Experience told Graeme Brenchley that dumping unwanted remains in the scrub at Tynong North would go unnoticed. He knew the local foxes and wild dogs on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne would make short work of the bloody load sitting in the back of his ute.
Brenchley, a local garage owner, and mates, Tom Looby and Len Trewin, spent that early summer’s Saturday morning slaughtering nine lambs at the shed of his Garfield property and they now needed somewhere to dump the offal.
While Trewin went to the cool room to store the carcasses, Brenchley and Looby hopped into the ute and headed to a familiar patch of bush at Tynong North.
Too close to Melbourne to be a getaway and too far to be an outlying suburb, the area attracts few bushwalkers and sightseers. A small island of scrub surrounded by farmland, there are no streams or mountains, no scenic spots, no points of great historical importance and no major attractions, except for the nearby Gumbuya Leisure Park. Millions of people choose to drive past the park’s giant golden neck pheasant statue every year on their way to more popular bush locations. But to Brenchley, it was the ideal spot to let the wild life clean up his morning’s work.
Exactly 1865 metres along Brew Road, north from the Princes Highway, a dead-end dirt track meanders 205 metres to a forked tree. To the left runs a maze of wallaby tracks that lead into the tussock grass and scrubland near a disused sand quarry – now filled with water.
Brenchley reversed the ute between two trees near the sand quarry and was about to dump the lamb remains. ‘We knew that there were foxes in that area so it was our intention to spread the offal in the bush area to feed them as Tom and I shoot them in the winter time.’
But the amateur slaughtermen weren’t the first to discover that the bush of Tynong North could hide a multitude of sins.
Someone else had been up that track to dump remains – at least three times – a few months earlier.
Brenchley walked about fifteen metres along a wallaby track. ‘I looked to my right and saw what appeared to be a body. I called out to Tom, “Christ, there’s a body over here.” Then, when I had a good look, I saw a second body. I called out “No, there are two of them”.’
It was about 2pm on 6 December, 1980. Police were to discover the bodies of three women, Catherine Headland, 14, Ann-Marie Sargent, 18, and Bertha Miller, 73.
It would take a further two years to find a fourth body on the other side of Brew Road – Narumol Stephenson – a woman abducted from Northcote in November, 1980. It is possible that one serial killer abducted and murdered the four woman and could be responsible for up to seven unsolved murders in Melbourne.
Several generations of detectives have examined and re-examined the case. Some claim they know the identity of the man who killed all seven victims. Others suggest that while there can be no doubt that Headland, Sargent and Miller were killed by the one person, coincidence alone links the remaining four unsolved murders.
More than two thousand people were interviewed in the original investigation and 11,400 pages of notes taken but, nearly twenty years on, the files were again been taken from storage, largely due to the lobbying of the man who was Chief Commissioner at the time, Sinclair Imrie ‘Mick’ Miller.
DURING five decades of policing, Mick Miller was never one to tolerate loose ends. A stickler for protocol, procedure and probity, he would not intrude on an investigation as he knew it should remain in the hands of his detectives.
In 1980 he was determined not to intrude on the Tynong North case, even though the former homicide detective, lecturer at the detective training school and crime commissioner must have been sorely tempted.
His interest in the case was more than just professional. It was deeply personal – one of the victims was Bertha Miller, his spinster aunt.
The idea that Mick Miller would use his influence to upgrade an investigation because he was a relative of a victim would be an insult. Miller didn’t just play by the rules, he wrote most of them. Personal interests were set aside; he had a police force to run.
But after his 1987 retirement from the force the frustration he felt over the case became greater when he began to research his own family tree. Next to his aunt’s name he was forced to write that her murder remained unsolved.
He felt he owed her another effort to solve the crime. Aged in his 70s, and despite open heart surgery, Miller maintained his powerful sense of purpose and his unshakeable view that all crimes are solvable.
But he offered present investigators more than encouragement. He believes he may know the name of the murderer, and has concluded that a crucial alibi – accepted at the time of the original investigation – may be false.
The alibi was that the suspect was at work at the time of two of the murders and the handwritten worksheets prove that he could not be the killer. But Miller believes factory work practices at the the time opens the possibility that the sheets could have been faked or the suspect could have left his job for hours without being noticed.
The original investigators worked on the basis the killer selected his victims at random, picking up woman hitch-hiking or waiting for public transport.
Miller believes the three women whose remains were found in a cluster in Tynong North may not have been grabbed by an opportunistic killer, but carefully selected by a man they all knew.
If the Miller theory is right, the two younger women were abducted, molested and murdered, while the elder woman was grabbed by a man who wrongly believed she was wealthy, then killed to silence her.
His views are supported to the extent that Catherine Headland and Ann-Marie Sargent were dumped naked while Bertha Miller was fully clothed.
The original investigators found nothing, other than the area where they were dumped, to link the three victims. Miller, however, believes there is one man – and possibly more – who could have known all three and committed the murders.
After more than decade of retirement Miller refuses to enter public debates on police matters. At a farewell dinner he was presented with a feather duster by a good friend and colleague of more than thirty years. It was a private joke on a much repeated Millerism that you are ‘A rooster one day and a feather duster the next’.
But when the elder statesman of the Victoria Police speaks, present senior police still listen. When he approached present Chief Commissioner, Neil Comrie, with his thoughts on Tynong North in late 1998, there was little doubt the case would be re-opened.
It was perfect timing as police had decided to progressively work through some unsolved homicide cases and the Tynong mystery was high on the list.
Miller spoke with the then Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Graeme McDonald and the case was handed to a group of investigators who have become self taught experts at trying to solve old mysteries and finding any hidden embers in previously raked old coals.
The case has been given to the group of homicide-trained detectives who spent three years reinvestigating the 1984 death of Jennifer Tanner, a young woman who was shot twice in the head in her Bonnie Doon farmhouse.
