‘The police are no closer to knowing who killed Seana and Margaret Tapp than they were the night the bodies were found.’
IT was the little girl’s body that got Jack. He’d seen corpses before – too many – but when he walked from the mother’s bedroom to the daughter’s, he went from hardboiled to heartache in a moment.
Years in homicide had got him used to staring down terrible sights, masking anger and disgust with blank eyes and black humour. But this almost seemed so peaceful, so normal, that it got under his guard.
She was in bed, quilt pulled up by whoever had raped and strangled her after killing her mother. You’d think she was asleep. Her name was Seana Tapp and she was only nine years old.
The memory of the murdered girl has stuck with Jack Jacobs for years, while so much else about the case has faded away. ‘When I saw her I cried,’ he says, staring into his drink. ‘She was the same age as my daughter…’
Dead kids are every copper’s nightmare. The retired detective senior sergeant fiddles with his glass, sighs and changes the subject.
Facts are safer than feelings. The trouble is, he admits, with this case the facts were hard to find. Still are. Only one stands out: the police are no closer to knowing who killed Seana and Margaret Tapp than they were the night the bodies were found on August 8, 1984. Even then, the trail was already 18 hours old, and cooling fast.
There are about 280 ‘cold cases’ on the Victorian homicide squad unsolved files, dating from the 1950s. There are another 400 in NSW, more than 1000 throughout Australia. This is just one of them, a brutal double murder of a mother and child that had no apparent motive, scant publicity and no obvious suspect … but many potential ones.
Some people have been ruled out by forensic tests. Too many others, meanwhile, have to put up with gossip and innuendo as they wait for police to clear their names.
THE last to see the Tapps alive were their next-door neighbours, the day before. Karen Bomford, 11, usually played with Seana, but the pair had argued on that Tuesday afternoon while walking home from Wattleview Primary School near their homes in Kelvin Drive, Ferntree Gully, in Melbourne’s outer east.
Later, about 4.30pm, Karen saw Seana riding her bike but did not join her. Neither did Melanie Harris, from across the street.
The three girls often played together and stayed overnight at each other’s houses.
But this night none of them played with Seana, the result of a schoolgirl tiff that now, twenty years on, still troubles them because of what happened to their playmate.
About 4.45pm, a neighbour glanced at the Tapps’ house and saw Margaret sitting in the lounge room, studying, as she often did.
Margaret was a divorced nurse with two children, a wide circle of friends and many ambitions. She had gone back to school in her 30s then enrolled in law at Monash University with the aim of becoming a medico-legal specialist. At 35, she was doing third year and often seen poring over her books late at night. Her 14-year-old son, Justin, had gone to live with her parents and she and Seana had settled into a routine.
One challenge was not enough for the restless Margaret. She was combining part-time work, parenting and legal studies with learning to drive a semi-trailer, taught by a young man eager to give the friendly nurse free lessons. Characteristically, she wanted the truck licence so she could help country friends harvest their crop. That was Margaret Tapp, her friends say, impulsive and generous.
At 7.30 that evening, Margaret made two quick calls. One was to ‘Jim’, a 44-year-old widower who often accompanied her on outings. She sometimes complained good-naturedly to other friends about Jim’s attentions, but perhaps she depended on him for company more than she let on. She told him she had opera tickets for the following night, if he wanted to go. She wanted to keep the relationship platonic, but she certainly had no reason to fear him.
As usual, Jim accepted immediately. The gentle Scottish-born carpenter had admired Margaret for years. They’d been neighbours before her split with Don Tapp five years before, and she had helped nurse Jim’s dying wife in 1977. Such kindness was typical, according to her friends. She had a warm heart – and she broke hearts. Her extroverted personality and good looks attracted men whether she wanted them or not.
Next, Margaret called her friends Penny and John Rumble and asked them to babysit Seana the following night. John spoke to her. Margaret was vague about her plans – saying she was going to ‘have dinner with someone’, rather than revealing she was going to the opera with Jim.
