CHAPTER 20

THE HOUSE

TODAY, EASEY STREET is part of Melbourne’s hip, inner-city scene, its Smith Street end home to radio station PBS FM and three decommissioned trams that sit atop the roof of End to End’s three-storey building. Opposite, the Token Artists team, professional agents for a stable of performers that includes Wil Anderson, Judith Lucy, Charlie Pickering and Dave Hughes, is located in an old factory that’s been repainted many times over and now boasts their motto ‘Excellence through guesswork’. A ‘coffee alley’ services the vibrant hub of local businesses that still includes A1 Drive Shafts and Timber and Veneer Boards just around the corner.

Closer still to number 147, there’s a small children’s park, not far from the Gold Street Children’s Centre. But the house now sits on its own, its ‘twin’ at number 149 demolished long ago to make way for a car park for workers at the health clinic.

When Sue and Suzanne moved in, of course, it was a more rugged patch of town, a ‘suburb with a history’, where houses still nestled alongside low-rise factories, and the shadows cast by characters from Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory were still visible to many who had grown up or worked alongside them. Even students and young couples looking for cheap housing had yet to properly embrace Collingwood’s workers’ cottages and its rather scruffy outlook. Its small ‘shotgun shacks’, with slab-concrete backyards, were not as appealing as the wider streets and ‘happy hippy culture’ of Carlton and Fitzroy, which were also much closer for those studying or working at the University of Melbourne or RMIT.

For six years after the murders, 147 Easey Street stood empty, a lonely, silent contrast to the busy neighbourhood that started to blossom around it.

Unsurprisingly, given the enormous media coverage the double homicide had received and frequent references to the ongoing police inquiry within the local neighbourhood, the owner who had rented the property to the ‘two Sues’ found it impossible to find new tenants. Peter Demeris had bought the house as an investment property in 1976 for $19,500, and eventually sold it privately in 1983.

‘It was difficult to sell because of what had transpired. It was fresh in people’s minds,’ Demeris would say decades later, when the house was sold again. ‘It had that stigma to it, and obviously we sold it at a discounted figure.’

The new owner retained the house for nearly three decades. But they renovated it extensively, according to historian and neighbour Hugh Parry-Jones. ‘In 1988, ’89, the owner’s got tradies in and they ripped up every bit of timber in the place,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘The house now sits on concrete slabs in every room.’

Seeing that the old wood was going to be laid to waste, the resourceful local decided to stockpile it for future use. ‘So I piled all the skirting boards and the floor timber in the back alley that runs up to our house.’

Eventually, it was transformed into furniture and sold at the Fitzroy Craft Market. ‘A guy came and got it and that’s what he did with it, made furniture out of it. I told him its “history”, about what had happened in the house it had been in. But he was really just interested in the old wood.

‘I have a letter rack on my kitchen bench that he made. A bit strange, I guess. But there it is.’

It’s not the only unusual thing to have happened in and around the house. After the renovation, the workers’ cottage was rented by Dennis Gentry, who allowed a young documentary team to film inside the house as they interviewed him for an online documentary they posted in June 2011.

Part of the series Vice Cool City, the short, two-part video described the property as ‘home to one of the most infamous crimes in Australia’. In it, Gentry maintains he didn’t know about the murders when he moved in, eleven years earlier. ‘I suppose it would have helped to actually know upfront that it was the house, because it would have explained a lot of the strange looks and notes that we used to get in the letterbox – and people driving past and slowing down and taking photos,’ he told interviewer Natalie Harris. ‘I mean, things used to go bump in the night and scare the living shit out of me … [but] I think over time, I started relaxing into it and enjoying the house.’

He probably should have realised there was a reason ‘the rent was really good’ and ‘the owners were having problems getting tenants’. But he, his three dogs, his cat and his flightless cockatoo weathered the obsessive, sometimes creepy interest their home continued to generate.

One early-morning visitor was particularly vexing. ‘We were in bed and it’s about three o’clock in the morning and someone’s knocking on the front door,’ he said. ‘And there’s this guy and he’s pissed as a newt. I just told him to go away. ‘But he says, “No, no, no, I know who they are.” ‘And I say, “Go away or I’ll phone the police.” And he says, “I want you to ring the police.” I asked, “Why?” He responded, “Because I know who the murderer was.”‘

Dennis Gentry called police, who came to the house and told the man to leave. He did, only to return half an hour later. This went on three or four times before he eventually went away for good.

More intriguing is a note written in black texta that was left in letterboxes in Easey Street by an anonymous source. Senior criminologist Dean Wilson was a resident in the street at the time, lecturing at Monash University. Now a professor of criminology at the University of Sussex, he was interviewed by the team of young documentary-makers nearly a decade ago. ‘This strange note that was written in black texta pen claimed that the actual perpetrator of the crime had died in Larundel Psychiatric Hospital sometime in the early 1990s, before the hospital was closed down,’ he said on camera. ‘No way to really test the veracity of that claim, though I must say it was a rather uncomfortable feeling to get that note and to be sort of drawn into the drama.’