The original botched police investigation suggested suicide while Task Force Kale provided evidence to an inquest that she was murdered by her brother-in-law and serving policeman, Sergeant Denis Tanner.
Their new investigation, code named Lyndhurst, required detectives to check boxes of evidence, old notes from detectives long retired and look at statements from witnesses, some who have since died.
Friends of some of the victims, who were school kids at the time of abductions, were in their late thirties when the case was re-activated. They were to be asked to recall minor details of events they had will have tried to block out of their minds for years.
When homicide detectives were called out on 6 December, 1980, the Tynong killer was well ahead of the posse. When the first three bodies were discovered the murders were already months old – the victims had been abducted in August and October in 1980.
In homicide cases, trails can go cold in hours – now police had to try to find fresh leads nearly two decades after those women were abducted and murdered in still unexplained circumstances. But they have one new asset – DNA technology – if there are any remains that can point to the killer then they can now be tested.
In 1980-81 six women were abducted waiting for public transport or from the street. Four bodies were found at Tynong and a further two at Frankston. Police tried to find whether two serial killers were operating in Melbourne at the same time or if one man was connected with all the cases.
The seven detectives from Operation Lyndhurst were briefed to concentrate on the four Tynong victims but on the clear understanding the investigation could be expanded if they found evidence showing links to any other unsolved cases.
FOR every similarity between the cases there is a dissimilarity, every suspect has a possible alibi and every thesis has its doubters.
The case is riddled with unexplained coincidences, intriguing possibilities, viable theories and possible suspects. What is lacking is hard evidence.
The murders are broken into two groups, the Tynong murders, four bodies found in scrubland, and the Frankston murders, two women found off Skye Road. To make matters even more complex there is a seventh murder that police now believe may be connected, the death of a woman abducted in 1975 from Box Hill.
Police who have looked at the Frankston and Tynong cases since 1980 have theories without proof. Two Victoria police expert analysts, who examined all available material five years apart, have come to different conclusions.
One believes one man is likely to have committed at least five of the murders while the second thinks there are three separate killers.
Now Mick Miller has come up with a name, one that was discarded by the original homicide investigators. The question now facing detectives is, was it discarded too quickly?
ALL murder investigations start off the same – with a victim. Operation Lyndhurst now has seven – not cases represented by dusty files, yellowing transcripts and deteriorating court exhibits – but real people who were abducted from Melbourne streets and killed, possibly at random.
The passage of time does not make the crimes any less outrageous. You can’t simply shrug your shoulders at murder. The victims were all women, aged from fourteen to seventy three. Three were mothers, two were teenagers, two were struggling back to health after serious illnesses and one was a highly respected church-goer. They seem to have only one thing in common – the violent way they died.
IF only Allison Rooke’s twenty-year-old EK Holden hadn’t been playing up on the second last day of autumn, 1980, she would never have been a murder victim.
If only she had given up on the idea of going into Frankston after it took five attempts to get the old car started about 10am that day.
If only she made other plans when she drove back to her unit fifteen minutes later after she realised the still spluttering car probably wouldn’t get her to the real estate agents to pay her corporate fees. If only she hadn’t decided to catch the Frankston-Dandenong Road bus. But she did.
Allison Rooke was a woman determined to enjoy life. She was comfortable without being wealthy, owning her home and having $6000 in investments.
In good health and aged fifty nine, she was a regular at bingo and enjoyed going to hotels with her daughter to listen to her son-in-law play Country and Western music every second Friday.
She had moved to her unit in Hannah Street, Frankston, in September 1979 after selling her Cranbourne home. Her husband died in 1974. She had three children – one daughter lived in Seaford, a son in Moorabbin and the second son, Ivan, was a policeman in South Australia.
On Friday, 30 May, 1980, she went to drive to Frankston when her car started to misfire so she returned, had a cup of coffee with her neighbour and friend, Albert Hodren, then left around 11am to catch a bus that travels along the Frankston-Dandenong Road. She told Hodren: ‘I’ll only be gone an hour or an hour and a half.’
She planned to go to Ritchies Supermarket to order groceries to be delivered and to Wal Jones Real Estate Agents to pay maintenance fees for the unit.
The regular bus driver on the route could not recall picking her up at the stop opposite Hannah Street. She did not place her grocery order and did not make the real estate agents.
Several people claim to have seen her at a lunchtime bingo session held at the Bay City complex that day. She was alleged to have attended with a male friend, known only as ‘Robert’. One witness said she arrived with Robert around 11.30am, but she was probably mistaken because she could not have left home at 11am and been at the bingo thirty minutes later.
A neighbor believed she heard someone in the backyard of the unit between 5pm and 6pm on the day she disappeared. There were five bottles of beer in the fridge, more than usual, leading police to speculate she may have been expecting a friend to visit on the night or over the weekend. There were two sets of keys to the unit. Neither were ever found.
Her daughter, Elaine White, rang repeatedly that day looking for her mother. They planned to go to a hotel where Elaine’s husband, Herbert, was playing with a Country and Western band that night. When she didn’t get an answer she rang her brother, Kevin, and they both went to the unit, fearing she may have collapsed alone in her home.
Kevin climbed through the window and found the place undisturbed, with an empty bottle of beer that Elaine had drunk with her mother the day before still in the sink.
The body was found on 5 July, 1980, hidden in scrub beside McClelland Road, approximately three kilometres from where she was last seen.
IT was to be Joy Carmel Summers’ first trip to Frankston on her own. Mrs Summers, 55, suffered from a stroke and arthritis and usually went shopping every Friday with her partner, William Cotter, but he had a series of medical appointments that day.
The trip to Frankston should have been simple – the bus stop was less than one hundred metres from their Norfolk Court, North Frankston home they bought just four months earlier.
