. Christoph Dale Flannery, the
Speaker 2: big time hit man, was disappeared in Sydney, murdered by
Speaker 2: gangster's prolific killer known as Renter Kill. Very violent man
Speaker 2: was sent to a boy's home in Victoria called Morning Star,
Speaker 2: run by the Franciscan monks. His cousin told me that
Speaker 2: he used to cry when he talked about what had
Speaker 2: happened to him at the boy's home. Now, this is
Speaker 2: true of so many of these guys that if you
Speaker 2: go back through it, you find out that they were exposed.
Speaker 2: I can do this for an hour. I can tell
Speaker 2: you examples of it, and I won't bore you with it.
Speaker 2: But trust me, so many of them, including that you know,
Speaker 2: the Russell Street bombs in Melbourne, the old guy Stan Taylor,
Speaker 2: who was the mentor to those young bucks. He had
Speaker 2: been put in a Salvation Army boy when he was
Speaker 2: nine for good reason. His own life would have been awful.
Speaker 2: His father was a brute. He'd been brutalized as a youngster,
Speaker 2: an intelligent youngster, brutalized and then always trying to get
Speaker 2: back at the world in some way, and it turns
Speaker 2: them into very, very violent, evil people. And I think
Speaker 2: that's something I've realized more and more and more that
Speaker 2: you see that pattern repeated often.
Speaker 1: What about the criminal justice system, because I think doing
Speaker 1: this podcast, obviously there are so many police officers out
Speaker 1: there doing the right thing, but then there are certain
Speaker 1: cases like the one we've been talking about today, where
Speaker 1: things haven't been done correctly, people have potentially fallen through
Speaker 1: gaps or there's corruption. What have you learned from that
Speaker 1: or do you feel a bit jaded?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Look, I think police forces have probably improved in
Speaker 2: many ways. I think they're more honest now, please, Because
Speaker 2: it used to be a step away from poverty for
Speaker 2: working class boys. If you're big and strong and were
Speaker 2: smart enough to get into the police source. You had
Speaker 2: to have a certain level of proficiency. It was a
Speaker 2: way to get away from swinging a pick or you know,
Speaker 2: working on the tramways. It became a very corrupt brotherhood
Speaker 2: for that reason that these were poor people on the
Speaker 2: make they were battling to pay off a house, battling
Speaker 2: to pay off a car, and the way they could
Speaker 2: do that on their relatively poor wages was to take
Speaker 2: money from sp bookies and from publicans and whatever else.
Speaker 2: And that's what made police force, particularly in New South
Speaker 2: Wales and Queensland but everywhere. That's what fostered that low
Speaker 2: hum of corruption that bloomed magnificently in Sydney. I have
Speaker 2: to say where it went right to the top. These days,
Speaker 2: police work I think is more of a middle class
Speaker 2: aspirational thing, and that you know, you may well know
Speaker 2: people that are police officers. I'm getting your parents may
Speaker 2: not have had a while guest, you know, back in
Speaker 2: the day, or your grandparents. I may not making gross assumptions,
Speaker 2: You're actually correct, you know.
Speaker 1: What I mean, grandparents and parents. I don't think I
Speaker 1: know a police officer, but I know several. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a very esteemed profession.
Speaker 2: It's changed and those people, the sort of modern, well fed,
Speaker 2: clean cut kids. They don't tend to be corrupt. They're
Speaker 2: not looking to steal twenty bucks for a start. They
Speaker 2: don't feel poor. They might not be wealthy, but they
Speaker 2: don't come from grinding poverty the way a lot of
Speaker 2: people did. You know, people who were joining up in
Speaker 2: the fifties, they remembered the depression, they remembered what it
Speaker 2: was like to be hungry, and that made them pretty mean.
Speaker 1: But I guess with so many crimes happening today, we
Speaker 1: don't have all of the resources to go back and
Speaker 1: undo all of the potentially bad police.
Speaker 2: Work of the past dead right. And I can recall this.