New Zealander Wilson came to know Collingwood well, especially Easey Street. ‘I lived in Easey Street twice during my years in Melbourne,’ he says. ‘Once in 1998–99 and then again from 2004 to 2010, when I owned a place. The note was dropped into the letterboxes when I was living at 100 Easey Street, so [that was] 2004–2005.’

Looking back on the letterdrop more than ten years later, he is now convinced there was credibility in what was being alleged. ‘At the time, [the author] just seemed like a nut job,’ he recalls. ‘But now I think about it, there was a plausibility to what was being said in the note … It’s someone who’s very passionate about the murders; it’s someone who feels a connection to the murderer. The thing that was pretty creepy at the time was that it felt it had been sent to me. But now, on reflection, I think it was a letter drop and I suspect someone in the street still has a copy.’

As it turns out, he is correct. One copy does still exist, saved by long-term Easey Street resident Andrew Muir. In rather shaky capitals, it reads: ‘Larundel Hospital protected Anthony Thomas Christie the Easey Street murderer for years. Sgnd, Peter Thomas Collier.’ In the top right-hand corner, Muir has written the date: ‘25-11-05’.

Close neighbour Susy Potter is another who recalls the note – vividly. She moved into Easey Street five years after the murders, yet ‘the street was still abuzz’. She pinned her copy to her message board and ‘it was there for years … The implication was, “I’m sitting on all this information and I’m going to blow it up – and if you want to help, contact me.”‘

That’s certainly what Peter Collier seems to have been trying to do, reaching out to Easey Street locals, as well as to the Armstrong family the year before. At the very least, he was dogged in promoting his theory about the case. If Collier was right and the killer was a patient at Larundel ‘for years’, it could help to explain why police failed to get a match with their DNA sample – and why no other murders in Australia seems to have mirrored what occurred that night in Easey Street on 10 January 1977.

Forty-two years after Sue and Suzanne’s deaths, their little house looks different. Like most in the street, it’s been extensively renovated, the third bedroom knocked out to enlarge the living room, and repainted inside and out so that it blends in with the rest of contemporary Collingwood, no longer the poor part of Melbourne’s inner-city suburbs. Real-estate prices have boomed in and around Easey Street over the last decade, and number 147 has changed hands twice since Peter Demeris sold it back in 1983.

Still, there’s an ominous sense about the property, especially for long-term neighbours – and there probably always will be. The murders might have taken place more than a generation ago, but criminologist Dean Wilson finds it hard to believe that anyone wants to live in the house, even today. ‘It’s an iconic property in Melbourne, that’s for sure. It definitely is … [but] I don’t know who would want to live in the house, I really don’t,’ he says, from halfway around the world. ‘Even when I lived in the street, I used to walk past it and be surprised there was anyone willing to be in it.’

Some of Melbourne’s real-estate agents have learnt the hard way the challenges of marketing the property. The Age reported in August 2011, ‘More than 100 people turned up for the sale [of the property] … many of whom proved more interested in visiting than buying the site of what is still regarded as one of the city’s most shocking crimes.’

Weeks before the auction, the real-estate agent’s marketing campaign had drawn fire from a victims’ support group, which claimed the sales pitch was disrespectful, taking particular issue with the wording of advertisements that referred to its place in Melbourne’s ‘folklore’. ‘Two girls were murdered there, a young boy lost his mother. [The families] still haven’t had any closure because no one has ever been found,’ said Bruce Kimball, from Support After Murder, who described the property’s marketing as ‘absolutely disgusting’.

Agents Nelson Alexander denied trying to capitalise on the property’s notoriety, but did change ‘folklore’ to ‘history’ after media coverage about it. ‘We were trying to fulfil disclosure obligations. We were trying to do it as discreetly as we could and be very, very sensitive to the history of the house,’ agent Bill Batchelor said. ‘Under consumer laws, agents must disclose that a murder or violent crime has occurred in a property when asked a direct question, but do not have to volunteer the information. But even with the crime more than three decades in the past, the property still had to be put on the market at a reduced price.’

Even so, the agents were happy with the result. The small Victorian terrace sold under the hammer for $571,000. ‘[The history] didn’t seem to make much of an impact at all today,’ said auctioneer Arch Staver. The new owner, a young woman, declined to be interviewed.

