Speaker 1: Why were detectives so dismissive of witnesses so willing to
Speaker 1: cooperate with their immediate investigation into the Easy Street murders.
Speaker 1: Why didn't they insist on interviewing seventy two year old
Speaker 1: ladders commentry straight away? And why not follow up with
Speaker 1: Peter Seller's and has made ray for that matter as
Speaker 1: soon as they could? And how hard would it have
Speaker 1: been to cross the street to have a chat with
Speaker 1: Christina For tourists with the hindsight of forty seven years especially,
Speaker 1: it makes no sense. But the late Brian Murphy maintained
Speaker 1: that the detectives seemed to have ignored.
Speaker 2: What was right in front of them to be quite unserted.
Speaker 2: I don't like to bag the blokes homicide squad. I've
Speaker 2: already given the indecent pay. But fail you to search,
Speaker 2: failure to find, and that's what the name of the
Speaker 2: game is. And TIL encourage every person to speak to
Speaker 2: and be nice to them, because you don't know how
Speaker 2: you're going to use and you don't know what they're
Speaker 2: going to tell you. People think that it's easy, but
Speaker 2: most homicides are solved by the average policemen being told these.
Speaker 1: The only possible explanation for this lack of attention to
Speaker 1: detail is that not long after entering the house in Collingwood,
Speaker 1: investigators believed they knew who committed the double homicide, and
Speaker 1: so they disregarded pretty much everything else. Right from the start,
Speaker 1: they had two serious suspects in their sites. The first
Speaker 1: was Barry Woodard, who'd taken Susanne and young Gregory out
Speaker 1: the weekend before. He told police that he and his
Speaker 1: brother went into the house on the Wednesday night and
Speaker 1: left the note under the ashtray in the kitchen because
Speaker 1: he'd been concerned that he hadn't heard from her for
Speaker 1: a couple of days. Obviously, this made him the first
Speaker 1: person to look at The second was crime reporter John Grant.
Speaker 1: Initially two the crime scene itself seemed to provide police
Speaker 1: with useful evidence. The blood all through the house, the
Speaker 1: note in the kitchen, the footprint on Susan Bartlett's bed cover. PETERH. Hiscock,
Speaker 1: one of the first detectives to arrive at Easy Street,
Speaker 1: recalls being confronted with a conflicting tableau. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: there seemed to be much to work with. On the other,
Speaker 1: they were already on the back foot.
Speaker 3: Those first initial thirty six forty eight hours are so
Speaker 3: important to investigators. But don't forget we'd lost three days.
Speaker 3: And it's so easy for people to be criticizing or whatever.
Speaker 3: But you've got to put yourself back in the time
Speaker 3: where it was. Take your mind back, close your eyes
Speaker 3: and think back. Oh, no mobile phones, no cameras, no
Speaker 3: vic roads, lots and lots of things that you use.
Speaker 3: Now people be tracked with their credit cards. So the
Speaker 3: tools that you had were good old fashioned shoe leather,
Speaker 3: knock on doors, ask questions and make observations. I mean,
Speaker 3: we were taught the ABC, which is assume nothing, believe
Speaker 3: no one or anything, and check, check, check. So that's
Speaker 3: all we could do in those days.
Speaker 1: So that's what he and Detective Graham McDonald tried to
Speaker 1: do in Collingwood on January thirteenth, nineteen seventy seven. He
Speaker 1: and his partner hit the streets check, check, checking, Rayam and.
Speaker 3: I Sacksville easy kill. I can still remember. We were
Speaker 3: up and down these three streets, knocking on doors. We
Speaker 3: thought we could solve this one very quickly. Such a
Speaker 3: horrific crime like that someone known. We thought something someone
Speaker 3: was going to see something, someone would see something.
Speaker 1: But nothing came from these door knocks. Yet there was
Speaker 1: something inside the house that helped them quickly form a
Speaker 1: view about possible suspects. Evidence of what the murderer did
Speaker 1: after he'd killed Susan and Suzanne. The killer's blood in
Speaker 1: the bathroom especially led them to believe that he knew
Speaker 1: something about police procedure and was trying to get rid
Speaker 1: of the women's blood from his own body and his clothes,
Speaker 1: as well as clean himself up before leaving the house.
