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The day that Beryl heard about Derek's arrest through neighbours, she collapsed. 'It was only two weeks after he had left our house and I had three children, the youngest only seven, and Anne had had a young friend with her as well. It was horrific to think about what could have happened to them.' It was to get a lot worse. Shortly after, three police officers knocked on her door and showed her the writings that they had found in Derek's locker. They were so dark, so disturbing, that even today Beryl struggles to comprehend the sadism in them. 'The writings were about me and my girls,' she says with a shudder. '"Go down below lake. Get her in car and take her to place." In another, he talks about tying us to a tree. It's horrific.' I remember the writings I have seen that almost made me ill, the explicit, coarse language Percy used to describe female and male genitalia, the detailed abduction of a mother and her children and the obscene things he would do to them. 'When I get there, blindfold them and strip them and have a good look and feel. Tie them to trees and ropes coming from behind under armpits, around behind neck and under other arm, and around tree . . .'

'I didn't realise, Beryl, that some of those writings were about you and your daughters,' I say. There is silence, for a moment on the other end of the phone.

'Now you understand my horror at realising he had been staying in our house and targeting us.' When Percy was arrested, the police refused to let Beryl see what he had written about young boys, but they showed them to her husband, Jim. 'He never told me what was in them, but he said to me to never mention that boy's name again in our house. Jim said he had never read anything so depraved in his life.'

Peter Couch was so distressed at hearing the news of Derek's arrest that a minister had to calm him down. 'I often wonder,' Beryl muses, 'whether the stress of that and blaming himself for putting his younger sisters at risk with Derek was the start of him getting the cancer that killed him in 1989.'

In December 1967, the Hosking family moved to Gladstone Park in Melbourne where they heard, two years later, that a sailor had murdered a young girl. 'I thought, "How dreadful,"' Barbara recalls. 'Ken had heard of Derek's arrest on the radio as he was driving home from trade school. His first thought was that there couldn't possibly be two people with the same name. He was completely devastated.' Upset and shaken, Ken spoke to Barbara as soon as he walked inside. 'Mum, you know that murder . . .?' and Barbara nodded. 'It's Derek Percy, isn't it?' she said.

Ken, she recalls, could not understand how she instinctively knew and she couldn't either. 'Am I right?' she asked, and he nodded. 'It was terrible, terrible news. This was the same boy who had lived in our home for months and who regarded himself as Ken's best friend.' Barbara has another reason to shudder. 'When Derek was staying with us, our daughter was three years old. He used to play doll's tea parties with her. It's awfully upsetting to think what could have happened to her.'

From the moment Ken heard of Derek's arrest, he vowed to not have any more to do with Percy and he entertained no warm thoughts or sympathy toward his old school friend. 'I don't have any time for people who touch up kids,' he says, his icy tone of voice leaving me in no doubt that he means it. 'He should have been hanged for that girl's murder.'

In the way that news is often spread, Barbara's husband, Harold, was told the grisly details of the murder from a local policeman at Gladstone Park. Barbara is still flummoxed as to why police, who knew Derek had stayed with them in 1965, did not bother to get in contact with them after his arrest. She did not have contact with any police officer regarding Percy for another thirty-eight years.

On 21 July, nineteen-year-old Tim Attrill was recovering in Geelong hospital from a car accident when a nurse told him that a naval rating had been charged with the murder of a young girl. 'I wouldn't mind betting,' he told her, 'that the bloke's name is Derek Percy.'

Bill Hutton joined the air force when he left school and read the news about Percy's arrest when he was at Laverton air base, Melbourne. 'Just as I saw the headline my phone rang,' he says. 'It was Kim White and we both said at the same time, "Derek Percy!" That night we caught up with four of the guys from school who had told us at the time that we were bullshitting about the Gorge incident. They were pretty stunned and apologised for not believing us.'