On 9 October, 1981, she had her normal breakfast of coffee, toast and eggs around 7am. She planned to go into Frankston to buy a side of lamb and although she disliked travelling alone she also insisted on personally picking her meat from her preferred butchers, Woodwards in Wells Street.
‘I think this was the first time that she had been to Frankston by herself. Joy was scared of traffic,’ Bill Cotter said later.
She had $66 in cash but she also took her bank book with a balance of $1990 because she was thinking of buying a small television set for her bedroom. She had only partial use of her right hand and suffered some memory loss following her stroke two years earlier.
Cotter left home about 12.05pm to keep a doctor’s appointment and when he returned nearly an hour later the house was deserted. He found a note in the lounge room, ‘Bill, taken string bags. Love Joy.’
The closest stop for the bus was at Chile Street on the Frankston-Dandenong Road, where she was spotted around 1.20pm.
No bus driver could recall picking her up and she did not place her meat order. Bill Cotter remained convinced she would not have accept a lift from a stranger.
On 22 November, 1981, her body was found by local residents whoe were collecting firewood in scrub beside Skye Road, Frankston – near where Rooke’s body was discovered fifteen months earlier.
BERTHA Miller, 73, lived in Kardinia Street, Glen Iris, for more than twenty-five years in the house she shared with her brother-in-law, William Ross. She was an alert, active woman, in good health, who did not look her age. She had a large group of friends and was heavily involved in church activities.
About 10.15am on Sunday, 10 August, 1980, Miller called out to Ross, who was in the shower, that she was off to church, would be late home and not to wait to have lunch.
She would usually take a tram from High Street, Glen Iris, to her church in Prahran. This time she didn’t make it.
One of her good friends was Jessie Moore, who lived nearby in Burke Road. They were both members of the Spring Wesleyan Street Mission in Prahran. ‘Beth’ was the longest serving member of the mission, having first joined in 1932. She worked at the Sunday School and had been the church treasurer.
‘Beth Miller was a very kind woman. She took a strong interest in the mission and was a very helpful woman. I feel that I was a close friend of Beth,’ she said.
For the previous ten years the two women would catch the same tram to church every Sunday – the 10.47am along High Street. Bertha Miller would board at the terminus and Jessie Moore would join her at the Burke Road stop.
But Bertha Miller was not on the tram. Her friend assumed she had caught the 10.15am tram to deal with church business with the pastor. Friends say she would not accept a lift from a stranger. The weather was quite mild for a late winter’s morning, with a top temperature of eighteen degrees, making it even less likely she would have accepted a ride rather than take her normal tram.
‘I arrived at church as normal on that date and Beth was not there,’ her friend said. ‘Usually if Beth did not attend the mission on a Sunday, she would ring me the following Monday. I waited about home on Monday, but of course, I didn’t receive any phone call.’
Her body was found off Brew Road, Tynong North, in December, 1980.
LIKE most fourteen-year-olds Catherine Linda Headland would have preferred to hang around with her mates rather than work part-time during her school holidays. But she owned a horse and her parents, not unreasonably, felt she could contribute to its upkeep.
The family emigrated from Lancashire in 1966 when Catherine was one and had lived in Allan Street, Berwick, for five years. Catherine was popular at school and loved competing with her pony in local gymkhanas.
For three weeks she had worked part-time at the Coles supermarket, at the Fountain Gate Shopping Centre, and Thursday, 28 August, 1980, was to be her first mid-week shift, from noon until 4pm. Her mother, Hazel, was employed at the same supermarket and arranged for her to work extra shifts during the August school holidays. She left home at 8.30am, leaving her daughter 70 cents for the bus fare.
At 9.30 Catherine left home to see her boyfriend, John McManus, who was at his house in High Street with friends. They were both students at Berwick High – she was in form three and he was one year senior. John McManus could remember the exact day they became boyfriend and girlfriend, 14 May that year.
Like many teenagers with a school-yard crush, they couldn’t get enough of each other, going to school together and then spending two hours after school together. Twice a week they would catch up after family dinners but even that wasn’t enough. John didn’t want Catherine working during the school holidays and she told friends that while she didn’t mind working she was thinking of quitting to spend more time with them.
After more than an hour with her boyfriend watching morning television and listening to records it was time to head for work.
A friend at the house said Catherine sat on John’s knee looking out the window for the bus to take her to the supermarket so she could wait until the last possible moment to leave. She saw the bus go past towards Beaconsfield at 11.10am and knew she had five minutes to get to her stop at the corner of Manuka Road and the Princess Highway.
‘When she got to the letter box, she turned and waved and said “I’ll see you tonight”,’ John said. She expected to be back by 5pm. Police say it would have taken her two minutes to get to the stop.
A bus driver was adamant he picked up a girl fitting Catherine’s description and a blonde girl at the Peel Street bus stop, eight hundred metres from Manuka Road. But police found ‘there is no evidence that she caught the bus.’
Friends claimed to have seen her and the blonde girl at Narre Warren about 2.30pm that day, but the blonde associate was never identified and police were to treat the Narre Warren sighting as unreliable.
But if she had gone to Narre Warren and had only 70 cents, she may have decided to hitch-hike home, a common practice in the area at the time.
The regular bus driver in the area told police he believed he had seen Catherine hitch-hiking along the Princes Highway on previous occasions.
When Catherine said goodbye to her boyfriend to catch the bus she was wearing a thin leather strap on her ankle. A group of girls from Berwick High wore the straps made from one of their father’s leather bootlaces, as a sign of friendship.
Police used that friendship strap to help identify the body when she was found at Tynong North more than three months after she disappeared.
ANN-MARIE Sargent was eighteen years old and like so many teenagers in the area, struggling to find a career. Her father, Fred Sargent, described her as ‘a happy-go-lucky girl’ with ‘a lot of mates.’
