Speaker 1: It's disconcerting to realize that it was only nine years
Speaker 1: after the two Suites were murdered that the first DNA
Speaker 1: evidence was presented at a criminal trial. Somehow, it seems
Speaker 1: tantalizingly close to the case, even though it was still
Speaker 1: almost a decade before the astonishing world first breakthrough that
Speaker 1: followed an accidental scientific discovery in a nutshell. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, UK geneticist Alex Jeffries uncovered something remarkable as
Speaker 1: he studied inherited illnesses. He had extracted DNA from cells
Speaker 1: and attached it to photographic film. Once developed, that film
Speaker 1: showed a row of bars, and the scientists realized that
Speaker 1: every person whose cells had been used in his study
Speaker 1: could be identified by those bars. The process could also
Speaker 1: determine kinship, so life as we knew it, as far
Speaker 1: as identity was concerned, was forever changed. Within two years,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey's DNA fingerprinting helped exonerator man arrested for murder in
Speaker 1: Leicestershire and convict the actual killer. That same year, the
Speaker 1: first DNA evidence was used in a rate case in
Speaker 1: the US. It took another three years before it was
Speaker 1: used in Australia. In a sexual assault case in Melbourne.
Speaker 1: What's almost as extraordinary is how there came to be
Speaker 1: any DNA to test in that INITIALSI case. It was
Speaker 1: due to the extraordinary foresight of the late Tony Raymond,
Speaker 1: then the director of the Forensic Services Center with Victoria Police.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty two, he ordered hundreds of samples from
Speaker 1: unsolved crime scenes to be stored in a special freezer
Speaker 1: at minus seventy degree celsius. Samples including hair, clothing and
Speaker 1: seamen collected by Victorian police. Such was Raymond's faith in
Speaker 1: the advances forensic science would make that when the technology
Speaker 1: to test samples became available in Australia a few years later,
Speaker 1: authorities had much to work with, but it took a while.
Speaker 1: Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton only became aware of the special
Speaker 1: freezer when he was appointed the lab's director in two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine. At that stage there were nearly two
Speaker 1: thousand samples from about six hundred unsolved crimes. Was any
Speaker 1: evidence collected at Easy Street part of this cachet. More importantly,
Speaker 1: was a seaman found near Suzanne's body secured in this freezer,
Speaker 1: or perhaps a similar one at a different temperature. Then
Speaker 1: there's the crucial question that really should be addressed first,
Speaker 1: How was that sample, especially as well as blood collected
Speaker 1: at the scene, stored before Tony Raymond made his visionary
Speaker 1: decision to free certain pieces of evidence, And how secure
Speaker 1: has the evidence taken from the house in collingwould been
Speaker 1: in the past forty six years. Victoria Police refused to
Speaker 1: shed any light on any of this. All we know
Speaker 1: for sure is that Senior Detective Ron Iddols felt there
Speaker 1: was enough DNA material to work with to reopen the
Speaker 1: easy Stree case when he took over cold cases in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven. After evaluating which of the states two hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty unsolved homicides were worth his new team's attention,
Speaker 1: he gave them each a color code according to their
Speaker 1: chances of being solved. Red indicated cases that were probably
Speaker 1: never going to be solved, yellow for those that needed
Speaker 1: a total overhaul, and green for the ones they could
Speaker 1: probably solve. The Easy Street file was one of just
Speaker 1: thirty on this list, given the green tick due to
Speaker 1: the fact that there was DNA to work with, Yet
Speaker 1: even the detective with the ninety five percent conviction rate
Speaker 1: couldn't find this killer. Again, there were no DNA matches
Speaker 1: between any of the men tested and the evidence taken
Speaker 1: from the house. But should this necessarily raise concerns about
Speaker 1: the way materials were held in those pre DNA years.
Speaker 1: Some scuttle butt suggests they weren't as secure as they
Speaker 1: would be now. Years ago, former detective Peter Hiscock was
Speaker 1: told off the record naturally that the Easy Street exhibit
Speaker 1: box went missing for nearly two decades now.
Speaker 2: There was a situation for about seventeen years. I think
Speaker 2: that those exhibits were misplaced down at Collingwood where they
Speaker 2: be stored.
Speaker 1: So what's happened to those exhibits in the time.
Speaker 3: I've got them?
Speaker 4: Who knows?
Speaker 2: They just been sitting in a box another area. They've
Speaker 2: got a facility down at Collingwood.
Speaker 1: So when did they go missing?
Speaker 2: That's I said. I don't know when they went missing.