Hutton wonders whether Percy could have received help for his aberrant behaviour if people had taken the incident at the Gorge seriously. 'I've sometimes been asked why we didn't go to the police back then. But it was different in those days. Back then you would cop six of the best just on suspicion of bullshitting. And what we witnessed Derek doing at the Gorge sounded pretty far-fetched. Who would have believed us?' He is irked, though, that police did not speak to him and Kim White the day after Derek's arrest. 'It haunts me. Five years before he was arrested for murder we knew something was horribly wrong with him. His parents knew, too. The tragedy is that nothing was done.' Something else haunts him, as well. 'After each school holidays,' he explains, 'we would talk about where we had been. Given our age, we were usually travelling with our parents. Either Lachlan or Derek told me that they were in Sydney during part of the 1965 Christmas school holiday and in Adelaide for the same period in 1966. Which puts Derek in the right cities for the Wanda Beach murders and the abduction of the Beaumont children.'

Wayne Gordes was living in Sydney when he saw the story of Percy's arrest for the Tuohy murder in 1969. He immediately flashed back to the occasion at Corryong High School when he jokingly accused Percy of being the Wanda Beach killer and he recalled his strange, confrontationist reaction. 'I had said it as a joke at the time but suddenly it didn't seem improbable at all,' he says. 'They were definitely there in Sydney at that time; we all talked about what we had done during the holidays and my long-term memory is excellent.' After reading the news, Gordes rang his local police station and reported the incident. The officer took down his story but nothing further was done. 'I didn't hear from anyone again until the story hit the news again in 2004,' he says.

In May 2008 I am directed to a website called Gunplot where serving and former serving naval personnel keep in contact. Can anyone, I post on the site, who served with Percy at Cerberus or on any ship share their memories or photographs of him with me?

The replies pour in for weeks; emails from around Australia and from men now living overseas. Underpinning them all is the shock – palpable, still after forty years – that one of their own could do what Percy did; that one of their own – even this strange loner – could break ranks and disgrace not only himself but the entire outfit that he served. Percy deeply shamed them. Pete Brown, then a Leading Seaman, says that sailors worked as a team and were virtually inseparable. 'Percy's behaviour didn't just affect him, it affected all of us,' he tells me. 'If one sailor played up, the whole crew copped the stigma. We took it personally. Very personally.'

Les Dwyer, now National President of the Naval Association, was at Cerberus at the same time as Percy and was a member of the Cerberus sailing club. 'He often went away with us when we participated in inter-service sailing over long weekends,' he writes to me. 'He was a strange character in that when we were all looking to go out after an event and wind down with a meal and a few ales, Percy would often volunteer to mind our children. Thank God we never took him up on his offer. The wives all had strange feelings about him and preferred to babysit themselves.'

How clever Percy was, I think, offering to make himself available for babysitting, to ingratiate himself with parents and children. And how often this happens. As a journalist I covered the trial of former teacher and respected international cricket umpire Steve Randall, who repaid families' trust in him by molesting their daughters. 'That man,' one of the girls' mothers told me, 'violated us in every way possible. I will never, ever forgive him.'

Dwyer was in the Personnel office when Percy's mother retrieved his belongings after his arrest. 'I remember his little car and the chalkish fingerprint powder that remained inside it. The whole affair was one of the most horrible events that I have ever been near. The thing that sticks out in my mind was the fact that he was seemingly an above-average sailor with a bright mind. What makes somebody like this tick? It is beyond me.'

Lachlan Percy only too clearly remembers when his family was told of Derek's arrest. 'My mother was very distressed, and my father very quiet,' he told police, many years later. 'As for me, I didn't want to know about it.' He admitted he was never close to his brother. 'We didn't ever have a violent confrontation or anything like that but we weren't close. I look at my younger brother, Leon, and I feel protective toward him, but I've never felt that way about Derek. And while we weren't a "huggy" or "touchy" family I don't recall any favouritism shown toward the other boys and not Derek.'