She went to school at Cranbourne but started to struggle in second form after developing a serious illness. She underwent urgent surgery on 15 December, 1977, to insert a device in her skull to drain fluids from her brain. ‘After this was done she was normal and bright,’ her father said.
When she left school she worked in a toy shop, a poultry processing plant and a supermarket, but by April, 1980, she was unemployed.
On Monday, 6 October, 1980 she stopped at her mother’s home at Cranbourne Drive, on her way to the Dandenong CES office and said she would return later that day to collect some clothing.
She lived nearby with family friends in Railway Road, Cranbourne, and after three months without work she tended to hitch-hike or walk because of her chronic lack of cash.
‘She could have had money from home for a bus but she said she would rather walk because she loved walking. On the day she went missing, I knew that she had to hitch-hike into Dandenong because she never had money to get the bus,’ Fred Sargent said.
She did get to Dandenong, as she lodged a form at the CES office that day, but was not seen again. Her body was found with the remains of Bertha Miller and Catherine Headland two months later
She was identified through the shunt in her skull and a catheter, code 01-66-0100.
IF it hadn’t been for a flat tyre and idle curiosity the remains of Narumol Stephenson may never have been found.
Former Essendon and North Melbourne footballer, Barry Davis, was driving along the Princes Highway to a college camp when a tyre on the trailer he was towing went flat about 11am on 3 February, 1983.
When his mate went off to borrow a jack he decided to stretch his legs. ‘Whilst waiting for the tyre to be mended, I decided to take a walk up the bush track. I walked up this track for approximately fifty metres and came to a dead end. I then turned around to walk back and noticed a bone on the ground.’
Most people may have just ignored the find but Barry Davis was not an average stroller. He was a senior lecturer at the Phillips Institute of Technology in anatomy and physiology and immediately recognised it as a human thigh bone.
When he walked into the Warragul police station with his find the police would have known it was a matter for the homicide squad the moment Davis said where he found it. Tynong North.
NARUMOL Stephenson, 34, was struggling to settle in her new country and was having doubts about her decision to move to Australia.
She married Victorian dairy farmer Wayne Stephenson in Thailand in July, 1978, and came to Australia in August, 1979, leaving her two children in the care of her parents.
The newlyweds were reunited in Darwin, lived in Cairns and Mission Beach and then travelled through Lismore, Sydney, Wollongong, Lakes Entrance and Melbourne before heading to the lush pastures west of Melbourne in Deans Marsh.
The heavy rain and numbing cold of the Otways must have seemed like another world to a woman brought up in the heat and humidity of Thailand. She was homesick and friends said she was deeply unhappy.
The couple returned to Thailand in May, 1980, for a month to visit her family and it took a great deal of persuasion by Stephenson to convince his wife to return to Australia.
On 28 November, 1980, the Stephensons and another couple from Dean’s Marsh, came to Melbourne to see a George Benson concert.
They stayed overnight with friends at Hartwell. The next day, Saturday, Narumol went to the Camberwell market to buy ingredients for a Thai meal she intended to cook that night.
The other three went out and didn’t come back until 9 pm and she became upset when told they were all going to visit a friend in Park Street, Brunswick.
When they got there Narumol, known to her friends as Dang, refused to go into the flat and stayed in the car. The other three people went into the flat to drink wine and coffee. Stephenson came down to check on his wife at least three times. The second time he found her walking down the street from the direction of a 7-11 shop. The third time she had been talking to a man in a car who spoke ‘Thai with a European accent.’
‘I saw her talking to a guy in a car just up the road a bit. I walked up to her and saw that the front passenger side door of the car that she was talking to the guy in, was open,’ Stephenson said.
He sat in the car and talked to his wife until nearly dawn then went upstairs and fell asleep. Shortly after 6am he had a shower and came downstairs to find his wife missing.
IT had been a difficult pregnancy for Margaret Conroy and her best friend Margaret Elizabeth Elliott looked ‘thrilled’ when she visited the new baby and proud mother at the Box Hill Hospital on 15 April, 1975.
The visitor, 26, had left her two young children and husband at home in Brisbane Street, Berwick, and expected to be home before 8.30pm.
Her red Mazda was later found in David Street, Box Hill, with blood on the seat and car door.
Her body was later found in Gardiners Creek, Glen Iris, just near High Street.
Police later said the Mazda had been driven between 140 and 170 kilometres, well over the thirty kilometres from Berwick to Box Hill.
The sump of the car was clean, indicating it had recently been driven over long grass.
Her family home in Berwick was one street away from where Catherine Headland would later live. A suspect in the Tynong murders also lived in the area.
Margaret Elliott’s body was found a few hundred metres from where Bertha Miller lived and within sight of where she had intended to walk to the tram terminus on High Street on her way to church on the day she disappeared.
Perhaps just another coincidence, or is it more?
‘To know the offender, you have to look at the crime.’
Mindhunter – John Douglas, FBI Serial Crime Unit
POLICE have looked at the six cases involving Tynong North and Frankston to try to find possible links. All were women, all were abducted waiting for public transport or from Melbourne streets.
The Rooke, Summers, Headland, Sargent and Miller murders have obvious similarities. All were last seen between 10am and 3pm. All were taken in the east of Melbourne. Both Frankston victims were abducted while waiting for a bus on the Frankston-Dandenong Road on a Friday around lunch time.
Miller was taken after 10am on a Sunday. Headland disappeared just after 11am on a Thursday and Sargent on a Monday.
All five were taken in a seventeen-month period in 1980-81 and four lived in the line from Frankston, Cranbourne and Berwick.
Stephenson was different. She was taken from a car, at night, outside the killer’s beat, yet she was abducted at the time the murderer was active and her body was found at Tynong North.
According to a 1985 police analysis of the crimes never before published: ‘There is nothing to suggest that the offender(s) selected their victim because of specific characteristics common to the women. It appears that each of them was selected at random. Who they were was not the criteria for their selection, but where they were was: ie at a bus stop alone, or hitchhiking, on a major road.’
