End of Innocence

Child Murders in the 1970s

In the 1970s there were several high-profile Australian murder cases where teenagers and offenders barely out of their teens murdered other children.

Nowadays the sight of children as young as six out and about alone, riding their bikes or playing with friends, is a rarity. It’s a much-debated issue whether today’s parents are breeding a generation of ‘cotton wool’ kids but it would be hard to find many mums or dads in suburbia who would let their young ones go out riding on their bikes without an adult or walk to the shops alone.

The victims of these crimes were no different to any other children of the 1970s. Their families probably never dreamed such evil could visit their lives. Their children were just doing what other Aussie kids of the 70s were doing – enjoying a carefree childhood.

These cases are reminders that danger can be lurking anywhere. In the 1970s few parents would have thought twice about letting their children move freely around their neighbourhoods. How can anyone predict such a terrible event like the murder of a child?

Edward and Audrey Thrussell had moved from England to Sydney and settled in North Ryde with their three daughters. They had come to Australia for a better life away from the bleak economic and social climate of 1970s Britain.

On 9 January 1978, 16-year-old Julie Ann Thrussell, their eldest daughter, set off from her Cressy Road home at 9.20 a.m. to buy a pair of jeans at Grace Bros department store.

The first-year apprentice chef used the public path that deviated through a nature reserve – a distance of around 200 metres – and led to a bus stop that would take her to the store. She was enjoying her job at the Sebel Town House in Elizabeth Bay and all the independence that came with earning her own money and learning new skills. Julie had even studied a cake-icing course at night school and was looking forward to a career in commercial kitchens.

Julie was due to go to work at 3.30 p.m. that day but the teen never made it to her shift. In fact, Julie never made it home that morning from the shops.

A man who was in the area visiting his in-laws that day found Julie’s body on fire in bushland. Their Higginbotham Road home was a few hundred metres from the bush track where he made the horrific discovery. Julie was only half a kilometre from home. Police believed her killer had hidden in bushland and hit the unsuspecting girl on the head with a rock. She had then been dragged off the path, raped, doused with petrol and burnt alive.

Mr Thrussell had to undergo the horrifying ordeal of identifying his daughter’s body. The following day, still no doubt in shock, Mr Thrussell gave a doorstep interview to newspapers, while neighbours and friends consoled Mrs Thrussell and the other daughters aged 15 and 12 inside the house.

‘What are we going to do about this maniac? I don’t think he is going to stop here,’ Mr Thrussell said to reporters. He appealed to the public for help in finding his eldest daughter’s killer.

Mr Thrussell was a salesman who had been working towards building the ‘Australian dream’ life for his family. ‘I thought the kids would have a good chance in Australia,’ Mr Thrussell said. However, the Thrussells had been jolted violently from their hopes of a safe, happy suburban life in Australia.

It was a devastatingly brutal crime and police had to work fast to find the killer before he struck again.

The path Julie took on her last moments of life ran alongside the Field of Mars Cemetery. Two days after her death, a 19-year-old gravedigger’s assistant was arrested for her rape and murder. Christopher Douglas Dennis, who didn’t live far from his victim, appeared in the Ryde Court of Petty Sessions in handcuffs and flanked by six detectives.

Dennis was remanded in custody but managed to escape authorities for a few hours on 23 March 1978, when he broke away from a prison warder while being escorted to a medical examination in Sydney’s CBD. Police scoured trains and all seven theatres of the Hoyts Cinema before Dennis was found on a bus in William Street, a main CBD thoroughfare. The then New South Wales state premier Neville Wran demanded an immediate report from corrective services about the incident.

Dennis was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Julie Thrussell.

In 1980, the Thrussells received $20 000 in criminal injury compensation from the NSW Government. It was the maximum sum payable at the time – $10 000 for each parent.

In 1992, Dennis’ appeal for release failed. Though there was evidence presented that he has undergone fairly successful rehabili­tation while in jail, the judge felt the bid for release was premature.

Two other migrant families also found themselves the victims of an unspeakably brutal crime in 1978.

