CHAPTER 11

THE SUSPECTS

DESPITE THE CLOSE relationships many journalists had with police across the force, detectives could not confirm the leads they were pursuing, not to mention what they were thinking about the Easey Street crime site and the possible profile of the killer, without compromising the investigation or libelling suspects. But from the start of this investigation, the city’s senior crime reporters knew of the two men ‘in the frame’. Within days, most journalists working on Melbourne’s daily newspapers were on to this angle, too.

Barry Woodard had caught police attention in the first few days of the inquiry. Those close to the victim are always investigated in homicide cases. But, just hours after the Homicide Squad arrived at Easey Street, their attention fell on another suspect, someone they felt they knew much better. It was a crime reporter – the male journalist who had stayed the night at Ilona Stevens’ place, in the house next door to the crime scene.

John Grant was a well-known writer in Melbourne at the time, who had been covering the ‘police beat’ for years, and detectives quickly became focused on where he claimed to have been at the time of the murders: sleeping on a couch next door. They also believed his job gave him knowledge of the forensic procedures of the time.

Like the salacious, knuckles bared–style tabloid he wrote for, ‘Grunter’ and many of his colleagues were proud of the fact they could work both sides of the ‘crime beat’, hanging out with police sources one night, criminal contacts the next. ‘Crime rounds were different then,’ a former colleague recollects. ‘The reporters “consorted” – they’d hang out with crooked coppers and crims. They had to, to get the yarns.’

This kind of work did not come naturally or appeal to everyone, and doing it well required a rugged disposition. Grant had one, and was a polarising personality within journalistic circles. He certainly lived up to the stereotype of a ‘police roundsman’ of the era: a big-talking, big-drinking journo, perhaps living a little too close to the edge of the criminal networks he wrote about.

Back then, colleagues either enjoyed his company or steered clear of him, and even now they still choose their words carefully when discussing him. At the very least, he was ‘a character’, known for his knock-the-door-down type of journalism. Much of the apprehension around Grant grew from what happened in Easey Street once it became apparent that he had stayed in the adjoining house on the night of the murders.

John Grant was not in a relationship with either Ilona Stevens or Janet Powell, and had never visited their home before. But after drinking and talking into the early hours of that Tuesday morning, Ilona had suggested he stay over on their couch rather than find his way home.

The trio insisted to police that they heard and saw nothing unusual that night. This was possible: the two cottages shared a common wall, with identical hallways running side by side, but the bedrooms and lounge rooms were on opposite sides of the properties, which meant all three at 149 were sleeping against the far wall, several metres away from the violence taking place next door.

Still, investigators could not ignore the coincidence of the reporter being in the wrong place for a second time in the space of two years. On 1 July 1975, he had been in a small group with a woman named Julie Ann Garciacelay the night the young American disappeared from her apartment in North Melbourne.

The nineteen-year-old had invited three men back to the apartment she shared with her sister Gail, one of them Grant, the other two notorious figures well known to police. Garciacelay has never been seen since. So it was hardly surprising that he was considered a key suspect in the early days of the Easey Street investigation.

He was one of the first men police interviewed at the Russell Street headquarters, and their questioning lasted an entire day. The session was unrelentingly tough; as one now retired detective has confided, ‘they didn’t miss him’. In other words, they did not go easy on him, or treat him with any professional courtesy.

Grant maintained his innocence throughout the interview and has continued to do so for the past four decades. He was also cleared of involvement by DNA testing.

Yet great damage was done to his reputation in the immediate days and long years after the double homicide. It wasn’t fair, but in Melbourne’s tight media circle, misinformation about him was rife: he had been waiting at the door of the murdered women’s house when police arrived, the stories went – and he found the murder weapon just up the road! None of this was true, of course, but that didn’t stop it from being repeated. For years. The fact that he worked for Truth was just icing on the gloaters’ cake.

Peter Hiscock, the young detective who attended the murder scene and now works as a private investigator, pulls no punches about his assessment of the reporter at the time. ‘I thought it had to be John Grant,’ he admits. ‘How many crime reporters could be in the wrong spot twice? I got it wrong, I admit that. He’s been cleared twice now.’

On 11 April 2018, nineteen-year-old Julie Ann Garciacelay was officially deemed a murder victim. ‘Despite there being no evidence as to the exact circumstance and cause of Ms Garciacelay’s death, her death was the result of homicide,’ Victoria’s state coroner, Sara Hinchey, declared.

