Speaker 1: The unsolved murders of Susanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett have
Speaker 1: been a dark constant in the lives of their families
Speaker 1: and friends for nearly five decades now. But can justice
Speaker 1: still be achieved after all this time? How long Canna
Speaker 1: Cole case continue to be investigated without success before investigator's
Speaker 1: attention and funding are reprioritized And at what point is
Speaker 1: such a decision made, if at all? Then again, after
Speaker 1: forty seven years, is it time for a more significant
Speaker 1: legal intervention, perhaps a second coroner's inquest. It's fair to
Speaker 1: say the first one into the Easy Street murders achieved
Speaker 1: nothing other than an official verdict that the two women
Speaker 1: had been fatally stabbed by person or persons unknown. Only
Speaker 1: ten witnesses provided statements to Victoria's coroner, Harry Pasco, and
Speaker 1: as we know, he heard nothing at all from the
Speaker 1: three potential witnesses who lived in the street at the
Speaker 1: time of killings, Gladys Coventry, Peter Sellers and Christina for Tourists. Now,
Speaker 1: some of those involved in this case believe a new
Speaker 1: coroner's inquiry should occur. It only happens on rare occasions,
Speaker 1: but lawyers I've spoken to while researching this podcast suggest
Speaker 1: it might be the only way forward. Many aren't too
Speaker 1: keen on talking about it publicly, but retired forensic pathologist
Speaker 1: Stephen Cordner, the eminent first director of the Victorian Institute
Speaker 1: of Forensic Medicine, has no such qualms.
Speaker 2: Occasionally, second inquests have produced useful results, and I think
Speaker 2: I'm not saying there hasn't been a second inquest in
Speaker 2: this case, and around about now probably getting to be
Speaker 2: about the end of the line if you don't have
Speaker 2: one now, and you're never going to have one because
Speaker 2: so much time has passed. But I reckon there's a
Speaker 2: good case, given the seriousness of this matter for the
Speaker 2: families involved. But this was a huge event for Melbourne,
Speaker 2: for Collingwood. An easy street just carries with it all
Speaker 2: of this baggage.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It sounds to me like precisely the sort of event
Speaker 2: that a second inquest exists to try and help with.
Speaker 2: And what have we got to lose some so it
Speaker 2: might flush something out, and including the possibility that somebody's
Speaker 2: been sitting on really important information for fifty years and
Speaker 2: for whatever reason, hasn't been sharing it.
Speaker 1: Professor Cordner Honorary Professor in Forensic Pathology at Monash University
Speaker 1: remembers what happened at one four seven Easy Street vividly.
Speaker 2: I think anybody who was sentient in Melbourne at those
Speaker 2: times has got Easy Street see it into their memories.
Speaker 2: It seems to be certainly in my mind. It's you know,
Speaker 2: it was the sort of thing that you didn't think
Speaker 2: could possibly happen in Melbourne, and I think upset people
Speaker 2: and made people feel less secure and less like we
Speaker 2: were living in you know, the wonderful country we thought
Speaker 2: we were, which we are of course, but it did
Speaker 2: alter things. I think, yes, just thinking of that baby
Speaker 2: left there for three days, but two two young women,
Speaker 2: one a mother, if it happened today, it would rock
Speaker 2: the city as well. There have been such improvements at
Speaker 2: being able to sort these things out where probably we're
Speaker 2: talking about a stranger.
Speaker 3: Well you know, there are.
Speaker 2: Arguments against it being a stranger, but let just for
Speaker 2: the moment, suppose that it was a stranger. Police technology
Speaker 2: classe secuit TV DNA. You know, microscopic faces can be
Speaker 2: detected and matched with something else, so that type of
Speaker 2: approach simply was not available at all in nine seventy seven,
Speaker 2: so I would think their success rate in those days
Speaker 2: with that sort of crime is very much less than
Speaker 2: it is today. And of course these days you've got
Speaker 2: a public much more turned into and more effectively accessed
Speaker 2: by police to make their contribution to which doesn't seem
Speaker 2: to have been completely covered off in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: Yet even with all these advances, there's still been no
Speaker 1: hit within Australia's national database. So what does that tell us?
