CHAPTER 14

THE LETTERS

‘I THINK THAT, afterwards, the monster was genuinely shocked by what he had done and tried to reform. But there are some things so bad they simply cannot be forgiven or forgotten,’ Tom Prior wrote in They Trusted Men.

But who was this monster? Despite so many theories about who the killer may have been, police were no closer to making an arrest.

As the years passed, the original team of detectives moved on to other cases. New information about what had happened on that January night in 1977 was just not forthcoming from the public. Many following this case closely came to believe that the police had been too dogged in their pursuit of just one ‘person of interest’ – journalist John Grant – and now he and the other seven names on the original list of suspects had been cleared by DNA testing, they were forced to wait for new information to come to light in order to progress the investigation. The truth was as hard to accept as it was to comprehend: the high-profile double homicide that Peter Hiscock and his colleagues had been so sure would be easy to solve was becoming one of the Homicide Squad’s most perplexing cases.

Over the decades, too, it turned into a public relations dilemma for the Victorian police force. How often could they make appeals for information without the community asking why there were no serious developments in this notorious case? How much time and resources should be devoted to such an old murder?

Then came the letters.

The first of the six arrived, without fanfare, at the start of 2004.

Written in the old-fashioned script of a student schooled in the 1940s, full of loops and flourishes, it was dated 30 January and addressed to Bruce Currie, Suzanne Armstrong’s stepfather.

The first two sentences were startling. ‘Dear Bruce,’ it read. ‘It’s terribly sad that your wife and the two families were cheated because of the criminal negligence of Larundel Hospital. Then to add insult to injury, the Homicide Squad have known for four years and five months … that Anthony Thomas Christie could be the Easey Street killer (which he is) but chose pathetic sad games instead of a proper investigation.’

The letter came from a man named Peter Collier. Without revealing anything specific about his own mental health, he said he had been a patient at Larundel Psychiatric Hospital in Melbourne in the early months of 1977, when his friend ‘Jack’ Christie was admitted ‘in a coma’ after attempting suicide towards the end of January 1977.

In this first letter, which apparently followed a phone call to Currie, Collier outlined Christie’s background: the son of an SP bookie who died when he was young, he claimed he did ‘time’ in the old Turana Boys Home (now Youth Detention Centre) before getting married and divorced and having a son of his own. But he was a ‘top crim’, according to Collier, and a physically dominating man.

Over the next seven months, Peter Collier tried to convince Eileen and Bruce Currie of what he fervently believed: that his friend had murdered the two young women in Collingwood and then, a couple of weeks later, tried to kill himself because of the ‘terrible act he had committed’.

Throughout his next five letters, his handwriting growing increasingly erratic and his thoughts circuitous, Collier returned to this key allegation: Christie had been admitted to Larundel in a coma that lasted ten days, and three weeks after regaining consciousness told two different group therapy sessions that he liked to ‘carve up’ women after having sex with them.

‘Christie said in group therapy that after having sex with a woman (any woman) he felt like getting a carving knife and killing them: you can see what he was about,’ he said, in his second dispatch.

Christie didn’t know if the staff were “cat-mousing” him; he had to find out whether or not he’d said something incriminating about the murders, this was his way of finding out.

It was only a small group of seven or eight patients, or clients as they are now known. The therapist should have discussed what he said with the rest of the staff; the statement was bizarre, because women liked Christie and Christie liked women. He said once ‘I’ve had my share,’ a real understatement.

About a week later, Christie repeated the statement in group therapy, again making sure that he hadn’t said something incriminating coming out of the coma … it would have been about this time of the year 27 years ago.

This letter was dated 11 February 2004.

Collier did not say much about himself in this determined yet ragged correspondence, although he made clear he was in New South Wales in the early part of January 1977, before being admitted to Larundel, one of Victoria’s old ‘mental asylums’.

It probably wasn’t surprising that he tried to keep his background to himself. Larundel had been closed for several years by the time he contacted the Curries, but it had an infamous reputation, and it is clear he assumed they would have known of the facility when he told them about his time in North 5 Ward.

Opened in 1953, the hospital catered for those struggling with severe psychiatric illness. The initial intake of 387 patients expanded to 750 within two years, including 270 women. Peter Dupas, one of Victoria’s most heinous serial killers, spent two weeks as an inpatient there in 1968, when he was just fifteen. By the time its doors closed in 1999 to make way for community-based care, the institution was seen as a relic of a draconian era. The site is currently undergoing a $500 million renovation, with contemporary-style apartments being built to adjoin the original red-brick Building 1.

While Collier didn’t provide information about his time inside the facility, or even the length of his stay, he did share a curious detail at the end of some of his letters. After his signature, he often wrote the number sequence 28-12-31. Was this his birth date and, in his mind, a way of convincing the family that he was trying to right a wrong before he died, before it really was too late?

He certainly tried every tack to persuade them of his theory. By his third letter, written on 23 February 2004, he quickly came to the point, outlining what he believed happened at 147 Easey Street. The spelling mistakes are Colliers’ own.