As crime stories went, it wasn’t big news, coming forty-three years after the young American had disappeared. So it didn’t warrant front-page headlines; indeed, only one of Melbourne’s daily newspapers reported it, and even then, the story was relegated to page twelve of the print edition. But the ramifications of Ms Hinchey’s ruling were dramatic, and not just for the Garciacelay case. Homicide detectives could now review the files, which had so far been treated as a missing-person case, and the details of the night that involved the three men at Julie’s apartment. One of the three, John Joseph Power, had always been considered ‘the real deal, the real bad deal’ by at least one lawyer who knew him.

When police dusted off Garciacelay’s missing-person file, new attention could be focused on the possibility that one of Grant’s professional ‘contacts’ had been involved in the Easey Street murders. One or two detectives might have long suspected this, but no proof had ever been found.

In 2018, the Coroner’s Court was told that the young woman from California had been working as a library reference clerk at Southdown Press, the Murdoch-owned publisher that later became Pacific Magazines, in Melbourne’s La Trobe Street. The Truth and The Australian newspapers were printed there, and on the day of her disappearance, Julie had spoken to Grant and two of his ‘associates’ when they were in the library: one, a former fairground boxer, Rhys ‘Tommy’ Collins; the other, career criminal John Joseph Power. As The Age reported, the coroner heard that while in the library on 1 July 1975, the trio had drawn the American, who was just a week shy of her twentieth birthday, into a conversation about opening a soul-food restaurant.

Keen to extend her social circle in Melbourne, having moved to Australia only eight months earlier, Julie organised a get-together with the men for later that night, back at her apartment. The block where she lived wasn’t far from where she worked, in Canning Street, North Melbourne.

Collins and Grant came over with another man, John Joseph Powers [sic], who had been acquitted of murdering a woman three years earlier and would later be jailed for 30 years over a shooting, armed robberies and the vicious 1992 rape of a 19-year-old.

The men said Ms Garciacelay left the flat at 10.30 pm to make a call at a public phone box for her sister, Gail, who was at a friend’s in Kew and had asked her to call in sick for her on her behalf. Ms Garciacelay never came home, the men said. Gail Garciacelay reported her sister missing at 4 pm the following day after coming home to find she had not showed up for work at Southdown Press.

She also reportedly found a blood-soaked towel and her sister’s underwear on the floor. Police would find a piece of paper with a phone number left by Gail, and money to make the call, inside the flat, while Gail’s supervisor told police they never received a phone call from her sister that night either.

Contemporary crime journalists in Melbourne had been waiting for this mystery to come before the Coroner’s Court for three years, after it was revealed in 2015 that the brief was being prepared. In a statement at that time, police confirmed their belief that Julie Ann ‘is deceased’.

Over the preceding four decades, police had come to know the details of her disappearance and her family well. A talented pianist, she had come to Melbourne to be with a ‘homesick’ Gail Garciacelay, and the two young women had planned to return to the United States before Christmas that year.

Detectives knew, too, that significant items were missing from the sisters’ North Melbourne flat: a carving knife, a black cape and $125 in cash. Over the years, they had also reportedly been given information about where her body was dumped that night in 1975, though it has still not been found.

While police ranked John Joseph Power a serious suspect in this young woman’s disappearance from the outset, no move was made to bring him in for questioning. One reason for this could have been the complaint he had made to the Beach Inquiry, which was underway at the time, looking into allegations of misconduct against members of the Victoria Police Force.

Power had alleged that ‘certain members of the Homicide Squad had conspired together with a view to having him wrongfully charged with the murder of a Mrs Rosa Rento, in the hope that they might have him convicted of that crime, and put out of circulation for the greater part of his life’. He claimed that he was arrested and charged with murder despite ‘there being no evidence against him whatsoever, apart from a three year old motive he may have had to cause harm to the Rento family, said to exist because some three years previously Mrs. Rento’s juvenile son had attempted to interfere with Power’s infant daughter – at least so Power thought’.

The Beach inquiry provided validation to these allegations. It recorded that, at his trial, it was proved beyond doubt that the gun ‘identified … as the murder weapon had in fact been in the possession of the Police for some 6 weeks prior to the shooting’.

‘How did it come about that this regrettable situation occurred?’ the report asked.

