CHAPTER 1

In search of evil

Even bad men didn’t like him.

THERE was something about Peter Keogh that men didn’t like. Perhaps it was the way his eyes darted about – never returning a gaze. Perhaps it was the nervous habit of shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as if deciding whether to attack or run.

Or perhaps it was the way he would grind his teeth, as though he was only one misunderstanding away from exploding into violence.

Even bad men didn’t like him. When he was in jail, he needed protection from fellow criminals who could see beyond the tough-guy tattoos to the inherent weakness beneath.

He needed a billiard cue, a broken glass or a knife to express his anger and his targets were usually women – or sometimes little girls.

But some women could not see that side until it was too late. Not the attractive bar worker, the single mother, the impressionable teenager, or the younger sister of a star footballer who would later enter federal politics. Keogh was short, shifty and not too smart.

He was unskilled – a drifter – the type many fathers would describe as a ‘no hoper’.

But the Cleary family didn’t like to make judgments, although they privately hoped Vicki would grow out of her interest in the older man with a past and no future.

They were confident she would ultimately realise the man, 13 years her senior, was a waste of time and effort. Her elder brother, Phil, VFA footballer, political activist, media identity and federal MP to be, knew that expressing doubts about Vicki’s partner would be useless. He was confident she would conclude the relationship was not long term. Better, he thought, to remain silent.

He was not to know the man he tried to tolerate for the sake of his sister was dangerous, obsessive and a potential killer.

‘People knew things about him that they did not divulge to us,’ he says. ‘I just wish I had known. He was not just a knockabout bloke with a bit of a past. He was a violent man who hated women.’

Phil Cleary paces the polished boards of his renovated Brunswick home and speaks with the passion of the football coach he once was and with the skills honed in the House of Representatives, where he was an independent member for four years.

He talks of his sister and the man who killed her. He talks of the system that could not deliver justice and the society that could not protect her from evil.

Cleary’s politics are of the left. His nature is to believe in rehabilitation rather than revenge.

But this is not a philosophical debate: it is a real-life tragedy. His sister was stalked and murdered by a man who could, and should, have been stopped.

FOR more than 30 years Ron Cleary was famous for the sausages he created in the back of his small Coburg butcher’s shop. He married Lorna Dorian in 1951 and they were to have six children. The three boys came first, with Phil the senior, and then the three girls, with Vicki the eldest.

Philip was nine when Vicki was born. She was just a kid when he became a university student, then a teacher and a footballing cult figure with Coburg in the VFA.

But as they grew older the age difference seemed to shrink. ‘I was just getting to know her,’ he would say, with the air of a man cheated.

She was working at the University of Melbourne laboratory in 1983, when she became ill and was admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital.

Phil went to see her and felt big brotherly concern when he saw four visitors in the room. ‘I didn’t like their manner and I didn’t like them.’

While she was in hospital a house-mate moved out of their shared home in Beauchamp Street, Preston, and Keogh moved in. She was just 22 and he was 35.

The young, energetic girl and the older, brooding man were to become a couple. Phil Cleary was concerned when he saw them together. ‘When I first came across him I didn’t like him. He wouldn’t look you in the eye, he ground his teeth and he was covered with tattoos.’

Cleary and Keogh were a similar age, but opposites in character. Cleary was passionate about causes and, despite his reputation on the football field, not disposed to violence. He has a natural warmth and a quick sense of humor. Keogh was cold, apathetic, prone to anger.

But, like her big brother, Vicki Cleary was attracted to unpopular causes.

Keogh had injured his back while working in a northern suburbs factory and was to be awarded $60,000 in compensation. Vicki Cleary saw Keogh as a person who needed her help. She told her mother she was concerned about his health and long-term future.

‘She was worried he would end up an old man in a wheelchair with no one to look after him,’ Phil Cleary said.

They were to buy a house in Broadford but, in April 1987, Vicki realised her life would be better without the needy, moody older man. Her family was relieved. Their tactic of letting Vicki make her own decisions had been vindicated.

‘I had no animosity to him. I didn’t think it would last and I was glad it was over,’ Phil says. There was no property dispute, no children and nothing to make the break-up complex. It should have been straightforward.’

But Keogh was not a straightforward man. He would never let her go. He began to stalk the woman he claimed to love, while she tried to deal with him without involving her family and friends.

Fights between former lovers are sometimes called ‘domestics’, but this was no simple spat between equals. There was a blameless victim and a ruthless attacker.

People who should have seen the dangers refused to become involved and those who could have helped were not told of the dangers. ‘We were from a solid, working-class family. We didn’t come from a background of violence,’ Phil Cleary says.

He knew his sister was having minor problems getting some property back from Keogh and offered to see him. Not as the heavy older brother, but as an intermediary to tell him gently the relationship was over and to advise him to accept reality.