This is only guesswork, but I knew Christie and it’s the only thing that makes any sense to me.

I don’t believe for a moment that Suzanne was raped, it’s possible but highly improbable: if your capable of butchering two women, your capable of making out that one of them was raped.

A far more likely scenario is that Suzanne and Christie were involved: in ‘pillow talk’, he’s told her Suzanne that he’s killed a couple of crims (he’d hinted at that to me). The women have decided to get rid of Christie and they have threatened him with the police. He’s lost control, their dead …

Consider this; Christie was thirty years old, probably nearing the height of his power as a tough, clever, resourceful crim and yet he destroys two women, nearly destroys himself; Why? For me, there is only one logical answer, he lost control; what would have made him lose control: his hatred for the Police.

I’ve raised some questions that can never be answered until we stand before the Lord at Judgement Day. I’m terribly sorry for any extra pain that I have caused you, but I’ve mixed with dangerous people, I know what they are capable of. Believe me, I’m sorry for your pain.

The unusual correspondent sent Eileen and Bruce Currie a fourth note in March 2004 to say that he was leaving his home in Bright, but offering to meet them before he left. They didn’t take up that suggestion, although they politely wrote back to him to decline. He wrote again, a month later.

Thank you for your letter, it was very gracious of you … I will carry some guilt to the grave that Christies wasn’t apprehended twenty seven years ago. When [he] made his statement in Group Therapy at Larundel, it was on the tip of my tongue to say ‘have you ever killed somebody Jack?’. The reason I didn’t speak up was that I wasn’t in good shape myself, however it was at that moment I knew he was a killer, sadly I had no idea who he had killed.

My failure however certainly doesn’t excuse the staff at Larundel who were criminally negligent in not working out that Christie was the Easey Street killer.

Throughout this correspondence, Peter Collier was obsessed with what he believed to be the authorities’ failure to properly comprehend the information to which they were privy – specifically, Jack Christie’s confessions in therapy that he liked ‘carving up women’ after having sex with them. In his mind, Larundel staff should have alerted detectives about what was said in the two group therapy sessions he cites.

A couple of months went by before he wrote to Bruce and Eileen Currie one more time. In this letter written in July 2004, he revealed – if unwittingly – an emotional volatility that underscored his relentless focus on the case. ‘You may not like the tone of this letter, but I’m tired of pussy-footing around,’ he wrote. ‘I’m an old man and could die any time. I’m surprised, no amazed really, that Greg didn’t want to see me. Sure, it would have been distressing to see a close friend of his mother’s killer, but so what? You can drown in self-pity you know.’

‘While I’m alive you’ve got a chance to get the truth out in the public domain,’ he continued.

You stand to gain by it as I have told you … I put it in writing to Homicide that I wouldn’t touch a cent of the $50,000 reward, it should go to the relatives of the victims … There is one way to get the truth out and that is to put it out on the Internet that Anthony Thomas Christie is the Easey Street killer and the evidence proving it. That would put some pressure on the creeps covering up the truth.

This was the last letter Collier sent the Curries for three years. No one knows why he stopped at that point in 2004, or why, on 10 January 2007 he sent them what turned out to be his final missive. Obviously, the date of his writing, exactly thirty years on from the murders, was not a coincidence. It’s clear, too, that the family hadn’t been far from his thoughts. Nor have they forgotten him; he said he had actually been to visit Suzanne’s youngest sister, Loretta.

Your probably aware that I was at Loretta’s place last Friday night. I told her that I was too old to go back to the ranges at Bright but I’m heading back there: I’m staying at the Star pub at the moment.

Last Monday, I went to the Police Complex at 412 St Kilda Rd and saw Det. Sgt Stuart Bateson and surprise, surprise! I liked him. We went over the case again. I told him that Christie had a son, and although I never met him I had seen his photo and there was no doubt who his father was … he [Christie’s son] was a street fighter, had worked out with [the] Supreme Court to get Christie exhumed ...

I told Bateson that Christie had told me that his son hated him so that could make it easier to get DNA from him. Bateson said he would keep an open mind on the subject with regards to deciding whether or not to approach Christie’s son.

Bateson also said that I must stop sending him abusive cards, I said fair enough … [he] shook hands a couple of times and treated me decently; he’s not a standover type but at times you can see that steel in him.

Gayle Armstrong says that when Peter Collier first contacted her mother and Bruce, they met with him to discuss his allegations and try to ascertain why he had chosen to reveal this information ‘out of the blue’. She also remembers how convincing some of what he put forward in the largely one-way correspondence seemed. ‘You read it as if it is really true,’ she muses. ‘And why would someone make all this up? He wrote like he did know [something].’

For some reason that he never explained, Collier had mentioned Terry Armstrong in one of his letters, writing: ‘Which begs the question, did Terence know that Christie was involved with his sister and was too scared to tell the police? Christie had charm, but he was bad news, dangerous and in those days his crim mates would have been scary as well. A crim at Pentridge said Jack Christie has got a name for getting things done.’