Speaker 2: Well, the national database, as good as it is, isn't perfect.
Speaker 2: There are different rules for getting your DNA onto the
Speaker 2: database for each state. Each state has slightly different rules
Speaker 2: for taking samples from individuals to profile and then to
Speaker 2: add on to the DNA database. And it's quite a
Speaker 2: complicated administrative process. So you know, I think there are
Speaker 2: a few barriers to as comprehensive a DNA database that
Speaker 2: people probably think we have. Having said that, I'm all
Speaker 2: in favor. I can't really see any too many civil
Speaker 2: liberty objections to a proper DNA database myself. So what
Speaker 2: does that say to us that it's not there? Well,
Speaker 2: it doesn't really take us too far. The one or
Speaker 2: more people, but probably one I think who was the
Speaker 2: murderer in this case has got away with it and
Speaker 2: hasn't been caught for anything else. It doesn't mean that
Speaker 2: it didn't know other things.
Speaker 1: You make the point though, in raising that question, that
Speaker 1: one possible answer is suicide.
Speaker 3: So that is a possibility.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think somebody who commits this sort of crime,
Speaker 2: if they have scaic of moral sense, then they're at
Speaker 2: risk of suicide because it just gnaws at them. They're
Speaker 2: the type of person that can have done this, and
Speaker 2: really the only the only decent thing they can do
Speaker 2: if they're going to continue to live, is either to
Speaker 2: give themselves up or to commit suicide.
Speaker 3: I know that there are murderers who.
Speaker 2: Have who have done that, and it's sort of in
Speaker 2: an awful way, it's understandable. So its possible this person
Speaker 2: has gone down that path. This murderer, in which case
Speaker 2: set probably quite an effective way of covering effects.
Speaker 1: Investigating this, of course, would be fraud.
Speaker 2: Huge task because you know, I mean in Victoria alone,
Speaker 2: there's you know, more suicides into our Morod traffic fatalities,
Speaker 2: so you know, probably seven or eight hundred suicide of
Speaker 2: a year in Victoria and fifty years since Easy Street
Speaker 2: not quite so, that would be a huge task.
Speaker 3: You would need.
Speaker 2: To develop a list of possibilities and then that would
Speaker 2: be enormous. Of course, you'd probably restrict yourself to the
Speaker 2: first decade after after therese murders. There is a sort
Speaker 2: of as a sort of start. You'd be struggling at
Speaker 2: this distance to get any DNA samples from those deaths
Speaker 2: because it's so long ago and samples wouldn't exist.
Speaker 1: There could be family, that could could be family.
Speaker 2: There could be family, but then you have to get
Speaker 2: more than you know, you have to get more than
Speaker 2: one family member probably to give you a sample. It
Speaker 2: would be a very difficult conversation to have with a
Speaker 2: family of somebody who's suicided, Very very difficult. And I
Speaker 2: wouldn't be surprised if the police authority to some extent
Speaker 2: gone down that path. They would might necessarily announce to
Speaker 2: the world that they've done that. But that's a place
Speaker 2: where occasional murderers have been found.
Speaker 1: As we explore what should happen next in the Easy
Speaker 1: Street case, it's instructive to note the view of the
Speaker 1: senior forensic investigator who attended the crime scene that morning,
Speaker 1: Sergeant Henry Huggins from the Police Forensic Science Lab, was
Speaker 1: troubled by what confronted him. Not only had two young
Speaker 1: women been brutally stabbed, but numerous police had been in
Speaker 1: and out of a house before he even arrived contaminating
Speaker 1: the scene. Fresh from a crime scene course in the UK,
Speaker 1: Huggins knew this before he started examining that scene with
Speaker 1: his colleague, forensic biologist Mariam McBain. One of the most
Speaker 1: obvious mistakes a detective had washed his hands in the bathroom. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: Sergeant Huggins and his colleagues collected as much evidence as
Speaker 1: they could without jumping to conclusions about what exactly had
Speaker 1: happened in the house.