THE Rumbles loved Marg Tapp. She and another nursing friend turned up every week to help bathe Penny Rumble’s mother, Jan Young, who had multiple sclerosis. Jan, although older, had nursed with Margaret at the William Angliss Hospital in Ferntree Gully and was probably the younger woman’s closest confidante. There was plenty to confide about in Margaret’s stormy private life.
It was late winter, evenings were dark and chilly and the Los Angeles Olympics were on. Most people stayed indoors to catch the Games highlights.
Rosalind Bomford didn’t. Rosalind, who lived next door with her husband Jeff, was a cook at a local pub, the Royal Hotel. It was evening work, and afterwards she went playing bingo with friends at another hotel and so didn’t get home until just after 10.30pm. She watched the Games with her husband. It was the night the Australian long jumper Gary Honey made the leap of his life to win the silver medal behind the great Carl Lewis. About half an hour later, she heard something strange: ‘A scream – a muffled sort of thing.’
Rosalind stood up, looked out the window and joked about a notoriously rough woman who lived in the street: ‘It’s probably [name deleted] murdering somebody.’ She asked Jeff what time it was. ‘Ten past 11,’ he said.
As Rosalind prepared for bed just before midnight, she was in the bathroom with the door ajar when her dog, which was inside, growled at the back door. Rosalind was sure someone was outside. She checked that the door was locked and went to bed. She didn’t sleep well.
Across the street, Jack and Loreen McNamara were already asleep. But just after midnight they were woken by Seana Tapp’s pet cocker spaniel, barking and howling. It was a meek little dog that they had never heard bark at night before.
AS Karen Bomford set off for school about 8.30 the next morning, she remembered the argument and decided not to drop in next door to see if Seana wanted to walk with her. The blinds were still closed at number 13. She assumed Seana and her mother were sleeping in, which was not unusual.
The blinds stayed drawn. In mid-afternoon Tony Blackwell, the young man then going out with Margaret’s older sister, called around to visit.
He picked up the morning newspaper from the driveway, dropped it at the front door and knocked, then tapped on a window. Puzzled that Margaret’s green Corolla was there but no-one was home, he left.
By the end of the working day, no-one in the house had stirred. At dusk, when other houses had lights on, the Tapps’ place was in darkness. Just after 6pm, Jim the carpenter arrived to pick up Margaret to go to the opera. A regular visitor, he knew the Bomfords by sight. He also knew what Tony Blackwell didn’t – that the sliding door at the back of Margaret’s house didn’t lock. Seana and the girl from over the road, Melanie Harris, had accidentally broken it while playing a few weeks before, and the easygoing Margaret had not had it fixed.
When no-one answered his knock, Jim let himself in. The kitchen and living room were empty. He went to Margaret’s bedroom. Bedclothes covered her body, but as soon as he saw her face, he knew the worst.
Jeff Bomford remembers Jim banging on his door. ‘He was pale and upset and was looking for Seana,’ Bomford recalls. ‘He said to me: “Jeff, it’s bad. It’s real bad.” He was hoping Seana was staying with us. He knew Marg had a few problems and he thought she had done herself in.’ But Seana wasn’t with the Bomfords. That’s when they both knew it seemed even more sinister than suicide. Jim called the police.
Twenty years on, his voice still cracks when he tries to talk about that night.
JACK Jacobs got the call at 6.43pm. He and the then youngest member of his homicide crew, Rod Wilson, lived near each other and were driving homewards together when the police radio diverted them to Ferntree Gully. They pulled up outside 13 Kelvin Drive at 7.02, according to the meticulous notes Jacobs made.
Number 13 might have been the unluckiest house in Australia that day, but it looked ordinary enough. It was a brown, brick-veneer about 100 metres from Burwood Highway, close enough to hear the traffic hum, but otherwise a quiet residential street where most people knew each other.
Local police had the scene sealed off and a distressed man hunched in a police car. The two dead were both strangled, they told the detectives. No sign of a struggle or forced entry. A pizza box in the oven with some dried-up pieces left in it.