Speaker 2: But this detectives spoke to me, oh quite a few
Speaker 2: years ago and said that they've just refound them. He
Speaker 2: actually worked out what had happened, whether they put them
Speaker 2: these with the aids.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: It's a very high level system down there. Knowing the
Speaker 2: police department.
Speaker 1: That's a forty year old case and the exhibits have
Speaker 1: been missing for seventeen years. That's scary in terms of
Speaker 1: solving it.
Speaker 2: Well, you need to check that for sure, tell me, but.
Speaker 4: Of course it is.
Speaker 1: Again. Victoria Police won't confirm or deny this happened, and
Speaker 1: it might not matter as long as the DNA samples
Speaker 1: were securely stored. Dad Na Hartman manages the molecular biology
Speaker 1: lab at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and she
Speaker 1: knows a great deal about the science the rest of
Speaker 1: us like to think we understand.
Speaker 5: To me, DNA is it's a living thing. It's a
Speaker 5: biological so we have to remember that it's a finite
Speaker 5: that it has properties that make it prone to degradation decomposition.
Speaker 5: So it's something that while holds the bootprint and tells
Speaker 5: us who we are, it's not something that lives on forever,
Speaker 5: and it's something that while we can recover, it is
Speaker 5: quite precious and we have to treat it with the
Speaker 5: utmost respect. For most part, our task is to help
Speaker 5: identify coronial cases. So where people have been reported to
Speaker 5: the coroner and they are not able to be identified
Speaker 5: by family members, then we might apply scientific means of
Speaker 5: identification such as DNA fingerprints dental records. For me in particular,
Speaker 5: I'm interested in being able to use DNA capabilities to
Speaker 5: help identify people.
Speaker 1: And so in a sense, it has our imprint, if
Speaker 1: you like, and everyone's imprint is individual, very unique.
Speaker 5: Yes, while we share a lot of things in common,
Speaker 5: there will be parts of OURNA that are unique to us.
Speaker 5: And from the purposes of identification, what we're targeting are
Speaker 5: those parts of the DNA that are unique to us
Speaker 5: so that we can build what is known as our
Speaker 5: DNA profile. So when we say we obtain your DNA
Speaker 5: or do a DNA profile really is we're looking at
Speaker 5: a subset of very small number of markers within your
Speaker 5: DNA that are unique and that we can then compare
Speaker 5: to the DNA profile of others. So we're not looking
Speaker 5: at all of your DNA. We're only targeting very specific
Speaker 5: regions that help us with identification.
Speaker 1: And when we say markers, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 5: But do you look sort of fragments of DNA that
Speaker 5: reside in different parts of your DNA. So DNA is
Speaker 5: arranged into chromosomes, we would target different DNA markers at
Speaker 5: various regions in those chromosomes. But those markers, as I said,
Speaker 5: useful for identification. There are other DNA markers that might
Speaker 5: be useful for let's say, genetic predisposition to disease, or
Speaker 5: important for you know, biological processes in our body. But
Speaker 5: we're targeting those that are useful for identification.
Speaker 1: Despite her obvious expertise, Dad and A Hartman can't comment
Speaker 1: specifically about the investigation into the murders on Easy Street,
Speaker 1: but I asked her if the sample of seamen found
Speaker 1: on Suzanne's bedroom floor could survive for three nights and
Speaker 1: two days in the summer of nineteen seventy seven, Yes, we.
Speaker 5: Should, I guess if collected appropriately and stored appropriately, we
Speaker 5: would hope to be able to go back to those
Speaker 5: sample types and extract DNA. Now, you may not be
Speaker 5: able to extract a lot, or it may be highly degraded.
Speaker 5: Here are the conditions the time that's passed, but we
Speaker 5: don't need a lot for what they're sort of analysis
Speaker 5: that we complete. Therefore, if you can just recover, as
Speaker 5: you know what I said, a smidgen of DNA, that
Speaker 5: might be sufficient to be able to develop a dnair
Speaker 5: profile for comparison. But that's dependent again on the sample
Speaker 5: being collected in an appropriate manner and stored appropriately as well. Now,
Speaker 5: I guess, going back that period of time when perhaps
Speaker 5: we went thinking about DNA, those people that were collecting
Speaker 5: those samples that probably were not wearing their appropriate pipe
Speaker 5: that we would do now, you know, wearing gloves, masks,
Speaker 5: ensuring that we ourselves don't contaminate those samples. How having
Speaker 5: said that, there are instances where we've been able to
Speaker 5: go back to cases, you know, cold cases where samples
Speaker 5: have been collected in a manner that was appropriate at
Speaker 5: the time, and we still successfully recover DNA profiles. From
Speaker 5: our point of view, it's kind of you just have
Speaker 5: to give it a go. You know, you can't say, well,
Speaker 5: you might be too old, or it might be degraded.