Speaker 3: Never have I seen it, but to stand in a
Speaker 3: bath and wash the blood down from such a horrific
Speaker 3: crime was so so unusual to us. That person was
Speaker 3: absolutely animal cunning to do that was just to cover
Speaker 3: himself up, because he obviously was going to go somewhere
Speaker 3: and he might be seen with all his blood on him.
Speaker 3: So we got the old bath and pulled apart, and
Speaker 3: in the elbow where the water drains out was fragments
Speaker 3: of bone which had come off the knife or his clothing.
Speaker 3: And I could not help thinking that this person knows
Speaker 3: something about investigations. Now, it's not something that I would
Speaker 3: have thought of. I'd have done that, but that time,
Speaker 3: who knows what you think put yourself in that position,
Speaker 3: but someone knew they had to remove the evidence from themselves.
Speaker 3: I mean the perfect murder. You could say someone could
Speaker 3: commit the perfect murder, then destroy all the clothing that
Speaker 3: they were wearing, all the shoes, any all the evidence,
Speaker 3: and then say nothing. It'd be very hard to get
Speaker 3: home on those investigations in those days. And that's fitted
Speaker 3: someone who writes about it thinks about it, attends murder
Speaker 3: scenes had been near other murder scenes.
Speaker 4: For PETERH.
Speaker 1: Hiscock, this was a pretty good description of crime journal
Speaker 1: John Grant, he wrote for Truth, consorted with crooks crimson
Speaker 1: coppers on the tough old police rounds to get the
Speaker 1: kind of yarns that Melbourne knocked the door down Tabloid demanded.
Speaker 1: Nicknamed Grunter, his work was well known to the detectives
Speaker 1: who descended on Easy Street that January morning in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven. What made them even more focused on the
Speaker 1: fact that he'd slept on the couch next door was
Speaker 1: that they knew it was the second time he was
Speaker 1: so close to such a terrible crime, unbelievable as it
Speaker 1: still seems. Just eighteen months earlier, Grant and two other
Speaker 1: men had been with nineteen year old Julianne Garcius Slay
Speaker 1: the night she disappeared from her apartment in North Melbourne.
Speaker 1: The young American has never been seen since, nor has
Speaker 1: body been found. For John Grant. It was an unlikely coincidence.
Speaker 1: The detectives on the case couldn't ignore.
Speaker 3: What we used to say, with these long, difficult investigations,
Speaker 3: the answer is always in the file. However, it does
Speaker 3: not seem to be in the file of this case.
Speaker 3: I mean myself personally, I had probably one very good suspect.
Speaker 3: He's been subject of DNA twice in the last several years.
Speaker 5: This is John Grant, so he.
Speaker 3: Was top of the list as far as me personally
Speaker 3: was concerned.
Speaker 1: Of course, he wasn't alone. Many of Peterhiscock's colleagues shared
Speaker 1: the same view. Even though an official list of eight
Speaker 1: suspects had been compiled by the homicide team for the
Speaker 1: next twenty years, John Grant was widely believed to be
Speaker 1: their chief person of interest. He always denied it, but
Speaker 1: that never stopped his journalistic colleagues openly discussing it for years.
Speaker 1: I know I was one of them, well, I didn't
Speaker 1: know John at all. I remember those conversations in which
Speaker 1: workmates would speculate about the sort of guy he was,
Speaker 1: the work he did, that kind of thing. Many believed
Speaker 1: it was just a question of time before he was arrested,
Speaker 1: even if they, like me, didn't know anything much about
Speaker 1: the case at all. Yet, someone who's always maintained John
Speaker 1: Grant's lack of involvement is one of the two people
Speaker 1: he was with the Knight of the Murders his former
Speaker 1: colleague Alona Stevens. She respected him professionally and in a
Speaker 1: way felt sorry for him.
Speaker 4: He was actually quite a talented journalist. He was a
Speaker 4: bit younger than me and we were just colleagues and
Speaker 4: we all had a drink after work together. Just knew
Speaker 4: him as a colleague. He was fun, he was driven
Speaker 4: and dedicated. He was really good at crime. He could
Speaker 4: get information for nothing out of nobody and make something
Speaker 4: of it. He was a real disciple of the genre.
Speaker 4: Whereas you know, we're always sports people just sat around
Speaker 4: having a good time, he was actually out there doing
Speaker 4: a real job.