Jacobs looked at the dead woman in the main bedroom. He could see the strangulation marks on her throat from the doorway. There were two empty Arnotts chip packets on the bed, and a law book she had apparently been reading before it all went wrong. He walked to the rear bedroom and saw the little girl’s body and it got him: a stab to the heart of a father who worked long hours away from home, methodically sifting the wreckage of other families’ lives as his own trickled away.
At first, it looked like a ‘domestic’, the description used in the first D-24 radio call. Most homicides are – arguments between partners that flare into murderous rage, one mad act in otherwise mundane lives. Police are trained to have open minds – ‘a mind is like a parachute,’ goes the standard lecture, ‘unless it’s open it doesn’t work.’ But, in the field, until the evidence points elsewhere, whoever reports a death is automatically top of a short list of suspects.
Which meant that Jim, the dead woman’s would-be boyfriend, would be doing some explaining before he was cleared. Meanwhile, the forensic people searched the scene – though not so thoroughly that they found Margaret’s jewellery hidden underneath her mattress. A relative was surprised to find it there much later, something that made him wonder about the efficiency of the police inquiry.
In 1984, DNA testing was still wishful thinking; fingerprints were the greatest investigative tool. Several prints were found but eliminated on the grounds that they belonged to friends, neighbours or relatives who could have legitimately been at the house. Ironically, knowing the victims could mask a killer.
Not only were there no unknown prints, but the experts who combed the house for evidence found frustratingly little – and nothing to give detectives an easy lead.
There were two different types of hair on Seana’s clothing and bedclothes: a long blond hair and some shorter grey ones that might have been tinted. But hairs could have come from anywhere, any time. Hair might confirm a suspect, but not identify one.
However, two other clues found at the scene could one day trap the killer. First, the semen stains on Seana’s nightdress. In 1984, it was not possible to identify the killer’s blood group from the sample, but after the mid-1990s it was possible to get something much better – a DNA profile unique to one person in millions. Second, there were fresh Dunlop Volley tennis shoe prints in Margaret Tapp’s bedroom and in the bathroom. The shoe size proved they were not Margaret’s or Seana’s. Nor did they belong to anyone else that police could legitimately place at the scene. Detectives concluded that the shoe prints probably belonged to the killer. Nothing has changed that view since 1984.
A lot can happen in 20 years. People change their looks, their names, their cars and their addresses – but they can’t change their DNA or their feet. Catching the killer is a case of finding the perfect match.
One day, the Tapp case will come to the top of the pile of files that the specialist ‘cold case’ detectives are constantly reviewing. They can only hope that the investigators of 1984 gathered enough names to let them trace everyone who might have been in contact with the Tapps.
Regardless of forensic wizardry in the laboratory, in the streets detectives still need doors to knock on. DNA testing doesn’t mean much until investigators track down the right suspect and force him to face the moment of truth.
Chances are, of course, the killer has slipped under the radar. Meanwhile, every man even remotely connected to the victim deserves to be checked and eliminated from the investigation for good.
Before the homicide squad arrived at Kelvin Drive, a local detective, Ken Mahon, had questioned Jim the carpenter in the police car. Later, as others started a doorknock in the street, Mahon took a detailed statement from Jim at the local station. Then Jacobs’ crew took over.
It was a torrid few days for the carpenter as detectives tested his story from every angle. They drew the same conclusion as Mahon had: Jim was genuinely devastated and did not falter on any detail.
Jim’s ordeal differed from that of his neighbour and Margaret’s former husband, Don Tapp. It was cruel but necessary that Seana’s stricken father be eliminated as a potential suspect. Fortunately he had a watertight alibi: he had been with his new partner and her family all Tuesday evening.
Jim’s story took a little longer to verify.
By the time police were satisfied he’d had no opportunity to commit the murders – let alone the desire to do so – the trail had split a dozen ways.
It wasn’t that there were no suspects. There were too many. One was a former policeman, a fact that would stay submerged for 20 years.
THE detectives probably would have found the man eventually anyway, but what made him appear more interesting was that Margaret’s sister Joan volunteered his name soon after arriving at the murder scene.
After police interviewed Joan, she recalled something Margaret had confided to her a few days before.
