CHAPTER 12

THE MEDIUM

NEARLY A YEAR after the coroner’s inquest, and eighteen months after the two women’s bodies were found in Collingwood, police had still not made an arrest. Perhaps more troubling was the fact that they seemed to have no real leads in their hunt for the murderer.

While most Australians were cheerfully enjoying Grease and Superman in cinemas that year, and the Bee Gees strangled the Top 10 with ‘Night Fever’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive’, 24-year-old Gayle Armstrong battled a rising sense of desperation.

Still relatively new to the role of mother to her own son, let alone to her slain sister’s little boy, and without the psychological support or media advice that families of murder victims have access to now, she was navigating the consequences of her sister’s death as best she could. She even agreed to a request to take part in a ‘reading’ with a psychic. And not just any psychic.

At the time, British-born Doris Stokes was an internationally popular spiritualist, a professional medium who could fairly be described, at fifty-nine, as a ‘rock star’, her success the 1970s equivalent of America’s John Edwards today. Her appearances on The Don Lane Show prompted heated debate as she made ‘contact’ with dead relatives of the night-time talk show’s studio audience.

Stokes toured the country, making public appearances in entertainment venues in five capital cities that year. Her sessions in various small churches were even more confronting, as hundreds queued for hours, waiting to be touched by her ‘healing hands’ as she stood not far from the altar, stained-glass windows rising behind her.

She claimed to have helped UK police solve a couple of difficult murder cases and, given the air of wonder that swirled around her, it’s not hard to see why it might have occurred to a journalist to ask her to try to ‘see’ what happened at Easey Street. Nothing else had worked in terms of solving the double homicide, the reporter must have thought. What was there to lose?

The Sunday Press arranged the meeting between the media-savvy psychic and the grieving sister.

While Gayle can’t quite recall how this ‘special session’ was organised, it seems that she drove from her family’s home in Euroa to meet Stokes in Melbourne, with Sunday Press journalist Stephen O’Baugh and a photographer on hand to record it.

As they both settled into big, boxy armchairs, the medium explained she could not promise to make contact with Suzanne Armstrong. ‘If I can’t do it, I won’t give you a lot of hearts and flowers,’ she told Gayle.

She did much more than that.

Within minutes, Stokes claimed to have ‘summoned’ Suzanne’s spirit and, over the next two hours, proceeded to tell her sister not only how both women had died, but the names of the two men who killed them and the location of the murder weapon.

She also identified the make of the murderers’ car, explained how they had escaped from the house without being seen and outlined where she believed they were living. More disturbingly, this ‘seer’ told Gayle that her sister had known both men before they came to her house that night.

According to Stokes, the men entered through a kitchen window, and one went up the passage to Suzanne’s bedroom, where he stood over her in bed. She said Suzanne ‘told’ her, ‘I woke up and saw [name deleted] standing over me in my bed. There was something around my neck.’

Later in the session, she claimed she was being ‘told’ the weapon was ‘a tradesman’s tool, possibly a chisel, something used to slice wood’. O’Baugh’s story in The Sunday Press continued,

At this stage, Gayle wept as Mrs Stokes, on behalf of Suzanne, said ‘why … why, why’ and kept repeating the name of her killer. ‘He’s the swine,’ Mrs Stokes cried in a burst of emotion.

Interpreting the getaway, Mrs Stokes said the killers rolled up their blood-soaked clothes and rushed to a vehicle they had left in a nearby dead-end street. They then drove off to the country about 50 kilometres from Melbourne. Mrs Stokes said: ‘They drove up a steep hill, up quite high and with a drop into a valley.’

When asked to name the area, Mrs Stokes took a map. With her eyes half closed, she traced a finger along the Hume Highway and suddenly clutched her heart. She said: ‘I feel a pain here.’

Her finger was resting on the Pretty Sally area. ‘That’s where they dropped the evidence,’ she claimed.

Forty years later, the article makes disturbing reading, and fails to capture how challenging this session must have been for Gayle. Coping with the intensity of Doris Stokes’ performance was one thing, but dealing with the specific details she was ‘receiving’ was an entirely different matter – especially without any professional support or an advocate to help her through the meeting and debrief after it was over. Like so much that has occurred in and around this murder case over the decades, such an encounter would probably not be allowed to proceed in this manner now.

But the still-grieving sister remembers it as an overwhelmingly positive experience. ‘It was an experience. She [Stokes] just sticks in my brain,’ Gayle says firmly. ‘I don’t remember the two names, no – but no, no, it was amazing. She was so nice.’

Gayle insists that her memory isn’t good, which is why she can’t remember the two names Stokes ‘conjured’ during their meeting. ‘I can’t tell you, I don’t know, I’m hopeless; my brain … it just doesn’t [get there] … and it’s not funny, I can tell you.’ But the British medium left an impression. ‘It was out of this world, she was out of this world. But don’t ask me any questions, because I can’t remember.’

