CHAPTER 13

THE BOOK

AS THE DECADES passed, the deaths of Susan Armstrong and Sue Bartlett were never far from the minds of the detectives who first walked into their home on 13 January 1977, or for those in the local community in and around Collingwood. But Doris Stokes’ grandiose performance was the last time the Easey Street murders made the front page of a newspaper or led a radio or television news bulletin in Australia. ‘Milestone’ dates – five years, ten, then fifteen since the women’s deaths – slipped by relatively unnoticed, given there was little more for the media to do than recap well-worn details.

It wasn’t until the year before the twentieth ‘anniversary’ of the double homicide that a senior crime reporter took it up again.

Tom Prior had been a journalist with Melbourne’s Sun newspaper for twenty-eight years, twenty of them as a crime reporter, and had worked at Truth before that.

‘Like some of the police involved,’ he wrote, ‘I developed an anger, a hatred and contempt for the killer.’ He also believed ‘the Easey Street murder investigation was handicapped from the start’ because some influential police started it with pre-conceived ideas. They blamed the victims. ‘Crime reporters, “in the pockets” of police as some were at one stage or another, went along with the charade and a monster got away with a shocking crime,’ he wrote.

He began to reinvestigate the case, speaking to friends and family of the women, and eventually wrote a book about it.

Prior was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer as his work, They Trusted Men, took shape. Published in 1996, the book attracted attention but unfortunately, as driven as he was to solve the double homicide, the ex-boxer ended up reducing the women to stereotypes. This might have been due to the pace at which he was working, as a result of ill health. But he also seemed to struggle with his own sense of what independent women could and couldn’t do without coming to grief. His perspective seemed at odds with that of the changing era.

In his book, Prior often refers to how the two women looked and how many boyfriends they had; early on, describing how Suzanne moved through various jobs after she left school, he wrote: ‘As soon as she was promoted, it seemed to her puzzled mother, she moved on – with David, Greg, Max, Rob ...’ This list went on. Later, he quoted a male friend as saying Sue was ‘a large, pleasant woman – did you know that they were known as “Big Sue” and “Little Sue” … it started when they were at school in Benalla.’

For all the good journalistic ‘digging’ he did, the book was also confusing: beyond the immediate Armstrong and Bartlett families, the names of all the people involved in the case, most of whom Tom Prior interviewed, were changed for legal reasons. It didn’t help that the pseudonyms he chose sounded like characters in daytime soap operas.

To research the case, Prior and Owen McKenna, the colleague who worked with him on the project, were granted unprecedented access to the case files at police headquarters. At the time, this wasn’t surprising. Both men were veteran crime reporters and so known to the Homicide Squad. Like Prior, McKenna had worked at Truth. ‘Owen was a drinker, a gambler, a hard-worker, a no-nonsense reporter … [we] disagreed about many things – but agreed on the important ones … the [Easey Street] investigation could have been handled better by some police and most of the news media.’

Suzanne Armstrong’s mother and a good friend also allowed him to quote from several deeply personal letters that Suzanne had written, some from when she was travelling, before settling in Naxos, leading up to the birth of her son. Gayle Armstrong permitted him to use some correspondence she and her sister had shared. She regrets having done so now.

Prior also tracked down the father of Suzanne’s child, Manolis Margaritis, in Greece, and helped him connect with Greg Armstrong in Melbourne. To this day, he remains the only journalist Greg has spoken to at length. ‘The worst thing is not to know who did it,’ Suzanne’s son told the veteran crime reporter two decades ago. ‘There is nothing I can do, but it would be different if I knew. For one thing, it would be something big I wouldn’t have to think about every day. The best thing about my father is he’s a top bloke, but it would be good even if he wasn’t, if he was ordinary. From all accounts, the last thing my mother could be described as was “ordinary”. I miss her. I wish I could meet my mother again, even just once.’

The poignancy of Greg’s remark was immediately overshadowed by the author’s next sentence: ‘Too many men had experience of Suzanne Armstrong, but few had anything to say against her.’

Despite his censorious descriptions of both women’s sexual activity throughout the book, Tom Prior was a determined and diligent reporter as he dug back into the case, looking at as many angles as he could, physically as well as intellectually. He even made an appointment to inspect 147 Easey Street – where he reached a surprising conclusion.