A friend of the family’s – a retired policeman who knew her father well from the Masonic Lodge – had been visiting Margaret.
He had brought flowers and lent her books on sailing, which she had tried on visits to the Gippsland lakes. But Margaret had apparently taken the older man’s attentions the wrong way. Used to attracting men, she assumed he was just another unwanted admirer, albeit an especially embarrassing one, because he was a friend of her father’s and much older.
Melanie, Seana’s friend from across the road, also sensed something was wrong. After the murder she tried to tell her mother and others that Jim was not Margaret’s boyfriend, and that other men had been around. Melanie insisted that she remembered seeing Margaret so annoyed at getting a bunch of flowers from someone that she screwed up the card that came with them.
The former policeman, then in his 50s, had resigned early from the force. Years before, as a teenager, Margaret had run away from home and it was he who had found her and brought her home to her grateful parents.
In 1984, this man owned a remote country property in eastern Victoria that Margaret and her children visited not long before her death.
He had taken the last known photograph of her and her children, sitting on a log in a hilly paddock. Margaret gave the snap to a friend, Sally Stevens, who later showed it to the author.
In some ways the ex-policeman seemed as logical a suspect as Jim the carpenter, yet he was fortunate enough to avoid any publicity.
He later told Margaret’s parents he had been questioned at length about the murders, but few outside the police force knew that.
Although the man was officially written out of the story – he was not named or included in the 1986 inquest brief – he was more fortunate than other potential suspects in that any lingering doubts about him were finally lifted in the late 1990s, when he was one of just three men discreetly cleared by DNA testing, according to police. The other two men eliminated the same way were the subject of even more delicate inquiries, both as a result of ‘tip-offs’.
One was a married surgeon who had supposedly had an affair with Margaret Tapp. The other was a man who had received a large loan from the widow of another of Margaret Tapp’s lovers. No thriller writer would dare invent a plot with so many twists.
The strange thing about the Tapp murders is that they got such little publicity. The apparently random killing of a mother and child in their beds had all the elements of a suburban horror story that would ignite public outrage. It never did. It should have made headlines and news bulletins for days – and again when the inquest eventually reached the coroner’s court in 1986. But without the usual trickle of information from police sources, official and otherwise, the story died fast and barely registered with the public.
A couple of mundane stories and a few tiny ‘briefs’ appeared in Melbourne’s then three daily newspapers and, without fresh angles, television and radio coverage soon dried up. It meant that only friends, family and neighbours of the victims were to remember it. Even the police directly involved say they remember other cases more clearly.
One reason for the lack of publicity was that the police found no new leads – or at least nothing they were willing to broadcast to attract information from the public. By contrast, the murder six months earlier of a woman called Nanette Ellis in the neighbouring suburb of Boronia won plenty of media coverage and concentrated police attention.
Interestingly, Jack Jacobs’ overworked crew also handled the Ellis inquiry, which was to stick in Jacobs’ mind far more than the Tapp mystery.
There were other reasons for the low-key coverage. Margaret Tapp’s family was publicity-shy and quietly discouraged her friends from talking to the media.
They were a respected local family who had lived in the area since the 1950s, when it had begun to change from small farms and orchards into suburbia. Margaret’s father was in the Masonic Lodge and her mother was a teacher and churchgoer. They were deeply respectable people mortified by any suggestion of family scandal.
Their reaction was understandable. Nothing could bring back their dead, so there was no point raking over things that might cause more pain – especially for Margaret’s teenage son, Justin, who had been living with his grandparents at their Gippsland holiday house when his mother and sister were killed.
The problem for the family and the police was that Margaret’s tangled private life complicated things. It meant there were other people, some of them with clout, who stood to be embarrassed by what might come out.
By the standards of a conservative older generation, Margaret Tapp was a modern, liberated woman. She hungered for knowledge and new experiences. She was impulsive and generous.
Her friend Sally Stevens describes ‘a stunning woman’ who turned heads: ‘She had red hair and a peaches and cream complexion and she didn’t realise the effect she had on people, which made her all the more appealing.’ She attracted men and she broke hearts.