What he didn’t know was that Keogh had already told Vicki if any of the Cleary brothers turned up he would ‘iron bar’ their knees.

The terrified woman was trying to protect her family from a man who was becoming increasingly erratic. ‘I rang her and she said, “He wouldn’t hurt me, don’t worry – there’s no problem”.’

In June that year she went to the Coburg Social Club to celebrate her elder brother’s 200th game. ‘She was so bouncy and happy.’

But Vicki was concealing a growing problem. Keogh was having her followed and was harassing her at home and work. Her car was damaged and she was being threatened.

At the kindergarten in Coburg where she worked, colleagues saw her fear first-hand. She would spend meal and tea breaks in a house across the road from the kindergarten, staring out the window as if she were looking for someone. Once, she was found hiding behind a door. But still Keogh refused to leave her alone. He continued to ring and harass her.

Vicki went to court for a restraining order in the hope that it could protect her. But the clerk of courts was on sick leave and his replacement did not seem interested. She left without one.

Her kindergarten director, Marie Mathews-Jessop, suggested Vicki take some time off. She was there when Keogh arrived looking for his former girlfriend. ‘I was so scared I went to close the door but he grabbed hold of the door,’ she was to recall.

On Monday, 24 August, 1987, Keogh again rang her at the kindergarten from a Preston hotel. He gave her an ultimatum: ‘Get over on Tuesday night or else there will be trouble.’

Again she was in tears.

Mathews-Jessop said: ‘Virtually her last words on the Tuesday afternoon when I left, she said: “Marie, I can’t go round there. I’m just too scared”, and I said, “Don’t put yourself at risk”.’

Her friends were frightened of Keogh and frightened for Vicki. They talked to her and gave advice. Unaware of the real dangers, some saw the situation as uncomfortable rather than life-threatening. They hoped Keogh would eventually lose interest and drift away. They were wrong.

But Keogh’s mates had no excuse for underestimating the risks. They knew of his violent past and they saw him brooding. They chose to do nothing.

Keogh spoke to a friend in a pub about six weeks before he killed Vicki. The jilted lover betrayed his growing, violent thoughts. ‘If she keeps going I’m going to neck her,’ he said.

The friend was worried enough to remember the conversation, but not worried enough to do anything about it.

Nobody would ring the police. They didn’t want to get involved, or to intrude in other people’s lives. After all, it was just a domestic.

ON Wednesday, 26 August, 1987, Keogh was outside the kindergarten in Cameron Street at 7am. He was dressed in bright-yellow overalls, peaked cap and blue jacket. Whether by design or coincidence, the overalls were similar to those worn by railway repair crews who often worked on the tracks that ran beside the kindergarten.

Keogh was now beyond talking. He had with him a large hunting-type knife, a Stanley knife, pliers, masking tape and rubber gloves.

He tried to conceal the knife against his leg but was annoyed when the blade pricked his calf. He fashioned a cardboard scabbard for the knife and strapped it to his leg.

He hid behind a tree for more than an hour and was seen drinking from a tap in the front garden of a house in the street. He would later claim he planned only to damage Vicki Cleary’s car. He did not explain why he needed masking tape, gloves and a sharp hunting knife to vandalise a Ford sedan. Police believe he may have planned to abduct his former partner and murder her, but stabbed her in the street when she struggled.

Vicki rarely drove her silver Ford Fairmont sedan to work, fearing that Keogh might follow her. But this day she chose to take the risk. She pulled up at the Shirley Robinson Children’s Centre in Coburg at 8.10am.

She got out of the car and he grabbed her. Witnesses were to say he tried to strangle her as she screamed for help. He forced her into the front passenger seat, slashing her face and hands as she tried to protect herself.

Vicki Cleary was dragged from the car and Keogh stabbed her at least four times in the body, perforating her liver. She collapsed in the gutter, bleeding to death.

The first people at the scene tried to use a blanket and a windcheater to stem the bleeding. She identified Peter Keogh as her attacker and then said quietly, ‘It hurts.’

She was taken to the Royal Melbourne Hospital at 8.46am and rushed to an operating theatre, but doctors could not stop the bleeding. She died at 10.40am.

Onlookers were to remark that Keogh ‘walked casually’ away after the stabbing and did not appear to be deranged or unbalanced.

One witness watched him calmly wipe the blood from the knife before placing it in his scabbard. ‘I was struck by the callousness of it.’

Much was made at his trial that Keogh was in a confused and disturbed state and his attack on Vicki Cleary was not planned.

While the woman he claimed to love was bleeding to death, Keogh was seen ‘ambling along’ as he walked about 500 metres to an auction room at 793 Sydney Road, Coburg, where he had previously bought and sold second-hand goods.

