CHAPTER 9

THE WITNESSES

GLADYS COVENTRY LIVED at 145 Easey Street with her husband, Thomas William Clyde Coventry. Their cottage overlooked the same little lane as 147 Easey Street.

Born in Tasmania in 1893, Tom had lived in Collingwood with his mother, Mary Elizabeth Coventry, since the 1930s. A long-time local, he saw monumental change in the community in his decades in the little house. The milkman would still have been delivering from his horse-drawn cart up and down the street when Tom and his mother arrived in the suburb, though by 1977 the bluestone ‘dunny lane’ had not been used for its original purpose for many years.

Nonetheless, it provided a thoroughfare to a narrower alley that ran along the back of his house and the three next to it. This allowed the Coventrys a unique perspective on their immediate community. The couple could look over their hip-high wooden fence bordering the lane and see their neighbours coming and going.

Gladys Coventry could also see quite a lot from her kitchen window, near which she sat most nights – in front of the fireplace for warmth in winter, and on hot summer evenings, to catch any breeze that blew through the little house to make Melbourne’s sticky nights bearable. She could see into the kitchen of the house next door if the lights were on.

The elderly woman, believed to be in her early eighties at the time of the murders, cared for her ailing 84-year-old husband, and from all accounts was undaunted by the fact that her hearing had started to fade and other indignities of age were creeping up on her. She was embedded in the community, having moved in with Tom some time after his mother died in 1963; she first appeared on the electoral roll as an Easey Street resident in 1968. So she knew everyone who lived around them, and had watched many of them grow up over the years. And they all knew her, ‘the little old lady in 145’. They would see her go shopping, pulling her trolley behind her, never accepting a lift as she walked to the bus stop, heading for Victoria Market, or trundled over to the milk bar, with her slight stoop, as well-dressed as she could manage. Her neighbours knew her routine, as she did theirs.

But Mrs Coventry saw someone on the night of the murders, that Monday night in January 1977 – someone it seems she did not recognise. There’s no police statement recording her testimony, let alone an Identikit sketch that could have helped identify a suspect. Gladys Coventry tried to tell detectives what she had seen, yet they never took her full account. But at least a couple recall her unsettling story, and before she died more than a decade after the murders, she told one of her neighbours what she witnessed that night.

In the kitchen at 147 Easey Street, a man was washing his hands at the sink, over and over – and he seemed to be scrubbing at a piece of cloth or clothing, too. Whatever he was doing, he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get it done or to leave the house.

When he eventually walked out the back door and stepped through her neighbours’ side gate, into the laneway, she might have pulled back, just a little. For a second, they would have been just metres apart, but he couldn’t see her as she sat in her cool, dark kitchen.

Then he was gone.

Late as it was, the long-term Collingwood resident probably didn’t think much more about this close encounter, at least not immediately. He must have seemed like just another of the women’s friends, someone who knew them well enough to be using their kitchen and leaving by the back door. He appeared at ease walking around the house, not in any hurry. A good two days would probably pass before she thought of that man washing his hands again.

But on Thursday morning she might have heard Ilona Stevens yelling out from the back of the house across the lane. ‘Call the police,’ Ilona was telling someone in the next house. ‘They’re dead.’

A little later, too, she would have seen the tall woman with the black hair talking to a young uniformed officer at the side gate of 147, then older men swarming up the lane and into the house next door, and two bodies being taken out the front door on gurneys. Was it the two young women she had seen, only recently, the little boy in tow? She would have quickly surmised that it had to be. And suddenly it must have been apparent how important what she had seen nights earlier could prove to be.

She tried to talk to the police. But the nattily dressed detectives from Homicide didn’t really listen, she felt; not properly. They didn’t ignore her, exactly, but they didn’t really give her the time of day, and she didn’t like the tone they took. So she simply stopped talking to them.