It occurred, the evidence before the Board suggests, because certain Police are content to do deals with informers rather than undertake the tedium of proper investigative work to solve crimes. Whilst the failure of the Police in this case does not fall within the same category of behaviour of those Police who find it easier to fabricate Records of Interview than make proper investigation into crime, it nevertheless justifies the strongest criticism.

If a strange sense of ‘due process’ protected John Power from further police attention through the mid to late 1970s, it worked in his favour again decades later, when a court order prevented him from being questioned about Julie Ann Garciacelay’s disappearance, due to a health condition. According to a report in The Age in July 2015, he was on parole in 2002 when police alleged he met an escort near his housing-commission unit in Broadmeadows. They claim the woman told him she would only stay for forty-five minutes, not a full hour. He allegedly grabbed the woman and threatened her with a knife, before trying to gag her. She escaped and ran to a nearby house. His lawyer argued successfully that ‘Power was dying of a heart condition and should not be questioned by police’. This applied to both the matter in question and, by extension, the Garciacelay case. But Power lived until July 2012, dying at the age of seventy-one.

Fifteen years after Julie Ann Garciacelay disappeared, police put out a public appeal for information. John Grant made a brief comment to a colleague that he had been ‘to hell and back’ since being linked to the murder. ‘We went over there for a drink and that was it,’ the former crime writer was reported to have said. ‘She went away and we got tired of waiting and left … I would like to see the whole thing solved too, of course. Get some peace for me, for everybody.’

It was an inelegant, gruff statement. Grant has never been willing to give a fuller account on the public record of what happened the night Garciacelay went missing – including his claim to police that he went home early that night, leaving her with Power and boxer Tommy Collins. He also declined to discuss either case for this book.

A decade ago, two detectives visited veteran journalist Adrian Tame to test part of Grant’s statement to police: that on the night of Graciacelay’s disappearance, the reporter had rung him and asked if he could take a taxi home, before grabbing a taxi docket from the office on the way. Tame was the news editor at Truth at the time and so would have been the one to approve such a request from a reporter. ‘They came all the way to see me here in central Victoria [to inquire] if John had asked me if he could take a taxi home – but I couldn’t remember if he had or not,’ he says. The detectives also tried to persuade him to be ‘wired up’ to talk to his old colleague about the case. Adrian Tame refused to be involved. It is understood, too, that detectives asked John Grant to visit John Joseph Power in jail to see if he knew where the young woman’s body could be found.

Those who know the former Truth reporter say the attempt to set up his old ‘crim contact’ was extraordinarily difficult for him to take on board. Yet if John Power had admitted involvement in Julie Ann Garciacelay’s disappearance, it might also have led to his being questioned over the deaths of Susan Bartlett and Suzanne Armstrong. Some semblance of the peace John Grant is still so desperate to find could perhaps have extended to their families, as well as to Garciacelay’s.

This is not to say, of course, that John Joseph Power would have admitted anything. It is simply speculation about where events could have led.

Where was the former gun-shop owner and member of the Painters and Dockers Union on the night of 10 January 1977? It remains unclear. He wasn’t in jail, so police investigating the Easey Street murders must have looked into his movements, given their strong interest in Grant. But it seems that Power was not on their original list of suspects.

Another intriguing point: as detectives worked on both cases, staring at the photos of Julie Ann Garciacelay and the ‘two Sues’, did it occur to them how similar the three looked? Suzanne and Julie in particular – they shared long, brown hair and pale complexions.

Perhaps this was just another coincidence, like the bloodied towel left on the couch at both homicide scenes and the presence of underwear on the floors.

But perhaps, perhaps … John Power somehow knew where John Grant was that night in January 1977. Maybe he had followed Grant and Ilona Stevens, without Grant’s knowledge, to 149 Easey Street and noticed the two women and the little boy next door, or at least the young woman reading in bed, in the front room of her home.

Then again, what of Rhys ‘Tommy’ Collins? Could he have been involved in killing three women? Australia’s welterweight champion in 1963, the former fairground boxer was more than accomplished in the ring, notching up twenty-seven victories in his career, eleven of them ‘knockouts’. But he was also a ‘two-up’ operator known to police through a series of comparatively minor criminal convictions. One source who knew the former boxing champ, who died in 1998, claimed Collins was in a relationship with Garciacelay when she went missing in 1975, although there is no evidence of this.