All the analysis can tell us about the possible offender(s) is that he/they:
1) Would have access to a motor vehicle.
2) Either did not work, was a shift worker, or maybe on annual leave.
3) Had a good knowledge of the area bound by Dandenong, Frankston and Beaconsfield and may have lived in the area.
4) Was an opportunist.’
‘Most victims of organised offenders are targeted strangers; that is, the offender takes out or patrols an area, hunting someone who fits a certain type of victim that he has in mind.’
Whoever Fights Monsters, Robert Ressler, FBI Serial Crime Unit.
MURDER victims cannot tell detectives who killed them but their bodies can often do the next best thing. No matter how carefully a murderer covers his tracks there are always clues left at the scene. The bodies of Miller, Headland and Sargent were all found within metres of each other in the bush of west of Brew Road, near a disused sand quarry. Stephenson’s body was found a short distance from the Princes Highway, about 800 metres east of Brew Road.
Rooke, Summers, Headland, Sargent and Stephenson were all found naked. Miller was clothed. ‘It may be that the offenders baulked when they realised her age, or fear and stress engendered by her situation may have brought on a heart attack,’ the 1985 crime analyst suggested.
Few personal items were recovered at the crime scenes indicating the killer(s) tried to hide the victims’ identities. A wedding ring worn by Rooke and ear rings and a leather ankle strap worn by Headland were the only items found.
There was nothing to indicate a struggle at the scene. ‘Marks found in the soil beneath Headland’s body suggested that she had been dragged into that position by her shoulders,’ a police forensic expert concluded. All of the bodies had been covered by local vegetation, although some of the bodies were hidden better than others. ‘The branches used to cover Miller had been sawn off, whereas the branches and saplings used to cover the other bodies had been broken away or picked from the ground,’ police found.
Miller, Sargent, Headland and Rooke were lying on their backs. Summers was on her right side. Miller and Sargent had their right hands on their chest with left hands beside the body.
The 1985 Bureau of Criminal Intelligence analysis supported the theory that there were two, or even three, separate killers responsible for the six deaths. The investigator felt that one person killed Miller, Sargent and Headland.
‘Even though Miller was clothed and Sargent was naked the fact that they were placed in exactly the same position shows the same person placed them there. Headland being in such close proximity to Miller and Sargent would indicate the same person(s) placed her at that site, also. Such care was not shown in the placement of the bodies of the other three victims; Rooke, Summers and Stephenson.’
The analyst came to the chilling conclusion the cold blooded killer of the three Tynong victims probably carefully selected the spot to dump the bodies even before the first abduction – that he grabbed his victims because they were vulnerable and he was able to trick, or drag, them into his car.
‘The person(s) who placed the bodies at the Brew Road site was also more particular in selecting a site at which to dispose of the bodies. An isolated site, off a little used road, considerable distance from the nearest main road was selected. He/they were prepared to take the victim a considerable distance from where he picked them up before disposing of the body. This could indicate that the offender(s) responsible for the deaths of the three women at Tynong North had given some thought to how and where they might dispose of the body and suggest that he may have planned to commit a particular offence if and when the opportunity arose.
‘The bodies of the remaining three victims, Rooke, Summers and Stephenson were all within fifty metres of a major road. This suggests that the three were placed at the first available suitable location known by the offenders. Their bodies were not placed or positioned with as much care as the three at Tynong North. These observations alone suggest that there were at least two different people or groups of people responsible for the deaths of the women.’
Then what of Narumol Stephenson? She was dumped naked at Tynong North and covered with branches near Brew Road like the others and was abducted just over a month following Sargent’s disappearance.
It could not have been a copy-cat killer, because the first Tynong body was not found until a week after Stephenson was taken. But she was taken from well outside the killer’s normal beat. Could it be just a coincidence that her body was left so close to the others? How many men were abducting women at random and dumping bodies at the time?
None of it makes sense, but if it did, the crimes would not remain unsolved, nearly twenty years later.
In an investigation that could hardly be more confusing yet another unexplained murder has become linked, the abduction of Margaret Elliott in 1975.
She was not waiting for public transport, no great efforts were made to hide the body and she was apparently taken in Box Hill, well outside the killer’s territory. But she lived in the Berwick – part of the murderer’s beat of Frankston, Cranbourne and Berwick and she lived one street from where the Headlands would later move. A major suspect for the Tynong case also lived around the corner from the Elliotts.
A coincidence? More than likely, but the body was dumped in Gardiners Creek, Glen Iris – less than five hundred metres from Bertha Miller’s Kardinia Road home and directly on the route the elderly woman would have taken on the day she was abducted five years later.
THE SUSPECTS
‘Sometimes, the only way to catch them is to learn how to think like they do.’ – John Douglas
A TAXI driver was known to offer women lifts in the Dandenong area and there were sightings of a taxi in Brew Road near the sand quarry area. He was identified and charged with a series of offences but cleared of involvement in any of the murders.
ROBERT was a male friend of Allison Rooke who would go with her to the bingo. Witnesses said they would often arrive at the bingo separately. He had offered several women at the bingo sessions a lift home. Rooke had her own car and did not rely on public transport. Despite a photofit being circulated Robert did not come forward and has never been identified.
‘MR BROWN’, whose real name can’t be used because of a 1985 court order suppression, tries to give the impression that he is a prude whose strong religious beliefs makes him a loyal husband and father. But the film projectionist is a man of two parts, and one of them is exceedingly unpleasant.
Co-workers would comment about their projectionist’s moralistic bent – he would turn girlie pictures to face the wall in the projection and staff rooms. He was quiet, pleasant and seemingly devoted to his wife, two daughters and a son – but there was something odd about him.