Speaker 1: Alona left work with a group of colleagues, including Grant,
Speaker 1: that Monday afternoon in January nineteen seventy seven and went
Speaker 1: for a drink at the Celtic Club, a favorite journo's
Speaker 1: haunt at the time.
Speaker 4: Well, we'd all gone for a bit of a drink,
Speaker 4: as was our habit, and because he had no car,
Speaker 4: I had my car. We'd all been having a good time,
Speaker 4: and I said, look, why don't you just crash at
Speaker 4: my place? I didn't live far away, so he came
Speaker 4: home with me. We had a couple more drinks, waited
Speaker 4: for my flatmate to come home. She and her partner
Speaker 4: had a restaurant, so late in the night, made a
Speaker 4: bit up for him on the couch and off we
Speaker 4: all went to bed.
Speaker 1: You made a bet up for him on the couch?
Speaker 1: Why because he was a bit pissed.
Speaker 4: Well, he was pissed. And secondly, it was only a
Speaker 4: two bedroom house, so I had my room, Janet had
Speaker 4: her room, and he had to sleep on the couch.
Speaker 1: No, I just wondered that you were worried about him
Speaker 1: going home.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I mean it was way too late. I'm
Speaker 4: not sure that him the trains would have been running then,
Speaker 4: so I just said, look, stay here and we'll figure
Speaker 4: it out in the morning.
Speaker 1: So sorry, just again, what time was it.
Speaker 4: Oh, it was late at night, early morning. Yeah, late night,
Speaker 4: early morning.
Speaker 1: What happens then? Do you remember anything from that night?
Speaker 1: He just slept through the night.
Speaker 4: Yeah. We all just got up in the morning, one, two, three,
Speaker 4: into the in and out of the bathroom and off
Speaker 4: we went. It was perfectly normal. He was still on
Speaker 4: the couch when I got up. Janet was always a
Speaker 4: late riser because she worked really hard in the restaurant.
Speaker 4: Do you remember what time he did get up? No,
Speaker 4: sorry I don't, but it would have been normal.
Speaker 1: And what was his demeanor when he woke up? When
Speaker 1: you got him up and got him moving because you
Speaker 1: ended up taking him home.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he had a headache, like like me, so you know,
Speaker 4: his demeanor was, well, I better get home now, as
Speaker 4: we know.
Speaker 1: Two days after driving him home that Tuesday morning, Alona
Speaker 1: found Susan and Suzanne's bodies in the house next door.
Speaker 1: She's still astonished that so many people regarded John Grant
Speaker 1: as a suspect in the double homicide.
Speaker 4: I was absolutely flabbagasted because for starters that I mean,
Speaker 4: they didn't never ask me about him, but you know,
Speaker 4: and I knew where he'd been. I mean, okay, I
Speaker 4: hadn't been beside him all night, but blind Freddie could
Speaker 4: have seen that there was no evidence to support that
Speaker 4: he had done anything.
Speaker 1: Did you ever talk to him about it?
Speaker 4: No, not that I recall, because there was you know,
Speaker 4: it was pretty intense at the time, and I left
Speaker 4: the truth shortly after that to go to the age
Speaker 4: to work, and I really never spoke to him again
Speaker 4: because he had a crime beat and I was in Sport.
Speaker 4: I guess we just all moved on with our lives
Speaker 4: and he must have known he wasn't guilty. I knew
Speaker 4: he wasn't guilty, so we didn't pursue it.
Speaker 1: Did you ever look at him differently after that?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: I always really felt rather bad because I mean, what
Speaker 4: are the odds that this is going to happen to you?
Speaker 4: You know, I don't good and hold an opinion on
Speaker 4: what happened to the young girl in North Melbourne, but this,
Speaker 4: to have this happen eighteen months later must have been
Speaker 4: the most terrible thing for him to actually live with,
Speaker 4: to actually have to have to bear, plus all the
Speaker 4: staring and the finger pointing and the police harassing it
Speaker 4: well as good as harassing him. I think he's had
Speaker 4: a really raw deal and had a lot of bad luck.
Speaker 1: For the record, John Grant declined to be interviewed for
Speaker 1: this podcast, just as he did when I was writing
Speaker 1: the book about the case. Andrew Rule was also a
Speaker 1: young reporter back in those days, now one of Australia's
Speaker 1: most prolific crime journalists and successful authors. He remembers Grant
Speaker 1: well and had a pertinent conversation about him with a
Speaker 1: homicide veteran.