Less than 10 minutes after the attack, he hid his blood – spattered overalls and weapons in a cardboard box. He then made himself a cup of coffee and calmly discussed business in the auction house. ‘It’s an impressive sale,’ he said to two men in the shop.

They noticed he kept looking at the front and back doors, but they put it down to his usual distracted nature. He picked up the cardboard box and left.

Police were later to find he had taken the murder weapon from a friend’s house in Preston where he was living. ‘It was used to cut up the meat for the dogs,’ the friend, Brian Freake, later said.

Keogh rang Freake at the house in Highview Road about 11am that day. He asked, ‘Have they been there?’

Later that day, Keogh went to police with his solicitor. Experienced homicide squad detective, Jim Conomy, said that while the suspect was nervous he was not particularly traumatised. ‘He just seemed a normal person.’

Yet, at the Supreme Court trial, his defence was that the disturbed and broken-hearted killer had somehow been provoked by his victim. He was eventually found guilty – not of murder but of manslaughter.

Vicki Cleary was stalked and terrorised. She tried to get a restraining order, and then was attacked without warning in a Melbourne street. She was just 54 kilograms and 157 centimetres. She did nothing wrong, but the man who took a taxi, a hunting knife and a disguise to the kindergarten where she worked, was found not guilty of murder.

Keogh was sentenced to eight years with a minimum of six. He was released on 18 July, 1991. He’d served three years and eleven months.

Years later, Vicki’s mother Lorna still cannot understand the decision and the sentence. ‘We do not believe in capital punishment, all we wanted was justice.’

Lorna Cleary had a dream the night before Vicki died. One of her daughters lay dead in a rosewood coffin. She could not see her face.

Three days later, Vicki lay in a funeral parlor – in an open rosewood coffin.

IT is many years since his sister was stabbed to death, but Phil Cleary remains angry and disgusted. This passionate man, who has spent much of his life lobbying for the powerless against the powerful, remains frustrated that his sister did not turn to him.

People started to tell him stories at her wake about what she had been through. ‘I was furious. She did not confide in us. I think she was trying to protect her family. She would have been worried that her brothers could have become involved.

‘She didn’t want to escalate the violence. She was concerned it could all blow up. She thought she could ride it out.’

He remains disgusted that the legal system could find an ambush killer not guilty of the murder.

Phil Cleary has had a full and interesting life. A stint in federal parliament, an elected delegate at the Constitutional Convention, an author, teacher, media commentator and the father of a young family.

But he is still drawn back to the sister who was murdered and the man who took her life outside a Coburg kindergarten. He has spent years collating information about Keogh, documenting incidents about his past. The man with the knife knew Cleary was investigating him and the stalker didn’t like the idea of being stalked.

PETER Raymond Keogh was born in February 1948, the second youngest of six children to a factory foreman and his wife, in the relative prosperity of post-war Victoria.

He lived in North Fitzroy before it was trendy. He went to Merri Street State and Fitzroy High, leaving when he was fourteen to work in a string of factories and, for a time, as a meat boner – learning how to use sharp knives.

His father died when he was young and his mother went out to work to support the children. Keogh would later say that he was deeply affected when he was sent to live at an aunt’s house when his father was dying.

He was 12 when he was first charged with indecent assault and was given a good behavior bond. The following year, he was charged with theft and given probation. Police who interviewed him at the time, described him as ‘a bare – faced liar’.

On 10 November, 1964, he waited with another teenager to ambush a foreman at Koala Shoes in Chingford Street, Fairfield. He was ordered to give up alcohol, but police who knew him doubted he would give up either violence or the bottle.

On 3 October, 1966, he was charged with assault outside a dance in Bendigo and sentenced to three months’ jail. In April 1968, he attacked a man with a broken glass at the Junction Hotel in Preston, and was sentenced to one month’s jail.

Court records show he was becoming increasingly violent and starting to concentrate his attacks on women and children.

In October, 1970, aged 22, he went to a woman’s flat in Coburg, claiming he was there to buy her car. She took him for a test drive, but when they returned he attacked and tried to tie her up. He punched her, but ran away when the woman’s partner returned home.

He attacked a man with a billiard cue in an Alphington pool hall in October, 1972, leaving his victim with a broken hand and head wounds. In late 1974, he dragged a female co-worker into the basement car park in a Collins Street building and repeatedly slammed her head against a wall. He was sentenced to five months’ jail.

A few months later, he tricked a nine-year-old girl into his Richmond home where he sexually assaulted her. He was sentenced to eighteen months’ prison. Much later, a lawyer would claim in court, the attack did not involve ‘any true violence’. He did not mention the terrified girl gave sworn evidence that Keogh threatened to ‘smash her face inside out’.

Seven years later, he was charged with molesting two eleven-year-old girls in Northcote. He was convicted and sentenced to two years’ jail, but the conviction was quashed on appeal in October, 1983.

