CHAPTER 5

THE EXAMINERS

As THE HOMICIDE detectives left the house to start their inquiries, the team from the Forensic Science Laboratory were just beginning their work inside.

A small unit from the field investigation division had been dispatched to 147 Easey Street not long after police arrived at the scene, and Sergeant Henry Huggins carefully entered the house through the front door, quickly inspecting the bodies that lay in the hallway and front bedroom. He then went to the back of the property, where he was joined by Moira McBain, a chemist with the laboratory. It was the first time the crime-scene examiner had managed to persuade the forensics lab to allow a chemist to accompany him to a murder site.

As the pair started their slow, very particular search of the house, a detective handed Huggins a bloodstained towel, which was quickly bagged as evidence.

Under Huggins’ meticulous direction, McBain examined all bloodstained areas deemed significant. She also collected samples that would be labelled and listed by a police constable assigned to work with them.

Collecting evidence from a crime scene is dry, almost clinical work that requires fastidious observation and precise reporting. Henry Huggins was up to the challenge. A third of the way into a career as an examiner that would span twenty-six years, he was used to difficult scenarios, and what he found that morning at 147 Easey Street shone light on how the double homicide unfolded – and what happened in the house as the women lay dead on the floor. The killer didn’t rush away; that was as obvious to the forensics team as it had been to the police.

In the kitchen, the light was on. ‘The sink was dry, the stove was turned off and the kettle on the stove was dry,’ Huggins wrote in his report. ‘There was a piece of paper on the corner bench. It had the words Barry Woodard 4803932 … there were a number of fibres on the high chair.’

Huggins saw three pages of newsprint on the floor – pages fifteen to eighteen of The Age newspaper dated 13 January 1977 – and was handed the first ten pages of the same edition by a detective. How did the three pages on the floor get there? It was a niggling question he left to his colleagues to answer as he continued his search of the house. They eventually surmised that the young police officer had brought it inside.

The light was on in the bathroom, too. ‘The three-pin plug for the washing machine and the light switch both held very small quantities of what appeared to be blood. No blood was detected on the clothing in the washing machine. This clothing was wet.

‘There were spots of what appeared to be blood on the side of the bath, on the bathroom door and on the mat beside the bath. The bath was dry, but there was a quantity of liquid in the bath plug.’

What he didn’t record was the fact that one of the police officers had washed their hands in the sink. It dismayed the examiner, but he pressed on.

With the chemist, he moved to the lounge room, where they found the towel on the settee ‘stained with what appeared to be blood’. In the bedroom closest to the living room, Huggins couldn’t miss the broken blind, with its ‘very unstable’ catches; in his opinion, it would have dislodged very easily. ‘On the bedspread at the foot of the bed, under the window, I saw a quantity of sand and dirt. I formed the opinion that someone had put their foot on the bed possibly when climbing in or out of the window.’

Still in Sue Bartlett’s room, he found ‘a number of leaf [sic] similar to the leaves that were in an overturned vase in the front bedroom’.

Poignantly, Sergeant Huggins also saw a strand of black thread caught under Sue’s body in the hall and running under Suzanne’s bedroom door, attached to a reel of thread behind the door.

But it was the walls in the hall that really captured his attention. ‘I saw a number of smears and spots of what appeared to be blood on the passage walls on either side of the deceased. On the west wall … there was a spray having an upward and northerly direction from fifty centimetres to eighty centimetres from the floor. On the same wall, there was a smear seventy-seven centimetres from the front bedroom door and 100 centimetres from the floor. It had the appearance of a stained hand.’

On the opposite wall, too, Huggins and McBain found ‘an area of spots from a point 200 centimetres from the front door for a further 100 centimetres’. In the front bedroom, ‘an overturned bottle contain[ing] some plants’ was lying at Suzanne Armstrong’s left side, ‘a pool of what appeared to be blood under head and shoulders’.

As Alf Oldfield, the lead detective at the house that morning, had also observed, there were no signs of an extended struggle in this bedroom. ‘The top bedclothes had been folded back from the top left hand corner and a book was open face-down on the corner of the bed,’ Huggins noted. ‘There were a few spots of what appeared to be blood on the folds of the top sheet. These had been deposited after the sheet had been folded back. There were also a few spots of blood on the chair beside the bed.’

On the bedside table, too, there was what appeared to be blood on the edge of an alarm clock and the switch of the lamp. Here, he could not help but try to explain what this meant, and his theory wasn’t pretty. He suspected it was consistent ‘with someone having blood on their hand reaching over the bed, smearing blood on the sheet and clock and operating the lamp switch’. He did not elaborate on whether this was likely Suzanne, trying to reach the phone on the bedside table, or her attacker, perhaps trying to switch off the light. Henry Huggins noted that the lamp was off and Suzanne’s curtains drawn.

He handed to Moira McBain eight items to enter into evidence: the two blood-stained towels, as well as ‘fibres from [the] high chair’, the bottom sheet from Susan Bartlett’s room, the top and bottom sheets from Suzanne Armstrong’s room, Suzanne’s clock radio and the panties from beside the bed. The next day, he would enter another item: a face washer, found when Huggins ‘examined all the manholes and road drains within two street blocks of No. 147 Easey Street, Collingwood. During this examination, I collected two items – [a] shawl and [a] face washer’.