Speaker 5: I had this conversation with a former head of the
Speaker 5: homicide squad, probably twenty five or thirty years ago, and
Speaker 5: when Eezy Street was already a big and soft case,
Speaker 5: and it might have been in the late eighties that
Speaker 5: I had this conversation and this homicide man, former head
Speaker 5: of the squad, he said, yeah, I can see why
Speaker 5: everybody thought it was John Grant, a truth journalist for
Speaker 5: various reasons. He said, we did too, and let me
Speaker 5: tell you. We got him into Russell Street and we
Speaker 5: had him in there for I think he said twenty
Speaker 5: four hours, but you know, all day and all night
Speaker 5: or something. And he, without giving me details, he led
Speaker 5: me to believe that he was interrogated very thoroughly and
Speaker 5: that clearly he didn't know any more than he told them.
Speaker 5: He was a knock about journo certainly was he ran.
Speaker 5: When you work for truth, you had to mix with
Speaker 5: coppers and crooks and all sorts of colorful people because
Speaker 5: that was where you got your stories. A lot of
Speaker 5: journals do that, including me, so you wouldn't automatically hang
Speaker 5: him for that. But he was a hard edged truth
Speaker 5: crime reporter. He did knock around with some very hard people.
Speaker 5: And as you know, and some people know, he had
Speaker 5: the bad luck to be involved with a couple of
Speaker 5: guys who were the last to see alive. A young
Speaker 5: woman who vanished in Melbourne earlier before Easy Street, and
Speaker 5: that is the mysterious case of Julie Garcia Slay. Julie
Speaker 5: Garcia Lay came from I think California. She was an
Speaker 5: American citizen. She came to Australia, very young woman, probably nineteen.
Speaker 5: She's come out here. She's working at the Australian Newspaper,
Speaker 5: which was then in the same building as Truth up
Speaker 5: in La Trope Street. And she was known for that
Speaker 5: reason too, people like John Grandain, many other journals, and
Speaker 5: she happened, you know, she was invited on a Friday
Speaker 5: night or whatever, to a party or a drink or
Speaker 5: whatever with a few people, and the last to see
Speaker 5: her alive, it would appear, were a couple of very
Speaker 5: bad citizens, one being John Joseph Powell and by chance,
Speaker 5: John Grant. Now this coincidence is probably the thing, and
Speaker 5: it probably is a coincidence. This is probably what has
Speaker 5: focused the police's attention on John Grant so thoroughly. It
Speaker 5: just makes all of us think, Gee, that's a long,
Speaker 5: difficult coincidence. But there's never been a scaeric of evidence
Speaker 5: against him. You can be unlucky if you're mixing certain circles,
Speaker 5: and John Grant certainly ran in those circles.
Speaker 1: Peter Hiscock still shakes his head at this particular happenstance,
Speaker 1: but he's come to terms with what Grant always maintained.
Speaker 1: He wasn't the killer.
Speaker 3: I have to believe John Grant absolutely extraordinary. But again,
Speaker 3: you could have a whiteboard sometimes of investigations where because
Speaker 3: something looks to be unusual doesn't mean to say that
Speaker 3: it is so that looked unusual. All those things led
Speaker 3: in one direction. But of course, again he would have
Speaker 3: been delighted that DNA had been invented. He'd be delighted
Speaker 3: that had been upgraded and he's been cleared. But if
Speaker 3: you had a whiteboard and we had forty experienced people
Speaker 3: down in a classroom looking at this, I guarantee you
Speaker 3: that most people would have pointed with all those points
Speaker 3: I was pointing out to you, and there's other things
Speaker 3: that I'm not going to go into, but you would
Speaker 3: have said, right, it's guying. Might be the person we
Speaker 3: need to look at.
Speaker 1: Barry Woodard, one of the two men who entered the
Speaker 1: murder house the night before the women's bodies were discovered,
Speaker 1: was the other suspect on the homicide team's initial list,
Speaker 1: but he didn't have to wait so long to be cleared.
Speaker 1: Police quickly accepted the then thirty one year old sheerer's
Speaker 1: alibi and his insistence that he and his brother hadn't
Speaker 1: noticed anything wrong when they visited one four seven Easy
Speaker 1: Street and left a note for Suzanne. Woodard also declined
Speaker 1: to talk with me when I was writing Murder on
Speaker 1: Easy Street, and did so again recently when I rang
Speaker 1: to let him know I was working on this podcast.