There is one thing that does stick in her mind about their meeting. She was especially moved when, near the end of their time together, the clairvoyant mentioned that Gayle was wearing something of her sister’s, a cardigan she still has to this day. ‘She knew exactly what I had on of Suzanne’s. Doris was definitely an eerie person. She knew something. She’s a smart lady, I remember that.’

According to the Sunday Press reporter, Gayle was ‘ashen-faced’ as her meeting with Stokes ended. She described some of the things the medium had raised as ‘startling’ and said she would ‘beg’ police to follow up the new claims. She also vowed to take a tape recording of the meeting to police, so they could hear what she had heard.

In response to the article, the head of the Homicide Squad was blunt with the media. Detective Chief Inspector Paul Delianis made clear that his officers were ‘concerned with the natural, not the supernatural’. He also denied the strange report the newspaper had run two days earlier, indicating that police were going to take part in the ‘séance’ with the psychic and Gayle. ‘None of my detectives has been to any such performance by Mrs Stokes. I am concerned that the squad has been involved in a showmanship atmosphere, or is seen to be promoting her act,’ Delianis said. ‘I am not making any comment publicly on her ability or inability to make contact with the spirits. But that’s not the way we conduct our investigations, and my men didn’t go anywhere near her.’ He added that the ‘clairaudient’ should contact police if she had evidence about unsolved murders. ‘If they bring a tape in, we’ll listen to it. But we’re concerned only with tangible evidence.’

Gayle didn’t have a copy of either the reporter’s tape recording or notes of her session with Stokes. So nothing came of the ‘information’ Stokes revealed. She says the police dismissed the more serious details about the murders that the medium provided, and which were published in the Sunday Press article, such as the location of the murder weapon. She recalls their response was along the lines of ‘oh, she’s just silly’: ‘She said that the knife or the weapon – something’s buried on Pretty Sally and could pinpoint it to a certain spot. But the police weren’t interested. Pretty Sally is the big hill before you’re going down into Wallan, just after Kilmore, but they didn’t go and see it … That just went dead, because I was in no position to be going digging anywhere.’ She allows herself a quick laugh. ‘So it all fell by the wayside.’

Soon after her session with Gayle, Doris Stokes made another public link regarding the Easey Street murders. In Melbourne to appear on The Don Lane Show on GTV9, Mrs Stokes spoke to actress Lorraine Bayly, star of the long-running serial The Sullivans, which Sue and Suzanne had watched the night they were killed.

‘I had contact with Lorraine’s father, Eric, on the other side,’ Mrs Stokes told journalist Tom Prior. ‘All of a sudden I started reeling off names and streets. I had never heard of the streets before. I mentioned names and I mentioned a psychiatric hospital, so we got out some maps and started going over them.’ Prior noted that Stokes, who ‘spoke in a pronounced London accent’, said she was ‘controlled completely by spirits “on the other side” when speaking of Easey Street. “I am only the medium,” she said, adding, to ally doubts, “I’m like your mum, lovey. She wouldn’t take you down, would she?”‘

It’s not hard to understand why the visiting clairvoyant so infuriated detectives at the time. Yet, nearly thirty years later, the Armstrong family would again be told that a psychiatric facility was pivotal to solving the case. But this time, the information would come from a more mundane source: a former patient.

A quarter of a century after the Doris Stokes ‘intervention’, the Armstrong family had a second brush with the paranormal. A television production company approached Gayle to take part in an episode of Sensing Murder. Based on the Swedish prototype, the series paired up psychics and private investigators to examine unsolved murders.

Back in the little house in Easey Street, the Australian team wandered through the rented, unrenovated property, ‘sensing’ different moods in different rooms as they recounted what had occurred on the night of 10 January 1977. ‘Yeah, those girls went into the house and told the reporter what they felt as they went,’ Gayle recalls. She did not go with them. ‘No way.’

Nothing useful came from this visit, in terms of new clues or information. Police refused to have anything to do with the makers of the program. The series was eventually canned, and although it was revived in 2017 its track record in solving cold cases is poor.

Debbie Malone, a Sydney-based medium who worked on four episodes in the first run of Sensing Murder, says the program ‘was really disappointing. They got police off-side and one of the original psychics declined to keep going with the show because of death threats she received.’

Malone claims to have worked ‘with the assistance of police’ on high-profile cases including the backpacker murders in Belangalo State Forest in New South Wales and the Claremont murders in Perth. She says that in her experience, Australian police will not admit publicly that they work with ‘mediums, psychics and the like’, but some do. She suspects that, despite extraordinary advances in forensic science, the general attitude towards psychic and spiritual inquiry has not evolved since the late 1970s, at least not within the police force. ‘The community has a broader appreciation of what we do. But I think the police worry that this kind of work shows them up in some way, that it gives people the idea that they don’t really know what they’re doing. I believe we can complement each other’s work.’

During the filming of the episode, Gayle was more taken with one of the psychics in the group who focused on her personally, predicting that she was going to be moving around quite a bit. ‘She told me I was going to travel … I was going to do a lot of travel. And I thought, far out, lady – you couldn’t have been more right. Ten years I’ve been travelling,’ she says with a laugh. A woman always on the move.