He was a member of a fundamentalist church that believed that the mainstream Christian religions had strayed from the true teachings of the Bible. But the religious prude was also a regular visitor to sex shops, purchaser of pornographic magazines and a gutter crawler who liked to pick up prostitutes.
While none of these habits mean that he is a serial killer, there is one other quirk he has which makes him figure in the shortest of short lists when it comes to suspects for Tynong North and Frankston.
He likes to pick up woman while they wait for public transport, often approaching them at bus stops on the Frankston-Dandenong Road, the same road where Allison Rooke and Joy Summers were abducted seventeen months apart.
Homicide squad detectives are trained to try and find links between where a body is found and any possible suspect. They know that most killers dump their victims in an area they know, perhaps an old fishing spot or a childhood camping site.
Before Brown worked as a projectionist in the city he worked at the Frankston drive-in off Skye Road, the very road where the bodies of Rooke and Summers were dumped.
Brown’s family home was between the units where the two victims lived. All three lived within fifteen hundred metres of each other and all lived on streets connected to the Frankston-Dandenong Road.
‘IF the police have a series of five murders that demonstrate the same MO, we advise looking most closely at the earliest one, for it will most likely have ‘gone down’ closest to the place where the killer lived or worked or hung out. As he becomes more experienced, the killer will move the bodies farther and farther away from the places where he abducts his victims. Often the first crime is not thoroughly planned, but succeeding ones will display greater forethought.’ – Robert Ressler
BROWN often offered women in the Frankston area lifts in his black Corolla panel van. He said he made the offer to both men and women because he didn’t like seeing people waiting for public transport. While under police surveillance he was seen to offer both men and women lifts.
He worked shifts and on the Friday, 30 May, 1980, when Rooke was abducted, and Friday, 9 October, 1981, when Summers disappeared, he was on afternoon shift, from 4pm and 2am. The women went missing between 11.30am and 1.30pm.
Several women gave statements to police they had been approached by a man in a black van offering them a lift. One said she was waiting for a bus on the corner of Mahogany Avenue and Frankston-Dandenong Road. When she refused he said: ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’ It was a Friday in May, 1980. Another woman said she was approached at the same stop, again on a Friday.
Another Frankston woman said she saw the van parked outside her home and when she refused a lift from the driver: ‘He appeared upset and turned his car around and in doing so screeched his tyres.’
A schoolgirl on her way home from an exam was approached by a man in a black van offering her a lift. It was a Friday.
At 1.30am on 21 October, 1981, two detectives went to interview Brown at the cinema in Collins Street where he worked. At this time Joy Summers had been missing less than two weeks and her body had not been found.
The police told him they were investigating the disappearance of Mrs Summers and had information about a man driving a car similar to his, offering people lifts in Frankston-Dandenong Road. He replied: ‘I often stop and offer people lifts along there.’ He said he picked them up ‘sometimes at the bus stops in Frankston-Dandenong Road, sometimes when they are walking along the street.’
He said he picked up males and females, ‘but mainly elderly ladies if they will get in with me.’
Asked why he offered people lifts. ‘Just to be friendly, and have someone to talk to. Some women have to wait at the bus stop for a long time and I help them by giving them a ride. You never know what will happen next. All the schools have got drugs in them now and the young kids are causing trouble.’
About twelve hours after being interviewed by police Brown’s memory seemed to improve. He rang the Frankston CIB office and spoke to Senior Detective John Kiely. He rang to volunteer that on the day Summers went missing he had driven to Frankston. ‘About 12 o’clock that day I went to the bank with my wife to get some money. We would have drove down the Frankston-Dandenong Road but I didn’t see anything suspicious, or else I would have remembered.’ This story was later supported by his wife. It would have been the perfect alibi if it was true. It wasn’t.
The bank manager later gave evidence to the Coroner that no money was withdrawn or deposited into the account on that day. Bank records show a withdrawal the day before, twenty kilometres from home.
After the body was discovered on 22 November, Brown was upgraded from a run-of-the-mill suspect to a prime target.
On 3 December three homicide squad detectives arrived at Brown’s Frankston house.
When asked if he was aware of the death of the two women he responded ‘No, I don’t read the papers or watch TV.’
Brown repeatedly lied to police when interviewed. Was this because he was the killer, or because he was simply frightened? He was found to have lied over an alibi. He denied knowing the location of Skye Road, even though he worked as the projectionist at the drive in on that very street.
He first denied ever being anywhere near where Summers and Rooke were dumped but he later admitted being in the area on his way to the local tip.
Police took him to where the bodies were found. Police had levelled areas and cleared scrub looking for clues. Yet when Brown arrived he carefully avoided the exact areas where the bodies had been dumped. ‘(He) became nervous and sweated a lot. He walked around the sites as asked, but at no time did he walk in the immediate vicinity of where the bodies had been lying. Extensive areas around the sites had been cleared of bush and scrub by the police crime scene searchers and the investigators stated that without some prior knowledge it would not have been possible to tell exactly where the two bodies had been lying,’ according to a police analysis.
One investigator said his ‘gut feeling’ was that Brown was about to crack and confess when he started to chant religious statements and virtually went into a state of self-hypnosis. He told police he had only ever offered ‘one or two’ women a lift because ‘I don’t like to see people walk.’
He maintained he did not know that two local women had been murdered. When reminded that he had been interviewed by police only six weeks earlier he said ‘I, I just forgot, I guess.’
He was then interviewed by Detective Sergeant Col Florence of the homicide squad.
FLORENCE: ‘Our information shows that you pick up a lot or offer lifts to only women.’
BROWN: ‘Yes, I get knocked back mostly.’
FLORENCE: ‘So you do offer lifts to ladies?’
BROWN: ‘Yes.’
FLORENCE: ‘Mostly elderly ladies?’
BROWN: ‘Mostly.’
FLORENCE: ‘Ever younger women?’
BROWN: ‘Mostly older women.’