Speaker 4: No, that's dangerous to do. Actually, yeah, No, you don't
Speaker 4: want to come to a conclusion into a place because
Speaker 4: you can make any theory fit any shene you like. Yes,
Speaker 4: we can make it fit if you're not careful. So
Speaker 4: bastually you go and say, I, actual, we've got one
Speaker 4: body there, noody here, that's still what we can find.
Speaker 4: But I don't think at that stage I ever really
Speaker 4: came to an inclusion. Well, I'd say it was pretty
Speaker 4: obvious that Amtal got killed before Bart well, certainly attacked,
Speaker 4: you know, but the amount of blood she lost in
Speaker 4: the carpet, in my life, I thought she was probably
Speaker 4: did i WM.
Speaker 1: Henry Huggins passed away in twenty twenty two. He was
Speaker 1: revered as a forensic scientist, investigating most major crime scenes
Speaker 1: in Victoria during his twenty six years with the police.
Speaker 1: Those who knew and work with him will call his
Speaker 1: attention to detail, his commitment, and his thoughtfulness. He certainly
Speaker 1: thought deeply about the Easy Streets more than forty years
Speaker 1: after attending that crime scene. When I was working on
Speaker 1: my book Murder on Easy Street, we went through some
Speaker 1: of the investigator statements that had gone to the coroner
Speaker 1: in seventy seven. He was immediately in the moment back
Speaker 1: in the little house in Collingwood and frustrated. He worried
Speaker 1: that the police photographer hadn't captured all the images that
Speaker 1: were relevant in Suzanne's bedroom, that the seminal stains on
Speaker 1: sheets taken from the house probably hadn't been stored in
Speaker 1: Tony Raymond's special fridge, That he couldn't really work out
Speaker 1: the killer's sequence of attack. For instance, he wondered if
Speaker 1: Sue had gone out that night only to come home
Speaker 1: and be confronted by the murderer. But Gladys Coventry's interview
Speaker 1: with truth pos's new questions. Of course, Henry Huggins never
Speaker 1: read her account of the tall man with dark hair
Speaker 1: she saw talking with Susan Bartlett early on January eleventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven. So did Sue actually unwittingly invite the
Speaker 1: killer in? Or was another man outside the house waiting
Speaker 1: to come in when her guest left? And why are
Speaker 1: the small glasses missus Coventry describes in the article not
Speaker 1: mentioned in the official list of exhibits presented to the coroner.
Speaker 1: There were other details too that bothered Henry Huggins.
Speaker 4: Will I find difficult with this is that we've got
Speaker 4: two blood grooms. This is Armstrong's and Bartlett's. From what
Speaker 4: I chance to do is find a reason for Armstrong
Speaker 4: being in the bathroom.
Speaker 1: So her blood was in the bathroom, a blood vision
Speaker 1: on the washing machine, No, on the side of the bath.
Speaker 4: So could that have been his one? Well it's possible,
Speaker 4: but he is also away, so that is a possibility. Well,
Speaker 4: otherwise I cannot see how she would be attacked in
Speaker 4: her bedroom and managed to get up to the up
Speaker 4: to the bassroom back again without spreading blood on the
Speaker 4: wad and the floor all the way.
Speaker 3: Out and get back there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she did at one stage try and get to
Speaker 4: the phone. Now, the phone is a bit of a
Speaker 4: mystery in the way because the phone acially liked there
Speaker 4: was blood on the young clock and up along the
Speaker 4: back of the room there there was no blood on
Speaker 4: the phone, and the phone was right in the corner
Speaker 4: in her bedroom.
Speaker 3: The phone was in the part now.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, when the photographer took the photographs and you did around,
Speaker 4: he missed that vital corner unfortunately, so there's no photo
Speaker 4: showing the phone. So they had two extensions. It could
Speaker 4: have been. I know there was one in the bedroom
Speaker 4: and arms from obviously tried to reach it over the beer.