After leaving her husband five years before, Margaret had embarked on a series of affairs – at least four of them with medical specialists. The first of these was with an anaesthetist, who had a breakdown when the affair ended. Affairs with a surgeon and a urologist didn’t last, either. But another, with ‘Dr John’, a gynaecologist and obstetrician, was more serious. He bought her the Kelvin Drive house in 1981, installed her as a ‘tenant’ and helped support her while she studied.
It was a stormy relationship. Dr John, to that date a sober and hard-working Lutheran with three children, was torn between his wife and family and the beautiful nurse.
He often visited Kelvin Drive but always returned to his family in the Dandenongs. Margaret told friends the dour doctor was the love of her life, and she was increasingly agitated that he wouldn’t quite leave home for her. Neighbours often heard them argue and she once damaged his prized Datsun sports car.
In early 1983 Margaret went to America. The trip was meant to help her get over Dr John, who had told his wife the affair was dead. Instead, within days of Margaret’s return, he was dead – killed when his sports car ran off a treacherous (but familiar) mountain road in the early hours of the morning as he raced to deliver a baby.
Road accidents happen every week – especially to tired and emotional people driving fast after midnight – but the doctor’s death caused a wave of rumour and innuendo aimed at his grieving widow’s supposed motives for hurting him. So when his former lover and her daughter were murdered 16 months later, the local rumour mill ran hot with far-fetched Agatha Christie plotlines peddled by armchair sleuths and idle gossips. The coincidence of the deaths was so dazzling that it misled many people into ignoring the lack of any logical connection – let alone evidence. Sound reasoning never stopped foul rumour.
The fact that the doctor’s shattered widow was a practising Christian who had reached an amicable financial settlement with Margaret Tapp over the Kelvin Drive house did not deter the gossips and their bizarre theories.
The victims’ relatives needed someone to blame, and anyone would do. Playing the blame game is a basic human response to trauma, though not always a rational one. Demonising Dr John’s widow, no matter how illogical that was, blinded Margaret Tapp’s relatives to a more likely scenario – that the killer might have been closer to home. It also ignored the fact that several other doctors’ wives had as much motive as Dr John’s widow to hate the amorous Margaret.
Margaret’s brother Lindsay, a former soldier who was deeply disturbed by the murders, now admits he was once obsessed with the idea that the doctor’s widow might have been involved, but later realised how silly that was. Lindsay had served in the army and was a good rifle marksman and keen hunter as a young man.
Deeply disturbed by the murders, he told friends he would consider shooting anyone that he was ‘99 per cent’ sure was implicated in his sister and niece’s murder. Fortunately, he gave up revenge fantasies without doing anything. And after the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, he gave up his guns – handing in all 14 of them.
The irony in all this was that he himself might have sat on the strongest clue for twenty years without realising. And no-one had thought to ask him.
‘WE had a lot of half-baked suspects but no good ones,’ muses Jack Jacobs. He is sitting in his new, bayside apartment, red wine in hand and his old police notes in a thick folder on the table. He is middle-aged, mild-mannered, medium-sized – the nice one in the good cop, bad cop routines. A compulsive note-taker then and now, he even recorded the names and colouring of the Tapps’ cats, Louie (black and white) and Moses (ginger), at the crime scene. He also noted some more useful details.
He produces faded photocopies of the Dunlop Volley tennis shoe prints, a tantalising clue to the killer. Trouble is, he says, the brand was so common there was a pair in every other house.
Anything else? There was, he ventures, one other lead as promising now as it was in 1984.
A red Falcon utility with distinctive mag wheels was parked near the Tapps’ house on the night of the killings. Two local youths saw it. One noticed it had a black tarpaulin, gold striping along the side and the fancy ‘12-slot’ wheels.
Detectives traced dozens of red utes but not the right one. They even tried hypnosis to see if the witnesses could recall number plates or other details. But the ute investigation petered out and even the victims’ family forgot it.
In 1984, Margaret’s brother worked for the body responsible for supplying Melbourne’s water. He was a maintenance worker, one of a gang that mended burst water mains, relaid pipes, painted hydrants and chipped weeds. They were a knockabout lot who often drank together after work at their depot.