Four years later, the house came under the auctioneer’s hammer again, selling for $1.095 million. This time, the agents copped criticism from locals for not mentioning the property’s past. Certainly, the online copy steered clear from provocation:

Enjoying a revitalised identity with a contemporary makeover while retaining its period lustre, this classic brick Victorian boasting a fresh neutral colour palette presents an excellent opportunity to secure a slice of the increasingly popular and tightly held inner city. With high ceilings and gleaming polished concrete floors, this refurbished home comprises 2 generously proportioned bedrooms with pure wool carpets and BIRs, living room with adjacent dining serviced by a well-appointed kitchen, refreshed bathroom and large courtyard/garden with excellent scope to extend. Exceptionally positioned in Collingwood’s eclectic lifestyle precinct, the home is conveniently located to Victoria Park train station, buses, trams and the delights of Smith St.

Four decades later, it was a sensible approach. But long-time Easey Street residents still had qualms. ‘I don’t know what the right thing to do is here,’ one reflected, months after the house was sold. ‘But it just doesn’t seem right to ignore what happened to those two girls.’

Despite the changing Collingwood streetscape, for many older residents still living in Easey Street, the morning the bodies of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett were taken away from their rented property never seems that far away. Some memories can never be lost, even after four decades.

Andrew Muir has lived in the same house for forty-four years, and he remembers 13 January 1977 as the ‘very hot day’ that police descended on his street. ‘They were always up there, on the roof. They were always coming in and out. Every time I’d go out [on the street], they seemed to be coming and going – and for quite a while after.’

Like many of his neighbours, he was comfortable in the street before the murders: he felt at home in Collingwood, and saw its potential long before the first hint of a real-estate boom. He bought the property in Sackville Street that abutted his house, to create a unique property of considerable value, with two matching ‘Singapore cottages’, originally imported in the 1850s, bookending his original home, which sits in the middle of the two blocks.

‘I salvage them,’ he says. ‘I’m an amateur builder. I used to recycle furniture and building materials – it was just an extension of that, really.’

Andrew, who looks like a wiry Leo Sayer, has a unique perception of his precinct, considered ‘undesirable’ when he first moved in, though it did boast ‘reasonable blocks’. ‘It wasn’t desirable. I mean, I bought for the house and garden really.’ Like Hugh Parry-Jones, he has a sense of curiosity about the history and the planning of the suburb around him, especially the alleyways that twist through the streets. ‘I’m interested in the lane layouts, and I hate it when they get blocked off. Very annoying.’

He doesn’t think the street changed all that much in the aftermath of the murders. ‘It wasn’t all that friendly [before]. But then, I’m insulated here. I was never much a part of it, although if there was someone that I got on with, there would be a friendship while they were there. There’ve been a few over the years.’

There were also neighbours he did not get on with, and it’s fair to say that one or two regard him, not unkindly, as eccentric. Yet while those in the street did not have a collective theory about who the murderer was, Andrew Muir always had two suspects in mind. He believed he knew two men police should have spoken to at the time, one who lived quite close by. ‘Everyone has their theories. Mine was just, “How would it be if it was a guy who lived close to me at the time?” He was a very awkward piece of work,’ he says. ‘He’d scrounge some things from the empty old boot centre [at the end of the street], next to the health centre that was being developed at the time. Once, I was in his house – we must’ve been getting on at the time – and he showed me this set of Bentwood chairs that were all connected. I said, “Oh, you got them up there!” He said, “No, no, no!” He just lied. He always lied. Unusual. He used to put it on some of his tenants, he’d put the hard word on them.’

He knows this is drawing a long bow. Nevertheless, he mentioned it to the two female police officers who came to his house in January 2018 to conduct a DNA test. Forty-two years later, it seemed they were widening the scope of their inquiries – ten doors up the street.

‘A couple of “lady cops!”‘ Andrew says with a laugh. ‘Yes, I gave them DNA and spoke with them. I got the disc back. You may want to borrow it.’

The police made a copy of the recording of the DNA test being done and the conversation that took place in his kitchen, with his wife present, while it was happening. They mailed it to him about a week after their visit. Or so they thought. In fact, they mailed a disc to him – just not the right one. He claims they sent him a copy of another DNA test being done with a man who suggested they investigate Andrew as a possible ‘person of interest’. It made disconcerting, if compelling, listening.

‘I played it,’ he recalls. ‘They’d given me one of some other guy, who I’d actually done work for in my days of restoration. He was telling them about a guy who lived here and his house went from one street to the back and the next. That’s me! It’s just a hell of a coincidence.

‘Then I figured it out. They’d been to see him before me. Does that make sense? But it wasn’t that they came here because of what he said, and I don’t know if they even would’ve absorbed the fact that it was me.’

Andrew knows the name of the man on the recording and believes he knows where he lives in Melbourne. But he decided against tracking him down to discuss the matter. ‘I thought of ringing him, I would’ve tried to ring him, but he’s not in the phone book. So how’s that, eh?’