Speaker 1: So that wasn't his blood, that was her blood.
Speaker 4: Well we don't know, as that is the problem we have.
Speaker 4: But I feel that blood across there the sheets and
Speaker 4: over towards the top phone was an attempt to get
Speaker 4: to the phone.
Speaker 1: I think, so many years later it was impossible to
Speaker 1: be sure. But the retired forensic scientist was especially unimpressed
Speaker 1: by pathologist James McNamara's failure to identify the fatal stab
Speaker 1: were en suffered by the women.
Speaker 4: See. One of the difficulties here is that McNamara hasn't
Speaker 4: made any suggestion till whether any old though on their own,
Speaker 4: would have been faithful.
Speaker 1: Matt the knife didn't they call?
Speaker 4: You've heard that very I mean these days we'd have
Speaker 4: a lot more detail than have been a a diagram
Speaker 4: or each body as to where they are.
Speaker 1: To be fair, Henry Huggins was critical of his own
Speaker 1: work too, insisting his official statement in nineteen seventy seven
Speaker 1: wouldn't make the grade now. In an email to me
Speaker 1: in May twenty nineteen, he went further, looking back at
Speaker 1: my and Morham at Bain's statement, I am thinking that
Speaker 1: perhaps we were asked for short statements for the coroner
Speaker 1: to establish cause of death only as no person had
Speaker 1: been charged or was expected to be charged. This meant
Speaker 1: a simple statement to assist in establishing cause of death.
Speaker 1: This often happened just to get an inquest over. In
Speaker 1: this note he also said that he just realized this
Speaker 1: was Maauram mcmain's first crime scene and that he quote
Speaker 1: should have gone over the scene in detail with it
Speaker 1: to ensure we had the right samples to test every
Speaker 1: theory we could come up with. He also pointed out
Speaker 1: a mistake I'd made in the book by reporting that
Speaker 1: it entered number one four seven through the front door.
Speaker 1: Where did you get the idea that I went in
Speaker 1: the front door? I think that is very unlikely even
Speaker 1: in those days, and I noted that it was shut.
Speaker 1: Henry Huggins was adamant this double murder would have been
Speaker 1: solved a decade later. I'm sure if it had happened
Speaker 1: in eighty seven instead of seventy seven, it would have
Speaker 1: been solved, he wrote in his final email to me.
Speaker 1: By then we had better blood and DNA analysis and
Speaker 1: better crime scene control. Former pathologist Stephen Cordner isn't quite
Speaker 1: as convinced about this as Henry Huggins, but he has
Speaker 1: the highest regard for his work, in particular the way
Speaker 1: he investigated this double homicide.
Speaker 2: Henry Huggins, I think this is huge testament to both
Speaker 2: his the way he thought. He didn't only think he did,
Speaker 2: he acted. He went out and looked in all the
Speaker 2: draines in the immediate vicinity, more than the immediate vicinity.
Speaker 2: So that's huge task, but really good thinking. I wouldn't
Speaker 2: think that had happened before. Maybe that was the first time.
Speaker 2: I don't know, But have you said in your book
Speaker 2: that he found a face washer.
Speaker 3: He didn't only find a face washer.
Speaker 2: He kept the face washer, made it an exhibit and
Speaker 2: tested it, and low and behold, found some semen on it,
Speaker 2: which I think asked to tell a story of you know,
Speaker 2: the And assuming that you'll tell me that the semen
Speaker 2: on the face washer was the same DNA has found
Speaker 2: on the carpet, well.
Speaker 1: I don't know, that's never been that's never been made clear.
Speaker 3: Let's assume that that's the case.