Speaker 1: But let's not forget that while the Woodard brothers were
Speaker 1: in the house, on Wednesday night, January twelfth, a new
Speaker 1: friend of Susan's had already climbed in through her bedroom
Speaker 1: window via the service lane.
Speaker 3: The night before, one of the fellows who just met
Speaker 3: them climbed in as a footprint that was on the bed,
Speaker 3: and they got in. Been trying to ring the girls
Speaker 3: and thought they might add the wrong number, and then
Speaker 3: set they climbed back out once they checked the number.
Speaker 3: Now you only had to turn your head to look
Speaker 3: down there, and you'd see what was their human nature?
Speaker 5: Can look around.
Speaker 3: I've been trying to ring these girls. I want to
Speaker 3: get hold you're just going to go and check the
Speaker 3: number and not so if they're there. Also the young
Speaker 3: Gregor who's still there. Whether he's winpling or whatever, we
Speaker 3: won't ever know. But I mean he's certainly had no food,
Speaker 3: He never had any drink, He had nothing, His nappies
Speaker 3: were soiled, his bed, all that sort of stuff. To
Speaker 3: this day, I don't believe this guy. I didn't believe
Speaker 3: him then, I don't believe him. Now you've gone in there,
Speaker 3: Well you've actually gone in through a window which has
Speaker 3: sort of broken in, climbed in over it's bed and
Speaker 3: gone looked at the phone number and not look back.
Speaker 3: We thought we're going to solve this pretty quickly, but.
Speaker 2: No, huh.
Speaker 1: He's never been named publicly, but he was a tobacco
Speaker 1: salesman and, as Peter Hiscock says, went round to the
Speaker 1: house after the phone kept ringing out on the numerous
Speaker 1: times he tried to call Susan. Fortunately he had a
Speaker 1: friend with him who led him up through the window.
Speaker 1: He also went straight to police when he saw the
Speaker 1: double homicide reported in the Herald on Thursday afternoon, January thirteen.
Speaker 1: They clearly believed he had nothing crucial to add in
Speaker 1: terms of detail. He was even allowed to leave the
Speaker 1: country before the coroner's inquest into the murders on July twelve,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven. But somehow, nearly fifty years later, the
Speaker 1: fact that three men entered the house where two women's
Speaker 1: bodies lay seems even harder to grasp. Can we really
Speaker 1: believe that this first visitor walked through Susan's unlit bedroom
Speaker 1: into the hall, turned right and right again to enter
Speaker 1: the laundroom to check the phone on the wall without
Speaker 1: seeing her. Perhaps harder to imagine is this guy walking
Speaker 1: back into the corridor to retrace his steps out of
Speaker 1: the house through her bedroom window. This means that for
Speaker 1: a few seconds at least he was facing Susan on
Speaker 1: the floor at the other end of that corridor, and
Speaker 1: was also close to the next bedroom, where sixteen month
Speaker 1: old greg Armstrong was in his cot Could he really
Speaker 1: not see Susan's body so close to the front door
Speaker 1: or hear Gregory. Had he seen her and called police,
Speaker 1: significant time would have been saved. The young women had
Speaker 1: been killed the night before, so police would have had
Speaker 1: more to work with, but as it was, they weren't
Speaker 1: found until Thursday morning, so that crucial forty eight hour
Speaker 1: window had closed. This still drives Peterhiscott quietly crazy, as
Speaker 1: does the fact that an ex police officer was also
Speaker 1: on the original list of suspects.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to name him. He was an ex
Speaker 3: policeman who had left the police force under a check
Speaker 3: and a situation involving women. Was not charged, but giving
Speaker 3: the opportunity in those days to leave, and.
Speaker 1: He did raping women, not quite but harassment.
Speaker 3: I think probably I haven't got evid of that, but
Speaker 3: that was allegations. So anyway, he was a plumber working
Speaker 3: on a roof not far away. He would have seen
Speaker 3: Susan Armstrong was an attractive young lady, and as time
Speaker 3: went on, I think, well, this guy would be just
Speaker 3: the sort of guy he had the propensity to put
Speaker 3: to females. If I don't book you, I'll come around
Speaker 3: to you. That resonated in my mind and bubbled away.
