CHAPTER 6

THE FAMILIES

AS NEWS OF the murders reverberated through Melbourne, and then around Australia, the families of the victims were forced to cope with an all-too-public release of information about the double homicide.

Crime reporters who attended the scene in Easey Street were informed about what had happened inside and quickly published as many details as they could confirm. This meant that both families heard the news second-hand, through the media. Suzanne Armstrong’s mother, Eileen, found out as she and her partner, Bruce Currie, were driving back from a holiday in Canberra. They saw the headlines on the front page of a newspaper when they stopped at a service station along the highway, and recognised the women’s house from the photographs.

Sue Bartlett’s brother, Martin, got a call from his girlfriend, after she heard on the radio about two bodies being found in Collingwood. He immediately rang his sister’s home. It was on the [Thursday] morning, about 10.30, 10.45 am,’ he says. ‘I rang the home line and a male answered. I said, “Who’s that?”

‘He said, “Who are you?”

‘I said, “I’m Martin Bartlett, Susan’s brother.”

‘And he said, “Can you come down here?”

‘“What for?”

‘“We’d just like to talk to you.”‘

When Martin arrived at Easey Street, he moved through a gathering gauntlet of journalists to speak with this detective in the street. The police wouldn’t let him into the house. That didn’t upset him. Once he knew what had happened, he had no intention of going in.

But he did want to be the one to tell his mother, Elaine, before she heard it from anyone else. She was staying with a family friend in Benalla, having ‘a bit of a break’. After ringing the friend she was with to let him know what had happened, and that he was on his way, Martin made the three-hour drive up the highway to break the shocking news in person.

With sixteen-month-old Gregory safely in care, police managed to contact Suzanne’s father, Bill Armstrong, and he told the rest of the family. This must have been gut-wrenching, and it was made even more difficult by the fact that one of his daughters was far from Melbourne, in the outback.

Gayle Armstrong was 1000 kilometres away from home that week in January 1977, working as a cook in a shearing shed in a tiny town called Tilpa, in far west New South Wales. Far, far west New South Wales to be exact – further north than Broken Hill and along the Darling River.

Tilpa boasts a population of forty-four, one pub and a cemetery that, according to the Australian Cemeteries Index, ‘contains no graves … the only cemetery in Australia, if not the world, to have no one buried in it’. It is still not easy to reach quickly; it must have been an arduous trek four decades ago.

Yet Suzanne had planned to visit the far-away town, loving the idea of just getting away for a bit. She had been hoping to join her sister – willing to take on the role of ‘cook’s assistant’. ‘I was cooking for shearers at the time, that’s what I did,’ Gayle explains. ‘There were probably six shearers and six other workers to feed, so a dozen all up. I was cooking on a wooden stove in 100-degree heat.’ No wonder she was looking forward to having Suzanne by her side. ‘She was just going to go up there with me to help me. Not that I really needed it. It was just a break; it was going to be a break for her,’ Gayle says.

Suzanne had tried to find someone to mind young Greg for a week or two, so she could make the trip. But neither of her parents, the most likely candidates, could help, and there were no friends she felt she could call on. So Suzanne and her son stayed at home, and she must have felt disappointed, maybe even a bit peeved, about not being able to go. She could not have foreseen how dire this change of plans would prove – a sliding-doors moment with nightmarish consequences.

When Gayle heard the news of her sister’s death, she was on her own. ‘Well, here I am in the shed, 30 kilometres away from the nearest neighbour,’ she recalls, haltingly. ‘The police found out where I was, and rang him [the neighbour] and sent a messenger over to me. The contractor took me back to the house and I’ve got the news … on the phone. From Dad. So then we had to go back to the shed and get my things and then go 200 kilometres or something to get to Broken Hill, bloody hell … to fly home.’

It took two days to make it back to Melbourne, and Bill Armstrong was waiting for her at the airport. Having just identified his oldest daughter’s mutilated body, it must have been the greatest relief for him to see Gayle walk off that plane. She went to stay with her mother, and a day or so later decided to visit her boyfriend, Henry Woodard.

The farmhand from Seymour was staying at his sister’s place in Northcote, along with his brother, Barry. Barry and Suzanne had been on three dates before her death, and he was the author of the note on the kitchen table at 147 Easey Street.

