23

The Suitcase Killer

Edwin Street’s murders went largely unnoticed by the press, but that didn’t make them any less evil. Given the 42-year-old invalid pensioner’s record of crimes against women and girls, it seemed only a matter of time before he committed murder and was locked away forever.

On 17 December 1993, Street’s wife, Dawn Rebecca Street, 42, a charity worker who cared for quadriplegics, was found dead in a park in Wollstonecraft, on Sydney’s north shore. She had been buried in a bag. Although there was no sign of violence, the post-mortem revealed that the woman had been suffocated.

When police checked out Street’s record he immediately became a suspect. He had a number of convictions for carnal knowledge and indecent assault. In 1989 he was sentenced to four years’ jail for attacking a young woman who had rejected his sexual advances.

But he steadfastly denied any knowledge of his wife’s murder. He alleged that he had last seen her when she left their home and went for a pint of milk at 8.30pm three weeks earlier, on 29 November. He apparently hadn’t thought to tell the police that his wife had gone missing.

Appearing emotionally distraught after the discovery of his wife’s body, Street made gut-wrenching appeals to the general public on radio and TV for any clue that may solve the mystery of the murder of his loved one.

Street sobbed uncontrollably as he begged: ‘Anyone with any information should let somebody know, because if I have to come out and do my own little investigation I will.’ As one detective said later, ‘It would have brought a tear to a glass eye.’

With the investigation going nowhere, detectives decided it might be a good idea to collect a few of the dead woman’s things to help the investigation along. As it turned out, this was an excellent idea, but the result was not in the least what they expected.

On 23 February 1994, detectives called on Street’s home in Enmore, in Sydney’s inner west. He ushered them in and suggested they have a good look around and take whatever of his late wife’s clothing and personal effects they wanted, if it might help them solve her murder.

Having collected various items, the detectives asked Street if they could use the suitcase sitting in the bottom of the wardrobe to take them back to the police station. Street hesitated, but it was too late. Before Street could stop him, a detective had opened the suitcase.

Inside was the body of Ms Linda Whitton. Ms Whitton had been living with Street for less than a week.

Street explained that during a ferocious fight Linda Whitton produced a knife and stabbed herself seven times before he could wrestle the knife from her. The detectives weren’t convinced: one of the stab wounds was in Ms Whitton’s back.

Under questioning, Street broke down and confessed to stabbing Ms Whitton to death in a fit of rage and hiding her body in the suitcase. He then also confessed to the murder of his wife. He told police that he had a short temper when it came to women and he had snapped when his wife had told him that one of her ex-boyfriends was a better lover than he was.

Street said that in a fit of rage he’d held a pillow over his wife’s face until she was still. He then had a few drinks and went to sleep. The following morning he awoke to discover that his wife was dead.

He panicked then, he said. He put Dawn Street’s body in a bag, packed it neatly into a suitcase, rang for a cab and bundled the suitcase into the boot. He instructed the cab driver to take him to the park at Berry Island Reserve where, when there was no one around, he dug a hole in the shrubbery and buried the bag with the body in it. He then caught a cab home.

Street was found guilty of the murders at his trial in the Supreme Court. Justice Dunford said Street’s original story about Linda Whitton stabbing herself was ‘obviously absurd, as the jury has found’ and described the murders of the two women, who were both small and both epileptic, as brutal in the extreme.

‘I regard the prospects of rehabilitation as only slight and the risks of his reoffending as significant,’ he said.

At Street’s sentencing, on 29 June 1995, Justice Dunford said Street had a ‘terrifying record of physical violence’, particularly towards women.

Justice Dunford told the court: ‘The maximum penalty is intended for the worst category of cases, and I regard the quite separate murders of two women some 12 weeks apart as amongst the worst category of cases.’ He then imposed the maximum sentence – life without the possibility of parole.

As he was led from the court, Street uttered Ned Kelly’s final words: ‘Such is life.’

But that final flippancy was the only thing that Edwin Street and Ned Kelly had in common. For all his shortcomings, even Ned Kelly’s detractors would concede that Ned’s principles wouldn’t allow him to prey on women.

Edwin Street has no principles. He is a killer and basher of defenceless women and a molester of children. The remainder of his life will be spent in jail.