Appreciating that they had somehow offended possibly their only witness, the Homicide team came up with a strategy to prise more information from her, enlisting a police doctor to visit the house and discuss the murders. But Gladys Coventry realised what he was up to and sent him packing.

No one pressed her for more detail after that. Nor did they insist she see their sketch artist to provide details for a portrait of the suspect.

More than forty years later, this astonishing oversight still troubles the few who knew about it at the time. They believe it’s where the investigation started to go wrong. It’s certainly the first thing former detective Brian ‘The Skull’ Murphy recalls about the case. ‘They buggered it up,’ he says, matter-of-factly. ‘Right from the start.’

Once one of Victoria’s most controversial senior officers, Murphy, now retired, has been the subject of two books examining his tumultuous career and the high-profile cases he investigated. No doubt there are more stories to tell for the detective who, as Age reporter John Silvester noted in a 2017 profile of him, ‘was charged (and acquitted) of homicide, caused a Royal Commission, was falsely accused of an underworld murder and was the subject of several corruption inquiries that always failed to implicate Murphy in anything illegal’.

This ‘copper’ heard things while on the job. He heard that Gladys Coventry told the detectives that she had seen a man washing his hands in the kitchen of the women’s house, but that the octogenarian clammed up because she didn’t like the way the young men from Homicide were talking to her. ‘It was alleged the coppers upset her,’ the retired detective says.

He believes his colleagues would probably have been impatient, too full of themselves, in their suits and ties, with their murders to solve, to give Mrs Coventry the time she deserved to tell them her story. ‘Maybe they were smartarses … Homicide were a pack of smartarses in those days. Arrogant bastards, they were.’ He suggests that the doctor called on to visit the elderly neighbour might have been John Birrell, Victoria’s police surgeon. ‘This was a woman with a fair bit of age on her, they went and got a doctor to see if she’d enlighten him about it. She sprung him!’ Brian Murphy laughs, with a gruff delight.

If he’s right, and Dr Birrell was called to Collingwood, it meant that one of the country’s most lauded medical officers was assisting in the case, highlighting not only the prominence of the double murders but also the significance police placed on trying to get Gladys Coventry’s eyewitness account.

Renowned around the world for his campaigning against drink driving, John Birrell is thought to have helped save around 30,000 lives through his support of harsher drink-driving laws, blood-alcohol testing and compulsory seatbelts. But if it was Birrell who was sent in to see Gladys Coventry, none of this was enough to convince her to talk to him or his colleagues. According to Murphy, he wasn’t straightforward with her, which probably didn’t help. ‘I think he told her he’d come for a welfare check, something like that,’ Murphy says. ‘But they chose the wrong bloke to send in to talk to her. He was a very properly spoken man, very plummy, and she wouldn’t have liked that – not to mention he was about six-foot-thirteen, with a bald head and built like a German tank. It was a bad choice – she picked him straight away. She said, “You’re a friggin’ copper!”‘

Murphy recalls that police soon became aware they had missed the chance to get a description of a man who had been in the house the night the two women were killed. ‘They took it seriously, but when she knocked the cops back, that was it. When it went pear-shaped, they wrote it off.’

Why? There were other murders to solve, other cases to work. These soon took precedence. But Murphy remains aghast at this opportunity lost. ‘I don’t believe she knew him [the man she saw], but she could have described him – and I think that would have gone a long way to solving the matter.’

In 1987, Hugh Parry-Jones struck up a friendship with Gladys Coventry. Moving in a few doors up, the street’s newest resident started using the lane that ran along the side of her house. He was clearing out his backyard and would strike up conversation with his older neighbour whenever he saw her.

Hugh was fascinated by his rather eccentric neighbour, who was in her nineties by the time he met her – ‘this classic, really old-school’ woman whose husband had died years before. Tom Coventry might have left her with a name that was almost sacred at the Collingwood Football Club – the great Gordon Coventry being the first AFL player to kick one hundred goals in a season – but their little rented house was tumbling down around her, the ramshackle side fence missing more than a few palings.