From the moment Gayle arrived, she says the atmosphere in the house was strange. Tense. Strained. The place seemed unusually dark, she remembers, as she walked down the hall, passing a room closed off behind curtains. Barry Woodard was apparently in that room, too upset to come out to see her.

The visit didn’t last long. Suzanne’s stoic, independent sister’s world was spinning, as the brothers’ must have been too, the collective grief overwhelming. ‘There was no conversation. I don’t even know if I had a cup of tea. And we sat and said whatever we had to say, and so it was time to go, and Henry came out to the car and said goodbye to me and [then] … nothing. It was just eerie. It’s always stuck in my head as eerie … the eeriest visit that I’ve ever had in a house.’ Considering the vortex of anguish the week had brought, this wasn’t surprising.

Looking back now, it seems odd to Gayle that she and Henry had thought it a good idea to bring Barry and Suzanne together. Barry, in turn, was not fond of her. ‘Gayle’s a wild one,’ he said, years after this awkward visit. ‘She was going with my brother at the time, but they broke up after the bodies were discovered. Everything changed then.’

Things certainly did change. As the long, grim week wore on, the ordeal seemed to worsen for the Armstrong family. They waited to hear from the police, expecting to be told more about what, precisely, had happened to Suzanne and her friend Sue, and about police leads on the person who did it. But over the next few days, they heard nothing at all from the detectives working on the case. Eventually, unable to stand not knowing what was happening with the investigation, they rang the police and asked if they could come in to see them. ‘It was terrible,’ says Gayle. ‘We had to go down to the police station, I remember; we had to go down to Russell Street. We had to get in the car and go to them.’

That wasn’t the only upsetting event they had to confront. Suzanne’s and Susan’s funerals had to be organised – a task almost too much for both families. Martin Bartlett was the only one able to step into the role of planner. Back in Melbourne again, having helped his mother through the initial distress of learning of her daughter’s death, the 25-year-old kept it simple. ‘I had to,’ he says now. He organised one service for the two friends.

The ‘Armstrong/Bartlett funeral’ was a heart-rending ceremony in the Blair Chapel at Springvale Crematorium. With only ten chairs available for the family to share, some fifty people stood to farewell the two women, including senior reporter Mike Roberts from The Age:

‘I would like there to be no minimising of the brutality and wrongfulness. Evil is a reality,’ the Rev. Geoff Crouch, Susan Bartlett’s uncle, told the gathering.

The crowded little chapel was hot, and here and there a man slipped his jacket off. ‘How much are we responsible for the kind of society that we have?’ asked Rev. Alan Lock, a friend of the Armstrongs’. ‘Those of us here find it hard to understand the pressures of those inner suburbs. Yet they chose to live in that area to express something of their personalities and their involvement and understanding of others.’

And soon it was over, a 25-minute service nine days after a brutal murder.

But to Martin, the ritual seemed anti-climactic. ‘Obviously, at that stage there was an ongoing inquiry, no result and no real leads. Never found a murder weapon,’ he says.

One of the things that bothered him about the investigation was the uncertainty around when his sister and her friend were attacked. If he left their house between 9.00 and 9.30 pm on that Monday night, 10 January, and their bodies were found at 9.30 am on Thursday morning, 13 January, had they died not long after he left, or had it been on one of the two subsequent evenings? He hounded the detectives about this at the time. ‘I was always asking about the timeline. [But] because it [took] so long to actually do the autopsy, the time of death was difficult to determine.’

Harder again was the impact that his sister’s death had on their mother. ‘For her to understand why someone would do it, and to do it to her daughter … really, just over the years her blood pressure went through the roof,’ Martin says. ‘She died at sixty-one. It just killed her in the end. It was just such a stressful thing that she never, ever came to grips with why someone would do it. Even if they had found somebody, she would not have comprehended why that person could have done what they did.’

A devastated Bill Armstrong did not live long after his daughter’s murder either, succumbing to severe burns after becoming trapped fighting a bushfire around Bairnsdale in January 1978. Less than a year after they had lost Suzanne, the Armstrong family was reduced in number again.