When Julie Atanasov and Magda Trajkov, both eight, failed to return from a playdate at a friend’s house in the southern Sydney neighbourhood of Bexley, their parents spent a most distressing night searching for their little girls.

On Sunday, 12 November 1978, the girls had walked to the house of one of Magda’s friends. The house was in Oriental Street, a five-minute walk from the Trajkovs’ Harrow Road home.

But worse was to come for the families who had both left Yugoslavia for a brighter future in Australia.

The families had been friends for many years and the girls would spend a weekend at each other’s homes every few months. The Trajkovs had settled in Bexley and the Atanasovs lived in Yagoona, a southwest suburb of the city. Mr Atanasov had established a successful car trailer business in nearby Bankstown and he and wife Bozna also had a four-year-old son. Mrs Atanasov and her children had returned just days before from a six-week visit to Yugoslavia to visit friends and relatives.

At 3 p.m. the girls left their playdate and started their route back to Magda’s house. They stopped at the playground of the local primary school for a while.

A witness last saw the girls talking to a young man in the grounds of the school between 3.30 p.m. and 4 p.m. Then the girls vanished.

Police searched through the night for the girls. At 10 a.m. the following day, two Bankstown police officers found Julie and Magda in a nearby reserve. Sergeant John McInerney and Constable Ian Dawson heard the weak cries of a child and it led them to the devastating discovery of the friends who were both naked and lying on the bank of Bardwell Creek. The girls had been smashed on the back of their heads with a rock. Julie was dead from a fractured skull and Magda was barely clinging to life. It did not appear that the girls had been sexually assaulted. As she was taken to hospital, brave Magda was able to give police a thorough description of the man who had attacked them. They were now looking for a man around 18 years old with light ginger hair, a moustache and a light beard.

More than 100 police officers scoured the bush reserve and creek area. The next day detectives arrested and charged a 17-year-old Bexley man with Julie’s murder and the attempted murder of Magda.

The youth, whose identity was supressed, confessed to the crime and told detectives, ‘I took the girls into the bush and tried to kill them by hitting them over the head with a rock.’

The youth was concerned about his father and did not want him present at the police interview. However, the youth’s father came to see him in the police station and asked, ‘Did you do it, son?’

When his son replied, ‘Yes,’ the father asked, ‘How could you do such a terrible thing to those little girls?’

An 11-year-old girl came forward as a witness and said she had seen the girls holding hands and skipping in the Bexley school grounds on the afternoon of 12 November. The picture of childhood innocence was heartbreakingly sad because just moments later the girl said she saw a man pulling either Julie or Magda back towards the centre of the schoolyard with the other girl holding onto her friend’s hand. The witness had not said anything to anyone when she got home because she thought the young man might have been one of the girls’ brothers.

The crime struck a nerve with the community who were sickened by the attacks on the little girls. Crimes like these feed into the fears of every parent who, at the back of their mind, is terrified that harm will befall their child.

At the youth’s 26 February 1979 committal hearing, Constable Dawson told the court about the day he found the little girls. Dawson said he had entered the bushland near the creek reserve and seen ‘the face of a child looking at me. It was covered in dry blood.’ He also detailed how he saw the body of a second girl, with a large pool of blood beneath her head.

Magda, the survivor of the horrific attacks, did not appear in court to give evidence because she was still too unwell. Her father presented the court with a doctor’s certificate to excuse his daughter from the court proceeding.

Police surrounded the children’s court building in Glebe during the hearing because around 30 people were protesting with placards and calling for the return of the death penalty.

The accused killer was committed to stand trial for murder and attempted murder. The teenager pleaded guilty to both charges and was sentenced to two life sentences.

Justice David Yeldham said, ‘No words of mine could properly describe the enormity of the crime.’

The year before, Justice Yeldham had also handed down two life sentences to another teen killer.

On 30 March 1978, an 18-year-old man gripped the dock railings and closed his eyes as Justice Yeldham told the former shop worker that he would spend the remainder of his days in prison.