Mrs Coventry’s kitchen, the room she seemed to spend most time in, was little more than ‘a really poor-quality lean-to on the back of the house – the place was just a shambles, totally falling down; dark, gloomy, damp. The kitchen was an earth floor, and she would just sit there in front of the fireplace, you know, throughout winter, because she didn’t have any heating,’ Hugh says.

By the time he got to know her, she was ‘really little and hunched’, with ‘an English accent, or a very refined Australian one – she was a lady, a very polite lady’. Gladys Coventry was quite deaf by this stage and had gone bald years before. ‘She had this series of wigs that would sit oddly on her, and sometimes when she went out to do the shopping, she wouldn’t realise … and she had all her makeup in the wrong place. And she dressed like a dowager from some sort of Agatha Christie novel.’

He believes she only had one regular visitor, an older man who would come and join her in the kitchen, where they would talk for hours.

Hugh ‘sort of took a shine’ to Mrs Coventry. ‘I was making a lot more use of the laneway, coming and going, and I would often say to her, “Look, is there something I can do for you? Can I help you, can I fix that up?” She was very nice to me, too.’

A history teacher, Hugh knew the fate of the two women who had lived and died so close by, and eventually he asked his neighbour if she remembered anything of that time. ‘One day I said to her, “Given the paucity of the fence palings and privacy, and the fact that you’re always up here, what do you know about the murders?” And she goes, “Oh, yes, oh, I’ve never forgotten that night. I was sitting here!” And you know, she probably was, at three o’clock in the morning, or whenever it happened. Just sitting there and she saw the light come on … I dare say she might have even had her window open.’

She went on to tell him what she saw. But this time, the account had one more important detail. She said the man she saw leave the women’s house that night was carrying a knife. ‘And she said, “I saw this bloke and he had a knife, and I told the police and they didn’t take it any further. The police said they’d come back to talk to me, but they never did. They didn’t believe me, they didn’t take me seriously.” She was cranky, she really was. And you can imagine – to a young copper, she’d be older than his grandmother. They probably thought she was a confabulist who was really asleep. It was the times, too; we didn’t have the same respect for the elderly we have now.’

Had she mentioned this extraordinary fact about the knife to police ten years before? Or was it an embellishment of time, the kind people often make when remembering even the most important things? Certainly, Gladys Coventry’s main point was the same: she had seen a man at 147 Easey Street on the night or in the early morning after the girls were killed.

Hugh was fascinated by what his neighbour told him. ‘I said, “Well, what did he look like?”‘ More than a decade later, she wasn’t keen to go back over it. ‘“Ah, no, I can’t remember,” she said. “But I gave them a description.”‘

Kind man that he is, Hugh didn’t hassle his elderly neighbour any further, yet remains incredulous that the police didn’t press her for as much information as she could provide in the days after the brutal murders were uncovered. ‘She would be the most likely person to have witnessed anything, if there was anything … she was so well-placed to be someone who would have some sort of evidence. But the cops just totally went down the path of all these mystery guys.’

He wanted to believe what Mrs Coventry told him, even knowing that the first set of detectives hadn’t set much store in recording her testimony. ‘She was very old and it’s like, you know, some of the things [she says] don’t really gel with reality, so you think, well, maybe that’s just another fantasy or something.’

But a little later, when this Easey Street resident walks through his backyard and into the narrow alley running into the wider bluestone lane next to what was once Gladys Coventry’s home, he points to where her kitchen would have been. And from this vantage point, it does gel with reality. If Mrs Coventry was sitting up that night, gazing out her kitchen window, as she usually did, she would have been staring right at the women’s house, their kitchen adjacent with hers.

‘I so much wanted to believe her, because like I say, it’s location, location, location, and seriously, you can’t do much better than that,’ Hugh says. ‘I mean, if I’d had the opportunity to talk to someone that owned the lodging house that Jack the Ripper had done his last murder in, as recently as ten years later, I think I would have talked to them as much as I could too, you know?’

