CHAPTER 17

THE REWARD

VICTORIA POLICE COMMANDER Doug Fryer turned to the cameras and microphones. ‘Put yourself in the position of these families – imagine the grief you would feel never knowing. Do the right thing and help us bring the person to justice.’

Not long before Ron Iddles retired, Victoria Police took a major step. In a bid to generate new leads for their reinvigorated cold case team, eight rewards of $1 million each were announced.

They related to eight suspicious deaths and missing persons cases dating back to 1985. The cases included a woman killed while sunbathing at Rye, a woman strangled in her home at West Geelong, a woman found dead after taking a taxi home from a nightclub in Ballarat and a man shot with a high-powered hunting rifle in Bendigo.

All eight matters had ‘been before the coroner, and our avenues of inquiry with the investigations have come to a stop’, Victoria Police Commander Doug Fryer noted. Victoria Police were hopeful that the rewards would generate crucial information to help resolve the matters. ‘There are people of interest in many of these investigations but we’re asking the community and the public for assistance,’ he told the media. ‘We know there are people out there in each one of these eight cases who can come forward and provide that crucial piece of the puzzle to solve these crimes.’

Families of those murdered individuals spoke out publicly in support of the initiative. A woman named Donna, the daughter of Debbie Bunworth, who disappeared from Newport train station in September 1985 and was assumed to have met with foul play, said her family had lived for thirty-two years with the ‘sadness of not knowing where she is or who is responsible for her disappearance’.

This $8 million reward bonanza made international headlines. It also refocused community attention on old murders not necessarily in the category of ‘Victoria’s most notorious’, and so rarely in the news.

But offering rewards for the solving of serious crimes can be a slippery slope. Months earlier, police had made clear that the rewards system was being overhauled, after former police commissioner Ken Lay described the system as ‘unnecessarily complicated’. Now, rewards were going to be based on the maximum penalty that could be handed down by the courts for the crime, with six levels within the new system. Level one included a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, and so came with a $1 million reward.

The approach, hailed by many families of victims in cold cases, led to national debate about the value of rewards generally. Do they elicit genuinely useful information? Or are they little more than an old-fashioned publicity stunt, a low-resource way for police to show they are doing their job, but offering little more besides?

A New South Wales law firm, Sydney Criminal Lawyers, argued that such rewards are ‘ineffective’ in solving crimes. Principal lawyer Ugur Nedim wrote that in England figures show that fewer than 2 per cent of people eligible for a reward claim it, and, locally, Crime Stoppers Australia estimates that only 6 per cent of its callers end up claiming a reward. Clearly it is not a key factor in people’s decisions to come forward with information.

In fact, rewards are rarely paid out. None of the $14 million Victorian Police had earlier offered for information relating to forty-three different crimes has left police coffers. A 2009 investigation by ABC’s Lateline found that over a ten-year period only two of seventy claims for rewards were ever paid. The first led to the arrest and conviction of notorious backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, and the second led to the arrest of Michael Gyder, who was convicted of killing nine-year-old Samantha Knight.

The main purpose of a reward, according to Nedim, is to offer ‘comfort and hope to families of those who have been missing for years’, showing that ‘the community cares about their predicament’.

Ron Iddles would no doubt disagree with any suggestion that police lack integrity in terms of paying out rewards when solid information has led to arrests and convictions. But he is only too aware that this kind of incentive has not had the impact hoped for. ‘In the past thirty or forty years, I think they’ve only paid out on two or three,’ he muses.

It’s not only Australian authorities wrestling with the legal and moral conundrum of whether to offer a public inducement to help solve crimes. In the United Kingdom, rewards are widely used, and linked to another contentious tactic authorities employ to stir compassion and engagement: police regularly use graphic images and interviews with desperate relatives to galvanise witnesses. ‘The reason behind putting up the sum of money is straightforward – to create greater media opportunities to glean vital information and help solve crimes,’ Nick Howe, former chief superintendent with Staffordshire Police and a criminologist at the University of Derby, told BBC News reporter Emma Hallett. ‘In cases funded by the police – and therefore the taxpayer – cash rewards are more likely to be offered for “heinous types of crime” … [cases] which cause moral outrage … murder, elderly people that have been severely battered … the ones that appeal to human sympathy and emotion.

‘What the police don’t want to do is contaminate evidence and the integrity of the investigation,’ Howe said. ‘If the person who is providing the information is actually a witness in the case, then the defence will, quite rightly, suggest … the evidence has been tainted by the inducement of payment … [Yet] if information can fast-track inquiries – bearing in mind most major inquiries/murder inquiries are very expensive … I think you can argue it is good use of public money.’

Tim Passmore, police and crime commissioner in Suffolk, said there were ‘few occasions’ when offering a reward was the best way to solve a case. ‘It would be very sad if a system were to evolve where people expected to be paid for providing evidence,’ he told Hallett.

This debate brings up a vexed issue: what is the media’s role and responsibilities in terms of cold-case inquiries? Obviously it’s vital in getting the message out to the community when a reward is announced, and refreshing the public on details of a case. But how much follow-up should the media give these cases, as police sift through new information that comes in to them? How much can they give?