Probably the most knockabout of all – ‘a shifty, strange sort of bloke,’ one recalls – was a man in his 30s who drove one of the depot tip trucks.
He was not disliked, but some workmates were wary of him. Strong and quick-tempered, he had once jumped out of his car in peak-hour traffic and smashed another driver’s side window with his fist after being cut off. He was a rule-breaker who was eventually sacked for rorting overtime and for thieving. If anyone wanted a cheap truckload of loam, he would steal it from the supply yard. And if someone wanted to ‘borrow’ the truck for a private job, he would be in it if there was something in it for him.
So, some time in mid-1984, when Margaret’s brother wanted to move a kitchen table from his house to hers, he asked the driver. They picked up the table in the truck and took it to Margaret’s and carried it inside.
Margaret and Seana were killed soon afterwards. In the nightmare of the following months, Margaret’s brother forgot all about the visit in the truck. He did not attach any significance to it then. Had the police talked to him, he might not have mentioned it anyway because ‘borrowing’ the truck might have cost him his job. It happened sometimes: the truck driver was later sacked when caught smashing fire hydrants with a crow bar so he could get penalty rates and extra time off for fixing the damage after hours.
Recently, Margaret’s brother thought about the tip-truck driver for the first time in years. He recalled the story about dropping off the table in the truck. Then, asked if he had known anyone who drove a red Falcon ute with 12-slot mag wheels in 1984, he went quiet and lit another in an endless chain of cigarettes.
The truck driver had a few flashy Fords in those days, he said, dragging hard on his smoke. One of them was a maroon ute with 12-slot mags.
The former truck driver lives five minutes drive from Ferntree Gully. Unlike most others who worked with Margaret’s brother at the maintenance depot, he says he never heard about the double murder. He didn’t read newspapers, watch television, listen to the radio or discuss it with his workmates, he says. And he doesn’t want to talk about it, thanks.
To Victoria’s cold case squad, the tip-truck driver is just one more potential suspect who is entitled to be cleared, a name to be added to a growing list of men who, ideally, should all be DNA-tested.
Some people were spoken to by police in 1984, others perhaps should have been but weren’t because the overworked homicide crew had no time to eliminate every possibility. Even Margaret’s brother should have been eliminated, but he can’t recall even being spoken to in 1984. Neither, astonishingly, were any of his friends or workmates – although at least one has been since this story was researched in 2004.
Among those who would like to be cleared in the Tapp case are the male members of a rowdy family that moved away from Kelvin Drive soon after the murders, much to the neighbours’ relief. One of them, then 23, finished late shift at a nearby factory at 11.30pm that Tuesday – exactly the right time to be ‘in the frame’, as he himself willingly admits. He also volunteers that his older brother (and a brother-in-law, a violent sex offender later jailed for rape) were not properly eliminated. Then there was his teenage brother – call him ‘Benny’ – a youth distrusted by every woman in the street except the easygoing and kindhearted Margaret Tapp.
Glenda Harris, then a single mother, lived opposite the Tapps. She vividly recalls Benny, then 15, blocking the footpath and making suggestive comments to her and her young daughter. ‘He had a filthy body and a filthy mind,’ she says. ‘I warned Margaret against letting him in the house near Seana, but she let him hang around.’
While others avoided Benny, he repaid Margaret’s kindness by mowing her lawns and servicing her Corolla car. But even she was annoyed about the way he would turn up unannounced and come in the unlocked back door.
Benny still likes talking about Margaret. He went to her funeral, visits her grave, and happily (and accurately) directs a stranger to her ‘speckly brown’ headstone with its gold lettering, just near the boundary fence of the Ferntree Gully cemetery.
One Sunday in August this year, just after the 20th anniversary of the murders, Benny drove down his old street, pulled up opposite number 13 and had a chat to the neighbours. They talked about the murder.
Since then, Benny has said he wants to know if the detectives are going to come back and find out what happened to the woman who was kind to him.
‘Margaret was my friend,’ he told the authors. ‘She had a heart of gold.’