The arresting officer in the case, Bernie Gaffney, said: ‘He had these strange eyes. He was very dangerous to women and young girls.’

Keogh was later to complain he was being harassed by police.

Two days after his successful appeal, a public notice appeared in a Melbourne newspaper. ‘Well Peter, you got off again. Little children beware.’

FRANK Bellesini was a uniformed constable stationed at Preston, when he got the call that a railway porter had been stabbed in the hand at the Northcote station, and the offender had jumped on a north-bound train.

Local knowledge suggested to the policeman, the suspect was likely to travel only four stations before getting off at Preston. The area was the social capital of the northern suburbs, with a local bowling alley and two popular dances within walking distance.

The head bouncer at the town hall dance was a tough TV Ringside boxer, who stood at the door with an iron bar – concealed in a rolled-up newspaper. There was little trouble.

It was 21 September, 1963. Geelong had just won its way into the grand final that afternoon and about 60 people got off the train to head down the ramp.

Bellesini was looking for a teenager in a white jumper. The youth he wanted was Peter Keogh, just 15 and angry-drunk after drinking a bottle of wine.

‘He jumped a fence on to the tracks and started abusing me,’ Bellesini recalls. He thought, ‘How easy is this?’

The young policeman and the even younger suspect stood opposite each other. Bellesini, 24, had already pulled out his baton, but was still relaxed. He was bigger and stronger – he was also in uniform and backed by his partner. He was less than two metres from the young offender when ‘I saw his knife flashing’.

Bellesini aimed his Browning .32 automatic – ‘a pea-shooter really’ – and fired a shot between Keogh’s legs. He thought it would frighten the teenager into surrendering.

‘He kept coming and I said, “Hey, stop son”, but he didn’t.’

Bellesini warded off the knife attack, although he was slashed across the palm. Under present police training, Bellesini would have shot the armed offender in the body, possibly killing him. But, back then, the constable took a different option.

He shot him in the left knee. Keogh stopped, started to collapse, but then continued towards the policeman. ‘I was backing back and he was still coming so I put one in his right knee. He was drunk and feeling no pain.’

Keogh fell to the ground. Bellesini took the knife from the injured teenager who then jumped up and tried to run. With two damaged kneecaps he wasn’t going far. The policeman and his partner grabbed Keogh. ‘The crowd was getting a bit ugly so we put him in the van and took him to the station.’

The bullets in his legs didn’t improve Keogh’s humor. While waiting for the ambulance he continued to threaten police. ‘He was a raving lunatic at the time. He was arrogant and abusive in the station. He said “My uncle’s a gunnie and he’ll get you”.’

Bellesini knew there were some teenage hoods who grew out of their violent phase, but he thought Keogh wouldn’t be one of them. He thought the angry kid with the bullet wounds would only get worse.

UNLIKE many divorced couples, John and Maria James remained good friends. She would often ring her husband for a chat at the Fitzroy Town Hall, where he worked as the town clerk.

Maria Theresa James, 38, owned a modest bookshop in High Street, Thornbury. The front room was filled with hundreds of second-hand paperbacks wedged in shelves. Behind the small counter was a three-bedroom home where she lived with her two sons.

On 17 June, 1980, John James’s day began badly. He had made only one work call when he realised he had forgotten his glasses and needed to drive home.

He stopped for a coffee and, by the time he was back, it was almost 11.30 – the morning was slipping away. He left his office and went downstairs to discuss local government business with fellow council officers.

It was about 11.50am when Maria James rang and spoke to his secretary, Isabella Fabris. There was no need for Mrs James to say who was calling – the two women had known each other for 25 years and grew up together in Fitzroy.

She asked, ‘Is John there?’ When the secretary said he was out of the office she said, ‘There is someone in the shop – tell him to ring me.’ Isabella Fabris said that at the time she thought there was nothing in Maria James’s voice to indicate concern. But much later she would think again.

Maria was well-mannered and would often chat to Isabella while waiting for her ex-husband to be free. But this time she was businesslike – almost curt. ‘She seemed a bit short on the phone,’ Ms Fabris would tell police.

The two women had developed their own code. Maria James would allow the phone to ring only three times and if Isabella Fabris had not answered she would know the office was too busy for social calls and hang-up. This time, she let the phone keep ringing. This was no social call.

John James came back to his office within minutes and was told about his ex-wife’s call. He responded, ‘Shall do.’

He telephoned straight back, but this time his former wife seemed distracted. She said ‘Hang on, please.’ For the next four minutes he could only listen, first with mild curiosity, then uneasiness and finally with a sense of foreboding.

‘I held on and while doing this I heard discussion in the background and then a bit of a scream and then there was more discussion and then silence. I then started to get edgy and started to whistle into the phone to get someone’s attention. I could still hear the conversation in the background and I couldn’t hear the exact words, but Maria was talking fairly loudly.