Speaker 2: And we might be wrong about that, but there can't
Speaker 2: be too many face washers down raines with semen on them,
Speaker 2: and let alone within a short distance of a place
Speaker 2: where there's just been a sexual murder. So let's suppose
Speaker 2: they're the same. Then that start to tell the story
Speaker 2: of the sort of murderer we're dealing with. There's someone
Speaker 2: who's thinking, who's cleaning and tidying themselves up and getting
Speaker 2: rid of the evidence. And as I understand it, no
Speaker 2: knife has ever been found. There are stories going there
Speaker 2: as a whole unclear. Haven't wait to put on those stories,
Speaker 2: but there's you know, stories of a man being seen
Speaker 2: washing himself. There's clear evidence that the bathroom has been
Speaker 2: used to wash himself in the bathroom, there's some suggestion
Speaker 2: that one of the bodies was cleaned up. So this
Speaker 2: sounds like somebody who may be in their own psychiatrically disturbed,
Speaker 2: psychologically disturbed mind, but he's also functioning in a reasonably
Speaker 2: ordered way to cover his tracks. So that, you know,
Speaker 2: makes me think that perhaps this person entered the house
Speaker 2: with this project, this murder in mind, and maybe you know,
Speaker 2: I thought he was going to be able to get
Speaker 2: away with just the one but then got disturbed and
Speaker 2: had to kill both women. It really does look to
Speaker 2: me like this was this was somebody intent upon murder,
Speaker 2: and so that makes you think about whether this person
Speaker 2: has done it before and or afterwards.
Speaker 1: Stephen Corner also has a telling perspective about what pathologist
Speaker 1: James McNamara was able to tell the coroner in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven and what he couldn't.
Speaker 2: I mean, when there's multiple stab worons because of death
Speaker 2: is bleeding from multiple stab word because they're all generally
Speaker 2: speaking happening at much the same time, and the bleeding
Speaker 2: is occurring from all of them. Yes, the bleeding from
Speaker 2: the heart will be more substantial than the bleeding from
Speaker 2: the lung or the bleeding from soft tissue in the
Speaker 2: arm or something like that, And you can't say which
Speaker 2: order they happened, So a reasonable thing to say is
Speaker 2: multiple stab worins.
Speaker 3: As doctor McNamara did, I think.
Speaker 2: He probably would have said, if you'd ask him, why
Speaker 2: didn't you describe how much decomposition there was? You would
Speaker 2: have said, oh, we talked photos so you can see
Speaker 2: for yourself, you know, And that's that's an answer. But
Speaker 2: I think most reports would probably include a description of
Speaker 2: it as well. But that was in the seventies and
Speaker 2: doctor McNamara wasn't actually attained pathologist, and that was the
Speaker 2: way the system sort of worked in those days. And
Speaker 2: one of the reasons that the Victim in Authentic Medicine
Speaker 2: came into existence was to repair that sort of system.
Speaker 1: In our last email exchange, the late Henry Huggins said
Speaker 1: that probably the bestly the police had four decades ago
Speaker 1: was a phone call to a prominent Melbourne journalist not
Speaker 1: long after the murders. Senior columnist Teslawrence from The Herald
Speaker 1: newspaper was invited by police to visit Easy Street. In fact,
Speaker 1: she wandered through the so called murder house as the
Speaker 1: two families were packing up the young women's belongings. When
Speaker 1: her piece was published, she got an unnerving call at
Speaker 1: work from a man who peppered her with questions about
Speaker 1: what she'd written, as well as commenting on certain items
Speaker 1: in the house itself. He was especially interested in the record,
Speaker 1: apparently an album on the stereo that he said she
Speaker 1: should have named. Was he just a true crime nut
Speaker 1: or did the murderer actually call the journalist At the time,
Speaker 1: Tess Lawrence tried to get police to follow up the call,
Speaker 1: but had no idea how seriously they took the matter.
