YOU expect the very old to die, but never this way. Not at the hands of someone who breaks into a nursing home late at night, goes to a bedroom and stabs a ninety-five-year-old woman in the neck. A woman who has suffered two strokes and is so frail she uses a walking frame and has trouble speaking.
But that is how Kathleen Downes was killed in a quiet residential street some time before dawn the last day of 1997.
Mrs Downes would have turned ninety-six a month later, on 29 January, and many of her far-flung family would have gathered for the birthday. Instead, they gathered for her funeral.
And the service, instead of being the peaceful passing they would have expected, was overshadowed by the brutality of a crime that has had police puzzled for a year.
The facts, as known, are few.
Mrs Downes was one of twenty-one residents at Brunswick Lodge, a nursing home in Loyola Avenue, Brunswick, an old working class suburb just north of Melbourne’s inner city area that is steadily becoming gentrified, like its near neighbor, Carlton.
Loyola Avenue is a quiet cul-de-sac of mostly 1920s red brick and tile-roofed houses, lined with palms and plane trees, a block from Lygon Street, one of the main thoroughfares and shopping strips.
Brunswick Lodge is a cheerful, modern place where Mrs Downes had spent eight happy years. She had the front room, overlooking the street, and was popular with other residents, staff and the owners.
The last member of her family to see her alive was her granddaughter Jenny Irwin, who visited her a few days after spending Christmas with her parents at Anglesea, a seaside town of holiday houses and retirees on Victoria’s scenic west coast.
‘I didn’t see her on Christmas Day, so I wanted to see her before I went back to Deniliquin,’ Jenny was to recall a few days after her grandmother’s death, when she was still red-eyed with grief and fatigue. ‘She was excellent. She was giving me cheek. She liked a bit of a laugh and a joke.
‘I got there about 11.30 in the morning. I stayed about twenty minutes or half-an-hour, then walked her down to lunch.’
On 30 December, Mrs Downes went to bed between 8pm and 9pm, leaving her bedroom door open into a hallway, as she usually did. It might have cost her her life.
About 12.30am, when staff made a routine check, she was sleeping peacefully. At 6.30am, a staff member found her body on the floor beside her bed.
At first it looked as if she had suffered a heart attack, but ambulance officers who arrived a few minutes later found she was lying in a pool of blood from a wound in her neck. Detectives later found a window had been forced. They can only guess that a would-be burglar attacked Mrs Downes. No-one saw or heard anything.
It was a savage end to a life of quiet decency. Kathleen Downes, a great-grandmother, was born in 1902 at Fryerstown, near Castlemaine, central Victoria. She was the youngest of four children of a gold miner, David Fraser, and his wife, Phoebe.
Kathleen often told her children she didn’t meet her father until she was nine because he had gone to the Western Australia goldfields after the Victorian mines petered out. He sent money to support his family for eight years until he returned about 1910.
The Fraser family shifted to a house in Ascot Vale before the First World War. There, as a teenager, Kathleen met Lionel Downes, who was three years older.
Like many other patriotic young men with an itch for adventure, Lionel put his age up to get into the army and was sent to France. He survived the trenches of the Somme and returned to Melbourne to court Kathleen.
The couple married in the late 1920s, just in time for the Great Depression. Lionel built a weatherboard house in Hillsyde Parade, Strathmore, where they were to raise three children and live the rest of their married lives.
The young bride was proud of her home. It was one of the first ‘all-electric’ houses in Melbourne, and included an early model Hecla electric range that Mrs Downes was to use until she left 60 years later.
The house had two bedrooms, and Lionel, who could turn his hand to most things, added a ‘sleep-out’ on the veranda as the family grew.
Unlike many in the Depression, he held a secure job – as head of a section in the ordnance factory at Maribyrnong.
But money was scarce. To make ends meet he and his sons melted down scrap lead to make fishing sinkers for sale, and Kathleen bottled fruit from her trees.
Their eldest child, Patricia Lack, a grandmother, flew from her home in Brisbane on New Year’s Day to join her brothers, Bill and Geoff Downes, in mourning for their mother.
She was, says Patricia, ‘a bright and caring lady who spoke her own mind’ and worked hard to help her family and other people.
As a young woman, she nursed her older sister, Doris, who was dying of tuberculosis. Later, she was to nurse her own mother through a long illness.
She was awarded the long service medal from the Glenroy branch of the Queen Victoria Hospital Auxiliary for her charity work.
During the Second World War, she and her husband took in servicemen on leave.
‘I don’t know how she fed them, because everything was rationed, but she did,’ recalls Geoff Downes. ‘Dad would play the piano and sing songs. They were kind and public-spirited people.’
Like many of her generation, Mrs Downes outlived her husband by many years. He died of a heart attack in February, 1963, at the age of sixty four. She stayed in the family home until suffering her first stroke after a heart operation ten years ago. After eight months with her son Bill and his wife Yvonne, she moved to Brunswick Lodge.
Her family visited her often and she was happy. On Christmas Day, Geoff and his wife, Phyll, drove over from their home in Templestowe and took her to the house of his daughter, Melinda, at Diamond Creek.
There, with three of her grand-daughters, the grand old woman the family called ‘Nan’ had her last Christmas dinner, a traditional meal with all the trimmings. ‘She had a fantastic appetite,’ recalls Geoff. ‘She ate more than I did.’
After chatting all afternoon, and a ‘bite of tea’, she packed up the presents the family had given her and Geoff drove her home. He didn’t see her again.
Homicide detectives know little more than they did the morning the murder was discovered. They have no motive, no suspects and no strong leads.
The only thing in their favor, they believe, is that the crime is so cowardly that someone who suspects they know who might have done it will make an anonymous telephone call.
The head of the homicide squad, Detective Chief Inspector Rod Collins, sees it as an offence that crosses the boundary between criminals and police. ‘This is a crime not only unacceptable to the community but to the criminal element. We’re waiting for that call.’
Kathleen Downes was a mother, a grandmother and a great-grandmother. She could have been yours.