Speaker 5: You just have to give it a go.
Speaker 1: I think it's some stage someone has suggested they were
Speaker 1: put in paper bags. Is that is that okay?
Speaker 5: Yes, that's fine. And again provided that they're sealed appropriately
Speaker 5: and have been, there's a chain of custody to be
Speaker 5: able to then go back and say, yes, these are
Speaker 5: the appropriate samples that belong to that case, then the
Speaker 5: ship be fine.
Speaker 1: Now, dad Na Hartman hasn't worked on the Easy Street case.
Speaker 1: That's all been done at the police forensics lab. But
Speaker 1: she knows what's next in a case if there's no
Speaker 1: hits on our national criminal database and familial searchers have
Speaker 1: hit a wall. And here's where past science really gets
Speaker 1: overtaken by contemporary scholarship. Forensic investigative genetic genealogy FIGG.
Speaker 5: Again, once you've looked at all your current avenues of inquiries,
Speaker 5: it might be that you might submit your sample for
Speaker 5: this application that would require you to generate a profile
Speaker 5: that's suitable for comparison to commercial databases where people have
Speaker 5: themselves have an interest in their genealogy and have provided
Speaker 5: can sent to have law enforcement be able to compare
Speaker 5: against their data. And what you're doing is you're not
Speaker 5: actually getting their DNA from the database. You're uploading the unknown,
Speaker 5: and you're asking whether you've got any people in the
Speaker 5: database that are closely related. And what you get back
Speaker 5: is a list of people who share potentially some DNA
Speaker 5: with your unknown. And then you've got to build genealogy
Speaker 5: trees and see whether you can narrow down and potentially
Speaker 5: identify your unknown. Now that takes a lot of work.
Speaker 5: And there's no guarantees that you will find people that
Speaker 5: are closely related to your unknown on those databases, but
Speaker 5: I guess it would be potentially another step that you
Speaker 5: could take in the investigation if your current modes of
Speaker 5: analysis don't pan out.
Speaker 1: This has been slow to take off in Australia do
Speaker 1: to privacy issues involving the use of commercially available databases
Speaker 1: like ancestry dot com. Yet, while legal legals take all that,
Speaker 1: Dardner warns against using up too much of the original
Speaker 1: DNA samples in historic cases.
Speaker 5: I think it's important to particularly for these finite samples
Speaker 5: where you can't keep testing them indefinitely. Well, eventually you're
Speaker 5: going to run out. You know, you might have an
Speaker 5: extract of DNA and you're using a little bit at
Speaker 5: a time for the different tests. Eventually that extract you're
Speaker 5: going to use it all up. So it's important to
Speaker 5: safeguard that material, and I guess make those decisions as
Speaker 5: to what would be the best tool to apply. And
Speaker 5: if that's not today, then let's wait six or twelve
Speaker 5: months and again review and see whether there's now an
Speaker 5: opportunity to use a different methodology, whether that be FIGG
Speaker 5: or something else, and they make the decision.
Speaker 1: Again, if we accept that one hundred people have been
Speaker 1: tested against this sample that was found in Easy Street
Speaker 1: in the bedroom, that doesn't necessarily mean that one hundred
Speaker 1: little extracts came out.
Speaker 5: No, So what would have happened is a DNA profile
Speaker 5: would have been developed from that sample. Now that DNA
Speaker 5: profile itself can be compared to the DNA profiles of
Speaker 5: four hundred persons of interest, so it's the data that
Speaker 5: you're comparing, not the extract. So I would hope that
Speaker 5: there would have used a small portion of that DNA
Speaker 5: extract to develop that DNA profile, that there's some DNA
Speaker 5: extract remaining and that's been stored appropriately, and that's what
Speaker 5: could be tapped in the future to develop more DNA information.
Speaker 1: While we await this debate, a former federal MP Reckons
Speaker 1: is an even broader political cultural concern, the dog's cold
Speaker 1: cases involving women. He's come to understand this from distressing
Speaker 1: personal experience. Bill Clear's sister, Vicki, was fatally stabbed in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven. Her killer was found not guilty of
Speaker 1: murder after running the notorious provocation defense, and sentenced to
Speaker 1: just three years and eleven months in jail to Cleary.
Speaker 1: The way detectives investigated both cases reeks of the same
Speaker 1: old fashioned framework.