Detective Sergeant Jim Fry then asked: ‘Have you ever given Miss Summers a lift in the past?’
BROWN: ‘Sir, I may have, I honestly may have, but if I did I didn’t kill her. I wouldn’t do anything like kill anyone.’
FRY: ‘Have you ever made advances, sexually, to any of these people?’
BROWN: ‘No sir, no. I never play around at all or do anything like that, sex is sacred and the Bible says it should be with your wife … I am not a sex maniac, I never play around and I resent the implication that I ever would.’
FRY: ‘On the 24th of October, 1979, did you appear before the Prahran Court?’
BROWN: ‘Look, yes, but it is not how it is sir.’
FRY: ‘This is for soliciting for the purpose of prostitution was it not?’
BROWN: ‘All I felt like was a cuddle. I was lonely.’
Police took Brown around the district to point out where tried to pick people up.
FRY: ‘Do you know where Skye Road is?’
BROWN: ‘Where sir?’
FRY: ‘Skye Road.’
BROWN: ‘No sir. I’ve never heard of it.’
FRY: ‘So what you are saying is that you’ve never been in or heard of Skye Road?’
BROWN: ‘I don’t know where it is. I’ve never been there.’
In his statement Brown said: ‘When I stop to offer lifts to people, I just ask them if they want a lift and that is all. I never force myself on them and when they refuse I just drive off. I would say that the majority of people I offer lifts to are female. I would say that I would have offered females lifts exclusively over the last twelve months. I cannot recall when I last offered or gave a lift to a male in my car. The age group which I ask for lifts in my motor vehicle is usually around the middle ages to older groups but I have offered lifts to younger females around the twenties and thirties … I would estimate the number generally, over the last eighteen months, to be fifty or even more. Most people do not accept lifts from me and I would say that my success rate is about two or three percent. Over the past eighteen months, about six females have accepted lifts from me.’
Was it just a coincidence that six women had accepted lifts – the same number to be dumped at Tynong and Frankston? He had lived in his Frankston home for fourteen years yet he began offering lifts around the same time as the first victim disappeared.
After he was freed by the homicide squad he sought legal advice. The following day he returned to the Frankston police station with his wife and lawyer. Two weeks later he was interviewed again and stayed true to his word. He was asked a series of questions and responded with a straight ‘no comment’ to each.
But then came another twist. On 6 December – the first anniversary of the discovery of three bodies at Tynong North – Brown returned to the Frankston police station.
Senior Constable Michael White was working at the watch-house at 7pm on a quiet Sunday – the day most devout Christians go to church – when Brown walked in, uninvited. He said he wanted to speak to police to tell them he was not involved in a series of rapes in the Ferntree Gully and Olinda area.
Then he said something that has never been fully explained, ‘You know I was brought in about two murders in Frankston, well why haven’t I been asked about five murders instead of two.’ White responded: ‘Which other ones are you talking about?’ He said: ‘The ones at Tynong.’
‘SOME offenders attempt to inject themselves into the investigation of the murder; or otherwise keep in touch with the crime in order to continue the fantasy that started it,’ – Robert Ressler.
POLICE in Victoria know serial killers can try to find out that state of the investigation into his case. Paul Charles Denyer, the man who abducted and killed three young women in Melbourne, contacted the Cranbourne police and falsely claimed to have been interviewed by police over the murders. He wanted to know if he was still a suspect.
WHILE there is no doubt that Brown remains the red hot suspect for the Frankston murders, was there anything to suggest he could also have been involved in Tynong?
If he was dumping bodies near his home, why would he drive to an area more than forty kilometres from his patch? Investigators needed to know if there were any connections between Brown and the scrub off the Princes Highway.
They didn’t have to dig too deep.
Brown lived in Garfield, the area adjoining the killer’s dumping ground, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He used to work at the Tynong Hotel.
During the time that Miller, Sargent, Headland and Stephenson disappeared he was a regular in the area and his black van was often seen parked outside an old friend’s home in Garfield.
He had one other job in the area before he moved years earlier.
He worked in the sand quarry off Brew Road – the very one where the bodies of three victims were later to be found. Is it yet another coincidence? Police remained divided. The 1985 police analysis concluded:
‘It would be possible to formulate a reasonably sound argument linking ‘Mr Brown’ to the deaths of the four women whose bodies were found at Tynong North. However, whilst there is little information available about the circumstances of their deaths, what is available is sufficient to show that person(s) was not Brown.’
The analysis found Brown remained a strong suspect for the Summers murder and the possible killer of Rooke.
‘The dearth of physical evidence and eye witness accounts linking him to either of the (Frankston) victims means that it is unlikely that he will ever be charged with any offence or eliminated as a suspect’.
‘The only conclusion I can draw is that the person(s) responsible for the deaths of Rooke and Summer at Frankston is/are not the same person(s) responsible for the deaths of Miller, Headland and Sargent and it is most likely that a third person or persons was responsible for the death of Narumol Stephenson.’
But a second Bureau of Criminal Intelligence report conducted in 1990 came to a different conclusion. Brown was described as a ‘viable suspect with weak or non-existent alibis’
‘On the balance of probabilities the same person or persons were responsible for the murders of Allison Rooke, Bertha Miller, Catherine Linda Headland, Ann-Marie Sargent and Joy Carmel Summers. On the information available (Brown) is the best nominated suspect for the offences.’ If Brown killed the two Frankston woman and was not involved in Tynong then two serial killers were abducting woman from streets at the same time. Even more baffling both stopped around the same time and do not appear to have struck again.
Brown was not working when Miller, Sargent, Rooke and Summers went missing but was rostered to work 11am to 11pm on the day Headland was abducted. If the alibi is right he is not involved in any of the Tynong murders at the quarry site as there can be no doubt Miller, Sargent and Headland were killed by the same man.
But what if it is wrong?