When Gladys Coventry learnt what had happened to her two young neighbours, and that summer waned without their attacker being apprehended, was she scared? With only her ageing husband to protect her, did she worry that the man she had seen the night the ‘two Sues’ died might return to hurt them?

Hugh has a theory about who the man could have been. Easey Street was originally a block longer, but had been shortened when Hoddle Street was widened to feed into the new freeway, which finally opened in late 1977. Major construction was still underway in the area that January; even closer was the work being done to finish building the Collingwood Community Health Centre in Sackville Street that backed up to the yards of 149 and 147. Could a worker on one of these sites have been the murderer? Hugh believes this is a strong possibility. ‘What is built directly behind the “murder house” was under construction at the time of the murder. So I’ve always held the theory that there are tradies working on the site – you know, doing roofing, who knows what. They’re looking over into this backyard that’s got two very attractive young women. It’s a heatwave. It’s January. So they’re at home in the backyard, perhaps drawing attention. In those days, itinerant tradies, day workers, you come and go. How are the cops ever going to track them?

‘I still think that site’s a really good avenue [for inquiry], because it’s such a randomly horrible crime. I don’t think it was someone they knew who had a grievance. I don’t think they’d leave the baby.’

Standing in the lane that backs up to the brick wall of the health centre now called CoHealth, thinking back to that summer of ’77, the history teacher’s theory about the builders and tradesmen does not seem far-fetched. ‘There may well have even been tradies making their way up and down [this laneway] all day. Again, that just widens the field of people who could see a couple of young attractive women on holidays in a hot summer.’

The bluestone lane has been gated and locked for years now. Initially, this was to keep out the junkies who started using it to shoot up, dropping their needles when they left. Hugh Parry-Jones still wonders if the killer dropped his knife there too, somewhere in the rubbish and weeds, as he came out the side gate. ‘He might have flung a murder weapon over into my laneway,’ he muses. Investigators never found anything at the time.

Did Hugh ever find a knife, as he cleared the narrow alley that led to his yard? ‘No. No. Didn’t stop me looking, though.’

The neighbour who lives between Gladys Coventry’s old house and Hugh has been there for nearly sixty years. Edie Haines worked all her life at a sock factory in Lygon Street, and she ‘couldn’t complain about living in Easey Street’. She remembers the Coventrys next door well, even though Mrs Coventry didn’t often interact with those around her. ‘She was a funny lady, elderly even then,’ Mrs Haines says. ‘She wouldn’t speak to you. I used to say “hello, how are you?” and she’d just look away, she’d never reply.’

The memory makes her chuckle now. But that’s not to say she doubts the veracity of what Gladys Coventry tried to tell the police in 1977. ‘They wouldn’t have taken her seriously, those blokes. But it’s not right, it’s just not right, what happened. They thought they knew everything, those detectives – and they really didn’t, did they?’

Gladys Coventry was not the only person to have witnessed something that related directly to the killings. Nor was she the only resident from whom detectives failed to take a statement. The wide brick-and-weatherboard that Hugh Parry-Jones and his family have lived in for the past thirty-one years provided another connection to the street’s double homicide.

The Sellers family were living in 139 Easey Street when the murders occurred. Bob Sellers, now eighty-eight, was born there and raised his own family under the same roof. He and his wife and daughter were driving back from a holiday in Queensland that week, arriving home in the early hours of Thursday morning, 13 January 1977.

But his son, Peter, remained in Melbourne that summer. ‘I was on holidays too – but to be honest, I wanted to go to the races,’ the former track-work rider and apprentice jockey laughs.

The then 21-year-old didn’t know Suzanne Armstrong or Susan Bartlett, but remembers them living in the street. ‘They’d walk past and we’d say hi to them. They hadn’t been there long, I know that. But they were quiet, kept to themselves.’

