CHAPTER 4

THE DETECTIVES

ONE OF THE first detectives to arrive at the scene wasn’t much older than the two women whose lives, and deaths, he would come to know intimately.

Detective Senior Constable Peter Hiscock was thirty years old that January when he arrived at 147 Easey Street. Right from the start, he and the team from Victoria’s Homicide Squad seemed on the back foot. For one thing, the young detective didn’t think he was attending a murder, let alone two.

It wasn’t what he and his team had expected to find when they got the call to attend the house. They thought they were attending a murder–suicide. ‘Because there were two of them. We thought it might have been a fight between them, we didn’t know,’ he recalls. ‘That’s how it sort of came across. So [it was] one of those ones [where] we’d go down there and have a look at it, then ring up Collingwood CIB and say, “Look here, guys, you do the inquest brief.”‘

As he scanned the front gate and verandah, and saw the bike with the baby seat strapped on leaning against the front wall, he was directed to enter through the back door. Immediately, he knew the police assumption about what had happened in the little house was wrong ‘and quickly, quickly, quickly assessed that this was a murder. Double murder, very serious murder. We were the first ones in there. It was just harrowing.’

Peter Hiscock suddenly found himself at the centre of a crime of heartbreaking horror. The young detective switched into ‘professional mode’ as he examined the two women lying dead on the floor of their inner-city home. ‘You don’t think about yourself, or anything like that. No, no, no. I know this sounds hard, [but] in actual fact we’re taught by the pathologist that they’re exhibits. That’s what we’re looking at, and they can tell us a lot of information.’

The crime scene was secured, with the young uniformed officer who had been first to arrive now officially guarding the property. ‘Then it was a matter of getting as many available detectives from Homicide and [other] areas to come down and help us.’

At the time, police protocol did not dictate that they wait for the forensic team to arrive to maintain the integrity of the crime scene, or that they wear protective clothing or footwear. The detectives moved through the house together, becoming increasingly aware that this was an unusually frenzied attack. Both women had been stabbed many, many times over – there were too many wounds to estimate their number at this stage. Working their way from the backyard to the front bedroom, the police carefully noted the layout of the single-fronted brick terrace.

Like everyone else arriving at the property, the lead detective, Detective Senior Sergeant Alf Oldfield, walked in from the lane, noticing as he did that the second window on the side of the house was slightly open. Entering the yard through the side gate, he made his way into the kitchen. As he glanced around the room, a square of paper under an ashtray on the kitchen bench caught his eye. A note, short and to the point. Barry Woodard, it read. RING 4803932 NOW. Barry. A couple of arrows drew attention to the phone number and the signature.

Oldfield moved on, making his way further inside, passing the bathroom off to the right of the kitchen, the blood smear on the bath clearly visible. In the lounge room, he saw a bloodied towel on the couch, before he finally reached the hallway, where Sue Bartlett lay. As he made his way towards her body, he noticed a sandal and two plastic spray-can tops lying along the passageway.

He headed towards the front of the house, and glanced into the bedrooms on his left. Sue’s was the first he reached, and he saw that the blind had fallen away from the window. He took a closer look. ‘On the bedspread near the window was what appeared to be a footprint in dirt. Apart from this, the room did not appear to be untidy. The [next] room contained a cot, single bed, small table with a sewing machine on it.’

Back in the hall, he took a few more steps to finally reach Sue, lying at the door of the front room. She was face down, on her stomach, arms by her side. So very close to the front door, and her friend just metres away in the front bedroom. On the walls either side of her body were bloody spots and smears. He could see ‘several stab wounds on the body’.

Closer examination, of course, would prove this to be a massive understatement. But Alf Oldfield and Peter Hiscock were reporting on their initial inspection.

He gingerly inched past Sue’s body to look in around the bedroom door. There, Detective Oldfield saw Suzanne lying on her back. Her legs were wide apart, her nightdress pulled up over her breasts, where she had been stabbed. A vase of dried flowers had been knocked over and was lying on its side to the left of her body, and just above her head the carpet appeared to be bloodstained. On the floor at the bottom of the bed, there were more signs of busy, happy lives, now lost: a reel of black cotton, a toy telephone, a shopping bag and a pair of white towelling shorts.