When it comes to cold cases, the relationship between police and the media seems to depend less on the detectives, who often want to engage with journalists, than on the attitudes of their superiors – a prevailing culture within police ranks about how ‘useful’ reporters can be to them as information gatherers. Victoria Police appear to take the stance that most reporters are of little use beyond the initial media call announcing a reward for the most recently ‘exhumed’ cold case. They hold their cards extremely close in terms of discussing active investigations with the media. Gone are the days a veteran reporter would be allowed to read through a police murder file, at police headquarters, as veteran crime writer Tom Prior and his colleague did more than two decades ago.

Unsurprisingly, Ron Iddles holds a different view. He sees strong working relationships with journalists as a vital tool in police work, and has praised the role of the media in publicising unsolved murders and other cold cases. ‘The media has a big part to play in helping police get information to solve crimes,’ he said before his retirement. ‘Former Homicide Squad chief Paul Delianis said to me in 1980, “as a Homicide Squad investigator, Ron, you need the media and the media need you.” That still holds true today.’

He cited one case as proof of this point. One of the early successes of Victoria’s original cold case unit came from a tip following a story in the Herald Sun newspaper, which mentioned the unsolved rape and murder of six-year-old Bonny Clarke in 1982. A childhood friend of Clarke’s read the article and revealed that she had always suspected a man who had been a boarder at the Clarke home, because he acted ‘in a weird sexual way’. ‘It turned out the lodger was the murderer and he was charged and convicted in 2004, after an elaborate undercover sting organised by Senior Sargeant Iddles and Homicide detective Tim Day. That sting led to a secretly taped confession … that he did it.’ Iddles is convinced this would not have happened without that story being written.

In the public flurry that followed the eight cold cases suddenly given million-dollar ‘bounties’ – and two more that followed in 2016 – it was difficult to believe the horrific double homicide in Easey Street did not warrant this attention. Was it just too old to resolve? Or were authorities waiting for something?

With the forty-year anniversary of the murders looming, some veteran crime journalists – those who remembered the original reports of what had happened in the little house – wondered if it would be the next case to have a public reward posted.

They were right.

On 15 January 2017 – almost forty years to the day that Sue Bartlett’s and Suzanne Armstrong’s bodies were found in their Collingwood cottage – Homicide chief Mick Hughes, with Gayle Armstrong by his side, put the $1 million reward on the table.

The Easey Street case was hard to read about, even for journalists who had long been following it. So for a family member, attending the media conference to launch the reward must have been nigh on impossible to endure.

Nevertheless, Gayle Armstrong made the most of her time with the senior Homicide detective. Brave, heartbroken, determined, she called once more for the public’s help in solving her sister’s murder, so many years after that first appeal in 1977.

This time, she did not hold back. ‘I hate to say it, but here’s a million dollars,’ she said, obviously well beyond frustrated. ‘You can live the rest of your life in comfort – just say something!’

Journalists gathered for that press call at police headquarters were left with no illusions about how her family had been treated in January 1977. ‘We weren’t even interviewed,’ she said in her usual clipped manner. ‘We had to make an appointment to go down to the police station to speak to the police, which was really bad.’

This forced Homicide detective Mick Hughes to admit that the initial inquiry had been fraught, acknowledging it was now standard practice to interview the families of murder victims. But, despite ‘the mistakes those guys may have made in the early days, I know all they want is this investigation to be solved, for the sake of both families’. He told reporters he did not believe that the perpetrator of so brutal a crime could go unnoticed. The killer, now believed to be in his sixties or seventies, was unlikely to have lived crime-free since 1977. ‘Someone will know something about his behaviour or conduct that can point us to him.’

Police had a DNA profile of the murderer, and a list of 131 ‘persons of interest’. Forty-one of those had since died. ‘We’ve made substantial inroads to the remainder of the people on those lists,’ he noted.

But the original eight key suspects had been ruled out after DNA testing. Detectives currently working the case had no fresh leads. Perhaps because of this, Hughes called on anyone who had been questioned at the time of the first investigation to get in touch with them again now, via Crime Stoppers Victoria. ‘If you’re going to offer your DNA, we’ll certainly do that. The only person who’s got anything to hide here is the offender.’

The cost of retelling this story was evident when Gayle was asked by a reporter what it meant to her that police were still actively searching for her sister’s killer. ‘Everything, everything,’ she said, trying not to break down. ‘This reward should have been offered thirty-nine years ago and [the murders would] be solved and we wouldn’t be doing all this now. With the DNA, even if this person is dead, you can now go to family members and find out that way if it was that person.’ It was a plea from the heart.

News of the million-dollar reward had been broken by the Herald Sun newspaper hours before the media conference. According to its report, the existence of DNA left at the scene and advancements in forensic testing were critical factors in relaunching this probe. ‘We have good DNA evidence and we obviously believe that’s the key to the investigation,’ Detective Inspector Hughes said. ‘We haven’t got a match. If we did, I’d be knocking on someone’s door and making an arrest.’

He said the brutality of the murders had deeply affected the police investigating the case, not to mention the women’s families. ‘Every Homicide investigator who has worked on this case has been moved by the ferociousness of the attacks and wants it solved.’ While the women’s deaths had been linked to other murders over the years, no conclusive connection had ever been established. Depressingly, this echoed the fact that while there were several knives related to the case in police exhibit boxes, detectives were not convinced that any of them were the actual murder weapon.

Gayle’s courage during this media launch did not waver. She told journalists that since her sister and her friend had died, she found watching the news too hard because it was ‘all concerning people like me’. Yet, somehow, she still had faith in the police. ‘I hear the miracles that they do and I think Suzanne will be next. They will do it, they will find this person.’