The night they were killed, just four doors away, a mate called Ray was staying with him. They were up late, talking and watching television. Peter will never forget what happened just after they had gone to bed. ‘It’s like it was yesterday. We’d just been watching tele and went to bed at about 2.30 am. My bedroom was at the front of the house and I’d just got into bed when I heard one door slam – like a front door. Then two car doors slammed and the car took off. That’s what I heard, most likely the murderers leaving – and my mate the next morning, he said he heard it too.’

Two nights later, between 8.30 and 8.45 pm, Peter thought he heard his family arriving home and went outside to meet them. But it wasn’t them. Instead, just down the road, he saw two men and a young woman standing at the edge of the bluestone lane. ‘There was a blonde-haired guy and another one with darker hair, and a girl was with them,’ he recalls. ‘The blonde-haired guy kissed her on the cheek, then walked up the lane; she turned and walked towards Hoddle Street.’

Wondering where the bloke was going at that time of night, and knowing the lane ran into the small alley that led to his own backyard, Peter walked back through his house and into the yard to see if he was anywhere to be seen. He wasn’t. Cindy, the family’s labrador, was unfazed, not barking at all as they scouted her territory.

Peter’s parents arrived home several hours later. He left for work as usual later that Thursday morning and it wasn’t until the afternoon, when he picked up a copy of The Herald, that he realised something terrible had happened so close to his home. ‘I got the paper, and it knocked the hell out of me.’

His mother told one of the police officers door-knocking in Easey Street that her son had something to tell them which could prove vital in the inquiry. ‘Mum said the copper wrote my name down in his book and put a big asterisk next to it and told her they’d be back to talk with me. Forty-two years later, I haven’t heard from them.’ When the police officer who had spoken to his mother didn’t return, Peter assumed they just weren’t interested in what he had seen and heard over the two nights.

Peter said the friend who stayed at his house that Monday night – who has since passed away – was also willing to talk to police, once he knew about the murders. ‘My thing is: why didn’t they come back and see me?’ For quite some time, he was more concerned that the killer – or killers – would come back.

Peter’s question is a fair one, and can be broadened: why didn’t detectives working this case in January 1977 knock on more doors in Easey Street?

If they were too stretched in terms of staff – with only sixteen detectives assigned to Victoria’s Homicide Squad at that point – why weren’t local police called in to assist? In fact, why wasn’t Collingwood CIB involved in this investigation right from the outset? They would have had a deeper understanding of the suburb, its characters and possible ‘persons of interest’.

Apparently, such collaboration rarely happened in that era, and only occurred if the lead detective instigated it. ‘And there’s detectives and there’s detectives,’ a former CIB chief remarked. ‘No, Homicide seemed to do these things on their own. They’d knock on a certain number of doors, but they would have had so many murders on their plates – it wasn’t like watching John Thaw [as Inspector Morse] driving round in his Jaguar, working on just one murder at a time.’ This case was high-profile, but the Homicide Squad had finite resources and other murders to investigate.

About a week later, Peter Sellers walked past 147 Easey Street with his brother and father and saw the door was wide open. The house was in the process of being cleaned, but the blood in the hallway was still visible, even from the street. ‘I reckon the blood was a foot from the front door,’ he says.

Forty years on, with the cold case back in the news after police posted the million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer, the Sellers family started discussing the murders again, and Peter’s older sister convinced him he should call Crime Stoppers Victoria, to tell them what he had seen and heard all those years ago. ‘To start with, I didn’t know whether to or not – it was such a long time ago and everything, and they hadn’t seemed very interested when it had just happened. But my sister hassled me. So I rang and I was on hold for ages, and I got really nervous,’ Peter, now sixty-three, recollects. ‘I don’t know why, I obviously wasn’t the murderer or anything … but I was hanging on for so long.’