The veteran investigator steadied himself as he glanced around the room, taking in as many details as he could. He knew they would reveal much about what had happened to the woman lying on the floor in front of him. At the same time, he realised the disparities of the grim scene. While Suzanne’s sheets had been ‘neatly pulled aside’, there appeared to be small spots of blood on the top sheet, and a smear of blood on the bottom. A book had been placed at the top of the bed, face down and still open, but a pair of ‘ladies panties’ lay on the floor at the left side of the bed. The contrasts were chilling.

By the time the whole investigative team arrived – two officers from the forensic science laboratory, along with a fingerprint expert and a police photographer – a theory was forming in Alf Oldfield’s mind.

Strange as it was, he could see that the violence of the stabbings the ‘two Sues’ had endured was not reflected in their immediate surroundings. There were few signs that a major struggle had taken place. The attacker had apparently entered the house through the front door, either opening it himself, or possibly having it opened by Suzanne Armstrong. The women had gone to bed, police surmised that first morning in the bloodsoaked house, when someone had arrived on the front porch and knocked at the door, or maybe tapped quietly on the front window to get Suzanne’s attention. Even though at least four people would report the side gate and back door being open, and someone had left a note in the kitchen, suggesting that the attacker could have come in the back from the lane, the theory that the killer came in through the front of the house is what the first detectives on the scene believed. And the hypothesis is still given merit, nearly two generations later.

As the temperature started to rise that summer morning of 13 January 1977, the pieces began to come together for Peter Hiscock, too. Alf Oldfield’s theory fit with what the young detective had encountered upon entering the house. The attacker would have seen the light on in the front room, he reasoned, because Suzanne was more than likely still up and reading Roald Dahl’s Switch Bitch in bed, a collection of short stories that was opened halfway through ‘The Last Act’ when Hiscock entered the room. This suggested she had left her bed calmly, perhaps to go to the door. ‘I clearly remember the bed. The sheet was just one fold back, and the book was on the side table. So … she knew the person. She put the book down, she didn’t chuck it and kick the sheets away with her legs [to get] out of the bed.’

Alternatively, the murderer walked into the house himself. ‘The front door wasn’t locked, so someone’s come in. It was closed, but not locked. Things weren’t that bad back then. There was no forced entry. He’s got through the door and she’s seen him.’

There are a number of possible scenarios, of course. Perhaps he knocked on the front door and Suzanne let him in; he might have spoken to her, quietly, through the front window, asking to see her – and then she opened the door. Then again, he might have tapped on the window and slipped in that way, to make as little noise as possible. There were no security bars to prevent that happening.

Either way, ‘I would think she knew him, and I believe there’s only one person, and he has hit her with the knife because she’s recognised him. There would have been a big commotion, a bit of a fight before he finally gets her to the ground,’ the former detective surmises when we discuss the case, four decades on.

‘Susan Bartlett, in the other room, hears this and has come up the passageway. She’s a bigger-framed girl, and she’s put up a fair fight, we think, because these defensive wounds, they’ve gone through to the bone.’

Hiscock is now a private investigator. A wiry, active man in his early seventies, his steely blue eyes are complemented by his grey hair. Over the course of his career he has investigated many cases, but this is the one that confounds him. Even after so much time, some things are hard to comprehend.

In a final act of degradation, the attacker ‘interfered’ with Suzanne Armstrong’s body. ‘That is gruesome. Necrophilia is what it’s called, and it’s probably the worst thing you can even think about,’ he says, his voice faltering.

He stares into the distance for several seconds. ‘Her legs were [spread] and he’d had sex with her after she was dead … it’s happened in hospitals, it’s happened in mortuaries, but I don’t know of any other cases where you see this out in a murder scene.’

Having inspected the bodies, the detectives worked their way back down the hallway, careful not to touch the blood-spattered walls on either side. Inexplicably, given the amount spilled in the attacks, there were no bloodied footprints to follow.