Speaker 1: It's probably not surprising that she's called for an inquiry
Speaker 1: into their handling of the investigation overall. Of course, detectives
Speaker 1: have had other leads to follow too. In the decades
Speaker 1: since the death of Susan Bartlett and Suzanne Armstrong. There
Speaker 1: were the letters sent to the Armstrong family by one
Speaker 1: Peter Collier, a man they didn't know. He claimed to
Speaker 1: have been in a psychiatric hospital with a man he
Speaker 1: alleged was responsible for the girl's deaths, and over a
Speaker 1: period of three years, outlined his theory in detail and
Speaker 1: quite dignified old fashioned handwriting. Certainly parts of his tale
Speaker 1: were true. I was able to verify that he and
Speaker 1: Anthony Christie, the man he was implicating, had been treated
Speaker 1: at Larundel Hospital in nineteen seventy seven. Collier was also
Speaker 1: well known in the bright region, where most of his
Speaker 1: correspondence was posted, and to be fair, his letters and
Speaker 1: postcards to Suzanne's Mamma Alene and her second husband, Bruce Curry,
Speaker 1: had an air of reason to them and a barely
Speaker 1: contained anger that the murderer hadn't been apprehended. In the
Speaker 1: first letter, sent in two thousand and four, Peter Collier
Speaker 1: blamed this on what he described as the criminal negligence
Speaker 1: of the institution as well as the homicide squad. Briefly,
Speaker 1: he claimed that Anthony Christi had been admitted to Larundel
Speaker 1: early in seventy seven in a coma that lasted ten days.
Speaker 1: After he'd regained consciousness, Christie allegedly told two different therapy
Speaker 1: groups that he liked to carve up women after having
Speaker 1: sex with them. Initially, the Armstrongs took Collier seriously enough
Speaker 1: to meet him at least once, and as well as
Speaker 1: writing to Suzanne's family, he also letter bombed Easy Street,
Speaker 1: putting flyers in mailboxes up and down the street that
Speaker 1: made similar claims about Larundel and the killer. A couple
Speaker 1: of locals who still lived there hung on to them
Speaker 1: for years. Aileen Curry, Suzanne's mother, also kept Collier's letters
Speaker 1: and cards. Despite police dismissing the scenario that he suggested
Speaker 1: as having any bearing on the case, sister Gail still
Speaker 1: has them. They said he was a looney and had
Speaker 1: done it before to other people, so who knows, She
Speaker 1: told me after a protracted email exchange, Victoria Police Media
Speaker 1: told me, quote, both Peter Collier and Anthony Christi have
Speaker 1: been investigated and eliminated unquote. This was the same email
Speaker 1: in which I was told on October five, twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: that investigators have also spoken to Gladys Coventry. At that stage,
Speaker 1: we didn't know about her interview with Truth. Police Media
Speaker 1: added that Peter Sellers will also be spoken to by
Speaker 1: investigators in the near future. A couple of weeks later,
Speaker 1: Senior Detective Lee Prados did just that. After forty five
Speaker 1: years and ten months Peter Sellers was finally interviewed about
Speaker 1: what he'd heard the night the two young women were
Speaker 1: murdered in his street. He admits he felt a bit
Speaker 1: apprehensive when he arrived at cramb And Police station to
Speaker 1: meet the homicide investigator.
Speaker 5: Not nervous, anxious maybe do you know what? Of course,
Speaker 5: it's been so long and someone in authority wanted to
Speaker 5: talk to me, that was the main reason. And yeah,
Speaker 5: once I started there, it was fine, and he was
Speaker 5: really good, really good. Initially, of course he just said
Speaker 5: to me and he can't discuss, he can't lead it
Speaker 5: into a question. I had to put forward in my
Speaker 5: own words. And then you wanted to Then I explained
Speaker 5: about the book and the podcast is all coming up,
Speaker 5: and you wanted to know exactly what I'm saying today
Speaker 5: is exactly what I put in the book in the podcast.
Speaker 3: I said yes.
Speaker 1: Once they got into the swing of things, Peter relaxed
Speaker 1: and his memory certainly didn't fail him. Though the interview
Speaker 1: took three hours to document.
Speaker 5: I proceeded tell a story, but then every now and
Speaker 5: again he stopped and he typed some more, then asked
Speaker 5: me like a question on the question.
Speaker 1: So he's not recording it as far as you know,
Speaker 1: he's actually asking you a question and then typing in
Speaker 1: your answer.
