CHAPTER 8

THE NEIGHBOURS

AS THE WEEKS dragged on, the detectives assigned to the double homicide came under mounting pressure. Not only did they need to find the women’s killer, but they also had to calm a city on edge.

Usually staid Melbourne was gripped by a sense of alarm. A murderer was at large, a man who could brutally overpower two women in their own home. And no one seemed to know who he was. The ferocity of the killings made even the most confident within the community, plus those who were already uneasy about the rising drug use and crime rates of the time, double-check their doors and windows as they retired for the night.

From the earliest news reports, there seemed to be consensus among journalists that one or both of the women had either known their attacker and let him into the house, or that he had somehow got under their guard – let himself in through an open door, and then taken their lives in the most violent way. Either scenario was, of course, terrifying – especially to other young women living in inner-city Melbourne.

As criminologist and former Easey Street resident Dean Wilson summarises nearly two generations later, it was a tale of gothic proportion. ‘There [was] a kind of moral undertone to the story, the sense that if you were a young, independent woman, you’d be murdered. It was a rented house in the 1970s with a lot of young people in and out of it,’ he says. ‘For some Melbournians, conservative Melbournians, it was a tale ripped from the side of Melbourne [author] Helen Garner wrote about. The “other side”. What’s interesting about it was there was this sense that there’s a danger about and all young women should lock themselves away … It had Monkey Grip written all over it.’

In fact, Helen Garner followed the media reports of the investigation closely. ‘I remember it vividly. It happened in the seventies and that was smack in the middle of the period of the great flourishing of collective or communal households in Melbourne,’ she recalled, nearly thirty years later, in 2005. ‘That was the period when I lived in that sort of household, and when we read about those murders in the paper it made our blood run cold, because it could have happened to us.

‘They were very innocent times in the sense that we didn’t lock our doors, the key was in the front door, and people walked in and out of houses in quite a casual way,’ she said. ‘And we were always going out to pubs and dancing the night away, and sometimes one would come home with a person one had only just met. Those are things that we did in those days. I look back on it with incredulity in a way – the sort of unguardedness of our lives. So we had a very lively interest in the story.’

For many, what made the murders even harder to read about, and impossible to ignore, was the presence of the little boy. Left unharmed, yet alone, in his cot for three nights and two days, with no food and no water, his mother’s body just metres away.

The police tried to reassure the inner-city community that their investigation was progressing quickly. They were pretty sure they had a key suspect well and truly in sight. And it wasn’t any of the three men who entered Easey Street following the women’s deaths.

Following the murders, the detectives had been back a number of times to inspect the house in Easey Street that, for days, had been a shroud, to make sure they had not missed anything. They were now locating family members, friends, neighbours – anyone who might be able to help them fill in the awful hours between 9.30 pm on Monday night and early the following morning, when the examiners believed the girls had died.

Police plundered the women’s address books and Suzanne’s diary for possible contacts to follow up: if they could track what the two had been doing in the days preceding their deaths, find out who they had been with, they might be able to ascertain if anything out of the ordinary had occurred. Had either Suzanne Armstrong or Sue Bartlett mentioned anyone troubling them recently?

Given the timeframe in which they believed the killings had occurred, they were also hopeful someone in the neighbourhood might be able to help paint a picture. It was summer holidays. Maybe one of the kids who lived in the street had been out on their bike that balmy evening and noticed someone entering the house a bit later than might be expected. Perhaps a local on his or her way home from one of the nearby hotels had passed someone in a hurry, later still.

There were two pubs nearby, both just a few minutes’ walk from the women’s house. The Leinster Arms was probably the most accessible of the pair, on the corner of Gold and Hotham streets; the Bendigo Hotel was on the busier location of Gold and Johnston. Both would have closed at midnight.

Phillip Perez’s parents lived in the street. After coming to Australia from Portugal, they moved from Fitzroy to Collingwood in the mid-1970s, where they started a family. They were part of the influx of migrants in the area during the 1960s and early 1970s; European families – primarily Greek and Italian, but also Spanish and Portuguese – took Collingwood to heart, planting vegetable and flower gardens in their yards, grapevines mingling with old-fashioned rose bushes. They appreciated how close they were to Clifton Hill, Richmond and the city – many walked to work each day. Several of these residents still live in Easey Street today, entertaining grandchildren in the long-established gardens they planted as their children went to school and played outside in the street nearly half a century ago.

In 1977, Phillip was five and a half years older than Suzanne’s son, but still young enough to play in his blow-up pool. He recollects running up the lane along the side of Greg’s house to get to the backyard. ‘It used to be wide open,’ he says, leaning forward on his knees as he pictures it. ‘I used to … walk straight into the backyard and play with the kid. I was wandering everywhere at that age. Mum said I used to love going into the street.’