They again passed the second and third bedrooms, noting that while the footprint on Sue’s bedspread had dirt on it, no blood seemed to have been spilled in her room.

The bathroom was another matter. It was awash with physical evidence of the terrible violence that had occurred in the little house days earlier. Someone smeared with blood had washed their hands in the sink and perhaps even stood in the bath to try to wash themselves down.

At the time, the investigative techniques police had at their disposal were limited to blood grouping and fingerprints. There was no DNA testing available to forensically match the evidence so plainly on view in the house – on the bodies, the walls, the floors and especially in the bathroom. But this didn’t stop these ‘first responders’ from trying to extract as much physical information as they could, as quickly as possible. Peter Hiscock remembers getting down on his hands and knees with colleagues, all of them dressed in suits, ties and leather shoes, and pulling up the drain to check if anything of significance had collected there.

They found bone splinters.

‘He must have been covered in blood,’ Hiscock muses. ‘He had a shower to wash [it] off, and we did something really unusual for the time. We took up the pipes in the bathroom and in the “elbow” [of the drain] there was little splinters of bone that were on the knife.’

The detectives believed this proved the killer knew something about their investigative procedures, as he clearly understood how important it was to wash away as much evidence as he could of his brutal attack. ‘So he’d washed it all down, and washed himself down – and that could be somebody who knows investigative techniques. They had to know to [do that]; that stuff was pretty new. So someone knew something.’

Then again, he might simply have wanted to clean himself up before leaving the house.

That wasn’t all that was waiting to be discovered in the house. The team returned to the kitchen bench, where the short note was pinned under the ashtray. The police read it carefully. Who was Barry? When had he left the note, and which of the two women was it for? Had he entered the house through the back gate, and if so been the one to leave it open? And if he had been in the kitchen after the women’s deaths, why hadn’t he called police straight away?

In Hiscock’s mind, there was no way anyone could have innocently come through that door after the women had been killed and not seen their bodies. Whether they came through the back door or clambered in the side window, the house was too small, the layout too tight, for them not to glance up the passageway and see Sue Bartlett’s body, or hear Greg Armstrong’s cries. It beggared belief.

‘I mean, it’s human nature; you’re going to look around. “I’ve been trying to ring these girls, I want to get hold of them” – and you’re not going to see if they’re there? I doubt it.’

And the little boy was in the house too, alone in his cot. ‘Whether he was whimpering or whatever, we won’t ever know. But he’d certainly had no food, no drink, he had nothing, his nappy was soiled … Human nature [says] you’d look around.’

As the number of detectives working their way through the murder scene grew, the young detective accompanied the two bodies to the city morgue, driving behind the government undertaker’s van. He also has a graphic memory of counting the stab wounds they had each sustained, marking their specific placement on two official diagrams that became part of the case file. ‘I remember getting so close to them and pointing to them [the wounds] with my pen, making sure I didn’t miss anything,’ he recalls. ‘I didn’t want to miss anything, after all they’d gone through.’

Like many investigators, Hiscock believes the first forty-eight hours in any murder investigation ‘are the most important – they can make or break your case’. At this early stage of inquiry, the detectives thought this would be an easy case. ‘We thought we were going to solve this pretty quickly,’ he admits. At the very least, there was blood they could test, fingerprints to collect, a note with a phone number to follow up and a footprint to trace.

Hiscock didn’t stay on the case beyond the first few weeks of 1977, because he was scheduled to take annual leave, yet he recalls the confidence the Homicide Squad had. ‘Such a violent crime for the time, you think, “It’s going to be easy to solve.’”

To start with, they would locate the ‘Barry’ who had left his number on the scrap of paper under the ashtray in the kitchen and determine exactly how he fitted into this grim puzzle.

Within days, the reporters gathering on the footpath outside 147 Easey Street would help to reveal not only who Barry was, but also how important Suzanne Armstrong was to him.

By then, police were already focusing on another suspect – a young man for whom ominous coincidence would prove unforgiving for the rest of his life.