‘I then heard a second scream. I then really thought something was wrong.’

He walked out of his office and told his secretary. ‘I rang Maria and it was odd – there was screaming in the background.’

It only took a few minutes to drive from the town hall to the bookshop in High Street. James parked around the corner, grabbed his umbrella and walked to the front of the shop.

Although the open sign was displayed he found the door locked. He rang the bell and banged on the door, then went around the back and bashed on the rear door. James checked the outside laundry where a spare key was sometimes hidden.

He then tried to kick open the back door before deciding to check the side kitchen window. He opened the window, hooked his umbrella on the air conditioning unit, climbed into the kitchen, grabbed a green-handled, small-bladed knife and yelled out.

The television was on and the phone was still off the hook as James crept along the passageway, glancing left into his son’s bedroom before walking into his ex-wife’s bedroom to find her body.

‘Her eyes were open and there was blood all over the place. I knew she was dead.’

She was dressed in dark slacks and top. Her open-toed, slip-on shoes were next to her body and her wrists were bound in front. She had been bashed and her throat was cut.

But what the autopsy would later show was that her body was covered by 68 nick and cut marks. She was slowly tortured before finally being killed.

James asked a neighbor to ring the police. When he came back there was a woman browsing in the shop.

Police believe it was possible the killer escaped from the front when he heard James trying to enter the shop at the rear.

Detectives could find no motive and could find no-one who disliked Maria James. They knew she had begun to date after the break-up of her marriage. She had told friends she was going to go out with a man named Peter, and police were to find three Peters who knew the victim. A local florist said a man had bought some carnations to be delivered to the bookshop, but he was never found.

All they had was a description of a suspect: about 167 centimetres, wearing light-grey slacks. Police concluded the killer may have lashed out during an argument. They believed the murderer probably lived locally, knew Mrs James, had an explosive temper and a hatred of woman.

From the early days of the investigation, police believed it would require a tip from the public to solve the case. The government offered a $50,000 reward within three days.

But there was a short-list of suspects. One committed suicide days after he was interviewed by police. Another was known to have an explosive temper and to regularly visit the bookshop. When he was interviewed by police he told lies or said he could not recollect his movements.

Within days of the murder, he had a sports coat dry-cleaned. The dry-cleaner said there was a mark on the jacket similar to a blood-stain. The binding used to tie the victim was similar to the type the man used to stake his tomato plants. Another suspect who matched the descriptions and knew Maria James moved to Queensland.

But there was another name nominated at least four times after the bookshop murder. He was 167 centimetres, hated women, had an explosive temper and loved knives.

Peter Keogh.

MARGARET Hobbs spent her life exploring evil. As a probation officer and psychotherapist specialising in sexually deviant behavior, she dealt with some of Victoria’s most dangerous, serial offenders.

One of Hobbs’s clients was Robert Arthur Selby Lowe, who abducted and killed six-year-old Sheree Beasley in June 1991. It was Hobbs who provided key evidence that helped police convict him of the murder.

She treated hundreds of people with compulsive criminal disorders. One of them was Peter Keogh. Even the professional counsellor sometimes needs counselling and, when Hobbs had a particularly difficult or disturbing case, she went to her trusted colleague and teacher, Dr Jim Goulding, who was an acknowledged expert in the fields of the subconscious mind and clinical medical hypnosis.

Hobbs studied and lectured at Goulding’s Australian Academy of Hypnotic Science and they had been friends for years. Goulding is now in his 70s and recovering from a heart attack, but he recalls when Hobbs came to his Deepdene office in 1980 – only days after the bookshop murder – to talk of Peter Keogh.

‘Margaret Hobbs was one of my students at the time and a very dear friend. I haven’t forgotten what she said – “I know that bastard did it. He told me he was going to get her”.’

The doctor believed that Keogh told Hobbs: ‘I’m going to kill that bitch.’

‘She was a very responsible lady. She was very disturbed by him for years. She was a brilliant woman who specialised in deviant sexuality. She could spot a maniac a mile away.’

His psychotherapist wife Joan was present during the conversation. ‘Margaret was very distressed by it. He had made rather threatening comments about a woman. She was convinced that he was the person who committed the murder.’

Hobbs could not go to the police because she was trapped by the code of confidentiality, but Jim Goulding had no ethical dilemma. The suspect was not his client.

He spoke to a senior policeman about his conversation with Hobbs and the information was passed to homicide. But by the time it reached the investigators, it had been diluted from a possible breakthrough to a well-meaning tip.

It said that Margaret Hobbs had a client named Peter Keogh who lived in the area near the bookshop and hated women. No-one told police of Keogh’s alleged threat. For the homicide squad, 1980 was the worst on record, with 15 of 55 murders unsolved by the end of the year.