The sequence of the killings adds to the mystery. Rooke was abducted and her body discovered three months before the first Tynong victim was grabbed.
Joy Summers was abducted ten months after the Tynong grave sites were found. Is it possible that after the killer’s first dumping area in Skye Road was discovered he had to find a second spot he knew well? Then after the Tynong spot was discovered he returned to his original base safe in the knowledge the police interest in the area had waned.
‘Organised killers learn as they go on from crime to crime; they get better at what they do, and this shows in their degree of organisation.’ – Robert Ressler.
IN August, 1997, police conducted a routine gutter crawling operation in St Kilda, code named ‘Elista.’ In the early hours of the morning a sixty-five year old man, dressed conservatively in a suit and tie, approached a policewoman working undercover as a prostitute. He asked for sex.
He was just one of seventy men nabbed in the regular clean-up but he attracted some more police interest when he told police he was ‘the prime suspect in the Tynong North killings.’ It was Brown.
DESPITE screaming headlines and political hysteria designed to play on the community fears on crime, Australia remains a safe country and, according to some statistics, Victoria the safest state in the nation. The murder rate sits around seventy a year in Victoria and few victims are picked at random.
There have been few serial killers identified in Australia, men who stalk and murder to a pattern – Denyer, who killed three women in Frankston, the Granny Killer, John Wayne Glover, who killed six women in Sydney and Ivan Milat, the backpacker killer, who dumped six young hitch-hikers at the Belanglo State Forrest.
But there is a fourth man who police believe is a serial killer, although he has been convicted ‘only’ of a double murder that was committed years before the FBI term became part of law enforcement language.
His name Raymond Edmunds, known by the media as ‘Mr Stinky.’
Edmunds murdered Shepparton teenagers, Abina Madill and Garry Heywood in 1966 but was not arrested for the murders until 1985.
Police believe he was responsible for at least thirty-two rapes and a series of unsolved murders in the nineteen years before he was caught.
Because of the law on police questioning at the time detectives could talk to Edmunds for only six hours, hardly sufficient to question him about the Madill-Heywood killings, let alone crimes where the evidence was not as strong.
Thousands of questions on sex crimes Edmunds is suspected of committing have never been asked.
He is the prime suspect in at least one unsolved murder – that of Elaine Jones of Tocumwal in 1980.
Edmunds has refused to speak to police but over the years prisoners tend to talk to each other and the convicted double killer is no exception. He confided to a fellow sex offender that he had killed ‘dozens’ of women.
In 1989 the then Chief Commissioner, Kel Glare, received a letter from Pentridge taunting detectives about their lack of progress on Tynong North.
The inmate has since been released from prison. ‘I have done some terrible things and I have taken some responsibility for them. He (Edmunds) was a very bad machine. One of those Tynong girls was only fourteen. I had to speak up.
‘He has left bodies wherever he lived. He shows no remorse and he’ll never change.’
The former sex offender said Edmunds once confessed to him: ‘If I told them everything I’ve done they’d neck (hang) me.
‘The enormity of his crimes is terrible. Society should know what happened.’
Certainly Edmunds knew the areas in question having worked and lived on a farms at Nar Nar Goon and Officer directly in the Tynong dumping area, and one in Chelsea Heights, not far from Frankston. But he moved to NSW in April 1980 and would have had to return to Melbourne regularly to have committed the crimes. Unlikely, but possible.
THE Miller suspect knew Bertha Miller and Catherine Headland and may have known Ann-Marie Sargent through mutual friends. In the 1970s and 1980s he lived in Pakenham and Berwick, inside the murderer’s triangle.
The original investigating police believed this man had an airtight alibi. He was working at a factory when Headland and Sargent were abducted. But some police now believe the airtight alibi has developed a slow leak.
Each worker at the factory had to punch in a card into a time-clock but there was no way of proving who actually placed the card into the machine. A worksheet, filled in by hand, showed when workers were on leave or sick.
Detectives will want to find out if the worksheet could have been filled out by another worker, completed by the suspect at another time, or if the man could have slipped out of work during the day.
The Miller suspect, then aged in his twenties, did not have a reputation as a good worker. He stayed in the job for only around seven months and often reported in sick.
There have been suggestions that supervision at the factory was poor at the time and time-sheets were not checked daily against staff present. Some would slip out for a few hours sleep in their cars at quiet times.
However, there was only one exit from the factory, manned by a guard. Staff had to hand in their passes before they could leave. The suspect would have had to slip out, commit the murders and then return. Alternatively, he did not attend work on the days Headland and Sargent disappeared.
He knew Catherine Headland, moved in a social circle which probably put him in contact with Ann-Marie Sargent and had contacts with Bertha Miller.
Intriguingly, he once lived in the next street to Margaret Elliott, the woman whose body was found in Glen Iris in 1975.
The 1985 police review found the man and members of his family were ‘unlikely to be involved.’ But that conclusion was based on the so-called perfect alibi.
‘The offender has devoted time to figuring out how to obtain victims, and may have perfected the ruse.’ – Robert Ressler.
ONE of the most curious aspects of the Tynong-Frankston murders is to explain how so many women of different ages and backgrounds would accept lifts – or if force was used, how five women could be dragged into cars in daylight hours in main streets and not be noticed?
For years in Melbourne an urban crime myth has done the rounds. The story goes that a woman hops into her car at night outside a convenience store to find another woman sobbing in the passenger seat. The distressed female tells a story of needing help and asks for a lift.
The car owner is uncomfortable and when she refuses the distressed woman leaves. The car owner then finds a large knife in the front seat, apparently dropped by the female.
The car owner reports the incident to police who inform her the distressed female is a man in drag who uses the trick to abduct women. None of these reports have ever been verified. During the search of the Tynong North location police found a fully padded bra discarded in the scrub – the sort used by some men, who for any number of reasons, choose to disguise themselves as women.