Speaker 3: Here two young women, one who has a child and
Speaker 3: of course is declared to be as a pejorative an
Speaker 3: unmarried mother because she's had the Greek daliance. Of course,
Speaker 3: that's Suzanne Armstrong. And there you have Sue Bartlett, who's
Speaker 3: the teacher. And isn't it interesting to talk about Sue.
Speaker 3: She was a big woman, but thankfully she had a
Speaker 3: beautiful face. But all the while the discussion about them
Speaker 3: was about their social activities, their relationship with men. And
Speaker 3: so from the moment they were murdered, we know that
Speaker 3: the police adopted the attitude that they had practices that
Speaker 3: put them at risk in that they came to know men.
Speaker 3: Now the police kind of knew that. But at the
Speaker 3: same time there was a counter story, which was that
Speaker 3: this bloke that killed them was a monster.
Speaker 1: Now this is a perspective Phil Cleary has thought about
Speaker 1: a lot. His sister's killer, Peter Ko was declared a
Speaker 1: person of interest in Melbourne so called bookshop murder, where
Speaker 1: Maria James was fatally stabbed in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3: And of course, if I put my lens on that
Speaker 3: story based on what I know about the killing of women,
Speaker 3: I don't look to that monster who they don't know.
Speaker 3: The man who kills them is a monster, but he's
Speaker 3: an ordinary bloke as well. But you know, we can
Speaker 3: say that these men are monsters, but they're on a
Speaker 3: continuum in that they're a monster at the point that
Speaker 3: they kill. They have monstrous ideas in that they are
Speaker 3: riddled with misogyny andtriarchal assumptions about women, and so in essence,
Speaker 3: this is the major problem. If we had a police
Speaker 3: force at the time that was thinking really smart about this,
Speaker 3: they would have solved the crime. I don't believe, based
Speaker 3: on all of the empirical evidence around historical killing of women,
Speaker 3: that this bloke has wandered in off the street and
Speaker 3: knocked on the door and then killed Suzanne Armstrong. I
Speaker 3: believe he knew her. He may have tried it on
Speaker 3: with her before and been knocked back. But she has
Speaker 3: been killed because she did what so many women have
Speaker 3: done historically before they've been murdered. She said no to
Speaker 3: a Dalian's a relationship or she ended a relationship with him.
Speaker 1: Certainly the late Brian Murphy believed the double homicide was
Speaker 1: planned to some extent in advance. The former detective didn't
Speaker 1: beat around the bush.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 4: I think fellows that commit those kind of murders have
Speaker 4: got it on their mind all the time. Most of
Speaker 4: those things are pre planned. You's either seen that both
Speaker 4: of them going in if they had a k might
Speaker 4: have put petrol in one time or another and thought,
Speaker 4: I wonder where they live. You know, there's a million
Speaker 4: reasons why they do it, But I think that they're
Speaker 4: well planned when they do it like that. And like
Speaker 4: the lady that was killed in the booksher, I think
Speaker 4: that was planned and it's just not on off the cuff.
Speaker 3: Theee, how is it that Maria James was murdered in
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty and Peter cho who kills my sister seven
Speaker 3: years later is not properly interviewed at the time and afterwards.
Speaker 3: Do you see a connection between that and easy Street?
Speaker 3: Of course you do.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: The upshot is surely that the institutional preconceptions about the
Speaker 3: place of women in the world, the blaming of women,
Speaker 3: afflicts every investigation unwittingly.
Speaker 1: Prominent Melbourne lawyer Liz Dowling remembers this cultural political prism
Speaker 1: and jury calls the impact that Sue and Suzanne's deaths
Speaker 1: had in the city.
Speaker 6: Everybody was talking about it, you know, everybody knew about
Speaker 6: easy strait, that write our bikes down there, had a
Speaker 6: look call, all of that sort of stuff. But I
Speaker 6: guess sense that it was always in such a way
Speaker 6: as even though the media were talking about it being
Speaker 6: a madman that was walking around doing it, there was
Speaker 6: also this other aspect of it being somebody that they,
Speaker 6: the women knew, And also there was all that such
Speaker 6: shaming that they had brought it on themselves, that the
Speaker 6: doors were open. And I mean even though they were
Speaker 6: supposed to have been a sexual revolution, I mean there
Speaker 6: was still there was still very much the ethos of
Speaker 6: You've got to remember also, Helen, that that period of time,
Speaker 6: of course, was between the contraceptive pill and aides, and
Speaker 6: it was huge up evils that had happened. I mean,
Speaker 6: women didn't have to worry about contraceptive and men didn't
Speaker 6: have to worry about the women worrying about contraception either,
Speaker 6: and it was a bit of a free for all,
Speaker 6: certainly as far as casual sex was concerned. The women
Speaker 6: that engaged in casual sex by certain groups. And I'd
Speaker 6: also say quite generally still had the old tags given
Speaker 6: to them about it. And I think that the women
Speaker 6: in easy Strait, certainly it was that view. She was
Speaker 6: a single mother, she wasn't married. And also the stories
Speaker 6: about you know, there were three blokes that had come
Speaker 6: in and out of the house when the bodies were
Speaker 6: on the floor and the child was even in the bedroom,
Speaker 6: giving an indication of the traffic that did go through
Speaker 6: those houses. But that happened in all the group houses.