Could Collins have been trailing John Grant for some reason two years later, when he and Ilona Stevens returned to Collingwood after work? Ilona can’t remember seeing anyone hanging around in the street when they arrived home. She is adamant, too, that her colleague never mentioned John Power or Tommy Collins in conversation, either at work or socially. They didn’t share a close friendship. ‘We were just co-workers who were mates,’ she says. ‘He could have been a younger brother – that was the relationship.’

Ilona insists that Grant did not know the girls next door. She and Janet Powell didn’t even know them well, as they hadn’t been living there long. The only way they would even have come up in conversation, she maintains, is if she or Janet had mentioned how unusual it was at the time for two sets of single women to be sharing two houses, side by side. ‘In those days, we might have laughed about how unusual it was, four single women living side by side like that. But that would have been the only way we’d have even talked about them.’

As Ilona again recalls the evening she, John Grant and her housemate stayed up talking into the early hours of the next morning, she becomes uncharacteristically disturbed about what detectives did and didn’t ask her after she found their bodies three days later. ‘I told them John was there with us and that he stayed the night on the couch,’ she says. ‘But they never asked me about how he came to be at the house, they never asked me about our “relationship”, about how he acted that night, or whether I saw anybody hanging about outside, and no one’s come back to me since. No one’s asked me any of these questions. Apart from my initial statement, I’ve never been spoken to again.’

Realising who could have been watching both houses from the street as the night wore on, Ilona is increasingly angry about what’s been missed in the investigation. It dawns on her, too, what could have happened to her and Janet. ‘Maybe John saved us by being there! Maybe Power did follow us home from the Celtic Club and somehow got the two houses mixed up. Or maybe he noticed Suzanne in the front room next door and decided to go in there instead?

‘No one’s come back to me about anything like this, let alone “are you sure John was on the couch all night?” All these things they should have asked, they didn’t and still haven’t. You’d have assumed that with a case of this magnitude, they’d be following up on everything, especially if, you know, they thought John was their number-one suspect. But nothing. It was weird.’

Those who knew John Joseph Power insist that he was capable of extreme violence – fuelled by a different aggression than his fighting mate Tommy Collins – and speculate that he had ‘the form’ to kill one, if not three, young women in the space of three years. Among the last people seen with a missing nineteen-year-old, and found guilty of raping another woman of the same age fifteen years later, Power could have been the one to wait, knock on the door when the suburb was quiet and overpower the two friends.

And John Grant truly would not have known a thing.

In time, detectives revealed that their initial list of suspects in the Easey Street case contained eight names. While they have never released these names publicly, four are obvious: the three men who had been inside the house and not seen the bodies, and John Grant.

A disgraced police officer, allegedly kicked off the force in the mid-1970s for sexually abusing women while on the job, also made this ominous register; so too a so-called ‘champion sportsman’, eventually identified as a racing-car driver, who purportedly knew Suzanne and had visited her at Easey Street, as well as a man detectives tracked all the way to Britain.

Perhaps most interesting was the possible eighth suspect on this rollcall, a man who lived in the Euroa/Benalla area and was known to both families. Early in the investigation, both Sue’s brother Martin Bartlett and Suzanne’s sister Gayle Armstrong had told police they suspected he could be involved.

He had gone out with Suzanne several years before she left Australia to travel overseas, was known to country police and had been in Melbourne at the time of the murders. A couple of days before the deaths, he and a friend had started drinking, ‘and he was getting angry’ at his home in northern Victoria, so his wife left for her parents as fast as she ‘could get the kids in the car’.

By Monday, he was reportedly drinking at a pub in Collingwood, just blocks from Easey Street. He was said to be visiting his ‘mistress’ at the time, who provided him with an alibi, telling detectives he was with her in Fitzroy all night.

His wife claimed police interviewed him several times over the intervening decades. But never when she was present. ‘They never came to the house, they always came to see him at work,’ she recalled.

When we spoke in 2017, she was long separated from this man and fighting terminal illness. She wasn’t sure he could have done ‘something so violent’ as commit murder, but alleged he had beaten her up before, and so believed she knew ‘what he was capable of’ when drunk. She seemed to take solace from the fact that he had told her a DNA test had cleared him, as it had the seven others on Homicide’s ‘list of eight’.

While the investigation seemed to be offering up many suspects, there was no apparent chief suspect to present in court. Maybe the official inquest would crack things open?