Speaker 5: That's correct. Yeah, yeah, not one bit was recorded. It
Speaker 5: was all typing.
Speaker 1: Does that strike he was odd in twenty two?
Speaker 5: I did initially, but the more you sat there and
Speaker 5: he did it just went by it. But he was
Speaker 5: very thorough and we got it all out and he
Speaker 5: actually apologized for things that didn't happen in the initial investigation.
Speaker 1: Did he specify what should have happened?
Speaker 5: No, just to getting interviewed, because he asked me, did
Speaker 5: mum and Dad get interviewed again? I said no, they
Speaker 5: interviewed the once and that was it. And yeah, he
Speaker 5: just trick, he said, But yeah, no, I'm glad I've
Speaker 5: done it. So yeah. He said it's going to be ongoing.
Speaker 5: That you said, don't even think it's going to be
Speaker 5: swept away. It's not. It's going to be ongoing. And
Speaker 5: he said, check in with me when if you want
Speaker 5: to find hour things are going.
Speaker 1: And Peter, three hour sounds like a long time, because
Speaker 1: I mean we've spoken a number of times about it,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't take three hours for you to say
Speaker 1: what happened? Why did it take that long.
Speaker 5: Mainly because he was typing as well. But when I'd
Speaker 5: say something, he wanted to know if I saw the
Speaker 5: make of the car they drove away, and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: So everything got broken down. When I saw the three
Speaker 5: people at the front, while were they wearing, how tall
Speaker 5: they were and.
Speaker 1: Just be could you remember that for him?
Speaker 5: Yes, as I said him, I can shut my eyes
Speaker 5: and see and hear what went on, so that wasn't
Speaker 5: an issue. But the height of the two guys, because
Speaker 5: one was in the gato, one was on a thing,
Speaker 5: so it wasn't to me one was taller than the other.
Speaker 5: And what they were wearing. Could remember that what were
Speaker 5: they wearing? The dark haired guy had jeans and a
Speaker 5: brownish reddish jumper on. The fair headed guy was like
Speaker 5: in Denham and it looked like a faded Denham top.
Speaker 5: The woman he was talking to was shielded behind him,
Speaker 5: so I couldn't really see she had pants on. But
Speaker 5: that was about it. But from what the other two
Speaker 5: were where he is plain as they Then I had
Speaker 5: to draw the outline of my house and the insight
Speaker 5: the layout say where I was to everything happening. Then
Speaker 5: I had to draw the street all the houses and
Speaker 5: picture where the people were standing, and meah, do all that.
Speaker 1: And Peter Sellers was happy to do all that pleased
Speaker 1: at The official Easy Street file now contains his account
Speaker 1: of what he heard on the night of the killings
Speaker 1: and what he saw two nights later. But what still
Speaker 1: wasn't clear was what police meant about having spoken to
Speaker 1: missus Coventry. For several weeks I tried to get them
Speaker 1: to explain, and then on December five, twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: I received another email from the media office. There was
Speaker 1: now quote approval to disclose that police obtained a statement
Speaker 1: from Gladys Coventry on February eleventh, nineteen seventy eight. Unquote.
Speaker 1: It hadn't gone to the coroner, they added, as it
Speaker 1: was obviously obtained after the inquest, but her statement could
Speaker 1: not be provided. Quote we have approval for release of
Speaker 1: certain information given its an active investigation. This is our
Speaker 1: public position unquote. Again, it remains unclear if detectives spoke
Speaker 1: to missus Coventry at all on the day the two
Speaker 1: suess were found, or if they only took a statement
Speaker 1: from her after she spoke with Truth thirteen months later.