The police eventually realised they had mixed up the discs, and a detective dropped by to give him the correct recording and retrieve the one that had been mistakenly sent. ‘He came in, in a bit of a rush. I try to gabble on with my theory – you know, the guy next door – [but] he just swapped the discs over. He was in a big hurry, he didn’t want to stick around.’

Before the detective left, Andrew managed to regale him with his second theory. ‘At the time I thought, how would it be if it was this person? There was a guy living down in Hoddle Street in a nice old house. I had a friend who’d tried to buy the contents of his truck, it was like a caravan truck. Anyway, this guy apparently got into some awful trouble and ended up in Queensland in some sort of lunatic asylum. I used to think, well, he just lives down the road, he’s a bit funny … so I mentioned that. He was my number-one choice!’

Yet as the detective was heading out, he told the Muirs that the man they were still hunting for the Easey Street murders could well have died in the preceding forty years. ‘That’s what [he] said. Yes, he just said, “We think he might be.’” Dead.

Artist Steve Cox has an entirely different perspective of Easey Street. Born in London, he spent most of his childhood in Sussex before his family made the ‘fairly traumatic’ move to Tasmania in 1968. ‘For the first six months, I couldn’t understand what people were saying,’ Steve says with a laugh, in a café not far from bustling Richmond train station. But after a couple of years, the family moved to the mainland, and the Australian dialect began to make more sense.

The budding painter enrolled at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1978. ‘Which was the year I moved into Easey Street,’ he recalls. ‘I moved into this student house which was diagonally across the road from the “murder house”. I didn’t realise that was the street I was moving into, and then suddenly people were talking about it in the street – and kids would sort of run past [the] spooky house!’

Unlike several long-term residents, who maintain that the street didn’t change much after the women were killed, Steve remembers a lingering apprehension even twelve months later. ‘At the time, there was a milk bar on the corner of Hoddle and Easey Street. I think they were a European couple who ran it. I think they might have been Greek? They would talk about the murders a lot … They remembered it very, very dramatically and they would say how horrible it was.

‘People in the street were still shocked by it at the time. I think there was a sense of, it could happen to anyone, in anyone’s house. I think they were shocked by the seeming randomness of it and the fear that it could occur again in the street – which was unlikely. I would tell people, “That’s not going to happen again.” But there was a sense that they felt personally threatened and frightened still.’

The milk bar is not there anymore, nor the service station across Hoddle Street that the artist suggests provided another layer of intrigue. ‘It was a big all-night service station. Speed was sold there. Not to us – I wasn’t really aware of it, I was a bit naive as a twenty-year-old. We used to go across and play pool. We had no money, so I’d often go over with a bowl of cereal and eat my cereal in there at night. And people would come in all the time and do these little sorts of deals, and later on it dawned on me, they were selling speed or whatever! I think it was speed.’

Some of the locals he got to know talked about the ‘two Sues’ and knew them well enough to still openly grieve about what had happened to them, twelve months on. ‘The milk bar people certainly knew them, they’d come in all the time. I think we got the sense that they were quiet, friendly, happy-go-lucky girls. That was always my understanding, which made the crime so shocking to the people in the street. The sense was that they didn’t have any enemies and they were just going about their business. They were just ordinary girls – with a son, yeah.’

Living in his ramshackle student house for eighteen months, Steve Cox realised the murders of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett had a major impact on his art. It wasn’t the first time so dark a subject had compelled him; he had previously focused on the Moors murders in England. ‘I was interested in the abhorrent psychology; what makes somebody decide to become a murderer? Having done that, they can never again re-join society, having made that step. They are always outside of society, and humanity, really. And what does somebody do once they’ve taken that step?’

He has no special knowledge of the double homicide at 147 Easey Street. But he wonders if the murders were truly random or ‘part of a series of murders that someone was embarking on’. If so, he’s fascinated by the ‘for want of a better word, artistic’ nature of the crime scene. ‘In serial killings, there are always things that they do which are just pertinent to them, the arrangement of things or things they leave or things they take. And that was interesting to me. I didn’t even have any images of the actual house, but I had images of this series [of paintings] I was thinking about: rooms, spaces where something awful had happened. I was very interested in the idea of this badness that comes in and affects something drastically, totally, and then moves out and nobody knows what it is. Does that make sense?’

The paintings and pictures that Easey Street inspired became part of Steve’s student portfolio at VCA. But not much of it has survived the past four decades. ‘People say to me, “How can you do it? How can you make work out of such horrible crimes? You’re glorifying the crime.” I hope I’m not – I never want to glorify. But art has to deal with all areas of humanity, all areas. Good things, bad things.

‘If you think of Caravaggio or Francis Bacon or Goya – you know, we are human. I think art has to deal with all aspects of that. Mine just happens to look at the darker aspects often because I think it’s a very rich area of artistic investigation.’