Speaker 3: When the million dollar reward came out. I got back
Speaker 3: to Hounsld. Mick Hughes, the boss there. They looked out
Speaker 3: and they said, no, he's been eliminated again from DNA.
Speaker 3: Can't tell me, said he's been eliminated. Now after that,
Speaker 3: I've got nobody else.
Speaker 1: Over the next year or so, as the case detectives
Speaker 1: have been so hopeful of slving quickly remained unsolved, they
Speaker 1: developed that list of eight official suspects. It's never been
Speaker 1: released publicly, but it's not hard to work out who
Speaker 1: The first four on it were John Grant, the Woodard brothers,
Speaker 1: and the tobacco salesman. Then there was the disgraced form
Speaker 1: of police officer, a so called champion sportsman eventually identified
Speaker 1: as a racing car driver, and another man detectives tracked
Speaker 1: down in Britain. The final person of interest in this
Speaker 1: inauspicious group was a man who hailed from Country Victoria,
Speaker 1: specifically the Euroa Banella region, so he was known to
Speaker 1: both the Armstrong and Bartlett families. In fact, early on,
Speaker 1: Sue's brother Martin and Suzanne's sister Gail told police he
Speaker 1: could be involved. He'd gone out with Suzanne several years
Speaker 1: before she traveled overseas, was known to country police, and
Speaker 1: had been in Melbourne when the girls were killed. His
Speaker 1: wife told me that a couple of days before their deaths,
Speaker 1: he and a friend had started drinking quote and he
Speaker 1: was getting angry unquote at his home in northern Victoria.
Speaker 1: She said she left their house and drove to her
Speaker 1: parents place as fast as she could get the kids
Speaker 1: in the car. By Monday, January tenth, her husband was
Speaker 1: reportedly drinking at a pub in Collingwood, a few blocks
Speaker 1: away from Easy Street. His so called mistress at the
Speaker 1: time told Polis he was with her all that night
Speaker 1: in Fitzroy, a suburb away. When his wife and I
Speaker 1: spoke in twenty seventeen, she was long separated from this man.
Speaker 1: She wasn't sure he could have done something so violent
Speaker 1: as murder, but claimed he'd beaten her up before, and
Speaker 1: so she knew what he was capable of when he
Speaker 1: was drunk. But DNA testing cleared him of the crime,
Speaker 1: as it did all eight men on Homicide's initial list
Speaker 1: of eight persons of interest. This meant they were effectively
Speaker 1: back to where they started when they first walked into
Speaker 1: one four seven Easy Street, horrified by what had happened,
Speaker 1: but with no clear next step and no real suspect
Speaker 1: to follow. This doesn't surprise Andrew Rule, senior columnist and
Speaker 1: presenter of the Life and Crimes podcast with The Herald's son.
Speaker 1: He clearly recalls what the police force was like back
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen seventies.
Speaker 5: He was composed largely of not really well educated or
Speaker 5: very sophisticated men who had joined the police force, probably
Speaker 5: fairly young. Their values and attitudes were shaped at the
Speaker 5: front bar and the footy club more than anywhere else,
Speaker 5: and are probably lagging behind some elements of society in
Speaker 5: their attitudes. And all of that meant that when you
Speaker 5: had two young women in a house in Collingwood who
Speaker 5: had a lot of male visitors and the whole sort
Speaker 5: of permissive age thing, there would be a total tendency
Speaker 5: by a lot of those people to regard the victims
Speaker 5: as sort of or maybe second rate or not worthy
Speaker 5: of as consideration as if it was the governor's wife
Speaker 5: and daughter. Well, that'd be much more serious, mind you.
Speaker 5: That's human nature that applies today. That still exists because
Speaker 5: we're human and that's the way we operate. But it
Speaker 5: was more pronounced then than it is today, I think,
Speaker 5: and those young women, the tragedy of what happened to them,
Speaker 5: the poor investigation that followed, is reflected by the fact
Speaker 5: that I think there's only something like about twenty four
Speaker 5: sheets of paper in the file. I know that various
Speaker 5: homicide detected since modern day ones have expressed to me
Speaker 5: privately their shock when they looked at the Easy Street
Speaker 5: file that it only had basically a few sheets of paper.
Speaker 5: It was a Manila folder with a few sheets of paper.