In 1976, the then-16-year-old had sexually assaulted and murdered 12-year-old Sydney boy Garry Barkemeyer. Months later the teen, now 17, struck again and stabbed 12-year-old Wayne Nixon to death after sexually assaulting the boy as well. He was considered extremely dangerous by the judge and the doctors who gave evidence for the court case.

On a Friday afternoon, 9 July 1976, the offender (who cannot be named for legal reasons) lured Garry Barkemeyer into a hidden part of Glebe’s Jubilee Park with the promise of a few dollars to help him stack boxes. Garry had been with an eight-year-old male friend and the two boys followed the teen’s instructions and waited for him at some sheds under the railway line, which ran through the large park. The two playmates had been trying out a yo-yo Garry had just bought with his pocket money when they encountered the older boy, who was tall and had shoulder-length brown hair. The teen arrived 30 minutes later and told the younger boy to wait while he and Garry stacked the boxes. The boy later told police the teen had told him he was too young to help.

Garry was led away along a secluded path and murdered by the teen, who struck the boy on the head with a rock. He came back and told the younger lad that Garry had already left.

Garry’s mother Hildegard reported her son missing to police on Sunday afternoon. Mrs Barkemeyer was living at a women’s refuge in Glebe with Garry and her five-year-old daughter Fiona.

It wasn’t until the younger boy’s mother heard that Garry had not gone to school on the following Monday that police had any real leads on his whereabouts. Garry’s playmate led police to the area where he had last seen his friend. Police made the tragic discovery of little Garry’s body in the bushes near the railway line. The boy had died from massive head injuries and his clothes were in disarray, which led detectives to believe there was a sexual motive to the crime.

On 30 January 1977, Wayne Nixon was enjoying his last days of summer before he was to start high school. He was riding his new bike, to which he had strapped a transistor radio, and was relishing the freedom that comes with having a set of wheels and not a care in the world. He had set off from his Kingston Road home in the inner-city suburb of Camperdown to visit a friend who wasn’t home.

A witness saw Wayne being given a ‘double’ on a bike by a youth fitting the teen killer’s description, along nearby Cardigan Road. It was not certain whether it was Wayne’s bike he was on but it’s unlikely that the youngster would have left his new transport that he had been so excited about receiving for his birthday in the September of 1976. This was the last time Wayne was seen alive.

Wayne’s partially clothed body was found dumped in thick bush against a fence in Jubilee Park, Glebe, in the same area where Garry Barkemeyer had been murdered. Wayne had been sexually assaulted and stabbed in the chest and thigh. Wayne had several cuts on his hands that indicated he had bravely tried to fight off his killer.

The park was around 2.5 kilometres away from where he had last been sighted. Wayne’s mother Hazel told reporters that it was unlikely her son had gone by himself to Jubilee Park.

‘He used to go there with his friends but after the Barkemeyer murder I told him to never go there on his own,’ Mrs Nixon told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Wayne’s stepbrother Robert, 32, thought his little brother must have trusted whoever killed him.

‘He knew the facts of life. I told him what a homosexual was. He was not the sort of fellow to go off with anyone,’ Robert said. ‘To have gone off with this youth he must have known him for a period of time somewhere.’

Two days after his death, Wayne’s bicycle was found in the Paramatta River, behind a mental hospital a few kilometres from where his body was found. Police interviewed staff and patients of the hospital, hoping for more clues to the identity of the child’s killer.

A teenage girl gave information to police about the identity of the teen seen ‘doubling’ with Wayne just prior to his death. The witness selected the accused from a line-up and when told this fact by police, he reportedly broke down and confessed.

‘Yes, it was me on the bike and I killed him,’ the teen told detectives. ‘I stabbed him and that is all there is to it. I told lies because I never thought I would get caught,’ he was alleged to have said.

At a June 1977 court hearing, Wayne’s 16-year-old sister Nina gave evidence that she had seen the accused killer a few times before. Miss Nixon told a police prosecutor that she was with Wayne in the inner-west suburb Enmore in late 1976 when she saw the accused outside a hotel. She said the young man had said ‘hi’ and that ‘Wayne said “I know him” and then said “hello”. The other boy nodded as if to say “hello”.’