The Perez family rented 127 Easey Street for five years, before buying a property immediately behind it in Sackville Street, the first of several they would come to own in the area. A much-loved Tuscan-style garden that his mother, Josephine, has tended for forty years sits between a couple of small houses there now, one of which she lives in. All up, he estimates the ‘family estate’ covers about 1900 metres – ‘something like that’ – a developer’s dream that was unimaginable two generations ago.

But Phillip remembers a livelier Collingwood, when there were more people in the streets. ‘Kids, the Greeks and everybody all mixed in the street,’ he says with a nod. ‘Australian, everybody, all mixed in Easey Street. All the kids would go out and play in the streets with their BMXs and dragsters and everybody was talking to each other. Everyone was more open. Yeah, everybody would just go to each other’s barbeques.’

There were also rough elements in the neighbourhood, and there was no escaping them, even for a child. ‘There was one family, probably a Greek family, they robbed banks and stuff. And I remember once I was about to walk out the front door – I was only ten years old – and heard bang, bang, bang. You know, you think, “What’s that noise, a car backfiring?” And then you hear police sirens, walk out the front door and there’s a VW Kombi at the end of the street with bullet holes in the back and the police all there – and these guys are running up the side of this car and then they’re jumping the roofs and up in the lane, and the police are saying, “Stay indoors!” It was stuff like that going on … a bit rough, I reckon.’

Phillip knew all about the gangs roaming Collingwood and its sister suburbs: the Collingwood Boys and the Collingwood Dump Boys, bumping up against the Richmond Boys and the Fitzroy Boys. There were skinheads and sharpies, many of the groups based around the housing commission high-rise apartments. ‘If you’d go to the commission flats here in Collingwood, there’d be a gang in there, and then you’ve got the other housing commission at Clifton Hill, there’d be a gang up there. And then you’d go to Carlton, the same thing. It’d be more Maoris in the Carlton flats, but in Collingwood, it’s all mixed. It was Aussies and Turks and Spanish, Greek, you know? Whatever it was, it was all mixed in Collingwood.’

Phillip Perez also remembers the police presence in the area, and the bias often shown towards young men. ‘Oh, you’d be walking down the street and they’d pull you up and give you a hard time, ask a million questions. I remember that. We were cheeky anyway, so ...’

Into this mix came a new wave of renters, younger, artistic people such as Suzanne Armstrong and Sue Bartlett, some of them single, some in couples, some working, some students, sharing the little houses often owned by their neighbours.

Josephine Perez remembers the women who moved into 147 Easey Street late in 1976, especially Suzanne, who would often be out walking with her son in his pram. Phillip was on the street the morning police arrived and cordoned off the house, and he ran to tell his mother that something was going on. ‘He didn’t understand because he was too young,’ Josephine says. ‘But there were too many people in the street [for it to be nothing]. I decided I’m going there to see.’

She arrived in time to watch two bodies being wheeled out of the narrow front door on gurneys and placed in what she remembers as an ambulance, but was actually the undertaker’s van.

Another neighbour, who had moved into Easey Street in 1970, came out of her house too to see the crowd gathered down near Hoddle Street. She already suspected that all was not quite right that day, having experienced something the night before the women’s bodies were discovered that she still can’t explain. It was a man’s voice saying, ‘Somebody kill the two teachers tonight.’

‘It was either a dream or someone walking past in the middle of the night,’ 85-year-old Christina Fourtouris insists. ‘I wake up in the morning, I say to my husband, to my kids – because I had a boy and a girl – “something happened: someone passed, or I’m dreaming, I’m not sure.”‘

When she eventually went outside later, she saw a street full of residents, and a swarm of police. ‘I say, “What happened down there?”‘

‘Killed the two teachers’ came the reply, according to Fourtouris. Although, of course, only Sue was a teacher.

‘I said, “What?”‘

She waited to tell police about what she believed she had heard as they door-knocked up and down the street over the next few days, searching for information. But they didn’t come to her door. She didn’t try to contact them, either; she knew her story sounded crazy. She knew they would think she was just a ‘crazy Greek woman’.

Mrs Fourtouris would say ‘hello, good morning’ to her two neighbours as she walked to her job as a machinist in Richmond and Suzanne cycled past with Greg on the back of the bike or Susan headed off to Collingwood High. ‘Nice girls, I can tell you. One tall – Susan, I think – and the other one a little bit shorter.’ She remembers Greg Armstrong as tall for his age, a toddler who loved to play outside with his dog.

All these years later, she is unwavering that she heard a voice in the street in the pre-dawn hours of 13 January. ‘The night [it] happen, somebody say, “Kill the two teachers tonight.” That’s it. Nothing else.’

And Christina wasn’t the only person living in Easey Street who had something to share with police and was never questioned by detectives. Two residents living much closer to the ‘murder house’ had something even more dramatic to reveal.