Speaker 1: And do you think this in form this view of
Speaker 1: women informed not just the detectives themselves, but also their
Speaker 1: way they went about the investigation.
Speaker 6: I think the police generally at that time came from well,
Speaker 6: they hadn't they hadn't gone to university, They left school
Speaker 6: at form five. The people that would being the police,
Speaker 6: I mean, they weren't living in the shit holes in
Speaker 6: group houses. So there were two completely different classes of people.
Speaker 6: They had probably been married at twenty two or twenty
Speaker 6: three and had a couple of children. I mean, I
Speaker 6: know I'm generalizing here, and they would have had their parents'
Speaker 6: values that women that had casual sex were sluts.
Speaker 1: Those perceptions aside this, Dowling says the suggestion that the
Speaker 1: killer was known to either Suzanne or Susan obviously helps
Speaker 1: explain how he entered the house and maybe how he's
Speaker 1: evaded investigators for almost half a century.
Speaker 6: I think there was the perception that they knew who
Speaker 6: the killer was, that the girls knew who the killer was.
Speaker 6: This wasn't somebody that had someone had broken into a
Speaker 6: house in South Yarra, some married woman you know, whose
Speaker 6: husband had been overseas had been raped and killed with
Speaker 6: her friend in the house. I think that there was
Speaker 6: a very an attitude of its time that this person
Speaker 6: was known to them. I'm just a little curious about
Speaker 6: the person with the knife, and maybe the person with
Speaker 6: the knife meant that they were no one, maybe no
Speaker 6: one to her, but not in the circle of people
Speaker 6: that she would have considered having sex with. Or so
Speaker 6: did someone decide that they were going to come a
Speaker 6: kniver or did the killing happen after there was a
Speaker 6: rejection of her? But why would you come in with
Speaker 6: a knife in the first.
Speaker 1: Place, unless to do harm?
Speaker 6: Unless to do harm?
Speaker 1: But like journalist Andrew Ruhle and others who've been trying
Speaker 1: to crack this conundrum for so long. Liz also worries
Speaker 1: that all the time spent trying to get a DNA
Speaker 1: match might have just been following a DNA bunny down
Speaker 1: a rabbit hole.
Speaker 6: And I was also interested in your book about the
Speaker 6: DNA as far as the DNA was concerned and where
Speaker 6: the DNA was found, because I think the conundrum has
Speaker 6: been if somebody did this, unless they dropped dead, it's
Speaker 6: unlikely statistically they would have led a blameless last since
Speaker 6: that period of time. So if you take the DNA
Speaker 6: out of the equation and say, well, we don't have
Speaker 6: anything about linking the DNA to the person and testing
Speaker 6: the person with the DNA, so I'm being an amateur detective,
Speaker 6: then maybe that does broaden the group of people that
Speaker 6: could have done it within their group.
Speaker 1: For this lawyer, the next step in this call case,
Speaker 1: nearly fifty years down the track, is a second coronial inquiry.
Speaker 6: The savagery of it, the savagery of it is not
Speaker 6: sex gone bad, and the savagery of it looks like
Speaker 6: it's something that's been planned. There's two women that have
Speaker 6: been extensively stabbed, and it didn't seem to be clear
Speaker 6: at the time, about how deep the wounds were, how
Speaker 6: they actually died, whether they were already dead when and that,
Speaker 6: like a lot of the stabbing went on, that just
Speaker 6: all didn't seem to be quite clear. So our crinal
Speaker 6: inquests could possibly explore those issues.
Speaker 1: Next time on the Easy Street murders.
Speaker 3: We should go back and revisit how DNA was used.
Speaker 4: This was a huge event for Melbourne for Collingwood.
Speaker 3: Contemporary inquests are so critical to our understanding on the
Speaker 3: failings of the past.
Speaker 4: What have you got to those