Speaker 2: I worked in this a tail end of that era. Place.
Speaker 2: You know, the hard drinkers. What you did if you
Speaker 2: wanted to get stories, You went to the pub and
Speaker 2: you put them drink for drink and sometimes I'd tell
Speaker 2: you something and write it down on a beer coaster,
Speaker 2: put it in your pocket.
Speaker 1: So you have, I guess a lot of hope seeing
Speaker 1: the police work of today.
Speaker 2: Look, it's technologically advanced. I mean, you know, it's like
Speaker 2: flying aeroplanes. These days, there's a computer, this it for you,
Speaker 2: and then the olden days you had to look at
Speaker 2: the sky and working out for yourself. It's that different.
Speaker 1: Well, as you said, it's harder to get away with
Speaker 1: crime nowadays.
Speaker 2: I think that in a modern Western world, you know
Speaker 2: a place like Australia, Canada, US, whatever, those sort of
Speaker 2: countries that a serious crime like murder is almost impossible
Speaker 2: to get away with telephones, credit cards, FPOs, cars, registration,
Speaker 2: all that stuff. You're traceable, and as soon as they
Speaker 2: suspect that you're a potential candidate, they can backtrack and
Speaker 2: work out where you were and when you were there.
Speaker 2: And then suddenly they go, oh, well she was here
Speaker 2: when so and say was killed twenty five feet away.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's good news right now. It does make
Speaker 1: me sad for the Margaret's and the Shawnas of the world.
Speaker 2: It's a terrible story, both of them, but poor little Shauna.
Speaker 1: It's actually a really sad story about what happened after
Speaker 1: the murders because there was another child involved.
Speaker 2: Oh, you're right. The last major story I did about this,
Speaker 2: I went to England on other business and I went
Speaker 2: to a regional town out of London called high Wickham
Speaker 2: to find Sureness brother I'd arranged to go and see. Well,
Speaker 2: by the time I got there, he was dead. But
Speaker 2: you know, in the intervening weeks when I decided to
Speaker 2: do this, he had essentially drunk himself to death and
Speaker 2: perhaps even suicided justin Tap was older than short, so
Speaker 2: I think he was thoughteen when the death happened. He
Speaker 2: had an English passport, I think his dad might have
Speaker 2: in English, and he used that to get back to
Speaker 2: England and work there. And I went and found the
Speaker 2: woman that he'd been living with at one point. She
Speaker 2: was very nice and she picked me up from the
Speaker 2: station and we out of long talk and she told
Speaker 2: me about his sad life. She said he came in
Speaker 2: and he played cricket and the local team and everybody
Speaker 2: liked him, but he just couldn't get away from the
Speaker 2: nightmares and the demons. And he always blamed himself because
Speaker 2: he had he been home that night, which he wasn't.
Speaker 2: He was staying with his grandparents, it wouldn't have happened.
Speaker 2: He thought that he would have saved them. And so
Speaker 2: the next, you know, thirty years, he blamed himself and
Speaker 2: eventually it killed him. He basically drank himself to death.
Speaker 2: He might have suicided. They couldn't tell when they found
Speaker 2: his body. It was so badly they're composed that they
Speaker 2: couldn't really tell.
Speaker 1: So when we talk about the Tap murders, we talk
Speaker 1: about Shawanna and Margaret, but really we should include Justin.
Speaker 2: And oh yeah, there's that, and then the father of
Speaker 2: the two children. I mean that poor man, innocent, nice,
Speaker 2: harmless man whose life has just been wrecked. But it's
Speaker 2: possible that there's some DNA sitting somewhere and one day
Speaker 2: they'll nailor it's conceivable.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Andrew Rule for assisting us to tell this story.
Speaker 1: True Crime Conversations is a Muma Meer podcast hosted and
Speaker 1: produced by me Jemma Bath. Our executive producer is Lift Proud.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week
Speaker 1: with another True Crime Conversation