CHAPTER 3

THE NEIGHBOURS

WHEN ILONA STEVENS woke up on Tuesday 11 January, she quickly got dressed, made a cup of tea and agreed, without much coaxing, to drive her colleague John Grant home.

The journalist had slept on the couch in the lounge room of the house she shared with her friend Janet Powell, who ran the Italian restaurant Casanova in Carlton. After a few drinks at the Celtic Club in the city, Ilona and Grant had arrived back at Collingwood at about 8.15 pm. They played pool and drank together until Janet got home just after midnight. The three stayed up talking until about 2.00 am. Given the late hour, Ilona made up the couch for him before going to bed herself.

Nicknamed ‘Grunter’, John Grant was an old-fashioned crime reporter who worked both sides of his ‘beat’, with as many criminal sources as police contacts in his notebooks. His reputation as a hard drinker preceded him – and so too his connection with a tragedy that had occurred two years earlier.

Grant was one of the last people known to have been with Julie Ann Garciacelay before she disappeared in 1975. She has not been seen since, has not contacted friends or family, but nor has her body been found. He was at the time a ‘person of interest’ in the missing person’s investigation. His fellow workers at Truth, a Murdoch tabloid, were aware of this, but Grant swore that he had nothing to do with the nineteen-year-old American vanishing.

Grant’s connection to the girl’s disappearance troubled some of his colleagues, but not Ilona. She enjoyed his company and felt sorry for the beleaguered reporter; it was another reason to be kind to him, especially after he confided that his father, with whom he lived, was an alcoholic and physically abusive.

When she awoke that Tuesday, Grant was already up, showered and ready to leave. As she roused him out towards her car just before 8.00 am, she thought she could hear young Gregory crying next door. This struck her as odd, because he rarely cried for long at all; Suzanne Armstrong was an attentive mother.

Her neighbours hadn’t lived next door long, moving in two months before Christmas 1976, so she didn’t know them well. But Suzanne was a single mum who clearly loved her son, zipping round the neighbourhood with him on the back of her bike, and nicking over to the corner milk bar with him on her hip. Her friend Sue, who shared the cottage, also seemed at ease with the toddler, a willing support to Suzanne.

Even happy kids cry, Ilona reasoned, so she didn’t give Greg much more thought that Tuesday morning. But later that day, when she returned from work, another odd thing occurred. Her housemate, Janet, asked if the women living next door – the ‘two Sues’, as they called them – had a puppy. When dog-loving Ilona confirmed this, her friend told her that she had just seen a young dog running loose on the street.

Janet enticed the dog into their house. Eventually, they went next door to let their neighbours know they had the naughty pup, a cheerful German Shepherd cross. ‘We both went to the front door of 147 Easey Street with the puppy. We knocked a couple of times, but there was no answer. We then took the puppy back into our house and put it in the backyard,’ Ilona later told police.

This didn’t seem overly concerning to either Ilona or Janet. The girls had probably been in and out all day, and the dog had managed to evade being ‘recaptured’, they thought. At least now she was safe at their place.

Ilona went out for dinner with friends in South Yarra. When she got home, the dog was still there, despite Janet’s efforts to raise their neighbours a couple of times during the evening. This now seemed a bit strange and, late as it was, Ilona decided to take matters in hand. She went into her backyard and shouted over the fence, but was unable to raise anyone. Getting on a chair, she looked over and saw the back door open and a light on. Yet there was still no response to her calls.

Tired as they were, Ilona and Janet decided to try another tack: they’d write a note about the pup and leave it on the girls’ front door. At about 11.30 pm, the two friends pinned a piece of paper on the door. Dear Sue’s [sic], it read. We have your dog which was wandering around the street. You are obviously not home. So give us a yell and we will return same to you PROMPTLY. Regards, Ilona and Janet.

Back at home, Ilona had a bath and heard the phone ringing next door. ‘I heard the phone ring in 147 and it rang itself out. This happened a couple of times. I then went to bed. Again, I heard nothing unusual during the night.’

She went to work again the next morning, not noticing that the note was still on her neighbours’ door until she got back later that night. Neither Sue nor Suzanne had dropped in to pick up the dog, and Ilona could hear Greg crying, if intermittently. In fact, she recalls hearing the little boy crying, on and off, over these two days, just as his puppy barked and barked in her backyard.

Janet also saw that the light was still on in their neighbours’ house when she arrived home later that Wednesday night, and for the first time she felt frightened. ‘At this stage, I felt that there was something wrong.’

Ilona was already asleep, so they didn’t discuss it again until the next morning. By now, both women were alarmed. What was going on next door?

‘The dog’s still running around and the baby’s still crying, but stopping – you know, getting quieter, which kind of rang alarm bells. It was just not like them to let him cry … [but] it was getting quieter and quieter. It was weak crying.

‘You could still hear it through the wall, but you could hear breathing through those walls. They were single-brick, just a single party wall, so you could hear [him] – and that’s what concerned me. If he’d cried normally, I would have gone, “Oh yes, he’s been fed and looked after,” but he was crying weakly.’