In 1995, the little Victorian terrace was pretty much as it had been in 1977, but the adjoining house next door, where Ilona Stevens and Janet Powell had lived, had been knocked down. Intriguingly, Prior came away thinking that it would have been hard for Ilona and Janet – and their overnight guest, John Grant – to have heard what was going on next door, even though they shared a common wall. ‘Standing in a parking area, which was the site of 149, I could hardly hear a thing when [they] turned up the volume as loud as it could go in 147,’ he wrote. ‘The thin brick wall of the old building was near perfect insulation; most of the sound which could be heard coming from the backyard of the house, not through the wall.’

For good measure, he also noted that ‘light definitely came through the glass above the front door into the passage however, and I found it hard to understand how Ridge and Hamilton [pseudonyms] could have failed to see Bartlett’s body. Ridge said he didn’t look, and Hamilton said he was drunk. Both then were lucky.’

Legally constrained as he was, Prior alluded to who he believed was the killer, but only after stating that he thought no one would be charged with the crime. ‘No, I do not think the Easey Street murders will ever be solved, certainly not to a jury’s satisfaction,’ he wrote.

Barring confessions – and if there was to be a serious one, surely it would have been heard before now – there is little chance of charges being laid. If there were an accessory, he or she was very much after the event and the event, the murders, [was] committed by a man.

Semen was found in the blood under Suzanne Armstrong’s body … but someone stabbed the “two Sues” 84 [sic] times; who was it? The longer I investigated the murders, studied the transcripts of my interviews and at least early on, POLICE records – the more I honed in on one man. Twenty years later, I am at least three-quarters convinced, he did it!

This ‘person of interest’ knew Suzanne, he maintained, and her father had even expressed ‘strong suspicions about him’ before he died. But Prior alleged this man was ‘not really investigated because he was “trusted” as a former associate of some police’:

He had an association with Suzanne Armstrong, but claimed he spurned her. He had been to 147 Easey Street and knew the location of the various rooms. He had a violent temper. His marriage had broken down, and a number of previous sexual associations had failed … He had assaulted women before. He was known to be drinking at the time of the murders, but had not drunk alcohol for a long time after them. He had given contradictory accounts of his movements during the murder week. And he was not robustly investigated.

What Tom Prior does not reveal in this second-last chapter is that he had interviewed the man he put forward as ‘worth another look’ and come away from the encounter quite shaken.

Prior went as close as he could in They Trusted Men to revealing this man’s identity, but the title of ‘labourer’ didn’t tell the whole story. His main suspect was a former police officer kicked off the force a couple of years before the murders after sexually harassing women he stopped for traffic infringements. He was known to have worked on at least one of the active construction sites close to Easey Street around the time of the killings, and some police believe he had met Suzanne Armstrong. They also considered him a possible suspect.

Publisher Michael Wilkinson recalls the ailing journalist meeting his ‘prime suspect’ towards the end of the project. He says Prior told him he played this person of interest a tape recording that took him by surprise, and it elicited quite an aggressive response. ‘Tom met that cop and played him a tape,’ Wilkinson says. ‘I’m not sure what was on it, I don’t know. But when asked about killing the girls, the cop told him, “Not saying I did or I didn’t, but you can’t prove anything.”‘

‘Tom seemed to be very rattled by the meeting. Very,’ the publisher recalls. ‘But he was also quite addled himself at the end of doing that book, due to the chemotherapy he was undergoing. It really knocked him around.’

Two years after They Trusted Men was published, DNA testing started being used in Australia. Eventually, the disgraced officer was cleared of involvement in the double homicide.

Following Tom Prior’s death, Andrew Rule, one of Australia’s best journalists working the crime beat, lauded ‘the old sleuth’s’ bravery in pursuing the case. ‘What Prior didn’t write, but later told this writer,’ Rule revealed, ‘was that while he was researching his book, a man telephoned his house at 2 am one morning and threatened his wife. The caller warned that Prior should “stop asking questions” and ended the conversation with “I know where you live.”‘ Rule reported that Prior thought someone in the force must have tipped off the former cop that he was asking about him. ‘He said he hoped nothing like that would interfere with the integrity of blood samples for DNA tests, which apparently cleared the former policeman along with the other seven suspects tested in 1998.’

Tom Prior’s book foreshadowed an awakening public fascination in cold cases, as well as tapping in to the very specific interest in the Easey Street tragedy. Perhaps more significantly, his investigation led to Greg Armstrong reuniting with his father.

But however unintentionally, it also tarnished the reputations of his mother and her best friend. Battling serious illness and racing to finish his work, it was as if he couldn’t quite grasp the character, let alone the vibrancy, of the two women whose murderer he was so intent on finding.