The squad was split into crews of investigators, each with its own cases. Frank Bellesini ran one of the teams of detectives and while the bookshop murder was not his case, he heard that one witness identified a suspect with a limp.

He immediately thought back to the angry young man with a knife he’d arrested seventeen years earlier. ‘I knew he loved knives and thought he was worth a look.’

Bellesini didn’t need to check the records to see if the suspect had a limp. Keogh’s kneecaps, shattered by police bullets at the Preston railway station, left him with a distinctive gait.

Police interviewed Keogh on 14 August, 1980. They searched his Westgarth Street flat and found nothing. They could not find a link between the suspect and Maria James.

He said he was with his girlfriend, Judy McNulty, who supported his alibi … at the time.

TERRI Delaney loves to sit and watch her two daughters play. They are too young to know disappointment and too protected to know evil. ‘My kids are never afraid. They don’t know what fear is.’

Their young mother knows how precious the innocence of childhood can be. Hers was stolen by Peter Keogh in a Northcote home 20 years earlier.

Her mother, Judy McNulty, fell for Keogh when they both worked at the Pampas Pastry factory. She had separated from her husband and was attracted to the rough-looking co-worker with the criminal past.

‘He was so different to dad,’ Mrs Delaney would remember much later. ‘Mum was a lovely lady who thought she could fix him and she couldn’t.’ Terri was just 12 when Keogh moved in to their St David Street home. ‘I didn’t get on with him at all. I’m not sure whether it was because of the (marriage) break-up or because he was covered in tattoos and so different to dad, but I didn’t take to him at all.’

She felt the new man in the house didn’t like her and made no effort to break down the natural barriers.

She remembers the family returning from her Aunt Dorothy’s South Melbourne home to find Keogh. ‘He was sitting in a chair. He was calm and acting too nice.’

Unusually for the lazy and self-obsessed de facto, he offered to make hot drinks for the family – coffee for Judy and Milo for the kids. Terri refused the offer, but her sister, Allison, nine, and her mother accepted.

They went to bed, Allison with her mother, and Terri and brother Bill, three, in the second bedroom. ‘I woke up and saw him pouring medicine in Bill’s mouth. He was still asleep. I asked him what he was doing and he said he (Bill) had a cough, but he wasn’t coughing.’

He then took the sleeping boy into his mother’s room, leaving the twelve-year-old alone and isolated in one bedroom. She said she got up to find her mother. ‘He grabbed me and was dragging me back (to her bedroom). I tried to scream but nothing came out.’

Finally her mother woke and took the children across the road to a neighbor’s house. ‘She was still dopey.’ The family remain convinced that Keogh used drugs to sedate Judy and Allison so he could rape the twelve-year-old.

Judy McNulty ended the relationship, but Keogh reverted to type. He stalked the family, terrorising his former lover. She came home in December 1981 and checked the house, looking for the man she once liked and now despised.

She opened her wardrobe to find her shoes and clothes slashed. Too late she smelt the roll-your-own cigarettes Keogh smoked.

He jumped out from behind the wardrobe and grabbed her. He was carrying a knife. He put her in a headlock and forced her into the street. He had a knife at her throat and dragged her towards his car, parked in the next street. Luckily, the local garbage truck turned into the street and, again, Keogh reverted to type. He ran.

Judy and her children moved to another house, but he continued to harass them and they moved again. ‘Mum was really scared,’ Mrs Delaney said.

She said for years they hardly mentioned Keogh. ‘I think mum had an awful lot of guilt over being involved with him.’

It was years later, when Keogh was released from jail after serving his sentence for killing Vicki Cleary, that the mother finally confided in her adult daughter.

‘If I hadn’t woken up that night he would have raped and murdered you,’ she told her. It was only then the daughter understood. ‘I was young and I don’t think I realised what could have happened.’

Terri Delaney’s children love to play. They are still too young to wonder why their mother is frightened of the dark and always checks behind the furniture whenever they come home.

DOROTHY Haynes was Judy McNulty’s elder sister. When she first met Keogh she sensed trouble. She thought, ‘Judy, what can you see in this man?’

‘Judy was a warm, loving person. Whenever you went into her home there was a sense of warmth, but there was a coldness in this place.’ Dorothy Haynes said her sister was filled with guilt from subjecting her children to the dangerous Keogh.

‘Judy was never the same.’ On 4 February, 1982, police released an identikit image of a suspect in the bookshop murder. It would be the last major public appeal for new evidence. Police manned phones that night, hoping for fresh leads.

Judy McNulty was visiting her sister that night at her South Melbourne home.

They sat in the lounge and watched a Channel 9 report on the murder. Dorothy thought of the cold and violent man who had terrorised her sister. At the same time, Judy said, ‘I bet it was him.’

Judy asked Dorothy to ring the police with the tip. At no time did she say she had provided Keogh with the crucial alibi more than a year earlier.