Speaker 1: But given her clear description of a tall man with
Speaker 1: dark brown hair in the house next door. Why wasn't
Speaker 1: even more made of this publicly? Why wasn't a sketch
Speaker 1: of this guy posted in all the daily newspaper papers,
Speaker 1: not to mention truth. Then there's a truly menacing figure
Speaker 1: who was apparently never a person of interest in this matter,
Speaker 1: John Joseph Power. He'd been with nineteen year old Julianne
Speaker 1: Garcissela the night she disappeared, just eighteen months earlier in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five. Those who knew Power recall his unsettling
Speaker 1: presence and say he was capable of extreme violence. One
Speaker 1: former lawyer even believed he could well have killed three
Speaker 1: women in two years. In fact, he told me that
Speaker 1: Power was quote a really bad guy, exactly the kind
Speaker 1: of guy who could do something so bad unquote. So
Speaker 1: did detectives ever take a proper look at him in
Speaker 1: relation to Easy Street? Or did the fact that he'd
Speaker 1: been named in the explosive Beach inquiry into allegations of
Speaker 1: police misconduct mean he was off limits to police at
Speaker 1: the time. Fifteen years after the Easy Street killings, Hour
Speaker 1: was jailed for raping a nineteen year old woman and
Speaker 1: to be fair, his DNA would have long been in
Speaker 1: the system given the amount of time he spent in jail,
Speaker 1: so maybe he was ruled out definitively. Others have certainly
Speaker 1: been tracked by police through the decades, but all to
Speaker 1: no avail. There have been no arrests, no convictions. So
Speaker 1: forty seven years after the murders on Easy Street, nearly
Speaker 1: five decades since Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett were fatally
Speaker 1: stabbed and young Gregory left alone in his cot, are
Speaker 1: there enough new facts and circumstances to compel a second
Speaker 1: coronial inquest. Former Independent Federal MP Phil Cleary believes so,
Speaker 1: and cites the Maria James case that went to the
Speaker 1: Victorian coroner for a second time in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: It shone new light on the original investigation into Maria's death,
Speaker 1: including detective's failure to formally interview Peter Keo, who later
Speaker 1: fatally stabbed Cleary's sister. The new inquiry into Maria James's
Speaker 1: murder was ordered after an application by one of his
Speaker 1: sons that the first coroner's finding be set aside. Karin
Speaker 1: and Caitlin English was damning in her finding, even though
Speaker 1: she couldn't identify Maria James's killer, but she did name
Speaker 1: two men as significant persons of interest, Keo and Catholic
Speaker 1: priest Anthony Bonjono. Not Surprisingly, Phil Cleary is adamant about
Speaker 1: what should happen next in the Easy Street matter.
Speaker 6: It's unbelievable that we haven't been able to solve this crime.
Speaker 6: What we know from the Maria James inquest is that
Speaker 6: you can unearth a whole lot of fascinating material and
Speaker 6: events and facts that throw new light on the killing
Speaker 6: of women, which I say has not been properly investigated historically.
Speaker 6: So we go to Easy Street people now exploring the
Speaker 6: question of DNA. Of course, we should go back and
Speaker 6: re visit how DNA was used, and maybe we'll find material,
Speaker 6: maybe we'll discover something about the DNA that does throw
Speaker 6: new light on the killing. But also from my perspective,
Speaker 6: I continue to say that contemporary inquests for historical acts
Speaker 6: of violence are so critical to our understanding. For me,
Speaker 6: it's like a truth commission. It enables us to put
Speaker 6: a considered more objective light on our failings or the
Speaker 6: failings of the past.
Speaker 1: But if a second inquest is ordered, what should it
Speaker 1: look at Professor Stephen Cordner.
Speaker 2: Well, look, I think probably at this point you could
Speaker 2: reasonably expect a high level of transparency about what investigators
Speaker 2: have actually found, so that that gets out a bit
Speaker 2: further that might prompt or job people's memories or consciences
Speaker 2: to actually do something. I think it's really trying to
Speaker 2: get to people out there that might have something to
Speaker 2: say that for some reason either haven't been spoken to
Speaker 2: or haven't felt like they could share, but could now
Speaker 2: be re assured that it's okay, you know, but we
Speaker 2: need to hear it before it's all too late.
Speaker 1: Victoria's state coroner will decide whether this happens or not.
Speaker 1: For now, this question remains how long can justice for
Speaker 1: Sue and Suzanne be denied