The two walked out their little front gate and in through the gate of 147 Easey Street. This time there would be no turning back until they raised the ‘two Sues’. Ilona went to the door and knocked loudly. No response. She banged on it again, harder. Nothing.

‘So I said to Janet, “Well, I’ll go over the fence, just make sure everything’s OK.”’

Here, talking about it forty years on, her memory diverges from what is recorded in the women’s police interviews, in which they both say they entered the property through the side gate on the lane and stepped into the kitchen together. As Ilona remembers it now, she clambered over the fence that separated the backyards of 149 and 147 and walked in through their neighbours’ back door, calling out as she entered.

But what happened next, she can never forget. ‘I looked straight through the house. I could see Susan’s feet, right at the very end of the corridor.’

With no lights on in the hall, and the only windows on the far side of the bedrooms, which were to the left of where she was standing, Ilona says the hallway was quite dimly lit. Even so, she could make out the feet clearly. ‘I saw her feet … and I didn’t look anywhere else. I went straight down the hall and I just remember as I got to her, her feet were black. From being there and not moving, I guess.’

It was clear that the 27-year-old was dead. As Ilona bent over Sue, whose body was lying face down and close to the front door, she glanced into the front bedroom and saw Suzanne’s body.

At that point, she realised she had not seen Gregory.

‘I saw her and then I back-tracked,’ Ilona says. ‘He was still doing [those] weak little cries.’ As she walked carefully into his room, she could see that he wasn’t in good shape. He looked weak, dehydrated. And even as Ilona hovered over him, he just lay there in his cot.

She spoke to him gently, trying to reassure him that help was coming. But she didn’t reach in and pick him up. ‘I wasn’t going to lift him up and try to comfort him, because this was not good!’

She’s adamant about this, despite her police statement saying she picked Greg up and took him back to her house. ‘That didn’t happen, so I don’t know why they’ve written it up like that. I don’t remember the detective who took my statement taking many notes; maybe that’s what he thought I did. But there’s no way I did that. I had no experience with babies, especially a young child who was clearly distressed. He needed help that I couldn’t give him, and I didn’t want to make things any worse than they already were.’

Instead, she sang out to her housemate, who was waiting anxiously on the other side of the fence. ‘I called out to Janet, “Ring the police, they’re dead.”

‘She ran inside, picked up the black phone, dialled – and it took them forever to come. I reckon it took a good twenty minutes.’

Her friend had to call a second time, in fact, to convince police they were needed in Easey Street. ‘They sort of went, “Yeah … what?” I suppose some girl rings them up and says, “My neighbours are dead, my flatmate’s in there ...” They kept questioning her, and she got shitty. Then they sent one car, with one young guy. They didn’t even send two [police officers]. One, that’s all.’

By the time the officer arrived, Janet had walked around the side of the house, in through the gate, and looked up the hallway and seen Sue Bartlett’s body. But Ilona stopped her from going inside the house. ‘She’s not like me, and I didn’t want her to see what I had just seen. I wanted to protect her from that.’ Both women were well aware, too, that their neighbours’ house was now a crime scene.

With Sue Bartlett’s body lying almost at the front door in the narrow hall, Ilona also realised she had to stop the police officer from trying to enter the house that way. So she hurried out the side gate and into the short laneway to meet the young officer as he was knocking at the door.

‘Susan was right there, so you couldn’t have opened it. I do recall being in the lane talking to this young guy and he’s going, “What’s going on here?”

‘Hello, I thought, took you long enough to get here.

‘I said, “You’re obviously not taking this seriously! They’re dead.” He went inside and looked – and the next thing, there were twenty cars and men in suits.’

A young policewoman also arrived, to place the toddler in a waiting ambulance. As they watched him being taken away, the detectives realised they had a great deal of work ahead of them. There were two dead bodies to attend to, and a house to comb for evidence.

Some things were immediately obvious. For one, the killer had not rushed away after attacking the women. He had clearly felt safe enough to try to clean himself up before leaving. The bathroom was a mess, with bloodstains on the bath suggesting he had stood in it and tried to wash himself down, if not take a shower; there was some evidence of blood in the sink. It seemed, too, the killer even had the presence of mind to think about using the washing machine, as there was blood on its lid.

Ilona struggled to come to terms with the blood she had seen in the hall, where it looked as if Sue Bartlett had tried to pull herself closer to the front door.

Months later, a senior police officer would tell Ilona that Sue might still have been alive at the time of her first visit. ‘She had some huge amount of stab wounds … but apparently they didn’t hit anything vital and so she was trying to get to the front door, because I was banging on the other side. So how good do I feel?’

A direct, intelligent woman now in her sixties, Ilona refuses to overplay her role in this case, or her unusually consistent recall of what she discovered that awful morning. She will not place herself at the centre of the tragedy, or use words such as ‘haunted’ or ‘disturbed’ to describe how she felt after finding the women’s bodies. Yet that detective’s comment has stayed with her for forty years.

Criminologists who have looked at the crime scene photographs in the last year as part of the research for this book believe that the senior officer’s theory could not have been correct. Sue had been stabbed so many times she would not have been able to move much, if at all.

Perhaps this perspective will bring Ilona some comfort.