Police notes from the time show Dorothy rang, identified Keogh, and left her name and number. She said he is a ‘slimer … a butcher who carries a knife and likes women’.

What police did not know was the key alibi witness was in the next room and ready to recant. If they had known, Keogh would again have become a suspect in the case.

Looking back almost 20 years, Dorothy believes her sister wanted to talk about Keogh and the bookshop murder. ‘She probably knew more than she was prepared to say. There were times that I think she wanted to talk but she was reluctant because of a sense of guilt. I wish I had urged her to talk, to open up.’

Judy McNulty’s mother, Dorothy, also saw one of the photo-fits of the bookshop suspect. She remarked how the killer’s legs appeared too short for his body, ‘Just like Peter’.

Police received about 40 calls that night with tips on the case. One was from Josephine Reeves – another sister of Judy McNulty. Police records show she said: ‘The person identified on 3KZ sounds like Peter Keogh, who has previously attacked my sister with a knife.’ But the police officer who took the call, mistakenly wrote the surname as Reedes, not Reeves. No connection was made to Judy McNulty, whose maiden name was Reeves.

The key alibi witness was never re-interviewed.

AFTER the trial of her daughter’s killer, Lorna Cleary was exhausted. She lay on her couch, still not understanding how the man who stabbed her daughter to death with a hunting knife, could have been acquitted of murder.

The phone rang. It was a woman’s voice expressing sympathy.

‘I thought it might have been one of the jurors ringing to say she thought it was the wrong decision.’ But Lorna Cleary would find it was a woman who lived with Keogh.

‘She said, “I was the lucky one. It could have been me”.’

The woman didn’t give a name, but the during the next call she said she was Judy. It was Judy McNulty, the woman who provided Keogh’s alibi for the bookshop murder.

In the next call, she went further and told Mrs Cleary. ‘He’s already got away with murder.’

‘I asked, “What do you mean?” and she said, “The Thornbury bookshop”. It just came out of the blue.’

The two women would talk regularly on the phone. Judy McNulty said, the day after the murder of Maria James, she was in the car with Keogh as they went to work. ‘She said he was very nervy and fidgety. He kept changing the channels on the car radio.’

Judy McNulty concluded he was trying to find news reports on the bookshop murder. She later moved to Warrnambool to be well away from Keogh. ‘She was scared of him,’ Mrs Cleary said.

The two women kept in contact. ‘She then rang and said, “I’m dying. I’ve got cancer and I wanted you to know”.’

She died on 30 April, 1994, before police could re-interview her over Keogh’s alibi. She was 47.

JULIE McAllister believed that after almost 30 years in the retail and hospitality industries she could pick a fake. She was wrong.

It was while working at a Preston hotel in 1992 that she first met Peter Keogh. He had only been out of jail a few months after completing his sentence for killing Vicki Cleary.

The single mother of two boys started having occasional lunches with Keogh. He told her Vicki’s death was a terrible mistake. ‘He said it was an accident. He went there to slash the tyres of her car. He said there was a struggle and she was stabbed. Because he was in jail for such a short time I believed him.’

‘Billy’ was one of the regulars at the Junction Hotel who would chat to Julie McAllister during quiet spells. Three separate times, the grey-haired man told her that Keogh, ‘killed the girl at the bookshop’. The hotel is only a few hundred metres from where Maria James was stabbed to death twelve years earlier.

She thought he was confused and was talking about the Vicki Cleary case. She gave it no further thought – later, she wished she had.

In early 1993, Keogh moved into her Mill Park house. She says he went through a period of heavy drinking and pill abuse, but, after a warning, his behavior seemed to improve.

After a fight, he would sometimes send her flowers – carnations, the same type of flowers sent to Maria James before she was murdered.

By early 1995, she had decided to return to country Victoria, believing it would give her younger son the best opportunities to grow. At first, Keogh was enthusiastic about the move, but he cooled to the idea.

But Julie McAllister was beginning to tire of the lazy and erratic Keogh. She told him she was selling her house and moving. He could come or stay – it was his choice.

She bought a house on almost a hectare of land, in a quiet court of four houses, ten minutes from Traralgon. The peace she was looking for would not last long.

Her relationship with Keogh had broken down. They barely talked. He wouldn’t get a job. She told him to change. He wouldn’t.

In April 2000, she told him to leave. She went to a bank and borrowed $10,000 to repay a debt to Keogh. He seemed to take the news calmly.

‘He stole property worth $4500 from my shed and $9000 from my father.’ It would be the least of her problems.

The same pattern of harassment that terrified many women in Keogh’s life and cost Vicki Cleary hers was to begin again.

It started with nuisance calls at home. She changed her number, then there were calls at work. She went to Melbourne during the school holidays and her car was vandalised.