Finally getting through, he started to explain what had happened, but quickly got the feeling that they weren’t interested. ‘I got the impression they wanted a name,’ he says now. ‘And I couldn’t give them a name, so they didn’t want to talk to me all that much. In the end, they just kind of said “thank you” and that was it.’

He admits that he didn’t get the chance to tell them the whole sequence of events, and never called back. In other words, he still hasn’t given a proper statement to police.

This troubles him, because he believes the theory that seems to have stood the test of time – that just one man was involved in Susan Bartlett and Suzanne Armstrong’s murders – isn’t right. Having distinctly heard two car doors slam in the early hours of that Tuesday morning, Peter thinks police should consider the possibility that two people were at the scene. ‘I’ve got no doubt whatsoever that there were two people involved. None whatsoever.’

This also makes sense to Robyn McKenzie, his sister. She feels it explains why such a ‘tall, big girl’ like Susan Bartlett was overpowered in the passageway. ‘She was strong and tall and I could never understand how one guy could have done that, even with a knife.’

The Sellers have lived with a sense of frustration for decades, waiting for police to realise there was a possible witness they had missed. When Robyn persuaded her brother to call Crime Stoppers, she was disappointed with the result. ‘I pushed Peter to call,’ she says. ‘I said you have to, it’s your duty to call them.’ But ‘they shrugged it off and said it wasn’t relevant; apparently it didn’t fit their timeline’.

Robyn remembers that police ‘interrogated’ her mother and father back in 1977 when they realised what time the family had arrived home. She says at that stage police believed the women had been killed on the Thursday morning, at around the time the Sellers returned. So, understandably, they were especially keen to talk to the owners of the car that matched the tyre marks in the lane. ‘It wasn’t very nice. They were just firing questions at us: “What time was it?” “What did you see?” That kind of thing.’ It doesn’t surprise her that an older woman such as Gladys Coventry would find a similar approach to questioning hard to deal with.

Robyn is also certain of something she saw from the back seat of the family car early on 13 January. ‘It was just after 2.00 am in the morning, very early,’ she says. ‘And I absolutely remember we drove into the lane, before turning around [to park] in the street. And I noticed there were no lights on. I know people have said they saw the kitchen light was on, but when we were getting home, that house was dark.’

Her brother confirms that his sister has always maintained the house was ‘completely dark’ – and so too her father.

But Bob Sellers is derisive about some of the initial media coverage of the case, especially a statement attributed to him in The Herald published on the afternoon the bodies were discovered. In it, he seemed to suggest that Armstrong and Bartlett were loud ‘party girls’.

‘That’s rubbish, I didn’t say that at all,’ he grumbles. ‘You’d say hello to them in the street and they hadn’t been there for long. They were nice girls. Nice girls.

‘In those times, everyone played out in the street until it got dark. In those days, the doors and windows were open to get some air in. Now, you’re a prisoner in your own house.’

Bob now lives in the curator’s house on the grounds of Collingwood Football Club, and says he remembers driving his car into the side lane at ‘ten past two’ that Thursday morning. ‘Those laneways were for the “dirt man” to come and take the pans away,’ he adds.

He knew Mrs Coventry, but they never discussed the murders, so she never told him about what she saw the night they occurred. ‘No, I never spoke to her about it … she was a bit of a boozer, I know that much. But that’s a long time ago now.’

His daughter remembers the family used to call her ‘a funny old bird – but that doesn’t mean she didn’t see someone in that house that night’.

Despite their street’s sudden notoriety, the Sellers never considered it unsafe. ‘We never suspected anyone in the street – we knew all of them,’ Bob Sellers says. Still, he can’t forget the impact the women’s deaths had on his old stomping ground. ‘We had thrillseekers driving past and pointing at the house at the time, kids hanging out of car windows pointing and laughing it up.’ He and his family found this behaviour unsettling. ‘It was the talking point of Easey Street, that’s for sure. But they were nice girls. Nice girls.’