There can be few more daunting roles than that of a coroner, especially a senior coroner in a major jurisdiction. Not many have the spiritual strength to take the job on for any length of time. Fewer still have had the presence of Harry William Pascoe, Melbourne’s chief coroner for two decades.

For lawyers, journalists and probably detectives too, the old Coroner’s Court – perched on the edge of the city at the far end of Flinders Street, not quite South Melbourne, not quite the CBD – always felt an unfortunate place to be, certainly more sombre than other magistrates’ courts around town. As senior journalist Geoffrey Barker described it, decades after being assigned there, it was ‘where matters of life and death, public reputation and lethal crime were presided over by the bespectacled coroner … and where sadistic coppers in the morgue behind the court delighted in showing virgin reporters their chilled clientele stretched out naked on gurneys with labels tied to their toes’. So quiet was this courtroom that young journalists and staff alike would wince when they heard a loud noise coming from the annexe off to the side of the main room, as this often meant that another body was being delivered to the morgue.

This was Harry Pascoe’s domain, his professional home for twenty-one years, and he cut a grave figure most mornings looking down from his magistrate’s bench, pen and gavel never far from hand. Yet that was as it should be; there was little room for levity in this grief-filled arena. How could there be, as this ‘special magistrate’ inquired into how and sometimes why a person had died in abnormal circumstances, and who, if anyone, was responsible for their death?

Between 1958 and 1979, Pascoe investigated some of Victoria’s more infamous deaths: the mysterious ‘brain bleed’ of Lady Anne Rylah, one of Australia’s first female veterinarians and wife of then deputy premier Sir Arthur Rylah; Australian cricketer Jack Iverson’s gunshot suicide; the thirty-five workers killed in the Westgate Bridge collapse; and the heart-rending case of six-month-old Margaret Loomes, suffocated with a plastic bag, and her two-year-old sister, thought at the time to be guilty of the murder (in fact, it was the girls’ mother).

More straightforward but no less confronting, Harry Pascoe also signed off on the inquisition into the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the last person to be legally executed in Australia, in 1967.

Perhaps it was fitting then that, two years before stepping down from this demanding role, it was this particular coroner who took on the inquest into the Easey Street murders, which was held on 12 July 1977. The women’s deaths deserved his attention. The case deserved this initial day in court.

By contemporary standards, the police brief the coroner was presented with was alarmingly thin – basically a list of nine ‘depositions of witnesses’ and a box of twenty-seven exhibits. But according to those involved in such hearings at the time, this was probably a fuller folder than usual.

What’s left on file in Victoria’s public records office is disconcerting in its lack of volume and order. When I first inspected it, at the State Coroner’s headquarters in Kavanagh Street in Melbourne’s Southbank, the collection of statements was in disarray, and it seemed as if no one had bothered to open the file for many, many years. The pages, now quite fragile, were out of order, suggesting that the last person who had rifled through it had taken no care with the file’s contents. Still, the information contained on the tissue-thin pages is substantial.

On 12 July 1977, just a day short of the women’s bodies being found six months earlier, the inquest began. But journalistic interest in the case had waned; only a couple of reporters were there to cover the matter. The city’s senior crime writers would have known that little new was going to be revealed in the evidence put to the court – except perhaps when Detective Senior Sergeant Alfred Oldfield put on the record that the Homicide Squad had not had any success in finding the killer.

Key witnesses in the case, including Martin Bartlett and Ilona Stevens, did not attend – or at least don’t remember doing so – but their statements given to police months earlier were presented to the coroner.

His official written finding was as dry and proper as it was unsurprising: Armstrong and Bartlett had both died from ‘multiple stab wounds then and there feloniously unlawfully and maliciously inflicted by a person or person unknown to me, and I further find that such person or persons did murder the deceased’.

‘In their summing up of their investigation, police described the case as a very brutal murder,’ The Herald reported Harry Pascoe as saying. ‘That description sums up everything I have to say about it.’

It was hardly enough. But only Suzanne’s father had the will to try to shake things up, once the inquest into his daughter’s murder was over. Outside the court, on the city’s grey edge, he said he thought the state government should at least double the $20,000 reward it was offering for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer.

Bill Armstrong’s frustration and pain was palpable that day. But his plea went unheeded for almost another year. The Victorian government boosted the reward to $50,000 in June 1978. It would take thirty-nine years for it to reach the level no doubt he believed it deserved from the start.