The final list of exhibits from the house was much more extensive, including what McBain collected herself: ‘scrapings’ from the side of the bath and the bathroom door, the bath plug and the liquid around it, brown particles from the bath mat, carpet samples from the front bedroom, and the ‘scraping’ from the passage wall – plus the more personal items that her colleague Sergeant Donohue gathered. It’s a confronting collection: one nightie with red and white spots; tubes of blood taken from both women; jars containing samples of their hair, nails and muscle tissue; one green dress; and two tubes containing swabs, one labelled b, 124 Bartlett, 13/2/77, Vag.smear, and another labelled b, 125 13/1/77 Armstrong, Vag.smear.

A few days after assembling these items for examination, McBain was also given a knife in a sheath to inspect. An eagle-eyed uniformed officer stationed at Collingwood, but not attached to the Easey Street case, had found the ‘bloodied knife’ in the boot of a car when he was out on patrol conducting vehicle searches, looking for drugs. Constable Ron Iddles had stopped a man in a car and turned up the weapon, promptly delivering it to Homicide, saying, ‘The guy claimed he’d found it at Victoria Park railway station, which was a short distance from Easey Street.’

After inspecting all this evidence, McBain determined that Suzanne Armstrong’s blood was type A, Susan Bartlett’s type O – in other words, both common types. The blood on the towel, carpet and nightdress was A; so too the blood in the bath, in the liquid from the bath plug, on the lamp, the clock radio, both sheets, the knife and a cardigan found in a basket that was a late addition to this evidentiary collection. The three samples taken from the passage wall were type O, as was the blood found on the green dress.

More chillingly, ‘spermatozoa were found on both swabs’ taken from Suzanne Armstrong, and seminal stains were found on all three sheets in her bedroom, as well as on the carpet and face washer.

There were thirty-six slits in the red-and-white nightie, mainly in the front chest area and on both sides of the left sleeve; twenty-three slits were found in the green dress.

All this forensic information was critical in terms of helping detectives to determine what happened in the house at the time the two women were killed. It gave them a great deal of evidence to work with, which proved invaluable as their investigation continued for months, and then years, and eventually decades, and forensic techniques improved in ways they could not have imagined on that sweaty January day in 1977.

Yet, looking back, the original forensic examiner at 147 Easey Street is not convinced that the evidence was thoroughly examined at the time. Those who examined it didn’t pick up what it was telling them – at least not enough to accurately reconstruct what occurred that night.

Henry Huggins, now eighty-eight, remembers the double homicide in Collingwood well. As precise and proper now as in his professional years, he bemoans the unwitting contamination of the crime scene by detectives who were in the house well before he and his forensic team arrived. He is critical, too, of his own official statement, insisting it was not precise enough and would not ‘make the grade’ in a homicide investigation forty years later.

And he remains unsure exactly how Suzanne was attacked in the front of the house without Sue being aware of what was going on. At least he can speculate unofficially now: perhaps she was out when the murderer entered the house, and came home through the side gate? Or was she out the back when he arrived at the front of the property, doing the washing, pottering around the kitchen?

Rereading his and his colleagues’ official statements, he is convinced that it is Suzanne’s blood on the sheet in her bedroom, and that she could have been reaching for the telephone on the other side of her bed. He remembers the phone clearly. But it’s not visible in the police photographer’s shots taken in the room.

It took two days and three nights for Suzanne Armstrong and Sue Bartlett to be found in their inner-city cottage, but their autopsies were underway within hours, at the old Coroner’s Court in South Melbourne, in a room behind the court itself.

James McNamara was the senior government pathologist on duty, and for the next four days, the doctor, known to his colleagues as ‘Mack the Knife’, conducted post-mortem examinations on both bodies. His report, in tandem with Henry Huggins’ forensic exhibits, brought to life the girls’ final minutes.

Suzanne Armstrong, ‘167 centimetres in height and weighing 60 kilograms’, had been stabbed twenty-seven times. McNamara’s external examination revealed seven wounds to her chest, eleven to her left arm, two to the right nipple and a single wound below her left nipple. There was also an ‘abrasion’ on her left eye and a stab wound to her cheek.

The pathologist’s internal exam revealed the attacker’s knife had penetrated her heart three times, her left lung seven times and her right lung once; ‘the third rib on the left-hand side was cut, with partial severance of the fourth and fifth ribs’. There were also two wounds to her liver, and an ‘abraded area’ above the vulva.

Susan Bartlett, ‘170 centimetres in height and weighing 89 kilograms’, sustained fifty-five stab wounds, although some seemed to occur in clusters the pathologist couldn’t distinguish clearly enough to count as separate wounds: ‘A stab wound in the right shoulder region and in the left shoulder region, more stab wounds, with stab wounds present around the left nipple and above the left nipple into the midline of the chest’, the report noted.

As Sue struggled with the killer in the hallway of the house, she sustained ‘extensive abrasions’ to the upper portion of her chest, some eighteen wounds to her arms and seven to her neck. The autopsy recorded a two-and-a-half-centimetre stab wound in the stomach, and two more wounds of similar size to her liver. It was obvious, too, that she was stabbed as she lay face down on the floor, given the number of wounds to her buttocks and thighs.

After listing the ancillary investigations – including a ‘routine histopathology, blood for alcohol to Medic-legal laboratory, blood for grouping … vaginal smears to Forensic Science’ – Dr McNamara recorded the official cause of death for both women: ‘multiple stab wounds’.

He did not isolate which had been the fatal wounds for either woman. To this day, it remains unclear.