A black-and-white mug shot of the murderer shows a very young-looking 17-year-old staring at the camera. The term ‘baby-faced’ would not be incorrect to describe the youth.

The young killer was ordered to undergo intensive treatment while in jail.

Earlier in the decade, NSW was shocked by a murder that was committed by two girls. Dubbed the ‘bikini cord murder’ and the ‘babysitters murder’ by newspapers, the murder of three-year-old Daniel Hay defied the belief of most people’s imaginations.

On 19 December 1971, a 14-year-old girl and her 18-year-old friend Leslie Raymond were babysitting at the home of the younger girl’s sister in Wyoming, near Gosford. The girls had four children in their charge that night: the younger girl’s sister’s children, aged three and four, and her sister’s friend’s children, little Daniel and his four-year-old sister. The two couples had left the children with the teenage girls while they went to a Christmas party nearby.

Leslie Raymond was not known to the sister of the 14-year-old but the adults had no reason not to trust the pair with babysitting the children.

During the night, the girls went into the room where three-year-old Daniel was sleeping and tied a cord from a bikini around his neck and each pulled an end. The little boy was strangled to death. As if that was not horrific enough, the girls then hit him on the head with a saucepan, which fractured his tiny skull, held a pillow over his face and stabbed him in the stomach to make sure he was dead.

Afterwards, the girls tried to cover up their murderous deed by slitting a flywire screen on the window of the bedroom to give the impression that an intruder had killed the little boy.

At 10.25 p.m. the younger babysitter went to a neighbour and told her that someone had broken into the house and killed the three-year-old boy. But the girls’ story fell apart and the older girl broke down and confessed, saying that it had been her young companion’s idea to commit the murder.

It was alleged in court that in her record of interview, Raymond said the girls had been watching television when her 14-year-old friend said she wanted ‘to kill Danny’.

‘I was not really keen at first but I guess she talked me into it,’ Raymond said.

Raymond allegedly told police during the interview that she had tried to stab the boy with a knife from the kitchen.

The 14-year-old girl told police that it was Raymond who hit little Danny on the head with the saucepan and that she held his nose while the older girl tried to strangle him again.

It would have been hard for the police to hide their shock.

The girls each stood trial for the murder and both pleaded not guilty.

A psychiatrist employed to assess the 14-year-old found that she appeared to have a personality disorder but not a mental illness. He advised that the girl would need psychiatric care for many years.

Their trial judge, Justice Begg, was explicit in his words about the crime during the May 1972 trial. When sentencing the 14-year-old to life imprisonment, Justice Begg said the girl had taken part in a ‘foul and monstrous crime on an innocent and defenceless victim’.

Raymond was also sentenced to life.

The girls won appeals against their sentences and a retrial began in December 1972. Again, both girls were found guilty of murder. The newspapers also included the detail that it was an all-male jury this time.

The judge for their retrial, Justice McClemens, said the case was ‘beyond experience’ and one that could never be believed possible.

‘I have never known a case like it in 31 years on the bench,’ Justice McClemens said.

He also said that despite Raymond being four years older than her accomplice, he felt the younger girl had heavily influenced her.

It was reported that the younger girl had tried to take her own life the day after her sentencing.

In the days before NSW’s Children’s (Criminal Proceedings) Act 1987, juvenile offenders were named and their photographs printed in the press. Photos of the ‘bikini cord murder’ girls were used prominently at the time. When the youngest girl was found guilty, her face was plastered on the front page of newspapers. The photo of an angelic-looking, smiling blonde stared out from the cover of a daily tabloid.

On 28 December 1974, it was reported that the younger girl, now 17, was on the run from the Parramatta Girls’ Training Centre. The girl and four other inmates had climbed a three-metre-high wall in the exercise yard the day before. A spokesman for the Department of Youth and Community Services told the media the girl had been a model prisoner and that it was a shame that she’d ‘spoilt her record’. Police warned the public that the girl could be dangerous.

The girl was captured three days later at her parents’ home.

A 1978 Sydney Morning Herald article reported that the young murderer, now 20, was being prepared for release and may have been transferred to a minimum-security prison. It is the last news report the author could find on the girls who committed a crime that shocked even the world-weariest in the legal profession.