‘He knew I would be in Melbourne and he drove around my friends’ houses until he saw the car.’

In August, he was seen sitting in the car park of the Traralgon hotel where she worked. ‘There was no reason for him to be there.’

Local rangers received an anonymous call that her dogs were barking. Centrelink received nine calls falsely claiming she was cheating to get a single mother’s part-pension.

On 24 August, Julie McAllister went to the Moe Magistrates Court for an intervention order. She accepted a court undertaking that Keogh could not come within 200 metres of her property or business and could not phone her.

In September, a quarry truck turned up and was about to dump crushed rock on her driveway before she told the driver it was a hoax call. Then he took a caveat out on the house. ‘It was mine, he was just cage-rattling.’

In March 2001, she went to Melbourne for her eldest son’s wedding. She left her car in the driveway of her home and her three dogs on the property. To anyone who didn’t know her movements it would appear the house was occupied. But someone knew better.

The house was well ablaze by the time the fire brigade arrived. Police were later to establish, the fire was deliberately lit in Julie McAllister’s bedroom.

Whoever lit the fire left nothing to chance. The water to the property had been turned off at the mains.

When Julie McAllister contacted her insurance company to make her claim, she learned how long the arsonist had been planning the attack.

Six months earlier, on 7 August, her insurance company received an anonymous tip. One of their customers, a Julie McAllister, had paid $5000 to a professional arsonist to burn her house down. The caller claimed he had secretly moved her good furniture out of the house and replaced it with old items as part of the scam.

Police believe Keogh made the call and later set fire to the house.

‘I was terrified. I pride myself on being a good judge of character, but he conned me. I know now that I didn’t know him. I didn’t see that side of him until he left. He had two personalities.’

ON Melbourne Cup Day, 1984, Vicki Cleary went to Broadford for a day with her family. When she returned about 5pm the house in Beauchamp Street, Preston, was empty.

Later Keogh told her the police had visited to search the back shed as part of a routine search. It was something to do with a missing girl.

The body of six-year-old Kylie Maybury was later found in Donald Street, Preston.

She had been raped and strangled. Kylie Maybury was abducted after she went to a shop in Plenty Road, Preston, to buy sugar. She lived with her mother in Gregory Grove, about 70 metres from where Keogh lived.

Relatives said Kylie Maybury would never trust a stranger. They said the man who took her had to be a local she recognised.

At the inquest, coroner, Hugh Adams, said he was puzzled as to how traces of Valium were found in the bloodstream of the victim.

Police say it was unusual for a child sex offender to use drugs on his victims.

But, years earlier, Keogh was alleged to have used drugs to sedate his de facto and two of her children before trying to molest a twelve-year-old girl.

The murder of Kylie Maybury has never been solved.

PHIL Cleary says he was determined to expose Keogh, but was never obsessed by the case.

He wrote articles about the stupidity of the law, which could find a stalker was provoked into killing. He wrote his autobiography Cleary Independent, which covered his sister’s death.

He wrote to the then Chief Commissioner, Neil Comrie, in 1997, raising Keogh’s name in connection with the Thornbury bookshop murder. Comrie responded, ‘Dear Phil … I have read your letter with great interest … I felt it was necessary to have the relevant files reviewed.’

Because of Cleary’s high profile, people who knew Keogh began to contact him with more stories about the killer’s past. ‘I did not seek these people out – they came to me.’

On Sunday, 24 June, 2001, Peter Keogh left his small flat in Mansfield Street, Thornbury, and sat in his car.

He turned the ignition and idled the motor. There was a tube from the exhaust into the cabin. He killed himself with carbon monoxide.

He had told friends he was worried that Cleary was going to try to expose him over a minor traffic case.

‘That was nonsense. Perhaps he was worried I would expose him over other matters that may have involved him,’ Cleary says.

Cleary has been asked to make a statement to police over Keogh’s suicide. He shows neither delight nor remorse at the death of the man he believes was truly evil.

‘I saw this as a battle of wills and I was not going to lose.’

For police, the trail in the bookshop murder has long gone cold. The suspect, Keogh, is dead, as is his alibi witness, Judy McNulty.

Keogh’s friend, Brian Freake, was murdered in his Highview Road home in March, 1998. The man who followed Vicki Cleary on behalf of Keogh, committed suicide in September, 1998. Margaret Hobbs, the psychotherapist who treated Keogh and believed he killed Maria James, was killed in a car accident in January, 1996.

But, in the homicide squad, where there is death there is hope. Why Keogh committed suicide will be the subject of a coronial inquest. Detectives want to know if Keogh took his own life to avoid being exposed by the Cleary investigation.

Before Keogh’s body was cremated on 29 June, medical experts went to the morgue and took a sample for DNA testing, to see if he could be connected with any unsolved murders – including the deaths of Maria James and Kylie Maybury.