Gayle has no idea why he brought her brother into the equation. ‘Maybe he had done his homework on us [but] he didn’t know any of us.’

Any hope Eileen and Bruce had that Peter Collier could shed light on what had happened to Suzanne and her friend dissipated when they talked to detectives about his allegations. Despite Collier’s repeated assertion about his friend Jack Christie being the Easey Street killer, police dismissed the scenario. ‘They said he was a loony and had done it before to other people … so who knows?’ Gayle says. She recalls they were told that the 76-year-old was known to them before he started making this specific claim. ‘So no, not really any good.’ It must have been crushing that what appeared a promising new lead from a ‘fresh source’, the first in many years, and couched in such intimate detail, ended up going nowhere.

Even though Anthony ‘Jack’ Christie had died a decade before Collier wrote his letters, the family wanted to believe the information about Christie was real. They hoped that the monster they had chased through the shadows for so long could at last have a face. In the wake of this particular disappointment, they joined Support After Murder, a victims group that had been set up by a couple whose son had been stabbed to death.

At the time, co-founder Bruce Kimball said there was a need for a support group for ‘those touched by the murder of a loved one’. ‘We support each other, because we’ve been there too,’ he said. ‘When you talk to Eileen, it’s like talking to all the other mothers whose children have been murdered; they share a similar pain. For Eileen, she needs closure by knowing who killed her daughter.’

It’s not hard to imagine why Eileen pinned hope on the content of a stranger’s letters. Much of what the former psych-hospital resident suggested seemed credible. The postal address he used throughout this correspondence – Bright Post Office, in north-eastern Victoria – is genuine.

And locals do remember him. According to one, who does not wish to be named, Collier ‘lived in just a bark or a tin hut somewhere in the bush out there’ and ‘always seemed a little bit strange’. When he was in town, he would spend time in the pub as well as the post office, and ‘he always talked about Bateson, Stuart Bateson’. ‘Does that ring a bell?’ the local asks.

It does, of course: Detective Bateson had worked on the cold case as a member of the Homicide Squad. He is now an assistant commissioner with Victoria Police. Collier never explained to his Bright acquaintance why he was mentioning the detective, or what it was about. ‘Nope, he didn’t tell me much more. But he was always talking about him.’

‘He used to come in, and drift in and out,’ this Bright local confides. ‘He’d have to be in his eighties now, yeah, for sure, and the last time I saw him, he didn’t look so good.’ That was at least five years ago, this local says, and he doubts Collier is still alive.

The basic facts that Peter Collier sets out about his time at Larundel Psychiatric Hospital are harder to determine, almost lost in history’s bureaucratic vault. The facility closed twenty-six years ago, and records listing admissions and discharges are no longer publicly accessible. But the psychiatrist Collier named, in his old-fashioned script, in that first letter to the Curries, did work at the old hospital. He was also director of clinical services at another hospital, part of Victoria’s Office of Psychiatric Services.

Of course, it’s unclear how much so senior a psychiatrist would have had to do with either Jack Christie or Peter Collier. Similarly, precisely why the men had been admitted to the facility, how long they stayed, and if they were treated on a long-term, outpatient basis after they returned to the community cannot be determined. But I understand that detectives never contacted the psychiatrist about any of his previous patients at Larundel.

Should doctors at Larundel have contacted police directly if these concerns about Christie came to their attention? Lester Walton, one of Victoria’s most respected criminal psychologists, says his professional colleagues have an ‘overriding duty’ to report anyone they believe has committed a crime. ‘You can be sued if you don’t respond accurately,’ he explains in the mid-city Melbourne office he has worked in for decades.

Given this double homicide was so prominently covered in the media at the time, staff would have been aware of the case. ‘The fact that it was topical may well have been the reason it was in his delusions … He’s clearly become obsessed by it. But that’s not to say it’s untrue. It could be the opposite, in fact … [We] can assume he was psychotic or very seriously depressed and so open to this story. So it could be his fantasy.’

Walton explains that Larundel was part of Victoria’s ‘psychopolis’, three psychiatric hospitals that admitted patients on a lower threshold than that required for admission today. Nevertheless, they had serious illnesses that couldn’t be treated in the community.

But the likelihood, he thinks, ‘of someone doing something like that and not being picked up’ by DNA testing is ‘minimal’. For this reason, Lester Walton is not convinced that a serial killer was involved in the Easey Street killings. ‘But it’s a very unusual crime. Most murders occur “in house” and are solved quickly.’ In other words, most victims know their murderers.

Peter Collier has not contacted anyone attached to the case for more than a decade now. Nor has he gone public again – as he did once, in 2005, with rather mysterious flourish. If the ‘28-12-31’ he included in his letters was indeed his birthdate, he would be eighty-seven now. If he is alive, perhaps this book will draw him out of hiding.