Nowadays the girl killers would be aged 56 and 60. Have they had their own children? Did they have their identities changed? Why did they kill a little child?

For a Melbourne family, the act of sending their child away on a school trip in 1977 ended in tragedy.

In October 1977, a group of around 40 children from a school in Essendon, in Melbourne’s inner northwest, went on a trip to Canberra, to take in the sights of the nation’s capital. Eleven-year-old Greta Penticoss was one of these children. The children were staying, along with the headmistress, two teachers and two parents, on the sixth level of the high-rise Gowrie Private Hotel.

The trip ended in the most horrific way when little Greta’s body was found on grass outside the hotel early on Tuesday, 4 October. She had fallen or been thrown from the hotel by her killer. However, she had not died from the fall. Greta had been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death after falling from the balcony.

The day after Greta was found, the policeman in charge of the investigation, Inspector Arthur Brown, said that police feared the killer would strike again. Brown said that the crime was ‘one of the worst, if not the worst, in Canberra’s history’ and at least 50 detectives were chasing the killer. At the time it was the largest-scale criminal investigation ever carried out in Canberra.

Police had a description of the man they believed was the killer – he had been involved in several other incidents at the hotel the night that Greta was murdered. While canvassing the other people staying at the hotel – there were permanent residents there as well as other visitors and groups – detectives were told that the man fitting the description of the killer had tried to enter a number of rooms while people were sleeping. One man reported hearing the keys to his door, which had been left on the outside, being turned and jangled. He got out of his bed and opened the door to see a young man moving quickly down the corridor. Keys had been left in the doors outside the rooms so that the teachers and parents could check on their charges easily overnight.

The mystery man was stalking the hotel. He entered one room and asked whether the child in there was a boy or a girl (it was a boy). The intruder entered another room with two boys inside and again asked their gender. A girl was woken up at 3 a.m. by a man who said he was a doctor and asked her to remove her clothes. In a sleepy state, the girl complied and was led from her room by the man who then put his hand around her neck. The little girl screamed, broke free and ran down the corridor to a room where a school parent was staying. The parent searched for the man but could see no-one. They thought the girl must have dreamed it. Unfortunately it was no dream.

Greta Penticoss was attacked soon after, probably while she was out of her room and heading to the toilet. The children were all staying on the sixth floor but the killer took Greta to the floor below, which was unoccupied. Police discovered her slippers there. It was believed that Greta fell from the balcony during the struggle with her attacker. He then ran down the stairwell, found the girl outside and attacked and killed her. Greta’s injuries were horrific. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed several times.

Police warned people to stay vigilant. Students in residence at the Australian National University were told to lock their doors. The city was on alert.

Two days after the murder, an 18-year-old soldier from the nearby Duntroon Military College was arrested and charged with Greta’s murder and the attempted abduction of a 10-year-old girl. James Ernest Taylor took part in an identification parade and ended up confessing to the crimes. In his accommodation at the college, detectives found weapons, clothes and the torch Taylor had used while he was stalking the Gowrie Private Hotel.

Taylor told detectives that he had been having nightmares about raping and stabbing a girl and had taken to riding the streets on his bike at night to try and rid his mind of the thoughts. In a court report from the Canberra Times on 16 November 1977, Detective Sergeant John Dau told a committal hearing that Taylor had told him he did not like girls, or his mother who called him ‘dumb’.

Taylor was found guilty of Greta’s murder in April 1978 and sentenced to life. He appealed his sentence on the grounds that he had not comprehended his actions when he had committed the murder.

The Federal Court ordered a second trial for Taylor. In 1979 he was found not guilty of Greta’s murder because he was insane at the time of the crime. Taylor was committed to an institution for the criminally insane at the governor-general’s pleasure.

With all the killers mentioned in this chapter, one can only wonder: What became of them? Due to privacy and information access legislation it has been difficult to find information on what has happened to these murderers. One can only assume they were eventually released. Did their youth give these killers a better chance at rehabilitation or did it make them even more of a threat?