Speaker 1: Twenty four pages of information in the original file certainly
Speaker 1: doesn't sound like a solid, thorough investigation. And when I
Speaker 1: looked at the official file from the coroner's office in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, it reflected this. Inside a yellowing jacket, copies
Speaker 1: of witness statements looked like they'd been rifled through too
Speaker 1: many times. By untrained hands over the decades. Some pages
Speaker 1: had been shuffled together without any regard for proper sequence
Speaker 1: or even whether they fitted together. Maybe this archival disarray
Speaker 1: was due to the file having been part of the
Speaker 1: public record for so many years, but most disturbing were
Speaker 1: the photos of Susan and Suzanne's bodies included in this
Speaker 1: crime dossier. They deserve better. When high profile detective Ron
Speaker 1: Iddalls became head of Victoria's first properly staff cold case
Speaker 1: unit in twenty eleven, he tried to bring new dignity
Speaker 1: as well as scrutiny to bear on the case. He
Speaker 1: sifted through two hundred and eighty unsolved murders on the
Speaker 1: book since nineteen fifty and green lighted those he felt
Speaker 1: they could probably solve. This included easy street colour coated green.
Speaker 1: Due to the fact that there was DNA to work with,
Speaker 1: all eight persons of interest on the original list were retested.
Speaker 1: Whether this was because of advances in DNA technology or
Speaker 1: problems with the first tests has never been made clear
Speaker 1: by police, but some thirty five people were DNA tested
Speaker 1: in total at that point, including the first eight, but
Speaker 1: there were no DNA matches for the seminal stains found
Speaker 1: on the carpet near Suzanne's body, let alone a face
Speaker 1: washer found away from the house by forensic scientist Henry
Speaker 1: Huggins the day after he first visited the crime scene.
Speaker 1: This intrepid investigator went back and checked the manhole and
Speaker 1: road rains within two blocks of the house and amazingly
Speaker 1: found the washer, as well as a shawl. It's hard
Speaker 1: to know if the face washer was used for DNA testing,
Speaker 1: given where it was found, it might have been too
Speaker 1: contaminated to be useful. Certainly, not much was made of
Speaker 1: Henry Huggins's remarkable find or most of the exhibit items
Speaker 1: taken from the house. According to the coronial file, These
Speaker 1: included a bloodstained tawel, scrapings from the passage wall, bed sheets,
Speaker 1: a pair of panties, a clock, fibers from a high chair,
Speaker 1: scrapings from the side of the bath, and two pieces
Speaker 1: of carpet. Blood, hair, and nails were also taken from
Speaker 1: Sue and Suzanne, but apparently revealed no useful information. The
Speaker 1: exhibit that mattered most was that small piece of carpet
Speaker 1: cut away from where Suzanne had lain, stained with seamen.
Speaker 1: For all of us riveted by TV dramas like Cold
Speaker 1: Case and CSI. DNA is supposed to be infallible forensically
Speaker 1: the key that unlocks that last door. The bad guys,
Speaker 1: especially the really bad guys, aren't supposed to be able
Speaker 1: to evade its forensic reach. In the end, this lies
Speaker 1: at the heart of the mystery surrounding this dreadful double murder.
Speaker 1: Has science somehow got it wrong.
Speaker 5: The police DNA sample is of seamen found in or
Speaker 5: around Sue Armstrong's body. The assumption has always been naturally
Speaker 5: that this would probably be the killer, That the killer
Speaker 5: is a sort of a rapist sex killer. Right, fair assumption.
Speaker 5: But what if it's wrong. What if the previous visitor
Speaker 5: who turned up at you know, eight thirty whatever and
Speaker 5: left at eight fifty five or nine fifteen. What if
Speaker 5: it's his semen and that the killer is actually the
Speaker 5: jealous bloke who turns up a few minutes later. That
Speaker 5: would turn this whole case upside down, because it means
Speaker 5: that the DNA samples are relevant because it's the wrong guy.
Speaker 5: That would be an explanation. I'm not saying it's totally likely,
Speaker 5: but it fits the facts.
Speaker 1: Next time on the Easy Street murders, DNA is it's
Speaker 1: a living thing.
Speaker 4: It didn't seem to be clear at the time about
Speaker 4: how deep the wounds were, how they actually died. It's
Speaker 4: not something that lives on forever, and the savagery of
Speaker 4: it looks like it's something that's been planned